Feature Friday: An Interview with Chris Lontok
Filipino-American worldbuilder Chris Lontok, aka kitoypoy, sits down with Haly to talk about the dos and don'ts of adding real world cultural touchstones into speculative worlds.
Chris Lontok Says “Enter Where You’re Invited and Take What is Offered.”
I sat down a few weeks ago with my friend and fellow World Anvil bean, Chris Lontok — aka,
— to talk about incorporating real-world cultural influences into our fictional worlds. A Filipino-American writer, Chris proudly reflects his heritage in his speculative World of Wizard’s Peak RPG setting. He was kind enough to talk openly and frankly about his views on the best ways to incorporate diversity into our worlds.Author’s Note: We sat down for this chat on Jan. 20, 2025. It was Chris’s choice to include <redacted political event happening today> as a bit of surreal humor. It is not an actual redaction; it is an actual quote. 🤣
Haly, the Moonlight Bard: OK! Ok ok ok!! Y'all are going to have to bear with me through this one because HOLY HECKIN HANDSHAKES, BATMAN, this one's a doozy. WorldAnvil community legend, the creator of the World of Wizard's Peak RPG setting, kitoypoy himelf, Chris Lontok!!!
Whether you know it or not, you are an absolute inspiration to me, not only in the quality and consistency of your worldbuilding, but also in your community participation! You, sir, are a model of how to maintain your own creative goals while always uplifting and supporting those around you.
Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Chris.... How in the world are you today??
kitoypoy: As long as I ignore the <redacted political event happening today> I'm great! Unlike every other day in my life, I have no obligations, which is why I picked today for this! I'll be rearranging my comic/RPG shelves, going through my WAWA submissions, and talking to you!
Oh, so that's YOU on the other side of this huge boat, rowing in the same direction as me! Always comforting to know that we're all sweating through awards submission season together.
You've been cozily on my "to interview" list because you have a real knack for not just imagining but also communicating unique, vibrant, and complex cultural dynamics. How does your perspective as a Filipino-American -- someone with a very close, direct, and immediate connection with his family homeland -- play into your worldbuilding when you're designing a culture?
So the Filipino diaspora here in Tampa, FL where I live is especially vibrant and active. My grandfather actually founded the first Fil-Am organization here and it's still going to this day. There are a bunch of them now and I've been pretty active in them, to differing degrees, over the years.
I was a founding member of the Philippine Performing Arts Company, I'm trained in Filipino Martial Arts (FMA), I've been going to fancy balls my entire life, and I participate in/go to PhilFest here in Tampa every spring.
As a kid, my worldbuilding was very generic Western European fantasy. I simply didn't realize that I was allowed to inject myself into my own writing. So I wrote what I knew. If you look closely at my older stuff you'll see Pern, Xanth, Dragonlance, Jhereg, and Discworld in it.
World Anvil is what changed it for me. As I was moving my stuff over from wizardspeak.com, I realized how “white” all of my stuff was. All of my outside influences, things that I loved, were in there, but nowhere in there could you see my brown skin.
So I changed that. I put myself into my own stories. By default, when I’m writing about the Kirinalos of the Zone, they’re brown. They look like me and my family, unless I explicitly say differently.
This is one of the many facets that makes Wizard's Peak so complex and engaging, two words that I reach for a lot, but because they are very precise.
What are some of the touchstones of Filipino culture that you have injected into WP....and what made you choose those particular cultural aspects to highlight?
Once I opened up the door, the Filipiniana completely infiltrated everything: the food, the mythology, the culture. Also my worldbuilding is specifically diasporic. The Kirinalos have settled around the Kirinal Pit after an apocalyptic event. After the original inhabitants were wiped out, people moved in with a large number of them being Talinos, my Filipino analogue in WoWP.
Like the people in my own community, they brought their cuisine and culture to a new land, but they adapt to where they're living now. They use local ingredients and materials. They live and mix with the people around them. But they still maintain their inherent "Talino-ness".
I've written articles about adobo night, magical bibingka, and elves eating balut. Beauty pageants take up a lot of oxygen (too much in my opinion) of Filipino culture, so the leader of the most powerful mages in the world is chosen in a beauty pageant to wear the Red Feather Regalia. The weapons, like the Ginunting ng Thaya are based on the badass Filipino blades that I train with.
I also try to bring in the less cool aspects of our culture: the eagerness to please, the internalized colonialism, the status seeking, and the social heirarchy. That kind of stuff actually comes out less in my articles and more in my games. The bad guys tend to be people trying to maintain the status quo.
