Character Equals World Building
Journal 93 5-11 June 2023
And vice versa.
The two go hand in hand, as I have mentioned in many of my previous world-building blogs/journals.
And as I promised in the last two posts (92 and 91) I finally sat down and started filling my world with people. Perhaps I need to explain a little better, for those of you who haven’t read the previous posts, or who won’t follow those links back.
Origin: Sandbox Cthulhu
Working on my Call of Cthulhu game I needed to move the story to a new location. What I did was print out the map, highlight a handful of buildings, and then I created characters. The intent was just to have a list of names with some characteristics (accent, defining feature, age, height, build) so that I would have a pool of NPCs to draw from.
But what happened was after a while I started to come up with histories of these characters. Dark secrets. Things that are going on in their lives. Suddenly my list was filled with story hooks, history, and new adventures. These hooks/adventures then filled in more details about the setting.
The kid who wanders around the streets and doesn’t seem to have a home or parents. What’s that about and when did he start haunting the streets? The cop who patrols the streets all the time, even off duty, who never removes his mirrored shades. The thirty-year-old fisherman who sits with two old men. His eyes are more haunted by life than theirs… and believe me the other two have horrific histories. Both veterans of different wars. All three having survived brushes with the mythos.
I spent a couple days filling this notebook with about 50 characters and in the end, I had five more adventures in mind. Then I had characters that tied into the current adventure (including survivors of the villain the party is seeking). I had a town full of secrets and dark corners.
In short, I had a living, breathing world (setting) instead of a map with street names and not much more. The X on the map that pointed to the villain was replaced with dozens of locations and scores of characters that could help or hinder.
Recap Over
That was the basis for the idea. Take the map, fill up key buildings with characters, let those characters add to the setting.
Did I just say that this character was a member of an assassin’s guild? Now I need to go create that guild. How do they work? What are their members like? Better create a few key figures in that guild then. So on and so forth.
Three weeks ago, I promised to do that with the map above (top of the page). If I’m not working on the novel currently, I might as well work on the setting of the next novel (and also hopefully my return to running fantasy games).
In Journal 92 I mentioned that I had a hard time getting started with the process. Mostly due to the sheer size of the city. The map covers an area 2 x 3 miles. It was overwhelming to try and tackle.
Therefore, I had to do my mainstay for tackling large jobs (or term papers, novels, etc.) and break it down into lesser steps.
In this case, I literally took my map and put it on the light table, put another sheet of paper over it, and then drew neighborhoods. I broke each sheet of my map down into about a dozen smaller places. And that set me up for what I accomplished this week.
Finally on Topic
Armed with 90 neighborhoods it was an easier task to concentrate on each one.
However, I’m finding it is not as smooth going as the Cthulhu map was. Perhaps the fact that it was earth I could just pull names out of a phone book if I really needed names quickly? But I have this block on fantasy names…
…and you know over the past decade I started adding in more normal names to my fantasy. I have Richards and Davids as well as Runes, Lethes, etc. The point though is that I just freeze up more when I’m naming characters in the fantasy setting than when I name in the Cthulhu/ Semi-Real World setting.
With Cthulhu I can look up historical events and place characters into context with “real” history before I add in the mythos twists. In Dusk I have to deal with looking over my own notes, second guessing them, adding in new history and then discovering that I already used that idea in another part of the world. I have to reference my notes on religion, world organizations, cultural notes, etc.
The second guessing and then revamping of the history… retweaking my older notes and ideas. Arguing with myself about whether my new ideas are better than my old…
Sigh.
It takes a lot. But here’s what I’ve accomplished so far.
Dusk: Old Town
If you go to the top of the page and look at the upper left corner of the city, that area is old town. I’ve cut it into 14 smaller neighborhoods, each neighborhood has anywhere from one to a dozen key places, and I’ve placed at least one memorable character in each location. Usually, 3 on average.
It has also had me think about guilds (assassin’s, thief’s, brewers, etc.), details on the government… and the fact that a lot of people have brown hair and eyes. It feels super repetitive and also… I’m probably wasting a lot of time on areas where people might never go and characters they might never meet.
BUT… that is a HUGE part of the process. The point of making all of these characters is to fill the world. To have to make that guild… to change the name of the order of wizards, to make hierarchies, invent story hooks, etc.
This task is not only intended for gaming… this is also setting material for the next novel. Several of these characters tie into the narrative of that novel…. Except that I haven’t started outlining that novel yet and only tentatively know what the story will be about. I mean I know how it ties into the overall narrative (you have to go back over several journals where I explain that each novel is broken into an over-arc, setting arc, and usually 1 or 2 pov arcs interacting with the other two) but I haven’t worked out the setting story yet.
In any case It is helping me to flesh out the characters and setting for both the novel and the gaming experience.
Characters = World
I’ve found a couple things that help to create the characters. Besides trying to throw in a secret or weird thing on each entry, and ties to other characters in the city, state, etc.; is the use of minority diversity.
I hope that phrase isn’t too charged. Let me clarify, the area is full of humans and I have plenty of them in their various places/roles. But the more interesting characters are the from minority populace, foreigners, 3rd gen migrants, etc. Also, those people who are unique to the area are also very interesting.
The country of Dusk does not have a native halfling population, when you put a bunch of them into a section of the city, it makes you start to think about how they got there? Why they’re there. How do the cultures meld?
The other thing I find that helps with making fun characters (or really “points of interest”) are Easter Egg and Homage Characters. Easter Eggs are usually when you take a name from another media and drop it in. Like having a character named Peter Parker or Tarkin (as in Grand Moff) And homages… well “homages” are usually called “rip-offs” but now the way I do them. For instance, I will admit that I have a character who is a firbolg who makes teas from fungus and plants grown out of dead bodies… but the character looks, acts, and IS fundamentally different from the character I’m referencing.
Outro
I could on much longer, but perhaps I will save those thoughts for a part 2. I plan on skipping next week as its Father’s Day and I have plans. But I will be working on getting more of the map covered and report on that then.
I highly recommend giving this a try… maybe I should have gone over more of the “mechanical’ side of things. Like how I sit down and break up the notebook and such. What information I put in entry and also how I think about things to work it into the world-building.
I still find people who divorce the two from one another and don’t think about how background, geography and othersuch influence a character.
If there is anything anyone would like to hear more about, or want to hear about more of these characters, fill free to leave a comment.
Thank you again for reading this far.
