Worldbuilding Project Log #1

 My goal is to, sometime in Q1 2025, have written (and ideally publish) a campaign setting introduction and 3 accompanying adventures. In my mind this looks a lot like the Hungarian D20 Society's Fomalhaut zines, especially the Drifting Lands campaign setting guide. The presentation of these zines is fantastic; they feel so authentically like a 1970s D&D publication while still incorporating the higher budget capacities of the 21st century. 

Worldbuilding has been my passion-art for nearly my entire life. I spent my time in high school buried in the Language Construction Kit and putting together long lists of monarchs and dynasties. But unlike a lot of the world's best world builders, I don't have a single setting I've been working on for a long time. I've jumped from setting to setting, largely because I deeply tie my settings to different parts of my life, and my life hasn't been very stable or consistent for a long time. There's also a thematic difficulty - despite having been at it for 15 years, I am still struggling to detail and outline a worldview that is both comprehensive and lasting. The world seems almost personally dedicated to tearing down pillars of my philosophy as often as it can, and that makes it hard to maintain a dedication to any specific story that relied on that pillar in order to mean something to me. 

God(s?) willing, my life has finally settled down, and should remain settled as far as I can foresee (which obviously isn't very far, but hope has to count for something). This means I have the time to sit down, work through all that I've suffered through these last five years, and put back together a coherent worldview that I can infuse into my setting. 

And I think this is an important part of the world building process that is often ignored in books about the art or blog posts about Narnia and Tatooine. The world we live in operates according to a set of coherent rules integrated into its structure and history (if we grant a post-modernist's rejection of this kind of objective and universal meta-narrative, then at least we can claim that mainstream art interprets the world through a set of coherent rules integrated into it). This enables us to tell stories about our real-world history. Good world building is believable because it follows this same structure: there are rules integrated into the world that enable a set of coherent stories all set in the same place.

Tolkien is the perfect example of this because, to my knowledge, Middle Earth is the most clearly and consistently philosophically informed world ever designed. Middle Earth is a place where a medieval Catholic vision of life and mankind is absolutely true, and its morals and metaphysics define every story that occurs in the world and every page of the Lord of the Rings. Middle Earth's worst adaptations, like Rings of Power, fail because they do not integrate these rules into their vision of the world, making them incoherent in light of the broader canon. 

Having a philosophical outlook that defines your world enables you to set the rules, themes, and broad narrative arc of all the stories set in your world. They become part of the same story, rather than a dozen separate stories that share nothing but a location (unless, again, your meta narrative worldview is a post-modernist one and you are specifically trying to make a point by setting twelve mutually contradictory and incoherent stories in one place; George RR Martin sometimes comes close to doing this, although I would argue his success comes when he actually undermines such a goal). 

So what about my worldview has been consistent enough to build a foundation with? I'd say I'm influenced by the broad tapestry of dharmic religions more than anything else - the idea that there is a omnipresent, transcendent divinity in the world, that clinging to the material world is the core problem of existence, that man is capable of at least some degree of apotheosis purely by his own effort, that the cosmos goes through cycles of rise and fall and that we are, have been, and will be for a long time yet in the midst of a dark age, that there is an ontological reality and power in words, and that the circumstances of our birth are not accidental. None of this is to say that I am specifically a Hindu or a Buddhist (I may be, in time, but I am not explicitly identifying as such at the moment). 

There is the question of ethics - or karma, if we want to stick to the Dharmic terminology. What actions lead to what consequences? What do I want to say is good, and what do I want to say is bad? Modern fantasy too often builds 'morally grey' worlds, which are some of the least challenging, since they rely on an utterly conventional and thoughtless acceptance of modern western morals and act as if it is some subversive and deep claim to present a world where those morals only go so far. All that says is yes, your moral outlook is completely right, the world is at fault for not living up to those standards. 

I need to straighten out my sense of ethics/karma/morals, which has been really devastated by all the horrible things I've been through and seen the past few years. And I can't have a world that says something meaningful if there isn't some consistent message, not just behind the structure of the world I build, but also in the behavior of those that inhabit it. But that's difficult when I really struggle to say something meaningful about the behavior of people in this world, beyond "it sucks." 

So that's task #1 for this project; go back and reread my Gita, or Patanjali, or whoever, and maybe lean into working on a behaivoral/karmic system for the characters in the world that works off the already Dharmic metaphysical assumptions.