World-Building 101
This is the beginning of a series in which I discuss my methods for world-building, it’s how I do things, a glance behind the curtain if you will. This will cross over between my Gaming and my Writing.
Origin of my Stories:
I started creating worlds for my characters when I was a fairly young. I started role playing when I was 10, I played a couple games with my Uncle, first as an unnamed Dwarf using the original Red and Blue D&D boxes.
Then several months later he came back home from the Navy and gifted me with all of his 1st Edition D&D Books, and I played a pair of characters over a long rainy three-day weekend. This was the summer of 1989.
As I owned the books, I instantly became the Dungeon Master to my friends in the spring of the next year when I tried to talk them into playing. And thus, my obsession with Role Playing and World building truly began.
First Worlds:
My first games took place in nebulous worlds with towns and kingdoms in a blank field. I never drew them and I just kept the names in a notebook (or just my head). The sometimes-shifting borders, and positions of towns and directions to kingdoms really didn’t matter much to me and my friends at such a young age. We were more into the exploring, fighting, and treasure.
As the years went by the usual things happen; people move away, people change their tastes, etc… And I ended up writing more and playing a lot less in my mid-teens. This was my genesis as a writer. As the years had gone by, I had started to draw more and more maps and obsess about putting things in their place. I would normally start by drawing the town the hero (pov) started in and then drawing around it and then adding roads to more towns.
The maps became webs of towns and roads with no country or national borders considered at all. I would willy-nilly throw in mountains, rivers, swamps, whatever. It would be years before I actually learned the proper geology/ geography to understand how water and air change based on platonics and how this all affects temperate zones and climate. But as you can see, I’m digressing far into the nerd part of my brain that is interested in such things.
Draklon
Ok that is not the most original name in the world, I totally accept that, but I first thought it up when I was about 14. It was meant to be “Dragon-Land” and I will probably not have enough room in this post to go through its complete genesis, so future posts? (YES)
When I first launched the world, I was over-reaching, I had the idea that all of my books and stories would happen in the same universe (first called a Multi-Verse and then later as “The Ultiverse”—remember I was a teen). Now I look back and feel it was kind of pretentious, but my Ultiverse was inside of an egg, with the Shell made up of billions of differing Earths. In a short story I had a direct link between the core of the universe, Draklon, and Earth created. This link caused the Earth to shatter into billions of possibilities and the “Gods” had to take these Earths and form the shell around the Ultiverse.
So, Draklon, was the center of my universe, and in my teens I was mostly writing stories that were fantasy and sci-fi mixed. Stuff like modern Earth-person ends up transported to Draklon and has to face high fantasy and magic with their tech. Later on, I had a whole colony ship trying to travel to the core of the universe. It was my “juvenile-period.”
My first completed novel (it will never see the light of day) took place in Draklon and I created my first full map, cultures, history. Many characters that I still use to this day were born over a summer when I was about 16.
Iterations.
So Draklon One was used in a horribly bad novel that I’m sure ripped off a ton of characters and stories from other writers I loved at the time. I decided to rewrite the world and the novel, at this time I fleshed out my Ultiverse idea and I was really starting to write a LOT. I even had ideas of doing it for a living (at this time I wanted to earn a PhD in English). So, I redrew the map entirely and wrote a new outline adding Sci-Fi elements to my story and Draklon 2 was created. It would never come to anything and I would try writing in new worlds for a bit, until I was about 18/19
I was experiencing the resurgence of Role Playing among my friends. It was to become the golden Era. I ran a massive campaign that was based off a storyline I had created for Draklon but I had never written about. Instead of putting it into my own world I ran it in a very popular setting for Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition. The game was a huge success, this was the birth of my Shadow Elves and their quest to find their home.
Draklon 3
2000 D&D would release it’s 3rd edition and I would recreate my world once again. This time expanding my map to include more continents and rearranging things to fit to actual climate and physics of a realistic world. (Yes I know this is a high fantasy setting—Kurt) I also decided to bring back the story of my Shadow Elves, and once again ran a campaign that saw the world being Invaded by them.
Darklon 4
It would only exist as a map I drew around 2008, which was right before I decided to stop running games. I had burnt out from arguing with certain players and a lot of personal issues happened in my life which once again saw friends moving away, friends no longer being friends, and the whole group fell apart. 2001-2010 also saw me give up on writing as a career and even as a hobby. These were dark times (sort of… these were body-building, tattooed, pierced, concerts every month times).
Darklon 5
Rebirth. Right before my 30th birthday I started writing again. I also started Twitter and I made some career changes that had me in a better state of mind. At this point I was reading a lot of horror and I started traveling to writing conferences and meeting writers for the first time in my life.
My love of creating could not be denied and I started to write again, mostly cop stories and horror shorts. But in the back of my head I remembered that I had a massive world map that was not being used. So, I created Draklon 5, by taking parts of that map, and also taking just about every other campaign I had run in alternate worlds as well and mashing them together.
Bringing it together:
So, for world-building shorthand I relegated the original core of the world (the previous maps from 1993 to 2008) as “Europe, Africa, and Asia” and I also expanded the “Asia” portion thousands of miles East. I then took 3 other settings I had used in old games, added one to “Asia” and combining the other two to create a “New World” continent across the western ocean.
Draklon had finally become a nearly complete globe and now had even more cultures, races, and gaming stories to add to it. The final piece was to update the setting to the current edition of D&D, which was 4th at this time. Thus, adding in an Empire of Dragonborn, and interesting class/ gaming features from that edition of the game.
There would be one final iteration where I divorce the setting from D&D specifics and I finally integrate all of the disparate storylines (campaigns, editions of D&D, and characters) into a cohesive history.
And Now;
Here we have finally arrived at the world I currently write in. This final, 6th iteration came about during the writing of the first Keegan and Slater Novella, which became the first K&S novel, which then got thrown into a dark pit. My current novel is now an adventure where several characters are traveling to the New World to race across a vast “badlands”, The Ashlands, to discover a lost city, that just might be covered in cold.
