First example — Star Wars
Darth Vader is second only to the Emperor, everybody knows that. But it didn’t seem to be the case in 1977.
In Episode IV, Vader is the muscle. He doesn’t even sit at the conference table, and paces around the room like an attack dog on a leash. That’s exhibit A.
Admiral Motti says, “Don’t try to frighten us with your sorcerer’s ways, Lord Vader.”
If the supreme ruler of the galaxy is a 10th dan black belt, no officer will ever joke about someone’s “karate shtick,” right? It doesn’t make sense. Motti’s scathing words, “Your sad devotion to that ancient religion...” unequivocally indicates that the Galactic Emperor, in Lucas’ mind, was not a Sith at this point.
Vader begins to Force choke Motti — but is ordered to stand down. That’s exhibit B.
The Sith Lord clearly isn’t the Emperor’s second-in-command here.
In ’77, galactic domination ain’t Vader’s chief concern: he is mostly obsessed with finding and killing his old master. “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed,” he says. “The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”
In the script, we can read: “Grand Moff Tarkin, governor of the Imperial outland regions, enters. He is followed by his powerful ally, The Sith Lord, Darth Vader.”
That sounds odd, doesn’t it? After all, Himmler wasn’t a “powerful ally” of Hitler’s — he was under his command. Mussolini was a powerful ally: not actually in the Third Reich, but from another country. That’s what an ally usually is. If you belong to the same military, you’re not an “ally,” you’re either an officer or a soldier. That’s exhibit C.
Three years later, in The Empire Strikes Back, there are no new Grand Moffs. Vader is the Emperor’s right-hand man, and he calls him “my master.” The Emperor is now a Sith, too. Worldbuilding has occurred.
In the very beginning, it was a military empire, with a lone “sorcerer” ally who wasn’t that impressed by the Death Star. Later, it became a Sith empire — with military personnel.
Huge difference.
We can assume that Vader isn’t actually part of the Galactic Empire in ’77. He stands to the side, like Destro in G.I. Joe — scary enforcer and / or independent contractor. The Sith Lord is Tarkin’s powerful ally, not the Empire’s. Seems like the Grand Moff personally hired Vader to retrieve the stolen Death Star plans; an unusual situation quite similar to Vader later hiring the bounty hunters to find the Falcon.
Tarkin, not Vader, has a direct line to the Emperor. “I’ve just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently.”
Vader isn’t a ranking officer in the Empire. Not yet.
Get this: in a “Revenge of the Jedi” deleted scene, the new Death Star commander refuses to let Vader enter Palpatine’s throne room.
When they remake A New Hope — let’s face it, it’s inevitable — they’ll rectify those details; Vader will indeed sit at the conference table, and Motti won’t mock him at all.
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Whether or not you agree with this analysis, one fact remains: the character of Darth Vader is much more dominant in The Empire Strikes Back than it was in A New Hope ― and that is due to cogent worldbuilding. How many times have we heard game designers say: “If your players connect with one NPC, give that NPC more importance in the next games.”
It is what Lucas did. Both kids and adults loved “The Sith Lord,” enjoyed his “sorcerer’s ways” and his “sad devotion to that ancient religion.” So, now, let’s give him more screen time and make him less of a loner, less like Merlin in Camelot; let’s take King Arthur — boom, he’s a sorcerer too! The Galactic Emperor himself is going to have his own sorcerer’s ways and a (no longer sad) devotion to that ancient religion. Vader is gonna be the Emperor’s apprentice. Thus, technically, the Empire’s number two.
That’s how you worldbuild.
Overhaul. Interweave.
After A New Hope, Lucas took governor Tarkin’s “ally” and the unseen Galactic Emperor, and linked them directly to one another. It made good sense, and enriched the world’s core principle, which is the Force. Imagine what Star Wars would be if Lucas had failed to do that.
Second example — The Hobbit
In my penultimate 2021 post, Low-concept vs High-concept, I talked about the giants that we see in The Hobbit, when Bilbo and the Dwarves are crossing the Misty Mountains. I thought it was totally preposterous, but someone recently told me that the “stone giants” are indeed mentioned in the source material. I was taken aback. Yes, it has been a long while since I read The Hobbit. I didn’t recall that one sentence, like, at all. My bad.
