A fundamental part of my worldbuilding is that these stories are set in an alternate Victorian era. I try to use actual history and historical people as much as possible. When something I’ve changed makes a historical person or event untenable as they actually were, I try to change things in a way that makes as much sense as possible, and, mostly, allow the alternate history to drive the story. If I really want the story to go in a particular direction, I’ll tend to go back and modify things in the “past” (from the point of view of that story) so that my desired story direction makes logical sense.
Tag: worldbuilding
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Victorian Interplanetary
Telling Stories Again
I’ve decided not only to start telling stories again, but to do it in my own setting instead of a fan fiction/crossover in someone else’s world. I won’t throw away the notes and ideas for the Harry Potter/Jack Ryan crossover, but I’m too excited by the potential stories in the Victorian Interplanetary setting instead.
There are several premises I’m using to inform the worldbuilding on this, and I am trying to do enough worldbuilding that I don’t write myself into a corner. I think that is kind of what happened with J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series. She did only enough world building to serve the story line at that time. I perfectly understand why. When she started out, she was scratching out time to write while trying to make a living – not conducive to spending a lot of time worldbuilding, especially if you are new to the idea.
On the other hand, I’ve done worldbuilding for numerous RPG campaigns in several different genres, and built on the RPG campaign worldbuilding, whether well done or not, for several others. I’ve also played in numerous campaigns that others gamemastered. Some of them had good worldbuilding, some had horrible worldbuilding, some took decent published worldbuilding and built on it, some took decent published worldbuilding and broke it anyway. I’ve even seen gamemasters that took a campaign with decent worldbuilding that they then threw out any pieces that didn’t fit, and made something better.
All that to say, I’m going to try to put together a setting with good worldbuilding. Worldbuilding that supports the story I’m working on, while minimizing the constraints on other stories that might be told later (sequel, prequel, or taking place at the same time in another part of the solar system). We’ll see where that goes…
Enough about what I’m trying to do. The next few posts include some of the elements of the worldbuilding in this setting.