World Building Worksheet (pdf)

[Lior Gonzales]

Nowwe get to the more conventional part of worldbuilding, where you develop various aspects of your world, like culture, government, geography, and ecology. I prefer to use my timeline as a base, and make inferences from there about what sort of world I am creating, dividing them into one of two categories:

What I want more than anything at this stage is for there to emerge some sort of internal logic to the world. Things should start clicking into place, and every decision you make about the world will have some sort of logic behind it.

World-building in stories is all about creating a world that makes sense within the context of the story. Essentially a world is made of two main elements, the central idea of the story and a setting. Before we jump into the list of 112+ world-building questions, there are a couple of essential aspects that should be kept in mind when building a fantasy world.

First of all, the world should be believable. To create a believable world we must take into account not only what is possible in the world, but also what is impossible. A world where people can fly, or where animals can talk or walk through walls, is obviously unbelievable. Even if this is possible, we must also take into account the setting of the story. Flying is likely to be impossible in a medieval setting, but a world where animals can talk is more plausible. Read our guide on how to write a fantasy novel for more details.

To begin using this free PDF worksheet, start by thinking of a fantasy world you would like to describe. It can be anything from a medieval city, a Tolkienesque high-fantasy world, a post-apocalyptic city, or even a modern-day city. Then use the questionnaire to describe the world in detail.

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

Discover the basic worldbuilding elements of storytelling.

With this worksheet the important first steps of world-building will be covered, such as Setting, the Status-Quo and defining Major Players.

Developing the world of Syntactic Labyrinths has led us to organise world-building on a few key principles.

This document was made for clarity of our ideas as we keep evolving the world in which our film takes place.

First, let me say that worldbuilding is an essential skill for every writer, regardless of genre. Not all writers need to concentrate on all areas of worldbuilding, but every writer must do some worldbuilding if he hopes to have a novel that is coherent, consistent, and real.

It used to be that the only places where you might run into special physics were in SF and fantasy novels. In SF, the special physics generally related to faster-than-light travel or time travel; in fantasy, it came about in the form of magic. But now, with time-travel and space-travel romances, vampire detectives, ghostly lovers, and literary angels intervening in the most earthly of novels, everyone needs to decide whether his book will require special physics. If nothing in your story touches on the supernatural, the magical, the mystical, or the (currently) scientifically impossible, you can skip this step. Go to step B.

If you write exclusively in the here and now, limiting your stories to your own neighborhood and your own neighbors, then the vast infrastructure of the universe exists for you ready-made. But if you dare to drift even a few years into the past or the future with your tale, or to slip sideways into an alternate realm, the infrastructure weakens, the safe supports begin to wobble, and you are forced to create havens in which your characters can be real three-dimensional people . . . people for whom not just the fate of the universe, but the fate of the annoying barking dog, are issues of importance.

I tend to put a lot of extra detail in my world building. Usually only a percentage of that makes its way into the actual novel, the rest of it is for me, to keep me on track through my work and give me the background I need to make my setting believable. The important thing to remember here is to keep things consistent; that is what will give your audience the impression of an authentic world.

When engaging in spiral campaign development, we start by thinking about the campaign's central theme, mission, or goal. What's this campaign about? The shorter this is, the better. Ideally one sentence. Maybe even just one word.

Sometimes these themes change. Sometimes we start with one theme and switch to another. For Descent into Avernus we might start with "hunt down the cults threatening Elturel" and then switch to "save Elturel" once it's sucked into hell.

The campaign's central tenants, often described during a session zero, make your campaign and your world unique. I often refer to these as the "six truths." There doesn't have to be six. There can be three. More than seven is probably too many.

Even though these truths may be big in scale, they matter to the characters right now. They tell your players what the world is like for them and what sort of characters navigate that world. They tell the players what makes this world and this campaign unique among those they've seen or played.

As part of your spiral campaign development, and during your session zero, ensure you reinforce the motivation for the characters. Why are they there? Why group together? Why go on adventures? Make sure this motivation is crystal clear and spelled out early so players have a good reason for their characters to engage in dangerous adventures. Reinforce this motivation often.

The whole philosophy of spiral campaign development is a clear focus on the characters, what they're doing, what they're going to do, and what the world around them is like. This isn't the end-all be-all of building a campaign. It's a start. Your world can be vast, deep, and old but the way you expose that to the characters, and their players, is through gameplay. It's during the game that the characters learn about the planes of existence, the old gods, the wars that tore apart the world, the lost species, and all the rest. They learn it one line at a time while delving deep into the old dungeons, caverns, keeps, and temples in the earth.

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs. Here are last week's topics with timestamped links to the YouTube video:

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A base for all civilizations, needed to understand the present and the precedents of your story. You might want to have some thoughts about it, maybe one or two crucial events happened in ancient times? It definitely is useful for expanding your world and even creating a major plot or conflict.

Expand it as much as you want! More details and well-thought events and progression come in handy if you ever want a more immersive world. It brings the idea you are in a real world that has seen real events.

The factor that moves the world, often overlooked in tribal eras, but if you are dealing with a stable society, and you want your story/ world to have an additional character attached to it, why not give it some thought?

Pretty self-explanatory: the artisans, mechanics, farmers, etc. of your world, how do you imagine their work? And who controls how everything works and moves as it should? The last question is spicier though, do they accomplish a specific mission in your world? Bring any kind of conflict or convey indirectly any kind of problem/ concept of the situation?

Think wisely, it could be a huge point in your story if you have any: the one ring to rule them all, the sacred sceptre to rule all nations, control the resource of gold, conflicts with the bourgeois, etc.

What a philosophical question right? It might look dumb, but it can explain how people think in your world. Is there a Creation? Any sort of spiritual energy? Afterlife? Nothing? And now for the best part, what really exists and how was it created?

Also, you might want to give these entities a story, a background,traits, and given abilities/properties if any. Not only the lore that people attribute them but also, if they actually do exist in reality, the actual lore and the story of their life.

Maybe by oral tradition or ancient scripts and stories, but religion and spiritualism has to be taught between generations. How has it evolved with time? And of course, go crazy with the legends and myths part!

Obviously needed if you have any kind of fantasy, sci-fi, futuristic world. You have an infinite amount of possibilities to explore. Keep in mind that for serious well-done worldbuilding, you will need clear constraints, anything you create on this topic will need them, otherwise, it might become nonsense.

Now for the technology, if the world takes place in the near future, search for information, we already have predictions on the technology of many years to come. If you have an alien civilization or sci-fi/ magic ones, you will have to think of limitations for it, just as with humans. For the last question, it might be the most crucial concept of the future, so again, have interesting possibilities, but add key boundaries.

Clearly related to the previous question. Again, you can always try looking up information on past systems in order to get any sort of inspiration. This can obviously be a common system, but you can also get amazing ones with some imagination!

How influential are the regions and the climate in your story? As a personal opinion, it always helps to have a map of your world! The process of developing a map of a region or world, can also aid the general worldbuilding as you might get good ideas while visualising the lay of the land!

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