Lizard Country
Narrative Designer/Writer - Worldbuilding Document
Solo Project - 6 months
Solo Project - 6 months
My inspiration for this project was simple – YouTuber ColdCrashPictures stated that there are “almost no dinosaur westerns”, and I took that as a challenge. This worldbuilding endeavor was fully personal, worked on in my own time, with research and writing sessions squeezed between classes, academic assignments, and working shifts. While I had worldbuilt original settings before, I opted with this project to take a stab at a reality-adjacent alternate history, diving into learning about Late Cretaceous ecology and North American history to weave the two together. Even knowing of and preparing for the unique challenges of this mode of setting development, the intricacies I discovered surprised me - it’s one thing to determine how world events shape each other and fall together when the entire setting is your own, but layering major ecological deviations into real world history brings a slew of new complications. Thankfully, I was able to leverage my network and reach out to connections more historically informed than I to help me untangle past geopolitical connections too obscure for a Google search, and overall, I found the whole process quite engaging.
Building this alternate reality included:
Building this alternate reality included:
- Researching, categorizing, and “evolving” dinosaur species of the American west into the contemporary environment
- Analyzing and restructuring the ecological and national histories of North America from the Chicxulub Impact through 1868
- Studying post-Civil War military forts, colonial practices, and social structures to develop the main setting
- Brainstorming and assessing story and character concepts within this universe
Content Warning: Mentions of death, dangerous situations, racial prejudice, military
Special thanks to Jack T. Murphy, Thomas Henderson, and Giancarlo Herrera for their assistance with the mangling of American history.
Copyright © 2023 Ellen Schaefer. All rights reserved.
Special thanks to Jack T. Murphy, Thomas Henderson, and Giancarlo Herrera for their assistance with the mangling of American history.
Copyright © 2023 Ellen Schaefer. All rights reserved.
Cover Images: Caleb Kimbrough, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Scott Hartman, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Scott Hartman, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons