worldbuilding

Creating worlds that feel ancient

In my current work to sharpen the profile of the Ancient Lands setting I am creating, I started looking deeper into the old Planetary Romance genre. In many ways it’s “Sword & Sorcery with laser guns”, but I would say it usually has a more grander scale and glamorous atmosphere to it, which I really love. The old Star Wars movies (and the most recent one) really are much more Planetary Romance than Space Opera, which is the genre of Foundation, Lensman, and Enders Game. Mass Effect, which very greatly inspired me, is both. The business with the Reapers, Cerberus, and the human Systems Alliance is classic Space Opera, while the story branches that deal with the Krogan and the Quarians feel very much like classic Planetary Romance to me. While looking for more in-depth information about the stylistic elements of Planetary Romance, I came across this interesting article adressing the feeling of ancient history that you find in the old Star Wars movies. (I am in agreement that the Expanded Universe mostly missed this aspect.) Basically, Star Wars feels ancient because even though the technology is much more advanced than ours, it is used in very antiquated ways. The Empire builds huge mechanical war elephant. Intelligent robots are treated and traded like slaves. And of course you have knights fighting with swords. There’s a princess and the big bads are adressed as Lord and as Master. Despite the technology, Star Wars really feels like its the ancient past, not the distant future.

And that got me thinking. Certainly you could use the same technique to make a relatively generic fantasy setting not feel like the late middle ages, but as being set thousands or even millions of years earlier in the history of their planet. Robert Howard set the Hyborian Age of his Conan stories in an age between the sinking of Atlantis and before the start of the Neolithic, but is often rather inconsistent in making it really feel that old. When people are trying to put Conan into pictures, they usually cheat a bit and don’t show the armor and weapons that are actually described and replace them with something more ancient Greek looking.

So I started thinking about elements that I would identify as visual clues that a story is set in an age long before the emergency of equivalents to medieval France or England. And I turned up with a surprisingly lot.

Giant Lizards: Reptiles today are small. Millions of years ago Reptiles could be huge. You don’t have to have actual dinosaurs, but something that looks like it could have been a dinosaur certainly should do the deed.
Volcanoes: Given the total age of the Earth and the amount of time between today and the dinosaurs, it seems very unlikely that volcanoes had been much more common during the time of the dinosaurs than they are now. But for over a century, all decent artists painting prehistoric animals put volcanoes in their pictures! It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t have to make sense. Volcanoes just feel and look very prehistoric.
Bronze Armor: As I mentioned above, one of the big things where Conan stories feel anachronistic is armor. And it’s something that makes a big difference. Put your heroes and soldiers into bronze breastplates and give them crested helms and big round shields and you instantly have a very different feel than warriors in steel plate armor or chainmail.
Oracles: What knight has ever gone to an oracle? Ocasionally you have someone secretly consulting a witch in the night to gain forbidden knowledge. But making a pilgramage to a sacred oracle to recieve the wisdom of the gods is something very un-medieval.
Slaves: When these come up in medievalesque fantasy it’s usually in the form of organized crime. But you’ll almost never see the average noble or wealthy merchant having lots of slaves in their homes and as their workers unless the story wants to point out that they are dispicable villains.
Skulls: “Why skulls?!” After the great plagues of the late middle ages skeletons became a fashionable motive in art, but usually we consider skull decoration as something primitive and savage. But there isn’t any reason why you can’t have depictions of human and animal skulls in the decoration of the homes of the rich and powerful.
Sacrifices: For reasons I don’t know Christians and Muslims don’t do sacrifices. Which gives it a feeling of being primitive and barbaric. But during antiquity many extremely advanced civilizations sacrificed animals to their gods and of course you can also have them sacrifice people. That really sets a very different tone for a fantasy world.
Cannibals: Have you ever had a knight deal with people who eat people?
Animal Gods: Again, in western thought, humans are created in the image of god. The Greeks did it too. To my knowledge only the Egyptians had gods with Animal heads, but during the middle ages it has always been popular to depict pagan demon-gods with animal features, and we still associate animal features with deities of primitive societies. Also always fun is having your people worship Old Gods like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, or Shub-Niggurath. As long as it doesn’t look human it’s fair game.
Scrolls: Wizards and sages love their books. But there isn’t any practical reasons why you couldn’t also have them read from scrolls. An interesting alternative to parchment or papyrus is strips of bamboo sewn together with thread, so that each bamboo splint holds one line of text.
Clay Pots: These never disappeared and where still very common during the middle ages. But in antiquity pottery really was the way to go for all kinds of containers. Switch some wooden tankards for clay cups and some barrels for amphoras and your tavern will feel a lot more ancient.
Ziggurats and Pyramids: The only true way to build a giant temple or palace.
Halls of Pillars: Before the Romans figured out how to make a self supporting arch, it was really difficult to hold up a large ceiling. While stone is very hard when you press down on it, it actually snaps very easily when you bend it unless you make it really thick and put the support pillars very close together. (Karate chopping roof tiles and cinder blocks isn’t nearly as hard as it looks.) In Egyptian temples you often can’t see the hall for all the pillars which take up half of the floor space. The Greeks got a bit better by cheating and making the roofs out of wood (which is why the Acropolis hasn’t one anymore), but they still needed a lot of pillars and interior walls. Consider this when describing palaces and temples. At least some people might unconsciously make the association.

