30 Days of World-Building!

[Leafar the Lost]

I have attempted this before, but I could never complete the 30 days of world building exercises. However, after finding this amazing forum, I might be able to complete it. I encourage you to also follow along with me. I hope that some of you will guide me as I go through the 30 exercises in 30 days. Just go to Google and type in "30 days of world building" to see the exercises.

My hope is to build my world like a stage, so i can write my stories on it. When I go to a show I am just looking at the players on the stage, and I am not focused on what is going on behind the stage. I have volunteered for musicals before, so I know that A LOT of work goes on behind the stage. These exercises are from October 2004, but its still very applicable today.

I absolutely welcome constructive criticism. If you think I did one of the exercises all wrong, please let me know. When I attempted it before it really forced me to think about the world I want to put the story in. I suppose it forced me to think too much about it, so I abandoned it. Now I really to finish it here.

Okay, let's make this Day Zero, and on my next post I will start Day 1 and so on. In real time I will start and submit Day 1 later today, because now I have to go. Thanks in advance for any guidance you may want to give...

 

[Devor]

The world building forum is usually for discussion. If you want a place for you to post the results of your exercises, I'd suggest you start another thread either in Writer's Work (if it's just for you) or Challenges (if you're asking others to join you).

As for the exercises - first off - it looks like these are explicitly under Creative Commons, which means we can list them here a bit.

Spoiler: 30 Days of Worldbuilding List

30 Days
Day 1: Climate & Variety
Day 2: Physical Planet
Day 3: Mood & Setting
Day 4: Cataclysms
Day 5: The Map
Day 6: Races
Day 7: Recent History
Day 8: Econ & Politics
Day 9: Language
Day 10: Mood & Culture
Day 11: Focus In
Day 12: What If
Day 13: Plot Hooks
Day 14: Education
Day 15: Resources
Day 16: Limits of Spec
Day 17: Mood II
Day 18: Spec & Society
Day 19: Character
Day 20: Plot Hooks
Day 21: Flora & Fauna
Day 22: Geography
Day 23: Culture II
Day 24: Mood III
Day 25: Sky
Day 26: Anti-What If
Day 27: Plot Hooks
Day 28: Left Out
Day 29: Character II
Day 30: Last Day
Burnout Bonus

That's an interesting list. Some of those days are going to be pretty hard compared to others though.

 

[Leafar the Lost]

Since these exercises are just about World-Building and not a story, I thought it would fit in here. It's not really a challenge either, but others can join me if they wish. I was hoping other WorldBuilders would look at this thread and offer some advice. Thanks.
I am currently parked in my car waiting for someone, so when I eventually get home I will complete exercise 1, which shouldn't be too difficult.

 

[Leafar the Lost]

Day 1: Climate and Variety​

OK thank you Devor for posting the link to "30 Days of WorldBuilding" above. I really hope its okay to post it here as a World-Building project. It will be easier for me to copy/paste the exercises and then post my answer below it. Again if you think I am doing something wrong please comment and let me know. It will only help me in the long run. Here we go:

How often have you read a book or story on "the ice planet" or "the desert planet"? These things simply do not exist. Humans are immensely adaptable-- if there's a section of the world they don't live on, they will do their best to figure out how to get there. There are now people living on platforms on top of the sea, as well as people living in habitats under it. The Middle East, the most hotly-contested region in the world, is in the middle of a desert.
The reason why books and stories try to limit the climate to one type or another is because the author wanted to hit upon a mood or a theme by presenting the story in a setting that is somehow related to that mood. Who doesn't have some emotional response to a frozen wilderness or a lush, verdant field?

Today's exercise:
Get out a map or go to an international website like National Geographic. Look everywhere. Antarctica. Saudi Arabia. The rainforests of Brazil. The rainforests of Central California. Look at how the different climates behave and appear.
The first fifteen minute exercise is to write down all the different climates you can think of-- if you need to just say a city name, do it. Sometimes "Seattle" is more evocative than "northern damp temperate climate." Write these names down in a list.
Then, go through that list and write one or two words that describe how that climate, either the word itself or the way the place itself may have made you feel, if you've been there before. Try to stick to abstract adjectives; emotional words, if you can, but nouns are also okay.
Put this list in your notebook. Tomorrow, you'll really need it, so keep it handy.

