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Category: The Northern Deeps
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…
Tools in the Toolbox
One very useful framework for studying society is in terms of grid and group, an approach created by anthropologist Mary Douglas more than fifty years ago in her book Natural Symbols, and then elaborated upon by her and others in the years since. Without bogging ourselves down in the minutiae of the theory, Douglas contends…
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…
Feuds, Divisions, and Stability in Viking Society
Creating a new dungeon campaign can involve–and often does–a lot of world-building. World building is not, and probably should not be, constrained to the sorts of fidelity expected of the sciences, but it must achieve sufficient plausibility and internal coherence that those participating in the experience are not distracted by it; if there are blank…
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…