Exchange of Realities

During yesterday’s riff on dreams, I mentioned the idea of a character’s dreamscape—a semi-constant world created by the typical dream-patterns of a single character. It’s one part alternate world, one part character exercise, and plenty of fun in its own right.

The first thing to consider is the dreamscape terrain; what’s a world if there’s nothing to stand on? For some dreamers, the terrain is a reflection of their history; you might see landmarks from their youth or places they might want to visit, and the landscape itself might resemble one they’re used to. Others can be based on personality; a character with a generally standoffish personality and a lot of emotional control may have a downright wintry dreamscape, while one who grew up on stories may have something downright fanciful.

Then there’s the question of what populates it. Sure, you can have normal people and creatures, but why stop there? The limit is in what the dreamer can imagine—do bits and pieces of the dreamer’s personality run around wearing her shape? Are there large numbers of creatures that seem as much like scenery as anything, like faceless ghosts or flocks of butterflies with leaves for wings? Some dreamscapes have their own guardians. These might be people or mythical creatures; they might draw from people the dreamer admires or fears, from legends, from the dreamer’s ideal self, from combinations of the above.

In some dreamscapes, even the laws of physics might vary with the dreamer’s personality. Imagine one where there is no gravity, or gravity is variable depending on where you are. What about a place where people’s physical abilities don’t matter, and it’s mental flexibility and force of personality that help you in a fight, because that’s what the dreamer values? Does it take a longer or shorter time to get from point A to point B? Might people be replaced by their shadows? Does conversation come out as music? In a sufficiently trippy dreamworld, who knows what might be possible? For a lesser version, people with more rigid minds might have harder dreamscapes to shape, and the more compassionate may have more habitable dreamscapes.

I had occasion to play with instant dreamscape creation last week, when my players were trying to learn how to function in my take on the dreamworld. I needed someone to let them practice in the mind of in a quick montage, and the logical choice seemed to be my hyper deathdealer, Ruby.

Somehow, the training ends up being in her mind. It seemed like a good idea at the time, since she was known not to have any Dark Secrets, Confidential Information or particularly disturbing bits of history that might crop up in there. On the other hand, attempting to practice fighting when surrounded by small fluffy things with melting eyes and six-inch fangs and occasionally in the distance seeing an enormous flaming squid frolicking in a tranquil sea, not to mention the almost blindingly bright color scheme, the perpetual clouds of butterflies, and the near-diabetic sweetness of a lot of it, was a bit… jarring.

Says a certain amount about Ruby herself, doesn’t it? That’s half the fun of a dreamscape; along with being an excuse to describe wonders that wouldn’t occur in the waking world, you can also sneak a little character exposition into your design. Have you given it a shot?

A little over a year ago, I talked about heroes/adventurers and their day jobs; not everyone can support themselves by adventuring, and not everyone wants to. The problem with these sorts of jobs is that many people just don’t find them interesting; they might take time away from a game group, seem “too much like real life” (yes, I’ve had complaints about this), or just be hard to come up with decent events for. But if you don’t do something with them, they may as well not be there, right?

The answer, then, is to come up with just enough detail to make it a worthy background. Here are some things you might need.

What exactly is the job? If you can’t summarize it, it’s hard to get it across, whether it’s being a doctor, teaching, serving as the translator for the God of Prophecy (irregular hours, but the pay’s good). Which leads to three simple questions: what does the character do, when does he do it, and who does he do it for? (In some cases, “How does he do it?” may also be applicable.

What are the people around him like? Just about any workplace is going to have at least one standout personality. Usually, it’s the boss, since everyone pretty much has to know who the boss is; likewise, it might be a similar-ranked coworker, or someone responsible for the character’s training—basically, someone whose name, position or personality sticks out. Once that’s established, occasional references to that person doing that-person-ish things can give a feel without actually requiring being there.

