Welcome to today's #WorldbuildingWednesday post! For those of you new to this series, I'm @oblivioncubed. In this series of posts, I break down what Worldbuilding means to me, how I build a setting, why I choose to build what I do, and hopefully provide you some inspiration to use in your Worldbuilding.
My world - Trothguard - is a setting I've created as a catch-all location for any tabletop RPG games I run, so everything I build is filtered through a lens of 'how will this improve the game for myself and my players?'.
Today we're going to talk about worldbuilding characters!
Worldbuilding Characters
Creating characters is an important part of worldbuilding, but can often be overlooked as it in some ways feels separate from the act of actually creating the world.
I think some of this disconnect comes from the fact that we usually create our characters late in the overall creative process, as they are generally tightly coupled with the plot or point of our creative output - be that a story, comic, or tabletop game. By the time we get to making named characters, it can feel like the worldbuilding itself is already done.
I think this is a feeling we need to consciously avoid if we want to truly build an engaging and engrossing world that captures our audience's attention. After all - the characters themselves are part of the world, so we should keep thinking of them as part of our worldbuilding.
So, how do we do that? Let's explore some of the ways I try to keep my characters connected to my world and look at some general tips I have for building these important parts of our worlds.
Character Importance
Before I ever sit down to make a character for anything I produce, I take a moment to analyze how important characters are for the media I'm making. Considering this lets me put into perspective how many characters I might need to develop, as well as how much depth those characters should have.
Tabletop games are going to require different numbers of characters than say, a comic book might. A story is going to require more depth than an interactive shopkeep in a videogame.
We see this all the time in the media we consume, but - at least for me - it's one of those things we rarely bother to stop and think about for any real amount of time. The actual-play D&D game Critical Role for example has hundreds of unique characters that are interacted with each season. Even in another - more tightly story-driven - tabletop podcast The Adventure Zone, the cast interacts with dozens of characters in their Balance storyline.
Contrast that with something like, say... the TV show Blindspot, wherein we really only know about a dozen characters through the entire storyline. And of those, we only know the core team well. But they have a depth to the characters that we definitely don't get from the random NPCs in our tabletop games.
Only you can really know how important and how abundant characters should be in the worlds you make, but I can give you a general rule of thumb. Anything you're creating that has an element of interactive play... probably is going to have a lot of very shallowly created characters. If you're making something like a story or a play or a movie, you'll probably need fewer overall characters, with a much better depth to them. Comics can go either way, depending on what feels like a million different factors - so if you're worldbuilding for a comic, it's up to you to feel out what you're going to need.
Character Purpose
So, now that we have decided on how important characters are to our world, and how much depth those characters should generally have... Let's talk about the purpose of characters.
Across basically all media, characters are inherently designed for two things:
- To drive the narrative forward
- To tell/show us something about the world, the plot, or another character
When I create a new character in my tabletop world, I try to make sure that every one of them tells or shows us something about the world, and, if possible... also drives my plot forward. I do this because, while I know my world intimately, my players don't. I don't want to just lore-dump "this is a poor, backwater fishing village", I want to show them that, through the characters within that village. Through what they wear, how they speak, the items they use, and even what they eat.
This is where our prior worldbuilding and our character creation really tie themselves together and give us an opportunity to ask ourselves some useful questions:
- Is there anything important or unique about the area this character lives in? How does that manifest in our character if so?
- What do the clothes, tools, and buildings say about both my character and the area they are in?
- How does my character feel about where they are? How do they feel about the culture they are a part of, and/or the culture they're immersed in currently?
- What does this character believe? Do they follow a religion? Do they identify with a political faction or movement?
- Why is this character here?
These questions can, once answered, help to clarify how we're going to use this character to further our intended goals of driving the plot or showing something about the world. Sometimes - often, in the case of my tabletop game - not all of the answers to these questions will be relevant when I actually surface this character for my players. That's okay! Sometimes details will be missed by players or readers, and sometimes things will be glossed over, forgotten, or just never mentioned or asked about.
