Understanding Worldbuilding
In this codex, worldbuilding is treated as the practice of shaping a setting so it can meaningfully support stories, games, and creative exploration. It is less about collecting facts and more about understanding how a place holds together, what influences it, what limits it, and how its internal logic creates a sense of reality.
“The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.”
At its most effective, worldbuilding provides context. It helps explain why conflicts exist, why cultures behave the way they do, and why certain choices feel inevitable within the world. When done well, it allows readers and players to accept the world’s decisions without long explanations, simply because those decisions feel earned. Scale, in this sense, is entirely optional. Some worlds span stars, planes, and distant realms. Others are defined by a single city, valley, or close-knit community. The size of a setting does not determine its depth. The same principles apply whether you are building an entire universe or focusing on a small corner of it.
It is also important to understand that strong worldbuilding often goes unnoticed. Its success lies in invisibility. When the rules of a world are consistent, the audience stops questioning them. Instead of analyzing how things work, they simply accept them and move forward, immersed in the experience.
Worldbuilding is not about inventing everything. It is about choosing what deserves definition and what is better left open. Knowing where to draw that line helps ease a common anxiety among creators: the feeling that everything must be built before anything can be used. In reality, restraint is often more powerful than excess detail.
Worlds change as they are explored, they are never static. Stories and players reveal weaknesses, gaps, and unexpected opportunities. Revising or expanding a setting is not a failure of planning, it is a sign of growth. A living world is shaped not only by its creator, but by the stories that unfold within it.
The Lord of the Rings is a powerful example of a world that feels alive because it exists long before Frodo ever leaves the Shire or Sauron rises again. Middle-earth carries the weight of ancient ages, fallen kingdoms, and wars that shaped its lands and peoples centuries earlier. Places like Moria, Gondor, and the Shire reflect memory, loss, and change rather than serving as simple backdrops. The world actively shapes its characters, from Aragorn’s burden of legacy to the fading of the Elves. As the story ends, the world itself changes, marking the close of an era. This makes Middle-earth feel less like a setting and more like a living character with its own arc.
Themes and Genres of Worlds
Every world is shaped by the theme it chooses to explore. Themes define tone, expectations, and the kind of stories that naturally emerge from a setting, whether it is epic and mythical, grounded and historical, or rooted in the modern world.
The themes below represent some of the most common approaches to worldbuilding. They are not rigid categories, but starting points. Many memorable worlds exist precisely because they blend multiple themes into something unique.
Low Fantasy
Description:
A grounded approach to fantasy where magic is rare, subtle, or feared, and the world closely resembles historical reality.
Core Focus:
Politics, survival, moral ambiguity, human ambition.
Common Conflicts:
Power struggles, social inequality, personal loyalty versus duty.
Examples:
Game of Thrones, The Witcher
Fantasy
Description:
Worlds shaped by magic, mythical creatures, legendary races, and pre-industrial societies. Magic often plays a central role in culture, history, and conflict.
Core Focus:
Myth, exploration, epic struggles, and ancient legacies.
Common Conflicts:
Good versus evil, fallen empires, magical imbalance, legendary threats.
Examples:
The Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons
Contemporary
Description:
Modern settings where extraordinary individuals, powers, or technologies exist within familiar societies.
Core Focus:
Responsibility, power, identity, public perception.
Common Conflicts:
Moral choices, collateral damage, authority versus freedom.
Examples:
Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Pokémon, Dispatch
Urban Fantasy
Description:
Supernatural elements hidden within a modern or near-modern world, often existing alongside everyday life without public knowledge.
Core Focus:
Secrecy, identity, hidden societies, the clash between mundane and magical.
Common Conflicts:
Exposure of the hidden world, balancing normal life and the supernatural.
Examples:
Supernatural, American Gods, Sandman
Alternate History
Description:
Settings that diverge from real history due to a key change or event, exploring how the world might have developed differently.
Core Focus:
Cause and consequence, ideology, divergence points.
Common Conflicts:
Competing timelines, political dominance, moral consequences.
Examples:
For All Mankind, The Man in the High Castle, Wolfenstein
Historical
Description:
Worlds inspired by real historical periods, focusing on social structures, politics, warfare, and cultural norms, usually without fantastical elements.
Core Focus:
Honor, power, tradition, social hierarchy.
Common Conflicts:
Political intrigue, class struggle, loyalty and betrayal.
Examples:
The Three Musketeers, works by William Shakespeare
Science Fiction
Description:
Worlds built around advanced technology, space exploration, alien civilizations, and speculative science.
Core Focus:
Discovery, progress, humanity’s future.
Common Conflicts:
Ethics of technology, alien contact, survival in hostile environments.
Examples:
Foundation, Halo, Star Trek
Science Fantasy
Description:
Worlds where advanced technology and fantastical or mystical elements coexist. Science and magic are not treated as opposites, but as forces that shape the world side by side.
