Melody [00:00]
Welcome to the Game Master Certification Organization's interview excerpt podcast series. Hi, I'm your host Melody Rainelle. We have been interviewing Jay and Jon, the minds behind Kanka.io. This is the last episode of our interview with them and we will be talking about the topic of worldbuilding. So, Jon and Jay, would you like to talk to us about worldbuilding entities?
 
Jay [00:29]
In the context of Kanka an entity is… that's a tough question.

Jon [00:33]
It’s just about anything, isn’t it.

Jay [00:36]
Trying- trying to think how to answer this question as a worldbuilder and not a- an engineer. But an entity is basically something in your world. That can be a person, could be a location, it can be a historical event. It's any part of your world which you want to document. So you could also think as it as an article on Wikipedia. An entity in Kanka is the equivalent of an article in Wikipedia, except we split entities in different sub categories, like I mentioned, characters, locations, events, calendars, quests, timelines, et cetera. So in that context, if you're running a game and your players will hear about something, you'll want to have this entity in your Kanka campaign, probably documented so you remember, A) it exists, B) what it's about. Because remembering that five years ago I mentioned a Festival of the Yellow Flower to my players. If I don't type it in Kanka to remember what I had in mind, then it's lost worldbuilding and that ends up being an entity. And same thing for an NPC. They met the son of a local blacksmith which had a name which was thrown out in a session. That's an entity which needs to be remembered in Kanka so it can be referenced or mentioned in the future or reused. Like I need a child, because my players are going back to this city. Who do they know? Oh right, they heard about this blacksmith's son, which I already created in my Kanka, so I can reuse that rather than creating someone new and they'll be like, “Oh yeah, I remember. That was mentioned two years ago.” I don't know if that answered the question, but I tried.
 
Jon [02:20]
I'm not sure I could add anything to that.
 
Melody [02:24]
So continuity.
 
Jay [02:27]
I'm not sure.
 
Jon [02:29]
I think I see entities as snapshots more than anything else. Just like snapshots of your world, because every entity is, you know, a different facet. Because entities are so vague in the sense that they can represent characters or races or anything really. Maps I guess, if you really want to. So it's just- it's all snapshots. Each entity is a minute snapshot of your world. More than continuity, in my mind at least.
 
Jay [02:55]
I'm not sure. English is my second language, so I'm not sure what you meant by continuity, so I'm glad Jonathan answered that.

Jon [03:02]
Aye to me - it's also my second language, so I hope I was at least vaguely in the right ballpark.

Melody [03:08]
May we ask, where are you both based out of?
 
Jay [03:11]
It's complicated.

Jon [03:11]
Officially, we're both based out of Switzerland. Officially.

Jay [3:15]
Yeah.

Jon [3:16]
We're both Swiss.

Jay [3:17]
Yeah.

Jon [3:18]
So we're simplifying, yes, because we're both a wide mix of things. But- but for the sake of this conversation, yes, let's simplify and say we're both Swiss.
 
Melody [03:27]
That's awesome, and thanks for sharing that. I think it's so phenomenal how tabletop role-playing games have just brought the whole world together, really, if you think about it. It's just so many cultures and backgrounds and so many wonderful areas of creativity that it brings, and something that is really uniting across the world. It's quite amazing, OK. Next question. What is your favorite worldbuilding detail?
 
Jon [03:57]
Another big one.

Jay [03:59]
I'll have to think back at my maps. I just love making maps, especially when I started DMing. I used to make these hand-drawn handouts of maps of towns the players would visit and they would take me hours to draw and like, “Yeah, you're arriving in this village, here's a picture of this village with five houses in it.” Why did I spend a whole weekend drawing this instead of properly building a storyline? I don't know, I just enjoy drawing maps. It's just very cathartic for me to spend hours just figuring out… “Okay, this shoreline… This is nice, but maybe a small, just a small smidge to the right, this small exclave which goes into the ocean. It adds a tiny bit of detail which is absolutely useless, but... I'll do it anyway.”
 
