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Picture the scene: you’ve worked long and hard on the perfect setting. You’ve crafted a fantasy world of ancient cities and unexplored depths, or a science fiction empire with planets teetering on the edge of war. Now you must decide, are humans alone in this … read more »
Are you cooking up a world for your story or game, and Earth-standard is just a little too bland? Want to give your setting a subtly different flavor without overwhelming your story, or adding a bad fridge-logic aftertaste? Well then, we have the perfect blog … read more »
When running a large campaign, you want to have a setting that players will care about. Your setting should feel like pieces of living history, not a series of location backdrops and tropes. This means you need to create a dynamic and nuanced world, instead of locations in a … read more »
The cultural ambiance of your world wouldn’t be complete without music. When adding musicians to your settings, it’s easy to insert generic instruments and songs without thinking through them. But that wouldn’t do justice to the huge diversity of music human cultures have. Here are some guidelines and inspiration … read more »
Earth is consistently used as a setting for fiction – even speculative fiction such as scifi and fantasy. This may have something to do with all known authors and readers being from there; Earth is a friendly, familiar, ready-made planet to dump characters and plot onto. But … read more »
As a genre, science fiction frequently runs roughshod over the hard limits of the universe as we currently understand them. Above all else, science fiction writers consistently forget, hand wave away, or blatantly ignore what is perhaps the most foundational rule in the universe: nothing … read more »
Culture encompasses almost everything we do. Language, religion, and social structure all shape and are shaped by the prevailing culture. The cultures you create for your worlds will make a permanent imprint on the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the people in them. With so many strands in … read more »
If your story takes place in another world, none of your characters are really speaking English. They aren’t telling stories or recording history in English; they’re doing it in the language you invented for them. An English language book describing their journey is clearly an anachronism. Read more »
Costumes reflect both a character’s culture and personality. Everything in their environment shapes the way they dress. Unless you have a professional costumer to defer to, costuming is left to the worldbuilder. When done right, a costume tells a story all on its own. Read more »
Star Trek is a franchise that I have, shall we say, a mild affinity for. It’s known for portraying a positive future for the human race, alien extras in funny makeup, and wondrous technology based in actual science. Okay, maybe based a little in actual … read more »