Your World doesn’t make sense… and that’s okay
I love making worlds. I spend a lot of my time thinking about imagined places and peoples. I do it mostly for myself, but I still find it useful. When I run a game, the time spent on creating the secondary world is rewarded with player immersion. When I am the Game Master and my players feel that they are living within the real world… It’s one of the best feelings you can have as an artist.
There is a youtube channel I really like. It’s called WorldBuilding Notes and it’s awesome. If you share my type of madness, you will love videos in which the author makes up a game played by people in their imagined world, or draws up the whole food chain of a fictional island.
Among all the videos on that channel, there is one that baffles me - not because it is bad in any way, on the contrary, it is very interesting. The video is called Conical Britain 1. Most of it is the author making a fun and interesting little world, similar to their other videos. The bit that I want to discuss is at the very beginning. In it they talk about how they take issue with most medieval fantasy. For them, the main problem is the culture. If you would make a new world and populate it with humans and all the other relevant animals and plants, the cultures of those humans would not mimic those found on earth. This thought makes perfect sense, and yet… It feels wrong.
In the genre defining Epic Fantasy in the Modern World, Stephen R. Donaldson posits that the history of fantasy is a history of the epic departing from reality. As humans developed, the grand questions regarding life, existence and mortality became less and less compatible with mundane life. Instead of being set contemporarily they shift to mythic past, creation of the universe, and eventually into oblivion, as the culture loses interest in the genre. According to Donaldson, it was Tolkien who saved the epic. He did so by completing this evolution and severing it from our reality 2. He did not however try to make this new reality unrecognizable and strange. He created a mythic past that has no ties to any time period.
This rooted Fantasy in the tradition of human mythmaking, thus strangely, through this separation, tying it irrevocably with our world. I believe this is also why Fantasy is a more popular genre for Roleplaying Games. No matter the culture you belong to, you also have a memory of a mythic past lodged in your brain. When I say to you that we are going to play in my fantasy world, you can bet your ass that there will be riding on horses or something functionally identical. There will be magic, grand kingdoms, terrible monsters and all of that shit. Yeah that’s cool and all, but it still does not make any sense to have 12-th century english knights running around in an unrelated fantasy world with no explanation. I mean… that’s true, but who says they are really there?
I am an artist by trade and education, and unlike some of my peers I really liked History of Art (no shade on my friends, our teacher was really mean). I especially love gothic and early renaissance paintings depicting events from the bible. For example Conrad Laib decided to put roman soldiers in contemporary plate armor in his Crucifixion of Christ from 1449 3. He probably knew that Romans wore something entirely different, but he didn’t care. This choice was made for a very simple reason, to communicate to a contemporary audience that Jesus was killed by figures of authority.
I cannot visit my fictional world. My players are not playing a triple A video game. We are not seeing, feeling or smelling the secondary world. The best I can do is describe it, and I want to do it in the most efficient and engaging way possible. I do the same as Conrad Laib. I use the real world cultures, tech and artifacts as a shorthand for the unreal ones. The term I use for it is Non-Diagetic Worldbuilding.
Within the framework of Non-Diagetic Worldbuilding, the actual secondary world is unknowable to both the audience and it’s creator. It is made comprehensible by the author using the elements of the real world as a stand in for the fictional ones. Lord of the Rings is a pretty good example. There is no English in Middle-Earth. Hobbits speak a language called Westron. The names of the beloved halflings are mere translations, Merriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck is in fact named Kalimac "Kali" Brandagamba 4. The conceit with Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, is that Tolkien found and translated the fictional Red Book of Westmarch. The names of the Hobbits have been translated into English because they are the POV characters. This is also why Elves, who are meant to be strange and mysterious, keep their original Sindarin names. It’s the same with the description of the Shire. It has that rural Victorian vibe because it’s a familiar fantasy of idyllic life for contemporary readers.
In my personal fantasy world, I have a western European medieval analogue called Neudany. They build grand temples with ominous spires very much like the gothic cathedrals of our world. They have high German names, their religion is concerned with penance and martyrdom and they are obsessed with chivalry. My players know the vibe immediately, it’s going to be very classic fantasy and very dark. On the surface Neudany is the most basic fantasy culture you can imagine. However, going for a certain vibe, does not mean that the culture needs to be an exact copy of its closest counterpart. Neudany is not a result of a roman-analogue falling apart. The conquering force that forged this state is related to my analogues of north african and middle-eastern cultures. Thus darker complexion is a marker of class, as most noble families share a foreign origin. Ancestor worship is an important part of this culture. The heraldic signs of the nobility evolved out of religious symbols.
There are many other facets of this fictional society that have nothing to do with high medieval western europe, they don’t have to.
I am not kidding myself, I know that every person who ever made a world, has done something like this, consciously or not. I am writing to point out that the fictional world does not need to make literal sense. It needs to have a consistent framework for creating mental images and transferring ideas. The knight stands up, having knelt before his liege. He leaves the hall and mounts his horse, there is a dragon to be slain. It does not matter functionally that the knight is wearing armor made from transparent resin, or that the dragon is actually a bug-eyed monster, this we can explain later. If I said instead that there is a man dressed in stiff semi-transparent plates riding towards a cave with a giant cockroach we all loose the plot and have no reference to what is actually going on.
There are many ways to instantiate the secondary world, which ones you like is mostly the matter of taste. Worlds that are entirely alien to the players/audience have their use and can be a great setting for a fish out of water scenario that is heavily focused on exploration. The power of Non-Diagetic worldbuilding is its ability to be understood by all involved.
Huge thanks to all the wonderful folks who helped me write my first ever blog-post: