Sicko Worldbuilding

The weekend Return of the King came out, the sun was just peaking above the horizon when my friend Mike and I piled into my dad’s truck and made the forty minute pilgrimage into the city. Dad didn’t even park the truck, pulling up to one of the twenty entrances that led into The Mall and letting us out. I’m not even sure he fully stopped, eager to get back home and enjoy a day without any kids around. We hustled inside and prepared for our day, with just enough allowance cash that we could get the all-day pass at Blue Shift Gaming, a meal at lunch, and see the movie in the evening. We weren’t there to explore the mall, we were there to park our butts in uncomfortable computer chairs, boot up the latest games on the fastest PCs and play until we got too hungry to continue. I remember Mike saying to forget about the movie, but it was the last one and I was a huge fan, so there was no way I was missing it. Reluctantly, he agreed.

That evening, after hauling ourselves across The Mall and up multiple escalators, we arrived at the theatre.

And as we walked in, I felt the dragon fire warming my face.

Here’s the thing I’ve come to firmly believe about worldbuilding. To be good at it, you’ve got to be a real sicko. What does that mean? Well, you can’t just be a tourist in your world. You need to live there. You need to pull back, into your mind, and exist there. You need to wake up there, eat there, go to work there, meet friends, make enemies, hate the place, love it, take vacations from it, change homes, change people, and in the end… always come crawling back.

When you start building a world, it’s sharp and ugly but you don’t know that yet. You’re still looking at it through the window, peeking in, too afraid to open the door and set up shop. Once you do that, you’ll cut yourself on those sharp edges, curse it out, but if you’ve got the sickness the blood and tears won’t matter. Eventually, you’ll handle it enough that, with scars on your hands, you’ll wear down the edges until it’s smooth and easy to touch.

Other people will be tourists in your world, peeking in through the window, but that’s not you. You need to sleep there, wake up there, and have soul-shattering breakdowns and buildups there.

You’re going to want to try and cut corners. Cheating, misdirection, and sleight of hand will come knocking at the door like a slimy salesman, offering a get-worldbuilding-quick scheme. And, as my dad taught me very early on: if it’s too good to be true, it is. Turn those charlatans away just like you do in the real world and sign that 1-year lease into your world.

Did you know that other people can feel it when you aren’t a sicko? They get a six sense about these sorts of things. They’re showing up to your world as a tourist, hoping to hear about all the hot spots, and what you’re giving them is the quirky burrito place down the street that everyone knows about. When the tour guide is a tourist themselves, you know you’re fucked. People want to be led around by the locals. They want you to lean in and whisper about how this street used to be full of beautiful hand-painted murals until the fascist pigs found themselves a few buckets of paint. The tourists want someone who was born here, grew up here, and who’s damn well going to die here.

I’m afraid there’s only one way to convey that. You’ve just got to live there. You’ve got to rent the cheapest apartment in the worst part of town and willingly go out and turn over every rock and open every garbage can. You need to eat at a different restaurant every night. You need to make as many friends as you can and lose them all.

The only way you can confidently understand your world (and to answer questions about it) is by living in that place for a long, long time. It’s fictional. You can’t know everything. But that’s not the point.

If you move across the world to a new city and spend half a year there, you’re still a tourist. Some people can localize themselves very quickly, but don’t base your own expectations on the exceptional. If an old friend flew in to visit, you’d be able to name a few favorite spots and show them some cool sights, but you’re still a tourist leading around a tourist.

I’ve lived in Alberta all my life. Starting in the country, and then moving in to Edmonton when I couldn’t handle spending an hour and a half driving every weekday. You know that thing that happens where you eventually just click with a place? I never thought I’d figure out the roads of the city, and this was before smartphones, so I was writing out instructions from MapQuest and hoping for the best. But then, one day, a friend and I were driving around exploring, got lost, and I saw a landmark. I knew where we were, and got us back on track lickety-spit. That was the day I became a local. Years after moving there.

Whenever someone comes to Edmonton, they want to see The Mall. That’s not really what most people here call it, but that’s what it is. Officially, it’s called West Edmonton Mall. To me, it’s just West Ed. I kind of hate it. I had an old internet friend come through Alberta, and we met up to catch up. After our lunch, he told me he was heading over to the mall to check it out. I asked why in the world he would want to do that, because it kind of sucks, and he just looked at me and said, “It’s the biggest mall in North America. I’ve gotta see it.” For a moment, I forgot that he was a tourist, but it all clicked at that point.

Even if I loved the mall, I just wouldn’t talk about it the same way as someone from out of town.

When you live in a place, you accumulate history. You gather secrets and lore. You know how it feels to live there. You can do the same with your fantastical worlds, in your mind, but it takes time and effort. You need to dig in. You need to imagine yourself as an alchemist, under the tutelage of a master. You need to be the beggar on the street. You need to be both the mayor and the opposition. You need to be the piece-of-shit millionaire that’s ruining the place.