“Bilbo… saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang… they could hear the giants guffawing and shouting all over the mountainsides.”
Believe it or not, those insane 300-foot tall elemental giants did not come from Peter Jackson’s fevered mind. So he was right to include them in the movie, wasn’t he?
Since we’re discussing worldbuilding, this is noteworthy.
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit around 1933, including the duelling giants for stylistic effect, fairytales and all. After that, as he started working on The Lord of the Rings, he completely scrubbed these creatures. His world was slowly shaping up, and he kept the Trolls, the Ogres, the Orcs and the Goblins, but abandoned the Stone Giants. Why?
He knew they wouldn’t fit. Even at that early stage, Tolkien certainly knew who Melkor would be, and how he would have perverted some of Arda’s creatures to make Trolls, Orcs, Goblins and so forth; but a race of rock hurling titans — how come? It’d upset the world’s balance. Indeed, why puny 40-foot Balrogs when you could have an army of towering elementals the size of the Statue of Liberty?
So Tolkien cut them out and never spoke of giants again in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales.
Top-notch worldbuilding.
But then Peter Jackson went and undid that.
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There’s a reason why Lucas scratched the name Starkiller, and there’s a reason why he cut the scene with Biggs Darklighter: they are bad names. Writing the script, Lucas probably tried many permutations — Starlighter, Starwalker, Darkwalker, Skylighter, Skykiller. In the end, he kept the one name that sounded really good.
What Disney is doing, returning to pre-1977 drafts and bringing back those deleted names and characters, is bad worldbuilding.
If there’s a Dark side and a Light side, there should be lightsabers and darksabers — right? Bad, and almost childish, if you think about it. When my nephew was 4 or 5, he saw a blue fire hydrant on the street, across from the park, and as soon as this information registered in his five-year-old brain — those things on the sidewalk aren’t always red, there can be other colors — as soon as he knew this, he started looking for the green ones and the yellow ones and the black ones and the orange ones. For months.
So, yeah, lightsabers… darksabers… shadowsabers are next on the list, probably.
All lightsabers in A New Hope were supposed to be identical: white. That would have been great, I guess. Adult sci-fi. Then Lucas thought it would be more dramatic if the good guy wielded a bluish blade (Heaven is blue), and the evil guy had a reddish one (Hell is red). Maybe not George’s best worldbuilding choice.
Forty-five years later, it’s Toys ‘R’ Us Star Wars.
And what’s going to be the “light” / “angelic” equivalent of the Nazgûl? The Nazgood?
What Peter Jackson did was bad worldbuilding, too. Tolkien removed the stone giants from all his works after The Hobbit, so why in hell is Jackson boisterously reintroducing them? Sure, the giants are present in the book — but you also need to look at all the other texts of Middle-earth, and see the big picture, and understand why the author did what he did.
Good worldbuilding is about adding layers to what’s already there instead of constantly inserting new stuff. Remember that nifty little Ring of Invisibility Bilbo found in some random cave? It turns out that it’s much more than just a generic Ring of Invisibility… That’s right. Think about doing the same in your tabletop role-playing games; instead of introducing a powerful new item, just take that “ordinary” +1 dagger the party found during their very first adventure — and make it speak all of a sudden. It’s an intelligent dagger +1 / +3 vs demons / devils, and it needs the party’s help to go free its former owner from a sorcerous prison inside a huge derelict steampunk meteorite!
“But why didn’t it speak to us for an entire year?” It’s up to you, the DM, to come up with a cool reason. Maybe the dagger was simply observing the player characters and assessing their worthiness?
Bad worldbuilding is when you go over the edge. Things were okay before, but then you add something more, and it all goes to hell. That’s what happened in White Wolf’s World of Darkness towards the tail-end of the storytelling game craze; with vampires and werewolves and changelings and mages and celestines and mummies and demons literally everywhere, why and how would there be any normal humans in positions of power anywhere?
The Star Wars universe is fine without Starkiller and darksabers.
Middle-earth is fine without Stone Giants.
The World of Darkness was fine with just seven vampire clans and a few garou tribes.
The most significant difference between good worldbuilders and bad worldbuilders is that good worldbuilders know when to rein themselves in.
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