Jon [04:44]
Yeah, I mean, it's never useless if you enjoy it, right?
 
 Jay [04:47]
Yea- It's still useless in the grand scheme of things, because my players won't see, "Oh, there's a small protruding landmass of few cen- inches in the ocean on this continental map. We need to go there to see exactly what's there, because there might be a Wizard’s tower. Who knows?" No, they won't.

Jon [05:04]
Yeah, fair.

Jay [05:06]
They'll just see, "Oh, this town has a city name. Let's go there.”

Jon [05:10]
I think for me it ties back to what I was saying earlier with the lore. I have a bit of a fascination with lore and history. So I think that history would be like that detail that I look forward to. I tend to start with the history of a world or of a kingdom and then sort of go from it sort of top-down, just, you know, build it up from Big Bang to where we are today. Going with, you know, not necessarily a huge amount of details for a hypothetical Big Bang. But for me I placed a lot of importance and I find a lot of, you know, we're talking about cathartic experiences… It's recreating a world from the beginning. And, you know, going into detail about that history is something that for me is quite cathartic because I guess in my mind I'm rebuilding better. I don't know if it's better of course, like is, you know, better compared to what, but just the intricacies of where the characters come from compared to where they are today. And not just the characters of course, because you know characters have unlimited lifespan, but the history of, you know, you've got two kingdoms at war. Woah. What's the history behind that? What has led- what was that sort of Big Bang moment that led to the first conflict between the two? And then, you know all that has stemmed, the current conflict has stemmed from initial acts of aggression or from initial, I don't know, raid or your family feud. Every time it's a bit different, but I think that historical aspect is to me the detail that- that matters.

Melody [06:36]
That's great. Thank you for sharing that. What approach do you take in deciding what sort of entities to start on?

Jay [06:44]
Ooh, I can answer this. When I start working on a new region, a new continent or new kingdom or whatever, I think about the culture and I try and base those off of existing cultures in our world. So, like my example earlier, I think, “Okay. Architecture: Turkish. Language: Italian. But what about the political power? Are we talking about a matriarchy? A magocracy? A kingdom?” And kind of going from there because that would influence a lot of the political aspects of that region and I like to run a political, like there's lots of politics involved in my game. So that's from where I start. So I’m figuring out, “Okay, what is governing the lives of the people here and what is the power structure and what is their power vacuum? Change and chaos always happens because the old power, whatever had power or control over region or people, stopped reign or collapsed. So what is that about? What happened which made it collapse?” And then kind of use that as an overarching focus or guiding line for when I'm worldbuilding or creating a new area and then start building down. “Okay, this city is the capital and this city far away. If this instability… Okay, this city is probably trying to break away or start a rebellion against whoever is empowered capital and who they allied with. Who's in charge? Okay, this person has a son which is married with the daughter of another city’s ruler. So they start scheming together and that might influence like the political situation in those places for when the players arrive and visit those places that will kind of influence… Okay, are they seen as pro the current government or anti?” And I will have all sorts of implications on the kind of role play and quests they’ll have and also influence the kind of NPC's I'm going to build. “Are there spies? Does one of their players have a spy background which they can use to root out, these spies and decide who they want to help?” That's where my brain goes when I start working on where to start with entities. Like figure out more in a global sense, “Okay. This place, what’s the power structure? What's the current power vacuum? And who's vying for that power vac? Who's trying to fill that void in the power structure,” and kind of go down from there.
 