You can’t do any of that as a tourist. When a tourist worldbuilder needs an element for something, like a story or a random encounter table, they by a two-way bus ticket, stay for one night in the world, and then bus back out of there. When a local needs an element, they already know exactly what to grab, because it’s just down the street and they walk by it every day on the way to the factory.

Even if you’re developing a loose anti-canon setting for a roleplaying game (the type of setting that is defined by a smattering of random tables) you’ve still got to live inside of it. Imagine taking a vacation to Spain for a week, coming home, and writing up random tables for a modern day horror adventure set in Barcelona. Anyone that lives there is going to read those tables and think, “damn, that’s tourist shit.” When you’re making a fantastical world, anyone stepping in to your world is going to catch the vibe. They’re going to know if you’re a sicko or a tourist, even if they can’t outright put their finger on it.

But guess what? Try moving in. Try going sicko-mode. Start spending time there, in your head, while you do errands, while you work, at the gym, commute, and every other moment you get some free time. You need to get in fist-fights for a scrap of bread. You need to haul stones with the other laborers to create the Great Temple. You need to be the priest of that temple, too. You need to give the order to execute a line up of revolutionaries against a blood-stained brick wall. And you need to be the revolutionary getting executed. Your world contains both good and bad people. I’m afraid you’ve got to become both of them.

There’s a tipping point when you go from tourist to local. It’s different for every world and every person, but it’s a complete paradigm shift. You go from wondering about a place to knowing about a place.

Attached to the ceiling of the West Ed movie theatre was a gigantic, hanging animatronic dragon. Around it, figures on clockwork flying machines were harassing her, trying to steal her dragon eggs. It was an impressive sight, back in the 2000s¹.

At set intervals, the dragon would let out a bone-shaking roar, and then breathe fire. Actual, bonafide fire. Inside of a building. Inside of a mall! It was high up enough that you couldn’t get singed, but damn, it was hot. It was mesmerizing. She terrorized movie goers for eleven years and then slumbered for four, until in 2014 she was taken down and shipped off.

A tourist worldbuilder hears about the dragon and tells their fellow tourists about it, and everyone goes “that sounds cool!”

A sicko worldbuilder feels the heat of the fire warm their face.

Be a sicko.

But don’t take my word for it! I reached out to a few of my favorite worldbuilders, and asked what they thought about this whole thing. Here’s what they had to say, with me highlighting a few of my favorite bits:

Ben Laurence writes Through Ultan’s Door, a series of zines detailing the flying city of Zyan in the Dreamlands. TUD has received countless praise for both adventure design and worldbuilding, and that’s no surprise. It’s some of the most evocative fantasy you can step in to, and I can’t wait for more.

Here’s what Ben had to say:

I’ve spent so much time living in Zyan, most of it with other people. The setting has taken shape over 3 long campaigns I ran spanning 11 total years of play. I’ve played more than 300 sessions there, with maybe 30 players. Most of Zyan has been created piecemeal over a long time in response to the needs of play. Generally speaking, when I want to explore some aspect of the world, I introduce an adventure location, or hook, item, or NPC, some playable element that lets me think a bit about that aspect in a way that matters to players. A lot of the worldbuilding has been driven by their interests, schemes, and downtime activities.

Rather than mix things up, I also intentionally ran all 3 campaigns with similar starting points. These “do-over” campaigns let me go back to things I wished I could have explored further and have a second or even third crack at them, to sink into them further, get deeper, let connections emerge, make them more truly what they wanted to be. Publishing, for my blog, zine, and now Patreon, adds another layer. It allows me to revisit locations yet again, to nurture my little notes to myself into mature forms.

And, yes, even if its directed at the table, I’ve probably spent far more time on my own thinking about it than the hours I’ve clocked at the table. I’ve written before that things are only working right if I manage fall in love with an adventure location, or idea, of bit of the setting. Besides the magic that happens at the table, the feeling of the imagination exulting in this abiding creation is a huge part of why I keep at it.

There’s still so much of Zyan that I don’t know as well as I would like, and probably will never know. But there are some parts I know very well. Take the neighborhood of Volish Hill. I know the little hidden spots of that ancient neighborhood, and something about the customs of the Volish HIllers, who never forget that they were once Sky Singers who sailed the Azure Sea. I can picture the interior of the Sky Goose inn, and the mosaics in the Plaza of Drowned Memories, where the mercenary company of the Sons & Daughters of the Village Watcher have their house. I can picture the steep hills of the neighborhood, its narrow steps, and walkways that run atop roofs, and park at the top of the neighborhood where the Guild of Horoscops has its eerie observatory.

Recently, I’m coming to know the White Jungle much better. In that case, trying to publish it was crucial, because the space was so weird–an inverted jungle hanging down form the bottom of a flying island–that I had to figure out lots of ways to try to explain it better, make it more concrete, actually figure out what the terrain is like in different levels.

Emiel Boven writes The Electrum Archive, a science-fantasy romp inspired by Morrowind and set on the planet of Orn. The world feels real, fleshed out, and thrumming with secrets and mysteries.

