Episode 20: Learn How to Create Places of Interest

Listen as host Randy Ellefson discusses how to create places of interest, including catacombs, interstellar sites, ruins, monuments, and more. Learn how easy these are to create and how they can improve interest in your setting and story.

Listen, Subscribe, and Review this episode of The Art of World Building Podcast on iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher, or Google Play Music!

In This Episode You’ll Learn:

• Concerns about creating floating settlements, whether on water or in the sky
• How ruins can add tension to a story
• What step wells in India are like and how they can be leveraged
• How to make monuments and tie them to world events
• How you can use asteroids and meteors from the past or present to add intrigue
• How to quickly create event sites and what sorts of events you can leverage

Coda

Thanks so much for listening this week. Want to subscribe to The Art of World Building Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? A review would be greatly appreciated!

Episode 20 Transcript

Intro

Hello and welcome to The Art of World Building Podcast, episode number twenty. Today’s topic is about how to create places of interest, including catacombs, interstellar sites, ruins, monuments, and more. Learn how easy these are to create and how they can improve interest in your setting and story. This material and more is discussed in chapter 11 of Creating Places, volume 2 in The Art of World Building book series.

Do you want practical advice on how to build better worlds faster and have more fun doing it? The Art of World Building book series, website, blog, and podcast will make your worlds beat the competition. This is your host, Randy Ellefson, and I have 30 years of world building advice, tips, and tricks to share. Follow along now at artofworldbuilding.com.

Ordinary Places

By “places of interest,” I of course, mean somewhere that your characters are going to visit or hear about, and where something interesting has already happened or is going to happen to them while they are there. They may know that something interesting is going on there or they may be en route from one place to another and they run across this place and something is going on. For anyone doing a story that’s action and adventure, this is something that we often need. If our characters are not traveling and they’re not in an interesting location to begin with, then maybe we don’t need to worry about this. But, for many of us, we’re going to need this. So, let’s look at some of these, and I want to start with some of the more ordinary places, for lack of a better word.

The first one I’ll mention is catacombs and hidden passages. This can also include things like bomb shelters, sewer lines, tunnels and subway lines. Hidden passages can also be anywhere in a city or even in just a building. These places by themselves may not be that spectacular, which is why I said they’re kind of ordinary, but sometimes we can place something spectacular inside them, such as a creature or a monster of some kind. They can also be used to interesting effect if a character is able to access one of these and get from one place to another without anyone realizing that they are doing so. We have all seen that kind of thing done in various stories.

There can also be lost items or items that were purposefully placed there, hidden there, and then, of course, somebody finds them and makes use of it, and havoc ensues. Another idea we’ve probably all seen is some sort of creature inhabiting these places and it uses it as a home or a base from which it emerges and then does unspeakable things that have been capturing people’s attention, and maybe the authorities are looking into this. They eventually track this creature back to this lair. This has been done so often that it’s something of a cliché, but if it’s done well it can be really cool.

Another thing we can do is a map that shows these places, and people didn’t realize that something was there, or the extent of them. Or maybe there’s a room that’s not on the map and this causes some intrigue.

When inventing such places, it’s usually a good idea to have some idea why they exist. This is something that we will want to reveal to the audience at some point. Even early on in the story, if we have approached it in such a way that this place is supposedly ordinary, as I’ve said, but then, as it turns out, other things are going on there that had made it extraordinary. In other words, sometimes it starts off ordinary, and then something else happens that makes it more interesting. Of course, we don’t need an elaborate reason for something like a bomb shelter, sewer lines or subway lines because it’s kind of obvious. And even catacombs, where the dead are buried, have a certain purpose to it.

Where we need to think of a reason is something like a tunnel or a secret passageway. And we can keep that reason relatively simple if we just decide that maybe the occupant of that home, if that’s where the tunnel is, was someone who is paranoid, or maybe they were, at some point, a robber baron or something where they were trying to smuggle stuff, hide it and not get caught. And, of course, we could decide that there is a nefarious reason for it all along, such as this is someone who wanted to murder people or kidnap them, and this is the place where they held those people.

Some locations may be military in origin, such as a place where some sort of secret research was being done. This is especially useful in science fiction. We can invent all sorts of phenomena that may not be supernatural but are something we don’t typically see here on Earth, or are something that we just made up, and where that was being used for experiments, or maybe it was something that needed to be dug out of the ground and processed somewhere, and that’s what the facility’s origin is.

A mundane reason for tunnels could be something like excessive heat in tropical locations where people have created tunnels so that they can cool off during the day. This is obviously something for a less advance civilization because, even our civilization, we have air conditioning, so we don’t need to do something like that. Now, such tunnels for that purpose could still exist because that could’ve been from 1,000 years ago when air conditioning, for example, did not exist. The idea of ancient tunnels and some sort of ancient evil within them is a fairly standard cliché, but again, if we use it well, it can turn out good.

If we have a world with dwarves or another species that is known for tunneling underground, then we don’t need any special explanation unless we want to figure out why they tunneled into this particular location. The obvious answer would be to access something underground such as gold.

The last point I’ll make about this is that sometimes these underground places are not known because they were created so long ago and, over the years, civilization has been built on top of them. And, as a result, modern people may not know, or at least very few people in the settlement may actually know that these are there. So, only a few people might be making use of them, whether that is for good or evil.

Step Wells

Now, I want to switch topics to something known as a stepwell. If you’ve never heard of these, I would Google the phrase, “Step wells in India,” and you will see some really interesting pictures. Basically, what these are, instead of the typical well that we might see in the United States where it’s just a kind of circular hole in the ground with a certain amount of brick wall around it on the surface, these are wells that are really large. I mean, they could be as big as a building. The reason they’re called stepwells is that you can literally walk your way down the steps into the deep recesses of this well. This is something that can not only be used for drinking water, but sometimes people used to do their laundry in such a place. These were so big that people would often gather in it. Some of them look like an amphitheater, almost, the way they steps are all around in concentric circles, or usually in a square or rectangular configuration.

Figure 61 Step Well

When I first saw some of these pictures, I noticed that, sometimes, a certain number of feet down into this stepwell there would be an opening that led into an underground area. And, of course, that immediately sparks the imagination about what could be in there. Another good use for this is that if you have a water-dwelling species, that species might actually be found there and, in fact, this could be the opening to a home of theirs or a place where the underground species and those on land get together and meet because that’s the easiest way to get to these guys if they live in underground rivers, for example. I would take a look at some of these pictures, and maybe they will inspire your imagination the same way they inspired mine.

Monuments

Another area that we just touched on that we should also talk about are monuments like statues, buildings and monoliths. Some of these are going to be kind of ordinary, but some of them will be kind of spectacular. One of the reasons for that could be the size. If most statues are about 10-20 feet tall, and then there’s one that’s 500 feet tall, naturally, people are going to think that this is amazing. Sometimes it’s the person who is depicted in something like a statue that makes it famous. We already talked about creating world figures in a previous episode, so this is one of the ways you can use these guys.

Now, if we’re creating a monument, sometimes these are celebrating an occasion like the end of a war, for example. So, we might want to think about why this thing exists. We can keep it simple. Another good reason is the foundation of the kingdom, for example. In another episode, we had also talked about creating history and events, and this is one way that we can use those again. We should also consider what condition these monuments are currently in, and how old they are because that will help us determine that. There’s a long tradition of badly worn and somewhat forgotten relics of a previous age. Sometimes these are overgrown and being reclaimed by nature. This can add a certain spookiness to them. Monuments that are buildings might house things that are considered valuable, and therefore they may be prone to people trying to steal things or to desecrating them if they are also religious in nature.

Now, why would someone desecrate a religious place? Well, if they are someone who worships in another religion or if that place has been conquered by a foreign power. Sometimes these monuments are still standing, despite the fact that they are somewhat ruined. Any discussion of this sort of thing would be incomplete if we didn’t talk about something like Egypt’s Great Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Stonehenge, or even the Seven Wonders of the World. Well, those are really the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and they included a temple, two statues, the pyramids, of course, and then a mausoleum, garden and a lighthouse.

Many of these were considered amazing architectural feats, so that’s one of the reasons why they were considered amazing. In a world with a lot of technology, like in scientific fiction, it might be a little harder to think of something like this. After all, the most advanced technologies are usually something that we are featuring in our story, such as a spaceship, for example. So, something that’s amazing on an architectural level may be simply dwarfed in coolness by something like a spaceship. Unless, of course, the spaceship is that thing, but then we’re not really talking about a monument, are we?

By the way, if you’re wondering why there are considered to be seven ancient wonders, that’s because, back then, there were seven bodies up in the sky. That included the sun, the moon and then the five planets that had been discovered at that time. This is actually the same reason why we have seven days in a week. So, if you’re looking for a different number of wonders in your world, well, you can do the same thing. If you decide there are six or eight heavenly bodies, then you can have six or eight wonders of your world. In science fiction, maybe it’s something like galaxies or nebula that we are counting.

Graves

The last relatively ordinary place I’ll mention is graves. Sometimes we have a mausoleum which can be enormous or uniquely decorated, or it could have someone famous buried inside it. Of course, this offers a good opportunity for grave robbing. Some of these might have guards, which could be ordinary or extraordinary, such as a ferocious animal, a monster, maybe a demon, something technological or even magical. So, if we have characters who are trying to rob this place, there’s a lot of pretty cool stuff that we could put in their way.

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Extraordinary Places

Let’s talk about a few more extraordinary places. The first on my list is underwater settlements. This makes a lot of sense if you have a species that, of course, lives underwater. Why treat them like fish who are seemingly just migrating all the time, or who might use a coral reef as somewhere to hover around? We could actually have them building actual homes and settlements underwater. And these could be in various places. They could be actually at a coral reef or they could be created out of a cliff or something like an underwater mountain. In a setting with magic or technology, we could also decide that they have created this using that magic or technology so that there are places that have even pockets of no water inside the settlement so that visitors like humans can visit and be comfortable in a space that has been carved out for just them.

We could also use magic or technological portals that allow people to simply appear there and then leave. In other words, maybe they don’t actually have to swim there or use a submarine or something to that effect.

A similar idea is the floating settlement. Now, there are really two versions of this. One is floating on water, and then the other one is floating in the sky. Unless the physics of your world are different, such as in the Avatar films where there are actually things floating for whatever reason, we’re going to need magic or technology to achieve the effect of something floating in the sky. The great thing about that not being natural is that this can, of course, be sabotaged by someone and cause a major problem. As you might expect, whatever is holding it aloft is going to be under heavy guard to prevent exactly that kind of catastrophe.

Aside from the fact that this place is floating in the air, it may not differ from other places by that much. However, there are a few ways in which it is different. Obviously, you can’t just go wherever you want by walking off the edge of this, unless falling to your death is something that you really want. All kidding aside, that does suggest that the ends of this place are not only heavily guarded, but it might actually be impossible for you to walk off the edge. Of course, you don’t really need the edge. You could fall down something like that famous scene from one of the Star Wars films where, right when Darth Vader tells Luke Skywalker, “I am your father,” he falls through that chute. The next thing you know, he’s hanging on the bottom of this floating city and he’s about to fall to his death. Except, of course, somebody comes by and rescues him. So, there could be other ways within the city that you could end up falling through the bottom.

