PROLOGUE

I must admit, it slipped my mind entirely that this edition of the newsletter would release on Thanksgiving. I hope the day finds you surrounded by cherished company and delicious food—it's these things that make it my personal favorite holiday.

Recently, I’ve been spending more writing time on worldbuilding more than anything else. Specifically, I’ve been worldbuilding for settings intended for use in tabletop role-playing games.

I wonder if I’ve been more compelled to write setting materials for TTRPGs because I see them leading more directly to a fun group/social experience than playwriting. When I write a game setting, there is a very logical and reasonably likely path to a social experience—a tabletop game session with friends—that may result from my efforts. All I need do, once I have a setting written and an introductory session planned, is organize a group of players (admittedly easier said than done). When I write a draft of a play, though, right now it's a tossup as to whether I’ll have a version of it I want to show others within a year, never mind a version of the play that anyone actually wants to produce.

The explanation I can see holding water is that writing is scary. Writing a whole draft of something is a committment, and it’s something that takes a lot of focus.

It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been doing the thing I cautioned myself against doing awhile back, which is writing lengthy newsletter posts at the expense of my scriptwriting time. In future months, I will be holding myself to writing shorter Art and Craft posts—haha, for my sake and, I imagine, for yours. Ironically, I think that, were I to dedicate more time to writing—or rather, editing—Art and Craft, I would end up with more concise posts. I'm in an in-between sort of space at the moment where I’m spending enough time on it to have a substantial chunk of writing, but not long enough to trim it down. I’m gonna work on that.

Other artistic updates include:

• In early November Ryan and I finished the first draft of our play about our cross-country adventure taking them from Massachusetts to Los Angeles! Next draft of that is coming…

• …when I get back from by first professional theatre gig on the first national tour of the musical The Miracle on 34th Street! This immense time committment is another reason my scriptwriting has been sparser—nonexistent, I’ll admit it—recently.

I make some of the final edits to this edition as I sit on a dark bus to New Haven—from there, I'll catch a bus or a train to Boston to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family for a precious couple days before shipping back to New Haven for the show's second stop. In this season of gratitude, I am immensely thankful for the wonderful team I have the opportunity to work with, and all the people who helped me on my way to doing some of the work I got my degree for. I'm thrilled to see what the adventure has in store—and, admittedly, I'm thrilled to be back home so I can write about it. The touring schedule is relentless!

I am also thankful to you, my friends, family, and readers, for setting aside some time to scan my reflections. Chances are, you are one of those people who has helped me on my way.

Wishing you happy holidays.

ART

Mobile Suit Gundam and other multimedia settings.

Earlier this month, I watched my first Gundam anime, a movie titled Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway.

Now, if those words mean nothing to you, allow me to elaborate. Mobile Suit Gundam is a Japanese entertainment franchise centered around the titular machines, themselves massive robots piloted by human operators.

I had been wanting to get into more mecha anime—“mecha” typically refers to those human-piloted bipedal robots—and needed something to watch after finishing Eighty Six, a great modern entry into the genre. One night, in the midst of another movie that wasn't doing it for me, I decided to switch gears, and pulled Hathaway up.

I wasn’t quite sure what was going on throughout the entire experience, but I was compelled by the movie’s setting, of all its elements, in particular. It feels like an Earth of the near future, but with one extraordinary exception in terms of technological advancement: the mobile suit, massive human-piloted robots—mecha—built for war and security. Apparently, the events of Hathaway take place 12 years after the events of a movie that came out in 1988.

Its world’s problems feel very grounded: overpopulation, environmental destruction, and political corruption abound. Sure, its titular war machines are blocky, hulking titans in brightly-colored paint, but they engage with the world in a logically consistent (enough) way.