Here’s what Emiel had to say:

I definitely feel like I’ve spent a lot of time wandering Orn in my head. Especially when I first started coming up with ideas for it. At that time in 2021 I was still working as a mail man and had a lot of mental downtime while walking and biking around, but not a lot of energy left after my workday to write it all out. So those early days were mostly just me mulling things over and occasionally making notes when I thought of something interesting, but doing very little actual writing.mark> It was only after I quit that job that I was able to start developing some of those ideas into something more concrete and start writing the zines, and by that point I had racked up a good number of hours exploring Orn in my head. After that, the amount of time spent thinking about it in such a freeform way varied a lot, but I never thought about it for such long, uninterupted periods anymore. To finish the zine I eventually had to get my head out of the clouds and get some work done, but after the first zine wrapped up I started fantasizing again about what else I wanted to explore.

Nowadays most of this “wandering” is done during walks, when I have tea by myself in my little vegetable garden, while taking a shower, or while laying in bed late at night.

Leo Hunt writes Vaults of Vaarn (which, as of this post publishing, is running a crowdfunder for a 2e!), another science-fantasy setting, this time inspired by Dune and Moebius, and other brain-warping pieces of art. The line between human and machine has blurred, and the world is a psychedelic trip with much of the worldbuilding handled by rolling dice and evocative tables.

Here’s what Leo had to say:

I do indeed spend lots of time in my imaginary worlds and I think it’s a prerequisite to making them vivid. I have quite a visual imagination so it’s easy for me to sort of step through the walls of the room and find myself in the blue desert. It is actually sometimes a problem because it’s really hard to focus on boring situations when I can start thinking about Gnomon’s street markets instead.

Although I will also say that sitting before blank pages can be a really good way to develop the setting as well, I think actionable elements do come from necessity when drafting.

Watt writes Cloud Empress, another science-fantasy setting (can you tell what I like?), inspired by Nausicaä and ecological collapse. It is rightly praised for it’s fresh ideas, evocative setting, and spot-on execution.

Here’s what watt had to say:

Cloud Empress imagines a far far future in midwest America, transcribing Dune and Nausicaa’s sandworms and Ohmu onto the numerous cicadas in the region.

In that way, (as a current resident of Minnesota, and nearly lifelong resident of Midwest America), I live the world of Cloud Empress using the landscape and ecology as inspiration for my worldbuilding. One of the significant challenges when writing the first setting book, Land of Cicadas, was my attempt to create varied terrain without succumbing to exaggerated features not present in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Midwest America (especially Illinois) is tremendously flat.

As a TTRPG reader and player, I’ve come to expect each setting to have a set of mountains, swampland, and perhaps a desert region. These polarized spaces create unique storytelling opportunities and clearly delineated environments, but may gloss over the nuances in the natural world around us.

How might I write two different prairie spaces?

How might I explore the landscape of a marsh?

How would characters traverse Wisconsin’s sporadic rocky outcroppings?

Holding myself as a writer in relationship to the land helped center my work. The other key aspect to my worldbuilding relates to exploring political and social ideas through gameplay. For instance, I am interested in more socially responsible/ecological ways of interacting with nature. In response to this interest, in Cloud Empress, I created the Farmerlings. Farmerlings travel during the summer and live migratory lives. The Farmerlings primarily bed down in a single city called Tack Town for safety in the winter You can then extrapolate all sorts of conflicts from this migratory arrangement.

Thinking your worldbuilding concepts through to their logical extension is a simple, but effective worldbuilding technique, especially for settings that attempt to evoke a sense of realism. In recent months, I’ve spent more time hiking in local parks and observing wildlife with binoculars. Not everywhere I go looks tremendously and overwhelmingly beautiful, but it’s been engaging trying to contemplate how I might capture a road cut with wildflowers or a peninsula on a tiny residential lake.

When all else fails, I go back to George Lucas. There are so many inconsistencies in the Star Wars universe, and Lucas himself is also teased by fans online for forgetting or contradicting himself. In spite of these so-called worldbuilding fails, the first Star Wars trilogy still holds an integral place in my heart for the themes of heroism, redemption, and failure expressed in an evocative fantasy story. If you can connect the world you create with the aspirations and lives of the people who engage with it, while saying something about our shared reality—you have a chance of making something deeply loved.

Felix Isaacs writes The Wildsea, a fantasy setting in an overgrown forest, with characters piloting chainsaw-driven ships across the canopy.

Here’s what Felix had to say:

Interestingly (perhaps), I spend most of my time imagining the people living in the world, rather than the world itself, and a lot of the locations, hazards, and scenarios flow from that.

I think this is particularly useful for a world created specifically for a TRPG, as it means you keep narrative potential and character actions at the forefront of your mind.

Very rarely do I think up a location and then wonder what an individual might do there - I more often think up an individual, usually one conforming to some aspect of the existing world, and think of what might horrify / enrapture / challenge / disgust them.

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and comments!

Sicko Worldbuilding

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