Worldbuilding 101: Cogs
As a worldbuilder, word choice is quite the hassle linguistically. There is no real proper word to describe all elements of it. A world is complicated and has everything from characters, to magic, to technology, to governments, to organisations, and more! It never stops! And There is no singular word to describe all the parts of a world! If there only was… wait, I have it! YES!
A Cog
The incredibly astute of you may have seen the title and the veterans of my blog will remember this article here, “The 15 rules of worldbuilding”. Under “Rule #4: The more important a cog is, the more it must be fleshed out”, I use and describe what a cog is but only roughly and do not go into the details. So this article is about defining the term and giving examples of them.
Definition
What is a cog in the worldbuilding sense? The way I define it is “Any component that exists within a fictional universe or world”. I hear you saying:
Sweet holy mother of dancing Jehovah, Vivian you sexy bitch!! That is such an incredibly vague definition! It is almost entirely useless!
To which I will say, Thank you! I do try to be a sexy looking Limax! But the vagueness is kind of the point. It is meant to be exceedingly broad and short. “Things in a world”, “The components of a world”, or any such phrasing is a god damn mouthful, and I just hate having to type it and more have it blurt out of my mouth. And the “almost” part of what you said is important. It is wide enough that it encompasses everything related to the parts of worldbuilding but stops just there and does not go further so it has meaning. A significant portion of its meaning comes from the boundary. Where a fictional world ends and a fictional world begins informs everything on whether it is a cog or not.
Metaphor
Where did I get this from? I view a world, a creation, a constructed world, a conworld, as a machination of things interacting with one another. Everything affects each other, every existing part. Everything is connected in a whole thing that does a job. Tell a story, give a game, show a world, anything you want. From this I imagined a machine with cogs connecting to each other like old school machines. Various cogs and more all doing things! And it felt like, “By Divinum! That makes so much sense!” and thus I used the metaphor and will continue to use it.
Cog types
When it comes to the parts of the world, there are literally so many myriads that even Archimedes who abused the word “myriad” would feel like the word is insufficient, but hey, I will give it a run for its money!
Characters
Every character, whether protagonists, antagonists, leaders, or anything at all, is a cog that must fit within the machination that is your world. But before I continue, I will say this with emphasis: When I say a character, especially the protagonist, is a cog, I don’t mean the classical negative view of “Don’t be cog in the machine” where cog refers to someone being replaceable and insignificant. Reread that sentence a hundred times please! We all know in stories told, games played, etc. that the protagonists are always a bit special and out of the normal. After all, why else would the story be about them if they didn’t do things out of the ordinary? Unless it is romance, at which you are being painfully mundane and somehow still get to be special (Yes yes I know, it is not all romance novels! I am just taking the piss out of Twilight!). What I do mean is that they are a part of the world and thus they have to fit into it in a sensible manner. Being “special” and worthy of “protagonisthood” does not invalidate that they are a cog in the sense I am using here.
Your characters need to make sense within their own world and context. A common mistake I often see is morality. You have these old school regressive societies that match a lot of human history and how Divinum awful you’ve been and… the protagonist somehow has a 21st century kind of morality and sensibility? Yeah, no, sod off! That is not how people work; that is not a cog that fits. I get it, you want to make them palpable to modern audiences and our own sense of moralities, but here is the thing.
You are making the cog no longer fit. You can have their morality deviate somewhat from the norm in a vacuum without additional reason but not massively so. If you still want to make them adhere to our moralities, which I will inform you happily are not new as similar morals are millennia old, then you can use many various means to have them be exposed to said moralities. Typically education, art, philosophers and so on may contain these naturally in a setting, especially the latter. Albeit historically they have also backfired strongly as some philosophers have been super into authoritarianism, but hey, you can make it interesting then! Failing to properly tweak this to make it fit is an example of “Hammering on the cog to make it fit”, as I say. Please read the rules in the link in the beginning.
I will reiterate this just so all writers can feel safe and not start crying harder than a spineful human: just because your protagonist is a cog that has to fit into the world does not in any way mean that they have to be entirely identical to those around them or lack the specialness of protagonisthood. It only means it has to be constructed in such a manner with background and everything that their deviation is not a clipped off piece of nail stuck in media consumer’s eyes. I will get into this much more in a separate post and how one can do it. I might even use Lady Verbosa (Anne Winchell) in the post!
