Patten: Make your own world for fun and profit

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a series on creating your own role-playing game, or RPG. See part 1 here. This installment is also applicable to aspiring fantasy and science fiction writers.

When I was a kid, I obsessed with creating a fantasy setting for my novel, which, of course, was destined to be a masterpiece.

But how do you go about creating an entire world?

My favorite books had fancy maps, so I started with that.

Impassable mountains! Treacherous seas! Forests of illusions! Lava pits! Now that I had those things, what sort of monsters lived in them?

Unfortunately, the result was an elaborate setting with an underdeveloped story. Oh, I had some epic scenes, but the stuff that happened between them was vague, and I found myself adding elements to the map just to give the characters something to do.

In short, there was little point to all my world-building without something concrete to fill it. The world’s a stage, but no one cares about your props if the production is empty.

So should I have focused on the characters and story and then built the world around it? Also the wrong approach. I would have ended up with the opposite problem: vibrant characters and a developed story, but a setting that didn’t feel consistent or realistic. And part of the attraction to fantasy/sci-fi stories and RPGs is the world itself. If you don’t put some hard work into the world, your audience will likely notice, get bored and move on, despite everything else being in place.

I think both story and world elements should be made one after the other.

View your process as a seesaw. You should be alternating which side (story/game or world) you put your creative weight on.

Here’s a simple example of a brainstorming approach you might take:

• I made up these really neat people with shape-shifting abilities! (World)
• What would I do if I had these powers? I’d probably end up abusing them and everyone would hate me. (Story)
• Due to a history of shapeshifters being jerks, they now have a strict code not to shape-shift unless in emergencies. An entire religion is based around it, and shape-shifting is taboo. (World)
• What if someone decided, “Forget that! I’m a freaking shapeshifter! Why don’t I take advantage of that?” This shapeshifter, naturally, gets into trouble. (Story)
• Shape-shifting society would cast out this character (Story) according to its rules and customs (World).
• Now our shapeshifter is in wider society. So now what? Would our protagonist take advantage of the system? If you are making an interactive story (a game) you can give the player a significant choice here. If there’s a monarchy (World), our hero/villain might, out of greed or desperation, pose as a missing royal (Story).
• And so on …

When creating a world, you have a lot to consider. Climate. Geography. Biology. Society (try to resist emulating medieval Europe). Clothing. Entertainment. Politics. War. Peace. Economics. Languages. History. Other planets, even. You could spend the rest of your life carefully crafting your stage, but the goal is not to build an elaborate world – you want a believable one.

In other words, narrow your scope. Go small. This advice applies outside of the fantasy/sci-fi genre too. Jane Austen, for instance, could have written about anything in her 19th century world, but she focused on a certain segment of English society, and it worked.

Maybe you don’t need to sweat so much over languages or politics for what you want to do. Or you can have your story take place in a constrained version of modern Earth. J.K. Rowling built her magical sub-world through the lens of a school. And the “Back to the Future” movies could have lost themselves in major historical events but instead focused on the Hill Valley area. No matter how large your world is, it should be small.

Fortunately there are countless resources that can help you be a creator of worlds. Here are a few:

• 7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding. No. 6 (“Not really giving a strong sense of place, like what it smells like after it’s been raining.”) is especially important.
• David Peterson, who created the Dothraki language for HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” has a lot of resources available on constructed (artificial) languages, or conlangs, including a video series, a book and a website with more resources. A lot of things will fall in place for your world-building if you have at least a basic understanding of the words and grammar your society uses and why.
• The Language Construction Kit. Building a language is far more than throwing some funny sounds together and tacking them on top of English grammar. Also available in book form.
• The Planet Construction Kit. By the same guy (Mark Rosenfelder) who made the language resource above, this one covers everything from alien races to calculating how fast a horse can travel in a day.
• Conworld. From Wikibooks, this also covers various aspects of creating a constructed world.
• Constructed Worlds Wiki. Especially helpful is its Getting Started page.
• Retronauts, a podcast on old video games (which I have mentioned before), analyzes and covers the stories behind your favorite games. The hosts often take a look at RPGs.

Next week we’re going to delve into world-building even further with a discussion important to any creator of speculative fiction or games: How do you create a proper magical (or technological) system?

Until then, let there be light.

You can follow Robert Patten on Facebook and Twitter.

Fantasy photos and top image via Shutterstock.