Help with Worldbuilding

Look up "worldbuilding guides" online and you'll find no shortage of possible questions to think about when designing your world. The problem is, these questions are endless and a lot of them can get pretty specific. “How does a planet with two moons deal with werewolves?” “What kind of insurance would a spaceship need?” “Do wizards have a union?”

My own rule one of worldbuilding is this: do you really need to worldbuild? Of the three "pillars" of storytelling (worldbuilding, characters and plot), worldbuilding is the easiest one to skip. If your story takes place in the real world, it probably doesn't need an explanation. Even if it doesn't, it still might not.

Honestly - I wouldn't start with worldbuilding. I'd start off with getting a plot and some characters together first. In fact, you'll probably get your worldbuilding from writing the above two. If one of your characters is a wizard who upsets the wizard union, then you can start thinking about how a wizard union might work.

Really, you only ought to add worldbuilding if one of the following is true:

You need to
You want to

If you've already got a really cool idea about how your world works, there's no shame in writing it down. The challenge will be to take it and find a way to work it into the story - but let the story play out on its own first, and if you haven't found anywhere to mention it by then, maybe it's not something that needs mentioning.

All this to say - don't think about all the things I'm telling you here. Just pick the ones that interest you, or the ones you think will be useful for your story.

Basics

There are a few questions you ought to ask pretty early on. The first is simply "where does the story take place?"

The Real World: A story that takes place here on Planet Earth. Good for stories that are (for the most part) realistic – ones where we wouldn’t expect things like elves or wizards to show up*.
The Real World, But...: A story that takes place in a fantasy version of our world. It’s Planet Earth as we know it, with all its familiar cities and landmarks… but there’s something different about it. Maybe magic and fantasy creatures are real, or maybe everyone has superpowers. Maybe this difference is common knowledge, or maybe it's hidden from most people.
Another World: A story that takes place in a world that we wouldn’t consider “real”. A place with completely different countries, species, landmarks, customs, etc.

*That’s not to say that they can’t show up, especially if your story is more comedic in nature – it’s just that every other character would probably find it a bit weird.

The second question I ask is "when does the story take place?"

The Past: Based on a period of history (Medieval times, pirate times, cowboy times, etc.).
The Present: Based on the modern day (at least at the time of writing). The world is probably going to be quite familiar-looking to the everyday lives of the audience.
The Future: Based on ideas of the future. Depending on how far it is, there might be a lot of sci-fi tropes such as robots or hovercars.
Some Kind of Mash-Up of All Three: "Science fantasy" is a genre that combines elements of sci-fi and fantasy. Here you can have things like killer robots and knights on horseback fighting side-by-side. Definitely a clear sign that your story takes place in another world.

The Supernatural

Does the supernatural exist in your setting?

Absolutely not. If anybody shows up claiming to be a wizard or a ghost, they’re either crazy or they’re lying.
Maybe…? But we don’t really focus on it. A lot of cartoons are here – The Simpsons takes place in a mostly-realistic town, but then you have characters like Professor Frink or Kang and Kodos, who are definitely in the realms of fantasy. A wizard or a ghost might show up in an episode, but the other characters would think of it as out-of-the-norm.
Yes, and it’s a big part of the story. Things like wizards and ghosts come up a lot in our setting.

When you add magic to your setting, it suddenly adds a whole new angle. Usually this means you have to come up with a bunch of rules - things like "where does it come from?" "Is it good or evil?" "Can anyone do it?"

For me, there's really only one important rule of magic:

Why can't the characters just use magic to get whatever they want?

Even if you have a setting where magic doesn't have any rules - where anyone can wiggle their fingers and make absolutely anything happen - if you want to keep your story from being very brief, you still have to come up with a reason why the main character can't just wish for their mission to be complete.

Usually this translates into magic having “rules”: certain things it can and can’t do. Maybe magic can only cheat the rules of nature, but it can’t outright break them (or maybe it can, but then it’ll cause some kind of cosmic paradox that destroys the universe).
Perhaps the “rules of magic” in your setting are literal: maybe magic is something that’s regulated in this world, with magic cops going around paying visits to anyone who breaks the laws of reality too much.
There’s only a set number of spells in the world, all with clearly defined rules and effects. You can cast “fireball” or “lightning bolt” or even “teleportation” – but there’s no spell that goes “abraca-give-me-a-million-dollars-dabera”.
Maybe magic having no rules is its own problem – it’s crazy and unpredictable, and you can’t just wish for victory without risking, say, spontaneously turning into a chicken or something.
Maybe it’s not the magic itself that’s the problem, but the people using it. Maybe they just don’t know how to do certain things with it, or aren’t willing to cast certain spells.

Geography

A planet can be separated into biomes - different areas with different climate and weather patterns. You can put them on a scale between cold vs hot and wet vs dry:

List of Biomes

Cold Biomes

Tundra: the coldest of the biomes, an area where it’s too cold for trees to grow (it comes from a Finnish word for “treeless plain”). The soil here is permanently frozen (permafrost). Plants can still grow here, but nothing much bigger than a shrub. It's very often covered in snow, but not always. You'll find this kind of biome at the tops of mountains or near the North and South Poles.
Glacier/ice cap: OK, maybe it's not the coldest. Rather than being a "true" tundra, the North and South Poles themselves are glaciers. In other words, they don't have any frozen soil, because they don't have any soil - it's all just a big block of ice. Glaciers move very, very slowly, pushing themselves across the land under their own weight.
Taiga/boreal forest: just outside of the tundra is the taiga, a particularly cold forest where snow is frequent. Only needle-leafed, pinecone-producing trees like pines, firs and spruces are hardy enough to grow here. This is the world's largest biome, and you'll find these on the slopes of mountains and all across Canada and Scandinavia.
Mountain: a piece of the Earth that's gone shooting upwards, where you can see the exposed bedrock on its side. They usually come one after another in ranges. The tops of them are very cold and often covered with snow.

Warm Biomes

Grassland: an area covered with grass. It's full of meadows, flowers and maybe a few trees, though not enough to make a forest out of (there is water here, but not enough to satisfy lots of trees). In the middle of America there's a wide area of grassland called the "prairie".
Forest: a big group of trees that cluster together so they block out the Sun above. The trees can be deciduous (where their leaves fall in the autumn) or evergreen (which keep their leaves all year long).
Woods: a smaller group of trees that stand together but don't quite block out the Sun. Usually a smaller, more spaced-out version of a forest.
Steppe: a kind of tree-less grassland that can be found in east Europe and Asia. For some reason, they always look yellowish in fiction.
Beach: a strip of sand or pebbles along the edge of the ocean or a body of water. The water waves gradually wear out the land until it's left rocky or sandy.
Wetlands: mucky areas where the soil is very wet. Wetlands can be found in flat areas nearby rivers, lakes and streams, where the water can spill out a lot and soak into the soil. They can be further split into swamps (that have trees) and marshes (that don't).
Plateau: a big flat area jutting out the Earth, surrounded by cliffs. Like a mountain but with more level ground.
Valley: a low area dipped between two hills, usually with a river or stream running through it.
Hill: a rising area of Earth, not as tall or as steep as a mountain. Usually gently slope upwards and have less sheer cliffs.
Island: a patch of land surrounded by water.

Hot Biomes

Desert: an area with so little rainfall the ground has become sandy or rocky.
Rainforest: the opposite of a desert - an area with so much rain it's become a dense forest. Often also called a jungle.
Savannah: a kind of grassy woodland where there are lots of trees, but they’re all so spaced out from one another they never form a closed canopy.
Chaparral: a unique biome that’s kind of half-desert half-grassland. They can be quite rocky and home to shrubs and small trees. Think the area around Los Angeles or the Mediterranean (Spain, Italy, Greece). Oddly, the chaparral biome only appears on the west coast of countries.
Volcano: a vent in the crust of the Earth that allows the lava within to leak out.

Where to Put Biomes

The hottest place on Earth is right in the middle at the Equator. This is because the Sun is shining most directly on this area. These areas are likely going to be a lot rainier too, because more heat from the Sun means more water is evaporating into clouds. The North and South Poles, farthest away from the sunny Equator, are covered with ice.

Wind is also a big factor in determining what the weather is like. Wind is air rushing over from areas where it’s squeezed together (high atmospheric pressure) to areas where it’s more spread out (low atmospheric pressure).

High-pressure areas tend to be warmer and sunnier because the wind is going away from it, while low-pressure areas are colder and stormier because the wind is rushing towards it.

Air on its own is constantly going up-and-down because hot air rises up from the ground, and cool air descends down from the sky. But because Earth is spinning around, the air kind of gets jostled by this motion, which creates these pressure differences.

Most of the world’s high air pressure can be found at the North and South Poles, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Meanwhile, most of the low pressure is at the Equator, the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic Circle.

The prevailing wind is the direction the wind is most likely to blow in. It kind of goes in a zigzag pattern down the Earth because… something about the way the Earth is spinning, I don’t know. I'm not a scientist, alright?

With the above in mind, we can see where it is most of the rain falls on our planet:

The most rain is right in the middle, which is where we find the Amazon and Congo rainforests. Above it, where there's not much rain, we find Mexico and the Sahara desert. Above that, on the next low-pressure band, we find the colder Canada and Europe. The rain here isn't as dramatic as in the Equator, but there's not as much sunshine to make up for it.

Deserts

So, if it's the hottest biome, why isn't the desert right in the middle? It's to do with the way the wind blows, since the wind is what's carrying the rain. There's actually three kinds of hot desert in the world:

Rain-shadow desert: when rain forms from evaporating water in lakes or seas, the wind carries it across the land. If it bumps into a mountain range, the wind is going to take a longer time to get over it, and the cold weather forces the rain to fall quicker. By the time the wind gets over the mountain, the rain’s already been used up, and there’s nothing left to water the lands beyond the mountain, which dry out into a desert.
Trade wind desert: right at the equator, the Sun is directly baking the Earth, which causes a lot of evaporation and thus a lot of rain, filling the equator with rainforests. By the time the wind currents around the equator – the Hadley Cells – carry the clouds further north or south, the rain’s already been used up, creating patches of desert.
Coastal desert: you sometimes get deserts right by the sea, but only on the west coast of countries near the Earth’s middle – around there, the wind’s blowing from east to west, so any rainclouds forming over the western sea are just going to get blown away from the shore. I can only assume this is the same reason why you only find chaparral on the west coast - tropical east-to-west winds blow the rainclouds forming over the sea away from the land, leaving it dry (the areas with west-to-east blowing winds are too cold for deserts or chaparral).

Rivers and Lakes

Rivers start off at the source. The source is usually either up in a hill or mountain, where rain or melted snow runs down into the valley, or from a spring, a place where groundwater shoots to the surface.

A river only has one exit – one point where it empties out into the sea. Other rivers can join (i.e. flow into) the big river, but they never diverge into a smaller river midway through (it doesn’t need to, since the water’s already going to the sea anyway).

This is a rule I’ve ignored plenty of times – I don’t like routes being too linear in my videogame-ish worlds.

If a river goes all the way between one end of the landmass to the other, it’s called a strait (and it's not really a flowing river by that point, it's more like a patch of the sea).

Lakes are big pools of water. Many of them are fed by springs or form along a river, while others are volcanic craters filled up with rain, or pits of melted ice left over from the ice age.

Forests and Jungles

Forests just seem to crop up wherever, as long as there’s enough rain to feed them. There’s probably going to be some kind of water source in there somewhere, like a river or spring or lake. Trees do like their water.

If I had to guess, I'd put big forests closer to the sea than grasslands and deserts are - the closer you are to the ocean, the more rain you're going to get.