Suuuuuper glad that you brought up the wholeness of your cultural influence, pulling from both the beautiful elements that deserve celebration, as well as the areas where there is room for cultural improvement. My own family (according to oral history from my mother) is most recently from France, through a revolutionary immigrant great-great-grandmother who put all of her out-of-wedlock children up for adoption the moment that they were born. And while that revolutionary spirit lives strong in my own worldbuilding, I also live in Indiana which is one of the epicenters of French fur traders driving out the Lenape and Shawnee and other tribes who had taken up residence in the area after being swept out of their ancestral northeastern (New England) homes by the English and Dutch settlers.
Along with that... Working away from the racism encoded into a lot of western fantasy and other flavors of spec-fic is one of the reasons I started writing Argentii; I wanted to model other conflict structures besides just "some people are just born evil." One of the consequences of this is that I've been forced to really look into not only the finer, more esoteric details of my own historic cultures (French, Irish, Welsh), but those beyond just the big three in the Midwest: German, French, Dutch.
One of the things that always startles and fascinates me is encountering a language that uses anything other than the Latin alphabet. What is your experience with Tagalog, or any of the other several languages that are traditional among the Philippines?
I can understand a bit of conversational Tagalog, but I don't speak it. The second-generation Fil-Ams my age (Gen X) generally don't because our parents wanted us to acclimate into US culture without getting discriminated against. So I'm nowhere near fluent.
There are literally thousands of languages and dialects in the Philippines. My mother's family speaks Ilocano as well as Tagalog and English. My aforementioned grandfather was a polyglot who could speak English, Tagalog, Ilocano, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Spanish. His ability to speak Japanese saved his life a LOT in World War II.
One of my favorite writers, Neal Stephenson, wrote a book set in the Philippines both during the war as well as during the 90s/00s telecommunications boom; Cryptonomicon. Excellent adventure, and led to a prequel series, The Baroque Cycle which deals with late 17th and early 18th century colonialism.
I'd like to talk a little about cultural mapping, that is, when we model our fantasy and spec-fic cultures onto real cultures. This is one of those subjects that a lot of people consider taboo because it's so very, very easy to get wrong. However, it's also a wonderful way to bring a sense of the familiar into a fantasy world.
One of my favorite resources as a white girl in fiction is Writing With Color, a blog dedicated to helping people like me incorporate all of the different shades and styles of humanity into our stories without perpetuating the harmful tropes and stereotypes that damage people and communities in the most insidious ways. They emphasize the importance of understanding not just what is important to a culture, but why it is important.
I think one of the most wonderful examples of this in recent memory is Westeros and Esteros from Game of Thrones. The Dothraki are an excellent example here, very obviously modeled off of the European Steppe tribes such as the Huns and the Mongols. He didn't just say "these are a horse people" he showed us in every scene that without their horses, these people die. It’s also similar to the way that the plains Indian tribes relied upon the buffalo (to put it into more North American terms).
What is your best advice for people who are inspired to incorporate keystones from real cultures into their world with sensitivity and purpose?
I actually did a World Anvil takeover stream on this topic a few years ago. What I said then still stands today: "Enter where you're invited and take what is offered."
People want to take the "best bits" of a culture, the religions especially, and use that in their worldbuilding. But that's usually the stuff that's off limits. Do your research, talk to as many of the people from that culture as you can, get a sensitivity reader to check what you've written. Be respectful.
With that said, I've found that people from MANY cultures, Filipinos included, LOVE it when their cultures are included in worldbuilding. The best places to pick from are cuisine, non-religious stories/mythology, positive depictions of rituals/festivals, and respectful uses of fashion.
If you can communicate: "I love this from this culture and I'm borrowing it, but I don't own it." You'll get a lot of leeway from the people in that culture. BUT, if you get called out or find you've gone too far, please just apologize and change it/take it down.
Very clear and actionable steps. Thank you. From this side of the spectrum, it can feel very intimidating to explore those cross-cultural borders. I think that a lot of white authors shy away from including other cultures out of fear of doing it wrong, and thereby paint a very monochromatic picture, then catch flack for being insensitive to the real hues of the world. It is certainly something that I struggled with as a young writer, and why I've gone out of my way to do the work to get out of that fear, and into a place of curiosity and respect.
Ok. Now, if you've read my interviews, you'll know that I'm only in it for the gotcha journalism. So let's slide off topic for a moment and talk about something you mentioned earlier.... The WAWAs.
For those of you unfamiliar, this is the WorldAnvil Worldbuilding Awards, one of the biggest events in the worldbuilding community and a chance for the nearly 3 million members of WorldAnvil, old and new, to showcase their best work from across their worlds.
If memory serves, you've been nominated several times in the past few years. From the outside, that seems like such a rollercoaster, especially looking at it from the very throes of the self-selection process. Can you talk a little about how it feels to comb through your work, prep it...and then make it past the first round of open judging?
