Building worlds: from tectonic plates to conflict

In Ventosaara, drinking from the great river crossing the desert depends on protection through a baptism that the clergy can deny or revoke. Without it, the water kills. An everyday need passes through a religious institution, and that relationship helps sustain a theocracy’s power. This is the kind of connection that interests me in worldbuilding: geography, magic, and political decisions taking part in the same situation.

I learned a great deal about this approach to worldbuilding from Artifexian↗ (opens in a new tab). I used his The WorldSmith spreadsheets to work on my universe’s physical foundations. The lesson I carried furthest was to begin with tectonic plates, move through winds, oceans, and biomes, consider mineral distribution, and then decide where to place civilizations.

That sequence offers a question to carry through the work: what changes elsewhere in the world when I make this decision? An answer can lead from geography to an economy, from a resource to a dispute, and from a rule of magic to someone determined to keep it secret.

Giving the map a past

Starting with tectonic plates gives the terrain a history. On Earth, plate movements help explain the formation of major features: a collision between continents, for instance, can raise mountain ranges.¹ In building a setting, this provides a starting point for connecting the map’s features.

Once I establish a mountain range, I can examine the crossings it allows, the detours it requires, and the places it separates. Each choice opens possibilities for developing routes, encounters, and distances within the story.

This work can happen at different scales. My setting includes two habitable planets, and the stories of Talia and Delfador take place on the habitable planet closest to the star. The spreadsheets help explore that planetary scale. At the regional scale, the question moves closer to its inhabitants: where can someone travel, how much must they carry, and whom do they depend on along the way?

Following water and heat

Terrain connects to climate. Ocean currents transport heat, and winds help drive the movement of surface waters.² A mountain range can also favor rainfall on one side and drier conditions on the other, depending on air circulation.³

When developing biomes, these relationships help raise questions about why a region is wet or dry and how it connects to neighboring regions. The map gains transitions and conditions that can affect its inhabitants’ everyday lives.

To bring this layer into the writing, it helps to follow a concrete need. Where does a settlement get its water? What can it produce? How much of its food depends on a journey somewhere else? The answers can turn an environmental choice into work, travel, and dependence.

This change of scale is useful because it brings the map closer to the experience of living there. The region on the page becomes a place where someone needs to find water, prepare food, and get home.

Placing civilizations: environment, choices, and power

The distribution of water, usable land, and minerals provides conditions for thinking about settlement. Then come the inhabitants’ decisions: how to share access, negotiate with neighbors, organize labor, and respond to a threat. Those choices can produce different societies even under similar conditions.

One useful way to develop a region is to follow a resource from its origin to its use. Who extracts it? How does it circulate? Who can buy it? Who can prevent others from accessing it? Each stage adds relationships between people to what was previously a point on a map.

In my world, Uivocortante offers a way to explore this transition. It is a mine for coveted magical ore, where enslaved people risk their lives to extract small quantities. The resource is already connected to exploitation and an unequal distribution of power.

From this place, I can develop the relationships needed to sustain its existence: control of the mine, the interests of those who depend on its ore, and the lives of those forced to extract it. These are worldbuilding questions that can also become conflicts within a story.

Ventosaara: an uphill river and control over water

Ventosaara occupies a desert region crossed by a great river, with the Nile as a reference for this presence of water in the desert. In my setting, magic makes the river flow in reverse, uphill until it ends in a lake in an elevated desert region. The capital stands beside that lake.

This choice connects the city’s location to an extraordinary feature of the terrain. The capital lies at the destination of a river that climbs. In developing the place, I can follow the consequences of that condition for people arriving, living there, or trying to advance through the territory.

Travel across the kingdom also involves magic. Its inhabitants used power from the gods, especially the god of wind, to travel in sand boats. This means of transport allowed them to cross the desert and control the territory’s vast gold mines. The resource, the ability to reach it, and religious organization become part of the same structure of power.

The most decisive control concerns water. The river is cursed: only those protected by baptism through Ventosaara’s clergy can drink from it without dying. The clergy can deny that baptism and withdraw protection from someone who has already received it. This puts the ability to drink safely from the river in the hands of an institution that can revoke access.

Ventosaara is an absolute theocracy. The clergy makes most decisions, the king is a “chosen one of the gods,” and the queen handles military affairs. Religious control over water gives that organization a material consequence: clerical authority reaches into a condition of survival. In developing someone’s life within this kingdom, I need to consider what it means to depend on protection that can be withdrawn.

The curse’s origin belongs to a mythical past many millennia old and will remain unknown. This is a worldbuilding choice: its origin stays in myth, while its effects take part in everyday life and the exercise of power. There is room to develop the relationships around the river without resolving where the curse came from.

