WorldCraft Club

Every GM is trying to creating a world with collaborators whether they like it or not. Authors are now embracing methodologies that include fans in their worldbuilding and story telling. How do you work well with others to create powerful settings and why might this be the best way to work? Long time collaborator and friend of the show Jog Brogzin has been busy. Like, really busy. Not just making awesome maps for Seth and his many other clients but building a collaborative world on his discord server one hex at a time. Seth and Jog go into detail on the process of cooking worlds with lots of chefs. What benefits this can yield and what pitfalls can make it tricky.

• Collaboration might need some guard rails to be effective (final decision makers or voting on content)
• Scope and boundaries are critical. A good understanding of the limitations of the world you’re creating can help you quickly determine what fits and what doesn’t.

• Jog’s Website – Check out Jog’s dungeon tiles and some beautiful maps he’s made for order on his site.
• Jog’s Patreon – This is where the magic happens. Get exclusive access to parts of Jog’s discord, 4k maps and much more!
• Jog’s Instagram – Follow along to see the amazing content he produces on a daily basis.
• Jog’s Facebook Page – Same deal as the instagram page.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for early episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding or help us with a collaborative project
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated sometimes.

Is breaking your rules because a particular scene needs a little extra oomph a good thing to do? The rule of cool is where your story starts to strain the expectations and rules that are created and there’s always a cost to it in the form of your visitant’s trust. Will you simply bend/break your rules again when it’s convenient? Marcos and James discuss where the limits of this rule are, jumping the shark, and Nathan Drake’s hit points.

• Villains and heroes frequently bend this to make characters appear powerful, unique and interesting.
• The Rule of Cool is really useful for creating memorable and powerful moments in your story.
• Figure out what you want to do with this rule bending. Is it worth the cost?
• There can be partial explanations for the rule that can satisfy the boundaries of your world, have you considered them? 

• Rule of Cool Tropedia – This resource is incredible, you should definitely dive into stuff here for ideas.
• Fast and Furious – The franchise that went from ‘cool, cars racing’ to ‘wtf’ in about a decade.
• Matt Mercer on Rule of Cool – As you might expect he has some really good insights on its usage in TTRPG.
• Nathan Drake is Lucky – This is one of the best interpretations of rulesets I’ve ever heard and it’s definitely my head canon for most games that involve HP these days.
• Voldemort Flying – Like, he’s not supposed to. It was supposed to be impossible but he can do it. Why? Cause he’s super cool and scary, that’s why.
• Super Carlin Brothers – Why broomsticks never run out of gas.
• Scott’s First Fight in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – I still remember the awe I experienced watching this mad cap fight for the first time in theaters.
• Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle – the scene that ruined it for Marcos.
• Jumping the Shark – This is it. It’s disputed as to whether or not this really was where Happy Days went downhill but it’s worth noting the phenomenon and seeking to avoid it where possible.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for early episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding or help us with a collaborative project
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated sometimes.

Fish don’t know they’re wet. We all have a culture whether we know it or not. We tend to see it clearly in others and recognize that it’s a pivotal part of worldbuilding. We all remember a particular race or culture in our favorite media’s world-building that set our imaginations on fire whether it’s the Necrons of Warhammer, the Protoss of StarCraft, or the Sylvan elves of Lord of the Rings a diverse array of cultures can bring your world to life. How do you start with creating cultures, though? James and Marcos discuss some of the best ways to develop your cultures and place them in your stories in a way that highlights them all the while building a culture of cybernetic vikings.

• Decide what role you want your culture to play.
• Location, location, location, where does your culture come from? This is a great first step when you’re asking questions about your culture.
• Culture is a by-product of progress which is rooted in necessity.
• Comedians are an excellent source of cultural commentary.
• Contrast is your friend, highlight differences with your visitants culture.
• Consider the impacts on neighboring cultures.

