Worldbuilding for Masochists

This episode was recorded during LACon V / WorldCon 2026 in Anaheim! At the time of recording, we had about 32 hours left of being Schrodinger's Hugo Finalists. Well, we once again did not win -- but we had a fantastic time at WorldCon nonetheless! And one of the best things about being there, besides getting to hang out with each other, is getting to see some of our listeners and take questions live.

We talk about the history of the podcast, what got us into loving and writing fantasy, how research can affect worldbuilding mid-stream, how to create worlds that don't just feel like rat mazes for the protagonist, exploring the sliding scale of magic systems, and more!

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For a writer, a "better" government doesn't necessarily mean well-functioning or benevolent; it means “more complex and better for your story” -- which may well mean a government that is worse-functioning in interesting ways! But fantasy governments tend to look like one of two things: an absolutist monarchy or a US/UK-style representative government, flattened out in ways that ignore potentially juicy layers of bureaucracy, negotiation, and power struggles. So how can we make choices for our fictional worlds that reflect the wide variety of ways people agree to live in a society together and provide compelling plot hooks and character motivations?

To figure that out, we can start by asking: What role does the government play in your story? Where does it intersect with your characters’ lives and with the plot? A political game-of-thrones type plot will need a lot of building out, but even a cozy romcom or an intimate noir will have aspects touched by that society’s government. What are the in-world conditions that led to your world's government having the shape that it does? Economic stressors, rebellions, coups, invasions, ideological shifts -- many factors in your world could contribute to a government's development, maintenance, and fall, and your characters might have their hands on some of those levers.

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Resources:

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (now a Hugo Winner for Best Related Work!)

Council of Foreign Relations: Forms of Government Introduction

That's right! It's infrastructure week at Worldbuilding for Masochists! So we're talking about the systemic underpinnings of a nation and its economy, the fixed installations that it needs in order to function -- which, admittedly, might sound like the exact sort of overly-detailed, tedious, weighty worldbuilding that people sometimes complain about.

Okay, except, so much in your plot probably depends on things like how people, goods, and information move around! This makes infrastructure perhaps the most iceberg-y of the iceberg things that your reader should only see the tip of, but that you might need to think a lot more deeply about.

So -- Who builds the roads, bridges, dams, and canals in your world? Who maintains transportation hubs and communication networks? Who controls all those points of access to both utilities and information? Who benefits from these systems? Who gets screwed over by them? And, critically, what does this mean for your plot and your characters? Whether you're riding horses over vast plateaus or zipping around at lightspeed, the logistics of time and space are likely to have some kind of an impact. How easily a message can get passed along -- or delayed -- can have serious implications. (Just ask Romeo). Points of change like revolutions or technological advances can seriously upset people's daily lives and the direction of whole nations. In this episode, we explore the ways that infrastructure can give you plot hooks, character motivations, and complicating factors.

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Resources: 

Educational Video from Dr. Esmé Louise James: Was it possible to get finger-blasted inside a Regency carriage?

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Ancient Road

UNRV: How Did the Ancient Romans Send Messages?

Bret Devereaux's Resources for Worldbuilders (many articles about logistics)

History of the Gander International Airport

Overly Sarcastic Productions: Trope Talk: Space Westerns

Magic is a lot of what makes fantasy fantasy. So, how can you do it better? What makes magic good and fun to read in the first place? Here at Worldbuilding for Masochists, we feel pretty strongly that magic systems should be more than an infographic, a D&D table, or a Sorting Hat. How, then, do we build magic into a world in a way that makes sense? And, even more importantly (because absurd and mysterious magic can certainly exist), how can we choose our magic intentionally in a way that allows us to explore something interesting both in the invented world and as commentary on our own?

We interrogate how things like our world's education system and capitalism may have detrimentally influenced the current vogue for "hard magic" systems, clearly delineated and highly transactional. Magic often seems both ancient and calcified; what happens when you make it something that is still being discovered and learned about, or something in a state of change? What systems of power have been built around magic, and how can navigating those create problems for your characters? In this episode, we poke at a lot of assumptions about magic and imagine some ways to draw out engaging plot hooks and character dynamics.

Also! If you'll be at LA WorldCon in two weeks, here are our schedules: Marshall | Cass | Natania

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Resources: 

Cass's handout on Making Magic

Overly Sarcastic Productions: Trope Talk: Magic

Fantasy protagonists are highly prone to getting stabbed, sliced, impaled, poisoned, bonked on the head, dropped off cliffs, and otherwise wounded. Which means they need someone to patch them up! So who does that in your invented world, and how do they learn to do it? Guest Jesse Aragon joins us to discuss emergency medicine and other issues of healing.

How much reality can you -- and should you -- bring into the medical components of your world? Waving a wand and curing all ills is easy, but potentially unsatisfying, but on the other hand, our heroes can rarely spare six months away from their Quest to let bones knit or infections pass. So just how much magic -- or sci-fi technology -- can you bring in to smooth the process along, and how do you make those things fit in with the rest of your world? Are there medical schools, or do you learn in a master-apprentice type system? How much experimentation is there? How well do your characters understand the real workings of the human body? And, most importantly: How do you get plot hooks out of it?

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Our Guest: Jesse Aragon* is a writer of sci-fi and fantasy, usually both at the same time. Her work features morally complicated protagonists, horror, tragedy, the numinous, and deep dives into the darkest, messiest parts of human nature.

She grew up overseas, and “home” for her is everywhere from Brussels, Belgium to Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has a Psychology BA, an EMT-I license, and a BSN. She has been an usher, a cashier, a server, a home health aide, an EMT, an ER tech, and a trauma RN—her jobs have consistently been much stranger than any fiction she writes.

When she’s not writing, she enjoys weightlifting, video games, and horror movies. She loves cats, green chiles, and UFO lore.

Her debut novel, THE DEMON STAR, is forthcoming from DAW/Astra in July 2026!

*Yes, this is a real name. No, it has nothing to do with Lord of the Rings. No, she is not (so far as she knows) a descendant of Catherine of Aragon. It is a very common surname for people of Hispanic descent in Mexico and the Southwestern US.