I went into the movie anticipating being showered with mecha slugfests galore. I was watching the wrong movie for such a thing, though. The titular protagonist, Hathaway—that's his given name—only spends one fight in the entire movie inside a mecha, the climactic dogfight at its end; the rest of the time, he’s maneuvering around the political landscapes of the world. In one pivotal sequence, he has to escape on foot from a mecha strike he himself ordered, and there’s a sense of immense danger as he runs from these oversized action figures. It's a tense flight where even the sparks from a stray plasma blast splashing off a mecha’s shield burns to a crisp scores of the civilians fleeing like ants below.

I realized, in reading the Wikipedia pages afterwards, that there are detailed breakdowns of each mecha and its capabilities. It made me wonder—had I missed these details in the movie alongside the rest of the plot?

A double check revealed I hadn't actually missed much at all, at least with regards to the logistical attributes of the mobile suits (I can't say the same for the plot). It’s not that the mecha stats are in the movie; rather, the breakdowns can be found in magazine articles and pages of the graphic novels. There are even more details in the figure models and the TV series and the roleplaying games.

Scanning through its Wikipedia article to get a better sense of where all the info comes from, I learned Gundam isn’t just a movie series—it’s a world. Each of its individual media seem to stand on their own, but combined, they enrich the experience of one another.

Now, there’s absolutely the shallow capitalist way to build a world like this, and my assumption is that Bandai Namco is in it primarily for the money as they disperse the Gundam brand across all these differing media. It feels telling that I can't think of another word for these concentrated storytelling efforts other than “franchise.” “Series”? The latter feels like it refers to movies and stories alone rather than the combination of setting, characters, and story writ large. That said, there was something in reflecting on Hathaway that fascinated me about worlds developed across different forms; a fan can enjoy the kineticism of a movie and then discover the exhaustive details behind a certain mecha’s armaments when they build a model kit, holding a piece of the fictional world in their hands.

There are a number of other franchises I know of that do this sort of worldbuilding well; The Pacific Rim novelization does this, offering various stats of the movie’s mecha between the book’s chapters. The Star Wars novelizations often do this quite capably, too, adding detail and nuance to the world and characters—nuance that is invaluable in the case of many of those films.

I suppose, in a way, this is what made various worlds more real for me as a kid playing with LEGO sets from licensed properties like Star Wars—I got to build and manipulate and play with a fictional world, exploring it and rendering it more real to me. Even when the primary world is the toy itself, such as with LEGO’s original… brand? Toy line? Opus? —Bionicle, the presence of comics, novels, and movies gave dimension to the figures I was building and playing with.

I consumed this world's many forms eagerly. The first thing I did with every LEGO magazine I got each month was go in the middle and pry out the Bionicle comic booklet—and there were many. Within the comics, vibrant, wryly-written tales of action and exploration sprung from the page which captivated me for years. Within the main body of those magazines? Advertisements upon advertisements for the latest LEGO sets.

It strikes me, though, that the sets remain—for the most part—in their boxes in my childhood home. What stay with me are the stories.

CRAFT

What's in a setting?

Before I descend into verbosity, let me try to distill my present thoughts on setting design into Four Cs: Clarity, Consistency, Character, and Concept. I present these in order of importance a la Aristotle's Poetics, and I will insist that Aristotle share his ancient opus’ pedestal with my upstart theory until my instincts are proven folly. The attributes of each C are as follow:

Clarity

Can an audience see the world? Does the setting transport them? Is the fidelity of the setting sufficient to support the content of the work? Tolkien's rich descriptions and detailed histories render his worlds with immense clarity.

Consistency

Is the setting true to itself? This needn't entail “realism”; a setting can be consistent in its whimsy, absurdity, or lack of ordinary “logic.” Given that, is the setting structured in such a way where its systems interact with each other in a satisfying manner? The Expanse’s commitment to science—speculative fiction, “hard” sci-fi—results in a grounded world with compelling challenges emerging from how its characters navigate the realities of spaceflight. The Wizard of Oz, on the other hand, is consistent in its whimsy, which itself allows the piece to drive home an allegorical tale which is carried by the metaphors built into its fantastical elements.

