Worldbuilding Template

Start with pressure, not with a map

The usual worldbuilding mistake is to begin with maps, names and a thousand years of history that no reader will see. Begin with the pressure on the people instead. Every field on this sheet is a way to ask what is hard, scarce or dangerous about living here. A world with no pressure is a backdrop; a world where water is rationed, or a bridge is cut, or the tide table is wrong, is a place where characters have to choose.

Fill in the one-sentence premise and the main tension first. If you cannot say what is different about this world and what that does to an ordinary person, more detail will not help. Come back to geography and history once you know what they are for.

Let each part cause the next

Good worlds are consistent because the parts cause each other. Geography decides what grows, and what grows decides what people trade. What people trade decides who has power, and power decides what the laws protect. Work down the sheet that way and ask how each answer follows from the one above it. A city on a cliff face needs rope, and whoever owns the rope owns the city.

Use the same test on beliefs and customs. A custom that has no cause in the land, the history or the economy will feel like decoration. A custom that comes from a real danger, like a tide-bell on a causeway, will feel as if it has always been there.

Give magic and technology a price

Whatever your world can do that ours cannot, write down who can do it, what it costs and what it cannot do. Limits create plot. If the magic has no price, nobody has to choose, and if the technology never fails, nobody has to improvise. The field for rules is the place to say what the cost is, and the field for secrets is the place to say what happens when somebody pays it wrongly.

Show the world through one ordinary day

The day-in-the-life field is the most useful one for a writer. It forces you to place customs, money, food, work and danger inside one person's morning, and it gives you scenes you can use. A baker who hauls flour on a pulley tells the reader more about a cliff city than three paragraphs of description.

Decide how much you will write down. You need enough to stay consistent, and no more than the story will touch. Keep this sheet beside the manuscript and add to it when the draft invents something.