Creating Fantasy and Science Fiction

Worlds
Introduction
Everybody says, "My topic is the most important thing you can learn in order to
write science fiction and fantasy," when they write a tutorial for FARP. But I'm
actually not exaggerating. The art of creating worlds is crucial to good Fantasy
and Science Fiction.
There are four basic parts of a story: plot, character, setting, and theme. You
cannot be a good writer unless you can command each of these. If you have a
mediocre, predictable, or contrived plot, your book will bore readers. If your
characters are two dimensional, unmotivated, or clich, readers will not care
about what happens to them in your story. Theme is what makes a story more
meaningful than mere entertainment.
But what sets Fantasy and Science Fiction apart from other genres is the setting.
The story of a rouge police detective dodging a former colleague because he's
been set up by the authorities sounds like a fairly typical mystery/thriller. But
what if the crime the detective was accused of hasn't actually happened yet, but
was only predicted by a police psychic? Suddenly you have the brilliant Science
Fiction movie Minority Report. Gattaca is essentially a thriller centered around an
identity theft crime. But what makes the story Science Fiction is its setting in a
eugenic society based on DNA determinism. A story about an engineer hired to
help build a ceramic engine for a race car transforms into a fantasy story when
you find out why the owners want a ceramic engine. They are "allergic" to iron
because they happen to be elves.
To be a good writer you need to know character, plot, and theme. But to be a
good Fantasy and Science Fiction writer, you need to master setting. This is true
even if your world is not a major focus of your story. Alien for example has two
worlds: the barren, stormy planet where they discover the derelict alien
spacecraft, and the Nostramo. You never see the ship's engines or learn anything
about how they work, you never learn much about the politics of Earth, you learn
absolutely nothing about the mysterious alien wreck, there's little there about the
technology of the android, or any of that. The rest of the universe, the
"Corporation", the government, is essentially implied, but it's there enough that
you are aware of a world bigger than the Nostramo. There's just enough to give
the alien good hiding spaces for it to jump out and slaughter the crew one at a
time. The key is that those hiding spaces don't come across as meaningless or
contrived like the Chompers in Galaxy Quest.
Nor do you need to create a universe that is totally original or free of those
dreaded Fantasy clichs. Think about the "greats". Fantasy worlds like Middle
Earth, the lands of Jordan's Wheel of Time, Discworld. These worlds are made up,
in many cases of pieces borrowed from other sources. Tolkien took most of his
world from ancient Norse mythology and Celtic legend. Discworld is an intentional
hodgepodge of other fantasy ideas. The worlds of Dungeons and Dragons are so
derivative of Tolkien, it was nearly sued out of existence in its early days. The
pieces may not be entirely original, but the whole is a world that sucks the reader
in and keeps them coming back.
And that's the key for creating a realistic world for your story, creating the world
as a whole. Our world, its physics, geography, environment, biology, and the
human cultures and civilizations on it all connect in complex interdependent
systems. You don't have to detail every aspect of your world, nor does your world
have to be totally feasible from a purely scientific standpoint. But if your world
can reflect some of that complexity it will make your imaginary world more real to
your reader. It will anchor your characters to the environment, anchor the plot in
a greater flow of history, and especially in Science Fiction and Fantasy, provide a
foundation for the development of your theme.
All this is not to say that your worlds have to be completely scientifically realistic.
Middle Earth, geographically speaking, doesn't work. There should be a rain
shadow east of the Misty Mountains that would make the huge forest of Mirkwood
impossible. The reality of Middle Earth is in its history. The Emin Muil isn't barren
and rugged because of geological forces like volcanism. It's there because of the
wars 3000 years before that destroyed it.
J.R.R. Tolkien studied languages. Especially the history and development of
English and related Germanic/Scandinavian tongues. He began playing around at
inventing a language or two of his own. He combined this with his love of the
legends and mythology of England and slowly began crafting a history to explain
the development of the languages he was inventing. (In other words, the model
for creating worlds suggested by this tutorial is hardly gospel, there are other
ways of achieving the goal of creating a world that becomes real to your readers)
That story is the basis of the quintessential fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. One of
the reasons readers enthusiastically return again and again to Middle Earth is
because the history of Middle Earth lends power to the narrative. The characters
aren't just slogging their way over hills, but treading across ancient battlefields,
skirting ruins of ancient towers, walking through forests planted in the dawn of
the world. That history gives the world of middle earth a reality that sucks the
reader into the story.
George Lucas's Star Wars universe was never very well developed, especially
from a technology standpoint, but it still works. For example, when we first see
the Millennium Falcon and Luke comments, "What a hunk of junk!" Han counters,
"She can make point five factors past light speed." Now we are never told exactly
how fast a "factor" is or why only one half of a factor is so blazingly fast. But we
can easily infer from the reactions of the characters, and the confidence of Han,
that whatever the speed is, it's considerably faster than usual for small, run-down
cargo ships.
You're never told anything about the engineering behind a "blaster" - notice they
avoid the term "laser" when talking about hand held weapons- or what kind of
engines the ships use. That's all black box technology. The important thing is that
when you pull the trigger the gun shoots, and it fires consistently. You don't get a
gun barely wounding a person in one scene when in the scene just before the
same gun blew a cubic foot hole in a stone wall. When you push the throttle
forward the ship speeds up. Or when the engine breaks down and Han and
Chewie start fixing it, you may not have any idea what the "transtator" does, but
they clearly do. I do have a hard science buddy who always complains about how
the fighters fly more like airplanes in an atmosphere rather than a space ship in
micro-gravity. But as long as it's the way things consistently work your reader
has a much easier time "suspending their disbelief" and living in your world with
your characters.
Since one of the most fun parts about writing Fantasy and Science Fiction is that
you get to be the god of your own universe, I'm going to look at how God created
the universe as a model for creating your own. Since everyone is relatively
familiar with the creation narrative from Genesis I will use its 7-day structure to
divide the process up into convenient bites. But I want to make clear my primary
point: a world is a cohesive whole with all manner of forces working together. The
key to creating a realistic world in your story is working from the beginning of the
process to make sure all the parts will work together.
Day 0: In the Beginning God: Theology
Before even the first day dawns, one of the first issues you must at least address
is theology. This is not just the issue of God(s) and how he/she/it/they interact
with the world, but the whole issue of the supernatural. Is there magic in your
universe and how does it work? It also addresses the fundamental morality in
your universe. What is right and wrong, and how will the characters in your world
decide between them?
There are a few basic answers to the theology question
Atheism/Agnosticism: Many Science Fiction stories assume an Atheist or
Agnostic answer. Either God doesn't exist or doesn't matter much as far as the
story is concerned. For example, in David Webber's The Honor of the Queen the
faith of the people of the planet Grayson and their arch foes on Endicott is an
important factor in the story, and the Grayson characters are very sincere about
their belief in God. But whether or not there actually is a god or whether their
doctrines actually reflect the intentions of any divine being is not an issue in the
story.
Naturalism: Atheism is often equated with naturalism, but naturalism is more
than rejecting the idea of a divine being. Naturalism rejects the idea of the
supernatural in general. Naturalism assumes that there is nothing other than the
physical, natural universe: space, time, energy, and matter. If you want to
include 'supernatural' elements into your world (like psychic powers or magic)
you will have to invent some sort of quazi-scientific explanation for how they
work. Morality and ethical rules are derived from personal choice or social
constructs.
Monism: This is something of a middle ground between Atheism and Theism. It
is the concept that all things are one; all nature, super-nature, spirit, matter,
consciousness are facets of a whole. That 'one' thing may be spiritual but it is not
a god, a personal being, just a cosmic force. Rarely can you attribute traits like
will, or love to it. Buddhism is an example of an atheistic, monistic religion.
Pantheism: Is kind of the next step. It is the idea that is all things are part of
God, that God is the aggregate of all the consciousness or spirit of the world.
Pantheism usually under-girds polytheist or animist world views.
Animism: Animism is classic paganism. An animist world-view holds that the
whole world is suffused with spiritual beings. To quote from Disney's Pocahontas,
a world where 'every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a
name'. Waterborn, by J. Gregory Keyes or Miyazaki's Spirited Away are very good
examples of this sort of world. There is usually little structure; that is, there isn't
necessarily a specific hierarchy with some gods or goddesses in charge of others.
Any given god or spirit has little authority or power outside their specific venue.
There may be major deities, like over the sun or moon, sky or sea, but the
primary concern of most people are the local spirits around where they live.
Polytheism: Classic polytheism, like the mythologies of Egypt, Babylon, Greece,
China, Rome, has a group of gods who often compete with each other for
worshipers, position, power, and prestige. The gods each have specific aspects of
the natural and cultural world under their control. So there might be a god or
goddess responsible over the Earth, the Sea, the Sky, Agriculture, Sex, the Arts,
Business, Technology, Math, History, etc. Frequently gods fill multiple rolls. For
instance Apollo is often called the god of medicine, philosophy, the arts, and
science (in ancient times all these fields were the perview of philosophy). But he
originally was a sun god (his sister Artemis was goddess of the moon).
Polytheist pantheons are usually built on an animist foundation (so each tree still
had its attending dryad and each spring its own nymph) but people are much
more concerned with what the big head honchos up on Olympus are doing. This is
often the result of historical forces. For example, the Babylonian creation myth is
a story about the ascension of the god Marduk (the patron god of the city of
Babylon) to power over the other older gods and his victory over Tiamat and the
forces of chaos. It reflects the historical ascension of the city of Babylon to power
over the cities of the older Sumerian Empire and the raiders from ancient Persia.
Dualism: This is the idea that there are two equal and opposite cosmic forces of
light and darkness locked in an eternal struggle. These conflicts can be moral in
nature (the eternal battle between good and evil), or amoral (both gods may be
selfish jerks or altruistic crusaders convinced they are the ones that have the best
plan). The forces may be personal, that is beings with personality, will, and
character, or they may be impersonal, like the 'light side' and 'dark side' of the
Force in Star Wars.
Monotheism: This is the idea that ultimately there is one God. This God is the
being who guides history, defines morality, etc. You must decide how powerful
the God in your story is, what their personality is, what their nature is, what their
ultimate goals are. You also have to explain where the bad guy came from and
why the God in your story allows him to exist.

Religion & Magic:

As you consider your basic theological construct, one of the most important
things with regard to your story will be how characters interact with and
manipulate the supernatural forces governing your story's universe. I'll spend
more time on religions in day 6 (since they are primarily social/cultural
institutions). One of the keys to building a good Fantasy/Science Fiction world is
building a workable magic system.
Magic works like an Etch-a-Sketch. You want to draw a picture, so you twist the
knobs. An unseen array of wires, gears, and rods move the stylus. And the
picture appears on the screen. You want the girl to fall in love, or the bad guy to
turn into a toad, or carpet to fly, so you mix the potion, wave the wand, or say
the magic words and they manipulate an unseen web of mystical forces that
create the desired effects.
As the creator of the world, you need to have at least a cursory understanding of
those forces and how they work. Even if they stay 'black box' (you never really
explain how it works, it just works like expected every time) you need to set up
established rules and limits. They both inform the reader and keep you from
using them as an easy out when you work your characters into a corner.
One of the best examples of this kind of abuse I can give is the Transporter
device from Star Trek (TNG). Yes, I know it's not strictly magical, but technology
serves much the same function in Sci-Fi that magic serves in Fantasy. It was a
common problem with many of the scripts to use the transporter as an
emergency solution to impossible problems. They used it to make rapidly aging
characters young again, re-incarnate Captain Picard almost out of whole cloth,
preserve Scotty for 70 years. The transporter could automatically filter out
disease causing microbes (unless the plot called for an epidemic to break out on
the ship) and disarm weapons during transport, but it couldn't remove any of the
Borg parts from Captain Picard.
The transporter was originally created as a quick way to move characters from
one scene to another without needing to constantly shoot expensive special
effects shots of a shuttle launching and landing. It allowed characters to travel
from the ship to a planet without a break in the action and drama. Writers,
however, quickly grasped that if a machine could break matter down into energy
and perfectly re-assemble it; is should be able to do all kinds of things besides
just move people from orbit to a planet's surface.
Eventually the producers had to lay down some hard rules and limitations on the
writers. They realized many of the people submitting scripts (and writing books)
had only to slide those three little levers on the transporter control board, and all
the plot problems 'magically' disappeared. Even when the writer had a novel and
creative explanation how the transporter could do what they wanted, it either got
rejected or rewritten. By the time DS9 and Voyager came around (and CG
animated ships drastically reduced the price of SFX shots of ships landing) you
will notice that the transporter generally reverted to its primary function of being
a convenient character conveyance.
So, a magic system has two parts, the gears, rods, and wires that work under the
surface and the knobs you use to control them

Different Magic systems:

