How to Write A Novel: Part 2: World Building

[Partizan]

One of the odder quirks of my personality is that, when asked a direct question (in person), I am unable to lie. Nor do I seem to be able to evade. Instead, if you ask me a direct question, you get a direct answer. And every so often, I meet somebody who, in an effort to make friends, asks me what I do for fun. The answer, that I write novels for fun, always seems to get the same response question: "How do you write a novel? Because I've got this really great idea for a novel, and I was wondering....". The answer is always disappointing: practice, practice, and more practice.

But I have found that it is easier if there is something of a method involved, and this is the method that I have created to do so. It is not perfect, or even close to it—but it is relatively simple (to me, anyway), and it is fairly quick to run through. And, most importantly, it's the complete method—no seven steps to write a novel, no six things to avoid, or five things to include. This is the whole enchilada. The real deal. The system and process of turning a random idea into a novel, from first inspiration to to the last words written on the paper. As for turning it into a good novel? Well...that's a little more complicated. And, honestly, the entire reason why I just write novels for a hobby, instead of for a living, is that I still don't think that I've really got it down.

I am sharing this method because I feel it will be helpful to many of the forum-goers at SV, many of whom seem to wish to write novel-length tales, but have never seen somebody really go through an in-depth process with them, so they can know what the hey they're looking at needing to do in order to make a novel come together. This process isn't taught in school, I've never seen an actual class for it (although I've heard of a few), and I've never found a good account of how to do so online, although I have looked. So I've posted this.

I would like to thank @sunandshadow for her excellent work in helping to edit this section--this thread would be much less coherent without her questions, and would be missing several quite critical pieces altogether.



I have divided this method into six sections ( Basics, World-building, Characterization, Plotting, Writing, and Detailing), both for ease of reading, as my posts tend to be rather wordy, and to allow me to post pieces of this without getting distracted by something shiny, and forgetting the whole idea. Each section contains potentially over-detailed explanations for each step and component in that section, and what purpose each part serves, and then includes a sample, where I have taken an idea and run it through the process, so that you can get some idea of how it works. You will probably find yourself using a modified version of this system, if you use it at all—among other things, I have a massive tendency to make things more complex than they need to be, so if you can simplify, I urge you to do so.

Finally, a word of warning, and a plea for help: this is not the only style or method for writing a novel out there, and my own methods are influenced quite heavily by the fact that I have more than a few things that are decidedly odd going on in my brain. As it stands right now, these instructions do not cover all methods and styles of writing, no matter how much I would prefer that they do. So if you see something that this method leaves out, and which you feel is really important, please, let me know, and I will try to include it. This is meant for all prospective writers, not just those whose brain works like mine--so anything that can be included to broaden its information base will be greatly appreciated.


World Building:

Every story you ever write will occupy its own world. Sometimes, this world will be much like the modern world, with only the fictional characters and/or locations you've created to make it something else. Sometimes, it will be only a bit different, either darker, or lighter, but still somewhat similar. And sometimes, the world your story occupies will be dramatically different from the world we live in, either by means of supremely advanced technology, or by magic, or by any number of factors.

This is important, because the world in which your story exists is the primary means for you to create restrictions and constraints upon your story. These constraints and restrictions will, in turn, provide the basis for much of the tension within your story. The nature of these constraints may vary, and in most cases will vary a great deal, particularly between two stories of different genres or sub-genres. In point of fact, one of the things that marks a series as...well, as a series (as opposed to a simple collection of stories that happen to feature the same characters), is the simple fact that the constraints and the environment either do not change, or notably change primarily in direct relation to the main characters' actions.

Let's take an example of these constraints from a story we all know and are familiar with: Star Wars. To specific, I'm taking this example from Episode IV: A New Hope, because that's my favorite, and because that is the movie where this is most apparent. Now, if you will recall, all of the sides involved in that movie operate under a series of constraints that they must overcome to be successful. The Empire has to find the Rebel base, and do so semi-quickly, before the lack of support in the Imperial Senate can become disastrous. This, too, is a problem, because the Imperial Senate controls the bureaucracy, without which the Empire cannot rule over the worlds that it rules (if you ever read the books set soon after Episode VI, back before Disney bought Star Wars, you find out that the Emperor had to sort of reinstate the Senate within a few years of its dissolution--he just couldn't control the Empire otherwise, no matter how much fear he could instill in the population). The Empire, then, needs a quick and spectacular victory, which the Death Star is well equipped to provide...but without knowledge of where to strike, the Death Star is useless, and is basically just another expensive toy for the Emperor to play with. The Rebels, on the other hand, are short of manpower, ships, equipment, and everything else. There is no widespread confidence that they can beat the Empire, there is no network of supporters they can use to spread their version of events, and there is no way for them to be anything more than a pinprick in the Empire's side. They have to win, to win big, and to make sure that it is not a pyrrhic victory. More, because of where the Empire intercepts Princess Leia, they also have to find a way to convey vital information across half a galaxy, and then find a way to destroy the largest war vessel ever built.

These are the constraints that both sides face. They won't change, no matter what else happens during the course of this story. Why not? Because these are the fundamental building blocks that deliver the tension, and make for an interesting conflict. You could have had Star Wars without these constraints, but it would not have been as good, the tension wouldn't have been as real, and there would have been much less reason for the Empire to let Princess Leia escape, or for the Rebellion to only take out the Death Star at the very last minute...and it would have left the sequels making little to no sense at all. Change any of these details, and the fundamentals of the plot vary dramatically. I could go on, listing other constraints, some major, some minor, but you get the idea--these are the details that force the plot to assume a certain shape.

Part of the reason why you need to settle on a plot archetype so early in the process is so that you can generate these constraints without blocking yourself off from the eventual ending you envision, or changing the nature of the conflict. It is possible to do this without a plot archetype, and while writing a story without this world building is frequently done--indeed, my own first novel length story was written with nothing in the way of world building--sitting down and doing the world building first makes it much faster, smoother, and easier. I'm still ironing out mistakes in continuity and tone in my first novel, almost eight years after completing it. My last novel was written in half the time, and I have yet to find any mistakes of continuity, or major plot holes (sadly, the style I tried to write that work in fell rather flat, so I won't be submitting it for publishing). That is how much of a difference this step makes.

So what does world-building cover? World-building is, simply put, the construction and the design of the mostly artificial world in which your stories take place. By doing this, you create the scenery--the game board, if you will--on which your story plays out. This can be a small town in Maine (population: 600, plus all the murder victims), it can be a vast, sprawling fantasy world, it can be an entire galaxy filled with Jedi and Sith Lords...or it can be something as simple as a small, nuclear family, and the neighborhood in which they live. Big or little, long or short, everything that restrains and contains your story and characters will exist within your world-building. This covers all the details that are going to be static—while you can change things about the world in which the story operates, you really sort of cannot, not without displaying an enormous amount of effort, and not without having very long-lasting and far-reaching repercussions in your story. Often times, the very act of changing these details and features is part of what signifies that things have come to a head...or that the story has come to its symbolic close, that everything has now been set, and that all that remains is to see the final elements of your tale play out, and what happens when the gambits all run their course.

Oddly enough, this can occasionally mean that world-building entails actual characters, especially in closer, more intimate stories, whose main cast is only a handful of people. In such a scenario, any character who exists only to fill one role (for example, that of yelling at the protagonist to "get back to work") will be, to all intents and purposes, part of your story's furniture. When that character finally changes, it is what marks the story's completion, and the protagonist's success, or failure, as being permanent.

Just to emphasize what this means: world building is about creating the barriers that constrain your characters' actions, and the obstacles they must overcome. It is about the things that restrict the reader's interest to just the story you're telling, and details that make it impossible (or at least impractical) for the story to turn out any other way. Don't be afraid that you'll lock yourself out of future possibilities, however--this is set in concrete, yes, but the secret to fixing a mistake that is set in concrete is to be willing to pour more concrete. The reason I have set up this whole method in the manner that I have is to allow users to quickly and cleanly go back and correct errors, and fix mistakes.

Practically speaking, world building will typically include things like geography, history, vital statistics (you can fudge these—unless exact numbers are important, don't worry about them, so long as you've got ballpark figures), relative affluence levels, relative tech/magic levels, and general issues that the population is concerned about. It will also include whatever power blocs exist within your story, how they are arranged, why they take the position that they do, and so forth and so on. In certain circumstances, particularly those that seem to arise most often when the protagonist must struggle primarily against themselves, the world building will also include those one-dimensional characters who have authority or unalterable influence over the protagonist, particularly those who are, for all intents and purposes, faceless. Perhaps most importantly of all, however, it will include its own set of themes and morals, both of which will have an impact upon--indeed, will generally be the core framework for--the world you build for your story.

Ideally, at least in my mind, there should also be one or more points of tension built in to your story's world itself, which exist in addition to the more obvious forms of tension expressed within your story's plot, core conflict, and idea. These points of tension will mark ongoing struggles, something that can often vastly enhance your options farther down the road. You don't have to include these tensions in your story—not all limitations in life are visible to any but the closest of insiders--but creating them will allow you to predict their effects, and will provide an additional source of friction that you can exploit to create additional drama. Personally, I almost always use these, either directly, or not...but part of the mental issues I have means that I am predisposed to prefer more complex methods of doing pretty much anything, including writing. You may find it easier to rely upon character interactions and/or plot tensions.

Typically, the way I write, world building must come first. This is because I am, literally, too creative—I have been accused of living outside the box, not just thinking outside the box, and unless I have some kind of constraints, I cannot really focus that creativity in such a way so as to produce a coherent story. This means that, once I've built the world, it is ironclad. I can go back, and add extra bits, and on occasion I will change this or that detail to because it allows this, that, the other thing, and these details over here to become an issue, or to better connect internally, but once I've started the story, the world itself becomes ironclad. This means no ret-cons, no alterations to fit the plot, nothing. Once Plotting is completed, only the minor details may be changed, and if I do change them, they have to stay changed throughout the entire story (this typically means that only names get changed). This makes for a much easier and smoother writing experience, at least for me, and will typically let me add some of the challenge I feel in working in these constraints into the story itself.

However, that said...mistakes will happen. In fact, if computer programming statistics are to be believed, you'll probably make a mistake roughly once per paragraph on average. Most of these mistakes will be minor. Some of them...not so much. Sometimes, I do set up a world where I cannot complete the story while remaining within the constraints that I have set up. This is very rare, because, with my unmatched brilliance (stop laughing, dammit! I can too be brilliant! Stop laughing, I said! Darn it! Why can't anybody ever take me seriously?!), I rarely make mistakes of any kind. However, on occasion, I do make mistakes. When that happens, oddly enough, the answer is very simple: go back to the world-building document you've created, and look at what you have to change to make things work. Until you hit the actual Detailing section, you can still go back and make changes--in fact, the entire reason why Writing and Detailing are two different sections is to allow for the relatively quick and painless correction of errors, without causing inconsistency or plot holes. It sounds like extra work...but when you have to go back and correct a mistake, having a coherent map of what's happening, why, when, and where, allows you to not only quickly go back and change one or two things, but also to quickly change all the dependencies that your change would alter.

Finally, a word of warning: if you are one of those fortunate souls who writes fan-fiction, you might be telling yourself that this section is one you can safely skip...or, at least, simply skim. It is not. Fan-fiction, just like any other form of writing, will require you to create your own world, just as you would for any original fiction. The primary difference is that you've got the work of somebody else to build upon, making it much closer to something like a story set entirely in the modern day, rather than a purely fantasy or science fiction story. This is part of the reason why all the best fan-fiction you'll see tends to focus at least in part upon an alternate interpretation of the world, or upon a world with a few key details that have been altered. In other words, fan-fiction is, if you want to make it good, every bit as demanding and difficult as writing original fiction...if not more so, since the original constraints you are working with are decidedly not your own.


Setting the Tone of your World
This part is all about how you want your world to be perceived. Is it a nice place to live? Is it an awful place to visit? Is it thriving, or decaying, is it young, or old, vibrant, or careworn, and so forth and so on. In short, you are asking yourself how this world will appear to others.

I cannot emphasize enough how critical this is...and how little this should have to do with how the characters perceive the world. The tone of the world sets the emotional and moral constraints of your story, and will determine the fundamental reality of how the story feels to your audience. Most of the rest of your world building will be about logistics, barriers, situations, problems, and so forth and so on—but the tone is all about the emotional impact, about what it feels like to live in the world that you have created. Is it fun? Is it bloody? Do people expect to live for a long, long time, or are they young and reckless (even when they're eighty years old)? Questions like these are what determines—or even conveys—your themes and messages throughout the course of the story.

Are things getting better, or worse?
This question is arguably one of the most important questions about the setting that you can answer, because it informs you, the author, of how the general population will react...as well as giving you a general idea of the tensions involved, how far the rest of the world is prepared to go, and so on and so forth.

Generally, in a world that is getting better, people will react a little bit more positively to the main characters' eccentricities. They will be a little bit more willing to take a risk, a little bit more willing to open up, and so forth and so on. Expect the world to come across as a slightly brighter place, no matter how dark the rest of the story might come across...so a world that is plagued by demons, the hungry dead, and so on and so forth may well be getting better, and would thus appear to be slightly happier than a world that is slowly being destroyed by the same. I honestly don't know why this happens, but it's actually a recorded historical phenomenon.

Incidentally, how good or bad things already are at the start of the story does not have any impact upon this. Also, different groups may and likely will have a different opinion on this matter, especially if your story is operating on a large scale...and those whose opinions differ will often have other fundamental differences from each other. Both of these things are very important to remember, because there can be and often is a very strong cyclical element to the answer of this question (sometimes directly, as is often the case in tourist towns), which is part of the reason why I suggest doing world building first, since it will can often have a direct impact on characterization. Neither answer needs to be permanent—there are lots and lots of stories (both real and fictional) where, during the course of the story, this answer changes—so all you're really looking at here is whether things are getting better or worse at the start of the story.

The answer to this question can also be "No", indicating that, for whatever reason, things are currently remaining locked in a stasis. In this case, an outside (or not) force, or some other mechanism, will usually be operating to keep things from getting better or worse. In such a case, your story's characters will typically not have any real or significant power over their own fate (or if they do, the rest of the world they live in will not), and that will show in their characters. In such a case, there will be a certain degree of pressure building up to break the stasis, as well as a certain degree of cynicism about what the results will be. For examples of an environment that is being maintained by an outside force, look at Egypt in the late 1800s, or China at about that same time period. Typically, for an environment that is being maintained without outside intervention, you are looking at something seriously corrupt and/or screwed up—several countries have tried this over the millennia, but only the Chinese and a few other cultures have ever managed to pull it off for any length of time.

Finally, there is a fourth answer to this question: "purple". Or...well, any color, or even any word, will do, so long as it doesn't really answer the question. This applies to a frontier society, or a society that acts as one, no matter how settled it might be. The reason for this is because, should things get worse, people can just leave, while there is a steady influx of new residents who sort of counteract any tendency of things to improve. This creates a different dynamic, one that cannot truly be said to be improving, or worsening. Instead, the dynamic is simply one of expansion. In such a society, until and unless some kind of limitation is imposed, or an outside force is encountered, things don't change, not really. They just get bigger. You know...sort of like Texas. Or Russia, for those who have less faith in the bigness of Texans everywhere.