Governments
What in tarnation is a government? Please go here for more details on what I mean by them! But yes, a government, no matter what it is, is still a cog! But this is not just A cog, it is, to be honest, a whole slew of cogs that look like a singular cog from a distance. You got the people that make them up, the keys (again, read previous post), the entire structure, and how it spreads out. In the broader scheme of worldbuilding, it is important to understand that governments do not exist in vacuums but constantly relate to each other, both internally (intra-relations) and externally (inter-relations). This is one of many reasons why regions generally have similar government types and share many characteristics. Europe didn’t have loads of monarchies “just because”, but because it was, for a long time, the most efficient way to govern large swaths of land. There were some republics that defied the norm, which is also important to take note of–there can be exceptions. But in the regions around China in the old days, proto-nations and the like tried to mimic China because of its long standing success. There will be natural upheavals and revolutions and the likes, French revolutions (or as I like to call it, the Baguette revolution!), and all that jazz. It is entertaining to write, imagine and do, but it is important to understand that governments are complicated entities and often mimic or copy things they see around themselves that seem to work.
Locations
You know what matters in real estate right? Location, Location, Location! The three most important things in any house purchase! This also applies in a world or in a universe. One important aspect in the creation of any location in a world is to make them distinct in some way. Sure there are forests, cities, towns and more all around, but as you travel through them, how much do they truly matter? Exactly, you have no memory of them as you went through because they had nothing that stood out. It is fine, of course, to make uninteresting towns and places just to fill out the map. But I strongly do not recommend that you put effort into them because they are space fillers to make the world feel full, which is in of itself very important. But for the places you wish to matter, always make them unique. It can be anything: if it is a forest, maybe it is a big strangely formed rock; if it is a lake, there can be a strange bottomless pit within it, or strange trees leaning over almost like they are trying to reach into the water to gather what lies within. For a city, it can be a tower, a building, a square, a well, anything that makes it really stand out! Make it pop! What is bland means nothing to consumers, it does not make the cog interesting. If you want to make it matter, make it pop and be special! And keep in mind, locations are built up from the cogs you make by everything else!
Culture
Cultures are exceedingly complicated. This will need not one, but several articles to discuss, so I will be short and sweet. Cultures are complicated! Ok, maybe not that short! But cultures are really sodding complicated. They depend on many factors. Let me give some of them:
Biology: yes, how a species is will determine some of it
Climate: yes, environment and weather and other things like that affect it
Available food: am I the only one sick of the obsession about this? No? Ok I am weird, but you get my point
Resources: what you can make, such as houses, homes, clothes, etc. Everything that can be made is affected by this.
Geography: the physical layout of the world affects how people trade, protect, react, and more
Unity: what people think makes them one
Stochasticism: by which I mean randomness. Something comes out of nothing but pure chance
That is the thing with culture. It is so big, so much, so diverse, and within each culture, there will be subcultures that adapt to the tiny differences in all these factors to make their own little culture. I will do a much bigger post, honestly several, on this topic. There is no cog as diverse as this one.
Technology & Magic
For fantasy and scifi, this is the central cog that makes or breaks their worlds. This is the spice that makes each and every thing in the world pop and be unique. What Magitech (as I will call them together as a singular cog type) you include is so profound to your world that it is nigh indescribable. Again, I will have to make posts on each of these divisions. The main thing to take away with magitech cogs is that they are so fundamental, they can break literally everything. They are the cogs closest to your rules, and sometimes stride so close to the rules of your universe that they are a cog and a rule all at once. Each time you introduce a new one, you should always follow my 15 rules and consider long and hard. How does a magitech cog relate to previous cogs? What will happen? What will become redundant and so on? The questions are so endless that yes, you cannot possibly think of it all, and that is fine. But try your best, and most will appreciate it, and I will say this, for the love of Divinum:
Do not ever introduce time travel unless you think a million times over!
It is a classical trope, but it is a trope that if invoked without much thought or rules, it will instantly break your entire universe as it becomes a “Get out of jail free card”. Again, I will do more in depth posts on this.
Summa Summarum
Yes, this is a blogpost predominately made to hone in on the term “Cog” for worldbuilding, but I want to iterate how useful it is. It gives us a convenient way to describe a huge variety of things within our worlds in a singular simple word. They are all interconnected and complicated and thus no one can really de-entangle all of them, but we can hope to imagine it with our terminology. Many small cogs can make large ones, and they in turn act together in the larger image. Every cog has to work together to give the machine of our stories unity and create a smooth, cohesive world. So pay attention to them!
Do you have any topics you struggle with or would like to suggest for a future blogpost? We’re open to suggestions!
Copyright ©️ 2023 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as cogs as a concept and the types of cogs are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific language or exact phrasing is individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