The word “jungle” is usually used for thick tropical forests. Often the term is used interchangeably with “rainforest”, but rainforests are just very big forests that get lots of rain, and can be found in temperate as well as tropical climates (there are some big temperate rainforests on the Pacific coast).

“Jungle” also usually refers to forests that are hard to walk through, owing to all the tangled bushes and brambles you have to cut your way through. Rainforests are a bit easier to walk, since the tall trees block the sunlight meaning less plant growth on the forest floor.

Mountains, Volcanoes and Islands

Mountains stand on the places where two tectonic plates (bits of the Earth's crust that move around on top of the lava) meet. These tectonic plates slowly smoosh together over the years, pushing the Earth’s crust above it upwards.

If one of these tectonic plates is bigger and heavier than the other, it will force the other plate down beneath it, into the fiery magma beneath the Earth. This gives the magma an opening to bubble up to the surface, shooting out as a volcano.

After it erupts, the lava eventually cools down back into rock. As the volcano keeps erupting and spewing out more rock, it gets taller and bigger.

Most islands are formed this way from underwater volcanoes. They keep erupting, cooling and building themselves up until they poke through the ocean surface.

Mountains are usually found clumped together in ranges along the tectonic plates. If a mountain is standing on its own (like Mt. Kilimanjaro), chances are it’s a volcano.

Another thing about mountain ranges: did you know most mountain ranges are - or start off at - somewhere near the coast? The Alps start off at Monaco, and the Rocky Mountains kind of stretch down from the west coast of Canada, while even the Appalachians kind of stretch down from near Quebec City. The only exception I can think of are the Himalayas, which separates India from the rest of the world - but its eastmost end is sort of close by the Bay of Bengal.

So, if you were drawing a mountain range on your map, I'd start by putting the "first mountain" somewhere nearby (but probably not right on top of) the shore, then stretch the rest of the mountains out from there.

Why Do I Need to Know All This?

You don't - not really. But nerds in the audience tend to get shirty when you put an icy tundra right next door to a hot desert.

They say you have to learn the rules before you break the rules. I have my own addendum to that: you have to know the rules in order to break the rules and mean it. If your rivers split because you don’t know any better, you’re just the guy who doesn’t know how rivers work. But if you know that rivers don’t split in real life, then choose to make them split, people will think you’re a rebel.

Here's a few ways to respond to people who tell you that your map isn't geographically correct:

If it’s a fantasy, mumble something about magic.
If it’s sci-fi, mumble something about terraforming.
If it’s a comedy, mumble something about it being a comedy.
If it’s none of these, mumble something about people reading too deeply into it.

Designing Continents

Once you decide where your islands and continents are going to go, then you need to come up with a shape for the islands/continents themselves. How do you draw a landmass? …hell if I know. Usually I either just draw some squiggly blobs or make it look like a familiar shape from above (as in “that cloud looks like a flower!” or whatever).

The Etherington Brothers have their own method of drawing landmasses that seems to simplify the whole matter a lot. I followed along with it and ended up with this:

They also suggest you carve up your continent into different segments, so you can determine which biome goes into which segment.

The little red dot there is where I imagine the capital city to be.

If you have Photoshop, there's another way of getting random shapes for your continents I got from this website:

Species

Now we have a place to live, we need people to live in it. In a realistic story, all you need is humans. Failing that, all the characters might be talking animals (usually the animal they are reflects their personality).

The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons between them have sort of set the rules over what the "standard" fantasy species are. We keep going back to them because they cover most of the European myth-scape.

The plot usually revolves around the "big fight" going on between these species. Of course, you get plenty of other species, but they're rarely as important because they're not involved in the main conflict, or they're just working for one of the above factions.

Other fantasy species include:

Fairies
Elementals
Ancient Greek monsters (like Minotaurs, cyclopes or gorgons)
Robots (probably called "golems")
Plant and tree people (usually shack up with the elves)
Unicorns and pegasi
Big eyes with tentacles floating around
Jinn (genies, who were a whole race of people in the original stories)
Angels (good versions of demons)
High elves (elves but "special". Usually it means they live in cities while the traditional elves - here called "wood elves" - live in the countryside)
Mermaids and other sea-dwelling people
People made of slime
Scary tentacle monsters who drive others insane looking at them
Gremlins (the "evil" techie race)
Dragons
Talking animals/inanimate objects
Yōkai (Japanese ghosts)
Natural-born wizards, who may be a species unto themselves

In sci-fi, you have a lot more freedom - there aren't any set rules as to what aliens look like. A lot of the time you can take the fantasy races and give them a sci-fi twist (like, replace "magic" with "psychic" or "super-science").

The only difficulty is trying to justify why these aliens look like they do. In fantasy, you can just say the gods designed them to serve a cosmic purpose, but in sci-fi, since they all live on different planets, you need to justify why it is they look like they do on their own planets. If you've got furry creatures living on a planet of lava, they'll probably all be cooked in their own fur.

Evolution is the process of animals mutating over time to fit in with the environment they live in. Everything I know about evolution I learned from playing Spore.

If you're struggling to come up with an original species, you can pick a few traits from this chart here and mash them together.

Towns and Cities

Say you’re making an RPG game, and one of the levels takes place in a sandy desert environment, full of scorpions and sandstorms and other dangerous things. Because you need a safe haven where your characters can catch their breath and stock up on provisions, you decide to add a town to it. But now you’re faced with another question – who the hell would choose to live in the middle of the desert?!

Well... the citizens of Las Vegas chose to. That's right in the middle of the desert, and it's one of the biggest cities in the world. It helps that it’s got lots of world-famous casinos and tourist attractions – if it wasn’t for those, there’d probably be no reason for anyone to live there.

So there's a good question to start off with when designing settlements: why does anyone live here? Here’s a few possible reasons to think about:

There’s a valuable resource found in this area, and people have moved in to get their piece of it.
The surrounding environment is highly dangerous, and this area is the only safe place to be (whether because of natural defences or because the town’s built next to an allied military outpost).
There’s a lot of people passing by this area already (maybe it’s a tourist spot or a busy road), so you might as well settle down and start selling them things.
It’s been way too long since the last settlement and we desperately need to set up a place where people can rest and refuel on their journey.

When thinking about why people would choose to live in your town, try thinking about it in terms of your story – why are your characters going to this town? The reason for your characters being here might relate back to the reason anyone else is here. Is it because there’s a famous tourist attraction here? Are there opportunities here that you wouldn’t get anywhere else? Or is it simply because it’s nearby – and near enough to some kind of resource or opportunity that would attract others?

Town Types

Capital City:

The "main" city of the whole country, where the country’s leaders are located (so it’d be very well-defended). Usually also the biggest and most popular city in the country, though not always.

Metropolis:

A massive city with at least a million people living in it. Usually the biggest city in a given area like a state or province. What you often find is that these cities are made up of several smaller towns and cities that all connect to each other (so, New York is made of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, etc.).

City:

An area where lots of people live, work and visit. Often have some high-rise buildings and skyscrapers.

Town:

Bigger than villages but smaller than cities, with at least a thousand residents. These places don’t usually have as many tall buildings.

Village:

A small community of less than a thousand, usually out in the countryside. No big businesses, just the bare essentials like a tavern, convenience store or post office.

Hamlet:

Smallest possible settlement. Less than a hundred people living in at least five buildings. Rarely more than one or two businesses catering to locals. Any smaller than this and you’ve got an isolated homestead or farm.

Town Layout (Modern)

In the modern day, villages are more and more rare. Nowadays they're more likely to be suburbs than independent settlements of their own. The village I grew up in had an inn, a church, a village hall (a general multi-use building), a convenience store, a school and a small park. The next village over was even smaller and had just a bar and a church. This drawing below isn't the same village, but it gets the general idea across:

As far as I know, America doesn’t have any English-style “villages” – or at least that’s not the word most people use. The smallest American settlement (that isn’t just a farm) would be the “small town”.

Like villages, small towns are usually centered around one long road going through them. Most of the businesses will be along this road, since this is where most people drive by. There may be a couple of big-brand shops (like McDonald’s or Walmart) but most of them will be locally-owned.

Along the main road, the businesses mostly cater to visitors, while further back in the grid they mostly cater to residents.

Designing a Big City

In terms of mapping out a big city, I like to split my towns into “neigborhoods” and “districts”. Now, I use these terms in a very specific way: for me, a neighbourhood is a group of connected streets, while a district is a group of neighborhoods that come together to fulfil a sort of purpose (so, the “shopping” district would have mostly shops, the “industrial” district would have mostly factories, etc.).

In real life, a neighbourhood and a district are kind of the same thing, except a district has a specific purpose and a neighbourhood’s just kind of doing whatever. I view a neighbourhood as smaller than a district for worldbuilding purposes, but really they can be the same size. My way of looking at it isn’t perfect – it’s just a good starting-point for visualizing a city.

I work it out like this - four houses a block, four blocks a neighborhood, four neighborhoods a district.

A "lot" is a space you can put a building.

You know, looking at it from above, that "district" looks more like a "neighborhood". Don't get tethered to my arbitrary limits - if it looks too small, you can add more to it (maybe throw together four of these "districts" to make an actual district?).

It also seems to have a lot of empty space. I've stuck with the strict "16 houses a neighborhood" guide, but feel free to add as many buildings as you see fit - if it's a busy part of town, it'll probably have more buildings. Maybe the empty spaces could be where you put some trees or green spaces.

How many districts should a city have? It’s hard to say. Manhattan has, like, 22 different areas, and that’s just going by the PS2 Spider-Man 2 game. Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos has, like, around 30.

The number I keep going back to is 9 for big cities and 3 for small towns. I think that came from how Arkham Horror split its boards.

Here's a list of some possible districts for your city:

Central Business District/Downtown: the “main” area of a city, usually at the heart of downtown. This is the place where most people are coming and going, so the biggest businesses will be here looking to sell to the most people.
Residential Area: a place set aside for people to live and build houses. Likely a suburban area away from all the tall buildings. Towards the city center, people will more likely live in apartment blocks.
The Bad Part of Town: a run-down area with the cheapest housing (likely because it’s near the industrial park or somewhere else noisy or stinky). Tends to be where the most crime takes place. Might have a name like “the Shafts” or “the Warrens” or “Shivtown”.
The Waterfront: the part of town closest to the river/lake/ocean. If it’s a nice beach, it might have touristy facilities like hotels. If it’s a grimy old harbor, it might be an industrial area where a lot of fishing/shipping takes place.
College Campus: if the city has a university, it may be big enough to be a district unto itself. Otherwise, other businesses nearby it might cater to the student life.
Industrial Park: home to factories and warehouses that make and store the products to be sold in shops. Probably going to be very noisy and polluted, and might be closer to the edge of town as a result.
The Rich Side of Town: the place with the nicest houses, the best views and the wealthiest residents. Businesses here will cater to the rich locals, so will be fancy and luxurious and have mortifying price tags.
Market Street: a commercial center where lots of shopping gets done. While the Central Business District might cater more to visitors and tourists, a separate retail area might cater more to residents.
Chinatown: an area of town based heavily on another country or culture, usually being home to many people from that culture moving into the city. For names, take your pick between “Somewheretown” and “Little Someplaceorother”.
Administrative Center: the place where all the main government buildings are, and where the people who run the city work. Things like the mayor’s office or the courthouse might be here. Likely to be old and nearby the CBD, but maybe not on it since it’s not a big touristy area.
Office Space: home to big modern skyscrapers where people in ties work that don’t seem to do anything. What they do is run all the other major businesses in town, so it’ll likely be a pretty rich area.
Entertainment District: your own little Hollywood. If the town has a movie or TV studio, it’ll likely be here, and the businesses around it will be focused on things like movies and TV. It’ll likely bring a lot of tourists, and may be nearby the rich part of town, since this is where all the celebrities work.
The Outskirts: also known as the rural-urban fringe. If the city has any farms, they’ll likely be way outside the city, since they need a lot of space. Power plants that also take up a lot of space will likely be near the city limits.

