Fantasy World Building (Part 2 of 3)
By Brian Lancaster (May 2023)
Website: www.laughingcoyote.net
Cosmology, Cosmogony, and Religion
Where to begin? Astrophysicists say the Big Bang, before which the laws of the universe did not exist. The Norse vikings believed in a cow that slowly licked away at ice to unfreeze the first of the Aesir gods, who then created mankind from tree trunks. And the Bible speaks of an eternal passive-aggressive father figure who forbade humanity from eating fruit or learning.
None of these are truly a beginning, of course. The Norse gods were frozen in that ice before they got licked out by the friendly bovine with no explanation. Instead, most creation stories begin with a kind of hard reset in an eternal cycle, which does make more sense than a true beginning.
The hardest part when writing the mythology for Warlordocracy was how to minimize the incest in the god pantheon. To circumvent this gross implication of many creation myths, I had a "goddess" from some other reality procreate with the creator god of this reality, and spawned four lesser gods. Those lesser gods then taught various aspects of civilization to humanity, such as agriculture and sailing, and then spawned a plethora of demi-gods with them. I'm still working out which material the creator god, Daos, crafted human beings from,
Another main feature of many creation myths is the light-bringer who gives knowledge to humanity, Prometheus in ancient Greece or Lucifer in the Bible. I'm still deciding whether I want those four lessor gods to have been punished for teaching and procreating with humanity.
Warlordocracy Spoilers: In fact, in Warlordocracy, 99% of this creation myth is imaginative fabrication, probably written by a group of people on psychedelic mushrooms who hated the government (much like how the Bible was written). However, there are grains of truth in it, otherwise I wouldn't torture the player with an intricate tapestry of bullshit. The creator sun God, Daos, has attempted to create a worthy species many times, became dissatisfied, and decided to start over. Each time, he would terminate his former attempt with fire. This represents a periodic natural phenomenon of a solar flare, which wipes out civilization once every 10,000 years or so.
Varying interpretations of religion can be a great source of conflict in your plot. Different cultures should have different pantheons, creation myths, etc., perhaps more closely related to their surrounding resources. A culture that trades heavily in silk may believe the first humans were molded from spider silk, for example. Some religions might be closer to a real ancient truth than others, or each one of them could hold separate clues to the reality of the birth of civilization.
Ultimately, consider having more than one religion in your fantasy universe. Religious motivations for war are far more complex and intriguing than merely fighting over resources.
The Warlordocracy setting has two moons, a pretty simple situation to accommodate for writing. I'm no physicist and I don't know how the tides would work, but there are no tide mechanics in the game anyway. The moons are named after the first two lesser gods and linked with the religion of the land. Other settings may have a binary star system, which would require much more research and a much more complex calendar, things I don't really have time for. If you do, please go for it.
Magic and Resurrection
The fluctuating seasons in Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series could be explained by the axis of the planet changing while it orbits the sun, but more likely it's just a magical reason. My personal preference is for low magic, which is why A Song of Ice and Fire was great until characters started getting resurrected. Then it essentially turned it into Batman vs. Superman crap where death is meaningless.
The opposite of low magic is Terry Pratchett's Discworld, in which the world is a disc perched atop four giant elephants, who are standing on a cosmic turtle, which is slowly making its way through the vacuum towards its future mate to have very slow turtle sex to make a new world, or the big bang theory. The church believes the world is round and tortures anyone who disagrees. Ridiculous magic settings work for comedy, low magic works for drama. It's the in-between ground that kills the plot, where irrational magic comes out of nowhere every so often to fill up the plot holes that the writer was too lazy to fill himself.
Glenn Cook's Black Company is another series with ridiculously high magic in which death means almost nothing, but it managed to pull it off. The Limper, a recurring villain who hates the Black Company, is tortured and killed repeatedly only to be resurrected to try again. By the fourth book, Glenn Cook could have just chosen a new villain, but he decided to have the Limper's severed head dug up by a dog demon and attached to a clay body to get butchered and tortured yet again. By that time it was funny.
Black Company also started with high magic and the knowledge that characters could be resurrected on a whim, so when it happened I wasn't disappointed in the slightest. When Jon Snow comes back to life in the HBO show, that's when the plot fell apart, as the initial appeal of the Season 1 was that characters could get snuffed out at any moment. The final written scene in George R.R. Martin's books was Jon Snow getting stabbed to death and I was so, so happy. Then when HBO picked up the plot and Martin went into extended hibernation. It would be interesting if Martin finally published the next book and Jon Snow never comes back to life.
