Storyworld Tip: The Power of Landmarks

Landmarks have power. I don’t mean just those landmarks lying atop ancient burial grounds at the intersection of three different ley lines. Sure, those suckers are crackling with arcane energy, but when it comes to crafting a storyworld, they’re no more powerful than the Empire State Building, Castle Grayskull, or the Great Sept of Baelor in King’s Landing.

When designing a storyworld, if you include a number of unique landmarks, you can harness their power to help define the world around them. Here are just a few ways:

• Establish a Mood: Geographically, a landmark can set the mood the region around it. Likewise, a landmark casts a long shadow over any scene in which it appears. It can even shape the mood of a whole story if you let it. (A story revolving around the inhabitants of the Tower of Blood will probably have a different feel than a similar story focused on the people of the Sun-sugar Valley.)

• Establish Conflict: Yes, yes, here I go on the importance of conflict yet again. Landmarks may be cool, but they don’t drive stories — conflict does. Landmarks might be explicitly the center of the conflict (the ruined keep at Moat Cailn that keeps changing hands), imply a past conflict (the space station is decorated in the skulls of its inhabitants’ fallen enemies), or hint of a conflict yet to come (the cultist compound where two factions have each taken over one of the two dormitories and stopped talking to each other).

• Establish Character: A landmark can tell the audience much about the people who live there. Behold: wise, kind King Randor. So noble, so brave. And sitting atop a throne of skulls in the Hall of Bones, where the skeletons of his fallen foes suggest there might be more his character than wisdom and kindness.

• Establish Location: Okay, I’m sort of cheating with this last one. But the point is that once you’ve set up a given landmark in the minds of your audience, you can use it as shorthand to create an “establishing shot.” If we start a Star Wars scene with a shot of the Deathstar, you have a pretty good idea of what sort of scene is coming up. This can be especially handy when working in transmedia, where the different platforms dictate how much detail you can include.
  

What if your storyworld is based on the normal world around us? You’ve still go landmarks, and they’ve still got power: The police station? The mayor’s mansion? The boarded-up gas station at the edge of town? Once could argue that these “mundane” landmarks might have even more power, since they automatically resonate with your modern audience… But that’s a blog post for another day.