Core Focus:
Epic scale, powerful factions, ancient technologies, and forces beyond full understanding.
Common Conflicts:
Faith versus reason, lost knowledge, godlike technologies, cosmic wars.
Examples:
Star Wars, Warhammer 40,000, Dune
Maritime
Description:
Worlds shaped by oceans, seas, and coastal regions, where travel, trade, and conflict revolve around water.
Core Focus:
Exploration, trade routes, isolation, naval power.
Common Conflicts:
Piracy, territorial waters, sea monsters, control of ports.
Examples:
Pirates of the Caribbean, One Piece, Subnautica
Post-Apocalyptic
Description:
Worlds shaped by collapse, catastrophe, or extinction-level events, focusing on survival and rebuilding.
Core Focus:
Scarcity, resilience, human nature under pressure.
Common Conflicts:
Resource control, moral decay, rebuilding civilization.
Examples:
Fallout, The Walking Dead, The Maze Runner
Mythic / Legendary
Description:
Worlds inspired by mythology, folklore, and oral tradition, where gods, heroes, and symbolic events actively shape reality.
Core Focus:
Archetypes, fate, divine influence, legendary deeds.
Common Conflicts:
Mortals versus gods, destiny versus free will, cycles of creation and destruction.
Examples:
God of War, Okami, Hades
Horror
Description:
Settings designed to evoke fear, dread, and uncertainty, often emphasizing atmosphere and the unknown.
Core Focus:
Vulnerability, mystery, the limits of understanding.
Common Conflicts:
Survival, loss of sanity, confronting the unknowable.
Examples:
Call of Cthulhu, Enigma of Fear, Fear Hunger
Sub-Themes
Every world is also shaped by the subthemes it embraces. While themes define the broad direction of a setting, subthemes influence how that world is lived, explored, and remembered, shaping its structure, atmosphere, and everyday realities.
The subthemes presented here are only a selected few, chosen for their relevance to core worldbuilding decisions. Many others can emerge from cultural influences, such as Greek, Roman, or Norse inspirations, or from narrative tone, like Grim, Hopeful, Operatic, or Pulpy storytelling. Like themes, subthemes are not rigid categories, but tools meant to be combined, adapted, or reimagined to create worlds that feel distinct and alive.
X-punk
X-punk worlds are defined by progress, and most of the times by the damage it causes. Technology is everywhere, but it rarely solves problems cleanly. Instead, it deepens inequality, empowers systems, and creates new forms of control.
Whether cyberpunk, steampunk, solarpunk, dieselpunk or something in between, these worlds focus on tension between individuals and the machines, industries, or structures that shape their lives.
Examples:
Blade Runner, BioShock, Cyberpunk 2077
Medieval European
Medieval European isn’t just castles and armor, it’s a way power works. Land defines authority, loyalty is sworn through oaths, and hierarchy shapes everyday life. Who you serve often matters more than who you are.
This subtheme is useful because its logic is familiar and intuitive. It gives clear answers to questions about rule, inheritance, war, and faith, which is why it became the backbone of so much fantasy.
Examples:
The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Forgotten realms
Untamed
Untamed worlds are places where civilization hasn’t won, and may never win. The land is bigger, older, and more dangerous than the people trying to live in it. Maps are incomplete, roads disappear, and entire regions exist beyond control or understanding.
In these worlds, nature is not a backdrop; it’s a presence. Settlements feel fragile, exploration is risky, and survival often depends on respecting forces that cannot be tamed.
Examples:
The Lord of the Rings (the wild lands beyond the Shire), Monster Hunter
Nomadic
A Nomadic world is shaped by movement. People don’t belong to cities or borders, they belong to routes, seasons, and traditions. Home is not a place on the map, but a shared way of life.
This changes everything: politics, warfare, trade, even identity. Conflicts often arise when nomadic cultures collide with settled ones, each unable to fully understand the other.
Examples:
Mad Max
Declining
Declining worlds live in the shadow of what they used to be. Empires crumble, magic weakens, traditions lose meaning. Ruins are everywhere, not as decoration, but as reminders.
These settings carry a sense of transition. Characters are often aware that they stand at the end of something, even if they don’t know what comes next.
Examples:
Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus
Frontier
A Frontier world sits at the edge of change. Civilization is advancing, but nothing is stable yet. Laws are loose, borders shift, and opportunity exists alongside danger.
Frontiers are shaped by ambition. Some arrive seeking freedom, others profit or conquest. Cultures collide, old rules fail, and new ones haven’t formed yet.
Examples:
Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect
At the end of the day, themes and subthemes are not meant to confine creativity, but to guide it. They exist to help you understand why a world feels the way it does, and how its pieces connect beneath the surface.
In the sections that follow, we’ll begin exploring these ideas in more detail, starting with the World Fundamentals :)
