#worldbuilding tutorial

Okay, you know the general history in your worldbuilding and so do your characters, but how is that history presented and recorded in their world?

Don't worry. I gotchu here, with plenty of ideas, inspo, and a little bit of tutorial in where to start (and to people who say they don't like my weird little gifs that I find, I keeping the damn gifs)

Importance of Recording History

Recording history means remembering it, and remembering it means teaching it, and teaching it means continuing one's stories and cultures, and hopefully the lessons learnt.

Worldwide we as humans have decided that writing, whether by hand and nowadays by computer was one of the most efficient ways to do this, alongside photographer, videos, and even written interviews. Memoirs used to play a major role, and very much still do, although they are not as heavily relied upon.

Step 1: Base lines.

Aka guidelines. Just do an unfilled rectangle and stack it on itself twice.

Step 2: Basic calligraphy

Choose your brush. Different brush shapes have different dynamics, and different dynamics will wield different results on paper.

Best experienced on actual paper, for digital programs cannot give you the exact right feel of drag when you try to do wrong strokes. Usually, if you write by hand on paper, and it's feeling effortless, then you're doing it right.

Cheat sheet for brush tips of different kinds:

Step 3: The execution

You might want to try asemic writing at first, or take inspiration from other writing systems that already exist. Know that it is nigh impossible to create something that never existed before, for your writing system will always bear similarity to at least a dozen others.

There are multiple methods of making scripts,

Engineered

You set up a goal and plan things up before setting up the canons. Usually used for featural scripts.

Post-asemic

Make an asemic array of symbols and assign them Latin equivalents.

Monogramic

Make a monogram - some complex symbol with lots of strokes - and break it into lesser shapes erasing some of the original strokes. Similar to the Combinatorics method. Example below:

Combinatoric

Make particles, combine in different ways. See below:

Natural evolution simulation

Following the pipeline "pictogram" -> "letter". As seen below:

Other useful tips:

Omniglot.com: go there and take a look at how many writing systems are there in the world. This site stores lots of conscripts as well, and you can submit yours if you want to!

r/neography is a huge subreddit that has everything about neography (aka the art of creating new writing systems).

Learn about what kinds of writing systems there are. Basically they are categorized by how much information a symbol carries. It could be one sound, a syllable, or whole words. Though there are nuances, explained on r/neography's wiki, by the way.

Practice. Doodle a lot. You will get the grip of it eventually.

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. The middle is between M and N, as M is letter #13. If you include numerals, that's 36 symbols. If you include punctuation, that's about 48 symbols depending on how much punctuation you want.

I have a sideblog called @thecrazyneographist meant just for neography, and all the scripts posted there are free to use per request!

Intro This is an example of how to develop history for your world. This tutorial will demonstrate a “building backwards” method for when you know what your present looks like and want to figure out what came before; if you’re interested in how to build history forwards from something earlier on, take a look at the example for World A. 

As noted in the other example, I’m going to start placing the examples under a “read more” break because they can get quite long. Enjoy!

Intro From this point on, I’m putting the example tutorials under a readmore so that they’re not taking up as much space. This will be an example out how to outline history, using World A; specifically, I’ll be using this world to demonstrate the sequential method I outlined in the tutorial portion.

Intro I received a request (a long time ago, by this point) to write about how to go about constructing a world’s history. The request is as follows:

Can you write more about how to develop a history for your cultures? And how much is adequate for a good story/campaign? You mentioned time altering things in the last one, and changing empires and migrations can create reasons for the spread of peoples, religions, cultural elements, and political forms. Great series!

Thus, without further ado: history!** **Disclaimer: This is one I might have otherwise waited longer to do, because it can be a bit fiddly compared to a lot of other aspects of world building. If you’re following these tutorials while building your world, you may want to wait on this one ‘til later!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are a few ways you can approach writing your world’s history. Which one you pick depends mostly on how much you have written about other parts of your world so far. If you have a lot decided-upon already, you may want to start by working backwards; if you’re still in the process of deciding what you want your world to look like, you may want to work sequentially instead. There are other ways as well, depending on what role history is going to play in your world - I’ll outline them each below.

Working Backwards In most cases, you’ve probably already got a fair amount about your world decided, whether it feels like it or not. Maybe you’ve already got a larger map with the major cities and borders marked out, or you have a sense of the cultural time and place you want parts of your world grounded in (example: the classic Tolkein-esque fantasy setting being medieval western Europe); either way, you’ve got a clear image of what your world looks like and the standards of everyday living. What you want to do is start from there and, well, work backwards to write your history.

