Young Writers Society

NaNo ´21 World Building Thread






Your journey has brought you this far and now you're standing here not knowing what's to come? Neither do I! But that's why we're here.

This is the WB thread for NaNo 2021, so whether you want some more ideas for your story, a structure for a world, or are just interested in creating a world and don't know where to start, you've come to the right place!

Here in this thread we will prepare and present some basics as well as tips and tricks. Sometimes during the NaNo month, some activities will be presented that you can take part in and help to give your world a better structure or even new ideas.

It doesn't matter if you come today or tomorrow, you can start at any time. All you need is a pad and imagination! Use this thread to give us a link to your pad. (In the course of the month, there will be a kind of table of contents here with all the pads.)

Also, do you have some ideas or tips of your own you'd like to share that have helped you with world-building? Or do you just have any questions? Then write a post in the pad thread and share your experiences! At the end of the month there will be a collection of the tips and answers here.

This is something like a big group work where everyone can and should participate. Everyone can work at their own pace, no one will be first and no one will be last.

The goal of this thread is to take off from the runway and steer the plane in your direction yourself. There is no right or wrong! So just give it a try.

Of course, it is also important to receive feedback from the individual participants. Maybe there is something that someone else sees that you have not yet recognized? Questions and feedback are necessary to fill the last white spots in your world.

So let´s

- Lim´s Pad
- The Hall of Darkness NaNo ´21 Edition
- Mailice´s Pad

Activity 1

Before you can start thinking about what exactly to include in the world, you have to decide what kind of place, time or dimension the story is set in. This is the first big stone that stands in your way and where you already decide in which direction to go.

Therefore, your first task: Describe your setting for the world in three sentences!

You can answer in your pad or here in the thread, but highlight it so that people can see which task you are answering for.

Activity 1: Describe your setting for the world in three sentences!

This is for my WIP, Project Mutant Families --

The story is set in the 2018 of an alternate history based on our world, plus some Lovecraftian elements. We focus on Ayer Pedang, where a mysterious event involving a tin mine in the 1960s resulted in a cluster of mutations in the human, animal and plant-life. It is a fictional Malaysian industrial city located on the Western coast.

Activity 1: Describe your setting for the world in three sentences!

This story takes place across multiple dimensions and worlds, primarily focusing on the massive pocket dimension that houses the afterlife where we focus quite a bit on how its run. The other major players involve a planet known as Vantaxia in the year 1772 and by this point that civilization is about as advanced as early 19th Century earth would've been but of course with a vastly different history. Lastly we touch on Earth in the year 2024, where it is slightly more advanced than the Earth we all know, along with several other locations scattered across the milky way such as Mars in the year 2100 (a very advanced civilization).

Activity 1: Describe your setting for the world in three sentences!

My world is set in another dimension with magic and steampunk elements, but where magic is only used and sometimes abused by politicians, so that there are always violent problems, such as riots or even revolutions. We accompany the heroine Sophie Winter and her servant Charlie as they try to win against the others in a world immersed in political power struggles, as the Democratic Party tries to use magic to find an old, sunken ruined city where it is said that all the world's knowledge is stored.

(I've just pulled all this out of my sleeve now and I'm excited to see where it will take me. World Creating in my head . . . in progress.)

1. Finding a start

The beginning is the most difficult thing because you don't know exactly where to start. It's like a property where you know there's going to be a house one day, but you don't know where to put the first stone. At the same time, there are a few ways you can start.

For example:

- You can use the previous plot where you have a place where you want to start to develop it and then the world slowly emerges from that.

- You start at the beginning of the story and write down your ideas from there and develop them further.

- You use the place where the protagonist (or even the antagonist) lives / comes from, and then you can develop the world.

- You create a story for yourself with significant places that may not be directly relevant to the story, but it gives you a solid ground when you start to look deeper into everything.

- You can use the plot to shape the world. Like a string where the plot runs through, you can then try to complete such a puzzle in a similar way to water that spreads.

As I said, there is no right or wrong and this list is far from complete. If you have any other ideas, please share them with us.

You can also start drawing a map of the world and then get stuck there, or you can take a business or a person and start creating a life for them, which might give you some side information that is not mentioned in the story. (For example, maybe a bakery that one of the protagonists or even the antagonist likes to visit, which might result in a pastry that is irrelevant to the story, but was perhaps made after a revolution and stands as such a symbol and therefore people like to eat it to remind themselves of the revolution?) Do you perhaps have an idea that you wanted to include in the story, but then it doesn't really fit in anymore? Maybe it fits well into side info that is only mentioned for the story and you can start from there.