Are there any interesting tasks it involves, that fit with the job but are outside its norm and thus notable for the character? Try slipping in references to those while summing up downtime. Take my library job. There’s not much point talking about standard situations, since libraries are pretty universal. But on the other hand, if your first time meeting the commanding general is when she walks in unannounced one Saturday morning when you’re the most senior employee on duty, and you’re having to figure out how you’re supposed to act and how you tell her she’s got a book overdue, it’s something you’re not likely to forget. An offhand summary of a situation like that can say a lot about the job without having to spend time on it.

Then there are the situations that happen at work but aren’t necessarily work-related—or at least, not related to the character’s work. They don’t say as much about the job specifically, but they say something about what can happen there, a little something about the world, and a bit about the people, particularly in how they react to it. “The boss locked his keys in his car and wigged out about it, and now we’re all stressed” or “One of the patrons told me a story about nearly being recruited by the CIA, and I had most of a blog post on it by the time I left” is one thing; seeing a coworker who was missing and possibly confirmed dead at lunch the next morning and everyone acting normal about this is something else entirely.

So what is it like working for these people or in this position? You don’t need to write or play out half the workday just to get it across.

One of the biggest problems people have with worldbuilding is that it involves a whole lot of detail—and the paradox that while not all of it is plot relevant, and too much irrelevant detail only bogs things down, you need a certain amount that both is and isn’t plot relevant to make the world seem more rounded. The difficulty, of course, is getting there: either having enough detail to give the world that nice rounded shape, or knowing which details to insert and how to bring them in cleanly so it doesn’t look like dropping information just to show off.

Which brings us to tonight’s technique: Buy one get one free setting detail. Essentially, what this does is pair a piece of information that’s there to further the setting rather than for any specific purpose (optional information) with a piece that’s necessary, if not for the plot than at least for the current scene (essential information). When the essential information is invoked—usually by player question in a game, or by plot necessity in a story—the optional information gets added as well, usually as a modifier or an addendum to the essential information. Where’s it come from? Either it was there already, or it’s made up at the last minute as a way to make the answer interesting.

In order to make buy one get one free setting detail work, the essential information and the optional information have to be compatible; if the optional information is a non sequitur, the setup seems contrived, while if the optional information is just a refined aspect of the essential information, the flow is natural. It’s best if it’s something the character would ‘already know’ or be able to notice easily; for instance, it makes sense to tell a person who’s in a library waiting for someone what the books in his general area are, but it’s kind of silly to give the same level of title and author detail to someone who’s more concerned with which ones he can throw at his enemies. (There are, of course, exceptions to this—if it’s already a running joke that a certain author’s magnum opus doubles as a lethal weapon, and the character’s aware of this, he might even be looking for it.)

If you want, you can even make the optional information a key to interpreting the essential information—this is particularly useful when done in terms of the character’s own understanding of the world. Granted, it’s a risky maneuver in a game if you and the character’s player have different images of how he sees the world, but it comes in handy when dealing with things the character knows already when the player doesn’t.

And of course, even the “optional” information doesn’t necessarily have to be irrelevant to the plot; it just doesn’t seem relevant at the moment. This makes buy one get one free setting detail a subtle way of introducing foreshadowing and/or priming Chekhov’s gun.

I had occasion to do a double dose of buy one get one free setting detail not long ago, in a side-chat I ran for one of my players. He’d been waiting for one of his friends in another’s personal library one evening, not trying to seem like he was waiting. So he started by asking what the available reading material was, and I first told him about the sections and what parts he might be particularly interested in (as requested, with the side detail of confirming some things he already knew about the library’s owner’s taste in books), then added a little optional detail about one of the books he might want to look more closely at. Then his friend came in, and I got to lay it on thick:

He can’t hear Amaya come in, but he can smell her—or rather, he can smell her dinner. Probably Devin’s cooking—it’s definitely not Luath’s, has too much scent to be [Amaya’s], and hardly anyone else is home.