On that note, that scene may not be particularly realistic because you would think that they would have some way to detect that there’s a heat signature on something, and maybe they should try to rescue whatever’s down there. Another issue that we should think about is that most likely the only danger to this place, aside from a malfunction that would cause it to crash to the ground, is going to be being attacked by something that can fly. In SF, we have ships that can attack this place, but there may be natural creatures like dragons that would exist in a fantasy setting, where they can also pose a threat. But all of those threats that might be on the ground, they’re not going to be able to do much. One of the problems that we might have is that doing any sort of trade with this place could be an issue. In fact, any sort of farming is typically done outside the confines of a settlement, but if it’s up in the clouds, what you going to do for food? You’re probably going to have to get it from somewhere else. Then the question becomes, how do you get it here? There are some logistical things that you may want to think about. These can add some interest to your setting.

Another concern is, what do you do when there are hurricanes or other strong storms? What kind of protection does such a place have from these? When it comes to realism, this is the single most realistic reason not to do floating settlements at all, unless we’re talking about a world where the weather is pretty much always calm.

Now when it comes to settlements that are floating on the water, we actually do have one of those called Venice here on Earth. However, it’s kind of an illusion. Most of the city I actually on stilts, but it gives the impression of floating on water. But since we are writing fantasy or SF, we can get away with one that actually is floating on the water. Once again, a water-dwelling species is the likely culprit behind creating such a place, or being very prominent there.

But as we were just talking about a minute ago, what happens where there’s a storm? Something that’s built underwater doesn’t experience this that much because it’s insulated from the effect of even a hurricane, especially if it’s deep enough, like a hundred feet down. But anything on the surface is obviously going to be pretty affected by waves. Now when it comes to Venice, it’s protected for the most part by a lagoon. If you’re thinking about creating such a place, you might want to think about putting a natural protection around it like that. Or it can be artificial, and once again, something can go wrong with that protection.

Another issue is, of course, the sea monster. This could affect both floating settlements and those underwater. If those monsters are known to be around, maybe these settlements don’t exist at all. They may provide too easy a target for something like this.

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Strange Phenomena

Another kind of place of interest that we can create is one where there are strange phenomena. This is something of a staple in both fantasy and science fiction. Space offers the possibility for nebulas, radiation and even alien planet environments. Strange planets offer all sorts of possibilities that we can make up or base on something that NASA has discovered. One of the great things about space phenomena is that we can basically have them be wherever we decide to put one.

Figure 13 A Dark Constellation

By contrast, any sort of weird phenomena that’s on a planet or another body, like a moon or an asteroid, is typically associated with a given location and it isn’t going anywhere. This means that while it can be discovered, it also could’ve previously been discovered and it is already known to be in that location. This, in turn, could mean that people are going there on purpose to make use of it in some way. How will, of course, depend on what the phenomena is. Making it something dangerous is often particularly attractive to us. This can be true, even if the phenomena could have a positive result such as being able to harvest something from it that can be used in a positive way, such as powering a space engine or, possibly, providing a cure for something. Just because it can be used for good doesn’t mean that something bad cannot happen when people are trying to collect it, or if they just encounter it by accident.

Speaking of accidents, that’s a really good way to create phenomena. We can have either magical disasters or technological ones. Having an explanation for a phenomenon is optional. Sometimes it will improve things, and other times we might want to just leave it a mystery. Sometimes we can actually do both and just leave it undecided for a long time, and then, eventually, someone figures out where this phenomenon originated. Experiments gone wrong, or especially a battle where something has happened, such as a ship being destroyed, are good sources of such phenomena. We can also use these phenomena to create monsters or other creatures who have come in contact with it, and possibly been transformed in some way. This is where superheroes in comics often originate.

While we’re on the subject of space, let’s talk a little bit about meteors. These can, of course, impact a planet and leave a crater that a less technologically advanced people might wonder what caused this, and they may assume that one of the gods did something. People can also attribute something supernatural to a meteor that is seen passing through the sky. This can be true if that meteor comes by at regular intervals, such as every 25 years, or if it’s only a one-time occurrence. Now, in science fiction, people probably realize more what’s going on, and they may not have this kind of myth anymore. But, even so, such an advanced civilization, or people from that, could be traveling around and come upon a planet where the technology is much less advanced. And, as a result, the people there do see this as something spectacular.

Event Sites

While we’re on the subject, we also have event sites. And the meteor crash could be one of these, but there are others such as a famous battle happening somewhere, or maybe the tide of war turning. Or there could be something like a species that was massacred somewhere, or maybe there was just a really high body count. Now, all of the examples I just gave are kind of gruesome, but we can create other positive ones as well. For example, there could be a place where a prophet revealed something, such as the way Moses is believed to have brought down the Ten Commandments. We also have things like a shrine, a church or a monument that may mark a special site that has a positive association. The monument could be somewhere where something happened for the first time, such as magic being discovered, or a type of magic, or something like the first contact with an alien species, or the first launch of a technology.

There are also natural phenomena like the Aurora Borealis, geysers or even sinkholes that sometimes gain special significance. Some of these places are a little bit more ordinary than some of the others we’ve been talking about, but we can make them more interesting by associating them with a cool story.

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Ruins

Another type of area that we’ve touched on before is the ruin. These can be a bit of cliché, especially in fantasy, but these are places that are ripe for death by misadventure. We can have monsters there, treasure and other items that can lure people there, for one reason or another, including something like a distress call that is going out. Some ruins will be legendary, and some of them will be unknown and discovered by accident by our characters. Danger is often assumed to be in these places, at least if we are setting a story there, because otherwise what’s the point of having our characters run across it?

Audiences tend to enjoy watching people explore a place and wonder what’s going to happen next. One twist we can do is having our characters not be the first ones who have run across it, but maybe someone else just did so the day before and they are still present. And now we’ve got a bit of an issue going on between these two different groups of characters.

A good ruin is like a mystery where, as a storyteller, we slowly unfold the story of what’s going on now, and maybe where this ruin came from before. And one of the ways to do that is to place interesting places within this. You know, we’re talking about creating places of interest. Well, the overall ruin can be a place of interest, but within there we can create some of the things that we’ve already talked about, such as monuments. The trick is to figure out how we can have our characters discover multiple things of interest where the general interest of this place is continuing to rise as they interact with it. We may also want to figure out what happened to the people who used to live here. One of the obvious examples is simply that they were attacked, they were conquered, and then this place became abandoned. A more mundane reason is something like trade routes drying up or the local economy falling apart.

Now, no one typically does that kind of thing in stories because it’s not that interesting, even though that is a major reason why some places become ruins. It’s arguably better to have an interesting reason behind it being discovered than something kind of boring like this. We should also figure out how overgrown this location is. A rainforest or a swamp is going to quickly consume a place so that it’s almost impossible to find. On the other hand, a desert is only going to slightly bury the place.

Last Thoughts

Now, one of the subjects that I’m not going to cover today is shipwrecks and what we can do with these to make them interesting, and that includes the reasons they are famous. I’m also not going to talk too much about where to start with creating places of interest because they are relatively easy to do and it’s one of the things that we can create kind of on the spur of the moment when we are not in the midst of creating a story or something that’s more involved like a species. This is a kind of lightweight thing that we can just create, and we might even create some things that we don’t use in a particular setting any time soon, or we just create it in general and then, maybe one day, we’re creating a setting and we go, “Oh, I had this idea. Let me take that and put it in this setting because I now know how I can use that.”

So, this is a great way to just invent stuff on the fly. Spend 10 minutes here, a week later you do another maybe 30 minutes of working on an idea, and you can just accumulate really interesting things that you can eventually find a use for.

Closing

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Episode 18: Learn About Travel in Space

Listen as host Randy Ellefson talks about travel in space. This includes the different types of engines, what to include inside a ship, and why we have a lot of freedom to decide how long it really takes to get anywhere.

Listen, Subscribe, and Review this episode of The Art of World Building Podcast on iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher, or Google Play Music!

In This Episode You’ll Learn:

• The different engine types we can use, how they differ, and consequences of each
• How the distance between locations impacts travel in space in ways unique to space
• What we must consider about the external structure of our ships
• What to include on the inside of ships and pitfalls to watch out for

Coda

Thanks so much for listening this week. Want to subscribe to The Art of World Building Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? A review would be greatly appreciated!

Episode 18 Transcript

Intro

Hello and welcome to The Art of World Building Podcast, episode number eighteen. Today’s topic is travel in space. This includes the different types of engines, what to include inside a ship, and why we have a lot of freedom to decide how long it really takes to get anywhere This material and more is discussed in chapter 5 of Creating Places, volume 2 in The Art of World Building book series.

Do you want practical advice on how to build better worlds faster and have more fun doing it? The Art of World Building book series, website, blog, and podcast will make your worlds beat the competition. This is your host, Randy Ellefson, and I have 30 years of world building advice, tips, and tricks to share. Follow along now at artofworldbuilding.com.

Engine Types

It’s fair to say that most of us have no experience traveling in space. The result is a need to do research on what this is really like. We can also rely on TV shows that we’ve seen, whether those are fictional in nature – and movies – or we can rely on TV shows that are more informational. Now, as it turns out, I work at NASA, but I am not a rocket scientist. But I do have access to people who are rocket scientists and I have run some of what I’m going to tell you by them to get their buy-off on this.

The first thing we want to talk about is propulsion because there are different kinds of engines that are used in space or in an atmosphere. Some of these are real and some are fictional. One thing I’ve noticed that’s interesting is that if an engine type is real, authors don’t typically spend the time explaining how it works, but if it’s fictional, we do.

However, we don’t really need to do that if we don’t want to. I suspect one reason this happens is that authors have as little interest as the average person in explaining how an actual technology works, but when we’ve made up something interesting, we’re trying to attract the attention of the audience as well and say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if this thing existed and it could do this? Here are some ideas on how that might work.” And it’s all speculative. Some science fiction makes a lot of mention of this, like in Star Trek, but others don’t make any mention of it at all. So, you have a choice here. If you don’t want to write a bunch of techno babble that you typically hear in Star Trek, then don’t.

Air-breathing Engines

So, the first kind of engine we’ll talk about are the air-breathing ones. These are obviously designed for when there is an atmosphere. In other words, this is not in space where, obviously, there is no atmosphere. So, in an episode about travel in space, why am I talking about this? Well, because your ships might still have such engines. Now, with real technology, I don’t explain in this podcast any more than in a story of mine how it actually works for the reasons I just mentioned. So, I’m not going to cover all the different types of air-breathing engines. We just need to decide if our spaceship has these.

Why would they? Well, arguably, space engines are designed for space. Therefore, they may have attributes that don’t make them work quite as well in an atmosphere. Therefore, our ship may be able to alternate between these. When I watch certain science fiction shows and movies, I sometimes hear the pilot say something like, “Switching to so-and-so power,” as they are changing from one type of maneuvering to another. Sometimes that means when they’re going from space to an atmosphere or the opposite. This is a detail we can add to our ship to make it more believable.

