We tend to think of world-building as the foundation of any fantastical project, BUT WE ARE WRONG.
Or
Here's some stuff that I didn't know I was doing until I was done, but it worked, so now I'm going to call it a method and pretend I'm a genius.
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[Brace yourself. Here come the wisdoms.]
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Before world building: primordial, accidental inspiration soup
The real start of any project is accidental inspiration soup.
(World building is dessert: it comes after the main course, and in small quantities, so you don't kill yourself with it).
A quick and inflammatory aside about inspiration
Inspiration is a loaded term.
We often interpret it as "Here's a list of things that I want to be like!"
We're making a game, so we go and play a couple of popular games, watch a couple of popular movies, and then say, "That's what I'm going to make, but with this tiny tweak that makes it mine."
It makes sense, IF YOU WANT TO CREATE DERIVATIVE DRIVEL.
All fantasy is D&D! The 3 flavors of sci-fi are Not-40K, Not-Starship-Troopers, and Not-Aliens! How will people know that this is like Darkest Dungeon unless it looks exactly like Darkest Dungeon's chibi-Mike-Mignola art? (Don't worry – this time, it's in space/the weird West/turn-of-the-century Paris/whatever!)
Anyways, this is not inspiration. This is following the leader. This is copying surface elements.
This is…
*shudder*
awkward fanfiction.
Inspiration is much grander, more nebulous, more... soupy.
Here's how to do it:
Hop in your time machine, set the dial to "formative years," mash the big green button, wake up in your past self*, nuke the Internet, move to a desert, find a crazy person and/or abandoned library, and start reading books off of their shelf at random.
*In a time travel way, not a Time Traveler's Wife way.
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(Or, if you're in a rush, you could do this now, but please understand that this is the diet version of the experience.)
It's important to do this in a physical world. Scrolling for never-ending reference images on your social media drug of choice is not the same thing. The glowing screen becomes a blur. What we are looking for is not volume, but retention:
The things we encounter are going to stick with us as ideas and emotions and half-formed images wriggling around in the shadows of our mind.
The more room that is left for your imagination, the better.
As a child, Dark Souls & Elden Ring lead creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki would try to read English language fantasy game books far beyond his grade school English skills, leaving him to piece together what was happening through inference and conjecture, based on illustrations and the bits of context that he could work out. Incidentally, the games' "mingleplayer" mechanics were inspired by his memories of random strangers helping push cars up a snowy road.
These are the things that we are looking to collect.
Julia Cameron calls the process of developing this "filling the well."
What we want to develop is a deep reservoir of strange things to fuel us as we create. Having these things bubbling in the back of your mind will be a kind of support group of images, thoughts, emotions, and ideas through the entirety of the creative process. You never know what's going to surface right when you need it.
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The soup that became Defender's Quest
My favorite part of this deep well of strange things is that there's all sorts of unexpected stuff in there: games and movies make up a much smaller percentage of its denizens than you might expect. (Drawing your inspiration from unexpected places is like a cheat code: your game feels shocking and original simply because you stole from places that people aren't used to and don't know.)
As an example, I'm going to look at the very first game that I ever wrote professionally: Defender's Quest.
ANYWAYS! Defenders's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten (DELUXE!) is a tower-defense/RPG hybrid set in a fantasy quasi-Mediterranean(ish?) medieval plague colony, starring a librarian, a bunch of zombies, and what we affectionately referred to as "an Aztec death god buried at the end."(Incidentally, it's only $2.99 at the moment thanks to an 80% off discount that runs on the Steam store until the 26th.*)
*A fair warning: It's pretty old and a little unstable at this point, but still has a small cadre of fans. There's been some talk of releasing the source code, but I have no idea if/when that's going to happen. And, of course, you can always try the gigantic demo (which I think is still available?) It's like the first quarter of the game, and you can port your save over if you decide to get the full thing. PS: I haven't gotten a Defender's Quest check in a bajillion years, so I've got no dog in this race.
Here were the things that I drew from as I wrote it:
Rudyard Kipling's The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
A weird, hallucinogenic Victorian horror/adventure short story set in the British Raj. It follows an Englishman who stumbles into a village populated entirely by people who have "died" and then made surprise recoveries - rendering them permanently ritually unclean. The whole place is isolated and imprisoned by a bizarre set of natural geological formations and mysterious armed guards who are only seen from a distance. The nightmarish environment, the shadowy forces that enforce the prisoners' permanent exile, and the inversion of the outside world's social order within the prison village's culture really stuck with me as a child. (I have since read that some people interpret the entire story has a heatstroke-induced hallucination.)
