ABCs of Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding - the practice, the theory, and the analysis of other writers' own worldbuilding efforts - is one of my great loves among the creative arts, alongside constructed languages and writing systems. Coming up with homebrew settings for tabletop roleplaying games is my most frequent outlet for this, but sometimes I'll also hare off in pursuit of something effort-intensive and faintly silly. Today's whim: crafting a unified theory of worldbuilding, in the form of an alphabetised checklist of things which - in my opinion only! Your mileage may vary! - a worldbuilder must consider in order for their constructed world to be immersive and believable.

Astronomy

If you approach worldbuilding from its strictest sense of building a world from scratch, you might start like the YouTuber Artifexian, at the very beginning (a very good place to start), with the actual composition of the galaxy, solar system, and planet.

• Suns, moons, other major luminaries
• Prominent constellations, mythology associated with them
• Any existing space program? Space stations and ports?
• Affiliated or hostile planets
• Threats from outside the solar system
• What is the world's mass? Its diameter? Its orbital period and distance?
• What sort of atmosphere does it have? Are there magnetic poles and a magnetosphere?

Botany

• What plants and fungi in what biomes
• Food plants, medicinal plants
• Flower symbolism in cultures
• Oceanic plants, seaweed, algae
• Agriculture, harvest festivals and other commemorative agricultural events
• Poisons and antidotes
• Paper-making (if applicable, and not using animal vellum or related materials)
• Stickbuilt and other wooden construction
• Plant-based fibres and dyes, textiles overall

Climate

• Weather patterns
• Seasons (not just the familiar four of the global West, but also wet/dry seasonal cycling, monsoons, trade winds, Sirocco and Mistral, etc.)
• Food preservation methods, pertinent to humidity and temperature
• Clothing

Disasters

Bad things happen, often on a cataclysmic scale, and often without prompting by the characters. These events change the face of the world and influence culture for centuries after the fact.

• Extinction events
• Natural disasters
• Plagues and blights
• Forced marches
• Mass migrations
• Droughts and famines

Entertainment

Character development can be expedited by having characters share media together, like Murderbot and ART watching The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon together in Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries. Entertainment is a bonding activity, as well as a chance for characters to advance their own interests. A tournament arc is a staple of shounen anime, for example.

• Games, sports, racing, tournaments, competitions, and gambling
• Music, dance, stage drama
• Screen media
• Books, poetry
• Gossip, ice cream social, high tea, and other "society" events
• Children's playground activities

Food

Mealtimes allow characters to bond and have natural-sounding, unforced conversations on both casual and serious topics. They serve as a "breather" for the reader, not unlike a save point in a video game, and it is not a coincidence that tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons treat mealtimes as both information gathering opportunities in taverns, and as restoration and healing breaks for the characters. Just as a real human life is naturally partitioned by the breaks we take to eat, so, too, is a narrative partitioned by these brief reductions in the intensity and escalation of the plot. Food lets the tension in a story be relieved temporarily, so that the reader does not become fatigued and annoyed by the lack of any relief or interruption in escalation. After such a pause, later escalation feels more acute, simply from the contrast.

• Mealtimes, meal compositions
• Etiquette, table settings
• Scarcity and abundance, how wealth affects this
• Special occasion foods and delicacies
• Food taboos and dietary restrictions
• Adventurous and dangerous foods (e.g. fugu or balut or durian)
• Prison food, institutional food, hospital food, airplane food
• Journey food (e.g. lembas or hardtack)
• Malnutrition, starvation, scurvy and related vitamin deficiencies
• If applicable, rules of the diets of vampires or other supernatural entities

Geology / Geography

If astronomy is engineering an entire cosmos from first principles, then geology is applying the same idea to the overall layout of the world, and the partitioning of territories. Landforms, rivers, bodies of water, and other features of a planet's surface will govern where nations designate their borders, and all the rest follows from there.

