Summer Camp 2023 Pledge Document

Well I haven't actually been worldbuilding much of anything since worldember, but here we go.

Of course, my word here is worth dogwater, as I have no idea what I'm doing and no actual plan. I'm probably going for diamond, and probably using Spirit to do it, but I might also do something entirely different. Who knows! But I've been able to pants my way to diamond in the last few summer camps as well, so I have some faith.

On Power

It's difficult to have a setting where this theme doesn't make an appearance. With a sufficiently expansive definition of power, power is almost a necessary condition for something to be worth writing about in the first place. Things with no power don't affect their world, and ultimately aren't very interesting.

I've generally been writing from the standpoint of societies and how they are organized and led, which is one of the most obvious kinds of power you could think of.

On Meta

Haha I don't have one.

On Frontiers

I've mostly been using this setting to run TTRPG campaigns, and one thing I've noticed is that some of the more established and stable parts of the setting like the United Runberi Emirates are actually more difficult to come up with campaign ideas for, because highly functional and stable states tend to take a dim view of unattached armed bands of murderhobos roaming around their territories. I'm reminded of Frank & K's somewhat profanity laden fan-expansion of D&D 3.5 (which I still recommend reading for GMs just for the examination of the implications of powerful adventurers and widespread magic, if you can stomach the writing style) where they point out that the "default" D&D setting actually implies more on an iron age society than a medieval one.

They key insight, I think, is that any state with the capacity to do so will want to integrate people with capacity for great violence into their state apparatus, or failing that, get rid of them. The typical D&D adventuring party is going to fairly rapidly soar to heights where they can credibly threaten local settlements all on their own, and getting there doesn't even require being able to punch out the local dragons. In a geopolitical sense, adventuring parties could be thought of as warlords.

The campaigns I've run in this setting have almost all been on a frontier. Kraken's Domain, which has no states whatsoever. Tinia's Wrath, which was on an island cluster with proto-states and a trading company, none of which have both the power and inclination to really behave like a state. Reign in Bronze, using the Children of Aktar region also neatly allows for adventuring parties because the only state that exists is essentially a failed one with at best paper authority outside their capital city. The only time I ran a campaign in the territory of a secure state, it was a low power urban campaign where the players never did anything that could really be seen as muscling in on the powers that be.

I might actually use The Mirror Plane for some of this theme, as I've already written a lot on frontiers in my fantasy setting (because I've needed them to run campaigns). This also ties into the previous theme. Geopolitical frontiers tend to be power vacuums, and that's why emerging powers like adventuring parties can exist without being either subsumed or crushed.

Of course, I could also write about some other type of frontier.

On Relics

This theme is a fairly easy shoe-in for my most recent topic of worldbuilding in this setting, which is the Children of Aktar region and the long-lost Shaftbuilders. Possessing a kind of magic that nobody in modern times even understands, and vanished 6000 years ago. Nevertheless the Thaner dwarves believe themselves to be descended from the Shaftbuilders and Shaftbuilder relics (some of which still work) are important legitimacy building tools.

However, my histories in this setting are actually mostly kinda blank. For most of my worldbuilding areas I've had the general strategy of determining an inflection point or two for that society or figuring out how things would've gone from there. In The Tescaries it was the founding of the Condominion and then Tinia's Wrath which mostly inform the "current day" of the setting, while in the Children Aktar it is the arrival of the dragon and Hagus' Revolt which serve as the historical context. However, apart from that I've mostly focused on the present day.

On Communication

I haven't actually explicitly thought about communication very much in my settings. Spirit is a pre-modern setting with relatively limited magic, so most long range communication is out of the picture (except perhaps the Starseers of Exodus might have something in their back-pockets, it would be in their wheelhouse). For the most part, we're looking at messages traveling at the speed of people. This serves to keep disparate areas relatively isolated from eachother. Spirit of the Age is a much less global world than our own, and in particular the spread of ideas across the Ibrit desert between the eastern and western halves of the continent is very slow.

In the Mirror Plane, I have actually thought about it a little more despite it being a much less developed setting. A science fiction setting some 200 years in our future, they naturally have various forms of lightspeed communication (though no faster). However, the Tein Gates that serve as the central "big lie" of the setting can only be used to transport matter, and thus messages have to be sent across with Tein Gate activations, generally by loading them into a transceiver moving back and forth that stores messages sent to it and then blasts them out once on the other side. Consequently, different star systems in the Mirror Plane setting are actually somewhat isolated from eachother in terms of communication, and would not be able to access a common internet (at least not quickly). This serves to fuel the political fragmentation of Human Space and prevent Earth from exerting more influence on colonial affairs.

It does feel like everything comes down to power in the end. The communications available have profound cultural implications, but they also inform who can project power where. If you can't constantly keep tabs on far-flung subjects, they might get more independent minded than you wanted.