Worldbuilding for Masochists

It's hard to find cockatrice eggs at the local market, your elderly colleague needs help saving a pentagram as a PDF, and it turns out your runes operate on proprietary magic and won't function if you don't renew your subscription. Isn't magical life glamorous? Caitlin Rozakis joins us to discuss mundanities of everyday life with fantasy elements.

Whether it's an office building, a kitchen, or the cutthroat atmosphere of a PTA meeting, magic can touch every sphere of life in your world, if you choose to let it. Sometimes that's just about making life easier: heating and purifying water, preserving food, healing wounds. And sometimes it might not help at all. Plus, the development of magic, if widely-spread in a world, is likely to affect how non-magical technology develops -- possibly accelerating some discoveries, but just as possibly circumventing others. So what does the presence of mundane magic do to other aspects of your society?

Whatever it is, we hope, most fervently, that you are never cursed with MagiTechBros.

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Our Guest:

New York Times best-selling author Caitlin Rozakis writes fantasy with a satirical twist and a cozy heart. Her debut novel Dreadful turned out not to be dreadful at all. Her Everyday Enchantments series include standalones The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association and Startup Hell.

She also writes romance under the name Catherine Beck; her novella “Leah’s Perfect Christmas” was adapted into the Hallmark Channel Original Movie “Leah’s Perfect Gift.”

Short stories have appeared under the name R. Rozakis in Cast of Wonders, Aurealis, Daily Science Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Weirdbook, as well as the anthologies Substitution Cipher, Clockwork Chaos,Baker Street Irregulars II, and Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2022.

Caitlin Rozakis is the pen name of Rebecca Rozakis. After graduating from Princeton, she has had too many career changes, including mechanical engineering (cut short after the murderous robot incident), finance (amortizing tequila receivables is not as fun as drinking tequila), and the American Museum of Natural History (who knew emus had birth certificates?), and a number of marketing positions, some at companies you may have even heard of. She lives in Jersey City with her husband and son.

From climatological calamities to terrestrial tragedies, from magical mishaps to interstellar incidents, disasters can be wonderful plot generators. So if you're going to tear apart the world you've lovingly built, how can you do that and what happens when you do? How do the people in your world deal with disasters? Do they attribute it to an act of an unkind god or to something else? What actions do they take to try to stop it -- or avoid it? And what happens to society in the recovery?

And then, how do we apply the elements of sci-fi and fantasy to these disasters? What happens when someone tries to do The Big Magic and rolls a natural 1? Or when space keeps trying to kill everyone who travels through it? We explore some of the common catastrophes particular to genre fiction and their creative uses in narratives.

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Resources: 

The Great Courses: The Black Death: The World's Most Devastating Plague

The Great Courses: The Black Death: New Lessons from Recent Research

The Great Courses: Earth's Great Extinctions

That's right! Former co-host Rowenna Miller is back again to discuss a worldbuilding topic near and dear to our hearts: fashion! How do you take clothing from bog-standard fantasy gear to something unique and specific to your world?

We four are all, obviously, very fashionable when we choose to be — but for people who aren’t clotheshorses, why should you care about fashion in your fiction? Well, for one thing, fashion touches on a lot of other parts of a world -- trade, economy, labor, social classes, etc -- and can quickly communicate aspects of those things to a reader. The choice of what to wear also communicates a lot about an individual character: Do they want to blend in or stand out? Are their clothes utilitarian or sumptuous?

We examine over- and under-used fashion choices in fiction, including scandalous sleeves, dragging skirts, the dearth of hats in fantasy, and the impracticality of leather pants. Also, learn about the "bloop vs squish" theory of the evolution of clothing!

Resources: 

Corsets and Crinolines by Norah Waugh

How to Read a Dress: A Guide to Changing Fashion from the 16th to the 21st Century by Lydia Edwards

How to Be a Tudor and How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman

Fashion: Explore the Collections from the Victoria & Albert Museum

The Fashion History Timeline

The Met Costume Institute Fashion Plates

NYPL: Costume and Fashion History: A Guide to Resources

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Our Guest: Rowenna Miller is the author of The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill, The Palace of Illusions, The Dancer and the Dream Thief, and the Unraveled Kingdom trilogy. She lives in Indiana with her husband, two daughters, four cats, and an ever-growing flock of chickens, where she teaches writing, trespasses while hiking, and spends too much time researching and recreating historical textiles.

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