A Beginner’s Guide to Starting Your Worldbuilding Project
Dec 13, 2025
So many people are now interested in the fantasy genre, and especially interested in creating their own world for a book or project.
This is a huge undertaking, whether it’s for a few friends playing D&D, or if you’re building out a world for full fledged novel. It can be daunting to get started, but I’m going to break this down into easier pieces for you.
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Hi! I’m Chris, an avid fan of worldbuilding and writing here to help you break into the craft!
For more on my worldbuilding project, as well as tips and resources for worldbuilding you can follow me on any of these channels:
You can also email me with questions at worldbuildingchris@gmail.com
📝 Starting Out
The most important thing when you are building a fantasy world is understanding your very specific ‘why’ for creating your world. This is important because when you get into worldbuilding, it is very easy to get bogged down with how far you can take each rabbit trail, also known as scope creep. Basically the scope of the project keeps growing, while you don’t make any real progress.
To avoid this you need to lock down a very specific ‘why’ for your project.
For a fantasy novel, you don’t need 4,000 years of documented world history. You need only what serves the story. For most cases that means, you need one or a few cataclysmic events to shape the current climate of the world, some races of people that are well thought out (food, clothes, customs, any idiosyncrasies), a magic system if that suits your world (if you want magic at all), and an understanding of the current political climate.
Knowing what things you actually need and don’t need will save you days of unnecessary creation of plants and animals that you may actually never see in your book or project.
🔨 Building the Thing
Now comes the fun part!
🗺️ Maps
A great place to start is with a map. A map will take out a lot of the guesswork from your process. You won’t need to ask your self:
“Wait, how long would it take my character to reach the next town?”
A map will help you have a visual of your world at all times that you can go back to and reference with your questions.
If you’ve not heard of the rice method for map making, I highly recommend it. If you don’t have a general shape in your mind for your world, you drop some grains of rice at random on a piece of paper, and then outline all of the groups of rice grains to form land masses and islands. You can even use the rice to determine where your mountains and lower areas of land are. The higher the mound of rice, the higher the mountain.
I do ultimately recommend a digitally drawn map, that way you can add layers to it as you need to in a drawing software. The ability to zoom in on a new layer and add smaller details is also very helpful. For instance you can draw out a map of your world, then on another layer add icons for where each type of vegetation and animal can be found.
Then add another layer for kingdoms, villages, notable locations, etc. Having a layered digital map allows you to be consistent and also have many types of exportable maps to reference.
Some free/cheap software for doing this would be Procreate (my personal favorite), Gimp, and Affinity.
📜 History
A great next step after a map is to outline your major historical events, that act as a kind of historical pillars.
Step 1: Define your major historical events/catastrophes
Think: great cataclysms or the formation of a kingdom. Determining these events will allow you to reflect and be able to pull smaller details for your worldbuild. For example, maybe a specific type of food became a cultural norm because it was the only food accessible during a past war, and then became a staple meal.
Step 2: Write out why these affect the present world
Once you have your major events laid out, write out how each one affects the present. This will help you form character stories, political dynamics, and so much more.
Step 3: Build the connecting events
Decide what events happened in between those events, how people recovered or didn’t, what scars those disasters left.
🗂️ The Nitty Gritty
Once you have your map, and a timeline of historical events, from here it will be much easier to come up with things like a magic system, deities, races, and more. You will probably have already made some of those during the process of creating maps and history.
Here’s a few categories to start you off, though I’ll remind you, if you are hoping to finish an end product, it's best not to get lost in the metaphorical weeds with worldbuilding.
🌎 Deities
✨ Magic System
🛠️ Technology
👨🏽 Races
🧑🧑🧒🧒 Factions
📍 Notable Locations
💵 Economy
🐄 Animals
🌱 Plants
🗡️ Important Objects
Organizing It All
If you’re looking for a way to keep all of your worldbuilding information straight, I have templates in Notion that keeps all your information easily accessible and seamlessly linked together! I’ve spent the last three years honing this template to serve worldbuilders and storytellers of varying degrees!
So if you’re not quite ready to go all in, that’s fine! I have a basic version that serves those starting out, all the way up to the advanced worldbuilder who needs a place to keep all of their world lore.
If that sounds like something you’d want, check out my Worldbuilding Wares!