Now, if we like the idea that we have ships that don’t need this, we can still do that because, in any science fiction setting, just as today, we have different technology. Some of it is old and some of it is newer. So, we could have our characters on a ship that is old and, therefore, they have to do this kind of switching back and forth between air-breathing engines and space engines. We can have a character remark that he’s making this change and say that this spaceship is a bit of a clunker because they still have to do this, and he prefers the one he doesn’t have to make this kind of switch. Obviously, this is just subtle detail and not something critical to the plot, but such little details can make things more believable.

Besides, why have all of your ships be the same? This and other issues with their vessel could be the reason why they’re on the lookout to acquire something better, which is certainly something that would add to your plot. They might want to steal something or buy something and not have the funds to do so, or someone might have stolen their ship and now the best they can do is afford this clunker. This issue of having to switch back and forth between engine types could be one of the things that this adds. Another issue with multiple types of engines is that they’re probably going to have different fuel sources and, therefore, they could run out of fuel for one type of engine but not the other.

Space Engines

Let’s talk about space engines. Space engines are divided into two categories: Those that allow faster-than-light speeds (or FTL) and those that do not, which are known as slower-than-light (or STL). Only the slower-than-light ones are real. Everything else is fictional. For slower-than-light engines, the propulsion is at least a little bit similar to atmospheric engines in that something is being ejected, usually from the rear of the vessel. This is, of course, what propels the ship forward. This is one reason why these types of engines could be used in atmospheric conditions instead of something that is specifically designed for atmospheric conditions.

Some STL engines could propel the ship fast enough that this can cause time dilation. This is when two observers experience a difference in how much time has passed. We sometimes see this in science fiction where the captain tells the pilot to travel at a certain speed but not to go beyond a certain threshold because that’s going to cause this time dilation. They may say, “Go up to speed eight, but no faster.” Sometimes the captain will explain why, but really the pilot’s going to understand already. So, sometimes, that kind of exposition is only being said for the sake of the audience.

One solution to that sort of scenario is to have an ignorant character standing there and ask the question, “Captain, if we’re in such a hurry, why don’t we go up to speed nine or ten when the ship can do that?” And have the captain explain why. We’re so used to that kind of thing that we accept it, but if you stop and think about it, it’s not that believable because anyone who lives in a society that has space travel is going to understand time dilation.

Here on Earth we do have space travel, but so few of us do that that most of us are only dimly aware of this. The only reason we’ve heard of it at all is from watching science fiction. But using the Star Trek example, in that sort of future where there is so much space travel going on, people are going to know this. We may need another solution, such as instead of the ignorant character, have someone else say, “Not in the mood for any time dilation today, Captain?” or something to that effect.

Let’s take a look at some fictional faster-than-light drives, all of which are public domain, which means we can use these ideas.

Jump Drive

One of them is called “jump drive.” As the name implies, the ship can simply jump from one place to another one like it’s being teleported there. As you can imagine, this is pretty convenient. What if you had a personal version of this right now and you could simply jump from home to work and back? While this is pretty cool, the problem that this creates for us as storytellers is that it pretty much eliminates all drama, tensions and problems that come with having to travel from one place to another. We’re not going to run into enemy ships that are going to bother us unless we run into them when we arrive. We’re not going to run across a distressed ship that needs help. In space, we don’t really deal with monsters typically, but there’s this issue of when you’re traveling, stuff happens. Well, that’s not going to happen in this scenario.

In that sense, there could be a lack of tension and, therefore, a lack of drama. And that’s not necessarily a good thing. If you have this sort of drive, I would suggest using it sparingly in your setting so that this is something rare. It’s also a little too easy for characters to get out of trouble with this if they’re doing something and then enemy ships show up, they can simply jump right out of there. They’re not going to have to fight unless the jump drive is malfunctioning or something. As you might expect, since there is no actual travel, a ship that has a jump drive is not going to experience time dilation when they use it.

Hyperdrive

Another type of drive is the hyperdrive, which is a drive that moves a ship into hyperspace. This is a fictional, separate dimension that is adjacent to normal space. Storytellers often use this idea that a ship that’s in hyperspace has difficulty or it’s not even possible to interact with a ship that’s in normal space. One reason we do this is that hyperspace has some advantages and, therefore, we should also give it some disadvantages. The greatest advantage is the speed with which it allows a ship to travel great distances. This type of drive also experiences no time dilation when people return to normal space.

Warp Drive

That brings us to the last space engine, and that is warp drive. This is probably associated with Star Trek for many of us, but this is a public domain idea. There’s this idea that there are different levels of warp, such as warp five being slower than warp six. The instantaneous travel, like jump drive, is not possible with warp. There is also no time dilation, but one of the issues here is that the ship is remaining in normal space. One thing that I don’t see mentioned typically is that there are plenty of objects with which a ship can collide. Despite the word “space,” there is a lot of stuff out there. It’s just that it is fairly well spaced out.

My big point here is that a ship is not going to be traveling this fast unless it has some sort of shield to protect itself from that kind of debris. So, a believable detail we can add is that there’s been some sort of battle and, as a result, the ship’s shields are down and someone says, “Hey, we need to get out of here at warp drive,” and someone else says, “Well, no. We can’t do that because we could hit something.” Having to leave that scene of the battle at a slower speed could also pose problems for them.

More Resources

If you’re looking for more world building resources, Artofworldbuilding.com has most of what you need. This includes more podcasts like this one, and free transcripts if you’d prefer to read an episode.

You can also find more information on all three volumes of The Art of World Building series, which is available in eBook, print, and audiobook formats. Much of the content of those books is available on the website for free.

You can also join the mailing list at artofworldbuilding.com/newsletter. This gets you free, reusable templates from each published volume in the series. You don’t even need to buy the books to get these. I also send out contest information, free tips, and other stuff to help with your efforts. Please note I do not share your email address with anyone as that’s against my privacy policy, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Sign up today to get your free content and take your world building to the next level.

Distance Issues

Now we’re going to look at distance. One of the realities of space is that any two locations are not going to be a fixed distance from each other. Everything is orbiting something. Moons orbit planets, planets orbit suns, and even the sun orbits the galaxy. All of that this means is that the distance between two places is always changing. In a previous episode about land travel, I talked about writing the words “not drawn to scale” on our map. Well, if we’ve created a map of a star system, we don’t even need to do that because it’s not going to be relevant. There’s also the caveat that no one can show up and tell us that our fictional star system has things that are a different distance from each other than they really are. One impact of all of this is that two objects, like two planets, might be on the same side of the sun, or on opposite sides, or somewhere in between.

As you can imagine, this could significantly change the amount of time it takes to travel from one to the other. In some science fiction, authors make no mention of this, but in other stories, they do. The way we would typically want to do this is to basically say that the characters need to get from where they are now to another place, but maybe they don’t have enough fuel to make the journey, given how far away that other location is at the moment. Maybe they have to wait a week or a month to do this. Or they could leave right now, but one of the issues is that it’s going to take a month to get there when they need to get there in only two weeks, maybe because there is an event taking place on that location in two weeks. Someone could remark, “It’s too bad that this didn’t happen several months ago when the planets were closer.”

This is also the sort of situation where if someone had a jump drive, it would be very advantageous because it wouldn’t really matter. On the other hand, if they don’t have it, then maybe they have to use hyperspace. Maybe they need to use slower-than-light travel, but they need to go beyond that threshold that’s going to avoid time dilation. They’re going to go so fast that they will cause time dilation and there’s just no choice. They’ve got to do it. Mentioning this sort of detail or putting it into your storyline is one way to make things more believable. One good thing about all of this is that it gives us flexibility to inject this sort of problem into our story.

At times, we might want to make it suddenly very easy for the characters. Like two planets or locations happen to be relatively close and they’re happy about that. Other times, we may want to make it more difficult. Try not to imagine that everything just works out magically and that there is no problem, ever.

Also bear in mind that when a ship is traveling to meet a planet, for example, it’s not traveling to where that planet is now, but where that planet is going to be. Naturally, this sort of thing involves computers figuring out some of this math for us, but what if the computers are down? Can we have a character who is pretty good at this sort of thing doing it manually? They can at least start their journey based on the manual calculation. Then, if someone gets the computer working, they can input the fixes later. This is another way to be more believable.

One of the problems we could face is trying to figure out should we first create engines that can travel a certain speed and, therefore, cover a certain distance in a certain amount of time, and then base our story around that, or should we create our story idea first and then figure out what kind of engines we want to make available? That includes coming up with engines that don’t quite do everything that our characters need. This is also one way to force them into a situation where they have a ship that doesn’t do the job, but if they had a different ship, well, then that would take care of the problem, such as a ship that has jump drive. I would say that we should invent a propulsion system first and then alter how far away locations in our story are based on the needs.

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External Ship Structure

One question we may face as world builders is what is the internal structure of our spacecraft? In a visual medium like television and film, we’re also going to worry about the external view because we’re going to have depictions of this on-screen. Now, most likely, if we are working in that sort of medium, we are going to have somebody who has designed that spacecraft for us, but for all I know you are the sort of person who depicts that spacecraft.

When it comes to the exterior of a ship, there is a tendency to draw something that is aerodynamic looking, even if it’s designed to be in space. One notable exception to that is the Borg Cube from Star Trek. When it comes to these more aerodynamic ships, one of the reasons we do this is that this ship may have to operate within an atmosphere. Now, we may decide that the ship is never, under any circumstances, going to operate within an atmosphere, and therefore we can get away with something that is not aerodynamic. Otherwise, if we think there’s any possibility it can enter an atmosphere and operate there, then we should make it aerodynamic. Any character who sees such a non-aerodynamic vessel is going to automatically assume it can’t operate in an atmosphere.

But just because something is aerodynamic looking doesn’t mean that it is designed for atmospheres. So, why would it still look that way? Well, just because we expect it. There is still the matter of slower-than-light propulsion ejecting matter, which is sometimes on the sides, but it could also, most likely, be on the rear. And then there’s the reality of needing to look forward through a window, for example, at the space that you are traveling through. Both of these lend themselves to that similar ship shape.

However, when it comes to that window, we could dispense with the actual window and use a series of view screens instead. There are other issues like this that we can consider, but basically it doesn’t have to be that way. It just can be. If we present it that way, the audience is never going to shrug and say, “Why in the world does it look like that?” We basically accept that without even thinking about it.

We may also want to consider where the ship can be loaded. On Earth, when you’re getting on a cruise ship or anything else on the water, the cargo typically goes on the bottom, regardless of whether it’s loaded from the back or the side. The reason for this is that we don’t want to make the ship top-heavy so that it doesn’t topple over. In space, we obviously don’t have to worry about that. Unless there is artificial gravity, the cargo is not going to weigh anything. That kind of brings up another point. Why don’t we ever see a cargo hold on a science fiction vessel where everything is basically floating? It’s always shown as it is pulled down. It’s just sitting there. The obvious answer for this is that it’s easier for the film crew to film it that way rather than using special effects to show everything floating all the time. But it seems plausible that you would not want artificial gravity in the cargo hold.

