30 Days of Worldbuilding

I'm going to give this a shot, but 30 days might be a little hard with how much I already have. The topics themselves are really interesting, and I can't resist fleshing them out.
 
Apologies for the delay in starting the new 'days' here! Beginning of school year's just been a little hectic, and as I mentioned to a few of you in the Discord channel earlier, I have a 7PM class on Wednesdays, which ends at 9:30PM, and I promptly passed out when I got home from that. :P I will aim to get these up at midnight PST from now on though! I'll consider Day 1 as having started on the 6th, since it was almost midnight PST when I posted it, so today (Sept. 8th) will be Day 3.

And a reminder, you don't need to wait for the prompts to go up to start working on them, if you have a good idea of what it's about already - they're more or less just 'featured' for the day they're posted, but you can keep working on 'em after the day it's up or before.

And I'll definitely be getting some of my own stuff up soon!

DAY TWO - GEOGRAPHY
What is a world without terra firma? Space? volume? Location? This is the part of world building where you get to wring your hands together and play the part of a biblical deity, shaping the mountains and pressing down the valleys. You fill the seas, and sprinkle towns on their coasts.

This step usually rests at the forefront of any world or map creation. You set down some rivers and decide that a town uses those rivers to handle trade, or that a kingdom is isolated by mountains, or placing a town in a vast desert with a secret at its heart that helps them thrive where others would get buried in the shifting sands.

Feeling a bit intimidated? Then draw it back, make a local area and fill that up. You can create a peninsula and fill it out with local points of interest. A fantastic tip I've heard for being a Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons is to only worry about the local town that the group starts in, then create the nearby cave they explore, then as time rolls on, the world will flesh out naturally, soon they'll be sent to the nearby city capital, which is much larger and feels like an ocean to a group of small fish who've only been flopping around a pond.

Geography also determines climate, weather, local fauna, convenient travel routes, inconvenient travel routes, but these are all questions for another day, and first determining the lay of the land is the first step to answering those questions.

Additionally, if you're designing whole solar systems for a sci-fi setting where planet hopping is going to be happening, don't fall into the trap of treating each planet as a single continent or gimmick. These are worlds after all, each planet may have the complexity that Earth has.

Well time to moonlight as a cartographer and…

GET BUILDING!​
DAY THREE - PEOPLE & RACES
Time to populate this world! Humans, not-humans, really-really-not-humans. These will most likely be the pool of folks you pull your main characters from, so getting good designs down for them is important!

Depending on your world, this prompt will turn out different for a lot of builders. Some will have only humans, and so mostly will work within where their humans come from and their different appearances, while others will be working with fantasy races or alien races. They may be more long or short lived than humans, they may have a special ability that humans don't possess, or their way of conceptualizing and sensing the world could be entirely foreign.

You'll get a chance to answer these questions more later on in the prompts, but while creating these races it's important to understand how their physiology, culture, and abilities play into their role in your world. If a race can fly then that means the world is a lot more open to them, or maybe that'd be the case in concept if it weren't for certain details of their worlds like strong gusts, or being stuck underground. Paint in broad strokes here though!

For inspiration, as always you can look into your favorite fantasy races from other series. Tolkien's elves are a staple of fantasy, but their original incarnation in the Lord of the Rings universe explores a race with great depth, and are strange to the races of man. They remember the follies of humanity, and have seen many great men rise and fall, then plan their own mass exodus from the world. In the stories their roles may seem detached and dispassionate from the events that are occurring, but this is a part of their nature, and an important consideration that must be addressed for each Elf. Obviously, they are each their own person, and can subvert those expectations, and it's terribly compelling when they do. What sort of questions must every member of a certain race ask?

Well, hopefully this gives you enough fire to whip up some stellar races! Remember that as with anything, races can change as well after time. Lord knows a great many of mine have gone through revisions to get them just right.

Now…

GET BUILDING!​
 
I can't find time to do this every day aaa so it won't be 30 consecutive days haha. Still good ideas to follow though.
 