See how much you can sneak into one sentence? In there, I get to allude Amaya’s tendency towards moving quietly, give him some idea who else his character would be aware or assume is home right now (a detail we skipped when setting the scene), and says a little about the cooking styles of those he’s considering and eliminating. And without the smell of the food, he might not have noticed her entering.

The best part of buy one get one free setting detail is that the characters are asking for it. In a game setting, the asking is usually explicit, with a player asking about his character’s surroundings or about things he might already know; in a story, it’s more implicit, usually being observed or considered by an active character.

So give ‘em a two for one special when they’re looking for information, and watch the world go rounder.

Orientations. Most of us have probably been through at least one, for work, or school, or something else. They’re pretty much a fact of dealing with large organizations, after all. Bunch of people leading you around the system telling you things that were already in the manual, except that every now and then there’s something useful slipped into all the whats and wherefores, or something happens that makes it interesting.

Photo by Michal Zacharzewski

Writers avoid them, gamers more so. Can you blame them? Most orientations are an infodump of epic proportions. Granted, it’s justified to have the announcer going on and on, but it’s also dead boring. On the other hand, there are useful things that can be learned, and sometimes there’s something else going on. Meeting someone, perhaps. Making discoveries. Coming to realizations about the job and what it means (and not always negative ones, either). In fact, one could say that those are the only good reason to run an orientation. The audience is likely to remember standard operating procedure through trial and error, after all.

So how does one execute a scene couched in an orientation?

First off, figure out what the parts that are actually going to matter are, and how many of them actually connect to the orientation itself. Is it an unusually surprising bit of information? Meeting someone? The oddity of being on one of these things when you’ve been in the place you’re getting oriented to for several months and actually work for one of the stops on the tour? (I know that one from personal experience.) These, needless to say, deserve to be given detail, so figure out what that detail looks like.

Then summarize as much as you can of the rest. It’s particularly easy in writing, when you can actually show the character’s eyes glazing over by going from the first few sentences of actual quote and word by word to a summary. Specific motivational pitches, bits of paperwork, whatever, give way to “and then a movie about [subject], and then a short speech about [subject], and the brochures piled up on the desk like leaves in fall.” The best part about the summarizing is that, when you introduce the thing that matters and start describing it with specifics rather than generalities, whether it’s a quote or a character or an incident or what, it’s going to stand out. Harder in a game? Well, yeah, here you’re having to balance out the length of exposition as well as everything else, since the players probably can’t just skim. Pre-write the unimportant parts.

Of course, on the summarized parts, you’re going to want to make every sentence count. If it doesn’t contribute to the context, if it’s just there to be part of the orientation, try to pare it down. Every sentence has to pull its weight, since the more sentences you have, the more likely you are to glaze people’s eyes rather than getting your point across.

Yes, there are very few things inherently more difficult to write well than a standard orientation. But if you can make it work, people will remember it.

A ritual isn’t just a bunch of steps blended together; it has to have a theme. After all, there’s a certain unity to most rituals, something that binds the individual steps together. You don’t often see a ritual involving invocation of the Five Dread Names of the Forbidden One, a reenactment of the last battle between the wind and the water elementals and its peaceful resolution by the Voice of Reason, and five minutes of breakdancing all set in a room that has been decorated in a riot of clashing colors and further granted ambiance through the sound of a children’s choir doing “It’s a Small World” in four-part harmony, now, do you? This is where the theme comes in: to unify the ritual, to make it seem like more than just a mix-and-match welding of interesting-sounding elements. But where can we get themes?

Sometimes, the theme is an action: a multistep process that encompasses the ritual itself. Consider the traveler example used earlier; the entire ritual is based around the process of preparing and eating a meal, and every part of it is encompassed by getting from one end of that dinner to the other. Just about any multi-phase process can be translated into a ritual with a little imagination, from getting up in the morning to preparing a new library book for circulation—even signing on to the computer. Haven’t you ever done something that seemed to have a highly ritualized process?

