If you have a passing interest in worldbuilding, writing, authorship, screenwriting fiction, or dungeon mastering in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and DragonsPathfinderD20 Modern, and all of the other non-d20 based games; my content will probably be of some use to you. If you do not know what worldbuilding is, or if you don’t care, then you might be persuaded to take up worldbuilding as a hobby. Worldbuilding is an activity that requires a high level of mental effort. If you like puzzles, writing, and critical thinking… you might find worldbuilding to be your thing.
Let’s start by going over what my content here will cover. We will begin with the just the basics: what worldbuilding is, what concultures are, and how constructing worlds can be a hobby in and of itself. I will also show you how to include worldbuilding elements that can supplement your other creative or commercial projects.
Perhaps you are writing a book or illustrating a webcomic series. Maybe you are designing a tabletop board game or electronic video game. Perhaps you were told by your company to make a marketable toy line or a compelling story-driven website for a particular demographic. You can always find a use for worldbuilding as long as your line of work needs a world to be lived in by its characters, or its customers.
We will go over the basics of concultures, what it means to construct a complete conculture, and how to make them feel believable and lived in. We will work to design religions, technologies, architecture, mythologies, and explore the ways in which cultures interact. Be they xenophobic or interspecies collectives, almost all parts of their interactions will be covered.
Among my posts we will discuss the broader topics of magic. Magic systems: the hard, the soft, and the weird. As well as how to design believable magic power sources, and create mystical creatures. On the topic of creatures, we will cover beasts, magical fauna, monsters in mythologies, and the development of believable histories through myths and legends. Rich cultural histories are those that include in-world traditional games, sports, works of fine art, music, and food. Also topics we will mull over.
We will discuss how to populate a world with unique organizational cultures and explain how to create interactions among them. Interactions between civilized people take place through power and politics, social etiquette, crime, justice, and law enforcement. Sometimes assisted by magic. In addition to this we have the structures of their governments, currency design, taxation, monarchies, ancestries, relationship dynamics, and changes to societies through social revolution.
Furthermore, we will cover many types of story setting. From the various kinds of punks, space opera, and other science fictions. Also, the invention of technologies for science fiction worlds, types of weird alien beings, planetary colonization efforts, and post-scarcity civilizations. More esoterically, we will also review blood magic, deithic and divine powers, funerals, divination, immortality, and making up entire systems of natural laws for universes not structured like our own.
This already vast list is just a fraction of what you will learn me. My motivation for this doing this is to get people into the hobby of worldbuilding. I want to help others understand what comes together to make a world feel unique, interactive, and immersive. I will share my own work with you during my time here, an example of my thought process.
These posts are intended to onboard you into worldbuilding. I have provided a streamlined version of what I have learned over decades of practice. While researching the building of worlds, I have absorbed all kinds of media. I want to provide you with the tools that have contributed to the construction of my worlds, to expedite the gathering of knowledge for yours. This, I hope, should save you a lot of time.
It will be fun. It will be challenging. It will stretch your imagination to its very limit. It will allow us to learn from others who have spent their lives worldbuilding. There are so many extraordinary people, with so many incredible ideas sharing their insights and knowledge freely. It is an absolutely amazing community, and I am fortunate to be a small part of it.