Okay this is me and I have completed the first exercise. I actually went to the National Geographic climate web site and I spent 15 minutes looking at all of the Earth's different climates. Then I wrote down what I thought. Here it is:

Temperate forested land: happy, peaceful
Cold, polar land: desolate, frigid
Seattle: cold, rainy
Las Vegas: lucky, risky
Dry climate land: thirsty, lost
Amazon Rain Forest: frontier, adventurous
Sahara Desert: ancient, fearful
Ozark Plateau: mysterious, escapist
Madagascar: comedic, treasure
European humid temperate: medieval, chivalry
Jungles: treasures, hidden
Mid-Atlantic Ridge: watery, traveling
Sierra Nevada Mountains: wall, mysterious

That's it. I will wait until tomorrow to complete day 2, and then hopefully I can post it on here. It really was helpful looking at all of the Earth's different climates and the map at National Geographic is truly amazing. I have saved that link. Until tomorrow...

 

[Ban]

I am using October and the rest of September for worldbuilding and preparing the story I want to write in November. I'm quite a ways into my worldbuilding, so I can't follow the same 30 days structure, but I'll be keeping an eye on this thread.
This looks like a lot of fun.

 

[Leafar the Lost]

Day 2: The Physical Planet

One of the best courses I took in college was on Physical Geography (especially read Chapter 10), which generally taught me why the Earth is the way it is, and how things like mountains and lakes and deserts are made. Most climates are formed by the interaction of land, water, air, and Coriolis Effect (the Coriolis Effect has a lot to do with why a particular coastline has cold water, while another part of the same sea has warm water). The Coriolis Effect is essentially what happens when the earth turns on its orbit, and the water and air on this rock turn at a slightly different rate than the rocks.

If the planet were covered only with water, you'd basically have interconnecting circular oceanic currents at the tropics, subtropics, and polar regions, and each current would be moving warmer water and air to cooler places, or cooler water (and air) to warmer places (certain places where these currents intersect have little interchange of movement and are called the doldrums). But when you add land masses, those currents run into land (where most people live) and bring cold air or warm air with them, and their attendant humidity.

Seasons are caused by the earth's tilt. It's possible to create a world without a tilt, but the climate would vary less seasonally. This, by the way, is one way to create a world in which there's a chronic winter state, or it's always summer, etc. You can still have weather, but the weather isn't dictated by the season, so you're more likely to have year-round weather that tends to be stormy or cold, or calm, etc. When you add land, you get orographic lifting, which cools air, often causing any moisture to condense into rain or snow or even fog.

The Exercise

What role do you anticipate weather playing in your story? Do you have a lot of travel that you want to complicate with bad storms? Are you going to snow in your mighty heroes? Will there be a mighty battle, determined by sudden flooding? You actually don't need to know right now. Your exercise for today is to jot down ten plot devices that relate to weather, and what you think they do to the story (for example: a snow-in can turn the mood very claustrophobic... or very intimate).


My answer

Okay the world I am thinking about has massive, worldwide storms and there is a Storm season in-between Summer and Autumn. I live in Florida, so every year I feel it. There is a lot of travel, so bad storms will absolutely affect my heroes and villains in my stories. There will be earthquakes, storms and even a maelstrom too. Now for my ten plot devices that relate to weather:

1. A massive earthquake shakes the entire world, and a demon-god who was imprisoned eons ago is released from his prison deep within the earth.
2. A bloodstorm is created by a dark magician. As it assaults the coastline, vampires gleefully come out of hiding to drink their fill of blood. It makes them super powerful.
3. A tornado rips open a portal between Earth and an unnamed fantasy world. A young girl and her pet travel to a bizarre land filled with bizarre creatures, psychedelic landscapes, and four powerful wizards.
4. An ancient winter goddess casts a mega-spell the covers the world in snowfall, and only a brave band of heroes can save the world from her cool evil.
5. An apocalyptic earthquake literally tears a kingdom in two, and it causes all sorts of social upheaval.
6. The primordial maelstrom, that has been raging since the Dawn of Time, begins to grow and it threatens to destroy the world!
7. The people of the good kingdom wake up to find a strange fog that covers the entire nation. Lovecraftian creatures begin to come out of the fog and do all sorts of evil things to people.
8. It’s starts to rain fire on a mighty empire, and the citizens start to blame the emperor for this punishment from the gods.
9. The great river overflows and floods the kingdom. Creatures from the bottom of the sea created the flood and they are now able to swim into the kingdom. They begin to attack the people of the land and feast on them.
10. Fiery tornadoes tear through the land, and it destroys entire cities. The heroes of the land try to find a way to save their kingdom from being annihilated.

That's it for Day 2. I will mentally rest and then move on to Day 3...