If your city takes place in a fantasy setting, you might have a district catering to something unusual – like a magic district if there’s a lot of wizards, a science district if it’s sci-fi, or a graveyard district if there are a lot of undead creatures shuffling around.

Here's a small map I drew up for a place to put a city. It's based on the Garden Rivers stage from Cities: Skylines, because I liked how it had forests, a mountain and a beach. This means it's got plenty of natural resources, tourist amenities, and most important - places for the main characters to go.

A good place to start when designing a city is to draw one big line showing where the main road goes. It'll usually be branching off the main cross-country highway, or it might be along the highway itself (maybe the highway goes over the town like a bridge, and when you go off the off-ramp you're right there in the city).

Here I've added in some rectangles marking out roughly where I think the main segments of the city will go. Downtown is right along the main road – everyone’s passing by here, and these will be the first buildings they see. All the big businesses are scrambling to have a spot by the main road.

The residential area is farther back from the busy highway so it’s quiet – it's also close by the forest so people can be closer to nature. I've lumped a commercial area between the residential area and the downtown block, for a place where residents can get their shopping done.

A tourist area is by the scenic beach. A lot of out-of-towners will be coming here to relax, so you could look at it as a “secondary downtown” – if a business can’t get a spot there, it might as well get one here. The industrial area is further down, but also by the sea, so it'll have a busy harbor. It's also by the swamp, which is already an undesirable area to live. Finally, there's a farming area on the outskirts of town, so it can have all the space it needs.

Now I've added in some more of the above areas to "block out" the city. I only feel like I need one downtown and tourist area, but I've added another residential area at the top edge of town with more wide-open space. I've also added an extra industrial area beside the mountain - if the seaside industrial area mainly does fishing, this area will mainly do mining. The blue commercial "uptown" areas kind of act as a "buffer" between the residential/industrial areas and downtown.

With this in mind, I've drawn out some roads in a simple "grid" pattern. The streets form "blocks" inside which we can put buildings. Some of these blocks are completely green inside - these are "green spaces" like parks, put in areas to give residents and visitors fresh air.

The roads are split into big roads (the main highway), medium roads (for travel around districts) and little roads (for accessing buildings). The big roads connect to the medium roads which connect to the small roads - you won't find a small road connecting to the big road without going through a middle road first.

A little key showing what all the buildings are. You'll notice I've put some houses in the blue "commercial" areas. The blue areas probably aren't going to just be shops - there'll probably be a few apartment blocks and other residential buildings scattered around.

The houses closest to the industrial areas will probably be the cheapest houses in town, since they're noisy and smelly places to live. These might be considered the "seedy" part of town.

Meanwhile, there's a few houses stretching out from the top residential area into the tourist area. This'll likely be the "rich" part of town, with nice views of the beach.

Downtown, meanwhile, has more "large buildings" (skyscrapers) than any other district.

Town Layout (Fantasy)

In the Medieval times (or at least in England), under the feudal system, the whole kingdom was separated into patches of land called "manors". These were ruled over by "lords", who were selected by the king or higher-up nobles to run the area. Peasants could come along and set up houses and villages in these manors on the condition that they'd do the lord's drudge-work, farming his crops and providing him with food.

In a Medieval manor/village, you'd probably have stuff like this:

A manor house, where the lord lives and where courts are held.
A church.
A rectory/parsonage/place for the priest to live.
A mill (either water or wind) to grind grain into flour.
Three big fields - one for growing wheat, one for growing vegetables* and one that's left empty. Which field does which changes every year.
A "common", which is an open area in the village for the peasants to use for grazing, woodcutting, etc.
A forest, reserved for the lord's use, where he would hunt animals.
Maybe a blacksmith to make tools, and a bakehouse to make bread.

*In real history the "vegetables" were mostly just things like oats, beans and peas.

Designing a Fantasy City

Designing a fantasy town can be done in a similar way to modern towns, only the districts probably won't be as modern (there probably won't be a "tourist" area, and the "industrial" areas probably won't be mechanized factories).

Medieval-style towns probably won't be as big as modern towns, since there's no cars to drive you between places.

In Medieval towns, the first priority his having somewhere to get drinking water from - if there's no water, people aren't going to stick around. That's why most settlements were built alongside rivers. It it's not by a river, it will need to have a well or some other way of getting fresh water (and it probably won't be a very big town, since rivers were also used as trade routes).

Town/Building Ideas

Here's a list of possible "town types" you might find in a fictional setting.

I've also made a list of buildings you'll likely find in a modern and a medieval fantasy city.

Points of Interest

That’s all well and good for designing self-contained cities… but what about all the bits in between? How do you design the countryside?

Most of the time, you don’t. You only need to design the places where things happen – you don’t need to do every little stretch of road the characters walk on.

But if you’re doing something like an open-world game, where the characters travel around in real-time, you might not be entirely sure how to connect all these places together.

In a video game level, there are generally three ways a player can go:

The Critical Path: The main expected route most players, it is thought, will take. Usually a relatively straight and uncomplicated line from point A to point B.
Detours: Alternative, less obvious side-routes that lead ultimately to the same destination that usually yield rewards or tactical advantages you don’t get on the main road.
Branching Paths: A path that leads to a unique area entirely, usually with some kind of hidden reward.

All these paths connect together what I call "points of interest" (or POIs). These are places that would be levels - or parts of a level - if my story were a video game. For example, let's say we know there's a jungle between one city and another. If we add paths and POIs into that jungle, we can map it out as a "level" for our chapter.

So, a single "level" of my story would be a bunch of POIs joined together by these paths. How many POIs? ...I'm gonna say seven. Seven seems like a good starting point – long enough to have variety, but not too long it becomes boring.

So, with that in mind, what's seven things you'll find in a jungle?:

An explorer's camp
A tribal village
A clearing where animals might rest
A lake with a waterfall
A hidden temple
A ravine with a rickety bridge over it
A really big tree

Now I can start to visualize what my jungle will look like. In my mind, I can start to make connections between these points of interest: the waterfall, for example, can flow down through the lake and into the ravine, while the village could be up on the cliffs beside the waterfall.

Now I’ve laid all these points of interest out into a “map” showing which places lead to which other places. I’ve decided to split the jungle into two – you can either go up along the clifftops or down into the forest itself.

Using the above as I guide, I can now draw out a proper map of all the POIs. I find that connecting separate POIs together is mostly a matter of drawing squiggly lines between them.

You’ll find there’s still quite a lot of empty space in our jungle, which means we can add more POIs if we want to (like perhaps a cave or another village), or we can just leave it to the imagination.

Of course, we can also add POIs to the POIs we've already made. The temple, for instance - it might have a corridor full of booby traps, a sacrificial chamber, an altar with a gold idol, and so on.

Buildings

When it comes to designing individual buildings, I often like to make a floor plan to show what it looks like on the inside. I'm not ashamed to admit this - I use Fortnite to do this. It comes with a level editor that lets you put down tiles on a grid-like pattern. I've used this not only to map out my buildings, but also to get an impression of what it would be like to walk through them. I've spent more Fortnite hours doing this that I have playing the game itself.

For example, here's my model of a suburban house with a street out front and a backyard behind.

Now, recently I've discovered a map-making website called Dungeon Scrawl, which allows you to draw out rooms onto a grid for free. I've used this to map out the inside of this house's two floors. I print-screened the result and manually drew all the furniture in red.

Here's a comparison between the floor plan and what the house looks like in Fortnite:

I made the scale one-to-one - so one Dungeon Scrawl tile is one Fortnite tile (roughly 16 by 16 feet). You don't have to be so anal about specific scale, but if you're making a video game setting you might want to have it down early. Things like rooms are always bigger in games than in real life so they can fit in the camera.

Here's another map I made using Dungeon Scrawl's wall tool and my own "Fortnite scale". It's a neighborhood intersection, with the first floor of a house on the bottom-right.

There's also an isometric mode, which I've drawn on top of to create a 3D view of my building's exterior.

Building Themes

Not every building looks the same, even if they serve the same purpose. A temple for one religion might look different to the temple of another, for instance.

If you want to make all your cities and cultures look different, you might want to give their buildings different "themes". This theme could reflect the environment it's in - so a building in the desert might be stout and blocky to keep the sand out, while a building in the jungle might be built on a treetop and use leaves for roofing or something.

Personally, I like to split my themes into two types - a "hard" theme and a "soft" theme. A hard theme is when it's pretty obvious what the theme is. It's like a theme park land or a video game level: you'll know walking into it that this is "space land" or "ancient Egypt land". A soft theme, meanwhile, is where it's not so obvious, and more suggests the theme than it does embody it. For example, a house with a soft forest theme might use earthy colors and filigrees that look like - but aren't exactly - fallen leaves. None of it screams "this is a forest", but it reminds your brain of it a little.

To illustrate my point, let's take a group of buildings with a "carnival" theme.

This one has a "hard" carnival theme. In other words, it's a carnival. It has rides and games and circus tents. There are bright colors all over as the attractions fight for your attention, and the whole effect is very kaleidoscopic and disorienting. You can take one look at it and you can already tell what you're going to be doing here - waiting in long lines and throwing up in sawdust.

This one, meanwhile, has a "soft" carnival theme. It isn't strictly a carnival, but the architecture and environment will remind you of that setting. The buildings all resemble canvas tents with peaked roofs, and there's a lot of brightly-colored lights strung up everywhere. The interconnecting treetop paths provide a lot of verticality, and the pathways kind of resemble roller coaster tracks. The water wheel by the river kind of resembles a Ferris wheel, and you can kind of imagine the river itself being like a log flume or a tunnel of love. If this were a video game level, you could imagine it being quite fast-paced.

See what I mean? The second theme isn't outright telling you it's a carnival, but as you walk through it your brain will start thinking about carnivals. It's inspired by theme parks without itself being a theme park - there are no actual rides here, but the environment is meant to remind you of them. You can imagine the people living here being very flamboyant and big on performances.

History

History, honestly, is a hard one for me, because all history is just the world's "stories". Your main story is just one piece of the world's history of stories. Focusing on a historical event is a lot like jumping to a different episode with different characters.

I guess historical events are just life events that the whole world remembers. You could ask somebody where they were when they got the news that this happened and get a pretty clear answer... unless they're long-dead, of course.

War: a fight or falling-out between nations or groups leading to mass loss of life. The result is usually bad blood between the two sides that lasts long after.
Marriage: marriage is particularly important for royal kingdoms, because it determines who's next in line for the throne.
Reign: the reign of a monarch, emperor, president or other kind of leader can leave lasting impressions. They might have been so good that their policies are still in place to this day - or they might have been so unpopular that every trace of their reign has been destroyed.
Birth and Death: someone very notable was born or died. Either way, their life left a major impact on society - these are the people who "changed the world".
Discovery: someone discovers something new that advances science and society. Maybe it fixes a problem or answers a question that's long plagued society until this point.
Tragedy: some kind of disaster or major loss of life that sticks with society as a collective trauma. New rules and customs are often put in place to make sure something like this can never happen again.
Building: a special building is constructed, like a monument or a wonder of the world.
Fall from Grace: a moment when someone famous or respected does something that makes them much less respected. Maybe they did something wrong or committed a crime, or maybe they just embarrassed themselves in such a way that the world won't let them live it down.
Great Work: someone releases a seminal work (like a book, film or painting) that goes down in history as one of "the greats".
Zeitgeist: a period of time where it becomes fashionable to wear certain clothes or act a certain way. A certain subculture gets its own fifteen minutes of fame.
Heroics: someone does something really really cool or admirable that earns them a place in the history books.
Destruction: an old period or state-of-affairs comes to an end, making space for a new era to take over.
Celebration: the first incidence of a festival that becomes a tradition, like a sporting event or a national holiday.
Founding: a group, city, country or civilization first comes into being.

