Personal Worldbuilding Foundations

[quinron]

I've recently made the final shift from working passively on my most recent setting to using it to run my games. It's not particularly well fleshed out - I like to leave plenty of wiggle room because my players tend to have better memory regarding aspects of the world that they've influenced the creation of than those I've thrust at them as givens. This has made me reflect, though, on what hard and fast parameters I do establish when creating a new world that help to direct the further development of the world. I'd regard these as my personal "springboard" elements.

Disregarding the mechanical elements (races, classes, etc.) and general land/sea distribution as obvious necessaries for any world, my first springboard tends to be climate/biome dispersal. I find that how I lay out a world's weather patterns does a lot to inform me on what creatures live where, how populations are distributed and thus how cultures differ, and how far the boundaries of civilization extend. Recently I've been able to get a lot out of climate by choosing the homelands for several races before I determined the climate layout, which led me to develop histories for their cultures that would explain their presence in otherwise incongruous regions.

Is there a specific concept you alway start with to get the ball rolling? I think getting an idea of what others consider fundamental for their worlds could help us think critically about aspects of our worlds we might gloss over otherwise.

[Eldan]

I mostly tend to ignore geography at first and start with either politics (and factions) or mythology. Mostly because I find those more interesting to write.

[2D8HP]

I just think of visual scenes to describe to the players, and then I build a world around them (if it even gets that far).

I've totally ripped-off been inspired by scenes from Conan the Destroyer, and Young Sherlock Holmes and lately I'm thinking of:

Spoiler: This

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Viking kids vs Morlocks ...

The PC's are adolescents and very young adults in an isolated village where two summers ago all the fighting age men, and many of the women left on a "trading" mission, and have not returned, so the elders of the village at a moot in the godshall have some of the youth accompany "old Ragnar", a one armed former Viking (who will die of natural causes soon after they set sail) as their guide.

What they find is that nearby they are de-populated and sometimes burned towns with no bodies and little evidence of what happened.

Upon returning home (assuming they do), they find their village simillarly emptied, with cooking fires still smoldering, and in the distance a low thumping sound, like a muffled hammering.

If they seek out the source of the sounds, they find what look to be new wells outside the village, but they see no water at the bottom, and ha hand and foot holds along the sides, and descending and exploring leads them to discover albino "Goblins" leading the enchanted people of their village deeper into the earth, and then....
....well basically the Goblins are the Morlocks in the 1895 Time Machine novella, and the 1960 film, led by albino Drow/Elves not unlike the character played by Jeremy Irons in the 2002 film.

Further exploration by the PC's leads them to find tunnels made by digging machines (like in At The Earth's Core), and locales like in Journey to the Center of the Earth (ruins and dinosaurs!), and a civilization a bit like the Selenites in First Men in the Moon.

Spoiler: Some images that inspired me

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[Knaight]

I build around themes and central conflicts, or around specific points of inspiration (often historical periods, but I did once design a sci-fi planet in a planet hopping game around a greenhouse design textbook a friend owned).

[Lleban]

I like to start off with a combination of themes and maps. First I like of a central theme or general aesthetic, then I build a map around it.

[sktarq]

Useually it comes from a quick mix of elements.

But biggest are theme, mood, style, and a couple starting mental images.

So I start with how do I want things to feel, and work out what sort of scenarios play well with that and then start figuring out why those things would develop. then it is a tennis match of "what does this need/imply exists in order to function" and "what are the consequences of this new thing appearing in my world" all the while looking to create plot hooks and keeping in mind the themes and moods. . . .

[Yora]

I start with deciding what region and period from history I want to use as my main reference point for how society is structured. This determines how large countries will get, what kings of government they have, and what level of technology the people will be using. To me this always has to come at the very first before any further choices can be made.
Second I chose what region of the world I chose as main reference for how the landscape of the described parts of the setting looks. This can be a completely different geographical region than the cultural region I chose in the first step. (And I think it's much more interesting when they are.)
Third I decide on some cultures from history that I use as main references for how people and settlements look and what weapons and fortifications they have.

Then it's on to the finer details. Mostly the supernatural stuff like monsters and magic. It also includes giving some thought to what the primary four to six resources are that dominate the economies of countries and the trade between them. That's something that needs to be decided before making a map. Justifying how a country can exist after its geography is already fixed feels needlessly complicated to me. With fiction, you have the luxury of being able to come up with the source after you already defined the result.

When I have all these, I have a pretty good idea how the setting looks and feels like. From this point, I can go into starting specific peoples and states. And it's only after I have decided what countries I want to have in the setting that I start to think about how they could all be fitting on a map. Rivers and mountains are placed appropriately so that the positions of different landscapes isn't completely nonsensical.