— No more contradictions —

Worldbuilding Template

One entry per place, organization, item, or race in the table above; a 26-point checklist below for the world as a whole. Every point comes with a worked example from the same setting, so you can see what a filled answer looks like before you write your own.

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A worldbuilding sheet is a single table that keeps your locations, organizations, items, and races sorted by type. The scariest thing in a long fantasy is settings that contradict each other — is this city to the east or the west? does magic have a price or not? One contradiction and readers are pulled straight out of the story. This template buckets everything by type, leaves no gap in the description, history, and rules columns, and — when you use it online — lets your settings link to one another.

Template preview

Worldbuilding sheet column examples

Field	Example
Name	Mist-Veil City
Type	Location
Description	A port city built on the cliffs, shrouded in fog year-round, navigated by lighthouse
History	Founded by pirates three hundred years ago, later absorbed by the kingdom as a border fortress
Rules	The city gates close after nightfall; lighting fires in the fog is forbidden (it draws the mist beasts)
Connections	The protagonist's hometown; tied to the 'Lighthouse Keepers' Guild' and the 'mist beasts'

Field guide

The preview table is where individual settings live — one row per place, guild, artifact, or people. The 26 points below are the world itself: the decisions that every entry in the table has to obey. They are grouped by the questions readers actually ask (how far is it, who is in charge, what does bread cost, what can magic do), and each one shows the example world of Mist-Veil City filled in.

Geography & nature

Field	What to write	Example
Size of the stage	How much of the world the story touches: one city, a kingdom, a continent, several planets. Everything else scales from this.	One coastal kingdom, three cities, a two-week ride from end to end.
Climate & seasons	The weather the characters live under and how the year is divided. This decides clothing, harvests, and when armies can march.	Wet and cold. A fog season of forty days, a short dry summer, storms in between.
Terrain & travel	Mountains, rivers, coasts, roads, and how long it takes to cross them by the means available. Travel time is the constraint plots break most often.	Cliff coast, one river inland. Road travel: five days between cities; by boat: two, when the fog allows.
Resources	What the land gives and what it lacks. Scarcity is where conflict comes from.	Fish, salt, whale oil. Almost no timber — every ship is bought from the south.

History

Field	What to write	Example
Origin event	The event the current order dates itself from. It sets the calendar and the founding myth.	The Lighting of the First Lighthouse, year 0: the pirate captains agreed to guide ships instead of wrecking them.
The most recent upheaval	The last thing that changed who holds power. Old enough that the world has settled, recent enough that people remember.	The Purge, twelve years ago: the crown broke the old cliff houses, House Su among them.
The history nobody tells	What the official version leaves out. This is where your secrets and your antagonist's motives come from.	The first lighthouse keepers kept wrecking ships for another sixty years. The guild's founding charter is a forgery.

Politics & power

Field	What to write	Example
Form of rule	Who decides, and how they got the right to. Monarchy, council, guild oligarchy, occupation.	A crown in the capital; in the port cities, the Lighthouse Keepers' Guild in everything that touches the sea.
Law & punishment	What is illegal that matters to the plot, and what happens to people caught. Pick three laws the story will bump into.	Lighting an open fire in the fog: branding. Sheltering a purged house: death. Smuggling: a fine the guild collects.
Military & policing	Who carries weapons legally, who they answer to, and how present they are in daily life.	City guard under the crown; guild couriers carry blades on the docks by custom, not by law.
The powerful and the opposition	Name the two or three people or factions at the top and who wants them gone. This is your political conflict in one row.	Captain Ren runs the guard and the crown's interest. The guild masters tolerate him. The purged houses' survivors do not.

Society & daily life

Field	What to write	Example
Rank & class	The layers people are sorted into and how visible the sorting is. Can someone move between them?	Crown families, guild members, dock labour, the purged. A guild badge moves you up one layer; nothing moves you out of the last one.
Family & marriage	What a household looks like, who inherits, what marriage is for. Inheritance rules drive more plots than magic does.	Houses inherit through the eldest child of either sex. Guild rank does not inherit at all.
Food, clothing, housing	What an ordinary person eats, wears, and sleeps in. Three details here make a scene feel lived in.	Salt fish and barley. Oiled wool. Stone houses cut into the cliff, one room per family, shared stairs.
Education & literacy	Who can read, who teaches, and what counts as being educated. Decides whether a letter or a rumour moves the plot.	Guild members read; most dock families do not. The guild school takes one child per family.

