Templates and Newsletter
Effective world building requires having written down details about the created world. To help you organize and jumpstart your efforts, each volume in this series includes templates in the appendices. This volume includes seven: gods, species, monsters, world figures (heroes, villains, and more), plants, animals, and undead.
Rather than typing these up yourself, you can download these templates for free by joining the newsletter for The Art of World Building. As each volume is published, whether you’ve bought the book or not, subscribers will automatically receive an email with links to download the templates as Microsoft Word files, which you can repeatedly use.
Creating Places (Volume Two)
The life we create needs to originate from somewhere on a planet: an ocean, a continent, in a land feature (like a forest or mountain range), in a kingdom, or in a settlement. Creating Places (The Art of World Building, #2) goes into detail about inventing such locations and figuring out how long it takes to travel between them by various forms of locomotion: foot, horse, wagon, dragon, wooden ship, spaceship, and more. The overall rules of our world are also considered, along with inventing time, history, various places of interest, and how to draw maps. We can start our work with any one of those subjects and crisscross between places and life, for one often impacts the other.
Cultures and Beyond (Volume Three)
Everything not covered in the first two volumes lies within the finale, Cultures and Beyond (The Art of World Building, #3). This includes creating culture, organizations, armed forces, religions, the supernatural, magic systems, technological and supernatural items, languages, names, and various systems our world will have, from health, educational, legal, commerce, to information systems. Finally, we look at how to manage our world building projects. Without these subjects, no world building project is complete.