SPEAKER_00 0:00

You have something in your teeth. You don't need to flesh everything out. I have an illness, that's why I do this.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

So those are things that people start paying attention to is the details.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Welcome to the World Kiln Podcast, where we discuss everything world building. I'm Clayton Corsans, a world builder of 30 plus years from multiple DD settings, including home to the eight-year-long campaign I'm currently DM, to my 25-year-long passion project book series.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

And I'm Tim Harris, author of the Hailorin saga and passionate world building, consumer and designer. On this podcast, we share our ideas, our breakthroughs, and the lessons we've learned in our experiences as world builders.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

In this episode, we'll be discussing general world building, focusing on the question why do the details matter in building? Let's get into the building.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

So to address this one for you, why do details matter in building? Yes. You have some good ideas. Let's see.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

So details are details are the lifeblood of world building. In my in my personal opinion. Because the thing is details are what we notice, details are what make things up. Right. When you're looking in the real world, we look at things in a broad sense, right? In a broad scope. But then we also like notice that there's a logo on your shirt. Or notice that you may have something in your teeth. Or notice that there's um like for whatever reason we notice a bumper sticker. It's little things that we actually notice. The same thing goes for world building, right? Um the first thing that I I really kind of want to point out, the first note that I have here is specificity creates reality. Right. Um because specificity gives things depth. It gives things life. As a really good example of this, have you ever seen the movie Blazing Saddles?

SPEAKER_01 2:23

You know, it's been a while. Okay, I'm not gonna come I'm not gonna say that. It's been it's been a while since I've seen that. Do you how much of it do you remember? Not a lot, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Okay, so in Blazing Saddles, there's there's a scene where this group of bandits is supposed to be coming into town and they're gonna just kick everybody out and stuff, right? So the town and their their new sheriff, they get this idea to build a fake town, right? So they they build, I'm trying to remember, I think it's like overnight they build this thing. Um, they build this town, but it's all of the storefronts in the in their main thoroughfare, but they're just facades. Like it it looks like it's designed to be funny, but it it's made to look like a movie set, right? So it's just the front in like wood framing and the and the the support. So as you're going down, like all you see is just the front of the house. Like you can't, if you open a door, it's nothing behind it, right? Um I use that because that's a perfect example of how specificity creates reality. If you don't have any depth, if you don't have anything, it's just a facade, right? There's just something there, and that's fine because you don't need to flesh everything out. I have an illness, that's why I do this. But a normal person doesn't need to flesh everything out, right? Um, it's okay to have those facades, but if you're going to do that, you need to understand that by building something in that regard, don't have it have meaning. Because if it has meaning but no depth, you're gonna lose people. That makes sense. Um I know I have on a couple of occasions made made something and I didn't flush it out. Uh and I've done it in your in the in the campaign.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

I'm sure you had to come up with something right then and there to figure that out and go, okay, you know what? I didn't have depth, but let me start something.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Um case in point Illis, as we've mentioned in previous episodes.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

Well, you know what? There's was also Droop.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Uh okay, yeah, well, Droop, yeah, both of them.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Actually, well, they were both granted that they shouldn't have had depth. That's the thing. It's like you we we wanted them, so then you had to flesh it out. So that is a that's another thing, is like sometimes you're not gonna have that depth, and you're gonna have to create it sometimes on the fly. And they're gonna give it some of that details you need.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Yes. I mean that that in a previous episode was a perfect example of something we we were talking about in the episode where the difference between meaning and arbitrary. Right. And that a perfect example of something arbitrary becoming meaningful, but what you don't want to do is make something that's supposed to have meaning feel arbitrary.