Jon [08:59]
I think I'm gonna to stick to my guns, and, you know, within the idea of a sort of a historical context to the present situation, I tend to start with gods and pantheons gods. They tend to be what of early civilizations… well, what helped create early civilizations. And a lot of wars that we see in the past, a lot of conflicts derived from religion. And so for me, you know, within the idea that the world I have is a medieval setting, there isn't too much of a problem between different political groups. Like, yes, sure, you have a few republics, you've got monarchies and you know, empires, which are just larger monarchies essentially, but by and large we're talking about sort of proto-political systems. And so for me, I prefer to start with the gods. Gods are where the conflicts ultimately derived from. I think Jay's points towards power and power vacuums is an excellent one as well. You know, you can definitely make a case where any sort of instability stems from. But for me religion tends to be my go-to and so therefore the first entities I tend to think of and then create will be deities. Oddly enough we don't actually have a specific deity category within Kanka. They're sort of characters with tags. But that for me is where it all starts. And I think largely also stems from my appreciation of Greek and Roman mythology. And, sort of, you start by creating that local mythology within the deities and you've got your different deities for different actions or different perspectives or different, other you know, agriculture or war, whatever. And then from then you can refine your cultures and you can refine your civilizations. To be more in tune with sudden deities or sudden representations of deities. And yeah, so within that historical approach that I tend to have, once again, deities are where I start.
 
Melody [10:51]
Wow, both of you have a great approach to this. Something to think about for sure. What is the most interesting thing you've learned from your community about worldbuilding?
 
 Jay [11:03]
People love calendars. Oh my.
 
 Jon [11:06]
Yeah, yeah. That's a good one. It's not something I use at all. Like at all.
 
Jay [11:12]
Same. I don't keep track of time. I don't. That's not an aspect of worldbuilding I spent any time thinking about. But our users love being able in Kanka to create a calendar. Define its months, it's days, it's seasons, it's moons, it's the festivals happening around, recurring on a full moon, every third full moon or whatever. So our community definitely loves calendars. And which is my biggest re-, like that's my biggest pain point in Kanka, is the way I built calendars. Because I've never thought about calendars. I don't use them. So it kind of was built progressively over the years and it's just a complete chaos. The code for it is a complete mess and it's all math figuring out, “Okay, when does this happen? Is this a Monday or is this a Friday or is this a whatever day?” And it is chaos and a nightmare whenever I have to add new features in a calendars or worse, if I have to fix a bug. Like there are bugs in-  there's a bug in the calendar module since over a year and I just have no idea how to fix it. And it impacts like a couple of calendars, but I can't- if I fix it for those calendars then it breaks for the other calendar. So I just have no… no idea. But people love calendars.
 
Jon [12:30]
It does tend to win in community votes quite regularly. I like to keep my dates intentionally vague because I don't believe that. Like, you know, if we talk about historical context, if we're talking about when things started, like civilizations or societies don't necessarily gain an exact understanding of time and events until much later on compared to sort of the medieval world where my world is set. So I think that calendars once again is not something I personally use very much. But yeah, but I'm always surprised at how detailed they are. Because, yeah, I'm repeating Jay, but the amount of festivals that we see or just, you know, it's just the amount of information that people put in these calendars I'm - I mean, I'm very happy they're being put to good use, but it is something that I- “Struggle to understand” is perhaps not the right word, but that was more surprising to me. I wouldn't have expected that it was as big a feature as it is.
 
Melody [13:18]
Note to self, when you control the world, you control time and calendars too. Ok, do you use any tools outside of Kanka for world building?

Jay [13:32]
It's nothing fancy. It used to be Photoshop. And then I stopped paying for Photoshop so I switched to another similar program where it's basically like a more advanced Paint program, not as complex as Photoshop or GIMP. That's kind of where I do my drawing now for my maps. Otherwise the only other tools I use is Discord to run the game. When I run the game with my friends we'll have a video chat, audio bots to play music from Spotify, and also DND Beyond is the other tool I use 'cause I - I'm glad long gone are the days where I had to help my players create the character sheets. Now it's just more like… ooh, would this feature- would this ability for my character make sense in the campaign you want to run and… not anymore, “What's my AC? What are my hit points at Level 3? How many spells do I have after a long rest?” So I'm glad things like DND Beyond exist now where I don't have to - I can focus more on running the game and worldbuilding and less on helping my characters figure out which starting equipment they have, et cetera. So those are the three, but like: DND Beyond, Discord, and this Paint program are the main ones I use.
 