How long has this been the case?
Again, an important question, masquerading as a minor one. Basically, the longer this process has been ongoing, the more ingrained the attitudes it inspires will be...and the more likely some people are to be willing to take chances to make things change (hopefully for the better, but you never can tell with some people). This, in turn, helps to determine how the tension of the plot will interact with the world which you have built, and how complacent the rest of the world is about the conflict that the protagonist must settle, or how reluctant it is to extend assistance, even if the problem is dire, pressing, and personal for the person the protagonist is trying to help. Major players in your world will be much less willing to flex, if things have been thus for ages, and so on and so forth. If your characters are able to upset enough long-established apple carts, they may well find themselves reviled and hated, even despite the fact that they have operated to serve and save the community in which they live.


What kind of scale are you operating on?
A world that exists on a truly global scale will have a different feel, different constraints, and different kinds of opposition, than a world that exists in a small town in Maine. That's just reality. What your neighbors think is a lot less important to you if you're only there for a few days a year, after all.

We've all seen this. Epic scale stories have a different dynamic, a different feel, a different type of tension, than stories that only affect a local community or even a single neighborhood. The smaller stories can be no less dangerous, no less important, but, somehow, they feel different. I couldn't tell you why, but they do. Certainly, different techniques are typically required to tell an epic scale story, but the difference does not end there, because many of the same techniques can be used to tell a smaller story, as well. But...epic feels different.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that a story's scale covers time, as well as space. Events that happen in a single night rarely feel as large-scale as stories that take months or years to come to pass. This doesn't mean, necessarily, that you have to narrate all the time that is taken up...nor does it mean that you shouldn't. While the time skip is a legitimate method of portraying time passing, it is very much not the only method, and it is one that can be very tricky to use. Like space, you must structure your narration to give the impression that time is covered. Most of this is covered in Plotting, but the general scale has to be decided here, because it's going to affect how much and what kinds of details you need to decide upon later on.

Generally, you're going to max out at about the same number of characters, by the way. This is an artifact of human recognition capabilities, not any personal preference of yours, so don't worry about it if your epic story has just about the same number of characters as a story that centers entirely around a small town in Maine or Vermont. However...how big a world they inhabit will have a direct impact on how they interact, how well they know each other, and how exceptional it might be for everybody to be together (or not).


How sophisticated is the society?
This actually has little to no bearing on technology—instead, it refers to how sophisticated the people living in your world are when putting together systems, tools, platforms, or ideas. Technology does enter into this question, yes, but only partially, so you also need to be looking at how complex the politics are, how many mechanisms there are to resolve conflicts, and so forth and so on.
Sophistication tends to denote thought, experience, planning, adaptability, and resources. This is not always entirely correct, of course, but it is typically the case. Typically, this is used to denote a certain degree of wealth, technical achievement, power, experience, or even just education, with the theory being that, the more sophisticated a group or society is, the wealthier and/or better educated they will tend to be. Also, typically, this will be something that is sort of decided automatically when you start putting things together...but the really, really, really good writers can portray several levels of sophistication within their stories, which means that you should really take the time to try and decide this consciously, and to try to understand the thinking of people who operate at different levels of society than your own.

A note of caution, and mention of an opportunity for more complex characterization later in the process, needs to be inserted here: just because a society or a world is sophisticated and advanced, does not mean that things like abuse, racism, sexism, ageism, and so forth and so on, are not present. In my experience, the exact opposite tends to be true—a more sophisticated form of prejudice, hatred, or other types of petty evil is not only much harder to detect (or, at least, to prove), but is also arguably more damaging, and is quite definitely much, much harder to change or to eliminate. A simple racist, for instance, might just hate a person, or hold them in contempt, or consider them to be point-blank inhuman, based solely on their skin color, be it black or white, without ever having met them. A more sophisticated racist is likely to think that, say, a Mexican is just as human as the rest of us (and that, right there, is a bad, bad sign), and that they have certainly proven themselves to be any person's equal...but they will probably also assume that a Mexican in this country would automatically be engaging in criminal or semi-criminal behavior, and would act on that assumption at the first opportunity, because, after all, that's what Mexicans do. A truly sophisticated form of racism might be to decide that a particular group is being victimized or oppressed by their treatment, which could result in the society or the person electing to take "corrective measures" that simply make the situation worse, without ever stopping to wonder why things don't seem to be changing. By displaying significantly more sophisticated forms of racism, say, you can create an unexpected quiet and often quite, quite bitter tension within your story, which can give your work a very different emotional undertone than your plot, characters, and so on would seem to indicate.


How like our own are this world's opinions and expectations?
Every work of fiction exists in an entirely fictional world. How closely the world you create correlates to the world you live in depends on your own personal tastes and preferences...but you need to know a few crucial things, because they impact a lot of other things.

One of the most crucial aspects of this is the societal opinions, expectations, and values. The difference between those you create and those that exist in the world around you will tend to reflect both in how your characters are perceived by the world they live in, and how they are perceived by the readers, as well as how sympathetic the world they live in strikes the readers. If a character is a kind and loving person, for instance, in a society where violence reigns supreme, than they'll come across very differently than a character that is fundamentally the same, but who lives in a society where peace and order are the norm. Likewise, a very violent character who fights to protect said peaceful person will often come across as inherently more noble in a society that expects and respects primarily violent actions than one who does the same thing in a more peaceful society.

Opinions and expectations are typically shaped by cultural history—a culture that has spent all of its two thousand plus year history fighting off one invasion after another, for instance, is often likely to be highly dubious when the latest band of outsiders claims to have entirely peaceful intentions. So if you're going to build a society where the opinions and/or expectations are radically different from what your audience might expect, you will likely need to have some justification. Also, this tends to combine very significantly with the question of whether a society is improving, or declining: a declining society, for instance, might be used to—almost expecting—its expectations not to be met, whereas a growing one may be much less willing to ignore a total flouting of societal expectations. Add these two factors together, and you've likely got a pretty good picture of how society in general will react to the protagonist, antagonist, and all the other characters and events of your story.


What's the predominant religious faith like?
This is closely related to the above question, and will typically have the same answer—that it's pretty close to the same as our own—but it still important, because it dictates the underlying emotional responses, as well as the internal cultural understanding of the world you've created.

For a lot of genres, such as mystery, action, and suspense, the answer will be that the religious beliefs are the same as they are in the real world (although, even here, that can be more different than you'd expect, since even different Christian denominations have different beliefs and experiences in unexpected areas). That said, of course, you can create a very real element of difference from other entries in those genres by the simple expedient of simply making the main characters adherents to a different religion, such as Buddhism, or Islam, both of which may have different reactions to a murder, for instance, and both of which expect different sets of limitations from their followers. Even if you elect to keep the same kind of religion as is standard, however, your experiences with, and expectations of, that religion will have a direct impact on the emotional aspects of your novel...and, generally, upon your audience.

For fantasy, alternate history, historical fiction, romance, science fiction, and others, however, religion becomes very important, and not at all assured to be Christian or psuedo-Christian. In this case, you really need to know how the religion differs from the Christian faith your culture will expect (if you live in America, or in most of Europe), or from whatever faith is predominant where you live. This is going to dominate almost every aspect of the world you create, often in ways that you do not expect, or would not think of consciously (for instance, Americans' emphasis on getting a college education is a direct result of both the Christian and the Jewish need for their adherents to be literate whenever possible/practical). For this reason, if you do not elect to use an existing religion, now is when you need to sit down and at least create the basic precepts of the faith or faiths you use. If you put together a world that includes several faiths, you will also need to include some description of how well they get along, and what they have historically thought of each other, as well, since competing religions have rarely been able to co-exist peacefully, and are thus likely to have clashed violently on one or more occasions. I strongly suggest that, for your first story in a world, you restrict yourself to only using one religion--there is no reason to go through any more work than you must, especially since you're setting up limitations, which means that you only want those that you really need to drive the story forward.

Most people learn and internalize information by actions, not just by reading or by hearing...so writing this all down means that you are much more likely to remember the basic tenants of the faith or faiths in the world you've created, and allows your subconscious much freer reign when it comes to designing characters, and creating a world in which they can live and operate.


What themes do you want expressed in your world?
This is the penultimate part of setting the tone, and is quite possibly the second most immediately important, because it determines the type of world that you're going to be putting together. These themes are not and cannot be the same as those that you chose for your Primary or Secondary themes. In point of fact, they should only be partially related to, at most, one of the two—anything more, and you start to run the risk of simply preaching to your audience. Ideally, the world theme should be unrelated to the primary and secondary themes, with you using your story to show how they are linked, and why they are integral aspects of each other...but that won't always happen.

Nor are the world themes going to be the only thing that matters when building your world. As I said before, the tone and impression of the world will actually have a greater impact on how the themes are perceived than the actual themes...which means that you will need to determine those before you determine the world's themes. Essentially, choosing your world themes is something that is done when you have determined how you wish to convey your message and your primary theme...because the world theme, together with the tone of the world, will control just about every aspect of things ranging from world building to characterization to plotting and writing.

The themes expressed in your world will convey two things: first of all, they are the fundamental basis through which you convey the justification for the protagonists' actions (and the viewpoint character's opinions); and secondly, they are the skeleton around which all of the details and the attitudes of your entire world will be constructed. You have to set this out now, before putting down the general details, or anything else, because you'll need to build all of that around your intended themes.

In theory, you could cover the other details of setting the tone after the theme, but I have learned that it seems to work better if you cover them, first—that way, you can describe something of the setting, and limit your potential themes to a relative handful that you feel can do justice to the world you are creating, while still remaining in keeping with the kind of scenario you wish to create. You don't have to wait until after the tone is set to choose the world theme, however. The two are somewhat interchangeable--I just find it easier to do it in the order I've prevented, and I'm not really clear on why. There is at least some suspicion in my heart that this has to do with how my own mind works, so other people may well find it easier to do things the other way around.


What are the general details of the world involved in the story?
Okay...all the stuff you cut from putting together your one paragraph setting description? It all goes here. Flesh it out, expand it, and make it grow, because this is the point where everything starts to show its colors, and you start to get a coherent world put together.

General details typically cover things like "how is the city/town/country governed?" and "what kind of significant events have occurred in its history?", not things like "how many people are there?" and "are they rich or poor?" You may find yourself mentioning specific names at this point, but it is unlikely, unless the person is so far removed that they play almost no part in the story, or unless it involves such a widespread popular perception of the person that it actually takes on a life of its own as almost a separate person. General attitudes will also be covered, to an extent, so that you can have some idea of this information for later, but anything that involves numbers, geography, most city/neighborhood names, and so on and so forth will usually be left out, especially if you have reason to expect that it will play a bigger part in the story later on.

By the time this is done, you should have a reasonable idea of how the world you're setting your story in looks, feels, and acts. In theory, you could stop now, and write your story just from this...but I've always found it a little bit easier, in the long run, if you continue, and start to include some semi-concrete details.




Vital Statistics:
The vital statistics of the world you've built are often going to play a much bigger part than you would think, since this impacts the...well, it actually impacts a lot of stuff, from reasonable plot progression to time scales involved, to what, exactly, the streets and the buildings look like when your viewpoint characters take a look around. I've written stories without sitting down to determine what the vital statistics are, and it's worked out pretty well—but it's faster, easier, and generally a bit cleaner to know this information ahead of time. In certain types of stories, this is actually a critical necessity—anything featuring a protracted war, for instance, will require some degree of knowledge about the vital statistics of the world it is set in, or else the war itself won't come across as believable. For others, the vital statistics will often boil down to geography, and the limitations it imposes upon locations—you can set up a lovely bit of tension inside a standard mystery story, for instance, just by setting the murder in an isolated cabin, and having so much snow around the cabin that the investigators can't get additional aid from the outside.
Most of this is all about the logistical details that you'll be building your story around. You'll be coming up with things like technologies, economies, availability of various transport modes, and so on and so forth. Typically, each hour you spend working this out before you actually start writing will save you an average of about ten hours later on. While this may seem a drop in the bucket, especially considering how many hours you will be putting in while writing your story, it most emphatically is not. Spending a week or so on the prep can easily save you months of time farther down the line, in addition to giving you a slightly higher quality story to present to your audience.


Biology And Technology Basics:
As a critical part of your decisions at this point, you're going to need to sit down and work out some details of the biology, and the technology, of the world you're creating. Be very careful, here--excessive detail is your enemy, right now, but it is very hard to tell when you've crossed the line from "not enough" to "excessive".

To a very large degree, this is the point where you're starting to create limits on characterization. If you've got elves in your story, you need to sit down, and figure out what it means to be an elf--do they sleep, how much do they eat, how long do they live, and so on and so forth. Depending on your mindset, that might be enough...or you might start going into details such as the fact that an elf's biochemistry uses a different molecule from the ATP molecule that humans use to transport energy from one point to another, meaning that elves have a higher innate stamina than humans (because energy transport is not as oxygen-intensive), but also don't have quite the same strength, because their energy transport molecule is not as efficient as ATP. This may combine with tighter bodily metabolism to mean that elves eat less than humans, but have a lot less body fat, which gives them much less long-term energy storage, meaning that elves have to eat every so often, where a human can just keep going.

Technology is somewhat similar, in that you need to mention basic technologies that you expect could dictate possibilities, as well as marking important things that set your story's setting apart from our own time (and keep in mind that what's important won't always match with what is spectacular--nobody from 1997 could possibly have realized how much smart phones would change all our lives, except for a handful of science fiction writers and readers). Although you'd think this would be simple, it can often become increasingly difficult, as the tech gap becomes greater and greater. Sometimes, if you're old enough, you can mention that the tech level is limited to the kind of thing found in, say, 2000. If you're not old enough to do this, or if you're writing science fiction, you'll have to do a fair amount of research, and you'll need to make sure to note a few cultural issues that are empowered by the differences in tech. This is especially apparent in alternate history, although it shows up pretty much everywhere, since you're partially using this to define what options are not on the table. As such, this is a part of the process that you'll be returning to, as you think of other options (or your beta readers do so), and you realize that you need to mention why those options aren't really on the table.

This means that, for technologies, you'll need to include limitations, as well as capabilities. Make note of how widely known those limitations are--most people today seem to believe that hacking is considerably more powerful than it actually is, for instance (although if you don't keep your security up to date, sometimes it is)--and keep in mind that your characters may have, as their defining traits, something which they have somehow worked out that lets them bypass one or more of those limitations. Depending on the story, this may well provide you with the bulk of your plot or character tension.


