Weekly Update - 219 - 5/20/24 (Patreon)

This month just flew by, huh?

I've been working on perhaps too many projects at once. Maybe that's why it felt like it went so quick.

I've got the main thing, God Slayers, always.

I've got a new secondary comic, which I've been hard worldbuilding so it'll have a solid foundation.

I've got the God Slayers TTRPG system, which is getting pretty close to a sharable state, but in need of a combat redesign.

Then I've got some bonus art to do, one of Quinn's character Frey and one of The Ancestor.

It's a lot, admittedly, to juggle all at once, but with all things it just comes down to whether I want to get it done faster or take my time and do it at the highest level of quality I'm currently capable of. I've always preferred the latter.

Comic this week? Not this week no. The Next Page, 197, has a lot of characters in it and needs a fancier background, it's just an above average amount of art.

Drawing: Page 197, Page 001-004, Ancestor art, Quinn's request.

Playing: WoW Panda Remix

Ramble:

Worldbuilding? Let's talk worldbuilding.

Many of you might be familiar with "Worldbuilder's Disease." It's a common problem among creators where they'll spend so much time on fleshing out the details of the fictional world their story takes place in, that they never get around to actually telling their story. It happens to writers and Game Masters alike. Many of my friends have been afflicted by this disease at one point or another, and I've caught it myself on projects before. This is largely because any topic, given enough attention, can contain a lifetime's worth of information and research on its own. We live in such a rich and interesting REAL world, and it's very easy and often kinda fun to want to emulate that in our fiction. Perhaps the story includes a one-off reference from a character where they talk about the life-cycle of a specific kind of insect. Suddenly as the author you feel like you should know at least as much about that insect as your characters might, but probably more. So you look up information about similar real-world insects with similar-seeming life-cycles, and it's about the time you're detailing the petal shape of the twentieth breed of flower the insect eats or the fascinating physiology of the insect's fifth most common insectivorous predator that you might realize you've maybe gone too far.

As writers I think a lot of us tend to want to borrow from reality in order to make our fictional worlds seem more realistic, and I think there's very good reasons to do so. The closer the fictional world is to reality here on earth, the less the writer has to explicitly explain to their reader. Borrowing from reality for much of your world also helps to make the fictional elements of that world stand out more. If gravity in a fictional world behaves like it does on earth, no reader will question it, and if nobody's questioning it, there's no reason for the author to have to explain why gravity behaves like we all expect it to. If fruit falls from a certain tree at a 45 degree angle, however, readers will question what's going on with the gravity around that tree. It draws specific attention to it by being different from what readers expect, and readers will probably require an answer eventually. If EVERYTHING in that world falls at a 45 degree angle, readers may question what's going on with the gravity of that whole planet, HOWEVER, it also becomes a fictional rule for that world and, as long as it's used consistently throughout, most readers might come to accept it as what is normal for that world. When things keep falling at a 45 degree angle, they may stop questioning it. But they will absolutely question when there's something does NOT follow that rule.

Worldbuilding at its core is setting expectations for the setting and calling attention to the details that challenge those expectations. When a character mentions how annoying Sharpsquitos are in a one-off remark, the author does not need to then launch into a wiki article about the bizarre mating habits of the Sharpsquito. The Sharpsquito sounds like something that's easy for most readers to imagine as a pesky insect. No more details about it really need to be discussed... unless a character remarks how they keep Sharpsquitos as pets. That is suddenly a challenge to the expectation, because people don't typically keep pesky insects as pets. At this point though, readers might initially question what's wrong with that character, because that seems weird, but it might still be okay if it fits the expectations we have for a weird character. If the author then explains how Sharpsquitos are actually soft and cuddly mammals that were miscategorized by an inappropriate name, what they've done is probably vexxing to a lot of readers because now it's starting to get absurd. There's a lot to question there, and none of the answers are probably any good. The writer might think they're being funny or something, but the annoyance they've inspired by challenging reader's expectations too much will overrule any other intended emotion. The author should set the readers' expectations, but then stay within them until there's something specific to call attention to in the narrative that is both different and INTERESTING. Don't challenge the expectations you've set too often or for no good reason. I've said countless times before humans are EXCELLENT at recognizing and identifying patterns. We notice the things that stand out the most. The single most common and most egregious point of critique I've seen for stories and games and shows alike is when a fictional world breaks its own established rules for no reason. Challenge their expectations when you want to catch a reader's attention. Do it too much if you want to annoy the shit out of people.

When to Stop Worldbuilding

Brandon Sanderson has said that worldbuilding is like creating a hollow iceberg. You want to create the illusion of a rich and deep world, but the author cannot be expected to fill out all of the details of that world. You may want to be an expert in your world, and you should be an expert in your world, but it simply isn't possible to be an expert in every single field of research for an entire world. You will most likely forget half of the worldbuilding you do before you even start writing anything. There should probably be lots you don't know about your world, even as you write your story. There will always be open-ended questions that you don't yet have answers to. The story of God Slayers takes place in Kuserra. I know a lot about just this one city, and I know there's a lot I still don't know about this world. I know that goods that cannot be produced in Kuserra, such as cloths, usually arrive on trade caravans from across the Deadlands. Now I know a little about these cities sending the caravans, I assume they have the capability to produce these goods, but I haven't given it much more thought than that. Their proximity to the Deadlands and their terrible drought conditions may mean they are still incapable of producing the necessary plants for weaving thread. It could be that they are actually getting the raw goods shipped to them from somewhere else that manages to grow them and they are just weaving them into cloth. I'm speculating on it now because I simply don't know. I don't necessarily need to know unless my characters actually travel to one of these neighboring cities. Inversely, there are also elements of worldbuilding an author might know but never need to actually ever share. The author might quietly say to themselves that this planet has 102% the gravity of earth, because it's a tiny bit bigger, or that a year in Kuserra is roughly equivalent to just short of ~1.2 earth years, but that's something that never really needs to be explicitly stated in the story because it doesn't make an enormous difference. Some readers certainly love to hear about all of the interesting tiny details, but most, I think, will enjoy filling in the gaps with their own imaginations.

