Creativity

Way With Worlds: Where The Characters Are – And What

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Crowd Of People

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum and at MuseHack]

You have built a world. You know it’s origins and its ecology, you know it’s people and their religion, you know technology or sorcery (or both) thta they use. You have a world that is a living-breathing creation, all in your head, and your documents, and your stories.

It’s time to populate it with characters. Sure you’ve probably started early, but we are going in order here.

Most of us creating worlds have them populated with people to tell stories about or to play (in the case of the game). Characters in a way are the start and the result of worldbuilding – the result of the worldbuilding we do to have people to tell a story about. More on that later, however.

So, where do you characters fit into all of this? Well, let’s take a look.

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Make It So: The World Archive

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When I last posted about the Abandonment Archive, a place to leave fan works anonymously, I was focusing on fan works. But a few comments on “Recording your World” by newcomer Marek Tarnawski got me thinking that this basic idea of a “dumping ground” (in the good sense) should be expanded.  Let’s face it there’s probably a lot more things we should be saving with the power of the internet, easy technology, and fan power.

In this case, I’m realizing that we need an archive for abandoned, unused, and previously used worlds.

Many a gamer, writer, and so on has a few worlds in their back pockets. They have the game they never made, or the RPG campaign they haven’t played in fifteen years. There’s that Livejournal RPG that everyone loved but which then faded away, or the wiki that you set up and never used for your novel. There’s plenty of unused worlds out there.

People love good worlds. Settings are important, and though we love to build them, some are so intriguing we want to play with them.  Also sometimes we need new ideas.

So let’s put all those unused worlds to use.

The World Archive

Imagine a world archive for half-done, abandoned, previously used, or unused worlds. People could leave behind their creations for others to use, along with notes, historical documents, and contact information. This way their creations would live on and could inspire and be used for others.

The benefits I see are:

  • People are able to let their creations live on – and maybe even get comments on them and sync up with other enthusiasts.
  • Other people can get ideas or whole settings from the “donated worlds.”
  • Even if people don’t use a whole world, they’ll be able to use ideas (I suspect many people wouldn’t use entire worlds).
  • It would provide some interesting historical records of games, game systems, writing plans, and more.  Think of what these worldbuilding efforts say about the people and their times.
  • It may help remind people of past games and gaming systems – and would be great as a supplement to those beloved systems and what can be done with them.

The Methods To Get A World Archive

On the other hand this gets to be a bit challenging because people’s notes, worlds, and so forth are in a variety of formats. Some may be in a wiki, some may be a text document, others may be in a dead RPG system, etc.  Many are just on paper.  It’s not like it’s going to be straightforward.

I think the only way to do this is:

  • Have a basic upload system to just store raw files.
  • The upload system should have some basic viral scanning for the sake of sanity.
  • Over time get members to work out formats and conversion tools (that could make the site great for career skill development).
  • Post resources like character sheets and the like to help people convert information over – and post them on the site as well (anything to help out).
  • Accept uploads as JPGs so people can scan. If you can get any cheap OCR software or point people at things it’d be a godsend.

On top of a standard posting, credit, and combination system, it should be reasonably easy, as long as it’s allowed to evolve.

There would, however, need to be a pretty extensive search and classification system so people can mark their creations for easy access.  People amy search for game system, era, theme, etc.  Your tags are going to need to be extensive enough to classify things, and organized (and limited enough) to keep them from being overwhelming.

Likely there’d need to be feedback as well to catch misclassified works.  Some works may be tagged wrong, others may be falsely tagged, and there’s always the concern of people playing pranks.  A simple feedback system for review would probably be easy.

In time I see such project evolving – and probably sharing its formats and technology. A good wiki converter, a character sheet parsing macro, etc. would all be useful.

Of course there are challenges . .

The Challenges of The World Archive

There’s going to be a few challenges facing any ambitious archivists.  They’ll need to deal with:

  • Who owns what. Like the Abandonment Archive, it probably needs some way to do ownership checks.  A passive “alert us if this is inappropriate” system would probably work.
  • Stability. If a site like this gets lots of uploads and downloads It should be very carefully written for stability’s sake.
  • Backup.  Seems obvious, but seriously, this thing needs to be well backed up or the point quickly becomes moot.
  • Ensuring that entires are actually useful. There;s dumping grounds and dumping grounds, if you get my drift.
  • Updating. If it’s just a place to add things and it doesn’t adapt and grow, if new features aren’t added to make it easier to use, it could become useless. The site needs to evolve to meet people’s needs – which may not be apparent until running it.
  • Paying for it. Pretty obvious, though I imagine ad sales and such may work out, and there’s a chance for merchandise. It might work as part of a larger initiative or supported by certain companies (who get a nice promotional out of it).
  • Long-term existence. Something like this sound great but might peter out – it should probably have Death Of Site plans built in just in case.

Worlds For All

I think there’s potential here – if not on a large scale perhaps on a small scale for specific worlds, or settings, or types of game systems. It could even evolve as a series of specific sites coming together.  People would get a lot out of it – and it’d be fun.

It might even branch out into more world building resources and archives, collaborative works and the like.

Anyone feel up for it?

– Steven Savage

Way With Worlds: Ecology and Ecologies

by

OldNatureScene

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum at at MuseHack]

So you’ve got the origin of your universe (or perhaps you used our universe as a template, which does save a lot of effort). So now that you know how it all began, it’s time to move things to the next level. Namely, what’s going on in the places your characters will be living, working, loving, dying, and in other ways advancing the plot.

Cosmology is decided. Time to move to Ecology

Now when I talk Ecology, that’s a word with a lot of meanings and a lot of applications. So for the sake of the column I’m defining Ecology in world building as how you define how the living parts of your setting (world, worlds, etc.) work, relate, interact, etc. Your plants, animals, biospheres, diseases, and the like. I’ll refer to it as Ecology with a capital “E” for general purposes, and with a small “e” for specifics.

You know, where life comes from and/or lives. Life in short, like your characters, or the things they’ll be interacting with, domesticating, fighting, eating, and so on. Or come to think of it the reverse as well . . .

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