Every setting begins in silence. The silence of what’s already broken, already gone.
That’s why I say: start with the ruins. The toppled tower, the collapsed bridge, the cratered colony dome, the derelict starship. The ruin is implication made solid. It tells you history happened here, but refuses to explain. That refusal is powerful.
Some worlds are forged in the long dark of history, hammered from myth and superstition until the shape feels inevitable. Others are scavenged—plucked from the ruins of pop culture, stolen from the junk heap of forgotten media, polished until they gleam like relics. And then there are the strange ones. The worlds born from something smaller. A scrap. A fragment. A single line from a song, cut loose from its melody and left to drift until someone—maybe you—catches it.