Vampire question settled?

[Jasdoif]

Second follow-up question: Storytelling. You deliberately choose to leave things ambiguous and undefined up until the point you need to. That's in contrast to, say, Frank Herbert's or Tolkien's approach in that they already had a fully developed world with backstory and myths . A symptom of this is the release of a full glossary for the one and a full set of appendices, chronologies, and family trees for the other.

May I ask why you chose this approach? Is it of greater benefit to you? The major advantage I can guess at is that you have the freedom to change anything, whereas Tolkien et al were increasingly constrained by the world they created. The major disadvantage , I suspect, is that there is a greater potential for incoherence and inconsistency in a work.

I'm speaking for myself here of course, but I find it incredibly easy to spend so much time worldbuilding that I end up with legions of details that aren't in a position to impact a particular story at all. There are scenarios where this isn't a bad thing, but in most cases time spent developing things that can't impact a story is effectively time and effort wasted that could be better used on the story instead.

[Keltest]

I'm speaking for myself here of course, but I find it incredibly easy to spend so much time worldbuilding that I end up with legions of details that aren't in a position to impact a particular story at all. There are scenarios where this isn't a bad thing, but in most cases time spent developing things that can't impact a story is effectively time and effort wasted that could be better used on the story instead.

Ditto. Especially true with D&D worlds. for a good 90% of players (at least in my age group) all you need is a map, a whiteboard, and the sourcebooks, and youre good. Its almost sad, I spend a good half year developing the history of a setting, and all people care about is where there are monsters to beat up and loot to be had.

[pendell]

Maybe, but it occurs to me that a well-developed setting can generate more than one story. Consider Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance -- if the setting is developed well enough, it can spawn not only multiple stories but even a franchise with different authors and modules.

I'm not a professional author. But I have to wonder whether the "leave it undefined until I absolutely need it" school provides the greatest dividends when you're writing a single one-off work, while a "define the setting first" approach allows greater opportunities for revisiting and expanding on the earlier work.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Jasdoif]

Maybe, but it occurs to me that a well-developed setting can generate more than one story. Consider Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance -- if the setting is developed well enough, it can spawn not only multiple stories but even a franchise with different authors and modules.

See, the multiple authors case is the prime example of where having a lot of extra details makes sense; if you're not the one writing the story in your setting, you can't know whether or not a particular detail will be important or not.

The same kind of goes for multiple stories you're writing...but, well, you can do worldbuilding as you work through your subsequent stories just like you did with the first one; you just have your already-established details to start off with.

But I have to wonder whether the "leave it undefined until I absolutely need it" school provides the greatest dividends when you're writing a single one-off work, while a "define the setting first" approach allows greater opportunities for revisiting and expanding on the earlier work.

Viewing it as only those two extremes would be a mistake. Like many things, the ideal point is somewhere in the middle.

An idea for a story usually includes some kind of high-level setting ideas too, and I've found that defining those at the start helps give a cohesive feel to both the story and my own thoughts. Past that, though, doing more worldbuilding when aspects of the setting come up (or when I'm stuck on how to effectively move the story forward the way I want) is sufficient. It's also more fun for me, honestly; It's incredibly rare for me not to have a great idea while I'm writing the story, and if I've established everything from the beginning it's much harder to get changes in. To say nothing of the occasional moment where I decide later that I don't like what I came up with at the beginning and want to change directions a bit.

[Kish]

There is certainly a guaranteed market for gaming tie-in fiction.

Whether any individual novel benefits or suffers from "you have to hew to the rules established for the Forgotten Realms setting, or the spooky wizard who lives by the bay will teleport into your living room and frown at you and possibly disintegrate your word processor" is far more ambiguous.

I think the Dune and LotR examples are better; Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance come with a ton of baggage that I very much doubt Rich ever regrets writing his webcomic without, even for a second.

[jere7my]

Second follow-up question: Storytelling. You deliberately choose to leave things ambiguous and undefined up until the point you need to. That's in contrast to, say, Frank Herbert's or Tolkien's approach in that they already had a fully developed world with backstory and myths . A symptom of this is the release of a full glossary for the one and a full set of appendices, chronologies, and family trees for the other.

Tolkien and Herbert weren't writing serialized works. They finished their stories, then released them. (Herbert went on to release unfortunate sequels, and Tolkien and his son went on to release backstory, but the main stories were finished before the works were published.) Rich is releasing his story one page at a time. He doesn't know everything he's going to need to use a hundred pages from now, and he won't be able to go back and revise the story if it turns out he defined something in the past that he needs to be different. In that situation, it makes sense to leave background details loose until you need them.

If Rich had defined everything in his world before writing the first strip, do you think he would've known to give Hel dominion over dwarven vampires, and Nergal dominion over lizardfolk?

[Kish]

As far as that goes, I doubt any even-arguably-successful author ever has done, "Create world, then create story, holding myself to the already-established-in-my-notes details of the world I created as strictly as WotC holds the authors who do the gaming tie-in fiction." I doubt Gondor existed when The Hobbit was first written. If it did, I would guess it did so as a note that said something like: "Gondor: Humans with horses. No current monarchy."

[Loreweaver15]

Also, I may be wrong, but I seem to recall reading that Rich doesn't intend to write more stories in the OOTS world once it's done--or, at least, has no plans for such.

[Keltest]

As far as that goes, I doubt any even-arguably-successful author ever has done, "Create world, then create story, holding myself to the already-established-in-my-notes details of the world I created as strictly as WotC holds the authors who do the gaming tie-in fiction." I doubt Gondor existed when The Hobbit was first written. If it did, I would guess it did so as a note that said something like: "Gondor: Humans with horses. No current monarchy."

youre killing me Kish. it was ROHAN with the horses.

