Worldbuilding for Masochists

Mar 26 2025 152 ep. 64 mins 617

Worldbuilding for Masochists Podcast artwork

A podcast by three fantasy authors who love to overcomplicate their writing lives and want to help you do the same.

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Episode 151: Everybody’s Working for the Worldbuild, ft AUGUST CLARKE

Mar 26 2025 75 mins

In amazing fantasy and science fiction worlds -- Who's doing the work? Where does the food come from? The clothes? Who does the caregiving? Guest august clarke joins us to discuss the hands and bodies that create a society. Labor is something that’s often sort of invisible in stories if it’s not explicitly the driving focus of a book – So, why is that? How can authors better

Episode 150: Team Efforts, ft. THIRD PERSON (Xen, Matt Roen, and Sara Wile)

Mar 12 2025 82 mins

Worldbuilding means getting to “play god” – so how does that take a different shape when you’re part of a pantheon rather than the One True Ruler of your world? Xen, Matt Roen, and Sara Wile, the creative trio behind Midst, a surreal sci-fi fantasy audio drama now produced by Critical Role Productions, join us to discuss co-creating a world and the stories that happen withi

Episode 149: Especially the Lies: Building Unreliable Worlds, ft. MARINA LOSTETTER

Feb 26 2025 71 mins

What happens when the world your characters -- or your readers -- first find themselves in turns out to be not quite what it appears? Marina Lostetter joins us to explore the different ways that a writer can play with an unreliable world. Maybe it means a story of scientific discovery that reshapes how their characters perceive their place in the universe; maybe it means a story wh

Episode 148: Horny on Main: Smutting Up Your Worldbuilding

Feb 12 2025 109 mins

In honor of Valentine's Day, the season of Carnivale, and our own amusement, we bring to you this extra-long episode, where we heat things up and get a little down and dirty with our worldbuilding. What role does sex play in the world you're building -- and how do you depict that? This comes up a lot, obviously, in romantasy and other related subgenres, but even if that's not what

Episode 147: Something Is A-Myth, ft. KRITIKA H. RAO

Jan 29 2025 60 mins

Mythological retellings have been having A Moment in fiction for a few years now. So, why do we do that? Kritika H. Rao joins us to explore the power and agency inherent in recontextualizing mythology for a modern readership! What is it that we reclaim or rediscover in retelling these stories for ourselves? And, on the other end of the scale, how can the retelling of ancient storie

Episode 146: A Matter of Character (ft SOPHIE BURNHAM)

Jan 15 2025 66 mins

The world a character exists in shapes their identity on many axes of power and privilege. So how do those various scales affect the emotional stakes of the story they find themselves in? Guest Sophie Burnham joins us to discuss building a world that suits the characters you have in your head! As a writer who starts with character first, Burnham answers questions about their world

Episode 145: To Worldbuild or Not to Worldbuild, That Is the Question

Jan 01 2025 75 mins

And obviously the answer is yes! But in this episode, we answer your questions! We talk about the "rules" and common advice of worldbuilding -- and the ways in which we merrily ignore, redefine, or defy them. We pull apart some techniques related to the craft of communicating worldbuilding to a reader and how to achieve balance within a story. We do some shop talk about the publish

Episode 144: What Do You Do with a B.A. in Magic?

Dec 18 2024 70 mins

How do the people in your world learn things? Lessons learned might come from formalized institutions, but knowledge might also get passed down through families, through guilds and trade organizations, or through the wisdom whispered in a character's ear by the trees. A world's literacy rate will define a lot about how information gets transmitted, preserved, or altered over time.

Episode 143: Children of the Revolution

Dec 04 2024 69 mins

In this episode, we discuss purely fictional, 100% not-at-all real, nothing to do with contemporary life ideas about rebellions and revolutions. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons is coincidental. Completely. Continuing our "back to basics" series, and jumping off of a lot of the things we've discussed in the recent episodes on governments and politics, we thin

Episode 142: Law & Order (DUN DUN)

Nov 20 2024 80 mins

So once you've got a government, what can that government do? What does it regulate, and how is it, itself, regulated? Laws can be created for a lot of reasons, some good and some bad. Sometimes they protect a citizen's opportunity to do certain things, sometimes they present a block to those opportunities, and very often, they aren't applied equally and equitably across all of soc