Worldbuilding: How to Start — Worldbuilding Series

Have you ever started a book or settled in to watch a film and found yourself completely… transported? Sitting atop an ent’s shoulder as it carries you under the dark bows of Fangorn Forest, or chroming your teeth with the war boys before a glorious death in the Wasteland?

Call it escapism, but there’s a magic in walking the paths of someone else’s mind. Even more when you realize that you could be the one to lay those paths. A world is a… very large thing to create, though. Without the proper tools, worldbuilding rapidly devolves into a Sisyphean task.

You end up putting patterns on the wings of every beetle, naming every star of every constellation in the sky. We may be a foundry, but only for stories. If we’re going to help you learn the art of forging worlds, we’ll need a proper anvil to do it on. Luckily, we’ve found just that.

With the help of the amazing humans behind World Anvil, we’ve been able to turn this episode into something special. Not only are we going to discuss how to build worlds, we’re going to give you the opportunity to do it yourself. World Anvil is a website dedicated to organizing and hosting your fictional worlds.

You can write articles about your world, link them together like a wiki, draw maps, nest those maps into larger maps, and access dozens of other useful features all for free. For this series, we’re going to be working closely with World Anvil to run a worldbuilding competition. The prize?

We’ll use your world as the setting for the short story at the end of this series. So stay tuned until the end of the video for details! Also, if you’ve been following the bizarre correspondence I’ve been keeping with the…

Entity that’s been sending me letters, you will definitely want to stay until the video’s end. The most recent letter I’ve received is the strangest thing they’ve said to me yet. But that can wait. Now, on to the matter at hand. Worldbuilding is interesting, because it isn’t exactly what it sounds like.

As much as you can use it for spinning whole worlds from the aether and devising the lineage of the gods, you can also use it to dress the inside of a hut, or plan the layout of a town square. In this sense the “world” in worldbuilding doesn’t really refer to “worlds” at all-it

Refers to the places, great or small, varied or singular, disparate or cleverly interwoven, which compose them. There are a lot of very good reasons to begin worldbuilding. Pure love of the craft, experimentation with concepts and environments, searching for ideas and inspiration. But we are storytellers.

For us worldbuilding represents the development of the places in which our stories happen-the setting. And this is where things start to get complicated. So, find a notebook, and buckle up! It should be pretty clear at a glance that Worldbuilding and setting design share an intrinsic connection, but they are not the same thing.

Where worldbuilding is about the creation of places, setting design is, obviously, about the creation of settings. That’s a good place to start, but for it to make any actual sense, we need to explain what we mean when we say the words “place” and “setting”.

In his book Story, Robert McKee lays out the “4 dimensions of setting”, which are Period, Location, Level of Conflict, and Duration. Location and period together make a place. The presence of all four of these things together makes a setting, in which something (most often a story) happens.

For instance, Medieval Italy is a place. A Medieval Italian villa frantically trying to create a quarantine in the days before the black plague arrives is a setting. Okay! That must feel like a lot in rapid succession, but don’t worry-everything so far has just been the groundwork for our actual topic.

As long as you have a grasp on what the terms place and setting mean, you should be able to follow along without too much trouble. What we really want to do here is show how setting design bridges the gap between worldbuilding and storytelling.

And, after a lot of research and cogitation, we’ve found a very simple way to do it! We call it the Three Fs of Worldbuilding! …not to be confused with the four Fs of evolution-that’s something very different. First, we have Free Design. This is what most people think of when they think “worldbuilding”.

It’s essentially the free development of a fictional world’s places independent of any possible settings. As you plan the locations and periods of your world, nothing is stopping you from painting with the broadest strokes, sketching in the most minute detail.

You might place a mountain and move on; you might turn that mountain into a volcano with cultural significance to those living in its shadow, who worship the primordial being that lives within. You might even strip all of this from your world after creating it. You have the freedom. Second, we have Fixed Design.

When you decide to add a level of conflict over a duration of time to a place in your world, it becomes a setting. At this point, the design of this particular place within your world becomes constrained by its new needs as a freshly-established setting. Take, for instance, the volcano from our free design.

You might say the people in its foothills worship the primordial being inside, but what if the volcano begins to show signs of eruption? What if, in the weeks leading up to the cataclysm, all those people have to decide whether to flee or accept the gift of the god they worship?

Now you’ve appended a level of conflict over a duration of time, and in the process posed a whole list of questions about the place this new setting exists in. What is their technology like? How hard will it be for them to get away?

Is there any way to protect themselves should they choose to stay? These questions now require answers for this part of the world to be cohesive. It is now beholden to the setting. It has become fixed. Third and finally, we have Found Design.

And this one is special, because unlike the other two which are methods of building, it’s a method of selection. Found design is what happens when, rather than freely building the places in your world or predetermining which places need to become settings, something external drives you to

Discover the parts of your world that need building. There are a lot of reasons this might happen, but the interactive nature of tabletop RPGs makes them one of the best examples. A Game Master might have painted some broad strokes for their world and may have created

Plot hooks to compel players toward certain possible places or settings. But what if an NPC mentions that there’s a cult out there somewhere who worships a primordial being in a volcano? And what if the players then decide, plot be damned, they want to go find it?

