Your World is finished, now let’s take a minute to breath and look back at what you’ve done.

You’ve shaped the mountain ranges, rivers, valleys, oceans and more to create your world. The land where poor farmers eke out a living on Cliffside terraces, where adrenaline junkies hang-glide through thousand foot forests, where post-apocalyptic kings and queens build junkyard fortresses on rocky outcrops.

You’ve decided what happened in your world before the current state. The myths and mysteries of your present day peoples have their roots here. Your audience may or may not learn of the exploits of the previous inhabitants, but the history you’ve created will serve as a foundation on which to plan the future.

You’ve been the invisible hand, deciding what has value in your world. You’ve played Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Gold coins or pieces of paper, free markets or gift economy, how your characters exchange, create, and acquire has been established.

You’ve created the hellos and goodbyes. Why should you rely on how people act and behave themselves in the real world? Creating social norms from scratch may seem like a small step in comparison to what you’ve already done, but it goes a long way towards convincing the audience that the characters in your story are real people.

You’ve filled the heads of those who populate your world with beliefs. The gods and spirits of your making roam the pantheons of your characters. Whether you’ve just changed the names of the Greek or Norse gods, or spent hours carefully crafting a complex and convoluted way for your characters to process the world, you’ve established a super-cultural touchstone for your characters to relate to.

You’ve done all this, your world lives. Taking the time and spending the effort to fleshing out your world pays serious dividends when the time comes to tell a story.

When building a well populated world, social norms are the genetic makeup. Issues like religion, geography and economy may be the ultimate basis for the world, but social norms are what your audience will spend 90 percent of the time with. Social norms are both easy, and surprisingly difficult to create. For some reason, your audience will accept floating mountains and magic gems without question, but if everyone speaks in rhyme, or no one wears clothes, “That makes no sense!” It’s your job as a world builder to make it “make sense”.

small talk
As covered previously in the religion post, much of what you say is influenced by your culture. In most European nations, it’s genuinely confusing to be asked “how are you” on the street. In the US we accept it as a simple greeting, elsewhere it’s seen as a serious question. Why is that? Don’t be afraid to have people in your world talk about more than the weather. On the other hand, the weather may be a dangerous topic.

large talk
Is talking about politics, sexuality, religion, etc. acceptable or not in your world? Why or why not? If your world isn’t related to ours in any way, let the large talk rely on something else. Maybe people talk about the growing threat in the west. They’re not immediately worried about it, but it’s obvious to your audience that something major may occur later on in your story. Don’t get too large however. No one wants to spend 5 books hearing about the main character’s latent ennui.

in the home
You might not think of how you talk to your family as a “social norm”, but much of it is based on media you’ve observed, or the culture you’ve been raised in. Something as simple as saying “good night” or “I love you” is certainly a social norm. Is there a deference to elders? Maybe a deference to the younger members? It’s important to flesh out familial normalities since that’s an area that is oven neglected, or misunderstood, even in real life. Many stories begin and end with the family, focus on it.

in the street
“On your way man”, “only in accordance to you, lord”. That sounds fairly odd or contrived, but similar conversational patterns have existed on our planet. As opposed to social norms that occur in private, social norms occurring in public are probably richer in opportunity to express religion, history and economy. They are often more rigid, and based on some, at least subconscious societal agreement. I suggest you go creative then shape your creation into believability.

in the end
I put forward the opinion that social norms are the most important part of world building. We’ve all imagined strange geography, strange religion, strange occupations, but how many of us sit around thinking about new way to say “hello”? It should be important to you. We’re not building “Europe in space” or “the Vietnam War in 10,000 BC” we’re building another world.

If you’re religious or not, the people in your world may be, or may not. From the perspective of a world builder the inclusion of religion can really only help your story. Religion serves as a strictly additive part of world-building. Religion is one of the building blocks of basic human expression for many.

All though social norms will be covered in more detail in the next post, religion has a major influence on them. Religion effects things as granular as common speech. Whether you are religious or not, if you speak English you say “oh my god” and “goodbye”, which is contracted from “God be with ye”. Think about real world religion to inspire religious codes and requirements for your world. Muslims are required (except in some circumstances) to physically travel from wherever they live on the world to Mecca. Many religions preach that your soul will reincarnate after you die. Christianity is a famously schismatic religion.

There are three major, but not all inclusive, methods of developing religion:

Classic “Dungeons and Dragons” Gods:

Just throw out some cool sounding names, give each name am assortment of virtues and sins, design logos, sigils, etc. and your good to go! This method offers the most simplistic, but quickest path to fleshing out religion. If you don’t need readily hyper-realistic characters this method is likely the best. Additionally, by starting out with such simplistically designed gods and religions, there is a lot of room for changes, even major ones, down the road. Your audience won’t blink an eye when you make the claim that Asuma rewarded Greg the Great with super strength, even if all you’ve said previously of Asuma is that she is the Goddess of mountains. There’s flexibility in vagueness.

