In the next part of the Worldbuilding series, I will talk about society worldbuilding. I could have made this series part of Worldbuilding 101 and made this Part 6, but I wanted to create a mental break from the first part of the series.
As an aside, I just watched the movie La La Land where Mia meets a Hollywood writer at a pool party who has “a knack for worldbuilding.” She cannot get away from him fast enough. LOL! I guess the moral is that we all find this stuff fascinating, but it’s not really party small talk.
Image: The Golden Globes
With that as the backdrop for our social setting, let’s get on with it!
Physical vs. Social Environment
Up to this point, this series has focused on the physical environment of your fictional world. From here on, we will be talking about the social environment of the world.
There is a mental distinction we make between “The Environment” and human society. In our minds, anything not related to human society is “The Environment”. In fact, there isn’t a real distinction between them. One influences the other. We interact with our environment and our environment determines how our society develops and functions.
You might have thought my focus on plate tectonics was too much detail for worldbuilding. In fact, geology has a huge impact in our lives. As one example, there is a famous study showing how cretaceous geology influences voting patterns in Alabama millions of years later.
What Makes Up a Society?
In this part of the series, Worldbuilding 102, we will look at how societies form and how they function. This is important for writing fiction. As you develop characters, you need to know the world they grew up in and what influences they had on their lives.
We’ll try to answer the question of what the are people like. What do they look like? Where do they live? How do they think and talk? What do they eat and wear?
In doing so, we will use what we learned in Worldbuilding 101 and build on it. Keep in mind that, just as in the physical environment, these topics do not stand alone. Each influences the other. When society worldbuilding, you can’t design one piece without having some knowledge of the others. Take it all in, do plenty of research before finalizing anything.
We’ll do a quick overview of the topics here. I’ll go into greater detail in separate articles for each. They might get pretty complex the further in we go. I’ll try to keep each article short enough that you won’t have to wade through too much detail. If it gets too long and complex, I’ll break the topic up into multiple articles. I can see that happening for language, which is one of my favorite parts of worldbuilding.
Lists of Society Worldbuilding Topics in Future Posts
These are the topics I plan to cover. Note that there might be more than one post in each topic.
History is not a separate topic, but permeates each other one. Each area of society developed over time. Just as we think about how each topic influences the others, we need to keep in mind how things change over time.
We’ll work through each topic keeping in mind the historical development of each area. I’ll use 10,000 year timescale. Longer time scales mean more detailed and complex cultures, though much is forgotten in just 3 generations. Think about it, if writing hasn’t developed, the only way for people to remember the past is for someone to tell someone else. When your grandparents die, they can’t pass on what they know. Only the important information is remembered. That is, what keeps you alive from day to day.
Society Worldbuilding for Fantasy
Remember that the world and societies we are worldbuilding are fictional and intended for a fantasy setting. That means that you can create and invent and make shit up as much as you want. the purpose of this series is to provide guidelines for how to invent something without it going off the rails.
Following the rules for how the various aspects of the environment and society interact makes your world more relatable to the reader. It provides a depth to the setting that readers like to explore.
Feel free to break the rules when you think it aids in telling your story. Just make sure that, if you do, you have a good reason for it. It is the broken rules that make for the interesting stories. Why does the dragon live in a desert where there isn’t enough food for him to eat? Why do the submarine people come out of the sea to trade on dry land? There should be a reason for these things other than you wanted to have a dragon or sea people in your story.
Keep these things in mind when you invent the world, before you start writing or even after you have started. We’ll start with demographics in my next article.
Are there any topics you think I missed? What areas would you cover?
It’s a sweet and sentimental movie. The movie and the song came out in 1944 in the middle of World War II. It was a bit of nostalgia for a time 40 years earlier than the war era it was released in.
The lyrics of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas have changed a couple times. The song as Judy Garland performed it in the movie had the line “Someday soon we all will be together / If the fates allow / Until then we’ll just have to muddle through somehow.” It’s quite sad and I like it for that.
Apparently, when she sang it for soldiers fighting in the war, it moved them to tears. Ultimately, it is a song of hope.