 

[Leafar the Lost]

I am using October and the rest of September for worldbuilding and preparing the story I want to write in November. I'm quite a ways into my worldbuilding, so I can't follow the same 30 days structure, but I'll be keeping an eye on this thread.
This looks like a lot of fun.

Thank you Ban! I look forward to hearing more about your own world.

 

[Leafar the Lost]

Day 3: Mood and Setting

As you've probably noticed already, a lot of my exercises aren't just about building a realistic world. They're about building a world that you can tell a story in. After all, world-building is fun, but if you're doing these exercises, you're probably not interested in spending 2000 hours worldbuilding without any practical application to your story, right? So, pull out your list of climates from Saturday and look them over. You should have a bunch of climates, maybe even places, and a word or two describing how you feel when you're there.

Well, it's time to make your first real decision about your novel. What kind of mood do you want it to have? See, we're going to set your novel in the kind of climate that contributes to its overall mood and theme. The mood of a novel is how it feels to read it. High fantasy is traditionally set in a climate similar to Europe or England, thanks to the father of heroic fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkein himself. However, it doesn't have to be that way, and you can capture a completely different feeling in a Middle Eastern desert setting or a Russia-like tundra.

For theme, you can adapt your setting to what's actually happening in the novel, what kind of message your novel has to tell. For example, if you want everyone in the novel to be in a constant state of uncertainty, maybe you should set them in a seismically active volcanic region (I type this just 77 miles away from Mt. St. Helen, which apparently is due to erupt any hour now). Or perhaps you want your story to feel very "escapist." Nothing says "escape" like a tropical island with balmy days, mid-afternoon storms, lush green plants, and a climate that doesn't vary seasonally but can bring up some exciting stormy weather.

If you already know "I want to write something dark and gothic" and you look at your climate list and there's "dark" or "gothic," you're there. You've got your predominant climate, and everything else after this is going to be figuring out how to build a world around that mood and climate.

If you are thinking right now "I have no idea what kind of mood I want-- this moraine person is crazy to think I know that this far in advance," then the below exercise is YOURS; it'll take 10 minutes and you'll have made a strong first decision about your novel. And don't feel bad if you don't know what kind of novel you're going to write-- nobody really does until they write it.

The exercise:
Read over your list from Day 1 and then turn to a blank piece of paper. Close your eyes and think about what kind of feeling you like to have when you write or read. Write down four words that fit into that feeling: two adjectives, a verb, and a noun. Now return to the page with your list of climates and emotions. Do any of them match up? If they do, you have your climate. If not, try to find closest-match words.
If you spend 10 solid minutes thinking about this and still can't decide, pick two climates that express moods you like. You can make up your mind later, and you can even build your world with both climates containing equally probable sites for your story.

My answer:
I went back to my list, and I thought about four words I think about when I like to read. I came up with these: Surprising, adventurous, fighting, magic. Then, I looked over my list from exercise 1 again and here it is below...

Temperate forested land: happy, peaceful
Cold, polar land: desolate, frigid
Seattle: cold, rainy
Las Vegas: lucky, risky
Dry climate land: thirsty, lost
Amazon Rain Forest: frontier, adventurous
Sahara Desert: ancient, fearful
Ozark Plateau: mysterious, escapist
Madagascar: comedic, treasure
European humid temperate: medieval, chivalry
Jungles: treasures, hidden
Mid-Atlantic Ridge: watery, traveling
Sierra Nevada Mountains: wall, mysterious

I see Amazon Rain Forest as the closet to my four words. Then perhaps the Ozark Plateau. I will go with those two for now. I am beginning to see something in this world that has worldwide storms, and that has affected the culture, religion and environment. The word storm keeps coming up in my mind, so it has to be important. All right, that’s it for today. Part of the process is limiting myself to one exercise per day. Feel free to comment if you want to. Day 4 tomorrow!

 

[Leafar the Lost]

Day 4: Cataclysmic Events​

I broke my own rule and decided to complete day 4 today instead of tomorrow. Here we go...
You have your mood. You have, generally, a climate you want. If you read the linked site, you might even have some idea of how to get that climate. Now, let's get into history. No, not dates and names-- that's too recent. We're talking planetary history. How long has your world been around? How old was it when your sapient species reached it (either through evolution or discovery)? Did a previous species dominate, like the dinosaurs, leaving a fossil record? Or is human(oid) evolution the first major species to leave a lasting record? If a previous species was sapient, did they also leave artifacts of their society?

A fossil record can be misinterpreted in many creative ways. You might end up with legends of dragons based on dinosaur records-- unless, of course, you have *real* dragons on your world. Your current sapient beings might believe in an older race that "built" everything, when in fact that older race actually destroyed it.