Character

Does the setting reflect the unique proclivities of its author? Does the nature of the setting support compelling dynamics between its inhabitants and within their psyches? Star Wars is driven originally by George Lucas’ fascination with westerns, samurai flicks, and war films, and subsequently by its new authors’ love of those and new influences. The results are telling—the setting is arguably one of the most distinct currently in circulation.

Concept

Is a setting driven by a compelling theme, question, or ideology? I place Concept last because I believe a strong setting can exist without a specific concept in mind as long as its other elements are strong. A powerful concept, however, can add immense dimension to a setting and make its depiction and overall impact much more trenchant. Bionicle's setting—I'll always come back to Bionicle—is phenomenal; it's a world inspired by one of its creators’ battle with cancer, the protagonists delivered in capsules to defend the body of their Great Spirit. The concept communicates a personal struggle and enables a fascinating variety of environments and characters.

Such is the distillation of my musings; I thought it'd be considerate of me to put it at the top. What follows is a deep dive.

As the intro to this edition described, I’ve been on a tabletop game-writing kick.

I have it in my head, true or not, that it takes me two tries to write a setting in a genre I enjoy. My first shot is an attempt to create a world in my head, and my second is, having played games or written stories in the first setting and seen its flaws and inconsistencies, an attempt at “mastery” of a genre’s conventions.

An example of this is with my fantasy worlds, Thar (not the Forgotten Realms region—I’d never heard of it) and Ur’Davir. Thar was the first setting I remember truly diving into the design of for long-term play; I consider it my first foray into setting design, and its thick black binder and pages of handwritten and hand-drawn notes comprise probably one of the most significant physical artifacts of my childhood and adolescence. I have now, for a while, been transcribing it to a Google Docs file.

I wrote Thar when Dungeons and Dragons’ Fifth Edition first came out and the prospect of game-mastering first opened my eyes to the incredible creative practice of worldbuilding. I had started my D&D adventures as a Fourth Edition lad, and had many wonderful experiences playing the system—shoutout to the Pritchards!—but Fifth Edition was the first time I really took worldbuilding into my own hands. I actually believe I designed a dungeon or two for Fourth before expanding the ideas into a world for Fifth.

The landscapes of Thar took shape in my imagination one late winter-early spring day while I was walking around my childhood cul-de-sac. I remember watching the light glint off the rivulets of melting snow glistening in silver veins through the cracks in the pavement. I imagined the rough crenelations in the gray ground as massive ravines, imagined the snowmelt as mighty rivers, and a permafrosted tundra world began to occupy my every thought. I called it “Thar” as a variation on “thaw.”

The more I imagined, the more the various dimensions of the world began to insinuate themselves in my thoughts. What, I wondered, if the world was a massive pangean supercontinent drawn together by the imprisonment of a gravity-controlling titan at its center? What if the collision of these continents created gargantuan mountain ranges dividing the continent into four distinct regions with their own climates? What if the gravity elemental at the center of the world created such a force of attraction that the rivers flowed inland instead of seaward? I imagined cities, factions, and characters; I imagined conflicts driven by classic fantastical enmities, strife between the elves and the element-channeling genasi natives of the land. I imagined a setting where the pull of gravity towards Petjokasuudinmial (that’s “pet-YO-kuh-soo-DIN-my-al”—an ancient ur-being’s gotta have a long name) increased the closer to the center of the continent one got, with trees and buildings and even mountain ranges becoming skewed and slanted and denizens having to exert more and more effort to walk in a straight line.

What I didn’t imagine as a young worldbuilder were the typical structures of society that we organize our own world by—countries and monarchs and the like. Thar became a world with a lot of cities and not a lot of societies, a lot of fantastical ancestries but very few, if any, nations. And my players have yet to really come across a lopsided house or feel the pull of the steadily-intensifying gravity. These players, I am honored to say, have been sharing Thar's story with me for probably over a decade now.

So I failed to make a convincing world, I thought to myself in spite of my players’ enjoyment. Where are the countries? Where are the national boundaries? What is this supposed to be, Renaissance Italy? Just a bunch of city-states?

