Literary Genres as Worldbuilding Tools: Introduction and Index
An idea that’s taken hold of me is using a setting’s literary or storytelling genres to communicate ideas about culture, character, place, and history. I want to share what I’ve come up with in a series, for which this post will serve as an introduction and index (below). But first some background.
Source: liz west at flic.kr/p/t6dXx
I have a Master of Arts in English literature. I focused on English theatre and poetry in the early modern period (also known as the Renaissance, 1500-1800), so when one of my players asked if his character could buy a book as a gift for an NPC, I went a little overboard. I borrowed a lot of what I’d learned in my undergraduate and graduate degrees and devised a robust print culture for the Kingdom of Ewistar, the campaign’s main setting. After all, my main campaign takes place in a period very roughly analogous to England in the 1590s because I’m more comfortable improvising with that period than with the medieval period. I shared the fruits of that work on reddit (link), though in the near future I plan to develop that material a bit further here sometime.
One of the comments on that reddit post posed a question: what are the drow writing and reading in my campaign? Because I had planned to have an Underdark adventure in my campaign, I thought I’d put some work into developing their literary culture. However, whereas I only made up one genre wholesale for Ewistar, I wound up not just imagining particular works for the drow but also whole new genres. I also shared that work to reddit (link), and plan to reconsider those genres here.
By this point I had been bitten by the worldbuilding bug; I had seen what I could communicate in a campaign both with specific texts and with the genres those texts are members of. So I asked on the Discord server for David Somerville’s Planegea (link) if anyone there had come up with stonepunk storytelling genres or conventions; I shared a few I came up with and some of the other users joined in. I also cross-posted to reddit (link), of course, but as with the others I intend to post more here when I’ve had more time to think through how I would use these in a game.
Just a few months ago I got to a point in my main campaign where I planned to have some NPCs invite the player characters to join a story-telling event; not only would this push the players to develop their characters a little bit, I would also use the stories the NPCs shared to communicate certain things about their motivations and expectations. However, as sometimes happens, the players made choices that disrupted my plans and I didn’t get to run the storytelling event. Maybe I’ll be able to use the forms of oral storytelling in the game yet, but even if I don’t, I figure that maybe somebody can if I share them. I’ll do that here.
This should be enough to get started. I’ll edit this post with an index, below, as I start writing posts. I’ve put in placeholders that may change as I expand or combine concepts.
Literary Genres as Worldbuilding Tools: An Index
- Booksellers’ Stalls in the Kingdom of Ewistar, Part 1
- Booksellers’ Stalls in the Kingdom of Ewistar, Part 2
- Theatre in the Kingdom of Ewistar
- The Literary Culture of the Drow
- Storytelling Forms in Planegea
- Oral Storytelling Forms of the Lesser Giants
- General Reflections on Made-Up Genres in TTRPGs
Originally published 9 February 2024