Concepts and Goals

Today we’re going to be discussing how to establish a worldbuilding concept, how to set goals for the worldbuilding process, as well as why setting those concepts and goals are important to begin with.

Hey everyone, my name is Matthew, at least that’s what I’ve planned for you to believe, and this post is the first in a series where I will be going through the worldbuilding process step-by-step, starting from nothing, and building a fictional world that could be used for something like a novel or a tabletop roleplaying campaign. My aim is to create something along the way, explaining everything as I go so that the process is nice and easy to follow.

BUT, before we can build anything, it’s important to set out goals for WHAT we want to worldbuild, kind of like a ‘session zero’ to set out things clearly before we start. In this post we’ll be discussing Worldbuilding Concepts, which are the main foundational elements for worldbuilding that we will build everything else on top of. Here we’ll ask questions like, is your fictional world going to be fantasy focused, or have elements of sci-fi? Is it going to be close to earth-like, or be completely different and unique? These decisions give a lot of scope for all the subsequent decisions you’re likely to make for your world.

The very first step we have to take in worldbuilding is to have a concept in mind. A concept, in storytelling or worldbuilding terms, is what defines your world at its most basic level. It is the core idea of everything you’ll be creating. These concepts might be something very general, like “A romance between two friends”, or something more specific, like “The Chosen One runs away as a child and then comes to terms with the fact that they must save the world.” There are no rules for what makes something a good concept, but for worldbuilding, general concepts allow for more creative freedom, and specific concepts are more constrained. The only worldbuilding requirement for ‘A romance between two friends’ is that two people exist. This concept fits into just about any setting, from a romance novel all the way through to a gritty horror. However, this lack of constraints can also be paralysing when it comes to starting worldbuilding and can make the process harder to begin with. It’s a little bit like asking yourself to just “draw the rest of the owl”.

To address this, if you are only working with a general concept, try to layer multiple general concepts on top of each other and you’ll start to see a more complete picture of what world you’ll be building. For example, if we establish five general concepts like…

1.       A romance between two friends

2.       An off-world human colony

3.       Cool swords

4.       Speculative evolution

5.       A catastrophic natural disaster

This now gives us a much clearer picture and direction to go with for worldbuilding. There are two friends in an off-world human colony, which clearly establishes that the people in the world are spacefaring, so we’re going to need to worldbuild an advanced civilisation. Cool swords for a spacefaring civilisation are easy to implement, and there are plenty of awesome fictional examples to draw inspiration from, like lightsabers from Star Wars to energy swords from Halo. You might even look at a historical example and tech it up, like a futuristic greatsword. Then, speculative evolution means that the creatures present are going to be different from earth, so maybe our off-world human colony takes place on a moon of Jupiter that has been artificially engineered to be suitable not only for human life but to provide a unique branch of evolution for many of earth’s creatures. And then finally there’s going to be a catastrophic natural disaster, so perhaps that engineering done on the moon was not done perfectly, and the atmosphere is rapidly burning through its oxygen, threatening to kill all the oxygen breathing inhabitants. This includes our two friends, who in what may be their final moments realise that they have always loved each other, and now that they aren’t sure whether they’ll survive it feels like the perfect time to finally say it. This sounds like a much more interesting world to worldbuild for.

Now of course, what concepts you choose for your world is up to you, but for this series I’ll be worldbuilding as we go along together, to showcase all the strategies I use along the way. For the world we’ll be making together, I want it to be a world that:

1.       Is Recognisably earth-like.

2.       To be fantasy-based.

3.       To include mythology.

4.       To make things as science-based as possible, with planet-making, speculative evolution, constructed languages, the whole works.

5.       Will have multiple intelligent creatures.

So, with these concepts in mind, we’ve outlined a worldbuilding process that we can stick to moving forward. Let’s go through each of these points, starting with wanting the world to be recognisably earth-like. This is important because the further worlds deviate away from earth, the harder they are to follow. Consider a world that is inhabited by creatures that look and feel like humans, that may have different cultures but overall, still are relatable to us as human readers and viewers. Creatures like elves or dwarves, or even cat-folk or wolf-kin are easily recognisable, and so we can more readily connect with their stories and emotions. There is a reason most fantasy works use anthropomorphised creatures, and it’s not just to be weird. It’s that we connect more with a creature like Baby Yoda, than we do with a garden snail. Compare a non-human creature like Legolas to a non-human creature like Shelob. Most readers and viewers easily connect with Legolas despite him not being human, while the most character development and emotional connection Shelob gets in any portrayal is in the video game Shadow of War, where she is portrayed in human form. The point is, if you’re wanting people to develop meaningful connection to the species you create and therefore the world you create, then making them more human is definitely a good decision.

Next, we mentioned that we’re going to be creating something fantasy based. Fantasy is the genre devoted to exploring impossible or improbable things, such as magic, and is often inspired by mythology and folklore. By its very definition, worldbuilding usually trends towards fantasy, because most worldbuilders don’t want to just create an exact copy of earth. Instead, we’re wanting to explore what COULD be, to make things more interesting and more capturing for those who are experiencing the worlds we are creating. Specifically, I want to create a world that has some iteration of magic, and that includes fantasy creatures.

Which brings us neatly into point number 3, wanting to include mythology. Mythology is an excellent pairing of our first two points, bringing together things that are recognisably earth-like and fantasy-based, because mythological creatures are already well recognisable by most people. The number of mythological elements we have on earth is very extensive, and so I don’t think we’ll be able to include everything, but I’d like to include a mix of classic favourites like zombies and dragons, dragons being my favourite mythological creature of all, while also exploring some more niche mythology that is less well known, and as an Australian I would be remiss if I didn’t try to include some Australian folklore as well. Stay tuned for dropbears.

Next up we have science-based worldbuilding, which is a huge point for me, and probably going to be one of the keystones of the series moving forward. As best as I can within a fictional fantasy universe, I want to worldbuild things that make sense, from the physics of planet-making to the biology of speculative evolution, to the sociology of cultural development. An important factor for here is that by making things make sense within the bounds of real-world science, it means it can be used by anyone, in just about any setting. The idea of making something work, at least on some scientific level, is an aspect of worldbuilding that I personally find fascinating, and I believe makes the entire process more interesting. Now, I’m not a scientist, and I assume many of you won’t be as well, but the great news is that for worldbuilding, that is completely fine. We are after all creating a fictional world, and at some point in all fiction, we’ll have to deviate from reality. But for this series, we’ll make things as true to science as possible, meaning that we’ll only deviate from reality when it makes sense, and when it’s going to make things cooler.

Finally, I want there to be several different creatures that we’ll worldbuild to evolve intelligence, so that we can continue their journey past their biological evolution and into their social and technological evolution, starting from the stone-age and ending… well, who knows where! While worldbuilding stars and biomes and languages is fascinating, it’s the culture and societies that are present in stories and games that I really connect with, and I feel that’s what most others connect with as well.

So, to recap, establishing the main concepts you want for your worldbuilding is important before you start. If you’re using general concepts, try to come up with a few that you can tie together to get a better view of what you want to create. For the world we’ll build together throughout this series, we’ll create an earth-like fantasy/science-fiction world, with elements of mythology, scientific justification, and intelligent societies.

Join me next time where we start the worldbuilding process proper, establishing some fundamental rules for the universe itself. And until next time… stay awesome!