Development 04 - Worldbuilding (Patreon)

Before we begin with the article, I just wanted to say I'm so, so endlessly appreciative for all of you. You're making my world so much better, and you're making something that felt, a year ago, like it was an impossible pipe dream, might just be some kind of reality. I'm aware my content has slowed tremendously since the first few weeks - I'm burning through my backlog and I've been so caught up in Solomon that I haven't had the chance to develop new games. Tomorrow, for Workbench Saturday, I will be showing some of the in-progress materials for Solomon, as well as talking about one of the most interesting interactions that's happened in Solomon so far - a dramatic duel between Landgrave Ezra of House Dontyenn and her Grace, Princess Araeyn-Saarya of House Volaya. The work I've been doing for Solomon has been dominating my life (which is exactly how I want it) and I'm excited to get it to a place where I can show you more about what's going on. I hope you find it as interesting as I do, and I hope I can provide you all with the content you absolutely deserve. I cannot articulate how much these past few months have been changing my life, and it's entirely thanks to your support. 

I've been thinking a lot about worldbuilding lately. When I was young, I would spend days and weeks inventing new worlds to examine - strange, distant worlds which weren't places to escape to for me as much as they were fascinations. Many of them drew pretty directly on my interests from the time - Warhammer 40K, Magic: The Gathering, Ben 10, other child things. What connected them together was a passion for making them as complex and intricate as possible, and having absolutely no use for them.

As I got older, I tried writing novels or making comics about these worlds in my head, but I was always hampered by the fact that I never actually had any plot for these worlds - just ideas. When I started writing LARPs when I was 14, that was the philosophy I was thinking about. Build as cool of a world as possible, and everything else will come together. When people talk about Adventure Games at Wayfinder, one of their toughest issues is that of Flow - which is to say, what happens during the game. I struggled with that more than most. I don't think I've ever written a game with a complex plot that has satisfied me while working alone, ever. The closest I've gotten was with The Horned King by myself and Jeremy Gleick in 2016, but it was still a very unconventional plot. However, there was still a huge shift in my developmental process.

In 2014, I ran one of my largest games ever, The Golden Blade. It's maybe the Adventure Game I'm most well-known for at Wayfinder, which feels absurd to me because it's so lackluster in comparison to what I want to be doing currently. Two days before I ran that game, I played another game called A Hollow Egg Hatches Eyes, which completely redefined how I write Adventure Games. So much so, I wrote an article about it! I left that week of camp with a firm resolve in my mind - that games fundamentally aren't about worlds. They're about experiences.

Since then, my games have always prioritized the emotional tug of the narrative over the background details I've invented. Some of my most recent games, such as Endless Lights, only have a paragraph to explain the background for the game. At this point, I absolutely believe that background is only relevant in something like a LARP or Tabletop game in how it impacts the fiction presently - background details for the sake of background details increase the cognitive load of the piece, and bog it down. 

The Last Days of Solomon is the first time I've thrown myself heavily into a piece of world background in years, and wow does it feel rusty. I'm having to relearn so many things I thought I'd figured out - we forgot to name the household of the Royal Family until the game already started! But I'm finally getting into the swing of things, and the other day I wrote about 5 pages about the complete history of Solomon - something I'm sorta mixed about.

On one hand, writing a lot of world background for any game increases the Cognitive Load, and makes that game harder to access. However, in a text-based roleplaying game, having a single coherent universe is more valuable when designing a character rooted in the history, and it's the sort of thing that's easy to go back to and read up on. Suddenly finding yourself caring about the Copper Age? Well, good news - there's a whole page on it! Otherwise, you're welcome to ignore it. That's an important tactic we're taking with Solomon, and something that's going to be vital to explain to the players as we proceed forward - that it's okay to skim. 

As we progress forward with Solomon, I expect to find myself writing a lot more about the city and it's setting, but my hope is that I can do so in a way that keeps the game feeling accessible, and that this background information can stay mostly in the background, acting as an interesting reference that one or two characters might use, instead of a textbook that players must memorize.