This is a resource that I came across years ago. It's a very thorough list of questions to help fantasy writers brainstorm their worlds. It's by Patricia C. Wrede, whom I've never heard of apart from the context of these questions. I've found them to be helpful in the past. For those Lauserites among us, consider it one person's "fractalling system" for worldbuilding. Some of the questions apply to more than one area and are repeated, and I feel I must warn that the religion questions are from a non-Christian perspective (well, ok they all are, but the Religion questions are the ones that are most obviously so). Thought I'd throw this out there for anyone who might be interested.

In Christ,
Jordan

I bookmarked it and read through it. Some of the stuff I've already developed in my world but other stuff looks good, I need to send Enderion through it. My only gripe is it's not all on one page, you have to click through to each section. (I'm lazy ). But yeah, it's a great resource, or, it appears to be. Have you actually used it in the past or just saved the link?

eruheran

I've seen that before, and if I remember correctly, Patricia C. Wrede wrote very non-Christian fantasy. That's all I'll say on that subject. But it's pretty deep.

Depends on what you mean by "used". If you mean have I taken one of my worlds and tackled question by question or even most of the questions, then the answer is "no". But I have read through all of the questions a couple of times, sometimes it helps spark my thinking in a certain direction, and sometimes not. But the first reading alone helped to get thinking about worldbuilding more broadly than I had before. You could say that these questions are what gave me my tendency to hone in on the details in worldbuilding. So in my mind the answer would be yes, I've used them. And there have been times when I've taken the questions on magic in particular and used them to help whip a world into shape.Sorry to hear that about her, but it doesn't surprise me. Guess that means use her questions and avoid her books

Ah I see. I can see what you mean, I'd count that as a 'yes' as well.

eruheran

That looks like a good list to aid in world building. Thank you for posting it, Seer.

I've found these questions more helpful than any other worldbuilding guide I've tried to work through (not that I've found many of those, but still ...) And yes, it does make the secular assumption that religion and morality are just one choice among many that a writer has to make in designing a culture ... but so has every other guide I've tried to work through. And, given the basic assumptions of the culture around us, how to make our faith show through the world we build is something we need to think seriously about.


Really? She's certainly not up there with Pullman (whose His Dark Materials trilogy is a fairly blatant attack on Christianity), nor Mercedes Lackey (who, whenever she has a church in a story---fairly often in one series, as it's a highly-regimented-medieval-society-plus-magic world---almost always has the villain either be a corrupt churchman or be allied with the institutional church, but portrays a few honest people working to change it from within, and also in another series has a country whose deus-ex-machina unifying and corruption-preventing force came from praying to any and all gods, and whose motto is "there is no one true way"). Unlike these two, who are obviously in one case out to attack Christianity and in the other opposed to organized religion in general and the institutional Church in particular, Wrede seems to just reflect the (nowadays, alas, typical) assumption that religion is either a "private matter" or just another element that some cultures have. If you avoid her on those grounds, that rules out pretty much all fantasy that isn't explicitly Christian ...

*shrugs* I don't really remember.

I'll have to go back through these again, now that I'm working on Secret Project 001.