So far in this series, we have discussed a lot of theories with a few suggestions for practical applied worldbuilding. I have set out a few examples along the way. Now lets take a moment to apply what we know to the sample world I created, Pancirclea. If you have read this series from the beginning, you’d know that the continent is named because I started with two circles representing continents and smashed them together.
Applied Worldbuilding: What We Know So Far
Back in my worldbuilding article on demographics, I came up with three basic genetic groupings, Hillfolk, Savannah People, and Silvans. I based them on the climate and biomes that they evolved in. When I was doing that, I kept in mind that they would likely have distinct cultures from each other.
Culture is not a single defining feature, but a set of features among a society that gives the society a distinct feel. Many of the things we talk about in this series of articles make up the culture of each society. Later, we will talk about language, religion, and politics.
In earlier articles, I mapped out the demographics and settlement patterns of southeast Pancirclea. Now let’s apply some worldbuilding techniques and look at the technology and economics of the region. I’ll take a stab at listing out some of the social forces at work in each society. Once we know that, we can begin to see some areas of conflict.
These social forces and conflicts are the starting points for developing characters that live in these areas. Those characters may have these conflicts as motivations, either as primary motivations or as secondary motivations. Either way, characters with multiple motivations make for much more interesting characters. See the most recent issue of Writer’s Digest (May/June 2021) for a great article on The Russian Nested Doll Theory of Motivation.
Applied Worldbuilding: Cultural Zones of Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin
Applied Worldbuilding: Resources Are Important
In order apply our worldbuilding techniques to what we know about each society’s technology and trade, we need to know what resources each of them has. This depends on where they’ve settled because their environment determines the natural resources available.
Savannah Culture
Savannah People are an agricultural society. They’ve settled in the plains and by rivers in cities A, B, C, D, F, M, and G. (I am going to finally give these cities names when I write an article about language. Stay tuned.)
They grow grain and raise livestock, including horses, cattle, sheep, and goats. The livestock also produce milk, cheese, and wool.
Hillfolk
The Hillfolk have settled in the hills. Their cities are E, F, H, I, J, K, and L. Cities E and F have some crossover culture between the Hillfolk and Savannah cultures.
Some of the hills are forested, some are not. The hills provide mineral resources such as copper, tin, and coal for bronze making, as well as iron, salt, limestone, and marble. The forests also provide wood for building. Wood can also be converted to charcoal for use in for smelting. They also raise livestock, including sheep and goats.
Silvans
The Silvans did not advance as much technologically as the Savannah or Hillfolk cultures because they were not as much under ecological pressure to survive. The forests still provide enough for their villages to thrive. Consequently, the need for developing intensive agriculture or metallurgy was not as high.
The resources available to them are mostly forest resources they can gather, including the obvious wood and woodcrafts. Also, their long relationship with the forest has allowed them to develop a deep understanding of the forest herbs and medicines derived from them.
Applied Worldbuilding: Natural and economic resources of Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin
Applied Worldbuilding: Technology and Magic
At this point, it’s time to apply our worldbuilding techniques to make some creative decisions. I’ve decided that, due to environmental pressures, the Hillfolk and Savannah People have developed Bronze Age technology, but the Silvans have not. The Silvans still make use of technology borrowed from the other two.
The creative part is the development of magic. There is no real world analogy, so let’s just make this shit up! Without going into too much detail on the mechanisms behind magical theory, let’s just say magic is based on life energy. It’s a common trope and one that works well for the purpose of this demonstration.
Sources of Magic
The Hillfolk have a lot of forests in their hills, so they can draw on the life force of the forests to wield magic. On the other hand, the Savannah People have grasses on the plains, though there are trees along the rivers. Therefore, they have less life force in the natural world to draw on (in spite of the equal value of different types of mana in Magic: The Gathering).
The relative scarcity of life energy in the plains forces that Savannah People to rely on another, more powerful source of life energy: human sacrifice. Naturally, nobody wants to volunteer for the duty, so they rely on prisoners and slaves for sacrifice. Later, we will see how this affects society in the areas of class, religion, and politics.
The Hillfolk are near forests, so they use as much plant material as possible. It is depleting the forests, clearing large areas. They use these cleared areas to plant grain and graze sheep and goats. The hills around city E, where civilization first stared, are almost completely bare.
The Silvans have an abundance of forest resources, including magical energy from the life force of the forest. Because of this and their ready access to herbs and medicines derived from them, they also have developed the knowledge of magical potions.
Applied Worldbuilding: Economics and Trade
As I pointed out in my last article on trade, societies will exchange their surplus resources with other societies for resources they lack.
If you wonder why I focus on trade so much, it’s not because I think every story needs to have merchants or traders in it. Rather, trade is a major pathway for cultural exchange. Ideas, religion, technology, art, and literature all flow along trade routes. It helps to know what materials flow along those routes to know where the routes get laid out.
The Savannah people have a surplus of grain, but lack minerals, metals, wood and charcoal. Because of the cost of the things they lack they have developed a culture that relies on them less. Where they cannot get them, they will trade with the Hillfolk for minerals and metals. To some extent, they will also trade for wood.
The Savannah people also use human sacrifice to power their magic. To some extent, they will take slaves from among their own people, either criminals or subjugated peoples. To make up the difference, they will go to war with other cities or kingdoms to capture slaves, raid the Silvans, or trade with the Hillfolk for them. We’ll discuss war, government, and politics later.
Hillfolk
The Hillfolk have almost exactly the opposite surpluses and deficits than the Savannah people. This makes these two societies natural trading partners. The Hillfolk have minerals and metals but less grain.
They also have wood and charcoal from their forested hills. Because of the forests, they also have more magical energy available. They can’t export that energy, but they can craft magical artifacts for sale. I imagine a brisk trade selling such artifacts to the people of the Savannah.
Silvans
Silvans have little they need from other societies, but find metals and minerals useful. Their magical energy derives from the forest. They store this energy in potions and trade with the Hillfolk for metals and minerals. Because they live on villages and have no cities, they also have no major trade routes.
Nobody is willing to trade their own people, so Hillfolk and Savannah people resort to raids to capture slaves. The easiest source for raids is among the Silvans who live mainly in poorly defended villages.
Applied Worldbuilding: Trade Routes in red. Slave trade in yellow. Image by Michael Tedin
Setup for Conflict
The core of a good story is the drama created by conflict between characters. Already, we are starting to see conflict arise between societies that might translate into personal conflicts. In my next article, I’ll discuss the class divisions within a society along with a money system.
I’ve been writing a lot about worldbuilding. I love the world I created for my own novels. It has a rich history, with political intrigue, economic conflict, and religious sectarianism. The cities and kingdoms are mapped out in detail.
One of the things any worldbuilding novelist struggles with when writing is how much detail to include in the novel. While editing a novel today, I had to delete thirteen paragraphs of beautiful prose describing the main character’s entry to a city. I struggled with these edits.
This is an example of the writing advice “kill your darlings“. That is, even if it is beautiful prose that you love and are proud of, if it doesn’t fit the story, take it out.
Beautiful but Boring
My beautiful paragraphs described the smells of late-summer aromas of scrub oak and dry grass, midday sun glinting off four gilt domes, massive city walls rising up like a mountain range, scent of spices and sight of brightly colored silks in the bazaars, the line of succession of the emperors.
OK, the first four descriptions are good, with sights and scents. They really gave a feel for the world of the novel. The line of succession of the emperors might have been too much. In any case, none of it was working with the way the story was going. The entire section was just getting the character from one place to the next. It’s like a date with a supermodel: beautiful but boring.
I inserted some of the description into other scenes, preserving some of the scene-setting. About half of it ended up on the cutting room floor. I copied it to another file and saved it in case I need it later, but I don’t foresee any scene that will be able to use it. I have killed my darlings.
When writing, keep the story in mind. The work you do while worldbuilding is interesting and fun, but when writing the story, you have to focus on the characters. All the worldbuilding in the world won’t make a story interesting if the characters are flat. The reason for the worldbuilding is to give life to the characters. The reader doesn’t need to know all the details of the world, but those details inform the writer, letting them know how characters interact with the world and those around them.
Economics sounds like a dry subject, even if it is fantasy economics. In college I wasn’t interested in microeconomics. I had little interest in supply and demand curves, prices, and opportunity costs. This article won’t cover that. Instead, we’ll look at macroeconomics. What resources does your fantasy society have, what does it need, and how does it get them?
Do we really need to get into economics to write a fantasy story? You don’t need a lot of detail, but some background helps flesh out the world. In addition, understanding the economics of your fantasy society helps provide motivation for any factions you might want to create. We’ll look at class and caste in Part 2.
