World Building is fun. I do it at the drop of a hat. I’ll world build just for fun. Heck, I sell world building services on Fiverr. It’s not something I need prompting to do.
I do world building for stories fairly often. Lots of scratch paper and unsaved spreadsheets have been scarified to idle world building. But in the PBRG process, it’s not about doing the fun parts of world building that come to mind. It’s about identifying what I need to build, doing the work, and then saving the work so that I can come back to it and reference it when I need it.
This is a long process, so instead of one big blog post, I’m going to try to do this in four. In this post I’ll touch on maps, then I’ll do Histories. Post three I’ll do Institutions and Organizations, and finally Mythologies, Magic and Science. This may change as I develop this series, but I don’t want to get too much into it. I’ve still got Research and Gaming to get through.
I am also going to do the General of the Pen segments at the end of each section, instead of doing a new blog post for each topic.
But I will want to build more than that, because I expect that inspiration will strike as I write. I want the depth to be there, so I don’t stop as I’m writing. This means I will build (and may have to research) more than I initially expect.
What is World Building Again?
Real quick, let’s go over what World Building is and how it’s different from Plotting.
World Building is building the depth behind the story, including aspects that may influence the story without actually appearing in it. If Plotting tells me my characters of going to Plotburg, World Building will tell me the size, the layout, some important places, the local government, the demographics, etc.
The purpose of World Building is to give me a good depth to the setting. It gives the places a better feeling. It gives the characters the ability to makes choices based off something other than plot. It gives me answers to questions I don’t know I’m going to ask while I’m writing.
It also gives me consistency. Remember, I’m building this process because my original process was too slow. And part of that was too many times where I wrote contradictory things I had to go back and fix. Oh, is Plotburg six miles from the river or eight? Now I’ll know ahead of time.
World Building Step Overview
The World Building step begins with a list of items from the Planning process. This list will include maps, character bios, institutions, mythologies, etc. Essentially, anything for the story that I should build before the story begins. It will grow as I plot, plan, research and game.
Now, I should have at least a good idea of what these things are and how they’re going to influence the story. I know where they’re going to appear and their importance. This give me a minimum of what I want to build for any given item.
So, let’s get into it, shall we?
Maps in Theory
There’s no project I’m working on that doesn’t require several maps. Maps of regions, maps of cities, maps of star systems or star charts of entire clusters. Lots and lots of maps. Oh, so many maps.
Maps aren’t just pretty, especially the early maps. They provide a good sense of how scale. More than once I’ve had to heavily revise a story once I realized the characters were moving too fast (it takes how long to walk a mile?) They’re helpful to track the location and movement of people and military units. And if I have to game out a campaign, I need the map to game on.
The number and details of maps can vary between projects. I generally find myself putting them in two tiers.
Tier I: Detailed Maps
Detailed maps I will need to reference often. I may need to game something out on them, or even put them in the book. These maps will have a key and a scale, a compass and a grid. They’ll be detailed, and probably in color.
Tier II: Basic Maps
Basic maps I don’t need to reference often; I just need to know what they look like. They don’t need to be detailed; just some simple bubbles showing the relative directions, with maybe some general distances listed. That’s all they have to be.
Maps in Practice – The General of the Pen
Now let’s consider my project, The General of the Pen. I’m going to start by listing the maps I’ll want to prep for the story.
- A continental sized-map, so I can determine where various nation-states are in relation to the area of the story.
- A regional or national map
- A map of the area the book will take place in.
- A map of the main city
- A map for each of the battlefields of the book (three planned books)
That’s seven maps. Not bad, really.
Next, I want to divided them into Tier I (detailed) and Tier II (basic) maps.
The continental and national maps I can put in Tier II; the story is going to stay in a valley, so I just need to have a general idea of what’s outside the valley.
The valley I need a detailed map of, since I’ll be gaming out military unit movements and campaign operations, so that’s a Tier I.
The main city I’m actually going back and forth on; some scenes will happen there, but not enough to warrant a very detailed map. I will put this in Tier II for now, and if I need to work on it more as I go, I will.
The battle maps will, almost by definition, be Tier I maps. I may or may not game out the battles, I haven’t decided yet. But I want the details so when I’m writing the battle scenes, I can write them believably.
Drawing the Maps
For the basic maps, I really don’t need to put too much effort into them. Now, if I do, great. Nothing wrong with that. But I don’t need to. I just need them to be broadly done.
For the detailed maps, I’m going to put some effort into them. And probably go through several drafts. In the past this has meant a lot of pen and paper as I’ve worked through multiple iterations. Recently, I purchased a map program called Wonderdraft that I use to build maps for my RPG games. This allows me to build, fix and play with my maps without needing to start all over.
Even this detailed map is missing a few things. What is the scale? What about town names? Still a lot to do to finish this map off.
Now, I haven’t built the maps for the three battles yet. Before I do, I want to puzzle out about how big the battles will be, how exciting they’ll be, and what I’ll want to have happen. Then I’ll build those maps.
Conclusion and What’s Next
The world building process is to establish consistency. Building the maps early helps me keep people moving at appropriate speeds and in the right directions.
Coming up, I’ll look at world building histories, including those of people, places and entire worlds.