Similarly, a ritual might be themed around one or more of its necessary components. In this, it doesn’t matter whether the phases of the ritual are all parts of the same process, as long as they all in some way relate to an object or objects vital to the ritual itself. Most often this is done with an object of mystical significance, but it doesn’t have to be the case; one of my best ritual ideas was centered around beads and string.

Some rituals are all about the explicit representation of a particular process. This one’s really popular when you’re dealing with alchemy, and all of its associated formulae, diagrams, and illustrations. In this case, people know what they want to accomplish, and what elements are supposed to go together to create it; if anything, the ritual itself might just be one tremendously long mnemonic rather than a series of necessary behaviors.

Still other rituals are all about reenactment instead of representation, usually of an event important to the concept behind the ritual. Most of these are either myths or major historical events, but all have to have some sort of significance to the ritual’s aim. Complete literalism, though in some cases useful, isn’t always necessary, particularly if the event involved one or more people dying and blood magic isn’t required. Regardless of technical literalism, it will usually be possible for people familiar with the event or story to recognize it through the reenactment.

And sometimes, a simple ritual is created by misunderstood cause and effect; somebody did something and a favorable outcome happened, so they kept doing it to get the favorable outcome to keep happening. Occasionally, it’s even justified with some other natural principle. One of my favorite examples is “summoning” mass transit by beginning something that’s not allowed on the bus, like lighting a cigarette or opening up a non-resealable package of chips; this attempts to harness the tendency of things to happen when it would be most inconvenient by making it inconvenient for the bus to show up.

Themes not only unify the steps of rituals into a coherent whole, but can also be used as a source of inspiration; once you’ve got a theme, it narrows down the list of possible forms the ritual can take, making it easier to choose appropriate steps and elements without being overwhelmed.

A well-described ritual can be an excellent tool: it lets storytellers create immersion, and allows RPG players to make their actions sound nifty and their crazy magical schemes just the slightest bit more plausible. But how to go about figuring out what they look like? In my experience, the best way to do so is to look at the heart of what has created ritualistic behavior for millennia: symbolism.

In essence, that is what a ritual is—a chain of symbols that to its creators seemed to evoke the desired result of the ritual itself, whether the ritual is known magic or a social behavior, known to always work when done correctly or based in belief. A ritual can be as straightforward as attempting to attain to the better qualities of a deceased individual by consuming her organs, or as complex and multistage as a Japanese tea ceremony, but in every phase it is possible to build a connection, however tenuous, between the action and what it is meant to accomplish.

When composing a ritual, I create two parallel chains of symbols. The first chain is one of images: to be exact, the steps in the metaphysical world at large that in the minds of the ritual’s creators would lead to the desired result. Often it recreates an existing myth, a natural process, or some other way of envisioning the purpose of the ritual. The second is a chain of action—the things that the person performing the ritual does to evoke those images. Despite the name, not everything symbolic in this chain is an act. This is the part where we bring in objects, circumstances, even people: this is where the limiting factors of the ritual come into play. In fact, a nice detailed ritual can justify many of the more exotic requirements; if people can tell why they’re needed, they’re less likely to complain about how difficult it is.

For instance, imagine a ritual a traveler performs to ensure a safe journey. Its chain of images breaks down to having the blessings of the spirits along her path, the guidance of the sun and stars so she doesn’t lose her way, the cooperation of the environmental factors (or at least their noninterference), and, of course, the traveler’s own health and strength. This one takes the form of a meal, cooked alone by the traveler, as she will be walking alone, the night before her departure. The food itself is chosen for two aspects: one, its association with health, strength and endurance (I shouldn’t have to explain why), and two, its tendency when cooked to create a great deal of fragrant smoke and/or steam (the scent, rising skyward, serves as an offering to the celestial navigational bodies). Before she begins to eat, she sets aside a small plate of food as a bribe for the spirits on her path, inviting them with her own variant on the stock invitation—the sentiment is universal, but the words are her own. Sometime during the meal, probably at an inconvenient moment, she is ambushed by a friend or relative armed with sopping wet washcloths, representative of the hazards of the journey; if she’s already been drenched before she leaves, might not luck and the road take pity on her and keep the rain off her back? And in the end, when she has finished every bite, she washes hands, face and dishes with those same saturated washcloths, resilient in the face of hardship, and goes to say her farewells.

