World building - inspiration v perspiration

A post on James Malizewski's Grongardia blog has got me thinking about world building and the mixture of approaches that can be taken which I have called inspiration and perspiration. My definition of these is that inspiration is taking ideas and not ensuring that every little detail has been matched up and thought through or particularly not rejecting ideas as being out of place to readily. Perspiration is based on the painstaking development of the base concepts.

Of course pretty much any world building starts with a light bulb moment (the usual cartoon depiction of an idea), but after that there can be the divergent approaches of trying to construct a detailed, logically fleshed out setting with much perspiration or just detailing the immediately needed areas of the world and then improvising on the fly after that.

I suspect that the reason that the inspiration approach often produces more effective results is that it uses internalised knowledge of world building and existing settings that allows something that 'feels right' to be identified unconsciously. The other strength of the inspirational approach is that not elements in a world do make immediate sense or fit together in an obvious way allowing a more organic and realistic feeling with the setting.

Personally I've not been the biggest developer of my own worlds often preferring to detail an area in a published or historical setting such as Glorantha or the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, but even then I find that I can get things to fit together well, often from long experience of the setting. In Glorantha there is a much stronger sense of the world compared to the Wilderlands which has always had a fairly loose approach to anything like 'canon'.

I think my favourite source of inspiration is often listening to my players' comments as we are in a gaming session with that leading to me being able to create adventure hooks and seeds in the campaign and that can go on into other campaigns in that setting.

My oldest miniatures

These are the oldest metal miniatures that I bought, Minifigs 25mm Hobgoblins from the D&D range. They show some efforts to remove the poor paintjobs and are due to be properly cleaned off and repainted sometime this year.

The next ones are some 25mm Napoleonics that I was given when I was about 10 years old, they were already painted and I'm not sure of the manufacturer, so if anyone has any ideas about which company made them I'd appreciate it as a comment.

British Line

Highlanders

French Line

French Grenadiers

Book Review: Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian

I've recently reread Patrick O'Brian's first book in the Aubrey and Maturin series, Master and Commander. As the first in the series it had to be written as more of a stand alone novel than the others as there was no certainty of it being warmly received. In this novel particularly Jack Aubrey's exploits are more strongly based on Lord Cochrane's real life experiences than some of the other novels in the series, particularly the taking of the Cacafuego which is based on the capture of El Gamo. In using Lord Cochrane as a model O'Brian follows a precedent set by Captain Marryat and used by many other writers of naval fiction.

The large number of supporting characters that appear in subsequent books have much less of a bearing upon this novel though some of the characters featured here do go on to appear in many other novels in the series. One of the more frequently used is Master's Mate Mowett whose poetical bent is established and often has the role of explainingnautical terms to Doctor Maturin.

O'Brien is careful to try and evoke the speech of the Georgian age and avoids excessive description though he does need to have passages where nautical terms are explained. This is mainly achieved by having Doctor Maturin, whose only experience of the sea has been as a passenger, recieve explanations from various members of the Surprise's crew. The pacing of the novel is good managing to have several peaks and keep the reader's interest and there is a depth to the characterisation that is not evident in all books of this genre. I would certainly recommend this novel and the series as a whole to other readers.

Tim Powers' historical fantasy fiction

I've reread a couple of Tim Powers' fantasy novels recently, The Drawing of the Dark  and The Anubis Gates. These two are pretty interesting to me because of the settings with the Drawing of the Dark being based around the Siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks in 1529 which matches my having had an Ottoman Turkish wargames army for many years.

The Anubis Gates could be subtitled 'a history of William Ashbless, poet' and is mainly set in the Georgian London of 1808. It does feature time travel using gates created by a failed summoning of the Egyptian God Anubis, hence the title. It is an entertaining novel with an enjoyably self-referential set of subplots and a surprisingly open ending.

Drawing of the Dark is centred on the siege of Vienna in 1529, though the purpose of the siege is revealed to be part of a magical struggle between East and West rather than the Turks conquering Europe. An ancient brewery in Vienna lies at the heart of the conflict and this is where the dark ale of the title is drawn. The ale has mystical powers that tie in with the theme of reincarnation and rebirth in the novel. The legend of the Fisher King needing to cured to restore the lands of the West to health is a basis of the plot and this links it into Arthurian and Grail legends. The Drawing of the dark was published earlier than the Anubis Gates and I think that the latter shows a more confident approach to integrating the traditional elements with the plot, but both are entertaining novels and good sources of ideas for fantasy roleplayers.

One consistent element in both is the need of magicians to avoid contact with the earth, which matches some of the older elements from mythology such as fairies being afraid of cold iron and shows Powers' liking for use of traditional mythical elements such as the Grail legends.