World Building For Game Designers: Lesson Eleven: Go Big AND Go Home
WBGD is a series of lessons on world building in general and for game designers in particular by multi-award winning game designer and world-builder Steve Dee. Each lesson stands alone or can be read in a series. Each entry ends with an exercise for the reader to stretch their world building skills, examine their world and look for ways to improve it, or as a prompt to solve problems they have encountered in their creations.
The eternal question of artists everywhere, and to artists everywhere: where do ideas come from? More importantly, where do the good ones come from? What makes a good idea to build a world on, and a game on?
Of course, you might already have a game, and if so we’ll talk about some of those options in a later lesson. Cole Wehrle, designer of Pax Pamir and Root suggests it should always go the other way. Find your world, then build the game to express that world. Of course a few ideas about the kind of game you want to play can form those keynotes we talked about in Lesson Nine.
But however prepared, directed or inspired you might come to the blank page, there’s still the need to make those first strokes. And my rule here is: go big, and go home.
Go big means to build your setting on big big ideas. Earth-shattering ideas, maybe literally. If they don’t destroy it, they should define it. The best worlds are worlds that have really big things that make them stand out. That doesn’t mean they have to be radically different, but they need to have bold, identifying features.
These might be features of content. D&D’s Dark Sun and Dune are defined by the harshness of a desert world. That is a big imprint on every part of the world, its people, its history, its customs and the stories it tells. You could tell a Dune story far away from Arrakis but it might end up feeling more like Warhammer 40K. 40K presumably has worlds that are much like Dune politicking, so there is a need to keep the chaos threat, warp travel and the militarization of everything up front. Boldness helps establish identity.
Big ideas might be issues of history or change, or twists on things we know. Alternative history is a familiar one, with the most famous ones tending to be again, big bold ideas, using things that we already think of as big bold things. Few alternative histories are based on Thomas Dewey winning the 1948 US Presidential Election. JKF not being shot is better. The nazis win WW2 or Rome never falls—even better still. Custer surviving Little Bighorn? Not great. The war never ending because the dead returned to walk the earth? Better.
These might be ideas of social or cultural shock, too, which you can explore. A big idea says “look further, there is much to explore.” If Rome never falls, what happens to all other history? If robots can look exactly like humans, what happens to society? You can also invert big genre assumptions. What if everyone was Superman? What if Lex Luthor won? Or Sauron? Buffy the Vampire Slayer was invented just by inverting the genre of the blonde girl running from the monster. Find a trope or a cliché, and invert it, subvert it or question it (like in Lesson Six).
“Everyone knows Custer died at Little Big Horn. What this book presupposes is…maybe he didn’t” – Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), The Royal Tennebaums</box>
Big ideas are efficient because they sum things up in a few words, but hint at huge changes and ideas. This is also another way to think of big ideas—what’s a way to summarise a setting (see Lesson Eight). Warhammer Fantasy’s big idea (or one of them) was to be much more historical than most fantasy settings on the market, highlighting some of the real history of late 17th century Europe, and using that grounded feeling to do parody and satire. A big idea can be just “this is like this thing here”—or even better, “thing A plus thing B”. The fantasy writer Stephen Donaldson said all his books were based on one idea he knew really well, and wanted to talk about, and one idea he knew nothing about, and wanted to learn about. The second one, for his early books, was “what if the hero in a fantasy novel refused the call to action, and had good reason to do so?”—a genre inversion.
Star Wars was a genre subversion—it had the look of sci-fi but had ancient wizards and princesses and magical swords. Star Trek was a combination of two big ideas: Horatio Hornblower naval adventures in a cerebral Asimov-esque world. The Cthulhu mythos is a social question: what if knowledge is our destruction, not our saviour? (Plus the big idea, in the RPG, of doing 1920 history properly.)
There is a danger in big ideas, however, and that is they can often not mean anything. If Sauron wins the War of the Ring but people still play men and hobbits going on quests and fighting orks, it doesn’t actually feel different in play. And since games are abstract and involve interacting through the real world, striking differences of theme and setting is vital, or everything just feels the same. Just another big bad to fight, after grabbing resources and going on a journey. A key part of making an idea feel really different, and a setting feel really potent in play, is the second part of today’s lesson: Go Home.
By this I mean, what is the minutiae of the setting, the everyday, the ongoing? It might not go down to the most normal and boring people, because your game might never ever deal with those things, but it should affect everything the game DOES deal with. If an idea doesn’t hit home with every element of the setting, then it’s just not big enough. Or it’s big in the wrong way: I’ve seen way too many settings where there’s a long backstory about gods fighting other gods and then none of that trickles down to affect play in any way whatsoever. It’s not really a big idea, it’s a HIGH idea. It’s not connected to anything properly. A proper big idea is connected to everything and affects everything.
Remember the example of the raincoat in Lesson Nine? Everything is the raincoat. Your ideas need to be big enough so that you can describe tiny parts of the setting in such a way that everyone can see that they belong in this setting, and are connected to the big ideas. There’s an old creative writing exercise where you need to describe a barn from the perspective of a parent who has just lost a child without referring to the child in any way. In a similar way, a good setting should let you describe a barn in a way that shows you what world that barn exists in, without mentioning the world’s backstory.
It's particularly important for the people who live in the world, of course, but we’ll talk about that next time.
Exercise: Go back through your summaries and keynotes from the previous lessons. Can you make them bigger—larger, more effective, more dramatic? If you’re happy with that, do the barn exercise. Pick something small from your setting—a character, an action, a plot beat—and describe it without any specific reference to the setting elements. Is it distinct? Could it happen in another setting? Pick an existing setting you know well in the same genre and describe in that setting. If there aren’t any points of difference, you may need to think of some.
<image credit>Frontspiece to Europe: A Prophecy (also known as The Ancient of Days), William Blake, 1794</image>