Of course, the elements’ ties to their symbolism doesn’t have to be as obvious as all that. Ritual symbolism tends to range from the blatant to the obscure, often depending on how old the ritual is and how secretive those who practice it are.

Write on!

Magical rituals have been around as long as magic has been a plot device, for a wide variety of reasons. Sometimes they’re plot-vital, keeping magic from taking a form that would be inconvenient for plot, world, or creator’s sanity; sometimes they’re more indirect-expository, created more to say something about the people who perform them than to help or hinder the magic in any way. It’s not even clear if all of them work, but half the fun is not being quite sure, isn’t it?

Sometimes, the ritual is important to the laws of the world, or to keeping the plot where it’s supposed to be without shattering suspension of disbelief or making the characters seem too stupid to live. When someone doesn’t want to write magic as just a few flicks of a wand or sufficient concentration, in comes a ritual. If someone’s trying to keep a magical effect from being overused by making it inconvenient or difficult in some way (time, resource cost, etc), they bring in a ritual. If they’re trying to do something that seems like it should be reasonable but the Way Magic Works doesn’t expressly accommodate it—ritual. Need something that agents of the other side can interfere in more easily than a standard spellcasting? Use a ritual. Looking for a way for people without inherent magic to produce magical effects? Have them learn a ritual! Want magic that’s secret by the standards of your magic system? Use a…. you get the idea.

But it doesn’t have to be as Rigid and Vital a purpose as that. Some magical rituals are more about flavor, essentially characterizing the cultures and subcultures from which they sprung up; in these, you might have two different cultures—or even two different schools of magic—perform a ritual to get the same effect, but do completely different things in order to get there. Sometimes, the process or effect of the ritual says something about the overall morality of the people performing it, whether that something is true or not—people tend to react differently to human sacrifice or when debasement isn’t just where de ceremony takes place than they do to reciting long formulae or creating overly complex but beautiful diagrams. Still others characterize their components: their symbolic value, their magical uses, or even the ritual creator’s opinion of them. Use of rituals can imply that a character has particularly arcane knowledge, and can set one group apart from others like them. And inserting them into a game as flavor test, like in the creation of a magic item, can make something seem a lot more interesting and important than just making a sequence of Crafting rolls (and certainly, no intelligent magic item should be without one).

One fun thing about rituals is that unless they’re explicitly designed as game mechanics, they don’t have to actually do what they say they do; in fact, magic doesn’t even have to really exist for there to be complicated rituals that try to draw on it. Just think about all the little superstitions of this day and age. It’s also quite possible that not all of a ritual’s components are really necessary, for any of a number of reasons. If the scientific method hasn’t quite occurred to the people designing these things, they might include a number of factors just because “it worked last time we included them!” Likewise, if you’ve got a group trying to keep power, they might try to make sure that all the known rituals have a component only they can provide, or an element that lets them track who’s doing it.

In short, there’s plenty of use for a good magical ritual. But how do you use them, and how do you make them interesting? Stay tuned.

When I was first hired on, I’m not sure what I was imagining a military base library to be, but I didn’t expect the interesting range of similarities and differences to public libraries that mine had. And between the fact that not everyone who reads this is going to have seen a military library, and the emphasis on library form being determined by library function that I put in my last post, I may as well show you what my Marine library looks like from a patron’s POV.

