Creating Worlds/Settings/Histories

I've touched on this before, but the other night I was talking with some people in the writing group who wanted to know how I built a complete world. They were referring to the city of New Essex for Counterfeit Line and Different World.

First I referred them to: http://www.strolen.com/content.php?node=1148 for a primer on creating a world for role-playing. This works for novel writing as well. But aside from that....

I start by looking at the story I'm writing. Let's take the Gina Stone stories mentioned above. The portal opens to several alternate history destinations. These were: 1943 Pacific Island, 1895 (New Essex), 1702 Bavaria, 1360 France, ~450 AD Central Bulgaria, ~1900 BC Egypt, ~6000 BC Himalayas, ~25000 BC Brazil. I took these and established a brief footnote for each one (I didn't need to do more if the story didn't need it).

1943 Pacific Island - a very small island in a coral lagoon. There's a crashed US plane on the island. The island acquires a Japanese garrison. This is fairly vanilla, and I didn't need to do much more. The bad guy has a run-in with the Japanese and barely escapes with his life.

1702 Bavaria - part of the War of the Spanish Succession. No change needed. I may still use this.

1360 France - in a ruined castle. No change needed, though I refer to it in passing several times. The Medieval warming period has continued in this alternate timeline (ending a century later). Important to remind the characters of the importance of disease control (the 1360's saw the second wave of the Black Death in our world).

450 Bulgaria - I needed a lush area that I could instead show as somewhat run down. No other change needed.

6000 BC Himalayas - I wanted the picture of the ice sheet from some mountain, that was all. No change needed.

25000 BC Brazil - in the original story the bad guy set up a drug growing operation here. I might still use this idea as it will be one that nobody can track (or at least so they think).

1900 BC Egypt - this was the 12th Dynasty, and I needed a lot of nitty-gritty of daily life. I did a lot of digging into Pharaohs, and dropped a couple more in. This was important to the plot. But I didn't need anything more as Egypt didn't change that much for quite some time.

1895 New Essex - I pondered how there would be no US. The key point obviously had to be that there was no American Revolution. Now a lot of the seeds of the revolution had been sown in the preceding decades. The British viewed the colonies as a source of raw materials to feed the growing industrialization of England. There was also that 'Lord and Master' strain that crops up in the English attitude toward the rest of the world, especially their colonies. This attitude exacerbated the tensions between Parliament and the Colonies.

I began looking at incidents and individuals who helped bring about the rupture. Time after time Lord George Germaine (originally Lord George Sackville) kept showing up. He had been cashiered after the Battle of Minden (August 1, 1759) for not charging the French with his cavalry. Piers Macksey has done a wonderful book on the incident The Coward of Minden. It has to be read along with His Britannic Majesty's Army in Germany During the Seven Years War by Lt. General Sir Reginald Savory. There was more to the incident than just not charging. Sackville was where he couldn't see the French. There was also a confusion of orders, and so on. Read it, the whole thing is fascinating.

So the simple solution was to remove Lord George Germaine (a favorite of the then Prince of Wales and future King George III). Why not have him die heroically leading his men in the climactic attack at Minden, destroying the French Army of Lower Germany? Taken with the loss of Canada at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, the destruction of the French fleet that year, and the loss of India, this would knock the French out of the Seven Years War, and probably end the war in Central Germany as the Austrians would have no French ally to tie down the British paid army.

All right, now one more thing: several leading members of Parliament suggested consulting with the colonies on their own defense and letting them find the money rather than simply raising taxes. Germaine had opposed this and managed to kill it. Now he's not there. And the taxes of the time had to be paid in coin (which was scarce). Now we don't have that, the colonies contribute to their own defense, and there is no Revolution.

The rest was simply copying what happened in Canada 80 years later. Except I had to have a growing of the West Coast. That was simple, actually. Instead of subduing the Plains Indians, the British elected to recognize them sort of like they did in India. So no settlers on the Great Plains. Instead you get them in parts of the Rocky Mountains and along the coast (which the Spanish/Mexicans had been settling anyway). And so the British move in (by the way, this almost makes it necessary for Texas to be independent -- think about it and you'll see why).

Now where are the places to settle? Where there's good sea-borne navigation. Where are the cities on the West Coast? At the mouth of rivers, and at natural harbors. Tacoma and Seattle both have great natural harbors, but Seattle has some problems (that were solved by the railroad). So stand that on its head a little. Which site has great communications into the interior, a natural harbor, and would be easy for the railroad to get to (the railroad would be pushing up from Vancouver on the Columbia). The Tacoma area actually comes to mind (as does the Everett area). So put cities at both places. Tacoma would benefit from the railroad first, so it grows sooner/faster. But I chose to put it on the flats around Puyallup and Fife where building is easier, rather than on the Pt. Defiance peninsula.

What about the social customs? To be different I didn't have Queen Victoria on the thrown for more than 10-12 years. She actually had five assassination attempts against her (which I didn't know), but she spent a lot of time being pregnant, at least those first few years. And women died in childbirth, even with the best medical care. That meant a Regency for Edward, and possibly an Edward VIII on the throne by 1895, but with a considerably lessened influence from Albert.

George McDonald Fraser, in his Flashman novels, pointed out that the Victorian attitudes and customs were showing up in the 1840s even without Victoria and Albert, and that Albert was the prig. Accepting this, and without Victoria, I could copy most of the Victorian world, but leave out the more irksome aspects (such as covering piano legs). In this I was helped by a lot of comments from a grandmother of mine who remembered the society she grew up in.

The physical layout of the town was the least work. I simply took a map of the Fife/Puyallup area and imposed a grid. The rest were details, like what color the houses were, whether the streets in certain parts of town were paved, and what life looked/smelled/sounded like in certain neighborhoods.

Simple, really, and most of this was worked out on the fly, not before-hand.