Worldbuilding: A Video Game World Part 2
Fantasy Word Salad and more on my story for Nanowrimo. Wordcount is over 15k words!
I had to rename terms three times while outlining my Nanowrimo novel because I kept coming up with names way too close to stuff from Brandon Sanderson. I know I’ve listened to a lot of his works lately, but it was kind of humiliating.
My Nanowrimo is being posted chapter by chapter over at Royal Road, and then here I’m going to post larger chunks on the weekend. So you can go and look here to get a sample of what I’m talking about, or you can just wait for Sunday.
Anyway, Word Salad. Have you ever opened a book and the author starts throwing out terms that look like someone tripped on their keyboard, but everyone is playing it off as if you should know them? It happens often enough that it amazes me anyone manages to get through a fantasy book.
“Darell knew that bleekbeak feathers weren’t in season during the roiling, but if he was going to survive until the durance he would need to make a mobby cap.”
Even if it all gets explained within a page or two, this kind of shotgun blast of unique terminology feels wrong to me. But at the same time, there are moments where speaking in the terms of the world keep the atmosphere intact. Because to Darell above, he isn’t thinking in translation. The roiling isn’t ‘that competitive event known as the roiling’, it is just the roiling.
When I was in school, my professors wouldn’t let me escape explaining how readers are supposed to know what a bleekbeak is. How is someone supposed to read through that sentence without stopping and wondering if they missed something? But for genre readers, especially those for fantasy and sci-fi, there is a certain expectation that they will be drawn out of their own world and into another. If there are no made up terms, no made up technologies, no made up peoples and places, then what was made up? What is new? The hope is to escape, to be drawn into a different life and experience, so you suspend your disbelief.
Thankfully for me, my Nanowrimo includes a fish-out-of-water main character. Being new to the fantasy world means that someone has to explain to him what a Soulflame is, and then I can explain it to the audience. Ash Walkers are obvious when you see them, but our main character will still wonder if there is something more to them, or if they are just a zombie with a fancy title.
I decided to stick with simplistic terms though, instead of crafting some kind of conlang. The mythology of this LitRPG is focused on the power of fire, so I ripped as many terms as I could directly from that. The Soulflame was gifted to mankind after defeating the Flameburst Dragon. Soulflames solidify your soul into a Soulstone, but that breaks down into Ash when you die. Ash is used to make Ash Walkers by reanimating a corpse to walk around after death.
I could have gone with the Broomzag Drake blasting Sondor energy into Dorstones, and it might have worked just as well. Heck, a Dorstone sounds kind of cool in retrospect. But I kind of like something about direct terms that can be read and partially understood. They are almost too on the nose.
Then again, our hero discovers that most of what he is hearing is a direct translation, so maybe there are garbled fantasy terms being used, and instead he hears ‘Flameburst’. A mystery for another chapter.
These terms are supposed to be for a game-like world, and in that way maybe they are simplistic so the game is more user friendly. Videogames do like to pick and choose when the all powerful divine energy given by a god is just called ‘Energy’, gets slapped with a fancier fantasy appropriate term like ‘Mana’, or something gonzo like ‘Heartburst Attack’.
No matter what I do, I’m going to feel I made the wrong choice, so it is better to just pick one way to go and stick with it. So prepare for every word to have some mix of ‘Soul’ ‘Flame’ or ‘Heart’. If it feels like too much, just be happy I didn’t bang my head on the keyboard.