Anglo-Saxon Literature
I took a medieval literature course immediately before starting Defender's Quest, and followed it with an Anglo-Saxon course where I got to translate excerpts of old English poems, adapted Bible stories, sermons, and historical records.
Avatar: the Last Air Bender
A children's cartoon about an Asian-inspired fantasy world where people have elemental superpowers, the entire world is embroiled in a 100 year war, and a Dalai Lama-esque figure is tasked with achieving peace, despite himself being a child (and a pacifist, and having spent the last century in an iceberg). I watched the whole series in 3 days, and then immediately restarted it.
Calvin and Hobbes
A classic newspaper comic about a hyper-imaginative (and incredibly verbose) 6-year-old and his stuffed Tiger. Required reading for literally anyone writing anything.
Archer
An absurd animated comedy series about a dysfunctional spy and the even more dysfunctional security agency for which he works, all set in a nebulous 1960s-esque time period.
Thief
At last, a game! Specifically, a late 90s first-person stealth game about a master thief in a nameless fantasy city torn between the competing forces of mechanical progress and atavistic savagery.
Book of the New Sun
An utterly alien coming-of-age story about a young professional torturer in a crumbling far future where the sun is burning out.
Vague memories of reading Aristotle & Plato in high school
The two premier ancient Greek minds who more or less form the first inkling foundation of Western philosophy, science, and debate.
The Prologue from Ochrid
A centuries-old collection of Eastern Orthodox saints' lives, divided into readings for each day of the church calendar. It was written in Russia but includes saints from all of the Eastern churches reaching back to the earliest martyrs of the Roman persecutions. An invaluable window into a religious mindset of a distinctly medieval nature and regions of the world generally quite alien to an American audience. I grew up hearing this every day.
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What they gave the game
Defender's Quest looks nothing like any of these, but the game would not exist without them. Each of these things was vital in creating the tone and emotion of the game. (And at the end of the day, emotion is what your audience is going to remember.)
Let's take a look!
Rudyard Kipling's The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
This is probably the most straightforward of anything here: the natural geographic prison that forms the Defender's Quest medieval plague colony setting ("The Pit") was one of the very first ideas that I had when discussing the story with the designers, and it came straight from this Kipling story. (Which, incidentally, I had not read since I was 12. That's the remarkable thing about an inspiration well – you never know what's going to come bubbling up to the surface right when you need it.)
Anglo-Saxon Literature
Anytime poetry is mentioned in Defender's Quest, it is drawing directly on the things that I read and translated in this class.
If you're going to write medieval flavored fantasy you'd better have read some actual medieval works. How else are you going to know what sounds and feels medieval? There's a reason that the most famous fantasist of all time was also a serious medievalist.
It's also worth noting that Beowulf has an incredibly early example of a fantasy religion – one which directly inspired the way that I designed religions in Defender's Quest. But we'll get more into that in my big, future, inflammatory post about creating fantasy religions. Right now, I've got to talk about children's cartoons.
Avatar: the Last Air Bender
The ending of Defender's Quest – specifically, the mechanical "reversal" of boosting the MacGuffin* – would not have happened without this show.
*Sorry, I swear this sentence makes sense if you've played the game. Well, played the game, AND READ BEHIND THE SCENES JOURNAL. If you haven't, I'm not going to derail things here trying to explain.
The ability of this goofy children's cartoon to shock me with the inner complexity and struggle of its characters, its willingness to unflinchingly handle serious life-and-death topics without sugarcoating them or wallowing in edginess, and its successful crescendo into a grand finale built brick by brick with nothing but the established rules of the setting completely blew my mind. I knew that I wanted to do the same thing in Defender's Quest, and successfully sweet-talked the designers into creating a whole new mechanic just for the game's climax. If it hadn't been for this goofy kids' cartoon, the game probably would've just ended with a pile of hitpoints to chew on (as is tradition.)
Instead, we got what I like to believe is a memorable mechanical culmination of both the gameplay and narrative rules that we had spent the entirety of the game establishing.
I don't think our chintzy little budget indie game is going to hold a candle to the 3 season buildup and payoff of Avatar, but it has stuck with a tiny handful of cult fans** in a way that I don't think it would have otherwise.
