Way With Worlds

Why I Wrote It: Superheroes And Worldbuilding

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

I have a few oddball books in my “Way With Worlds” collection on worldbuilding, and the Superhero one is one of them. It’s the first book of the series to tackle worldbuilding in a given genre directly, and though it may not be the last like it, it’s one near and dear to me.

I love the superhero genre.

The superhero genre is a meta-genre that combines many other genres, tropes, ideas together in one heady brew that wears a cape. Orphans turned detectives team up with godlike aliens and humans transformed by chemicals to fight sentient gorillas and criminal clowns. It takes a few trope frameworks (people with unusual abilities develop specific identities and roles) within which you can go wild.

I even helped run a shared universe superhero newsletter back in the day. The crew created their own characters in a shared setting, we’d often trade-off, and the result was a four-year-plus series of stories and a giant body of work. It went every direction, yet also was still recognizable as a superhero body of work.

Again, I love the superhero genre. That would have been enough to write a worldbuilding book on it – but there was more.

Superheroes are a genre that deserves more exploration as it is a meta-genre, a wrapper for many familiar characters and story types. Because it allows one to write so many ideas while still using an easy-to-access framework, you can make the bizarre accessible. The Grant Morrison Doom Patrol or the anime Concrete Revolutio are just some examples – the former surrealist, the latter a puzzle-box. In today’s grand age of superhero tales, we have a chance to explore.

I was further motivated by thoughts of new caped horizons and masked adventures. Yet, one other motivation came into play.

We’re so inundated with superhero stories, I wanted to make sure people didn’t fall into tropes old and new, so my book is a small contribution to avoiding that. My superhero worldbuilding guide asks hard questions to help people make believable worlds. Because superhero worlds are often many genres, that means such a worldbook inspires people to think through bizarre possibilities – and make them seem real! To reconcile alien invasions, time travel, cybernetics, and a mild-mannered reporting career pushes one to artistic heights.

So my worldbook was born of a love of the genre, hope for more, and fear of stagnation. A small contribution, perhaps, but a heartfelt one, and one I hope inspires others.

Sometimes the best thing you can do when you love something is to inspire others who love it to go to heights you never imagined. That’s where “Superheroes and Worldbuilding” came from.

Who knows what other genres I could tackle?

Steven Savage

Why I Wrote It: Worldbuilding Checkup

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

“Worldbuilding Checkup” is a strange book in the lineup of the Way With Worlds series. The books consist of two guidebooks and then an ever-expanding set of books on specific subjects. Why, suddenly, have a book that’s all “let’s check on the basics”? Well, that actually tells you something about my methods.

Originally I never intended to do more than six of these books.

The smaller “Worldbooks” as I call them were originally designed to be tie-ins to address subjects I wanted to write more on, and get interest in the core books. To flesh them out I went over the core books, the past columns, and subjects I really wanted to write more on. Out of those notes, I realized that a book on more abstract questions would be useful.

See, a lot of the original six books were deep dives on subjects that really needed more exploration – gods, magic, sex, and so on. But among my notes were a lot of questions that could be asked in the abstract – is your world internally consistent, is your timeline useful to you, and so on. I realized that there should be a book that was just “hey, let’s see if your worldbuilding is working.” Then the notes easily became a full book.

Thus, this slightly odd entry in the series was created.

Somewhere after the first six books were written I realized I was on to something and decided to keep going. I also raised the price as a friend with a marketing background noted people would take them more seriously – and I suddenly sold more. There was a market here (and, strangely, I found sometimes charging more is a service that helps people see that your work is valuable).

So as more and more books were created, I realized this book has a special place.

Maybe you don’t need a deep dive on creating believable methods of reproduction or you don’t care about superheroes. None of my specific subjects interest you because you don’t care or you’ve got a good handle on them. But if you’re wanting just a quick check-in to see “hey am I doing this right” the book has you covered – and it definitely does sell, though not as much as others.

I’ve wondered if maybe I should consider other checkup type books, probably one on record-keeping and saving data. Or maybe it’s a one-off. I don’t know yet, but the joy of writing these books may lead me to a new one eventually.

There’s two lessons here.

The first is that for any kind of specific set of guides or instructions, you may need something more abstract or high-level. It may not be for everyone, but there are probably some people who know enough or want that view.

The second lesson is, well, plans change. Now this book is an odd one in the expanded series – but one that may in time inspire more works . . .

Steven Savage

Why I Wrote It: Religion and Worldbuilding

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

I’d like to say I wrote this one with noble intentions. But the main intention was “save me from badly worldbuild religions.” This is a personal thing for me.

As a youth I was fascinated by theology. When tested for career inclinations, Minister was in my top five. I probably would have ended up a Unitarian Minister under different conditions.

Theology is amazing, and is really a broad wrapper on a variety of things. It encompasses vast pantheons of gods and cultural traditions. It can be about powerful psychological and mystical processes and practices. In the end, it’s about humanity’s place in the universe and trying to make sense of it all. Well, that, and the legions of a-holes that often mess it up.

You can imagine why I took to it. It was probably one of the reasons I did a BS in Psychology.

But also I would see religions created in fiction and RPGs and they could be as fascinating as our world’s – or they could be derived from our world in obvious and unoriginal ways. One of my pet peeves about fictional worlds is when it’s clear that parts of our world were dropped into something not our world. I saw it too much.

I also get why it happens. We want our fictional religions to be relatable. We might not know how to make interesting fictional religion. We’re used to others “lifting and dropping” our world into other worlds. Also how many people really are interested in theology or get much exposure to it.

So? I wrote a book on it.

As much as I got annoyed by badly made fictional religions, I knew why they happened. I also had that theology interest so I could make a series of questions to help people.

It’s a weird thing really. Annoyed by something, then realizing why it happened, then trying to solve for it. But it looks like a book people responded to, and I’m glad I could help them out.

Steven Savage