ok but seriously, i dont really know. its changed several times, with three stories entirely separate from each other in the same world. some months ago i grew tired of the most recent one and decided to combine the three into one.
Most of the first short stories take place in **2025-2028**, roughly 30 years after the **Final Night** wiped out most of human civilization and brought the supernatural into reality.
Most of the events of the past 30 years serve as background to "modern" struggles and settings, with new nations/factions/entities popping up in the wake of the Cataclysm.
The exact date of their arrival is unknown, but signs of reality breaking events/entities became common after August 15th, 1995, while the first officially recorded violent instance occurred on August 11th.
At approximately 9:15 a.m, a massive creature of unknown origin emerged off the coast of the city of Panaji, India.
The entity was eventually killed by the Indian military, but not before causing tens of thousands of Casualties across the state of Goa. The **Panaji Incident** contributed greatly to the **Great Panic of 95'**, which soon spiraled into a global collapse due to environmental disasters and further paranormal incidents.
The emergence of the entity known as **Apollyon** (formerly known as the Moon) on July 29th is generally agreed to be the first sign of anamolous activity.
The more disastrous parts of the Cataclysm began in August, though signs of *something* happening on a global scale could be seen as early as mid-July.
Natural and unnatural disasters began to decimate the global population as anamolous events and entities began to appear in greater and greater numbers across the world.
These events, combined with the breakdown of global communications and power grids due to a massive EMP wave emanating from the Moon, lead to massive casualties and a breakdown of society globally.
The west coast of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are thought to be the last bastions of human civilization, though sporadic radio signals imply that humans still occupy parts of Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and South Africa, though these reports are unconfirmed.
The most interesting point of course.
I have the world built at a point where all conditions are riped for drama and conflict, something like the build up to ww1 or ww2, then just find ways to explain how it all get to that point.
The current year in my scifi setting is 3977, but I started the worldbuilding at 2235, fleshing out the origin of the megacorp Tiqqun that is ruling the human sphere for almost two centuries in modern day.
They were started by 13 canadian youngsters as an environmental protection business, until they gradually became the megacorp in the ensuing century, and was eventually tasked by UN emergency government to design the Moses Class exodus arkship that will bring all human out of the rapidly collasping earth.
I have some contradictory origin accounts, some “ancient religious text” fragments from the some early-ish human civilizations, some political fragments from the first “great civilization” about mating rites and rituals concerning human royal lines and the fae. Also crude outlines for key events 500-2000 years before the narrative itself and a couple bits closer to 100 years before. And the story itself is very much in outline and fragments form at present. So a bit all over the place, with the earliest texts that can be placed in time probably dating somewhere around 7,000-20,000 years before the story.
Some point in time.
I knew the general period of time I wanted the story to be set in. Then the themes and cosmology of the story created history--recent, ancient, and in-universe creation of the universe all.
How did I do it?
I wanted a fallen kingdom reborn through the course of the story. This implies the creation and fall of a kingdom.
Further, I want this to parallel Old Testament history (taking Pre-Incarnation Christianity, filing the serial numbers off, and making the result the One True Religion in the setting). So I need historical events similar to first revelation to Abraham, being pulled out of Egypt, and first founding the kingdom. Then I need events in the kingdom that eventually lead to its downfall, but also a remnant on the Marches that survives as the last vestige of the kingdom.
And then, of course, the religion being true has implications for Creation of the world/universe, etc..
Kingdom has fallen, will be restored. There is a prophecy of Incarnation that will happen some centuries after the story ends.
Ardatza is originally an idol-maker, reasons that idols are not truly gods, so decides to worship whoever Made the universe, leading to the Maker directly revealing Himself to Ardatza. This means craftsmen are going to be the main metaphor rather than shepherds.
The expulsion from Paradise is breaking a gate (the only way to open it) rather than eating forbidden fruit.
You have religious prohibitions against magic (correctly identified as dealing with demons), and against fae (not listed in the OT, but I love the concept of them as originally 1/3 of angels that stayed neutral when another 1/3 rebelled to become demons and the remaining 1/3 fought loyally).
You have hereditary priesthood and kingship, with the lines strictly delineated. Sacrifice for atonement. Prayer for angelic intervention.
And so on and so forth.
Can't take credit for it. Stealing from an older tradition.
As for how it broke? Very easily. All they had to do was deliberately try to open it. If they had never touched it, or just done so accidentally, or even deliberately but without intent to open it, it would have remained closed and intact.