Of course, this is going to depend on how the ship is generating that artificial gravity. If it’s one of the more believable rotating vessels, then obviously everything has gravity and there’s only so much you can do about that. However, on that note, if you do have a rotating vessel, there’s going to be more gravity on the farthest reaches of that vessel than towards the center where there’s still going to be almost none. Once again, this is something that is sometimes overlooked. It’s a nice detail we can add for believability. Most of the living space would obviously be on the farthest reaches of that so it has the maximum gravity that they’ve intended for people to have. But there might be maintenance things that are happening towards the center of that vessel where those people have to float.

Now, if we don’t have to worry about that cargo having a weight to it, we could assume, “Hey, it can be loaded anywhere.” Well, what if people have done that and they’ve loaded all the cargo on, say, the left side of the ship, and then this space-faring vessel enters an atmosphere? Suddenly, it’s going to have gravity and all that weight is going to be on one side. The next thing you know, our ship is lopsided and it might crash. Naturally, this is one scenario where maybe they do have artificial gravity in the cargo hold all the time so that they don’t have to worry about this. But it could also be a situation where as they are preparing to enter an atmosphere, they have to go and turn on more artificial gravity there, or something to that effect. Maybe they also have to move the cargo around prior to this. If the cargo was loaded in space, maybe they didn’t worry about this, but if the cargo was loaded on the ground where there is gravity, then they would have worried about this. But then, maybe once they’re into space, they rearrange things.

There are some other considerations like where the weapons are located and where the engines really are, but we can basically make up a lot of that. The big thing we need to worry about there is that we don’t want guns that can accidentally shoot into the ship. By the same token, we obviously don’t want engines that are going to burn up part of the ship. What this really means is that the slower-than-light engines that are ejecting matter to cause propulsion are probably going to be on the sides or in the back, but really the faster-than-light engines with these fictional ways of getting around, we can pretty much put that anywhere. We might have a ship design where the slower-than-light engines are on a typical location that we would see on an atmospheric engine, but the faster-than-light ones, we could just decide to put that wherever we want. We could put that further inside the ship so that it is more protected from enemy fire.

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Internal Ship Structure

Let’s talk about the internal structure of our ship. If our ship is really small, so much so that only two people can fit inside it, for example, then the internal structure doesn’t really matter because it’s probably a single room. But if we’re talking about something like the Enterprise from Star Trek, then the structure of the ship does matter. One reason is that characters need to move between locations, like the bridge, the cargo, the engine room, and their quarters. We may have active scenes such as aliens breaching the ship at a certain place in the hull, and it might be five minutes for our characters to get there at a full run, but they need to get there in two minutes because, otherwise, the aliens are going to destroy something.

To some extent, we could just make up scenarios like that, but if we’re going to use the ship repeatedly, we may want to have a sense of this so we can be consistent. We don’t want it to take five minutes to make that trip in one story and then two minutes in another and then ten minutes in a different one. Having planned out our ship to some degree helps us think of scenarios like this to start with. We can organize our vessel to avoid one problem, but we’re probably going to set up another one. So, no ship is foolproof and any scenario could come up where it just causes a problem.

There are certain realities that are going to exist on a ship, such as the living quarters being somewhere near the dining areas. Now, that said, if you’ve ever been on a cruise ship, they do have the main dining area, but they have all sorts of smaller restaurants spread throughout the vessel. Such a scenario will also be true on a large spacecraft. Similarly, there will also be things like lounges in different locations so people can relax regardless of where they are.

Things like propulsion and cargo are typically located towards the rear of a vessel. More importantly, they are farther away from the living quarters because most people don’t want to be near that, partly because that area tends to be a little bit on the dirty side. If you’re creating a passenger ship, this is something to keep in mind. The cheaper rooms are going to be in such an area, or at least near that area.

If we do plan out our ship, I would suggest not going overly detailed unless it’s really going to matter to your story. For example, you may want to say that engineering is on deck six towards the rear of the vessel, and it’s on the port side, for example. You can just leave it at that. You don’t have to say that adjacent to that is some other area. You can basically decide a certain deck and one side of the ship has a certain number of things, and not actually figure out exactly what is right across from each other or next to each other until it matters in your story. Being a little more generic and general about the location of these things gives us some flexibility if we need to change things later.

As for what we’re going to include in our ship, we obviously need a bridge, which is the command center where all the decisions are being made and where a lot of the senior officers are during the important scenes. We’re obviously also going to need to living quarters. Now, one thing that we may want to do there is have the officers have better quarters than the regular crew. Whether our ship is a passenger vessel or not, it’s going to have a certain amount of entertainment. It’s just that the number and type of those are going to vary. Even on a military ship, we’re still going to have shops because people need to buy supplies. On a passenger ship, many of those shops are going to be concentrated in a mall-like area.

Any vessel could also have a jail, which is also called the brig. A military vessel is almost certainly going to have something like this, but even the passenger ones may have one. We may also want to plan out where the escape pods are if these are going to be used in our story. These are typically going to be mostly near the living quarters, but some of them are also going to be spaced throughout the ship so that those who are working the ship and controlling it when it needs to be evacuated still have somewhere to get to relatively quickly rather than having to go all the way back to their living quarters.

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Where to Start

Finally, let’s talk about where to start with space travel. The first decision we should really make when planning a vessel is to decide where it’s going to operate: only in space or both in space and in atmospheric conditions? Another early decision: Is this a cargo ship, a passenger ship or a war vessel? In some cases, it could’ve started this life out as one thing and have been converted into another. We should also decide whether the purpose of our ship is local travel near the planet where it originated from or is it intended to go in between solar systems or even stars? This will determine what sort of engines are needed. If the local solar system is relatively peaceful, then it may also determine how many weapons it has. We should also figure out what kind of events we want to take place on this ship and what kind of vulnerabilities it might have which can be exploited by the way we layout the ship.

These are just suggestions. You can do things in whatever order you decide. One of the general recommendations I always make is if you have an idea for something, just work on that first. The best point of origin is an idea.

Closing

All of this show’s music is actually courtesy of yours truly, as I’m also a musician. The theme song is the title track from my Some Things are Better Left Unsaid album, but now we’re closing out today’s show with a song from my album The Lost Art called “Loeillet de Gant, Sonata No. 1, Second Movement.” You can hear more at RandyEllefson.com. Check out artofworldbuilding.com for free templates to help with your world building. And please rate and review the show in iTunes. Thanks for listening!

Episode 15.2: Learn How to Create Sovereign Powers

Listen as host Randy Ellefson talks about how  to create a settlement. This includes the differences between an outpost, village, town, city, and even settlements in space.

Listen, Subscribe, and Review this episode of The Art of World Building Podcast on iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher, or Google Play Music!

In This Episode You’ll Learn:

• Which settlement types have the most corruption
• How travelers might be treated in each
• What kind of attitudes will be where
• Where to places your outposts, villages, towns, and cities
• And other differences between one type and another

Coda

Thanks so much for listening this week. Want to subscribe to The Art of World Building Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? A review would be greatly appreciated!

Episode 15.2 Transcript

Intro

Hello and welcome to The Art of World Building Podcast, episode number fifteen, part two. Today’s topic concludes our discussion about how to create a settlement. This includes the differences between an outpost, village, town, city, and even settlements in space. . This material and more is discussed in chapter 6 of Creating Places, volume 2 in The Art of World Building book series.

Do you want practical advice on how to build better worlds faster and have more fun doing it? The Art of World Building book series, website, blog, and podcast will make your worlds beat the competition. This is your host, Randy Ellefson, and I have 30 years of world building advice, tips, and tricks to share. Follow along now at artofworldbuilding.com.

The Outpost

When we’re populating our continent with settlement types, we have a variety of these to choose from, and we’re going to start this podcast by starting with the smallest ones, like an outpost, and work our way up to the megalopolis. The difference between all of them is, of course, physical, and this is determined, partly, by population size, their defenses and the availability of resources. But size, in turn, affects what is available there.

We can call something an outpost, a castle, a tower or something else, but we’re basically talking about a single building or a small group of them that are not big enough to qualify as a village. I’m generalizing throughout this episode, but these outposts may not be permanently staffed with people. This may have consequences, such as the inability to do farm work, depending on how often this place is inhabited.

Naturally, once plants are planted, they need time to grow and, arguably, there’s only so much that needs to happen in the meantime. Now, someone who is a farmer listening to this might think that there’s all sorts of things that need to happen, so pardon my ignorance, but if there are people there every season and they can do something with the plants that have been planted, such as harvesting them or planting them at a different time, then it may be possible for farming to happen. But my point is that if no one is there except for occasionally, such as once a year, then farming is not going to happen.

Farming is not the most exciting topic to most of us, but the point here is that if people cannot grow their food there, they’re going to have to bring it in from somewhere else. In science fiction, with something like a food replicator, this is less of an issue. In a fantasy setting with magic, it might be possible to open a portal somewhere and, therefore, supplies can come in that way. Without these options, people are going to have to bring their food with them. The exception is, of course, anything that they can catch or hunt.

Now, to over simply things, if the inhabitants are basically evil and they do obnoxious things, then they’re not going to have any problem raiding a local village or town for their food supplies. On the other hand, if they’re more benevolent and get along with people, and this is part of a sovereign power and there is a nearby village, town or whatever, then that other settlement might be tasked with providing food as necessary to anyone who is in this outpost. Another option here is that this outpost could be so far away from every other settlement, and it might even be forgotten, that there is no one who is responsible for this place. And that’s true whether we’re talking about supplies or even maintaining this place when no one is occupying it.

If no one is responsible for this place, then it has probably fallen into a certain amount of disrepair. Another option we have is that there might be other things inhabiting it. For example, we could have a monster living there. We could have orcs, goblins or something else in a typical fantasy setting that are making use of this settlement. This might be a known problem so that anyone who is intending to come there and make use of this for more peaceful purposes, for example, they might know that when they arrive they’re going to have to fight and drive out anything that is occupying it.

Some of these considerations are things that we can do to make it seem like this is not just a standing building that’s out there and no one has anything to do with it and it’s not connected to the real world. There are people and things that are going to be using this even if no one is consistently using it. Some of these might have been truly abandoned so that they are a ruin, but other ones might be only temporarily used or maybe only used seasonally. If that’s the case, you’re probably going to need a reason for that. For example, using weather, let’s say that there’s a monsoon season that only takes place for about two months in every year and, during that time, the monsoon causes certain things to happen to the land. As a result, this place should be occupied. In preparation for the upcoming monsoon season, people will probably come here and clear out anything living there and spruce it up a little bit.

Another issue with an outpost is that the population is smaller and, therefore, there are a lot of professions who are not actually present. In fantasy, they might realize they need a carpenter or a blacksmith, but one is not present. In science fiction, they may realize they need someone with technical skills, like an engineer, and this person simply isn’t present, or the one they have is not advanced enough to do what is needed. This is one reason such an outpost could have an alliance with a larger settlement. There’s also likely to be no police force here so that someone is taking it upon themselves to deal with such matters if it comes up.

When creating such an outpost and deciding which professions are not here, try to think of something where the absence of that person is going to cause a problem for your story. An obvious example would be medical personnel. If someone gets hurt, it’s a little too easy for us to think of the perfect healing ability or technology to fully recover that person. It might be better to have them still impaired in some way, but not as bad as when they were first wounded. Try not to make everything too easy for them.