Jon [14:42]
Because of my use case, I don't personally use anything other than Kanka. I don't really need anything that's sort of role-playing related as it's really just for documenting of the world types of building for my novel. So no, just Kanka for me.
 
Melody [14:57]
Where do you go for inspiration for worldbuilding?

Jay [15:02]
For me a big inspiration, has always been- well not always has been, I discovered Critical Role. I think just as Campaign One ended and I would have been DMing for a bit for my friends and I was just thinking how can I improve the way I DM? How can improve the game for everyone, how can I make it more fun for everyone? And I discovered Critical Role, and started watching it and enjoyed it and enjoyed Matt; just his sheer love for the craft of worldbuilding and being in character and crafting these really fun stories. That inspires me a lot, just to be better and to, yeah, just seeing how much fun he and his friends have and replicating that somehow on my table. Another big inspiration or big help was Matt Colville who also has many videos on being a better DM, running the game, et cetera. He has some really excellent… just I used to watch his videos religiously whenever they came out, and that also helped me just to see again from a perspective of someone with more experience who's been DMing for a long time. How do they handle these situations where I just didn't know how to handle? And then another big place of influence, or where I get inspiration is Reddits. There are several great communities on Reddits for worldbuilding, for DMing, for creativity, for handling your players. Some’s particular for DND 5th Edition, like DND Behind the Screen, which is a great resource for amazing contents and that's where I'll get some creativity. Otherwise a big place of inspiration. For me it's just history. There are several really cool You Tube channels like OSP. I forgot their full name. They do various video essays on various parts of history, or Extra Credits. They'll do on various, again, history or mythology or myths or legends. These are all great sources to like get inspired for an idea. I used some of Extra Credits… I don't remember which one, but there's one about creature from it similar to hags, like a weird creepy creature. And I used that for one of my story arcs where the players encountered a hag coven, and that was the big bad for 20 sessions. Just history. I love just going to Wikipedia and going down to a rabbit hole and suddenly ending up on, “Oh, something about the Reconquista.” And then be “Oh, this is interesting how they, again, there was a power vacuum,” like I said before, and that kind of- there's the religious aspect, which is also the power aspect, where there was this chance and they seized it to start reconquering Spain and kind of using that to influence my worldbuilding. Or when I'm working on an empire and thinking, “Okay, what's the political structure?” Go on Wikipedia or looking back, it's Rome or other big impacts of the past, how they were structured and using that as inspiration. Jon?
 