Ancient-Egyptian-Columns-2

Writing Fantasy as if it is History

People interested in Fantasy and especially the aspect of worldbuilding probably have encountered expressions like “his writing has a great sense of history” or “you should describe the world as if it is history”. I’ve seen it applied to both Robert Howard and Tolkien several times, but it tends to show up in many diverse places. There is something about these expressions that sounds very profound to me and I have feeling that I understand what people are getting to when they use it. But what does it actually mean? How do you write your fantasy as if it is history?

The most obvious answer to that question would be to write a big and comprehensive history book that deals with the great rulers, powerful dynasties, and big battles between the great powers of the world. But that’s almost certainly not what people mean by that, and it would also be completely impractical. Aside from being a huge amount of work, how would you bring any of that into your story so that your audience learns about it? And even more important, that they care about it? And when we turn to Robert Howard’s Conan stories, which are regularly getting praise for the sense of history they contain, we actually don’t find any of that. The most we get for almost all the countries are names, as well as the names of maybe one or two major cities. Occasionally the name of a ruler who is currently plotting against Conan, but that’s all the present, not the past.

Some weeks back I was reading some articles about the Conan story Beyond the Black River by people with a very strong interest in historical fiction, which directed my attention to another perspective on the subject. In that tale Conan is some kind of “military advisor” who is using the skills and knowledge he learned as a boy in a barbarian tribe to teach and supervise civilized soldiers who are trying to claim new territory for settlement from the local barbarians. Then the natives are getting restless and Conan is really the only one among the good guys who is capable to deal with true savage warfare. The story has been described as being a fantasy adaptation of tales from the American Frontier, but it could also be a fantasy adaptation of the Romans crossing the Rhine or the Vikings crossing from Greenland to the American mainland.

It’s not the classic history book type of history that deals with kings and generals, but much more similar to the currently very popular kind of history that examines how people lived and what they were dealing with at the lower levels. It’s about how things were normally instead of the exceptions when extraordinary things were happening. Especially when it comes to early (colonial) American history, there seems to be a very high interest in the personal stories of interesting individuals that have been preserved, even if their deeds are completely irrelevant when you take a more global view spanning centuries. Part of it is probably necessity because at the time there were no big kingdoms, powerful kings, or many huge battles. But even the tales of a hunter who became an important translator for solving a few specific conflicts between locals and settlers can get very exciting because they are windows into the world of those people involved, to which we otherwise have very little access. When we write down such tales of our own ancestors, we usually refer to it as History. But what it really is is Ethnography. A description of the culture and everyday life of specific groups of people. Not necessarily of an entire population, but also of more specific groups like the American frontier men. Or the Skandinavian sea merchants, or the Roman legionaries on the German border. I think that this is the true sense of history. The feeling that these people we see in the story could actually have lived and that they have a complex and fascinating culture, even if we only get a very short glimps at them.