Working on a map this weekend for the New Comic, I started exploring the ideas of continent placement and I got to watching a video that was detailing tectonic plate movements and their numerous interactions. Initially, it made sense to me that this is probably a great place to start when designing a larger world, it might help you to create a more realistic map with fully fleshed out land features. But I stopped about halfway through drawing the first few plates, and I asked myself, why am I doing this? Does it really matter? Will the specific tectonic details of my planet ever matter to the story? No, they will not. I'm not about to write a scene where my new protagonist is forced to listen to some scholar explain the nuances of the three different ways two oceanic plate might converge. It would be entirely uninteresting to her, and she would probably fall asleep, (I think most readers would as well.) What's more, while I was working on it I identified a far more interesting characteristic to my world that would probably end up having a far greater impact on my cultures than continental drift. I opted to focus on that instead.

People seem to love poking holes in worldbuilding these days, and I think a lot of writers feel as though they need to defend their worlds against such intense scrutiny by predefining every Thing. Leaning on realism as a foundation for most things is good, but there is a point where an author will have to simply concede and readers will simply have to suspend their disbelief. One thing that occurred to me while drawing my map is the rules of how tectonic plates work here on earth don't really apply properly to my new fictional world anyway. The planet was not formed the same way as earth, and it doesn't have the same interior composition. I actually don't know how the landforms might flow over its interior surface, if they do at all. One might argue that this is some kind of a cop-out, but to me it ties into the more interesting story of how my universe was created and the forces involved in my universal mythos. While I maintain there's no real magic in my universe, it would take someone far smarter than me to explain the science involved behind my science fiction. I think it is still valuable for the author to maintain a vague understanding of these things of course. If I commit to the idea that my world's tectonic plates don't work like earth's do, that there's some other logic happening there, that is a rule of this world that I must adhere to.

So I guess the question I'm constantly asking myself when I'm worldbuilding is... how do I know when to stop? My general fuzzy rule for worldbuilding is to go three layers deep, then stop. What this generally means is my brain will come up with an idea, and at first it often sounds like a great idea, or one that works well on the surface, but then I ask myself questions about it. If I can scrape away three layers of scrutiny and the idea still holds up okay, then it's a good idea. Otherwise, it gets scrapped or reworked. Going back to Sanderson's hollow iceberg example, you don't want the walls of your iceberg to be paper thin. Readers, even dedicated readers that have suspended their disbelief for you, will tap on your iceberg, they want to peel away layers and learn more about it. They want to have faith that there's more to your world than just the surface, and it is the author's job to write enough to uphold that faith.

Another answer to the question of when to stop worldbuilding is: just don't. Personally I like to imagine my hollow iceberg is filled with water, and that water is made up of all the possible ideas that simply haven't been frozen yet. Just because I haven't thought of something doesn't necessarily mean it can't exist in my setting. What that means is I keep an open mind to pretty much any possibility lurking beneath the surface, even ones I don't come up with myself. If someone suggests that Kuserra hides a super rare flower with panacea properties that only grows in the Reach. Yeah, I could see that being the case. Someone once suggested that zombies would be fitting for a setting like Kuserra, and after giving it some thought, I decided against it. There's no real undead in Kuserra, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. However, I do agree that zombies might fit the theme, and since mutants ARE a thing in Kuserra, I created the Decrepit, a classification of mutant that's... actually pretty tragic. Will they ever come up in Kiva's story? Very unlikely. But I could see them in the setting so they're in the TTRPG document now.

 I think a good end goal is to achieve a level of understanding about your world that's about on par with your protagonist or the average knowledge of the rest of your important characters. AVERAGE, not the sum total. The average character probably does not know the exact chemical makeup of the soil beneath their paws, yet they MIGHT be fairly well-versed in the complexities of pulling on pants when there is a tail in the way. They might know the color of the sky, but not understand why it's that color. They might recognize the smell of a nearby predator, but have never seen its den. They might have opinions on the local politics, but not understand all the complexities of each and every faction involved. They might get a craving for their favorite food, and be very familiar with its flavor, but they probably do not know everything about its ingredients, production and distribution process. Focus on the things that matter most to your characters, and that'll carry you most of the way through worldbuilding without succumbing to Worldbuilder's Disease.

ANYHOO, I think I have Rambler's Disease. Got no clue when to stop rambling. And you know, after a ramble like this I always feel like I sound super pretentious and full of myself and I begin to doubt that any of these innumerable words are useful or meaningful in any way to anyone. BUT the whole point of this is to get all this shit out of my head so I can focus on other things. So I'm always happy to hear your thoughts, if you agree, if you think I'm wrong, or if you have any worldbuilding tips of your own, I'd love to hear them!