![The template open in Strokes: a banner picture of a walled harbour city of pale towers above a wide bay, above the title “Worldbuilding: [World name]”.](/_next/image?url=%2F_next%2Fstatic%2Fmedia%2Fhero-light.f9c48df7.webp&w=3840&q=75)
![The template open in Strokes: a banner picture of a walled harbour city of pale towers above a wide bay, above the title “Worldbuilding: [World name]”.](/_next/image?url=%2F_next%2Fstatic%2Fmedia%2Fhero-dark.d23aa63f.webp&w=3840&q=75)
When to use it
- Planning a fantasy or science fiction novel before the first draft
- A draft that keeps stalling on questions about how the world works
- Designing a magic system or a technology with real costs and limits
- Gathering scattered world notes into one document before a rewrite or a sequel
A worldbuilding template is a set of questions about an invented world, grouped by subject: land, history, peoples, power, money, gods and daily life. You answer the ones your story needs and leave the rest blank. The worksheet above covers twelve areas for fantasy and science fiction, with tables for the timeline, the cultures and the rules your plot depends on.
How to use this template
- Write the big difference first
The most important line in the document is in the overview: the one or two ways this world departs from ours that the plot depends on. Magic that costs memory. A drive that reaches other stars in weeks but kills anyone awake on board. Most of the other sections are consequences of that line, so write it before anything else.
- Fill in what your opening chapters touch
Answer the sections the first act visits: the home place, the people your viewpoint character lives among, the power they answer to. Leave the rest blank. A blank section only means the story hasn't asked yet. This works for a plotter who fills in a lot up front and a pantser who fills in a little.
- Give every power a cost and a limit
In the magic or technology section, write the cost, the limits and the weakness before the powers grow. Then log each rule in the table under it, with the chapter that shows it to the reader and the chapter that tests it. A rule that saves the hero in the climax has to appear on the page long before.
- Draft, and let the story ask the questions
When a scene stalls on something you don't know (how long the ride to the capital takes, what a guard earns), add it to Open questions with the chapter that needs it. Answer it, then copy the answer into its section. The document grows where the book goes.
Build only what the story needs
In Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ernest Hemingway wrote that an iceberg moves with dignity because only an eighth of it is above water, and that a writer can leave out what he knows and the reader will still feel it. Worldbuilding works the same way. The history you worked out but never explain is why a character's grudge sounds real. The trap runs the other way too: a world so complete that chapter one never gets written.
So build in order of need. A useful test for any note: will a character want it, fear it, use it or trip over it? If not, it can wait.
| Section | Fill in before drafting if | Otherwise |
|---|---|---|
| SectionMagic or technology | Fill in before drafting ifThe plot turns on it, above all the climax | OtherwiseKnow what it looks like and what it costs |
| SectionGeography | Fill in before drafting ifCharacters travel, fight a battle or wait for news | OtherwiseSketch the places the first act visits |
| SectionHistory | Fill in before drafting ifAn old war, crime or treaty drives the plot | OtherwiseOne past event per present conflict |
| SectionPower and politics | Fill in before drafting ifSomeone is ruling, hunting or overthrowing someone | OtherwiseKnow whom your protagonist obeys |
| SectionEconomy | Fill in before drafting ifThe plot is a heist, a siege, a famine or a trade war | OtherwiseKnow what a meal costs and who is poor |
| SectionReligion | Fill in before drafting ifA character believes, doubts or serves a temple | OtherwiseKnow what people swear by |
| SectionLanguages | Fill in before drafting ifNames appear on page one, so pick each culture's sounds early | OtherwiseA full grammar can wait forever |
| SectionDaily life | Fill in before drafting ifAlways, for the viewpoint character's own street | OtherwiseOther classes and places can wait |
What you do build has to reach the reader in pieces. An info dump, three pages of dynastic history before anyone wants to know, is what usually happens to a world built in full and then poured in. The guide to writing a fantasy novel covers how to reveal a world through action and dialogue instead.
A filled-in example
Here is part of the worksheet for an imagined fantasy set in a northern port where the winter night lasts for months. One rule, stored daylight, produces the economy, the politics and the main conflict.
The big difference. In Hask, a harbor city where the sun does not rise from late autumn to late winter, licensed glaziers can seal summer daylight in glass jars and let it out in the dark months.
Cost, limits, weakness. Sealing a jar draws the warmth out of the glazier's hands; old glaziers can't hold a cup. A jar holds one summer day's light and leaks a little every week, so nothing lasts past spring. A cracked jar spends all its light at once, in a flash that blinds everyone nearby.