It doesn't matter if the stone for the house is still very wobbly at the beginning. The scaffolding will only become stable when there are more stones, so there is no harm in turning around and starting again or continuing and changing it as the building progresses. As long as the story is not on paper, everything can still be changed.

There are as many methods as there are stories to create world-building.
So now the questions; how have you done it so far? Did you do it in a structured way or did you always think more during the plot about how everything will look like? Is there a particular step that you would like to use for NaNo?

Finding a start

How have you done it so far?

Hmm, so building worlds for me has been pretty straightforward for a while now because every single one of my stories takes place in the same "world". Its something I call the Alphaverse. Its something I started making wayyy back sometime in 2014 and by now 7 years later, its evolved into this massive google doc which just so happens to actually be longer than 50,000 words. Yes I am that crazy...although to be fair one or two of my friends also contribute to that

So when this world was first conceived, it started with the place where the protagonist lives and then the place where the antagonist lives. That's all I built for my very first attempt at a story. Then I just sort of felt the need to expand and much like the big bang, this world exploded from this one tiny seaside town which had an apartment complex right next to a giant port for godzilla to invade long story don't ask to at this final count having 72 dimension that contain 2,097,152 universes each. Obviously only like fifty of those are fleshed out, but there is room for literally over two million different settings in this giant template of sorts that I constructed over the years.

So, now, for An Anachronistic Aye for example, the way I built its locations was actually very simple. The Afterlife is something I developed in great detail because one of my front running character Jason Hardy who has appeared in a decent amount of my stories needed a place to do his "job" I guess. So it was all built around that with a very base template in mind and all I do for this specific book was just develop a few select areas until they had some much finer detail.

The same goes for the towns I'm using. Vantaxia first appears in a story I wrote a while ago involving another group of characters I wrote who steal this ancient book from an underground library. It was actually in an essay I wrote for a school exam. It was made on the spot just very roughly as the plot of that one unfolded and now I just took that, added a few cities and BOOM, we have a new setting because this is Vantaxia 42, which is a different dimension from where that took place in.

Mars and Earth I developed much longer ago with these details actually in place as kind of a past time. Predictably I spent a lot of my early just random worldbuilding days making the Solar System and the Milky Way be detailed and fleshed out. This Earth is one of maybe ten different Earths I've built by this point and it all comes pre packaged from when I developed these for fun quite a while ago.

Did you do it in a structured way or did you always think more during the plot about how everything will look like?

I like structure in how I do things, so yeah, it was always very structured. Everything in my world is built with numbers and equation right down to the magic system. In fact that's how I keep it consistent. I have a literal set of equations I made with coefficients assigned to each character for their ability to use magic and for how long or with how much intensity.

I spent a long time working out numbers for universes, multiverses, planets, star systems, galaxies and a bunch more and then systematically developed the ones I considered most important. This list has about 25 nearly fully fleshed out planets and a few other lightly fleshed out ones with literally millions of blank spots for me to draw from. I have this master excel sheet where I record all this as I add random references mostly for jokes and whatnot in random roleplays or stories. Of course the fleshed out stuff also exists there. (Fun fact, excel has only 1,048, 576 rows...I discovered that while creating the record for this set of universes)

I do however also occasionally make a few places up with the plot but that's very rare. Often what I do nowadays when I have a new story is that I pick a location from the Alphaverse, look through the notes I already have on it and then make sort of a rough chapter outline of what needs to happen in the story with the characters and the plotline.

Then based on that structure I flesh out locations with all sorts of required details and such. Lastly then as I write if I find a place lacking in detail or just "missing something" I add in more last minute details. Very rarely, I find that the original outline changes significantly with regards to location and I have to make new locations from scratch.

Is there a particular step that you would like to use for NaNo?

Well I kind of already use all of the above for NaNo. Its how this world was born. I think I already said it in my answer to the first question, but AAA was built that way. Its at the stage where I already have a pretty decent amount of detail on every location I think will be important. If it turns out that I need more, it's quite likely in this story with so much time travel and such getting involved and with how long I expect it to get, I will build as the plot then dictates.

So TLDR of all of that. I do mix of almost every method mentioned above. I use a long since developed previous plot to build the initial notes for my world. I also write down a lot of things I will think I need at the very beginning. I used the location of the characters to first build most of those location. I've created nearly a hundred completely irrelevant stories that are simply to make everything seem deeper and more detailed, stories only I will ever read probably. And of course the main thing I use is having the plot outline spread out and detail the world.

