Some of these are not mine, they’re from author Randy Ellefson, I’m just interpreting the tips I like in my own words. These specifically come from his book, 185 Tips on World Building. I don’t agree with all of them, because he tends to read as a “you must do this specific thing to be successful,” which is limiting and doesn’t consider when elements work because they’re different, these books are also in the “throw all your eggs in one basket” camp for your one series/mythos, instead of different worlds for different universes.
Ellefson also disagrees with my argument of “everything you build doesn’t have to serve a purpose”. Verbatim, in his book, he says: “There’s no reason to invent something if we don’t have a plan for it.” Which, sorry, no. Easter eggs and details purely for fluff in a one-off sentence make your world feel real.
That said, he does have some useful nuggets I’ll paraphrase below, and some I just went off-book entirely.
1. Pacing your Workflow
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and sitting down to hash out all the elements of your world in one sitting and never deviating from that path greatly limits the scope and variety you could come up with. The real world wasn’t manufactured by a nitpicky author on a quest to absolve us of plot holes—let your worldbuilding be a little illogical and contradictory and just plain strange and inexplicable.
The best way to do that is to worldbuild when inspiration strikes, or at least leaving your worldbuilding loose enough to add in extra details and spice whenever you come up with something cool. Do a little note here or there, toss it in your “worldbuilding” bin, and you’ll likely end up with something far more unique and organic than following any step-by-step method.
2. Are the Gods Real?
In essence—say you have your fantasy world and your fantasy religions. Decide whether or not those prayers can actually be answered, and to what degree, and how the existence (or just speculation) of your world’s religion impacts scientific thought and endeavors.
You can write a whole-ass religion with all these beliefs and practices, and leave it entirely up to speculation whether there’s anyone listening. Or strike it somewhere in the middle where they do exist but aren’t very hands on, or they do exist, but only for certain groups, or they did exist, etc.
In my WIP sci-fi series, I had a little bit of both. One world where they’re very much real and there’s proof, and one world where everyone sure believes their capital-G god is real, with zero evidence.
3. Species vs Races
Most of the time, in fantasy, they’re different “races” in that they can intermarry and interbreed and create things like half-elves. In sci-fi, they tend to be different species with different lifespans, biological structures, diets, habitats, restrictions, etc. If your world is the latter, something really underexplored in these kinds of settings is how being completely different species can be devastating to romantic relationships that connect on an intellectual level, but just can’t on a long-term scale.
Also an aside—if you’re going to write a racism allegory consider the following: Racism in the real world is a social construct. We are all human and the differences between us are negligible, making all the fearmongering baseless. And yet, in so many stories, fantasy racism is between two legitimately different species or between one group, and one Much Cooler group (mutants, fairies, elves, aliens, supernatural entities). Suddenly the fantasy racists have a leg to stand on because they aren’t all the same species and they are fundamentally different, which… misses the point entirely? Elves vs “Dark Elves” are a whole different ballgame than “Elves vs Humans”.
4. The Planet of Hats
Taken from OSP, and Ellefson. “Gee, I wonder who the bad guys are?”
The bad guys: Blood red eyes, stereotypically ugly features, skulking around in the dark with yellow teeth, claws, a penchant for hissing, and a color pallet of reds and blacks.
The good guys: Conventionally gorgeous, pastels and bold rainbows of color, sunny utopia of a civilization.
Unless the point is to comment on the planet of hats, or be funny, try to inject some variety and nuance in the Bad Guy realm.
5. Determine the Social Hierarchy
Most of us can come up with the lower class and the rich one percenters for our worlds rather easily, I think, because those tend to be emphasized most heavily in fantasy, and your hero/villain will likely fall into either side. But do you have a middle class? What socioeconomic hurdles are in place to keep everyone in their lanes?
What’s the difference between homeless, impoverished, poor, getting by, renting, home-owning, and land-owning? How can you tell, and how does your world’s rich maintain their place, outnumbered by your world’s proletariat? Hunger Games is a fantastic example—some Districts are much more heavily favored and nurtured by the rich than others.
6. Monsters
Similar to whether or not the gods are real—are your monsters real? Does your world have their own in-universe metaphors and allegory for the “monstrous” that are still myths? What does that say about these people? Has that view around those “monsters” and what they allegorically represent in-universe changed?
If the monsters are real, are they actually monsters, or the victims of propaganda? Are the “normal people” the real monsters? Are they all just people creating violent slander against each other?
