Paracosmicon

By Shawn Fluhr

This book covers a large range of topics, including but not limited to: depth vs breadth worldbuilding style, the design of natural laws for universes, geographical features, flora and fauna, materials, settings and genres, in-universe art and architecture, relationships between characters and civilizations, cultural traditions, governmental systems, currency and trade, guides on naming various features of a world, constructed languages, and how to receive and handle feedback as a creator. The book contains judicious examples from all types of media, and a chapter showing the results of my worldbuilding in relation to the book's content.

For authorship, explanations are given in the context of a creator looking to build a world of fiction for any medium. It explores how the environments they create can improve their ability to drive a narrative, write compelling plots, and characters that interact with that world. The book is written with an educational slant, and gives a lot of technical information about why things in our world are the way they are, and how best to apply the research you do to inspire new creations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawn Fluhr
• Release date: Sep 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215389188

Book preview

Introduction

Contents

If you have a passing interest in worldbuilding, writing, authorship, screenwriting fiction, or dungeon mastering in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, D20 Modern, and all of the other non-d20 based games; this book will probably be useful to you. If you don't know what worldbuilding is, or if you don't care, then this book might persuade you to take up worldbuilding as a hobby. Worldbuilding is an activity that requires a high level of mental effort. If you like puzzles, writing, and critical thinking... you might find worldbuilding to be your thing.

Let's start by going over what this book contains. For context, we'll start with the basics. We are going to cover what worldbuilding is, what concultures are, how constructing them can be a hobby in their own right; but also how they can supplement your other creative or commercial projects.

Perhaps you are writing a book or drawing out a webcomic series. Maybe you are designing a tabletop board game or electronic video game. Perhaps you were told by your company to make a marketable toy line or a compelling story-driven website. You can always find a use for worldbuilding as long as your line of work needs a world to be lived in by its characters.

We will go over the basics of concultures, what it means to construct a complete conculture, and how to make them feel believable and lived in. We will work to design religions, technologies, architecture, mythologies, and explore the way cultures act between each other, xenophobic, and interspecies cultures; from the ground up.

Included are the broader topics of magic; the hard, the soft, and the weird. Magic systems, believable magic power sources, and magical creatures. On the topic of creatures, we will cover beasts, magical fauna, and monsters in mythologies and the development of believable histories. Histories that include in-world traditional games, sports, works of fine art, music, and food.

We will discuss how to populate a world with unique cultures and explain how to create interactions between them through power and politics, social etiquette, crime, justice, and magic-powered law enforcement. As well as the structure of governments, currency design, taxation, monarchies, ancestry, relationship dynamics, and how people adapt to changes through social revolution.

This book will cover all types of story settings from the various kinds of punk, space operas, and other science fiction; inventing technologies for that science fiction, weird alien beings, planetary colonization, and post-scarcity civilizations. More esoterically, we will also review blood magic, deithic powers, funerals, divination, immortality, and making up entire systems of natural laws for universes not structured like our own.

This already vast list is just a fraction of what you will learn from Paracosmicon. My motivation for this book is to get more people into the hobby of worldbuilding and to understand what comes together that makes a world feel unique, interactive, and immersive. I will share my own work with you near the end of this book. You can use this as an example of my thought process, as I've matched the sections of it with the order of the book's chapters.

This book is an attempt to help onboard you into worldbuilding by providing you with a streamlined version of what I have learned over two decades of work. Researching the building of worlds I've absorbed all kinds of media. I want to provide you with the tools that have contributed to the construction of my worlds so that you can use them for yours.

It will be fun. It will be challenging. It will stretch your imagination to its very limit. It will allow us to learn from others who have spent their lives worldbuilding. There are so many extraordinary people, with so many incredible ideas sharing their insights and knowledge freely. It is an absolutely amazing community, and I am fortunate to be a part of it.

Paracosm

A paracosm is an imaginary world that a person creates in their own mind. It is usually detailed, complex and may include its own history, geography, and inhabitants. Paracosms are the place created by worldbuilding that people explore and inhabit. Paracosms are often a product of daydreaming and can be used for escapism, creative expression, or as a way to better understand, engage with, or simulate the real world. These worlds can be shared with others but must be constructed and organized to be shown to other people.

For many, their paracosm is a refuge away from the mundane reality of their everyday lives. It is a place where they can be anyone they want to be, do anything they can imagine, or create and manipulate anything they desire. It is a place where the impossible becomes possible, and the imaginary becomes reality. For some, their paracosm is a means to cope with or escape from traumas, stress, or negative social interactions. A place where they can go to forget about their troubles and relax. For others, their paracosm is a place where they are free to express their creativity, without boundaries, limitations, or destructive criticism.