Castles

Arguably, the largest outpost is going to be something like a castle that has no village surrounding it. Castles are defensive in nature and, therefore, they are largely self-sufficient. They will need the farmland nearby, but of course, a certain amount of those supplies are stored within the castle so that they can withstand a siege of a certain duration, such as a month. However, until recently, the ability to preserve food is pretty limited. So, don’t think that you’re going to have a castle where they have like a year’s worth of food and it’s not going to just rot within a month. That’s only likely to happen if magic is involved.

Now, there may be buildings adjacent to this castle that are not big enough to be considered a village, but basically, these are temporary buildings in the sense that they could be destroyed during a siege, and it’s not a huge loss to the people in the castle. They can always rebuild those. So, there’s only going to be so many of them in this scenario we’re talking about where there’s a castle with no real village. There may still be these other buildings around.

One big question for world builders is where do we place a castle? These are typically placed along an important trade route. They may be near a dangerous territory, such as a mountain pass. If there are nasty things like ogres in that mountain range and they are likely to emerge from those mountains in that mountain pass, then somewhere within a mile or two of that pass there’s probably going to be a castle. The idea would be to stop these ogres before they get further into a sovereign power.

This has another advantage to us in that we can decide that we have a character who is something like a knight who has special training in fighting ogres. And how did he acquire that training? Well, he went to live in that castle for a couple years and he specialized in doing this because that’s what goes on there. This castle could be famous for that and any knight who lives there should be required to go there. And this is one way we can fill out the backstory for such a character.

Another thing to consider about castle placement is that, yes, we may have decided that we want one within, say, two miles of this mountain pass, or whatever the danger is, but then the question is, well, where within those two miles do they actually build the castle? Since it is defensive in nature, castles are often built on existing areas of land that have some sort of natural fortification. The easiest of those is land that is simply higher than the surrounding terrain. There might be something like a cliff face that is standing behind this castle so that no one can attack from behind. There could be a body of water there that is large enough to inhibit anyone from attacking the castle from that direction. If there’s a cliff face on one side and a body of water on another, then this place can only be attacked from two different directions.

A final word on castles is that there seems to be an oversight in a lot of fiction where if a castle is located within a sovereign power, but somewhere near the border – and we’re talking like 50 miles – then there is this impression that whoever owns that castle now has always owned it and, therefore, they are the only ones who know the secrets of this castle. Well, the reality is that if this castle has stood for, say, 1,000 years, it has probably changed hands several times, especially if it is near a border like that.

I can tell you this: If I captured your castle, I would do everything I could to learn its secrets. And then if, let’s say 50 years later, my country lost that castle to yours again, well, I would still know those secrets. I mean, I might be dead. But the point is my sovereign power, we would still understand the secrets of your castle. So, we might know how to break into it in some sort of secret avenue that you’ve created, such as hidden tunnels or whatever. So, it’s not going to be the situation where I don’t have any tactical knowledge of your castle. I’m probably going to know a lot about it. So, try not to fall into this trap of portraying your characters in a story as being the only ones who understand the secrets of this castle. That’s probably not true.

More Resources

If you’re looking for more world building resources, Artofworldbuilding.com has most of what you need. This includes more podcasts like this one, and free transcripts if you’d prefer to read an episode.

You can also find more information on all three volumes of The Art of World Building series, which is available in eBook, print, and audiobook formats. Much of the content of those books is available on the website for free.

You can also join the mailing list at artofworldbuilding.com/newsletter. This gets you free, reusable templates from each published volume in the series. You don’t even need to buy the books to get these. I also send out contest information, free tips, and other stuff to help with your efforts. Please note I do not share your email address with anyone as that’s against my privacy policy, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

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Villages

Let’s talk villages. When we are going to create a settlement type, we often are trying to figure out, “Should it be a village, a city, a town or what?” If we have a map and there’s an area that we consider to be somewhat out of the way, but potentially useful, this is where we might choose to place a village. Why a village? Well, because we might reason that this place has some things to offer, but not so many that it’s going to attract a lot of people. Generally, you probably want to place your villages on a map after you have already decided where the major cities are. Actually, to be honest, I don’t even place villages on my maps unless I’m doing something really regional. The reason is that there would be so many villages that it would completely consume my map. That’s all you would see.

Even so, this basic idea of an out-of-the-way village is one to keep in mind. Such a place is probably less visited and, therefore, they might be less likely to be welcoming of strangers or travelers, and this is something to keep in mind if your characters are going to arrive there. They are more likely to be viewed with suspicion.

Another location for a village is along an important trade route, but not at a critical part of that trade route. At a more critical location, such as a place where multiple roads are coming together from different directions, that might be a major trading point that increasingly builds up to a town and then, later, a city.

So, if we have something like a city at a major crossroads, then where would the villages be? Well, they’re going to be along those trade routes, but at not such a critical place. By along the trade route, I don’t mean that they’re necessarily right on the road.  They could be several miles off to one side. They are, once again, going to be somewhat remote, but not as remote as one that is off in the middle of nowhere. They, therefore, might be used to travelers, especially if it actually is built along the road and it can be seen from there. Such a place is more likely welcoming of strangers.

In the Creating Places book, I have an entire chapter about travel on land, and one of the things you learn in that chapter is how long it takes to get from one place to another by various means of locomotion. The reason I mention this is that if two locations are within a day’s travel, there’s probably not going to be a village along the way. On the other hand, if it would take a week to go from one major location to another, then there’s probably going to be something like a village or a town in between. The reason for this is not only the distance that needs to be traveled, and the fact that a certain number of people are going to be living there, but the reality is that people need somewhere to stay overnight when they are traveling by land. A village may spring up for exactly that purpose. Now, originally, it’s probably just something like a campsite that has a convenient water access. In time, maybe someone built an inn or a tavern there and this becomes the focal point of a village that slowly grows out from around it.

For example, if wagons are routinely going through there, well, wagons breakdown. We might need a carpenter and a blacksmith. So, these might be two people who live in that town. Well, we’re talking villages, but you know what I mean. This sort of point of origin is a good idea to keep in mind because it can affect the attitude of our settlement, such as whether they are welcoming of strangers or they don’t want them to come there. There are other ways that the attitude of such a place can be affected by this. An out-of-the-way village might be one where everyone shares a similar religious belief, for example. Differences might be less tolerated.

By contrast, a village with a more transient population of people coming and going through there is going to be more tolerant of differences. If I’m a traveler and I’m about to approach a village that’s in an out-of-the-way location, maybe I’m smart enough to hide something like a talisman of the god that I worship because I don’t know if that is viewed favorably there. On the other hand, if I’m approaching a village that is right along a major trade route, I might reasonably assume that they are more tolerant and not do such a thing.

Another thing to keep in mind with all villages is that they are less likely to have a dedicated, official protector like a sheriff. The community might be small enough to not need someone who does that on a full-time basis. The reason we might care about this is that there’s probably someone in that settlement who is a better fighter than everyone else, such as an expert swordsman, for example, and that person is the one who is looked to by the rest of the villagers for guidance or, at least, interference when there’s some sort of fight that breaks out. Or if villagers are being approached by travelers who are coming there, this might be the person who someone goes running to get and says, “Hey, there are some people coming up on horses,” for example. “Why don’t you come up in a show of strength and make it clear, ‘Hey, we’re not just defenseless villagers. We’ve got a guy here with a sword and he looks like he knows what he’s doing.’”

So, this person might be seen as an unofficial protector of the town. The same can be done in science fiction where a character can just appear to have a lot of confidence with the way they wear their guns or they’ve got some sort of rifle slung over their back. A village is also unlikely to have something like a wall surrounding it. Or, if they do, it’s probably going to be made of something like wood. That may be less true in science fiction because they are more likely to have technology in general, and it’s relatively easy to have something like a wall built if you have things like spaceships. And, of course, that wall is not going to be made of wood.

While a village may have characters like a carpenter or a blacksmith or an engineer in science fiction, they may not have these individuals. So, once again, we might decide who is here and who is not. The big reason I mention this is that, let’s say it’s fantasy and there used to be a blacksmith who lived here, but he recently died six months ago. Well, now things might be falling into disrepair a little bit and one of our visiting characters might have that skill and be able to barter that. In other words, maybe this character doesn’t have money to pay for food and lodging, but they have the skill and they might have to stay for a week doing a bunch of repairs. And the same thing can be done in science fiction with an engineer.

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Towns

Let’s talk about towns. Unlike with the villages, a town is likely to have more than one of something, such as a blacksmith, a carpenter or an engineer. This means that not only is the population not going to be deprived of such expertise, but there is competition for these people’s skills and the business. A side effect of competition is that everyone raises their game. The result is that everyone here is likely to have a superior skillset compared to the same people who are from a village. Our traveling characters are also less likely to get away with bartering their services for fare and lodging. In other words, they’re going to need money. If they don’t have any, this might be one reason why they visit villages instead of towns.

Another issue with a town is that there tends to be more diversity of the population, and this includes races and species. Depending on which ones you have invented or included in your settlement, this might also affect the amount of crime that takes place here. For that reason, some species might not be welcome here. Or, if they are, they are watched very carefully, or there might be special rules just for them. These rules can include a curfew or not being allowed to carry weapons. There is also almost certainly a dedicated police force. Both of these promote more rules and laws. That, in turn, means there’s probably a jail.

Now, there are likely to be fewer laws here than a city, which means that there could be more corruption. We could have businesses more likely to cheat customers, for example. Sometimes corrupt officials hold considerable power, and this kind of reminds me a lot of the Hollywood westerns that we’ve seen. A stereotype of those is a traveling character who arrives somewhere and runs afoul of the corrupt sheriff who is intimidating the town.

Taxes are almost a certainty in a town. While that’s not a glamorous subject, one of the things that comes with taxes is the ability for the town itself to improve the town. This could mean better roads and better fortifications. Those police we were just talking about need to be paid. We don’t really need to worry about what taxes are used for, but the basic idea is that the town tends to be better quality precisely because of the taxes. There’s also a kind of infrastructure there in the sense that there might be a mayor and he needs to make a living. Although, in some places, he may not be officially paid.

Generally, things are more official and formal here. Naturally, due to the population size, there’s going to be a lot more farming going on nearby. In a less civilized world, like in a fantasy, the farmers may have a lot of prominence. Whereas, in our modern world, we tend to take that for granted because we have such an abundance of food. Try to keep this in mind if you’re writing such a scenario because the farmers have a lot of power.

In addition to the mayor, there might also be a formal town counsel. These people might be appointed, but they might also just be people who have influence in some way, such as those farmers we were just talking about. We could have a wizard, a blacksmith, an engineer or whoever we think is important to this town’s functioning.

A town often has one or more families that have been there a really long time, and they are considered to be very influential and, in fact, the town might actually bear one of their names. In order to ease the management of a town, it is sometimes divided up into wards, with each one of those neighborhoods having someone who is ostensibly in charge of that ward. Those individuals are the ones who can be voted on and voted into the town counsel to represent the interests of that ward.