7. Plants, Animals, and Natural Resources
Stuff like this is, in my opinion, only important to heavily detail and think about if the plot demands it. As in, I don’t need to know about the land’s farming practices if a food shortage or grain disease or fantasy inflation of corn prices isn’t part of the story. A one-off line? Sure. A farmer’s backstory? Sure. Taking a random aside to talk at length about genetic engineering of onions in your book about fantasy spies? No.
That said, if this is part of your plot, mix together some real-world analogues and when it comes to fundamental methods for survival, like farming, think of what would be the path of least resistance for these people to come up with. A seaside village is probably going to survive mainly on fish, mussels, and crustaceans because it’s right there for the taking, as opposed to trying to farm avocados on starved soil. If they are trying to farm avocados, now that’s a peculiar story I’d love to hear more about.
8. Zombies?
Or the general concept of an afterlife, and reverting back from it. Is there a religion around their dead and where they go when they’re gone? Can they come back? Do the people only think they can come back? Are there whole rituals or beliefs around revival or reincarnation or body-hopping?
What parts of your afterlife really are a myth, and what can you prove within the narrative? Does it even matter to the plot if fantasy heaven is real? Do your characters refuse to believe in it, despite evidence to the contrary?
Are the “undead” bound to religious rules, or supernatural? Meaning: If I write about vampires, am I writing with Christian rules (with the churches and the holy ground and crosses being problematic) or something older? If I write about zombies, are they a natural phenomenon, or a plague from the gods?
9. On Practical Planets (Anne's)
I watched a movie where there was a lock-box with a celestial combination lock, and to unlock it they needed to know the specific future date the last people who touched it would have thought of. The problem: That box predates the modern calendar, and the writers either didn’t know, didn’t care, or didn’t think it was important (it wasn’t, but still).
Same principle applies on creating planets: How “real” do you intend to get? We’re already off the edge of the map when we create multiple humanoid alien races, implying a cosmic degree of convergent evolution. The more “real” you get with your worldbuilding, the more questions you open up, the more it starts to fall apart as you put the audience’s ability to suspend their disbelief under a microscope.
Example: Artificial gravity. We can either make spinning spaceships, or just say the ship has some fancy alien tech that magically makes it happen and not explain in any further detail. And people will buy it because this is sci-fi.
When it comes to planets and concerning elements like tides, seasons, weather patterns, different gravitational pulls, whether the air should even be breathable, it can get very overwhelming very quickly if you yourself don’t allow some room for your own suspension of disbelief. So consider playing with elements on non-Earth worlds like how the night sky would look on an inhabited moon, or a binary star system, but also, this is fantasy. Just roll with it.
If you are intending to write a universe with very realistic and grounded physics, you have a lot of research to do and authors like Ellefson have plenty of guidance to help you.
10. Practical Geography (Anne's)
Once again: If it’s important to the plot, go ham on your climates and weather patterns and how the geography and mountains shape rainfall and such. The more bearing the physical environment has on the story, the more detail it deserves. Your fantasy city is going to need a source of freshwater and ample fields for food if they farm, vs import.
But also, get weird. Fill your fantasy geography with crazy natural phenomena. You might have a forest of trees that your fantasy woodpeckers bored a million holes through, and when the wind blows, the entire forest sounds like a godly flute. Or you have a river that runs beet purple in the spring because of a natural mineral deposit upriver, perfectly harmless. Or you have a flower that can walk, creeping around the forest floor on its root ball devouring beetles all night long.
Real world physics are fun to play with and can create some interesting problems: Like your heroes crash land on a jungle world with air they can’t breathe, demanding they address this problem that many sci-fi stories overlook, but it’s also terribly constricting. This is fantasy. Get fantastical.
11. Fantasy Politics and Why They’re in Power
100 years from now, I’d love to know how the textbooks describe the evolution of early 2000s American politics. If you have a fantasy dictator, figure out how they came to power, who they stood on to get where they are, and what parts of the populace were so desperate for a world they don’t live in, that they gave this leader the shirts off their backs.
Figure out the answer to “How did we get here?” Let it be illogical, and let our current political climate serve as example. You can have whatever hill you want to die on for your chosen politicians, for the most arbitrary reasons, and most of us don’t have well-thought-out theses on why we vote the way we do. Our views are filtered through the media we consume, and the media we don’t consume.
Let the system be broken and nonsensical—you can’t get any worse than reality.
