“The Long Earth” is a Sci-Fi novel by authoring greats Sir Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. In the book, a device for travelling between copies of our Earth is discovered, leading to great social change and many interesting adventures for the book’s characters. The novel is a great example of world building and from it we can derive a simple formula for creating our own fantastic realities. c2t66

 

 

Steppers 6on5n

In “The Long Earth”, a scientist leaves behind a device that allows a person to “step” from our world to the next along a string of earth’s. Think of this string of earth’s like a string of beads – you can move “east” or “west” from earth to earth, step by step. Each earth is a slightly different copy of our own, with a different outcome of evolution or global and cosmic events having left their mark. The device and the instructions for creating them (left on the Internet) leads to the mass migration of people from our own earth (Datum Earth) and the colonization of thousands of other earths.

 

A Formula 3p5j5g

Effectively, the authors have taken our own world, here and now, and added one fact or reality:

There exists a number of different iterations of our earth.

With this reality they add some mechanics to describe how the reality works in practice:

• You can move one earth “east” or “west”, with a device called a “stepper”. This is called stepping.
• Stepping causes nausea.
• Some people can step naturally, without the device or the inconvenient side-effects.
• Readers of the book will be familiar with “stuttering” and “soft spots”, further mechanics of the Long Earth, which describe aspects of how the “reality” works. I won’t go into that now, read the book if you want to know more.

From the above “mechanics” the authors draw conclusions which shape the world (or “worlds” in this case). These conclusions come to light through the narrative of the story:

• People step for various reasons – to explore, to run away, to get rich, and so on.
• Some worlds have dinosaurs, other ancient mammals, others are devoid of life or covered in ocean.
• People have different beliefs about what the Long Earth is, and factions form around those beliefs.

 

In short – a reality – one single concept that defines the world, is represented by a number of mechanics. These mechanics describe how the “reality” works in practice. From these “mechanics” we can derive “consequences”; repercussions of the mechanics that are visible in the world.

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Reality -> Mechanics -> Consequences 5f2c1a

 

Taking these principles into , it’s easy to see how they can be expanded on or repeated to add more complexity to the world or an aspect of it. I think “The Long Earth” works well, at least as a novel, because it isn’t an overly complex world, yet from the core “reality” an interesting world containing infinite possibilities is derived. That’s what makes this formula so great: it’s simple and limitless. Give it a try in your own campaign, it will give you the framework your imagination needs to run wild.