Then, of course, there's our own world's historical periods to draw inspiration from:

Dinosaurs
Stone Age
Mesopotamia
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Greece
Roman Empire
Vikings
Middle Ages
Medieval Arabia
Imperial China
Feudal Japan
Aztecs
Incas
Renaissance
Pirates
Victorian/Industrial Revolution
Wild West
The World Wars
The 60s/70s/80s
The Future

…but honestly you're more likely to find them as "location themes" than as time periods.

Timeline vs. Storyline

Usually you fit all these events on a timeline, from the beginning of time to the present day. But honestly, I feel like its best to work backwards. Instead of going straight to a timeline, I like to do a storyline.

You see, history to me is just asking the question "why are things like this?" So the idea is to go through the bits of your story and ask "why is it like this?" The main characters visit a town - OK, why's there a town there? How long has it been there? What are the people there like, and when did they start being that way? The main characters are attacked by the villain - well, what's that guy's problem? Why do they want to take over the world or whatever? Why are they making a move now? Have they tried anything like this in the past? Where did they get the resources to do all this with? Is no one else going to stop them? Why's everyone so scared?

See, I'm working backwards from my story beats and figuring out what questions might explain how things got to this point.

Really though, this might just be how all worldbuilding works. You have your story, and you work backwards to explain how the story came to be. Worldbuilding is the "why" - why is the story like it is when the characters first arrive in it? The second half of the question is the main plot itself - what comes next, and how will the characters change things?

Once you've been through your story and figured out all the historical reasons-for-being you need (or care) to, then you can try putting them in some kind of chronological order with a timeline. Events coming later in the timeline will probably be the ones that have the most immediate effect (or threat) for the heroes.

Time Travel

What happens when one of your characters uses a time machine to change the past? To me, time travel is a lot like magic - you can do whatever you want with it, but you need to set some ground rules first.

Honestly, to me, time travel is usually a simple affair - a character goes back in time, changes the past, returns to the present, finds that it's changed, goes back in time again, fixes their mistake, and when they come back everything's normal again. The only real hard question there is "well, if they undo it, that means it never happened, so how can they remember it?" Well, I dunno. Maybe you remember some stuff that never happened. Memory can be a fickle thing.

Another famous paradox - a character goes back in time and accidentally kills their own dad. No dad - no them, and no time machine, and so no one to go back and kill their dad in the first place. Of course, none of this is a problem if your story just... isn't about them killing their own dad. Once you throw a time paradox into the mix, the whole story just sort of becomes about that paradox.

One of my favorite spins on this is the "closed time loop" story. A character goes back in time to try and stop a war in the future... only to end up causing that war in the first place. It's not as shocking a twist nowadays as it used to be - you can bet if a character's motivation is "I've got to go back in time and stop this from happening!" they'll almost certainly end up making it happen because of their time-travelling antics.

A lot of stories talk about "alternate timelines", which is something that's always confused me. Surely there's only one time, and it goes from our past into our future, right? An "alternate" timeline suggests that one day a portal could open up and characters from another present could emerge. How can there be two "nows"?

Truthfully, I don't know. Best I can imagine it is like this: imagine there's a god-like being in your setting who is "beyond" time. How would they see everything? Perhaps such a being wouldn't see the world as one timeline - they'd just see all possibilities and view them all as equally "real". Makes no difference which one was really "chosen", because for a timeless being, there is no time with which to chose. Every possible past, present and future is just playing out to them at once - and it's not their problem how bad it gets or whether a timeline destroys itself or whatever, because they don't experience time so they won't get hurt by it.

Languages and Alphabets

Making a fictional language isn’t something I do very often. I’m no good with real-life languages, let alone fantasy ones. But when I have to make up words, I like to make them "sound" like what they refer to.

Take the word “yellow” – it’s got “yell” in the name, which is fitting because yellow is a very bright color that sort of “screams out” at you. Apparently it comes from Proto-Germanic gelwaz, which sounds like some kind of jewel.

Now think about the word “grass”. It starts with “gr”, like green, and it ends with a “ss” sound, which kind of sounds like wind rustling through the blades (this isn’t the actual etymology, it apparently comes from Proto-Indo-European greh, which means “to grow”).

You see what I’m driving at here? The words for “yellow” and “grass” kind of sound like what they look like.

So, imagine if we were coming up with a new word for grass. We know it’s near the soil, and it makes a hissing sound when the wind blows through it. “Soil-hiss.” Put them together and you get “sliss”.

Meanwhile, yellow is a color that “pops” out at you and shines like the sun. “Pop-shine”, which can be pushed together to make “pshine”. If you want, you can change some of the letters to make it look more (or less) natural – “pshyn”.

So, “pshyn sliss” means “yellow grass”… except “pshyn sliss” is very hard to say out loud. Maybe instead our fictional language would say “sliss that is pshyn” – sliss tiz pshyn. “Tiz” is just me glepping together “that” and “is”.

There’s another one – “glepping”. I just came up with that on the spot, but I think it’s a corruption of “gathering” and “pushing”.

See what I mean? I don’t know anything about how real-life languages are formed – I just made this by picking syllables that “sounded” like what I was describing.

Meanwhile, when it comes to writing new alphabets, I just kind of do the same thing - pick a symbol that "looks" enough like the letter I'm going for. Maybe twist it around a little, add some extra flecks and such.

One interesting idea I've seen is to draw something with the same first letter as the symbol you're using, turn it into a stylized version and make that into the letter (so the letter "b" might be represented by a butterfly doodle).

Languages in fiction can have a certain "personality" depending on what species uses them. For example, elves might use lots of soft, whispery sounds to reflect the rustling leaves of the forests they live in, while dwarves might use harsher or guttural sounds to reflect the tumbling rocks of the mountains they live under. This also extends to fonts - good-aligned or more "artsy" races might have fonts that are curvy or easier on the eyes, while evil or rough-and-tumble species might have letters that look more jagged.

Your writing might also read in a different direction than right-to-left - it could go left-to-right, or up-to-down or even along a curve.

Names

Character names are something I struggle with a lot - though this is more of a "character" thing than a worldbuilding thing.

What I often do is look up the meaning of names online, and try to find a name that means something associated with the character. So, if you've got a mermaid character, you might call them Cordelia (which means sea-jewel) or Marisol (which means "sea-and-sun" in Spanish).
Some words or names might just conjure up certain kinds of imagery for you. For example, a girl living in the forest might be called "Ashley" for "ash tree", while a boy might be called "Bruce" which rhymes with "spruce". And "Flash Cockburn" sounds like the name of a porn star.
You might name a character after somebody else - like calling a scientist character "Albert" or "Edison", or calling a priest character "Gregory" (as in a pope) or "Saul" (from the Bible).

In terms of place names, I find that a little easier - usually I just give it a name in English that reflects what the place is like. So, a place like "Blackheath", for instance - that's probably nearby a heath (a kind of shrubby plain), and "black" could signify a number of things. It could be because of gloomy weather, it could be dangerous, it could be a heavily industrial place and the "black" is the smoke of factories.

You can use the language rules above to translate this English name into the fictional language of those living there. So "Blackheath" might become "Jehtrütt" ("jet" as in jet black, and "rütt" as in "root", like the root of a shrub). I suppose the culture here would be Germanic-inspired with a name like that.

But what about countries and continents? You're not likely going to find a mountainous country and call the whole place "Highspire" or something. Well, maybe you would - but it sounds more like a city or region name than a country name. If we're talking about a whole country, the name is probably going to be something more general - something that everyone living there has in common - so maybe something like "land-of-this" or "people-of-that".

You ever noticed how a lot of countries end in an "a" sound? China, India, America, Madagascar? Italy is known as Italia in its native tongue. So maybe you could make an instant country just by adding an "a" sound at the end of it. Or maybe taking away the "a" sound. "Madagas"?

So, how about "Highspire-ia"? Hysperia? Or just Spiria? I like the sound of it - "spire" as in spire, but also as in "respire" - to breathe, so air and wind. I don't know why, but I don't like all those "i"s. Maybe change one of them to a "y" - Spyria.

There's a place in Dungeons & Dragons called "The Shaar". I don't know why, but this makes me think of the Arabian Nights. "Ar" as in "bazaar", or "Shah", which is Persian for king. So maybe "shar" could mean "place" in an Arabian-inspired language of mine. Something else from the Arabian Nights - genies. Beings made of smokeless fire. And fire is hot, like the desert. So what's Arabic for fire? According to Google translate, it's "nar". "Narshar?" Uhh... get rid of the r. And we have Nashar - land of fire (maybe I'll put an apostrophe there to emphasise the stress on the "shar" - Na'shar).

Another one - this time I want some generic Medieval land. Knights, dragons, chivalry, that kind of thing. You usually find that in Europe, so - France. "Francia"? No, that's too obvious. Change a few letters - "Phrancia"? Hmm... get rid of the "cia". "Phran"? The Kingdom of Phran... it has a ring to it.

You can also work backwards as well. As a kid, I had a name for a fantasy kingdom I never used called "Ethermere". Well, "mere" is Old English for "sea", and "ether" sounds like ethereal. So the name I guess means "ethereal sea". So I'm guessing this place would involve a lot of magic and a lot of maritime trade.

So we've already got the land of Spyria, the Na'shar Sultanate, the Kingdom of Phran and the realm of Ethermere. If this all seems like random word-association, that's because it is: I know next to nothing about real-world etymologies, I'm just picking stuff that sounds catchy.

What about naming the whole planet, though? Earth is our planet, which just means "ground". That's kind of hard to argue, isn't it? No matter what country you're in, the Earth's going to be the ground you're standing on.

So what does your entire planet have in common? Will it have a name that just means "soil"? Or a name that means "land" or "life"? "Sky" maybe? Or "sea" if you believe the ancient Greek idea that everything came from water? Is it an ice planet, in which case it'll have a name meaning "ice" or "ice world"? Then again, the people who were born on that planet aren't going to know anything but ice, are they? Is it a name they've given themselves or a name that's been given to them?

You know, the other planets in our solar system are named after Roman gods. Is your planet named after a god? Does its name mean "creation of a god" or just "creation"? If you're a pantheist, are the planet and the god the same thing?

Religion and Gods

Religion can be split into two halves. The first half is basically organized belief in the supernatural*. By “organized”, I mean they’ve got specific “rules” as to how the supernatural works – one religion might say that gods, demons and witches are real, while another might say that gods and demons are real, but witches aren’t.

The second, and perhaps more important half, is the belief that we should tailor our lives to suit the supernatural nature of the universe. The difference between religion and philosophy is that 1.) religion is more of a group activity, and 2.) the idea that we’re tapping into/appeasing supernatural forces.

*In real life, some people don’t like associating “religion” with “the supernatural”. This is because when you think “supernatural”, you’re not thinking of loving gods or spiritual wellness – you’re thinking of haunted houses and jack-o'-lanterns. Maybe that's something you could look into with your story - maybe the gods are "natural" because they created the world in the first place, while things like ghosts and monsters are "unnatural" and a consequence of the universe going wrong.

Believing in Gods

Many (but not all) religions focus on gods or god-like beings. These are super-powerful beings that create/control the cosmos, and it’s generally not considered a good idea to go against them. The different gods people believe in are split into a lot of "isms":

Monotheism: believing in only one god. Other gods either don’t exist, or they’re just “avatars” of this single god.
Polytheism: believing in more than one god.