At first glimpse, you might mistake it for a small public library. There’s the circulation desk, up front, with its two reference computers; the internet room a ways to the right, the copier and the fax machine to the left; the single drop box is an internal wall slot rather than an external bin. Nonfiction fills the first room (weighted, of course, towards military history, which covers about half the normal shelves, as well as the ‘professional collection’ wall), DVDs the room behind it, and fiction and the juvenile and YA sections are in smaller rooms off to the side, all clearly labeled though not all labels visible from the door. In the main room, as well, there’s a magazine rack and a newspaper rack, three tables—one with at least one puzzle, probably more, one with a patron on a laptop, one with a pile of somebody’s gear—and a shelf each for travel and test prep. At any given time, you’ll likely see between two and four techs in the main room, one on Sundays; if you’re lucky, you might even see one of our two librarian/admins. And of course, there are brochures advertising programs, posted rules for the internet (and a corresponding sign-in sheet), and potted plants on top of every other bookshelf.

Then you notice the decorations. There’s a reproduction of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima painting just inside the door, similar paraphernalia at various places throughout the wall, a paired national and service branch miniature flag set on the end of one shelf, a bust of the anthropomorphic Marine bulldog mascot on the other. The bulletin boards are full of events on the base targeted primarily to Marines and secondarily to their families, except the one in the back half-covered with postings for jobs at Miramar. And then on the far wall there’s the crest, right below the banner that says “Commandant’s Reading List” (bet you didn’t know that Marines had homework!) and right above the shelf dominated by the big binder labeled “Marine Reading List”. (But wait near the desk for a little while; it’s almost a given that someone wearing desert camouflage will come in, probably as part of a group, almost invariably with two chevrons or fewer on his collar, and ask if we have the list and if so where it is.)

Speaking of that desert camouflage, you may not see it too often off-base but here (at least in summer) you’re unlikely not to see it. Some days they’re just a few tan spots in an already empty library, but more often they’re in small knots, swarming the tech lab or the copier, walking in pairs up to the Commandant’s List shelf to choose the subject for their book report or bemoan the fact that all the copies of the Art of War are checked out again, crowding into the TV room for a movie with explosions and shouting, bunching up behind the last shelf of the fiction room for a board game (yes, we provide those too). If the copier’s swarmed with camouflage and the tables are full of overflow from the computer room, the printers both working at top speed, it’s probably Tuesday, and Recruiter School has probably begun a new session. If instead they’re in a tidy mob between the reference desk and the tables, sprinkled with people in civvie garb and listening to one person lecture them about DVDs, internet programs and a coffee machine while another unobtrusively weaves through them distributing flyers, it’s Welcome Aboard and probably the first time any of that group has been through these doors.

Of our fiction, adult General Fiction comprises the largest portion of the holdings, with mysteries a little way behind and Westerns, mostly read by the retirees who pop in almost as often as the men and women in uniform do, narrowly edging out “Science Fiction” for third place. Then again, the audiobook collection is as large as the science fiction section. Children’s books get a room to themselves (along with children’s DVDs, seventy-five percent of which sport the strip of paper sticking out from under the back cover that signifies they’re checked out). Young adult (which seems to be entirely fiction and biographies) doesn’t; it’s four shelves around the outside of the TV room. It’s not clear if the Powers That Be understand what constitutes age ratings on a movie; instead, ‘Juvenile’ DVDs are all animated in some way, and the rest are all not.

Can you see how the patrons and the location have shaped the building?

Do you want a way of explaining where characters acquired or could acquire knowledge without having to worry about where they keep the books? A point of contact for academics, with each other or possibly even with everyone else? A way to make sure that knowledge in your setting, be it facts or stories or even potentially dangerous secrets, is not forgotten?

Image by ams9w3

You may need a library.

But before you fall into the standard model found in public libraries everywhere, think about the overall purpose and feel of your library, and how that would make it different.

First, consider the purpose—and please, be a bit more specific than “that place with books everyone can look at.” Where reproducing manuscripts is expensive, libraries are likelier to be a source of information than a source of books; materials are perused within the building itself, and borrowing might even require special circumstances and proof of trustworthiness. Some might be about finding information quickly and efficiently: in these cases as well, borrowing is likely to be limited, and the emphasis will be on making sure the materials are all well-organized in their places and that the staff know the organization system perfectly. Often, these sorts will be in a specialized field of study, like medicine. On the other hand, you have situations like today’s public libraries, in which the idea is to give people a source of books, fiction is as prevalent as (if not more so than) nonfiction, and a particular book might spend all but about a day or two of its first month in the collection checked out.

