Create Unforgettable Worlds in Minutes
It's easier than you think
There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of worlds in the TTRPG hobby. You’re probably familiar with some of them: the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Golarion, WH40K, to name a few.
While many of these settings have their own wikis and have tons of content written for them, those came over decades of history and worldbuilding. When they started, they all shared something stood the test of time:
Hyperdiagesis, or the world beyond the world we see.
If you’re one of those blog-reading types, you may have seen this word (or words like it) spinning around the blogosphere over the past month or so. Hyperdiagesis comes from Matt Hills very formal article “When Doctor Who Enters its Own Timeline: The Database Aesthetics and Hyperdiegesis of Multi-Doctor Stories”. He describes it thusly:
“… the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nonetheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension.”
That’s pretty long, so let’s break it down to this one-sentence revision:
“Making the world come alive, even without experiencing or encountering the majority of its details.”
You’ve likely seen these sorts of things in various non-TTRPG media:
What are the Clone Wars Obi-Wan is describing in Star Wars: A New Hope? For nearly thirty years, fans could only speculate.
What was Weathertop before it was a ruin that Frodo and the hobbits made camp in? Most Lord of the Rings fans won’t ever read the book that describes that detail.
What is Vault-Tec’s ultimate goal behind the tests distributed through the Vaults? The answer differs based on which Fallout media you’re consuming.
I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to sit down and create a lore bible for your world, or an entire pantheon, or structure out your entire setting’s rules of magic to have effective hyperdiagesis. In fact, you don’t need to really do anything aside from one simple action.
You just need to create:
Repeat that in your mind and really think about the words. I’m not saying depth, I’m saying a sense of it.
You don’t need to create a vast thousand years of history to emphasize that a location has been plagued by war for centuries and may currently be under tyrannical or autocratic rule. Instead, you can simply say:
“Fresh flowers were not just rare, they were practically extinct. Only the oldest of the Amari could remember them, from the days before the failed Ylian Revolution.”
That’s a lot to unpack. From those two sentences, we have thoughts that:
The land is wartorn or industrialized to a point where nature, specifically flowers, are minor miracles.
The Amari are referenced by their name, inferring that they are a marginalized people and are different from our speaker here.
There was a revolution by the Ylian (or at Ylian) that failed, resulting in the world we have today.
None of the things I mentioned above are explicitly referred to in the text — they’re all constructs of the imagination, kickstarted by the evocative language of an unseen or unknown thing.
One of the most dangerous, double-edged swords in worldbuilding and creating an evocatOive setting players fall in love with is attempting to fill every open mystery with an answer.
Your goal should be to inspire or evoke the players now with something they either hook onto or simply get a taste of and move on. Put another way, if you’re consistently coming up with very cool stuff to share in the session that has virtually no backstory in place, you’re doing it right.
Remember: The players can always look into whatever cool lore you alluded to after the fact to see if they’re interested in it. You don’t need to do the work up front.
Crafting Unforgettable Worlds Worksheet
If you want a dead-simple, step-by-step process for how to get started with hyperdiagesis, click on the image below for a free downloadable worksheet. It’ll help you get started by creating a few prompts that can then get you in the mindset of providing a sense of depth rather than overprepping.
The parting word:
It’s more important to create a sense of depth than to create a rich backstory before the players even have a chance to engage with it.
QUESTION OF THE WEEK:
Do you have any examples from books, TV shows, movies, or other media that use hyperdiagesis successfully? What about in your own games? Share your answers in the comments!
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Colin
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Space Pirate
This is another of those instances when someone has defined something that I’ve been blundering along doing it without thinking about exactly what it is that I’m doing. To the extent that I considered the question at all, it was as a technique I employed because I’m lazy and want the illusion of depth and reality without troubling to put in the actual work. Like a lot of these things, I sometimes instinctively recoil from the notion that one can establish processes and methods for achieving them, because the alternative is the grim realisation that I’ve gone about groping towards how to do this stuff really inefficiently and haphazardly…
Hyperdiagesis is a concept I love but have struggled to describe simply in the past. Thank you so much for adding this word to my vocabulary today!