How I've done it so far

With Mutant Families, I've mostly followed the PlanMo prompt for making a location list and also used a set of prompts from this MasterClass website.


Did you do it in a structured way or did you always think more during the plot about how everything will look like?

I think I started out with some structure, like the climate and the approximate location, as well as real-world inspirations for the setting. But then when coming up with the plot I started to have more ideas on what I wanted to do with the science-fiction elements. I was hoping to have a similar epiphany with regards to the martial arts elements but . . . no luck. Looks like some last-minute research and planning are in order.


Is there a particular step that you would like to use for NaNo?

'Using the plot to shape the world' seems like a great idea to me at the moment. I'd like to think that looking up the parts of martial arts that will be key to my plot (for instance, some real-world inspirations for the duelling and training) could be most useful for me

How have you done it so far?

I can't remember any more. When I started creating my world, I think it was 8 years ago, I just started after I drew a sketch of a country and I was happy with it. Today I'm standing there with a 580-page summary with all the characters, countries, institutions, etc... I think I could definitely fill up a few hundred Wikipedia pages there. This process was slow and gradual and I designed the world and the structure a bit more with each new chapter.

Did you do it in a structured way or did you always think more during the plot about how everything will look like?

When I designed a scene, I knew what, for example, the place where the action was taking place looked like. Then I tried to design everything around it. For example, what do the streets look like behind it, or if it's a room, a hall, what does this building look like, how many entrances are there, etc... Sometimes it goes into so much detail that it looks like a miniature world when I make notes or sketches about what the distribution of space in a room looks like.

Is there a particular step that you would like to use for NaNo?

Since I want to write an old story for NaNo where the world is already given, I might fill in some gaps that occur to me as I write. For the worldbuilding thread, I don't have a story yet, and I'm designing it step by step, so I'll just follow the path that's given here.


@HarryHardy That's just fantastic what you've got going on. I think it's just great and I'm amazed.

@Liminality That's a cool website. Maybe I'll take a look there too.

Activity 2

After you have chosen the genre in which the story will be set and thus also decided what the world will look like in terms of its foundation, the next activity comes. Actually there are two and you can choose which one you want.

Create the home town (city, town, village, etc...) for one of your protagonists and / or for the antagonist. You can answer in bullet points or make it seem like a description. In the end, when a reader reads over it, they should visually form a picture. (This can include, a name for the place, some general history, some aesthetics, (how do the houses look, etc.) and you can even draw some ideas and share them here.) Then comment on someone else's worldbuilding. Is there anything you have noticed so far that somehow contrasts with what has been presented in the world so far, or is there something that you think is missing or has been used well?

The aim of the task is to lay the first stone for the foundation of the story. With this stone we can then try to make the world bigger and bigger. This stone then becomes a small house with a ground floor, then a villa and then a castle, etc... Maybe during this task you get already some new ideas for something, so write it down somewhere. Every tiny idea can develop your world further.

Create the home town (city, town, village, etc...) for one of your protagonists and / or for the antagonist.

Okayy...soo, this is going to cause some interesting questions here. If I pick my two main protagonists, I have Susie and Harry.

No Susie's hometown is technically where she lived when she was alive, but that will not be making any sort of appearance in this story. Even though the accident in which she dies is shown, that occurs a little ways away from the town. Soo...that means her hometown as mentioned in the story would The Dalsaf Sea which is the part of the underworld where she has to live in.

I'm gonna go ahead and give a description for both I guess. So first off, The Dalsaf Sea.

This is located on a tiny planetoid about one third the size of the moon, but about the same mass. This means it has a gravity about one and a half times the Earth. There's a basic atmosphere which has a pressure of about two times that of the Earth. Its mostly just a rocky misshapen asteroid. The gravitational forces on it are definitely big enough to keep it in a roughly spherical shape, but for the most part its covered in inhospitable rocky terrain with no smooth areas and being mostly flat the whole way around.

There is one small section, perhaps about half a kilometer squared that's been developed into some sort of living space aka The Dalsaf Sea. This is a tiny walled in town. The walls are made of the same rock as the rest of the planetoid and its a rough three metre high affair that's mostly blacks with various spots of grey. There's a simple black gate to allow entry.

The Underworld having no real source of light, this wall does have long mounted floodlight style lighting runes which give the small village a decent amount of light should you need it, but they can turn it on and off as they please, so its kind of like the "Sun" of this planetoid can be turned on and off depending on whether the inhabitants want it.

Now this little town is built in the shape of a somewhat irregular square. Two roads run across the center, forming a cross shape. These "roads' are just flattened out paths filled in with loose gravel. Now this cross shape divides the walled off area into four distinct sections in which four buildings have been built.