Define the Community (or communities):
The scale of the plot, and the number of people who could reasonably be expected to get involved on either side are always going to be different, unless, again, you're writing a story about a protracted and total war. If you're writing a story about the outbreak of the Ebola virus in Nigeria, for instance, the scale of your story would likely focus on the effects of the disease across the entire country's population of 186 million souls...but the actual community around which you'd write the bulk of the story would likely be the aid workers who rushed into the country to try to fight the disease back, and a handful of villages and small towns that were hit by the disease. You would almost certainly have sections of the story dedicated to looking at how the disease impacted the rest of the country, ranging from the drop in tourism (and the resentment this caused among those who depended on said tourism for their livelihoods), to how badly the country's oil production got hammered, potentially along with some of the environmental problems this caused...but the actual communities around which your story would be centered would be much, much more limited. Partly, this is an artifact of how human social consciousness works--we have an upper limit to the number of people we can relate to in our own communities. But mostly, it's a limitation caused by the fact that only a certain number of people are going to have the knowledge and the proximity required to be involved in any particular plot or scenario.

Additionally, restricting yourself to certain communities of individuals not only reduces the number of characters you need to keep track of, but also helps to explain why you've focused the story on one particular facet of the situation where you have the knowledge to speak intelligently (or at least convincingly). Needless to say, this is one of those things that you need to pay attention to, as it helps a great deal when it comes to writing a convincing story.

• Population:

You do not have to have exact numbers for the population of the communities, unless it is likely to be a plot point, but knowing something of how many people are directly involved in your story (and not just as characters) is kind of important, since this represents the total pool of available characters you have to work with. This number is typically, although not always, different from the scale you set up earlier—a story that encompasses the entire world, with seven billion people, may have a population of only six or seven hundred, depending on the size of the community or communities that are primarily involved. This will be somewhat complicated by the fact that you'll pull characters in from outside the primary communities, since that is going to be part of your tool set for putting together the plot...but the size of the primary community will still be important to determine.
This will also have an impact on characterization—a primary community of about five hundred to a thousand individuals, for instance, could reasonably expect its members to have at least been introduced to each other before the story starts, even if they've never really gotten to know each other, or worked together before. A primary community of thousands, on the other hand, will have no such expectation—their members will often be able to find references fairly quickly, but they won't be able to rely upon having met or worked with other individuals before, unless they're part of an established team or specialty within the community. Tens of thousands has its own dynamic, and so on and so forth.

• Community relationships with others:

With a few exceptions, no community exists in a vacuum. To carry on the previous example, for instance, medical aid workers tend to interact quite heavily with more established doctors and nurses, as well as the vendors and salesmen from various corporations that deal in medicines and medical equipment. Likewise, they're also likely to deal quite heavily with those people who are insane enough to fly a jet liner full of medical gear onto an improvised landing strip in the middle of what was trackless jungle twenty-four hours ago (a surprising number of these individuals make their primary living as illegal arms dealers, which also means that medical aid workers may very easily have other, rather shadier connections). These communities are likely to be outside the scope of your story—you may have one or two characters from these ancillary communities involved, but you're not going to care much about the community as a whole—but they're still important, and their interactions with the primary communities are still something you have to know about ahead of time. For instance, if I was writing a story about the above suggestion, I'd almost certainly have to have somebody who's willing to fly supplies in to the area, or who is willing to drop lots of DDT to zap mosquitoes, or...well, any number of things. But the community of pilots who do this for a living is not going to be part of the medical aid workers' community, which means that you'll need to include details on how the two communities interact in general, in addition to how the pilot in question interacts with the main characters.

This will be true no matter what the primary communities are—today's world, and any world you put together, is so complex and interconnected that it is virtually impossible for any community to exist without the ongoing aid and assistance of at least a few other communities...or, failing that, the community will have at least developed some sort of adversarial relationship with other communities.


Define the Area
This is simply a question as to where the story will be happening. Again, this is mostly about logistics, and the question of where things should happen, overall. Basically, the more of the story's geography you can map out ahead of time, the faster the actual story can be written. Try to make note of things like scale, travel times, locations, resources, and things of a similar nature. If you can, try to trace out the routes you expect people to travel...or, at least, the potential roads or routes linking point A to point B.
Oh yeah, and actually drawing a map is generally more helpful than you'd think. It doesn't have to be a good map, or pretty, just so long as you've noted the scale, and the map is somewhat accurate. If you can, you will typically find that remembering where everything is becomes much, much easier, and it will often let you visualize the locations and character progress much, much more easily (I have a whiteboard set up by my computer for just this reason, which is why you won't actually see me do much on this particular issue for the example).

• Important locations

One of the most important parts of this process will be to define those locations that are the most important to the groups, communities, and residents of the area where your story takes place...or, failing that, that are the most famous. It is entirely possible that none of these locations will ever show up in your story—I've read more than one story where this was the case—but you'll still find things to be much easier if you work these out ahead of time.

Why? Simple: these are the places that everybody knows about, that everybody can place, and that everybody gives directions by and positions themselves in relation to. This, in turn, will define neighborhoods, as well as give attitudes something of a basis in geography, like the antipathy that people living in what was once the old Confederacy often claim to feel for anybody who lives north Washington D.C. (although these days that often seems to be more about harassing people from New York City than anything real).

Because of this, while it can fairly be said that putting these locations together has little or nothing to do with being able to tell your story, it can also be said that it has everything to do with telling your story, since this will give you a feel for the world you're using, and allow you to use locations smoothly and seamlessly. This can sometimes save you almost a complete draft in its own right, and will make it much easier for your proof readers and beta readers to catch errors, since geographical errors won't be among them.

• Critical sub-locations:

This is something that is more of an issue in large-scale stories, where your cast may include certain individuals whose only relation to the story tends to take place in specific rooms or locations. Certain types of mystery stories in particular make heavy use of this—the police station will often be a critical location, where a great deal of action will take place...but there will be certain rooms in the station that are more important than others, and which will have multiple scenes taking place within them, just by the nature of the story.

This is one of those things that is more easily done once the characters are determined—hence the reason why the order in which you do these two does not matter—but it will still help to do it before you go on to plotting. Personally, I like to do this first, since I am of the firm opinion that a person is at least partially defined by their environment. Which you do first will probably rely on your personal philosophy on the matter of whether a person is defined by their environment, or whether they define their environment. Again, you won't necessarily use all of these sub-locations, and you may well find that you will be using some that you did not make note of before...but knowing which ones are available will often help you to settle things down, and will help you when it comes to creating many scenes when you are dealing with the Plotting section, as well as with Detailing.

When possible, unless you expect it to be plot relevant, or unless you expect to be spending a lot of time at that sub-location, you want to try to limit your descriptions of these places to one or two paragraphs. That said, don't worry about trying to refine the descriptions just yet—you won't want massive descriptions of these places in your story, but it's not really important enough to worry about just yet, especially if, like me, you find it easier to write six pages than to write just one paragraph.

• Culture(s)

The last (sort of) element on defining your area is defining the culture or cultures involved. This is something of a complex issue, and often involves some elements of the history that has come before, which has led to the culture in question being part of it. These cultures may be the only ones in a community...or there could be several groups of cultures within a community (this feeds back into the earlier question as to how sophisticated the population is), depending on what you need for your story to work. Different families within a community, however, that are basically the same culture, but which just hate each other, are not different cultures—these are competing power blocs, and will be dealt with later. Instead, cultures denote different sets of beliefs, and different approaches to life, that will have an impact on how people act, feel, and react.


In the Balance
When I write a story, I like to have conflict on multiple levels—not just that of the plot, but also a larger conflict that is an inherent part of the world I have created. I have noted that this is not unique to me, and that many other writers like to do something similar, since this adds an additional layer of tension to your story, and adds an additional element of triumph if the protagonist manages to triumph over this other conflict as well. For me, it's just the idea of a world that is in motion, in transition, if you will. Such a world is one that can be more believably swayed by the actions of a single individual, which satisfies my innate egomania, and presents a more believable scenario for how a person can truly triumph over the entire world at once.

Creating an inherent conflict within the world you've put together is a vital part of the world building exercise, as it opens up an enormous number of storytelling options for you to make use of. Just to start with, creating an inherent conflict allows you to build a cascade of effects within your story, allowing a seemingly minor action early on in your story to come back and play a major part later on, without stretching the bounds of credulity, or belief. In some stories, the inherent conflict you've built in to the world will actually provide much or most of the basis for the actual plot, although in others, it merely serves to add additional complications or flavoring to the story. Mysteries in particular are notable for including the world's inherent tensions as a critical plot element, although they are not by any means unique in that regard. I could go on, but you get the point.

This will often have a surprising effect on the story, the plot, the characters, and many other aspects of your story, so you should feel free to do some serious thinking about this. This is also generally the point where you create most of the history, the legends, and the myths that go into this world. By the time you've done this, and by the time you've gone through the power blocs, you've pretty much created a usable (if often somewhat basic) world.

Tensions should almost always be related in some way or another (and the relationship can be a bit twisty and torturous) to either the world theme, or the secondary theme, especially if these tensions are directly related to the plot. However, for reasons I have not been able to ascertain, tying the tensions to the primary theme simply does not work—you'll find yourself spending enough time exploring the primary theme, to make the plot of your actual story feel rushed and somewhat contrived...and the more closely the two are linked, the more blatant this seems to become. This problem, which I have seen in several genres, from multiple authors, was actually what tipped me off to the existence of secondary themes in literature in the first place, so I know that this is not just my own shortcomings kicking in. Although I don't know why this happens, what I can tell you is that the results of this mistake seem to be very consistent, and seem to be very universally and easily noticeable, once you've realized what to look for.


Basis for tension
This comes down to one question: what seems to be the problem, here?

Unfortunately, it then spreads back out again, because no problem ever exists in a vacuum. Once you've answered the "what?", you will still need to finish off the questions, asking who, where, why, when, et cetera. Basically, you will need to answer the following questions to get things filled out, and the basis for the world's inherent tension set up.

• Why is this a problem?

Just because you've created a problem does not mean that you have created a world problem—in order to do that, you have to make sure that elements of this problem show up in most aspects of the environment of the story you're telling. This means that you now need to sit down and expand the problem, so that it will tie in to increasingly large numbers of issues, get characters (and thus, readers) involved emotionally, and in general create the sort of tension that makes for good stories.
For stories that center around problems that aren't necessarily accepted by your audience as immediate evils, you will also have to write down why this is a problem at all, because that's more than likely going to be required at one point or another in your story.

• Who does it affect the most?

Life is not equal, and neither are problems—not everybody is going to be affected equally. Race relations problems, for instance, were a big problem in the American South in the 60s and the 70s, but they were much less of a problem in places like Maine, Alaska, Vermont, Hawaii, and several other states. This left those states sort sitting on the sidelines, almost existing as spectators, as the rest of the country tried to solve a real and pressing problem—while they may well have had an effect, they never really needed to get massively involved, since the problem was largely academic in their cases.

So in other words, you're going to have different groups affected differently by the problem, and to a different extent. How this pans out is going to play a large part in how the power blocs in your story are formed, so you need to be aware of this, and plan accordingly, especially if you have particular power blocs that you want to see created.

• Where are its effects most apparent?

Just like any problem is going to have different levels of impact on different people, it will also be more apparent in some locations than it will in others. That doesn't mean that people in these areas will acknowledge it as a problem, mind you—just that it will have different impacts in different places. Try and figure out the place where this is going to have the biggest impact, and mark it as such. This is going to be the ultimate destination, if the protagonist can't help to settle the world conflict...or, at least, one step on the path to that ultimate destination. Because of that, you feel free to go a little nuts with this place—mention other problems, many of which can and should be mostly unrelated, which have gotten out of control because people are so busy obsessing over the world conflict that they won't take the time to deal with them (or possibly they can't, because the world conflict is a root issue, that has to be solved for any solution to have a long-term impact).

• When does this matter?

This goes in to why the world conflict can't be built along the primary theme, because if you've done it right, the world conflict—and the world theme—should be showing itself primarily in the little things. Things like not being able to hail a taxi in the middle of downtown, or having to pander to a person one hates, because he or she controls whether or not you (or your spouse) will get that job you've been hoping for. This, in turn, means that you can build in added barriers or layers of misery or complexity for your characters, making the resolution of the plot that much more satisfying, particularly if you can use that resolution to address the world conflict as well.

World conflict should never be a driving element in the story, although it can be and often is incorporated into the plot, and sometimes into the driving elements of the story as a sort of secondary driver--that is, as the factor that drives one of the plot's primary driving elements--where it can be used to impel the characters just that little bit farther.

• How does it affect the attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions of events?

This ties very closely into when, and will have a direct impact on Characterization, particularly on the responses and attitudes of non-major characters, and on Plotting, as it presents concrete barriers and restrictions that the characters must operate within. Basically, you're looking at how this problem will complicate your characters' lives, and how the characters may or may not be able to use this to their advantage. Describing this isn't really complicated, but the eventual results you get often will be.
Note that you would think that this would include how the problem actually affects people, or how it affects the characters themselves...but it doesn't. The first question, of how it affects people, has already been answered (in "why is this a problem?"), while the second question is something that will be covered in characterization.

• How much of an impact does the problem have?

Basically, this is about how closely you're going to allow the world problem to intrude upon the plot line, later on. Sometimes, it won't really intrude at all...but on other occasions, the intrusion may be much more dramatic and pronounced, affecting why things happen, and a primary motivation for the events that drive the story. It is entirely possible to create a story where the world problem completely overshadows the plot, and this does not necessarily mark a failure on the part of the author—all it means is that the author will have to emphasize that the characters either cannot, or will not solve the problem on their own, and are trying address something very different, but which is probably either more personal, or simply more immediate than the world problem.


History of tension
The history of the world problem is where you put together the bulk of your world's history, myths, legends, and so on and so forth. This is nothing more or less than a description of what has been happening, and how things have gotten to the current state, so expect it to take several pages, and to go back years, decades, or even centuries. Your goal here is threefold: to describe why things have gotten to the point where they are in the story, to determine why the world problem is (so far) intractable, and to identify tension hooks for later construction, involvement, or arc welding. Geography and culture both will play a very heavy role in this, as will other things that you put together earlier in the world building exercise.

This typically takes several pages for me to cover, and the more you work with a world, in terms of sequels or related non-sequel volumes, the more history you'll generate, to the point where eventually you're going to find yourself with a complete world history that you've generated pretty much by accident.

One word of warning, by the way: generally, the longer a problem remains unresolved, the harder the solution seems to become, since so much emotion gets wrapped up in various viewpoints. Even if you can resolve a long-standing problem with a single stroke, the repercussions of that solution tend to be severe—a large part of what led to the fall of the USSR, for instance, came from the excesses of the solution to governmental corruption imposed by the initial Soviet governments. Keep this in mind, and understand that it is perfectly acceptable for a problem to be only partly solved, or for the world problem to be in the process of being resolved when and if the characters interfere, and try to make things better.


Popular opinion of tension
So let's say you've got this tension, and its history spans the centuries. What do people think of it? Are they right? Do they demand that their government address this problem, or do they think it can be resolved on an individual level? How ferocious are the debates about proposed solutions? How seriously do they take the problem?