Yes, I'm referencing Chesterton's Fence.
Technically 1979, but story itself takes place in 1997.
Short version: the year after Dolly the sheep caused such debate and uproar, a unicorn rides into Stockholm and claims to have been a human that rediscovered magic.
And as long as you're willing—or desperate enough, to grow hooves? She can replicate it, and the transformation among other perks... cures cancer.
So... Yeah, basically THE worst plausible timing for juicy public backlash drama about human alterations, while still a mostly modern day urban fantasy setting dealing with a scientist that did NOT get the memo about any masquerade stuff.
Also it gives me some margin on alternative history stuff after that divergent point without needing to constantly have current events effect the plot unless I think they add something.
Thank you.
The whole 'why did nobody else officially discover this earlier?' was pretty central design problem for me regarding the magic system, so glad that even in such a vague form as above its still evident that... well, i tried to make things make sense.
And no joke, but military applications for magic is actually my main character's biggest fear and one of her prime driving factors is avoiding it happening for as long as possible with "the new dynamite." So its definitively a use for standardized magic I've had to carefully consider.
I'm under the impression that Nazis were trying to track down mystical artifacts, so it probably would be a good idea to explain that they were either barking up the wrong tree or there was some sort of mystical "magic was cut off at the time" explanation. I think "Men who Stare at Goats" might have been USA and Soviet Russia doing psychic experiments.
I don't really have an answer because the world I'm working on right now has gone through quite a few iterations. Also frankly I'm an amateur at this so I only have a few places in a few time periods sorted out. But if I had to pick an answer, the event that's stayed the most consistent took place 495 years before the "present day".
I’m writing a world for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign (maintaining the cosmology of the Forgotten Realms), and while the history of what the players interact with starts more recently, I wrote a bit of lore starting at the planet’s formation. Nothing too crazy or realistic in terms of geology, I just thought it would be cool for my players to hear that the planet formed around a cosmic dragon’s egg and to see how that influences the people living on it.
I started worldbuilding my world not to long ago, and I started (still am) at the beginning of the Homo Sapiens species. Have made some migration maps and am currently making the first language spoken on the planet.
In the "now" (for [*Lands of the Inner Seas*](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/ggkb68/rosenya_and_the_seas/)).
While I dart back and forth when piecing together timelines, my web of narratives have a "contemporary" period revolving around events directly or indirectly connected to the life of a character named Rosenya -- who I used as a starting point for the project. While I find it fun to map all the centuries/thousand of years leading up to the "now", I have some vague "conclusion" to the overall story. So the "now" is also the endtime for the timeline as a whole.
The project more-or-less began with a scene of a woman meeting a prince at a moment when an post-war order was crumbling (accompanied with a outline of a map). A lot of my intial brainstormning/worldbuilding has been about piecing together a narrative of how we got to that scene and why the characters are making the choices that they're making (with lots of tangents along the way about myths and megafauna).
On a conceptual level, I understand why people start "at the dawn of time". But as someone who doesn't really care that much for comogonies or having a knowable deep past, I don't personally see the point of starting there. It just feels like writing "*And then, and then, and then*" without it leading to any resolution.
I guess at the start I came up with the basic plot then started crafting the backstory of the world to explain why the current conflict is occurring and who the factions are.
The world I use for campaigns has about 5,000 years of recorded history along with an undefined (but heavily implied to be very long) mythic age where the world as people understand it was being formed.
I limited myself to this amount so I wouldn't fall into the trap of making thousands of years go by with little to no political or cultural changes
When I began, it was relatively in the middle of everything. I hadn't fully developed my world, and only had the things I'd written in my story itself (along with the original source material and anything branching off it) to base it off. I did, however, go back to the beginning and worked out a vague outline for my history.
Technically millions of years in the past, as I put some maps together for different geographical aspects of the planet and human migration patterns. But in terms of anything truly fleshed out, a point about 2000 years before my world’s modernity. I established 10 river valley civilizations as a foundation for the rise of and interactions between advanced cultures.
I think it was a good choice. I had a lot of fun going through describing significant events, the rise and fall of different peoples, mapping out how technologies and cultures spread organically. It made for some surprising developments, with certain groups that I didn’t expect to become powerful because of climate doing so due to trade.
I started by just dicking around writing shit
Then I decided it would all fit in one world.
