--- name: fiction_worldbuilding description: >- Build a fictional world that holds together as linked systems: physical geography and climate first, then resources and economy, governance and power, belief and daily life, with a consequence cascade run on every major invention and a world bible that keeps canon checkable in seconds. Use when creating a new setting, expanding an existing one, fixing contradictions, or auditing whether a world change breaks the story built on it. metadata: category: writing --- # Fiction Worldbuilding ## Purpose Build one world as one system, in a fixed order, instead of collecting cool details in piles that contradict each other later. Geography decides what people can eat, trade, and defend. That decides who holds power. Power and lived hardship together shape what people believe and how they spend a day. When a writer changes one part, the rest moves. This skill makes that movement visible before it reaches the page, and it keeps the result in a world bible the writer can check in seconds. The method draws on three practitioner frameworks. Patricia C. Wrede's Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions, hosted by SFWA, supply the question banks by domain. N. K. Jemisin's macro and micro split supplies the build order: physical world first, society second. Brandon Sanderson's laws for magic supply the rules for any speculative element. Real physical geography supplies the constraints underneath all of it. ## Workflow ### 1. Anchor the world in two sentences - Write the premise in one sentence: where the story happens, who lives there, and what pressure they live under. - Write Element X in one sentence. Element X is the one invented change that makes this world differ from a plain historical analogue: a magic system, a dead god, a second moon, a plant that stores memories, a climate event that never ended. One change only at this stage. Everything else in the build must either cause Element X or follow from it. - If the writer wants two big changes, build the first one all the way through steps 2 to 7, then add the second and run step 7 again. Two untested changes at once hide which one broke the logic. ### 2. Lay the physical base Work in this order and write each answer down. Do not skip to culture yet. - Plates and relief. Pick how the main landforms formed. Convergent boundaries, where plates push together, produce mountain ranges and volcanism. Divergent boundaries, where plates move apart, produce rifts and new crust. Transform boundaries, where plates slide past each other, produce fault lines and earthquakes. A writer does not need plate maps for a single village story, but the main range, the main river system, and any volcano or quake zone in the story need a cause that agrees with the map. - Rivers flow downhill to a sea, a lake, or an inland basin. Settlements that farm or trade sit on water first and on roads second. Place the capital and the major towns only after the rivers are placed. - Latitude and climate controls. Set climate from five controls, not from vibes: latitude, distribution of land and water, ocean currents, atmospheric circulation, and topographic barriers. Land heats and cools faster than water, so deep interiors swing harder between seasons than coasts do. Warm currents move toward higher latitudes and cold currents toward lower latitudes, and both change coastal weather. Use the Koppen groups as a quick sanity check: A tropical, B dry, C temperate, D continental, E polar, classified by temperature and precipitation patterns. - Rain shadow check. Where a range stands in the path of moist air, the windward side gets the rain as air rises, cools, and condenses. The leeward side gets dry sinking air and far less rain. If a lush forest and a desert sit side by side, the range, the wind direction, or Element X must explain the split. - Seasons, hazards, and resources. Name the growing season length, the two worst recurring hazards, and the resources each region has in surplus and in deficit: grain, timber, metal, salt, stone, horses, fresh water. Surplus and deficit lists drive step 3. A region with no deficit has no reason to trade, fight, or travel, and stories stall there. Output of this step: a rough map or a written gazetteer list, plus one climate note and one surplus and deficit list per major region. ### 3. Derive the economy from the map - Staple first. Name what most people eat, what it costs in labor to produce, and what happens in a bad year. Wrede's questions press on exactly this: how people make a living, what counts as a luxury and why, and what ratio of food producers to town residents the tech or magic level can support. - Trade follows surplus, deficit, and transport cost. Rivers and coasts move heavy goods cheaply compared with overland hauling, so bulk goods travel by water where water exists. List the three main trade goods, their origin, their destination, and the route. If a good is valuable enough, someone will tax it, guard it, steal it, or forbid it. Note