It took me until my second re-read of DUNE to really pick up and understand the Emperor's political undercurrent throughout that entire book. It didn't stop me from enjoying the story on my first read and simply enhanced my enjoyment on a second pass. Sometimes, there are just too many details to capture all at once. Particularly in tabletop games, where the narrative is more liquid and is shared by both you as the DM/GM and your players. Don't be discouraged if you build an incredibly unique character brimming with hints about the rare beast in the nearby forest who is also knowledgeable in the political and religious goings-on of this city only for that character to be ignored in favor of the surly goblin who just wants to drink his drink, sleep, and leave town in the morning to peddle his wares in the next city. It happens. Move the important character so they run into them again, and see what happens.
Similarly, if you're building for a story... don't worry if a reader misses the worldbuilding implied by how a character dresses or what the architecture is like. Some of my favorite moments are when I notice something on the second read of a book that I missed the first time. Tie your character to your world, surface the answers when it's relevant, and let the reader, player, or viewer do with that information what they will.
This feels like a good place to break up this post, so next time we'll finish with some further tips that are more about the characters themselves. I'll also show the two main character profiles I fill out when I'm creating folks for tabletop and writing.
Before I go though, I thought I'd take a moment to just address the long long gap in #WorldbuildingWednesday content. If you're not interested in my life and the reasons behind that, skip this next part, and I thank you for reading!
The long time away
So, for anyone paying attention or who has taken a glance at the collection created for this worldbuilding series, it's been a whopping ten months since my last post on this topic. It's been a long time coming, and I'm sure some of you likely thought this was just never coming back.
May 2021, my wife and I were - as everyone - struggling through the pandemic as best we could. Lockdowns were in place, nobody knew terribly much about the virus, and life was a bit all over the place. We couldn't go anywhere, we didn't really see anyone, it had been months of four people crammed into a house doing the best that we could. Creative outlets keep me sane, but, at this point in the pandemic... I was burning out. The stress of everything was crippling my ability to create for enjoyment.
We'd just received a letter from our landlord telling us that rent would be going up by a couple hundred dollars, and the apartment we were living in was cramped with two kids and two adults in a tiny two-bedroom place. We decided we'd be better off to give our notice and finally spend the money we'd been saving up to become homeowners. We'd been planning to do it for a while, and this seemed like as good a time as any. Despite the pandemic, or perhaps because of it, we hit the house search with everything we had.
We looked at a lot of places over the course of the next month and a half, but finally settled on one we actually wanted - and we made an offer and got accepted. Great! Super fun! We were going to be homeowners!
But now we had to get everything we owned packed. We needed to cancel old services and utilities, and ensure new ones were set up. We had to plan how to actually do a move with a brand new baby and a toddler. It was a monumental undertaking, that consumed most of the next month. On July 23rd, 2021, we officially got the keys to our new home though, and two days later we were officially moved in.
Then came the process of actually getting settled down, and adapting to a new routine. It honestly took way longer than I expected, but it was super enjoyable and incredibly rewarding. I kept my blog here limping along after our move, but still couldn't dedicate enough time and attention to it to do an in-depth post like this one. Gaming content became more frequent, as that was an extension of what I was already doing and it definitely helped me return to writing.
The last month or so, I've finally really settled into a good routine and so... here we are. Pandemic restrictions are lighter now than they've been since the beginning, we've got a ton more space, and we know (more or less) how to be homeowners. There's a lot less stress, and I'm not feeling the burnout I had been a year ago.
What does this mean for future Worldbuilding posts? Well, those will probably return on a monthly basis. It takes a while to plan for one of these and write it, edit it, and all that jazz. Between times, I'll continue the various gaming and ttrpg posts I've always done. I've also picked up worldbuilding prompts again on the @worldbuilder account, so check those out if you need a bit more inspiration in bite-sized chunks.
Now, for real, that's all from me today. Thanks for reading. See you again next time for more Character Building!
Thank you for reading today's #WorldbuildingWednesday! I hope this has provided you with some inspiration!
If there's something else you'd like to ask me about, please do so! I will make every effort to answer it in an upcoming post.
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