Frank Sinatra thought that line was too sad for his 1957 album “A Jolly Christmas”, so he asked the songwriter to change it to “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.” Maybe he wanted to forget the painful memories of the war. I really don’t like that line. It has nothing to do with the previous lyrics.
The funny thing is, Judy Garland herself demanded the song be changed for the movie to make it less depressing. The original lines “It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past” became “Let your heart be light / Next year all our troubles will be out of sight”.
Watch the scene from the original movie on YouTube here:
Welcome to the last post on mapping the physical environment of your fictional world. I will have more posts in the worldbuilding series when I get into fictional societies. We’ve already covered the topics of map projections, continent formation, climate, and landforms. Today, we talk about biomes.
What the Heck Is a Biome?
A biome is a community of plants and animals that give the area an environment with common characteristics. When people talk about “the environment”, biomes are what they are usually referring to. This environment gives your setting its atmosphere.
It’s a common trope to start stories in safe environments and move them to exotic locales when the story gets going. Familiar environments are perceived as safe. Exotic locales offer more danger.
Keep in mind that what is familiar to one person might not be to another. For example, to most Americans and Europeans, the civilized farmlands and cities in those temperate zones would be familiar, while the Australian outback would be exotic and dangerous. It is widely recognized that everything in Australia is trying to kill you. An Australian might disagree with this.
The exotic doesn’t need to be far away. For example, the wild forests (mostly extinct) of Europe and North America were the source of a lot of anxiety among inhabitants nearby. They were the inspiration as the source of danger in many fairy tales and fantasy stories. Think of the wolves of Little Red Riding Hood and Peter and the Wolf.
General Types of Biomes
Biomes are found in three general types: Forests, Grasslands, and Deserts. Generally, the wetter the climate, the larger the plants. Shrubs grow in all types and are the transition between each. They are usually found in drier areas.
Tree in Green Forest. Photo by Julia Volk from Pexels
Brown Grass, Cruzilia, Brazil. Photo by fabio.tsu from Pexels
Brown Sand Under White Clouds, Photo by Taryn Elliott from Pexels
In this article, I focus on terrestrial environments, not aquatic, except where they intersect in mangroves and marshes. If you want your setting in an aquatic environment, there are some notes at the end of this article for you to do more research.
Climate and Its Effect on Biomes
We covered climate in an earlier article, but while climate affects the natural environment and often determines what kind of flora and fauna exist in an area, they are not synonymous.
These general types of biomes turn out differently depending on the climate. For example, hot and warm climates produce tropical, subtropical, and hot desert biomes. On the other hand, cool and cold climates produce temperate, sub polar, and polar biomes.
Moisture also plays a large role in determining the biome. Generally, the wetter the climate, the larger the plants and animals. This is why we usually find forests in moist climates, though we also find dry forests in some dry climates. This is because in those areas, seasonal monsoons provide enough moisture for at least part of the year.
Moisture also plays a role in biological diversity. More arid regions have less diversity.
Also, generally, the warmer the climate, the more diverse the ecosystem, so long as the moisture levels are comparable. That is, tropical forests are more diverse than northern forests.
Worldbuilding Biomes
So how does this play out when worldbuilding and mapping biomes onto your fictional world? I used the World Wildlife Fund biome definitions and mapped biomes onto corresponding climate zones. See below or here for links to some ecoregions. These links will have detailed lists of biomes. There are other systems you can use as well.
The biomes are broad classifications of very distinct ecosystems. Certain biomes might cross different climate zones, but are generally associated with a few related climate zones. Different biomes classifications might look different depending on the climate or location. This provides opportunity for a lot of creativity for the author, depending on the atmosphere one wants in the book.
They way I went about it was to look at my climate map, figure out where forests, grasslands and deserts would go based on drier or wetter climates.
Forests, Grasslands, and deserts of Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin
Focus on the Details
Next, I homed in on the biomes. That is, which biome would be appropriate based on the Köppen climate system? As an example, I focused on a couple of biomes and how I mapped them. This is a pretty loose application of theory to practice. There will be plenty of opportunity to drill down to specific details when you plan your actual story. Above all, you want to create a general atmosphere for your setting.
