Worldbuilding: Striking Twice

Let’s take worldbuilding from the perspective of, you’re going to want specific environments for certain stories and scenes, and those settings will change what your characters are likely or able to do. I’m going to give you some examples from the Gulf Coast.

Swimming. Oh yes, great weather to swim here, most of the year. Unless it’s storming – if you can hear thunder, you should already be away from the water. But storms are dangerous even too far away for lightning. The winds and currents they cause make riptides more likely, and those kill far more people than lightning strikes. What’s worse is if you see waves crashing onto shore, except for a few spots where it looks nice and smooth? Most people will choose to swim there. Don’t do that. There’s no waves because the water is flowing right back out to sea. That’s a riptide. Meaning you could have your character observe great beach weather and not one local in the water. For good reason.

(Maybe several good reasons. Portuguese man’o’war, anyone? We get whole schools of them.)

Sitting in a car. Seems harmless enough. Only when the temps have already hit the 80s and the humidity is pushing the heat index into the 90s-plus, it doesn’t take much solar input to turn your harmless car stakeout into a life-threatening sauna. Complete with burns from the metal bits of your seatbelt. That sizzle you hear is you.

Car travel gets even more interesting, because the coast and the various military facilities on it combine to make sure there are often limited traffic corridors for getting from A to B. U.S. Highway 98 is one of the infamous roads; unless you can get to a turn-off and head north to I-10, your options for getting east-west are Slim, son of None. (And said turn-off is likely to add an hour to your trip. Just so you know.) So if you throw in one casual traffic accident, you’re likely to back up travel for hours, and everyone local knows all the possible alternate routes, so it’ll be backed up there too.

The sunny Gulf Coast is indeed that. But at least half the time it’s stormy, sometimes in patches, sometimes in lines of devastation that leave no trailer park standing. If you have characters here for a whole week and there’s been no storms… they better be here either April or October, we do get dry stretches then. Otherwise it won’t feel right.

Local environmental hazards are often very well known to the locals; and known to some better than others. AKA it doesn’t matter how much you paid for that mulch stacked out in the parking lot. If there’s a lightning storm, no one is going out there to load it. Everybody’s listened to years of news on the latest lightning fatalities in the area and they don’t get paid enough. Getting mad about this is only going to mark you as someone literally not smart enough to come in out of the rain.

It also means we have people paid good money to rescue golf balls from water hazards, and poke around recreational lakes, because alligators. Likewise we have various measures to hopefully bear-proof containers, and some of us curse out bird enthusiasts a lot, because black bears love birdfeeders. Nature is never too far away, and some of it likes to eat you.

All of which goes to say if you have a character living on the Gulf Coast in an eco-friendly house on a lake completely powered by solar panels, who walks out their back door onto their boat dock in their pajamas and slippers without a care in the world, anyone local is going to look at you askance, because that won’t work.

So when you worldbuild… think of what the local hazards are, and what they lead the locals to do. You can have your characters be ignorant, sure. But if so, they have to see the consequences!

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