Worldbuilding Template

The seven fields to settle before chapter one

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

Fill them in this order. The size of the stage tells you how far apart things are. Travel time tells you how fast news and armies move. The last upheaval tells you who is angry, and the form of rule tells you who can do something about it. The price of bread and the level of technology fix what daily life looks like. What magic can do, written as a ceiling, tells you what your climax can't rely on.

The whole world sheet, filled in

Here are all 26 fields for Mist-Veil City, condensed to a line or two each, with the seven to settle first starred. Most answers are a single sentence. A world sheet you can read in two minutes is one you'll actually check mid-draft.

Worldbuilding questions by category

When a field stays blank, answer one of these instead. They are grouped the same way as the sheet, five per group, and each one is worded to produce something a scene can use. The full set is also in the downloads.

Geography & nature:

• What does a traveler see in the first hour after arriving?
• Which route does everyone take, and what happens to people who take the other one?
• What season is it in chapter one, and what will the next season make impossible?
• What does the land run out of first in a bad year?
• Where is the one place nobody goes, and why?

History:

• What happened a lifetime ago that old people still argue about?
• Who wrote the official history, and what did they gain from it?
• Which holiday, monument, or curse word comes from the last war?
• What would your antagonist say really happened?
• What does everyone believe about the founding that isn't true?

Politics & power:

• Who can have someone arrested, and who can get them released?
• What is legal here that a reader would expect to be banned, or the other way around?
• Who wants the current ruler gone, and what stops them today?
• How long does an order from the top take to reach a street corner?
• Who collects taxes, and what happens to people who can't pay?

Society & daily life:

• What does a working family eat on an ordinary night?
• What would get your protagonist thrown out of a respectable house?
• Who may marry whom, and who breaks that rule anyway?
• At what age is someone treated as an adult?
• How do strangers greet each other, and what counts as an insult?

Economy & technology:

• What does a day's wage buy?
• What gets smuggled, and who looks the other way?
• What does every household own one of, and what do only the rich own?
• How does news travel, and how fast?
• What breaks often, and who fixes it?

Magic & powers:

• What is the most a practitioner can do on their best day?
• What does it cost, and who pays when the user can't?
• What can magic never do, no matter who tries?
• How is it learned, and who controls the teaching?
• What would an ordinary person do if they saw it used in the street?

Religion & belief:

• What do people do at a birth, a wedding, and a death?
• What do people swear by?
• Who in the faith holds real power, and who only appears to?
• Which rule do most believers quietly break?
• What happens to people who don't believe?

Language & names:

• What do locals call the city, and what do outsiders call it?
• What does a name tell you about someone's family or class?
• Which words will your protagonist use that the reader won't know, and how will the reader learn them?
• Is there a language only some people speak, and who uses it to keep secrets?
• How do people address someone above or below them?

If you want the long version, the worldbuilding guide works through the same layers with a checklist for each one.

Fantasy worldbuilding template: the extra fields

The 26 fields work for any genre. A fantasy world needs six more, because fantasy readers check these hardest:

• Peoples and species: who lives here besides humans, and what each group wants from the others.
• Creatures and monsters: what is dangerous outside the walls, and how it shapes daily rules.
• Calendar and timekeeping: how years are counted and what the months or seasons are called. The timeline template takes it from there.
• Gods: whether they act in the world or are only worshipped. Decide before a miracle shows up in chapter 30.
• Magic's history: when it appeared, who controlled it, and the last time it went badly wrong.
• The map in travel days: distances between the places the story uses, in days by each way of traveling.

Magic gets its own worksheet, below. Write the cost and the limits before the wonder, and note the chapter where the story tests each limit. A limit the plot never tests is decoration. A limit the hero gets past exactly when it matters reads as cheating.

A map for writers: distances in days

You don't need a drawn map to write a fantasy novel. You need to know how long it takes to get from one place the story uses to another, by every way of traveling the world has, and what slows it down. That's what readers check.

Sketch the places as boxes and the routes as lines, and write the travel time on each line. Add the season or the weather that closes a route. In the example, the boat to Saltreach takes two days, but not during the forty days of fog, which is exactly when the plot needs someone there.

Science fiction, historical, contemporary: what to change

• Science fiction: rename Magic and powers to Technology and its limits and fill it the same way: what it can do, what it costs, who controls it. The cost-and-limits field is where hard and soft science fiction differ. Add travel time between worlds and communication delay under Terrain and travel.
• Historical: keep all eight groups, skip magic, and add what you changed from the record and the real events happening in the background. Historical readers check prices, titles, and travel times against what they know.
• Contemporary: skip magic and most of history. Record where your book departs from reality: the invented company, the renamed town, the police department that doesn't exist. Those are the details that drift out of sync later.
• Horror and fairy tale: history and religion carry the weight. The origin event and what is worshipped are often the same thing.

Where each answer goes

The 26 fields describe the world; the entry table holds the things in it. A rule from the sheet ("open flame in the fog: branding") goes into the Rules cell of the entries the story touches: the fog, the city, the guild. When a scene breaks a rule, you look it up in one place.

In LitMemo, those entries live in your world as setting cards with types you choose, each linked to the characters, chapters, and timeline events it involves. After you sign in, you can paste notes you already have and LitMemo extracts the places, groups, objects, and rules it finds into cards you can edit.

Worldbuilding template, questionnaire, or story bible?

A worldbuilding template is a fixed set of fields you fill once per world, like this one. A worldbuilding questionnaire is a long list of questions, often a hundred or more, that you answer to discover the world; the 40 questions above are a short one. A story bible holds the world and everything else a series has to keep straight: characters, timeline, and the facts each book established. Start with the template, and move it into a series bible when book two begins.

If you're prepping a tabletop campaign rather than a novel, the needs are different: players will go where the story didn't plan to. See the post on building a TRPG campaign world.