Economics is About Allocation of Resources
When thinking about the economics of your fantasy society, ask what is the basis of the economy? To some extent, this depends on the resources available to your society as well as the level of technology (and magic) available. For more about resources, see my article on Landforms. Also, see my article on Magic and Technology.
At its most basic, economics is about providing the people of a society with the things they need to survive or thrive. Fantasy economics is no different. The word comes from the Greek oikonomia, meaning “household management”. All societies need food, water, and shelter. More advanced societies need metal and minerals, wood, energy sources such as coal for heat and animals (or slaves) for work, and other technology or materials.
Types of Economies
Naturally, there are multiple ways to get resources to the people that need them. Scholars have grouped them into three basic types: gift economies, barter systems, and market economies. These need not be mutually exclusive. A society with a market economy might use barter or gift economies as alternatives methods of resource distribution.
Gift Economy
A gift economy is an exchange where goods aren’t sold, but given without an explicit agreement for anything in return. There are usually rules, social norms, and customs governing how gifts are given. For example, it might be a social obligation for the wealthy to give alms or hold a potlach. Often, while there is no explicit expectation of a return gift, there might be an implied expectation of a gift at some point in the future in order to maintain a relationship. Think about birthday or Christmas gift giving.
Gift economies might become quite complex and embedded in a culture. An example is the gift-giving potlaches of the tribes of the Northwest Pacific coast. These feasts were opportunities for leaders to demonstrate their power by giving away their wealth.
Kwakiutl bridal group, British Columbia, 1914 Edward S. Curtis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Patronage and Feudalism as a Gift Economy
Another type of semi-gift economy was the patronage system in the Roman Empire. A patron would give a gift in land or position in expectation of service by the client at some unspecified point in the future. This evolved into feudalism in medieval Europe where vassals received land in return for a promise of military service in the future.
Investiture of a knight (miniature from the statutes of the Order of the Knot) Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
If you are looking for a good conflict to form the basis of the drama of a story, you don’t need to look much further than the conflict between the social norms and customs of a gift economy and how people actually act in such situations. Perhaps the conflict is between two leaders, each trying to outdo the other in maintaining social status. Perhaps a client balks when his patron requests he perform his promised obligation.
A system of gifts might work within a society where social norms are agreed upon, but it doesn’t work as a system of exchange with other societies that might have different customs. As such, it can’t be used for external trade, that is, for a society to trade with others to obtain resources they lack.
Barter
Barter is a more familiar form of exchange to most westerners. It works better as a system for external trade. In barter, participants directly exchange goods or services for other goods or services without money. When bartering, both sides must agree on the value of the goods traded. Barter is common even in market economies when money is scarce.
It is difficult to use barter for long distance trade due to the difficulty in carrying large amounts of goods long distances and coming to an agreement on the value of the goods you brought. There is a high risk of bringing what you think is valuable to a distant city only to discover your trading partners don’t think it is as valuable as you do.
I can think of possible story hooks where a merchant brings his goods a long distance to trade only to find they had less value than he expects. Does he bring them back and lose the cost of the travel? Does he trade them for less than he thinks they are worth? What sort of risks and dangers would such a merchant face?
Market Economies
Market economies are the most familiar to modern readers. As such, they usually work well as a default option for fantasy stories. It is an economic system in which the price of goods determine decisions regarding investment, production and distribution of resources. Markets can be highly regulated or completely unregulated (laissez-faire), depending on the level of government involvement or social custom. For a market economy to work, the society needs clearly defined property rights.
Note that a market system is not the same as a capitalist system. Capitalism is a system based on private ownership of the means of production and operated for profit. The feudal system of the middle ages had a market system, but not a capitalist one.
The farmer’s market near the Potala in Lhasa, Tibet. Nathan Freitas, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Fantasy Economics and Trade
In my article on mapping out the cities in your fantasy world, I discussed trade as a main driver of city growth. At that point, I was already thinking about trade routes. Now, it’s time to think about what moves along those routes.
Placement of the first cities and trade routes in Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin.
Societies typically don’t have all the resources the need or want, so they trade. Trade happens when a society has a surplus of one commodity and a shortage of another. A society lacking certain resources might value a commodity more highly than a society with a surplus. They will trade their surplus with the surplus of another in order to fill their shortage. In this way, trade benefits both societies.
In David Ricardo’s formulation of comparative advantage states, “When an inefficient producer sends the merchandise it produces best to a country able to produce it more efficiently, both countries benefit.” At least, that’s how the theory works. Often, trade is between unequal partners and conflict arises.
People can trade through barter (see above) or through trade markets. Often, a more powerful trading partner can dictate the terms of the exchange. This will often lead to conflict if the weaker partner doesn’t feel they received full value for their products.
What goods and services can people trade in fantasy economies? Start by looking at the resources available. Mountainous areas have metals and minerals. Forests provide wood, lumber, charcoal, herbs, spices, and medicines. Plains have grain, cattle, and horses in abundance. In dry hills one finds cattle, sheep, and wool.
You can also put economics with a fantasy element at the center of your story. Think about magical trade goods. Do your mages create magic items to trade? Would such items be considered protected technology like cutting edge electronics and software is in the computer age?
Services are also traded, though usually within a society. What services could be sold in a fantasy economy?
Magic: The Gathering Aladdin’s Lamp. Art by Mark Tedin. Copyright Wizards of the Coast
In my next few articles, I’ll continue discussing other aspects of fantasy economics, specifically money and class.
For those of you looking for another Worldbuilding 101 article, I am a bit delayed. I have too many projects going on right now and my day job is keeping me quite busy. All that along with searching for a COVID vaccine has taken up a lot of time and energy.
Some of the things I’m working on right now are:
Writing Projects
Writing a post on Worldbuilding 102 – Economics in Fantasy Societies Hopefully, this will be done in the next week or so. It pulls together a lot of things I’ve already written about in earlier posts and lays the groundwork for creating factions and political parties in your fantasy society.
Rewriting Book 1 of the Gemstone Man series – The Statue of the Mad Caliph I self-published this a few years ago and would like to improve and polish it. Ideally, I’d like to find an agent and publisher for it. If not, I’ll publish it for free in installments on this blog.
Editing and publishing Book 2 of the Gemstone Man series – The Amulet of the Lost Comté This is finished, but I haven’t self-published it or found an agent to represent it. I need cover art if I’m going to self-publish. Either way, it probably needs another round of editing.
Writing Book 3 of the Gemstone Man series – The Sword of the Warrior I’m not half-way through the rough draft of this. It’s slow going. I think it will be better than Book 2, but it’s going to take some time to get there.
Other Projects
Preparing the garden for planting. It’s spring and almost time to plant. I usually have a garden of tomatoes, green beans, sweet pumpkin, and onions. I might add some potatoes. I need to get my tiller working and till the soil. I need to mow the lawn for the first time since about September. I also want to clear more blackberries. Spring is a busy time for yard work.
Building Cabinets for my wood shop. I used the router table I inherited from my Dad for the first time last week in preparation for building cabinets. This week, I plan to rout dadoes and rabbets in the pieces in preparation for assembly.
Finishing the stairs to the loft of my wife’s storage shed. I’ve been working on this project since last summer. I’ve got the structural pieces built. I need a day of good weather to cut some plywood, then I can assemble it.
Easter dinner. I bought a leg of lamb last week to roast for Easter tomorrow. That should take most of the day. I can get other things done while it cooks, but it’s going to take some time and energy to plan it out.
Anyway, with all these projects to do, I need to prioritize. The Worldbuilding 102 post will come, though it may take a couple weeks longer to finish that expected.
Magic and technology are two sides of the same coin and are inextricably linked. Therefore when building your fantasy world, consider whether to include magic and at what level.
Similarly, think about what level of technology your society is at. Whatever level you choose, magic will influence it. Magic might replace certain technologies. On the other hand, the existence of certain magic might render certain technological advances irrelevant.
What do I mean by level of technology? Is it medieval, classical, bronze age, stone age? What inventions have been made and discoveries found?
Most fantasy stories default to a semi-medieval level of technology with some magic thrown in. Before you use default the default option, think about the implications. What technologies are available? Do you want to take some away to make life more difficult for your characters? How does magic affect the development of other technologies? Above all, because the semi-medieval level is default, it is also cliché.
Magic and Technology
Remember, many of the factors in worldbuilding have to be considered at the same time as others. Magic is one of those. I don’t want to get too deep into designing a magic system. After all, that could fill an entire course higher than 101-level.
More importantly, when deciding on a magic system for your fantasy world, think about how pervasive magic is. You needn’t get into too much detail initially. All things considered, if magic is widespread and common, it would likely replace other technologies. If you have a fireball spell, who needs gunpowder?
