Sometimes, it's difficult to know where to start with world-building. Join science fiction author Oliver Langmead and speculative writer Tam Moules for creative writing workshop helping you to develop your own brand new setting using an unconventional, but seriously fun (and thought provoking) set of prompts.

You can learn a lot about a world by the currency it uses. The Fallout series uses bottlecaps to demonstrate a post-apocalyptic shift in economic perspective, the Dishonoured series uses whale-bone to illustrate a society that places the hunting of whales at the fore of its economic concerns, and in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, people spend pieces of their own souls to survive.

How might you invent a currency of your own? Will you create a literally consumable currency, like Bioshock’s Adam, or a currency based around the dismemberment of others, like Kingdom of Loathing’s Meat, or, perhaps, a currency based around the accumulation of madness, like Bloodborne’s Insight? What will your currency say about the society that uses it – and what might it have to say about our own world in turn?

Oliver K. Langmead lives and writes in Glasgow. His long-form poem, Dark Star, featured in the Guardian’s Best Books of 2015, and his new book, Birds of Paradise, is arriving April 2021. Oliver is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow, where he is researching terraforming and ecological philosophy, and in late 2018 he was the writer in residence at the European Space Agency’s Astronaut Centre in Cologne.

Tam Moules is a writer and audio producer based in the south-east of England. They graduated from the University of Glasgow’s MLitt in Fantasy Literature in 2018, and these days mostly spend their time reading, writing, making audiobooks, and watching too much of The X-Files.

Running time: 90 minutes

Tickets: £6/ £4 (plus 50p booking fee)

The event will be live on Zoom.

This workshop is supported by Write Gear, purveyor of the Writer’s Notebook and creators of The Page One podcast