As surely is evident from going through over 10 years of posts on this site, I have always had a challenging relationship with Sword & Sorcery campaigns and worldbuilding. I think the roots for what became the Ancient Lands and later Kaendor were already there when I first got seriously interested in making my own fantasy campaign setting all the way back in 2009. I had a very strong vision for the kind of world I wanted to make, inspired by the aesthetics of Conan the Barbarian and Return of the Jedi. But with all the (often short) campaigns I ran over 15 years, it never actually played out as adventures that evoke that style. What I managed to run always ended up being fairly generic D&D. In 2014 or so, I was dabbling with trying story writing again, set in a world of that style, but that never took off due to lack of any plot ideas. And more recently, over the last year, when I took up videogame design as a new hobby, it always was a big indecision and endless back and forth whether I wanted to make something in that fantasy style, or in my more recent concept for a Space Opera setting.
The one dominating problem has always been that I couldn’t come up with stories, because I couldn’t imagine what kind of actionable goals and motivations heroes could pursue that would make for a great adventure but also feel believable and make them sympathetic characters. One thing that I realized last winter was that my ideas for Kaendor and Sword & Sorcery have always been an idea for a strong aesthetic, but never a concept for themes or stories.
I really love the idea of Iron Age style societies living in a prehistoric wilderness. But what do I actually have to say about Iron age people and cultures? What ideas and concepts do I want to express through the conditions and actions of people living in Iron Age societies? I don’t really have, and never had, anything interesting interesting about Iron Age cultures that I find interesting to explore through fiction. I always just really liked the aesthetics of it.
There is, of course, always the option taken by lots of fantasy writers, to simply have the people of a fantasy world think like and have the concerns of contemporary audiences. The Witcher games are a prime example of a world that has medieval technology and magic, but is inhabited by people who intellectually and culturally think and behave like 21st century Europeans. D&D has persistently progressing into that direction for the last 40 years now. But to me, that idea has always been completely unappealing. What’s the point of having fantastic cultures that are based on ancient societies and use ancient technologies if they think and act, and deal with the same concerns as we do today? That would just be modern society dresses up in costumes, and missing everything that makes Iron Age cultures interesting to me in the first place.
Things are very different for me with Space Opera, though. While technology in Space Opera is often significantly advanced to ours, their motivations and concerns are generally seen as the same as ours. In the mid-20th century, modernist thought was that great advances in technology would drastically transform society, and that new technologies could solve the many issues society had been struggling with for generations since the start of industrializations. But we now know that this is not the case, and this has been the whole reasons of being for the entire cyberpunk genre since the early 80s. New technologies do not solve societal problems. Modern technologies have massively improved food production, energy generation, and medicine. But most of the newly generated wealth only ends up making the already rich even richer, without lifting the poor out of poverty. Throughout Europe and North America, the message by the ruling classes has been for decades now that the common people have to get used to becoming poorer, being able to afford less, and are going to have to work more. At the same time as the countries as a whole are getting ever more richer. It is of course foolish to assume that people will still live the same way and have the same culture as we have today. But we also really have no reason to assume that anything is going to change in meaningful ways either, or that the social problem of 2525 will be different from those in 2025. Or those in 1825. There are no trends that clearly point to significant social changes in the future. (Except significantly lower population numbers everywhere.) There’s still going to be rich elites that tell everyone else they will have to tighten their belts while they get ever richer, and distract from their own blame by agitating for hostility against some minority or another. Cool tech gadgets won’t change anything about that.
Which is why I always find it infinitely easier to come up with goals and motivations for characters, ideas for possible adventures and stories, factions, and large scale conflicts in Space Opera environments. In a Space Opera, I have no problems coning up with themes, or meaningful things that I want to express through worldbuilding. In contrast, Sword & Sorcery has always been only a very dear and appealing aesthetic to me. An aesthetic that ironically was inspired mostly by Return of the Jedi, the Dune game from 1994, Albion from 1995, and Knights of the Old Republic. Which are all Space Opera! So realizing that aesthetic that always dominates my imagination through a Space Opera setting rather than a Sword & Sorcery world is absolutely doable. (And the six planets of my new iteration of Iridium Moons satisfy that artistic urge very well so far.)
Every couple of weeks, I have a moment where that old familiar call to take another shot at making that vision for an Iron Age society in a prehistoric world work comes back very strongly. But each time, I still can’t think of any new ideas for themes or conflicts that speak to me. Having been at it for 16 years now, I often feel that my motivation to do so is probably mostly habit and familiarity at this point. It is an old dream, that is very dear to me. But I also feel that from the perspective of narrative creative expression, it probably is just a dead end to me. There just isn’t anything I want to express or explore through characters native to pre-modern societies. And for once, this isn’t a sudden burst of half thought through thoughts that I want to shout out to whoever might want to listen. This has been a fairly consistent experience I have had for probably at least 5 years now. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I absolutely feel that with Iridium Moons, I really do have something that has a lot of potential for true greatness and making an impact, and is just as exciting to me. When the excitement of wanting to work on Sword & Sorcery runs out and I get stuck, and I think about maybe making something new for Iridium Moons instead, the excitement always comes rushing back immediately.
I think perhaps this just will take more time to get used to.