• Synthesis – Massive spoilers ahead for Mass Effect. This is one of the three possible ending for the Mass Effect Trilogy. Where the endless conflict between organic and synthetic life is fixed by a complete blending of the two.
• Shark Laser Cavalry Charge – This is the best thing ever.
• Is Aquaman Good Worldbuilding? – Your question is invalid. There is Jason Mamoa. Seriously though, this thread is a really interesting discussion point for worldbuilding. All credit to -violetskies on our Discord for highlighting this.
• When you get slapped for thinking – Satire is such a great source. This clip won’t really help you at all. But should probably watch it anyway.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for early episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding or help us with a collaborative project
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated sometimes.

Everyone’s afraid of being unoriginal. I mean, it’s understandable that we want to stand out. We don’t want our world-building to be hum drum filled with the same junk that we see day to day. But we needn’t fear the humble trope because it’s like salt. Too much and it’s poison but just the right amount can really pull the dish together. Tropes serve as a short hand for your players and readers. They allow someone to get caught up quickly with what you’re trying to say. When a character arrives on the scene in a menacing cloud of black smoke cackling all the while we can safely assume that we’re dealing with a villain and save some exposition in a scene that needs some pace. We can always build upon the character later or choose to subvert the trope in a unique way but just now we’ve offset some exposition labor on our world building and laid it back on the trope for a minute and our visitants will thank us. Join Seth and Marcos as they explore how to make the most of this powerful tool in a world builder’s arsenal.

• Tropes set expectations in your world and can be a short hand for exposition.
• Good tropes are molded to your world but bad tropes seem to come out of nowhere or carry baggage that you don’t want.
• Repeating information (the inn keeper is a jovial fellow) sets expectations which operate like internal tropes that you can then use to attenuate your visitants to important information (when the inn keeper is gruff and dismissive they know something has changed).

• UltraViolet Trailer – This movie looks terrible. I mean, I don’t really know why Marcos and Seth even mentioned it. This trailer is… it’s bad.
• You can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball – Probably the best scene in Dodgeball, or really any movie.
• Carrot’s Character Profile – Seth’s pretty much right about this. If you read Pratchett you’ll be a better writer for it.
• TV Tropes – Here’s a handy list of tropes!
• One Punch Man – This show is very silly. You should probably watch it.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for early episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding or help us with a collaborative project
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated sometimes.

It’s hard to kill your darlings. To let go of something that you spent hours (days/weeks/years) creating but that’s what we do when we engage on any creative endeavor. It’s especially true with tabletop roleplaying games where the visitants tend to want a hand in the creative process. They’re not passive observers of the story but active participants. RJD20 and James discuss how to hold your writing in an open hand and allow your players a seat at the table when you’re playing even as you do much of your harder worldbuilding at your desk between games.

• RJD20 Blog – This is RJ’s blog and it’s exceptional. The worldbuilding content here is specific to TTRPGs but anyone can gain something from its worldbuilding content.
• RJ on Twitter – @RJD20 writes.
• Villain Backgrounds Volume 1 – Available currently for only $1
• Facebook Group – This is RJ’s Facebook group and is a great place to join in on the fun and talk to RJ.

• GURPS Supplements – do yourself a favor and give these a read. They’re honestly phenomenal and worth every penny no matter what your worldbuilding aims or medium is.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for exclusive episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding. This is really where the magic happens.
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated sometimes.

It’s a bug bear isn’t it? Exposition. I mean, in one sense we’re told to show and not tell but we also need our visitants to understand your worldbuilding, to feel like they can anticipate outcomes so they’re not caught flat footed (or we don’t fail to catch them flat footed when we need to). How do you go about telling your visitant about the world you’re creating? Seth and Marcos uncover some really powerful tools that will help you up your game with exposition, promote clarity and help your visitant settle in. So pop on the ear amplifiers of your choice and dive into another fantastic episode of the WorldCraft Club Podcast.