• Positions of continents and oceans
• Mineral deposits, mines
• By extension of mineral deposits: coinage, metallurgy, armour, weapons
• Impassable or deadly land features: mountain ranges, canyons, deserts, tablelands
• Bottlenecks for travel: mountain passes, valleys, cliff trails, ferries, bridges
• Places of ambush: Forests, cliffs, caves, hills, overhangs

History

Where astronomy and geography tell us the raw shape of a world, history tells us about its causality, the origins of cultures, and the beliefs and opinions its various peoples have about themselves and each other, due to their past interactions with each other. History is the scaffolding precedent upon which the story's own main plot will be built.

• Major world events
• Propaganda, mediated depictions of history
• Survivorship bias of primary and secondary sources
• Long-lived eyewitnesses (e.g. an immortal vampire character, if applicable to your narrative)
• Architecture and urban planning, as influenced by changing population compositions and the shifting relevance of various geographic regions

Influences

Many or most of your worldbuilding ideas are not going to be strictly original, because some ideas just make very good sense and are worth recycling, re-interpreting, and investigating from new angles. Having some respectful awareness about where you sourced these ideas, allows you to present them in their best light, without coming across as a plagiarist or as ignorant of the history and norms of the genre you're writing.

• Worldbuilding by other authors, which is consulted or referenced by your own works
• Homages paid to other authors, allusions, recycling of technology from another narrative (e.g. the ansible from Ursula K. LeGuin's Rocannon's World was used by Orson Scott Card in Ender's Game)
• Problems not addressed in another work's worldbuilding, that your work might address; oversights by another author that you might solve or give attention
• Redevelopments of another author's basic worldbuilding premise, but with the twist of some added or subtracted feature, or a different atmosphere (e.g. George R.R. Martin's attempt to apply gritty realism to a setting similar to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien)
• Roman a clef and other fictionalised abstractions of real people and events
• Alternate histories and "for want of a nail" narratives, in which some major political event in the real world transpired differently

Justification

Your constructed world needs to be a place with an internally-consistent causality, and that means that the characters you create for it need to have justifications and motivations for their behaviours, beliefs, and reactions to stimuli.

• In-narrative, convincing reasons for why the characters do what they do
• Convincing motives for the villain(s), which do not boil down to "the baddies are stupid"
• Convincing reasons why the villains are a challenge to defeat, which do not boil down to "the good guys never communicate with each other, or/and they are stupid"
• Why the state of the world is the way it is; why its problems have not already been solved before the events of the plot
• Why technology is at its current point, and has not yet advanced further at the time of the plot
• Why the characters believe what they believe about the world (and whether or not they're wrong in these beliefs)

Kinship

• Family structures
• Marriage and related practices, arranged or negotiated marriages, convenience or political marriage, dowries and bride-prices
• Marriageability / eligibility, courtship rituals, modesty conventions
• Marrying in or out of the natal household, moieties, siblings and germanes, milk-siblings
• Gender dynamics, matriarchy or patriarchy or something else
• Communal or nuclear parenting customs
• Consanguinity, inheritance, legal norms, vendettas
• Widows, widowers, orphans, adoption

Language

A little conlang goes a long way, but a bad conlang is worse than no conlang, and can cause an author to be discredited in the eyes of the reader. A few worldbuilders, like Tolkien, only bothered worldbuilding at all because of a conlang they wanted to create a usage context for. Others, like Christopher Paolini, the author of Eragon, manage to get away with linguistic murder, slapping a fresh fictional name on a collection of words ripped wholesale from Old English, but then integrate it so well with the world's magic system that the reader isn't even annoyed about it. I suppose the real lesson here is, if you're going to file the serial numbers off a dead language and call it your own, it's imperative that you justify the theft with a delightful magic system. Refuge in audacity counts for much.

