Fantasy Worldbuilding

Winged · 09-27-2013, 08:01 PM

The way I see it, there are two main ways to get started at world building; top down, and bottom up.

Top down design would be coming up with concepts and then figuring out where those ideas would come from in the setting.

For example you might start knowing that you want a group of monks who are master swordsmen and seek to resolve conflicts before they can become wars. To support this idea you would work backwards.You decide that after a very long war some number of generations ago a number of swordsmen shaken by the senselessness of war retired from military life to study philosophy, the followers of these men are your modern sword monks.If you like you can keep working your way back, deciding what the aforementioned war was about, and so on.

Bottom up is the opposite, you look at what you already have and try to guess what it may become.

For example if you draw up a map with nothing but raw geography and you decide that the grasslands are populated by a nomadic people living on horseback. You decide that for a few years in a row the herds of the nomads main food source has been dwindling causing the people to spend a lot more time fishing. The culture eventually subsist mainly on fish and move from a culture that lives on horses to one that lives on ships. In time they become a feared naval power. Now you have a culture of warriors with ships painted with horses all over them using long bows that have replaced they short bows they would have hunted with from horseback.

Naturally you can combine the two methodologies and bounce ideas back and forth, perhaps the war i mentioned the the first example lead to a food shortage which caused a bunch of people to over hunt the deer populations that the plains people needed and set the second example into action.

As for starting the game without the world entirely though out consider the following. The entire map in Skyrim take up like 2 square miles of the real world. Unless you intend for your players to be traveling far and wide you can actually get a ton of game out of a very small area even in a sand box, and even if players want to travel and explore, travel on foot or horse is still very slow in a world without well maintained roads. I you are worried about your players asking questions about parts of the world you don't have built yet give them the basics of the ideas you have during character creation, and f no one wants to be from one of your distant lands it can be on the back burner for a while.

09-27-2013, 08:01 PM	#7
Winged Join Date: Jun 2007	Re: Fantasy Worldbuilding The way I see it, there are two main ways to get started at world building; top down, and bottom up. Top down design would be coming up with concepts and then figuring out where those ideas would come from in the setting. For example you might start knowing that you want a group of monks who are master swordsmen and seek to resolve conflicts before they can become wars. To support this idea you would work backwards.You decide that after a very long war some number of generations ago a number of swordsmen shaken by the senselessness of war retired from military life to study philosophy, the followers of these men are your modern sword monks.If you like you can keep working your way back, deciding what the aforementioned war was about, and so on. Bottom up is the opposite, you look at what you already have and try to guess what it may become. For example if you draw up a map with nothing but raw geography and you decide that the grasslands are populated by a nomadic people living on horseback. You decide that for a few years in a row the herds of the nomads main food source has been dwindling causing the people to spend a lot more time fishing. The culture eventually subsist mainly on fish and move from a culture that lives on horses to one that lives on ships. In time they become a feared naval power. Now you have a culture of warriors with ships painted with horses all over them using long bows that have replaced they short bows they would have hunted with from horseback. Naturally you can combine the two methodologies and bounce ideas back and forth, perhaps the war i mentioned the the first example lead to a food shortage which caused a bunch of people to over hunt the deer populations that the plains people needed and set the second example into action. As for starting the game without the world entirely though out consider the following. The entire map in Skyrim take up like 2 square miles of the real world. Unless you intend for your players to be traveling far and wide you can actually get a ton of game out of a very small area even in a sand box, and even if players want to travel and explore, travel on foot or horse is still very slow in a world without well maintained roads. I you are worried about your players asking questions about parts of the world you don't have built yet give them the basics of the ideas you have during character creation, and f no one wants to be from one of your distant lands it can be on the back burner for a while.