Another issue with a town is that there may be zoning. What I mean is residential, commercial and industrial areas. If you’ve ever played a game like Sim City, you know that it’s not a good idea to have your industry right next to your homes because the residents start complaining about the smell, for example. When thinking about laying out the interior of a town, you may want to decide where everything is located.

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Cities

Let’s talk about cities. In a place with this many people, there tends to be a lot of formalities such as laws, regulations, police, a legal system, mayors, a voting system in a free society, zoning and even procedures like how to evacuate or handle certain kinds of emergencies. As world builders, we don’t typically have to worry about a lot of this and we can simply assume it’s there.

However, one area this comes up for is when these laws don’t take into account certain minorities who don’t have the rights that other people have. This is something we definitely might want to consider because it could impact the lives of our characters whether they live in this city or whether they are just visiting. With visiting characters, some of them may be allowed to carry their weapons while the others have theirs confiscated. Not only can this be based on race or gender, but it can also be based on where this person is from because that other country or city might be a traditional enemy of this one.

Try to think of some restrictions that you can impose on some of your characters, but maybe not all of them. Someone who lives here but is not treated equally might see this as a reason to leave this place for somewhere else. This is one reason why immigrants come to the United States, which is seen as a place where this kind of diversity is more tolerated, even if it is so with limitations. The concept of equality for all is a driving force behind that kind of immigration, even if the reality fails to live up to that.

Cities offer the best and worst of everything because there’s a lot of competition here, but there’s also a lot of crime. It’s going to depend on the settlement, of course, but there’s a lot of leeway for people to get away with things. There can be a big difference between how life is for the rich and for the poor.

There’s definitely going to be zoning where industrial areas are separated from commercial and residential. It can be tempting to think that the rich people live in one area and that the poor people live in another, but there are certainly places on earth where everyone is mixed up together. So, we have this as an option.

Cities are certainly going to have some of the best fortifications and the military to staff them. It can be assumed that something like a knight from such a place is better trained and has more experience than someone from a town or a village. There is snobbery in all things, so this can also influence the attitude of such a character. Maybe when this guy is traveling and he comes into a village and there’s a knight there, he is looking down on that person as being inferior when that person might actually have been from a city or had extensive experience there and is simply living in the village now and is, actually, much more capable than is assumed. This is one of many ways we can add dynamics to our characters.

These military people might have inns, taverns and equipment shops that cater to their needs as well. There may even be a certain amount of culture associated with them because there are so many of them.

There tends to be more anonymity in a city, but that will depend on the technology level. In a science fiction setting, we could easily have people be issued some sort of card that is needed to access every single doorway or something else so that people always know where they are. Without that kind of technology, people are much less likely to know where you are coming and going from because there’s simply no way to track you and there are too many people for anyone to be paying too much attention to that.

This is in stark contrast to a village where everyone might know your business, whether you want them to or not. This freedom allows you to do things that might be considered inappropriate. So, let’s say that you have a sexual orientation that you don’t want anyone to know about. Well, in a village, people are going to figure that out pretty quickly. But in something like a city, it’s going to be easier for you to carry on with the kind of relationship that you want, and possibly keep that a secret.

We haven’t talked about tolerance since we were talking about villages, but in a city there’s likely to be much more tolerance in general of different viewpoints. This does not mean that there’s not going to be prejudice. What I mean is that there are going to be individuals who still have a nasty attitude about some other belief system, but all of these belief systems are still there as one giant melting pot where people are mixed together. By contrast, in a village, the people who have some opposing view might actually be shunned out of that village altogether.

In a city, opposing groups with different viewpoints can still be there, but they may not have much interaction with each other. But then, some of them may. So, you’ll have a mix of tolerances. Generally, people in a city are exposed to many more ideas that they may not agree with and which may change their opinion about things over time. A generalization we can make about people on earth is that those in cities tend to be exposed to more viewpoints and have more tolerance, while those in more rural areas tend to have a more homogenous viewpoint, and the people who live there are more uniform in the way they think about things. The reasons for that could be complicated, but one of them is just exposure, or lack thereof, to opposing ideas.

The main difference between a city and a megalopolis is simply the size. In our modern world, we have cities that have very large suburbs around them where those suburbs are actually towns. Those towns are often right up against another town that is next to another city so that all of it almost seems like one giant place. Each one of these will still have its own name whether it gets absorbed into a larger megalopolis or not. One distinction I’m making there is that we might effectively have a megalopolis, but we don’t actually give it a name. It’s still just going to be called a city, even though it’s right up against other cities. Functionally speaking, they may form a megalopolis, but no one’s probably going to call it that. Lastly, another word for megalopolis is metropolis.

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In Space

Figure 60 Rotating Space Station

Let’s talk about settlements in space. There’s what I’m calling a “vacuum settlement.” This means any settlement that is surrounded by a vacuum instead of breathable air. This reality will completely dominate how life is in that settlement. Since such a settlement doesn’t happen naturally, we are completely fabricating how that is laid out. We can pretty much do whatever we want – within reason, of course. These can range in size from a village to a city, and many of the issues we’ve already talked about will apply to these.

Naturally, one of the most important aspects of such a place is that no one interferes with the oxygen supply. This could literally kill everyone. And, as you might imagine, there’s probably going to be significant technology preventing such a thing from happening. This means not only redundant systems, but significant military who are protecting these. Such a place is likely to have significant rules for even something as simple as opening a door from one place to another could lead to depressurization.

As you can imagine, most people living there probably have a significant understanding of the risks. They almost certainly have an interest in certain kinds of laws being obeyed; those laws being the ones about that kind of interference. Even someone who considers themselves a rebel is unlikely to be willing to go that far with their rebelliousness that they interfere with such a thing. Visitors might also be closely watched and monitored to make sure that their access to one thing or another is tightly controlled.

What’s Not Covered

Now, before we wrap up with how to start creating a settlement, I want to talk about a few things that are not going to be included in this episode. These are additional subjects that are included in Creating Places in Chapter 6.

One of these is the defense and offense of such places, such as the fortifications like archery towers, cleared areas, castles and, of course, the wall. There’s also a discussion of what kind of armed forces are really located here, from the local guards to cavalry, knights, flying forces and beyond. Then there’s the importance of how our settlement is known to others, and from within its own population. This includes not only reputation, but its colors, symbols, slogans and even the products that they produce. All of these can make our settlements more interesting and believable.

Where to Start

Finally, let’s talk about where to start with inventing a settlement. It’s a good idea to start with a settlement’s location because this is going to affect so many things about it. This includes not only its layout, but the climate and, therefore, how people dress, for example, and even the plant life and animals that are nearby. The neighbors are also important to decide soon, and this includes things like the terrain, such as a forest or mountain because that’s going to impact how easy it is to reach this place and what sort of products and livelihood they can create for themselves.

We should also determine where it is within a sovereign power, such as how close to the border or further in because that’s also going to impact the fortifications. The most important of these neighbors is, arguably, any neighbor that affects the number of species and kind of species that are located here. The size and population is a major area to consider after you’ve decided where this settlement is located. This will determine much about what life is like here, including the society’s worldview. The smaller areas that we can worry about later are things like its reputation, how well it is known and things like the symbols and slogans. These are not things that are going to have a major impact on our use of this place, but just add some color and depth.

And, as with everything with world building, the most important thing is to start with something where you have a solid idea. As long as you’ve got one, just go with it and it doesn’t really matter what order you do these things in. It’s just really a question of whether you have an idea or not. And if you don’t, then I recommend doing the order we’ve talked about here. But if you have an idea, go ahead and work on that first, exhaust it, do what you can, invent everything you can think of and then worry about some of these other things.

Closing

All of this show’s music is actually courtesy of yours truly, as I’m also a musician. The theme song is the title track from my Some Things are Better Left Unsaid album, but now we’re closing out today’s show with a song from my album Serenade of Strings called “Reverie.” You can hear more at RandyEllefson.com. Check out artofworldbuilding.com for free templates to help with your world building. And please rate and review the show in iTunes. Thanks for listening!

Episode 14.3: Learn How to Create Sovereign Powers

Listen as host Randy Ellefson concludes our talk about how to create sovereign power. Learn how population, location, climate, symbols, and tensions between a sovereign power and others can all enrich your kingdom, republic, dictatorship, and more. Why have them all be the same when little details can bring out the vividness?

Listen, Subscribe, and Review this episode of The Art of World Building Podcast on iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher, or Google Play Music!

In This Episode You’ll Learn:

• How to determine what the population consists of regarding species/races, and how terrain impacts this
• How to create variety in your population
• How a sovereign power’s relationships with others or people within it can create more contrast
• How to create symbols, colors, and flags to identify a sovereign power
• How location impacts the way a power develops, and how you can leverage this to create believable details
• How a power’s reputation is earned, changed, and viewed, and why characters will pay attention to this when traveling
• Where to start with creating a sovereign power

Coda

Thanks so much for listening this week. Want to subscribe to The Art of World Building Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? A review would be greatly appreciated!

Episode 14.3 Transcript

Intro

Hello and welcome to The Art of World Building Podcast, episode number fourteen, part three. Today’s topic is how population, location, climate, symbols, and tensions between a sovereign power and others can all enrich your kingdom, republic, dictatorship, and more. Why have them all be the same when little details can bring out the vividness? This material and more is discussed in chapter 5 of Creating Places, volume 2 in The Art of World Building book series.

Do you want practical advice on how to build better worlds faster and have more fun doing it? The Art of World Building book series, website, blog, and podcast will make your worlds beat the competition. This is your host, Randy Ellefson, and I have 30 years of world building advice, tips, and tricks to share. Follow along now at artofworldbuilding.com.

The Population

The first thing I want to talk about is the population of our sovereign power. After all, the people and our characters are the whole point. Something that’s fairly obvious once it’s been pointed out is that we should consider which species are likely to live there based on the land features that are available. For example, in fantasy, dwarves are typically living either in mountains or rolling hills. If our sovereign power is located almost exclusively on a grassland, then there probably aren’t going to be too many dwarves who call this their home. The same would be true of elves if we accept the idea that they prefer the forests.

On the other hand, if the sovereign power includes a territory that does have a forest or a mountain range or rolling hills, then the species that live in those are going to be more concentrated in that area. All of this is something to keep in mind when we are laying out a sovereign power. The great thing about it is that it’s a built in way of deciding where people are. The work is virtually done for us by the geography. All we need to say in our files of information or in our stories is that there is a certain type of terrain in a given area and, therefore, the dwarves, the elves or whoever are more commonly found in that area.

Let’s take a specific example of this. Let’s say that on the eastern side of this sovereign power that is mostly a plain, a grassland, there is a forest. But then, farther to the west, several hundred miles away, there is another, much larger forest where there are also elves. We might have a human character encounter an elf and wonder out loud, or even just in their own mind, “Okay, which forest is this guy from? Is he someone from my own sovereign power, or is he someone from that other forest that is several hundred miles away?”

One way he might be able to tell is if elves are accepted as a member of the sovereign power, then the elf might be wearing a symbol of some kind that identifies him as belonging to this sovereign power, especially if those other elves that are farther away are considered enemies. After all, he wouldn’t want to be mistaken for one of them. Then again, those elves that are farther away, and who are enemies, might purposefully figure out how to wear clothing that looks like this, and then infiltrate this sovereign power doing this, by pretending they are the elves that are from that area.

