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Argeus the Paladin -> RE: Vereriaz Comments (11/29/2011 8:06:36)
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The way I do my world building is normally like this:
1) Start small. You don't want to sit down at the table and suddenly going "Oh, oh, I want to create a Tolkienesque world! A complicated, interesting, awesome, epic world with elves and orcs and evil overlords and jerkass gods and...". That is a one-way ticket to derivativeness and blandness - just look at Eragon and the Maradonia Saga. Instead, what you would probably do is to pick a portion of the world you want to create. A very small portion, a scene, if you would like to call it as such. Such as the adventure of a hero, a skirmish between two countries, a diplomatic meeting between two monarchs or as simple as a day in the life of your average water elf. The most mundane might sometimes be able to yield excellent insight into the world you are trying to build.
2) Once you've chosen that particular 'scene' you want to elaborate on, expand it, starting from the most basic questions you'd ask yourself whenever you write a short story. What is the hero's background? How does that influence his choice of equipment, his companion, his attitude to the adventure, his goals and motivations and everything along those lines? Where is the adventure taking place and what is the story behind it? And so on. From the background of the hero, you can further expand on various aspects of his personality and reverse it back to create your dafinition of places and factions. Say he's a water elf born in a metropolitan sea port going to venture out because, say, fishing was turning unprofitable, and a cave not far from town was his destination of adventure. From that simple setting, you can expand into so many things.
- The water elves were so readily impoverished because they are economically backward, owing to, say, their patron gods disliking industrial production. From here you can easily concoct something about the water elven religion and culture based on that set of belief.
- The fishing might be bad owing to, say, a great battle with bio-magical weapon in the general region that killed off vast quantities of fish that year. Such a battle is fought between two sides with powerful mages and unethical generals, perhaps, as part of a larger war. From that, you can go on to elaborate the two factions involved, their conflicts and how they went to war, and what effect this has on the grand scheme of the world, etc.
- The cave is not far from the city, yet still promises loot - perhaps because of some reasons nobody dared to waltz in and take things? Beliefs? Fear of danger? If it is owing to a belief, elaborate on that. If that was out of fear of danger, where does that danger come from? Monsters? Traps? Treacherous terrain? The first two can go very well with your bestiary, while the latter melds in pretty well with any fictional-world-map-making effort.
3) Rinse and repeat until you've got a collection of short scenes, each elaborating outwards into a set of traits, characteristics and description of the world while remaining consistent with one another. This way, the world's details wouldn't be forced, since you are effectively building it from the ground up.
My closing words are those: "The real world is just a collection of many billions of diverse individual tales and stories, all of which consistent with one another. As long as your fictional world can achieve or at least promise that level of consistency and diversity, your world is alive, and vice versa."
EDIT: Or what LK said. I are ninja'd spectacularly.
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