The buildings are in fact identical except in size. All four of them are box type shacks essentially. The simple have four smooth walls made of a blackened concrete, topped with two interlocking sheets of black sheet metal. Its never really suffered any wear and tear or anything, so they are all just kind of unnaturally smooth and with no details.

Each one has a simple black door with a golden handle and the inside is simple a grey concrete floor and an equally grey ceiling to match. There are no furnishings pretty much when the girls first move in and well that's kind of how it is for the most part of this particular story. In the sequels it will change of course.

Let's move onto the hometown Susan once lived in.

First of all this is Earth 27, the most powerful of the seventy two parallel Earths that exist in the Alphaverse. In case anyone's curious, Earth 36 is what most of y'all would be familiar with. Earth 27 is actually ridiculously powerful among the planets, to the point that it is known as the third most powerful planet in the twenty seventh dimension and fifth most powerful across all dimension, behind only Hydrania 27, Lightnia 27, Renevexia 42 and Notpyrk 16.

This is a city in Earth called Old Halenton. Its in the state known as the Eastern Seaboard Section 4, in the country called Greater Hangoria in the continent North Ilora. For context, North Ilora is the exact same as North America. Its divided into two smaller parts, Greater Hangoria which would be covering most of what we know as Canada and like three quarters of the USA. The region covered by the rest of the USA and all the other countries in that continent is the country known as Little Hangoria.

Eastern Seaboard Section four, is in the lower quarter of the eastern coastline and Old Halenton is a city built on the coast. It's one of the smallest cities of the country, with a population of around 100,000. Its not 100% fleshed out cause I don't plan on needing it until maybe book 4 or even later than that.

For now I have a rough image of a park or two, a long road that runs near the edge of town stretching across the coastline, and Susan's house which is right on the edge of said road.

It is a futuristic city in that it has a defensive force field. The roads and such support vehicles capable of travelling on air, water and land. There's a small domestic teleporting unit and a small spaceport for routine trips to the Moon or Mars where some people from the town work. It's powered fully using solar energy, and by solar energy, I mean energy siphoned from one of the many Dyson spheres that Earth has built around its surrounding stars. Earth 27 is a very powerful civilization, one capable of harnessing the power of the entire multiverse it exists in.

Moving on to the antagonist before I get to Harry...cause well, there's no "Main" antagonist for this, hence why I call them questionable villains. So yeah, there is a main antagonist to this story but they are not going to make an appearance just quite yet. So I won't mention it here.

For Sacira, she comes from 23rd Century Mars 27. Her hometown is a small city called Ginager off in the Verngova Desert. Its located towards the equator of Mars. It is...well a pretty small city. Large than the Dalsaf Sea of course, but still rather small, with a population of maybe 300 people living in it.

It is built to look like a bit of a poor town as an aesthetic, and the people who live out there are sort of those who want to have a taste of living a little on the edge with some basic luxuries missing. By "basic luxuries" of course we mean, anti weather shields, teleportation hubs and easy access to a spaceport. By 21st century Earth standards, this would be a very luxurious perhaps even futuristic city thanks to its water extraction devices which keep the area looking green and very much not like the desert its inside of. The houses are simple, but all pretty well furnished and fairly comfortable. Besides the things I mentioned above, most of the usual suspects for things required in a small town are available. There's actually even a small airport.

The house designs are the traditional Martian fare, where there's a very cylindrical shape to them, with them almost looking like long tubes rather than the more boxy style you find on Earth. Their roofs are more Earth like, or at least the sloping roofs, not the flat ones.

That's about all I've got on this town. I haven't gone too far with this much like Susie's old hometown, because it barely gets mentioned by name in the story, and will never be visited during this story.

Lasty, we move to Harry's "hometown". He technically has no hometown cause he's a celestial being who was born and belongs outside the bubbly known as reality. He's supposed to be a concentration of pure celestial energy floating alongside the six bindings forces of reality but uhh..well nothing to really write there. Soo...moving to his birthplace and such..he was born on top of the Latelylarl mountain range in the middle of literal nowhere before getting sold into slavery. But umm...his first sort of settled "home" in a city of sorts would be when he was somewhere close to 200 ish years old and that would be the city known as Copolecal right on the North Pole of Hydrania, in a country called the Enyikaran Erfugara (Northern Republic in Ancient Hydranese). Hydrania has 27 continents, and this one would be Xialvaea named after a four headed sea serpent that terrorizes people all around that area.