These are kind of the basic choices for the gears and rods under the surface of
the etch-a-sketch:
Mana - A root magical concept in which various fields of magical energy exist
along side of the fundamental forces of physics like gravity and
electromagnetism. Certain people, or races, or objects (or even technology) are
capable of manipulating those fields in a variety of ways to produce a variety of
effects. These fields may be elemental in nature (like fire, earth, air, water, life,
and death), moral in nature (good or evil), it may just be that thought or
consciousness is as fundamental a force as gravity (like the Force in Star Wars).
The key is how the characters in your story manipulate them.
Chi - This is where the magic user calls upon his own spirit to power a spell. This
is a good choice if you want magic to be a more subtle part of your world because
you can easily limit the scope of magic by how much chi a person can draw on
without causing themselves serious harm.
Astral - The spirit can interact with alternate realities that interrelate with our
own. Magic is actually performed by an astral projection of the magic user's self
Derivative - This is where the magic user's powers are derived from other
spiritual beings, usually gods. When you hear a spell-caster say, 'In the name of .
. .', that's derivative magic. The magic user needs to have a connection with and
some sort of authority granted by the divinity or spirit. Abuse of derivative magic
can have some very nasty side effects. One of the attractions to this sort of magic
is it always gives the bad guys a leg up. The good gods usually place all sorts of
restrictions on their followers, while the bad god is totally willing to let his minions
use all the power they like.
Proxy - This is where the actual magic is performed by a spirit or familiar under
the command of the magic user, like the Genie of Aladdin's Lamp or Ariel, the
sylph who served Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. (Or Dr. Morbius'
Robbie the Robot in the sci-fi version Forbidden Planet)
Keep in mind, that you can mix and match these different forces (and any you
might make up). For example you could have a group of heroes that includes a
priest character using a form of derivative magic, a druid who walks the astral
planes, a shaman with proxy animal spirits, while a sorcerer who uses mana and
a martial-arts monk who calls upon his chi. They may all argue a lot about who
has the best powers, or who's theology is right, but your world doesn't have to be
limited to one form of magic. You might even play with different forms of magic
working in different areas, or have a series of parallel worlds each having
different theologies and magic systems.
Once you've got an idea of the gears under the surface, you need to decide on
the knobs that move them. These are fairly interchangeable and frequently you
will see more than one in any given universe (such as different orders of
sorcerers using different forms of magic). The names are not necessarily technical
names but terms I use myself:
Mental - The magical forces of your world are controlled by nothing more than
the will and concentration of the magician. Perhaps the magic user can see
threads of the magical energies or visualizes the result.
Shaman - The shaman is closely connected to, communicates with, and often
channels animal and nature spirits. As such he is part of an animistic world. He
can ask or even force the nature spirits to perform services or give information.
These interactions are often deals, which obligates the shaman to the spirits he
calls upon. These obligations may be simple offerings left at a shrine, or small
tasks, or epic quests.
Random/Tarot - This is based on the idea that there is no truly random event.
The spiritual fields surrounding people, places, and events constantly interact.
Therefore a deck of cards, dice, or bones properly attuned to those forces will not
fall in random patterns, but in patterns that meaningfully reflect the patterns of
all those interacting ethereal forces. They can even predict patterns of events.
Powerful cards may even be able to reverse engineer those patterns causing
events rather then just predicting them.
Alchemy - by properly manipulating and mixing ingredients one can manipulate
other objects or people even at a chemical/atomic level. This is not to say that it
is chemistry. The eye of the newt and the leg of spider don't react chemically to
create a sleeping potion. The ingredients of a magic potion are based on the
ingredient's association with a particular trait, like love, beauty, sleep, vitality,
hatred, strength, truth, deception, etc. So a potion to slow an enemy down might
include ground snail shell or a potion for wisdom might have owl's eyes.
Alchemist will usually be familiar with regular 'bathtub' chemistry as well, able to
mix potions from natural drugs
Summoning - Magic based on summoning creatures from distant places, or from
other spiritual planes of existence. These creatures may just be animals or they
may be monsters, warriors, demons, angels, and demigods. You can have all
kinds of fun with how controllable these beings may be (or how uncontrollable).
Summoning is obviously built on a proxy magic foundation.
Necromancy - Magic based on manipulating death and the dead. This is akin to
Summoning and usually must involve other forms of magical manipulation to
control the spirits of the dead. Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy has one of the best-
developed systems of necromancy I've every seen in a book.
Sacrifice - The magic user must offer some sort of sacrifice to seal an agreement
with a spiritual being, or the energy released in the taking of a life (usually
symbolized by the blood) is used to power a spell. This may involve something
simple as leaving a small bowl of grain in a shrine or pouring a few ounces of
wine on an altar. This may involve the ritual slaughter of a hundred people.
Occasionally this is combined with ritualistic cannibalism, in which the sacrificial
victim is consumed, imparting its spiritual energy to the sacrificer.
Erotic - Sometimes called Tantric. The idea that the energies released during
seduction and intercourse can open one to altered states of consciousness or that
one can funnel those energies to influence the world. Commonly this form of
magic is associated with fortune telling. It is often vampiric in nature, sucking
energy off the victim. It is also frequently used to seductively manipulate and
mesmerize victims.
Physical - Physical discipline and precise forms of movement can control spiritual
energies of the body and the world. This form of magic can appear as a simple
hand gesture, or a series of karate moves, yoga poses, or a dance.
Vocal - Magical forces are manipulated by the spoken word. This can mean that
the spoken word is simply a focus for the mind to manipulate the magic (as in the
case of a magician that always says 'presto' no mater what spell she is trying to
cast). Or it could mean that saying a certain string of syllables causes a specific
effect. In this case what is important is the words and phrasing (and perhaps the
language) of the incantation. Check out 'A Wizard of Earthsea' by Ursula LeGuin
for an example of a magic system based on a 'true language' where things can be
controlled by knowing their names in the true language.
Musical - This is a variation on 'vocal'. This is the idea that certain sound
patterns can manipulate the magical forces of the world. They may need to be
vocal, that is sung, or played on a musical instrument. This is based on the primal
power of music and lyric on the human psyche. J.R.R. Tolkien was fond of this
and you see it frequently in his writing. Indeed Middle Earth is the physical
embodiment of the song of the Valar composed by Eru, the One.
Symbolic - This is magic controlled by written symbols, runes, or words. This is
one of the most common magical methods historically employed. Ancient Roman
and Greek sorcerers wrote spells on sheets of tin or lead, rolled them closed and
threw them down a well. Oriental spell casters often use a spell precisely written
on a strip of paper to seal a spirit or place blessing or a curse on a person or
room. Often spells need to be performed in a precisely drawn diagram, or a box
sealed with a precisely engraved symbol. Tattoos are another method employed
using this type of magic.
Focus - The magic user needs an object, like a wand, staff, ring, gem, hoop,
charm, doll, or ball to focus and control their power properly. The focus acts
something like a magical antenna directing the magical energies. In some cases,
especially wands, the object must be precisely moved to generate the desired
effect.
Now the fun comes in when you start to mix and match things. For example you
can have rival schools that use different types of magic. Frequently magic
methods are combined, like when a magician has to scribe a precise symbol on
the ground (symbolic), speak the incantation precisely (vocal), then precisely
strike points on the symbol with a staff (focus).
Day 1: Let There Be Light: Physics
As the creator of the world in your story you get to determine the laws of the
natural universe, electromagnetism, gravity, or even elements like fire, water,
earth and air. You need to have at least a cursory understanding of the physics of
your world. Like theology and religion are often a minor issue to the sci-fi writer,
physics is usually a minor issue to the Fantasy writer because the fantasy writer
assumes a universe that physically behaves identically to our own with just the
addition of a little magic or non-existent elements (like mithril). For the Sci-fi
writer Physics is often the 'magic' of the story. It is how the characters interact
and manipulate the world around them. How faster than light travel works is
often at the core of any sci-fi universe. What role does cyberspace play? How do
energy weapons work? Shields? Nano-technology? Psychic abilities? Are there
spiritual/magical aspects to the 'Physics' of the world (like the Force of Star
Wars)? How mechanistic is magic? How do the magical and technological
elements interact?
Magic is frequently dependent on a sentient soul, while manipulating physics is
performed by machines. Often crystals form a bridge between the two. The
quartz crystal vibrates so precisely under an electrical charge that we use them in
clocks to keep time. The ever popular 'Dilithium Crystals' of Star Trek fame used
to be said to have a 4th dimensional matrix which was part of how they worked in
the Warp engines. Other crystals may respond to vibrations in fields of magical
energies. Some of the source material for Star Wars suggests that the crystals
that focus the Light Saber are formed only under the proper influence of the
force. Therefore the light saber blade projected by the crystal is also an
emanation of the Force, not just plasma. That is why they can deflect even high-
powered energy beams and cut through meter thick blast doors a turbolaser
wouldn't dent. Or like the Materia crystals in Final Fantasy 7 that are tuned to the
mystical forces of the world and empower technological machines, weapons, and
armor with a wide array of side effects from boosting strength to summoning
dragons.
Often scientific and magical forces cannot co-exist. For example, in the Harry
Potter stories there's a degree of separation between the magical world and the
muggle world imposed by the interference magical forces cause with electrical
devices.
If you're creating a sci-fi world one of the first issues you need to consider is how
to get characters from one planet to another. I find that your ship's drive systems
are a good place to start to develop the rest of the technology level in you
universe. Propulsion technologies are often at the forefront of technological
development whether it's the wheel, the steam engine, or a hyperdrive. It gives
you a base line against which you can compare other technologies, like counter-
gravity generators, weapons technology, force fields, power systems, computers
and robotics, and the like. It also gives you a baseline to compare cultures in your
world that have different technology levels.
If you are going to use esoteric, mystical, and wholly invented systems of
propulsion, those sciences will effect all technology throughout your world. If your
FTL drives require a psychic to guide the ship through hyperspace, for example,
you need to develop psychic abilities in a wide array of technologies, like law
enforcement or medicine. In Disney's mediocre Black Hole, the robots are able to
communicate with telepathic humans if real-time, with no radio lag.
Let me throw a few numbers at you:

1 Light Second = 186,271 Miles or 299,760 Kilometers

1 Light year = 5.9 Trillion miles or 9.4 Trillion Kilometers (the nearest
star is over 4LY away).
1g = 32 feet/s/s or 9.81 M/s/s

That means that to reach light speed (300,000 Kilometers/second) accelerating at

1G (0.01 Kilometers/second/second) would take almost 8500 hours, that's 353
days, almost a whole year. (That doesn't include relativistic effects.) Rocket
engines like those on the shuttle or the Saturn V that went to the moon run about
4-7G acceleration (so it would only take about 2 months burning your rocket at
6Gs).
Now just imagine how much fuel you would need to power a conventional
hydrogen/oxygen rocket at full acceleration for 2 whole months given that the
entire fuel tank on the space shuttle runs out in about 60 seconds. Don't forget,
when you get to where you're going, you need to decelerate for two months at
6Gs to get back down to orbital speeds.

Sub-Light Drives
Solid Fuel Rocket: Solid fuel rockets are not exactly spacecraft engines because
the gunpowder, paraffin, or whatever fuels you use needs oxygen to burn. Either
you have to have liquid oxygen, or some other chemical like Nitrous Oxide to
provide the oxidizer.
Liquid Fuel Rocket: Since there is no air in space to provide oxygen for burning,
you need to take your own oxygen with you. This requires the technology to
refrigerate oxygen and hydrogen into liquid. But even condensed into liquid,
oxygen and hydrogen take up a lot of space, meaning HUGE fuel tanks for
anything farther than a trip to the nearest planet.
Heavy Fuel Drive: This engine relies on a nuclear plant to create heat that flash-
boils some heavy element, like mercury to create thrust. The atomic density of
mercury means that you will need significantly less volume of storage to get the
same level of reaction mass. This rocket appears in some of Robert Heinlein's
early stories.
Solar Sail: The simplest drive system. A thin foil sail large enough to catch the
solar wind and pull the ship through a solar system. If you introduce esoteric
particles and energies in your universe the sail might be able to catch Neutrinos,
Tachyons, or made up FTL particles, or ride gravity waves or other kinds of
electromagnetic fields.
Thumper: A slang term for a drive system that works by detonating nuclear
explosives behind the ship. The drive is essentially a huge shock absorber and
radiation shield that can absorb the energy of the explosions and covert it into
smooth acceleration. The Messiah spacecraft from Deep Impact used this drive.
Photon Drive: Similar in concept to the solar sail, but the ship carries it's own
light source. The photon drive works by converting the pressure of photons on
the drive reflector into forward momentum. The drive reflector has to be
enormous for this engine to work.
Ion Drive: Ion drives work somewhat like a particle accelerator in reverse. The
engine creates a stream of charged ion particles that are projected out the back.
Even with the small mass of the ions, their near-light speed will be able to
accelerate even fairly large ships. The TIE (Twin Ion Engine) fighter from Star
Wars used this drive. NASA's deep space probe launched in 1998 used an Ion
drive. With current designs, you can eventually achieve high top speeds, but they
only accelerate very slowly.
Plasma Drive: This type of engine uses electric arcs or lasers to create a stream
of magnetically focussed plasma. Thrust is provided by the expansion of the
reaction mass into plasma and the mass of the stream.
Fusion Drive: One step up from a plasma drive, a fusion drive heats and focuses
the plasma enough that the nuclei in the plasma begin fusing. This dramatically
increases the level of thrust you can get out of the reaction mass. It also creates
a lot of neutron radiation.
Anti-mater Drive: Instead of using plasma, a stream of matter and anti-matter
are directed at each other. The energy released in the matter/anti-matter
annihilation provides the forward thrust.
Gravity Drive: Now we're entering territory well outside our current
technological know-how. This type of drive works by manipulating gravitational
fields around the ship to propel it forwards. This is often the drive system of
choice. It requires no reaction mass, so all you have to fuel are the reactors that
power the ship. Scientists, in answer to some surprising observations about the
expansion rate of the universe, are proposing that there is also an anti-
gravitational force that repels matter. David Weber's latest book In Fury Born the
ships project a black hole in front of themselves that pulls the ship along. This
makes for some interesting games of chicken.
Tachyon Drive: Tachyons are theoretical particles (there is no proof they exist).
Just like the speed of light is impossibly fast for normal matter, for the tachyon,
the speed of light is impossibly slow. You'll just need to invent a way to create
and control them.
Liljenberg Field Drive: Hey, you're the creator of your own universe. You can
make up totally non-existent forces and energies and ways to control and direct
them. You can extrapolate from known science. If you get a lot of energy splitting
atoms, what kind of energy could you get from splitting the quarks apart in
protons? What if you could break apart electrons? What if you could harness the
power of a black hole? You can also bring in the magical forces (if any) you
cooked up in the previous chapter.