SPEAKER_02 5:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Um which again is going back to this, why details matter. Because if you don't have the details, it doesn't matter. Like even if it matters to you in the story you're trying to tell, if they're if your audience doesn't feel that it's real.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Well, I think it comes down to it's with the details, you're not you're not looking for uh the story to like, even with the details, it doesn't need to be the main portion of the story. It just needs to make the world feel real. So when people are going through your story and understanding how day-to-day life works, they need the details of like you know, a fireplace going inside, you know, a conversation of like two people having a conversation of coming down from um like a son and mom, a son coming down from breakfast, you know, and calling them down, just little things that bring that story to life, and explaining, you know, what she's doing in her day-to-day life. It's not necessarily gonna be meaningful for the full story, it's it's small things, but it makes the world feel real. You know, explaining, you know, what people do during, you know, a fishing trip, you know, like giving that details of like how what what is it, what is it like to be on the fishing trip? Is it is it a cold weather? You know, you you're gonna feel it. Um does it impact the full story? Not necessarily, it's not gonna impact the the the full story of what you're trying to say in a long series of it, but it makes your world feel real, it makes things um it makes those small things matter. Um you know, and if people don't feel like your your your world's real we're if they don't feel like it's real, then they don't want to continue with it. Like why wouldn't they want to feel that your world is a real world? They want to get out of theirs to enjoy yours.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

It's it's an investment issue, right? It's if it doesn't if you lose the immersion, you lose the person.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Because then they're like, oh well, this is just kind of no that being said, there is a level of forgiveness that an audience will grant you, right? But if it becomes like a consistent habit and then there's no it's like, okay, well, maybe that detail is off, or you know like okay. Uh I'll give you an example. I have a character and and you've read my original version of my book, right? Yes, yep. Um I'm saying original because it was printed a long time ago. I stopped it because it needed a lot of work. Um I need to preface that. Um but okay, Galidor. The character Galidor. Okay. He's still in he's still a character. Obviously, he's kind of a main character, a main character, and there's a lot to it. He's a blacksmith. Okay. I'm not a blacksmith. I need to learn about some things that have to do with blacksmithing. I'm gonna start talking about this guy who's a blacksmith, especially when Baalmere and Ko meet him for the first time, right? Right, because they're meeting him in Cochell in his original in his home, right, right? And in his home, he is a blacksmith for the Corum Riders, and I'm not gonna go into his whole backstory, but he's a blacksmith, that's where they meet him. If I just start making stuff up about blacksmithing, there's gonna be people in the audience who are actual blacksmiths going, you don't know what you're talking about. And it's gonna break the immersion for them, right? Now, that being said, do I need to become a master blacksmith to be able to describe this couple things?

SPEAKER_01 9:23

No, no, but you should understand how the forge works. How if you're if you're gonna explain how he's making a sword or an axe or whatever, what goes into the forging of you know the steel? Like, how hot does he need to necessarily make it? Probably not. Like, do I need to have this at exactly 200 Celsius? You know, no, you probably don't need to know that much where a real blacksmith would know that, but to get the right feel of how the progression works of how to create something, you know what? Yeah, you you wouldn't want to say that he's starting to work on this sword before he's even actually put it in the the kiln and started working it, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:02

You know, like exactly yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

And knowing to knowing the difference between when you would hit it versus like when you actually would put it in water, what kind of water, who knows? I mean, there's a lot of things in building, say for a blacksmith is like you you have to quench it to a certain point before you can start hammering it and forming it.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