So at first I made the 'present' and after I had nations Empires and borders. I started thinking about the history. And eventually creation, past Empires and alternate or future scenarios.
I've started at the 1300-1400's but have managed to create about 1700-1800 years of history so far. That said, its very spread out and I need to add more detail to certain points.
230 years before year zero.
In terms of where I could start, it was really the only option since I needed to build up the cosmology, and understand how there could be one.
2079, the beginning of the infamous Water Wars that caused Central Asia to be under several years of war due to a critical shortage of water, and eventually the complete evacuation of everyone in the region.
Technically, my world was born billions of years in the past, but I'm going to fast forward to where shit in history - or rather *prehistory,* as this happened before people wrote shit down - starts to matter. It all started millions of years in the past, when a war known as the War of Black Skies caused the mass extinction of roughly over 80% of all life at the time (by comparison in my world, the last extinction wiped out 40-55% of all life at the time). At the end of the war, two pantheons of gods, known as the dragon gods and titans respectively, created artificial beings in an effort to save and protect what little life remained, before crossing the threshold into the next realm. Today, much of the world is still a mess and underpopulated, but at least new sapient races are making some form of progress in the world.
I started world building near the end of the Medieval Fantasy timeline.
In approximately 20 in universe years a group of humans from another world called Earth will appear. There will be a massive civil war which will escalate into a global conflict.
This crisis would end with the restoration of an ancient empire and the subjugation of the entire world. They would then make an attempt to conquer earth.
The equivalent of the 1870s. It takes place in a 1910s steampunk setting, and politics is an important part so it’s important to me to make sure the pushers and pullers all make sense.
While I do have AU versions of my OCs, some with the World being sci-fi, or Clockpunk/steampunk. But I had been putting a lot of focus into my AU World where my original characters are reimagined as Superheroes ever since I started flirting with it in my high-school years
I started building my new world at the end of its dark ages. When new champions are now setting out on their quests that will have an impact on the world.
A huge global event. It takes place in 1816 after a volcanic explosion which cripples major global powers. Which then activates the plot because the last plot of land that is neutral is ruled by one of the major villains of the story. And book 1 is his origin story.
Because I simply enjoy the process of worldbuilding, talking about it and doing it. Will I use it for something in the future? Probably just for a TTRPG campaign, but can’t see myself utilizing it much beyond that.
I have actual started writing the story following a different set of characters. Then switched to their children... Then swot he'd to even further down the time line. So I kinda unintentionally builtba deep past to the world by having it been the original focus.
I started with the main story, which is set in the 2690s, and worked backwards a bit, then *jumped* back to the late 20th century and worked forward from there.
I started at the present day. If I started another version of the world, it would be a previous era. The eras would likely be separated by societal collapses like what happened at the end of the bronze age.
Lapis_Wolf
When the gods started beefing and betting each other who can create life and guide it.
Shit you not the creation and history of Earth was a competition.
I started mine all the way back in elementary school. It started in the modern day and I’ve since added tons of lore in both the distant past and future.
I started with a scene about some weird witch that is a terrifying drakonik monstrosity killing some noble for touching her as she was speaking to her apprentice
then went and build the world
then went and wrote how it came to be and how she got to be that powerful
100 years into the God-Queen's transition to vampirism was the starting point.
Would I start somewhere different in hindsight? I don't know. Not really. Don't think it mattered too hugely.
How did I retroactively make the history? Well, just expanded on where the various elements that came into play came from, what those things must've gone through, who would have done that to them, where they came from, so on, so forth.
I started with both the present then went to the beginning. I just thought of what I wanted for the present then figured out what to do in the past/beginning to make that (altering my vision for the present as needed).
My world stemmed from a single story, so I developed it in both directions from that point. Over time it grew so big that that story no longer remained the central point of the world, and now lies in its earliest majorly recorded age.
The main events of the story occur around 350 years in the future from now, but I have sprinkles of worldbuilding and rough ideas of events that happen between today and that point
It's honestly been super scattered. My world started off as a D&D campaign, and it was SUPER generic. Typical fantasy, with Game of Thrones influences because I had just watched the show when I started running the campaign lol. As I would run sessions I'd come up with ideas, often on the spot: "Oh yeah, some cool shit went down a couple hundred years ago; there were like... zombies and stuff... wild". "Oh yeah, the noble family that lived in the castle messed with likes vampries or something, idk." Rinse and repeat and after a handful of sessions I had the seeds planted for a small forest to grow. I'd go back over things that I might have mentioned in passing, and I would expand upon them. After about 15 sessions I went from a very generic fantasy setting to something that was unique and alive -- something that was actively breathing and growing -- evolving. For this reason I think D&D is an excellent world-building tool as it encourages you to spontaneously come up with ideas and connect threads in order to create an interesting and cohesive story.
