How to Make a Monster Part 2: The Primal Predator
Last week I talked about the 4 Monster Archetypes I am using the Primal Predator, the Twisted Reflections, the Corrupted Humanity, and the Divine Enforcers. This week I want to…
How to Make a Monster Part 1: Starting from Scratch
Monsters. When you create an original setting, you may often need a monster to terrify your characters and our audience. Or a plethora of them to fill out a wider…
How to Begin an Invented Civilization, and How Far to Detail it.
One of the hardest parts of building a culture from scratch is grasping the scope of the world. How much is necessary? How much serves the story and how much…
Top 10 Disguises For Chupacabra In The Modern World
But of course, these only reflect the opinions of one human being and the individual chupacabras available for interview. So I asked the allegedly human people of the "Concellation 2020"…
How to Name Things when you struggle with Naming Things
Coming up with the perfect name for a character, a location, or almost anything can be one of the most frustrating parts of worldbuilding, or storytelling in general. At times…
Creating New Civilizations with a Random Generator
If you're stuck, don't know where to go next, don't have any idea what might need to be added to bring some uniqueness to your world, you want to start asking questions. Each answer will provide the potential for new questions, new answers, connections, and patterns to develop.
Creating New Cultures and How to Not Make Them Racist
What makes a civilization? What makes a culture? I'm going to define a culture as a group with shared traditions and values, often regional, and a civilization as one or…
Designing Unique Alien Species for your World
This is honestly one of my favorite topics. It's always important to me for a world to have a variety of points of view, physical forms, and non-human species and…
Start with the Story or Start with the World
Top-down vs bottom-up world development. As I look at some of the other worldbuilding advice givers out there, I see several of them talking about the problem of putting too…
How to Generate a Map for your World
The Goal So there are any number of ways to draw up a map of the local region, or even a continent. You can start from many different angles, such…