The first question when looking backwards is, of course, what do you already know? Look back through your notes. What’s your cosmology - how did the world and its people come into being? Did they come to be slowly over time, evolving from prior species and working through their stone age (or equivalent) and onwards - or were they manifested as they are now, with or without cultural and technological assistance from another source? Consider how long it’s been since your world was populated, where they started from, and where they have ended up. That will give you some sense of the distance that you’re looking to fill.

If you have places that you’ve already established - particularly cities - take a look at those as well. Which one is the oldest? Which one is the newest? What order were they built in, and by who? Are they still controlled by the same cultures that founded them? If not, when did they change hands - and how? This can go for other locations, too: dungeons, the local dragon lair, a major spaceport, a pirate hideout, you name it. You can go through the same process with other things too: a major trading company, a secret order, a ruling bloodline or house, an ancient and powerful being, you name it. Figure out what order everything that exists now came in, and write those out in an outline to get a sense of which things started to come into being during the same time period. Are there any patterns? Jot those down.

The other thing to consider is the question of prerequisite. What needs to have happened in order for things to be the way they are now? If your world has a ruler or government, that had to be founded at some point. If your world is spacefaring, they must have acquired or developed the technology for that at some point. If two countries or cultural groups are enemies, something must have happened to spark that enmity. Consider what the basic prerequisites for your world in the current day are, decide how long ago they happened, and note that down with your locations. As a rule of thumb, for determining age: dynamics that are more settled have been ongoing for longer; and dynamics that are still shifting or subject to change are more recent. This isn’t always the case, but it’s a good “when in doubt”.

Once you have major places and events sorted in order relative to one another, look for clusters - groups of events that all seem like they happened in the same time period. Do they share a history? Did the same thing instigate multiple events? Did one of these events lead directly to one of the others? Trust your gut - if it says yes, then yes; if it says no, leave it be for now. Look also for any big gaps - if there are long periods of time between clusters of events, why? Either decide why nothing of importance happened during that time, or fill them in with the little steps that bridge the point between the older event and the newer one. Continue to fill in the gaps until you’ve got something that looks roughly like you want it to for your world.

Sequential Development If you’re working through a process of building your world from the ground up - perhaps literally - you may want to develop your history sequentially instead. That is to say, starting at the beginning and building out from there, and following that development wherever it leads. This one tends to work less well if you’ve already got a clear idea of what your world looks like right now, although it can still be done even so.

As always, the first question to consider is what you already know. The species and rough cultures you’re working with can be a good place to start, since that influences all that follows. Based on those factors, you’ll want to start with determining early population centers - I’ll write on that more extensively in another tutorial, because that’s a doozy - and working a bit with the development of early civilizations. How fast do they develop? Do any of them get wiped out, through war or disease or natural disaster? Where do the survivors of these fallen civilizations go, and what impact do they have on wherever they end up? Consider all the empty spaces on your map - who’s going to start to reach out to those first? Are the settlers deliberate expansion attempts from a civilization - or dissidents from it? What is their reason for moving into these places? Play with the dynamics of early civilization and see what survives. 

Survival is not the only factor to consider: for those civilizations that hang on for long enough, change is a factor as well. Cultures don’t simply stay the way they are for hundreds of years; they change, in a myriad of ways. As they expand, for example, they may need to adopt new ruling structures that suit a larger domain. Or as they develop new technologies or discover new resources, a culture will adapt to and incorporate (or vehemently reject!) those discoveries. As other cultural groups move through the area - the remnants of fallen friends, or invasion from enemy forces - a culture will pick up pieces from other cultures, particularly those most relevant to the point of contact. Is the primary contact between two cultures trade? Then expect that influence to come in the form of aesthetics, transportation, and status. Is the primary contact more like an incorporated population of refugees? Then the influence may come in the form of family structure, religion, or holidays. Consider how that change may ripple out to the larger culture - will it be celebrated? Suspect? Spurned? By whom, and why? What follows, and what changes?

Sequential history development is really a matter of following these questions through to their natural conclusions. Moving from early civilizations into middling ones, there are other factors to consider. What cultural origins are no longer relevant? A culture may have had its origins in herding, but if herding is no longer necessary (or possible), what will creep in to fill its absence?  What changes are necessary to accommodate an increase in population, or physical territory, or changes in the landscape and climate itself? There is also the matter of the influence of prior history itself - for example, we would never have had the Italian Renaissance without the efforts of Arabic scholars translating old Ancient Greek works; and Rome always aspired to be Greece, even if its vision of Greece was deeply distorted by its own cultural lenses. What do the people now think of the people who were? What do they even know about them? Do they look down on them, do they idolize them, are they merely confused by them? These questions change culture too.

