The World Building Thread

Quote by Mendalla
A demon imprisoned in a volcano is involved. A journey through a lava field, a night or two living in a lava cave.

Great ideas. Dramatic and really visual, and now you have the details in your head.

Quote by verbal

Great ideas. Dramatic and really visual, and now you have the details in your head.

I even have a pic from the trip picked out for a cover image 😊(actually a couple, but one is a mountain that appeared in Game of Thrones so I am leaning to the the other)

I have a vision for a setting right now. A vast forested plain wracked by almost ceaseless storms. Rain in summer, snow in winter, but seemingly perpetually stormy. Why is it like this? Who would live there and why? What stories could I get out of this? Inquiring minds want to know.

The great-granddaddy of contemporary shared universes has got to be H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (Classical Mythology is an even further back ancestor). Right from the start, Lovecraft happily allowed friends and even fans (Robert Bloch, best known for Psycho, started out this way) to write in and add to the implied setting of his universe. A name dropped in one story would become the gibbering cosmic horror of the next. Lovecraft appeared in a Bloch story (and died horribly), then wrote a sequel in which "Robert Blake" also died horribly.

And even after Lovecraft's death, horror writers kept writing Mythos stories. Even King has gone to that well a few times. There have been an increasing number of movies, some adapted from or inspired by Lovecraft, others original stories incorporating elements of the Mythos (e.g. Underwater starring Kristen Stewart ends with an appearance by Cthulhu itself).

My own relationship to the Mythos is a long one. I think I first encountered it through roleplaying. The Mythos appeared in the first edition of the D&D book Deities and Demigods before being dropped from subsequent editions for copyright reasons (Lovecraft's work had not leaked into the public domain yet). But that got my group and I interested, leading us to Call of Cthulhu, the first and still most popular RPG based on Lovecraft (though many more have now appeared since the Mythos went into the public domain).

And it got me reading H. P. Lovecraft himself, along with many of his heirs and successors. While Lovecraft is a problematic read today (racist, classist, something of a fascist, more than a tad sexist), the ideas stuck. My favourite horror writer Ramsey Campbell, along with some of his contemporaries have done a bang-up job of modernizing the Mythos and getting away from the problematic element.

So naturally I started toying with writing Mythos stories. At one point, I even toyed with my own "Mythos", trying to divorce myself from having to ape the structures of the original. You can see this in Voice of Ice, whose first draft actually goes back to that period in my life. Of course, I failed miserably at that divorce and the whole academic discovering horror from reading ancient books is alive and well in that story. My recent The Summer Beast is probably closer to creating something in the cosmic horror vein that is not really part of that lineage, but it is not really all that cosmic. Though if I ever get a sequel going, who knows where I would go with it? I never did establish where the beast came from in that story.

And so, right now, I am writing a story that will be consciously Mythos, or at least Mythos-adjacent. Old books, horrors from beyond normal space and time, and so on. But I am hoping to put my own spin on the hoary old tradition, too. We shall see if I succeed.

(And, yes, there's a non-zero chance I might end up having this, The Summer Beast, and Voice of Ice be in the same universe. After all, the Mythos was not really deliberately created, just evolved out of Lovecraft dropping the same names and obscure references over and over. Sometimes stories that were not meant as Mythos stories even got sucked in by Lovecraft's name-dropping, e.g. Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow.)

Started notes for a new s-f universe. Still not sure what the stories in it will be like. Might end up being something I build that I can plug various stories into, even for that other site.

Basic premise is that aliens are more or less besieging Earth. They have banned space travel (they destroy anything that goes higher than 100,000m above sea level) and more or less enforce global peace by destroying military bases, military formations in the field, and such with brutal, powerful attacks from orbit when a war breaks out. If we give up things like nuclear weapons, then they will lift the "Alien Laws" as these restrictions are called.

This has a number of impacts, including things like losing the use of geostationary orbit and other high Earth orbits for things like GPS and communications satellites. Transoceanic cables come back into vogue for carrying communications between continents, high altitude atmospheric vehicles like balloons and planes are used for spying and collecting weather data, and so on. Still thinking through ramifications.

Rumours and conspiracy theories abound, of course, including the belief that the aliens actually have secretly landed on Earth and have somehow infiltrated governments, corporations, etc.

There's a couple core mysteries involved:

Who are they? Other than a few one-way communications in which they handed down the "Alien Laws", we have had no contact with them and have only seen their spacecraft.

What is their real agenda? Are they actually trying to force us to live more peaceably? Or some more sinister operation happening?

To be honest, even I haven't worked out those details yet.

I've got a sci-fi romance, that's rather soft on the sci-fi, and based in my city, so world building is rather simple and it takes place about thirty to forty years in the future, and not too far off from what it's like today, with things they're trying to do today, like androids and electric cars.

The Fantasy novel is a bit more involved with races, magic, monsters, etc.

Quote by JaxRhapsody

I've got a sci-fi romance, that's rather soft on the sci-fi, and based in my city, so world building is rather simple and it takes place about thirty to forty years in the future, and not too far off from what it's like today, with things they're trying to do today, like androids and electric cars.

Yeah, my default city for contemporary stories is basically an amalgam of two of the three cities I have lived in, heavy on the current one.

There is a near future s-f version of the city in a story on another site but it's dystopic and the story ends with the characters fleeing as a revolution sets the city ablaze.