Unboiled

A Storyworld Incubator

Main Content

UNBOILED

is a publisher & studio for world-building.
We craft mythologies and canons for works of speculative fiction and more.

WORLDS

Ancient cultures based their mythologies on rules of the natural world—patterns everyone could agree on. World-building is the art of creating new rules and patterns for a fictional canon of stories.

Over the past 100 years, most storyworlds have risen from one principal literary work. But we believe in building the bases of detailed, imaginative worlds first. This way, numerous storytellers can weave singular tales concurrently while staying part of a unified canon.

Our approach treats world-building as a literary form independent of storytelling.

Historic

Time is a vital component to the art of world-building. Major events will contribute to a fictional world’s history, informing its past and future time span.

We use timeline tools and historical trends to build detailed chronologies of our fictional worlds—webs of events spanning temporal boundaries.

Cartographic

Whether a storyworld is light years in diameter or just miles wide, it is mappable—boundaries are distinct, points of interest linked and traversable.

We design detailed cartographic works that represent the physical grounds of our worlds at different periods. They provide placement for the stories told there.

Elemental

If time and geography are vessels, elements are what fills them. Storyworlds are a cornucopia of things—animate and inanimate, tangible and ethereal.

We use wiki tools to build realistic codexes of our worlds, cataloging prominent figures, widespread ideologies, religions, even languages.

CANONS

Once we’ve laid the foundation for a complex and realistic world, we can spin all sorts of interconnected tales there. Since a world’s History, Geography, and Elements represent its objective facts, we can use various storytelling styles and mediums to express the unique perspectives of people living in that world—all the while, remaining confident our works are unified with the broader canon.

Like the folklores of ages past, our development process adheres to a few time-tested methods.

COMMUNAL

Canons are not created for an audience. They are devised by communities for the benefit of those communities. Our canons are not built by us alone. We grow them for and with the explorers of our fictional worlds.

COLLABORATIVE

We listen to our community to gain better insight into the fictional world of a canon. We borrow new ideas from the shared stories of others, treating them as elements of the fictional world. We encourage our community to do the same.

EVOLVING

We recognize that the more rigid a canon becomes, the more prone it is to shatter. We accept contradictions and divergent paths within a canon. We allow it to flex, flow, and fork into parallel versions of itself like the complex mythologies of antiquity.

Introducing

Masslore is an upcoming Unboiled project that combines traditional fiction development and publishing with next-generation decentralized technologies (blockchain, tokenized assets) to empower communities to collectively build expansive, shared canons—storyworlds— and participate in their long-term success.

Learn more at our informational site.

… including

Our first Masslore storyworld, August One, is a fictional, alternative history of the Roman Civilization, spanning from the final years of Augustus Caesar’s life to a distant future in the cosmos.
World of August One: The Elemental Decades is a collectible, companion book accompanying the launch of the project.  It is a mix between a faux-encyclopedia volume and a coffee table art book. With over 150 pages of lore and 200 pieces of original concept art, the book focuses on a crucial 40-year period in the broader August One storyworld and will serve as a storytelling guide for this debut Masslore endeavor!

Interested in learning more? Reach out!