Worldbuilding Part 9: Thin Slices and Snapshots

We use the term 'thin slice’ at the middle school where I teach, and it’s a term I just learned this year, but I kind of like it. The idea is that you get a single sample of student work, and you use this to make some large-scale holistic evaluations. You understand when you do it that this is an incomplete profile of what’s going on with this student. In my class, I present this as a snapshot. I explain to students that this writing today is going to be a selfie; it is a picture of where you are right now, today, at this moment, but it’s not the whole thing. I won’t know everything there is to know about you as a student from this, but I’ll get at least an idea. I’ll be able to get a good initial sense of who you are as a writer from this sample.

When moving into the more intricate parts of setting construction, my temptation was always to work in layers. I wanted to figure out what was happening at the national level. Then I would work out the local level, and how this is impacted. Then, I’d look at the micro level; how does a family live within this? I suppose I was inspired by (or maybe overwhelmed by) the World of Greyhawk setting books, and the details therein on what different nations were producing as resources, and who they traded with, and how that sort of socio-economic system worked. Now, it might have been a carefully-crafted interconnection of balanced concepts, or (more likely), Gary made a list of things that societies might have of value, and sort of randomly assigned these to different nations (hmmm…. Four countries already trade silver. I guess these guys get copper. Sorry, Pomarj). Regardless, it made an impression on me; your setting must have this huge level of interconnectivity to really be ‘alive’.

And it does, but not necessarily in that way. I have learned instead to do the deep dive in a small area. That’s what I’m doing with the core rules for Shards. I don’t know (yet) how the macro economy works in terms of trade between hundreds of worlds. However, I am really, really starting to understand how the guilds on the moons around Banquo II interact, how resources are gathered and distributed, and how important contracts and writs and land rights are. I can see how the mandates of the guilds and off-worlders really rub locals the wrong way, and lead to all sorts of land skirmishes between the more tribal native species who have dwelt there for generations and those who showed up one day with skim miners and started tapping gas wells a hundred kilometers below the surface. I can see what life is like for a day laborer on Banquo’s Maw (it kind of sucks by the way). However, the other benefit in this is that I’m working out a form of template that I can apply to other worlds and other locales. Once I really understand how this one micro system works, I will be able to generate a sort of grid to plug information into. I will then be able to move to the next planet and fill in the details. Once I know how the various forces interacting in one of these micro systems work, I can jump to the next planet over and start the process over again. I don’t have to figure out how all that other planet’s resources interact with everything else; I only need to tie a few threads back to my first snapshot. When I detail the planet called Prospero (if that’s what it’s called), I only need figure out how it links to Banquo II.  

It also helps me to make very concrete decisions. I know that bounty hunters like Gat Parmetheon here often do the dirty work of taking out tribal leaders who openly resist guild force, or who a family might hire to take out their own nephew who won’t fall in line, a nephew who keeps making noise about wanting to break off and form his own guild. There are some jobs you don’t want your own crews doing. He’s not generic bounty hunter doing generic jobs; there are very specific types of things one calls a bounty hunter like him for.

Oh, and a side note, I found for myself that I wanted there to be consistency of naming planets and moons. I wanted it to be easy to remember, and evocative. I like that the planets of our solar system are named after Roman gods. It gives the whole thing a nice uniformity. So, I’ve picked Shakespeare character names. Each planet is a Shakespeare character name (a lot of them end in ‘o’ by the way), and then the moons around that planet are a facet of that character (hence the planet Macbeth might have moons named Macbeth’s Eye or Macbeth’s Fist). I find having this consistency creates an automatic sense of uniformity to the setting. If you’ve got the city Ko next to the city of Vilizainatkhwona, you’ve got some consistency problems.