Also look for the non-biological records of physical change. Most geography changes slowly. You'll find that mountain ranges take forever to grow, except when they don't. When they change suddenly and dramatically, people remember, and their attitudes about such places change as well. Worldwide legends about sudden changes may spring up-- nearly every Earth culture has a flood story. There may be a historical record there, or there may be a parable being told instead. But they all have one, and there's therefore some kind of scar on what humans perceive of as their planet's history.

For example, consider earthquakes and volcanoes. Any seismically active region will gain a reputation, perhaps as a place where geographical records may be upturned rapidly (in the case of a tectonic shift bringing a fossil to surface), may be destroyed or buried quickly (perhaps by volcanic mudslides), or may be altered rapidly (such as by a more dramatic volcanic eruption that not only buries but also relocates debris for several miles, or an earthquake that opens a rift in the center of town). In a scientifically advanced society, your seismic causes won't hold all that many surprises for your characters, unless you want to set forward a speculative question about geological cataclysm (such as a non-earthly cause or something unearthed that's unexpected). For your fantasy characters, of course, a volcanic eruption can be an enormous deal-- the wrath of the gods, a dragon awakening, or even a magically-induced catastrophe.

Other major, fast-moving cataclysms include hurricanes and flooding, fires (though recovery from fire is actually a fairly rapid process, taking a matter of years), earthquakes, volcanoes and rifts, and meteorites. Less rapid but still quick in the geological scale are glaciers, ice ages, and global warming. A good example of a very slow-moving but planet-changing event is the plate tectonic shift that essentially moved India into Asia, forming the Himalayas and causing a massive climate shift in Africa, drying the continent out and forever altering (or perhaps just starting) the course of human evolution.

Even though we're not yet into culture-building, start thinking now about what kinds of scars your planet might have from major cataclysmic events. What major mountain ranges do you want or need to put into your story, what deep canyons, what crater-marked plains? Are all of your scars natural, or are some man-made through technological or magical forces?

The Exercise

For 15 minutes, jot down some of the Really Big Land Features you want in your story and just think "what if that were made by...." Write down a couple of causes for those features and scars and stick it all into your notebook. Which scars are slow-force scars (like plate tectonics), and which are fast-forces (anything that takes less than 10,000 years is medium-to-fast in geological scales).

My Answer
I did my best with this. I do not have a great understanding of geological forces, but I put down what felt right. The whole storm theme was there.

The Immense Canyon-it is a ragged canyon that separates two rival powers. It was created by fast-forces when a tornado of immense power literally tore the land apart. Countless people died, and it forever separate a domain into two separate places.

The Storm Mountains-they were created slowly over time, and they are a very large mountain range that divides two continents. Godlike beings make their homes on those mountain peaks.

The Torrid Volcano-it was created through fast forces (about 10,000 years ago) by a person with godlike power. He or she was able to cause the shifting of tectonic plates under the earth to release burning magma into the surface of the earth. It was created to destroy the domain that was once there, and artifacts of their culture were left behind. The volcano erupts once every 1,000 years.

The Scorched Plains-it was once a beautiful, grassy plain filled with life, but then through fast forces meteorites began to crash into it and torched the landscape. Today it looked like a scorched land filled with craters. It is also filled with extraterrestrial minerals and strange creatures.

The Primordial Plateau-made through slow forces and rises above the land in a remote region. There is archaeological evidence of a primordial race that once lived there.

The Nameless Valley-it was created through fast forces by strange means. An unknown people live there, and they try to keep distance from other people. Strange sights and sounds can be seen and heard from the valley. The valley is always covered by a gray mist that conceals it from the outside world.

The Primal River-it was created through slow forces, and it is the longest known river in the world. It divides a continent in two between east and west. A large variety of people live on along the river, including an aquatic race.

The Gigantic Glacier-its has existed for many ages now, and it slowly moves across a frozen continent. It is believed that a titanic being of great power is frozen inside the glacier and it is waiting for a time to break free…

The Blood Cliffs-through slow forces these cliffs are reddish in color, and they were formed over time after ages of blood storms.

The Grand Crater-ages ago an asteroid or small moon crashed into the world, and it caused cataclysmic damage. I (think) it killed off the dragons that once dominated the world before man arrived.

That is it for now. I promise tomorrow I will just do Day 5, which is The Map...

 

[Giovanni]

This seems pretty interesting, I know I'm hella late, but I was browsing the forums and just wanted to point out that Even though I'm late to the party I think it will be nice to look into.