Table of Contents Introduction Fantasy Conceits, Analogue Cultures & Subgenres General Questions Geography Biology Physics (Magic!) Metaphysics Technology Culture Glossary Worldbuilding Worksheets Additional Resources Introduction It would be easy to call worldbuilding an art since it is a creative act wherein the builder fashions something new for others to enjoy. But “art” can be a loaded term, one full of pretension and preening, so perhaps it is best to call worldbuilding a craft, in that it is a skill one hones over time. Craft is a component of art, after all, and every artist, be they a painter, musician, poet, or author, must spend time increasing their skill so it can match their artistic vision. The aim of this handout is to help with the refinement of your personal craft in order that you have the honed skills required to fashion your own world. Over the course of researching and writing Worldbuilding For Fantasy Fans And Authors , a deep dive into the theory and practice of fantasy worldbuilding, I noticed several patterns within the field. I also ended up with a collection of over 700 worldbuilding prompts compiled from fellow fantasy authors, video-game developers, and the RPG community, the most pertinent of which I’ll be sharing here. Mastering the act of worldbuilding is a long and arduous journey in the same way learning to paint, sing, or write is, and these prompts are meant as a starting point for burgeoning worldbuilders in order to set them on the right path. This handout is aimed at fantasy authors but can certainly be used in creating a homebrew campaign or just a thought experiment to kill a few minutes. The two major strategies for worldbuilding are top-down , in which the creator envisions the rules of the world ahead of time and begins with large ideas that gradually filter down into smaller details, and bottom-up , where the creator begins with the granular details and gradually constructs an overarching system by stringing these ideas together into a coherent whole. Each strategy has its own strengths and weaknesses, although what most people overlook is that audiences encounter the worlds from the inside-out , meaning one ground-level detail at a time. This term is borrowed from the RPG community and means that audiences care mostly about the details that pertain to that specific gaming session, with only a small amount of attention set aside for details that may lead to future campaigns that open the world up. With each new campaign session, the world comes into clearer focus as the players explore new regions and discover how the world’s history and cultures intertwine. In this regard, the purpose of these questions is twofold: For bottom-up creators, it’s a questionnaire to help them figure out their fantasy conceits, which we’ll cover in the next few pages. For top- down designers, it’s a chance to refine their big ideas and see how the output details can add specificity to the world for their audiences to process from the inside out. Fantasy Conceits, Analogue Cultures & Subgenres Tolkien noted in his lectures on worldbuilding back in 1939 that audiences use their understanding of the real world to assess the strength of worldbuilding, a fact echoed by Hugo and Nebula winning author N. K. Jemisin in her workshops on worldbuilding. This means most fantasy worldbuilding breaks into two components: fantasy conceits and analogue cultures . Fantasy conceits are how the fantasy world you are constructing deviates from the real world we are all familiar with, whereas analogue cultures are real-world societies and time periods we use as a baseline for the fantasy conceits to deviate from. The success of both fantasy conceits and analogue cultures hinges on the audience’s authentic experience of details within the world, which is why it is important to get both right. For analogue cultures, this means nailing not just the big details of their societies, such as what weapons or armor they use, but also the little things, such as what they ate, what songs they sing, how they pass their history from one generation to the next, and how they care for their kids. There’s a reason that when surveyed, fantasy fans picked history as the top field for assessing the effectiveness of fantasy worldbuilding. In terms of fantasy conceits, getting the details right entails an understanding of many different fields, ranging from geology to physics. It is also a matter of extrapolation and speculation in deciding how you think the constructed world would deviate from the real-world due to the introduction of your fantasy conceits. Fantasy conceits generally move from large-scale components on to smaller components, flowing in the order of Geography to Biology to Physics (magic) to Metaphysics to Technology to Culture. Not every constructed world will contain fantasy conceits in each of these categories, although all will contain the category of Culture since all characters come from a culture of some form. Fantasy conceits also generally manifest themselves in the following ways: Exsecting : When something is removed from the world, such as standing water, iron, or horses. Unchanged : When the world mimics our own, although it may be named something else. Divergent : When the constructed world takes a different course in one major way but basically remains the same—e.g., a world where humanoids evolved from cats instead of apes. Additive : When a fantasy conceit is added to the constructed world, be it magic, dragons, or impossible technologies. Fantasy conceits and analogue cultures play another integral role in fantasy worldbuilding, in that they are used to denote subgenres. Analogue culture subgenres are pretty easy to spot, including Arthurian, Arabian, wuxia, urban, historical, gaslamp, and mythic fantasy. Each of these connotes a specific culture or time period from which the author is drawing from. In terms of fantasy conceits, both high/epic fantasy and low fantasy (to a much lesser degree) deal with the introduction of magic and impossible creatures, such as elves and dragons, which fall under the Physics and Biology categories. Steampunk, flintlock, litRPG, science, and military fantasy all depend on a Technology conceit. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should hopefully demonstrate the importance of what analogue cultures and fantasy conceits you choose when building your world. With that in mind, it’s time to get to the questions. For the top- downers (“planners,” as they’re often known), this should be a matter of keeping your fantasy conceits in mind and answering the sections that pertain to them. For the bottom-uppers (“pantsers” in the parlance), it might be wise to answer all the sections and see which sections you completed the most questions in to figure out your conceits. Once they’re uncovered, extrapolating from them for further worldbuilding should be much easier. General Questions 1. What subgenre will you be working in? This matters because each subgenre has certain specific tropes and audience expectations. Knowing your subgenre at the onset can ease in focusing which categories you should spend special attention on (Technology for steampunk, for instance). For bottom- uppers, it might be wise to answer this question after going through all the rest and have discovered which conceit categories you have spent the most time with. 2. What analogue culture(s) will you be using? What Earth analogues will you use in your world? What distinct characteristics are they known for? Make sure to include the specific time period, since England AD 1000 is much different than England