which one applies. - Money and work. Pick how people pay: coin, credit, barter, labor obligation, or a mix by class. Name five ordinary jobs, five skilled jobs, and who is not allowed to do them. Name what a day laborer earns in food terms, for example a day of work buys a stated amount of grain. Invented numbers are fine here as canon, provided they stay consistent and the bible records them. - Scarcity is plot. Every shortage the economy creates is a pressure the story can use. Record shortages in the bible under Open Pressures, not in loose notes. ### 4. Derive governance from the economy - Who controls the surplus controls the politics. Ask who owns or taxes the staple, the trade route, and the main hazard defense: the granary, the bridge, the dam, the wall, the wells. That holder is the real power, whatever the titles say. Jemisin's micro worldbuilding starts here, with who has power and how roles get assigned. - Form follows reach. A ruler can only govern as far as orders and soldiers can travel and return in a tolerable time. Mountains, deserts, and winter seas cut reach. Where reach ends, expect local autonomy, smuggling, dialects, and rival law, even inside one claimed kingdom. - Law in daily terms. Write down who judges a theft, who can carry weapons, how inheritance works, and what happens to a stranger with no local kin. Keep it to rules a character will actually meet in a scene. Leave constitutional theory for worlds where a scene needs it. - Conflict inventory. List the two groups whose interests cannot both win: upstream dam holders and downstream farms, port merchants and inland lords, temple grain stores and a hungry city. A world with no structural conflict needs Element X or a hazard to supply the pressure, and the writer should know that before drafting. ### 5. Derive belief and daily life from lived conditions - Belief answers the hazards people cannot control. A flood culture, a drought culture, and a quake culture build different rituals, calendars, and ideas about fault and luck, because they fear different things. Start from the hazard list in step 2 and the shortage list in step 3, then write what people pray about, swear by, and blame. - Calendar follows work. Festivals land where the labor year allows them: after harvest, before planting, at the return of fish or rain. Naming a midwinter feast in a place with no hard winter is a tell that the culture was copied, not derived. - Daily life check. Run a short pass of Wrede's daily life questions for the main setting: how people bathe, dispose of waste, tell time, furnish a room, treat foreigners, and mark birth and death. Answer only what a scene could touch. Depth in the places the story visits beats thin coverage everywhere. - Taboos need a material root or a stated exception. A food taboo in a famine prone region, a ban on iron near a sacred site, a rule about speaking a dead person's name: each should trace to a resource, a hazard, a past event, or Element X. If it traces to nothing, mark it as a deliberate mystery in the bible or cut it. ### 6. Add the speculative system under stated limits Apply this step to magic, advanced technology, psionics, or any invented physics. Sanderson's laws, stated plainly: - First Law: a writer can solve conflict with a system in a satisfying way only in proportion to how well the reader understands that system. Systems the reader does not understand can create wonder and danger, but they cannot fairly resolve a climax. - Second Law: limits, weaknesses, and costs are more interesting than powers. Write the cost before the second power. Costs can be physical, economic, social, legal, or spiritual, but at least one cost must bite in ordinary use, not only in extremes. - Third Law: expand what the system already does before adding a new ability. Each expansion should follow from an existing rule plus a condition in the world built in steps 2 to 5. - Hard or soft, choose on purpose. Hard systems have explained rules and can carry problem solving and detective style plots. Soft systems stay partly unexplained and carry awe, horror, and faith. Mixing them works when the bible states which parts are hard and which are soft. - Social embedding. A usable system changes jobs, prices, law, and worship. Run the system through steps 3 to 5 quickly: who can use it, who licenses or forbids it, what it costs in the market, and what ordinary people believe about it. If nothing changes, the system is decoration, and the story should treat it as decoration. ### 7. Run the consequence cascade on every major change Do this for Element X, for each speculative system, and for any late invention the writer adds mid draft. Use the worksheet in `references/consequence-worksheet.md`. One pass takes about fifteen minutes and saves a rewrite. - First order: write the direct effect in one line. Example form: the change, then who gains the new ability or resource, then what they do with it in the first year. - Second order: write the consequences of that effect. Prices move, people