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A Guide by Elly
Worldbuilding has become a thing of legend in recent years, seen as a difficult artform meant for the lucky few who can grasp its many complexities. Despite this, I believe that you needn’t be a creative genius to begin worldbuilding and creating interesting works. This guide aims to deconstruct the complexities of worldbuilding into its principal parts and give you the tools to arrange the parts as you see fit. Worldbuilding is also an essential skill for science fiction or fantasy authors, as even a decent grasp on worldbuilding can have the ability to transform otherwise mediocre works into modern classics.
Worldbuilding is an incredibly deep topic that I believe no singular text could faithfully explore in its entirety. In lieu of this, this guide focuses solely on constructed languages and cultures, or conlangs and concultures. Conlanging is the art of creating constructed languages, or conlangs. Most widely known for their portrayal in certain pieces of media such as Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and Game of Thrones, conlangs are a niche but highly expressive form of art. There are many different types of conlangs, including naturalistic conlangs, auxiliary conlangs (auxlangs), artistic conlangs (artlangs), and many more. Despite this multitude of possibilities, the parts of this guide dedicated to conlangs will focus on naturalistic conlangs, how they differ from natural languages (natlangs), how to make them, and how to incorporate them into larger worldbuilding projects. On the other side of the coin lie concultures. Concultures are, as previously stated, constructed, fictional cultures that typically reside within fictional worlds (or at least fictional versions of Earth). Concultures and naturalistic conlangs, more often than not, go hand-in-hand. Although concultures can exist without naturalistic conlangs to back them up, the reverse is generally not true. For this reason and for the sake of example, I will be covering concultures before moving on to conlangs. Throughout this guide, I will be creating an example conculture and subsequent conlang in order to demonstrate the principles presented.
To create a conculture, you must first think about the environment in which that culture is being formed. Are they from a dense forested area, open plains, arid desert, or rugged mountains? Deciding where a culture resides will inform many of the decisions you make down the road. That being said, I am no expert on geography nor how different biomes get formed, rainshadows, plate tectonics, or anything like that; for that reason, I won’t be going into mapmaking or anything beyond choosing in what biome or climate zone a culture resides. With that out of the way, an important thing to consider when choosing a location for your culture is whether or not their environment changes cyclically such as with the seasons. For example, a culture may employ hunting techniques that require them to move alongside herds of animals throughout the year, changing their environment as they do so; or perhaps there could be some magical or extreme-weather-related reason for the change in environment such as violent storms that lead to extreme flooding or times of constant sunshine leading to drought.
The key takeaway here, and for the majority of this guide, is that the sky is the limit. Just because we want our cultures and languages to feel realistic doesn’t mean that the circumstances surrounding their creation or continued existence need to be feasible or even technically possible in the real world. Science fiction and fantasy, at their cores as genres, thrive on creative bending of established rules and tropes to create fantastical worlds to explore through media. Another key thing here is to not necessarily throw away everything we hold dear as real people, but to subtly bend one or two aspects of the world and figure out the natural consequences of that change in the world’s ruleset, watching how those small changes cascade into new and interesting things for us to explore.
Another important aspect of culture is what level of technology said culture has access to. Generally, as time goes on, cultures will gain access to more and more advanced technology; they will find more effective methods of doing the things they were already able to do and sometimes even gain the ability to do entirely new things. Personally, I find it useful to think of technological access in terms of their closest counterparts in terms of the history of Earth. For example, it may be helpful to think of the stone age if your culture hits many of the same technological beats as cultures found during that time period. It’s important to keep in mind while you are worldbuilding that it is highly unlikely for a culture to remain technologically stagnant for long stretches of time. Even when ostensibly minor, any change in technology can have major impacts on how we view and interact with the world around us.
Next, it’s important to ask yourself about what your culture values most and what things cultures associate with positive emotions. Like everything else in worldbuilding, this can be interconnected with a lot of other factors, but let’s just focus on environment and technology and how those things impact cultural values. For example, take the Fremen from the Dune series. The Fremen are a nomadic culture that live on an arid desert planet called Arrakis. In the first novel (I haven’t seen the films), the Fremen are shown to view water as the highly precious resource that it is on Arrakis, going so far as to construct special suits to retain as much moisture as possible when traveling across the sand. Notably, this example ties together the three things we’ve touched upon so far; the Fremen live in a desert, therefore highly valuing water, which in turn creates demand for technological advancements by way of the stillsuits.
Speaking of examples, it’s high time I started creating a conculture for demonstration purposes. Following what I’ve said so far, I want this culture to live in a heavily forested area filled with deciduous trees and other plant life. Technologically, they would likely use simple tools made of wood and stone and live a more-or-less sedentary lifestyle, hunting animals and gathering nuts, berries, and other edible plant life for sustenance. As for what they value, I think a natural extension of their environment would be for them to have a deep respect for flora and fauna. However, I also want them to value cooking, which is something I don’t see very often but I think would be a very interesting angle for a conculture, so I’m going to roll with it.
Keeping that in mind, it’s time we talk about societies and social structures.