“Shrouded History” Religion:

If your world’s history, or prehistory as mentioned in a previous post, isn’t totally clear cut for your audience, religion might be a way of communicating what actually happened in the past. Perhaps you have a post-apocalyptic world. There may be a cult dedicated to the cause of destruction. Maybe your main character is an initiate of a religious order based on mythic giants from the region, and she’s tasked with finding a famous cracked bell. “Oh! This is the east coast of the U.S. centuries after world collapse”, your reader will surmise. Shrouded-history also takes “power from the vague” to the next level.

Earthlike religion:

This path may be more difficult, since you’ll need to both draw on and avoid real religion, without your audience simply rejecting it as a shameless copy out of hand. Another issue is the projection of personal opinions on religion. There are certainly good criticisms to be made of many religions, but crafting your worlds religion to serve only as an “edgy” “religion is bad y’all” parody is masturbatory at best. On the other hand, if you are religious, cramming your beliefs into your world might be off putting to the audience.

What’s whatever you’re using to view this post worth? Immediately you might respond “well I paid $X for it”, but what does that really mean? When world-building you need to take a step back and really think about how value is determined in the societies of your world.

How your characters interact with and exchange value will greatly influence their basic character traits. Have a feudal society? Your peasants probably rarely even see money, their value grows right out of the ground, and their view of value will be very physical. Do your characters inhabit a galaxy spanning empire that makes use of “credits”? To them money will be just another abstract concept. The level of technology, societal organization, public belief and more will influence the traits of your economy, and how your characters are affected by it.

There are many approaches to creating an economic system for your world. For future worlds, one is to dream up where modern economies and politics may go. Perhaps corporatism rolls into neo-feudal society, where all are pledged and beholden to one company or another. Another is to simply pick some pure economic ideology and sand the edges down to something believable. Even societies with communal ownership will need some form of exchange if they want to also specialize their labor. If you don’t want to sit down and plan everything out, you can also shape your economy strictly by implication. The sentence “It cost fifty of my hard earned silver to get to the city in bribes alone!” immediately informs the audience of multiple facets of your economy: There is money, money is earned through labor, the economy experiences corruption. Additionally, by putting an actual price on something the audience now has a barometer for how cheap or expensive other exchanges might be.

Don’t be afraid to take a deep look at your own perceptions and opinions on economy. Almost everywhere private ownership of land and natural resources is accepted, but why? It can’t be said of any of those owners that they did anything to create the land or resources. Ultimately private ownership of land is less a logical economic exchange and more a threat of violence towards others who might want to use it. On the other hand there are no laws of physics preventing private ownership. Who’s to say which ethics of ownership are “correct”? However you may feel about economics, make sure to try and thoroughly understand whichever economic system exists in your world, so that at the very least it will be believable and not caricature.

Then again, this world is imagined, and likely far more fictitious than realistic. Is the main culture of your characters fanatically collective, perhaps unified by a gestalt intelligence or even insect-like pheromones? An economy would just get in the way of a society like that. How about a society that only facilitates exchange with large baked goods and cool rocks they found on the river bank? Make your economy fit the tone of your world, realistic or fictitious, sober or comedic.

It’s easy to abstract our current economy and the way you use money in the real world into your imagined one, but it sticks out like a sore thumb if the rest of your world is different. Taking a bit to think about what value really means in your world will greatly improve the quality of economy you create.

Now that the geography of your world is established, you need to fill it with story.

When you wake up in the morning, how do you know that you haven’t just popped into existence? Your memory of course. Knowing what has already happened to you over your life is how to understand and believe where you are now. We justify and explain personal opinions, feelings, traits, relationships and much more based on past experience. Scale this up and you get history and how it explains politics, art, culture, and the general state of things. If you’re building a world and want it to seem believable, you must create a history to convince the observer to suspend their disbelief.

First things first, you need to establish a bedrock on which to build history proper: prehistory. When it comes to prehistory, you can meticulously flesh out every detail of what happened from primordial soup to the dawn of recorded history … or you could just make up a handful of facts, this is prehistory after all! Even if you want to know the whole story before the story, the contemporaries of your world shouldn’t. Ideally prehistory should appear in your world in the manner of “show don’t tell”. Perhaps you know there was once an ancient world spanning empire that lasted five thousand years. Now all that remains are some mysterious ruins at the edge of a farm.

Now you arrive at the beginning of history. Depending on what sort of world you’re constructing this is where the process diverges. If you’re building a spacefaring hyper intelligent culture, history will likely be composed of very specific and detailed facts stored on computers. If you’re building a medieval style world, history is probably a mixture of a few important scripts and whatever local legends have been passed down orally. These differences will greatly impact your character’s relationships with history.

When it comes to crafting your history a good starting point is our own world’s. Think of all of the small events that led to great change, or the massive advanced empires that rose and fell. Our own history shows that pretty incredible things can happen; you shouldn’t feel limited. The other benefit of using analogues to our own history (provided you don’t over use them) is that the audience will easily comprehend and accept your series of events without stopping to question them. This helps keep people invested in your world, rather than jarring them out of it.

