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In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

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bro choose every possible cheat code 🐈😺

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Ok, done gathering setup rolls for a demo Squire game! There were a lot of ties so I rolled for a winner on those. I might reserve them for an alternate version to demo how these prompts might work across settings. So the main winners are:

Setting/genre:

Medieval Mishmash, Ren faire style world

The Squire:

Middling Your family are skilled artisans or merchants in the new and tiny middle class, powerful despite their mundane bloodline. What do they do? Are you proud or embarrassed of them? What are their hopes and fears for you? Better With Horses Than People You’re very good with horses, true, but not quite so good with people. What about people is challenging? What’s different when you’re in the stables? Strange It’s certainly not going to be hard to tell you apart from the rest.

The Lands:

Diverse, bustling with trade and travelers from far and wide

The Liege:

A recently ascended young heir, untested

The Knight:

First impression: Beautiful They are striking in appearance; people gravitate towards them Oath: Protect To be a shield for those who have none (or to those who paid well) Coat of arms: Turnip and leaping fish Holdings: A couple of hog farms sliced off an argumentative noble’s traditional lands Priority: Responsibility The knight feels a burden of care for you and all who answer to them Failing: Idealist They do not know when to quit, they hold nothing back, and they will drag you along to tilt at windmills. Dying nobly is almost as good as winning to them.

and most importantly

The Steed:

Outer appearance: Skrunkly Inner nature: Friendly

as one last plug this is to make a demo for Squire, a solo storytelling RPG that is out for playtesting now!

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Now rolling for the Knight the squire is assigned to serve:

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Now rolling for the Knight the squire is assigned to serve:

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Now rolling for the Knight the squire is assigned to serve:

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Now rolling for the Knight the squire is assigned to serve:

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Now rolling for the Knight the squire is assigned to serve:

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Now rolling for the Knight the squire is assigned to serve:

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Two rolls to broaden the world:

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Two rolls to broaden the world:

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Three polls for the demo squire:

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Three polls for the demo squire:

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Three polls for the demo squire:

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Plugging away with Squire, my game about trying to work for a knight and become a knight and decide if you even want this, all at the same time! Thanks so much to everyone for your support.

I’ve been wanting to make a demo game for Squire and the trouble is I keep getting distracted by playing the game. So: let’s pre-make some setting & character decisions so I can hopefully streamline a demo!