FTL Drives
FTL drive names are often used very interchangeably. Many different writers use
more than one technique even in the same universe. I have given the names
most common for a particular FTL method, but it is not uncommon for people to
mix and match FTL techniques. In a number of books what they call a 'warp drive'
works like what I call here a 'jump drive'. You also can put all kinds of wrinkles in
the mix to make FTL more dangerous; a common side effect of translating
between normal space and hyperspace is nausea or insanity.
Warp Drive: Yes, right out of Star Trek. This is a fairly conventional FTL method,
the warp drive projects a field that creates a multi-layered bubble of normal
space around the ship inside which the ship is never exceeding C, even though
the bubble is. The ship can still see and be seen by objects around it. It can still
collide with physical objects in normal space.
Hyperspace: Probably the single most common FTL technique, this involves
crossing into an alternate plane outside or beneath (hence the common name
'sub-space') Einsteinian space/time where your ship is free to violate the C speed
limit. Hyperspace may not be a totally separate dimension, so objects like
planets, stars, and black holes and their gravitational fields will still effect
hyperspace. Hyperspace can be a complete space; that is, a ship can enter at any
given point and travel in any given direction. Or you can limit it's scope to special
pathways and vector lanes (which is rife with strategic implications).
Jump Drive: The Jump Drive is another common FTL techniques. The idea is that
the drive instantly transports the ship from one location to another without the
ship actually moving. Usually this works by folding space (sort of like the engine
moves the whole universe around the ship rather than the ship itself) or by
crossing in and out of an alternate dimension (this technique frequently requires
some sort of psychic navigator). Usually you need to put on a variety of
limitations, like limiting the range of the jump to 30 LY (like in FASAs Mechwarrior
universe), long drive recharge times, large interstellar objects can block the strait
line trajectory, etc.
Ether Drive: There are scientists who deny Einstein's C speed limit and continue
to debate his whole concept of linking space with time. In this view breaking the
light barrier in the interstellar ether is analogous to breaking the sound barrier in
an atmosphere.
Wormhole/Warp Point: Wormholes are natural phenomena that have so
warped the fabric of space/time that they connect two distant points in space. As
such they are usually associated with gravity fields. Warp points usually connect
to only one other warp point, but some stories allow you to travel to different
warp points depending on your entry vector.
Stargate: Essentially an artificial wormhole, the basic idea is that the power
requirement of opening a door into hyperspace or the physics of a wormhole
necessitates a permanent, relatively stationary facility.
Dimension Hopping: This one is more common in fantasy universes and usually
does not require a vehicle. These devices or magical spells allow characters to
transport to wholly different dimensions and realities where even the laws of
physics may vary. Like the D'ni linking books from Myst or the D-hoppers from
Robert Asprin's Myth books
Time Travel: Leave yourself no end to the worlds, technology levels, and
cultures you can explore. Have fun with temporal paradoxes, alternate events,
and the nature of causality.
Remember that one of the major issues with traveling at high speeds in deep
space is the constant threat of cosmic radiation and dust. At even orbital speeds
crashing into a pebble the size of a pea can blow hole through the outer hull of a
ship. The earth shields itself with a huge magnetic field that spreads out past the
moon, the moon itself, the Van Allen radiation belts, and a 100-Kilometer thick
blanket of air. Your ship will need similar protection.
Science Fiction has a number of classic conventions that are commonly accepted,
even though they don't make much sense from a scientific point of view, like
shipboard artificial gravity fields. Gravity is the least understood of the 4 principle
forces. If you can manipulate gravity at a precise enough level to control it on a
room by room basis on board a starship, there should be very little that your
civilization cannot accomplish. For example in the movie Aliens, why are people
with the technology to create earth type gravity fields on an object as small as a
space cruiser (and fully AI androids) using bullet firing machine guns and flame
throwers? With that level of technology shouldn't they have personal force fields,
silksteel armor, powered exo-suits that make that loader look as clunky as a
brontosaurus, microwave lasers, and plasma beams? Basically the whole
shipboard gravity field is a function of the ease of filming and nothing more. We
simply suspend our disbelief and assume some inventor figured a surprisingly
simple way to do it.
Movies also inspire a rather inaccurate view of space combat. In Star Wars, for
example, the ships, especially fighters, fly much more like airplanes in an
atmosphere, with the nose always pointing forward. In real zero G, where you
conserve your angular momentum, a fighter would have its nose pointed to the
center of the curve of its turn. (You remember playing Asteroids?) This makes
real dog fighting in space a much different procedure than in an atmosphere. As
in Asteroids a fighter becomes more like a mobile gun turret. Babylon 5 is the
only show that has handled this remotely accurately. Also, in Star Trek you
frequently see the ships very close together, just a few miles apart. This is done
entirely to get the ships to fit on a movie or television screen together. In reality
the ships would probably be thousands of kilometers apart and barely able to see
each other with the naked eye. Since energy beams travel at the speed of light
and maintain their coherence in the vacuum of space, the effective range of
energy beams in combat will be on the order of a light second (that's around
300,000 Kilometers) unless your ships have tremendous acceleration rates. Out
of combat, or in a surprise attack, energy weapons could have effective ranges of
millions of kilometers. While developing the technology for Ronald Reagan's SDI,
NASA used Mars' moons (80 million Kilometers away) as target practice for its
particle accelerator weapon prototypes.
I do need to comment on a couple more aspects of science in your world. I've
focused in the section on interstellar and interplanetary scale science fiction, but
other major fields of technology you may want to develop include
Gravity: artificial gravity fields, anti-gravity lifters, artificial black holes
Weapons: lasers, phasers, grasers, death rays, particle beams, energy
beams, antimatter bombs, laser blades, energy axes, powered armor, force
fields
Communication: printing press, video, radio, FTL
Biotechnology: genetic engineering, cloning, cybernetics
Nano-technology: (the current vogue technology appearing in all the
latest sci-fi books) using microscopic machines that can manipulate objects
(from human cells to cybernetic armor) at a molecular level.
Cyberspace and information technology (slightly passe these days),
artificial intelligence, virtual reality, hacking, robotics
Teleporters: How much power do they need? How much mass can they
transport and how far? (see day0 for a description of teleporter abuse.
Ultimately, unless you're writing a strictly 'hard' science fiction book, the goal is
not to make a scientifically feasible world. The goal is to lay down consistent rules
for your world: What kinds of weapons can penetrate a force field? How much
firepower can your shields absorb before collapsing? Do you have to lower your
shields to fire weapons? What side-effects do the nano-bots have? How 'invisible'
do cloaking fields make your ships? Can you make cloak and shield generators big
enough to cover a planet or small enough for a single person? Are Artificially
Intelligent computers inherently hostile to their human creators? How much
power and range do the teleporters have?
Rules and limits give your world some believability even if your technology isn't
realistic. They also set up the tactical situation your militaries are forced to use.
They set up challenges your characters must overcome: the invincible super
weapon of the enemy, or the impenetrable shield, the bad guy's way of
penetrating the good guys "impenetrable" shield, the stealth fields of the raider's
fighters, etc.
There's a whole lot more you can say at this point, but as I've already gone way
long on this segment I'll refer you to some resources that I've found helpful and
very interesting. The best thing you can do is to read, a lot of science literature,
magazines, and web sites. Read other Sci-Fi/Fantasy writers to see how they did
it. A great source of ideas for integrating science into the world you are creating
is role-playing games. Whether you're creating an advanced nanotech society,
Sci-Fantasy, or a steam-punk or anything in between, you can find an RPG source
book with all kinds of ideas to modify and appropriate at your local game store or
on-line.

God saw that the light was good

Only God gets things right on the first go. As you progress through this series,
remember that the ideas from one day affect the days to come, and the things
you come up with on latter days may require you to go back an modify what
you've already done before. Don't be afraid to play around, consider the
implications of changes you want to make. Look for subtle ways the changes you
want to make will affect everything else in your world. It's usually those little
things that make your world more real.
Day 2: Let There Be An Expanse: Weather
As the second day dawns we want to consider the sea, sky, and the climate.
Weather is an often-overlooked element in fantasy worlds.
The interaction of the sea and sky drive our weather systems. In the equatorial
latitudes the winds blow east to west, this is largely do to the earth's rotation; the
ground is spinning faster than the layer of air above it. This wind drives warm
humid air from the Atlantic across Brazil until it hits the wall of the Andes
Mountains, where it dumps out all that water into the Amazon basin. It continues
across the South Pacific, holding back a huge warm water current. In years where
the winds are less powerful than normal that warm water current streams back
eastward creating an 'el Nino'. The winds load up with moisture again that,
guided by the towering Himalayan Mountains, they dump across the Siam and
Indian peninsulas. There is no rain left as they hit the mountains of Afghanistan
and Iran. On the equator the winds hit the mountains of central Africa and pour
down into the Congo and the Ethiopian highlands where it flows into the Nile and
Congo rivers. In the north the winds, dried out after their journey across
Afghanistan and Arabia blow across thousands miles of the Sahara Desert. When
they hit the equatorial Atlantic again, especially in late summer they suck up so
much moisture so quickly they spawn powerful tropical storm systems. The winds
in the mid-latitudes blow the other way, and those winds drive the weather in
most of North America, Europe, and Asia. This doesn't even get into Jet Streams,
High Pressure ridges, storm fronts and all the other features of our complex
climate.
We live on a meteorologically diverse world. There can be a chain of hurricanes
crashing into the Caribbean while drought withers crops in the Western US and
France has the best wine year in a decade. But most of the worlds we can see
through our telescopes are very homogeneous. Mars is a giant desert with two
basic conditions: cold and clear, or sandstorm. Sometimes the sandstorms can
cover the whole of the surface. Jupiter's weather is so consistent, that humans
have observed the cyclonic hurricane of the Great Red Spot for almost 500 years.
Of course, the main difference between the earth and those other planets is the
presence of water in all three states: solid (glaciers), liquid (oceans), and gas
(clouds).
So as you create your world, think of the sky and the winds and the rains, the
water cycle. What is the weather like on your world, or at least the part of the
world of your story? What direction is the prevailing wind? Does it change based
on the seasons? How much rain or snow falls in the area(s) of your story? How
warm or cold is the average temperatures? The weather will affect the characters
and their civilizations. It will affect the kind of architecture designed, the growing
season and kinds of crops and livestock farmed by those civilizations. It will affect
clothes. Scantily clad warrior babes aren't going to be frolicking around in the
high mountain snows. Heavily armored knights will bake in their plate mail riding
across a desert. The weather can be an obstacle your heroes must overcome in
their quest.
Don't forget to consider your magic and technology systems and how they
integrate into the weather system. In the Jack Chalker's Changewinds, magical
storms transform whole villages of people into magical creatures. In the movie
The Day After Tomorrow, human pollution causes a series of storms that cause an
instant ice age. In the Greek myths Zeus causes storms and rains lightning bolts
down on any who oppose him.
Weather can also be used symbolically. In The Lord of the Rings an east wind is
an ominous sign of Sauron's power. East winds bring destructive storms, clouds
of overshadowing darkness, plague, and war. The west winds are inherently
noble. They bring healing and light; they blow away the darkness and bring rains
that cool, cleanse, and nourish. They are a symbol that the real battle is a
spiritual war occurring on something of a divine plane between the heavenly
forces of good in The West and Sauron in The East.
Usually the core of your story is that something is fundamentally wrong with the
world and your heroes have to fix it. Something fundamentally wrong with the
universe of your story will often result in unusual if not downright devastating
changes in the weather.
As the second day comes to an end, consider the climate, the winds, and the
waters of your world. It is the first stage of building the environment of your
world. Keep your ideas in mind as you move into the third day of creation.
Remember the key to creating a realistic world is to build the world as a whole.
Don't write your ideas in stone yet. Be ready to modify them to fit new
developments and ideas as you build more of your world.
Day 3: Let The Dry Land & Plants Appear:
Geology & Botany
The third day dawns over the seas, but the climate is only the first stage of
developing a complete environment for you world. Now we turn our attention to
the land. The physical world you build for your story will affect the civilizations
and characters in both subtle and dramatic ways. A desert is more than hot
temperatures; it is a geographic feature that lacks water, with all the implications
for life there. Mountains create rain forests on one side and rain shadows on the
other. A jungle and the river system associated with it are features of the land
that will affect the people, their cultures, and civilizations that live there. Cultures
and religions will reflect the needs and blessings offered by the geography. Plants
are an extension of the Geography. Lush oasis, vast grassy plains, fertile valleys,
and towering forests are essentially geographical features.
In other words, you may have to go back to Day 2 and revise your climate
systems as you build your landscape. That will be the case at every step of the
process. The goal is to build a whole world where all the parts work together.
That way nothing will seem contrived or out of place to your readers. Geography
has a profound impact on the cultures and civilizations in your world.
For example, the fertility of the soil caused by the annual flooding of the Nile
empowered Egypt to become one of the earliest world powers. An army has to
eat. But in order to do their job the soldiers have to train instead spend all their
time plowing fields. Tradesmen have to have time to work on weapons and
chariots instead of plows and carts. But because the floods renewed the topsoil
every year, Egypt was often able to bring in two whole crops per year. Egypt
could feed its whole population and afford to feed a full-time army, a huge priest
class, and still export food. The pyramids and temples were not built on the backs
of slaves, but mostly by Egyptian farmers who where out of work for three
months while their fields were underwater. The annual flooding cycle is also at
the core of Egyptian religion.
Why did Japanese Samurai carry thin, sharp swords, while European Knights
wielded thick broadswords? The answer is geology. The orient is iron poor, while
in Europe iron is common and close to the surface. This means that Europeans
had enough metal to make armor out of it. Their swords have to be strong
enough to smash through that armor. In China and Japan, even though
metallurgy was more advanced, iron is rare enough that you couldn't afford to
waste it on armor. You need it for tools and weapon blades. Since the armor is
made from leather and polished wood, the sword needs to be able to slice
through it.