Yes, my imagination had asserted long ago. Judge not your dream for its nature as a dream. But I set about to “master” fantasy worldbuilding. I wanted to create an “ideal setting.”

Ur’davir was the result. With Ur’davir, I began with a text detailing the creation of the world. I dreamt up an ancient world sprung from the ennui of the Absolute Order, a landscape carved by primordial demons and then stewarded by the younger creations of the Absolute Order, the gods. I saw a world shaped by the gods’ struggles to emulate their sire, fantastical races—the same as usual—created by the gods to fight their wars and fulfil their divine mandates, kingdoms—ah, kingdoms!—formed as a product of these struggles. I invented Ur’davir after reading A Game of Thrones in college, and was inspired to create a setting that was dark, if not grimly so, and adaptable to the interests of a variety of gaming groups. I was motivated by a collegiate academic rigor; I was precise about naming conventions and cultural groups and plausible geography. I built layers and layers into my world’s systems of worship, detailing not simply gods pulled from D&D’s pantheon but rather conceiving of primordial beings beyond mortal knowledge and gods of utmost sanctity and old saints become paragons and new saints become objects of idolatry and relic-seeking.

Ur’davir’s pretty detailed. I’m pretty proud of my efforts with it.

And yet, despite all that, I revisited it recently—I’ve actually played very few games in Ur’davir—and was somewhat unsatisfied with it.

I ran a one-off game for a couple friends—this is your monthly reminder to support Spilled Coffee Creatives—after having read The Language of the Night (see last month’s edition) and found the world I’d built, for all its sophistication, painfully derivative. How many takes on Middle Earth am I going to make? How many different reasons can I conceive for elves and orcs to go to war, for humans to be scorned as upstarts, for plains and tundras to be home to a civilization of nomadic tribes prone to raiding and plundering a la the Dothraki and the Haradrim and whatever other reductive takes on some notion of Middle-Ages Mongolia?

I saw a Reddit post recently that absolutely entranced me. It features original concept art—I followed some links to the artist’s tumblr profile—that details an alternate 15th-century world of angels and demons who preside over an omniscient living city housing the last vestiges of humanity that haunts the thoughts of its inhabitants.

Wow! Holy originality, Batman! It helps, I’m sure, that the few paragraphs of context for this setting were accompanied by slide after side of dazzling artwork, a mix of haunting, grotesque images and intentionally lo-fi gifs bringing the characters to life. Hence, I think, the most important aspect of an imagined world: Clarity. Can you see it?

I see things like “you’re not supposed to be here”—the aforementioned setting—and I think of Ursula Le Guin’s wisdom about reaching inside oneself to create a world that, in reflecting one’s own personal specificity, reflects greater truths and refuses to simply be a reheated mish-mash of previous successes. I think my fantasy settings thus far lean on the tropes of elves and dwarves because D&D and the descendants of it that I write settings for are derivative of The Lord of the Rings—hell, the Tolkien estate nearly sued D&D’s original publishers. Yeah my fantasy worlds have elves and dwarves in them: those are the heritages that are detailed as par for the course in each book I pull from.

I wonder what the impact of my age is on my worldbuilding. Where Thar seems animated by youthful daydreaming, Ur’davir seems driven by a more rigorous pursuit of internal logic and Consistency with familiar world mechanics—at least, that’s the pattern that appears to me when I try to superimpose a story on my experiences. If this is true, did the uninhibited, unconcerned worldbuilding instincts that wrought Thar get flattened out by cynicism and self-doubt as time went on?

What’s nice is that it’s all words on a page, and I can change and retcon as much as I like. Recently, after having been away from it for a while, I began some revisions to Thar that will flesh out its cosmology and distinguish its gods a little bit from the cookie-cutter molds I took originally from Wizards of the Coast’s archives. After being spurred to detail Ur’davir some more for that aforementioned one-shot, I developed origins for the world’s fantastical races that are less rooted in the standard-issue biological determinism of a lot of settings—orcs are violent because they are predisposed to be—and shifted the origin of the world’s various cultures. Now, it’s not that the gods created Ur’davir’s various races in their own images; rather, the peoples of the realm are the products of the demons’ original shaping of the world, and the gods created various cultures—to which anyone may belong—to suit their ideas of what the world should be, and how it ought to be arranged.

