Building Ethoas — Worldbuilding fundamentals

Every story, no matter how big or small, needs some level of worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe.
Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding

When I think about stories, I see three fundamental concepts; plot, characters and context.

A good plot keeps us engaged.

We identify with and create emotional bonds with well-written characters.

But the context, the little details, the surroundings are what help us believe that the story could actually be true.

Building a whole new fantasy world is a long process. I’m not joking when I say it can take decades or even a lifetime. Tolkien started working on his world around 1910 and he constantly kept revising and changing it up until his death in the early 70s. I started working on Ethoas over 7 years ago and I’m nowhere near done. I keep going back to things I once thought made sense and completely rewrite them. I evolve the world as I learn more about life itself. It’s an interesting process and I honestly don’t think I’ll be ever done with it.

It’s unlikely, however, that you need a fully flashed out world to tell stories. In fact, writing stories can help further build your world once you have the fundamentals down. But how do you create the fundamentals?

My Framework

I distilled down my process into three approaches. They tackle different things but are complementary to each other.

On the bottom is the Universal scale.

Here I define everything that is fundamental to the whole universe; think laws of physics, how things came to be, what are the propelling forces and how do they manifest in life.

For example, Ethoas is a world in my (so far unnamed) fantasy universe where there is a set amount of energy that can only be transferred, but not created or destroyed. At the beginning of time, there were 12 deities who could use and manipulate energy in any way they wanted. One of them, Annu, created the planet Ethoas where my stories take place.

Of course, that’s just a minor snippet of the whole thing, but you get the idea. Basically these are rules that simply cannot be broken.

Next up is the Macro scale.

There’s a vast amount of topics that can go into this layer. Everything from cosmology, geology, geography, biology to politics, laws, diplomacy, power dynamics, economics, philosophy, culture, architecture, religion, warfare, etc. It’s a never-ending list of high level concepts that shape the state of life on a specific planet.

My advice here is try not to tackle all the topics at once but rather as they come up. You can pick one that you like and start building on it. When you bump into the first question of “okay, but how does this relate to X?”, you can do a superficial take on topic X until you find the answer. Many times, it’s not quite so easy, but we do have to start somewhere.

At the very least you need a good grasp of at least a few groups of inhabitants and their relations towards each other.

Then there is the Micro scale.

This is probably the closest to us as individuals. Essentially this comes down the community or the individual level. Here we can start thinking about traits, core values, morals, person-to-person interactions, small-scale politics, relationships, etc. These are all things that should help you create more complex characters that don’t feel very binary.

I find it extremely useful when I’m designing a new character to understand the social dynamics that fundamentally shaped them as they grew up. It helps me answer a lot of “but why?” questions that I otherwise couldn’t.

This framework works fairly well for me. It helps me introduce new concepts into Ethoas and weed out the ones that I think could be good but ultimately end up falling short. One of the drawbacks, of course, is that the lower the level of the pyramid I want to change, the bigger the ripple effect it causes.

There’s no strict rule on which level to start on. Ideally you have the fundamental rules before you dive into the macro or micro levels but by no means is it impossible to start on the micro level and work your way back to the universal level.

It took me a couple of years to conceptualise my own way of working but now I find it invaluable. These are just the very basics though. We’ll dive deeper into specifics in upcoming blog posts.

If you want to get a discussion rolling feel free to leave a message below and I’ll do my best to answer! I’m really interested in hearing what’s worked for you and what hasn’t.