Today we sum up the rest of the basics of ideas you might want to consider when worldbuilding. This final part of the series will give the broadest overview of the most basic core pillars you need to consider. Take your personal goal into account, and work accordingly. I have developed four pillars that I typically begin with when working with a new idea, but the process can be different.
This is the final part of a series. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.
Did you go ahead and make a map for your world? If you did, that can help you flesh out the rest. If not, that’s totally fine, you’ve got a free and amorphous zone to let your creativity play free! Here are the top three core concepts on which you base your world:
People
You will need to fill your setting with people. Sentient beings are at the core of any story (unless you’re doing something truly unique). When I say People, I mean everything from the individual all the way up to the galaxy-spanning empire. Your setting needs inhabitants, and it’s most often the idea that worldbuilders start with. It can be as small as your Dungeons and Dragons character idea that spirals totally out of control into a new setting, or as vast as an idea for a domineering interdimensional nation ruled by a multiversal godking.
I recommend spending a certain amount of time on this or deciding on a certain number of characters, nations, or factions to design before moving on. I am all for sinking into worldbuilder’s disease, but because of the meandering nature of the art, you might find that one idea for People leads quite naturally into considering a different aspect of your world, like its Conflict.
Conflict
Whether you are worldbuilding for a novel, roleplay campaign, or just a hobby, your setting needs a conflict. Conflict is what drives a story, what really makes a world interesting. Often, this takes the form of war, like in Star Wars, Stormlight Archive, and even the board game Root. As above, this can be vast or tiny, like world war or the raiding of a small mountain village (which was the inciting incident of the aforementioned Spellmonger series).
Conflict doesn’t necessarily mean war, though. The type of conflict is often a significant impactor of the themes involved in your world. Political intrigue, romantic webs, natural disasters, angry gods, zombie apocalype, or anything else could stand in for the primary driving conflict of your setting. There will be more discussion on this blog in the future about types of conflict, but for now, if you need more, you can check the Further Reading section below.
Law
Law represents significant concepts about your setting that are objectively true and impact the setting in a meaningful way. This includes things like the laws of physics–does magic exist? How does it affect daily life, technology, etc? Does God or a pantheon of gods actually exist? This is where you can play with the very core ideas of setting, even the way physics works or how stars exist in reality. Sometimes, this is where you end up when you have an interesting mechanical idea you’d like to explore.
For example, part of my setting for Honor in the Dark was born from the question of what life would look like if planets didn’t exist, and life only existed aboard artificial megastructures or vast homeships travelling the stars. Planets not existing in my setting is a Law I based the entire premise off, and informed the cultures of my People (how do factions form aboard a starship big enough to be a city?), as well as my Conflict (what kind of resources do people fight over without planets to live on?). I began carving my pillars with this idea.
This idea, like the following one, represents a broad spectrum of ideas, and purposefully so. The Laws you develop for your own setting will be unique to the story you want to tell.
Lore
The final aspect making up the basic pillars of your setting is what your People believe. This represents religions, political ideologies, cultural norms, scientific principles, historical perspectives. The important part of this pillar is that it specifically does not necessarily relate to what is actually true of your setting, but rather what is believed by its inhabitants. Even if the gods don’t exist, some people (or most people) may believe they exist.
Lore, along with Law, represents the most broad and the most metaphysical ideas of your setting, and will certainly be ideas we will dive into more in future posts.
This concludes the First Steps series. We’ve been through a broad overview of how to start worldbuilding, and in future posts we will be diving deep into specific topics, discussing tropes, and critiquing popular worlds. Thank you for joining! See you next week.
Further Resources
- The Templin Institute: Worldbuilding Pillars | Identifying Your World’s Key Elements
- Reedsy: 7 Types of Conflict in Literature: A Writer’s Guide
- Brandon Sanderson lecture at BYU on the basics of worldbuilding