One of the biggest mistakes young authors can make is to assume that, just because something is a problem, that everybody will automatically devote all their energy to resolving it. This is not true—there are a large number of problems in the world at any given time, and people generally only feel that they have the energy, resources, or even just the attention span to address one of them. This, in turn, allows for an increasing degree of tension within your story, as your major characters' perception of the problem can come to differ from that of the people around them.

Additionally, the popular perception of the world problem that you've created may hint to yet other problems, which, while outside the scope of your story, could still be used to tie your story into a larger world, galaxy, or universe. This is often used to explain why stories that are largely personal are directly linked to epic tales and actions...such is the case for Star Wars, for example, where the struggle for things like funding, ships, manpower, and accurate intelligence plagues the Rebels throughout the original three movies, but is never directly mentioned, although it is alluded to in each movie, as the Rebellion's visible military assets grow from a handful of space fighters to a force capable of fielding a massive fleet of large and powerful warships over the course of Episodes IV, V, and VI. Although the reason why this growth is possible is never mentioned directly, other media works from the time of George Lucas make it clear that the Empire had a large number of other problems to deal with, and thus initially dismissed the Rebellion as something that would crumble with time, and which didn't pose anything like the threat of the other problems to begin with.


Current status of tension
Basically, what are things like now? Are people trying to solve the problem on their own, or are they demanding that it be achieved by governmental fiat (or both? Is progress being made, are things staying pretty much the same, or are they getting worse? Is this triggering other problems, which will also have to be cleaned up...or is the problem sort of something that exists in semi-isolation?
The idea here is to generate the means by which your characters will reflect the world problem's existence, even as they carry out a plot that may or may not be directly related to the world problem. This issue right here is what prevents the world problem from turning out to be a Chekhov's gun (a Chekhov's Crisis, if you will) that hijacks the story, and takes over from the primary theme.





Power Blocs
This is something that can frequently blend into Characterization if you're not careful...and with certain types of stories, it seems to be a bit inevitable, particularly if you are writing a mystery story, or some other story that will almost automatically have a relatively small cast.

The power blocs in your story represent the competing interests that can affect the plot, as well as the different viewpoints individuals may have about both the world's theme, and the primary theme. These are the groups of people who share broadly the same views. Typically, you'll only see somewhere between one and three members of a power bloc in your actual story, unless the bloc itself is integral to the primary theme and/or the plot...but this is not a hard and fast rule, and if you want to have one or two power blocs play a more active role in the story than the rest, it would not be out of line to introduce more characters involved with those particular power blocs. Try not to do this with more than two power blocs, however, because the blocs themselves need to be oriented around the world theme, and not the story's primary or secondary themes. Even including one or two power blocs in a major way will run the risk of replacing your primary theme with your world theme—if you include three or more distinct power blocs, you move from an increasing risk to a virtual certainty, just because of the logistics required to explain why these three groups are cooperating on a matter that should be dividing them sharply.

Typically, I like to tie my power blocs to specific tension points within the world, and then build a little bit of history behind them, but you can do it the other way around—create the power blocs first, and then create the rifts and tension points to separate them. I've done this too, and it works fairly well, but I have found that I have a bad habit of losing track of the actual story if I do this, since I get so carried away creating the power blocs and their history that I forget about the actual world building, the world themes, and why the power blocs need to be in the story at all.

Often times, it seems to be the case that any story whose inherent tensions are related to the secondary theme will see the division between the power blocs based on the theme inherent to the world itself, although I have seen no such correlation to lead me to believe that the reverse must be true. Regardless, for each power bloc you create, you will need to answer certain questions. I've outlined the most common below, along with some of why they matter.

The questions below form the standard worksheet I've put together to cover the details of power blocs.


Who are they?
Basically, you need to know who they are, what they're about, and where they draw their membership from. On very small scales, this can easily cap out at five to ten individuals, by the way, although this is rarely how things seem to work in most stories. On extremely small scale stories, especially those that focus on the conflict of Man Versus Nature, this may well be nothing more than a voice in the person's head, which makes snarky comments, or just urges the protagonist to follow this or that course of action. If this is the case, don't do more than mention the power bloc's working name—the rest of this will fall into the category of Characterization.


What do they wish to accomplish?
Power blocs form around either an agenda, or a person. Of the two, the agenda is almost invariably the more dangerous, since those power blocs that form around a person will tend to be limited to the goals and the aspirations—basically, the agenda—of the person who built them. Either way, the power bloc will have certain goals and objectives that it wishes to achieve. Knowing what they are lets you determine how the bloc members will act, react, and perceive events.


What does their power come from?
This is important, since it determines why people listen to them. Typically, power blocs will base their power on one of four things: knowledge/wisdom, assets, emotional connections, or just volume. In other words, people respect a power bloc because they're the acknowledged experts in one or more fields; people will listen to them because they have control (or significant influence) over a desired asset, such as is the case with the De Beers Cartel; they will heed the bloc's words because those words resonate with their own feelings on matters; or the bloc will be able to achieve its objectives because they just drown out any opposition through sheer volume, loudness, and annoyance (basically, nobody can remember any other arguments).


How do they relate to the world problem?
Because power blocs tend to form in response to world problems, it follows that they will have a relation to this problem. This does not necessarily reflect their agenda, especially if their relationship to the world problem is one of denial, instead of attempted resolution. This ties in to public perception of the problem, by the way, so keep in mind that these need to mostly match where possible.


How do they (or will they) relate to the characters?
The answer may well be that they do not relate to the characters. They could be just a big group of powerful (or not) people, who will crush the characters like bugs out of complete indifference, or that will move to help them for much the same reasons.
This is part of why the power blocs are important, and why you need to ask these questions: power blocs can represent a very significant impact on your story, and can, if left alone, come to implement a deus ex machina or a diabolous ex machina. Both of these mark a sign of incomplete plotting, meaning that you can find yourself creating some fairly major plot holes if you're not careful...so knowing why the big good or the big bad intervene at crucial moments is likely to be fairly important.

Who opposes them, and why?
Every power bloc ever made engenders opposition. Sometimes that opposition really is not coherent or unified, and sometimes it is powerful and nigh-invincible in its prowess. Which one is which will depend on the answers to previous questions, especially the questions about the tension and how the public responds to it, as well as what you think you will need it to be in terms of story requirements.

These opposition figures mark the cultural and social divides that prevent your world or society from being strictly one-dimensional, so they are important, and will finish the job of fleshing out the world you have created. These opposing blocs, also, are not bound by any of the themes that you have created for your story—they exist entirely to highlight additional issues, which are not mentioned in your story, but which will still have an impact nonetheless. For this reason, these opposing blocs should play no direct part in the story you are creating; instead, they will simply serve to provide limitations and restrictions upon what would otherwise be an instant I-WIN button.

 

[Partizan]

World Building:
So...this is the point where I put together a world to write my story in. If you will recall, the setting I put together here is that of a world where mortals—elves, dwarfs, and humans—are essentially considered to be completely powerless, to have no rights, and for there to be no real purpose to extending any kind of respect, courtesy, or honor to any mortal or mortal community.

Normally, I write my worlds to be at least as silly and lighthearted as my actual story, because that's basically who I am. But I want to try something a bit different with this story, so I'm going to shake things up a bit. I have noticed that Earthscorpion has consistently managed to achieve very good results by contrasting what are outwardly very dark worlds with characters and plots that really sort of...aren't. I am hoping to achieve something of the layered complexity to the humor he presents, so that things strike people as being funny on multiple levels, instead of my own more shotgun-like approach to humorous writing. Don't get me wrong, I have no intention of giving up my Shotgun of Funniness—but I am starting to think that I might be able to get results that are at least as good if I take a little bit of time to aim, first.

We shell sea...er...I mean, we shall see.



Setting the Tone of your World
The tone of this world should be one of adventure, surprise, hope, and glory....but I also need strong elements of hate and rage involved with this. This should be a dark world, especially for mortals of all stripes, and it should be very obviously one where there is no hope that appeasing a local Dark Lord, or fleeing an advancing army, is going to get you much of a chance of saving your life. This should make the contrast to the characters, who are only sort of dark, and the plot, which really isn't, all the more dramatic—these characters are rising above the world around them, and doing so in a very dramatic and glorious manner.

As I mentioned before, I'm hoping to set a contrast between the world, and the rest of the story, in hopes of making the humor much more complex and capable of operating on many levels simultaneously. This is something that I personally have always struggled with, as one of the big issues with autism (from which I suffer) of any kind is that it makes it very difficult for a person to think on several levels simultaneously. This makes it very hard to write anything that is truly engaging for large numbers of people, which is something that I need to correct before I can become a serious author.

Are things getting better, or worse?
The answer is that things are generally improving, but only very, very slowly, and by very small amounts. How small an amount? Well, the situation as of two hundred years ago was such that most dragons, demons, and others like them were seriously debating whether humans were more pests who polluted good hunting grounds, or a convenient source of snacks whenever they could be caught out in the open...and while things have improved since then, they haven't improved much. Dragons, demons, giants, and other dangerous creatures still regard humans as either pests, or snacks, but by this point most of them agree that there are so many humans that exterminating them all really isn't likely to be practical. Which is progress...sort of...I guess.

Overall, what improvements have been made are primarily coming at the hands of the elves, the dwarfs, and the handful of other mortal races, all of whom have evolved defense mechanisms to ensure that they are harder to drive out of their homes. Humans have simply grown in terms of population size...but this has engendered a tertiary world theme: namely, that as your population grows, so, too, do the chances of producing truly exceptional individuals, and sufficiently exceptional mortals are starting to be unexpectedly capable of influencing the plans and actions of their betters.

So mortals in general, and humans in particular, are starting to become numerous enough to have garnered increasing levels of attention, and interest, from the various supernatural beings of the world. Whether this will be a good thing, or a bad thing, is unknown, but at least there are probably enough humans to make their complete extermination somewhat unlikely. This has come with some changes—it is becoming easier for human merchants, traders, and artisans to become wealthy, as they are becoming more and more able to at least snap up table scraps from the feasts being enjoyed by the truly wealthy and powerful of the world.


I'm generally a pretty cheerful guy, and a world where things are gradually improving, despite the best efforts of its inhabitants to the contrary, really sort of fits my worldview. But I'd like to emphasize here—while the world will improve quite a bit in the next several thousand years, it will still be pretty bad, by our standards. At this point, it's probably pretty bad even by the standards of failed nations—at least in nations that are being torn apart by warlords and civil war, you don't have to worry that the warlord is going to kill you because he's hungry, and you look tasty.


How long has this been the case?
While things have been improving for a long time, the change has only recently become noticeable, even to creatures that can remember thousands of years prior (most mortals still haven't noticed). This is starting to get to the point where it would trigger changes in how the low-level supernatural creatures do business and deal with each other (and with humans), but so far, these changes are minor, and relatively recent—any real shifts aren't going to take place for some centuries to come.


The longer a trend continues, the harder it is to stop...and the more you need something truly paradigm-shifting to change the direction of events. This is mitigated by the amount of effort required to keep things moving in that direction...but here, things are moving sort of absent-mindedly. Nobody is making any serious effort to push this trend forward, or to kick it back, meaning that the trend itself is probably going to be pretty hard to reverse. This isn't actually relevant to the story, I don't think, but it is


What kind of scale are you operating on?
I'm going to restrict my story to a single minor city-state. Frankly, the idea of a human ruling even a minor city state is going to be ridiculous enough to this world—having a human seize the throne to anything bigger is just going to be stupid.
Time-wise, the story shouldn't take long—no more than two or three weeks, at most, possibly as little as one week.

Thinking about it, I like the idea of one week—that would be long enough to make it sort of believable that this is happening, without requiring too tight a sequence of alliances, but still fast enough to make it clear to the remaining city elders that things have changed, and changed dramatically. That said, I will probably find myself stretching it to two, or possibly even three weeks—certainly, it will take time at the end for the various groups to come to a decision, and there will be several events that need to happen for this to work.


How sophisticated is the society?
This society is not sophisticated in the slightest. Slavery is still a thing, and humans in particular are often viewed as a particularly tasty (and invigorating) snack. No ruler in the world has yet learned to base their rule on anything other than their personal ability to destroy their rivals, and their ability to control huge swathes of territory or major empires is thus basically nonexistent. So, basically, the sophistication level is about that of, say, Egypt under Ramses II or Ramses III, or even earlier. Life holds no great value—if it holds any value at all—and freedom is kind of irrelevant. Mortals are a bit more sophisticated, for what it's worth, but that isn't much—they don't yet have the firepower to reliably take on anything more powerful than they are, and they don't have the wealth to hire somebody who does.

Technology-wise, the society is still very primitive, although they do have the use of iron, mostly because I can't wrap my head around how rare and valuable metal weapons and tools were before people began to become able to work with iron instead of just copper or bronze. So mostly iron weaponry, but it will very primitive—axes, spears, clubs, and that sort of thing. Swords are just being invented, and as of now are still largely evolved from axes or exceptionally long knives or spearheads. Bows are known...sort of...but they're still considered to be fairly simple hunting weapons, ones which are occasionally used when mortals want to fight each other, but which are rarely useful in other circumstances. Armor is still thought to be largely pointless, because so much of what you'd want to protect yourself against doesn't care about armor. Horse taming (and horse riding) is fairly new, and shows up only very, very rarely...and without stirrups, to boot. Overall tech is at early iron age stages, with oxen acting as the primary draft animals, and wheels still being made of solid wood, instead of spokes or other methods.

Religiously, there will be a mishmash of different faiths, with dozens of temples throughout the city, all of which tolerate all of the others with a sort of benign amusement. Beliefs are fairly simple, almost Conan-levels of simplicity, and center mostly around what must be done to placate the gods, and hopefully persuade them to go away. Religion has not yet started to serve as a focus for organizing a society, which means that it is not yet able to monopolize civic beliefs...which really tells you all you need to know about how brutal things get in the city and the countryside.


If I do other books in this setting, they will be set in a much more sophisticated society—perhaps something like the Roman Empire, or even Medieval Europe or China—but this is supposed to be set right at the very beginning of the period where mortals began to gradually overtake and overwhelm the much more powerful supernatural creatures that have so far dominated the world. This was the age before empires, when the city-state was all, and this is a fairly minor, unimportant, backwards, and somewhat isolated city state, so sophistication and complexity won't be massively apparent.

The religious bit is actually fairly important, although I don't know how well it will show up in the story proper. But initially, religion was all about how humans tried to exert some control over the world around them, and how they could understand something beyond just where the next meal would come from (this purpose hasn't really changed in the modern-day world). This was hampered by the fact that nobody really knew anything about anything, but experimental evidence gave early humans a few tools, and religion was used to make sure that those tools could and would be used as effectively as possible. This is a very important detail, and one that should be stressed: religion was one of the single most important discoveries in human history, because it is the only method we've ever found that allows us to consistently convey facts, attitudes, and mental and societal tools that cannot be proven or explained easily, if at all, to each new generation. The fact that the truths being passed on here are currently nothing more than"the gods want this, give it to them and they might stop bothering you" should convey a great deal about just how incomplete this society's knowledge of the world around them is, and how primitive its attitudes and beliefs truly are.