And whether you quench it in water or you quench it in oil, because depending on what you're doing, there's there's a different reason for doing it differently. The temperatures at what at which I don't need to know what the what the the melting point of of iron is, right? I don't even know that he's gonna make sure that the you know nowadays with with blacksmithing forges and you know they can dial in their uh um their temperatures, so they're like, oh, it's exactly at like you know 2500 degrees. Right. We're talking about a fantasy world where he's like, I'm gonna throw more logs in because the fire needs to be blown burning and I'm gonna hit the pillows, right? Like, right. That's the type of things I need to know. I don't need to know the types of hammers he uses to to to uh lay out the blade or like I'm not a blacksmith, I don't need to know that stuff. But to get a good but basic understanding, somebody does. And if I'm gonna incorporate it, those little details, again, there's you're gonna get minutia that you're gonna get wrong. It's gonna happen. But for the majority of your audience, whatever that is, or whatever story you're telling, whether that's RPGs, books, games, whatever, most people are gonna be like, oh yeah, well, I know that a blacksmith makes stuff with metal and they put it in a fire, they bang it with a hammer on an anvil, they put it in water and cool it, and okay, yeah, that seems real enough to me, right? It's those it's those details. That kind of segues into something that I use and we were talking about this before. I have a little acronym which helps me remember things when I'm building, especially specifically about details, and it's I call it M3, right? Or 3M if you want to however you want to word it. But minutia makes memories. The little things are also what people remember.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Yeah, I think there's been just the smallest, like as an example, uh you know, reading the whole Harry Potter series and you going through it multiple times, because you know, there's I guarantee you, many, many people are going through there and going, nope, I went through that whole series, but there's a lot of things that you go through and you're like, okay, that doesn't seem right. Like they contradict or de contradicted the small details from like book two to book five. Now, could it have been on purpose? Sure. But one of the biggest portions that you know details in the book two is Percy catches Ron and Harry coming out of the girl's bathroom. And he goes, I'm taking five points from Gryffindor. But then in book five, Malfoy takes points from Harry and Ron. And Hermione or Ron, they go, You can't take points from a c from a s from a uh house. The house, thank you. Yes, the house. And they go, I know you can't take points, Weasley. They said only teachers can take points. Well, how is it that Percy was allowed to take points from Gryffindor, but that one they said that they couldn't. Now, is that a prefect could take points from their original house, but no other house? Or is it the fact that they just made a mistake and technically prefects can't take points at all? You know, so those are things that people start paying attention to. It's the details where you're like, oh, was that a mistake, or was it something that actually they could technically take it? It just seemed like it was wrong because there's no other nothing else that that contradicted it or allowed it to be like, yes, I've seen this multiple times, and yes, well, the person's house boy, like can the house take its own points but not anybody else's? They just can't add points. Like, how does that work, you know? Yeah, that that well, I mean that's a good point. That but again, that's where details matter. Like people are gonna notice, like you said, the little things that had nothing to do with the big story of how things go, but it was a detail. Another detail that they had from that one was in the fourth book. In one of the original fourth books, they actually had Harry's what was it? They had they had switched two people in there that when he was coming out of their wand, they didn't have I think they switched the mom and the dad. Um, and the dad ended up coming out first before the mom or something like that. But it should have been it should have been the other way around, which they ended up fixing that one because that was an error. But again, it's a detail that should have been noticed if they're reversing how death comes through. Um so, like you said, details that's what people pay attention to. They don't pay attention to the big story of it, they pay attention to the little things that don't that counteract each other, contradict each other.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

I think it's a healthy balance though, right? Because people we know Harry Potter because we love the story of the boy who lived. Right. Right? Against this just absolute villain in Voldemort. Um but like to your point, using the Harry Potter example, one of the things that I remember is in book five, which is my favorite. Order of the Phoenix is my favorite one. But there's a there's a detail in there that in the movie they gloss over, but it actually plays a pretty important role um in some of the lore. And that's so when when the Order of the Phoenix first gets Harry and they take him to Grimmold Place, right? Okay, what you find out is he is given a slip of paper. That slip of paper has the address. He opens it up and he reads the address. That's how he's able to find and get access to Grimold Place, which is that which is the Black House instead of but the reason for that was because that little piece of paper was written by Dumbledore Dumbledore, who was the secret keeper for the order. Why is that important? Because in the in The Prisoner of Azgaban, okay, when it's revealed that Peter Pettigrew betrayed uh the Potters, right? Betrayed Lillian James in the movies. They don't explain any of this. The reason that he Because they switched secret keepers. No, because Peter Pettigrew was the secret keeper for the Potters because he was their best friend. He then gave up that secret and gave it to Voldemort, which is how that so the fact that they Because they originally thought it was gonna be serious.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

