Initial World Ideas
Listening to Jordan talk last week I was immediately struck by two things:
When I developed Harmonium last semester I didn’t really take world-building into consideration at all. We just came up with a fairly thin story concept and ran with it and created a rather conventional fairy tale that was very sweet and cute and it had a really interesting mechanic and that was that. Of course the really interesting thing was that the nature of the game kind of asked a lot of questions that suggested the world was not as conventionally fairy tale as supposed – but those were questions I never considered or even tried to answer with Jen until I heard some of Jordan’s points about the importance of building the parts of the world you may not even see in the first game/experience.
The Primal Fantasy discussion really lit a bunch of lightbulbs in my head, especially the off-handed remark that the examples were kind of boy-centric since those were the primal fantasies that drove game sales.
So I surveyed a bunch of people I knew all week long, all girls, and the type of people I knew were not big gamers but might play a video game if one ever appealed to their Primal Fantasies the way Jedi games and action hero games appeal to mine. And so I asked them what kind of things might qualify as their primal fantasies.
Interestingly, a lot of them said they played in or imagined fairy story kinds of lands – they also almost all of them favored creation-driven elements. But none of them told me about Princess Bride or final Fantasy sorts of imaginary lands. It wasn’t really storybook in the traditional swashbuckling sense. I was very intrigued by what I heard back from people I’d known and respected about what kinds of games they played and where they imagined they were when they day-dreamed.
So it seems like a good exercise for me and a good opportunity to sort of combine these two musings.
Practice building a world that appeals to someone other than me
Ground that in the imaginative roots of the group of people I enjoy creating for
Fix the slipshod world-building job I did on my last game
What do we know so far about Harmonium’s world so far? It has some storybook elements but it also holds a very deep an ancient kind of impersonal darkness. It is also a world where magic and music are very closely linked, and where skilled musicians are the equivalent of mages. We also know that it’s not a world jammed to the gills with people, and it’s not a middle-ages chivalry kind of world, so it defies some of those genre conventions. We also know that magic/music is a force that can literally change the landscape or environment.
Most importantly, though, it’s the kind of place that, as Jordan encouraged, contains lots of different fairy tales, not just the one. And I think that may mean that the whole land is like a storybook itself, containing lots of different tales that may even feature different people.
So what would one of those other tales be like? The first game took place in the wastelands and uninhabited areas. But it’s a place that contains people. What would a city look like? Where would it be located, how would it be built, and how would it function and feel to be there given what we know so far and what questions that knowledge raises?