If you ever find yourself in a place of not being sure where things go next - if there’s not a clear sequence, or your world has become too stable - introduce something radically different. Natural disasters in their many forms are always good candidates; so are plots and conspiracies, sudden deaths of important figures, first contact with a perviously-unknown Other - you get the idea. Something to shake things up a bit, and something that there isn’t an immediate or obvious solution to. History is, ah, exciting (or rather, chaotic), despite historians’ best efforts to paint it in as dull a manner as possible - and full of crazy things and crazy coincides on even the most sane of days. 

The last thing to consider as you develop is to think beyond merely events. People are an easy example - who drives these changes? Who will become the important, storied figures of history whose tales and influence survive long past their deaths? Locations, too - what new locations will arise, out of discovery or opportunity or necessity or tragedy? Artifacts is another; what are the important artifacts that come out of this history, and what happens to them? Who owns them, and what do they gain from it? Stories is another good one, especially as civilizations move into ideology as a primary motivator - what stories from their past are these civilizations striving to live up to - or avoid at all costs? 

Keep going until you reach the point in your history that you’re ready to settle at, whether for your own story or game or interest; then flesh it out in more detail. And, of course, you can always go back later to fill in more things as necessary.

Spiderwebbing This is a method you may want to use if you already have a few key historical moments in mind - the fall of an empire, the assassination of a political leader, the arrival of a prophet, the theft of some holy jewels, you name it. Spiderwebbing is similar to working backwards, but involves “spidering out” from several key points rather than from simply the current state of your world. With spiderwebbing, you look at each event and then spin your history a little forwards and a little backwards - what had to happen in order for this event to come to pass? What are the consequences from this event, both immediate and long-term? You can then draw the before and after out a little longer and a little longer until you connect the major events of your world into a chain of its history. Once you’ve got the chain, you can build off details as needed to support the chain and fill in the gaps. How did these events impact or affect those who weren’t directly involved? What was going on elsewhere in the world? 

Final Considerations If all else fails, consider the factors that motivate changes in history. Need is a big one; people will go to great and even desperate lengths to obtain the things that they need. Want is another big one; people are also willing to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain things that they want, and the more resources they have to do it with, the greater those lengths can be. These things don’t only have to be resources; they can be power, agency, and knowledge can all be needs and wants too. Values is another big one - how do you ensure that you continue to pursue the values of your culture? Do you try to spread your values to others - and if so, how? What do you do if your neighbors practice values directly counter to your own? What if it’s your own people who reject these values? Mystery is another one, particularly if your species is like humans - what is left to be discovered? What remains unknown? What happens if we try x, y, z?

How Much History Do You Need, Anyway? This one harkens back to the fundamentals of world building - which is to say, consider what purpose you’re building your world for. If the story that you’re telling is ultimately one that has little to do with history, there’s no need to go all-out; what you want to develop may resemble a list of historical fun facts more than it does an actual outline, and that’s okay. On the other end of it, if the history of your world is absolutely integral to the story you’re telling now, you’re going to want to go deep. If your world is static - that is to say, not being influenced by anyone besides you - then you can afford to develop a little less now and add more later as you need; but if your world is dynamic - that’s to say, there are others who will influence it as well - you’ll need to make sure you put in just a little more work up-front than you think you’ll actually need. Lastly, of course, there’s the matter of fun; if you’re having fun with it, there’s no reason to stop before you’re tired of it. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Intro This is a tutorial on how the practice of magic, religion, or other supernatural forces can shape or be shaped by culture; and how different cultures perceive and understand those things separately from the objective truth of those forces. 

Check Your Notes Before starting work on this part of building your world, it’s a good idea to check your notes. Refresh yourself on anything you’ve written so far on magic, the divine, or other supernatural forces; as well as any culture notes that are relevant to those forces. Now is the time to edit any of those if you need to. As you build your world you may find that earlier ideas didn’t end up panning out, or that you misremembered something and built things off of it after that. This is normal, and checking and retroactively editing things for consistency is good to do on a regular basis. If you want to do any editing to these things, now is a good time - then continue.

Awareness of the Supernatural After you revise your notes, the first thing to consider is what different cultures can actually percieve of different supernatural forces. If certain phenomena can only occur in certain parts of the world; if supernatural events only occur during particular times of season or century; how different forces manifest, and why; all affect your cultures’ ability to understand what is going on. 

Conversely, there are many things your cultures may not be able to notice. For example, if magic is a finite pool but that pool is very large, your cultures may believe that it is infinite and not go looking for the mechanisms by which that pool is replenished - because they have no reason to believe that it is. If your deities have secretly manifested on your world in the guise of heroes and been catalyst to historic events, your culture may understand that as the work of mortals rather than anything relevant to your world’s pantheon. Look at both what your cultures can see and what they can’t, and start to draw their conclusions from that.

