I moved my blog over here. Because.

mood: crappy

Now accepting art commissions.
Details here.

mood: bouncy

First concept artwork for the project is online. It's here.

*keels over dead*

mood: exhausted

Heh, this is fun. You can see when I'm doing research by the big stacks of pictures with similar topics cropping up in my deviantART faves collection. (They're here, in case you want to research some stuff, too. /plug)

mood: working

2010 is my 15th year as a worldbuilder, and this is the 3rd article in my anniversary series.
Note that if you're new to worldbuilding, this series is not for you.


Here we go with some of those pesky assumptions worldbuilders make with regards to how you have to go about building that setting, and what needs to be in there – from clichés to genre conventions to cultural concepts so deeply ingrained you don't even notice them anymore. This is one of my pet peeves, and also one that I'm still struggling with.

Exactly. Because it's hard to get rid of them.


Methods of Worldbuilding
There are different technical approaches to building settings, and all of them have their advantages and drawbacks, and good reasons to exist – after all, people obviously use them with success. What's annoying about them is that they keep getting treated like the holy grail when they're not.

I realize using a specific method step-by-step as described in a tutorial is a great thing to do to get into worldbuilding, but then again, this series is not for beginners. However, once you've wrapped your head around the basics, you should perceive it as your duty as a worldbuilder to start experimenting with the methods (as well as with everything else), lest you wish to build the saganth Middle-Earth ripoff.

That said, I might be somewhat prejudiced, being an autodidact and all (I was about six or seven years into the hobby when I discovered by mere chance that there was a name for it, not to mention tutorials and stuff). And then, one of those methods may work perfectly well for you, who knows. Well, that's cool, but you might actually be missing out on some fun there. Also, I think it's not a valid excuse to not at least give it a try. (I did, and it was rather inspiring, even though I did return to my old method in the end.)


Genre Conventions
Someone said that if you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME. I don't recall who it was, but they got a valid point there in any case. The assumption here is that certain things have to be in fantasy, sf, or whatever genre you want your setting to belong to. Alright, so let's take a closer look.

- Limyaael already wrote two awesome rants on medieval fantasy (here and here), which means I'm not going to repeat any of it here. (Nor of the other fantasy-related assumptions, since Limyaael did an awesome job on most of those as well, and in any case way better than I probably could.)

- Apparently there is a deeply rooted notion that science fantasy has to be wimpy. I have yet to read one that doesn't smell of bland pseudo-medieval fantasy with spaceships.
I do recall reading a science fantasy book back in the stone age that could have made my favorite list (I can't remember the author or title, only that it belonged to some series), it was a far-future post-apocalyptic fantasy with magic, and apparently set on Earth. It used ancient (read: modern day) technological artifacts in rather interesting, if obviously minor, ways. However, it also had sloppy characterization and an angsty werewolf as one of the viewpoint characters.

- And last, there's actually the very basic assumption that every setting has to belong to a predefined genre. Guess what, those genres were created by artists willing to take a step beyond the boundaries of the existing genres. There's no secret law of worldbuilding saying you can't do that, too.

I could go on forever with this list, since there are enough other genres out there. But then, if you can read and understand this essay, you can also go to Wikipedia to look up the various lists of genre conventions and figure the rest out on your own.


Cultural Concepts
This one is most obvious with Western concepts, since so many published books/games/movies were created by people from those countries. Then, maybe it's not exactly obvious, since so many of the readers/gamers/audience are also from that area.

So, in other words, this is the hardest part. And since I'm from one of those Western countries, too, I'll uses some of those concepts for this essay, although it can essentially be applied worldwide.

- Did you know that progress (as in, technological advancement at (almost) any cost) is not perceived as a Good Thing™ everywhere, nor used to be at all times in the past? Now you do. No more cheap excuses allowed beyond this point.

- White is not the default skin color in this world. It may be in the country you live in, but then it's entirely your own fault if you don't even try to look beyond your neighbor's garden fence.

- I'm not sure if the Common Tongue Syndrome is actually a Western concept, but it looks like it would fit, since everyone is somehow expected to speak English in this world. (BTW, I'm a non-native speaker, and all I have to say on the topic is this: Folks, your language is just ever so weird.)
Alright, so you just can't come up with a convincing way to solve the language barrier problem, and the only thing that comes to mind is a common tongue. Well, then give it a unique twist at least. Make it a mess, like Old Babylonian (an Akkadian dialect) with its borrowed logo-syllabary, or an even greater mess, like Europanto (c'est muy more Spaß), or at least make it a Creole (I've yet to see one of those in fantasy, so there's lots of room for experiment).

- The concept of sexual orientation is brand-new, less than 200 years, I believe. Trust me if I tell you that you can do tons of very interesting stuff without it.

