This morning I was pondering a particularly stupid paradox of my views about good worldbuilding. I think most long running series of anything decay over time because the progression of the story increasingly chips away at the worldbuilding elements that made the setting interesting in the first place. Particularly when it comes to campaign settings for roleplaying games, moving the timeline forward a few years or decades always seems like a really bad development. I’ve long been thinking that my disinterest in any new Star Wars story for almost 20 years now is precisely because the Clone Wars era and the Feloniverse are set in a world that is very different from Classic Star Wars in the 80s and 90s. (Though that’s actually going back in time rather than moving ahead, but it’s still a case of being a very different setting.) When you have a story that is about dealing with a particular situation in the world, and you continue the story after that situation has been resolves, it’s not really set in the same world anymore. Which is why for example Mass Effect has nowhere to move forward after three games that establish a conflict in the first game and resolve it in the third game. The Mass Effect setting doesn’t actually have anything interesting going on in it other than the Reapers situation.
Yet how this becomes a stupid paradox is because my whole core concept about Iridium Moons as a setting to have many different stories take place in, is all about a struggle of regular people fighting back against a kleptocratic elite. It’s a setting based on a specific situation, made for stories about resolving that situation. Players are meant to contribute to a greater struggle to break the power of the oligarchy, but as I established above, I also don’t want the situation to change in any meaningful way.
But this conflict in priorities is not actually that bad, and the solution to it is really not that difficult. Instead of asking at the end of a particular story “And what happens next?”, the question should be “And what has happened somewhere else, at the same time?”
The issue with movies in particular is that the faces of the main actors are a huge part of the marketing and advertising campaign for any follow up movies. But also in videogames, stories are often written specifically to get the players attached to specific main characters. (Mostly happens in games that try to emulate blockbuster movies the most. Who would have thunk?) But it does not have to be that way. The Dragon Age games, even though they are all set one after the other with a kind of ongoing metaplot continuing through all of them, each mostly have a completely different cast of characters. As do the Fallout games or Elder Scrolls games. (Which also always advance the timeline. Why?!)
Many popular long running series are set up from the start to be about a small group of characters first, and the setting build around them to accommodate their story. Since the stories of specific characters are linear, and the characters are the main selling point of these stories, there are difficulties in adding more stories that aren’t added to the end of the latest installment. (Or in front of the earliest installment.) But when designing a world from the ground up to instead accommodate several stories of different characters happening in different places during roughly the same time period, this is a situation that is very easy to avoid. It’s a corner I really don’t have to paint myself into. I know I want to use this world in two or three campaigns over the coming years, and maybe manage to make a little Godot game or two also taking place in it. Each story can be about toppling one villainous oligarch on one of the three planet, making one big step towards the ultimate goal that I have no intention to ever see playing out.
Of course, I have the luxury of not being beholden to corporate suits who’s main priority is to monetize the face of some world famous movie stars. But then again, Fallout has been a huge success even with the continuity between stories being just fan service and not being relevant to each story. If you want to have a world that can be reused for many stories and does not change with each story, and your vision does not revolve around finishing that ultimate battle where evil is destroyed for good, then there really isn’t anything that would force you into that situation in the first place.