Henotheism: believing there are multiple gods out there, but choosing to worship just one.
Monolatrism: like the above, except choosing to worship the only god that “deserves” to be worshipped. Maybe all the others are slackers or corrupt.
Kathenotheism: believing in multiple gods, but only worshipping one of them at a time. Maybe the gods take it in turns ruling the universe.

Pantheism: believing that God and nature/the universe are (part of) the same thing. Maybe nature itself is conscious on some level.
Deism: believing in a god that doesn’t get involved with the universe. They might have created the world, but they don’t do miracles or answer prayers.
Autotheism: believing that you are a god, or have some “god-ness” in you. Might just be hubris, but it might also be the belief that God exists in all human beings.
Atheism: believing in no gods. The universe was not created by a conscious being capable of being worshipped.

Non-theism: not having any idea of gods. While atheists have heard of the idea and don’t buy into it, non-theists might not have been introduced to the idea of gods.

Agnosticism: not knowing whether gods exist or not. Since that’s kind of the default state of everybody, “organized” agnostics usually go further to say it’s impossible to know whether there are gods or not – it’s something that science can’t ever find out.
Antitheism: not really an opinion on gods, but an opinion on the belief in gods. Antitheists believe that people shouldn’t believe in gods. Usually at odds with pretty much every other religion.
Maltheism: believing in gods that are evil or against humanity. Some mythologies have gods who are “bad guys” like Set and Loki.
Misotheism: hating the gods. Not hating the idea of gods like with antitheists - this is believing that gods are real but still disliking them. Maybe this character has a personal grudge against the gods.
Classical theism: a belief that gods are or live in the “true” reality, and the day-to-day world we live in is just a reflection of that truth.
Alterity theism: believing that gods exist, but they’re so “beyond” and unrecognizable to humans they might as well not exist.

Not every religion worships gods. Buddhism speaks of god-like beings called “devas”, but they didn’t create the world and don’t decide what’s right and wrong. Chinese Taoism talks about a “proper” way of the universe (the Tao), but doesn’t give it any human traits. Hinduism has several gods (or at least one god with several incarnations), but worshipping them is not as important as following the “dharma”, the natural order of the cosmos. Christian philosopher Paul Tillich suggests that you can’t say God “exists” because that would mean He occupies a finite point in time and space, and since God is infinite He can’t do so. To say “God is real” is to put Him into reality, when He is supposed to be “beyond” reality.

God Categories

If your religion has many gods, then each of these gods may fulfil a different role in the universe. Their personalities will often reflect their role:

God of the Sun: some historical cultures have worshipped the Sun itself, believing its radiance to be the source of creation. They weren’t entirely wrong, according to modern science, since the elements of Earth were made in exploding stars. As a result, they’re ranked pretty highly among gods and are often leaders.
God of the Night: a god of darkness sounds like a terrifying thing, especially in cultures where night is the enemy of day, but this may not always be the case. A night god may look after all the nocturnal animals, and provide a place for people to hide their secrets. Related to this are moon gods, since the moon is like a second sun that provides some protective light in the darkness.
God of Storms: a god who rules over the weather. Just like the weather, they can be unpredictable and have major mood swings. They’re often high-ranking gods, if not their leader, since weather comes from the sky, and the sky has been considered the realm of the gods since ancient Mesopotamia.
God of the Sea: an important god for people who make their living as sailors or fishermen. Tend to be quite dangerous, since humans can’t survive underwater. There may be a separate god that rules over smaller bodies of water like rivers.
God of Life: usually this is a nature god, associated with plants and trees. Often depicted as nurturing and motherly. They’re similar to fertility gods, who help make the crops grow, and so are popular with farmers.
God of Death: gods that determine what happens to the dead. Always a particularly powerful god, since nobody escapes from them. Likely to be an evil god if you conflate death with destruction. Even if they’re benign, they don’t often care about humanity, since the only humans they deal with are dead ones.
God of War: what this god is like depends a lot on what you think of war. If war is terrible thing, they might just be a glorified god of murder. But if war is necessary, this god might be more noble or big on honor – if you have to fight, the least you can do is fight fair.
God of Wisdom: often the “god of being really smart”, but also the god of prudence – knowing what the right thing to do is and when to do it. They might find themselves having to mediate between the other gods when it comes to decision-making.
God of Evil: usually a “fallen god” that was rejected by their peers for creating (or mastering) evil. It’s hard to imagine a “friendly” god of evil, but evil still might be a necessary part of existence.
God of Love: since love is one of the finest feelings a human can have, love gods are usually portrayed as kind, gentle and benevolent (though they could also be indiscriminately horny). Related to this are fertility gods, who as well as looking after crops also look after childbirth and growing up healthy.
God of Fire: you’ll often find these gods living in volcanoes. Since fire is a destructive thing you might be tempted to make them bad guys, but fire is also important for light, industry and keeping people warm. Hence, they may also be a god of forging or progress.
God of Chaos: there’s actually two “kinds” of chaos god. The first is the traditional god of disorder – very unpredictable, likely to be a bit crazy. The second, however, comes from the ancient Greek idea of “chaos” being the empty void that existed before the gods created the world from it. This chaos god might represent oblivion itself, and is probably none too happy about the other gods coming along and messing up their perfect non-creation.
God of Order: the opposite of the god of chaos, trying to make sure everything follows the “divine plan”. Often very strict, and may even be tyrannical. If they’re not careful, they might start thinking of non-existence as the ultimate form of order, which would make them just like the chaos gods they oppose.
God of Wine: more broadly the god of parties, socializing and intrapersonal relationships. Likely to be a chill, laid-back guy whose main concern is making sure the mortals are having a good time.
God of Animals: ancient Egypt is well-known for its animal-headed gods. Animal gods might be able to command their chosen animal, and take it personal when one of their favorite animals are harmed. It’s hard to imagine animals themselves having a religion – what is “right and wrong” to a snake?

The Problem of Evil

Alternatively, your religion might only have the one god. This often means this god has to fulfil all of these roles at once, even when they contradict each other. This might lead to a difficult question for that god's followers - why should they worship a god that harms humans just as much as they help them?

There are generally two answers to this: the first is that "evil" isn't really a thing (in the sense that it's a creation of God) - it's what happens when the natural order goes wrong. The second is that, while evil has to exist to balance out good, the natural state of the universe bends mostly towards good (mysterious ways and all that). A terrifying third option you might consider is that evil wasn't created by God at all, but by another powerful, god-like being out there that not even God knows about.

Afterlives

If the biggest mystery in the world is "where did everything come from", the second biggest is "what happens after we die?" Everybody dies, unfortunately - even if you survive murder, disease and poisonous snakes, eventually you'll just up and die of old age... or do you?

You see, no one ever actually dies of old age - they die of sickness. It's just as you get older your body gets less and less good at fighting off sickness. As your cells divide, over the years they lose a bit more and more of themselves as they do so, until there just isn't enough left to plug the holes in your body made by germs and disease.

But if somehow you were able to stop this from happening... if there was a way of keeping your cells fresh and able to fend off any disease... would you live forever? Is death really an eternal destiny, separated from us only by time, or is it a misfortune, a flaw in the human code? And if so, is it a flaw that can be fixed? Is death just the ultimate sickness that, through mad science or dark magic, can too be cured?

While you think about that as possible motivation for your necromancer/alchemist characters, here's some ideas about what the afterlife could hold:

Most afterlife beliefs talk about a soul. It's the immaterial aspect of you - the part of you that's immune to death. Maybe it contains your personality or your memories. Maybe it's your "true self", like the pilot in the cockpit of your brain and body. Ghosts are thought to be souls that have become separated from their bodies. Animism, meanwhile, suggests that everything has a soul, from humans to animals to plants to maybe even bricks. If everything has a soul, are they all different souls, or are they all fragments of the same super-soul?
The afterlife is thought to be a world your soul goes to after death. Though maybe it doesn't "go" here at all - maybe it's always been here, and it's just "puppeteering" your body in this world. This ancient Greek idea is part of the reason why the afterlife is associated with gods: because it's the "true" reality that this material world is just a reflection of.
Christianity (or at least Christian folklore) has a pretty famous idea of the afterlife - if you're good, you go to heaven, while if you're bad, you go to hell. The idea is that heaven's an eternal reward for pleasing God, while hell is eternal punishment for going against Him. Are these afterlives different places, or are they just different experiences of the same place? Does God just send people to these places because He feels they deserve it, or is there another reason for it? Does God really choose who goes where, or are souls just naturally drawn to the afterlife that reflects their behaviour most?
If it's a place where you get rewarded or punished, what does that reward/punishment look like? When you get to hell, do you get strapped down to a torture rack by giggling demons and subjected to your own worst nightmares? Or are you just dumped into an inhospitable landscape and left to fend for yourself? Is the suffering tailored to the individual, or is it the same for everyone?
Who's in charge of an afterlife? Is there a throne occupied by God or the devil? Or are the residents just left to their own devices? Are there any rules here, and can they be broken?
Is there a third place between heaven and hell for those who don't meet the criteria for either? This place might be called Limbo, purgatory or the underworld. What happens to the souls here? Do they just float around in eternal boredom? Is this a stop-gap between one world and the other? Is it like purgatory where you get punished for your sins in life, then get allowed into heaven? Are any of the afterlives eternal, or are you only there for a limited time?
What about monsters? Things like ghosts, zombies and vampires? How did they get like that? Were they "denied" a proper afterlife? Why do they take this out on humans? Is there any way to get them back into the afterlife? Is their state of being a punishment, or just a mistake?
Are there other creatures in the afterlife that aren't dead people? Do the dead dwell among gods, angels or demons? Does that make the dead themselves powerful beings? Do they now have abilities their living selves did not have?
Do you get reincarnated or reborn into the world after you die? Do you become a different person or animal in your next life? Why do you get reborn? Is it because you messed up the first time and need to do it again? How do you break this cycle of rebirth, and what happens if you do so?
Does nothing happen when you die? Is there no afterlife at all? Do you just go unconscious forever? Do you cease to exist entirely? Can the human mind even wrap its head around the idea of not existing? Is there an afterlife, but it's so impossible for humans to understand it might as well not be there?
Is there only one "true" afterlife in your world, or do people go to the afterlife they believed in when they die? Does that mean the human mind "created" these afterlives, or do the gods share the Earth between them? Could one afterlife invade another? Do these afterlives serve a specific purpose in the universe? Could they even be destroyed?
Can you come back from the dead? Is the "reward" offered by a god immunity to death, rather than just going to a nice place after it? Are there ways of avoiding death entirely? Can you escape from a place like hell? Where do you go if you do?
How important is the idea of legacy? Is the fact that other people remember you important to your afterlife? Can their opinion on you change what your afterlife is like? If you were evil enough to go to hell, but someone in the living world still loves you and vouches for you, could that improve your afterlife? Would you be given a second chance at this life?
How about what happens to you before you're born? Where does your soul come from? Why does it incarnate on this Earth as a living human? Who made the cycle of life and death, and what purpose does it serve?

Politics

I think of politics as a simple matter of two questions – “who’s in charge” and “how are they in charge?” The "who's in charge" usually has three answers:

A group of experts get together and try to figure out what the people want/need. They can’t come to an agreement, and there’s a civil war.
One person sits there and tries to figure out what their people want or need. They get it wrong, and there’s a civil war.
One person sits there and doesn’t care what the people want or need. The people realize this, and there’s a civil war.

The other question is “how” – how did they get to be in charge in the first place, and how do they control their people?

