World building is a long and arduous process. Depending on how its gone about and how much detail is desired, it can take anywhere from a few days to a few decades. I started world building as a hobby when I was around 10 years old.
I was sitting around, in Junior High, with my rudimentary understanding of how the world works, and thought, “Hey, maybe I can make my own world.” And that was when my creation of The Void Jumper’s Continuum began (as described here). Since then, I have experienced multiple renditions and restructures of the VJC, and attempted creating many more worlds alongside it – mainly to use in tabletop roleplaying.
VJC was much easier than any other world I have tried to create, of course, on account of I have had to do very little other than take our own real world, take aspects of various mythologies around the world, make a few twists and turns here and there, add my own unique pieces (such as the Zedekiah, which I may explain in a different post), and call it my own. Making those other worlds was much more difficult.
My most recent rendition of this would be the world of Kithria, the setting for both my web novel, Isle of the Dreamer, and the default setting intended for Lady Luck’s Chosen Few. Kithria itself began as a world I created for D&D to be used in the web-series D&DE (RIP). I created it as best I could to incorporate the standard D&D races and monsters into its lore and history, and to have as unique of cultures as possible while sticking to that. In that state, I was pretty happy with it. But then I came up with the idea for Lady Luck’s Chosen Few.
I wrote up a few basic rules, got some groundwork laid, and then it just kind of sat there. It was probably in a working state at that point (at least as much as it is now), with one exception. You see, LLCF is designed to be played as a story, not as a game. To simply plop characters down in Fantasy Land and go at it didn’t seem practical in my mind, but at the same time I had no world to really use. Every world I had made in the past was for a system intended for high-fantasy: Pathfinder, D&D, Open Legend, etc. While they certainly could have been used for Mid to Low Fantasy, that wasn’t the purpose of the system and anytime I tried, it simply went off the rails when my players all decided to be magic-users.
Then, D&DE got cancelled – it was a disappointing process as I watched delay after delay come about, extending it further and further. It was only when I gave up on that project, however, that I finally gained some direction with LLCF. You see, my issue there was that I felt I had to start from scratch. I had to build my own low-fantasy world from the ground up, something I had tried to do a million times before, but always seemed to fail at for the aforementioned reasons. Now, I had a chance. And what better way to do it than with the world I just created. The world that was originally designed to be low-fantasy, made with the pressure of being in public domain, subject to the scrutiny of, like, 10 people (but possibly the entire internet)?
Now, it should be important to at least give a brief overview of Kithria’s original creation. I’m going to skip the original brainstorming, though, and go straight to the point where D&DE started becoming a reality. At that point, there were four human races (five if you include orks), three elven races, and two dwarven races. At that point, I had little intention to include any more races, trying to limit it. On top of that, my original intention was that magic would be rare. That was the plan. But, best-laid plans. Players threw fits and I felt a need to include more. I added, for that reason as well as others, two races of halfling, three of gnome, all the goblinoids, an additional elven race, half-orks, half-elves, the Touched (my own spin on Tieflings), dragonborn (as a human race in the lore), and kobolds.
Most of it, I was content with, but the only added part I was particularly happy with were the gnomes (who had been given reason to their pranking antics and were perhaps the most horrifying creature in the world – I say were because, when I created the LLCF version, I also added the Haklos, an original race of mine that is wholly alien).
All I had to do to create the world I wanted for LLCF was gut the world, getting rid of everything that didn’t have a reason. For once, I didn’t feel obligated to include things because they were part of the default. I didn’t feel like I needed to include certain things and omitting them had to have a specific reason. I felt I could work from the opposite direction: only including things because I had a specific reason. And because I felt I could omit things, I felt my world-building benefited.
No longer did I feel bound to include standard fantasy races, and I felt like those that I did include, I could do what I wanted with. I removed goblinoids, dwarves, halflings, dragonborn, and kobolds entirely; I made my elves a bit more mysterious and a lot more powerful – and a lot less numerous; and I made humans a far more diverse race, with 8 different human ethnicities (9 if you include orks) rather than the original 4 human races (6 if you included the orks and the Touched). For those who aren’t certain of the difference, I am assigning the terms as follows (using real-world examples): race would refer to European, Asian, African, or American; ethnicity would refer to German, English, Spanish, Italian, etc.
As well, I felt the freedom to completely change the geography of the world – something I did incorrectly when I made Kithria before – to be more fitting for these 8 different human ethnicities. Each ethnicity, you see, comes from a different region of the world; originally, each human race was tied to a different continent.
This resulted in another major change: Kithria went from the name of world at large (four continents closely connected together), to the name of the continent, with multiple regions (in a similar vain of the Roman provinces). Kithria went from the four continents of Kapfas, Shelez, Gelth, and Mikron to two continents: Kithria and ‘the Southern Continent’. The former is now made up of 7 regions: the cold highlands of Kapfas, the mountainous lowlands of Barush, the river-crossed Felseth, the forested lands of Gelth, the desert basin of Imin, the lush plains of Biria, and the rocky plains of Shelez; and the latter is made up of one charted region on its northern edge, facing Kithria: Mikron, a region full of lush rainforests and foreboding wildlife.
From these unique regions came unique cultures, shaped by the geographical features of their places of origin. However, I believe I have gone a little off-track, so I’m going end this post here – but my process of creating cultures is where I’ll pick up next time I talk about world building.
Just remember: don’t let the norms of world-building and fantasy limit what you create, or force you to create things that you don’t want to in the first place. Start your world-building not by asking yourself what to omit, but instead by asking yourself what to include. By limiting your options, your world-building will be much better as a result.
So, I guess that’s the main takeaway: sometimes bounds can be limiting, but they can also be more freeing than having none at all.
Xavier Makes 