When I first started writing The Also Rans, I didn’t really do worldbuilding. Oh, sure, I knew about the idea of it, but it really was hard to come up with a reason to do all that worldbuilding if I didn’t see the characters in the story doing anything with it. Not having aspirations of making a gajillion lore bibles and supplemental appendices of what sort of cakes they are baking in the Shire this week, I also didn’t do a lot of planning as far as basic story elements. Things like, “does it get cold anywhere” or “are there oceans?”
Since I had originally planned this as a RPG computer game, things like mountains and water are typically boundaries rather than viable parts of the story. Cold areas are usually reserved for survival puzzles and fighting some yeti, but mostly the action is in good old forests and plains, because its easier to walk around on those and fight random encounters than it is to trudge through the snowy wastes. Also, if you send adventurers into the snowy wastes, then you gotta pay Morgan Freeman to narrate them failing to breed or find enough squid to survive the next random encounter, and I don’t have that kind of money. I mean, probably; maybe he works cheap and I didn’t actually ask him, but I am going to assume he gets paid pretty well for his somber declaration of genetic failures of flightless birds.
Heck, I didn’t even plan for weather or day/night schedules, so planning for cold climates or unseasonable shifts in the weather was right out. Do I regret this decision? Nah. Rule of funny dominates my writing style, and having characters needing to thaw out their beef jerky before they can eat it isn’t generally very funny. Well, I guess it would be if one of them got the bright idea to put a slab of chilly salted beef leather into their pants to warm them up, and the other characters saw them do this, but that’s a brief “tee hee, quit jerking around in your pants, lolz” moment of arm punching for a character and not exactly a major plot point.
I’m a little hard pressed to think of a lot of stories where the cold climate was terribly relevant. On Hoth, it was the setting, and sure, you have to shove your friends into a dead taun-taun now and then while there, but these people had spaceships; they weren’t going to actually do the whole movie in the cold. Whatever town Elsa froze up in that one movie might not have liked life for a while, but they’re NPCs; everything always works out for NPCs by the end of the story. I guess there’s the end to The Shining, but again, that wasn’t really the point of the movie and really was just a way to say “yup. Being crazy and unprepared for the elements is a bad combo.” Jack could have been scuba diving without an air tank and the same message would have gotten across.
Any other stories you can think of where the cold actually mattered to the setting, versus just a plot point to challenge the main characters for a time? Because I’m stuck… frozen… on this one myself!
The Also-Rans 
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