Archive 81 is one of my all time favorite podcasts because, in essence, it is a story about stories. It is a story about how a good story can trap you, transport you, destroy you. The first season of Archive 81 is like a delicious story onion. It is a story about Mark telling a story about Dan telling a story about Melody, telling a story about Visser. Layers of narrative wrapped around each other with something terrible at its heart. I loved the concept of Visser. An entity that is at once a building, a human, a leviathan, a story, a collection of tapes. A thing that used stories and songs as doors. Something you could never fully pin down the nature of. And the idea that some soulless corporation saw it as a cashcow.
Hey btw, if you’re doing worldbuilding on something, and you’re scared of writing ~unrealistic~ things into it out of fear that it’ll sound lazy and ripped-out-of-your-ass, but you also don’t want to do all the back-breaking research on coming up with depressingly boring, but practical and ~realistic~ solutions, have a rule:
Just give the thing two layers of explanation. One to explain the specific problem, and another one explaining the explanation. Have an example:
Plot hole 1: If the vampires can’t stand daylight, why couldn’t they just move around underground?
Solution 1: They can’t go underground, the sewer system of the city is full of giant alligators who would eat them.
Well, that’s a very quick and simple explanation, which sure opens up additional questions.
Plot hole 2: How and why the fuck are there alligators in the sewers? How do they survive, what do they eat down there when there’s no vampires?
Solution 2: The nuns of the Underground Monastery feed and take care of them as a part of their sacred duties.
It takes exactly two layers to create an illusion that every question has an answer - that it’s just turtles all the way down. And if you’re lucky, you might even find that the second question’s answer loops right back into the first one, filling up the plot hole entirely:
Plot hole 3: Who the fuck are the sewer nuns and what’s their point and purpose?
Solution 3: The sewer nuns live underground in order to feed the alligators, in order to make sure that the vampires don’t try to move around via the sewer system.
When you’re just making things up, you don’t need to have an answer for everything - just two layers is enough to create the illusion of infinite depth. Answer the question that looms behind the answer of the first question, and a normal reader won’t bother to dig around for a 3rd question.
This is good advice on worldbuilding.
And also.
I would really like to play a vampire-hunting sewer-nun and her pet alligator in a ttrpg.
Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.