I’ve always liked stories with other dimensions. I mostly enjoyed the comic book Excalibur, written by Chris Claremont, because of its trans-dimensional adventures; the combination of the serious-minded characters finding themselves in strange and sometimes humorous situations was done well. My favorite role-playing book is still D&D’s first edition Manual of the Outer Planes, written by Jeff Grubb. This book opened a door to other realms by giving playable game mechanics to places that were only vague concepts before.

Science fiction has long been the playground for philosophical theories and esoteric concepts. Many science-fiction TV shows explore other worlds or dimensions. Often these shows have interesting ideas, but varying degrees of quality in the execution. The Twilight Zone conceptually wrestled with a variety of metaphysical ideas, but like most science-fiction productions they had a tight budget, which I felt hurt the implementation. Any production that requires entirely new sets and costumes every episode will have difficulty producing a high-quality show. Star Trek dealt with this problem by having the same actors, costumes, and sets each episode with only a few new locations added when they visited another world.

When creating your own strange world, it’s best, especially in the beginning of your project, to quell the many great ideas and focus on only one or two. The broader the scope of strange, the more difficult the implementation will be and a limited scope allows you to concentrate on the quality of the execution. Quantum Leap had a limited scope for its science-fiction elements—one guy time-hopping into other people’s bodies, which gave a good hook for each episode, since he often jumped into dramatic situations.

It is to your advantage to use the science fiction or strange elements to help tell the story. The “characters experiencing a strange event” scenario is always a good way to hook and hold the interest of an audience, as the characters try to discover the why behind the strangeness. If the quality of the story is good enough, then even after the audience is shown the reasons behind the strangeness they will still have their interest held to see how the story plays out.

The audience wants to experience a satisfying story, not only discover a strange new world. Try to keep the focus on a personal level: how the strange world affects the characters individually. Little details in a character’s everyday life that are different because of the strangeness can give the story immersion.

TV shows are good examples of the “make it up as you go” approach to writing a story. Even the shows that aren’t episodic, like Lost and Battlestar Galactica, still use a lot of inspiration along the way to make the story more interesting. This can be a slippery slope if you don’t have a solid core concept at the heart of the explanations, which becomes clear to your audience when the story’s payoff is either satisfying reasoning or deus ex machina.

Games more than TV shows have the ability to demonstrate strange new worlds, allowing players to enter the world as characters and explore it. I’m often surprised how the worlds we create in games represent the same physics and reality as our own. With the possibility of creating our own universal laws, there are plenty of worlds we have yet to create.

The concept of my own game, Cyber Run, has changed from a futuristic science-fiction story to a multi-dimensional traveling adventure. I’ve decided to focus the game on the characters’ personalities and their out-of-the-ordinary experiences. Each adventure has its own strangeness linked to a larger, flexible explanation that drives the campaign.

Thanks for reading, and please comment on what you think is a good discovery of a strange story, or what you think is important to keep in mind when creating strange new worlds.