On Foundations and Worldbuilding
World building is my favorite part of writing. It’s thrilling to imagine what a person might experience as they walk through a futuristic bazaar full of wildly exotic foods, drinks, and flashy clothes. What do the walls look like? Are there building-sized holograms towering over a plucky hero? Do we see a gritty and smelly mega-city alley or is our character standing in an ultra-white LED-backlit corridor? It was more than a decade ago that a world I wish to introduce you to started taking shape. It came in fits and spurts in the form of little chapters I would follow inspiration to write. They were messy. They were straight out of my mind with no background. Still, a grain of continuity became the core of what would eventually turn into the world I now refer to as The World of The Blacksmith. From there, I started capturing notes in a Wikimedia instance I installed on my own personal server. Names like Niall Breen and Saori Saito made their entry as permanent characters, the first shapes of a complex and vibrant world.
This fledgling world started with a central question: how do I create a world that is the best humans we all know could do without being unbelievable? Humans are messy. We are violent, selfish, and sometimes dumb and ignorant. We are definitely dangerous animals. We are also passionate, creative, curious, and beautiful and that’s because of our mess. Any better world we create has to embrace not just what the best of us are, but what we are at our worst. I took this and imagined a society that learned from its past without erasing all of that ugliness; I imagined a world of perfect friction, compromise, and growth.
I started thinking about a smithy where institutions were the fire of humanity. The government was the anvil. The media was the bellows. Science was the hammer and people were the steel. It was rough and kind of a silly analog, but it worked as I imagined humanity tempering itself. It’s a society shaped by heat, pressure, and persistence, but never purified of what makes us human. This became the philosophical foundation of The Blacksmith. Not perfection but the constant pursuit of improvement. A continual self-reforging.
The wiki, once sparse and simple, quickly took form into meta-articles of events, people, and places. The world expanded to a level of detail swiftly exceeding my ability to find any given lore fragment. It was unrefined and disorganized, and I realized I needed a real codex so I started a OneNote notebook. I started this early this year (May 2025) and it did not take long at all before I found myself ready to start writing. After more than a decade, I knew where to start.
I had historical timelines, figures, places, cultures. I had invented technologies and systems. I had described a society. With all this background in place, with this codex, the next step is to bring the world to life. I write in arcs. From the smallest storytelling component, a chapter, to the largest, a series of books, every segment is a story that stands on its own. It propels the story, but were a reader to stop after just one chapter it would be a beginning, middle, and end and would add to the world. The codex feels a lot like a textbook. It’s antiseptic, but a story adds humanity. I am going to start writing small stories. Chapters. Novellas. I can expand the world organically, a process that mirrors the metaphor that inspired this world to begin with.
The Blacksmith is a living and breathing world forged piece by piece, through effort, experimentation, and continual shaping. The foundation isn’t an endpoint or a goal, but a waypoint. It has stories to tell that will continue to shape it for as long as I am here to write them.