Cultural Twists The next factor to consider here is your own culture’s day to day life and what they have exposure to. If you have a culture that is entirely landlocked and unable to access the ocean, they may not know that an ocean deity exists. Or, they may ignore the ocean aspect and understand the deity by other aspects instead (death, time, travel, etc). This applies to magic too: if particular substances are used to practice magic but those substances don’t occur naturally near a particular culture, they may have never known that magic existed at all. 

Similarly, two cultures may understand the same thing very differently. If your magic works through force of applied will, a culture that has an extensive war or sports culture may understand magic as a work of physical exertion and a force that a person outputs; whereas a culture with a heavy emphasis on language and writing may understand magic as something that is cast by being written onto scrolls and the power is in the language itself. Neither of these is wrong, per se, but both lead to differences in casting technique and what the culture is likely to use magic for. 

Geography and Politics Once you have a sense of what is generally known, not known, and understood by people in your world, consider geography. Religion and other supernatural practices often do not follow the same boundaries as political boundaries - it’s plenty common to either find a single practice that is widespread and crosses many borders, or variations upon variations on practice within a single political border. Culture matters here more than politics; culturally similar areas are more likely to not only have similar practices, but also to share those practices with each other. The more culturally diverse a region, the more diverse forms of practice may be.

There are exceptions to this. For example, if you have any theocracies or magocracies - any form of government which is steered by adhering to a supernatural tradition - a particular form of practice may be mandated within the borders of the region. Even without there being such a governmental system, certain practices may be actively banned within a region for being too dangerous, blasphemous, or morally objectionable. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there’s no one who practices in a contrary way in either of these situations; just that whoever it is will likely be practicing in a secretive way, and there won’t be very many of them. 

Conflicting Practice Religious, supernatural, and/or magical practices in your world don’t exist in a vacuum. In places where the edges of two different and conflicting traditions meet, or in places where many traditions operate within a relatively small space, they will change. There are a couple different ways this usually goes - which is to say, by sharing or by force.

Force is the easy one. Our real world has seen its fair share of religious wars and large-scale conversion efforts, and most people have some sense of what that looks like. It can take the form of wars in which one group tries to dominate the other; in these cases you will often find places of practice (be they religious buildings or mage schools) refitted to the conquering practice and laws made to limit the influence of the practice that was supplanted. It can also take the form of proselytizing, in which individual people organize without the force of a government to try and convert as many people who do “other” practices as possible - violently or nonviolently.  

Sharing is the friendlier way this tends to happen, and is more likely the more cultural or circumstantial similarity there is between differing groups. Sometimes sharing results in each side adopting some of the customs of the other - holidays, rituals, ingredients, or the like - and creating a local variation on the practices that is its own unique thing. Sometimes sharing results in a new practice entirely springing forth from the participating practices as people draw from the most relevant pieces of each practice to make something new. 

Time is another factor that can change a practice. All practices change as time goes on - because the culture shifts, because certain ingredients are no longer available or newer ones become accessible, because certain phenomena no longer happen, and so on. Consider how time and cultural interactions will have affected supernatural practices in your regions; no practice is a monolith, especially those which are most widespread.

------------

Intro This world, as usual, will be a much better example for building your standard fantasy world than World A was, for the tutorial on government an on others. I will use a couple different methods of building governments just to demonstrate examples of how to come up with these things. 

------------

Region #1: Warm Coastal Region This is a region with a small physical area but a high population density and a lot of resources moving through. It’s a trade city with a lot of money flowing and a lot of access to unusual services and goods, and thus the government needs to be able to support all of that. A lot of the day-to-day trade affairs are governed by guilds; there are many major guilds in the city - for shipbuilding, carpentry, theater, blacksmithing, dyers, bakers, you name it - and individual guilds will tax their members for funds by which the guild operates. Guild members are expected to abide by certain rules about where they can conduct their business, who they can conduct it with, etc; operating in a craft without belonging to the guild is not quite illegal but heavily penalized. In return the guild will help protect them and their families and support them in some situations - especially legally but in other ways, including monetary ways, as well. The guilds have a lot of power in the city, and while they do not run it and nor are the guild masters de facto on the ruling council, they have a lot of weight to throw around if they choose to. They also compete heavily with one another (and within themselves at times) and are not beneath sabotage and subterfuge in order to get an edge.