Mapping Biomes to Climates: Tropical Moist Broadleaf Forests. Images by Michael Tedin
The first of these climate/biome pairings, the tropical rainforest, is the classic jungle most similar to the Amazon or Congo basins. Likewise, the tropical monsoon forest is similar to Vietnam; Miami, Florida; or Yucatan, Mexico. The humid subtropical forest is similar to southern China.
Tropical and Subtropical Dry Broadleaf Forests
I’ll do one more just because I did the research and I find in an intriguing environment. The tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests is not what you typically think of as a tropical forest. Instead, it is seasonally wet and dry, changing as the intertropical convergence zone moves north and south. The trees in this biome are mostly deciduous.
Mapping Biomes to Climates: Tropical Dry Broadleaf Forests. Images by Michael Tedin
As an example of a dry broadleaf forest in a tropical savannah climate, look to Thailand, Cambodia or Tamil Nadu in India. Additionally, you would find a dry forest in a semi-arid steppe in the Gran Chaco of Paraguay or the Deccan Plateau of India. For some reason, I am intrigued by the India-like environment. I think a fantasy story set in a mythical India-like world would be a fascinating read.
Flora and Fauna
Once you have these biomes mapped to climate, you can decide what actually lives there. Figure out what kind of plants and animals live in the area. What are the main identifying flora and fauna? You don’t need an exhaustive list, just the main ones that give the right feel for the environment.
When deciding on flora and fauna, use real-world examples to mimic your fantasy world. For areas you want to actually as a fantasy setting, you’ll want more detail. Research some of the ecoregions the World Wildlife Fund uses to define the environments of the various biomes.
For example, in the Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub, the typical flora is oak and pine trees. The typical fauna is the small mammal: badgers, small cats, mongoose, and mice. The Mediterranean biome is also home to larger animals such as gazelles, sheep and goats, and wild dogs like the jackal and hyena. Wild boars are common in Italy and Spain. Don’t forget birds such as vultures and eagles.
Temperate Climates and Biomes. Images by Michael Tedin
Fantasy Plants and Animals
If you are worldbuilding a fantastical world, you might want fantastical flora and fauna. You can create new plants and animals that we see in the real world but are adapted to a different environment. Animals adapt an move around. Climates change. Polar bears became brown bears when the ice retreated.
Maybe a bear the size of a cat or mouse could evolve in the desert. Maybe fast-running flocks of lizards similar to dinosaurs evolve in grasslands. Don’t get too carried away. Mushrooms require a lot of moisture so you wouldn’t see large masses of them year-round in the desert, though you might see them after a rare rainstorm.
Put as much detail into the areas you want to use in your stories. Focus on the areas that you want to use as a setting. It helps to have an idea of what other options are there in case your characters travel to a different part of your world. Feel free to use real-world examples as a short-cut.
Remember though, that fantasy is all about the non-mundane, so the fantastical elements of your world might be these environments. To do it properly, take the biome and create something new. That is, invent a new plant or animal that would fit in the environment. It might take some real research into biology and environmental science.
If you do decide to create a fantastical biome, make it part of the story. That is, there should be a story reason for the difference from the real world. Exotic fantasy animals for the sake of making something up often feels forced. However, if there is a story reason for the change, it makes the story much richer and likely you will come up with something original.
Monsters
The next step in worldbuilding your biomes is to populate them with monsters. What kinds of monsters live in that environment?
Werewolves and werebears might be common in temperate forests, while giant lizards or snakes might be common in jungles. You might find fire-breathing creatures in deserts, but not likely in polar regions. Don’t put a colony of giant frogs in a desert unless there is a localized source of water. Even then, the colony would not be large.
Next, think about what creatures are sentient. For instance, are humans the only sentient creatures or have others become sentient? Think about lizardfolk in tropical forest biomes or Rakshasas in the tropical dry forest (for an India-like setting). Centaurs might develop sentience in the grasslands and steppes.
You could also leave off the exotic monsters and use the most dangerous monster of all: humans. Have humans evolved into multiple species? Think of the elves and orcs of Tolkien. For those that want to avoid that cliché, you can create other types of sub-species adapted to particular environments.
Once we know what sentient creatures live in what areas, we can start to focus on how their societies are organized. That will be a complex set of topics covered in the next set of articles in the worldbuilding series.