When building a fictional world, having a clear, well-defined setting is important. Without a well-grounded imaginary reality, the events that unfold within it are difficult to suspend your disbelief from. A paracosm provides a detailed simulation of imaginary reality created by the mind's eye. This simulated worldview can allow a person to test what will or should work, and what may not. A paracosm is as much an object of experimentation as it is a codified canonical version of a fictional universe. Nobody can tell a creator what is in their paracosm, and it may differ from the world they put onto paper.

Starting Worldbuilding

Why do we as writers, roleplayers, and people in general take time to create our worlds? There are a lot of reasons why people build worlds. We know it can be a means of escapism, but it can also be a form of self-expression or a way to flex one's creative muscles. It can be a way to explore different cultures and ideas, or create something completely new. It can be a way to connect with others who share similar interests, or a way to have fun with a community of like-minded people. Regardless if you are a wordsmith or a worldsmith, building a place of your own is a great achievement and something you will always cherish. No matter what, fire, prison, war, homelessness, or anything short of amnesia; the world you build can never be taken away from you.

Worldbuilding is the process of creating that new world or creating an alternate version of history that diverges from our own world. Worldbuilding creates a world from square one, and a conculture is created to fit within that worldbuilding project. Worldbuilding can be used for creating a foundational setting to tell stories in works of fiction. These can be books, short story anthologies, movies and screenplays, comics and graphic novels, or other types of literary or visual media. As well as game settings for tabletop roleplaying games or electronic games of all kinds; but mostly for AAA video games. The Elder Scrolls, Final Fantasy, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Zelda, Halo and Mass Effect series' are just a few notable examples of games with plenty of quality worldbuilding.

Many different and diverse elements go into worldbuilding a fictional setting. The setting is a backdrop against where the story takes place. Without it, a story cannot move forward as it has nothing to interact with. Worldbuilding includes cultural aspects, environmental features, materials, history, a timeline of events, political interactions, geological processes, celestial objects, magical forces, mythical creatures, and flora or fauna; fungi, bacteria, viruses, or some other unique forms of life that doesn't exist in our own world.

When you start building your world there are many considerations you need to make. You need to decide the scope of your world. Are you building a small town, a nation, an entire planet, a multi-planet civilization like a galactic empire, or even larger? When it comes to details of the world itself, you need to think about its climate. What is the average temperature? Does it vary from season to season? Are there any extreme weather conditions? What are the major landmasses and landforms? Where are the mountains, forests, and deserts relative to the center of civilization or your story? What bodies of water are there nearby? Is it an ocean or a river? If there are none, why?

You also need to consider the people who live in that civilization and their culture. That culture is one built by you; called a conculture short for constructed culture. What are the cultures that exist in your world? Does your world only have one major culture or many small groups of people? What languages do they speak? What are their beliefs or customs? What are the events that have shaped their history? How were those cultures founded? What wars have been fought for their way of life?

Beginning the process of worldbuilding can be a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. The most important thing, regardless of the method that you use, is just to start somewhere. Pick a corner of your world to start with and expand from there. As you worldbuild, you will begin to get a feel for the scale of the project and how everything fits together.

A useful tip is to join, or start, a worldbuilding community. There are many online communities dedicated to worldbuilding where you can find writing advice, and support from other worldbuilders. You can use this to get feedback on your ideas, find inspiration, and get new viewpoints on concepts you can't see on your own. It is impossible to think of everything, and you will always miss things that are very clear to your audience that you haven't covered. To have an FAQ, you have to have questions asked to you to see what issues frequently come up. There are also many software programs out there targeted to worldbuilders, that we will go over in a minute.

When it comes to people already used to worldbuilding, it takes a lot of practice exploring worldbuilding concepts to move onto the next level. It can take years of experience building worlds until you get good at it. Like with writing, the first project you work on you are pretty much guaranteed to dislike. One of the best ways you can become a worldbuilder is to read and watch as much as you can about worldbuilding. There are lots of great books out there on the subject, as well as one of my favorite resources; Worldbuilding Magazine. Worldbuilding Magazine is a professionally produced and edited publication that is available for free from its website.