• Shaun of the Dead Doesn’t Know There’s Zombies – This provides world context for the story and highlights the sense of alienation that are present in so many zombie movies (even the funny ones).
• John Wick – The boogey man scene – This is straight exposition but it’s done with such dramatic flare that you’ve gotta love it sometimes its the difference between labeling details and making those details significant through the telling. Warning swears abound!
• The Way That Matrix Scene Played Out – This, my friends, is a lore dump.
• The Way That Matrix Scene Should’ve Played Out – I think we can all agree the architect was miscast in the original. ‘Ere go open you’re yapper one more time!’
• The Wise Mentor Trope – Rip Torn as Patches O’Houlihan was really the best example of a wise mentor trope. We know exactly what role he’s supposed to serve and he does it with a wrench in hand.
• One of Terry Pratchett’s Infamous Footnotes – The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles — kingons, or possibly queons — that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for early episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding or help us with a collaborative project
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated sometimes.

But, what is the secret sauce!? Peter Chiykowski is all about it. He’s an award winning author, cartoonist, dog enthusiast and maker of awesome kickstarters and we get to pick his brains! We talk about it some of the key components to good worlds and how a creator can build such depth into their own settings. Take a second here to listen in on some of this solid wisdom.

• The Deck of Worlds Kickstarter – This is THE Kickstarter for you get on the ground floor of if you want to get your brain motor running on creating settings. It’s a fantastic tool.
• The Story Engine – The precursor to the Deck of Worlds, it’s a modular writing
• Peter’s Website – Find out more about the man, the myth, the legend here.
• Peter’s Comic – Rock, Paper, Cynic is a comic that Peter’s been doing for a long dang time and it’s worth some of your eye time.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for early episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding or help us with a collaborative project
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated sometimes.

Isn’t it great when your players are obsessed? When they form massive cork boards with twine and string connecting images of different characters and phenomena in your world. How do you bottle this, though? How does a GM drive player engagement with worldbuilding? James and Seth break down how to drive player excitement and engagement.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for early episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding or help us with a collaborative project
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated weeklyish.

Well!? The Empire is obviously evil, I mean, obviously. However, we reckon most folks in the galaxy far far away were pretty ambivalent about it and might not have even noticed the change of the guard. Marcos and James discuss the Mandolorian and how the show depicts the regular folks in the margins of galactic society and how they might’ve seen the Empire and the experiences they might have had as it collapsed. Was everyone on board with the Rebellion. Is the Rebellion doing a good job running the show since the Emperor died? We discuss these questions and more to give you great content for your own story worlds featuring collapsed empires.

• Operation Cinder – for those of you not in the know this is basically the pinnacle of mustache twirling evil that only Sith do.
• Basically Every Episode of the Mandalorian – We can’t do our mission because we’re out of… milk.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for early episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding or help us with a collaborative project
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated weeklyish.

Happy Star Wars day everyone! May the Fourth be with you!

The Jedi are a staple in everyone’s worldbuilding imagination, most everyone wanted to be one at one time or another. Seth and I are gonna tell you why they’re terrible and not just cause they indoctrinate kids in their hokey religion or have a weird attachment to political power. The problems lie a little deeper, their philosophy presents the type of problems that generate Sith faster than Sith do.

• Kreia’s Conundrums – Or was it conundra? Either way I highly recommend journeying down this rabbit hole. It will not disappoint.
• Other Force Traditions – This was another interesting journey for me. There’s actually a lot of non-sith non-jedi force traditions out there.

• Join the Club – We love our Patrons and they make this world(crafting club) go round, join us for early episodes, memes and a say in the direction of the pod
• Facebook Page – Our community here is rapidly growing and super fun, it’s also a great way to find out more about what we’re up to
• Discord – Well, color yourself invited to our Discord channel where you can jaw with us about worldbuilding or help us with a collaborative project
• The Website – Oh yeah! We’ve got one of these too, check it out if you want to keep track of the blog where numerous authors talk all things worldbuilding. It’s updated weeklyish.