Here’s an excerpt from my original history of Ur’davir:

Reimagined, I might see the Hagr as the architect of a set of cultures rather than races. I think it's less biologically deterministic in a way that feels compelling, or at least more unique--there is no shortage of settings where elves are beautiful beings of grace and intellect and orcs are warlike brutes.

As time goes on and I invent new settings, I want to challenge myself to pull from my own garden of inspirations and experiences. That’s not to say I don’t think I can use preexisting stories to my benefit; Le Guin herself noted the usefulness of mythology for outlining stories, and there’s that old adage about great artists and thievery.

The setting design I’m doing that prompted me to want to write about worldbuilding in the first place involves none of the settings I’ve been discussing thus far in this section. Rather, I was inspired by my current work constructing my second, my “mastered” cyberpunk setting, Millennium City.

Writing for an alternate history and accompanying alternate future is difficult. As realized in gameplay, the action of this setting will take place in the titular city, a compliant tower—think like an oil rig—built to be “the city of the future” after aliens descended upon humanity and demanded they prove themselves worthy to join galactic society in a century’s time. The city itself is a multinational enterprise organized by the United Nations and called home by people from all around the globe… but this requires, I feel, a basic understanding of people from all around the globe and how countless countries would have responded to this alien visitation.

It’s a concept that warrants exponentially-expanding Wikipedia dives in a vain attempt to make impossible extrapolations on fantastical hypotheticals. I feel a pressure to have an understanding countries I have no hope of having an insider's perspective of; I've been trying to identify a way to approach worldbuilding other than, “Read this academic report on Africa's economic future while you identify the likelihood of this other region balkanizing and assess the impact of the Moonies upon Japan's national psyche.”

The book I’m using to design this setting—and the tabletop system I’m designing this setting for—is called Cities Without Number, and it notes that cyberpunk settings have a variety of themes they tend to explore. When I rolled dice to pull two such themes at random from a table in the book, I got “Madness” and “Caste Formation”; not only is the global community losing its mind in anticipation of the aliens’ return, but technology is also accelerating the divisions between people and classes.

In the past, I have been dismissive of writing for Theme; a trenchant theme will emerge, I've always thought, as a product of effective storytelling, and design with the Four Cs in mind should be naturally conducive to the development of strong themes.

This time around, though, I've been doing it differently. I have an entire tab of my document dedicated to my own questions surrounding the themes of the world. As I follow the threads of these questions, I have been finding they naturally lead to setting concepts and mission ideas. For example, one set of questions I had related to Dehumanization was as follows:

DEHUMANIZATION → Dehumanization through cyberaugmentation → At what point, after augmentation and genetic engineering, is someone not even human anymore? → What does it matter if someone with human “roots” still classifies as human or not? → What happens when laws exist for different “species”?

These questions led me to the terminus of perhaps all game design: a gameplay hook, here in the form of the summary of a gig the players’ characters might undertake:

“Person who needs documents forged verifying ‘augmented’ status.”

Sounds like Gattaca! The resemblance to which, I think, is alright: the main idea is that players enjoy pursuing the gig during play, and the secondary conceit that the gig pose thematic questions relating to the nature of the world.

The questions I ask with regards to the themes guide the design, and thus the design communicates the ideas behind the questions—or such is the hope! My goal is to let these questions guide a thoughtful approach to setting design. I am building this imagined future through contemplations upon the central questions I have on my mind, rather than blind speculation as to its socioeconomic future aimed to guess at its place in a “logical” imagined future.

I'm curious to see how the design of this setting goes. It's captivated my artistic attention for a while now—maybe once I'm satisfied with an initial design, I can devote my thoughts on the Four Cs to new drafts of the scripts waiting in my stable.

—

Michael