• Phonology, morphology
• Syntax, grammar
• Semantics, semiotics
• Orthography, literacy, scribes, bards, oral history
• Writing tools, media, and materials (e.g. clay tablets for cuneiform, ink for calligraphy)
• Etymology and onomastics (how the names of people and places develop)

Magic System

Obviously not all story genres have magic in the first place, but for those which do feature magic, quite often the magic system is the entire reason the author developed their story world in the first place. A magic system can be the seed from which the rest of a world spawns, sprawling and elaborate.

• How magic works
• Rituals, incantations
• Alchemy, potions
• Wandlore, spellbooks, other equipment
• Education in magic, inheritance of magic
• Masquerade (magic is hidden) or ubiquity (magic is public)
• Stigma or status of magic users

News / Networking

Believable worlds are connected by travel and communication, trade and rumour.

• How does information get transmitted in this world?
• Postal services, couriers, shipping
• Telecommunications, broadcast media (radio, television)
• Journalism
• Nautical travel, space travel, merchant navies
• Roads, canals and river systems, rail and monorail
• Airplanes and airships
• Carts, carriages, horses or horse-equivalents
• Bandits, highwaymen, tolls, protection rackets
• Silk roads, international trade routes

Omissions

Ernest Hemingway coined a writing method he called "iceberg theory," in which the narrator gives as little detail as can still successfully lead the reader to a conclusion which aligns with what the author wishes for the reader to believe. Most of the mass of an iceberg is below the waterline, invisible from the surface, while only the least fraction of the iceberg is explicitly visible. The underwater size of an iceberg may be inferred, however, by the visible size of it, allowing a ship's helmsman to judge correctly that he should steer around it, giving it a wide berth. In worldbuilding, much can be implied without direct explication, and usually this is preferable. A story set on our own Earth might mention tides taking place in a port city; this would be enough to allow the reader to infer Earth has a moon, to cause those tides with its gravity. It would not be necessary to actually clarify to the reader that Earth has a moon. Note that this is a very different thing from Unknowns, a later entry in this writeup. Omissions are not unknowns, but are instead opportunities for the author to develop rapport with the reader by trusting the reader's intelligence to naturally fill in the gaps of what is explicitly stated. Anything that is explicated, which seemingly does not need to be given such detailed treatment, may then be treated as foreshadowing, e.g. Chekhov's gun: it is noticeable because the author took the time to call attention to it, rather than maintaining their habitual economy of detail. This rewards the cleverness of an attentive reader, by granting them satisfaction at guessing correctly, or by granting them the pleasure of a twist or surprise that subverts expectations.

Politics / Power

• Political systems, e.g. monarchies, democracies, republics, federated states, feudalism
• Elections, suffrage, protests and demonstrations
• Lines of succession, appointments, hereditary knighthoods and magistracies
• Meritocracies and imperial exams, bribery, corruption
• Espionage, assassination
• Economic systems, e.g. capitalism, communism
• Social face, social rank or credit
• Prejudice, discrimination, race and caste
• Statecraft, legislation, judgment, law enforcement and peacekeeping, prison systems
• Slavery, indenture, weregild, lawsuits and litigation
• Political exile, executions, outlawry
• Proxy wars and rebellions

Questing

Worldbuilding doesn't count for much, if there's not actually a narrative through which to experience the constructed world. A quest conducts the reader through the world, by showing it to them through the eyes of the characters.

• Inciting incidents, events which actually necessitate long distance travel by the protagonist, in order to demonstrate worldbuilding through the traversal and exploration of the world by a character
• Knights errant, parties of heroes, round tables, adventuring guilds
• MacGuffins, the Holy Grail, artifacts of power, super secret weapons
• Rescue missions, damsels in towers
• Escort missions, missing persons
• Dragons in caves, loot
• Successive quest arcs, monster of the week or other episodic approaches, distinction of threat level between final boss and mini-boss

Religion

Characters tend to have some beliefs about the cosmos which may or may not reflect the material reality they directly experience through their senses.