The Map
If you haven't done it already, this is the time to make a map.
The first rule of making maps of your fantasy world is very simple: until the map
is published in your book don't consider it final. Always be open to changing your
map, even scrapping it altogether and starting over. Be willing to experiment,
move whole mountain ranges and rivers around. Tolkien's original maps of middle
earth pictured it as a ship floating on the outer sea.
So be willing to keep your map fluid. Your story will both suggest the physical
layout of the world, and the map you come up with may influence your story,
suggesting geographic obstacles that your heroes must overcome, or nations that
are allies or enemies based on their proximity to valuable resources or strategic
points.
As you slowly map out your world ask questions.
How much population can the land support?
This is a function of fertility of the land, the availability of water, the rain
and weather or in the absence of these, the availability of food and water
through trade.
What kind of foods can be hunted or farmed?
What kind of natural resources are available for trade and industry? Where
are the mineral deposits, metals, mines, magical crystals, oil, trees for
lumber and fuel?
Where are areas of magical and/or religious significance? Are some kinds of
magic stronger in some areas and weaker in others?
Where are the trade routes to import needed goods and food that cannot be
provided locally?
Towns will often spring up in the middle of very inhospitable terrain if there
is a natural stopping place or crossing along major trade route, or if there is
a valuable resource (like a silver mine). If those resources are used up or
the trade routes move people will leave, even to the point of abandoning
the town.
In pre-industrial societies towns usually form along waterways. Streams
and rivers provide a ready source of water and sewage disposal, a source of
food (fish), and transportation links with towns up and downstream.
Depending on the tech level, rivers also can provide water-wheel power.
What natural barriers separate peoples, nations, and empires? Mountains
can be virtually impassible for an army. Wide rivers are hard to bridge even
for relatively advanced civilizations. Ferry's are a lot easier to build, but it
takes a long time to ferry an army over a river.
What areas are prone to natural disasters: flood, hurricanes, blizzards,
earthquakes, or volcanoes? How do those disasters figure in to the religious
beliefs or superstitions of the people living there? How do they cope and
protect themselves from these problems?
The point again is that geographical features will affect the world around them,
often in very subtle ways. Those affects need to be felt in the world of your story
and the world will come alive, and your readers will love to visit it. They will read
it again and again, and anxiously await sequels.
Look back at what you've already developed on previous days. Is the technology
of your civilization based on some sort of semi-mystical spice that can only be
found on one desert planet? What effect does that have on the religions and
interstellar politics of your universe? Keeping with the 'Dune' theme, is the world
of your story a vast desert with only a few oasis? Water will be an overriding
concern for the civilizations living in your world.
Also don't forget that places change over time. Rome and Carthage fought the
Punic Wars primarily over Spain. Both cities were competing over trading routes
over the Mediterranean Sea. That meant they needed ships. Ships built out of
wood. Wood is fairly scarce in north Africa and Italy didn't have many forests
either. Spain did. Spain is not known for it's forests anymore, over the centuries
all those forests were cut down, mostly to build ships and as the population grew,
for cooking fuel. England realized this to a certain degree, and though they
eventually built more ships than Spain ever did, they planted whole forests of oak
to supply their shipbuilding industry.
Medieval Demographics Made Easy: Numbers for Fantasy Worlds is an article
where you can find answers to many of these questions based on demographic
information from the middle ages. For instance:
The average population density for a fully-developed medieval country is
from 30 per square mile (for countries with lots of rocks, lots of rain,
and lots of iceor a slave-driving Mad King) to a limit of about 120 per
square mile, for a land with rich soil, favorable seasons and maybe a
touch of magical help.

It's full of information even I didn't know (like the difference between a 'hamlet'
and a 'village': hamlet refers to a village surrounded by fruit orchards rather than
grain fields).
One of the first issues to consider is scale. Many fantasy stories (Lord of the Rings
included) take place in a relatively small part of the world. The map of Middle
Earth in most LOT books is about 900 miles square, with Bag End about 800 miles
from the Lonely Mountain and about 1000 miles from Mt. Doom. In contrast, the
Mediterranean Sea is over 2100 miles from the shores of Palestine to the Pillars of
Hercules. New York is about 2500 miles from Los Angeles.
As you relate your map to your story, to consider how long it takes to travel. In
our age where we can drive a car 70 miles per hour (120kph) and travel two or
three hundred miles in an afternoon, or commute 30 miles to work every day, we
forget how long it takes to travel when you only have muscle driven technology.
A walking man can cover up to 30 miles per day pushing hard and provided good
food (villages and inns) and smooth terrain. But it's hard to keep up that pace for
more than a few days. Rugged terrain reduces that distance. Needing to spend
time hunting and gathering food reduces that range even more. A trained runner
or messenger on a road can do 30 miles in about 9 hours on paved roads, but
that's about the natural limit of human endurance. 10 to 12 miles is about the
maximum extent of 'a good day's walk', two or three miles is the extent of a daily
commute (you don't want to tire yourself out before you get to the fields). This is
why in most middle-age countrysides will have villages only a couple of miles
apart. A horse can greatly speed travel and range, especially in more rugged
terrain. But the biggest advantage of a horse is the increase in cargo capacity. A
'day's ride' would be about 30 miles though you can push it up to 50. Again,
endurance is a big factor. A horse can only keep up that kind of pace for a few
days, less if you're pushing it. If you have regular stations to change steeds you
can dramatically increase the speed of horse travel (a consistent 10 to 15 miles
per hour, sometimes even 20). Wagons can increase your range (because you
can bring your own supplies and don't have to waste travel time foraging), but
they actually tend to slow things down. The wagon trains (men, women, and
children, with ox drawn wagons) that crossed the Western US from Missouri to
Oregon considered 12 miles per day excellent progress across the plains. Trade
caravans make similar pace. But that pace is greatly reduced in adverse
conditions (excessive heat, lack of water, mountains, storms, snow, etc.) Armies
on the march can do as much as 30 miles per day on a road, including time to
break and make camp. They can usually maintain that pace for several days
(especially if they train for it) but ox-drawn supply wagons will get left behind.
Travel by boat can actually be rather quick depending on currents, tides, wind
speeds, and the type and rig of the sails (which depends on the technology level
of the civilizations in your world). Sea routes for trade are very important. Boats
can haul tons of cargo with only a few hands to run the ship around the clock. A
similar cargo in a caravan would fill several wagons or burden dozens of pack
animals or hundreds of porters (all of which will need regular food and water and
must stop every day to rest). When Rome conquered Egypt, it destroyed the
Italian small family farmer. It was cheaper to ship grain by boat across a
thousand miles of the Mediterranean Sea than to cart it 20 miles in from the
countryside. The small farms were bought out by large landowners to grow cash
crops like wine or olives. Up to that time the small family farmer supplied most of
the Roman Army's soldiers. Rome had to start relying more and more on German
mercenaries as the Roman economy collapsed. By the time the Goth's sacked
Rome in the 5th century, the Roman army was just as German as the invading
'barbarians'. (These are the sorts of subtle complexities that can add to the
realism of your fantasy/sci-fi world.)
Technology and/or magic can greatly speed things up, and many fantasy writers
often resort to these to speed travel up across large worlds like the Waygates and
portals Robert Jordan uses in the Wheel of Time books or the steam punk airship
that always pops up in Final Fantasy games. Transportation technology greatly
impacts a society. Punctuality, that much esteemed Victorian virtue didn't become
a virtue in English society until the invention of the railroad allowed for
predictable transportation schedules. Most pre-industrial societies are don't view
punctuality as a virtue, to them scheduling anything in times more precise than
'morning' or 'afternoon' are an unreasonable imposition.
But consider other implications of distance. Let's say there's a gold mine in the
mountains 100 miles away from your King's castle. In industrial or modern tech
level terms that's only a three hour train ride. In a pre-industrial society, that's a
three-day carriage ride through territory teeming with bandits. Ox drawn supply
wains up to the mine take over a week to get there. That means the king needs
to build not just a road, but a series of forts, or even castles, along that road to
protect the gold convoys (no small investment for a small kingdom).
So, as the third day ends, you should now know quite a bit about your world: its
geography, its climate, its natural resources, and its strategic locations. Now,
before we begin to populate your world, we're first going to locate your world in
your universe as a whole. Once again, let me throw out the reminder, the key to
creating a real world is to build a whole world. Be ready to change things as you
develop more of your world so that all the parts work together.
Day 4: Let There Be Lights in the Sky: Astronomy
& Time
As the day begins on the fourth day, it begins in a new way, with the rising of a
huge golden light hanging in the sky. Now God begins to populate the world he
has made, first by populating the day and night with lights in the sky. There is
some evidence that the ancient Hebrews considered the stars and planets angelic
beings. According to the Creation narrative in the Bible, the function of the sun,
moon, and stars is to give light to the earth and to mark time. The passage of
months, the cycle of the seasons, the ebb and flow of the tides all depend upon
the motions of the lights in the sky. A common issue overlooked in many science
fiction universes is different orbital and rotational speeds different worlds would
have.
One of the reasons we know Tolkien's Middle Earth is supposed to be our Earth is
that the moon operates the same, and several times he describes the
constellations Orion and the Big Dipper (though he gives them different names).
On the other hand, we know that the world of ElfQuest is not exactly the Earth we
know because of its two moons.
Remember the scene in The Lion King where Simba, Timon, and Pumba are lying
back looking at the stars. Pumba thinks they're 'big balls of gas, burning billions
of miles away.' 'Pumba,' Timon remarks, 'with you, everything's gas.' Maybe in
your world the stars really are the 'great kings of the past looking down on us'. I
am reminded of the line from C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader when
Ramandu, the retired star, comments that burning gas is 'not what a star is but
only what it is made of.'
An example of something else to avoid, I was recently reading Brian Jaques' book
Salamandastron, one of the Redwall Abbey books. The book follows four parallel
plot lines. In three separate chapters - each supposedly happening at the same
time as the others - the moon is described as 'full as a plate', first quarter
crescent, and half. The phases of the moon go well with the specific scene in
which they appear, but the sub plots are supposed to be simultaneous. It really
jarred me out of the story.
In many pre-industrial societies calculating the date by the phase of the moon is
second nature to people, as is knowing the tides. Most ancient societies held the
night sky as an object of worship. They meticulously plotted its patterns and
changes to the point of being able to predict eclipses and conjunctions, usually for
the purpose of making astrological predictions. Stars and planets become
associated with gods and goddesses, and by association the cities, countries, or
even specific rulers who worship them. In a sci-fi/fantasy world, those threats
may be more than symbols. In the Annn McCaffery's Pern series, the Red Star is
the source of the 'Thread', spores of some sort of voracious fungus that can
survive interplanetary space and atmospheric re-entry.
In your world you may want to develop a whole star chart, mapping out the
various constellations, the stories, myths, or 'real' history that goes along with
them, and how they figure into your magic and religious systems. Is there a north
star? More than one sun or moon? Significant planets? What if your world is
actually the moon of a huge gas giant? How would the rings and other moons
figure into the other aspects of your worlds?
Needless to say for Science Fiction writers, this can be a very important topic.
You should probably do some research into astronomy and planetology. A good
place to start is magazines like National Geographic and Popular Science, both are
written for the general audience (and they can be found free at most public
libraries). Televised science documentaries, like Nature, Nova, and Scientific
American can often give you detailed glimpses of front line scientific
developments and theories.

Suns
If you've ever looked at any book on astronomy, you've probably seen this
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram cross-indexing a star's Magnitude (brightness) with
its temperature. Stars are generally typed by color using the letters O, B, A, F, G,
K, M. The letters are sub-divided using the numbers 0-9. (The sun is a type G2
star) Most stars fall along the line from the upper-left of the diagram to the lower
right, called the 'main sequence'. Main sequence stars burn hydrogen into helium.
Giant stars have burned up all their hydrogen and are now fusing helium and
heavier elements which makes them expand to huge sizes. White dwarf stars are
the burned out cores of novas.
Type O stars are very blue in color and very hot (35,000 C about 6 times hotter
than the sun). Any worlds orbiting a star like this would have to be very far away
(with very long years) to not be burned to a cinder.
Type B stars are also very hot (21,000 C almost 4 times hotter than the sun)
both O and B stars are so hot because they are fusing their hydrogen quickly.
They tend to cluster together in areas of star formation which means they are
usually too young to have planets, and their powerful solar winds tend to blow
away the congealing dust clouds that would have formed planets.
Type A stars are white and about twice as hot as the sun. Sirius, the brightest
star in our sky is a type A star. If the sun were a type A star Mars and the
asteroid belt would be in the Optimum Life Zone, Mercury would literally melt,
Venus' atmosphere would be blown away by solar wind, and Earth's water would
boil away. The point is, that if a world in your story is around a type A star it
would have a very long year, and the ground would be bathed in higher levels of
UV radiation than the Earth is. Another group of type A stars includes the white
dwarf stars that are the collapsed cores of red giants. They usually sit in the core
of a planetary nebula. If there were any worlds around a white dwarf they would
have to have formed since the star's nova. They would be exposed to a lot of
radiation.
Type F stars are creamy in color and only a little hotter than the sun. Again,
worlds around type F stars would need to be further away from their sun and
have longer years.
Type G stars, like our Sun are actually rather rare stars. They are very stable in
age and radiation output, and so, are the most likely stars to have habitable
worlds.
Type K and M stars fall into two groups. In the main sequence these stars are
small and cool. They burn very slowly, are usually much smaller than the sun,
and are the most common kind of star in the galaxy. Worlds around such stars
are cold, unless they are quite close (and therefore have a very short year). The
other type K and M stars are the Giants and Supergiants. These stars have
burned up all their hydrogen and are now burning their helium. This causes them
to expand to hundreds of times their original size. When the sun goes into its
giant phase, it will engulf Mercury, Venus, and the Earth. So any habitable
planets around a Giant star would likely be the moons of the gaseous planets
further out from the star.
Most stars in the universe exist in groups of twos and threes. Binary and trinary
star groups are unlikely to have worlds, because their dueling gravitational fields
tend to prevent planets from forming, and any that do tend to get sucked into
one star or the other, or shot off into space. It is not impossible, however. The
closest stars to the earth (Alpha and Proximia Centauri) are a trio of stars. Alpha
Centauri A is a G2 star like the sun, but slightly larger, and Alpha Centauri B is a
slightly smaller type K star. They orbit each other every 80 years coming as close
together as 11 AU (about the distance between the sun and Saturn) and as far
apart as 36 AU (about the distance from the Sun and Neptune - 1 AU is the
distance from the earth to the Sun). It would be possible for small rocky planets
to exist in orbit around the two stars without the other star pulling them out of
orbit. If the earth was a world in orbit around Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B
would appear to be a visible disk at it's closest, bright enough to be visible during
the day and just a very bright star at it's farthest.
To have a world with multiple suns, like Tatooine in Star Wars, or the triple suns
of the world of the Dark Crystal the stars would have to be almost ludicrously
close together and the planet would have to be in orbit around both stars
But, again, you are the creator of your universe. You don't have to scientifically
explain the orbital paths of the stars, or gravitational forces, or any of that. You
can make worlds where the star is old, huge, and red. You can make a world with
two suns so bright that for a quarter of the year there's one sun visible during the
day, and the other is visible most of the night.