On the other hand, some magic might spur other technologies. Like technological development, magic might give a society certain advantages over others. For example, the fireball spell will give a military advantage over those without it. Controlled use of it might advance metallurgy.
Fireball. Mark Tedin 2006 Copyright Wizards of the Coast
One possible scenario is living in a society that has fallen from its peak. It had magic, but lost knowledge of it. Such a society might be stunted in its technological development. Some people would be seeking to retain or relearn certain magic. Others might strive to find technological developments to replace it.
For example, if society developed iron weapons, what is the source of the iron? If your fantasy empire is in the center of a broad plain, it’s unlikely they are mining iron. Without an energy source such as wood or coal, they would not likely be smelting ore either. They would have to trade for iron and coal. What do they have to trade? If they’re in the middle of a broad plain, they probably have a surplus of grain. I’ll discuss trade in more detail in a future article about economics.
Perhaps the technology never developed in your society. Bronze and iron smelting didn’t reach the Americas until the arrival of Columbus. Even without widespread metal tools, pre-Columbian societies had complex societies.
On the other hand, one society might benefit from the developments in another. For example, the peoples of the Northwest Coast or America did have access to iron that drifted in from Japan.
Knowledge vs Technology
Another factor in the level of technology is the level of knowledge in the society. The difference between knowledge and technology is like the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Knowledge is information. Technology is turning that information into useful tools. As an example, mathematics is knowledge. Engineers use it to develop technology.
Mathematics developed when people began counting and measuring the natural world. From there, they began to calculate those measurements. Finding patterns in the measurements and calculations allows prediction of other measurements. This was important in developing astronomy, astrology, and calculating time.
In a world that uses technology and magic, mathematics might not develop. If it does, it drives the accumulation of other knowledge. It might even drive the development of magic in the form of numeromancy. In fact, the three magi or “wise men” of the Jesus story were widely believed to be astrologers, which was dependent on mathematics. The word “magi” originally meant a Zoroastrian priest whom the Greeks perceived to be magicians.
Technology often unlocks more advanced activities, increases wealth and population, and gives societies advantages over other societies. For example, western Europe had ocean-going ships and gunpowder, giving it an advantage over other societies.
Gunpowder and steel allowed Europeans to subdue pre-Columbian civilizations and enslave Africans. Once disease depopulated the Americas, these technological advancements allowed Europeans to plunder the wealth of the newly conquered continents.
On the other hand, some inventions are made that never lead to other inventions. For example, the Chinese invented gunpowder, but not guns.
In some cases, one society developed a technology well before others did. For example, the crab claw sail drove Austronesian expansion across the Pacific beginning at around 3000 BCE. Lateen sails reached the Mediterranean in the Roman era (Lateen = Latin). The lateen sail developed from the crab claw. This sail type allows sailing into the wind and is necessary for ocean-going ships. Without it, the Europeans would never have conquered the Americas. The Austronesians also developed double-hulled catamarans, which are more stable on the ocean. The Europeans never did.
The main technology driving social change for thousands of years BCE was metal. The great ages of human history and pre-history are named for advancements in metal. The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. The Iron Age corresponds to slightly before the classical era of Europe.
Metal is a prime technology because it is needed for weapons. As bronze weapons replaced stone, societies with bronze weapons had a significant advantage. For a swords and sorcery adventure story, technology and magic matter. It makes a difference what the swords are made of.
Neolithic Era
When one says Stone Age, most people think of Paleolithic cave men carrying clubs and wearing fur pelts. In fact, Neolithic societies were far more advanced than widely imagined. They had developed agriculture, pottery, and irrigation. People lived in villages and towns, fought wars, and traded with faraway places. They wore jewelry, woven clothing, and used a variety of tools. Social life was organized with clans, tribes, priests, and warlords. The main difference between this society and the Bronze Age society was the lack of metal.
The development of smelting led to the development of copper tools. When combined with arsenic or tin, it led to bronze (ca. 3000 BCE). Tin didn’t often naturally occur in the same area as copper. For most societies, trade networks brought the two metals to them.
While metalworking didn’t change the basic aspects of daily life, it did lead to major changes in social structure. The Bronze Age is characterized by the development of cities with hundreds of thousands of people. It is in this era we find the first written records.
Writing allowed people to measure the stars and earth, leading to astronomy and mathematics.
Technological advancement led to a more centralized government, hereditary monarchies, a caste of priests, and written laws. City states became kingdoms and empires.
Iron Age
In constrast, iron is more abundant than copper or tin, but melts at a higher temperature (1535ºC). This means the civilization must have access to wood or coal and a furnace to maintain the heat. The technological advance that made iron possible was the furnace. In order for society to develop this furnace, knowledge of smelting was necessary.
Iron was more common than bronze due to the scarcity of copper and tin. On the other hand, steel is an alloy of iron and other ingredients, mainly carbon. The invention of steel didn’t make a huge difference in the life of the average person. In the default setting of medieval Europe, steel was available, but expensive. Only the fabulously wealthy could afford a full suit of plate steel armor.
China entered the bronze age much later (ca. 1600 BCE). Consequently, they progressed to iron later as well. It wasn’t until China was unified under the Qin dynasty (221 – 206 BCE) that iron technology fully developed.
Later Eras
After the Iron Age came the classical Greek and Roman periods in Europe, both of which advanced in other areas of science. In western Europe, the Roman world degraded to medieval society. The real difference between classical Roman Empire and medieval society are the loss of technology and development of the feudal social structure.
In the Middle East, the Umayyad Caliphate replaced the Roman Empire. Later, technology and learning continued to advance under the Abbasids in Baghdad.
Writing as Technology and a Source of Magic
Writing was a major technological advance. Whether and what kind of writing a society has can determine how knowledge is collected and passed on. Consequently, for a fantasy society, writing is a major consideration in magic and technology.
Do your wizards write down spells? Are they invoked by runes? Is other knowledge and technology recorded or transmitted through writing?
Think about how widespread reading is. If writing requires expensive materials, the poor won’t be able or even have the opportunity to read. Instead, it will be the technology of the rich. In societies where magic can only be written, it would be the domain of rich wizards. On the other hand, where spells can be memorized, the poor will have their own witches and sorcerers.
Widespread writing and books requires cheap materials. The earliest records were recorded on stone, wood, bone, clay, wax, cloth, or metal. The Egyptians used papyrus as far back as 3000 BCE. Parchment replaced papyrus in the 2nd century BCE . The Chinese invented paper in 105 CE, but didn’t reach Europe for another thousand years.
Stone, clay, and, to some extent, metal tablets don’t travel well, so are impractical for mass storage or transmission of knowledge over distances. Parchment, papyrus, and paper work better, but are subject to deterioration over time.
Any society requires a power source to drive its economic activity. Before the domestication of cattle in the Neolithic era, agriculture and hunting was done by humans. Later, domesticating cattle and horses to pull plows allowed increased agricultural output and importantly, the surplus needed to feed the animals.
Egyptian ard, heb, with braces, c. 1300 BC. Burial chamber of Sennedjem, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Other civilizations made use of slave labor. This is easy and cheap if the society has: 1. a high population of people available to enslave, 2. the means to subdue others, and 3. agricultural surplus to feed them.
If there fewer people available to enslave, societies might innovate new sources of energy such as water or wind power. Does your areas have flowing water? If not, is there enough wind to drive mills and pumps? After all, harnessing water and wind requires machines, which implies a level of technology that might not develop if the society relies on slave or animal labor.
Industrial development in western Europe grew when engineers used the steam pump to raise water out of tin mines in Cornwall. The steam engine was cheaper than importing slaves, which is ironic given the slave trade spurred the British exploitation of colonies in North America and the Caribbean.
Magic and Energy
Likewise, think about how magic determines power sources. Does the magical system in your world require an energy source? What is that source? Is it provided by technology? For a more sinister source, perhaps it comes from human sacrifice in the form of slaves.
Do magic users have the knowledge of how the energy is called upon or the technology to create it? If magic is free and easy, why invest in enslaving other people when you can make things magically move?
Finally, when thinking about the society of your story, ask whether slavery exists. If it does, it doesn’t preclude other technological advances. On the other hand, there would be less incentive to develop other energy sources and other technologies. In addition, think about whether your society domesticated horses or oxen. After all, it’s hard to think of a fantasy story without riding horses, though it’s certainly possible.
Other Technologies
There are many technologies that might or might not be present in a fantasy world. The clichéd default option of medieval Europe gets boring. As a thought experiment, try removing some technology and think about what happens to society if that technology doesn’t exist. Will someone use magic to invent a replacement?
