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Worldbuilding


So, now that I do writing as a “job” (I haven’t been paid for it yet, so it’s hard to use the J word here), my free time can be spent on other pursuits.  One of my bigger free-time activities is playing Dungeons and Dragons with my college buddies.  We get together every week online for a few hours and dish out some pen-and-paper awesomeness.  It’s a good time.

We have played several campaigns, and a few of us have taken turns GMing.  Right now, I’m in the hotseat, and I’ve been running them through a pretty complex campaign.  I wrote a piece for it on Legendary Pants when we started, so feel free to read that.  We’ll be putting this particular campaign on suspension two weeks from now (I’ll probably write a piece about hanging it up then), and Rob will be taking over as GM after that.  Good times.

What I want to talk about here, though, is the nebulous quagmire that is worldbuilding.  It is, without a doubt, my favorite part of GMing.

I’m not sure exactly where the appeal is, though.  It is a creative art, to be sure, and a complex one, but much of the time it ends up being a lot of work.  Worldbuilding, to the extent that I generally do it, involves far more time in research and headache than in actual writing or dreaming.  For example, in one campaign, my players were going to be spending a lot of time in a desert, so I spent hours researching camels.  I think my players actually dealt with camels in the game for about ten or fifteen minutes.  That’s about the typical ratio between my worldbuilding interests and those of my players’ exploration.

My current campaign is centered around the Janko sea and involves a half dozen countries.  I worked on these countries enough that I can tell you the six major imports and exports of each along with a brief political history and a cultural dossier.  I think my players have only even been to one of them and have sights on a second (though they only have two sessions left to get there).  Indeed, I have pages of information written that will likely never actually reach my players’ ears.  That’s a good amount of work that will never be read.

However, I do truly enjoy it.  The research, the creativity, the writing, all of it appeals to some internal desire to construct.  In some way, it’s like exerting oneself in a physical hobby like woodworking or sculpting.  The hard work somehow adds to the experience.  A product feels more complete when true struggle went into creating it.

Writing, too, fills this satisfying requirement.  However, I’ve been treating writing more as a treadmill that I need to run everyday.  Even when I end a story, I need to have the next one in my sights and ready to go.  Constructing these worlds, however, feels more satisfactory because I work towards an end with each, even if they just serve as frameworks for the stories they contain.

Or I’m crazy and masochistic.  Either way, I have fun with them.

Now, Rob is taking over, so I can sit back and enjoy being a player in his world for a while.