I’ll beg to disagree about real world settings, at least when you’re dealing with historical ones. I’ve done exactly one bit of historical fiction, and it was an exercise in discovering how little I *really* knew about the period where I’d set it. The details you want in a story for descriptions and so forth don’t make it into the history books. Making up those details is a *lot* easier.

I don’t know if it’s so much of an advantage. The internet is a godsend for researching locations one can’t get to in person — but what does it *smell* like? Or my particular frustration — there’s plenty of pictures of famous landmarks, but what does the approach look like? What’s behind the photographer? Where are the trash cans? (I take the world’s most boring vacation photos; yes, I actually have pictures of the trash cans at Brookfield Zoo. It was a plot point.)

And you know there’ll be some reader who’s been there or done that, who’ll find the one detail that’s Just Not Right. Frankly, I’m looking forward to finishing the run of current-day novels I’m working on, and getting back to writing science fiction where I can *make stuff up*. (Given that new ideas in the series keep sprouting faster than I can write, I may be looking forward to that for quite some time to come.)

Katya – That’s how most of us do it, really. The trick is to do enough of it, but not too much…and to know what “enough” and “too much” are for you.

Mary – But it works the other way, too; you stick in a mutant goldfish for color, and only much later do you realize that it can be used to provide the perfect plot twist (with the added bonus that you don’t have to go back and plant something).

Gray – If you don’t tell the readers things, they make up their own stuff to fill the empty spaces. I’ve occasionally seen real-life examples of this when I don’t want to explain some major life-change, and friends and especially acquaintances begin making comments about their own experiences and finish with remarks like “Well, of course you know that; it’s why you’re doing X, after all.” They’re mostly wrong.

Kate – I’m afraid I have no idea. Obviously, it was some incident in the past that ended badly; probably, it was something that happened before the frame-up, though it may have been something during the time he was spying. Beyond that, I don’t know. If I ever do find out…well, what happens next will depend on how interesting the answer really is. It may be something totally boring that Shoreham is making a bigger deal of than necessary.

I think a completist fan would find me rather annoying: I remember one of my RPG worlds in which there was exceptionally little solid detail ever created about the founder of the kingdom or the courts of its near neighbours, but quite detailed selections from its holy scriptures, unresolved philosophical disputes, and songs regionally popular after the third or fourth pint.

Premature and needless filling-in was a vice of mine from childhood, and probably still is where I don’t notice it. Training myself away from it has been great fun, and no little of a liberation.

Basically, it’s a free pass to fill in stuff as needed for the plot. Not all GMs do this, of course — some hate to “wing it” at all. Others ad-lib entire sessions.

Sounds like it’s roughly the same thing, really, as coming up only with the Obligations that one needs!

(I do admit, I am curious — did the remaining Lesser Obligations spring to mind, as bits of background sometimes will — or had the universe been sufficiently “compressed for storage” that unpacking it wasn’t trivial enough to generate ‘em?)