Category: Book Blog

The influence that the supernatural has on a setting can be enormous unless the supernatural is rare. In fantasy, places are often presented as if they’re medieval-like with a smattering of wizardry thrown in. Theoretically, this only makes sense if Read More …

Throughout this chapter, we’ve touched on the idea that supernatural elements may only sometimes be available for our characters to encounter. This is true for beings and energies that might exist all the time but only periodically flare up in Read More …

Figures of Note Earth mythologies are full of interesting characters that are not gods or humans. This includes Charon, who ferries souls across the rivers Styx and Acheron. There’s Cerberus, the three-headed dog in Greek mythology, who prevents the dead Read More …

In Creating Life, we discussed both animals and monsters, so these won’t be covered here, but we can take any of them and add supernatural elements. We don’t always need to decide where a creature originated, but it helps us Read More …

A chapter from Creating Life (The Art of World Building, #1) covered the creation of gods and pantheons in detail, but here we’ll cover lesser beings: the demi-gods. The term can mean many things, so for our purposes, we’re discussing any Read More …

Most of us have probably seen an alternate reality depicted, especially in SF. There used to be a TV show called Sliders where, in every episode, the characters were forced into an alternate reality from Earth. These variations can be easy Read More …

In some fantasy settings, there’s an alternate way of traveling that amounts to magical paths, which may have a corresponding magical doorway for access. Using these paths typically offers an advantage accompanied by great risk. A common advantage is much Read More …

Some could argue that a fantasy world without the supernatural isn’t really fantasy, though we can still consider it that if it has all the other trappings, such as fictional species and races. But in SF, we can skip the Read More …

After determining the god this religion follows, world builders should start with history because we can incorporate this in the invention of a religion. Almost every religion pays great attention to its beginnings. This will include historical figures that performed Read More …

Our first decision on the afterlife is whether it’s real or imagined. If it’s real, then likely a god created it and the rules are incontrovertible. In this case, our religion is probably right about anything going on there or Read More …