Jon [17:50]
Yeah, I think, you know, expanding a tiny bit on Jay's point about history. I think history is full of inspiration for just about everyone. Especially... There's so much that we don't know, of course, but I think, you know, you take history classes and your history classes are always going to be centered around something that's relevant to your historical context. So I think if we think of that within Europe we're talking about, you start off with ancient Egyptians, you move on to ancient Greece, you move on to Rome and then you move on to everything surrounding barbarian invasions of Rome in Germanic tribes, the Vikings, you know, Charlemagne moving forwards and so on and so forth. But I think within that, I mean there are of course because you- we don't have time and we're only children, but there are glaring gaps within our historical knowledge about any cultures that aren't necessarily centered around the world in which we’re brought up. So if we're talking sort of examples, you know, if we're thinking about my exposure to the history of different groups and different countries, we can talk about East Asia. You can even talk about Africa or Latin America, but I think these are things that are very much only explained when they are relevant to the narrative of your country or of your culture. And so I think within that, it's important to keep in mind that there's a lot of inspiration out there, usually about histories that you have very little knowledge of and that a lot of people around you won't necessarily have much knowledge of either. And so I think within history there is just an endless wealth of inspiration that we haven't really been exposed to and so I do like to, yeah, peruse some- some history. I do like Japan as a source of inspiration for several civilizations because it's a sort of evolved almost in isolation because of the fact that an island and limited contacts with the exterior world and limited invasions back and forth. I think it's quite interesting to historically see civilization build itself in a completely different way to what happened in Europe. And so I think with history in that sense is an immense source of inspiration because it is almost endless. You could never sort of consume all the history that I just don't think that there's anyone that has that much time or that much capacity for remembering details or whatever. So I think that's a big one. And I think within the history, of course, you do have this mythology aspect also, which Jay touched on briefly, which is just that all these old cultures are very rich in their own mythologies and then their own interpretations of the world and topics such as death or divine intervention or what we would potentially call luck today. Mythology is as diverse I guess as there are ancient civilizations because there are all ways of explaining the world around you that different people from different places around the world sort of came up with for lack of a better word. And then, you know, on a more sort of contemporary note, I do get a lot of inspiration from books and games and also a bit travel. Travel also comes into that because it's sort of the first hand exposure to something very different. And then that can also awaken my curiosity when it comes to the history of a place. You know, I'll travel to a place and then I'll realize I know very little about it, and then I'll end up reading a bunch about it just to kind of get some exposure to that. Yeah, so I guess history for me is a large part of it. And then there are, of more contemporary note, books and games. Books in particular, more so than games, I think. As I said, I love books with a very extensive lore. And, you know, Tolkien is always a good example. But even R. R. Martin is pretty - George R. R. Martin has some pretty good lore surrounding his universe. And I've been reading a lot of Brian [Brandon?] Sanderson lately, and that's always different also because he's really come up -It's quite interesting actually, the way his universe works, because it's almost, in a way, the way I would consider building a universe with sort of everything boiling down to these deities initially and then there's dispersal among different worlds within the same universe/solar system. And so it's been interesting to see how he goes about this because it's an approach that I can totally get behind. And that of course, you know, like with everyone imagines magic differently and everyone imagines different, sort of, supernatural phenomenons differently. And it's always interesting to kind of inspire yourself from these different interpretations of what is essentially the same thing.
 
Melody [22:08]
Ooh, that's great. Thank you for sharing that. Are there any questions you wish I had asked you about worldbuilding?
 
Jay [22:17]
Another one, another question I thought of is: what are maybe misconceptions of worldbuilding? And for me, it's like it doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to figure out every detail. You can let out a lot of blanks. When you're building your world because the world wasn't built… or Rome wasn't built in a day, and just like you can't build your world in a day and your first idea is like a book to your first draft won't be the one you publish. You're going to do iterations so you don't get too hung up on the details. If this city name you're not happy with it or this party not happy with it, leave it simmer in your head for a bit and come back to it later. Don't try and make it perfect or make sense because especially if you're doing role-playing games, your players won't notice the inconsistencies. They won't notice that, "Oh, you've already used this river name in this other place," or whatever. It's just these are fun little things. Like it's not important. Worldbuild. Get creative. Throw this creativity to your players. Let the chaos reign. They will bring chaos to your world. Let it - let the chaos reign and have fun.
 
Jon [23:27]
Yeah, I think that's uh, honestly, good closing words. I don't know that I really want to add much to that.

Jay [23:32]
Embrace the chaos.

Jon [23:34]
Embrace the chaos.

Melody [23:36]
Awesome. Thank you both Jon and Jay for being here with us. We really, really appreciate your time and all this wonderful information you've shared with us.

Jon [23:48]
I hope this was what you needed.
 
Melody [23:50]
You've been great interviewees.

Jon [23:53]
Perfect. A lot of rambling, that's what you get.
 
Melody [23:57]
It's been a pleasure speaking with you and thank you again so much for being with us.

Jay [24:02]
Awesome. Yeah, thank you so much. Have a good one. Take care.

Jon [24:02]
Good.

Jon [24:04]
Thanks and good day.

Melody [24:07]
To our listeners, please see the podcast description for details on how you can connect with Jon and Jay, and visit Kanka.io while you're at it. This is the last podcast episode for our interview with Jay and Jon. There are, however, more interviews coming up so stay tuned. Follow us to receive notifications when new podcasts are released. For more podcasts and information, check out our website: https://www.gamemastercertification.org/. If you liked what you've heard in this episode, please share it. Thank you for listening.
 
Jon [24:44] 
Catch you later.