Truth in Worldbuilding

Do you really need to know exactly what’s going on to create satisfying worldbuilding? When creating a fantasy world for novels, role playing games, or video games, creators sometimes have the tendency to want to start from the very inception of the in-game universe and work towards the “starting point” of their story.

This approach may be part of the fun of worldbuilding for some, but it tends to bog down a creator by presenting too many variables just to get to a highly centralized viewpoint at the end of it all.

Because whether you’re creating a fantasy novel or role playing game, the focus of the game is limited to a few characters (hopefully) and what affects them directly. What Matters?

A concept I’d like to touch on in this is the difference between character knowledge and reader (or player) knowledge. From here on, I’ll be talking about this from an RPG-oriented point of view, but this also applies to any fantasy media.

Let’s say you create a detailed history of how things got made in your world, whether that’s by the will of some deities or through natural processes. It’s likely that in your fantasy world, not every character would have an intimate knowledge of this history, especially in a medieval fantasy setting. So likely, a fantasy setting would have an established religious or cultural tradition with its own set of stories or scriptures that attempt to explain the natural phenomena of the world.

As a writer, you’d likely want these reckonings of the world’s inception to differ, right?

Yes.

Depending on the size of your game world, you may want to create various cultures and traditions, but how can you fabricate this diversity if everyone believes the same truth about the world around them?

Working Backwards

Likely, if you've started creating your own fantasy world, you've taken inspiration from other franchises or stories. Each creator becomes attached to different facets of the media that they enjoy. Some may enjoy the aesthetic of a certain video game or movie, while others may become invested in the political rivalries of the fictional kingdoms in a series of novels. Also, some creators are enamoured with the history of our own world and wish to create their own retelling of a certain era.

In the case of my game, Legends of Lang'Kor, I wanted to create a fantasy world that felt more medieval than fantasy, but didn't feel like history homework.

So I started by really thinking about which aspects of either side I wanted to bring into my world.

This type of brainstorming usually marks the starting point for all of us, and in the context of what we've been talking about, it's the end point of our world building. I call it the “End Point” because we’re only building our fictional history up to that point, as it’s where the adventure or story “starts”.

Establishing Standards

So like I said, I knew I wanted certain things. For the world to feel medieval, I needed to bring in elements from history that were quintessentially tied to the medieval era of our own world, at least in Western Europe. Some of these elements included:

• Feudal kingdoms
• Pre-gunpowder technology
• Well established religious tradition
• Peerage systems
• Temperate climate
• Familiar Languages (Middle English, Middle French, Church Latin, Old Norse, etc.)

So with that, I wanted to bring in elements from various fantasy franchises that I enjoyed.

• Fantasy races (Elves, Dwarves)
• Monsters
• Dungeon Exploration
• “Lost” Technology or magic

There were also a few things from contemporary fantasy, particularly role playing games, that I knew I didn’t want.

• Racial diversity (I wanted this to be a human-centric world)
• Magic as a commonplace occurance
• Loose political structures
• Mismatched technology levels (e.g. Vikings and gunslingers co-existing)

Isolating Elements

So taking each of the elements I wanted in my fantasy world, I started thinking about what it would take so that each of these would be present. This was the hardest part of the endeavor and resulted in many charts, family trees, and historical records. For example, for there to be some kind of lost advanced magical or technological society, there had to be some cataclysmic event that caused them to die off. I looked into historical events such as the bronze age collapse and the fall of Rome as examples from history.

Abstracting

I tried really hard at first to create, at least for myself, an “absolute truth” about each of the elements in my world.

I tried to align each element to a cohesive starting point, sometime in the distant past, but this was a difficult endeavor.

I took a break and then while playtesting the game, a player and I were discussing what his character may think about a certain in-game element.

It made me realize something: all that matters is what the characters being played (whose perspective is the focal point) know about their contemporary world.

So I started thinking: “what would a peasant in this kingdom know about the origin of mankind on this planet?”

If I truly wanted to model my world on a medieval society, it clearly wouldn’t be very scientific. The narrative being presented by way of the clergy would be minimal but would be accepted by the majority of the population.

So I started writing in terms of “what people believe happened” rather than “what actually happened”. I don’t mean to say that I got to work on my in-game bible, but I started to lay out ideas for the beliefs that governed the major societies in my world.

Example

I ended up creating a religious tradition that was more-or-less analogous to medieval Christendom, which included holy texts, a tradition of saints, and a governing structure that included bishops, abbots, monks, and parish priests. I knew this is what I wanted, once again, as an end point, so I got to work on the pantheon of deities that would make up the backbone of the stories that would make up the belief system of this area.

This type of approach made the “journey” from end point to “the beginning” much easier to define. I didn’t have to go into great detail to give at least somewhat of a background to “current” customs in the game.

I knew that there had to be some event that defined the faith, believed by the practitioners to be a divine intervention of some kind.

I made this the finding of an artifact called ‘The Guiding Stone’, which was a large carved stone made of jade-like material that bronze age humans discovered in the wilderness.

According to the stories surrounding it, the stone was gifted to mankind by the deity Varda and it contained writings that propelled humanity into a new age, which I’m calling this world’s iron age. Was the stone actually a divine gift? Who cares! The people in this world, those of the Vardic religion believe that it is. That’s all that matters.

This idea of only creating a “true” narrative from a grounded perspective frees us from needing to connect everything succinctly and precisely. As storytellers, we want to tell stories, not present scientific explanations for worlds that don’t rely on science to understand themselves.

Conclusion

In summary, if you’ve got an idea for your fantasy world in its current state, start there and only work far enough backward to make it make sense to your characters, not to your players (or readers).

If the understanding is set up that this fantasy world can be explained scientifically, the expectation is that everything in that world has a clear explanation, which is not always congruent with how fantasy media is enjoyed.

To cite a famous example, in the Silmarillion, the supreme deity of that world transforms the world from a flat world to a round globe at some point during early events in that world. Scientifically, that’s probably impossible, but does that matter? Probably not, It’s the same world that has rings that can make you invisible. No one asks by which scientific process the ring does these things, it just does.

So start where you want your fantasy world to be at the start of your adventure and work backwards from there.