Historical Timelines
The word "prehistory" means the time before the invention of writing. So once you have the commonly-accepted creation myth filed and approved by the celestial bureaucracy, it's time to decide how long your civilization has been keeping written records. If you're going to write a timeline, it's best to start with prehistory and estimated dates. Then the oldest piece of writing ever found should mark when exact dates begin.
If you're designing a fantasy world, chances are they have not yet developed carbon dating methods. Therefore, before writing any kind of book of lore for your universe, decide whether you want it to be objective and godlike, or subjective and written by a renown scholar of the time. Lots of game manuals and RPG source books take this latter approach, including letters from the fictional author, and it can be entertaining. For the Warlordocracy Player's Manual, however, I'm taking the omnipotent objective approach.
History is written by the victors, and so each culture in your fantasy world should have different historical accounts, much like religion. Cultures in real life often take great pride in their age and originality, often to the extent of ignoring significant outside influences (cough China cough). This is another great source of conflict when you are writing dialogue or plots in your world.
According to the QAnon Anonymous podcast (highly recommend), the website Conservapedia was founded in 2006 when Andrew Schlafly read a student's essay that used the term Common Era (CE), instead of the Christian Anno Domini (AD). This led to one of the funniest encyclopedias of nonsensical religious babble on the internet. People get pissed off when you leave Jesus out of things. Your world should also be populated by religious idiots who argue over nothing and kill each other over it. It's entertaining in real life and it's entertaining in fantasy stories.
QAnon Anonumous "Conservapedia" episode: https://podbay.fm/p/qanon-anonymous/e/1684217134
You can find a timeline in the Warlordocracy Player's Manual (link below), which may be a bit too long. As always, I tried to drop in a few nuggets of information that may help you in the actual game. The vast majority of the history books found in Brigand: Oaxaca don't provide the player with any useful game hints, and so in the Panama DLC, I included Trivia Night at the local bar, which will grant the player some skill points for typing in answers to trivia about history, both real-world history, and the fabricated future history after WWIII.
Naming Stuff, Things, and Shit
It will be necessary to come up with thousands of names for your characters, towns, roads, inns, etc. One great online name generator is fantasynamegenerators.com, which you can at least use as a starting place. What follows are some other methods for coming up with thousands of names, which is fun at first, but quickly grows into a chore without a few techniques to speed things along.
One tried-and-true method is to think of a real name and switch up the spelling or a single syllable. Warlordocracy has characters named Sebastius and Andresi, for example, just normal names with a single sound altered. The main culture in the setting of Warlordocracy uses names that sound ancient Latin, but not exactly. Each culture should have its own unique style of names and spelling. Some languages should completely omit letters in their names (the Hawaiian alphabet only has 13 letters), or have common endings like ancient Latin's masculine/feminine/neuter suffixes.
When the player gets to know characters, especially party members that accompany you throughout the story, it's good to make a short nickname. This also helps to save space when I'm listing reputations in Warlordocracy, such as "Seb's Friend". Sebastius eventually becomes "Seb" in dialogue with the player, and Feluco eventually becomes just Luco -- a good way to represent familiarity between characters.
While I was ripping off ancient Rome for Warlordocracy, Brigand: Oaxaca was filled with names such as Ballistic, Fingers, Bones, etc. -- just words you could find in a dictionary. Initially I was naming too many characters after animals, so I had to stop myself and find other simple words. Do the technique that parents in Thailand do when giving their kids a nickname, flip through a dictionary and choose a random word, then think about if it would sound good as a name.
I also took a lot of native American names from history books for Brigand: Noise of Running Feet (used in the game) was a child messenger of Chief Joseph, known by his indigenous name Thunder Rolling Over Mountain (Mountain Thunder runs the first store in the game). I've been envious of native American names my whole life and ended up stealing one for the name of my business. The bottom line is to distinguish different cultures by using different naming styles.
As for location names, you mash together two words from the dictionary. This works great for towns (Lockdell, Frostgate) and tavern/bar names (Rusty Nail Saloon, Hag's Head). You could also just name locations like people and throw together some random sounds.
I had to change a few names in Warlordocracy after learning that other campaign settings were using them. This isn't inherently a problem, but I want consumers to remember unique names from this particular setting, and I don't want Google searches to get confused. What was once Lurkwood became Tuskwood, as Lurkwood was a forest in the Forgotten Relams that I may have subconsciously absorbed as a kid playing Baldur's Gate. Tuskwood is unfortunately a kind of wood material in the Star Wars universe, but I refuse to change anything because of that shitty franchise. It might help to Google a really good name you created to see if other major franchises are using it. If they are, not a huge problem, but consider the above reasons for changing it.
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