Another thing that regularly appears in various Conan stories and which makes them different from most other adventure tales, is that his stories regularly intersect with what are important “big history” events. We only see what Conan does and encounters, but the people he fights against or for are generally involved in some pretty big business. There are big things happening in the history of the world, but instead of seeing them in the big picture from above with the kings and generals, we usually get a look at them directly from the ground where you can see only a very small piece but with details usually invisible in Epic Fantasy. Think of the opening of the movie Gladiator. We see the Roman general Maximus in a major battle against German tribes. We are not told what the battle is about. Why the German warriors are attacking, why the Romans are in the area, or how long the campaign had already been going. And once Maximus is betrayed and has to flee, we never learn how that war between the Romans and the Germans turned out. But during this early part of the movie there is a clear sense that this battle is not some random border skirmish that happens once every few weeks and is of no consequence in the greater picture of things. This is something important. A decisive battle in a very important war. The Emperor himself comes to the front to see Maximus in person because he has very big plans for him, based on his leadership during this campaign. We are getting a clear sense that there is an important war going on and that even more important things lie ahead for the future of the Empire. But we don’t actually see any of that. Because it’s not relevant to this particular story of Maximus being betrayed, believed to be dead, and becoming enslaved to be a gladiator. And from that point on his future in the higest ranks of the Empire becomes irrelevant to Maximus. This is a deeply personal story, but it takes place in a location and time where big historic things are happening. We are getting a sense of history, without actually seeing it.

The other writer next to Howard who often gets praised for creating a sense of history is Tolkien, and The Hobbit is perhaps the best example to see that. For Bilbo it is a completely straight adventure tale. Go places, encounter monsters, return home rich and wiser. But for the dwarves it is an important episode of their history. It’s not just a single adventure but a big turning point that completely changes the power structure in the region. But the tale is Bilbo’s tale and so when the big battle between all the regional powers takes place it’s done in three or four paragraphs because Bilbo was mostly sitting this one out and had nothing really to do with it himself. But you know that his individual adventure takes place before the background of big historic events.

It is examining the situation and changes of a fascinating time through the events that happened to a few interesting, though also not really special individuals. Individuals who are not the big masterminds behind the big events or who single handedly decided the outcome of large scale conflicts through their actions. To create a sense of history, you don’t need to go into detail about politics and battles. It really is about creating an atmosphere of the protagonist being surrounded by people who have a real culture, and also a past and a future.

A Typology of Monsters

I have always been a big fan of monsters and are regularly disappointed by the lack of them in most modern fantasy books. It’s always about wizards, soldiers, and assassins fighting to protect an empire. Which sounds like the most boring thing ever to me. I want monsters!

Writing about monsters has turned out to be not quite as easy as I thought. When working on the Ancient Lands setting, one of the first things I started with was making a list of cool creatures I want to inhabit it, most of them coming from videogames and RPGs. But eventually I realized that monsters in narrative stories work very different from monsters that are fought in games. You can’t just have a dozen different hostile creatures in various locations throughout a castle or dark forest in a story and then have the protagonist run into them to have a cool fight. In games this works great. There’s anticipation any time you come around a corner or open a door and every fight is different. But when writing a story that just doesn’t work at all. Any fight scene needs to have some narrative function and that means whatever monster the protagonists encounter needs to have a function in the plot as well. Having a fight scene just for the sake of having a fight scene or making the story longer just leads to terrible results. In movies you can at least show off some pretty special effects, but even then it’s noticable when a fight scene has no point. When writing stories you don’t even have that luxury.

So before I went ahead with making a new list of monsters for the Ancient Lands, I first set down to try figuring out what kinds of roles and functions monsters can have in a story. And the ones I came up with are really not that many:

Wild People: These creatures are pretty much people, but they are as foreign as it can possibly get. Trolls, giants, lizardman, fish people, and the like. Not only is their culture incomprehensible and their morals loathsome, they are almost always also very much sub-human. They are stupid and violent, but generally very strong, which makes them a threat. They hate our Freedom and want to steal our stuff!
Fair Folk: Like the wild people they are basically people, but instead of being fearsomely sub-human, they are incomprehensibly super-human. They are very intelligent and have magical powers and often live very long or are outright immortal. If they wanted to they could easily destroy and conquer all mortal people and the only reason they haven’t already is that they don’t really care. Normal humans are usually insignificant to them and the best way to stay safe is to keep it that way. When they are around, everything you do can spell your doom because their minds are so alien that it’s impossible to really know what they want and what might provoke them. And they can be very cruel, simply because they don’t really think of humans as actual people but more as talking animals.
Guardian Spirits: These creatures are being tied to the land they inhabit and serve as its guardians. Nymphs, ents, some dragons, the sphinx, and so on. Their main motivation is usually simple to get any intruders to leave and stay away. However, they might be convinced to let some people pass through their territory or to grant a request, which requires the observance of strict rules. Their direct interactions with people are usually very limited, but their real role is to serve as a threat what happens when the rules are not observed. Struggling to not break the rules is the real obstacle the characters are facing.
Maneaters: These are the most simple monsters. They are really just pimped-out carnivorous animals that will eat people when the opportunity presents itself. The only interaction with characters they have is attacking to eat some of them. Their main role in a story is to be nearby but unseen, posing a constant threat that keeps everyone on edge. They don’t talk, they have no complex motives. They just jump out from behind some trees and disappear again once they grabbed a few people or have been badly wounded. While they behave like animals, they still can look very human-like. Ghouls are one example and some versions of Medusa.
Soul Stealers: These creatures are predators as well, but they are usually very much like people and instead of wanting to eat you, they want to make you theirs. These are vampires, succubuses and some other demons, rusalkas, and sirens. They are manipulators who want you to join them, which at that time they make sound a pretty attractive offer. But the true fate of anyone who gets caught by them is much more horrific. Their role is to tempt characters and make them lose their hold over themselves and submit to their own doom.
Deathbringers: This type of monster only wants to kill. They are not looking for food, they don’t want to leave, they don’t want anything you have. All they do is kill and continue to kill until they are destroyed. These are zombies, barrow-wights, some demon hords, and darkspawn. Sometimes they want to harvest the bodies of their victims as a resource to make more of themselves, like the Flood, the Reapers, or the Borg, but every place they visit they just kill and destroy everything. They aren’t not even like ammoral forces of nature, because they will target you and try to come after you.
Troublemakers: A usually small creature that doesn’t attack people directly but instead damages and destroys things and makes life hard for them. Though when they destroy food or set things on fire they can still be a very serious and deadly threat. Usually they don’t have any real motivation and do it simply out of spite.
Fictional Animals: Some creatures are like ordinary animals in every way but don’t hunt and eat humans. From a narrative point of view, these aren’t actually monsters. They are just animals like any other.

By looking at the subject of monsters from this perspective I realized that I had a lot of redundancies on my list. You don’t need seven different types of giant crab-spiders that all fall under the maneater category. Two are already more than enough. And some creatures I had added just because of their looks. There really wasn’t any point to harpies and giant hyenas. I ended up cutting the monster list down from about 110 to 46, which really looks a lot sleeker and more tidy now.

Awesome future novel idea #3: Pirates of the Baltic and Kraken!

George Martin described his Song of Ice and Fire series as being basically the War of the Roses with dragons. So when I was checking some facts on the 14th century German pirate Klaus Störtebeker, I very soon realized that someone should write a fantasy series inspired by the whole regional situation in which he lived and was active. I always considered the Baltic Sea a region where nothing really ever happened after the times of the Vikings was gone. A rather boring and insignificant part of the world. There was the time when Sweden send troops into Germany during the 30 Years War and that time when the Fins repelled two huge Soviet Invasion during World War 2, but that appeared to have been pretty much it.