So far in the worldbuilding series we have mapped a fictional world from plate tectonics to climate. Now we look at landforms, which fills in more detail in the geography of the map. This topic covers a wide range of areas, including erosion, drowned river valleys, barrier islands, coral reefs, and salt deposits.
We want to deal with these things after climate and not after creating the basic continent map because most of these things are dependent on climate. Climate affects landforms. We need to know where it is cold or warm. We also need to see what areas have high precipitation.
We touched on erosion briefly in the plate tectonics article, merely to say high mountains erode down to low hills. Water is the main driving force behind erosion, though wind also plays its part. Rain, rivers, and storms all move particles from place to place as water moves. Normally, water starts high and travels down. This is the main method of erosion. Rain and storms in high areas bring rock, sand, and silt to low areas.
In high areas, streams cut into rock and soil, wearing it down. The high mountains created by the clash of continents will erode away eventually. The forces created by continents colliding generate high heat and temperature deep in the earth, precipitating minerals such as copper, gold, silver, tin, and iron out of the rock.
The intense heat and pressure of mountain building affects layers of sediment. Metamorphism will turn shale into slate, schist, or gneiss. Slate one of the basic resources used by cultures in areas where it is abundant. Metamorphism also creates many types of gemstones by crystallizing sedimentary rocks.
Young mountain systems. Image by Michael Tedin
Erosion will expose these minerals or bring them closer to the surface. For this reason, areas that were once high mountains between continents become areas rich in mineral resources. This will become important later on when we discuss societies and economics. The mountains of Wales, northern England and Scotland are this older mountain type.
Eroded mountain system. Image by Michael Tedin
Also, stream erosion takes these minerals away from their source and deposits them with gravel and sand in placer deposits. The gold fields of California are an example of this.
When worldbuilding your fantasy setting, you could put miners in these areas. The dwarven city of Moria and its mines are probably the most famous community of miners in fantasy literature. Also, gold has been a major motivator in literature and real life throughout history. How many Macguffins are some type of gold object, idol, or gleaming treasure?
Rivers and Streams
River and stream environments offer the sort of bucolic setting that we often see at the beginning of fantasy stories. They don’t have to be, though. They also offer the potential for danger in the fast moving rapids or waterfalls. Also, you can find dangerous creatures hidden in marshes at the edges of slow moving rivers.
As mentioned, rivers bring sediment from the high areas and deposit them in low areas. As rivers and streams move from highlands to lowlands, they become slower. Water turbulence determines the size of the particle deposited. As the stream slows, it deposits larger particles first, leaving behind gravel in mountains and hilly areas.
Meandering Rivers
Where the stream slows, it will deposit sand along its edges and at its mouth. In flat lowlands, this process will build up the floodplain in a process called aggradation. The river eventually moves across a nearly flat plain, resulting in a meandering river with oxbow lakes. We don’t need to get too deep into the mechanics of this, we just need to know where a river will tend to create a meandering course.
Left arrow: highland erosion. Middle arrow: meandering river in a floodplain. Right arrow: Delta. Image by Michael Tedin
One aspect of a meandering river is that, if tectonics lifts the entire area, the river will cut down into the surrounding landscape, creating some of the most interesting landforms, like Goosenecks State Park in Utah.
The final step of the river’s course is at the mouth where it hits a larger body of still water such as a lake or sea. The water in these large bodies are still, so the larger particles will deposit here, often extending the floodplain out into a delta. The most famous is the Nile delta. The smallest particles will settle to the bottom of the lake or sea, creating muddy bottoms.
All the sediments washed down from the hills and mountains form layers of sand and mud in the lowlands. Under the weight of sediment above, they form layers of rock. Sand becomes sandstone and mud becomes shale. We will see how other types of rock such as coal and limestone get sandwiched between these basic rock types.
When tectonics lift large areas of the continent, the layers get lifted as well. Erosion cuts through them, exposing the layers. This is why we see so many mountains with layers of rocks piled on top of each other. Piled sedimentary rocks form most of the Alps and Himalayas , though much of it has undergone metamorphosis.