This town is a very different town from the others on this list. It's built during the very first couple of hundred years of recorded Hydranian history, so it's a town that's built into a mountain, essentially slightly carved out and shaped caves. Its not like caveman era stuff, but there's only the sort of bare essentials available, with electricity being a invention that is maybe ten years old. The transportation system is essentially walking or using this type of snow horse serpent hybrid that can run nicely on the icy footlands of that mountain. Its a town on the outskirts of civilization at the time so its even more behind on development than the area not so developed main hubs of Hydrania which exist towards the equator. Its a cold, somewhat desolate that runs entirely on its fishing industry. Yeah...that's about as much detail is as required on that. I have a bit more, but I've been typing a little too much by this point so I'm gonna stop for the moment...this town is important, but not in this story. At the time this story takes place, this town doesn't even exist to most people, including time travellers, there are few who can find the corner of the timeline where this town still stands.

Create the home town (city, town, village, etc…) for one of your protagonists and / or for the antagonist.

So the city where the protagonist lives, Sophie Winter, is called Easthaven - Dondelport. It is a double metropolis with a population of several million and, as the name suggests, it is situated on the coast facing the sea. Partly with many islands and cliffs, the two cities (which have only been one city for a few years) stretch for several kilometres along the shore. In parts, the city is connected by many bridges and cable cars.

The geography of Easthaven - Dondelport is not only characterised by the many cliffs, (partly made of shale), but also some narrow pebble beaches as well as the mouth of the longest river in the country, the Dondel, which in some places plunges into the sea from the high cliffs (in places over a hundred metres high). When the city is not built up with houses and streets, there are many green spaces and forests.

Beneath the city slumbers a mighty tunnel system of catacombs, the sewage system, some secret rooms as well as casemates, some of which have dug deep under the seabed. Some of them are open to tourists today, but most of them are closed because of the danger of collapse. Due to the rapid rise of the sea, there is a danger that the deepest tunnels, some of which also have holes to the outside, could sink. Some welcome this because a lot of explosives are still stored there from the war that took place a hundred years ago, but others are afraid that the entire city could be blown up.

The city has only a few districts, such as the harbour, which stretches along the Dondel waterfalls. There are the shipyards and the main distribution centre of food to the country. Once a year, the "maiden throw" takes place there, where newly-launched ships are thrown into the water by means of the magic of the politicians in office and it is seen whether they are seaworthy. There are also many cranes here and the noise has led to a two-kilometre forest being planted around the harbour where no one lives.

Another district is the political centre. Part of it are many libraries, the parliament and universities. Characterised by the old town, it is the oldest part of the city and is constantly guarded by a strong magical barrier, so that people who enter the district are scanned and an information system (which is partly underground) checks people and arrests them if they are wanted.

Other districts include the Fortress District with armouries and some museums, the Mercury District where many artisans are, and the Noble District, which is on the highest cliffs where the rich look down on the city.

Sophie Winters lives in the political centre with her servant, in a larger flat that belonged to her father when he became a politician.

The architecture of the city takes its cue from the Victorian era. Amidst all the soot and dust that rises above the city, there are many half-timbered houses and people are beginning to build upwards. Steel comes into fashion and people try to create bigger buildings, some of which look exorbitant. With the magic that the politicians are allowed to use, many building sites could be finished quickly, but they don't want to get their hands dirty, so there are regular strikes and sometimes violent confrontations in the city.

The highest building is the parliament "The Catadoxa" at about 400 metres. At the top of the highest tower is the seat of the Prime Minister. (The Parliament is modelled on the Hungarian Parliament House in Budapest). The antagonist also lives in Easthaven - Dondelport, in the “DP House”, the home of the Democratic Party, in the attic.

A bit of history:

Once there were two cities, Easthaven and Dondelport. Both towns were always in a dispute as to who had the most inhabitants, and so there were always nightly assassinations between the two. At times, tunnels were dug to kidnap inhabitants of the neighbouring town in order to get a higher number. But since this eventually got out of hand, there was a bloody revolution that led to the two towns merging. This was also at the time when magic was restricted to politicians. Since then, there has been more of a conflict between those in favour of limiting magic and those against.

Summary:

Name: Easthaven - Dondelport
Population: 3.820.193 inhabitants
Surface area: 1.093 km2
Mayor: Cedric G. Of Lohanstone
Highest elevation: 239 Meters
Lowest elevation: 0 Meters
Random Fact of the day: There was once a tidal wave that buried the entire streets of the lower city. Apart from a few deaths, the lower city was the cleanest region in the country for a while. xD