lincoln

i liked this bit from this blog post:

Tolkien, for all his vaunted designs, only got to The Good Stuff when he was IN it, really working the text of the novels (or novel, if you consider The Lord of the Rings one big book). He could not world-build his way into a workable story; he had to muddle and discover and revise, just like the rest of us.

and it got me thinking about the whole "top down" vs "bottom up" dichotomy as it pertains to world building. how many well-known examples of actual strongly-top-down worldbuilding are there? much less ones that are considered great? tolkien got very top-down about certain things that he was a huge nerd about - language and mythology - but all of the lasting narrative-emotional-memetic connections people have with LotR he kinda just had to pull out of his ass, like a GM responding to their players deciding to talk to everyone in the tavern.

the elder scrolls games have one of the weirdest feats of top down worldbuilding i can think of: they drew out a world map for the first game, Arena, in 1994 and have more or less stuck with it to the present day.

it's mind-boggling to me to think of a few fairly off-the-cuff creative decisions i made at the beginning of my career defining so many specifics of a problem i'm solving 20+ years later.

i guess world maps are a slightly special case, though. unless you're filling in every town and road, they are sparse matrices of imagination; all they were really committing to in 1994 was "there's a desert in the southwest, a swamp in the southeast, snowy mountains in the north". and drawing up a map like that at the beginning of a creative process can actually be a great way to get the juices flowing, it gives you some broad spatial relationships, constraints to push against, and dangles some points on the horizon, much the way a GM does to get players interested in one direction vs others.

on the other hand, drawing up a map of the entire world in any detail like this would have been disastrous for One Piece - some very important parts of the mystery live in the specifics of that, the final island, etc. in early chapters we get a couple vague overviews for a light dusting of context. then, 100 chapters in Oda gives us this:

he makes it very clear that the shape of this world is going to be driven by the shape of the story - a journey from island to island, revealed only in scraps. if you pinch-zoomed to the far side of that chain, you'd be spoiling yourself on the ending.

and i think the vastly different ways these different kinds of stories have be planned out (at least a little) and then built up over time are unignorably significant too. a pen-n-paper GM can be pretty "just in time" about many points of world building, plot points, twists, etc; past a point predefining every possibility can even proscribe the players' agency. whereas a digital game storyteller kinda does have to author every detail and possibility in advance (yeah, even in strongly "emergent" games, or in PGC games where they're simply doing so at a level of remove). and a noninteractive storyteller working in a serialized medium like weekly manga is really building brick by brick, compared to a novelist building a cathedral-like epic over several years before the final draft goes to print.

the brick by brick approach is really appealing though, i wish it were easier for more media to work that way. some of the most mind-blowing shit in One Piece might seem like top down masterstroke, but on closer examination you can tell was just Oda planting some seeds, working out a few things on a notepad, and then waiting 15+ years to pay them off, having had all the time in the world to consider and massage the details.

so i think to some extent "pure top down" is an illusion; fictional worlds aren't structured static data that is simply "rendered" by the tale teller. the basic loop of planning and execution means that by venturing in to write details, you are making decisions you had deferred until that moment. that doesn't make everything jazz by a long shot, just indicates that maybe the way this continuum is commonly understood is a bit lopsided. and hopefully makes storytelling a little less... intimidating? - for newcomers, who look at a finished towering work that inspired them and might imagine authors materializing perfectly planned cathedrals out of pure thought, or something. we are all just figuring it out as we go, planting seeds, tending our bonsai. (exhausts daily metaphor budget, goes to sleep)