Worldbuilding for Masochists

Jan 15 2025 147 ep. 64 mins 606

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 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

Episode 141: More Perfect Unions

Nov 06 2024 84 mins

Government is a set of rules agreed upon, and politics is how a society determines those rules. So how do you create the systems by which civilizations negotiate those levers of power in your fantasy or sci-fi world? On the sliding scale of representation to authoritarianism, where do the civilizations in your world fall -- and why? What pressures have shaped society to behave in t

Episode 140: Practical Magic, ft. ROWENNA MILLER

Oct 23 2024 67 mins

As with the last two “back to basics” episodes, we thought we’d spend some time looking the thing that (usually, though there are exceptions) makes fantasy fantastical – the magic! How do we build magical systems, and what questions do we ask ourselves while doing so? Guest and former WFM co-host Rowenna Miller joins us to discuss how, exactly, we make magic! With magic bei

Episode 139: 2 Crunchy, 2 Curious

Oct 09 2024 77 mins

We’re spending a couple of episodes going back to the basics of worldbuilding, talking about the questions that it’s often fruitful to ask oneself when you’re doing this wild thing. Last time we did the physical world, so now it’s time for the world of people! What are the building blocks of a human life? (Or an alien one, or draconic, or elven, or whatever you've got?) Fro

Episode 138: Crunchy Questions

Sep 25 2024 71 mins

Every once in a while, it's good to go back to the basics. And for us, that means the basics of worldbuilding! When you're getting started out with a new project, building a world from the ground up, there are a lot of things you can take into consideration! This episode is not so much about finding the answers as figuring out how to ask the questions and what kinds of questions yo

Episode 137: Smile and Be a Villain, ft. CHLOE GONG

Sep 11 2024 67 mins

A villain may not have excuses for their behavior -- but they probably have reasons. How can worldbuilding feed those reasons? Antagonists are often those characters who are both the most willing and the most able to seize control of power structures and take advantage of their privileges. So what pressures in your world have created those structures, and how does your Big Bad mani