I've been lucky enough to make it to the WAWA finals twice, for the 2021 & 2022 editions of the awards. I keep a spreadsheet of my past nominations so that I don't double submit, and that's also a good place to go for work that I think is up to snuff, but hasn't been nominated yet.
Then I go to Brigid (shoutout Hanhula!) or my Articles tab in WorldAnvil and look at which of my articles have been liked/commented/seen the most. Then I go through my submissions for challenges, Summer Camp, and World Ember. In the process, past work that I'm proud of usually shakes out and I add those to the list. Finally, I have Thor bring over Mjolnir and see if any of my articles can lift it.
Once I've done that, I look at the categories and see what articles can slot into them. This may or may not work for anyone else's brain, but it does for mine.
I literally hit submit on my WAWA submissions in the midst of this conversation, so I'm entering my next next step now. I'm reading my entries and giving them a polish/edit/update to my current standards of worldbuilding. A couple of them are a few years old and my bag of tricks is bigger!
After that, I cross my fingers and let it fall out of my brain. Unlike a lot of people in our space, I don't have the anxiety or self-doubt that a lot of us struggle with. But I did get the procrastination, tendency towards over-commitment, and the scatter brains!
My dog is very unhappily resettling herself because I woke her up laughing at that final test for your articles.
The idea of submitting and THEN polishing is absolutely alien to me and positively terrifying. I'm OK with people reading my work before it's polished; my newsletter subscribers know that I'll hit publish on any garbage that spills out of my fingertips. Even though I know nothing gets shown for judging until everything has been 'locked', it's a very scary place in my psyche.
I want to win, you want to win, I don't think that anyone submits to something like this and honestly believes "I don't want to win, I just want the horrifying experience of being vulnerable in front of the entire internet without the trouble of nude selfies." How do YOU handle the nagging feeling of...stress/anxiety/anticipation/fear that lingers while your work is just out there, like laundry on the line, waving in the breeze for everyone to gawk at?
So here's my secret superpower, I'm an extrovert in a space where the majority of you guys are introverts. I was in that Filipino dance troupe on and off from the age of 14 to just a few years ago. I've been dressed in feathers and a loincloth in front of thousands of people more times than I can count. I've been divorced twice. I am active in the swing/partner dancing scene here in town.
I have no shame.
I just put that shit out there and whatever happens happens.
I'm not sure if that's a teachable skill.
I don't know it it's teachable, but it's certainly learnable!! It's something that I've been able to do, and something I try to impart to my peers and my community whenever I can. Sometimes you just have to do it scared. And, eventually, when you do it enough times, your brain begins to recognize the fear as excitement instead, and you start looking forward to it instead of dreading it.
Chris, we're coming to the end, but one of the things I always like to do is use this little apple crate of mine to promote my friends, my peers, and other people who are doing wonderful and amazing things in the worldbuilding community! So, please, tell the world what's currently got you excited about your own worldbuilding, and out in the fiction and worldbuilding communities in general! Chris Lontok, the spotlight is on you, take this opportunity to SHINE!!!
So you're correct, it actually is a learnable skill. I had to "break the seal", "jump in headfirst", and learn to get over myself enough times that there's nothing left to get over. YMMV.
Since I have the opportunity, I'm going to pimp the two WAWA submissions I'm most proud of: Concordant Academy of Command was a finalist in the "Institutions of Learning" challenge last year. It's got some of my best work in it and it's the thing I'm most proud of last year.
Then there's my Silver Slice article that I wrote as a "slice of life" exercise for someone traveling through part of my world. I have ambitions to write seven (!) more of these for the other slices in the Zone.
Finally there's my Tarot of Wizard's Peak article that I'm not submitting for anything, but I'm inordinately proud of. I just like having eyes on it!
For other folks in the community, I have to shout out my WA bestie, E. Christopher Clark. We've become each other's biggest cheerleaders. He's in the middle of putting out The Blood of Seven Queens as actual comic books and I'm SO jealous that he's at that stage in his journey.
I'm working on a publishing company myself while trying to stay gainfully employed and being a parent to kids barreling into adulthood. Fingers crossed that I get a project or two into publishable shape this year!
This has been such a fun conversation, and I cannot thank you enough for sharing yourself and your wisdom with me and my little community of misfit Moonbeams! I wish you all the very best of luck in the upcoming WAWAs, and do make sure to keep me informed on how goes your journey bringing a publishing company to life. That's going to be an all-new, fascinating path I'm sure!
Thank you! This has been so much fun! Good luck to you too and I do enjoy reading your newsletters!!
Fantastic interview! And thanks for the shout out, kitoypoy!
Thanks for the interview and making me look so cool!!