Here are some topics and some of the technologies to think about in each category. Navigation: Compass? Astrolabe? Measuring time: Mechanical clocks? Sundials? Literature: Writing? Paper? Printing? Movable type? Agriculture: Irrigation? Windmills? Plough? Wheel? Pottery? Architecture: Building with stone? Brick?
There are probably more topics under technology, but for every one you think of, think about why it would develop. What need does it meet? Are the resources and knowledge available for it to develop? Can magic meet the need? In order to answer these questions, you need to have a good understanding of your society’s level of technology and magic.
I have to admit, I love designing fantasy cities, but drawing city maps takes so much time. I could create shortcuts, but I want to know where all the streets and alleys are as well as all the major buildings. For this reason, I never really finish most of my maps.
When you are designing fantasy cities for your story or game, you don’t need that much detail. You will need detail for the specific settings, but for the most part, as long as you have an idea of where the major landmarks your characters might interact with, it should be good enough.
In order to stay as close to your original map as possible, clip a bit of your continent map where your city is placed. Past it into the graphics program and expand it to show the area you want for your city map. You will use this as a template for drawing more detail. I use Inkscape for my drawings. It’s free and works remarkably like Adobe Illustrator. If you have access to a full blown professional drawing program, by all means, use it.
The first thing you’ll need to do is adjust the size of the elements on the map. When I blow my own map up, I find the tiny dot on the continent map is now more than 20km across. You might have to move the now-gigantic dot.
City C of Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin
In any case, you’ll have to shrink the dot to a reasonable size. Most pre-industrial cities were no more than 1km to 2km across. That corresponds to 100-400 hectares or about 250-1000 acres. The largest, like Rome at the height of the empire, were up to 5km (2400 hectares or 6177 acres).
City Plan of Ur. https://irows.ucr.edu/research/citemp/estcit/estcit.htm
Most people in pre-industrial societies did not live in cities, but on farms, in villages, or even small towns. It would be a good idea when designing your own cities to think of what they would look like if they grew from a small village. For cities founded by outsiders, you can design it as you wish. Just remember that cities are the exception, not the rule.
Focus in and add detail
When you blow up the map to the size you want to see, you can fill in the detail of the terrain. In my example below, City C is at the edge of the floodplain of the river to its southeast. It has four trade routes going southeast, northeast, north, and northwest.
I have added a stream because all cities need a watercourse. Some elevation lines give a better idea of the terrain. The topography includes a valley for the stream and a slight ridge to the northeast. I wanted the ridge as a defensible area where a fortress will be built later.
Pancirclea City C as a village. Copyright Michael Tedin
Major Features of Fantasy Cities
Unless you are reinventing the city wholesale, the major features of designing any fantasy city will mirror the major features of real life cities.
When designing a fantasy city or town, I like to recreate it historically. This allows the city to develop over time, giving it historical depth. If the city grew organically, I start by thinking about what it looked like as a village, then add features as it grows.
Most ancient cities were much smaller than what we think of cities now. None grew any larger than 1 million inhabitants until around the time of the Roman Empire, when Alexandria, Egypt reached that size.
Before that time, the first cities started out no larger than 1-2 thousand people. The first cities were Jericho or Çatalhöyük in about 7000 BCE. Over time, the largest cities grew in size, to one hundred thousand inhabitants (Ur in 2100 BCE), to two hundred thousand (Babylon 500 BCE), to five hundred thousand (Carthage 200 BCE).
The medieval era in Europe saw population decline, but other parts of the world saw growth. Rome shrank to fifty thousand inhabitants in 800 CE, but Chang’an in China grew to 1 million in the same year. Baghdad grew to as large as 1.2 million in 1000 CE.
City Centers
The major features of the city normally cluster around the city center. The central features depended on the main function of the city within the kingdom or empire. Some cities were sparsely populated political capitals, others were trade centers, and still other cities had a primarily religious focus. The largest cities served all three purposes.
The obvious city centers of each of these would be the palace or citadel; market or bazaar; or temple, cathedral, or church.
Palace or Citadel
In cities where rulers live, they would have a palace. The homes of the richer nobility clustered around the ruler’s palace. The word palace comes from Palatine, one of the hills in Rome where that ancient city was founded and where its rulers lived.
In a more warlike society or one with external enemies, defense is a high priority, so cities might have a citadel. Literally meaning “little city”, this fortress usually sat on a hill within the larger city. Rulers had responsibility for the defense of the realm, so they often lived in these citadels, building palaces within them.
Often, the citadel was there first as a hill fortress. Often, a city grew around these fortresses as tradesmen and nobility settled nearby to take advantage of the protection of or access to the ruler.
In more peaceful time, the ruler might abandon the need for a fortress and build a palace in a more serene setting. For example, the official residence of the Mughal Emperors in Delhi was the Red Fort, within which was the Chhatta Chowk bazaar and multiple palaces. Zafar Mahal, their summer residence, was in a hilly and wooded area in south Delhi.
Where a city included a large enough citadel, the nobility might be able to own a home within it. Prague Castle is such an example.
In a more democratic society, there would less need for a citadel. Instead, you might find an assembly hall of the senate or public assembly. The ancient Roman Senate building was in the Forum, the central gathering place and market of the city.
Religion played a major role in most human society throughout history and prehistory. As such, major cities had major religious centers as well. Even after Rome lost its place as the center of Roman political life, it retained its preeminence as the center of the Roman Catholic religion. The same is true of Mecca and Jerusalem.
In cities that are the center of a religion but not a government, the religious site becomes the focal point of the city. In medieval times Rome had no more than 100,000 inhabitants, but the Pope’s residence remained in the Vatican or Lateran palaces.
Jerusalem has been a pilgrimage destination Jews, Christians, and Muslims for thousands of years. Except for a 200 year period when the crusaders ruled the Levant, it hasn’t been the capital of a kingdom since the Babylonians captured it in 597 BCE.
Religious sites pepper the city, though the Temple Mount is the central focus, the site of the Western Wall, revered by Jews, and al-Aqsa Mosque, revered by Muslims. Christians have multiple holy sites, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Any one of these would be a major draw as a religious center.
Jerusalem – Holy City for three world religions. Copyright dierecke.com
If you are designing a fantasy city with a religious focus, Rome or Jerusalem would be good models of cities with a single focus or multiple focuses.
Trade Centers
Wherever people congregate in large numbers, trade follows them. Cities that have religious, governmental, or defensive centers almost always have large markets as well.
Conversely, wherever trade goes, people follow it. some cities are trade centers but have no governmental or religious significance. This is less common in times of war and strife. Trade needs defense. In more peaceful times, trade can flourish.
Cities whose main purpose was trade include Florence and Venice in Italy, Carthage in Tunisia, or Mumbai in India. Romans, Phoenicians, Greeks, and western Europeans built or developed many colonial towns for the purpose of increasing trade with the home country or city.
Some cities had multiple purposes, especially in societies where religion was closely tied to government. Constantinople, for example, served all three purposes. It was the seat of the Byzantine (late Roman) Empire, the seat of the Orthodox Patriarch, and a major trade center at the crossroads of Europe and Asia as well as the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
Baghdad under the Abbasids was the same, though for a different ruler, a different religion, and different trade routes.
Even when cities have multiple purposes, the palace, market, and temple normally cluster close to the center. Remember, the city center is usually not more than 1km across.
Rome, showing the temples on the Capitoline, the palaces on the Palatine, and the market of the Forum. Copyright mapaplan.com.
Residential Neighborhoods
Your city’s inhabitants will mostly live in the neighborhoods beyond the center. These neighborhoods usually cluster tightly together. There was nothing like the suburban sprawl that we see in modern cities. In addition to being crowded, these neighborhoods were usually dirty as well, with no running water or sewers.
Travel was by foot in the cities, though richer people owned horses. This limited the physical distance a person wanted to walk. If you take the rule that a person won’t normally walk more than 20 minutes for an errand, it keeps most day to day functions such as local food markets close.
Streets were normally about 10 meters across, wide enough for two carts to pass, though they were narrower in places.
The broad avenues of most major modern cities were built in modern times to ease congestion through the city, bypassing the narrow confines of the neighborhood streets. In the 18th and 19th century, city planners designed the radial patterns of of avenues in Paris and Washington DC with this in mind. Compare Paris in 1223 to 1702 to 1765, and finally 1874, when major routes were added. We see little change from 1223 through 1702, the beginnings of a radial street pattern in 1765 and a major change in 1874.
In many preindustrial cities, tradesmen lived where they worked. Shops would front the street while the family lived behind or above the shop.