For online resources, I suggest using the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange or joining one of many of World Anvil's Worldbuilder's Guild communities and subcommunities. Although World Anvil itself is a quality paid service, its community is a great place to ask questions and get advice from other worldbuilders. There is also the r/worldbuilding subreddit. To improve your worldbuilding skills, you should take part in forums and online contests. There are plenty of contests like these based on categories of entry and for various styles of maps.

Worldbuilding Tools

Some software tools out there are made specifically for worldbuilders like World Anvil, Campfire, Legend Keeper, and notebook.ai. All with different prices and likelihood to survive the next decade on the internet. The truth is that many worldbuilding software tools eventually go unmaintained, or their software as a service goes the way of extinction. Thankfully, many of these services provide conventional offline backups to prepare you for the inevitable collapse or relocation of their features.

There are, however, very powerful worldbuilding tools that are both free and open source, or at least have an extensive plugin repository. This prevents rendering the software usable in the long term, or in the event of a change in an operating system's core functionality. One of these pieces of software is Obsidian Markdown, a mind mapping software. Mindmapping is the process of putting all of your thoughts onto paper in an archival framework that makes those thoughts easier to retrieve.

It is a powerful memory-enhancing tool that can help you create a second brain accessible through software. When you mindmap, you create a visual representation of information that can be used to support cognitive effort. You can see the big picture and make connections between ideas more easily. Mindmapping is a great way to organize information for exams, essays, studies, or projects. This technique can help you remember information more efficiently and recall it more quickly. Mindmapping typically refers to information structured on a web graph or cluster diagram, but more recently it has been used to describe the process of constructing a second brain instead of a specific type of chart.

Creating a mindmap is simple. Choose a mindmapping software or application. You can also use analog methods such as an index card catalog. For software, there are many options available and we have already mentioned a few. Find one that suits your needs, and do your own research on the software to make sure it is a good fit for your workflow. Once you have made yourself accustomed to the software you plan to use, you can start creating your mindmap. Start by adding a central topic, and add subtopics and supporting information. Depending on your software you might do this visually like in Freemind and XMind, or connect to them via wikilinks. Once a subtopic page is created, continue with this process into finer details. Make sure you exercise both depth and breadth.

Obsidian has become my bread and butter for worldbuilding, and I can't praise it enough. It is free, with full utility, and has paid features that allow the hosting of archives directly to the internet to share. The software saves any file that you create in a human-readable directory, and text is saved in markdown syntax. It also shows a graph view containing a visual display of all the documents you have in your archive. This gives an idea about how information in the archive is connected, and provides insights into which concepts need expansion. Documents can be tagged into categories, and include wikilinks to navigate seamlessly between articles. You can use this software to build your own personalized wiki.

There are other personal wiki software out there. Another good free one is called Zim Wiki and has similar competitors like WikidPad. These are standalone desktop applications that can be used to build and manage an entire wiki's worth of text data. They are built to manage thousands of individual articles and can export an entire website to be uploaded directly to a web host. Connections in these files are managed via categories and directories called namespaces and linked internally via hypertext. Using either feels like editing wiki content in real-time, without the need to save to see changes. Many personal wiki desktop applications are highly customizable and include their own scripting, formatting, and styling options.

Another good option is a full-blown wiki software such as MediaWiki, the software used by Wikipedia, and DokuWiki built in a similar framework that has human-readable files. There are also javascript-based options like TiddlyWiki, but I have found these to be insufficient for the amount of data a worldbuilder needs to organize. You can host these on your local network with software like WampServer or XAMPP both completely free. Although, with a learning curve if you aren't tech-savvy. Once you get everything set up, you can use a fully featured wiki editor to save, and search through files with complete revision history. If you upload it to a live website, you can even have multiple editors.

Finally, analog mindmapping is a thing that can be done with a catalog of 3 by 5 index cards. This structure called Zettelkasten or Notecard Box, was first founded by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist. He wrote over 70 academic books and hundreds of articles across his career. Remembering all of the information and questions he had proposed led him to develop a detailed method of notetaking.

The Zettelkasten notetaking method is itself an entire philosophy and lifestyle. This lifestyle keeps in mind at all times the possibility to write information down; with a pen always in arms reach. When you come across information you want to remember or explore later, on the front of the card you rephrase the content briefly in your own words. Write questions that you want to answer later on the front near the bottom. On the back of the card, you write the document name or bibliographic entry for the content or question which caused the card to be created.

