From the Founder's Desk: Why Knightverge Uses Relational History

When I started building Knightverge, one of the things I became increasingly interested in was how the history of the world should actually work. I didn't want history to exist simply as a timeline of events that happened in the background while the main stories took place somewhere else. I wanted history to have a direct relationship with the characters, locations, organisations and societies that exist in the present.

That led me to what I call relational history.

The basic idea is quite simple. In Knightverge, historical events are not isolated pieces of information. They are connected to the people, places and organisations affected by them. A character may have a connection to an event that happened centuries before they were born. A location may exist because of something that happened hundreds of years earlier. An organisation may still follow traditions that originated during a conflict that most people alive today have forgotten.

Those relationships are part of the world.

History Should Have Consequences

A fictional timeline can tell you that something happened in 1455, something else happened in 1486, and another important event happened in 1912. But simply knowing when something happened doesn't necessarily tell you why it matters.

Real history is much more complicated than that.

Wars change borders. Families remember old conflicts. Organisations inherit traditions. Populations migrate. Technologies develop in response to earlier problems. A decision made by one generation can create consequences for another generation that may have no idea where those consequences originally came from.

I wanted Knightverge to work in the same way.

If something important happens in the history of the universe, I want that event to leave a mark somewhere. It might affect a family, an organisation, a location, a technology or an entire population. Sometimes the effect might be obvious. Sometimes it might be buried beneath centuries of history.

This means that the history of Knightverge isn't simply there to provide background information. It helps explain why the world is the way it is.

Characters Exist Within History

This approach also changes the way I think about characters.

I don't want characters to feel as though they were created in isolation and then dropped into the universe. They should have relationships with the world around them.

A character might have been born in a particular location, trained by a particular organisation, inherited equipment from somebody who came before them or belong to a family whose history stretches back hundreds of years.

Those connections can influence who that character becomes.

The same applies to groups and organisations. A Slayer house isn't simply a name on a page. It has a history. Its methods, beliefs and traditions have developed over time. The people who belong to it inherit that history, whether they agree with it or not.

That gives characters something I think is extremely important in worldbuilding: context.

The Same Event Can Have Different Histories

Another reason relational history is important to Knightverge is that different groups don't necessarily remember the same event in the same way.

An event recorded in a human historical account may have a completely different name in vampire history. A Slayer organisation may have its own records and interpretation of what happened. Another group may have experienced the same event from an entirely different perspective.

That allows the history of Knightverge to become more complicated and, hopefully, more believable.

History isn't always a single perfectly preserved account. It is also about who recorded something, who survived it, who remembered it and who had a reason to describe it differently.

This is particularly important in a universe containing populations and organisations that have existed for centuries or, in some cases, much longer.

The history of the vampires, for example, cannot simply be separated from the history of the humans they encountered. Their movements, conflicts, relationships and migrations inevitably leave traces in other parts of the world.

The same principle applies to the Slayers.

History Can Explain Generational Trauma

One of the things I have always found frustrating about fictional worldbuilding is when a story tells you that an entire population has suffered persecution for generations without actually showing you the historical process that produced that situation.

If a population has experienced centuries of discrimination, violence or displacement, there should be a history behind it.

There should be events.

There should be people who remember those events.

There should be communities that were changed by them.

There should be locations associated with them.

There should be descendants who inherited the consequences.

That is much more interesting to me than simply stating that a fictional population has "a history of persecution."

Relational history allows that history to be explored rather than merely mentioned.

You can start with a character and discover the events that shaped their family. You can start with an event and discover the population affected by it. You can start with a location and discover why it became important.

The direction of discovery can work both ways.

The World Should Reward Curiosity

This is one of the reasons I wanted Knightverge to be structured as an interconnected encyclopedia rather than simply a collection of character profiles.

I want someone to be able to discover something almost accidentally.

You might begin by reading about a character and notice that they were involved in a particular historical event. You follow that event and discover another character. That character has a connection to an organisation. The organisation has a headquarters in a particular location. That location has its own history, which leads somewhere else.

Eventually you realise that what looked like a small piece of information was actually connected to a much larger part of the universe.

That is the experience I want Knightverge to provide.

The world should reward people who are curious enough to keep looking.

Why This Matters to Knightverge

Ultimately, relational history is one of the ways I am trying to make Knightverge feel like a genuine living world rather than a collection of fictional information.

The characters have histories. The locations have histories. The organisations have histories. The technologies have histories. The different populations have histories. Most importantly, those histories intersect.

That means the past isn't separated from the present.

It is part of it.

When I build a new character or location for Knightverge, I therefore don't just ask, "What is this?" I also ask, "What is this connected to?"

Where did it come from? Who was here before? What happened here? Who remembers it? Who was affected by it? What changed because of it? And what might still be happening today because of something that happened hundreds of years ago?

Those questions are what make relational history useful.

For me, worldbuilding becomes much more interesting when the answers to those questions begin connecting together.

That's ultimately what Knightverge is designed to do: not simply tell you a history, but give you a world whose history you can explore.