Sunday, June 28, 2020

God Creatures and Cults with Ulterior Motives

... I seem to be unable to come up with something else!

Well, it's not quite as bad as that. I'm okay with writing low fantasy stuff that doesn't touch on fantasy religion at all - dealing with wacky goblins, negotiating with a bored dragon, finding out about that giant boar that terrorizes the village.

But whenever I'm writing something that is supposed to feed into my far too ambitious weird fantasy heartbreaker setting, I come up with some combination of the following elements: Some (usually giant) god creature (floating in space in an ancient cocoon, sleeping at the ocean bottom with its back bristles breaking the surface, living in a giant hive of beetles conditioned to do staggeringly complicated calculations for it), some kind of cult that has access to a valuable ressource (a drug produced by people turned into trees that lets you experience a jumble of their memories, the boiling, poisonous blood of that sea good, impossibly accurate answers to complex mathematical and mathemagical problems), and an event that involves the player characters and that will probably upturn everything.

Now I wonder: Is that the theme of my setting? Does all of that stuff firmly belong into the same setting because it has such similar themes, or does each of these stories belong into a different setting for that very reason? Should I try to conceal the essential repetetiveness of my imagination by trying to spread these scenarios on as many worlds, maybe even rpg systems as possible? Does it even make sense to ask that question as long as I have written up no more than one of these scenarios (and that one being far from ready for publication)?

You see, I really don't know if I just want to write a bunch of interesting scenarios about themes that, for some reason, seem to matter to me, or if I want to come up with a Fantasy World with a capital F and a capital W.

At the moment, I'm leaning towards the easiest way to not make that decision: Just write the first scenario in a way that wouldn't make it impossible to have all these other scenarios take place in the same world. Then write the next one. And by then, I should have about ten to fifteen years of additional life experience under my belt, which should help me making a more meaningful decision.

EDIT: Or, I could just stop complaining and write some kind of sourcebook featuring a collection of God Creatues and Cults with Ulterior Motives and be done with it. Of course, I only just thought of that AFTER writing that blog post. Sigh.

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