Economy & technology

Field	What to write	Example
Currency & the price of bread	What money is called and what one common thing costs. One anchor price lets you improvise every other number consistently.	Silver marks. A loaf of barley bread: two copper bits. A courier earns thirty bits a day.
Main industries & trade	What the place makes, what it imports, and who it trades with. Trade routes are where strangers come from.	Salt and whale oil out, timber and grain in. Everything goes through the guild's harbour.
Level of technology	What the most advanced tool in daily life is, and what is missing. State it plainly so you do not invent a printing press in chapter 20.	Sailing ships, oil lamps, hand-set type in the capital only. No gunpowder.

Magic & powers

Field	What to write	Example
What it can do	The effects that exist, stated as limits: what is the most a practitioner can achieve? Write the ceiling, not the wonder.	Sound-sight: a few people can map a space by echo. Range of a room. Nothing else counts as magic here.
Cost & limits	What using it takes away, and what it cannot do under any circumstances. A power without a cost flattens every fight.	Headaches that worsen with use; permanent hearing loss in the old ones. Useless in wind or rain.
Who has it & how society treats them	Is it inherited, learned, bought? Are its users feared, employed, hunted?	Born, one in ten thousand, mostly in the old cliff houses. The guild hires them quietly; the crown lists them.

Religion & belief

Field	What to write	Example
What is worshipped & what it asks	The gods or forces people pray to, and the one or two rules the faith imposes on daily life.	The Keeper, a saint of the first lighthouse. Faith asks two things: keep a lamp lit at night, and never let a ship wreck unaided.
Religion's distance from power	Whether the faith runs the state, advises it, ignores it, or opposes it. Sets what a priest can do in a scene.	The guild is the church; the crown tolerates it because the ships arrive.

Language & names

Field	What to write	Example
Languages & the common tongue	How many languages are in play and which one the story is told in. Decide whether foreigners are understood.	One coastal tongue; southern traders speak their own. Guild couriers learn enough of both to haggle.
Rules for personal names	The pattern names follow: house-then-given, one name only, patronymics. Decide once and every new character will sound like they belong.	House name first for the old families (Su Wan); a single name plus trade for everyone else (Ren the Captain).
The sound of place names	What the map sounds like: hard consonants, compound words, saints' names. Two or three examples keep future names consistent.	Descriptive compounds: Mist-Veil City, Saltreach, the Lamp Stairs.

Plain-text version (copy & paste)

The 26 points as a plain-text list, ready to paste into Notes, Google Docs, Notion, or a series bible. The seven points to settle before chapter one are marked with ★.

■ Geography & nature
★ Size of the stage:
Climate & seasons:
★ Terrain & travel:
Resources:

■ History
Origin event:
★ The most recent upheaval:
The history nobody tells:

■ Politics & power
★ Form of rule:
Law & punishment:
Military & policing:
The powerful and the opposition:

■ Society & daily life
Rank & class:
Family & marriage:
Food, clothing, housing:
Education & literacy:

■ Economy & technology
★ Currency & the price of bread:
Main industries & trade:
★ Level of technology:

■ Magic & powers
★ What it can do:
Cost & limits:
Who has it & how society treats them:

■ Religion & belief
What is worshipped & what it asks:
Religion's distance from power:

■ Language & names
Languages & the common tongue:
Rules for personal names:
The sound of place names:

The seven points to settle before chapter one

Size of the stage, terrain & travel, the most recent upheaval, form of rule, the price of bread, level of technology, and what magic can do. These seven are the ones a reader will catch you contradicting in the first fifty pages; the other nineteen can be filled the first time a scene needs them.

Twenty-six points is deliberately short. The 500-question worldbuilding questionnaires answer everything a world could contain; a novel only has to stay consistent about what it shows. Fill the questionnaire later, for the sequel, once you know which questions the story kept asking.