Larger cities such as Rome built multi-story apartment blocks called insulae (islands) to house residents. These were usually crowded and dangerous, contributing to disease and fire. Cities in China and pre-Columbian America also had apartment blocks, though they were not as crowded as in Rome.
Ostia: Plan of Regio III – Insula IX – Case a Giardino (Garden Houses) Source: smarthistory.org
Defense
As I said in my previous article, people live in cities for defense. For this reason, most pre-industrial cities built walls for defense. In peaceful times, this might not be as important and the population settled outside the walls, but when outside enemies threatened, the walls became quite important.
Some city walls were massive, such as those of Constantinople. Others were simply masonry or field stone piled on top of each other.
Frequently, cities took advantage of water not just for personal needs but for defense, locating on islands in rivers or lakes. The Aztecs built Tenochtitlan in Lake Texcoco.
Map of Tenochtitlan, 1524. Friedrich Peypus, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Water and Sewage
In addition to needing water, cities need sewers. Removing human waste and excess rainwater is a necessity for the health of the populace.
Waste removal in medieval Europe was sadly deficient. Usually, cities disposed of waste in open streams or ditches running through the city. This led to high mortality due to disease, plague and pandemic. Paris didn’t clover its sewer until 1370.
For the most part, the poorer neighborhoods lacked high quality sanitation. They were crowded and dirty.
Public Baths
On a week-long trip to Budapest once, I decided to tour all the public baths in the city. Maybe some day I’ll write about my experience in the Turkish bathhouse there, but not today.
Many ancient and medieval cities also had public baths. Cities in Rome, Greece, and as far back as Mohenjo Daro had them.
In ancient times public bathing included saunas, massages and relaxation therapies. Neighbors met and discussed community concerns in these communal places. Think of the cliché of the mafia don meeting his rivals or lieutenants in a public bath.
Public baths improve the health and sanitation of the city, but they require adequate public water supply and sewer systems.
You don’t need to map out the sewers when designing your fantasy city, but you should decide how adequate the sewer system is and whether there are adequate facilities for bathing. Which of these models you want your city to follow is up to you. I like a cleaner city, but if your story wants a filthier, grittier setting, opt for the European model.
City Layout and Urban Structure
In designing a fantasy city, you will need to decide its geography. Where are all the main features in relation to one another? City layout and urban structure is a complex topic with many facets. It would be easy to get lost in the weeds in inventing a realistic city. However, one doesn’t need a degree in urban planning to design a fantasy city.
Scholars define five different city layout types: geomorphic, radial, concentric, rectilinear, and curvilinear. The most common ones were geomorphic, rectilinear, and radial. As an amateur city planner, you are free to invent your own as well. Just remember that people must live in your city. Even if they are fictional, they they will adapt the city you design to their own use.
Geomorphic
Geomorphic patterns follow the layout of the terrain. These are common where there is no central planning. In such situations, cities grow organically according to the needs of its inhabitants. People walk according to the route that requires the least expenditure of energy. My own home town of Sitka, Alaska is laid out in a geomorphic pattern out of necessity.
There is an urban legend that the settlers of Boston followed cow paths when laying out the streets. This is probably not far from the truth. Just looking at the map, one can see that it followed geomorphic patterns.
The most familiar of these to students of European history was the Roman grid plan. The Romans founded multiple cities throughout western Europe as Roman colonies. One can still see the grid on the map of the city centers of Florence, Italy, Cologne, Germany, Zaragoza (Caesaraugusta), Spain.
Roman cities as central districts of modern cities
As you can see from the maps, these cities grew beyond their Roman cores in stages. By studying the maps, one can see the rings of medieval, renaissance, industrial, and modern era growth.
Radial
In a radial structure, main roads converge on a central point, usually a market or plaza. Cities such as Amsterdam or Erbil, Kurdistan follow this pattern. This radial pattern became popular in the renaissance and can be seen outside the Roman core of Florence.
The radial plan needn’t have its focus on the center of the city. In larger cities, avenues might radiate out from satellite centers in neighborhoods, linking them together. Later cities such as Washington, D.C. combined the radial and grid plan in just this way.
Hopefully, this exploration of city structure and planning gives you enough ideas to design your own fantasy city. Remember that any city has to be used by people. Design has to conform to their needs. Whether you lay it out following terrain or in a grid, set up city walls, or have adequate water and sanitation, these factors will influence the people in it. The people living in a city also have their own ideas of how they use the infrastructure they are given.
Once you have the design of the city, you can start populating it. The major districts imply the existence of rulers, priests, and merchants. Once you understand the environment they live in, you have a better understanding of who they are and how they would act in certain situations. Once you have characters, you are well on your way to creating a fantasy story.
Final Comments
I will leave you with one of my favorite maps, though it isn’t a fantasy city. It is Berlin ca. 1855. It captures the development of the city from its founding up to that time. One can see the original medieval city in the center and the river that protected it. The imprint of the renaissance walls and moat surround the medieval core. Outside that are the rectilinear grid of Friedrichstadt and the radial pattern of streets in the northeast and by Hallesches Tor. The city at this point is encircled by a wall used mainly to collect customs rather than for defense. Outside that wall are the beginnings of industrial development in the train stations (bahnhofs). The city grew beyond these walls in the later 19th and 20th centuries to the city we know today.
Sansculotte (talk · contribs), CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
In my original Worldbuilding series, I covered how to draw maps for your fantasy stories. If you want a fully-fleshed out world for novels, movies, D&D, or other games, this is a great place to start. The Worldbuilding 101 series covers mapping a fictional world. The Worldbuilding 102 series will cover creating fantasy societies.
Now that we know what our people look like, let’s explore cities in a fantasy society. Not literally explore them, just explore the topic. We didn’t necessarily need to know what the people look like in order to know where they live. This topic could have come first, but it is intrinsically bound with other topics we will explore in the next few articles.
Why and Where before the How
We’ll deal with the How, the actual layout of the city, in the next article. It is the level of detail that your characters interact with and is the bare minimum your will need for writing a story in an urban setting. Before we get to that, let’s look at the Why. Why do people settle in villages, towns, and cities to begin with? It’s possible the people in your world don’t live in cities at all.
On Earth, humans evolved on the savannahs of Africa and spread throughout the world during the Paleolithic period (old stone age). For 200,000 years, Homo sapiens lived off the land, hunting animals and gathering plants for food and textiles. While humans built shelters out of wood, clay, straw, they were mostly campsites for nomadic tribes.
It is possible to write a fantasy story in a Paleolithic setting. The Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean M. Auel is a great example.
Earliest Settlements
It was only in the Neolithic period (new stone age) that humans built permanent settlements. This coincided with the advent of agriculture about 11 thousand years ago with the climate warming at the end of the ice age. Farming began when hunting and gathering wild grains was not enough to support populations. The population grew in good times. When drought constricted food supply, people turned to farming to survive.
Farming required the farmer to stay in one area to tend to the crops. If the family moved elsewhere, another family might move in and harvest the crops the first family worked so hard to grow.
In this period, lasting for thousands of years, people lived in villages of about 50-100 people. Villages would be governed by the elders of the clans. The villagers were not subjects of a king, nor were they citizens of a republic, though a village might have headman as a leader.
The practice of farming spread as people migrated, taking agricultural techniques with them. Neolithic agricultural techniques and societies persisted among humans clear through the industrial revolution. Except for the introduction of iron tools and the rule of kings, the vast majority of peasants from ancient to medieval times lived an essentially neolithic lifestyle.
Centres of origin and spread of agriculture. Joe Roe, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Villages to Towns, City-States, and Empires
Villages grew larger in the bronze age. It was in this period that political power grew stronger, more organized, and more centralized. Hereditary chieftains or kings supported by a class of priests arose around this time. The king often acted as the chief priest or claimed the mandate of the gods. This was about the time of the Uruk period in Mesopotamia and the Zhou period in China.
Centralized power coincided with the development of organized irrigation. Agricultural technology allowed the accumulation of surplus food, which allowed a division of labor. This coincided with the advent of writing, which was first used to record accounts (Egypt and Sumeria) and as oracles (China).
Cities in Fantasy
The first question one needs to answer in planning cities in a fantasy society is whether there are cities at all. Humans developed agriculture in response to environmental stress. That led to writing and cities. Did the humans, humanoids, or non-human species of your world face the same pressures? In other words, Does your fantasy society need cities and towns at all?
Humans lived in nomadic tribes for hundreds of thousands of years in the Paleolithic era. One could imagine the Silvans of Pancirclea living in simple shelters in the forests, moving from place to place following the seasons or pursuing food sources. They would be uncivilized in the sense that they don’t live in cities, but that does not mean they wouldn’t have a complex culture. Perhaps they would not develop writing or smelting, but they might borrow such things from nearby civilizations.