- The OMG-you-can't-do-that-what-will-the-neighbors-think!? syndrome, aka. German Angst™, is a notion maybe not unique to Germany, although it's pretty common there (and annoys the heck out of me right now, always has done so, and always will). It even extends to international relations, which makes me want to gnaw off my own arm. On the other hand, I could stand to see that last variety used more in fiction, since it could make for some nice and tricky political situations.

Again, just touching on the subject here, but I think you can see where this is going. Now, what do you do about these? Watch out for them, recognize them, and eliminate them, or at least use them in a new and interesting fashion.


Wow. I don't think I ever used so many parentheses in a single post, and I already eliminated a good deal of them.


This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Please attribute to Lex Mosgrove.

mood: amused

I planned to include this in the general research link roundup, but it's just way too funny, so it gets a separate mention:

The 20 Things You Didn't Know About ... columns over at Discover Magazine. (I'd include a best-of here, but they're all really funny, so just go read them.)

No more excuses about how dry and boring research for that next fantasy novel is.

mood: loved

Alright. I wanted to write this somewhat earlier, but never got to it for one reason or another. So here we go now, at last...

First off, I participated in a two week course at Games Academy (Berlin) last month, called Game Development Basics. It was awesome to say the least, and as a result, I now got a board game to work on with two other guys from the course. That would be the first project.

Second is a graphic novel I'm working on, which is set in my current worldbuilding project. I'll be posting some artwork on deviantART next week month (sorry, will take longer), if I can convince my scanner to work properly. I'm not sure yet what format this thing will be published in, so if you're lucky it's gonna be a webcomic.

ETA: I just realized how big that comic book project really is. Now I'm wondering what I've gotten myself into...

mood: tired

2010 is my 15th year as a worldbuilder, and this is the 2nd article in my anniversary series.
Note that if you're new to worldbuilding, this series is not for you.


This article is short and ranty, and ties in nicely with the previous post in the series, Realism & Plausibility, since consistency is possibly the most important ingredient of verisimilitude. Let me show you the importance of consistency through a genre that got it wrong from the start.


Steampunk
Steampunk is an eclecticistic melting pot, a baroque best of of virtually any genre from fantasy to science fiction, and by its own definition doomed to fail, since it's little more than a big list of possibly fun but utterly unnecessary features lacking any consistency whatsoever.


Eclecticism and its Simple Cure
Eclecticism is the main culprit for steampunks disease, and it tends to show up in other genres as well once they're out there for a while. Eclecticism occurs when you take a huge stack of random unrelated ideas you just happen to like, throw them into a blender as they are and without carefully measuring first, and just use whatever vile soup will come out of it.

While this may be a valid way for some people to invent new cocktails, it doesn't work with genres, nor with worldbuilding in general. And this is the other valuable lesson that steampunk can teach us, apart from how not to do it. It's the simple fact that it can tremendously improve, and maybe even revolutionize, a genre if you use its conventions as sparsely and intentionally as expensive spices.

Doing so adds greatly not only to diversity, but also to consistency, by shifting the focus from the genre feature list to the logical structure of the setting itself. Instead of ticking off single points that happen to belong to the genre by convention, you first build the foundation for the setting, and then choose which features logic allows to go in there, and which it doesn't.

Which, all by itself, should be a pretty common sense thing to do.


This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Please attribute to Lex Mosgrove.

mood: awake

Lee Sheldon called it "such a cliché that to call it a cliché is a cliché" (Character Development and Storytelling for Gamesy, p.47), and I think he's right, although not so much because it's been done to death, but because it's been done so clumsily to death.

I'm talking about amnesia in player characters, of course, used with the single intention to keep player and character knowledge even. Not the newest trick on the planet, nor a sign of extraordinary inventiveness either. I thought. But you never stop learning...

About an hour into playing The Witcher (finally got my hands on an enhanced edition, yay!), I eventually realized the game did it, too. Yet they didn't fall into the cliché trap, at least it didn't feel that way to me (I would have noticed it much, much earlier then, if not to say instantly).

Whatever they did with it, whether it was some brilliant foreshadowing trick or somesuch, they made me curious about what actually happened (no spoilers please, I'm not through with the game yet!) instead of annoyed by the fact that there's yet another amnesiac running around in a video game.

Very strange indeed, and thus I'm working on figuring it out. I do have a vague suspicion as to how they fit that obvious plot device in there so effortlessly, but I'm not telling you just yet.

There's certainly how you can use clichés to your advance.

mood: happy

I wrote a guest post for The One Minute Minimalist (TOMM), an awesome blog by Vita Reid of Philadelphia, PA. The post is about minimalism, autodidacticism, and worldbuilding, and you can find it here. If you enjoyed it, read the rest of the blog as well, it's definitely worth it!

mood: busy