Speaking of exotic and mundane settings… When creating a fantastic new world (i.e., one not based on the ball of mud and angst outside my door), I try to emphasize the exotic elements of that world. These are the bits that are exciting, intriguing, and decidedly different from our normal experiences.
When coming up with these things, it’s all about meeting or subverting audience expectations.*
Here are a few examples:
Make it more! Take the expected thing and make it extreme. It’s way bigger, faster, friendlier, cuter, or deadlier than the audience would expect. Is the audience expecting an assassin? Make it a ninja with shape-shifting abilities. Are they looking for an abandoned temple? Make it a whole city of abandoned temples, now occupied by albino apes. Expecting to meet the queen? Make her a giant who rules not just with wisdom, but with an axe the size of a horse.
Make it weird! Take the expected thing and make it radically different from anything the audience expects. The assassin is a sweet, gray-haired old lady with deadly psychic powers, who represents a whole guild of such elderly killers. The abandoned temple is a featureless black cube hovering ten feet above a clearing full of animal bones. The queen is a dinosaur whose commands are translated by a talking snake coiled around her neck. Whatever it is, no one should be able to say, “I saw that coming.”
Make it… exactly what they expect. Seriously. If everything is a surprise, then nothing is a surprise. We need the mundane to make the exotic seem extraordinary by comparison. Besides, it keeps your audience from getting burned out and jaded. (“Crumbling jungle ruins, eh? Bet it’s full of apes. No, wait. Giant albino apes with cybernetic arms and laser beam eyes! Am I close?”)
* I was going to say “player expectations,” since I’m currently in the Karthador mindset and thinking about creating worlds for roleplaying games, but really these ideas work just as well for fiction, movies, and any other sorts of media in need of world-building.
