Are you building a world for your game, tabletop campaign, or just for your own enjoyment? Interested in honing your craft, showing off your ideas, and seeing your world in a whole new light? If this sounds like you, join us for this four-week intensive worldbuilding workshop!

Overview:

Worldbuilding is the process of imagining a setting. Good worldbuilding invites us to think deeply about the systems, power dynamics and problems that shape societies and cultures, and to be open to complex and nuanced answers. In this workshop we will focus on how to bring this nuance into the process of worldbuilding through exercises, short lectures and skill-sharing. We will also join a Discord server where we can share our work, ask for advice and show off our worlds!

This workshop is for you if:

• You are already working on a worldbuilding project
• You have some experience with worldbuilding, but want to refine your skills and maybe learn a few tricks
• You want to connect with other worldbuilders and rad creative folks
• You can attend all four sessions

About the Instructor

Kaelan Doyle Myerscough (they/he) is a trans/nonbinary game designer and academic. They are a PhD student at the University of Chicago, where their research concerns the history and politics of worldbuilding. They are also co-authoring a textbook on critical worldbuilding with a professor at the City University of Hong Kong. You can find more of their work, including the worldbuilding games One Hour Worldbuilders and City Planning Department, on their itch page or their website.

Agenda

This workshop will consist of four live sessions, once per week at 7 PM from July 6 until July 27. If you sign up, you should plan to attend all of them.

Each session will last about 90 minutes and will consist of the following:

• Show-and-tell roundtable for sharing worldbuilding progress and the results of weekly exercises (30 minutes);
• Brief, interactive lecture (30 minutes);
• In-class exercises to help expand our worldbuilding (30 minutes);

In addition to live sessions, there are also weekly take-home creative exercises which will develop a specific aspect of your world. Each exercise is highly adaptable to your energy levels and needs - you can complete them in as little as fifteen minutes, or tinker away at them for the whole week!

Finally, we will also run a Discord server throughout the month of July where you can share your progress and show off your world!

What to Bring

• A world: You should come to the first session with a worldbuilding concept already in mind. Maybe you’ve been working on this world for years, or maybe the idea came to you this month and you’ve only got the broad strokes - either is fine!
• Drawing, writing or crafting materials in whatever medium is most comfortable for you. Some exercises will involve drawing or craft-based visualization!
• Your Discord handle for the server!