worldbuilding | Karavansara

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 →

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 →