This is a pretty simple and effective way to give an impression of more dynamics to our setting. It also makes it easier to not have everywhere be just the same and some sort of generic place. When we are laying out a sovereign power, we might want to purposely include parts of different land features inside the borders of that sovereign power. Of course, one issue that could result is that there might be a forest that the elves believe belongs to them, but then part of that forest is seen as part of one sovereign power, and then another part of it is seen as belonging to yet another sovereign power, so that we sort of have three different groups who are claiming areas of this land.

Hopefully you remember from the previous episodes that if more than one sovereign power is claiming they are sovereign over a territory, that means that neither of them really are until one of them falls. So, all we really need to do here is decide that a land feature has a given species living in it and that another sovereign power has claimed some of that area as its own. If this other sovereign power has completely taken over or surrounded that land feature, then maybe those living in it consider themselves part of that sovereign power. But, either way, there could certainly still be some hostility going on here.

Another issue to bear in mind is that monster or other undesirable animals could be inside that land feature. As a result, even though that area has supposedly been conquered, there are things in there that are a problem for the people who are living in that general area. This is, once again, something that we can make use of because people from a given area of the sovereign power might be living near a dangerous land feature. Not because of the feature itself, necessarily, like a volcano that might erupt, but because of the things that live in that land feature, or are on it. Just as we consider one area of our own country to have a certain kind of weather or reputation, maybe that area of the sovereign power that is dangerous has a reputation because of what’s there.

Part of what I’m getting at with all of this is that we don’t really want a sovereign power that is just uniform across its entire territory. There should be areas that are seen as being one way versus another, and that there is contrast. This keeps things more interesting, and also realistic. Right now, we’re talking about population and type, but we can also do that with the weather. In other episodes, we talked about how climate can be different on one side of a continent versus the other because of things like prevailing winds. And this is something that we should make use of to create more variety. Now, when it comes to these undesirable creatures or monsters, our sovereign power could have specialized fighting forces who are experts at dealing with this. Naturally, these people might be trained and stationed in the area where they are going to encounter this problem.

We can also decide that this country is known for having people who are good at fighting this threat. Maybe there’s a training center there and maybe people from other sovereign powers that are friendly to this one come here for training and experience dealing with it. This can help give our characters some backstory. If we have a knight from one sovereign power, he could have spent time in another sovereign power gaining a certain kind of experience, and now it is years later and he is off on our story and he has a certain amount of world experience as a result of this. We could have him encounter a citizen from that sovereign power where they trained him, and he knows cultural things or even language issues and is able to relate to that person and say, “Oh, yeah. You know, I spent two years training at this city and this region where you’ve got these monsters,” or whatever. This is a great and believable way to add some diversity to our character and make it seem like people did not just grow up in a little fish bowl where they have no outside experience.

Maybe this knight even has a certain amount of reputation because he trained with those people, especially of those people have a reputation for being really good at fighting this problem. People can then look at our knight character and say, “Well, you must be really good at it, too. Maybe you can help us with the same creature here,” or, “We’ve got a similar one and you would be the most qualified. Therefore, we’re going to ask for your help in dealing with this.”

So, lack of uniformity in our sovereign power is a good thing. There’s a tendency among us human authors to create sovereign powers that were created by humans for humans, and where any other species that we have invented are just bit players on that stage. This might be something that we want to challenge. And in science fiction, that probably does get challenged a little bit more than in fantasy. I’m speculating, but the reason for this is likely the prevalence of aliens from different planets merging on some sort of moon or whatever. You know, there are these stations where people get together. There’s just all this interconnectivity that is assumed to be taking place. By contrast, we almost have more racism built in where everyone is holed up in their area and not wanting much to do with everybody else.

The elves are too snobby, or whatever. They’re elitists. I forget what the usual stereotype is for dwarves, but they basically stay underground. So, everyone’s got some sort of prejudice that keeps them there. The question is whether we want to continue doing this trope, or do we want to expand and do something new? Either way, we should decide who is in power in this sovereign power and what percentage of each population is. We probably don’t want to go with hard numbers because that’s not really going to translate for most people, and it also kind of binds us. It’s a little more flexible to just go with a percentage, like saying the dwarves are about 20% of the population, the elves are 15%, and maybe the humans are 54% and the rest is a hodgepodge of other things. I wasn’t paying attention to my math there, so hopefully I didn’t go over 100%, but you get the idea.

Something else to bear in mind is that whatever species created that settlement, they may not be the only ones who are in power anymore. This is going to depend on the age of the sovereign power or the settlements within that sovereign power. You may remember from the previous episodes that a given form of a sovereign power, its type of government, does not last forever. They come and go. It could be a kingdom one century and it could be a dictatorship for 20 years. It could then be a totalitarian government for another 30 years and then switch back to something like a constitutional monarchy, and then, later, it’s going to be a republic. So, this changes a lot. And each time the form of government changes, it’s possible that new species are more prevalent in this sovereign power.

The practical impact of this is that 200, or even 1,000 years ago, let’s say the elves were only a small percentage of the population. But now it’s 2,000 years later and they’re a much larger percentage of the population. When this newest form of government forms, maybe they are an inherent part of it and so are aspects of their culture. To me, this is a much more believable scenario, assuming that there is territory of this sovereign power that includes the typical elven homeland in this case. You know, the terrain of forests.

Now, we could be thinking that each time a sovereign power collapses, its territory gets divided up into smaller bits. And that can happen, but a new sovereign power can essentially take the place of the old one and have more or less the same territory. It might shrink a little bit, it might grow in one direction or another – literally one compass point or another – but it’s going to cover much of the same territory. The fact that a new government has taken over, and maybe renamed the country, doesn’t mean that the sovereign power as a whole has really vanished. It’s just kind of reinvented itself. In order for it to really vanish, you would have to bomb it off the face of the earth so that no one lives in that entire territory anymore.

So, it’s still going to be there. The people that made up the previous incarnation of this sovereign power will still make up the new incarnation of this sovereign power. If we’ve got a mix of species, like elves, dwarves and humans, and some sort of outside force conquered this sovereign power, but then didn’t have the armed forces to maintain control over it and left, those species that were there before are still there, and they’re going to need a new form of government. When they form that, they may still do so together. They’re not necessarily going to be just the humans forming it, and the others have no say. If they’ve been around for a while, then maybe they’ve changed their minds about how they want to do things and they are more inclusive.

You know, this does happen. People don’t necessarily just shove people out. What I’m talking about there, by shoving people out, is excluding them from the new government. If it’s going to be a more authoritative state, then maybe they do. But if it’s going to be a new form of democracy or like a federal republic, then those are more inclusive by nature. And this is how we’re going to end up with laws that say, “Yes, the elves can be elected prime minister,” for example. And if you’re thinking it’s only elves who are going to be pushing for that, that’s not necessarily true. In the United States, the founders tried to make things inclusive from the very beginning. This has mostly lasted since then, although it has had problems and challenges. But the basic vision of inclusion was created by white men where they wanted to give more rights to others.

Now, some of that wasn’t there in the beginning. Eventually, women had to be given more rights, like voting rights, and others had to be given more rights. But the basic idea of the country being inclusive was there from its founding. So, even though white men arguably founded the country, or were involved in creating the documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, today, we’ve had a black president and it’s been a really long fight to get to that point. But this is the kind of thing that we can do in our sovereign powers that we are inventing.

What I’m getting at here is that we should decide who invented the sovereign power a long time ago, and then how things have changed as time has progressed, and who was involved in the new formation of the sovereign power, and what kind of rights do they have? In order to do that, we need to understand our population. And, in order to do that, we should have an idea of what land features are included in our sovereign power’s territory.

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Relations with Other Sovereign Powers

Since we’ve been talking about relationships within a sovereign power, let’s talk about that a little bit more and how that can be affected by relationships with other sovereign powers. All good stories need tension, and even in the gaming world, we need to have reason for our characters to go from one place to another. So, let’s talk about causes of tension.

The first up is going to be ethnicity. This is similar to racism and is an unfortunate reality that we can use in our work. If we’d prefer not to include this in our work, then it’s better to not comment on it at all and just ignore it than to actually comment on it and say that there is no ethnic hatred because that’s not really realistic. It’s a nice end state that maybe humanity or other species of our invention will one day get to, but we’re not there and I doubt it’s going to happen any time, even on fictional worlds. But if you don’t want to do anything with ethnic hatred, then just ignore the subject rather than saying, “Hey, everyone gets along fine,” because that’s not realistic. It’s also not interesting.

In general, with ethnic hatred, what happens is that unfavorable attributes, such as character, are assigned to a group of people who usually share physical traits, and that makes them easier to physically identify on sight. Usually, we’re talking about facial features like the shape and size of the nose, or the eyebrows, the jaw, even the mouth. Really anything. In a world with fictional species, we can use other features that are more prominent, like the pointed ears of elves or a lot of the brow ridges that you see on characters in something like Star Trek.

So, if you want to create ethnic hatred, one of the things that you can do is just decide that people in a given region of your world have certain physical features. There doesn’t need to be any rhyme or reason for those. It’s just going to be the way it is. What I mean is that those features are not going to have anything to do with where they live. It’s just that people who have those features have congregated in that area for a certain amount of time, and now they are associated with that area and they are an actual ethnic group. People typically just assign negative character traits to a group of people with whom they have experienced tension before. It might have been some sort of dispute, and it could have been anything from cultural to ideological, or something based on the form of government.

We almost don’t need to do a deep dive into this. We could decide that one culture is really big on personal freedom, and another one is not. And, as a result, they really have a problem with the way those manifest in each other. And, as a result, they have associated that form of government with bad behavior, for example, in their opinion, and associated that with the physical features. So, therefore, it becomes not just a general hatred, but a hatred that is associated with the ethnicity of the people who exhibit those physical traits and those behaviors.

As usual, we can take analogues from Earth, whether that’s an actual ethnic issue from Earth or something cultural that we’ve decided to assign to one ethnic group versus another. For example, abortion rights and even gun rights are hot issues. So is homosexuality and whether this is accepted. All we really need to do is assign one side of this argument to one group, and the other side to the other group, and associate this with ethnicity because of physical features and have it be a more localized issue. That’s how that comes about. You know, in our modern world, we’re also interconnected, so these are not issues that have anything to do with ethnic groups. It’s a more widespread issue than that. But we can do the same thing on a more local region, and that’s how it becomes an ethnic issue.

This brings up another source of tension that can happen with a sovereign power, or between one and another. And that is the worldview. We can use countries on Earth, again, as examples. For example, we have some that are known for being democracies and others that are known for being these authoritative regimes that are really brutal to people. Something that can happen is that countries can end up fighting proxy wars. For example, the United States likes to see democracy spread. So, sometimes we assist other countries in becoming a democracy.

By contrast, communist countries have typically supported each other for the same reason. At times, we’ve had the United States propping up one country, and another country, like Russia, propping up a different one and turning this into a kind of proxy war where the United States and Russia are not going at each other directly. They are fighting each other ideologically through countries that each one of them is supporting.

