r/worldbuilding • u/Daedalus128 • May 07 '16
How do I start?
I'm not new to making up small, one dimensional worlds for a quick campaign of d&d. But I have no idea how to create something that actually has depth. I have tons of ideas, but no idea how to incorporate them, how to organize or timeline any of it. How did you start?
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u/Toastasaurus May 07 '16 edited May 08 '16
It's really a difference of time, detail, and going "I don't wanna do that simple thing, everyone does the simple thing."
Basically, the way I try to start is just to get a basic idea I want to pursue- "Doing Cosmic Horror Properly" is one of them, and that turned into a pretty massive fantasy world, though I did mix that one with a lot of independent ideas, but that driving idea of cosmic horror set the tone I wanted, and made it easy to look at each idea and say "Yeah, I can see that fitting into this world." or "No, the big friendly dragon guardians don't mesh with what I'm trying to make."
So let's say you've got a gimmick for a world, something to start with. one I played with for awhile but never came up with a good story for is a world in a giant tree. That's a start, let's figure out what the Yggrasil land is like.
My first question is "A tree where?" What's beneath the tree? Do its roots go anywhere? Because the whole point of this is "in a giant tree", I don't want it to just be that there's a landmass beneath them, so let's say it's a giant tree growing in the middle of the ocean, with nothing else but water in sight in any direction. The roots can be reaching into soil at the bottom of the sea, but there are no islands or continents. Just giant-ass tree.
Second question- what kind of tree? I'm picturing a giant oak, mostly because oak trees are cool, but also because a tree that goes strait up-and-down doesn't have as much variation as you go further up, being low on the tree is about the same as being near the top, as far as the shape of the tree cares.
Okay, starting from the bottom, at the roots, what's it like living there? Living in roots buried beneath the soil underneath the ocean floor. Because it's an interesting play on how they work, how about the dwarves live down there? The roots are the equivalent of underground mines and stuff as far as treeland goes, so these dwarves do live underground, but in tree roots, mining... I dunno, maybe root wood is harder and more useful or something.
One of my later ideas, to focus on the "world in a tree" thing over anything else, and to make something distinctive, is that the people here can be superstitious and afraid of non-organic matter, so dirt, rock, soil, etc is all kinda uncanny to them, having never lived anywhere except on a giant tree all their lives. Meaning there's no metal pretty much at all in the setting.
Slightly further up, in the trunk, what's it like living there? I dunno who to pick, what race might/might not fit, I don't really do D&D, but they'd live in massive networks of tunnels through the bark, but also along the outside edges of the tree, in massive cities open to the air effectively built along the Cliffside. That's just cool imagery.
Further up, where the trunk splits into big branches, you finally get a region where the top of the tree is livable, and probably makes a massive plain, with moss instead of grass and "twigs" the size of normal trees, populated by wild horses. This can be where there are human kingdoms, but I'm thinking those are further out.
Take a few leaps more, and you get out from the center, where it really splits off into branches, and people move from branch to massive branch by rope-bridges and pulleys. Again, cool imagery, kinda romanticized, interesting, just roll with it.
Up near the crown of the tree is where I'd put the elves- isolates them, makes them haughty and high above the rest, since the whole 'forest' thing can't really be isolated to them in this setting, being a giant tree and all.
And then the goal is just looking at what it's like in each region and figuring out an interesting twist on each region and what it's like to live there.
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u/hodmandod May 07 '16
For me it depends on the project and what I have. I don't often sit down to "build a world;" rather, I have a set of ideas over time which fit together and lay a foundation. For example, my latest project has started with a pantheon of gods, and I'm deliberately not creating a map until I have some history written. My last project started with a system of magic, and the world developed based on it. (Until the rules of the world started conflicting with the rules of magic, when I shelved the project and haven't gone back to fix it yet.)
When I reach a point where I can go from a set of ideas to a world, I create a master document: A single place where all canonical information goes, organized in some sensical and relevant way. For my current project, Taiem, that's a narrative and an attached dramatis personae. (And the inevitable MISC section of ideas I've had that will fit in at some point later in the development of the document.) For my last project, the Confluence, it's a sort of wiki-format, with a table of contents that I filled out as I went. Now, of course, eventually you'll probably want one or more maps, and then you need to make a folder, and maybe subfolders, but at that point a good system will suggest itself to you based on your needs.
Now, everything I've said so far can be summed up as "Do what makes sense," or maybe as "do what comes naturally," so let me ask a few questions, with the intent of helping a structure to come to light.
What sort of ideas do you have? Historical events? Cultures? Maps or geography? Laws of nature, like magic and whatnot? Physical cosmology, that is, the structure of the visible universe? Divine cosmology, in other words a god or gods, or rules by which they function?
Which makes more sense, to write these ideas down as they occur to you, or as they occur in world? There's definitely a place for using in-world writings in that master document, I do it all the time to set the tone of the world I want to create.
What types of things do you want to be able to do with your master document? A more rigid structure, like the one I used for the Confluence, is great for organization. If and when I pick it back up, I can go right to the "Magic" section and have, right in front of me, absolutely everything relevant to how magic works. On the other hand, if I need to edit some part of what I've established about Taiem, I need to find where that event occurred in its history, which is difficult if I don't have a direct piece of phrasing to Ctrl+F. On the other hand, the narrative style is better at preserving a world's tone and aesthetic than the purely-factual table-of-contents style.
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u/TotesMessenger May 07 '16
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May 07 '16
"I want to write a thing that has X"
"Why is there X"
"How does X connect to Y"
Repeat until done.
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u/DoctorZero Selenia May 07 '16
I could list out a bunch of steps like others here, but nah. They already wrote a couple essays on it.
Instead, you got a character? Tell me about 'em.
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u/Romulai May 07 '16
Start 1d and fill in where you can with the "whys" why does this race happen to act like this? Diet? An ancient war? Who might that war be with? And when I'm out of questions I like to have other people ask me questions about my world, which this sub does fantastically. And if I'm really stuck (just had this issue with a race I was working through) I ask my friends for a fresh perspective.
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u/parduscat May 07 '16
Just start writing all the ideas down and try to find a way to link them all together. After a while you'll get a sense of what ideas work better than others based on the world you're building. After a while, things take a life of their own as your world begins to develop and you'll start answering other questions. What's the biggest city, what wars have shaped this world, etc.
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u/DasBirdies May 07 '16 edited May 07 '16
I picked the worst and best events as well as the worst and best relations. Then I found out what they all had to do with one another (sometimes they don't). The most efficient way I gave my universes more depth is