• Deities and demigods, and whether they're actually real within the setting
• Culture heroes, mythological figures
• Magical or supernatural powers mediated through religion
• Ghosts, demons, angels, possessions, divine interventions
• Divination, visions, prophecies, omens
• Evil Eye, apotropaic gestures and talismans, good luck charms
• Beliefs about death and the afterlife
• Beliefs about the origin of life
• Purity norms and ritual impurity
• Coming of age rites, baptisms or temple dedications
• Organised church establishments and their leadership hierarchy
• Monastic communities
• Temple prostitution
• Pontifex Maximus and calendars
• Initiation rites, conversion rites
• Saints, martyrdom, religious persecution
• Scriptures, hymns, holidays
• Holy symbols, superstitions, minced religious oaths (e.g. zounds and crivvens
• Excommunication, apostasy, heresy, schism, inter-denominational conflict

Struggles

Every step of the way, your characters should encounter "feedback" from their environment, in response to their actions. Most often this feedback takes the form of direct resistance from other individual characters and obstruction by institutional and systematic forces at play in the world. Some amount of this resistance should always originate within the character himself, and some of the character's internally-sourced struggles should interact with his external struggles, such as bringing bad luck upon himself through unpersonable behaviour or a refusal to hear every side of a story before passing judgment. A character's actions should always face consequences, even and especially when they are the most correct available actions in context. Simply making the right decisions should not be a way to hit "fast forward" to the part of the story where everything suddenly becomes effortless, because that will make the character's successes feel unearned and therefore unsatisfying, which undermines any power fantasy the story might be providing for the reader.

• Hostile gods, fate, or destiny
• Political opponents or organised crime
• A hereditary foe or vendetta from a previous generation
• A romantic or professional rivalry
• An authority figure with a grudge
• A mole or double agent within one's team
• A betrayal
• Hamartia or hubris
• Cowardice or reasonable fear to act
• Being untrained or underqualified to face the challenge

Technology

Worldbuilding can be made or broken by the internal consistency and causality of its tech tree. Some industries and technologies innately require others to exist in the first place: radios need transistors; advanced optics require glass.

• Where and how are raw materials sourced for technology?
• How are skills transmitted; how is craftsmanship learned (e.g. through apprenticeship or schooling)?
• Famed inventors, thinkers, mad scientists
• Documentation and preservation of methods
• Industry funding - through a market, through military or administrative research and development, or through a private patron?
• What events prompted forks in the tech tree that do not resemble technology in our world

Unknowns

Effective worldbuilding needs something to be left to the imagination - some gaps that the reader's speculation can populate with their own ideas and questions. Ideally you, the author of the world, should know nearly everything there is to know about the setting, at every level of granularity that will ever see mention in your narrative, but that doesn't mean you need to get ahead of every question your readers might ask. Over-exposition kills the soul of a story, by coming across as a dry recitation of facts. Under-exposition challenges the reader to try to figure out what you're deliberately and unintentionally not telling them, and this shepherds them toward greater investment in what's going to happen next in your world. What kinds of things should remain unknown, are for you to decide; there is no universal roadmap. Similarly, your characters - even your narrator - should not be truly omniscient, and the world should not unfold its entirety through the perspective of only one character, even a very well-traveled one. Characters should be ignorant of some things, mistaken about some things, morally wrong on some things even when they are usually benevolent and sympathetic. The interplay between the gaps in their understanding is a major source of character development, and should be leaned into, not smoothed out.

Violence

• What does conflict look like in this constructed world?
• What constitutes provocation (e.g. dishonour, deception, wanting what someone else owns)?
• Are there any state-approved mechanisms of violence (e.g. code duello)?
• Does the state have any monopoly on violence (e.g. weapons only police or military are allowed to own)?
• Are there any locations where violence or weapons are taboo (e.g. inside the Roman Pomerium)?
• Are any weapons considered more civilised than others? How do weapons differ among the various social classes?
• Are there any martial arts, and do they have any integration with social rank, magic, or religion?
• How are skilled combatants trained? Are there any social groups which have an obligation to become martially skilled? Is there a military draft?
• Who is allowed to join the military? Do gender norms affect military participation?
• Are there any combat sports?

