Michelle Lyons McFarland, Monica Valentinelli, and Shanna Germain join Howard and Dan at GenCon, and talk about the craft of world building for role playing games.
Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
Fifteen minutes long, because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.
Michelle Lyons McFarland, Monica Valentinelli, and Shanna Germain join Howard and Dan at GenCon, and talk about the craft of world building for role playing games.
We answer questions about consistency, alternate histories, and the Great Spoke Plague of ’77
How do you describe water from the point of view of a fish?
Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard talk about fictional ecologies.
Brandon, Dan, Howard, and Mary discuss communications technology, and how the ability for characters to communicate is a critical piece of your world-building, whether you’re writing science-fiction, fantasy, or pretty much anything else.
Let’s get back to world-building, and dig into a tough one: government. In this case we’re talking about government as part of the backdrop, rather than political intrigue as part of the plot. Are you going to create a monarchy, a democracy, or perhaps some crazy, experimental sort of rigidly…
Why is worldbuilding is essential in your writing? Today, we answer this question and dive into some working definitions of how we want to talk about it. After the break, we discuss why we chose this book Arkady Martine’s “A Memory Called Empire” and highlight what it does well. We…
If you’re writing short fiction, how much of your world do you even need to figure out? Should you have it all written out? Can you just wing it? This week on the podcast, we discuss how much of a world to build for a short story (and how). We…
Your Hosts: Dan Wells, Fonda Lee, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler Here at the end of our 8-episode intensive series on Worldbuilding we discuss stepping away from the defaults, the clichés, and the tropes, and choosing every element deliberately. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the tropes. We’re just suggesting that they be…
Your Hosts: Mary Robinette Kowal, Cassandra Khaw, Dan Wells, James L. Sutter, and Howard Tayler Worldbuilding is one of our favorite topics, and it’s a domain in which game design and novel writing share a lot of territory. In this episode we talk about how much we love it, and how…