WORLDBUILDING

I've always enjoyed creating things.

When I was a kid, I'd design my own video games and write about them on sheets of paper or booklets that I made from A4s stapled together. I have drawers in my room filled with all the random games that I made up when I was still in single digits.

Throughout the ages, I did more creative things: I wrote stories (sometimes printing them out and giving them to classmates), drew sketches, made masks, custom themed packs of playing cards, painted bottles, and more. But the final form which my creativity crystallised into was worldbuilding.

What is worldbuilding? The way I tend to explain it to people is, before Tolkein wrote the story of Lord of the Rings he made up the world it was set in- Middle Earth. That process of making up the world is worldbuilding. It's something I've done quite a few times since then. For each project, I'd write down all the information about the world in a word document, and then draw an A3/A2/A1 map for it.

As I got older, the worldbuilding projects became bigger in scale, more detailed, more complex, and were based off of an increasingly large body of research about history, politics, geography, anthropology, theology, and more.

My worldbuilding incorporates all of these different fields and has progressed from pure creative expression to scientific simulation. I design the outcomes of stories based on what I've learned about human psychology; I determine which of the fictional countries in each world are most powerful (and what their cultures are) according to anthropological and macrohistorical theories; I base the ecology and settings of my locales on real geographical and climactic principles. For me, worldbuilding is a way to utilise everything I've learned and integrate it with my desire to create.

The projects that I made, starting from the earliest projects when I was 13 and ending in 'Project 10', are detailed here. Mightiest, which has its own page on this website, is worldbuilding Project 9, but I continued to work on it after Project 10. Some projects don't have their own maps either, but those that do will have them shown here. Enjoy!

Note: this page is still a work in progress! Some documents and images will be uploaded at a later date.

Project 11 - 'Zealotry'

Started 02 June 2024

[Ongoing]

This project is set in the same world as Mightiest, my ninth worldbuilding project. Written in the style of an epic, this is a massive political saga starting with a revolution in a newly industrialised country; and charting the bloody and twisted aftermath.

Zealotry is a series about politics, psychology, and philosophy: what makes people left wing or right wing? What makes people go to war? What is morality itself? All of these questions are explored according to actual expert consensuses and theories in political science/psychology/philosophy and sociology. Zealotry aims to entertain people, make them think, and disseminate real scientific knowledge that helps explain how human beings and the world works.

Zealotry is set in a world very different from ours, but which operates according to the same sociological and anthropological rules. For example, what causes certain countries to be more or less developed than others? The answers to these questions are applied to the world of Zealotry as well, so it all makes scientific sense. The entire scope of this world's history has been designed to fit perfectly with what we know about how societies and the modern world developed. However, although this world works according to genuine, well-studied principles, it displays massive divergences from our own, showing a world that is recognisable to us but which has meticulously crafted geopolitical and economic differences.

Just as in Mightiest, all the characters are created with real psychology in mind, resulting in 3D characters with complex personalities, motivations, and goals. To inform the decisions of the characters and the course of the story, I drew on all the theories of behaviour, identity, and cognition that I knew. The result is a project which seeks to explore the human condition and human nature itself.

Project 10 - 'M22'

Started 25 March 2023

61 A4 pages

A project speculating on the political, social, and economic state of the world in the middle of the 22nd century. This is a similar premise to Project 07, but is more detailed, more thought-out, and based on more of my accumulated geopolitical and economic knowledge.

To predict the political and socioeconomic trajectory of the world- including the income levels, GDPs, HDI, and EIU Democracy Indices of all its countries- I pored through statistical and demographic data, understanding trends whilst studying the underlying institutional and global causes behind what makes certain countries richer and more democratic than others. To try and predict the world's borders, I examined the political and ethnic backgrounds of every country currently in existence and applied political/psychological principles to try to predict which new secession/unification movements would form- or succeed.

The result is a detailed snapshot of the world in another century, with its borders, economics, and geopolitics determined not just by serendipity but by detailed study of statistics and the literature.

Project 08 - 'Iron Crown'

Started August 2021

81 A4 pages

An alternate history work speculating on how Napoleon I could have won the Napoleonic Wars- and what the subsequent effects on European history would have been.

The French Revolution is a topic I talk about all the time in Polymath. Its incredible, revolutionary significance marked world history, and the Napoleonic Wars was part of that historical episode. What if it all played out differently- and modern history was forever different?

For this alternate history project, I based this new trajectory of the world on scientific and technical principles. I gathered as much information as I could to form an idea of Napoleon's psychology, which I combined with my own psychology knowledge to simulate his decisions. I pored through genealogical records and 19th century succession laws to examine who would succeed him. To simulate which wars/revolutions would happen and who would win, I researched famine years, economics, military ordinance and organisations, political and conflict psychology, the institutional/sociological causes of industrialisation and modernisation, political philosophy, the psychologies of various absolute rulers, and much more.

The result is an alternate history project that I feel is realistic and could well have happened. Other alternate history ideas I played with, but never wrote about, were the Confederacy winning the American Civil War; the Carolingian Empire never dissolving; a successful German Peasants' Revolt in the 1520s; a socialist USA; and many more.

Project 07 - 'Carbonpunk 2170'

Started March 2021

179 A4 pages

A project speculating on the sociopolitical, economic, demographic, technological, and cultural state of the world in the late 22nd century. This project, like all my others, was based on research, statistics, and scientific (including social scientific) theory. It drew on a massive body of information about economic change, geopolitics, sociocultural changes and their underlying causes, industrialisation and economic development, technological change and futuristic technology, military technology, space travel and colonisation, astronomy, and more.

I later created a new project about the future, Project 10, which was designed to be a bit more realistic. Although Project 7 was all based on real research and history, I had a bit of fun with the storyline, slapping in a couple of world wars for the fun of it. It still draws upon a huge amount of research, however, especially considering futuristic technology and the future of space.

Project 06 - [Untitled]

Started late 2020

34 A4 pages

This is an incomplete project. I stopped working on it when I had ideas for Project 7, and eventually incorporated many of the ideas from Project 6 into Mightiest. Project 5 was inspired by a Renaissance Europe, emerging from the Middle Ages. This project was more based on late antiquity, on classical empires contending with new tribes, nations, and kingdoms. By this point I'd already accumulated lots of historical knowledge, especially on the intricacies of European history stretching from modernity to the classical era, but I wanted to explore polytheistic religions more here. The research I did for Project 6 on that was then transferred to my creation of the pantheon in Mightiest.