Planets
Even in fantasy stories where you don't have travel to other worlds, planets often
have religious or magical significance. They are primary symbols in any
astrological chart, and they are often associated with particular deities. The
Greeks and Romans named the days of the week after the 5 visible planets, and
the sun and moon. So recall your theology and magic from day one and look for
areas to integrate
Planets come in two basic flavors, terrestrial or rocky planets, and gas giants.
Terrestrial planets tend to form close to the sun since the sun's gravity pulls the
heavier elements they are made from closer in. Gas giants form further out from
their sun, as any hydrogen close to the star will either get sucked into the star, or
solar wind will push it out to about Jupiter's orbit (for a sun sized star). Gas
giants also tend to form out past the ice-line, the line past which water in space
will freeze. So most of the time a Gas Giant will be well out of the Optimum Life
Zone (OLZ). The OLZ is the distance from a sun where a planet can sustain water
in all three states, liquid, vapor, and ice. It is conceivable that the moons of a gas
giant could sustain life if the star made the transition to a red giant and warmed
the moons enough to melt the ice. You might also be able to include a third type,
ice, like Pluto or Jupiter's moon Europa. They aren't exactly rocky worlds, but
they are solid.
For planets there are too many variables to reduce them to a simple group of
classes. Variables that affect a planet and its ability to support life:
Orbit:How far away from the star is the planet and how long is one year. This
also involves how elliptical the orbit is and the orbit's inclination (the tilt of the
orbit above or below the plane of the solar system). Pluto was recently 'demoted'
to 'dwarf planet' status, because unlike the 'real' planets in the solar system,
Pluto's orbit is both well outside the elliptical plane (27) and while the other
planets have nearly circular orbits, Pluto's is so elliptical, it overlaps Neptune's.
Rotation:How fast does the planet rotate? How long is one day?
Size:How big is the planet?
Density: Planets with lower density will have weaker gravity for their size, fewer
metals, and more water and organic chemicals. Denser planets will have larger
amounts of heavy metals, like lead, mercury, gold, and uranium (and be more
toxic to organic life but more attractive to mining consortiums). Saturn has so
little density it would actually float on water
Gravity:How strong is the surface gravity? This, of course is a function of the size
and density of a planet. Gravity will affect life on a planet in many ways. Planets
without enough gravity will not be able to hold hydrogen in the atmosphere, and
eventually all water will disappear. Planets with very strong gravitational pull will
have very high air pressure at low altitudes. Planets with high gravity will tend to
attract moons (and comets and asteroids). Planets with lower gravity will be
affected by tidal forces from their moons, other planets, and their sun more.
Planets with high gravity will require ships in orbit to travel at much higher
speeds.
Axial Tilt:Seasonal weather patterns are affected by the axial tilt of the planet
and by the planet's distance from its sun. The more extreme a planet's tilt, the
more extreme its weather. The more eccentric its orbit the more extreme its
weather will be. The earth's orbit is nearly circular, but its closest point to the sun
is very near the beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. This means
that, generally, winters are more mild in the north, though not by much. And that
summers tend to be a little cooler in the north. This is effect is mediated by the
huge stretches of ocean in the Southern Hemisphere.
Magnetic Field:Magnetic fields protect planets from solar radiation. They will
also affect spacecraft in orbit, disrupting communication links, shields, and
weapons fire.
Tectonic activity:How geologically active is the planet? Are there a lot of
earthquakes and volcanoes? Geologically active planets will have more rugged
features, higher mountains (which create more extreme weather around them) .
Atmosphere:What gasses make up the atmosphere of the planet? How
breathable is the air? What kinds of organisms will thrive and what kind will
struggle?
Magical Fields:How does your magic system interact with a planet? Are there
magical energy fields or lines of force? Do they disrupt or improve the creatures
or societies that live in them? Do certain divinities, magical, or even physical laws
apply on certain worlds?
Moons:Moons are planet and planetoid sized bodies orbiting a planet. They range
from irregular asteroids only a few miles across to worlds even larger than the
Earth. There could be moons out there even bigger. Maybe even somewhere
there are moons with moons.
Moons can affect a lot of different aspects of a civilization. Moons of sufficient size
affect the tides of seas and oceans. Their phases mark rhythms and patterns of
nature and social rituals. Many mythologies associate our moon with females
because of its monthly cycle. Moons could be part of a mystic cycle where certain
conjunctions split the boundary between the physical and spiritual world. Maybe
one of the moons is an artifact of an ancient civilization.
Rings:Rings appear to be a feature exclusive to Gas Giants. Planetologists are
still trying to figure out exactly how they form and how so many small objects in
such a dense pattern keep a stable orbit around the planet. The bright ones
around Saturn and Jupiter are made up of ice particles, so the should only exist
out past the ice line. But the rings around Uranus are made up of very dark
material, probably containing carbon. So there isn't any reason you can't find an
excuse to put rings around your planet. Can you imagine what impact rings in the
sky would have on your world's magic system or mythologies?
Of course the fun of making up your own world is that you can create whatever
you want: a world where everyone has to live under the ground because their sun
has become unstable and is now cooking the surface with radiation. How about a
world suspended between two planets so that everything is weightless? You could
create floating continents in the clouds of a gas giant like Flash Gordon's planet
Mongo.
Stars
Yes, we've already gone over star types and all that and I haven't even scratched
the surface of supernovas, black holes, galaxies, neutron stars and all of that. But
the point of this tutorial is not to make you all astronomers, but to help you
create worlds for you fantasy and science fiction stories.
For the most part, the stars serve as a backdrop. You may want to create (or re-
name) constellations with special significance to your characters or to the cultures
in your story. Are they part of astrological signs that influence, signify, or even
predict events in the world of your story? Are there signs in the sky, like a rouge
star, that grows in power as the evil emperor gains power over the world? Are
they affiliated with gods, angels, or spiritual powers?
So, as the sun sets on the fourth day, consider what role do the sun, moon,
planets and stars have in your universe.
Day 5 & 6: Let the Water, Sky, and Land Teem
with Life: Biology
Having separated the sea and sky on the second day, then separating the sea
from the dry land on the third day, God now populates these environments on the
fifth and sixth day.
I've put together a PDF EcosphereWorksheet that will allow you to condense all the
info from this tutorial into a single reference page.
One of the 'fantasy clichs' beginning authors are encouraged to avoid is the
tendency to make your fantasy world more exotic by giving the regular animals in
it fantastic names: calling a duck a 'fizgig bird', for example. If it looks like a
duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, go ahead and call it a duck. However,
there are exceptions to such rules. One place where this has been done well is in
the 'Land Before Time' series of videos. The terminology they use: 'bright circle'
for the sun or 'sky sparkles' for snow; reflect the dinosaur characters' primitive
understanding of the scientific realities of the world around them.
On the other hand, one of the fun things about creating your own world is
developing your own ecosystems. It is handy to have a working knowledge of
evolutionary theory (even if you radically disagree with Darwinism). The idea is to
make the animals in your world adapted to the environment you've developed.
The more the biology in your world is based on actual biological theory, the easier
it will be for your readers to enter into your world. Planets of bloodthirsty
carnivores might seem to provide a great backdrop for an adventure story, but
the reader will constantly have the nagging question, 'what do all these
bloodthirsty critters eat when the hero's not around?'
FARP already has a very well done tutorial on creatingindividualanimals, so I'm not
going to go into that here. What I do want to talk about is building a whole
ecosystem that is a part of a whole world.
So if you want to develop a full ecosystem you need to consider the food chain.
Most food chains are relatively simple: a plant is eaten by a specific herbivore;
herbivore is eaten by a specific carnivore. A 'plant' is an organism which takes it's
energy from the environment around it: solar energy through photosynthesis,
thermal energy from a volcanic vent, chemical energy from the soil, magical
energy from the spirit of the earth. Plants are usually stationary because the
processes for converting environmental energy to biological energy are relatively
inefficient. An 'animal' is an organism that gets its energy from consuming plants,
or consuming other animals. Since the plant has already done the hard work of
converting the environmental energy into compact starches and sugars, the
animal has a lot more energy. Carnivores have even more energy, because the
animals on which they prey have already converted and compressed the energy
into fat.
Usually a predator focuses on one prey animal and adapts specifically to catch it.
Most environments have several parallel food chains. Large herbivores feed on
the most abundant plant food and are preyed upon by the largest carnivores.
There is usually a chain revolving around mid-sized herbivores, and an array of
predators from hawks and tarantulas to weasels and cats that prey on small
rodent sized herbivores, insectivores, and omnivores. There is almost always an
herbivore who has figured out the secret to not getting eaten is to grow so large
no predator would reasonably attack it, like elephants or those huge long necked
sauropod dinosaurs.
Prey animals survive by using strategies like migration, herding, camouflage,
rapid reproduction (think rabbits), defense mechanisms (like porcupine quills, or
tree frog's poison)
Marine food chains tend to be longer than terrestrial food chains. Most plant life in
the oceans is microscopic, single celled algae. So the animals that eat the plants
tend to be as microscopic as the algae. So this leads to a many linked chain of
bigger fish being eaten by even bigger fish. The odd thing is that the largest
marine animals (baleen whales and whale sharks) actually skip most of the
intermediate links and only eat the microscopic animals.
Warm-blooded mammals need a lot of food. It takes a herd of thousands of
wildebeests and zebra to supports just a few prides of lions and a pack or two of
hyenas. On the other hand cold-blooded animals like crocodiles or spiders with
their super slow metabolisms can survive on much fewer prey animals because
they eat so little. So you can have hundreds of square miles of African plains with
only a few lions, and a river running through the same plain with a crocodile on
the banks every 50 meters.
Let's just consider one animal, a zebra. The zebra is one of several grass grazers
on the African plains. It's primary predator is the lion, though they are also prey
to hyenas. But that isn't all. The zebra's carcass also provides food for a variety of
carrion feeders. When zebra herds move through the grass their passage stirs up
insects, so an array of birds follow the herd, often riding on the animals' backs,
snatching those insects up. The birds also often act as sentries, watching out for
predators. The point of this example is not to force you to write a major
documentary on each species of animal you want to include in your world. This
type of detail is rarely necessary and usually including it in some sort of
exposition in your book will bore readers to tears unless it has very direct bearing
on the story. The point is simply to show the interconnecting webs of
relationships present in the real world and get you to think a little about your own
world.
Recall how your world's magical/spiritual aspect works into the biology of your
world. What creatures will be magical? Will it cause some creatures to be evil?
Are some naturally aligned with the bad guys or the good guys? Will some
animals be hunted to near extinction because they supply some special magical
object (like a unicorn horn)? Are some linked to elemental types, like Poke'mon?
Which animals will be sentient? Maybe all animals are sentient to a degree, but
only magical/telepathic people can pick up on it. What animals are domesticated?
What are their uses: transportation (steeds), food, clothing, etc.?
Animals on our world fall into a wide array of classes: reptiles, mammals, birds,
insects, fish, etc. In your world you could limit or expand them. What if all the
ecological niches in your world were filled with just insects or just reptiles? What
if marine cephalopods, like octopuses and starfish evolved to live on land?
What special conditions will be present on your world and how will those
conditions affect the animals that live in it? For instance if humans ever
terraformed Venus one problem that would remain is Venus' day (1 full rotation is
243 Earth days long) actually longer than Venus' year (224 days long) This
means that the actual day on Venus, from solar noon to solar noon, is years long.
Since plants can't survive more than a few weeks without sunlight any wild
animals would have to migrate constantly to keep ahead of the night, or develop
some sort of hibernation cycle that would allow it to last without food throughout
the Venetian night.
Look up animals in our world to see how they've adapted to specific
environments: like Bat's sonar, or cheetah's speed, or shark's electro-sensory
organs, or army-ant's organization. Extrapolate some of the bizarre ways the
animals in your world have adapted to those special conditions. The fun is going
as wild as you can, but you always need to keep it grounded in the rest of the
world your building. Think of the ecological niche the animal fills, the environment
it lives in, all the info you've gathered on the previous days. Maybe you need to
go back and change some things or bring in some new ideas to make some
animals work. Great! The key is to build a whole world. Here I'm treading on
Ashley Lang's tutorial on creatingfantasyanimals. I suggest you go ahead and read
that one now before you go on to the next day.
Day 6: Let Us Make Man in Our Image:
Anthropology
As the sixth day progresses we now get to the most important part of this series,
developing the cultures, civilizations, and races that populate your world. This
section involves a whole mess of ology's. It involves history, culture, social
structure, politics, technology, religions, social morality, codes of honor and
ethics, government, the military, sexuality and gender roles, biases and
prejudices, racism, education, language . . .

Sentience & Spirituality

Aside from all the theological discussion about what it means to be 'created in
God's image', primarily what it is that humans are free moral agents with the
capacity for creativity, rational thought, language, and emotion. It also implies
that humanity has a unique place in the natural order. Since you are creating
your own world, you get to determine in whatever image you want the races of
you're your world to be. The title of this section 'Anthropology' is a bit of a
misnomer, since your fantasy or sci-fi universe is likely to contain non-human
races. What races will you have in your universe? What are fundamental
characteristics of each race? In what ways will different races in your world
conflict and cooperate? How do the different races or classes connect spiritually
and physically with the world around them?