Another source of conflict is resources. Earlier, I talked to you about having a forest that is partially or completely inside a given sovereign power. Well, what if there’s something in that forest, whether it’s the trees or something special that we’ve invented, and it’s rare and, therefore, the sovereign power has total control of it, or at least partial control of it, and somebody else wants that thing? Well, now we’ve got a source of conflict. This is another thing to bear in mind when you are laying out where your sovereign power’s borders are.

On that note, territory is another source of conflict. Aside from the obvious reason we were just discussing, it could be an issue where something like a landlocked sovereign power wants access to the sea and it can’t get to it unless it conquers another territory. Of course, if both sovereign powers in question are democracies, then maybe they work together in a more peaceful way. But if one of them is totalitarian, like a dictatorship, and the democracy is the one that has the access to the sea, it’s probable that the totalitarian government is going to attack instead of negotiate. Unless it’s going to do something like build up its nuclear weapons, for example, using an example on Earth, and say, “Hey, we’re only going to give up these weapons if you give us access to the sea.”

This is the kind of thing that goes on in the real world where sometimes countries build up an arsenal not because they’re intending to use it, but as a bargaining chip. It’s always smart to go into negotiations with something to trade.

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Identifying Sovereign Powers

Let’s take up one of the easier subjects in world building, and that is the different ways that we can identify our sovereign powers. Sometimes it feels like there’s a lot of research or other things we need to do and spend a lot of time on something, but this is one area of world building that we can just do one at a time or in batches and just kind of quickly get this done and move on. It’s relatively lightweight. What we’re talking about here are symbols, flags and even slogans like you might have seen in Game of Thrones. These are used to identify a sovereign power. Of course, they can also be used to identify smaller units like a settlement.

On one hand, this is a minor subject, but the symbols are important exactly because they are symbols. We can create a brooding, intimidating symbol for an authoritarian power, and then something that’s a little more welcoming for a democracy. These symbols will be emblazoned on things like ships or battle stations or the walls of a castle or just the flag that’s flying overhead. They can also be incorporated into the uniforms that characters are wearing. Along with the colors, these symbols are a good way of quickly getting across an impression. This is one of our great uses for them as storytellers.

That said, I do think this is something that should be invented later in your development of a sovereign power because you’re going to want to understand what your sovereign power is like and what it may represent to other people before going too far with something like this. However, you can always change your mind. If you decide that your symbol is really cool but maybe it doesn’t go with the sovereign power you originally associated it with, you can just take it off and put it on another one, provided you haven’t actually published something using that.

The goal of any identifier we choose is to not only identify that power, but to embody or portray a fundamental trait of that power. And they can inspire fear, loathing, love, indifference, or they can also be a rallying cry during a war. And when our characters are traveling and they are going to arrive somewhere, they’re going to be on the lookout for these symbols. And failure to mention them is a bit of an oversight. Imagine, even on Earth, if you were on a boat in the ocean and a ship was approaching you, and it was a military one, would you be looking to see what country it belonged to? Because if it’s from Russia or the United States, that could have a very different impact on what’s going to happen to you.

When it comes to symbols, these may change each time the sovereign power itself changes. In fact, this is more likely than not because the new government wants a literal symbol of the fact that it is a new government and it’s not the previous one. There’s been a change. Of course, they could also change the name of the country, for example, but it’s still going to want a symbol. But it doesn’t have to change, especially if the symbol is something that is very cherished to the people. Also, if the symbol is a geographic feature like a mountain that’s distinctive, then that’s probably not going to change if that mountain is still within the territory of the sovereign power.

That brings up an interesting scenario of that land feature being in a territory that has been conquered by another sovereign power, and now the symbol of this sovereign power is located in another sovereign power. That’s probably going to be a big point of pride and something that really bothers people. Bear in mind that an authoritative government is going to have a more intimidating and bold symbol, and even the colors, to imply the impression and dominance of that government power. Even the architecture in such a sovereign power can reflect the attitude of the people who are in control. On the other hand, a democracy might want softer colors and a less threatening and more inclusive symbol.

We should be sure to make a comment about the impression that any symbol we invent makes. If we just say that it’s a hawk, that doesn’t really tell us what it looks like. It could be depicted in a benign position, or one where it’s kind of attacking, or one where it looks majestic. These differences are pretty important. When it comes to color, a domineering government is going to choose a primary color such as red. They can also use things like black and white because these are fairly stark. Colors certainly come into play when it comes to flags because many of the simplest flags here on Earth are simply a horizontal stripe of one or more colors.

These colors don’t have to signify anything to us, but it’s always better, of course, if they do. Although, the average person often forgets what the colors may mean. I think that this is one area of world building that we can usually skip because the average person reading our work is not going to care what the colors mean. What they care about is the impression. Bear in mind that the flags should be relatively easy to depict. Because, in our modern world, we have machines that can create really elaborate designs, but you may have noticed that most flags are not that involved. That’s probably because they’re very old when it was relatively easy to sow together two or three different horizontal stripes that are each in a different color in order to make a flag.

So, if we’re doing fantasy where the technology is not like our modern world, we might want to go with pretty simple flags. But if we’re doing science fiction where technology is far in excess of what we have here, then we may want to go with something that’s a little bit more elaborate. The more advanced it is, the harder it is for the average person to depict that flag.

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The Impact of Location

I want to say a few words about the location of our sovereign power because, as the old adage goes, location is everything. We’ve already talked about how land features can influence this, but I want to go into this a little bit more. The example that I’m going to use first is that if we have an island nation, then this can really impact the culture that originates in that place because they are going to be relying on the sea not only for transportation, but for things like fish. As a result, they might be not only very good at sailing, but they might be explorers.

On one hand, this is so obvious that it almost seems like a cliché, but it’s also so obvious that it would not make sense to not do this. However, if that nation is relatively young, it may not have the industry to really build ships to do that. And, as a result, it might be the kind of place that is easily conquered by others who do have that industry and the resulting skill at sailing. They also might not be good at fighting, so that they get conquered even though they are good at sailing. So, on one hand, the fact that they might do a lot of sailing could suggest that they are a seafaring power and that they’re someone to be feared on the seas, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. They could also be a victim.

Something else we can also leverage is the proximity to the equator. Here on Earth, we still need to use the equator to help us lift off into space. The reason for this is that it’s easier to get to that kind of altitude if we are closer to the equator because the Earth is spinning faster there. In science fiction, we could decide that the engines are so powerful that this is no longer a concern, or we could decide that the world that we’re creating is a little bit more like our modern one where they still need to use certain kinds of rockets that benefit from being close to the equator. One scenario that can be helpful here is that if a sovereign power wants to launch something into space, but it’s not near enough to the equator, then it’s probably going to want to form alliances with a sovereign power that does have that territory.

I hope one thing that you’re picking up from all of this is the way we can create allegiances and enemies with sovereign powers based on terrain and location. We can also decide to use the landscape as a way of characterizing the sovereign power itself, and even justifying the forms of government that have been found there. It’s a bit simplistic, and almost a cliché, to say that a foreboding and intimidating landscape, like a desert, is therefore going to give rise to a totalitarian or authoritative government, but the idea does have some appeal. The idea is that the landscape is harsh and, therefore, so are the people. On the other hand, if it’s more like a paradise, then maybe everyone is kind of soft and the government is benevolent.

The climate might also affect this. For example, if the sovereign power is centered right over the equator, then it’s going to be pretty hot and rainy. Therefore, people are not going to be wearing heavy, long clothes. As a result, something like a man wearing a full suit of plate armor might be relatively uncommon and just not part of what they do there because that’s hot, it’s heavy and it’s not something you’re really going to wear in that climate. This is not to say that it can’t be done, but that is something that originated on Earth in colder climates. Actually, that may not be true. I haven’t really looked into that, but it does seem plausible.

We should also pay attention to how easy it is to access this sovereign power. If it’s very mountainous, then maybe people have a hard time getting there. This could also inhibit people from successfully attacking it in war unless they are doing so from the air. These are things to keep in mind because you might expect the military in such a place to not focus so much on ground forces, but on aerial forces for defense. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, it’s likely that there’s more than one terrain in this sovereign power. So, different areas of it are going to be impacted in different ways. This means that those who are really good at flying on great birds of prey might be doing so in one area of the region, and found frequently there, but on another area, where it’s mostly plains, they may not be in use. Or they actually still could be because it’s still a fast way to get around.

As long as we have a justification that makes sense, we can kind of do what we want here. Sometimes it’s a good idea, again, to have variety for not only different kinds of terrain, but different kinds of skillsets and peoples who are found there.

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Our Power’s Reputation

The last subject I want to cover before we close out and talk about where to start is the reputation of our sovereign power. All countries have a reputation for one thing or another. A single dictatorship might have the same reputation among two different democracies, or it might have different ones. More importantly, a dictatorship will view a dictatorship differently than a democracy will view that dictatorship. Now, if that’s starting to seem like a lot of work to make up all those viewpoints and reputations among different ones, we don’t really need to do that. We just need to do the one that we’re going to actually use.

Granted, if we have a character from a democracy and a character from a dictatorship who have become friends, and they’re approaching another dictatorship, each one of them might have a different attitude about what’s going on there and what the reputation of that place is. But this is not a scenario that we usually use. That’s the scenario where you are going to have to worry about this. So, I’m going to read off a quick list here of things that a country might have a reputation for.

One of them could be a mad king. It could be slavery, whether they have slaves or whether they are the source of exported slaves. It could have a reputation for spacecraft design or a type of man-o-war ship. Maybe it’s a reputation for raiders, like the Vikings, or conquerors, individuals like Genghis Khan. Maybe there are unique plants and animals or products, or a war that seems to never end. It could be known for superior weapons, armor, technology or other devices. And they could have really powerful wizards, or maybe wizards are banned altogether in that sovereign power. So, you can make up your own list of things that we can give a reputation for, and these are things that we might want to choose based on the story that we are going to tell.

Where to Start

So, let’s conclude by talking about where to start. Creating a sovereign power is a really big subject. So much so that it has taken three different podcast episodes to cover much of what is included in the Creating Life book about this. And there are some things that I did not cover. When getting started, we can often do things in different orders, but, I think, with a sovereign power, we should first decide on a very big picture item, which is, this supposed to be a force for good or for evil? Because that’s probably one of the two ways we’re going to use it.

Once we decide this, we can then choose the form of government because a force for evil is going to have a more restrictive, authoritarian government, and a force for good is most likely going to have a more democratic one. Next, we should really think about where on the continent it lies because that’s going to determine any other sovereign powers that we’ve already invented and the kinds of conflicts that are going on between them. It’s also going to determine what land features are included or near that sovereign power. And that, in turn, will also impact what kind of resources that are there, and potentially some of the conflicts and the population makeup in different parts of our sovereign power and overall.

And, lastly, we can start worrying about some of the simpler items like the identifiers, the customs and the languages that are found there. Creating a sovereign power is actually one of the more fun things if you have a pretty good idea on how to go about it. And I would recommend signing up for The Art of World Building newsletter, if you haven’t already, and getting the free template that walks you through filling out all of this.

Closing

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