Imaginary Worlds

Last week I attended the funeral of a member of our church, a lifelong railway enthusiast. The eulogy his son-in-law read out during the service contained the following lines:

During his teenage years Alan attended The Strand School where he made good friends of fellow railway enthusiasts. Can you believe that a group of these schoolfriends created an imaginary island with all its infrastructure - government, transport, housing, education, health ... everything that was necessary for it to function as an independent state?

Yes, I can easily believe it!

It's not only roleplaying gamers that create elaborate imaginary worlds. Those words took me back to when I was about ten, making up worlds largely defined by their railway networks. Of course, the earliest ones made little or no sense, but ones developed in my teenage years had rather better-defined topographies and economies; the two things a railway network would need to overcome and support, and a consequence of having studied Geography at school.

A great many model railway builders have also come up with elaborate fictional histories of the imaginary prototypes for their layouts in much the same way, whether it's a fictional county, or a fictional railway serving a real place that had no railway in our own history. It's ironic in a way that most of the model railway layouts I've built have been based on real-life locations.

One of the things I love about roleplaying games is that it gives another outlet for world-building. Perhaps Kalyr ought to have a railway network? Perhaps in ancient times it did?

I notice my eight-year old nephew is now making up his own imaginary nations with their cities and politics - he added some railway lines after I suggested the idea to him!