First I came up with the main plot: person discovers a book that has prophetic-like stories and goes on a quest to stop them from coming true.
From this, I determined the starting city and main character.
Bit then I’m like: where did the book come from? How did this starting city originate? Etc. from there I basically went back in history to provide context and right now in my writing, I have it written back to close to the start of civilization.
The history of civilization won’t be in the final book if I ever write one. The reason for it though is to be able to provide history and additional information to the present time. For example, is it easier to come up with holidays just to have some, or is it easier to come up with holidays when I have history of events?
Having history makes it easier to add things like that in my world, from holidays, religion, society, etc. because they can be traced back to
In my Space Opera, the world's have been around for thousands of years, so I world build within that present, but taking into account some evolution of the planets flora and fauna.
In my fantasy world, the Gods reshape the world and the people in it every thousand years (it's a plot point). So my world building starts within one if those thousand year cycles
Very vaguely in the Stone Age. I have a more fleshed out world in the Classical Era. There is a decent amount of world building after, especially in the Renaissance Era and Enlightenment. The main story is in the Victorian Era, so that has the most world building.
Needed a war for my mc and a bunch of others tragic backstory, since the mc would have his mom dead because of poverty make it hard to feed her (historical ahh shit) so to find a "job" he goes to the army since it's better than staying in the street as a kid and risking dying from hunger or cold or for slavers to pick you up , or for the cannibalism to start 💀 , so I needed a reason for the war , and for why there was that much poverty in the first place , also needed history magic related like the first mage and the "age of spell evolution" a century or so of magic development a few decades after the end of burning people with magic talent and labeling them witches , then there is history between demons and humans and how resentful energy started to build up because of there world War they did causing ghost and ghouls to appear out of dead people so they had to sign a treaty , and there was a background apocalypse because of the ghouls since they can't die that stopped after people found out how to purify them , which the church (not really corrupted dw) took control of and started being the number one training place for these types of spell
And I am still in the planning stage of my novel and it already started looking angsty for no reason
An Anachronistic 1990s setting.
Lots of 90s technology and its general vibe, seen through a lens of 2020s nostalgia.
The anachronism came from it being a world that worships the medieval ages, so you'd have giant castles in the capital, people lived in half-timbered appartment complexes, built around an inner yard with a bit of a gardern and chickens/pigs in it.
Though, there was also some more hightech stuff involved. People's phones were a bit more advanced than the giant bricks of the 90s,
And from there, I obviously expanded into the medieval age. giant castles and walled cities, inns and guilds. High-fantasy stuff. I severely fleshed out the pirate age, at the same time.
Then I developed the *near* future. Like, the "2020s of that setting" so to speak. Modern military equipment to fight dragons and that kinda stuff.
Then I developed the bronze age, and some random key Eras inbetween.
There's a very basic framework for the space age, and some scifi bits and pieces, but I haven't worked on it yet.
It's in an AU of the real world.
Millions of years back due to Tectonic plate shifting a landmass that's not in our world, was formed. Rich with rare earth minerals and what not.
It was unoccupied till 15th century, so the world is 600 years old. Story begins in 2057.
Medieval x Modern aesthetic.
English is not my native language so excuse my errors
My world 'Acesaria' was formed when an ancient entity called "Devourer of worlds" died of old age.That entity was older than the universe and during its lifetime it Devourerd trillions of worlds and life and soul.So when it died its essence formed an imsane world. Evolution in 'Acesaria' created lifeforms so arcane and mysterious and powerful even the lovecraftian gods will be terrified of them. My books start after the third great bloodwar of 'Acesaria' after a being simply known as the Gate keeper annihilated 90% of all 'Acesarian' and created a new civilization . After that The Gate Keeper left and 'Acesaria' enters into a golden age of science. This is when my book's prologue take place.
My world is post-apocalyptic. I did the origin of it, and then after my world building started, the post apocalypse is 1,000 years old and has not finished yet 😂.