Once you’ve fully satisfied with the layout of events, take another look. It’s easy to build your history sequentially, one thing leads to another, but sometimes when you step back you might realize that a sequence of events, transitions of power, religious movements, etc. that made sense when you were building them at second glance are actually fairly improbable. Thing of your first go through as a rough cut that might need some trimming and massaging here and there to fully form. If you want the reader/player/audience to believe it, it has to be believable in the first place.

There is a huge number of possibilities when it comes to the physical makeup of your world. Perhaps your world is a giant desert. Maybe there are floating islands. You don’t really even need physical land for a “world”. There are positives and drawbacks to each, and each lend themselves to telling different stories.

Earthlike worlds:

How fractured are your major landmasses? One giant continent could lead to massive nomadic cultures, many islands might lead to sprawling maritime empires or many isolated nations. Something in between is often an easier model to use, as were more used to it. Avoid making your landmasses too regular. If you look at a map of the earth you’ll see it actually looks pretty weird. Strange sharp angles, small land bridges between major landmasses. Play around with the edges of the continents.

The two most important features for defining borders are rivers and mountains. If you have nations already planned out you’ll need to take that into account. On the other hand, if a river is large enough it might serve as a central feature of a given nation. The placement of forests are a bit more up to you, they can be found at the foot of mountains, or sprawling all the way across the continent.

Now the world is wrapped up, the mountain ranges are rolling, the jungles are steaming, and the seas are shining. It’s time to sprinkle in some landmarks. You get a lot of bang for your buck just by sprinkling a few names on peaks and valleys. You can touch on history, important figures, and local cultures. If you are building your world from the ground up, landmarks can serve as a jumping off point for more granular development.

Other Alternatives:

If you choose very few, or a single biome building the world won’t take long, but there are still a few things to consider. You’ll need to find some explanation for why there is only one biome. Maybe the planet orbits a star just slow enough to fry your world, or the planet is geothermally active enough to support a civilization without orbiting a star. You don’t need to be scientifically accurate, but it helps to have at least a semi-reasonable explanation.

World building isn’t limited to planet like structures. Why not build a world representing someone’s consciousness? Perhaps different emotions and thoughts could be the nation-states of your world.

Whatever sort of world you build this part of the process is vital to making sure it’s consistent. People can easily forgive major differences between your world and ours in terms of magic or technology, but not when the world just doesn’t make sense.

So you’re not content with a single story. You want your characters to feel “alive”, whatever that means. You ask questions like, “Why didn’t the wizards in Harry Potter recognize the power of nuclear weapons?” or “The fiat that Superman is powered by our yellow sun is a bit much right?” You’re likely interested in building cities, provinces, nations, worlds, galaxies, or existences that make sense. Enter World Building.

Geography: where does the dirt end up?

Think about Earth, the planet you live on. The continents didn’t simply poof into existence the way they are. The mountains didn’t rise from nothing. The rivers churn and snake across the landscape over many years. A complicated system of tectonics and erosion dictates the surface of our planet. How does your planet shiver?

History: What the hell happened between now and then?

In the beginning, there was life. Otherwise why build a new world? Let people know how the major species/lifeform/cognizance came to be. Were they always the proud purveyors of the planet, or was there a long and varied period of development? Additionally, why did it take them this long, and what were the obstacles? Once they were masters of the planet what took place?

Economy: What is value, what is labor? What is exchange?

Is your world a bastion of perfect information and a truly free market? Does a governor dictate a feudal tithe? Maybe corporations run your world. Perhaps there is social ownership of the means of production. Systems of economy effect everyone living on your world.

Religion: What do people believe in?

This can be a tough one, since you need to recognize that others might not believe the same things you do. Are there religio/political hierarchies or does a single system reign? Are there ancient landmarks or objects that point to the religious foundation? Are the major religions headed by ideologues or con men/women?

Social Norms: Why the people do like they do?

This is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Think about it. When you interact with others, most of your time is spent either running through niceties, “Hi, how are you?”, “fine thanks, how are you”, “I’m good thanks.” Or participating in physical gestures such as shaking hands, or hugging or nodding at acquaintances. How is that done in your world?

The elephant in the room: clichés and prejudice.

So you want multiple “races”. Elves, Dwarves, Humans etc. This is totally ok. It’s natural to think of other groups as “them” vs. “us.” There is however a fine line between introducing more flavor and culture to your world and simply perpetuating bigoted ideology. The Turithians shouldn’t be a people naturally disposed to picking Elz and loving their Grozen masters. It’s both lazy and racist to write racial/political caricatures.

Wrapping it all up:

Ultimately, whether you’re building a world for yourself or others, you should strive to make your world as believable as possible. It doesn’t matter if your world is a mining colony in a science fiction epic, or glittering city in your modern drama. Remember as always, everyone is creative enough to at least modify human history; don’t restrict yourself to parroting others.

Note that the header image was created with the application “Hexographer”. http://www.hexographer.com/