Serial Worldbuilder
It might be time to acknowledge I have a problem. I can’t stop building new worlds for stories or even entire series of stories to be set in.
A few years ago I wrote a draft of a fantasy novel. For various reasons, I didn’t think I could pull off that particular book. It needed things I didn’t want to do as a writer. That said, the world worked quite well for a D&D campaign I ran. The setting was like a Tolkienesque fantasy world, except that generations ago, the heroes failed. The villains won. The players of the campaign found themselves in a subjugated world, one where the initial sting of oppression had long since worn off, and the entrenched bureaucracy of the occupation had become the norm.
But that campaign was short. It was complete, but it was short. Partially because I had another world I wanted to play in.
While I was running that campaign, I was writing another book, one which I would finish writing. The world that novel is set in took quite a bit of world building, but as if that wasn’t enough… all the things I couldn’t put into that world because of something very specific about that setting… I wanted those things so much, I came up with a completely different world to put those things in. So I fired up Hexographer, put my fantasy playlist on the iTunes, and created first a world map, and then set about writing up a history (the history of four distinct ages), the description of the geography of the world, what the various peoples are, the religions of that world, who is in charge, and so much more… I started writing short stories in that setting, most of which were things that couldn’t happen in the other book’s setting, but some were also D&D ideas that struck me as uniquely weird or fun.
And then I started running two campaigns in that world setting. I’m still running those and they’re going great. I took that Hexographer file to Kinkos or FedEx or whatever it’s called now and printed it off big enough to roll it out when the parties are deciding where to go next.
Meanwhile I’m writing a science fiction spy story set hundred of years in the future and so I get to world build again, although “worlds build” is maybe more accurate since in that aspirational setting there are human colonies and stations throughout the solar system all the way into the Kuiper belt. To write this I need to know so many things…what are the intelligence agencies of these worlds? What are the factions? Who is in charge? What is the technology like to allow this? How are the colonies and stations laid out?
And while I’m doing this spyfy, I’m overcome by an idea that just won’t rest on the backburner, and now I’m building a weird fantasy setting. And it’s amazing when you draw a map and have that sense of excitement thinking about the stories that are going to take place in it. It’s amazing.
Though perhaps it’s too addicting. Perhaps I need to go cold turkey for a while to get some more of these stories written. Please stop me before I map again.