Fantasy, science fiction, contemporary: what to skip

Fantasy: fill all 26. Magic & powers is the group readers test hardest — write the cost before the wonder.
Science fiction: rename Magic & powers to Technology & its limits and fill it the same way; the cost-and-limits row is where hard and soft SF differ. Add a line under Terrain & travel for how long a journey between worlds takes.
Contemporary or historical: skip Magic & powers entirely and keep the rest. A story set in real Lisbon still needs the price of bread, the form of rule, and the history nobody tells, and the real world will punish you for guessing them.
Horror and fairy tale: History and Religion & belief carry the weight. The origin event and what is worshipped are usually the same thing.

Where each answer goes

The 26 points describe the world; the preview table holds the things in it. A rule from the checklist ("lighting a fire in the fog: branding") becomes the Rules cell of the entry for the fog, the city, or the guild — whichever the story touches. In LitMemo the checklist answers live as setting entries with a type of their own, so a rule written once is the same rule every chapter that references it. Paste your existing notes into the sandbox and the entries are extracted for you, with the relationships between them.

How to fill in this template

The biggest danger in worldbuilding isn't writing too little — it's scattering it everywhere and having the pieces fail to line up. Is this city to the east or the west? Does this magic cost something or not? The moment a setting contradicts itself, readers snap out of the story — and you usually don't catch these mistakes until you're halfway in, when going back to fix them is agony.

Bucketing your settings by 'type' is the key. Give locations, organizations, items, races, and rules each their own category and you'll find things fast. For every setting, fill in at least the 'Description' and 'Rules' fields: the description is what it looks like and how it feels; the rules are its hard constraints in your world (the price of magic, an organization's taboos, a location's quirks) — and the rules are what actually rein in your plot.

The 'History' column is the one fantasy authors most often skip, yet it's what gives your world its depth. Why a city is the way it is, why one organization feuds with another — the history behind it doesn't all have to make it into the main text, but you need to be clear on it yourself, or when you reach the conflict you'll find the motives don't hold up.

The 'Connections' column ties your settings together — which organization a city is linked to, which race worships an item. A world isn't a pile of isolated entries; it's a web, and the more clearly you fill in the connections, the more naturally you can weave layered background into your writing. Set up a few core locations and organizations and you're ready to start writing — the rest can grow as you go.

Fill the template in four steps

1

Decide on your setting types

First sort what you need to track — locations, organizations, items, races, rules. Once everything's bucketed, it's far quicker to find.

2

Write a description to set the tone

For each setting, write a short description — what it looks like, what feeling it gives off, and what role it plays in your world.

3

Lay down hard rules

Fill in the rules column — the price of magic, an organization's taboos, a location's quirks. These constraints are what actually rein in your plot.

4

Connect everything together

Note how your settings relate to each other so your world becomes a web — then you can weave layered background into the story with ease.

Better together

Don't want to draw the table yourself? Do it with LitMemo

This template maps to these LitMemo features — fill it in online and everything auto-links:

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Frequently asked questions

How much worldbuilding do I need before I can start writing?

Enough for the first three chapters; fill in the rest as you go. People who try to finish the whole world before writing usually stop at the worldbuilding.

Does a story set in the real world need a worldbuilding sheet?

Yes, but you record different things. For a real-world setting, record where you altered reality — the invented company, the renamed town, the department that doesn't exist. Those are the places that later drift out of sync.

I wrote a lot of setting material and never used it. Was that wasted?

Not wasted, but keep the ratio in check. Setting material that never reaches the page earns its keep by telling you where the boundaries are when you make a decision. If you can't even remember the entry exists, that one was genuinely wasted.

How rigidly should I fix the rules of a magic or power system?

Fix the cost and the things it cannot do; leave the rest flexible. Readers won't object to an unexplained mechanism, but they will object to the protagonist acquiring a new ability exactly when it's needed.

Is this a worldbuilding questionnaire?

It is the short version of one. A questionnaire asks several hundred questions about everything a world could contain; this template asks the 26 a novel has to stay consistent about, and marks the seven to settle before chapter one. Answer the seven, write, and come back for the rest as scenes demand them.

Does it work for science fiction or a real-world setting?

Yes. For science fiction, fill the Magic & powers group as Technology & its limits. For a contemporary or historical setting, skip that group and keep the other 23 — the price of bread and the form of rule matter just as much in a real city.

Can I download the template?

The copy-paste block gives you all 26 points as plain text for Word, Google Docs, Notion, or Scrivener. Filled in LitMemo, each answer becomes a setting entry you can link to characters, chapters, and the timeline, and the whole world exports with the manuscript.

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