My Sense of Place

・┆✦ʚ Introduction ɞ✦ ┆・

I recently read an article by Louise Erdich, called Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place. It went over how important location is in a writer’s work. But what really stuck out to me is the idea that, even if it’s subconscious, your location and environment influences the worlds you write about, even the fictional and fantastical ones.

So, that’s what I’m going to focus on…

・┆✦ʚ The Real in the Fantastical ɞ✦ ┆・

As someone, or rather a system, that creates worlds for various games, both digital and tabletop, this claim is astounding. We make fictional and fantastical worlds that, for the most part, do not follow our natural law. Amphibians are able to have fur or feathers. Cephalopods can have a small solar system orbiting them without collapsing due to the world’s gravity.

But we make small villages and towns. We make huge cities. We make rules for each location consistently, unless there is a lore-based reason that they don’t. The idea that we’re subconsciously influenced by our environment and our perceptions of it, even when making a world that follows very few of our natural laws in this world, is so wild to me. It makes sense, though. Our small towns and villages are more likely to care about wildlife. Our big cities are where the universities are. The commonalities are much more common than we originally thought.

・┆✦ʚ “What If” ɞ✦ ┆・

Another way you can look at the idea of the real world influencing the fantastical is by asking “what if”. What if a volcano erupted at specific intervals, hiding and revealing a secret entrance. What if a snake-like creature had an angler fish’s light and how would it interact with its environment? Obviously it couldn’t be a prey animal; the light would give it away.

Also, real-world investigation helps in creating a logical and followable flow in how animals fit into the environment and the food chain. It helps create logical world rules and layout. If you have a desert right next to a snowy tundra, how? If you have only a single dead tree in an entire swamp, why? How is it still standing?

Magic doesn’t mean you can’t use real-world logic. Twisting real-world logic doesn’t mean you never used it. It just means you started there as a jumping off point, explaining the differences from our world, even if you treat the explanation as obvious and normal in your work.

・┆✦ʚ Effectively Using Our World ɞ✦ ┆・

I think you can utilize this realization in many ways when building your world. You want to put in something magical. Maybe you want to add a floating city. How does it float? How do people get in or out of the city; can they get in or out of the city? Are you even going to answer these questions or leave it up to the reader or player to figure it out?

When you don’t add explanations, it can ruin immersion or it can evoke a mystery to be solved. When you do add explanations, it can ruin immersion or it can foster it. It’s a difficult line to straddle. It’s a strange balance. You don’t want to confuse readers or players without a satisfying answer to be found, but you don’t want to infantilize them by explaining every little detail.

Personally, we treat oddities as normal, but, for example, we explain how a species acts in our “critter encyclopedia” on the site. We explain the world in the “atlas of Aelnypt”. But we explain it in ways that make it seem obvious. Not to mention, these “books” are not forced upon players. They’re in the library. You have to go out of your way to access them.

We also hide journals in the rooms of the main characters. They’re easy to find if you know what to look for, but if you don’t click around or are told about the journals, they’re easy to overlook. But that’s just more lore, this time about the characters.

・┆✦ʚ Conclusion ɞ✦ ┆・

Although I would have never thought of it in those terms, I think Erdich is 100% correct in the idea that our environment interacts with and influences pretty much every aspect of a world we’re writing about.

I think that it’s an interesting thought experiment – especially if you write, read, or play in fantasy locations – to figure out how it has been influenced by the real world. I encourage you to follow this extra line of critical thinking when reading and writing books or running/making and playing games.