Where do you start when creating an entire world? Do you go small, creating a starting scene and expand it out as you need to? Or do you start big with cosmology, gods, creation, history and countries before working your way in?
The truth is, there’s no right answer. Only the one that works for you.
That doesn’t sound very helpful for a post that’s styling itself as instructional, does it? With this series, I’ll touch on both aspects of world-building in time. Mostly I’m going to talk about what works well for me, my personal approach to crafting an interesting world and story, and laying out the steps in hopefully manageable chunks.
So let’s think about themes. My Starfinder entries will inevitably share my thoughts on science fiction, space travel, and a setting that branches across multiple worlds. Alternate earth is another option, ala Harry Potter where we imagine our own world but with some unique difference to it, but honestly that’s never been my style. In the end, I think we’ll be settling on a more traditional fantasy world.
This means we should expect the basic class of elves, dragons, dwarves and wizards. We’ll tentatively strike down for a standard euro-fantasy with knights and castles but we can always judge this better down the line.
Lastly, while this is by no means something you should expect to have out the gates, it’ll make addressing the project easier so we will be calling this setting ‘Wove’ if you’ll allow me the wordplay.
I hope you’ll all forgive this being a shorter post, but it’s mainly been designed to establish the project as a whole. Next week we’ll start looking at some of the basic concepts and the roles we want them to hold. I’m thinking we mix up some of the expectations…
Weaving Worlds 