How like our own are this world's opinions and expectations?
This world has almost nothing in common with our own opinions and expectations. The fact that the main character has something vaguely similar to those values is going to be the driving factor behind his success, and behind his behavior.
Just to start with, the nature of a fantasy adventure realm is going to breed a heavy level of fatalism in its inhabitants, except for the most powerful (or phoenixes, but they're pretty strange), since they are all living in a world over which they do not have any control, and really cannot easily conceive of having any control. The idea that a being could improve its station in life through sheer intelligence, determination, and some degree of luck is going to be as alien to this world's inhabitants as...well, I can't really think of anything that alien. To make matters worse, the pecking order isn't just going to be fairly well set, it's going be cast in stainless steel, and then heat-treated to make extra sure it won't change, and our heroes will start at the bottom—this is why it will take such a spectacular series of victories before anybody takes them seriously.

One of the things I want to explore in this story is what a fantasy-style world would really look like, once you stripped off the romantic veneer. Without a powerful reason to tolerate races like humans, dragons, for example, would have little reason and less need to consider humans to be sentient creatures, as deserving of life as they are. The same holds true for demons, giants, and all the other fantasy races. Humans, dwarfs, and elves are traditionally portrayed in most fantasy as sort of holding the short end of the stick, when it comes to things like strength, toughness, and so on and so forth. We assume that superior organization, wealth, and experience have made those three races reign supreme, and allowed them to prosper and dominate the world despite those weaknesses...but what would it look like, back in the days before that was possible?
Later stories will emphasize that there is a lot of hate brewing in this social system, but right now, that's not the case. Hating dragons for eating humans would be sort of like hating the mountains for being tall, or hating the clouds for dropping inconvenient rain storms. It's just the way things are. You don't hate nature for being natural. You don't hate time for not stopping at that perfect moment. This is just the way things are. In a thousand years or so, there will be enough examples of mortal ingenuity, defiance, brilliance, and determination that hatred will start to become possible, but right now, it's just the facts of life. Right now, only the truly desperate or the halfway insane would ever consider facing off against a demon, let along a demon lord. This is reflected in attitudes and values...as it would be.


What's the predominant religious faith like?
Right now, there is no predominant religious faith. Demons don't worship any god but themselves, most races, magical or not, have their own creeds, as do most mortals. The main character worships the Risen God, who is supposed to have been able to rise from the dead after he (or possibly she, since different sects hold different opinions on the matter) was killed, and the body was quite effectively and totally destroyed, but this faith is regarded as highly unusual, more than a little bit eccentric even for mortals, and basically as one big joke.

As for other gods, they're real, and they behave in much the same way as you'd expect, based on ancient mythology: they're always fighting, both within, and among their pantheons, and almost all of them seek supremacy over all the others. Their various followers reflect this, and part of the reason for the interminable conflict among supernatural creatures (even most gods don't see mortals as important) is because of all these deities seeking to depose each other, and reign as the supreme deity over all and sundry.

It wasn't until a bit later in human history that religions began to become unwilling to tolerate competition, and to try to actively suppress other faiths. Mostly, this began to happen because it became clear that other societies were now able to actively threaten the cultures that spawned these faiths in ways that had never really been possible before this. This isn't an issue here, so the religions will all get along. In terms of gods, the actual beliefs are widely varied, but one thing holds true for almost all religions—most of them don't have much use for humans, and won't intervene in response to human prayers. The Risen God is one exception, although there are a few others—but mostly, I'll concentrate on the Risen God for now, since this is meant to be an expy of Christianity (sort of), and that's something I am actually familiar with.


What themes do you want expressed in your world?
The big theme I want expressed here is going to be repression, and the kinds of behavior and feelings it spawns. Humans, in particular, are held in contempt, and are actively prevented from having any kind of freedom, or from holding any kind of meaningful job. This interacts with the Secondary Theme in that the repression and contempt has effectively removed any kind of freedom for anybody but the protagonist, and his few allies...which means that only they are truly free to act on their own behalf, and to achieve their own goals. This also means that not only humans are bound by chains of law, custom, and fear, but so are other races, including the supernatural beings that are nominally the humans' owners and/or rulers. The fear that others will not fear them, and thus will not treat them with respect or obedience, drives a lot of the power struggles, and the rulers' actions, in the story's world, even though the characters probably won't see much of this.

Repression mixes very nicely with the secondary theme of freedom, especially in the inverse, which is what shall be the case here—the good guys don't have any kind of freedom, as such, unless others don't care enough to take it...or unless they can prove that they're strong enough to keep it. They do so, but at a price, because they are required to take responsibility for what they have wrought. This, in turn, reflects one of the primary themes: with responsibility comes power. By claiming responsibility for the city (even if only temporary), they have claimed power, as well. The fact that nobody cares to contest this claim makes that assumption stick...and leaves them with a role they never really wanted.


What are the general details of the world involved in the story?
This story takes place in the city of Wittin. Wittin is ruled as an absolute autocracy, with nothing in the way of any kind of governmental apparatus—Malor, the ruler is in charge, and it is everybody else's job to do what he says, or else. Because he is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, this presents problems from time to time, but he is immensely powerful, so nobody dares contradict him. The city itself is a filthy mess, with mud or dirt streets, no paving, little plumbing, and little effort made to improve infrastructure, or make things better for the inhabitants. There is a significant sewer, although nobody knows why—it is a remnant of one of Malor's projects to "modernize"--that would catch the refuse and take it away, if the street were paved, or there were any kind of plumbing system. Instead, there are dung-carts, who pick up night-soil and take it away to do who knows what with it. Most of these dung carts are operated by humans, a few of which are paid for their service, but most of which make their money from the sale of the dung and other byproducts (although most of their supernatural clients don't think about this—there are even a few who think the humans eat the dung!).
A lot of mining activity takes place in the area, but this is a fairly recent development—there is no copper, no tin, and no gold or lead in the area, although there are signs that there might be silver a few days' journey away. Most of the mining in the area is of iron, which is a really new thing that there isn't a whole lot of market for just yet. What iron is sold abroad is typically transported via caravans, usually on the back of mules or donkeys—the city is located on a river, yes, but the river isn't deep enough for any kind of serious traffic. During the summer, the river level drops below five feet deep, although it gets to be as deep as twenty feet after severe storms.

The weather is extremely hot, and quite humid, meaning that clothes tend to be minimalist, and as skimpy as possible, just to prevent over-heating. Naked isn't really a thing, but...eh, let's just say that armor is avoided when possible. Worse, there isn't really a winter—just a less humid season—so the conventions of a hot-climate society still apply, although at least there is enough magic floating around to keep diseases minimal. Slavery is widespread, and most humans in the city are slaves of some description or another. The slavery isn't quite chattel slavery, because the slaves do have some minimal rights (like the right to only be eaten by their owners), but it isn't far from it...and the rights aren't real helpful, truth be told. Officially, having any humans that aren't slaves of somebody who lives in the city is illegal, but since Malor has carefully made sure that there are no other powers in city, this law cannot really be enforced.

Wittin's primary trade is in salt, and in leather, meaning that its trade goods are bulky, but surprisingly valuable. The salt is produced from brine wells, which tap into salt water pools buried deep underground, to produce high quality and very pure salt. Wittin salt is known to be exceptionally valuable in the low country, and the salt-makers are a very powerful faction within the Merchants' Guild. Importantly, the people of Wittin can almost always get their hands on salt, despite it being officially a controlled substance, restricted only to the most needful of applications (Malor does not like to be around salt, and takes steps to make sure that he isn't). Wittin salt is visually distinctive, since it is a bright red in color.


I picked the city name from a list of randomly generated city names. I have found a very helpful name generator at City name generator, which does not just cover city names, but also generates random names for everything from aliens to Amazons to species of animals to dragons, to dryads, to dwarfs, to gorgons, to elves, to...well, pretty much anything you can imagine. It has proven to be extremely useful, and is one of the sites I visit more than almost any other.

Although this is not the case today, salt was historically a major trading good all through ancient times, and into the early Industrial Revolution. The practice of using brine wells to produce salt is ancient—in point of fact, this technology actually predates China itself (and yes, it was developed by the Chinese), and is known to have been practiced at least six thousand years ago. By way of contrast, written records of Chinese civilization only stretch back to cover four to five thousand years old, and the first recorded Chinese dynasty can only be traced back to 1700 BC—less than 4,000 years ago.


Vital Statistics:
Wittin has a tropical environment, although not quite enough to qualify as a tropical rain forest. Costumes tend to be minimal, which is in keeping with an extremely hot environment. The city itself is dominated by minor demons and other creatures of similar power levels—werewolves show up occasionally, but this isn't really their scene. The same holds true of vampires, who tend not to get along with minor demons anyway. Most of the city's population is made up of merchants and artisans, not warriors—there is little need for warriors, considering Malor's power, and an army would only entail expenses that Malor is both unwilling, and unable, to meet.

Currency is somewhat scarce in the city, and is mostly limited to coins from other realms, and the city itself does not mint currency, since it doesn't really have any precious metals to speak of. Thus, most of the population gets by via barter and trade in kind. There are a certain number of humans—both male and female, who get by via selling their bodies for goods and services, meaning that there is a thriving underground trade among those who don't have access to regular currency. This has also led to humans having a reputation for being willing to screw with absolutely anything and anyone...and there are rumors that, occasionally, a child is born who displays the traits of both parents, though in muted form.


Biology & Technology Basics:
Magic plays a rather extremely heavy role in this world, enough so that most of the creatures living in the world rely heavily upon magic to make their bodies work (forget magic powers—most of them couldn't survive at all without magic to power their bodies). This is the defining difference between mortals, and supernatural creatures: mortals are beings who do not possess any innate magic to speak of, while supernatural beings have magic as a fundamental part of their biological makeup. The price for this is that any supernatural creature is limited in terms of what types of magic it can use, and what its nature can become, so that a dragon could not become a social creature, because the magic that sustains it will not allow that behavior to take place. Instead, it would have to evolve its own set of rules or standards to function in a social environment, and it would be unable to deviate from those rules, even when it knows for a fact that this is harmful to its ability to survive. A few dragons have worked out why this might be a problem, and have enrolled mortals to provide a limited form of assistance, in the form of the Dragon-Sworn Houses, which are gradually allowing dragons to at least communicate with each other on something approaching a regular basis, among other things.

Mortals, on the other hand, are completely non-magical in nature, but the advantage they get is that they can learn and use literally any type of magic in existence, assuming that they get the opportunity, including a few that correspond to the abilities of no known creature of magic or the supernatural. They are also cross-fertile (sort of) with pretty much anything, although only humans find this to be a somewhat regular occurrence, since only humans are in a position where they are forced to be so massively submissive.

Of the many,many, many supernatural creatures in existence, only a handful will appear in this story: phoenixes (but only indirectly), dragons, demons, demon lords, werewolves, vampires, hill giants, trolls, and basilisks.

Phoenixes are sort of split between Terry Pratchett's interpretation, the traditional interpretation, and a version I saw in Heroes of Might and Magic. They are typically seen as relatively smallish birds, no larger than an eagle, with unusual dark red plumage...but when they decide to unleash their full powers, they become a bird the size of a large building, who is capable of breathing fire (or ice), as well as using their magical body as if it were an extension of their real body. They are completely immune to any elemental-based magic, and are highly resistant to all other types of magic, meaning that a single phoenix is a real handful, even to a dragon or a demon lord, despite being much less physically and magically powerful than either one. Groups of phoenixes—for phoenixes are by nature social creatures—are not tolerated anywhere in the world, and are typically hunted and scattered or destroyed by entire groups of dragons, demons, or other creatures, meaning that most phoenixes will avail themselves of Sworn members of various Houses, who serve as both companions, and as eyes and ears to give their master some kind of warning when a threat approaches.

Dragons are huge, immense, powerful, big, and very, very massive. They typically start out (for a fully grown adult) at about 50+ feet long, and weigh in at ten plus tons, even for a small adult. They get bigger as they get older, and there is no known upper limit for a dragon's age, although the growth does slow as they age, so that a dragon who is 10,000 isn't much bigger than a dragon who is 8,000. They are intensely magical, as is witnessed by their fiery breath weapon, and they are incredibly powerful physically, but their size is such that they have severe problems when it comes to keeping themselves fed, often to the point where they will eat anything they can catch. The more a dragon eats when it is growing up (they're born only two or three feet long), the bigger it gets as an adult, although once they become an adult, this is no longer the case. Dragons have their own form of magic, although most don't take the time to develop it incredibly well, that revolves heavily around fire, and around the incredible potency of dragon blood. They prefer to live somewhat alone, but many have taken over the rule of this or that city or community, on the presumption that these communities can and will provide food for their dragon overlord. Many dragons are becoming increasingly fascinated by gold, gems, and other signs of wealth, which is starting to have some decidedly odd results. Stealing from a dragon is deadly dangerous, as dragons can track an individual across thousands of miles, even despite the best magic being used to try to break the trail. Nobody is sure how dragons do this, and the dragons aren't telling, but there you go. Dragons are not immune to any kind of magic, but given how tough a dragon is, using magic on one is typically ill-advised.

Demon lords are one of only a handful of creatures who have any hope of matching a full-grown dragon's power in a stand-up fight, and they are the dragons' chief rivals and principle enemies. This would be noteworthy, except that demon lords are known to hate pretty much everybody, and they're enemies to most really powerful races. Demon lords tend to vary wildly in shape, and sort of vary in powers, but they are all highly resistant to any kind of magic, and immensely resistant to any kind of physical attack. They utilize a wide variety of shadow and flame-based magics, as well as being able to summon other demonic beings to their side at will, but only if the demon is within a certain radius of the demon lord. Demon lords are harsh, cruel, and often capricious, but are also powerful enough to make it stick...and, thankfully, much less likely to treat a human as a random snack since, as far as anybody can tell, no demon of any kind actually needs to eat.
Demons are the nickname for lesser demons, who stand a notch above vampires and werewolves, but aren't really dangerous enough to be considered a serious threat. They have some degree of magic, and can often summon small lightning bolts, fireballs, ice cones, or other magical effects, but they really aren't all that dangerous, aside from being mostly immune to physical attacks. Warrior demons can be quite strong, and very dangerous to any creature as powerful as they are, but most of the demons in Wittin are more merchants and artisans (mostly merchants) than warriors, and so are much less willing to pick fights. Even most of the warrior demons are, frankly, more than willing to let a human who apparently kills dragons for fun have his way, and rule the city. Like dragons, demons don't seem to have a maximum lifespan, but unlike dragons, there is no such thing as a young demon—they all emerge fully grown, and will only change in their overall power level. Demon power levels go up and down over time, but it is very hard for your average demon to reach demon lord status, and only two are known to have ever managed it (and neither one could keep the position). Demons cannot normally fly, although there are a few who can.

