• Cosmology and astronomy - What constellations are around your world? How many planets are in your world's solar system?
  
• Flora and Fauna - What animals and plants are there? What do the inhabitants of your world eat or farm? What medicines are there? What ecology is there?
  
• Inclusion of the supernatural - Is there magic in your world? Can biological/supernatural creatures use magic? Does magic follow scientific laws? (If not, what laws do they follow, if any)
  
• Society - What social divides are there? (upper class/lower class) What jobs are there and who does them? What education/governmental systems are there?
  
• Culture - What do people wear? What do they eat? What hobbies to people have?

• Rivers - Rivers are made out of different parts. They generally start as springs in high ground, and flow down towards the ocean, joining other springs and growing larger every time. Most people imagine a river like a tree, with the branches forking out, however rivers generally do not split. They take the path of least resistance down toward the ocean. They only split when they are travelling along flat land and end up depositing sediment in their path.
  
• Biomes - According to google, biomes are "a large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat, e.g. forest or tundra." They differ based on the latitude they are at. Local geography also affect biomes. /u/Elektrophorus has a guide on biomes, found here
  
• Plate Tectonics - Tectonics define the shape and movement of land. There are two types - Oceanic and Continental. Oceanic plates are denser, meaning they will always sink below continental plates. What this means for mapmaking is that they define where mountains and earthquakes could occur. This is a simple map showing earth's tectonic plates, for reference.
  
  
• Mountains can form rain shields, having a wet side and a dry side. This is due to the rain clouds being unable to pass the top of the mountain.
  
  
• Ocean currents allow for hot or cold air to be transported around the planet

• Translation method - Basically, this method involves taking words related to what you are trying to name and throwing them into google translate. Try to stick to the same language for related names, such as names of people and places all in the same country, for cohesion.
  
• Name using a theme - Decide on a theme for the names of a group of people etc. For example, one user names his gods after herbs that represent their natures.
  
• Naming Languages - /u/Jafiki91 created this guide for naming languages
  
• Word combinations - This method involves taking names of things that already exist and combining them - such as two animals. This is commonly used in Avatar:The Last Airbender
  
• History - The best place to find names - especially for near-earth worlds - is in early censuses.
  
• Generators - While they are generally frowned upon, generator can still throw up a bunch of names you might find useful.
  
• Real Words - Not everything needs a fancy name in an alien tongue. You could just as easily call something by what it is. For extra flavour, you could say this is an english translation of your worlds language.

• Consider the audience. When you're on /r/worldbuilding, you're performing. It's worth asking yourself how much you're willing to let this affect you. Even if your work is intensely personal (for example, it deals with ideas that are close to your lived experience), it's worth dealing with the constraints posed by an audience insofar as they force you to innovate.
  
  
• Choose a goal and go for it. Having a particular goal in mind (RPG campaign, short stories, exploring a set of themes, or something else) helps give you a set of rules you can judge your content by. This will help you decide what to include, what to focus on, and how to present your content. Without a goal, it's easy to be very inconsistent.
  
  
• Keep your eyes open for inspiration. Inspiration can come from anywhere: history, science, religion, daily life, fiction, conversations with friends or family. Don't be obsessive, but do ask yourself: "is this useful for my project?", because you'll be surprised how often the answer is yes. Your ability to pick up on sources of inspiration will grow as your artistic vision becomes clearer and your sense of what makes your project unique becomes more acute.
  
  
• Tropes and genres are tools, not guides. Don't use tropes or genres to structure your project or determine what you should add next. This sort of checklist thinking prevents a project from being really "yours". This isn't to say that you can't use tropes and genres as a way to understand your work or someone else's, but try to think of projects and stories and worlds as whole objects in themselves. They can be described in a variety of ways, all of them wrong, but some of them useful.
  
  
• What makes your project good? This is blunt, but that's intentional. If you don't know what makes your project interesting or worthwhile, how can you make it better? Spend some time answering this question, and revisit your answer frequently -- both to revise it and to inspire you when you get into a rut.
  
  
• Develop a world-sense. What makes your world your world? Imagine your world less as a list of content, and more as a set of rules. What fits and what doesn't? Potential areas of growth include visual design language, themes, or a particular emotional impact. A world-sense is valuable because it lets you easily judge new content, cut content that doesn't fit with the project, and support the creation of new content. Often, this kind of compression is the mark of a mature project (at any level of seriousness).
  
  
• Make, then remake. Everything is terrible at first. The best favour you can do yourself is not to get stuck. Keep active, keep iterating. You'll often find that ideas take on a life of their own, and wind up looking very different than how you first imagined them. This is good! It's the easiest path to a better project.
  
  
• Cut mercilessly. You're free to like your content, but don't get attached. If you really really don't want to cut something, you probably should -- it's probably keeping you from executing a simpler, stronger variant of your project. Consider taking cut ideas and saving them -- for future projects, to give to your friends, or for later use if you find out that they're not as useless as you first thought. But don't keep things around for the sake of it. Minimalism is your friend.

• The creation of a Fantasy World Map, history, geography, ecology, mythology, several different cultures in detail, and usually a set of "ground rules", metaphysical or otherwise. Sometimes, such worlds will have a Creation Myth that's either hinted at or told in more detailed fashion. This kind of worldbuilding can go to the extreme of working out entire constructed languages. Authors typically revise constructed worlds to complete a single work in a series.
  
• The work that goes into deciding the details of a setting. It's very difficult to write a story that contains absolutely no imaginary elements beyond what's described to the reader, so nearly every author worldbuilds a little bit. Some, however, go above and beyond the call of duty in that regard, in which case the sheer amount of detail not immediately relevant to the story at hand often serves as a major distinguishing point of their work.

pospysyl fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Apr 29, 2018

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Apr 30, 2018

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Apr 30, 2018