What it has changed. From the first snow, rent is paid in jars. The Glaziers' Guild licenses every glazier and is richer than the harbor lords. The Lower Quay can't afford enough light, so by midwinter its workshops run in shifts around one shared jar. Guards carry their light covered.
History. Year 212: ash from a distant eruption dims a whole summer, almost no light is stored, and a third of the city dies in the dark that follows. The next spring the guild gets its charter and its monopoly. Year 340: the Quay Riot, after the guild doubles winter prices. Still causing: guild members may not own property in the Lower Quay.
Conflict. Unlicensed glaziers in the Lower Quay sell cheap jars that run dry by midwinter. The guild wants them hanged. The protagonist is a guild apprentice whose mother is one of them.
Daily life. Children born in the dark months are called night-born and are thought unlucky on boats. In winter, people greet each other by lifting their jars, and covering your light while someone speaks to you is an insult.
Open question. Can someone born outside Hask learn to seal light? Decide before chapter 9, where the foreign envoy is caught with a jar.
The geography (a long night) and the rule (stored light) did most of the work. The guild, the riot, the insult and the apprentice's split loyalty all came from asking two questions: who controls the jars, and who can't afford them?
Worldbuilding questions that make plots
The placeholders in the worksheet are prompts. These questions go further, and each tends to make trouble for a character, which is what a story needs from a world. They work just as well when you start from a familiar trope, such as the corrupt guild or the generation ship, and ask what it costs the people inside it.
- Who would lose most if the magic or technology stopped working tomorrow, and who would celebrate?
- What is a crime here that we would shrug at, and what is legal here that would horrify us?
- What does your protagonist eat for breakfast, and who grew it?
- What do people get wrong about their own history, and who benefits from the mistake?
- Who can't afford the thing everyone else takes for granted?
- What would a visitor from the next country find rude within an hour of arriving?
- Which border runs somewhere nobody agrees on?
- What changed in the last twenty years, and who still hasn't accepted it?
- What happens in a bad harvest year, or when the supply ship is late?
- Which rule of the world does your antagonist understand better than your hero?
For a longer list, Patricia C. Wrede's Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions, posted on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association's site in 2009, runs from climate and natural resources to manners, diet and calendars. Wrede says at the start that you don't need to answer all of them, or any, to write a story. If you need a premise before you need a world, start with these fantasy writing prompts.
Using it for science fiction
Read the magic section as technology and put the scientific premise in the big difference. The cost, limit and weakness questions apply to a starship drive as much as to a spell. The hard part in science fiction is the "What it has changed" line. Isaac Asimov made the point in a 1953 essay: anyone in 1880 could have predicted the automobile, but the traffic problem was the hard part.
Older books show the method well, and these are in the US public domain, so you can read them free and quote them at length. Each takes one rule and follows it all the way.
| Book | The rule | What follows |
|---|---|---|
| BookJonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726) | The ruleScripture says true believers break their eggs "at the convenient end" | What followsBig-Endians against Little-Endians, six rebellions and a war with Blefuscu over which end that is |
| BookEdwin A. Abbott, Flatland (1884) | The ruleEveryone is a flat shape, and a son has one more side than his father | What followsA class system made of geometry: women are lines, priests are circles |
| BookH. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895) | The ruleThe split between capitalist and laborer keeps widening (the Time Traveller's own theory) | What followsBy the year 802,701, two species: the Eloi above ground, the Morlocks below, who feed on them |
| BookCharlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915) | The ruleIn an isolated country, women bear children without men | What followsA peaceful society built around raising children, which three male explorers keep misreading |
Where the worldbuilding document lives
The worldbuilding document holds everything you know, including the history that never reaches the page. Once a fact is in the manuscript, log it in a story bible with the chapter that set it, so later chapters agree with it. For a book series, the series bible tracks what carries from one book to the next. Invented names and words belong in both, spelled the same way, like a copy editor's style sheet.
Frequently asked questions
How much worldbuilding should I do before I start writing?
Enough to write the first act with confidence: the big difference, the home place, who holds power and what the magic or technology costs. Then set a deadline, two weeks for example, and start drafting. The draft will show you what else you need.
What is the difference between a worldbuilding template and a story bible?
A worldbuilding document holds everything you know about the world, including history that never reaches the page. A story bible records only what the manuscript has established, with chapter numbers, so later chapters stay consistent. Many writers build the world first and start the bible with chapter one.
Does this template work for science fiction?
Yes. Read the magic section as technology and put the scientific premise in the overview. The questions about cost, limits and weaknesses apply to a starship drive as much as to a spell.
Do I need worldbuilding software?
No. A document with headings and tables is enough, and it opens anywhere as Word or Markdown. Dedicated apps such as World Anvil and Campfire add linked entries, maps and timelines. Check their current plans and prices if you want those features.