Created 'in God's image' also indicates that humans are spiritual beings with both
a unique relationship with our creator, and a relationship with the physical world
that is deeper than the physical senses. You get to develop the depth and breadth
of the spiritual dimension of the characters in your story.
For example, in Tolkien's Middle Earth, the elves are tied to the world physically
and spiritually. That is why the are immortal, they live as the world lives. Their
role seems to be shaping and beautifying the world and caring for the creatures
that live in it. Humans, on the other hand, have the gift of mortality. Their spirits
were created to yearn for something beyond the world, and when they die, their
souls leave the world for places and purposes unknown to all but God. The
dwarves were fashioned by Aule, the spirit of rock and metal, as servants to
literally help build the world and to repair the damage caused by the conflict with
evil.

Sex, gender, & family

Humans are psychologically, morally, emotionally, spiritually, socially complex
creatures. At the heart of all that complexity is sexuality and reproduction. How
the sexes interrelate and procreate is fundamental to human society.
In the Genesis creation account the division between male and female is a
fundamental part of humanity. Currently there is tremendous debate and
controversy over the implications of that division. Are there inherent difference
between men and women? Are the 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'
stereotypes about the differences between the sexes inherent and fundamental or
the effects of cultural indoctrination and discrimination? Since you are the creator
of your own world, you get to decide.
The entire Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan is an exploration of this issue.
He has created a magic system in which men are naturally more adept with fire
and earth magic while women are more adept with wind and water. Men are
naturally stronger than women are individually, but women have the ability to
connect together geometrically increasing their power. He further complicates this
by adding the 'taint' to the male side of the True Source of magic that drives any
male who can connect to the True Source destructively insane. With this
foundation he gets to explore across his world various cultures that have different
cultural expectations of men and women, different family structures, patriarchal
and matriarchal social structures.
The complexity of human society is so great that a child needs 15 to 20 years to
learn how to successfully live in one. This is why the family unit is the basic social
unit. It is the place where children are taught the basics of language and social
interaction, social norms and gender roles. In many societies it is also where you
learn your basic trade.
That is why the structure of the family in a human society affects the whole social
structure built on top of it. Many ancient cultures where polygamy (one man with
multiple wives) was practiced viewed women as property with the marriage
arrangement a variation on the man purchasing the woman from her father.
I once heard a speaker from India commenting that eastern & mid-eastern
cultures think one of the greatest crimes in western cultures is that we force
young people to base their decision to marry each other on mutual affection and
sexual attraction. In their cultures, older, wiser adults arrange the marriage on
what they think would make a strong, life-long relationship. Instead, he said,
Americans and Europeans leave the decision up to the two people whose minds
are the most clouded by hormones. No wonder, he said, that your marriages fall
apart so easily.
Several societies have tried to supplant the family. Sparta pulled young boys
away from their mothers and integrated them into military barracks by age 5.
That way they could ingrain their martial values into new generations. Our
civilization is right on the edge of a cultural revolution as we enter the 'Genetic
Age'. Cloning, artificial wombs, genetic screening and eugenics, and cultural
forces like the acceptance of homosexual marriage and the accompanying ideas
of polygamy and polyarmory are poised to radically re-define the family. (And
biotech and cybernetics are poised to radically re-define what it means to be
human.)
Since you have the benefit of creating your world from the ground up, you get to
determine the structure of the family and how and where sexuality fits in with
things. You could create reptilian races where the young hatch from a nest never
knowing a parent. Or a species like the Cuckoo bird that lays it's egg in a different
bird's nest where the chick will eventually take over the nest, killing the other
chicks. You could create a species that spend part of their life cycles as males and
then become female.

Social structures - priest, warrior, worker

Beyond the basic structure of the family (or whatever institution you replace it
with), and the larger structure of the clan, human societies larger than a few
dozen people quickly segregate into three basic categories (or castes): priest,
warrior, and worker. The priest caste includes religious leaders, magic users,
artisans, and intellectuals. The warrior caste is self-descriptive, and the worker
caste contains the farmers, merchants, and tradesmen. Sometimes tradesmen
and merchants are given their own caste. Be aware that this 'caste' breakup is an
over simplification and that in reality there is usually a lot of overlap. Some
societies bolster these caste division with religious doctrine, like the Hindu's caste
system, or with law, like the Roman Emperor Domition's 'dominate' system
(which forced all people into hereditary jobs - you dad was a blacksmith so you
will become a blacksmith) that far outlasted the Roman Empire through the
Middle Ages up till the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Different cultures will elevate different classes over others. For example at the
core of the struggle between ancient Athens and Sparta was that Sparta idolized
the warrior class while Athens idolized the intellectual class. In Feudal Japan the
farmer (often the lowest social rung in many societies) was held in almost as high
esteem as a warrior. But merchants were despised. They were seen as greedy,
willing to make a buck at others expense, only selling things that others
produced.
The downfall of the feudal system that governed Europe since the fall of the
Roman Empire was not the rise of the Renaissance intellectual, but the rise of the
worker caste (especially the tradesmen and merchants) into the middle class and
upper classes.
Often these castes are in conflict, but it is not always the case. Hitler was able to
unite the workers (by destroying all union and communist opposition), the
academic class (infatuated with Darwin's idea of 'favored races' and Niche's
concept of the 'superman') and the military by making Nazism the de-facto
religion of Germany. In ancient Sparta the priest who worshipped Ares actively
supported the total domination of their society by the warrior caste.

Social Class
Another side effect of this social division is the evolution of social classes. In any
society there will be those with the intelligence, cunning, resources, skill,
connections, family, brutality, greed, ambition, or luck to dominate the cultural
structure. What kinds of traits will different societies favor in their upper classes?
What sort of traits will denigrate them to the lower classes?
In most societies, those in the power classes tend to view the traits that got them
there as virtues. Thus their very success in reaching the top (or staying there) is
a testament to their inherent superiority over the those in the lower classes.

Culture

Morality and Values

What's right, what's wrong, and how do your characters decided between them?
What are the consequences for violating moral standards? Go back to DayZero and
think about the social and personal implications of the theology you've set up.
What are the sexual morays of the culture(s) in your story? What is the value of
human life? Are members of one caste or class more 'valuable' than others?
According to the Code of Hammurabi (the first written legal code) a person from a
higher class could murder a person of a lower class with only a minor fine. Murder
of a person of the same class might result in corporal punishment and a fine.
Murdering a person in a higher class was a capital offense. Keep in mind your
social structure. In a society dominated by the warrior there will always be a
tendency toward a 'might makes right' morality. Worker societies are more likely
to be dominated by a strong work ethic, or, if the merchant is the dominant, by
profit. Priestly societies will base their morality on the principles of their religion.

Religion
We've discussed this topic from the perspective of the divinities in your world. But
you also need to look at it from the character's point of view. How is religion
expressed culturally and personally? What temples, shrines, or churches will your
characters' cultures build? What are the qualifications and cultural roles of
priests? What does worship look like? Are there sacrifices, feasts, or regular
worship services? What is the relationship between the religious and political
structures? What is the cultural authority of the religion (how much will people
follow or ignore the religious leaders)? What kinds of religious ideas will the
culture reject? If people violate religious taboos what will be the consequences?
Does everyone believe it, or just play lip service to it? Does it reflect the real will
of any divinity or is it a social fabrication? If the religion is a fabrication, where
did it come from? How have religious practices evolved over the years?

Medicine & Science

In many ancient cultures the physician was the priest. The priest, philosopher,
and scientist were the same person. The human, being a unity of body, mind, and
spirit, needed a physician who could cure problems of the body, mind, and spirit.
Classically, philosophy referred to all academic pursuits. Even today we still give
out Ph.D. (doctor of philosophy) degrees in physics, history, mathematics, and
medicine. This is why I include all these in the priest caste.
But we need to look at where the rubber meets the road. How are the sick and
wounded treated in your world? Are there healing potions? Are there bionic
prosthetics? Will it take weeks for a character to recover from a major injury or
broken bones, or are their ways to cure him in a few minutes? Are there
hospitals, witch doctors, or astral healers? The field of medicine has also
frequently been a field where women were allowed power even in male
dominated societies.
What unique technologies are available in certain cultures? This is where you go
back to Day1 and detail the technologies used by the characters in your story.
What sort of weapons does a particular culture favor: Spears, Swords, Bows,
Light Sabers, Six-guns, Summoned demons? What sort of vehicles do they use:
flying carpets, flying saucers, horses, powered armor suits, Harley Davidson
motorcycles?

Education
I put this here, because the primary purpose of education in most cultures is to
communicate social values and religious doctrines to new generations. Sciences,
math, and language are communicated in these contexts. For example, the most
literate cultures historically are literate because children need to be taught to
read scriptures. On the other hand, in illiterate cultures the religious leadership
jealously guards the power that literacy gives them (especially if writing has
anything to do with magic). There are also cultures that spurn education and
ostracize scholars while placing much value on athletic or military skill. Pre-
literate cultures rely on the human memory to record history. So the bard, or the
local equivalent will be a person of great importance.
How have the characters and cultures in your world been taught to think? How
will this affect their relationships and conflicts with characters of other countries
or races? If your characters are going to buck the system, what has broken
through their own prejudices?

Language
I like making up languages for my fantasy stories. My background is in language
so I tend to go the Tolkien rout of devising whole languages, verb declensions,
script styles, and inflected endings. In fact, I will confess, it's something of a
waste of time. I obsess over made up grammatical forms, while I neglect actually
writing the story. Remember your goal. Are you trying to write a story, or make
up a language? The purpose of a created language (or using a real language) is to
make the world, cultures, and characters who speak the language more real,
more alien.
One of the most practical uses for a made-up language is profanity. It's a way to
make colorful, roguish characters and still keep the story PG. It can also be a tell
to cultural values. Why is a word or phrase particularly offensive?
Using consistent language patterns in place names will help create a sense of
place. In Lord of the Rings you start out in earthy, normal Hobbiton where
everything has very everyday names: The Shire, The Old Forest, The Water,
Buckland, Bree, Staddle, the Last Inn. But you know you're not in the Shire
anymore as they near Moria and suddenly you get names like Zirak Zigil,
Carathras, Nimrodel, and Lorien. As you enter Gondor every hill has the word
'Amon' in its name and cities have names like Osgiliath and Pelargir.
One other area where language will affect your characters is in your characters'
names.
While developing the languages for all the aliens in Star Wars, George Lucas'
standard practice was to combine two languages, borrowing the grammatical
structure from one language and the vocabulary from another.
Usually you only need to develop a base vocabulary. Try to keep the culture in
mind, especially if you're writing for non-human beings. Reptilian species you
might want to have a lot of sibilant consonants: s, sh, t, th for them to hiss out.
Feline species you might want lots of rolling r's and nasals like n and m.

Literature
Generally you can lump all cultures into two broad categories: literate or illiterate.
Of course, there are varying degrees of partial literacy. Illiterate cultures rely
heavily on the mnemonic power of poetry to record thoughts, history, and
information. Just as partially literate cultures rely on specialized scribes to write
and read, illiterate cultures rely on bards whose job is to remember and pass
down the tales, songs, and records.
The power of writing profoundly impacts a society, from the simple ability to
accurately keep accounting records to the permanent recording of written law.
Oral tradition is easily corrupted or even destroyed by time, but written records
can persist long after the culture that wrote them down is forgotten. Similarly,
people are often quick to believe a story if it has been written down. Readers are
prone to assume a writer has properly researched a topic.
In pre-electronic cultures, literature, poetry, and music are the primary forms of
private entertainment. Before radio and TV came along, people filled those
'prime-time' hours sharing tales, songs, writing and reading letters to each other,
reading stories. Watching the news was going down to the local inn and listening
in on the conversations.
In societies where the priest caste is predominant the primary literature will be
scriptures or spell books. In worker societies the literature will tend toward
entertainment. Warrior societies will have long heroic epics that extol a warrior's
strength and honor. In other words, what kind of people will your culture consider
heroic? That will be what their literature is about.
Entertainment
How do people in your culture spend their leisure time? Generally the more
advanced a culture becomes the more leisure time they have. Over human
history we've come up with an endless list of ways to entertain ourselves: drama,
athletics, combat, music, poetry, stories, spectacle, dance, gaming, dining,
drinking, recreational drug use, of course there's always that 'oldest of
professions'. Entertainment comes in two basic flavors: spectator and
participatory. What kind will your culture(s) prefer? In addition there are two sub-
flavors: individual and team. What kinds of entertainment will the people in your
culture prefer? What do the activities your culture entertains themselves with say
about that culture.
Remember that cult classic movie 'Rollerball' (not the recent re-make). The
government used this brutal form of roller derby to promote a communal attitude
in the populace. They wanted to denigrate individual achievement and emphasize
teamwork. The conflict arises because an individual player becomes so successful
that he threatens that message. So the government that secretly controls the
games, tries to have him killed.
How is entertainment paid for? Are artist's self-supporting, free to charge for their
products with ticket sales? Are artists sponsored by government, church, rich
private, or corporate interests? Do those interests control what the artists can
say, or who wins?

Art
Art, of course, encompasses most forms of cultural expression, but I'm referring
specifically here to the visual arts, painting, drawing, and sculpture. In a priest
society you might see elegant stain glass windows, ubiquitous sculptures of
divinities and saints. In a warrior society the sculptures would depict heroes,
weapons, and memorialize great battles. Art in worker societies oddly tend to
feature recreation, what people get to do when they finally get to stop working.

