Why worldbuilding? I happened upon a book by Angeline Trevena, called 30 Days of Worldbuilding - An Author’s Step-by-Step Guide to Building Fictional Worlds, and figured I might give it a try. Not that I plan to become an author or game designer or anything, but having an extra world to escape to when the regular one is less than ideal sounds like a good idea.
This guidebook is broken into 30 easy, manageable prompts for you to complete. If you work your way through, simply completing one prompt per day, by the end of the month, you will have a strong, solid basis to your world. From there, you can grow it more.
You can get your own copy here: stepbystepworldbuilding.com
To avoid copy-pasting and plagiarism, I'll only share the chapter title for each day, not any of the hints and clues and helpful information from the book.
Day 2: Draw your map
Maps already? It's only the second day, I haven't had time to learn how to draw yet! Luckily there are plenty of free map generators out there, so I played around with some of them and came up with this:
The pretty parts were made by Watabou's neighbourhood generator, the icons, arrows and text were added by me. The town has no name, because I haven't thought of one yet.
If I knew how, I'd have edited all the roofs to be shiny black, to show that they are covered with solar panels. And I'd have put little symbols for drinking fountains all over the map, so the people of my town can refill their water bottles instead of buying a can of soda or yet another bottle of plastic-tasting mineral water, if I had found a good emoji for it. And the big hospital, and small local clinics, and daycare centres and local police stations and... all the other interesting things things one can find on maps.
The big empty space in the center isn't really empty. I simply couldn't find a free to use image that worked with the rest of the map. In the top right corner there should be a huge government complex, with the mayor and the tax office people, the central police station, the environmental bureau, the school overseers, health department and so on. It also has a public library, and all the registers of births and deaths, driving licenses, and permits to serve alcohol etc.
The lower left is open for market stalls. Anyone can pay a small rent and use a space for a day, to sell their wares, or give out information about a projext they are running or want to start, or any other activity that seems workable on a 5 by 5 meter plot. Knitting classes or poker tournaments perhaps?
There aren't a lot of car parks, because most people don't have or need a personal car. Large motorized road vehicles are mostly used by public services - there are ambulances, fire trucks, police cars etc. For short trips mostly everyone uses bicycles, scooters, motorbikes, or their feet. So there are a lot bicycle parking places, or whatever they are called, all over the town both in public and private spaces. For longer trips, the subway goes all the way to the other towns shown on the map below, and further still (though between towns it's mostly above ground,) and a lot of transporting of raw materials and finished products go on the same rails. Freight subways!
Then I wanted a map of where the town is located... and Watabou has me covered there too with an area generator.
As can be seen, the town is located by a lake. People settled here long ago because if farming failed, fishing could hopefully pick up the slack, and vice versa. It is always good to have a backup source of food! Also, as can be seen by the roads (or is that a a railroad,
And lastly, there's a picture of my house, made with the Nightcafé AI thingy.
What can I say about this? I like the idea of not having far to go to work - downstairs is just the right distance - and I like cooking. So having my own restaurant on my ground floor would suit me fine.
I don't really think it's a good idea to make such detailed decisions about how things look and where they are located this early in the process of creation, since I'm bound to discover that the town needs to be near a wood or a mountain instead of a lake, that my house should be built from stone instead of wood, and that the roads need to be much wider, but the book calls for it, so this is how things are. Until I manage to change them. ;)
1: Genre and Setting ← First post → 3: Water sources