But, oh boy… At least for the last decades of the 14th century, shit was getting seriously real around here. The king of Sweden and Norway had split his kingdom between his two sons and the new king of Norway married the daughter of the king of Denmark. After the deaths of the kings of Denmark and Norway, the Danish princess manages to get the nobles to elect her son as successor of both her father and her husband. This angered her sister, whose own son had been meant to become king of Denmark, but that had been overruled by the Hanseatic League. If you’re not familiar with them, think East India Trading Company. But probably even more powerful by quite a bit. These super wealthy merchants ruled over several of their own independent city states. The prince who had been denied the throne of Denmark was also the Duke of Mecklenburg in Germany and now understandibly upset with the League.

baltic_14th

The Swedish nobles saw an opportunity to get rid of their king by making an alliance with Denmark-Norway and start a kind of civil war. Since Denmark had the Support of the Hanseatic League, the Duke of Mecklenburg joined in on the side of the Swedish king. This lead to the creation of a serious force of mercenaries/privateers/pirates who are lead by impoverished nobles from Mecklenburg and came to aid the besieged Swedish capital Stockholm. These pirates quickly became a serious disruption of sea trade and so the Hanseatic League send its own troops to fight them and eventually occupied Stockholm. The pirate army gained control of the island Gotland, which is the largest island in the entire region after Great Britain and Ireland and sits right in the center of all the Baltic Sea trade routes. This annoyed the knights of the Teutonic Order, who originally were crusaders in Palestine but then went on another crusade against pagan Slavs on the Baltic coast and established their own independent country in Lithuania a hundred years earlier and was regularly at war with Poland. So the Teutonic Knights invaded Gotland, which forced the remaining pirate leaders to flee the Baltic Sea entirely. And they ended up in East Frisia, a region that previously had been an egalitarian anarchy but after several desasters fell under the control of several warlords. From there the situation gradually calms down as Sweden gets integrated with Denmark and Norway into the Kalmar Union and the remaining pirates are eventually hunted down and executed. There’s no big finale or ultimate showdown to the real story.

But, damn! This is wonderful stuff for a big fantasy novel! It got everything. Various kingdoms, succession conflicts, dynastic struggles, merchant lords, exiled nobles, pirates, warrior monks, island fortresses, barbarian chiefs, sea battles, sieges, public mass beheadings of known outlaws. Instand awesome, just add magic. And probably the best part: You got two sisters who both fight over whose infant son will become the ruler of the whole region.

The one thing with my Sword & Sorcery setting that I was always a bit unhappy about is that it developed into something that really wasn’t suited to have a lot of Baltic Sea culture integraded into it. But this would be a perfect opportunity. And many of the key locations are right where I grew up. Lübeck, Hamburg, Mecklenburg, Denmark. That’s right outside our front door. (And I am currently planning to return back North later this year after several years in Southern Germany.) 14th century is a bit late when it comes to my personal taste to fantasy aesthetics, but transfered into a fantasy world the basic political situation should also work quite well in something that looks a bit older. Can’t really have a super powerful alliance of merchant lords in a true dark ages setting, but there’s plenty of room to wriggle. But then, I think the world as shown in the Witcher games seems very much inspired by pretty much the same peroid and region and I enjoy that quite a lot.

Though I really have no idea yet how to turn that into a story. Because I am actually not a fan of these huge epic series with millions of words. But it feels to me like an idea that I should seriously keep in mind if I one day feel the need to take a break from my Ancient Lands stuff.

The World of Magic and Monsters

While working on a draft for a story set in the Ancient Lands for while now, I’ve still been struggling to come up with plots that really embody the themes I have in mind for the world and evoke the style of other works that greatly inspired me. In situations like these I always find it very helpful to get back to the very basics and make a list of the works I want to emulate, and then try to find what elements they all share in common. And it did help quite a lot this time as well. Looking at Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Metal Gear Solid, and various wuxia stories, I noticed that they all share the trait of having a kind of separate and hidden community of heroes and villains who share knowledge of things mostly unknown to the rest of the world.

It’s made the most explicit in the wuxia genre in the form of the Wulin, the “community of kung-fu”. In most wuxia tales all the masters of kung-fu know each other, either personally or by reputation, and tales of their deeds spread quickly among all practitioners of the secret arts. Regular people know of this hidden world, but they know very little of what’s going on inside it, the alliances and rivalries inside it, the exact nature of the supernatural arts, and the special traditions and customs these people observe. Something very similar is found in Star Wars with the world of the Force that includes the Jedi and the Sith, but also the Witches of Dathomir, the Sorcerers of Thund, and many other minor groups. In Metal Gear Solid you have this crazy world of super-powered super-spies, which really is very similar to the whole superhero genre. While not made explict but still present, there is a similar exclusive community in the Indiana Jones movies which includes Indy, Marion, Beloq, Mola Raam, and all those Nazi leaders. In the Witcher stories there seem to be something similar going on with most sorcerers, witchers, and alchemists being in complex web of relationships that covers all the Northern Kingdoms. Another great example are the roleplaying games of the World of Darkness, where it is spelled out explicitly right in the name. It’s a whole different world that geographically overlaps with everyday life and occasionally interacts with it, but for the most part remains hidden from normal people. Which is just as everyone involves prefers it.