Typically the cards are numbered, and if two cards contain similar content, their relevant card numbers are annotated or sorted into a branching identification system. Some people include the date and time of creation as well. You then sort the cards by ID and look through them each time a subject comes up that you want to recall. You later answer proposed questions to expand your knowledge on the subject. This notetaking system has the downside of not having a digital backup or being searchable in real-time. Instead, the cards have to be reviewed manually. They can be digitized and skimmed through software like Obsidian or with wiki software, but lack the same tactile tangibility, and feeling that index cards have. Zettelkasten is a favored analog note-keeping method for this tactical sensation.

As a small aside, the translation of Notecard Box is argued by Scott P. Scheper in favor of the more common translation of Slip Box in a write-up titled The Term Zettelkasten Does Not Mean What You Think It Does. I agree with his interpretation of this translation and would consider him to be an authority in knowledge about a niche German notetaking system.

Viewpoints

When creating content for your audience, especially when it comes to writing, you have two viewpoints; In-Character (IC) and Out-of-Character (OOC). The term in-character used in roleplaying and tabletop gaming communities. The use of the in-character viewpoint while acting is method acting. Method acting is a technique used by actors to get more emotional weight out of a performance by embodying a particular character entirely. Being in-character is a method acting experience, where you take up a person's ideologies, mannerisms, and actions as if you are them. Doing things you might never do yourself, such as committing a crime in a fictional setting or taking up the role of a political leader despite lacking any political power of your own outside of the roleplaying group.

The opposite is the out-of-character viewpoint, which describes a position outside or superior to a character's reality. This can be in the form of omniscience, as an author knows the past, present, and future of the reality their characters experience. As the author is the all-known, all-seeing god over the story they create. It may also be from the viewpoint of the audience, who watches the character from outside of the fourth wall looking in. They do not have the omniscient knowledge of the writer but may have access to dramatic irony; possessing information inaccessible to the characters in the story. Like the existence of a magical artifact determining their fate, the true identity of the villain, or the death of a character the protagonist has yet to discover.

Worldbuilding Viewpoints

Both of these viewpoints have analogous equivalents in worldbuilding. The in-universe viewpoint has a component of being in-character. Characters within a worldbuilt universe are living within it, and the lives of those fictional people are affected by the creator's changes to it. Be it change to fundamental laws or the introduction of a new object or lifeform. The worldbuilder has to take up the mantle of a character within their universe to see how a change might affect the inhabitants' lives. Even small changes can have ripple effects throughout the world that might need to be accounted for. The author might miss a connection if they don't walk some time in a character's shoes.

Besides the characters themselves, objects, and media might be in-universe as well. Examples are diegetic objects; things that only exist in a fictional world. You might have a complete understanding of how the planes of your universe's afterlife are structured. The canonical truth of what really happens to a person when they die. The people in-universe are going to have a different representation of that. None of them might be correct but might have their own religious frameworks. Due to the nature of death, nobody can see the afterlife and bring information back with them. Even if they can, and are 100% correct in their description, it is unlikely that anyone will believe them more than superficially.

This viewpoint is actually called Diegesis which is a fictional style presenting details of a world through the experience of characters within it. A person may be existing in a world telling stories about their cultural history to their children. Their interpretation or telling of their mythology is almost certainly not an exact telling of the details of a true historical event as it happened. As the arbiter of their reality, capable of altering their past, you know the perfect truth. They have their own in-universe recounting of the same events.

This total knowledge of how their universe works is the out-of-universe perspective. It is the perspective of the author and the narrator. The level of knowledge one processes about a universe is relative to how much they are invested into it. Employees or ex-employees of Bioware are likely to know more about the inner workings of the Mass Effect series than the average person. Fans of the series will know more. People taking to the employees via private non-disclosure agreed conversations will know even more. Then Drew Karpyshyn and later Mac Walters, the lead writers of the series are going to know far more than anyone ever will.

The extent of the canonical viewpoint is relational to a person's investment in it. When it comes to a fictional world, it can quickly grow to become something outside of your full creative control. Unless you are adamant that it stays in your hands. Opening a wiki about your world that other people can edit, starts to become canonical information; even if it is a misunderstanding. Fanon is the creation of canonical content by fans (fan canon).

This can happen due to popular fan theories, or assumptions by fans that are adopted by a series author. This concept is referred to as Ascended Fanon. A popular example was from the anime series Dragon Ball Super, where during the Resurrection F movie Frieza was combating Goku and Vegeta. The blue form used by them was canonicaly Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan. A state where the Super Saiyan God form gains the Super Saiyan powerup. Fans instead referred to this form as Super Saiyan Blue. This was later co-opted by the official staff and