Now consider the library’s patrons, both what it’s likely to attract and how the people who come are going to shape the library’s holdings. Purpose will often create patronage: a specialist library draws specialists, logically enough, and a children’s library draws children. If it’s one of those libraries where the books have to be read on the premises, the average patron by necessity will have more time to spare than the average patron in a public library, who can sneak chapters of books between meetings or listen to an audio in a traffic jam on the way home. But the people in the area around the library have an effect as well. For instance, the Oakland Public Library system has a few branches that are the go-to spot for materials in different languages, since they’re in areas with high concentrations of people who speak those tongues. On the other hand, my Marine library (largest demographic enlisted personnel, then retirees, then dependents of the above two groups) not only has the expected slanting towards military history in the nonfiction section, but also features a shelf dedicated specifically to required reading for enlistees and a Western section larger than either its science fiction section or its young adult section.

Here’s a fun question: are the materials it holds necessarily books? Using something else can give a library an exotic feel and necessitate some long-reaching differences in how it’s built and how it’s organized. And even modern public libraries are as likely to have electronic materials as not.

What sorts of services does it offer besides the storage of information? A library can serve as a meeting place or a place to post events; it might host classes or hook mentors up with students. Most public libraries have copy machines and provisions for their patrons to get online. And what more can be done in a fantasy context?

Any of these factors can characterize a library, setting it apart from others of its kind and giving it its own personality. Give it a try!

One of the best things about writing and gaming is that they take skill synergy like almost nothing else in the world does. No matter what you do or learn, odds are that some part of it can apply to the writing desk or the game table. Sometimes it’s direct, sometimes it’s obvious when you’re willing to think twisty, and sometimes it’s entirely unexpected.

Take biology. Micro, macro, medicinal, there’s a lot to work from—and there’s a lot to use. If you’re playing or writing in the real world, it helps you avoid slip-ups like putting polar bears and penguins on the same continent (seriously; someone in one of my writing classes pulled that at one point), having ferrets eating seeds exclusively… you get the idea. Not only that, if you want to do a storyline with some sort of biological threat, you know what you’re talking about. And of course, it can help you write convincing biologists, getting the jargon, the lab procedure and the material to something that doesn’t break a pro’s suspension of disbelief too much.

Then there’s biology in worldbuilding, particularly if you’re the type who sticks to ecosystems and how they work. While some people might settle for just creating newer and scarier predators, there are plenty of other things that a little knowhow can do: create prey animals as scary as the predators, figure out how the various species interact with each other when they’re not getting underfoot for travelers, estimate the impact of a given species on other species and figure out how to keep them from taking over, creating unique but logical behaviors for the critters to engage in and interesting little behavioral quirks—you get the idea. A little life science goes a long way.

Consider applying it to other sciences, particularly if you’re the kind who likes magical tech. People do this already, with things like car paint based on butterfly wings. But when magic gets involved, and when you’re willing to go microbiological, you can get a lot more variety. Consider, if you’ve played it, the City of the Ancients in Final Fantasy 7, where the architecture is very clearly inspired by conch shells. I’ve played a lot with the kinds of things you find inside a cell, like creating a transportation system based on motor proteins.

And every now and then, there’s taking something tangential and slapping it in. That’s one of the things I’ve had the most fun with; I once used the Inner Life of a Cell as a way to show people what a mindmeld with a vast and incomprehensible creature during interplanar transit might be like, I’ve named characters after enzymes because the names sounded cool, and I once had a character and three scenarios inspired by something I saw through a microscope during an experiment. It’s all about having an open mind and a little lateral thought.

Have you ever found new uses for biology in a story or a game? Share away!