Crafting an Immersive World: Tips for Aspiring World-Builders
- theworldofkolgenno
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
Crafting an Immersive World
When I first started dabbling in the initial thoughts of what would become Kolgennon, I had no idea it would develop into a whole world, which lived and breathed, albeit mostly in my imagination. As such I set myself no constraints on my thoughts, no limits or boundaries to keep my musing consistent. This was liberating at a time when I was just looking for a place to express myself and free my thoughts in moments of tedium. But quickly I found that the no limits approach did not set me off on a path of unbounded creativity, instead it created inertia. Too many ideas, too many distracting images meant that I could not form a consistent or connected set of stories that cohered into a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts, an immersive world. That only came when I set the bounds of my world.
Creating the physical layer
Much like the great wandering philosophers of Kolgennon, I have created my own framework through which I build my world and form my ideas into a living breathing realm. These constraints do not constrict creativity, rather they lay a path before me, to follow to the natural end point of a consistent story and world that makes sense. This is the core of how I craft an immersive world.
The first of these are the physical bounds of the world. How is the planet conceived, how do the physics work and, most importantly for me as a man obsessed with maps, what is the geography of my world. These may seem like background details that add flavour and enhance the finished story, but I would rather argue that they are fundamental to shaping the final piece. We are after all prisoners of geography to paraphrase Tim Marshall, and our (hi)story would not be the same without it.
Cognition
With the physical frame of a world established, thinking about how the peoples of this realm would conceive of their environment suddenly became much easier. How do they view the sea, the land, the sky, all makes much more sense once you have a clear idea of the geography and typography of the world that they inhabit. This is much more so the case in Kolgennon, where the people rely on those things to survive and so such notions are important.
Kolgennon
As I plodded my way through different iterations and conceptions, with my restraints in place, slowly but surely Kolgennon took shape. The final challenge then became how to give the reader a window onto the world without revealing everything all at once. My conceit, as it is many others, for that is to write from individual’s points of view (why not make use of all that thinking about cognition after all). However, what I have enjoyed the most is constructing whole stories and tales from the view of the historian / philosopher looking back. It is an approach inspired by the histories that have come down to us from the ancient world that have so captivated me for a long time.
Accompanying these blog posts is my most ambitious attempt at that yet, a view of the entire world of Kolgennon from the perspective of Yusukol Kosua, the personal tutor of Tekolger and philosopher from the school of Kunpit of Thelonigul.