Large-scale Worldbuilding Advice

[schlime9k]

Hello, melonlanders! Worldbuilding is awesome but can be frustrating to task yourself with, and understandably so, especially if you're making a whole world, or universe that is vastly different to our own!

If you've any advice to newcomers to the worldbuilding community, comment down below to help them out! Or if you're looking for advice yourself, don't be afraid to ask, we'll help out any way we can.

My 0wn advice will be that you always need to start small, then build it outwards, it ain't called world-building for nothin'! Start with a town/city, then build the cities and towns around them. Maybe start with a character / group of characters, then build the world around them, create situations for them to be in that is caused by the world they live in. Maybe a God(s) that create the world, but begin with only a small part of that world them build outwards...

This mindset will help you out drastically, because fully fleshing out one part of the world gives you a reference point for other parts of your world that you can build off, create conflict and plot!

Now, my question to all you worldbuilding aficionados: Do you bother with language building as well? Or do you stick to having your characters speak english or your native language?

[MediocreMetastasis]

For me when making games I make a couple characters and locations first, try to link them together, and expand from there.

Usually I do the character design first then make up a reason why they look like that (e.g. I thought up of a group of skeletons being exiled to a volcanic area to explain why they have metallic skin)

Now, my question to all you worldbuilding aficionados: Do you bother with language building as well? Or do you stick to having your characters speak english or your native language?

Unless the character is meant to be foreign or the fact they can't speak English is a plot device then I wouldn't.

[pepper]

I can also support the idea of starting small and building from there. Even if you've got an idea for the whole thing in your head, it's still going to take time to build it out while sharing with others. Start small, discover the world as you make it!

I think it's also important to know the scope of what you want to build, before you start working on it in earnest. Are you making something whimsical that doesn't need explanations for every little detail? Or are you intending for it to be a plausibly real place, needing full explanations and correct physics for everything? For instance, I'm making a scifi near-future Earth with space travel and furries, and it's been my intention from the start to make everything plausible. Part of my process has been to define pre-historical geological events and divergent evolution, studying the energy needs for ion thrusters, and detailing food production at high volume within orbital space habitation stations. But I need this background information only because I chose to make my world plausible. If I only wanted something more fun and wanted to focus on the stories and characters first, I'd not worry too much about any of the science of my science fiction and just get to work writing plots and conflicts. (As it happens, the research is helping me to discover conflicts, like how does a station decide what the weather will be? Or I'll bet there are raiding parties of pirates that attack space stations, but the ones that grow lots of food are probably spared bc you don't mess with food in space!)

Think Star Trek vs Star Wars. Do you want lots of background explanations and social commentary, or just fun magic and flashy whimsical stories? Both are great!

I think another piece of advice I can offer is: as the creator of your world there is going to be so much in your head that will only ever live in your head! Not everything can (or even should) be shared in your work, and that makes the world more rich for your readers, because (I believe) they can tell when there's more under the surface, and it makes it feel more real. I don't need to share in the text exactly what's going on on Mars, but I can hint once in a while that there's something fishy going on after the Corpo muskrat took his companies and his workforce and founded a colony, named himself king, and began nuking anyone who approaches, and now nobody has heard from them in a hundred years. I know that Dante's Inferno is happening on Mars, but my readers only need to wonder what's going on. They make it real in their heads.

As far as language goes: why yes I do dabble in conlangs! I also intend to study contact languages (pidgins and creoles) to make something for the people of my space ports to speak in orbit. Language is absolutely not something that is necessary and it's enough to write in your native language and simply state in the text that a different language is being spoken by your characters. I certainly don't plan to compose a Corvus phrase everytime my crows are talking to one another!

[schlime9k]

Not everything can (or even should) be shared in your work, and that makes the world more rich for your readers, because (I believe) they can tell when there's more under the surface, and it makes it feel more real

Well said @pepper , what I like about ancient mythology, particularly Greek/Roman and Norse, was how collaborative it was, where storytellers were able to riff off one another and expand upon ideas set by others.

That has translated over much better in the modern day, with things like The Backrooms and The SCP Foundation, and I'd like to bring that to my own mythology where I can leave certain things in the dark, maybe sprinkle some clues here and there (and everywhere) to let readers fill in the gaps or make stories of their own in the same universe!

[Seechain]

I recommend using a tool like Mappa Imperium. Really, as you start drawing the locations, lots of ideas for characters and their stories come to you.

https://nookrium.itch.io/mappa-imperium 

[Rubbereon]

The biggest advice I can give is to use WorldAnvil because for a very long time I only ever worked with raw html and it ended up not looking very good and it's tiresome, all links must use the <a> tag with the href option even if it's a literal link, you get this goofy stuff in the end and it bores me,

Code

<a href="website.com">website.com</a>

Also even with a visual editor it would sometimes just not follow my div stuff like I wanted and I'm worried it messes things up, so I really didn't want to edit using a visual editor past the first draft (that's true for most pages on my website, but it's no big deal, it's just nice worldanvil exists as an alternative and at some point they won't need to be updated anymore).

  Just a fyi, it is free, but it has a paid subscription plan and they are very eager to advertise it to me, so might as well bring it up in case that's a turn off for you.

[schlime9k]

The biggest advice I can give is to use WorldAnvil ... Just a fyi, it is free, but it has a paid subscription plan and they are very eager to advertise it to me, so might as well bring it up in case that's a turn off for you.

I remember trying out WorldAnvil but it wasn't right for me, not just because of the ads for their subscription (which is fine, welcome to 2026 WWW amirite) but because I found it not right for my needs, if it works for you that's awesome and for anyone reading that hasn't tried WorldAnvil, try it, it could very well work for you. I tend to prefer to type all info out in a doc (was using Google Docs, now using Ellipsus) and draw my own maps physically.