The layers also tilt up 90° or more as the land lifts. This creates long rows of mountains as the softer layers erode into valleys. They usually form at the edges of the central mountain core. The western Appalachian Mountains are of this type.
Tilted sedimentary mountains. Image by Michael Tedin
Drowned River Valleys
Another feature of river systems is that they cut valleys into hills. If these valleys are near coastlines and sea levels rise, seas flood the valleys and create estuaries. Some might be open to the ocean, others might be blocked by barrier islands.
Ria (open estuary). Image by Michael TedinBar-blocked estuaries. Image by Michael Tedin
Bar-blocked estuaries tend to have brackish water. In dry areas, evaporation will cause the water to become highly saline, perhaps depositing salts in dry lagoons. In wet areas, such estuaries are marshy, depositing layers of carbon-rich plant material. Again, here is an opportunity in worldbuilding your fantasy setting to find dangerous swamp creatures.
Salt Deposits
Salt also precipitates in arid areas in places that a lake would otherwise form. Seasonal precipitation will bring water to a desert depression where it evaporates, leaving behind salt deposits. These deposits can be hundreds of meters thick.
Dry lake bed in a desert. Image by Michael Tedin
We see this sort of evaporating inland sea in places on earth such as the Great Salt Lake in the United States or the Aral Sea and Caspian Sea in Asia.
Layers of sandstone and shale might sandwich layers of carbon or salt as sea levels rise and fall with climate change or due to tectonic forces. In such cases, the carbon might turn to coal. The salt deposits might become a layer of salt, gypsum, or other evaporate mineral.
When other sediments bury thick salt deposits, the salt can be mined. There are some huge salt mines throughout the world. I visited the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland some years ago. It is large enough to have an entire church underground. Such a location can provide many ideas for worldbuilding your fantasy setting.
Cezary p, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons
Barrier Islands
Earlier, I mentioned barrier islands in relation to drowned river valleys, but they also form offshore along coastlines.
Barrier islands. Image: Michael Tedin
There is some debate as to how these islands form. The offshore bar theory posits that waves moving into shallow water churned up sand. As bars developed vertically, they gradually rise above sea level, forming barrier islands. The longshore drift and spit accretion theories posit that sediment moving in the breaker zone constructs spits extending from headlands parallel to the coast. In tropical areas, the sands might include limestones from coral reefs.
However they form, these barrier islands also create bodies of water behind them with brackish water, mangrove swamps, and marshes. Real world examples of this are along the eastern seaboard and gulf coast of the United States from Texas to Long Island, NY.
Like marshy estuaries, these lagoons might have deposits of carbon-rich plant material. As sea levels rise, the sands will accumulate in layers as the barrier islands move inland. The seams of rich carbon deposits might turn to coal under the pressure of the overlying rock.
The barrier islands are often sandy and have their own ecosystems. Moving inland, you would find first a beach, then grassy dunes. One might find woods and thickets landward of the dunes and marshy bays farthest inland. When worldbuilding your fantasy setting, marshy bays provide opportunity for dangerous creatures hidden below the surface. Think the Dead Marshes of Tolkien or even the more mundane alligators of Florida.
Coral Reefs
I briefly mentioned limestone earlier as a type of rock sandwiched between layers of sandstone and shale without explaining where the limestone came from. Coral reefs create limestone along continental edges in warm, shallow water about 60-90 feet deep.
Coral reefs in tropical areas. Image by Michael Tedin
The ideal environment for reef building is in the tropics between 20°N and 20°S where the water is between 20-29° Celsius. This means that, if plate tectonics didn’t bring your continent across those latitudes, it is unlikely to have limestone deposits. It might have carbonate rich mud dredged up from ocean bottoms, but is less likely to have pure white or grey limestone.
Coral reefs form offshore obstacles like the barrier islands, but under water. The Great Barrier Reef of Australia or the Florida Keys are the most famous reef systems, but most of the islands in the South Pacific or the Bahamas are atolls made of coral reefs.
I stretched the range of coral reefs far enough north on my map to surround the jungle-covered volcanic island in the middle of the sea. The sea is fairly shallow and has no cold currents, so reefs might grow farther north than normal.
