Designing a World

Geopoeia
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Usually three different methods or approaches for world-building are distinguished:

In case of the first (top-down or macro-to-micro), the designer/creator starts with a general idea and broad characteristics of the world, and then starts filling in the details: continents and cultures, then countries and peoples, then cities, and so forth.

In case of the second (bottom-up or micro-to-macro), the designer/creator starts with a particular detail or a small number of very specific aspects of the world, and then starts adding context to that.

The third approach is a compromise between the first two in which the designer/creator starts with the broad picture, then moves to some detail, and continues switching between broader and more detailed perspectives.

All three of these approaches assume that a world is a kind of tree structure with higher and lower levels, such that either the lower levels (the details) are determined by the higher, or the higher are generalizations or derivations of the lower. In either case, working out one level enables working out the next. Reality is a bit more complex, however. To get a climate map correct for example, one has to switch several times between climatic effects (such as precipitation) on physical geography (the course of rivers, the creation of swamps and lakes, the direction of sea currents, etc.) and conversely the effects of physical geography on climate. Effectively, to get 'things' right, the designer works in a sort of spiral pattern, touching upon the same subjects again and again, slowly adjusting them more and more to each other, slowly approaching a plausible model. However, in that progress, nothing is fixed, what seemed 'details' may change the initial broad picture, and details that initially seemed fixed may change under the influence of other factors. In other words, there is a fourth approach to world-building: Holistic Design, which is 'holistic' in the sense that it explicitly recognizes that in a 'realistic' world (as in the real world) everything hangs together.


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