When working on outlines for Ancient Lands stories, I most often end up with a generic monster or haunted ruin piece that frankly even bore me. How is it going to entertain anyone else when even I don’t feel really excited about it? I occasionally considered approaching new ideas for stories as Star Wars fan fiction and then just moving them over into the Ancient Lands. But I think many of my very early ideas for the world already provide a solid foundation that can easily be expanded into such a community of the supernatural which would make that step unnecessary. A special World of Magic and Monsters. The Druids were conceived that way from the very beginning. Not an actual organization with hierarchies and headquarters, but an informal association of shamans and witches who keep each other informed about what they hear about sorcerers and demons. Going a level higher there already exists an implicit community of witches, priests, monster hunters, and treasure seekers. While their goals are different, the knowledge they come across and have use for is often the same. And it makes perfect sense that those who explore ruins of the Ancients have close connections to shamans or monster slayers.

I would not go so far and make it as explicit as the Wulin in wuxia, or as clearly separated from normal society as the World of Darkness, with strict laws and traditions. That would seem inappropriate given the wild and disorganized nature of the world as a whole. But I like the idea of part of the world running by special rules and relationships that you really can only learn about if you are initiated into this community. You may know that a neighbor used to be a monster hunter and now he’s just another old man tending a small garden, but when he gets visited by mysterious strangers nobody really knows what kind of things they might be talking about all night behind his door. I also really like the idea of everyone knowing everyone and no antagonist being a random stranger. It always makes the world feel much more alive and connected and also supports the idea of a world where everything is decentralized and governed by personal connections.

What I would put into science-fiction that aims to be realistic

My personal perception of science-fiction of the past decades is that there seems to be an absence of the great visions of how technological advances will change life in the future. From the 50s to 70s, such stories seem to have been all the rage. When I look at popular “science-fiction” today, it’s mostly “post-apocalyptic distopia”, “superheroes”, and the occasional “space adventure”. None of which really deal with the finer aspects of science or technology. If there is amazing technology, it’s generally handled just like magic, with no actual scientific basis. I think part of it might quite possibly be that we had an unusual boom period of scientific discoveries in the late 19th and early 20th century, that is a highly exceptional moment in human history. Quite often we believe that the trends of the last two or three decades will continue forever, with progress accelerating always faster. But I don’t think that’s the case. What happened in the late 19th century was truly extraordinary with whole new fields of science and technology being opened to us, which eventually lead to nuclear power and digital computers a few decades later. But since the 60s, progress has been mostly refinement instead of huge breakthroughs, which I think is a much more normal state for scientific and technological progress. A hundred years ago we made a huge leap forward and have been riding that wave ever since. But of all the possible problems of engineering and nuclear physics, it was the easiest ones that people figured out first. There are still many great discoveries to be made and we’re probably never going to run out of them, but with each one the bar is set higher for future scientists and inventors. A hundred years ago, two people could make a huge discovery by working a few months in a drafty shed. Today it takes hundreds of people working for decades with a massive budget. And the usefulness of any new discovery will be ever more difficult to anticipate in advance. At least until someone has another huge breakthrough that opens up a completely new field of science that nobody had imagined to exist. But that certainly makes it a lot more challenging for science-fiction writers to understand the research that is currently going on and make educated guesses how those future discoveries might change everyday life.

Personally, I don’t expect that life in 2115 will be as drastically different from life in 2015, than how life now is different than from life in 1915. While my interest in fantasy is much greater than in science-fiction, it still entertains me to think what kind of world I would predict if I were to write science-fiction stories set in 2115.

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