Architecture
Architecture is primarily a function of environment and available resources, but it
also reflects the technological level of a culture. Italy and Greece have relatively
abundant marble, so many of their buildings use it. In Egypt where sandstone
and clay are common but wood is very rare, they used sun-dried brick. Bricks in
Europe had be fired or else they would dissolve in the rain so they tended to use
wood since it was abundant, or stone in areas, like Scotland, where wood was
less available. In China, the abundant bamboo and timber became the primary
building material.
Greek and Roman architecture is open: a series of open rooms surrounding a
roofless courtyard. This is because of the relatively mild Mediterranean climate. In
northern Europe rooms were closed, equipped with a fireplace, and windows
glassed or shuttered, because of the much cooler and wetter climate.
Building height is also a function of technology. There is a limit to how many
stories tall a tower can be simply because of the limited strength of stone.
Habitable buildings cannot be much more than six levels tall unless you have
some sort of elevator system.
You might also want to include elements from your magic system in your
buildings: floating buildings, organic buildings grown from magically manipulated
trees, structural integrity fields (or their magical equivalents) that allow super
strong structures that look almost unsupported, like half-arcs, spirals, or bizarre
curves. Cities under constant threat of attack will have strong defensible buildings
with few windows, thick city walls, and usually little aesthetic qualities. Rich,
populous, and secure cities will have open buildings, an emphasis on making
buildings look pretty, and any city walls will be viewed more as an obstacle than a
defense.
Architecture offers visitors to strange cultures (like the readers of your book)
clues to the culture's main values. If the largest, most elaborate building in the
city were a temple or cathedral, what would you think is the dominant force in
that culture: priest, warrior, or worker? What if the largest building is a coliseum,
a fortress, or the palace of the king? What if some 300 level corporate
headquarters dominates your city's skyline? In 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'
the cathedral and the imposing Palace of Justice dominate the skyline. The
conflict in the story is symbolized by the conflict set up between these two
buildings at opposite ends of the city and the ideals they represent.

Fashion
Fashion and clothes are great clues to a society and culture. How people present
themselves and how they are required to be presented is an easy way to
communicate to a reader important information about a new character. Clothes
can instantly communicate social class, national allegiance,
Fashion will reflect
Sexual Morals: how revealing or modest a dress can tell how prudish or
wanton a culture might be
Social Values: Warrior cultures will feature martial clothes if not outright
uniforms. Worker cultures often feature earth tones, especially if you're
going for a rustic look. Priestly cultures often tend toward ostentation and
can be as stratified as a martial culture. What kind of culture might feature
androgynous unitards?
Social Class: finer fabrics and elaborate clothes for the rich, simpler,
courser and patched fabrics for the poor
Social Roles: jobs usually have some sort of uniform, official or unofficial: a
chef's hat, a maid's apron, a lady's fan, a woodsman's hood.
Resources and Trade: What fabrics are produced locally, what can they
import? Fur, leather, cotton, wool, silk, linen, synthetics, feathers, etc.,
need to be available or obtainable by trade. Poor folk will usually have
 clothes made from local materials while richer folk will wear finer, imported
fabrics.
Environment: Cold environments need warmer clothes with less revealed
skin, warm environments need less clothes usually exposing more skin. Hot
environments tend to need clothes again. What kind of environment would
you think a culture lives in where everyone wears acid-resistant, plastic
raincoats?
Religion: Many religions strictly dictate fashion. Usually they are in line with
other social and cultural roles, but often they exist only to distinguish the
'wes' from the 'thems'. From the turbans and ceremonial knives worn by
Sikhs to the rosary beads worn by nuns to the color coded shawls of the
Aes Sedai.

Food
Different cultures and races eat different foods and often view food differently.
Except for Swedish Meatballs. According to Ambassador G'kar of Narn from
Babylon 5 every culture has a version of Swedish Meatballs. If your food is heavy
on the garlic, your probably eating Italian (especially southern Italian or Sicilian).
If your food is spiced with paprika it's probably Slavic, the French tend to use
onion, Scandinavians use allspice, Indian uses curry, and Mexican favors peppers.
But more than just regional taste, food is often reflective of many other aspects
of culture.
How is food eaten? Chopsticks? Forks? A Shared Knife (as in medieval Europe)? A
multivitamin Tablet? I.V.?
Do people sit in chairs around a table, kneel at a table, or recline? Are there
restaurants, inns, taverns, commissaries, messes or other public eateries?
Can men eat with women, or children eat with adults, or is that considered
improper?
What are a culture's rules about hospitality? In cultures where food is scarce or
hard to produce, food and sharing meals together is a big deal, even sacramental.
Are certain animals or foods sacred or unclean? Are some foods poisonous? Are
certain foods reserved for special times and occasions, like Chinese moon cakes,
Jewish Passover matza, or roast turkey at American Thanksgiving? What foods
are identified with certain societies, like the English and tea?
I know this tutorial is overwhelming (it was overwhelming to write it). The point is
not that you have to include every detail, every aspect of human society in your
world (as if this were an exhaustive list). I wanted to throw out a lot of different
ideas so that you can pick and chose a few, maybe a few you hadn't thought of,
that will help you flesh out your world and make it more real to your readers. I've
put together a CivilizationWorksheet that will allow you to condense all the aspects
of this over-long section into a simple single reference page.
Economics
You've heard the clich, 'He who has the gold makes the rules.' This tends to be
true in cultures dominated by the worker caste. In societies dominated by the
priest cast it tends to work the other way round: 'He who makes the rules gets
the gold.' And in warrior societies it's 'He who has the largest army makes the
rules and takes the gold.' So, as you create a world for your Fantasy or Science
Fiction story, important questions to ask are: how does money work in your
world's cultures, and who controls the money?

First question: How does money move around?

Barter: the most basic form of exchange: I give you something that you want if
you give me something I want. Goods and services are exchanged for goods and
services of similar value. A good bargainer tries to give something easily obtained
or made for things much more difficult to produce.
Medium of Exchange: a specific commodity or resource begins to serve as a
medium of exchange and the value of goods and services are calculated according
to that resource. So the value of all materials in an economy might be calculated
based on bushels of grain, strings of beads, ounces of salt or silver, or mystical
psycrystals.
Coinage: now the government begins to get involved. The government regulates
the medium of exchange by making coins with fixed weights and official images
stamped on them. Gold is ideal for this purpose because of how soft it is, making
it easy to stamp in official seals or images of Caesar's face. Coinage can become
the victim of the economic force of inflation, where the government tries to
increase the amount of coins in circulation by diluting the purity of the metal in
the coins.
Paper: the government begins to issue special cheques that have their value
backed up by gold in a kingdom's vaults or grain in the kingdom's granaries.
These evolve, like coins, into special, government-printed bills. Eventually, the
bills may not even reflect the value of the standard on which they were originally
based, but have their value determined by money markets of competing
currencies.
Credit: at this point no actual coinage or paper needs to be exchanged, only
information that money has changed hands. The appropriate amounts are
transferred between financial institutions and the only thing that's actually
changed is the numbers in the accountants' spreadsheets.

Economic Structures
Now we need to consider who controls the money. Lets look at some of the
economic structures of societies. Many different structures can exist side by side.
Even in a bustling free market economy there can be specific locals operating at
only a subsistence level or in rigid socialist societies there can be very active
black markets.
Subsistence: A community produces only (or almost) enough goods and food for
their own immediate use. Subsistence cultures have little division of labor.
Everybody has to be a jack of all trades, make their own clothes, grow their own
food, make their own tools, defend their own property.
Trade I: individuals begin producing enough goods to have a surplus. You begin
to get division of labor, or specialization. Since Farmer Jones and Farmer Green
can produce enough food for three families, Bill Smith can devote all his time to
the forge. The new, and better tools, make Jones and Green even more
productive and so Fred Carpenter can now afford to spend all his time on the
edge of the forest working wood.
Trade II: At this stage communities begin to trade with other communities.
Whole communities begin to specialize based on local resources, cash crops, or
industries. Trade networks begin to develop. If defense wasn't a problem before,
the security of trade routes becomes an issue now. Villages are founded for the
express purpose of exploiting a specific resource or because of their location
along a trade route.
This is important because individual communities cease to be self-sufficient. They
are dependent on essential supplies through the trade network. This makes them
vulnerable to disruptions, like natural disasters or invasion. It can also make
particular communities strategic targets for thieves, raiders, pirates, enemy
empires, or the forces of darkness.
Colonialism/Imperialism: An imperialist economy is designed to funnel
resources from the colonies to the imperial center. Usually this leads to fairly
extreme forms of exploitation to increase the profitability of the colony. England
in the 18th century held human liberty in high regard, yet they looked the other
way at the growing slave trade and continued to deny a political voice to the
American colonies because they were making so much money off them.
Free Market: In free market economies the government and business
theoretically stay away from each other. The economy is ruled strictly by the laws
of supply and demand. The government's role is to protect the market from
artificial, political, criminal, and dishonest forces from affecting the
supply/demand equation. The weakness of a free market system is that demand
can be manipulated by cultural forces (i.e. fads). The free market is also amoral.
If there is a demand, (for example, prostitution, narcotics, assassination)
someone will try to fill it. How will the forces of culture try to curtail these
tendencies?
Mercantilism: In a mercantilist economy the government uses its political and
military power to benefit specific domestic industries usually through protectionist
trade policies. This is indeed an example of those having the gold making the
rules. The industries and business are privately owned (in contrast to Socialism in
which the companies are government owned), thought the line between
government and business is blurred. The guild run cities of late medieval Europe
were mercantilist governments, run largely by the most powerful business
interests in the city. In some cases private companies are given extensive
political power. For example throughout the 1700s and well into the 1800s the
East Indian Trading Company ran the English presence in India and the Hudson
Bay Company ran the colonies in much of Canada. These companies were allowed
to have armed security forces and ships to enforce English rule. Their ship
captains were given rank in the English navy, even though their ships were
privately owned. Their managers were given full diplomatic authority to negotiate
trade agreements that essentially operated like treaties. In effect the East India
Company was a branch of the British government, but the money it made went
mostly into the shareholders pockets instead of the government treasury.
Corporatism: Corporatism is an extreme version of Mercantilism in which the
private companies actually begin to supplant the government. Corporate security
forces take over the role of police and military. Private transport companies take
over the delivery of mail. Corporate training programs replace education systems.
People live in company owned or financed housing blocks. Most areas of the
economy are monopolized and smaller business are bought out or squashed by
their larger cousins. What municipal or national governments that are left are
totally controlled by the business interests that put them into power.
Socialism: Socialism is the opposite of Corporatism. Under socialism the
government strictly controls all aspects of the economy including private
business: prices, wages, imports, exports, productivity, hiring policy, new
construction. Socialist governments often take over whole sectors of the economy
(usually starting with health care) replacing the corporate bureaucracy with
government bureaucrats. Money and profits from the economy are funneled
directly into government coffers. Of course government bureaucracies are usually
even more inefficient than corporate bureaucracies, and just as prone to
corruption. Economies are vast complex webs of relationships that defy efforts to
micro-manage.
Communism: In an ideal sense communist societies have no private property.
All property is owned communally (hence the name). There are no rich or poor,
because nobody has anything, everyone shares everything. Goods and services
flow freely 'from each according to their abilities, to each according to their
needs.' In practice, however communism is a very difficult society to maintain. All
it takes is one or two greedy or lazy people to threaten the whole system and
they have to be eliminated or 're-educated'. Without the economic motivation of
wealth what values motivate people to contribute to your communistic society?
How do you transfer goods and services freely from each according to their ability
when some have considerably more ability than others do? How do goods flow
freely to each according to their needs when so much of any economy is based on
fulfilling wants, not needs? Who needs a Rolls Royce, or yachts, or a 52-inch
plasma TV? Who really needs a TV at all (and the whole entertainment industry
behind it)?
Governments
We've already got a pretty good article on FARP about governments, so I'm not
going to go into a list of government types. What I want to look at is making sure
the governments of the countries, races, and planets, etc. integrate into your
whole structure.

National Governments
As you've put together the cultures in your world, look at the relationship
between their values and how their governments are structured. What will the
government look like for a society dominated by the warrior caste, or worker, or
priest? If you're going to create an evil, totalitarian empire for your good guys to
fight, consider how they got that way. Oppressive fear rarely works well or very
long. Just look at the Soviet Union. Hitler's rise by inspiring people; feeding
people a line about safety, power, and empowerment; by uniting the people
against scapegoat enemies like the Jews or the Jedi. At least a certain percentage
of a population has to buy into the tyrant's vision for the tyrant to come to power
without a lot of civil unrest or all out civil war.

Military
What is the purpose of the nation's military: offense, defense, or civil order?
Offensive militaries are designed to attack and conquer other countries. Defensive
militaries are formed by nations who fear being attacked by countries with
offensive militaries (real or imagined). Nations structure their military for civil
order when they plan to use their army as police to enforce martial law (because
the leaders fear their own people).
How does one become a part of the military? Do they draft conscripts? Do they
impress unwilling people? Do they only accept volunteers? Do they only allow
people from certain economic or social classes? Do they hire mercenaries? Does
being in the military offer people special perks or social benefits?
What kind of special training do soldiers receive? What kind of special training do
officers receive?
How does one advance in the military: skill, patronage, loyalty?
How competent is the military? How loyal? How independent? Is the military
under civilian control, or are the civilians under military control?

Internal Politics
Countries are rarely monolithic. There are political parties, regional dynamics,
ethnic groups, sub cultures, religions, generation gaps all working together. Even
single cities have Chinatowns, boroughs, and neighborhoods with their own
unique cultural flavors. These different groups often have radically different
cultures based on radically different values. For example, different castes usually
worship different deities in a pantheon, holding different festivals, eating different
foods, attending different entertainment venues. They may even have different
governments. In ancient Rome the upper-classes ran the senate. Only members
of the upper class could run or vote for senators and consuls. The plebes, the
lower class, could elect a Tribune of the Plebes. For a brief period the Tribune was
the most powerful person in Roman politics.
Often in Fantasy or Science Fiction all these subtleties are glossed over to simplify
the setting to focus on the main point of the story. That's not a bad thing to do.
You can get caught up in the minutia.

Local Government
Many times the local government of a village or town will be quite different from
that of a nation. Even under an incredibly autocratic imperial leader many of the
towns maintain a fairly independent and democratic government. Likewise, even
in the most democratic countries, you can still find areas dominated by a violent
criminal gang or single individual, like the owner of the local factory. Local
governments, even more than national governments reflect the cultural values
and morals of the community.