migrate, rivals copy or counter the change, institutions react. Ask the Wrede question for institutions: who certifies, taxes, or bans this, and what happens to people who do it without permission. - Third order: write the consequences of the second order effects, at five to twenty years out. Norms shift, a new class forms, an old craft dies, a belief hardens or breaks. Check whether a feedback loop forms, where a later effect strengthens or weakens the first effect. - Contradiction sweep: compare the cascade against the map, the economy notes, and the bible. A change that gives a desert city unlimited fresh water must rewrite its trade list, its power holder, and at least one ritual. If the cascade sheet shows no changes outside its own section, the pass was too shallow. Run it again and follow the money, the food, and the hazard. - Keep or cut decision: keep the change only if the writer accepts its second and third order effects as canon. Record accepted effects in the bible the same day. Rejected effects go in the bible under Ruled Out, with a one line reason, so a later draft does not reintroduce them by accident. ### 8. Keep the world bible as the single source of truth - Use the structure in `references/world-bible-template.md`. Sections: Canon Rules, Geography and Climate, Resources and Economy, Governance and Law, Belief and Custom, People and Language, Speculative System, Timeline, Naming and Spelling, Open Pressures, Ruled Out. - The five second rule: any fact a writer needs mid scene must be findable in under five seconds of scanning, by heading or by search. One fact lives in one place. Cross references point to that place instead of repeating the fact, because repeated facts drift apart. - Canon states: mark each entry as Locked (appears in finished text, cannot change without a retcon note), Set (decided, not yet on the page, can change if the bible logs it), or Open (a question, not a fact). Never let an Open entry get quoted in a draft as if it were Set. - Update at the end of a writing session, not during a scene. Add new names, spellings, distances, prices, and rules the session created. A bible that lags one chapter behind is still useful. A bible that lags a whole draft behind is a second manuscript to reconcile. - Validate the file with the checker in `scripts/bible_check.py` before a revision pass. It reports missing sections, entries with no canon state, and duplicate headings. ## Output Contract When building or auditing a world, return these items in this order: - Anchor: the premise sentence and the Element X sentence. - Physical base: regions with climate note, surplus, and deficit, plus the hazard list. - Linked systems summary: economy, governance, and belief, each in three to six lines, each line traceable to a physical fact or to Element X. - Cascade sheet: first, second, and third order effects for Element X and for any other major change, with feedback loops and contradictions flagged. - World bible: the populated template, or an update list for an existing bible, with canon states marked. - Open questions: only the questions that block a scene or a chapter, each with the cheapest way to decide it. Park the rest under Open in the bible. When auditing an existing draft instead, return a contradiction list first: each item names the two facts that clash, where each appears, and the smaller fix that keeps the most finished text intact. ## Operating Rules - Build in order. Physical base before economy, economy before governance, governance and lived conditions before belief. Skipping ahead produces cultures that could live anywhere and therefore feel like nowhere in particular. - One invented change at a time through the cascade. A world can hold many inventions. It cannot be debugged if they all arrive at once. - Respect real geography unless the world says why it differs. Rivers flow downhill, rain shadows dry the leeward side, interiors swing harder than coasts. Element X can override any of this, but the override is canon and belongs in Canon Rules. - Never present an invented number as a real world fact. Numbers inside the fiction, such as prices, distances, and populations, are canon for that world. Numbers about the real world in the skill text come from the sources file and nowhere else. - Depth over density. Expand a region, a system, or a custom the story uses before inventing a new one. A continent of one line entries helps no scene. - The bible is the truth, not memory and not the draft. When draft and bible disagree, decide once, fix the loser, and log a retcon note if the fact was Locked. - Do not answer every question in any checklist. Wrede's own framing is that the questions provoke thought about how a setting hangs together, and a writer should use what helps and leave the rest. The same applies to this skill. - Worked material lives in `references/`: the consequence worksheet, the world bible template with a filled example world, and the domain question banks. Keep this file as the sequence and the rules.