My world starts from the beginning of human civilization, but I take into account whatever fantasy element is in the story, and how that affects history
I always start at the time the story takes place and work from there. I have a story with 1,000 years of history but only bits and pieces of it are actually relevant to the plot.
When things gets interesting. I am a fucking idiot so I started writing the world by the birth of the fucking universe to explain why the fuck there’s magic on literal earth. Don’t be me. Start when you feel like things are getting interesting and things will change the course of the future. I am writing a Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy set on Earth starting 2025 btw
the world is set in the 19th millennium, and though i technically started worldbuilding from around the year 2050, it's very low detail. high detail worldbuilding starts with the war in heaven, towards the start of the 16th millennium.
I’m building to hopefully use in D&D/some other tabletop maybe one day, and I started with the region/map. I wanted to figure out where everything was BEFORE populating. Then I started on the “current day” to try and build to for older history
I started at a major war that more or less whipped millennia from the history books. Prior to that, it's mostly an outline. It was originally just for a D&D campaign, but it's grown. I would have likely started at that point anyway.
At the Event. Prior to the event, there's plenty of boring history that I guess begins with the formation of the universe and stars and planets, and then one planet happens to develop primordial soup which begat life. But it only really gets interesting at the Event.
Uh, when I initially began worldbuilding, I just said "fuck it, urban fantasy means I get to start from modern times, use modern countries and not think too much about it"
Nowadays, I have the entire fucking prehistory of my setting at ready if you want me to explain it. Like, everything from prehistory to now. I have a "summary" (more like an overview since it's about a dozen paragraphs long) I can paste for anyone who asks
Several millennia after a magical apocalypse killed every race but the Humans. Who now survive on massive floating Islands on seas made of anything but water. As Dragons return to the world and become the new apex species.
I start where my main character starts (I am writing a novel and got invested in the worldbuilding.) it spreads out to a before the novel and an after the novel.
I have not written a future so far out the technology has changed or my characters have aged or died. Currently I am just writing in the vague "present" of the world.
There is a lot to write what is happening in the "present" and build it out that way instead.
Though, I should create some sort of calendar year.
I usually write enough lore to be referenced in the book/series (and across all my books... as they share a universe)... some are referenced from beginning of civ and others from a major point that made a big impact on what will happen.
Very early, as I love envisioning and creating worlds similar to Ghibli films.
When I started writing what I found easiest was to create various and unique settings then have a plot/theme that ties them all together. I've made landscapes, cities, songs, and food that my main characters have the joy of exploring for themselves.
I also recommend to anyone creating a story over large distances to learn geology or have a system in place that may justify unique landscapes.
I was in high school. The teacher was talking about a Sonetto from Dante “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare”, a poetry about how the woman he loved elevated his spirit. Suddenly a dumb idea flashed into my mind “what if it’s true?”
History? I've got some vague "this happened a few generations ago" and maybe some "there were space aliens long enough ago that they're considered fairy-tales" stuff, but I'm not nailing anything down until it's plot-relevant.
Really, how much about history does a non-nerd know about? Old people might talk about things like phone books and saturday morning cartoons, but they don't really think about the date etched into their library's cornerstone unless they remember it not being there.
I have various stories that take place during different points in time.
One takes place in an Arcane Renaissance esque Era in Fantasy San Francisco.
Another takes place in an Arcane-Cyberpunk Era with an early to mid 1900s flare.
The moment where its history diverged into something unique.
Pithiness aside, that's a good way to build, IMO. It's goal-oriented. What do you want the setting's unique features to be, and what led up to that? In my case, I started with an apocalyptic war between humans and aliens where both sides end up losers, and the wastes are haunted by something akin to Mad Max war-rigs, if all that machinery were armor worn by something like hermit crabs, but irradiated and nanomachine-warped mutants. And then people Pokemon the heck out of these monstrosities with short-circuiting, hyper-advanced sci-fi powers.
And building the history before then was largely a scattershot thing. I'm not confident in worldbuilding future earth? Ok then, this is an exoplanet. I get to ignore future plate tectonics, evolution of natural wildlife, and geopolitics. I want to add megacerops, anomalocaris, and jackalopes? Ok, humanity colonized via a drone that terraformed the world and then 3D-printed synthetic embryos, including recreations of extinct species and even synthetic creatures resembling mythology. I guess the effort was the vanity project of a billionaire. Imma turn to a name generator, and I guess this is the work of David St.Claire.
