Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Character Building

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we begin our discussion of perhaps the most important part of the world:  its people.

What We Have So Far

We have, more or less, a world as it would look with no people in it.  It is a world of vast spaces, a mild and wet world, where fog banks hundreds of kilometers long roll in daily from the sea, dashing themselves on mountains that ever so slowly climb until they are several times higher than the Himalayas.  Strong, mercurial tides stir the ocean, and the skies are lit by the Lantern and its sister satellites, a "blue" moon and a "red" moon. 

The average tree is about as tall as the tallest on Earth, and the tallest trees climb more than a kilometer.  The thickest forests have entire biomes that never touch the ground, save for exploding fruit and hardened nuts that can roll for quite some time.  Among these trees climb and glide a plethora of creatures, some familiar, some quite alien.  Beyond the trees, in savannahs the size of continents, roam creatures that bear some passing resemblance to Earth creatures, though they tend to be larger, with rough, grasping pads on their feet.  There are also magnificent leaping creatures that can easily bound from one end of a football field to the other, but the real speedsters are those that resemble multi-limbed arthropods with clawed hands for grasping the ground. 

Above hyperforest and megasavanna alike, flocks of soaring birds frequent.  They range in size from pollinators the size of eagles to sky whales who barely move their 100-foot wingspans to stay aloft.  And from the sea crawls a multitude of denizens.  Perhaps oddly, the depths contain animals with which we are most familiar; it is the inhabitants of the surface waters that are unusual, gargantuan, and surprisingly quick.

What we don't have yet is a single being capable of qualifying for a boat loan, but that's what we're going to start working on now.

Purpose-Driven Design

For all that we love details in our worldbuilding, we've also taken care to give you a highlight reel of sorts for each topic we touch upon.  For example, when we went through the biomes of our world, we didn't cover all of them.  That list would have had a good two dozen entries.  Heck, we didn't even look at the other continents of our world, meaning our map only covers about 1/4 of the planet.  So it is that, before we start digging into people, we should decide what parts are important enough to address.  After all, if we dig into every tiny little specification, we'll never finish this world.

With that in mind, we need to remember what this world is for:  to tell a story.  We have no clue what that story will be, as of yet, but we do know that it will be a story, and thus will have a plot, a setting, and characters.  The plot is, at this point, incidental.  The setting we have about half-covered (the half that doesn't involve what people have done with the place).  The characters, though... those are who we must consider now.

Effectively, our goal is to develop the world's people until, with any given person we point to, we can answer the most basic questions about them as a character.  Bearing in mind our tendency to go no more than three levels deep on any given detail, we'll want to answer no more than two follow-up questions on a given topic.  And this means that, if we have that list of questions, we'll have everything we need to build laid out in front of us.

So... what are the questions?

The Big Six

Who are they?

Where are they?

What are they doing?

Why are they doing it?

When is this happening?

How are they doing it?

Not a very frightening set of questions, is it?  Well, until you really start thinking about how to answer, anyway.  For example, the first question:  "Who are they?"  Sounds easy, yeah?  You just need a name... or maybe an ethnicity or culture, since when someone asks who a stranger is, they often describe them as "that British guy," or, now that we think about it, there are a lot of people who are described by their occupation... and now, you might be seeing the connection.  That first question boils down to all the different ways you have of describing someone.  As part of worldbuilding, you'll have to figure out all of the possible descriptors.

This same logic applies to the other questions, as well.  "Where are they?" could mean what planet they're on, what continent, what country, county, city, neighborhood, building, or room.  "What are they doing?" All the actions they could take.  So on and so forth.  And for each of these questions, we'll want to be able to dive down about two levels.

See, we weren't exaggerating when we said we would be discussing this part until the end of time.

Baby Steps

Since even our pared-down list is so daunting, perhaps we should instead focus on the most basic of basic questions.  Let's take a random, unformed character from our world, and try to describe them.  We'll start with the most generic questions, and we'll worry about diving later.

So, first question:  is this character human?

...Um.  Not necessarily?

Our current world could have humans in it, sure, and they would be (thanks to the low gravity) wildly entertaining in basketball matches... but our niche as a persistence predator would be harder to fill.  Most animals are going to have to work much less than normal, meaning our habit of walking after them until they die will take several times longer.  On the bright side:  our other ace in the hole, throwing things at them, will work better than ever.  Marksmen on this world will conceivably be able to hit targets as far away as can be seen- miles, at the least.

That said, this is not a small world, after all.  There's more than enough room for other sapient creatures to develop, and especially with a world built to favor leap attacks from a distance, humans won't be the only creature with a mind capable of performing subconscious calculus.

And with this, we have our first step:  deciding what kind of intelligent creatures make this world their home.  We'll go ahead and skip past similar reasoning to give you an idea of where we'll be going from here:

• Figuring out what the different species of "people" there are
• Figuring out how their presence changes our setting
• Figuring out the effect of magic* on our setting
• Building a basic city
• Figuring out changes to technology
• Building a generic culture
• Working through a day in the life of an average citizen

Even this short list will take time, months at the very least.  We'll revisit once we've done this much.

*Magic in particular is something that will need to be dealt with carefully.  Starting with the new year, we'll be working on a magic-building series every Friday.  Expect the magic-building and world-building posts to reference each other!

Conclusion

Well, that was a whole lot of words for "there aren't just humans running this planet," but it needed to be said.  We wouldn't worry too much about it; diversity is the spice of life.

Tune in next week when we ring in the new year by getting some specific portions of the internet quite excited... because the other peoples of this world are likely to be furry.