That's why they everybody thought he was the one who did it. Yeah, because everybody thought that until the end when they switched right before they were gonna make him the secret keeper, they made Peter Pettigrew because they didn't think that he would. They thought that nobody in their right mind would ever think Peter would be the secret keeper, so they made him that, which inevitably made him. But then you go you go into that. But you're right, they didn't mention any of that.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

They didn't mention any of that. And then again, in Order of the Phoenix, in the book, Dumbledore is the is the secret keeper for the house for House Black, right, which is Grimold Place, which is where the Order of the Phoenix meets. The only way, and then this is where this is where the details matter because this is how they explained it. The only way Harry could get into that house is if the secret keeper told him where it was. If you want to stay updated on new episodes or world building info, go to our website, theworldkin.com, and sign up for our email notifications. As a thank you, we'll send you a special gift to help you in your next world building project. Now, back to the forge.

SPEAKER_01 18:37

Well, to even push onto that, which they didn't do in the seventh book, once Dumbledore died, everybody that he gave the secret to is now a secret keeper. So every single person can allow, like if they told him where the or showed him where the place was, they now gave the secret. So that instead of making it just one person that hadn't knew the secret, it gave everybody that was in the order, so 15 to 20 people now have that secret, which is why they were not in there after that. So to break that down, that is why when they went to the um when they went to the Ministry of Magic and brought back, I think whatever that guy's name starts with a Y. Um but he brought him back. Yeah, actually, yes. They brought him back to the steps right in front. He was now allowed to see it. He couldn't tell other people because he wasn't technically a secret keeper, but he could bring them up through the steps. Because all of those who had been told by the secret keeper. Which now was all three of them that brought him back. Now, you wanted you want a uh you want a more uh personal example of the of my M3 rule?

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Yeah. The Erodiceum.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

Huh.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

That's actually pretty good, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

We spent three sessions. Three sessions of you going head to toe on that ship, learning everything about that ship, and then and then you being named captain of the ship, having uh Adam's character Angel, now the first mate, then getting your crew. We spent three sessions on learning about that ship. Why? Because details matter. Hey, and it it there was a lot of things to that ship that made it worthwhile to have. But here's the question for you. Would it have been that important, or would it have mattered as much as it did if it weren't that detailed?

SPEAKER_01 20:46

No, if it was just a regular ship that just you're like, ah, it's just a standard ship.

unknown 20:51

Right?

SPEAKER_00 20:51

It wouldn't have made a big deal at all. Be like and I can give you direct proof because you didn't think twice about you were you've been on that ship for a couple of weeks. You didn't think twice about it until you discovered what it was. Nope. Nope.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Because it was just a ship. We went down downstairs, found out that it had these. I mean, we went through everything. I think I had a roll for the trapdoor. And then I got through there and noticed the cramped space with these iridysum crystals that charge up and make a huge make it do things, and so then we started playing around with it. And it took a while to play around that to get it to do what we wanted. And even then, Angel's the first one who messed with the controls. And I was like, you know what? If he's gonna mess with it, I'm gonna mess with it too. So what do I do? I hit the speed button and throw people out the back window. It was speed mode. It was great. Again, those details, it was great.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Like you dumped who was it that you dumped out the back.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Uh Constance and Angel, I think. It was at least Constance because he was flying up here, but there was someone in the water, maybe it was Illis, but someone was in the water. One flew into the water and and It might have been Drew. But it was Consist and someone else because and I had to turn around and go grab them. My favorite moment.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

My favorite moment of all of that whole experience was the dragon. No, that was that was good. Come on, that was fun. That was a great that was your favorite moment because that was mine. Because you get to use the uh the ion cannon on that thing. Uh no, my favorite moment was the look on your face when you realized on the gravity on the gravity drive when there was a place for you to put the uh the the uh elemental stone, and you realized that that ship could plane shift. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

I was like, everybody else is looking at it and I'm like, oh shit, I got this. And they're like, what is he doing? I'm like, oh no, I got this.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

He's gonna grab it, and I'm like, oh, that was one of my favorite one of my favorite moments of that whole interaction was just the look on your face when you realized that you could put one of the one of the soul or elemental stones on that ship, and it would plane shift to somewhere else. That was that is way better than the Hermit. I was like, yes. Uh but but again, this all goes back to details.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