I can't wait to do Days 5 and 30.
 
I actually prefer the idea someone had of doing this every 3 days. There's three months to the trial period, so tripling the length of each day benefits the event as well.
 
Day 2: Geography
Day 3: People & Races
Day 4: Cultures
Day 5: History

These first four days topics (since there's no way I can cover all that in 4 days) are probably going to kill me. Oh well, time to keep writing all this.
 
I definitely agree that 30 days is not nearly enough time to explore all the topics, and I never intended for anyone to be able to fully flesh out one topic per day - like I said, there's really no strict deadlines here, but since there are still some concerns with the timing, I think this is what I'll do: I'm going to keep introducing a new prompt every day, but the event itself will last for the entire duration of the Multiverse's trial period - so once these first 30 days are over, you will still have about 2 months to work on them at your own pace. How's that sound to everyone? :)
 
DAY FOUR - CULTURE
This is a huge subject, and one that will get divided up further into later days due to its immensity. Really though, which part of your world couldn't someone potentially write a book on in its own right within that world?

Culture is the beliefs, the customs, the arts, and all that jazz of a society, group, place or time.

Ripped mostly right from the dictionary, but that should give you an idea on how broad of a subject this is, but it's time to give those races their cement as people with histories and lives. You could have cultural schisms throughout the same race within the same town creating a tension between neighbors.

Culture will eventually define the rules of the land, and how people live and die within that land. These ways may have come about due to what sort of land they exist within when you decided to place these people on a place on the map you created earlier. For powerful examples you can always look close to home in your own cultural history, ripping apart powerful events, and deciding points that changed history, then asking how they apply to yourself now. Dig into the history, the geography, the people, and ask how they all had a hand in this past.

Once you are done naval gazing, you can then apply those same questions to your races and understand that it's sometimes a nuanced answer, or an answer that is devilishly simple which creates great waves, waves that you can ride to…

GET BUILDING!​

Aand some proof that I've been worldbuilding too! A quick WIP of what I've been working on for Day 2:
Spoiler:

Aiming to get my own thread up sometime tomorrow!
 
Last edited:
Esper said:
What tools did you use to make that map? Photoshop with some landscape brushes like for the trees and such? It looks good for a WIP.
Click to expand...
Thanks! It's a pretty cool brush pack, and I think it works well with the kind of world I'm going for - https://starraven.deviantart.com/art/Sketchy-Cartography-Brushes-198264358

I was kinda surprised I could install PS brushes onto GIMP though, like sure, it's not the best program but for an open source thing it's capable of so much more than I expect it to, haha.

DAY FIVE - HISTORY
Time to make history! History for your world that is.

I'll whip out another great Dungeon Master tip for this subject, which is to create 3 major events: One that happened a bit back in the past, but still resonates within the world due to its importance, an event that happened a while back, and current events.

The far past event can range from a great natural disaster that shook the region or world, a great war, the depletion of an important resource, the extinction of a race or species, the death of an important figure that has thrown a realm into civil war, this is something that anyone would know about, or hear in passing.

The middle history is something that happened a month ago, maybe a battle was won or lost, talk of a new faction is overheard, death of an old faction opens an opportunity for those hungry for power to step up. Word of mouth is carrying news of this event fast and can help further set the stage for events to happen.

The current event is something that is best to have more immediate repercussions. A battle begins, a town is set ablaze, the winter sets in, a river dries up, a mysterious murder takes place, the fifth one this week and everyone knows it is not a mere coincidence.

These events can help set a more local understanding of your world if you're deciding to focus in on one area first and expand from there in particular. This might even be a helpful tool to create each country as you line off a map and figure out the concerns of these countries.

You can then think back much further, perhaps even into the concept of creation of this world. Which origin stories are repeated by storytellers around fires? Which history is written and passed along, and which history is forgotten? You most likely delved a bit into the history of your cultures yesterday, but today it's time to really flesh out those timelines and dot them with points of interest and…

GET BUILDING!​
 
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