The leader(s) are chosen by the people – they got together and held a vote, and this leader seemed the best at the time.
The leader(s) are chosen by some of the people – not everybody has a say in the matter.
The leader(s) were chosen by a god, magic sword or similar being… or at least that’s what they tell the people.
The leader(s) are gods, or claim to speak on their behalf.
The leader(s) have already killed all the people who wouldn’t do as they said.
The leader(s) were chosen by their parents – the job is handed down the family tree.
The leader(s) took the place of the previous leaders, who were either very unpopular or very bad at defending themselves.
There technically aren’t any leaders… but there just so happens to be one person everybody seeks the advice of.

In terms of how they control their people, that usually goes one of two ways:

Fear: the leader(s) stay in charge because the people are too afraid to get rid of them. They’re either afraid of the leader themselves and their harsh punishments, or they’re afraid of others who they think the leader will protect them from (“if you don’t vote for me, the terrorists win!”).
Respect: the people follow their leader(s) because they honestly want to. They either admire the leader and think their policies work, or if they don’t, they think the leader is at least reasonable enough to take criticism.

With this in mind, we can explore a new question – what does this political group think of this other political group? Relationships between nations often look like this:

They’re our allies, and we help each other out. Mess with them and you mess with us.
Whatever. They can do whatever they like, as long as they don’t start dragging us into their messes.
Do as we say or we’ll bomb you.

Relationships between political parties of the same country (American Democrats vs Republicans for instance) run a similar gamut:

They’re as good for the country as we are, and we should support them.
We don’t know how to feel about them, but as long as they don’t get in our way we should be fine.
These maniacs are going to kill us all.

What do these other political parties do when they're not in power? Do they have some representation in the government or are they left out in the cold?

Political Questions

Some questions to think about when designing your political group:

What do you think of freedom?

No one should ever be forced to do something they don’t want to do. We’ll let people do what they want, and whatever trouble they get into is their own problem.
Everyone should have freedom within reason. We can’t give people the freedom to destroy other people’s freedoms. If you want to live in society, you need to agree to a few rules first.
Freedom just means they don’t have to do what I say. Why would I encourage that?! There’s a “right” way of living life, and my job’s to make sure everyone follows that.

What do you think of money?

People get money on their own. We’re not going to give it to them. They’ll have to work for it, or else they’ll grow dependant on us.
While we don’t want to take people’s money away from them, it isn’t fair to let people who struggle with making money go hungry. We’ll give everyone a certain amount of money to keep them on their feet, but if they want more than that they’ll have to work for it.
We’re doing away with money. Instead, we’ll give people the food/drink/resources they need as and when they need it.

And where are you going to get the money to do all this?

We’ll make everyone who lives in our society give us some of their own money. Hopefully it will be enough to pay for things like hospitals, fire engines and other things society needs to survive.
We’ll become a company. Our government will sell things to other governments, and hopefully if we’re popular enough we’ll be able to afford the things we need.
Well, we’re gonna steal it from that other country over there.

When do you punish people?

We try not to. We’re more interested in rehabilitating wrongdoers than harming them.
Only if they do something wrong. How bad the punishment is depends on how bad the crime was.
Only if they disagree with me.

When do you go to war?

Only as a last resort, and only ever in self-defense or to defend an ally.
If we get something good out of it, or if we can stick it to a rival country.
When we come across a new country we haven’t conquered yet.

What do you think of religion?

People can have whatever religions they want. Our government isn’t going to personally side with one god over another.
We’ve got our own religion, but we’ll make space for people from other religions to live in our society.
Why do you need your own god? You have me!

What do you think of magic?

It needs to be regulated. It’s way too dangerous to just let people do what they want with it.
We won’t touch it. I don’t think we could control it even if we wanted to.
What the hell’s that?

What about public services (firefighters, police, ambulances, railways, etc.)? Who’d be in charge of those?

The people are going to have to figure that out on their own. We’re not giving away anything for free.
They’d be private companies, but we’d have to approve them first to make sure they’re up to standard.
We’ll provide these services, and we’ll pay for them with our own money.

How does somebody join your government?

You get born into it.
We’ll let you in if we like the look of you.
We’ll let you in if the public think you should be in.

How can you tell what the public wants?

We ask for them to vote on certain policies.
We gather together experts and see what they have to say about it.
I just know, OK? I just know.

What about people who disagree with you/say they hate you?

That must mean we’re doing something wrong.
It’s whatever, man; it’s whatever.
I’d like to see them do that from the inside of a prison cell.

In the past, your country did a terrible or unfair thing (like conquering another country, for example). You’re no longer like that anymore, but what happened still has lingering after-effects that are felt today. How do you deal with the guilt?

We really should apologize and try to make it up to them.
We can’t change the past, we can only try to be better in the future.
Stick my fingers in my ears and yell “I can’t hear you!”

A criminal group has been tearing up the country doing whatever they please. Unfortunately, this criminal group happens to have given your government more money than any other group. If you lost the support of this criminal group, the whole country could run out of money. What do you do?

“Criminal group? What are you talking about? Those are our special military reserves!”
Make a deal with the criminals – you’ll let them get away with certain crimes, but you won’t let them hurt too many people.
Have them all arrested. I’d rather have no government at all than a government that owes itself to criminals.

How do you feel about torturing/killing those who do wrong?

Never! That’s horrible!
We hate to do it, but sometimes we have no choice. It’s between them getting tortured/killed or other innocent people.
It creates less citizens, but better ones.

What would you say your government’s favorite pastime is?

Looking after its citizens.
Trying to make sure we don’t run out of money.
Declaring wars.

You wake up one day and realize your government doesn’t have much money left. You only have one pile of money, and you can only give it to one group of people. Who do you give it to?

Give it to the poor. Hopefully they’ll use it to buy more things, and the increased demand will put the economy back on track.
Give it to the rich. Hopefully they’ll use it to make more products, and the increased supply of things to buy will get the money moving around again.
Give it to the military so we can go find another country to steal from.

One of your allies is having a hard time with a belligerent country, and they come to you for help. What do you do?

Tell them they can fight their own battles.
Secretly send them weapons and supplies, but don’t get involved in the actual fighting.
Send the army over there and hope they sort it out.

Half the citizens of your country agree with your policies, and half of them disagree. The two factions are constantly on the verge of fighting. You’re asked to send a message to those who oppose you. What do you do?

Try and compromise with those who are against you and look for an answer that hopefully satisfies everyone.
Stick to your guns, but try and assure those against you that what you’re doing is best for everybody.
“Bigfatstupididiotssaywhat?”

Your reign has come to an end, as all reigns do. A new leader is coming to take over your position, and the public agree that it’s time you stepped aside. What do you do?

Shake their hand and retire to a tropical island somewhere.
Get some loyal members of your government to keep an eye on them and sabotage them if need be.
“You can take my government when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!”

I know all this probably feels a little thin-on-the-ground, but truthfully when it comes to fictional political groups, I feel the only real important difference is whether the leaders are good guys or bad guys. You might have a president elected fairly by the public, but if they're a corrupt weasel who takes advantage of the public trust, the heroes will likely want to overthrow them. Meanwhile, you might have some kind of warlord who conquered the whole country, but if they genuinely care about their people and what they have to say, the heroes will be more likely to side with them. In fact, that can lead to an interesting character conflict - if the absolute ruler is an otherwise decent person, how will they react when someone tells them "I don't think you should be in charge anymore"? How will the characters react - will they start picking sides? Will they all pick the same side or will this create a huge rift between them?

Groups in General

When I'm talking about political parties, I'm really just talking about groups with opinions. Truth is, people will split off into groups by their very nature. Everyone belongs to something, even if that "something" is just the outcasts and misfits no one knows what to make of.

Every setting has its groups - schools have the nerds, the jocks, the cheerleaders and such, your taste in fashion will put you into punk, goth or hipster, and even those groups will have sub-groups of their own: among the goths you'll find steampunk goths, goths who paint their faces, cheerful goths who run around like kids on Halloween, etc.

Not only that, but one person likely won't belong to just one group. Take for example Homer Simpson: he's part of the Simpson family, he's part of the Power Plant employees, he's part of the regulars at Moe's, and so on. Not only that, but the sub-group he's in changes depending on the episode: at home, he's often paired with Marge to be part of the "parents" group, but some episodes pair him with Bart to make up "the boys".

So what happens when two groups conflict or disagree with each other? Someone who's part of both those groups is going to face a real test of loyalty, since groups are kind of what give people their identity. If these two groups start getting in the way of each other, like your career gets in the way of your family life, you're going to face a dreadful but character-making question: which part of your identity is more important, and which identity are you going to kill?

Holidays

Here I'm going to talk you through making a holiday of your own. Of course, you can always do something like Christmas with the serial numbers filed off, but let's try making one completely from scratch.

What season does your holiday take place in? Is it in the spring, summer, fall or winter? The season will likely reflect the content/activities of the holiday - since autumn is where you harvest crops, this is likely when the harvest festivals will be held, which might involve a lot of eating or farm-related activities (scarecrow building, bobbing for apples, etc.). For a summer holiday, everyone will be outside, having BBQs in their backyard and such. Winter is cold and pretty miserable, which is probably why people go all-out for Christmas - it gets you outside and distracts you from the cold. It's probably also why winter holidays are often home-and-family-centric, because you'll be holed up inside with them for warmth.
So what's the occasion? Why are we having a party? What historical event are we celebrating? The vast majority of holidays that I know of are anniversaries of a kind: Christmas is the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, Easter is the anniversary of the death of Jesus, Independence Day is the anniversary of modern America's founding, etc.
What does everybody do today? What are the activities? Giving people cards is the main one, while feasts and parties are also very popular. Every holiday has something that makes them "different" - on Halloween you pretend to be monsters, on April Fools' Day you play tricks, on Mardi Gras you have parades. What's your holiday's "theme"? Is everyone pretending to be something? What kind of food do you have? Who do you celebrate it with/for?
Does the holiday have a mascot? Christmas has Santa Claus, Valentines Day has Cupid, Halloween has monsters (like, every monster). Are they figures of folklore or are they modern inventions? What "job" do they have on this holiday? Is there more than one of them - is there a whole "cycle" of stories associated with the holiday? Christmas mainly has Santa Claus, but it also has Rudolph, the Grinch, Frosty the Snowman, and of course there are different "variants" of Santa from different countries across the world (Krampus, St. Nick, etc.).
Are businesses closed on this holiday? Do people get time off to celebrate it? Do they get a little cash bonus to help buy all the stuff they need for it? Is that why businesses are so gung-ho about selling things this time of year?
Where do things like weddings, birthdays and bar mitzvahs fall into this? Are those "personal" festivals?

Here's a list of some standard "holidays" you might find in a fictional world:

Festival of Giftsmas: the gift-swapping holiday is by no accident the biggest - everybody wants a gift, which means everyone's going shopping.
Festival of Togetherness: whether it's romantic love as in Valentine's Day, or familial love as in Thanksgiving, expressing your love for those around you is the key idea of these holidays.
Festival of the Harvest: the harvest is done, your hard work paid off, you've got all this food - you might as well dig in. Another variant might celebrate the beginning of the harvest, to wish it good fortune.
Festival of Culture: a festival that celebrates a certain culture - St. Patrick's Day, for example, celebrates Irish culture. That means people the world over will be taking part in that culture - drinking themselves stupid in St. Paddy's case.
Festival of the Dead: a holiday that remembers and honors dead loved ones. People make offerings to the deceased and (at least symbolically) treat them as if they were still here. It's not quite the same thing as Halloween - the dead aren't treated as scary monsters, but as family members coming round for a visit.
Festival of Prosperity: celebrations of historical events usually count under here - ones that celebrate the progress made in society since then. It's also where you find things like Labor Day, which celebrate the contributions of a group to society.
Festival of Time: a festival of beginnings and endings - usually the ending of one time period and the beginning of a new one, like the Gregorian or Lunar New Year.
Festival of Spirit: if there are gods or spirits in your setting (or at least people believe there are), there might be some days where they're more active than others. If there are any prayers or rituals you want to conduct to get these spirits' favor, now's the time to do it.
Festival of Selling as Much Crap as Possible: what most of the above festivals are destined to become.

