Hopeful dungeon masters, game developers, aspiring fiction writers, lend me your ears! It certainly isn't easy to just pull a landscape out of your pocket and set up a rich fanciful history from scratch. World-building, as rewarding as it can be, can also prove quite tedious. At the start, trying to construct a world from scratch can be daunting, with countless details you have to be aware of. However, with a couple of key features hashed out, the process can become far simpler. Having dabbled in the art for a while, here are some basic guidelines on how to start building a fictional realm from the ground up.
1. Food, glorious food!
I put this one first not because it trumps geography or other factors of world-building, but because it seems to be something a lot of folks tend to overlook. Who produces what in the narrative you are attempting to illustrate? What is imported and what is exported? Who do you want producing what? This can often be an excellent starting point for organizing the locations of cities and towns in your world, and can even help shape the politics of your story. Everybody, be they evil overlord or hardworking commoner, has to eat, drink, and consume natural resources on a daily basis. Rivers, forests, and fertile land, in a more realistic setting, are not limitless cornucopias for everyone to enjoy. Certain groups of people might have a monopoly on farmland, or perhaps a certain coastal town is the fishing magnate on a particular continent. Bottom line: don't put yourself in a situation where your audience is grilling you about where their meal comes from without an informed idea about how production works in your world.
2. Land, ho!
Once you've parsed out areas of bounty, we must also consider areas of scarcity. Maybe much of your geography is dominated by harsh deserts where rainfall is scarce, or a boundless snowy tundra where plants seldom grow. Suppose you take a more fanciful route, and large plumes of lava and fire dot the horizon, and those that do survive must do so amidst the volcanic wasteland. One of the nice things about natural hazards and pitfalls is that it provides the narrator with a very basic reasoning to have parties of raiders or feral masses set upon the heroes: folks have to make ends meet, or steal the means to do so. This logic isn't just limited to thieves, either; nations can't always be neighborly when resources are scarce, and depending on your geography, certain powers may go to war or have trade disputes regularly, depending on whether they share the territory of a large stream or a barren mountain range. Rather than try to make an even landscape, it can be far more rewarding to format terrain for the purpose of creating drama in your narrative.
3. Democracy, dictatorships, and political gray matter (oh my!)
When people are trying to survive, more often than not they'll band together for the purpose of mutually beneficial support. Cities will grow and citizens will rise, one way or another, to lead governments. What kind of government that proves to be can have massive ripple effects on the other people of that city, outpost, or town. For example, a direct democracy, where everyone has a voice in politics, has very different pros and cons compared to a despotic empire, where one individual holds almost all of the executive power. Wartime, diplomatic, and trade policies can be drastically dissimilar between powers, depending on how they are governed, and can further conflict or strengthen international powers according to these political bodies.
For some of you, this may not seem like the most entertaining subject to deal with, but I guarantee you will be better off spending some time to flush out the political scene of your world. Politics can be a great tool for creating moral ambiguity in a setting because, as a general rule, not everyone has the kind of political sway a noble or an elected official has. A guard may attempt to arrest a well-known protagonist, not because they want to, but because it's their job, because their livelihood is funded by the government of the fiefdom they reside in. Perhaps it was a corrupt order handed down by an official, and now they have to make a decision to either let this person go on moral grounds, or take them in due to economic survival. It's a realistic dilemma, and it will help to further the dramatic tensions of your narrative. You may be surprised just how many ways political unrest can help justify the conflict in your world.
4. Divine influence and inspiration.
Presumably, this mystical realm you're creating isn't solely populated by atheists and agnostics; chances are, somebody is going to seek some form of divine influence. It never hurts to have one or more deities as an active cultural force in your setting. Faith can also be an excellent motivator for both protagonists and antagonists, and shade in the kind of character that person might be. Are they seen as a lawful upholder of a divine protector, or a wicked fanatic fulfilling a pact with an evil immortal entity? Just like politics, religion can take on forms both benign and hostile, and you can use the appropriation of those faiths to further plot details or to refine background and cultural conflicts.
There are certainly plenty of other factors to discuss regarding world-building, but this is plenty to swallow in one day. In truth, there are many ways to go about piecing together a fictional setting, and I'm not about to sit here and judge the techniques and tropes of others. As with most creative works, guidelines are appreciated, but not always required-- after all, we all have it in us to tell a unique story in a unique way.