For the Game Master, that might just be a foot note. They might never have intended to develop that part of the world in any way. But now, at the very least, they need to flesh out the place so that players can experience it.

Even more, they might need to add a level of conflict over a duration of time and turn this little footnote into a fully-fledged setting, depending on what they and their players want from the experience. Instead of attempting to preemptively free design every possible blade of grass that

Could exist in their world- instead of plotting out a field of fixed settings with their own predetermined levels of conflict-they’ve allowed themself to find the places and settings within their world. That can be a lot to digest. It certainly took me a long time to wrap my head around.

Don’t worry though, this is just an introduction. We’ll delve much deeper into free, fixed, and found design as independent worldbuilding methods in our upcoming list video. But like I said near the start of the video, we’re storytellers. What we really care about here is how worldbuilding applies to storytelling.

And for that, we look to fixed design. When writing a story, we actually want to be fairly constrained with the places we’re building, because if we go wandering freely into our worldbuilding, we might never actually write a story.

In fact, there’s a term to describe the phenomenon of writers getting lost in free design. Worldbuilder’s Syndrome is when, instead of working with a fixed design to develop the place specific to your story’s setting, you begin a free design and get totally lost in the innumerable details of your world.

Luckily, this is very easy to prevent. There are two main ways to approach fixed design. Let’s go over them one at a time. First, the way we described earlier: you begin with a place, turn it into a setting through

The addition of a level of conflict over a duration of time, and then build the details of the place specific to that new setting. Essentially, if you’ve decided your setting is going to be the city at the volcano’s base

In the days before its eruption, full of people deciding whether to stay or flee, that is not the time to begin developing the wholly unrelated underwater kingdom on the other side of the planet. The second way to approach fixed design-and this is very common with higher concept stories-is

Precisely the opposite: you begin with your level of conflict over a duration of time, and then build the place in which these things exist in order to turn them into a setting. So instead of creating a fixed point in a pre-existing world and getting very detailed

With it, you’re creating only as much of the world as you need to from a starting fixed point. For instance, you may decide you want to write a story about a people who are confronted with a cataclysmic event and have only several weeks to decide between their beloved religion and their own lives.

Level of conflict and duration. You might then decide that their culture and religion has developed around a primordial being said to inhabit the volcano they live beneath. Location and period. These both work really well, and in fact we use both of them for the show!

Our recent Slavic Folklore short story began with some inkling of place, generously given us by the existing myth and tales, and then we developed a setting from there. Our Junji Ito short story, on the hand, began with the high concept that our protagonist

Ought to be a vehicle for the main spectacle-the horror-which lead us to develop a level of conflict over a duration of time before building the specifics of the place in which they exist. This second one is actually a lot more common for us, so it’s going to form the basis for

Our challenge to all of you. I mentioned at the beginning of this video that we’re going to be running a worldbuilding competition for this series. More specifically, we’re going to give you the beginnings of a setting-a level of conflict

Over a duration of time-and it’ll be your job to build the place-the location and the period. And this is something we could never do without the help of World Anvil, because they allow you to turn the nebulous task of worldbuilding into something concrete and manageable.

Essentially, what you’re going to do is make a free account, visit the competition page (link in the description), and then build a world by writing several small articles using the list of templates provided. When the time comes, we’ll review the worlds created by our finalists and select the one

That would work best for our setting, at which point we’ll write a brand new Tale Foundry short story based in the world you’ve built. Check the description for more information, and stay tuned! We’ll be uploading a brief instructional video with World Anvil after this one!

Now, the prompt you’re going to be building your world around: “There have been creatures hiding in plain sight among the populace for centuries, but only now are the people becoming aware. They must race over the course of the next week to prevent the catastrophe that will result from their discovery.”

Now, go build a world for it! We’ll be waiting. In the meantime, if you like you what you saw here and you’d like to help us make more, consider supporting the show on Patreon! It’s our amazing Patreon community that allows us to make these videos.

In return, we give them votes to help us decide on video topics, daily updates, weekly sneak-peeks, and bi-weekly think tank sessions where the team brainstorms ideas for the next video with the community! It’s a lot of fun, and we’d love to see you there!

And now, as I promised, I have something… odd to share with you. My correspondent’s latest letter is, frankly, the opposite of what I’d been expecting. I think it may well be the first genuine question they’ve asked me. This, because following one particular recommendation in the comments, I dared to ask what their

Connection to The Foundry is. – Whatt precisely do you mean by “The” Foundry? – Short, but… I don’t know if I’ve ever had so many expectations dashed in eight words. I thought I’d eventually start to get some answers about this place, not start to give them. I know so little.

What should I even say? If you have any ideas for me, leave a comment. I’ll be reading them. At any rate, that’s all for this episode! Thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up! We’ll see you… next time! Bye! 1