So, for example, let's say that we have a town that was founded in the shadow of a particularly dangerous mountain which we'll call, uh, the Shatterhorn. Many attempted to scale it, but none succeeded - until one day, when Reginald McMountainman and his team became the first to reach the mountain summit and return alive.

Ever since then, the town has held the annual "Shatterhorn Festival" to commemorate McMountainman's achievement. People from across the world gather here to re-trace McMountainman's journey and climb the mountain themselves. Of course, technology has advanced a great deal since then, and things like ski lifts and cable cars mean it's a lot easier and safer to get up to the summit and back that it used to be. Probably along the way are some commemorative plaques teaching tourists some history and science relating to McMountainman and the Shatterhorn.

I think this would mean the Shatterhorn Festival would have to take place in the summer, no matter when it was McMountainman made the journey, since a lot of people will be going up the mountain and you'd want to do that when it's warmer and safer. Back on the ground level, I'm imagining there'd be some mountain-related activities like yodelling or rock-climbing. It's the summer, so people will be cooking outside, and I'm imagining a lot of stereotypically Bavarian foods - bratwurst, schnitzels, lots and lots of beer... of course, if your city's culture is inspired by a different part of the world, there'd likely be different foods and activities. So if the mountain in question was inspired by the Himalayas rather than Europe, the food might be something like dumplings and there'd be throat singing instead of yodelling.

In terms of a mascot - I'm imagining a Yeti. Maybe local legend has it that McMountainman met a very hairy mountain man who guided him up to the summit. Maybe there's people running around dressed in Yeti costumes, jumping out at tourists and posing for pictures. Maybe there's a competition to see who has the best Yeti costume that year.

This isn't a holiday of global importance - it doesn't need to be, it can just be something that one city or region does. A town festival is an excellent way to attract tourists, if you've got something worth having a festival about.

What's the point of all this? Because it's a good excuse for your characters to get into certain plots. You can already imagine what the plot would be for this "episode" - the Shatterhorn Festival comes around, everyone's already pretty drunk, and two characters decide to settle a long-standing grievance by racing to see who reaches the top of the Shatterhorn first. It's a perfect excuse to get your characters into (and presumably lost in) a mountain environment.

Maybe someone back on the ground starts doing some research into the holiday and the mountain's history... and finds that Reginald McMountainman actually never made it to the summit. Maybe the history of the holiday is wrong, and McMoiuntainman just lied and told people he reached the top (or maybe he's a skeleton in an ice block somewhere near the summit). Obviously this is bad news for someone stuck on the mountain and relying on the spirit of McMountainman (physically or figuratively) to get them out.

And then there's the whole Yeti thing... well, you can imagine the only thing worse than being stranded up a freezing-cold mountain is being stranded up a freezing-cold mountain wearing a cheap Yeti suit. How do you think passing tourists are going to react? How do you think the actual Yeti is going to react, since you know for sure that legend's going to turn out true?

Business and Trade

This is the part of the worldbuilding project that's been giving me the most trouble, because this is probably the most ungodly boring subject in worldbuilding. This is the part of simulation games that I always skipped - oh, this town will pay more for fabrics than for spice? Guess I wasted my time raiding those spice mines belonging to that enemy town.

What makes a town like that want fabrics more than spice? Maybe they've got a shortage of clothes, and they'll pay good money to anyone who provides them. Meanwhile they've already got more spice than they know what to do with. Maybe if I set fire to their spice mines, they'd suddenly be more interested in the spice I have for sale.

See, I can only comprehend economics if it's in the context of cheating, lying and setting fire to other people's property. I feel like I'd make a good capitalist.

Anyway, here's some resources that you find in every simulation game:

Gold (cash money, can pay for everything else)
Building materials (bricks, metal, lumber - stuff for building things)
Food (meat, fish, fruit and veg)
Weapons (guns, ammo, stuff to defend themselves with)
Luxuries (stuff that's not necessary but nice to have - they'll probably buy this last)

A single area is only going to have so many resources to go around - if you're not by a mine or mineral deposit, you're not getting any metal of your own. If you've got poor soil, you won't have so many crops and not much food.

A town running low on metal is going to have to get some from another town, but they'll want something in return. Maybe this other town needs more fruit - so they'll trade some of their metal for some of the other town's fruit. A trade route is established between the towns, they both start giving each other what they need, and they build up a good relationship. If one of them gets attacked, the other town is likely to step to their aid - otherwise they'll lose out on their supply of fruit/metal.

That is of course until another town comes along with a better offer - "we can get you more fruit than the other guy if you give us your metal instead" - at which point the other town will either have to find another town to trade with, or go ahead and conquer the metal-rich town and plunder them for everything the ingrates have... except these new fruit-sellers probably will try and defend them, and are probably stronger than us if they're confident enough to muscle in on our trade in the first place, so we'll probably have to go find some weaker town to ransack (see, I don't like this subject matter, and the more I think about it the more my thoughts turn to violence).

This is kind of why we have cash money in the first place - cash can be traded for just about anything. Instead of giving away a portion of our fruit supply, we can just pay for the metal in cash, and they can just use that cash to trade for whatever else they want. It's a lot simpler a process than the arcane three-fruits-for-a-metal-girder bargaining that usually ends with warehouses being set on fire in the middle of the night.

Trade Routes

Here's a map showing the location of three towns. Each of them have a lot of one resource and are in dire need of another one.

The resources they have - and the resources they need - reflect the environment they're in. The town by the sea is going to have a lot of fish, because the sea's where all the fish are. The town by the mountains will have more metal because it's by an area where the Earth's crush is poking out, but it has less fruit because the ground's not so good for plants to grow (also note how it doesn't need any fish, because it's right by a river, so they can just catch fish from there). Meanwhile, the town in the forest is surrounded by trees that can grow fruit, but it's far inland and doesn't get a lot of fish (yeah, I know, forests are likely to have water sources and thus fish - just go with it, alright?).

If these towns are smart, they might establish three trade routes between them:

So mountain town sends its metal to beach town, beach town sends its fish to forest town, and forest town sends its fruit over to mountain town.

Except mountain town is probably looking at beach town and asking "well, what have they got for us?" In truth, these towns probably aren't just lending their stuff to each other in the name of mutual survival - they're probably selling it. Beach town sells fish to forest town, then uses that money to buy metal from mountain town.

From the map, we can make a guess as to how these resources are going to be delivered. Since the route from beach town to forest town goes overland, they're probably going to send their fish via wagon train, or trucks if it's the modern day. Meanwhile, mountain town is at the source of a river that goes down to the sea outside beach town, so they might load their metal up on boats and send them downriver.

You can also see from the map where outlaws might strike, depending on what those outlaws want. If they're interested in stealing metal, they're likely going to lurk along the river waiting for a shipment to ambush.

How's this of any use to you? Well... those purple areas on the map are likely to become paved roads. If you want to establish where the roads between cities are, try and think about where the trade routes will be - a trade route is going to be a busy area with a lot of traffic, so they're probably going to build a road to accommodate it.

Corporations and Greed

In all likelihood, though, it's not the towns themselves doing all of this buying and selling - it's the businesses inside them. Beach town's big export is fish - that means the biggest and most successful businesses in beach town are going to be the ones that contribute to getting fish over to forest town (the fishermen, the shipbuilders, the cannery, the guy who makes the fishing rods, etc.). These businesses are going to be the ones with most money, and the ones most people will be working for as a result. They'll also be pretty important for the town economy - if one of them shut down or decided not to do its job anymore, the whole town could be in trouble unless they find a replacement quickly.

Now - it's a sad fact of life that the more money someone has, the more likely they are to lose it. If you're poor, you're going to be careful what you choose to spend money on, but if you're rich, you're going to get careless. You might find it stolen, or lose it in a bad investment, but most likely you'll simply funnel it into expanding your business - more workers, more factories, whatever.

Inevitably, it's going to get to a point where you'll expand too much too soon, and you'll be spending more money than you're making. Or alternatively, some kind of disaster comes out of nowhere and you suddenly need to come up with a million dollars or else your business will go kaput. In any case, a lot of business owners are going to start doing some pretty unethical things to stabilize the ship.

Say the guy who makes the fishing rods suddenly finds himself short on money after an ill-fated drunken night in Las Vegas. If he's desperate, he could go up to the town leadership and ask them for some extra cash. The town leaders might give him it, knowing that if there aren't any fishing rods, there won't be any fish to send to forest town, which means the main businesses will collapse, which means no one's getting paid, which means no one's playing taxes, which means the town's on its way to becoming a ghost town... you see why they might be tempted.

The problem is, the government gets its money from the taxpayer. The townsfolk aren't going to be happy to see money that was meant to go to things like hospitals and fire stations being used to bail out a big company that can't even look after its own money. Of course, they could just give it to him off-the-books... but if the townsfolk find out about that, they'll be even less happy.

So instead, fishing rod guy starts cutting corners - he sells sub-standard fishing rods made from cheap, shoddy materials, and charges double for the pleasure. He starts firing employees for no good reason just so he doesn't have to pay them anymore. Nobody likes this, but there's nothing anyone can do - he's the only fishing rod salesman in town.

Until the day comes when a hero emerges - an old man who makes traditional fishing rods just for his own use. He sees the decline of the town's fishing rod business and realizes it's all come down to this moment. Before long he's set up a rival business, making good-quality fishing rods and selling them at a fair price.

Now if the original fishing rod guy wants to keep in business, he's either going to have to treat his workers and customers a little fairer, or he's going to have to arrange a little "accident" for their new rival (which will probably involve warehouses being set on fire in the middle of the night). But if he keeps his old ways, or the sabotage, pretty soon he'll find himself run out of money and out of town. A new business takes over the fishing rod market and prosperity is restored... until "gold fever" sets in again, the old man wakes up in Vegas and the cycle begins anew.

Why am I telling you all this? Because here's where you can find some juicy character conflict. The main character's in dire straits because he just got fired out of nowhere from his job, whose owner flew too close to the sun and is now bleeding money. Or the heroes are going up against a corrupt business that thinks it can do whatever it pleases. Maybe a business is spending so much money because it's branching out into different places - setting up its own taxi service, buying out social media, building its own paramilitary force...

Imagine if Walmart bought up all the bread in the world, and every loaf had "Shop with Walmart!" stencilled on it. Or they painted all the bread blue because they thought that was a more "marketable" color for it. Sure, there's nothing technically wrong with that, but doesn't it feel kind of like they're taking advantage of you - like they don't respect you, and they honestly think you're stupid enough to fall for bread-based advertising? …Are your characters stupid enough?

If you're not sure precisely what you want your business to sell, take a look at my Modern Buildings list and pick something out from those. Even a house had to be built and sold by somebody.

Other Worlds

Maybe your setting is a bit bigger than just one planet. A sci-fi story might take place across multiple planets, while even fantasy stories often feature portals to other worlds.

As far as I know, the real-life universe is made up of galaxies, which are a bunch of stars kept close together by gravity, probably from a really, really big black hole.

There are roughly three “shapes” of galaxy. The spiral shape is the most common, followed by the elliptical galaxy, while irregular galaxies are the rarest. Galaxies on average have about 100 million stars, but they can be as few as a thousand or as many as a hundred trillion.

Orbiting these stars (I don't know if it's every star) are balls of rock, gas or liquid called planets. If you're lucky, you can find animals or civilizations on them.