And that's what makes it exciting, though, is the details because that's the stuff that you catch when you're like, oh my god, I know what this does. Hence, hence M3, minutia makes memories, and it does, it it pulls people in. It's like, wait a minute, I'm connecting the dots. I know what that does. I know what that is. And then when you're right, you get personally me, I get excited. I'm like, sweet, this is awesome.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Oh, I do the same thing, and I I love it in books too, especially when you get in like a series and the author's been like breadcrumbing things throughout like the whole book or through like the series, and you're like, Oh, I know what that does, I know what that is. Um like that to me is great. I I love that in storytelling. Um, but that is a key component of world building, because in order to be able to do those kind of things, you have to have the details in your world, whether it be history, design, whatever the case may be, you have to have those details to make those moments grander, to make those revelations bigger, because it's the little details that you drop along the way. And then, like you said, people start connecting the dots. They start putting these things together and go, oh.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Well, it's the same thing that you do when we're playing our campaign, you know, like the little details that you keep dropping, the little things that kind of work up to what we're eventually supposed to either join or thwart, right? You're gonna be trying to, you're trying to either gonna join or thwart these Animus Persomas um group, you know, that's trying to overthwart the gods and become them instead. Do they have a great point of why they're doing it? Yeah, they want to help humanity more than what the gods have done already. Are they going about it the right way? Do they know there's a better way to do it? I don't know. But also, is it right to kill the gods that are also the ones who helped create all of the stuff and created you in the first place? You know what? That's something we have to come in and figure out. But the little details that come through to get to that point, to figure out what it is that we need to do. How are they trying to get to these gods? What do we need to do to get there before they do, or stop them getting what they need to get to that point? You know, those little details that you bring up as we're going through there, that makes a big difference. Like, if you just gave us everything, it wouldn't make much of a difference, it wouldn't matter as much. You'd be like, okay, well, this is this is easy. We we know exactly what we need to do. You know, that it's not a story. You know, you're giving everything out without it being interesting, without us making a difference. You know, we have to figure out, we have to go to these different people, we have to talk to everybody, we have to, you know, interrogate people, whatever the case is, to get the information that we need to make those details to become what we need to become to figure out how to end this. Whether that's good or bad.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

Well, and it's interesting that you that you you mentioned little details that kind of help you figure out where you're going and it would make it easy, right? Like so one of the things that I had one of the my notes is that without details, storytelling becomes better. I would completely right because if you don't have the details, if you don't have these breadcrumbs, if you don't have the little things, one it doesn't the obvious answer is it doesn't make your world feel real, right? There's it it breaks the immersion. But then two, if you don't have these these details, then there's no flavor, there's no feeling to your story. There's no immersion, there's nothing for you to feel. You you can you can write a story that has you know a beginning, a middle, an end, a protagonist and antagonist, and there's you know those are called fables. Right? Like it's it's a story, there can be a moral to it, but there's nothing else to it. Right? There's no there's a reason why book series like Fourth Wing are popular, amazing world building. There's a reason why Sarah J. Mass is, in my opinion, one of the best women world builders. Um her world building is amazing. I agree. It's fantastic. I love her books.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

Hers are very immersive.

SPEAKER_00 28:11

Yes, they are. Yeah, Akatar is a fantastic series. I can't wait for books six and seven. Um I may or may not already be on the waiting list for the audiobook. Right? I get that. And it isn't even done, it isn't even published yet. Um like she's phenomenal. There's a reason why Tolkien for his books could not be written today, the way that he wrote them.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Because they're insensial, they're essentially encyclopedias. Right? Um but there's a reason why his stuff is still talked about today. And you know what? You can hate me all you want for this, and I'm a huge Tolkien fan, it ain't because of the story. Say history. It's everything that he created and the world that he created.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