Law Enforcement
How will the civilizations in your world enforce their rules? One of the 'rubber
meets the road' issues in the world of your story is how your characters will
interact with the authorities that run your world. Most of what we've been doing
in this tutorial so far is setting up the rules by which your world operates. What
happens when your characters cross the line and break the rules? Who goes after
them? What happens when they are caught? Who tries them? How are they
punished?
Who enforces the law?
Self: you get your own justice. In many ancient cultures, if you couldn't hunt
down and kill a criminal yourself, you weren't a real man and deserved to get
robbed. Often called 'frontier justice', this sort of justice tends to lead to cycles of
escalating revenge.
Watch: In many isolated towns and villages the constant threat of attack by
raiders, roaming bands of ogres, packs of hell hounds, and other beasties require
a group of men who volunteer to maintain a constant watch over the town. Since
they're already keeping an eye on things, they might as well keep and eye out for
petty thieves, murderers, con artists, and other ne'er-do-wells too.
Constable: The constable is the watchman free of his duty to serve as an on-call
defensive military. The constable is also a professional, not a volunteer. As such,
the constable patrols the street keeping an eye out for thieves, murderers, con
artists, and other ne'er-do-wells full time. Usually constables do not have the
authority to use deadly force.
Sheriff: The sheriff is charged with keeping the peace. So his role is not so much
solving crime as maintaining civil order, stopping crimes before they start or
apprehending criminals caught in the act. Sheriffs can have a lot of unofficial
discretion about the application of their authority. This is because a sheriff is
selected by the people of the community. Sheriffs also have the power to use
deadly force. A unique power of the sheriff is the authority to deputize civilians as
fully empowered law enforcers.
Marshal: The marshal usually does not patrol, but pursues criminals. The
marshal has more official authority than the sheriff does. His jurisdiction is
broader, and he has the official authority to act as something of his own judge,
jury, and executioner. The marshal's extended authority derives from a higher
level of government.
Fed: The fed is an agent of the national government and their authority trumps
the local authorities. They are still constrained by whatever rules the legal system
places on law enforcers.
Street Judge: This guy, taken from the Judge Dredd comic, is police, judge,
jury, and executioner. He has broad authority in the pursuit of criminals, the
gathering of evidence. The arrest of a criminal is also the trial and sentencing
hearing.
Detective: The detective is a special category of law enforcement. Instead of
patrolling to prevent crime or to catch criminals in the act, the detective is called
in after a crime is committed and given the job of figuring out who did it and
catching them. As such they have the power to search for and gather evidence
and question suspects.
Bounty Hunter: The bounty hunter is a marshal for hire. They are private
citizens given the authority to pursue criminals and bring them to justice.
Because they operate outside the constraints of department they can get away
with a lot of abuse of the 'rules'.
Enforcer: Unlike the sheriff who keeps the peace, or the marshal, who pursues
criminals to bring them in for trial, the enforcer's job is 'preemptive punishment'.
They don't bring you back for trial, they just beat you up for violating the rules. A
society that uses enforcers rarely pays any heed to 'civil rights' even in the best
of cases.
Secret Police: or State Police operate outside the chain of the legal system.
They have both the full resources of the state and the freedom from its rules. In
the name of state security, you can justify a lot of things: torture, arrest without
cause, search and seizure, even murder. The secret police operate (as the name
suggests) covertly. They rarely wear uniforms and employ many informants and
spies, often through blackmail.
Consul: In places under martial law, the military doubles as the police force. In
ancient Rome the consul's power derived from a document that allowed the
general to execute soldiers for disobeying orders. Thus the military governor has
nearly absolute powers in the exercise of his authority. In other words, he can
have you executed just because he wants to, no trial, no defense, no evidence
Punishment
How are rule breakers punished? Punishment serves three basic purposes:
prevention, deterrence, and restitution. Imprisonment, execution, exile, or
amputation all have the side-effect of preventing a criminal from repeating their
offense. Harsh punishments, like torture, caning, or public display are designed to
essentially scare both the punished and other prospective criminals from choosing
to break a law.
The third idea is that punishment should bring justice. That a criminal must pay
for the harm they have done to their victims and the rest of society by violating
the rules. These punishments will usually line up other cultural values. Societies
that value freedom will imprison people, considering the removal of freedom to be
drastic enough a punishment for most crimes. Societies that value social order
tend to harshly punish even minor offenders. Societies that value money will
often impose fines. A society of magic users may de-magic a convicted wizard. A
society of warriors might reduce a criminal to a menial slave laborer. The most
common punishment in ancient Rome was banishment. What worse punishment
could a Roman think of besides having to live in someplace less than Rome?
Punishments also reflect what a society considers just to the victims and society.
Mild offenders are frequently sentenced to 'community service' repaying the
damage they did to society by forcing them to contribute in a way a society might
deem constructive. We imprison criminals not just to punish them, but also to
protect people from the other crimes they might commit. This is also the logic
behind cutting the hand off a thief or castrating an adulterer.
Generally speaking, the more primitive or frontier a culture, the more personal
the justice system. In many ancient cultures individuals were responsible for their
own protection and justice. If you caught someone stealing from your shop, you
could summarily cut off their arm without involving any local authorities. If the
guys in black hats shot your brother-in-law and carried off your sister, it was your
duty to don your white hat and go after them, not run like a coward to the local
sheriff. Many cultures (especially those dominated by the warrior caste) hold to
trial by combat. From the dueling floor in Hamlet to Main Street in Tombstone,
Arizona it is not uncommon for two disputants to settle their differences at the
point of a weapon, hand-to-hand, or spell against spell. The theory being that the
gods, fate, or some universal law of poetic justice would guide the aim of the
righteous and somehow impede the guilty forcing them to loose.
Of course this kind of cowboy justice tends to leave a high body count and lead to
increasing rounds of violence. Enter the magistrate. Courts are an effort to fairly
apply the rules; first by taking as much of the emotion out of the argument as
possible and rely on logic and evidence. A major breakthrough in many ancient
societies was to write the law down. Written law allows for fairer enforcement.
Modern cultures seek to stop the abuse of power by law enforcement by
acknowledging rights like habeas corpus (the right to know what crime you're
being accused of) and limits on the power of police to search and seize private
property.
History
This is where you pull it all together.
Once you've got a basic map, a list of the major political, religious and economic
forces (the nations, states, governments, churches, guilds) you want to construct
a bit of a history. You need to answer basic questions like:
Why does this nation have the government it has?
What is the history of the conflicts between the warrior, worker, and priest
castes?
What is the history of the conflicts between different nations?
Nations that are dominated by the worker caste will fight over trade
and resources.
Nations dominated by the priest caste will fight over philosophy and
doctrines.
Nations dominated by the warrior caste will fight over territory and
strategic objectives.
What are some of the defining events?
Natural disasters, plagues, or supernatural calamities
Wars, invasions, conflicts
Life or reign of notable political/military/religious leaders
For most of the areas on your map this history doesn't need to be more than a
paragraph listing the race(s) who live there, who the current king or leader is, the
basic government and cultural type, the dominant religion, and any special
resources or technologies they might possess. Those areas that directly affect the
story, the more detailed you want to make this history. You especially want to
detail the cultural and political forces that directly influence your characters. This
can help you greatly with character development, giving you clues to who they
are, why they make the choices they make, what conflicts they will have with
other characters from other backgrounds.
I know this tutorial is overwhelming (it was overwhelming to write it). The point is
not that you have to include every detail, every aspect of human society in your
world (as if this were an exhaustive list). I wanted to throw out a lot of different
ideas so that you can pick and chose a few, maybe a few you hadn't thought of,
that will help you flesh out your world and make it more real to your readers. I've
put together a CivilizationWorksheet that will allow you to condense all the aspects
of this over-long section into a simple single reference page.
Day 7: Rest - of the Story
So the seventh day dawns and you wonder, now that I've created this amazing,
whole fantasy world, can't I take a break? But, of course the beginning is only the
start of the story, you've still got a story to write. But having a well-developed
world can help you with the other parts of your writing. As I said waaaaay back in
the introduction, Setting is the defining characteristic of Fantasy/Science Fiction
literature. But what about the other basics parts of a story: Theme, Character,
and Plot? I wanted to conclude this series by looking at how making the effort to
create a world helps you develop the rest of your story.

Setting and Theme

In a review of the movie Vendetta the reviewer expresses surprise at the
thematic depth of a science fiction movie. He even bemoaned that it took a
science fiction movie to so vividly explore themes like the ease with which
surrendering liberty in exchange for security can slide into a police state, or the
ease with which the dissident can slide into terrorism.
To be blunt, as a science fiction fan and writer, I was a bit offended. Did this
movie critic think that the only story that could possess a profound theme was a
drama like 'To Kill a Mockingbird' or 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'? What did
this writer think Fantasy and Science Fiction are all about? Fantasy and Science
Fiction have always been primarily about theme. Think of the very first English
novel, the fantasy Pilgrim's Progress and it's very obvious theme of the journey of
a Christian life. Think of the first Science Fiction novel, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein
and it's themes about life, death, and the dangers of scientific discovery
outpacing morality. What about Bram Stoker's exploration of hedonism and
sexually transmitted disease symbolized by vampirism in Dracula? Even a light
and humorous story, like Jules Vern's Around the World in 80 Days is looking at
the profound cultural impact of technological advances in the speed of
transportation and communication.
The beauty of Fantasy and Science Fiction is that since you create the universe in
which the story takes place you can make invisible and intangible ideas physical
aspects of your universe. This allows you to explore human characteristics and
conflicts in ways you cannot do in other forms of literature.
For example, you can explore the issue of racism by creating really separate
races that have built in biological incompatibilities. What if one race literally is
poisonous to the other? What if one race really is superior to the other? (What do
you mean by race? What do you mean by 'superior'? These are things you get to
determine.) What if one race is inherently evil while the other is good?
You can explore the conflict between good and evil by actually personifying evil.
Explore moral decision making by creating a universe where you have defined
morality and the consequences for you character's decisions. You can create
races with three or four sexes or imagine Amazon societies with reversed gender
roles or species that transform from one gender to another. You can explore
fundamental questions like what it means to be human? Who or what is God?
Why do we exist? What's the point of the universe? And you can explore these
questions precisely because you get to create your universe from scratch.

Setting and Character

If you want characters with depth, having a well-developed world will help you
build your characters' back-stories. If you create a whole world, you will know
your characters' places in it. You will have a structure explaining how the
characters relate to the spiritual forces of your world. They will have a cultural
and ethnic identity. You will know what countries or factions your characters are
from and their history and conflicts. You will know the characters' economic and
social classes and how all of these traits influence the conflicts your characters
will have with each other.
With this history, you will have a foundation to understand your character's moral
choices and the moral complexities that give such depth to a character.
Detailing your world's technology or magic systems will also explain potential
weaknesses in your characters. What are some of the detrimental side effects of
FTL travel or magic use that may cause chronic problems for your character?
Working on language can supply your characters with dialects and trademark
slang and profanities.

Setting and Plot

A well-developed world can help you develop the plot. The core of many stories is
that there is something wrong with the world and your main characters' job is to
fix it. This works on many levels.
What's wrong with the world of your story may be something very limited and
personal. In Shakespeare's Hamlet the death of Hamlet's father has turned
Hamlet's world upside-down (the death of the king barely seems to affect anyone
else). His world is further disturbed by the revelation that his father's death was
murder. He must repair this injustice, this disruption in the moral order of his
universe, by seeking vengeance against his uncle. His failure to avenge his father
and repair this injustice ultimately ends up destroying his finance, her father and
brother, two of Hamlets friends, Hamlet's mother, his murderous uncle, and even
himself.
In a more standard story it may be something like the balance of power between
two rival nations shifts to one side or the other and war breaks out. The hero(s)
are part of an elite fighting force (or more usually a 'rag-tag' fighting force)
working to restore peace, as in the Anime Venus Wars.
In a more epic story, there could be something fundamentally wrong with the
fabric of the universe: the corruption of the mystical energies used by the
sorcerers, a rift between worlds that is tearing the fabric of space/time and time
letting in demons from other dimensions, the Dragon of Light has disappeared, or
a mysterious and powerful race of aliens has invaded the Earth.
Since you have built your world from the ground up, you will have some good
ideas about what might be wrong in your world that your heroes must fix.
Because you built a whole world, with interdependent parts, you will be able to
understand just how profound an impact that problem has in all different parts of
your world. This will give you many ideas for conflicts, disasters, or obstacles for
your characters to deal with that will both advance your story and build tension
and drama in your story as the characters, and the reader, come to understand
the full magnitude of the problem.
Many fantasy/sci-fi stories follow a quest format. Having a basic map of your
world will help you develop your plot. Just tracing a path across your preliminary
map will help you find all sorts of interesting plot points, some you might not
even have thought of: crossing a mountain range or desert, trekking through a
treacherous jungle, or crossing the border of a hostile empire.
You might also try a calendar instead of a map. The Harry Potter books all follow
the school calendar of Hogwarts: the trip to Diagon Alley, the train to school and
the banquet, the start of classes, Halloween, the start of Quidditch season,
Christmas, Spring Break, Finals, and the story finale. There are other events
depending on the story, but it gives J.K. Rowling a basic skeleton for all of her
books.

The End of the Beginning

Wow. That ended up being a lot bigger a series than I thought when I first started
outlining it. But here we are at the end of 'The Beginning'. We've:
Developed a basic theological/spiritual foundation for your world with a
magic system.
Determined the basic physical laws that drive the natural forces in your
universe and how the civilizations in your story may have harnessed those
forces in technology.
Defined the scope and role of weather and climate in the story.
Mapped out your new world noting the geography and how it influences the
people and civilizations living there.
Filled your world with animals specially adapted to live in the environment
you created.
Built the complex cultures and civilizations that your characters live in and
interact with.
We finished by looking at how all this work will help you develop the rest of
your story.
Thanks for sticking with me through this whole thing. I hope you found some
great ideas to develop your world and write your story.