Peoples of Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin
Development of Cities and Civilization in Fantasy
In your fantasy society, if you want to look at the history of cities and civilization on your continent, you really only need to go as far back as a Bronze Age. This is when cities on earth grew and developed the attributes of writing, smelting, and complex government. Also, this is when the first empires were founded.
On my map of Pancirclea, I started with an area where farming might have begun. It is a hilly area where a warming climate changed the biome from a fertile one able to support a large population to a less fertile one unable to support the same population. In this case, people developed farming to increase their food supply.
Over the course of hundreds of years, farming techniques spread, including irrigation in the river valleys, which involved more complex social organization and the foundation of what we now think of as cities. This is the core of civilization on Pancirclea.
Over time, they spread to other areas suitable for farming, sending colonies to relieve population pressure at home. These colonies encroached on the homelands of the Silvan people and Hillfolk, causing conflict and possible war. One can imagine the city people invading the Hillfolk lands to seize mines for metal ores. One can also imagine the Silvans attacking settlers who attempt to clear forests for more farmland.
Origins and spread of Civilization in Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin
Placement and Growth of Cities
We have answered the Why. Let’s look at the Where. Where are cities placed? Part of the answer depends on why the city is founded and the social conditions that it is founded under. Did it grow from a neolithic village or was it founded as a colony from another city? Was it a peaceful era with few external threats or were the founders worried about bandits, marauders, foreign armies, or other enemies?
The two main factors determining where cities grow are defense and trade. Cities are by their nature centers of trade, religion, and politics. Originally, they grew from towns as population increased. Technological innovations such as literacy, bronze smelting, and legal codes allowed economic diversity. Scholars have attempted to define a the origin of cities using characteristics similar to these.
On the other hand, many cities were founded intentionally, especially in later empires such as the Roman. Major cities such as Milan, Florence, Cologne (Colonia in Latin), and London were all Roman colonies. Many colonies were established for defensive purposes outside Roman territory.
Many cities grew around military forts or castles, often forts of conquered people. For example, Colchester, England, Paris, France, and Cologne, Germany. Cities also grew around hill forts such as Prague, Czechia, Delhi, India, and the Kremlin, Moscow.
Trade Drives Growth
Trade routes allowed cities to grow beyond their original defensive purposes. Often, merchants settled near forts to take advantage of the protection of the military based there. This became the core of a new city. Trade was always the driver for the growth of cities. Cities along trade routes grew richer and larger. It begs the chicken and egg question: did the first cities grow along trade routes or did the first trade routes grow between larger towns? Whichever comes first, settlements grow where trade routes nourishes them.
The two factors of defense and trade ebbed and flowed in importance depending on the conditions of the time. In warlike eras, defense became more important. Cities on hills or islands had an advantage during times of unrest. Cities better situated along rivers or across easily traversable terrain had an advantage during peaceful times when trade flourished. Those that had both, such as Paris or Venice, flourished under both conditions.
Everybody Loves a Water Feature
Another key need for the growth of cities is water. A large population needs fresh water to survive. For this reason, most large cities grow near plentiful water supplies, usually rivers. The first cities were along the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow Rivers. Sometimes, the cities built canals or aqueducts to bring water to them. Roman Aqueducts are still considered an engineering marvel. China’s second great engineering marvel is the Grand Canal, linking Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south.
Rivers and canals also allow increased mobility with boats and barges, increasing the ability to trade with other cities on the river.
Grand Canal (China) via Wikimedia
Common sites for Cities
Some of the most common sites for major cities are:
Not all cities are placed on rivers. As I said earlier, some were created around hill forts for defensive purposes. The hill towns of Tuscany or ancient Palestine were placed at the top of hills, but each of them needed an abundant source of water, usually from wells. These cities usually succeeded in times of social unrest or particularly warlike periods due to their defensive advantages.
Again, placement of cities in a fantasy society goes back to the map. Find the area where civilization first developed. Cities in those areas will grow organically based on the factors of defense, trade, and access to water.
Next, look to where people would intentionally found cities as they spread from their home civilizations. What would be the best sites for colonies?
At this point, you might not have enough detail to determine where islands or fords in rivers might be. In Pancirclea, I placed cities where it looked like a good place for a kingdom or empire to grow, then drew in additional rivers and streams to provide water for the city. As the worldbuilder, you have the freedom to add detail as you focus in. When you do, pay attention to the guidelines set up in earlier articles, especially on landforms.
One hint for islands and fords is that water is generally shallower and islands form where rivers grow wide in low flat areas. Rivers are also shallower above river confluences.
One hint for islands and fords is that water is generally shallower and islands form where rivers grow wide in low flat areas. Rivers are also shallower above river confluences.
Placement of the first cities and trade routes in Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin.
Rather than naming my cities now, I gave them letter designations. Names are a function of language, so I’ll give them names that conform to the language of the inhabitants when I discuss that later. I’m pretty excited to get to that topic. I love conlangs (constructed languages).
Now we know where the cities of our fantasy world are and where the trade routes that link them lie. In the next topic, I’ll talk about the How of cities, focusing in on individual cities and their layout. What are the major features? How are the streets laid out?
Our exploration of worldbuilding humanoid and non-human groups is merely an extension of the discussion in my last article about fantasy demographics. The question is, what do the humanoids or non-human groups in your fantasy world look like, if you have any.
Avoiding Cliché
In my own story writing, I have left out elves, dwarves, halflings, and orcs. It is such a staple of fantasy that it is hard to create a fantasy species that is not a cliché or a knock-off of Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons.
In defining the races of Pancirclea in my last article, I specifically created them so they could be quickly converted to humans, elves, and dwarves if I wanted. Savannah people would be humans. Add a few features to distinguish them such as pointy ears on the Silvans to turn them into elves. Make the Hill people short and stocky and they become dwarves.
Pancirclea Humanoid Distribution. Image by Michael Tedin
There is a way to put these species into your writing without it being cliché, but it is difficult. It has been done so many times that a new kind of elf or dwarf would be difficult to come up with. You will have to draw on all your creative power to come up with something original. Hopefully, this article will help.
Humanoids
First, we should define what a humanoid is. In my mind, it is a sub-species of human, closely related enough to interbreed but different enough to be considered not quite homo sapiens sapiens. Maybe elves are homo sapiens nobilis?
Second, the basic body shape is human. That is, a central torso with two arms coming off the shoulders, a head on top, and legs about as long as the torso coming off the bottom.
Image of humans from plaque aboard Pioneer 10 and 11
Humanoids should conform to this basic body shape. Any deviation from this should be classified not as humanoid, but as non-human. More on them later.
The point of humanoids is to have a creature that is human enough to relate to but with enough of a sense of otherness that they are not quite right. Often, having such creatures creates a sense of wonder and mystery, which is why they are used so often in fantasy.
Humanoid Features
Similar to our discussion of fantasy demographics, humanoids follow a similar set of features, with a few added features to include.
That is, when creating humanoids for your fantasy world, create charts of skin color, eye color, hair color, and hair texture. With humanoids, everything will be fictional, so feel free to add more fantastical elements. Give them blue, orange, or green skin; yellow, purple, or pink eyes.; or different colored hair. Really, anything goes at this point.
When doing so, think about analogies to human genetic variance. Perhaps green skin evolved in certain areas due to magical background energy. This genetic group might slowly mix with other groups outside that area, creating a higher concentration of green skin in the area, with a gradual decrease in prevalence farther away.
You can come up with whatever explanation you like, just so long as it keeps things consistent in your fantasy setting. You don’t have to explain the underlying reason for it. People didn’t fully understand human genetics for most of human history or pre-history. The purpose of creating a reason is so you can keep things straight in your own writing without unexplained divergences from your fictional norm.
Humanoid Differences from Humans
What really sets humanoids apart from humans? Along with the features discussed above and in the fantasy demographics article, there are things that differentiate the two groups.
The most obvious and cheapest for movie and TV makeup departments to create are pointy ears, big noses, and ridged foreheads. The main things that you can alter from the basic human shape are the head and hands.
Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in Star Trek. NBC Television
Peter Hambleton as Gloin in The Hobbit. New Line Cinema
Michael Dorn as Worf in Star Trek. Paramount Pictures
Humanoid features: pointy ears, big noses, and ridged foreheads
And big hairy feet.
Elijah Wood as Frodo. New Line Cinema
I get the sense that so many fantasy and science fiction creatures in movies and TV are created with human body shapes is because it is the cheapest way to create aliens.
