Last updated on February 18, 2022
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.
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.
Human Demographics
Humanoids and Non-Humans
Settlement patterns (Villages, Towns, Cities)
Designing Fantasy Cities (Urban Geography)
Magic and Technology (Resources, Knowledge, Magic)
Economics
Types of Economies and Trade,
Money and Banking,
Caste, Class, and Clan
Language
Sounds and Phonemes
Words and Morphology
Culture
Architecture
Art
Clothing
Food
Philosophy & Religion
Government (Politics, Law, Military)
What About History?
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?