Anyway, The Hobbit is a bad example, because when it was written it was not written with the lore of Middle Earth were familiar with (ie the Silmarillion) in mind. He DID have the rules and such written and established, not that that stopped him from wanting to change things, however he didn't decide they applied until later.

[Jaxzan Proditor]

I doubt Gondor existed when The Hobbit was first written. If it did, I would guess it did so as a note that said something like: "Gondor: Humans with horses. No current monarchy."

Yes, as far as I can tell Gondor didn't exist until Tolkien started planning out The Lord of the Rings, and what it was like was not fully planned out until later. In fact, in early drafts it was called Ondor (Stoneland).

I'm not sure that The Hobbit is the best example, as Tolkien did already have an extensive world planned out (that crept into The Hobbbit from The Silmarillion), just not a lot of what we saw in The Lord of the Rings. However, he did change that backstory a lot, so he wasn't totally holding himself to it either.

I'm not sure why Tolkien would think that Gondor having horses would be noteworthy.

[factotum]

I'm not sure that The Hobbit is the best example, as Tolkien did already have an extensive world planned out (that crept into The Hobbbit from The Silmarillion)

Agreed. Tolkien definitely had much of what would later be released as the Silmarillion in place when he wrote the Hobbit, which is why there are references to Gondolin and its fall in there, amongst other things. His major issue was that he never intended for *hobbits* to exist in the British mythology he was creating--those were something he created to tell stories to his children, and they were never intended to get mixed up with the world he'd created.

[The Giant]

Maybe, but it occurs to me that a well-developed setting can generate more than one story. Consider Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance -- if the setting is developed well enough, it can spawn not only multiple stories but even a franchise with different authors and modules.

I'm not a professional author. But I have to wonder whether the "leave it undefined until I absolutely need it" school provides the greatest dividends when you're writing a single one-off work, while a "define the setting first" approach allows greater opportunities for revisiting and expanding on the earlier work.

You may not have noticed, but the OOTS world is the most ridiculous paper-thin placeholder for a setting possible while still getting a large-scale story told. It's intended to be Everysetting, to a degree; default D&D with no particularly wild deviations. Because the setting isn't important to me; the characters are. I don't care about nitpicky political details or cultural quirks or any of that stuff—I just need places they can go and do their stuff. If I want to write another story, I'll make another world—one that fits the tone of that story as well as the generic vanilla world I'm using in OOTS fits for a comedic satire of the fantasy genre.

[pendell]

You may not have noticed, but the OOTS world is the most ridiculous paper-thin placeholder for a setting possible while still getting a large-scale story told. It's intended to be Everysetting, to a degree; default D&D with no particularly wild deviations. Because the setting isn't important to me; the characters are. I don't care about nitpicky political details or cultural quirks or any of that stuff—I just need places they can go and do their stuff. If I want to write another story, I'll make another world—one that fits the tone of that story as well as the generic vanilla world I'm using in OOTS fits for a comedic satire of the fantasy genre.

So let me see if I understand this correctly.

Part of the reason OOTS is a paper-thin placeholder of a setting is precisely because it is intended to be a parody, a comic satire. The fact that it looks like every other D&D world in existence is precisely to make your satire and commentary more effective. If you diverged from that and made your world noteworthy in its own right, the story would be less effective as satire because it wouldn't reflect everyworld -- it, would, instead, be its own standalone creation. It could only satirize itself. By making it a generic everyworld this allows you to parody and comment on D&D *as a whole*.

Is that a fair statement?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[The Giant]

So let me see if I understand this correctly.

Part of the reason OOTS is a paper-thin placeholder of a setting is precisely because it is intended to be a parody, a comic satire. The fact that it looks like every other D&D world in existence is precisely to make your satire and commentary more effective. If you diverged from that and made your world noteworthy in its own right, the story would be less effective as satire because it wouldn't reflect everyworld -- it, would, instead, be its own standalone creation. It could only satirize itself. By making it a generic everyworld this allows you to parody and comment on D&D *as a whole*.

Is that a fair statement?

Yes. OOTS oscillates between satire and pastiche, both of which are better served the closer the setting hews to the original source material.

[pendell]

Yes. OOTS oscillates between satire and pastiche, both of which are better served the closer the setting hews to the original source material.

Thank you.

And you've mentioned something else which I really ought to have twigged to by now: OOTS is a character-driven story. That is, the most important thing about it is the interactions between the characters.

It is not a settings-driven story. As you say, it's paper-thin.

Nor is it a plot-driven story. "Stop the evil lich from destroying the world" isn't exactly the most original plot ever penned in the multiverse :).


The most critical thing about this story you're telling is about the people. The protaganists and the antagonists. Both the relationships with their team-mates,and their relationships with their opponents.

That's why, in the book we just completed, we hardly saw anything of Xykon or Redcloak. Because the important thing about this book was to resolve Elan's relationship with Tarquin. Because Elan and Durkon were the ones doing most of the character growth, naturally that is where most of the focus of the book was on. Redcloak and Xykon, by contrast, have changed very little since the last book, so few panels were spent on them.

...

Now that I understand that, I think I am in a better position to appreciate and enjoy the story rather than, say, tapping my foot because the plot hasn't moved yet. The plot is not the important thing, and it's not what you're focusing on.

...

You think I'd have twigged to that a bit more quickly than the eight years I've been reading the strip but, hey, better late than never :).

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Stella]

Shamans are a diverse lot, and can worship anything from vague land spirits to puppets to established deities of the creator pantheons.

Perhaps a pie eating contest will settle things!

Or maybe cream colored pony pies and crisp apple strudels.