Werewolves are standard werewolves—they change into wolves on every full moon, and can change in wolves or wolfmen at any time. While changed during a full moon, they are vicious and bloodthirsty monsters, but they are also easily distracted, and not all that intelligent. They can be killed with almost any magical attack, or with silver, but are highly resistant to normal attacks. Aside from their shapeshifting, they have almost no magic, and what they do have is almost entirely confined to spreading the curse by means of their bite. Werewolves can be born, but most are simply bitten, since the transformation does really bad things to pregnancies—you have to find a way to keep the werewolfess from shifting for all nine months for one to be born naturally. Those born naturally have more magic than those who are bitten, and many become something like druids or shamans, but even their magic is not especially powerful, and they are not widely respected.

Vampires are, again, traditional vampires, with their need for blood, their inability to withstand daylight, and their ability to command normal wolves, bats, and vermin. They have a fierce rivalry with werewolves, and their opinion of themselves is such that few other races are willing to tolerate their presence for long, but their ability to raise the corpses of the dead is enough to make them surprisingly dangerous to anybody operating at their own level. They are frustratingly hard to stop if you can't find a way to track them, and their ability to levitate can make that surprisingly hard. They can only be killed by sunlight, by fire, by a piece of wood through the heart, or by being attacked while in contact with garlic, although these last two methods require you to cut their head off to be sure. The more blood a vampire drinks, the more powerful it becomes, and if it can manage to drink the blood of something magical, it becomes more powerful still, so that they can become frustratingly powerful if left alone.

There are many sub-sentient magical creatures, as well, but I do not expect them to play any major part in the story. However, it should be noted that these creatures are gradually becoming more and more rare, as they are slowly being driven from their normal ranges, mostly by the actions of the various mortals who live nearby.

Technologically, the single biggest thing to know is that these people are at the same stage as late bronze-age, or early iron age civilizations. Composite bows, swords, and other slightly more technical primitive weapons are rare—clubs, axes, and spears are the norm, although javelins are used somewhat widely by some races, particularly mortals. Bows are rare outside of the most isolated country settlements, because most "civilized" humans and other mortals have learned the hard way not to go hunting in areas where there are lots and lots of creatures that might take offense at such actions.


The bit about humans selling themselves to get goods and services is an actual pre-currency practice. You'd think that people would just use barter, but recent studies have shown that, apparently, they didn't—somehow, sex served much the same purpose. Honestly, I'm not really clear how or why that worked (it CANNOT be as dirty as it sounds, no matter what the anthropologists say), but it seemed to serve its purpose. Conveniently, it would also answer the question of how a society that is only half a step from outright slavery would possibly be able to offer anything to its "betters", as well as serving as an explanation for all the half-dragons, half-demons, half-angels, half-elves, etc. Humans, thus, would appear to be willing to screw pretty much anything, provided the attempt won't actively kill them. Perhaps as importantly, this, combined with the tendency to just eat random humans, is providing specific evolutionary pressure on the human population to breed for good looks, seductiveness, and a certain degree of kinkiness...not to mention cunning, agility, strength, and endurance. I have absolutely no plans to have this ever happen in the story, either in a plot-related way, or not, but it is important for me to know it, if only to make sure the insults are correct.

Currently poverty and malnutrition are preventing this Darwinian pressure from having much of an effect...but as time goes on, and the mortal populations start to accumulate more wealth (and get a better diet), this is going to become more and more apparent, especially as mortal-based autocracies arise, and start acting as if they were dragons themselves.
The attractiveness, and the willingness to sell one's self, is present for both males and females, by the way—I'm not actually misogynistic, and in this case, it makes complete sense that both sexes would take part in the practice.


Define the Community (or communities):
The community as a whole is the city of Wittin. Mostly, the story will be taking place in and among the city's lower classes, with the taverns, brothel-keepers, minor criminals, and day laborers playing a larger part in events than the city's elite (such as they are). The richer and more influential individuals in the city will show up—sort of—but won't really play a major part until the end, and the story should never end up moving through their community. Most of the main characters will be drawn from the very small community of adventurers that is part of the city's night life, but a few may be long-term inhabitants.


Population:
Overall, the city of Wittin has about 2,000 "citizens", for whatever that is worth. Since only the head of household is counted as a citizen, that equates to about 4,000 to 6,000 supernatural inhabitants, plus anywhere from 6,000 to 12,000 human inhabitants. The city's hinterland (the area of land that supports the city and provides it with food, a captive market, etc) probably comes in at about 100,000 souls, possibly as many as 120,000.

Community relationships with others:
The city of Wittin doesn't really have many relationships with other cities. There is another, somewhat larger city named Ziq located about two weeks' journey to Wittin's east, with which it has regular trade, despite the sporadic wars that spring up between the two every century or so. There are also a few other towns to the south that Wittin has semi-regular trade with, but right now, the town of Wittin is largely isolated. Malor has designs on all of these cities, but he doesn't really have either the resources to carry those designs to fruition, or the intellect to make up for his lack of resources, so those designs amount to little more than occasional annoyances towards the other cities' rulers. To the north, somewhere in the mountains, the dwarfs are rumored to have their own settlement, which is supposedly named Nen Buldor, but nobody in Wittin is quite sure where it is, nobody really cares, and there is basically no communication or link between the two.

Within the city itself, the city's merchants are fairly resentful of the ruler's occasional random edicts for or against them, not to mention the occasional decision to just randomly torture one of their family members for no particular reason. They dare not display this resentment, of course, and basically just try to keep their heads down, and away from their lord and master's attention, trusting in the gods to keep the city's ruler occupied with other concerns. The humans who live in the city are even less willing to push their thoughts, and are basically trying to keep out of others' way, so that they don't get caught in the occasional anti-human purges that Malor commands of his subjects. Despite Malor's edicts, and purges, at least half of the humans in the city don't have actual masters or owners—instead, they're either basically contract workers (sort of), or they answer to one of the city's criminal chieftains, who are known as the city's Thieves. There are six Thieves known to live within the city, five of which are humans. The sixth Thief also claims to be a human, but considering that she has been a Thief for over a hundred years now, there are those who doubt the validity of her claim. The Thieves act as a sort of ersatz government for the city's human population, and what few things humans can take care of, are taken care of by the local Thief.


Define the Area
The story's area is focused mostly in the eastern, western, northern, and southern quarters of the city, which basically covers the whole city.

Heh. Okay, so you got me. I don't expect the southern quarter of the city to enter into the story in any meaningful way. But overall, the story takes place entirely within the city's primary walls, particularly within the city's relatively low-income neighborhoods. As the plot progresses, the action will be taking place in successively wealthier, and less human-oriented districts, to symbolize the escalation of the main characters' quest, and just how far it is taking them from being seen as entirely mortal.

The symbolism here is something I would like to think will be important—the main characters are moving steadily farther and farther out of not just an ordinary mortal's comfort zone, but outside of what the various supernatural creatures in the story understand mortals to be. Yet, at the same time, they're still able to survive, to find aid and comfort (to a point), and even to thrive, even as the shared experience binds them closer and closer together.


Important locations
Obviously, Malor's "palace" will be important, as will the sewers under the city (they're pretty much the only good way to move undetected). Otherwise...within the city, there are the granaries, in the northern quarter, which hold the city's grain supplies/taxes are collected; there are the city's temple complexes, which are dominated by the six pyramid temples of the Crown Gods in the Western Quarter; the Grand Market, in the Eastern Quarter, which also serves the city as its primary Trade District. The northern quarter holds most of the city's artisans—it's close enough to the supplies of raw materials to get what it needs, and far enough away from the Palace in the Northern Quarter to keep Malor from interfering.


Critical sub-locations:
I don't have any specific sub-locations yet, aside from there being a handful of taverns involved. I will have to come back to this after the next few sections are complete, but I don't really anticipate much in the way of sub-locations being necessary—the plot will be moving, to a large extent, as the fight(s) go through a large chunk of the city.
That said, the granaries will be important, if only because there are limited numbers of ways to kill something that big and powerful.

Culture(s)
I don't actually know anything about the cultures, yet. I know low-ranking demons try to avoid fighting, and they're lousy artisans...but that's about it. I also know that the merchants, and the artisans, are organized into guilds—there are seven guilds in the city—but that the guilds don't really have that much in the way of power. Nor, honestly, do they know about –or even care about-- humans and other mortals, for all that most of their activity has originated from human-derived technologies.

The seven guilds are: The Merchants' Guild, the Magicians' Guild, the Smiths' Guild, the Priests' Guild, the Tanners' Guild, the Weavers' Guild, and the Masons' Guild.

The Merchants Guild, obviously, deals with merchants, both those who operate entirely in and around the city, and those who deal in long-ranged trade. Eventually, it will start to split off, with one group specializing in banking and money-lending, another in assaying, and so on and so forth, but for now, it's all merchants. They focus on things that typically require practical knowledge of people and products to achieve. In about three or four centuries' time, the Merchants' Guild will get together with the Thief Azura Meyer to create a systematic set of laws and regulations for money-lending—the first real banking regulations in existence, and the birth of an industry that will power the economy of the city of Wittin for tens of centuries to come.

The Magicians' Guild, so far, is just a handful of individuals who are particularly good with their races' unique forms of magic. Right now, they're not so much a guild, as a proto-guild. Someday, they'll be able to organize enough to be a major power player in the city—indeed, someday, the Magicians' Guild will be forced to split into several smaller guilds, to maintain the ablance of power within the city, but that won't come to pass for several thousand years. Right now, they're just an old boys' network who want to be big. It does include the alchemists and the enchanters, though, so it's not quite useless.

The Smiths' Guild handle pretty much anything and everything having to do with gold, silver, copper, and bronze (there aren't enough iron workers in Wittan to be counted as smiths yet). They are probably the second-richest guild just by the nature of what they work with, but they're also the least respected guild, because the nature of their work means that humans and mortals play a much larger part than they do for other guilds. The Smiths Guild will be the first of the Guilds to split into multiple guilds, and will ultimately disintegrate under the pressures of accelerating change, forcing the Crown to take over many of the regulatory duties the Guild once handled, but other than that, the city gets along quite well without the Smiths' Guilds, even if they are still the most mortal-centered of the guilds.

The Priests' Guild is the guild that controls not just the priests, but also the scribes, the lawyers, the doctors, and all the people who make their living by means of knowledge and laws. Only the magic-users exist outside of their jurisdiction, and that's just because, basically, nobody really cares about them. While they will play relatively little part in this story, they are and will remain one of the most powerful and influential of the guilds.

The Tanners' Guild is currently one of the richest (if not the richest) of the guilds, and it controls...well, it controls the making of leather. Right now, that's one of the primary activities of note in the world, and it borders on being almost cutting-edge, but it is an art whose influence will gradually wane as time goes by. They play a big role in the story, though, so they'll be important—more on how they're important will be covered under Characterization.

The Weavers' Guild is a relatively poor guild, one that will grow richer as time goes on, but it is respected, as weaving is one of the few arts that did not originate in some way with mortals. That said, mortals are known to be rather good at it, although many swear that the cloth produced by supernaturals is somehow superior. Like the Tanners' Guild they play a relatively big part in events, especially in the later half of the story, mostly because they don't get along with dragons, and never really have—reptiles and weavers just don't mix, to be honest. They're a lot more important as one gets farther from the equator, but here, they're just not all that important—nobody really needs to wear clothing to stay warm, so it's just not as important a guild as they are elsewhere. Again, though, they're still respected, so their words carry weight...and boy, do they know it.

The Masons' Guild controls building...and also pottery, for reasons that nobody really understands. They make heavy use of brick, rather than stone, and are really big into baking (this also explains why the Bakers are part of the Masons Guild, although there is talk of the Bakers splitting off into their own Guild.

This is really too early for guilds to start forming...but Malor's approach to governing the city is so...well...inept, that the city's artisans have had to organize themselves, and set up their own government. Malor has allowed this, because all he cares about is taxes, and having enough slaves to make sure that he has hot tomangoes, or whatever he wants to eat, at the end of each day. At the end, with all other forms of government exhausted, the city is left with no choice but to turn to the Guilds, and the Thieves, to form a new government, or dissolve into anarchy...which nobody wants, to be honest.



In the Balance
This world is one that quivers on the brink of someday changing enough to perhaps experienc a dramatic power shift of some description. Although the supernatural creatures still reign supreme, the world is starting to shift—mortals are beginning to be able to think about doing something about the magical world around them. Well...at least the smaller parts, like minor magical animals. Heroes are starting to arise, although as yet, they aren't able to really do much—they just hunt things like cave bears and dire rats, slowly clearing out minor threats, nuisances, and pests so that mortals can start to expand, and become more and more of a thing.

But all of the actual tension of this aspect is a little bit in the future. For now, the tension is much quieter, and a bit bleaker. Right now, the tension revolves around the fact that nobody gives any respect to anybody who doesn't have their own innate magic...and even then, if the magic isn't, well, magical enough, then it isn't respected. Even when the main character provides proof, the supernaturals don't believe them—it takes the testimony of a Phoenix-sworn to get them believed.

Normally, I like my tension to be a bit more blatant, but right now, it's not. The world's theme is such that I have plenty of room to make it blatant, you understand, but this is one of the few themes that I prefer not to make blatant. Growing up in the American South, I have seen a fair bit of racism, but one of the things I want to emphasize—seriously emphasize—is that racism takes many different forms, and can be just as damaging and dangerous if it is quiet and understated. Because of this, I don't want the racism to be showing up as hatred, or fear. Instead, I want it to show up as disbelief, denial, rejection, and incomprehension. This will show up, and have a pretty impact, later on.

My mother likes to say, and I think that she's on to something, that racism—even in its ugliest, most brutal form--takes on several different flavors. There is one that says that a group of people is awful, but all the individuals you know are okay. This is the form commonly found in the American South—even the most racist of Southerners will typically have one or two people they consider friends from the offending race (and these will typically be the only people of that race who they know). The other flavor that commonly crops up in the USA these days is the idea that a group of people is okay...but a steadfast refusal to have anything to do with any individuals of that race. This, I think, is the more damaging form of racism, since it masquerades as open-mindedness, and does so well enough to fool not just the racists, but the people they are being racist against. To a person like myself, who does not have the neurological wiring to make that kind of distinction, this is especially infuriating, especially when people who are the second kind of racist accuse me of racism for not agreeing with their opinions on the subject. We will see both types of racism on display here, along with a third type, which actually has been mostly wiped out (or at least reduced) in America: the belief that a group of people are somehow less able to do a certain job, just because of their skin color, religion, etc. Although I typically detest the notion of using broad strokes laws and legal actions to resolve problems of this nature, I have to admit that, in this case, it seems to have worked, allowing us to at least consider the other kinds of racism, and maybe someday even resolve the issues behind it.


Basis for tension
Simply put, there is no reason for anything supernatural to give any respect to anything mortal. Mortals have no real power, aside from the ability to reproduce, and no innate abilities, aside from the ability to learn...and right now, all that mortals can learn is how powerless they are. This is not the point where that changes, however. Rather, this is the point where humans, at least, start to think that perhaps it may change...and there are many people, throughout the world, who will not be willing to accept that possibility.