Humanoid Size
Other features that might differentiate humanoids from humans are size. Dwarves, hobbits and sometimes elves are smaller. Giants are larger, sometimes much larger. The basic body shape is the same, but fantasy has either made them huge or tiny to create a sense of otherness.
The range of humanoid size reaches from mountain-sized (giants), to thumb-sized or smaller (fairies and pixies). On the other hand, I would argue that fairies and pixies are not humanoid because they have wings.
Garden gnomes, on the other hand, would be humanoid. Also, they love to travel.
Roaming gnome on safari. Travelocity
Creating Humanoids from Other Species
Another common trope, especially for TV, is to create humanoid species from animal species. Again, in movies and TV, it is common because it is cheaper to get a human actor with a mask to create a monster.
But even in written works and games where there are no such budget constraints (unless you hope to sell your novel to Hollywood), we find humanoid creatures based on other animals. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Kzinti, a cat-like species in Larry Niven’s Known Space series. There are also lizardmen and dragonmen in game settings. In my own writing, I have created dog-men, though they did not evolve, but were created.
One might make an argument that these creatures are not humanoid, but non-human in human shape. I would argue back that, according to my definition, they are humanoid because they keep the same basic body shape. On the other hand, there seems to be a gradation between humanoid and non-human species. At what point does a change in body type make a creature no longer humanoid?
Non-Humans
When talking about non-humans in a fantasy setting, I specifically mean non-human sentient species. These are intelligent creatures able to communicate and reason similar to humans.
Sentience is a multidimensional subjective phenomenon that refers to the depth of awareness an individual possesses about himself or herself and others.
There are those who would argue that humans are the only known sentient creatures. There are also those who argue that our definition of sentience is constrained by the fact that we only recognize our own intelligence and are unable to comprehend a non-human sentience.
Whew! Let’s not get too deep into the weeds here. Maybe when I was 30 years younger and under the influence of controlled substances I would have this discussion. I probably did.
The purposes of fiction, let’s define sentience as an intelligence that is able to communicate with humans in some manner. Perhaps the plot of your story is your characters’ struggle to understand the alien species, but the potential for communication is there.
What is Non-Human?
The real defining feature of a sentient non-human species is body shape. Going back to the races of Pancirclea, if we wanted to go further than to turn Hill people, Silvans, and Savannah people into dwarves elves, and humans, we could alter their body shape.
Think about how each race’s unique environment might change them over the course of 100,000 years. If the Silvans lived in trees, perhaps they would use their arms to climb more than their legs. Humans developed long legs from running across open fields. Silvans would not do so. Perhaps their legs would be shorter and their arms longer, similar to other tree-living apes.
Add feet with opposable thumbs to aid in climbing and you’ve got a hairless, sentient forest ape similar to a chimpanzee or bonobo.
Similarly, perhaps the Hill people have adapted to the mountainous environment by living in caves. I’m having a hard time imagining how they would evolve a different body type other than something similar to a dwarf, shorter with powerful arms and legs. Maybe you have a better imagination than I do. I’d love to hear your ideas.
Other Body Types
Similar to the dragonkin in the picture above, you can create a range of sentient species based on other species. One might argue that the Kzinti, lizardmen, and dragonmen mentioned above are better classified as non-humans than humanoids.
Any body shape you can imagine can be made into a sentient creature, from animals similar to humans to as alien as jellyfish. I recently read Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. In it, she created a race of Medusae, a jellyfish-like species the main character interacts with. The creature is as alien as they come, but still sentient, rational, and honorable.
Character Driven Differences
The potential for creating weird and unusual creatures in your fiction is as broad as your imagination. However, think about why you want to put such creatures in your stories. Is it just to flex your imagination muscles? If so, your efforts may fall flat in your writing.
Think about your story and your plot. Plot is driven by characters. If your characters are humanoid or non-human, think about what difficulties those differences create for them. If they are interacting with humans or other humanoids or non-humans, do the differences create conflict? Conflict is the heart of plot.
If your creatures are simply humans with fancy face makeup (or hairy feet), what is the point of making them different? They become nothing more than set dressing. You might as well make your characters all human.
Your Thoughts
Feel free to respond with ideas. What creatures have you created? What drives them? How do they interact with other species or members of their own species?
If you are worldbuilding for fiction, either as a game or as a novel, you need people to inhabit your world. Your primary concern should be your main characters. They are what drives your plot. Similarly, you need minor characters for your main characters interact with. Fleshing out your fantasy demographics allows you to create characters the reader can relate to. Where do they come from? What is their family history?
Demographics tell us what the people in a certain population are like. It is defined as “the statistical characteristics of human populations“. Among most demographers, two of the main categories of demographics are race and ethnicity.
Race and ethnicity are somewhat artificial divisions in a society. Race is a social division based on physical characteristics, while ethnicity is a more narrow division based on racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origins. I will discuss the factors that make up ethnicity in later articles in this series.
Keep in mind that these guidelines are just that. Focus on creating compelling main characters first. If for some reason you have a good story reason to deviate from the worldbuilding rules you create, story should take precedence. If you do deviate, it would be best to find a reason in the rules you have created. What would be better would be to make the deviation a plot point.
For this article, let’s focus on race as expressed by physical characteristics. I will also expand on physical characteristics to look at the fantastical elements such as human sub-species, humanoid species, and non-human sentient creatures in a later article.
Physical Characteristics
When talking about the physical characteristics used to define the demographics of a race, modern humans look at things such as skin color, eye color, hair color, hair texture, and body size.
Of these, skin, eye, and hair features are mostly determined by genetics. The role of genetics versus environmental factors in determining human body size is a matter of great debate.
Mutations as a Source of Genetic Difference
Humans are widely believed to have evolved in the hot, open environment of the plains or at least, a tree-dotted savannah. Later on, with the invention of tools such as clothing, they moved to other environments.
World map of prehistoric human migrations, according to mitochondrial genetics. Wikimedia Commons
Of course, such migration took place over the course of millennia, allowing greater variation in genetic diversity. Populations that are further apart geographically and ancestrally are more genetically distinct.
Mutations rose in distinct populations that affected appearance among other things. As an example, the stereotypical northern European has different hair color and texture, eye color, and skin color than a typical aboriginal Australian or American Indian.
Genetics and Racial Mixing
Contrary to much of what was taught through the history of the United States, racial divisions are not hard and fast. Rather, they are a social construct loosely related to genetics. Some scientists say that race is a poor description of genetic diversity.
In the United States historically, anyone with “one drop” of African blood was considered Black. This is a rare definition and was originally used to justify enslaving Negros in a time when any enslaved person in the United States was a Negro.
Consequently, in the rest of the world, such a definition confuses people. Most cultures other than the United States accept that different genetic groups mix. In such cultures, the offspring of a mother and father from two different racial groups would be called a creole, mulatto, or mestizo.
Through such mixing, different physical characteristics disperse throughout human populations. For example, the concentration of blue eyes in Europe is heaviest around the Baltic Sea and disperses in the population farther away from the sea.
For the purposes of fantasy demographics, we will use race as exactly what it is: a social construct. In later articles, we will look at how it influences economics and culture. For now, we want to examine the physical characteristics used as markers that signify race.
Genetic Mixing and Migration
The more humans move from place to place, the more mixed populations will be. With little genetic mixing, mutations might become dominant only in certain groups. On the other hand, with mixing, the mutation becomes shared. In the blue eyes example above, if Vikings didn’t raid, there would probably be fewer blue eyes in northern Britain and Ireland than there is now.
In the modern age, with world travel available to people from every country, the opportunity for genetic mixing is the highest it has ever been. Prior to the era of ocean-going ships, railroads, and flight, travel was mostly by foot. In those times, people did not travel great distances in large numbers very often. When they did, their migration was constrained by the natural environment. Mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas all did their part to limit and direct the movement of peoples.
Human Demographics
When creating your own fantasy demographics, use the map you created in Worldbuilding 101. Firstly, look at your landscape and see where the natural features that divide and direct people are. Any division will work. Northern vs southern populations, if distant enough are not likely to mix. East or west sides of seas, rivers, or mountain ranges usually have less mixing.
Next, take into account whether seas and rivers allow for greater movement of people or less. Obviously, boating cultures are more likely to spread their genetics across bodies of water than landlubbers. The Viking example mentioned above is a case in point.
In addition, mountain passes allow movement of people, but usually only in narrow bands. When the Lombards moved into northern Italy, they brought their Germanic genes with them, settling on the fertile plain of what was up to then Cisalpine Gaul. Since their arrival, the region has been known as Lombardy.
Fantasy Demographics and Races
The history of human evolution and genetics is very fascinating, you say, but what does it matter in a fictional world that doesn’t have Vikings, Africa, or aboriginal Australians? If it doesn’t, you have to ask yourself, does it have people with blue eyes, black hair, or green skin?
