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Steve’s Book Roundup 1/4/2021

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I write a lot and have quite a few books.  So now and then I post a roundup of them for interested parties!

The Way With Worlds Series

This is what I do a lot of – writing on worldbuilding!.  You can find all of my books at www.WayWithWorlds.com! 

The core books of the series will help you get going:

  • Way With Worlds Book 1 – Discusses my philosophy of worldbuilding and world creation essentials.
  • Way With Worlds Book 2 – Looks at common subjects of worldbuilding like conflicts in your setting, skills for being a good worldbuilder, and more!

When you need to focus on specifics of worldbuilding, I have an ever-growing series of deep dive minibooks.  Each provides fifty questions with additional exercises and ideas to help you focus on one subject important to you!

The current subjects are:

Fiction

Take a typical fantasy world – and then let it evolve into the information age.  Welcome to the solar system of Avenoth, where gods use email, demons were banished to a distant planet, and science and sorcery fling people across worlds . . .

  • A Bridge To The Quiet Planet – Two future teachers of Techno-Magical safety find trying to earn their credentials hunting odd artifacts backfires when they’re hired to put some back . . . on a planet where gods go to die!
  • A School of Many Futures – The crew is back, and finding having secrets and keeping them isn’t the same thing! Unfortunately they also find “very normal” is a cover for “anything but” . . .

Creativity

I’m the kind of person that studies how creativity works, and I’ve distilled my findings and advice into some helpful books!

  • The Power Of Creative Paths – Explores my theories of the Five Types of Creativity, how you can find yours, and how to expand your creative skills to use more Types of Creativity.
  • Agile Creativity – I take the Agile Manifesto, a guide to adaptable project development, and show how it can help creatives improve their work – and stay organized without being overwhelmed.
  • The Art of The Brainstorm Book – A quick guide to using a simple notebook to improve brainstorming, reduce the stress around having new ideas, and prioritize your latest inspirations.
  • Chance’s Muse – I take everything I learned at Seventh Sanctum and my love of random tables and charts and detail how randomness can produce inspiration!

Careers

Being a “Professional Geek” is what I do – I turned my interests into a career and have been doing my best to turn that into advice.  The following books are my ways of helping out!

  • Fan To Pro – My “flagship” book on using hobbies and interests in your career – and not always in ways you’d think!
  • Skill Portability – A quick guide to how to move skills from one job to another, or even from hobbies into your job.  Try out my “DARE” system and asses your abilities!
  • Resume Plus – A guide to jazzing up a resume, sometimes to extreme measures.
  • Epic Resume Go! – Make a resume a creative act so it’s both better and more enjoyable to make!
  • Quest For Employment – Where I distill down my job search experiences and ways to take the search further.
  • Cosplay, Costuming, and Careers – An interview-driven book about ways to leverage cosplay interests to help your career!
  • Fanart, Fanartists, and Careers – My second interview-driven book about ways to leverage fanart to help your career!
  • Convention Career Connection – A system for coming up with good career panels for conventions!

Culture

  • Her Eternal Moonlight – My co-author Bonnie and I analyze the impact Sailor Moon had on women’s lives when it first came to North America.  Based on a series of interviews, there’s a lot to analyze here, and surprisingly consistent themes . . .

My Sites

Buckle Down And Let’s Do This

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

We’re heading into a tough time with Omicron. So I just wanted to wish you all well as we try to get through this.

As of this writing, covid struck an old acquaintance, one of my best friends, one of my best friends family (possibly), and I’m probably missing some people. This is going to be hard.

But I want to know, personally, I want you to make it.

I want us to get through this. Not just to survive, but to do something with all this crap. To overcome the problems that got us here.

A lot of us are creative types. I hope we can sincerely use that power to entertain, inform, comfort, and change.

So get vaccinated, get boosted, get an N95, buckle down, and let’s pull together.

Steven Savage

The Writer’s Game: Dungeonmans

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Dungeonmans from Adventurepro games is a parody of fantasy games in the roguelike style.  As a titular Dungeonmans (the title is used no matter the preferred gender) at Dungeonmans Academy you sally forth to crush monsters and find treasure.  Near-inevitably your character will die, but their legacy lives on to assist the next student.  Eventually, you accomplish the all-too-common goal of finding the Big Evil and beating it up, then faffing around and exploring if you so wish.

Dungeonmans doesn’t aspire to a unique plot – the game’s charm is that it embraces all the tropes of fantasy and the roguelike genre.  Among the kill-and-loot mechanics and laughs there are multiple lessons for writers – because comedy is challenging.  Fortunately, Dungeonmans is fun, funny, and educational for writers

Embrace The Tropes

The game embraces every trope of fantasy and dungeon-delving games without a single inhibition.  Dungeonmans has dungeons, treasure, towns in need, and everything you’d expect from the umpteenth fantasy adventure game or story.  It doesn’t feel boring or repetitive, because the unoriginality is needed as it’s a parody.

By embracing the tropes, the game meets expectations of gameplay, but also allows it to mock them.  A player gets exactly what they expect in play and story, while also getting to see them taken apart and parodied.  You can’t parody from a distance, you have to embrace it.

Come to think of it, you can’t do anything with a genre without diving in, can you?  Other wise it’s half-baked, whereas Dungeonmans is perfectly prepared.

Explain The Tropes

Good worldbuilding in any story is needed so players understand what’s going on, or think they do.  When you’re playing with tropes, say in a parody game like Dungeonmans you have to explain what’s going on.  The tropes need to be explained as that’s part of the parody – because parody is often taking things to ridiculous lengths or exploring them.

Dungeonmans goes out of the way to explain what’s going on.  Dungeonmans are a recognized profession in a world overrun with monsters and evil.  An Academy was put in place to train such adventurers because they have to come from somewhere.  Some villains you face are even failed heroes, suggesting a kind of “economy of evil.”

The game is thus funnier because of the worldbuilding.  All the things you take for granted in a fantasy game have reasons, reasons both funny and thought-provoking.  Imagining the social and economic implications of professional but expendable monster-killers takes you places like any good story.

Funny Needs Details

Dungeonmans explanations arent’ just broad strokes.  Every item you find or create has a name and text explanation.  What is this wand made of? Why does this ridiculous sword exist?  Is the name of this weapon really twelve words long?  There’s all sorts of little details in the game that make it more interesting and funnier.

Good parody – and any good writing – has those little details that draw you in.   When you’re “in” the world of a story or game, you appreciate it more and feel those chills, thrills – or laughs in the case of parody.  Dungeonmans is filled with these little details, and you might find yourself pausing to read the description of the latest treasure you find.

Into The Depths of Humor

For me, Dungeonmans was the rare experience of a game both funny and engaging.  I kickstarted it, played it at least twice in early access, then once after it was released, and once after many updates.  Every time it was fun, and every time I’d get a good laugh, even with material I’d seen before.  Over these years, I realized these were lessons worth sharing.

Lessons for Writers:

  • If you parody something, embrace the tropes enthusiastically.  That meets expectations while letting you poke fun at the elements you’ve targeted.  You have to know a trope to take it on.
  • Disinhibition is necessary to embrace tropes, or you might do it halfway, and that is often miserable.
  • In parody – or anything involving tropes – you’ll need to explain them.  That makes the world believable, and is even more important in parody or extrapolation.
  • Details matter in any story as they draw the reader in.  They are important for impact – even when the impact is a good laugh.

Steven Savage