**(Don't worry, there's a follow-up post in the works just for the 1.5 of you who desperately need to know more.)
Calvin and Hobbes
Every ridiculous character that I have ever written is channeling the primordial spirit of Calvin, myself included. I genuinely can't emphasize the importance of this newspaper strip enough. (Whilst I'm recommending comic strips, I also highly encourage you to check out Get Fuzzy, which does an excellent job of creating humor out of characters rather than punchlines, if that makes sense. There is rarely a drumroll ba-dum-dum-tish! at the end of a Get Fuzzy strip – the humor is all in ridiculous characters being ridiculous. As I recall, the author stated that one of his big inspirations was Monty Python.)
Archer
If you want a master class in snappy dialogue, it's hard to beat the first season of Archer. You get to see pacing. You get to see excellent examples of surprise (a foundational element of humor that I fear we are slowly losing in the smartphone world.) Perhaps most strikingly, you get to see that it is okay for comic characters to try to be funny and fail… until it becomes funny. That's an incredibly powerful trick that I'll discuss more once we get to our DIALOGUE post.
I'm not sure that I ever would have thought to add Act Intro Quotes to the game's 7 acts if I had not seen them used to incredibly great effect in Thief's intro. These ended up making a fantastic way to set the tone of a segment of the game, expand the world, and generally ended up being some of the most memorable writing in the game. Hats off to Looking Glass Studios (and specifically, writer Dorian Hart) for a simple and incredible writing trick. I'm not sure that there is a faster, more effective, more flavorful way to tell players what kind of world they are entering.
Book of the New Sun
I read's Severian's adventures partway through the development of Defender's Quest, and I immediately knew that it was going to influence everything I wrote for the rest of my life. There's just about infinite story writing and world building lessons that you could draw from this, but the two that probably had the biggest impact on Defender's Quest were these:
1. Characters experience the world at a personal level, and the audience experiences it through their eyes.
Only the author has a bird's eye view of the world and the cosmic struggle underlying it. The audience only gets an ant's eye view as they crawl through, one tiny step at a time. No matter how grand the conflict, your characters (and the audience) experience it at a human scale.
2. The social order of a fantastical world should feel alien to the audience.
This means that morality should not line up with what we might call "modern American median pop-morality" – an alien culture will have things that are considered necessary, acceptable, or even good to the people of that culture that do not fit with standard American values. (If a journey into a fantastical world only shows you value systems that you can see at home, it is not a journey into a fantastical world; it's just Santa Fe with pointy ears. It's genuinely kind of shocking how common this is.) Furthermore, they hold these values and beliefs for a reason. The second gigantic pitfall waiting for us as fantasists is to create a bunch of bizarre and deranged beliefs that characters believe for no reason (complemented, of course, by a main character who – despite being from this world – doesn't believe any of it and spends the whole time rolling their eyes and pointing out how stupid everything is. LOOKING AT YOU, ALOY.)
Vague memories of reading Aristotle & Plato in high school
If your characters are going to think and discuss in anything other than online stoner terminology, it absolutely pays to know what ancient people thinking and discussing sounds like. It's also tremendously useful to see the logic behind very different beliefs. Again, people don't hold values and beliefs for no reason.
The Prologue from Ochrid
I'm going to make a whole post about writing fantasy religions later in this series, but for now, I'll say this: Religion being a kind of take it or leave it item at the buffet is really a development of the last 300 years. For the rest of human history, it was an integral anchor for a person's life.
If you want a world that doesn't just feel like Santa Fe with pointy ears, that world needs to have religion, and that religion needs to feel like actual religion – that is, a system of belief and practice that is strong enough and compelling enough to be passed from one generation to the next over and over.
If you have no familiarity with religion other than vague ideas of the local mega church or bitter memories of your parents burning your D&D books and/or making you feel bad about sex for reasons that they couldn't put into words, it is going to be an uphill struggle to create believable fantasy religions. I highly recommend checking out some religious material from an old religion, especially primers rather than scripture – reading a religion's scriptures without context is a great way to get very mixed ideas. Primers share both what the religion believes and why. You'd be surprised at how alien these things feel coming from a modern American perspective.
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Go simmer the soup
Note how much staying power something in our deep well of strange and interesting things has: for most of these, I had no idea that they were going to be an inspiration when I first experienced them. Oftentimes many, many years had passed between first encountering them and having them bubble up to the surface of my mind as I wondered how to solve some narrative problem. That's the joy of inspiration soup – you never know what's going to bubble up to the top.
As we begin a new project – before we even begin the delicious poison-candy that is world building – we will already be quietly building the tone, timbre, and emotion of our project as we (consciously or not) draw from our deep well of strange things.
So, nuke that Internet you're eating and go pick up something old and alien. Start the soup simmering now.
We'll be using it forever.
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