Tiny Worlds, Big Stories: The Advantages of Micro-Worldbuilding
Haly shares two examples of micro-worldbuilding and the stories behind their creation!!
Thoughtful Thursday: Tiny Worlds & Award Anxiety
Voting for the fifth annual World Anvil Worldbuilding Awards begins on Saturday, and I have submitted a number of things for consideration. Since that time, I’ve been editing and polishing some of my favorite work from across my worlds and letting my imagination run wild with the possible stories I could tell.
Micro-Worldbuilding
Long-time readers will know that Summer Camp provided a surprising number of challenges for me this year. My original side-quest to fit all of the prompts into one story was unachievable within the frame that I established, and so I had to let go.
Once I let go of my unsustainable expectations, I ended up creating several micro-worlds. Like micro-fiction, these creations are tiny, usually only a single long article, or a handful of shorter articles. The most familiar use of this technique is for contemporary fiction where a micro-world is built inside of a real place. An excellent example is Central Perk being a micro-world inside of New York City.
Voyager I, the Zylithians, and Harmony Station
Out of the several slivers of micro-worldbuilding I did this summer, my favorite is the story of a diminutive alien race — the Zylithians — encountering humanity’s first long-distance space probe, Voyager I. They literally bump into it (the cause of that communications outage that made all the science headlines in 2024), and then repair it (which is why comms came back).
I was born in 1977, after Voyager I & II were launched. For all of my life, those twin beacons of curiosity, exploration, and hope for the future have been sailing through the solar system. As long as I can remember news of one or the other has come across my attention bringing new pictures of the outer planets, new information on their atmospheres, the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter and the swirling crimson storm of it’s “eye.”
The steady presence of those amazing and enduring little machines and their antiquated bleep-boop language gives me comfort, and hope. Weird or not, I hope I die before Voyager’s last transmission.
I submitted a piece titled Harmony Station for the WAWAs because of that deep connection I feel to the Voyager mission. There are three articles in this world — Harmony Station, Terra’s Delightful Symphony (a recipe), and Voyagers I & II — and I am extremely proud of the work I did on them. Harmony Station is the longest piece and shows the most work.
This is an example from my own work where I used real history to inspire my worldbuilding, as I was talking about in yesterday’s “Ask the Bard.”
Let me know in the comments what you think!!
School of Cat
In September, World Anvil hosted an “Institutions of Learning” challenge, where we had to create — you guessed it! — an institution of learning. This was sponsored by Hero Forge and it was a lot of fun.
Part of the challenge was that everything had to be contained within a single article AND there was a maximum word count! This forced me to be creative in how I displayed information. I immediately decided to make school ID cards to serve as little info-graphics and also to make very liberal use of tool-tips instead of linking to other articles. This strategy allowed me to keep everything “contained” and, because tool-tips and graphics aren’t a part of word count, I got to maximize my world in a very minimum space.
All I needed was the perfect hook, an appealing curriculum for an irresistible student body. Thus, School of Cat was born.
This article shows what you can do with just the basic Master toolset in World Anvil. Nothing fancy, just simple BBCode and graphics. That’s why I submitted it for Best Article. And for all of the work I did on those graphics. Also, how can you argue with the hilarious idea of a school where kittens go to learn how to be house cats? That’s right! You can’t! Because you’re on the internet.
Let me know in the comments what you think about the different education tracks (Magnificence and Mischief)!
One More Thing…Coming Soon
Hang with me at GenCon!
Badges are ON SALE NOW at GenCon.com; get yours early because they WILL sell out! Hotel registration opens Feb. 23; event registration opens May 18.
MoonlightBard.com will have more information on my own events while we wait for the Event Catalog to drop on May 4.
