Wowsa, great thread.

Great examples of how you detail things, Ecna. Very cool.

I really enjoy worldbuilding myself, so here's my own 2 cents.

Realism?

I think that it depends on your tone, and your universe. Internal consistency, like others have mentioned, is paramount. I don't think that it has to be realistic per se, but it needs to be understandable and digestible. Fantasy cliches tend to work because they are really familiar themes that help the reader get into the book quickly. The cost: depth and originality.

Maps?

I think that maps are some of the best tools out there, for building your world and keeping the details straight. They also can help you build stories, as the environment can play a big role. If you're doing sci-fi, maybe it's a star map rather than a full on world map.

Here are some maps that I used to develop and old pen & paper fantasy (cliche?) RPG that I was making, Agyris:

http://www.agyris.net/v3/encyclopedia/places/maps/dl_static.asp
http://www.agyris.net/v3/encyclopedia/places/maps/dl_interactive.asp
http://www.agyris.net/v3/encyclopedia/places/maps/beyond_dl.asp
http://www.agyris.net/v3/encyclopedia/places/maps/irva_map.asp
http://www.agyris.net/v3/encyclopedia/places/maps/astro.asp

Here's the beginning map I'm making for Monster Commute (a more Americana urban fantasy with an entirely different tone)

http://www.monstercommute.com/wp-content/uploads/map-of-monstru.jpg

I'm just beginning to add cities and regions to this thing... it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with Monstru.

Strangely Familiar

A theme that I go for a lot is "strangely familiar". I want a world that people can "get" pretty quickly, but I also then want to take them down twists and turns that they don't immediately expect. It makes it somewhat more accessible than making a completely alien universe, but also keeps it interesting for me and the reader. I hope.

Your Mileage

And of course, your mileage may vary.

I think that there are lots of cool and interesting ways to build your worlds, and many of them may work way better than anything that I'm/we're telling you.

Just go out there and build-build-build, and your personal best tools will be invented through their use.

Haha! Love the little ship getting sucked into the spinning sea on your interactive map. Nice touch.

Yea, I love that too!
Those are some very nice maps, but I think the map of Monstru is my fav. And also a big thanks for your advice!

Many thanks!

Ecna - Did you click on the little ship? Or on the red dot icons? Or some of the names?

It'll bring up a little more detail. Click to launch "more detail" there on the right side, and it'll launch a webpage with more info.

Glad that you like the Monstru map the best, Rynn1. I'd be sad if it was the stuff from 15 yrs ago that you liked best.

LOL, "mysteriously" lost at sea.

I'm not sure how this fits in the "writing" section, but to me it's definitely world building... How do people feel about stuff like set design and set decoration, wardrobe, etc. as a part of world building?

My story takes place in current day North America, but it's a world where "unknown phenomena" (aliens, monsters, etc.) are commonplace. I find I'm spending a ton of time writing background material for things like interviews that the characters gave or books they've written. And to tie this into my question above, I'm then going about designing books and other background materials that will appear in the story at various points.

To people like Ecna and SteamCrow: are you sharing all of the "behind the scenes" world building materials with everyone or are they just for your use?

We have 4 categories of information:

1) Tell it as fast as we can. So far 3 of our races are fair game, get everything in this category into the audiences hands as quickly and non-jarringly as possible. This is an informal category.

2) Soon, but not yet. Two of our species are still under wraps, so a big chunk of information about them will soon be in the Tell it fast category, but for now, all hush hush.

3) Secret For Now. All our races have a depth of secrets that will eventually be fleshed out, but we want to build up the surface knowledge so we have some norms that we can disturb by letting out the secrets. These sections are actually marked in our internal wiki so no one lets them slip accidentally.

4) Secret Forever. The readers will never ever hear this information. It exists solely to keep a consistent background so the writers know what's going on, even if the readers never do. All this information is marked in our internal wiki.

We thought we'd have a lot of "Tell It Fast" information that we wouldn't ever be able to show off, but we're finding more and more opportunities to use these images and text in various products. It's nice to be able to pull in a bunch of pre-designed material when you need to get something out the door right quick.

I'm doing a lot of worldbuilding right now, both for the comics I'm planning and (for bonus points) as a campaign setting to run an RPG in when my current game (a galaxy-spanning space fantasy with just enough world-building that things remain consistently ridiculous*) runs its course.

The whole project pretty much started out of frustration with all the fantasy campaign settings that are out here these days. Everything's ripped (sometimes badly) straight out of Tolkien, and I'm sick of elves and dwarves. So I started building a setting with other fantasy races, and the more I learn about, the more unique and interesting the setting gets. "Research, research, research!" someone said, and I couldn't agree more. It's not just about fact-checking, but also getting ideas. ;D

That said, I guess what you have to think about is: just how outlandish is the place (example: peasant farmers growing crops and supporting a feudal kingdom high in the cold, snowy mountains), and what do you have to work with as far as suspense of disbelief? If it's a fantasy setting rich with magic, perhaps every town has a mage that makes sure the plants can grow. Or maybe part of being a farmer is knowing that kind of magic. Or maybe they farm a plant that magically protects itself. If magic is a rare-but-powerful thing, maybe the king (or his optionally evil sorcerer/ess) is the only one with that sort of magic, and controls the fate of the kingdom's crops (and its peasants.) If your setting is low-magic, then you can make up a plant that can both feed a lot of people and survive high in the mountains (though you might have to research exactly what kind of plant could survive in those conditions.)