These human mutations happened in the real world (except green skin), but they don’t have to have happened in your own fiction. You could just as easily have a race of red-eyed, blue-skinned people as have races that mimic real-world human evolution. Keep in mind that, the further from real-world phenotypes you diverge, the harder it will be for readers to relate to the character. Usually, writers cast these more fantastical characters as villains, though not always.
If you do create characteristics not found in the real world, think about how the feature might have evolved. Why do forest people have green skin? Yes, I am kind of on a green skin kick. Perhaps some algae or chlorophyll DNA got mixed into their own DNA. Additionally, perhaps green camouflage allowed for natural selection among the various predators in the jungle.
Racial Divisions in your Fantasy World
By racial divisions, I don’t mean racial strife, but what natural genetic markers differentiate one group from another? For illustration, let’s look at three groups in southeastern Pancirclea: Hillfolk, Silvans, and Savannah People.
Pancirclea Racial Distribution. Image by Michael Tedin
I chose these three based on the environment that divides them. I could also have chosen sea peoples or marsh dwellers. Maybe I’d do that if I were to set a story in those areas. For illustration, I’ll limit it to these three.
I’ll make a further distinction between the northern and southern Savannah People. I could also make distinctions among the various Hillfolk divided in each of their valleys, but let’s keep it simple for now.
Skin Color and Evolution
Among the people of the real world, skin color is probably the most prevalent marker of race, though other features also are used. The second most used feature is eye shape. For example, most East Asians have an epicanthic fold.
This doesn’t mean that every person in a population will have the same skin color. Because of the proximity of different groups, there will be some variation of skin color within a population to account for mixing between the groups.
One of the most common classifications of skin type is the Fitzpatrick Scale, listing color from Type I (very light) to VI (very dark). These six classifications are described differently by different users. That is, the various descriptions for each classification are various synonyms for shades of black, brown, tan, and white.
When creating my Dungeons and Dragon campaign, I created charts similar to the charts in the old AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master Guide. I still use it for minor characters in my novels. The chart below creates a distribution of skin colors for different populations in Pancirclea based on the Fitzpatrick Scale.
Skin Color
Ivory (I)
Ruddy (I)
Fair/Pale (II)
Beige (III)
Light Brown (IV)
Dark Brown (V)
Black (VI)
Special
Northern Savannah
1-22
23-41
42-55
56-80
81-90
91-96
97-99
100
Silvan
1-19
20-29
30-51
52-76
77-90
91-96
97-99
100
Hillfolk
1-10
11-13
14-33
34-53
54-75
76-90
91-96
100
Southern Savannah
1-3
4-4
5-26
27-35
36-60
61-79
80-99
100
Skin Color of Races in Pancirclea. Copyright Michael Tedin
As you can see in my chart, the southern Savannah People have a much greater distribution of dark skin than do the northern Savannah People. The southern Silvans probably also have a similar distribution vis-a-vis the northerners. Maybe they don’t because they get less Vitamin D due to lower levels of ultraviolet radiation underneath the forest canopy.
I kept this chart simple for the purposes of this worldbuilding demonstration. If I were going to be creating fantasy demographics for a novel or game, I would likely want to add more detail. For instance, I would divide each of the three groups into northern, central, and southern divisions, weighting the skin color of the southern divisions more heavily to the Black (VI) skin color and the northern divisions more heavily to the Ivory (I) or Fair/Pale (II) colors.
I also added a Special category to account for mutations. Examples of special skin types might be mutations, albinism, vitiligo, or diseases such as leprosy. I created an additional chart for special outcomes.
Special:
Grey
1-30
Pink
31-60
Yellowish
61-85
Bluish
85-100
Hair Color
Another major distinguishing feature of a race is the prevalence of certain hair colors. Almost everybody knows the most basic colors: grey, blond, red, brown, and black. There are other subdivisions and scales, but for our purposes, we can keep it simple.
Black is the most common human hair color. It is a dominant trait in humans. Brown is the second most common color. Blond hair is most commonly found in Northern and Western Europeans, but many Melanesians also carry a gene giving them blond hair. Also, northern and western Europeans are most likely to have red hair, but it is the rarest of all colors.
White and grey hair is more prevalent with age because hair loses pigmentation as people age. Other conditions might also cause a person’s hair to go white.
Human Hair Colors on Pancirclea
Blond
Red
Brown
Black
Special
Special:
Northern Grasslands
1-30
31-32
33-62
63-90
91-100
White
Silvan
1-20
21-21
22-51
52-90
91-100
Grey
Hillfolk
1-25
26-26
27-46
47-95
96-100
Bald
Southern Grasslands
1-15
16-16
17-31
32-90
91-100
Bluish
Greenish
Human Hair Textures
Just as with color, you must keep in mind the variety of hair textures. These textures are found in almost every human population, though some are much more common than others. For example, the typical Japanese person would have straight hair, but wavy is also common. Kinky is very rare in Japan unless the person is of mixed race.
The image above shows finer detail than we need for creating fantasy demographics. I simplified it so the numbers correspond to categories: 1: straight, 2: wavy, 3: curly, and 4: kinky.
Hair Texture
Straight
Wavy
Curly
Kinky
Northern Grasslands
1-20
21-50
51-85
86-100
Silvan
1-35
36-65
65-85
86-100
Hillfolk
1-20
21-55
56-85
86-100
Southern Grasslands
1-15
16-35
36-70
71-100
Remember that these charts are for demonstration purposes. You can mix them up for your fantasy demographics as you want. Feel free to add more sub-categories of color and texture or change the distribution. Perhaps you want one of your races to have more red or blond colors to set them apart from the rest.
Eye Color
Now that we have skin and hair colors defined, we can turn to eye color. This should be the simplest physical feature to define. Seventy-nine percent of all human eyes are brown. Conversely, that leaves a minority of mutants descended from one person somewhere in northern Europe.
For fantasy demographics, you can use any eye color you wish, but your characters should be relatable. You can make green, blue, or grey eyes more prevalent than the real world. I will let you create your own chart for this among the populations of your own world.
Height
When talking about body size, we are mainly talking about height and weight. Humans all fall within a certain a size range. There is some variation mainly due to nutritional factors, which may also be related to climate and latitude. That is, in areas with fewer edible plants and animals, people may be shorter and thinner. People in mountainous areas often also have smaller stature due to food insecurity and poor health.
As we can see from the chart above, most human males are between 160 and 190 cm (5′ 3″ to 6′ 3″) . Similarly, most human females are between 145 and 175 cm (4′ 8″ to 5′ 9″). There are many cases of people falling outside those ranges an inch or two or in the case of dwarfism and gigantism. However, these are fairly rare. Dwarfism and gigantism are usually due to hyperpituitarism, genetic disorders, or growth hormone deficiency.
Weight
Height is the main determinant of a person’s ideal body weight. If the average male is 175 cm, then his ideal body weight would be 70.7 kg (155 lbs). However, weight fluctuates depending on a person’s genetic background, metabolism, eating habits, and activity level. Average weights for men in the world range from 55.4 kg in Afghanistan (122 lbs) to 99.4 kg in Tonga (219 lbs). Extreme weights have been found from 2.13 kg (4.7 lbs) to 635 kg (1,400 lbs).
The variation here is so wide, you can set just about any weight for a person within these parameters.
The simplest way to describe sizes is by size categories rather than specific measurements. For example, you could use categories such as tall, medium, short and light, medium, heavy. If you really want to get specific, you can create charts similar to the skin, eye, and hair charts I created.
Races and Racism
One thing to be careful of in discussing human races is the tendency to attribute certain features to a person depending solely on their membership in a particular race. For example, in political races in the United States, there is the assumption that, because you are black or Latino, you will vote for Democrats. The Democrats learned the hard way that this is not true.
Throughout American history, racist views have ascribed certain attributes to African Americans based on their race that were more likely due to the socio-economic status they were forced into.
Above all, be clear in your fiction that the classification of people into races is based on a few features, not that the classifications determine those features. We are creating fantasy demographics, but we don’t want to be drawn into real-world biases.
Remember that race is a social construct that might affect other aspects of your society, especially economics. When we get to that topic, we will cover such issues as economic stratification, caste, and class.
Sub-species and Non-Humanoid Species
We have been talking about the genetics that create the wide diversity in human populations, but there are more species found in fantasy literature than just homo sapiens. The classic Tolkeinesque fantasy includes goblins, orcs, elves, and dwarves, among other things. I had planned on covering this topic in this post, but there is a lot of rich material to be mined there. I think it merits its own post. Look for it in the next week or two.
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