I am intrigued by this island. It would make a great King Kong setting, but it might just be something like Hawaii. Worldbuilding is about creating settings. What happens in those settings is up to the creativity of the author.
Coral Reefs Become Limestone
As ocean levels rise and fall, sediments cover these coral reefs, creating layers of limestone. When tectonics lift these layers up into mountains or hills, the limestone will erode away due to underground water seepage, creating extensive cave systems. These caves might have their own unique ecosystems. Perhaps a species of glow-worm illuminates it or a shriveled creature resides in the depths, eating blind fish and obsessing over a precious magical trinket.
The pressure of plate tectonics will metamorphose limestone into marble. Such marble deposits lie in areas of tropical continental margin that have been pushed up into mountains. Italy and Greece are two such areas on earth. Needless to say, such marble deposits might be a common building material for cultures in areas where it is found. Later, when this worldbuilding series has an article about culture, art, and architecture, we will see how this becomes important.
Parthenon, Athens Greece. Photo taken in 1978. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Glaciers and Ice Caps
The last topic we’ll cover in this article is how ice affects landforms, from glacier carved lakes, isostatic rebound, and fjords. We’ve discussed the unique landforms of warm and wet climates. Now, let’s move to the frigid north.
As the temperature of a planet cools, ice accumulates at the poles and at high elevations. During ice ages, these accumulations can cover hundreds of thousands of square miles in ice sheets. We had such an ice age in human prehistory. It ended about 200,000 years ago, just in time for the arrival of modern Homo Sapiens to Europe.
Your fantasy story could be set in a region such as this where glaciers are retreating and humans are moving in. There is an entire sub-genre of this type of story. The worldbuilding for this type of setting is almost completely ready to start writing. It just requires the author to do some basic research.
These giant sheets of ice scrape the top layers of rock, carrying sediments hundreds of miles from their source. They also carve out valleys in mountains. Where these valleys meet the sea, they form fjords. Mapping out fjords on a fictional world can be an exercise in baroque art. The character Slartibartfast was proud to have designed all the fjords when constructing Earth in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Slartibartfast was the ultimate worldbuilder.
Map showing fjords (west and north), glacial lakes (east and south), and isostatic lake (center). Map by Michael Tedin
Glacial Lakes
Ice sheets are responsible for many of the lakes in northern latitudes. Retreating glaciers carved extensive lake system of Finland and the Great Lakes of North America.
Retreating ice sheets can also leave behind large lakes and seas. The weight of huge ice sheets depress continents due to isostatic adjustment. Water fills these depressions, either from runoff or from the invading sea, creating large lakes or bays. Hudson’s Bay in Canada and the Baltic Sea in Europe are examples of this.
Over time, these areas rebound, rising up and shrinking the size of the depression. The Baltic Sea first formed as runoff and seawater filled the depression of the retreating Weichsel glaciation. As the land rebounded, the bay became a Ancylus Lake. The lake only became an arm of the sea about 7500 years ago when the north sea broke through the straits between Sweden and Denmark.
Final Map
There we have it. Now we have a map of continents created by plate tectonics and influenced by climate. The map has more detail, with mineral resources, unique landforms such as coral reefs, glacial lakes, fjords, drowned river valleys, and barrier islands with marshy wetlands.
The continents of North and South Pancirclea. Map by Michael Tedin
Can’t I Just Make It All Up?
All the steps we have taken to this point have been to create a world that is familiar to your readers. But this is fantasy, you say. Why not just make it all up? You are certainly welcome to do so, but any story needs internal consistency and this is how we make sure we have it.
You are free to change aspects of the world to make it more fantastical. We will be doing just that in future articles. At this point, if you have something that doesn’t fit this framework, it should have a fantastical explanation. Magic is the most common. A wizard piled rocks high enough to create mountains. A dragon dragged himself across the land, creating a giant valley. These were the kinds of stories ancient societies told because they didn’t fully understand the natural processes that created landforms.
In our next article we will detail out the basic flora and fauna of ecosystems in different areas. With fully fleshed out ecosystems, we will be able to identify sentient creatures, whether they be humans, humanoid, or evolved along a different path. When we start getting into creatures and civilizations, we have a lot of leeway to create more fantastic elements for our stories.
