All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters’ goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view.
This explains why I’m terrible at writing anything, or coming up with good overarching plots whenever I want to run a TTRPG. Because I don’t really understand other people very well.
I found a lot of success in joint-DM ventures with somebody who is great at telling ground-level stories. I do all the world building, they handle all the people stuff.
One of my favourite settings I built was a world where magic flows out of nexuses of power built by an ancient civilization that’s now lost to ruin. (Spoiler warning for my son if he reads this.) The world is a polar-shifted Earth, post-climate change and post-nuclear war. The power nexuses are the locations of nuclear power plants, and the island chain the story takes place on is a flooded European continent. I did a whole bunch of math and simulations in a GIS thingy, and figured out where the floodplains would be, and what would still be above water if sea level rose by X meters. Then I rotated it, just to make it even less recognizable.
It’s one of the ways I came to grips with the limitations of being Autistic, and how I can lean into the strengths I have instead.
This explains why I’m terrible at writing anything, or coming up with good overarching plots whenever I want to run a TTRPG. Because I don’t really understand other people very well.
I found a lot of success in joint-DM ventures with somebody who is great at telling ground-level stories. I do all the world building, they handle all the people stuff.
One of my favourite settings I built was a world where magic flows out of nexuses of power built by an ancient civilization that’s now lost to ruin. (Spoiler warning for my son if he reads this.) The world is a polar-shifted Earth, post-climate change and post-nuclear war. The power nexuses are the locations of nuclear power plants, and the island chain the story takes place on is a flooded European continent. I did a whole bunch of math and simulations in a GIS thingy, and figured out where the floodplains would be, and what would still be above water if sea level rose by X meters. Then I rotated it, just to make it even less recognizable.
It’s one of the ways I came to grips with the limitations of being Autistic, and how I can lean into the strengths I have instead.