(No idea if this is the place to post this; mods, please let me know if it should be moved somewhere else)
I am, at my core, a world builder. It's where I find the most joy in storytelling - world informs circumstance, circumstance informs character, and character drives story. You can ask me about a half dozen different places that each own a part of my mind: The Aldern Expanse, Tarn, Forestall, The Broken World, or the realm of a man named Tashar Rynn. The one I want to ramble on about in here though, is The Future for Woe.
Each of the settings I named before have innumerable and unnamed influences - I'm sure some of the Silent World snuck into a few of those too - but Woe was a setting made for other people; a game of decision making and political intrigue in a world where brutality was the norm and death was around the corner. Through it a long dormant enjoyment of a snowbound post-apocalypse became something to share. I Games Master a fair few games and systems, and have been known to even make a few up, and during the first year of COVID I found myself very much thinking gloomily, and poured that into something I could create with friends.
I made maps demarking parts of Europe that survived my apocalypse (a little more 'the sun is a giant deadly laser' rather than a horrible disase), and didn't realise until just recently how much those old maps of the Silent World left that impression on me. No beautiful drawn and hand shaded pieces for me though; thank the gods for digital regional maps that can be colour coded and demarked to a county level of detail. The players in the game, loyal friends all fascinated by helping to create their individual corners of this destroyed continent, were making decisions that changed borders and built nations. That spelled doom for them if they went a little too far, or wandered into the wrong places. The wandering, and the horror of finding what was really out there along with all the wonders, might be what really stuck with me from a comic I had read most of a decade prior.
And Thirteen Turns later a lot of changes, developments, and weird happenings turned a nascent world of a few strange communities into...well, a much more messed up one;
For a post apocalypse it was much more populated than one might think - though by that point the hubris of players and of humanity in the setting had begun to reduce that population all over again. War, greed, and terrible science dominated the stories told. Exploring dead cities that it had become impossible to live in, meeting the dormant mistakes of a world that was eventually going to destroy itself even if the universe hadn't decided to do it for them, and finding the incredible technology of a golden age gone to rust. There was an extra element of wonder for my players, discovering all I had come up with and all the strange beauty of a world before the one they were messing about it - finding old technology, or hearing about the last desperate heroes of humanity trying to find solutions and failing. That exploration of a dead world is a feeling I chase in fiction, and the first time I experienced it was with the Silent World.
...It also helped me realise just how effective a good spooky audio recording can be.
The game unfortunately ended on its 13th turn due to life matters, and other than a disastrous sleep deprived nightmare of a NaNoWriMo run (which was hit the target word count so was technically a success, and won me a bet) hasn't been written in since. Yet I still remember it clearly.
Ultimately the entire point of this post was to link something I made with an influence I didn't expect, and hadn't fully realised was poking around in my brain. I've had a fair bit of thinking going on concerning SSSS since I joined the forum just a short while ago, felt like sharing, and now you get to look at something that's sat in a notes document for a few years.
It's good to end on questions! So; what surprising influence has cropped up in your own storytelling? Has something come up in your world building that, no matter how slight, eventually reveals itself to you in an 'ahh! That's where you came from!' moment? Where do
you start when you build a world?