Um well, like it's he created all that before he created a story, where most people are creating the story as you go. Like, your world is getting built as you create your story, where he created the world and then created the story. His did the exact opposite of what most people would end up doing because what he did is overwhelming in the in the sense of like trying to create everything, get everything to line up together, all the different little stories about each person's history, how each person married this person and this person and this person, kind of similar to what George R. Martin did in a way. Like he created his world, but Martin did it similar too, but he also did his stories first. But he grew his his world as he was building his stories. He had certain things going, and then he built his stories. But like, and maybe maybe he did all the world building the same way that Tolkien did too, because his books, you know, his first book started in '93, and he still hasn't finished the sixth book. You know, it's been how long? Right? I don't think he'll ever finish.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

We'll get there. I would be very surprised if he finishes it, because he just keeps going in these other directions, which is fine as a world builder. Right. But you started a story that everybody's wanting you to finish. Exactly. So uh one other point I want to make before we kind of wrap things up. Wrap things up is details give things identity. Right? And and I'll give you an example. The Darksaber. In Star Wars. Okay. Everybody knows what a lightsaber is. Yep. Right? And a lightsaber is a lightsaber. It's a weapon of the Jedi. It's an ancient, you know, weapon that the Jedi Order used before they got disbanded. And um anybody who is a Star Wars fan knows what a lightsaber is. But if you say the darksaber, that's that is a lightsaber. But nobody is thinking lightsaber when you say the darksaber. Right. It's one small little detail that completely changes something's identity. That is a detail and a name, an identity in a name, right? A name, uh as I've said before, and we've talked about this, uh a name gives something an identity. Um but having a small detail different than everything else gives it a different identity. Hence the Darksaber. It's why I'm such a big proponent of of detail. Aside from the fact, like I said, I have an illness and I have the detail everything. My brain just goes, oh, I've I've created something. Now I have to figure out what happened and why this happened 5,000 years ago. You gotta put a full history of it. Yeah. Um because that's just what my that's just how my brain works, right? Uh but the the details are so important, and they matter tremendously. Because with without detail, you're you're not giving your audience for whatever the story is, right? Again, whether it's role-playing game, uh, a novel, a video game, uh even like you know, I have a huge collection of board games. Even in board games, like there's world building, right? Um one of my favorite games, Betrayal, which we've all played, right, right, all the way through. It's there's storytelling to it, right? You have this house that you build and you discover, and then this this crazy house, at some point one of one of the players becomes the traitor, and they and then one of 50 in the base game, one of 50 different haunts happen, and now you've turned the house into some into a haunted house, right? And that's a story, right? Um the Gloomhaven. That's essentially D D in a box. We'd love to try to play that once, at least. Eventually. Uh, Scythe, one of Steph and my favorite games. It's it's all about like, okay, what if World War I had mechs? Even something in that as simple as that. That takes a common knowledge and gives it a different detail. One little detail, Switch. What if you had mechanized units in like a World War I era setting? In like Europe, right? Huh. Okay. Now, granted, scythe is like resource gathering, and but a lot of the flavor text is going back and forth of between players and between things like that. So um, but it's those little things, and then of course, our our favorite series is the villainous series, sure, right? And that's just every Disney villain ever made, and they're coming. We we just got the most recent one. Um so details matter immensely when you're building a world because it's like you said, it's those little things, that's what people grab onto. So you got anything else? I think that's uh I think that's a wrap. Okay, cool. So we want to thank you for listening to this episode of the World Kiln Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

Please tell us your thoughts on why details matter in the comment section.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

We love to hear the different methods, ideas, and techniques that you use to build your worlds.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

If you like what you heard, consider subscribing to the podcast wherever you're listening to get notified of new episode drops.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

And don't forget to head over to our website, theworldkilm.com, and sign up for our email list to get notified of new episodes, exclusive info and offers, and additional world building tips.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

And as our way of saying thanks for signing up, we'll send you our step-by-step fill-in checklist for building believable settlements, whether it be a small village or a bustling metropolis.

SPEAKER_00 35:21

So, remember to stay creative, keep forging, and we'll see you in the next building.