Worse Things

No matter how grimdark your story is, and no matter how utterly destitute your character is at the beginning of your plot, there should always be a capacity within your constructed world for things to become persuasively worse. There should never be a moment in your narrative when it is impossible or implausible that your character can be convinced to get up and move, or change course, or stop what he's doing. There must always be a worse option that the character avoids taking, a worse future that the character wishes to prevent, a worse version of himself that the character refuses to become. One way to present this is to give your protagonist an antagonist or foil who has been through similar experiences, and already fallen so far that they are unrecognisable to themselves, like Frodo Baggins seeing his own worst possible ending in the form of Gollum. A similar approach is to have an antagonist who is trying to convince himself that his own downfall was inevitable, by attempting to corrupt a paragon into becoming the same type of monster, like how Joker in The Killing Joke (1988) tries to thwart Batman in his pursuit of justice without murder. It isn't necessary to constantly confirm a character is always on the better path, or to validate the character's choices by rewarding them with pleasing outcomes, but it is necessary for characters to encounter options which provoke them or inspire their fear and revulsion, or which seem at the time like inferior choices for believable reasons. A story too rich in contentment and the expectation of perpetual ease, is a story which does not get past the first paragraph.

Xenology

• Immigration, expatriation, refugees
• Ethnic communities (e.g. Chinatown, Little Italy)
• Pidgin and creole languages
• Border patrols, no man's land, territorial boundary walls
• Empire buffer regions, outer empire, military forward operating bases
• Wars of conquest, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies
• Cartographic expeditions (e.g. Lewis and Clark)
• Trade relations
• Extradition treaties
• Stereotypes about foreigners or aliens
• Hospitality norms, guest rights

Yearning

A constructed world needs a soul, an underlying sense that it's a place worth living (if it's a generally bright-toned narrative), or a place worth saving (if it's a grey-toned or morally complex narrative), or a place worth surviving and conquering (if it's a dark-toned narrative). If your reader wishes they could have been born in your world, or imagines how they would solve that world's problems, if they lived there, then you've achieved this most difficult of worldbuilding objectives.

• Overt Appeal - What about your constructed world is just blatantly better, easier, simpler, or lovelier than the reality we actually live in? Even if other aspects of the world are far more complex, difficult, or unpleasant to navigate, is there anything about the central problem of the world which makes it feel more emotionally accessible than reality in some way, or allows it to serve as an escapist fantasy or a power fantasy? Example: A zombie apocalypse story likely has none of the drudgery of modern corporate office jobs, and none of the pathetic banality of modern politics. The straightforwardness of a narrative where survival itself is the constant source of uncertainty, rather than problems more familiar to one's day-to-day life, can be a great relief for a reader.
• Redeemability - Is there something or someone there that deserves a second chance? Is there a character or culture seeking atonement, reparations, or to restore themselves from the brink of total extinction?
• Solvability - Is this world defined by a problem that would be interesting to solve, which challenges the creativity and intellect of the reader?
• Aspirational Glory - Does the world have a former state of grace, a golden age, or an age of enlightenment that I strives to return to, through revolution or renaissance? Does it have a millenarian eschatology or a promised land or grand Ragnarok-style battle for the fate of the entire cosmos, which the world is gearing up to fight?

Zoology

• Dangerous megafauna, current or extinct
• Domesticated livestock
• House pets
• Zoos, research facilities, nature preserves
• Equestrianism, hunting
• Nomadic herding
• Zoonotic diseases
• Migration patterns
• Mythical beasts, shapeshifters, and cryptids

Doubtless I've missed a few glaringly important things, which will occur to me in the shower or on my commute. If you've read this far, then I thank you for your time, and I hope you found something to enjoy here, in return for my effort in writing it.

Iron Noder 2024, 26/30