This condition also helps explain the kingdom’s defenses. Ventosaara is militarily weaker than neighbors such as Frantendur and the Scarlet King, yet it is very difficult to invade. An invader must sustain a presence in the desert, where drinking from that river can be fatal. The curse gives the region an advantage that a comparison between armies alone leaves unexplained.

Here, several worldbuilding decisions begin working together: the desert makes water central; the magical river locates the capital; revocable protection through baptism connects survival with authority; sand boats provide access to the mines. Ventosaara’s political strength takes shape through those relationships. They also give concrete substance to the conflict between freedom and control that I want to explore in the story.

A rule of magic also reshapes the world

Ventosaara shows how a magical rule can affect transport, resources, religion, and war. In developing other abilities within the setting, it helps to follow the same question about consequences: who has access to them, how do they learn, and what must they endure to use them?

In the system I am creating, some power comes through worship of deities or powerful creatures, while other power is learned through manipulating the essence of dreams and nightmares, called channeling or coding. Coding involves domains, effort, and consequences for the practitioner, including marks on the body.

These marks connect a rule to social life. If the use of magic can be recognized, questions arise about recognition, prestige, fear, and concealment. Developing the answers can give magic a place in everyday life and social relationships.

It also matters to distinguish how the world works from what its inhabitants know about it. The system includes Biology, Forces, Soul, Space, and Time, but knowledge of temporal magic remains hidden for much of the story.

Who knows the world’s rules?

Merloen chooses Delfador as his title and discovers temporal magic. He keeps this knowledge out of greed and because he believes its power is too great for other people to control.

That decision makes knowledge part of the conflict. Delfador can know a possibility that others do not even realize exists. In writing this world, I need to consider both positions: what he can do with that discovery, and how others interpret events through incomplete knowledge.

Freedom and control run through my story’s planning. Delfador’s secret brings this theme into a concrete character choice. The magical rule and the decision to keep it secret begin working together.

This reasoning also helps in thinking about institutions. To develop an order, school, or tradition, I can ask what knowledge it preserves, how it passes that knowledge on, and who can learn it. These are ways to give social consequences to the rules I establish for the setting.

Bringing the world into someone’s life

When writing, I can choose a detail through a character’s contact with it. A difficult pass matters during a crossing. A resource’s distribution becomes apparent when someone needs to obtain it. A naming convention gains meaning when it reveals parentage, occupation, or position in a conversation.

In Ventosaara, names can carry parentage, a role, and a noble family. In the Order of Light, they include an honorific and rank. These conventions offer ways to make social organization visible as characters introduce themselves.

Point of view also changes the discovery of a place. The travel book follows Tomas through accounts from his perspective, allowing room for encounters and incomplete interpretations. In the main book, Talia’s relationship with trust, faith, and control offers another way into the setting. Both stories take place in the same world during different eras.

When deciding what to show, I can ask what that person needs to notice at that moment. This helps select, from many worldbuilding decisions, the ones that take part in the scene.

An exercise: follow a decision into a scene

To try this process, imagine a coastal region crossed by a mountain range. This is a hypothetical worldbuilding example, intended to explore relationships between the setting’s layers.

1. Define an environmental condition. Choose the mountains’ position and the wind direction. Examine how that combination might distribute moisture across the region.
2. Choose a need and a resource. Place a settlement and decide where it gets water and a material it depends on. Trace the route from origin to use.
3. Add a social decision. Decide who administers a crossing along that route, what they require to allow passage, and how other people respond to that requirement.
4. Write a situation. Follow someone who needs to cross and encounters a condition they cannot meet. The environment, resource, and social organization now take part in the same problem.

The exercise can be repeated with a magical rule, a discovery, or a custom. Returning from that problem to the map may mean revising a distance, a route, or a place’s importance.

This movement between scales is what I want to explore in worldbuilding: begin with plates and oceans, reach the conditions of life, and follow what people do with them. The story also returns questions to the setting. A difficulty within a scene can reveal exactly which part of the world needs to take shape.

This interest in rules and their consequences also appears in GridTurnWorld, my tactical RPG experiment. There, biomes, perception, and movement form a playable laboratory of interacting systems.

Footnotes

1. USGS, Understanding plate motions↗ (opens in a new tab). A reference on plate boundaries and the formation of features such as mountain ranges. ↩

2. NOAA, Ocean currents↗ (opens in a new tab). A reference on ocean circulation and heat transport. ↩

3. NOAA, Teek and Tom Educator’s Guide — Lesson 2↗ (opens in a new tab). Educational material on winds, terrain, and rain shadows. ↩