30 Days of Worldbuilding

Finally been able to get started - introduction!
https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/377853#introduction

I hope I covered the basics - I'm afraid that it's only coherent to me because everything is already in my head and I'm mentally filling in any gaps of information I've left out as I read, lol.
 
DAY SIX - CIVILIZATION & ARCHITECTURE
You have a race, you have a culture, you know their history, now to expand upon the places where they live. There are a great many factors that can decide how a building is put up. Are these people nomads who need to put up and tear down their homes often enough that simplicity is more convenient for them? Is this a sedentary society who has access to great amounts of stone, who create stone temples and buildings that exhibit beautiful stonecutting techniques honed by generations of artisan craftsmanship? Must the buildings stand up to great winds? Frequent floods? Harsh winters?

These are not even just homes, they are places of business, places of government, defenses against invaders, and monuments to human achievement in some cases. Design can come from both necessity and experience. Maybe a building does not need to extend so high into the clouds as to scrape the sky, but fixing an issue of population density by building up instead of out, then racing to see who can carry this concept higher for prestige and money has created the cityscape that lines the horizon of many great cities.

Architects are artists as well - they see people living in these spaces, they see how these spaces invoke feelings, they understand what each form and shape does to us. You can see it in the way a doors opens, in the way streets are laid out, you can see it in the locations of light fixtures, and the placement of a window.

Now draft up those floor plans and…

GET BUILDING!​
 
DAY SEVEN - ECONOMY
How do the folks in your world trade for goods and services? Do they barter? Do they accept payment in lots and lots of dollars? Do they carry around heavy coin purses? The way your world does its business can lead to a lot of interesting questions when it comes time for people to acquire the next boat out of town, or even if their coins from another kingdom are any good here in this town.

Economy can also be the question of how wealth is acquired and what services or trade items a region relies on. Are they into the spice? Textiles? Farming? These can be answered by the region they are in, or can even help fill out the map further. If a town is rich with ore, they must have a nearby mine, right? This can also create issues if suddenly a town is cut off from its source of income, or a disaster ruins the crop this season.

Logistics also play a good part into this prompt, as paper money is the solution to keeping us from jangling around ungodly amounts of change, and credit cards have simplified this further. What if someone has to trade 10 cows in town for supplies? They have to definitely have the capability to safely herd those goods where they need to be or be able to orchestrate a deal where someone comes by and picks up the cows for them.

Another important question is what happens if someone cannot pay? How are the poor treated versus the rich? How willing is someone to help another on good faith, or are there measures in place to make sure someone does not starve? This can help drive the socioeconomic disparities in your culture.

Well all I wanna do is *bang bang bang* *Cha-ching* and…

GET BUILDING!​
 
DAY EIGHT - HIERARCHY, POWER & GOVERNANCE
Who's in charge in your world? Who makes the big decisions when they matter? Who lays down the law? Who enforces the law? These questions help decide how order is maintained in your cultures and who has the most effect on the land. Sometimes someone becomes more powerful than the government and creates their own military government. Then they let the emperor still be emperor, but the de facto military leader is actually in control.

The emperor can still dress like an emperor if he wants, that's fine.

Of course there are services that governments provide their people, and this is important to figure out when figuring out how good they're doing their job at the moment, and if they have the faith of the people behind them, or if the leadership should be worried about getting aHEAD of themselves (as in they're going to lose their heads to a guillotine). These services can include military protection, local law enforcement, roads, education, etc., etc., these are the things we argue back and forth on with modern politics as well.

While you're figuring out the political system of your cultures, you might as well take a stab at their laws, determining how cool they are with killing another person, if they can practice certain religions, what they are expected to pay in taxes. Then you can figure out how punishment is handled if a citizen crosses those lines.

These questions may be bleak, but they do help set up the tensions down the road. If a character breaks the law, their reaction could differ based on the punishment, and even their chance of breaking a law differs based on how draconian the local laws are.

Ain't no law against it so…

GET BUILDING!​
 
Oops, a step ahead of me this time, Cutiefly. :P

DAY NINE - RELIGION & COSMOLOGY
This is a fun prompt for some, maybe not as important for others. Not gonna hide it though, thinking about deities and the things they do gets me excited!

This day is dedicated to fleshing out the cosmic powers that be, and those who believe in them. Maybe though the spirituality in your world is more subtle, a source of hope, and motivation when none can be otherwise found.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people" -Karl Marx

Religion may otherwise be used to answer the unanswerable questions of the people in your universe or maybe an interpretation of how the Deities work and where they came from. Sometimes the deities are not close enough to the mortal coil to explain this themselves, or they may reach out to humanity often and give their own account, but what if two deities don't have their stories line up? What if there's a chance one of them might be lying or misremembering the nature of the universe? What if they preach different solutions to reaching enlightenment or operate by different rules of the universe? Even if divinity is readily present and tangible, the answers to the universe may not be clear-cut.