There are two portions to the actual rulership of the city: the council and the regent. The council does most of the heavy lifting; they do the proposals, the research, the wording of the decision or law, etc. The regent then approves or disapproves the decisions and signs off on them, although the regent can be overruled by a 8-1 vote. The council and regent are also in charge of adjudicating major crimes (minor crimes are usually dealt with by city law enforcement, who answer in turn to the regent). Regency is hereditary through a family member chosen by the current regent and approved by the council (does not have to be a child); councilship is not hereditary (though the same family will often find their hands on the seats) and can be any of the upper-class members of society. Candidates are nominated by guilds and other powers around the city, including the regent, who serves as a tiebreaker in the ultimate vote on new council members.

Region #2: Wooded Region Because of the widespread smaller-scale communities and the cultural disinterest in large-scale stratification, government in this region tends to come down to individual villages. Generally villages will have a town meeting every week which is open to anyone who wants to come; during the meeting everyone has the opportunity to discuss issues with other townsfolk, say their bit or present their own perspective, and then the yes or no of the issue is determined by a simple majority vote. There are several city officials who are in charge of running, conducting, and mediating these meetings; they are the closest it generally comes to any kind of ruler. They are also the figures who, in times of crisis, will be sent as “diplomats” to speak to other towns or villages and come to an agreed-upon course of action. These figures are usually people who have been active in the town meetings for a long time and shown interest in the job, who are then brought in as trainees until someone is ready to retire (or the population grows such that they need another person to fill the job).

Region #3: In-Between Region This region operates in a somewhat feudal system governmentally speaking. There are a number of fifes which are ruled by various nobles or warlords; this land is governed by the owner, whose rulership is hereditary. Generally the more land and resources a noble has, the more power they have; as such, land wars between fifes are fairly common. If you live on the land belonging to a fiefdom, you are assumed to belong to that fief and subject to its laws; for more travel-oriented jobs, such as trading or barding, it is common for people to pledge themselves to a particular house who then becomes the patron of that person and funds their ventures (so getting a house to accept your pledge is a big deal). Fiefdoms can negotiate with other fiefdoms to make alliances, trade or land deals, fund armies, etc - all the larger decisions that require some degree of coordination.

Region #4: Open Plains Region This region is essential rule by local warlords. Bands vary widely in size from 20 to hundreds of people, and bands may merge or split as it becomes politically or economically necessary. The headperson in charge of an individual band is whoever has enough sway to keep control of and manage it well; this is often hereditary, although traditions vary somewhat and in all bands there inevitably comes a time when the next blood relative doesn’t have the skills necessary to take care of the band, at which point they are usually usurped by someone who does or the band splits off to follow a rival. Marriage between bands is common as both a way to keep inbreeding from becoming an issue and also as a way to cement alliances and other agreements; it is traditional for the member of the more powerful band to join the less powerful one as a sign of good faith. At times there will emerge warlords who have the drive and skill to bring many bands together into their own and create something more like a dynastic period under a single ruler; this also tends to break apart eventually, though that time can vary to the rulership of a single headsperson to many, many generations.

Region #5: Cool Coastal Region Unlike the other regions so far, this region is actually ruled by a monarch and a centralized state. Individual towns and people pay taxes, the wealth goes back to the monarch who distributes it across various projects throughout the region. The rulership is hereditary to some extent, although it usually passes within the same family rather than from parent to child; the monarch nominates an heir and their advisers and other notable figures (like a representative from a particularly large city) confirm or deny the nomination.  Aside from taxes and any state projects that are local, there isn’t much day-to-day interaction between communities and the government; mostly the communities regulate themselves however they see fit, usually a combination of selecting a community member to be the headsperson (usually an elder or married couple of elders) and town meetings.

A cultural note on the monarchy in this region: unlike in our world, the position comes with very few bells and whistles. The vast majority of people don’t know who the reigning monarch is and don’t particularly care except in passing; there’s little glory or personal wealth attached to the position, mostly just a sense of duty. If a particular monarch starts to step outside the lines on cultural norms, it’s usual for their advisers to stage a quiet coup and things essentially go on as they were. 

Region #6: West Coastal Region Like region #5, this region is ruled by a monarch. Unlike the previous region, the power structure is much more stratified, top-down, and rigid; the throne usually passes from parent to child, comes with a lot more glory and power and wealth, and is paid more direct attention by common folk. Rulership is usually done by a married couple; the man’s (King’s) purview usually includes collecting taxes, running the military, and making trade agreements. The woman’s (Queen’s) purview usually includes distributing crown resources and overseeing legal or judicial affairs. The two work together on projects that fall under both their purview, but otherwise work independently - hence one of the important traits that people look for in their rulers is a good marriage, because a bad one will tear the country apart. 

------------