1. Why is this a problem?

Right now, humans (and elves, and dwarfs) cannot really get a job. They may work as domestic servants, or as day laborers for tasks that don't require huge amounts of strength, but if they do, they work for peanuts, at best. Outside of the city, things are somewhat reversed—humans do most of the farming, and provide something like 90% of the city's total food supply (and they do the majority of the cooking, but most supernaturals don't realize this).
The fact that humans are effectively barred from so much of the city's economic life means that the chronic labor shortage that any society suffers from (I am convinced that this is the case, even if, in most societies, the shortage is so acute that people cannot see it as such) is vastly exacerbated, to the point where even the merchants and the nobles live in what can only be called wretched poverty. Were it not for these beings' powerful magic, the situation would be much, much worse...but as it is, the power they wield is only a fraction of what they could wield, were they to use that power for others' benefit.

Additionally, the shortage of ways to make a living means that the crime syndicates in the city wield a great deal more power and influence than they really should. The city's Thieves are a shadow government in all but name, and their gangs, small as they are, give them disproportionate influence within the city. Those who cross them might not necessarily have to worry about finding themselves suddenly coming down dead...but if the humans refuse to do your laundry, cook for you, and so forth and so on, it can certainly make things inconvenient. Still, the Thieves aren't really powerful, as such—instead, they've got influence, and they're actually pretty skilled (for the time period) at using that influence. Outside of the mortal districts, the Thieves mostly wield soft power, rather than hard, which is quite different from our own world...but it also means that the main characters have a ready-made support network, especially for the second half of the story.

1. Who does it affect the most?
   This is something that affects pretty much everybody, and always in different ways. The supernatural creatures are heavily affected, because they don't have enough labor or intelligence to do everything they want. The mortals, because they can't get access to money, or to paying jobs. Even the ruler of the city is affected—there are plenty of people who could provide him with the intelligence resources, and even some of the skills and the manpower he would need to carry out his schemes...but because he doesn't respect anybody weaker than himself, he will never really avail himself of those talents.
   Note: this may turn out to be the world theme, instead of racism...but if so, the labor shortage will come from the racism, so this will most likely be the theme effect within the world.

​

1. Where are its effects most apparent?
   
   
   The effects of this pervasive racism are probably most apparent in the human-populated neighborhoods, where poverty is rampant, and, tellingly, the only laws that exist are those made and enforced by the humans themselves. This is a situation that no government in existence would willingly tolerate, as it makes for an independent form of authority that does not answer to the government officials...but Malor tolerates this, because he doesn't know it happens. And the reason he doesn't know it happens is because he, like all supernatural creatures, believes that humans are beneath his contempt, and are nothing more than animals (or, occasionally, vermin).
   
2. When does this matter?
   In overall life, there is no point when this does not matter. It is directly important primarily for humans, and those who actually use them, but it matters at all times.
   
3. How does it affect the attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions of events?
   The racism here is so deep-set, and so pervasive, that it doesn't even really show up as racism—instead, it simply appears as a set of universal understandings, including the understanding that the only things mortals are really good for is to be farmers, or to have sex with. The main characters will display a degree of this racism themselves, without ever realizing it—it's just so widespread, and so common, that they've picked it up without ever thinking about it.
   
4. How much of an impact does the problem have?
   Well over eighty-five percent of the known world's population is mortal by now, and they are all locked out of pretty much any job including anything but the most basic of farming tasks, and the sex trade. This has resulted in a permanent underclass that is starting to grow to the point where it can no longer entirely occupy itself with providing food for its "betters", and is starting to look around for something else to do...with the slight problem that there is nothing else they can do right now. Or, at least, nothing that is strictly wholesome, which is causing some interesting problems all over the known world.

One of the things I've found to be true is that, even once you have the world theme and the basis for the world conflict/tension laid down, there are additional strands that show up, some of which may be able to successfully masquerade as the theme. One of these, in this case, is that of a labor shortage...or, to be more precise, a shortage of critical types of skilled labor, and how that affects the society in which it exists. Even if you solve the first problem, that of widespread racism, the second will remain for a long, long time, because all societies suffer from a shortage of the labor needed to accomplish everything the society aims to achieve (in point of fact, one of the things that will really seal the deal on mortals taking over from supernaturals is that the mortals find a way to reduce that shortage to something that can conceivably be managed by conventional technological and magical means). Any economic system ever created has centered around a society's efforts to resolve this problem—that's basically why business, and economics, exist--even back in ancient times, when the shortage was so acute that it could not be perceived as such. I mean this literally, as the amount of effort required to, say, feed the population was so great that leaders and visionaries simply could not visualize a world where that amount of effort was reduced, and were thus constantly terrified that someday, something might come up that made farming much less manpower-intensive, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without work, and, ultimately, starving. The idea that there would be or even could be other things for those individuals to do simply did not, and could not, occur to them.

Here, this problem is magnified by the artificial split across racial lines, which dictates that human, elven, and dwarfen labor is not as important as supernatural labor. This, in turn, means that nobody cares about the value of mortal lives, and, thus, that nobody really cares about the presence of mortal laborers, either.


History of tension
NA—this tension has always been there. The supernatural creatures may have shown up after mortals, or before (smart money is on before), but the end result is the same: mortals cannot and never have been able to defend themselves against any kind of supernatural creature, and so are still considered to be nothing more than animals by those that have magic as an innate part of their very being.


Popular opinion of tension
Again, not applicable. The ant does not ask the opinion of the 18-wheeler that just drove through its nest, and vice versa. If the ant has built its nest in the middle of a parking lot for a warehouse, these things will happen from time to time. It's just part of life. Likewise, with mortals, and supernatural creatures—if a mortal has elected to live near a supernatural creature, these things happen. Mortals accept the status quo with a sort of fatalistic attitude, and the supernatural just assumes that this will be the way things always are. Obviously, proof that this might not be so will be met with some degree of fear and revulsion.

Current status of tension
See above. Right now, things are pretty much set in stone, and will be for quite some time, unless something really weird—like a small group of humans killing two ultra-powerful supernatural creatures in a short span of time—should happen. I should emphasize again, however, that right now, the racism and prejudice against mortals is still, and will still be set so deep that it doesn't even show up as such. Instead, it simply shows up as a belief that of course mortals can't accomplish anything notable, because they don't have the lifespan to really learn a skill, and/or they don't have magic suited to the skill.





Power Blocs
The power blocs here are limited, primarily because Malor is so reluctant to share power. By and large, they are formed of the most important individuals in the city, plus the guilds, who form a quasi-legal power structure that actually runs the city. These power structures have very little impact on the actual ruling of the city, but they're not just social clubs, either. They have real power within the city, and can legitimately dictate what king the city will accept to rule over it.

Malor
Who are they?
Malor is the demon lord who rules the city/town of Wittin. He is one of many demon lords, although not a particularly powerful one, mostly because his refusal to share power means that he cannot avail himself of many of the more traditional means for demons to gather power (like amassing armies of easily disposed-of-minions who can be sacrificed to raise power quickly and cheaply). His refusal to accept the service of others, who he is convinced will betray him at the first opportunity, also means that he has little ability to enforce his edicts outside of his immediate presence, although his existence as a sort of limited genius loci within the city limits means that he will know when one of his laws is being flouted, and may choose to take action upon that knowledge, so every breach of one of his edicts is most definitely a major gamble.
All of that said, Malor is a single entity, and his local omniscience does not extend to people or beings who are not inhabitants...which means that he is automatically suspicious of any newcomers, even when he knows that they can't hurt him, simply because he doesn't know what they're doing.

What do they wish to accomplish?
Malor, like all demon lords, wants to rule the world. He would prefer to do so via stealth and guile, but he's not above using raw power to do so. Because he is not a particularly strong or intelligent demon lord, however, he is sort of shit out of luck on this front, and he knows it...and resents it.

What does their power come from?
Malor's power comes from his status as a demon lord, and his status as a genius loci, which grants him limited omniscience within Wittin's city limits.

How do they relate to the world problem?
Malor (and his few supporters) are regarded as being unusually paranoid even by demon lord standards, to the point where he regards humans without masters within Wittin to be an active threat, and will attempt to execute them whenever he finds out about them. Because of the extreme difficulty humans have in finding work, this has tended to limit the number of humans in the city, and made it much more difficult for human farmers to sell their crop within Wittin...which has greatly limited the potential population, both human and non-human.

How do they (or will they) relate to the characters?
When Malor finds out about the main characters' presence in the city, he confiscates their property, and orders them to leave on pain of death. Since this is equivalent to starvation for all of the main characters, they take offense at this, and decide that if they're going to die, they're going to die on their terms.

Who opposes them, and why?
Malor is opposed by every known demon, demon lord, and other power that is not specifically one of his citizens. Like most (but not all) demon lords, he takes particular offense to phoenixes, who are pretty much the only beings not on his level who are willing to challenge him, mostly because phoenixes are legendarily hard to kill.


Malor is one of those characters I really hate to write, but in this case, nothing else really fits—to indulge in racism of any kind, in my mind, is nothing but pure stupidity, no matter how well disguised it might be by structures of logic or emotional conviction that it is no such thing. At the end of the day, there are only two things that really matter: wisdom, and compassion. All else is, at most, a temporary handicap, and one that can be usually dealt with by anybody willing to expend a little effort. Perhaps this is simply a function of my autism—to me, it is a person's deeds and actions that set them apart, not their race, and most certainly not their religious beliefs or country of origin.

This makes it doubly infuriating when somebody accuses me of racism or sexism, since I really don't care about any of that. I've met black people who fit into WASP society far better than I ever will (and I was born into it), I've met white people who would not be out of place in any inner city gang culture; I've met people with an IQ low enough to qualify them as retarded who can hold informed and well-reasoned discussions with people who border on genius-level IQ—I don't get into arguments with one of my aunts, because she always wins, and it is humiliating getting out-debated by a woman with a measured IQ of 72—and I've met people with all kinds of problems both mental and physical who are perfectly capable of operating in a world that is almost designed and built entirely for people with no such limitations. There are no limitations, save for those that for those that we choose to impose. There are no barriers, save for those that we choose not to overcome. This novel is meant to explore that reality, so while luck will play a part in this, mostly, it will be all about the fact that the main character is willing to just keep trying.



Alagash the Horned

Who are they?
Alagash is a relatively young dragon, who has taken the unusual step of securing the allegiance of a small House of Dragon Sworn. He mostly uses them as spies, and to cause trouble for his rivals, of which Malor is considered to be one. Alagash is a fairly young dragon, who is as yet unable to challenge any of the larger, more established dragons for their domains.

What do they wish to accomplish?
Alagash desires to rule Wittin (it will be a step up for him, and won't require him to spend several centuries securing the allegiance of an equivalent number of subjects). Once he has accomplished this, he hopes to spend a few hundred years letting the city grow, before thinking about moving on one of his neighbors, and maybe adding their realm to his own.

What does their power come from?
Alagash is a dragon, which grants him a certain degree of power in his own right, plus he has secured the allegiance of several Dragon Sworn. He cares absolutely nothing for these mortals, and regards them as potential weaknesses, but is willing to accept their basic utility...for now. Of course, if it were to turn out that one of these Dragon Sworn were to be able to pose a threat to him, that might change....

How do they relate to the world problem?
Alagash and his followers are a textbook example of the world problem—he doesn't respect humans, he doesn't care about humans, and he doesn't think humans are worth his time or energy...and when they prove that they can be, his first reaction is one of fear, and loathing. Secretly, he knows that humans pose a threat, if they can ever figure out how, and the realization that they might have figured out how makes him react in ways that are truly counterproductive. This mirrors the reactions of many southerners to the slave rebellions that reared up between 1810 and 1830—many Southerners who opposed slavery came to feel that freeing the slaves was a death sentence, which led directly to the slaughter of the American Civil War thirty years later. Of course, when a dragon reacts this way, you've got a whole different problem on your hands than how a bunch of white southerners act....

How do they (or will they) relate to the characters?
Alagash will try to kill the characters, once they've proven that it is possible for them to be a threat. Even before then, he has no plans to support any of his followers, and will take no steps to protect them if they are found out for any reason.

Who opposes them, and why?
Alagash is opposed by Malor, and the main characters. He has gained a mild reputation for eating unfortunate underlings, so other beings within the city also oppose him quietly, but dare not act openly.

As nature abhors a vacuum, it is inevitable that, as soon as Malor falls to the main characters, there will be a replacement (or several). Usually, this would be the cause of either internal stress, or external invasion, but Malor made sure that there was no one local who could replace him, and the city is relatively isolated enough that nobody he fought with cares. Thus...Alagash, who is not yet strong enough even to challenge Malor, but who is still powerful enough to be rated amongst the greatest and the most powerful. His faction is a little more willing to include others than Malor, and they're more intelligent than Malor and his supporters. They are sort of groping their way towards the bureaucracy that would eventually become an early empire, but they'll never really get the chance. Still, this group is very much focused almost entirely upon Alagash, which will cost them dearly.


Merchants' Guild
Who are they?
The Merchants' Guild is a loose association of traders, merchants, and artisans whose primary business is associated with long-ranged transport of goods. The Wittin Merchants' Guild is unusual in that the guild master is a werewolf (and not a particularly powerful one, at that), who holds his position primarily because Malor has historically killed anybody more powerful who took the position. The guild master has managed to maintain the guild has a coherent, unified force, simply by means of delegating important tasks to more magically or supernaturally powerful members who support that particular task. Currently, their activities as the richest and most organized guild in the city mean that they often move to deal with minor problems that Malor does not care about, like putting a bounty on a vampire who is being particularly troublesome in an effort to persuade some of the city's mercenaries (or at least more powerful creatures) to hunt down and destroy the problem. This has garnered them a fair amount of unofficial power, influence, and respect among the city's inhabitants, including a few who would ordinarily have nothing but contempt for a bunch of minor demons, werewolves, and other such (relatively) powerless beings.

What do they wish to accomplish?
The Merchants Guild is just trying to survive, in a city where their ruler is openly suspicious of them, and his immediate replacement seems to regard them as nothing more than a particularly annoying group of food animals. This is ultimately why they end up throwing their support behind the characters—they have come to the conclusion that, based on their own experiences as a guild, the characters' lack of power will provide them with a good reason to practice diplomacy, politics, and management skills over just sheer raw power, and, as a bonus, the characters and their descendents are highly unlikely to try to kill and eat them.

What does their power come from?
The Merchants Guild's power comes from its relative wealth, and the fact that it is the most coherent and best organized guild in the city, thanks largely to its very unusually low-powered Guild Master.

How do they relate to the world problem?
The Merchants Guild actually sort of inverts the prejudice—or, perhaps, uses it to their advantage—by using less powerful, but more intelligent beings to run the guild, while the more powerful beings simply act as support and/or counterweights. The less powerful beings garner more political support because other less powerful beings see them as understanding the plight of the less powerful, while the more powerful can tell themselves that they can manipulate freely, even though they know that the balance of power is such that this is not possible.
P.S. One of the results of this is that the Merchants Guild considers mind control of any sort to be highly "illegal", and will automatically execute anybody they catch using mind control (advertising and marketing are one thing—mind control is something else entirely).