Some things you'll find in space:

Black holes: big suck-holes that have the strongest gravity known to man.
Dark matter: invisible material that doesn’t give off light, but it’s got to be there because it has gravity.
Stars: big balls of plasma that cook up all the chemical elements. When they explode, they scatter these elements across space.
Planets: big round rocks (or balls of gas) orbiting a star. They're round because they're made of gathered-together space dust - it's like rolling up a snowball. When it gets big enough, it's eventually going to start looking round.
Moons: smaller round rocks that orbit a planet.
Quasar: the blisteringly light core of a galaxy that’s just been formed.
Proto-planetary Disk: a disk of gas and dust swirling around a new-born star. Eventually all this dust will gather together to make planets.
Asteroids: floating space-rocks.
Comets: town-sized chunks of ice that orbit a star.
Nebula: a colorful cloud of space-dust. This dust can sometimes clump together to form stars or planets.

Bigger things you'll find in space:

Group – 50 or fewer galaxies together in the same gravity field.
Cluster – hundreds or thousands of galaxies in the same field.
Supercluster – a cluster of clusters; at least about a hundred-thousand galaxies.
Filament – strands of superclusters stretching for like 50-80 megaparsecs but not being much fatter than 20 million lightyears.
Void – empty spaces between filaments, 10 to 100 megaparsecs in size.
Cosmic web – the bubbly, veiny look of the universe split into filaments and voids.

A "parsec" is about three-and-a-quarter lightyears, so 19 trillion miles. A megaparsec is a million parsecs, which is 1.9e+19 miles (that's 1, 9 and eighteen zeroes – 1.9 quintillion).The observable universe is 28.5 gigaparsecs (which is a billion parsecs), which I'm not even going to try measuring. And that's just the observable universe - the parts of the universe we can see from Earth.

Picture of the observable universe stolen from Wikipedia, showcasing the "cosmic web". Kind of looks like the Jimmy Neutron brain blast.

Faster-than-Light Travel

The speed of light in a vaccuum is the fastest thing in the universe we know, but even then, it takes 8 minutes for the light of the Sun to reach Earth (so, if the Sun suddenly switched off one day, it’d be 8 minutes before we on Earth notice this*).

*To be fair, it's eight minutes plus the millions of years it takes for the light to get from the core of the Sun to its surface.

Obviously, if you want a high-flying space story where spaceships drive around the galaxy like cars on a freeway, you’re going to want them to go faster than light, otherwise it would take thousands of years for your characters to get anywhere.

In real life, nothing we know of can go faster than the top speed of light. Why is this? Truthfully, I don’t know. I’ve had it explained to me time and time again, and it’s all gone way over my head. Talking to a physicist is like talking to a magician who keeps pulling rabbits out of their hat and acting like the rabbits were always there.

The closest thing I have is this: Einstein measures the universe as a combination of space (where something is) and time (when it’s in that place). So, here’s a graph of my travels through the universe:

I’m always moving up on time, because time always goes forward from sunrise to sunset, right? But I’m not always moving out on space – at the start of the day, I’m just sitting around at my house. At midday, I decide to go to the store. Now I move ahead in both time and space, until I get to the store, where I stop moving in space again (apparently I get locked in there overnight).

Here's how light would make that same journey:

It just booms over there in quite literally no time at all. How faster can you get than that? Any less time than “no time” and you might well end up going backwards through time.

If you want to get philosophical about it, “time” is just what a clock reads. And you need to see a clock to be able to read it. And what do you need to see anything? Light. So something going “faster” than light – taking less time to get there than “instantly” – would either be impossible or completely incomprehensible to the human mind.

All this to say – don’t fret too much over explaining away something like faster-than-light travel. You’d have better luck explaining why magic is real in your setting. If you want some spurious, ad-hoc explanations, then:

Say something like “the FTL engine pushes the ship faster than light by harnessing the vibrations of pseudo-gleps” (people can’t complain about scientific inaccuracy if they don’t know what a pseudo-glep is).
Have the ship travel through another dimension.
Have the FTL engine hack into the universe itself. Light is timeless, but it still takes 8 minutes to get to Earth from the Sun – maybe the universe itself is faster than light.
Have the ship travel at the speed of darkness. How can anyone argue with that?

Habitable Planets

All life – at least as we know it – needs water to live. Not just to drink, but to provide a primordial soup for creatures to form in. And water is very picky about what planets it chooses to appear on. If a planet is too close to its star, it’ll be too hot for water, and if it’s too far away, it’ll be too cold. The distance a planet needs to be away from a star to be able to support water (and thus life) depends on the size of the star – the bigger it is, the further away the planet has to be.

If you’re going to have aliens living on planets outside of this “habitable zone”, they’d either have come to live here from elsewhere, or they’re a strange new form of life that isn’t water-based like all life on Earth is.

The Multiverse

The universe refers to "everything that exists", but is it possible for there to be another "everything that exists"? Maybe in your fiction, the universe has a "destiny" - a definite way of being. But what if that destiny were to change? Multiverses are how fiction explores this idea of "what if?"

I’m not going to pretend to know anything about how multiverse theory works in real life. It might have something to do with chunks of spacetime being blown in different directions by the Big Bang, it might be how since there’s only a finite amount of elements eventually they’re gonna repeat themselves… whatever. Just think about it like this: in your story, if you want a completely alien world, you just need to put it on another planet. But if you want a world that’s the same but different (like, different histories or whatever), that will take a parallel universe.

If you want to access another universe, you’ll likely have to travel through another dimension to do so. “Dimension” is just a set of directions – so, one dimension is up and down, another is left and right, a third is back and forth, and so on. A fourth dimension might be forwards and backwards through time – “before” and “after”, perhaps.

Does the afterlife count as a separate universe? Or is it just a different “level of existence” in the same universe? Would different universes have different gods? Different ways they were created, even? Something to think about.

The Omniverse

If a multiverse is a collection of universes, does that make an omniverse a collection of multiverses? How does having more than one multiverse make sense?

My favorite idea for the omniverse is that it contains all the worlds of fiction. Marvel Comics talks about the omniverse containing every reality imaginable (and un-imaginable) - not only does that include every single fiction ever, it also includes dreams, ideas and even the "real world" in which we live. Is our world the prime universe that created all the others? Or does the fact that these worlds can be imagined mean they must exist somewhere?

I imagine it like something from Kingdom Hearts – over here you’ve got the world of one Disney film, over there you’ve got another, and right over there is the world from one of the Final Fantasy games.

Think of it like this: travel through the universe and you’ll meet an alien. Travel through the multiverse and you’ll meet yourself from another timeline. Travel through the omniverse and you’ll meet a character from a different story entirely.

Under this definition, I’d probably save the whole omniverse idea for when you’ve got several different stories/worldbuilding projects finished and you feel like having a crossover between them - or if you can get the rights to another fiction and rope them into a crossover.

Some Other Stuff

Some other worldbuilding "pillars" that I honestly haven't got much to say on, either because there isn't a lot you can do that's different to real life, or because they fall more under character or story-building for me.

Family

At least one parent or parent-like figure takes care of at least one little 'un until they grow old enough to take care of themselves. It's hard to imagine any spin on that formula, unless one species has a Spartan-style "leave the baby up on a mountain and let's see them prove themselves" mentality when it comes to parenting.

Punishment

There are usually three ways of dealing with criminals:

Torture them to death
Torture them for a set amount of time
Torture them until they stop being criminals

What form this torture takes depends on the crime committed and the society punishing it. For a non-serious crime, it might just be a quick slap in the face - an inconvenient but easy-to-get-over hardship like paying a fine or doing some community service. For something serious, like suggesting the king is wrong about something, you're looking at getting your head cut off in front of a live audience. But if that audience feels your execution is unjust, they're going to turn against the king. How do your leaders make sure they don't make martyrs out of people? What do they want to prove by punishing them, and how does the punishment prove that?

Weapons

They're either going to be melee (to kill the guy standing next to you) or ranged (to kill the guy standing too far away for melee weapons to reach). The type of weapons a person/group uses might tell you something about their character - someone using a bow and arrow might be quick and precise, while someone using a flamethrower might be a maniac.

Plants

They're either gonna be shrubs, grass, flowers or trees. Maybe the trees won't be made of wood, but they'll have trunks made of something. Maybe they don't feed off sunlight like plants usually do - maybe they feed off moonlight, or from some other life force. Maybe they don't feed off water. Maybe they feed off people. Do you think plants can eat other plants?

Animals

You know that chart I did that was "people but" and a bunch of weird traits? That but animals. What neat abilities do they have? How will it help them in the place they live? If their diet involves other animals, how can those other animals defend themselves? Which ones are kept as pets or as farm animals? Are any of them dangerous to humans?

Technology

Does this world have the internet, or something similar? Can people just talk to complete and total strangers on the other side of the word at any moment, or do they have to use something like a carrier pigeon? Are there cyborgs who have merged themselves with technology? How would cyborgs work in a low-tech setting? Would they have arms made of clockwork or wood? And if there is a cyborg walking around... how come no one else is a cyborg?

Food

Are the people here vegetarian or carnivorous? If I sprinkled magic dust on my meal, would it taste better? Would there be any side-effects? What does roasted goblin taste like? How do goblins feel about being roasted?

Physics

What goes up usually comes down. I find it hard to imagine a setting that doesn't have Earth-like physics - one where things don't get hot or cold, or where balls that are rolling just keep rolling forever, or where the rain falls upwards. If the physics get weird, it's usually either a core concept of the story, or some kind of one-off set piece like a videogame level.

Currency

The currency is probably just going to be dollars under a different name. 100 coins makes a super-coin and all that. Maybe there's different names for different amounts of money - 25 cents is a quarter, ten cents is a dime. What are these coins made of, and who makes them? Are these naturally-occurring things? Does money literally grow on trees? Some cultures used seashells as coins after all.

Illness

If some weird animal bites you, do you catch something? How easily can it spread? Do you turn a weird color or start itching uncontrollably? Is there any known cure? Can magic give you a disease? What's the prognosis for "growing an extra head" syndrome?

Fashion

Honestly, I think this is more of a character thing than a worldbuilding thing - the clothes someone wears tell you a little bit about their personality, or at least about what they want other people to think of them. I guess if it's true for individuals, the same must be true for groups as well.

Myths and Legends

This probably comes under history, because in these stories, things that are "just" legends end up being true nine times out of ten. When you're doing the story-line method, try writing down different things the answer could be, then pick the one it definitely is - the rest of them could be legends, rumors or in-universe misconceptions.

Art

Pictures, movies, TV, theater, games, books, music... it's hard to imagine any other kinds of art. I mean, you do get fictional instruments, but they usually tend to be weirdly-shaped violins or flutes. The only exception I can think of is sport (if that counts as art), because you do get things like broomstick racing and 4D chess.

Fetishes

I think that's... really more of a "character" thing than a worldbuilding thing.

My Own Worldbuilding Example

Alright - now it's time I put my money where my mouth is. I'm going to create a fictional world right off the top of my head, using what I've talked about here. However, this blog post has already gone on far too long - I'll put all these examples on a Google Doc here instead.

I want to reiterate - you really should get your story down first, or at least have a good idea of a story, before you start going into this kind of detail with worldbuilding. That's why the above Google Doc doesn't have too much in it right now - I don't have a story to spin into a world to build.

Remember not to just explain point-blank to the audience what the worldbuilding is like. They're not here for the worldbuilding, they're here for the characters and story. You kind of have to "sneak in" the worldbuilding - show them things that suggest what the world is like rather than just giving them a big info-dump. And if you're going to give them a big info-dump, make it so it relates back to the characters and story. Worldbuilding can be great fun, but if it's something that's not part of the story, it's probably something the audience doesn't need to know.