thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-11, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
(partially reconstructing a dead post, partially improving it)I'm going to set aside the whole "divided hobby" discussion (though, worthwhile as its own thread sometime?) and focus on the Technique issues about how to design.
Matthijs - "So each protagonist is a seed."
Yes! Beautiful. I often start stories or setting-design with an image of a cool character in my mind and then start filling in what that character implies or requires around them. (I wonder if Vincent started "Dogs" with the image of a Dog striding into town, gun in one hand and Bible in the other, and extrapolated the rest of the setting from there?) A character's a great seed simply because a person is (potentially) so complex as to generate a whole bunch of second-order effects: e.g. family, ethnicity, ideology, social class, even fashion.
I'd agree with Matthijs that "ideas," by contrast—e.g. naked expressions of Premise sitting out on their own like "Power corrupts"—are probably too abstract to make good seed crystals for setting. On the other hand, J's "three principles" campaign suggests that fairly abstract ideas can be great rules to generate HOW new concrete elements should evolve out of the seed crystal. E.g. for Dogs, combine the gun-and-Bible guy with a rule like "The biggest problems grow from a little seed of pride," and suddenly it becomes awfully easy to generate setting & situation elements.
Besides Characters and Ideas, what other potential types of seed crystals come to mind?
- Gadgets! Yes, this can get soulless (e.g. James Bond car fetish), but well-imagined technology can stimulate a lot of creativity. How much of the Star Wars universe is set up to justify guys with cool laser swords?
- Locations!
- Organizations? These can get fairly abstract, like "Ideas" (e.g. "Evil Galactic Empire"; "early Mormonism"), in which case I suspect they serve better as rules-for-generation rather than seed crystals. But if you think of an "organization" instead in terms of a vivid image of its representative member (e.g. a Storm Trooper, a Dog), that can be very vivid and specific. Maybe this is why "splats" are so successful?
I'm really wondering now if the Technique we're trying to isolate from various specific instances actually involves combining
(1) seed crystals: highly specific, concrete, vividly visual images—but with plenty of complexity and ambiguity to stimulate and allow growth in multiple directions
(2) generation rules: simple, clear, abstract principles that guide how new specifics are derived from existing specifics.