How do they (or will they) relate to the characters?
The Merchants Guild gets along pretty well with the characters—not well enough to risk their necks, but well enough to lend some support, and to offer their contacts with those who are better protected from the city's overlords and would-be overlords.

Who opposes them, and why?
The Merchants Guild is sort of opposed by the Smiths Guild (the Smiths will work with the Merchants, but not publicly, and any charge that they agree with the Merchants will be vigorously denied and disproven), who see the Merchants Guild as getting away with things that the Smiths are reviled for, and the Weavers Guild, who actively dislike the merchants, and anybody who does anything like direct business with mortals. The fact that some of the better weavers and dyers are mortals, and that this gives the Merchants Guild a distinct advantage when it comes to selling cloth and garments is only icing on the cake.


When I first started writing, it was because I was creating worlds in my head, and wanted to be able to do something with them. The center of this was the power blocs, and the history behind them. Learning to curb this tendency was one of the big lessons I had to learn even to start learning how to write effectively. The worksheet was a critical part in learning to do that, while still retaining all the important elements.

 

[Eukie]

Let's take an example of these constraints from a story we all know and are familiar with: Star Wars. To specific, I'm taking this example from Episode IV: A New Hope, because that's my favorite, and because that is the movie where this is most apparent. Now, if you will recall, all of the sides involved in that movie operate under a series of constraints that they must overcome to be successful. The Empire has to find the Rebel base, and do so semi-quickly, before the lack of support in the Imperial Senate can become disastrous. This, too, is a problem, because the Imperial Senate controls the bureaucracy, without which the Empire cannot rule over the worlds that it rules (if you ever read the books set soon after Episode VI, back before Disney bought Star Wars, you find out that the Emperor had to sort of reinstate the Senate within a few years of its dissolution--he just couldn't control the Empire otherwise, no matter how much fear he could instill in the population)

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First things first, not everyone are familiar with Star Wars.

Secondly, "The Empire has to find the Rebel base, and do so semi-quickly, before the lack of support in the Imperial Senate can become disastrous." This is not something the film tries to communicate. The film is, in fact, pretty lax about giving specific reasons for why the Empire needs to be swift in finding and destroying the Rebel base---actually, let me be precise; the film doesn't even communicate that they need to be speedy. Then we get to your reasoning and everything just falls apart. Lack of support in the Imperial Senate? For one, the Emperor dissolves the Senate, so the film actually communicates that the Senate is irrelevant. Further, your justification for this draws upon a long-winded explanation from the Expanded Universe - not in the film, and further not something the "everyone" who's seen the movie would be familiar with. This entire point about the need for speediness is based on weak arguments build on a weak foundation.

A small point perhaps, but it feels like you're kind of fumbling around in the dark when writing this guide.

 

[Lisafication]

I'm just going to drop in and point out that if your worldbuilding exists outside of providing a vehicle for your characters to act in and your themes to be expressed and your story to be told...you're overdoing it.

 

[Maugan Ra]

On a more general note, if you're including stuff like elves and demons and dragons in your story, you are far better served focusing on what distinguishes them from the base template of their species in fantasy as a whole. It might be that nothing does, and this is fine. It just means the races serve as a backdrop to the actual characters.

 

[Partizan]

First things first, not everyone are familiar with Star Wars.

Secondly, "The Empire has to find the Rebel base, and do so semi-quickly, before the lack of support in the Imperial Senate can become disastrous." This is not something the film tries to communicate. The film is, in fact, pretty lax about giving specific reasons for why the Empire needs to be swift in finding and destroying the Rebel base---actually, let me be precise; the film doesn't even communicate that they need to be speedy. Then we get to your reasoning and everything just falls apart. Lack of support in the Imperial Senate? For one, the Emperor dissolves the Senate, so the film actually communicates that the Senate is irrelevant. Further, your justification for this draws upon a long-winded explanation from the Expanded Universe - not in the film, and further not something the "everyone" who's seen the movie would be familiar with. This entire point about the need for speediness is based on weak arguments build on a weak foundation.

A small point perhaps, but it feels like you're kind of fumbling around in the dark when writing this guide.

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Thank you for mentioning this--it is, as you said, possibly a bad example, and I will need to correct this and find a better example. If you can suggest one, I'd appreciate it--it would make my life easier, and make this more of the collaborative effort I'd like it to be.

And yeah, I sorta am fumbling around in the dark when writing this. This is something that I put together myself, without having any ready access to the standard theories and conventions of writing novels...and I have noticed that some of the things I've had to learn to take into account when I'm writing seem to pass entirely beneath the notice of other authors or the internet as a whole.

The thing is...I've seen authors who don't pay attention to these things that I've had to learn to take into account, and the symptoms are noticeable, consistent, and problematic. The multiple themes, for instance: one of the things that I've noticed is that authors who use just one or two themes tend to drive their message home with a much heavier hammer (John Ringo is particularly guilty of this--he's one of my favorite authors, but the simple fact that he only uses one or two themes for his stories means they tend to feel almost like sermons at times, when a little bit more diversity in his themes would make his point just as effectively, and make it much more accessible for large portions of his potential audience). Authors who use several, each directed at different aspects of the story, like, for instance, L. E. Modessitt Jr, will often hammer the same themes just as hard...but because of how they approach it, it goes down smoother, and makes the story feel a lot less like an example cooked up just to demonstrate those themes.

And this is just one of several types of mistake that you find in the world of modern literature. Anytime you find a series with a highly polarized audience, something weird is going on, and nine times out of ten, that something is a mistake that the author made when creating the story or the series. I haven't identified all of these mistakes, or even most of them. I doubt I ever shall, if only because, ego aside, I'm not really interested enough, and don't have enough time, to examine the entire output of modern fiction authors. But I've identified enough to be able to put together a method that tries to address them. Eventually, I'll have enough of this written out to be able to go back and do a point by point comparison to current methods, and I expect that a lot of this will work mostly as supplemental writing techniques, not as a complete replacement of the current methods. I'd like to think that reading this will help people avoid some common mistakes that they really don't have to make...but I'm not crazy enough to believe that it will automatically solve all their problems.

I'm just going to drop in and point out that if your worldbuilding exists outside of providing a vehicle for your characters to act in and your themes to be expressed and your story to be told...you're overdoing it.

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That is incorrect. Every story you ever write--including a short story of no more than six paragraphs--has its own world it operates in. Knowing what that world looks like, and how its important pieces interact with each other, makes for a much smoother and faster writing experience. Especially the faster. I have tested this in my own efforts, and it reliably pans out--when I stop and go through all this in advance, I write the story faster, while if I don't, it's slower, and there are more continuity errors. The more you know about the world you're setting your story in, the faster and easier you will find your writing becoming. Now, this runs into diminishing returns sooner or later, but when that happens probably varies from one person (or possibly one genre) to another. What's more, I have read enough about how other authors work to know that many professional authors take the time to work most of this out ahead of time, as well, so I know this isn't just my being in love with excess complexity. I don't know enough of the theory behind this to be able to explain why this has the impact it seems to have, however, so I can't really explain why it's important, other than to say that it has a noticeable impact.

That said...all of these sections are independent, so that you can skip pretty much any of them, if you'd prefer. I don't suggest that you do, but it's set up so that you can, in the belief that most people who use this forum will have sections that interest them, and sections that don't.

On a more general note, if you're including stuff like elves and demons and dragons in your story, you are far better served focusing on what distinguishes them from the base template of their species in fantasy as a whole. It might be that nothing does, and this is fine. It just means the races serve as a backdrop to the actual characters.

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This is a good point, and is quite possibly something else to be mentioned--I include things like the biology simply because, every so often, it comes up, and I don't know about you, but I never know in advance when it will come up.

 

[Jemnite]

To a very large degree, this is the point where you're starting to create limits on characterization. If you've got elves in your story, you need to sit down, and figure out what it means to be an elf--do they sleep, how much do they eat, how long do they live, and so on and so forth. Depending on your mindset, that might be enough...or you might start going into details such as the fact that an elf's biochemistry uses a different molecule from the ATP molecule that humans use to transport energy from one point to another, meaning that elves have a higher innate stamina than humans (because energy transport is not as oxygen-intensive), but also don't have quite the same strength, because their energy transport molecule is not as efficient as ATP. This may combine with tighter bodily metabolism to mean that elves eat less than humans, but have a lot less body fat, which gives them much less long-term energy storage, meaning that elves have to eat every so often, where a human can just keep going.

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what the fuck

you don't need to detail how elves poop

Holy shit, this is excessive to the nth degree. This is like... no. Nobody needs to do this. You don't need to literally explain everything, just enough that you can create verisimilitude.

You don't need to literally create a city to film something set in one. Just enough setpieces that you can fool the audience that there is a city and it exists and your story takes place in it. Same thing goes for books. Just build enough details that you can fool the readers into believe that what you're telling them is real and believable.

Honestly this guide is probably more damaging to any new writers than it is helpful. Novels are made to tell stories, not form the basis of a 3000 page encyclopedia about your made up fantasy world or whatever. If it never comes up in the story you're aiming to tell, it literally doesn't matter at all. You might as well discard it because it is completely and utterly irrelevant to the novel writing process.

 

[Lisafication]

That is incorrect. Every story you ever write--including a short story of no more than six paragraphs--has its own world it operates in. Knowing what that world looks like, and how its important pieces interact with each other, makes for a much smoother and faster writing experience. Especially the faster. I have tested this in my own efforts, and it reliably pans out--when I stop and go through all this in advance, I write the story faster, while if I don't, it's slower, and there are more continuity errors. The more you know about the world you're setting your story in, the faster and easier you will find your writing becoming. Now, this runs into diminishing returns sooner or later, but when that happens probably varies from one person (or possibly one genre) to another. What's more, I have read enough about how other authors work to know that many professional authors take the time to work most of this out ahead of time, as well, so I know this isn't just my being in love with excess complexity. I don't know enough of the theory behind this to be able to explain why this has the impact it seems to have, however, so I can't really explain why it's important, other than to say that it has a noticeable impact.

That said...all of these sections are independent, so that you can skip pretty much any of them, if you'd prefer. I don't suggest that you do, but it's set up so that you can, in the belief that most people who use this forum will have sections that interest them, and sections that don't.

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No it absolutely is you being in love with excess complexity. Some professional authors do this, sure. Some professional authors also write while on LSD, something that I've found to be counterproductive.

As a rule of thumb, worldbuilding is completely meaningless beyond the impact it has on the setting. Like, you should have sketched out your plot and your themes before you get to anything like fiddling with the technicalities of the setting. If doing excessive amounts of worldbuilding is somehow faster than just writing, you're not storyboarding correctly.

You decide on your plotting, your themes, your characters - things like this should all be relatively fleshed out before you get into the nitty gritty parts of the setting. Ultimately the setting is nothing more than a stage for your characters and story to play out on. Doing more than that is just a waste of time.

 

[Partizan]

No it absolutely is you being in love with excess complexity. Some professional authors do this, sure. Some professional authors also write while on LSD, something that I've found to be counterproductive.

As a rule of thumb, worldbuilding is completely meaningless beyond the impact it has on the setting. Like, you should have sketched out your plot and your themes before you get to anything like fiddling with the technicalities of the setting. If doing excessive amounts of worldbuilding is somehow faster than just writing, you're not storyboarding correctly.

You decide on your plotting, your themes, your characters - things like this should all be relatively fleshed out before you get into the nitty gritty parts of the setting. Ultimately the setting is nothing more than a stage for your characters and story to play out on. Doing more than that is just a waste of time.

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I don't know why, but this doesn't work for me. Like, literally, at all--I've tried it, and the results were a dismal failure. There's something about the way my brain works that makes it so that I HAVE to do it in this order. I don't know why. I can switch out the character section with the world-building, although I rarely do, and by this point I already know the basic shape of the plot (I figured that out in the basics section), but I'm still two themes short, and the actual details of the plot still escape me until I can figure out what I've given myself to work with. I don't know why it works like this, and I really, really wish I did, because it would make it a lot easier to figure out what I need to do to compensate.


Also, I'm going to politely request that everybody who is criticizing this keep following (and check out the other sections as they're posted), and continue to criticize, since one of the weirder and more frustrating aspects of my particular brand of autism is that I will automatically try to add complexity to any method well past the point of absurdity, which I suspect I did a long time ago when it came to putting together how I write a story. I've shaved it down a fair bit, but I've gotten to the point where I can't shave it down any more, so if you can suggest a simpler method, or any steps I can knock off, I'm open to suggestions. Just...keep in mind, I've got a fairly rare condition, and most people with this condition tend to lean much more heavily towards math and science than English, so there really is a reason why I'm approaching this as a scientific or a mathematical formula. That's just how my brain works, and I figure that, here, there's going to be somebody who can tell me what I can skip, and what I can re-arrange.


Also...do people really write while high on LSD? Even the thought of trying that scares the hell out of me. I've got enough problems trying to keep my brain on one track as it is, let alone after actively trying to screw up my thought processes.

 

[Lisafication]

I don't know why, but this doesn't work for me. Like, literally, at all--I've tried it, and the results were a dismal failure. There's something about the way my brain works that makes it so that I HAVE to do it in this order. I don't know why. I can switch out the character section with the world-building, although I rarely do, and by this point I already know the basic shape of the plot (I figured that out in the basics section), but I'm still two themes short, and the actual details of the plot still escape me until I can figure out what I've given myself to work with. I don't know why it works like this, and I really, really wish I did, because it would make it a lot easier to figure out what I need to do to compensate.


Also, I'm going to politely request that everybody who is criticizing this keep following (and check out the other sections as they're posted), and continue to criticize, since one of the weirder and more frustrating aspects of my particular brand of autism is that I will automatically try to add complexity to any method well past the point of absurdity, which I suspect I did a long time ago when it came to putting together how I write a story. I've shaved it down a fair bit, but I've gotten to the point where I can't shave it down any more, so if you can suggest a simpler method, or any steps I can knock off, I'm open to suggestions. Just...keep in mind, I've got a fairly rare condition, and most people with this condition tend to lean much more heavily towards math and science than English, so there really is a reason why I'm approaching this as a scientific or a mathematical formula. That's just how my brain works, and I figure that, here, there's going to be somebody who can tell me what I can skip, and what I can re-arrange.


Also...do people really write while high on LSD? Even the thought of trying that scares the hell out of me. I've got enough problems trying to keep my brain on one track as it is, let alone after actively trying to screw up my thought processes.

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Sure I can do this.

And well...yes.

Check out Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at some point. It's enlightening.

 

[Partizan]

Sure I can do this.

And well...yes.

Check out Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at some point. It's enlightening.

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Thanks, I appreciate that. And while I probably won't change the order I say to do it in, but I will try to emphasize that this order is mostly because it's how I have to do it, and that other people have a lot more freedom to change the order around.

That disturbs me on more levels than I even want to think about.

Why would anybody want to create extra voices in their head? Aren't the ones they have bad enough?