Definitely do lots of research into all the –isms in the world for this day. Learning about different relationships with deities, or learning about religions that do not rely on deities to run the universe. Even if you are sure what sort of system you want, it doesn't hurt to figure out what that system is called and finding equivalent religions in the world to fill voids in your cosmology that you haven't even thought about yet. These are concepts that have after all been heatedly debated and fleshed out by Theologists for countless generations.

This also may be a chance to understand the basic concepts that are introduced by your Gods being present, your Gods being present but hidden, your Gods being dead, your Gods never being there in the first place. Even if there is no God up in the sky in your world, does everyone in your world buy that? What about those who cry out for reason and purpose?

Take the threads of creation and…

GET BUILDING!​
 
Ah, finally! A topic I'll enjoy working on!
 
DAY TEN - LANGUAGE
The words we speak, and the ways we communicate can help bring together and push apart your world. Language can be your home, and if you have ever been surrounded by strange words then you may then understand how you can take your language for granted.

The threads of language can be frayed, woven, split, and spread throughout the histories of the cultures in your world. Different dialects exist, different words are used depending on which side of the mountain your town is on, and you can get very particular.

Let's be real here, we're not all Tolkien, to create a whole new language is a massive undertaking, and after it all you may be so exhausted that you may just be inclined to call a location "Mt. Doom" or something. You may be simply translating a strange language when writing a story from there. You describe the cadence of the words, the way they fall from the tongue and lips, the softness of the words, the power of the words, and you can maybe pass along the feeling of the language that is being spoken, what it would be like to overhear these characters. You might also create a Lingua Franca, a shared language to bring together cultures for simplicities sake, calling it common, or a trade language.

Between kingdoms there are most likely interpreters on hand. Perhaps a flub of meaning causes ill intentions to be drawn out of a compliment. Heck, even amongst the same language it's not unheard of to read between the lines and extract an unfavorable tone out of an otherwise pleasantly written letter.

Speak softly, and…

GET BUILDING!​
 
I will work on this soon.

Like I said I would work on other things.

Which I didn't.
 
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Lol no worries, take your time!

DAY ELEVEN - FAUNA
The birds in the sky, the mole in the ground, the tiger in the trees, today's prompt is answering what animals we could expect to see in your world. Some creatures simply serve to fill out the niches in the biomes in your world, providing meat for humans sometimes, but not being too notable otherwise. Maybe your world has a great importance placed on the animals in your world, where some are threatening beasts, or maybe they have a magical or corrupted origin that attaches them to the cosmology of the world. They may be a real obstacle in the world as entities who are relentless and are not susceptible to negotiation.

I'll say this a lot, some of us could spend a whole month on this subject, especially if you're filling out a monster manual for your world full of fiends and dire whatevers. Even if the creatures are not all that important, they can be used to great effect to convey how alien a world is. If a wizard strokes a small pet dragon who remains the size of a house cat, and it's not seen as any big deal, it drives home that these characters are comfortable in a world that is not our own.

If you have a huge roster of creatures to design, I can help at least start the ball rolling today. A great tip is to understand the biomes of your world, and the families that these creatures come from, and divide those up. You may have an entire monster family of devils, then an entire section of varied harpy families, your seas may be ruled by aquatic dragons who feast on various jellyfish who infest the sea. If you at least figure that you need to explore the different forms of these dragons and jellyfish, then you can work back from there. You can even figure out "What sort of places would these creatures inhabit?" And work backwards from there. If you have magical ruins, then you can think about what would be attracted by these magical energies or be left over. Maybe these ruins were abandoned long ago due to a great summoning circle gone wrong and creatures from another plane now inhabit the overgrown building and at the heart within the circle it was brought from this world from, a great beast remains, controlling minions and planning to reopen the gate to its own world or to find a much more reliable source of humans to eat.

Otherwise think of the food chain as well when creating a believable ecosystem. Which creatures are apex predators, which creatures graze upon the plants and run from the apex predators, which creatures have found a way to totally subvert the food chain and have found an obscure niche to fill licking rocks for nourishment.

You can also think about domesticated creatures. Humanity has had a long history of bonding with animals who serve a purpose. Cats eat rodents, dogs can help hunt alongside humans, and both provide companionship. Maybe races in your world have more aesthetic uses like tropical fish being cared for in a tank.

Now go wild and…

GET BUILDING!​
 
Oh
That's why everyone's been on about things like language and stuff.
Well, that certainly clears things up. And here I thought I was in the minority for not immediately focusing on that stuff.
Well, I wish you all the best of luck in seeing your respective worlds through to the end of the event! I'll be lurking about and supporting you silently from the sidelines!
 
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