Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers

Trent Hergenrader is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. His fiction writing has appeared in such places as Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk, and Best Horror of the Year #1. He is co-editor of Creative Writing in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Creative Writing Innovations (Bloomsbury, 2017).

If we as creative writing teachers can increase the relevance of our discipline by tackling the type of storytelling students are interested in, while simultaneously helping those students grapple with thorny cultural issues, why wouldn’t we? Hergenrader’s book offers one way to deal with some of the challenges we face as a discipline, and does so in a clear, cogent, and unpretentious manner, that allows him to successfully appeal to the broad audience he aspires to.

• Part One – Collaborative Worldbuilding Concept and Terminology1. Introduction to Collaborative Worldbuilding2. Worlds, Worldbuilding, and Collaborative Worldbuilding3. Audience and Genres4. Frameworks of Fictional Worlds5. Structures and Substructures of Fictional Worlds6. Catalogs of Fictional WorldsPart Two - Collaborative Worldbuilding Projects7. Collaborative Worldbuilding Resources8. Before You Begin Your Project9. Building the Foundation and Establishing the Framework10.Developing Structures and Substructures11. Writing the Metanarrative12. Designing Catalog Templates13. Storytelling and Gaming in Collaboratively Built WorldsCoda: Building Worlds TogetherAppendix A. Worldbuilding Structures WorksheetAppendix B. Framework WorksheetAppendix C. Scope and Schedule WorksheetNotesGlossaryIndex