So, you’ve planted your seed of an idea, you’ve sprouted it into a few cornerstone basics of your world. It’s time to spread out and develop the setting into a strong base to operate on. Whether you’re writing a novel or running a game, there are some very basic questions you will probably want to ask of your world. Let’s start with a name, and maybe a map.
This is a continuation of First Steps: Get Started Worldbuilding.
Develop the Name
Most likely, you will want to come up with a name to call your setting. This will help whenever you need to reference your setting as a whole and will help you mentally categorize when you inevitably come up with an idea for a new setting and world later on.
Whether you come up with a permanent name or something temporary to work with, that’s up to you. It can be the name of the primary continent, planet, or galaxy of your story, or it can be something symbolic, like the title of the future book the story will be a part of.
Develop the Map… Or not?
Map making is a fascinating subject for worldbuilding, and will certainly be the topic of at least a couple future posts. For now, we’ll discuss whether or not you may want to begin with a map. There are pros and cons:
Pros:
Beginning with a map can help you start with a rich backdrop to springboard ideas from. When I designed my first fantasy world to GM a tabletop roleplaying game, just writing down random cities, mountains, forests, and other landmarks kindled my imagination. “Who lives on this island? How do they get along with that coastal town across the channel? These mountains are called Svargraiv’s Range, who was Svargraiv?”
For the visually-oriented creators out there, and for those who do well kicking off of other ideas, this can be a huge boost in terms of how quickly you can develop your setting in broad strokes. Just from those few questions in the previous paragraph, I was already beginning to develop two cultures of the world. From those questions I can think about the geopolitical situation in that region of the world, as well as a bit of lore about a historical figure that could tie into the previous ideas or push me into a new area of the setting.
Cons:
If you’re writing science fiction, map making can be hard. If you’re not a visual person, it might not kickstart you in the same way. Sometimes, starting with a map doesn’t feel right, or isn’t applicable to your setting. If your story takes place in a single town, or if one of the core ideas you started with in the previous article is portal travel that makes distance between locations a non-issue, it might not make sense to start with a map.
Moving Forward
As you can see, we didn’t get very far before we hit something optional in worldbuilding. That’s the beauty of it, you only work on what sparks your interest or what you need for your story, and skip the rest.
However, I understand that can be pretty daunting. Where do you go from here?
In next week’s post, we will introduce the rest of the broadest strokes of the world, general ideas that you will likely need to think about at least in some form or fashion as you build out your setting.
From there, we’ll cut the general terms and broad ideas and start digging into the meat of your setting. Each week, we will talk about a worldbuilding concept and how you can use it, introduce a trope and unpack it, do a case study of a great setting from book, film, or game, and generally have some fun building strange new worlds!
See you next week,
Nate
