worldbuilding | Karavansara

29 April 2016
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

A new feature: Worldbuilding

As a spinoff of the massive work I’m doing on the Hope & Glory project, I’ve rebooted my old collection of Worldbuilding Resources as a new feature page here on Karavansara.
You find the relevant link on the top bar, under Features.

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The page collects articles, books and software for writers interested in worldbuilding – that is not only the Tolkien-esque chore of spending thirty years drawing maps and noting down Elvish irregular verbs, but also quite simply the task of providing vivid and active detail to your story.
Or game.
Or whatever.

Check the page out.
If you have any suggestions, if there’s anything you think I left out, please use the comments on that page to give me a pointer.

I’ll post updates to this Feature occasionally.

4 July 2015
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Riding the Leviathan

World-building.
So far I’ve had it easy – most of my fantasy is historical fantasy, after all, and the action takes place in historical settings or pretty close to them.
World-building means a good history reference book (or five) and a few pages of notes on what’s hiding in the cracks of what we consider historical.

I’ve worked like that on the Aculeo & Amunet stories (set in the Third Century AD), on my novel The Ministry of Thunder (set in 1936 China), and on my current Le Corsaire project (set in the Mediterranean area, in the 1950s).
And the Corsair stories are not even fantasy – they are action thrillers.
Yes, even on my science fiction novel, The Hunt for Tethys¹, I did most of my worldbuilding on a handful of post-its. Continue reading →

15 December 2014
by Davide Mana 7 Comments

A new gaming project

I started working on a new roleplaying project – at the moment it is still very hush-hush, but it’s certainly the largest, most complicated RPG project I ever had to face: I’m designing a whole world, and I have to write about it in a way that will make it accessible to players.
The estimated word count comes close to 80.000/100.000 words.
That’s huge.

Writing for gaming is very different from writing fiction, it requires a much more delicate balance between invention and organization.
They don’t call it “game design” for nothing. Continue reading →