Building a Pocket World, Part 1: Theme and Backdrop

Alright, as promised, we’re building a fantasy world together. Not behind closed doors, not polished and pretty after the fact — right here, out in the open, one step at a time. I’m calling this my skinny complete worldbuilding method, because it strips the process down to the bones while still giving you everything you need to stand a world up on its feet.

There are ten questions I ask when I build a Pocket World. Today we tackle the first two. You’re invited to come along and learn from my approach, laugh at it, or steal it outright. Whatever you take away, you’ll get a real look at how my brain works when I’m cooking up a setting. We’ll even name this thing eventually. Not yet. Let’s earn it first.

Question 1: What Is the Overarching Theme?

Every world needs a heartbeat. Before the maps, before the monsters, before the names you can’t pronounce, you need to know what the whole thing is about.

Here’s mine.

I’m imagining a world where an evil empire has conquered the hero’s city. They’ve crushed every real opposition, leaving behind only scattered holdouts and freedom fighters — heroic brigands fighting a war that, by all rights, should already be over. The banners came down. The city fell. And yet a stubborn few refuse to accept that it’s finished.

But here’s the part that matters most: this isn’t just a rebellion story.

It’s a story about honor.

Beating the overlords isn’t enough. Anybody can swing a sword at a tyrant. What I want is a moral imperative driving the whole thing forward — the kind of iron-spined knightly honor that says the city we rebuild has to be better than the one that fell. Stronger. Worthier. If we just liberate the same broken place we lost, we haven’t won anything. We’ve only changed the name on the door.

So the theme, boiled down: rebellion in service of honor, and restoration in service of something greater. That’s the heartbeat. Everything else grows out of it.

Question 2: What Is the Historical and Cultural Backdrop?

Now we give that heartbeat a body.

I write pulp, and pulp is usually human-centric. So this world stays grounded in human heroes. But a pulp world with zero non-human flavor feels undercooked, so I’m adding a few threads. The evil overlords? Not human. And out beyond the city walls, in the wild lands, there live one or two non-human races.

Why? Because I love an underdog story. I want my heroes to have to earn their allies — to work with peoples who might lack the fire or the reason to fight the overlords on their own. And right now, as I’m typing this, I’m deciding something important: the humans failed because they stood alone. They faced a superior evil by themselves and got flattened for it. Their only path to real strength is uniting the scattered forces around them. That’s the lesson baked into their defeat.

If you want the quick pitch, picture the Knights of King Arthur meets Red Dawn in a fantasy setting. Chivalry and oaths on one hand, desperate homeland resistance on the other.

How I Research This

I don’t go wide. I boil the Pocket World down to a handful of load-bearing pieces and dig into those. Here’s where I start.

The honor code. The knights need a moral framework, so that’s the first thing I build. I take the classic knightly virtues and rank them by how much they govern this particular world, from 1 to 10:

• Courage – 10. Courage is the fulcrum. Everything else draws its strength from here.
• Duty – 10. With the old government gone, duty is the only thing giving the movement reliability, structure, and belonging. Without it, there’s nothing holding the fellowship together.
• Justice – 10. Strip this away and the knights are just outlaws with nicer armor.
• Loyalty – 9. A single disloyal member can burn the whole thing down, and fast.
• Sacrifice – 7. Important, but not the top. You’ve got to leave something worth saving. Sacrifice everything and you’ve saved nothing.
• Mercy – 4. Mercy isn’t always possible in a war like this. It’s the lowest priority — but it’s never forgotten.

So the three virtues steering the ship are Courage, Duty, and Justice. The two riding in the back are Mercy and Sacrifice. And yes, knights will sometimes appear to bend their code. But when they do, there are consequences. A code without teeth is just a suggestion.

Knights versus bandits. This distinction is the whole moral spine, so I need it crystal clear. A resistance fighter deprives the enemy, and only to sustain the cause. A bandit profits from anyone — friend or foe — for greed, power, vengeance, or any other hungry little vice. The clean way to say it: knights and freedom fighters serve their virtues. Bandits serve their vices. My heroes lean hard into their chivalry, the strength of their fellowship bonds, the weight of their oaths, and the long memory of their names.

The Resistance Lens

It’d be easy to just call my heroes knights and move on. But they’re more than that — they’re survivors. So I need to understand what that really means.

I name-dropped Red Dawn earlier, but honestly, I’m researching the French Resistance more deeply. The stakes feel closer. Occupation, collaboration, the long grinding patience of it. That’s the texture I want. Here’s what falls out of that study:

• The attack that toppled the city almost certainly scattered refugees into the wilderness. Some become brigands on the fringes. Others organize into marches, seeking shelter with allies or a fresh start somewhere far away.
• After a humiliating loss to a stronger enemy, most people — inside the city or out — are simply afraid. They serve the twin gods of fear and self-preservation, and you can’t blame them.
• Many of the old heroes died in the fall. They fought valiantly, but their deaths triggered a catastrophic, cascading collapse of morale among the survivors.
• The overlords set up civilian offices to fake a sense of order — and use those same offices to gather intelligence and pump fear and propaganda into the population.
• Not every freedom fighter is a hero. Some are terrorists, gangsters, thieves, and thugs. There’s as much to fear inside the resistance as outside it.
• The resistance isn’t united on what should rise after the overlords fall. Many futures are possible. Most of them are bad.
• Outside agents and soldiers get dropped behind enemy lines to help. Some of their motives are dangerous enough that you’d be wise to steer clear.
• Clandestine meetings, hidden bases, forts, and secret encampments aren’t just fun story tools — they’re an unavoidable consequence of the situation.

All of this is exactly why the knightly fellowship and its virtues matter so much. When a dozen factions want a dozen different endings, solidarity becomes the rarest and most valuable thing on the board.

And the overlords? They break a population the old, ugly, reliable way — through fear, through collaborators, through control of the food, through curfews, and through public punishment. Simple tools. Brutally effective ones.

Next Week

That’s the first two questions down. We’ve got our heartbeat and we’ve got our bones.

Next week we keep building. We’ll dig into Geographical Features, figure out Who Holds Power and How It’s Structured, and map out The Major Conflicts and Threats that’ll keep our knights up at night.

Bring your curiosity and your sense of humor. See you then.

If you would like to revisit past articles, look no further than the Geek Opera Index!

Watch the shadows, my friends. And always check your ale for poison.