Tag: worldbuilding

  • Symbolic Play

    Symbolic Play

    The old text based pc adventure games: They would tell you the basics, what you see in a room, but you’d have to interrogate the game to find out a key was hidden beneath the lamp. There was no ‘roll a perception check.’ That kind of play requires more effort, but it also more evocative…

  • Tools in the Toolbox Part 2: An Illustration from The Mandalorian

    Tools in the Toolbox Part 2: An Illustration from The Mandalorian

    In my last blog post, I introduced Mary Douglas’s culture theory of grid and group as a potential world-building tool, but I never really gave an example of how you might use it to not only create more convincing, coherent cultural worlds, but to clarify the sorts of conflicts and tensions that might naturally arise…

  • World Building from the Well Up.

    World Building from the Well Up.

    It is easy for world builders to overestimate how interesting their lists of wars and rulers and the fantastic get a reader to really care about the world they created. Tolkien’s Silmarillion would have been much less captivating without the smaller, more tactile world depicted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; stories…

  • Odin’s Ravens

    Odin’s Ravens

    Odin’s Ravens most commonly take the form of the common raven, but in their natural form, Odin’s Ravens are marked by an incredibly large and singular green orb, a shard of the Eye of Odin. Devotees to the Allfather believe that seeing Odin’s Ravens in this form is a profound sign of Odin’s attention.  Odin’s…