Worldbuilding Part 12: From a Certain Point of View

One of the biggest things my entire doctoral journey revealed to me is this basic truth: we as humans tend to look at complex things in simple ways. We want to take a nuanced problem like funding inequalities in schools and solve them with a simple solution – let’s take money from here and put it there. Ta da! But that simple solution would, by its nature, create a whole other set of inequalities. Oh, and it wouldn’t actually solve the original problem either. One of my least favorite conversations is when someone who has not stepped foot in a school in twenty years decides to tell me what is wrong with schools and how to fix it. Um. I have a doctorate in ‘fixing schools’, and I have no idea how to do it. However, tell me again how if we just bring back shop classes, we’ll fix the deep flaws in the fundamental social and economic forces that underpin the vast majority of problems that schools face.

This relates to setting design. I promise. Because settings aren’t simple, and we have different views on what’s happening in our setting. I look at a complex array of interconnected problems; my (imaginary) uncle looks at an empty shop classroom that just needs kids getting more splinters.

Our perceptions are the reality. What you believe about something becomes your truth about that thing. One of the interesting things about people is that we more often don’t agree, even on basic stuff. I cannot understand how someone would look at a certain former US president and see anything but a pathological liar and world-class con artist. Others (who I consider intelligent people worthy of deep respect) see a prophet from God who is doing His work in the world. We look at the exact same thing and see two different realities, and it’s not because ‘I’m smart and they’re dumb’. It’s more complex than that.

In doing some of the more discrete setting work for Shards of Tomorrow, I realized that different peoples populating the moon of Banquo’s Tooth would see events and natural phenomena in fundamentally different ways. Rather than choosing to present the ‘real’ way and the ‘imaginary’ way, I present both perspectives, and let the GM decide (or not) what is ‘really’ going on. Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s neither. Is that salt river cutting across the frozen tundra a naturally occurring deposit that bubbles up, or is it the tears of an ancient god buried deep in the moon that well up to the surface? I have no idea, but both ideas are presented. For key events or unusual phenomena, ask what each of the groups that interact with it thinks. How might they have different views? I use the previous post on history to guide some of this; historically speaking, how did people perceive this? What cultural or social or philosophical filters did they use to process this? Did they look at it through a scientific or supernatural lens? By the way, the more I read and study, the more credence I give to the supernatural; I come back to Hamlet’s line, “there are more things and heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” line to Horatio. Horatio is a smart, scientific thinker – and he doesn’t get how it all works together at all. I like that inherent tension; science can sometimes only take us so far. What you think about the thing, whatever it is rooted in, becomes your truth in how you respond to it.

That’s all that really matters.