I found a list of links to worldbuilding stuff just recently... *finds it* (link) There are some really good links in there that might be useful.

I have to agree that maps are extremely useful. I start all of my worldbuilding projects with a map (though it usually changes a few times before it's done!) which works for me because I think visually, and I need something to look at and organize. Speaking of maps and worldbuilding resources, I highly recommend the Cartographers' Guild. You can find out about just about anything that goes on a map there, which includes a great deal of worldbuilding. And how to make your rivers run properly.

Anyhoo, I hope some of that made sense or even helped. Good luck!

*Far in the future, when humans have been gone from Earth for so long that they've lost it, in a galaxy filled with evil corporations bent on galactic domination, leagues of interstellar assassins, space pirates, giant mechs, ninja rabbits, and therianthropic cyborg warriors. It follows the antics of a starship crew led by an irresponsible captain, consisting of a famous (and eccentric) biomechanic, her assassin-in-disguise research assistant, her amnesiac cyborg bodyguard, a lecherous mech pilot, a four-armed alien mechanic and his assistant (a cat), a half-squirrel girl with psychic powers, a sorcerer, and more, all on a ship powered and controlled by a temperamental, telekinetic, pink rabbit from Pluto. Hilarity ensues. Character ideas typically come in the format of, "Sort of like (character from something), mixed with (character from something else), but with (something random)" For example, "Sort of like Long John Silver, mixed with Davy Jones, but with a giant mech!" I kid you not. He's the ship cook.

Where do you start from world-building? From the characters out to the world, or from the world down to the characters?

For me, I ended up hitting character related questions on my Comrade Hero Project that I needed to research to avoid inconsistencies, clear up any confusion, or because I plain didn't know the answer. My world-building started from the characters and went outwards from there. Eventually all those little bits of research started building up a worldview from the point of the characters and then I ended up having to decide whether to fit the characters into this world, or make the world conform to the characters.

Thankfully because my Project isn't far removed from contemporary 21st Century norms, I didn't need to put in the sort of world building attention and detail like so many science fiction, and fantasy world creations. The black patches on the map have slowly gotten filled in over the years, rather than started with a blueprint of the world already mapped out. So my world could be wrapped around the characters very easily.

That said I like to keep a tight reign on details and research to make sure things are at least plausible, or aren't too far removed from what's already being used/research IRL.

I found a good article on the twitters with a potential NSFW title (but SFW content):
Worldbuilding is a Kind of Masturbation

tl;dr: World-build the stuff that actually ends up in your story and relates to your plot and characters, the rest is just for your fun time.

It's a similar lesson to what I've learned over the years on Carpe Chaos. Take this paragraph for instance:



NEVER gonna make it in a comic. I will never write a script with the Porg's Judicial Oversight Committee. Ever. Documenting that was a waste of time.

I don't agree entirely with the author of the post, but it's a strong reminder, that world-building should always be in light of your story. If your story can't see that part of the world, you don't need to build it. Your world needs to be more than a facade, but not much more.

The real value of world-building for your reader isn't a single unending omniscient view of a complete world (which is the view the author has), but a series of complete and majestic panoramas as your characters travel along the plot.

"Overbuilding" a world may not be the most effective use of your time, but I don't agree that it is a "waste" of time. As long as you don't find it necessary to try to shoehorn everything you come up with into your story, there's nothing wrong with having "too much" background information. You never know when a seemingly irrelevant factoid may become relevant, or lead you to a train of thought about your world that is relevant, and extra background information can help you present a world that feels complete, even if it is never directly presented to the reader.

And maybe... you just enjoy worldbuilding. Even masturbation has a purpose.


It depends, but I usually come up with character archetypes first, though with some high-level idea of what the world is like, and then as detail is added to the world, this fleshes out the characters, and vice-versa. So it's really both at the same time. Sometimes the development of the characters outpaces that of the setting (and more specifically, the plot), and I have trouble figuring out what the characters are there for, and the project stagnates.

I enjoyed that article but I also agree with Arioch. Sure, it's counterproductive to get endlessly lots in meaningless details of the world, but you can't always develop it just to suit the story. Sometimes you need the world to be present before you come up with the story. I'm in this situation now, preparing a future GN once I'm done with Malaak, and I have a concept I'm excited about, but no storyline yet. I need to do some more work on the world itself and see what emerges of that. The advantage of this is also that you're more likely to come up with a unique plot, only suitable to your own world, as opposed to an all-terrain plot that you then clothe in your world's culture.

There's no real wrong way to world-building.

If starting from a concept (battling zombie terrorists) gets those creative juices going, then run with it.

If starting with a specific character(s) gets that ball rolling for you, then keep on rolling.

And if you feel like building an entire sandbox for your characters to live in first, then go for it.

And fudging can be just as beneficial as doing a Tom Clancy techno-explanation. So long as the reader buys it, and the story keeps moving along, then throw aside caution (and the laws of physics) to the wind.