12. Romanticizing (Anne's)
In other words, does your world have an era, a style of design, a way of living, a philosophy of a bygone time that they romanticize? Do they have idolized fantasy celebrities? A type of home or settlement that’s the Fantasy American Dream? What’s being advertised by the fantasy luxury, leisure, and cosmetic brands?
Was there a previous leader who led like no other? Do you have your own “Make Fantasy Land Great Again” group? Do they have merit? Is there another culture one group strives to live like? Architecture or clothing or cultural items they buy en masse to “be like the idols”.
I have a world with cultural artifacts inspired by Italian Murrine style glassblowing and via magic, they can make some physics-bending art pieces. Those artifacts, from that ancient culture, have been stolen and sold to enemy museums and the elite and have become a status symbol, even though the ancient culture just made plates and bowls out of necessity and would be horrified at their legacy.
13. Fantasy Weaponry and Innovation
Necessity inspires innovation, but what if your world never invented cars or gunpowder? For example: American land travel and urban design was built, with rare exception around our oldest cities, for cars in mind, not trains or horses and wagons and foot traffic, because of where we sit on the industrial revolution timeline. Our cities aren’t retrofitted for cars, our roads are wide enough for that sole purpose. Our settlements can be very widely spread apart because they were built with the knowledge of speedy travel in mind. Very few things, especially in the South (where I live) can be considered in “walking distance,” much less safely. You must own a car, you have no other option. The Powers That Be also hate trains because more trains means less need for cars and car companies like money.
Alternatively, how does warfare change depending on how deadly and plentiful your fantasy weapons evolve to be? Modern soldiers don’t prance around in their national colors and fancy feathered hats anymore, standing across from each other and shooting on command. Was there any practical reason for dressing your soldiers in bright, candy red, Britain? Surely must’ve been easy to spot for an ambush. Surely wasn’t practical, or logical, but it did happen.
14. Timescales
I want to address the alternative to the obvious “create a standard unit of measurement”. Show what happens when there isn’t a standard unit of measurement, and let chaos ensue. You should have one for the sake of not confusing your readers, but in-universe, have different cultures choosing to die on their hill of having 25 months when the rest of the world has 23, with the former based on their local natural phenomena and the latter based on lunar cycles.
“Military time” as we call it in the US, is the standard 24-hour clock that still confuses us and has us counting up on our fingers. A system we refuse to change even though it’s fundamentally the same amount of time, is a broken system that we still use because it's too hard to change (like the imperial measurement system).
15. Famous Places and Significant Architecture
Do you have a fantasy Disneyland? What about a fantasy remnant of a fantasy World's Fair randomly in your city? Or a bidding war between rival artists amounting to crazy monuments and art installations around the region trying to one-up each other? Your own Chicago Bean with a real name that no one uses and most of us aren’t even aware exists?
Or for religious purposes, what do your churches look like? Do they tower skyward as a monument to a celestial creator, or do they bury deep below ground and into the ocean, to reach a land or water god? Are they massive monuments or humble temples? Are they beautiful displays of wealth, or little wooden gazebos built by the locals? What does your architecture say about your culture?
16. Languages and Cultural Barriers (Anne's)
Whether you decide to write your own language or come up with a few words here and there and allude to foreign tongues, how do these languages, and the people who speak them, navigate foreign lands? How is the dominant language taught? Is the foreign language looked down on and discriminated against? Is even speaking it or having a name from it considered a crime? Are signs and advertisements written in multiple languages or just the dominant one?
What foreign traits are seen as unsavory by the dominant one, whether it’s clothing, religion, lifestyle choices, names, social behaviors, food, parenting, etc? How does the dominant culture discriminate–through law or social pressure?
Is your culture striving to protect a dying language and offering free courses and resources to learn it? Is there a dialect specific to one class or group or region? Do you have a pidgin or creole (not Creole) that comes from a blending of cultures, by force or by chance?
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I want to make it clear that I don’t think Randy Ellefson is objectively wrong. He makes a lot of good points—for grounded worldbuilding. As I said above, the more central any one piece of your worldbuilding is to the plot, the more detail and thought you should put into it so it feels believable and it feels like there’s much more beneath the tip of the iceberg than just what’s on the page.
He points out many facets of how a society is established where it is, when it is, and why a people would come together, stay together, thrive together, and fall apart. Lots of elements you might not think about when you’re staring at a blank canvas.
I just think his tips don’t allow for the creative freedom of the weird and illogical aspects that make a world feel organic, and not manufactured with step-by-step instructions. His tips are for world building, not world discovering.
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