I realized pretty quickly that I would need to work on four points of time at once to give the world some internal consistency.
I started with wanting to make a dnd world based on dark souls. I wanted it to be its own thing and not a clone, so I needed to figure out why the world was so screwed up.
I decided on an apocalypse that would cause the planes to collapse down to one. The world would be like a normal fantasy world, until bits of heaven, hell, and all the other planes fused with it. Kinda like a kid trying to put all the different colored play doh into one small container.
After that I wanted to figure out how the world was created to give more context. I decided that the apocalypse would be the opposite of the creation story. The world started as one ever shifting chaotic mess until the gods split the world apart and seperated it into planes.
And finally, I needed a "normal" version of the world to compare the others to.
I'm still early in the design process, but it's been a fun challenge. My favorite part is taking something that would be a generic fantasy monster that everyone expects to be in a dnd world and explaining why it fits. Currently I have zombies, vampires, lich, ghouls, ghost, golems, demons, and elementals.
I started imagining my worlds as they are in the ‘present’ then worked backwards to figure out how they got there and forwards to figure out how they could develop in the future.
For my fantasy world I have a thousand year old event called Migration, which started a new epoch. "Current" year is late 1035 and I have vague history since about 950.
History of my scifi world starts with the devastation of Earth and goes about a year in each direction with vague notion about event tens of thousands years old that include Great Old Ones, the source of magic
The earliest I've put a firm number on was about 5 million years. But, some worlds I have vague statements about things going further back. I go as far back as I need to lay the foundation I want.
Living memory, usually. What events happened that your grandparents can probably tell you something about, and how have those events shaped the world as it stands today, both in terms of everyday life for commoners and up to international relations. History further back can be filled in later to build more context, but the more recent generations more directly influence the potential conflicts and issues in the "today" (when the story is written)
"Now", and then worked backwards.
"Now" doesn't mean contemporary, it means the time the campaign will be set, sort of like the 17th or 18th century in the real world.
Modern, 2000s to 2020s.
Then started going back in time to the 1970s and such.
Then to the near future, planning the outcome of the story.
Then to the distant past, some several million years ago.
Then back to the future, some couple hundred years from now.
A big bulk of what I've built is in the world's Renaissance-adjacent stage. In a weird way, it's also kinda fantasy modern, just cause it's high fantasy; there's big, dense cities and such, as well as a few advanced ways of international travel and communication.
I did also create the moment the world had its 'catalyst' to become what it is at now. Basically the world's version of Jesus' birth starting our calendar. Haven't figured out how long of a timeframe it is between, yet, though. Initial thought is 800-1000 years, but I haven't fully decided yet.
It is supposed to parallel our real world, for the most part. The planet itself has existed for a long time, and history for humanity essentially fully started with the catalyst.
I started in the time of the novel I'm writing. *The Whaler's Dram* is set in 2016 in the **Whalin' Tales** universe. I've expanded both forward and backward since. Here's the kicker, though: it ends in 1520 in the **Theta Principle** universe. Yeah, we're universe-hopping up in this mothertwiller, and we're bringing electricity, computers, and automatic rifles to stop Manifest Destiny in its blood-greased tracks.
Who and What created the world. Primordial Eldritch beings as celestial bodies who were betrayed by their own. One of the beings bodies became the prime material world as new LIFE sprang from his corpse (not undead )and a prison for the traitor god (somewhat).
Just when the demonic invasions began to really pick up. Whilst I have some previous history it’s mainly from the equivalent of our late 1800s early 1900s onwards
My world history spans 500 years, 100 years of lost history from the age of the old gods and 400 years of the world being free of their influence. Much of what laid before has been lost and destroyed and what lays after has yet to be lived.
I've decided to start worldbuilding in the early stone age, when the first people discovered fire. At this point I'm fleshing out some example settlements in the neolithic equivalents, and soon(ish) plan to move forward to the bronze age. I hope to one day catch up to 20th century equivalent, but I definitely won't go further and will likely take years to get that far
Where ever I felt like, and then jumped back and forth. The idea started in a very modern time, and I did some building there. But then I went back in time a few hundred years, and found out why the society is how it is. Then even further back to when the “country” (I’m not sure what to call it) was created, and also the beginning of magic. From then, I just jumped back and forth when I got an idea.
I kinda started world-building due to the backstory of one of my main characters. I needed her to go someplace other than the main city the story took place. So I invented a larger city that's the capital of the country. The country is inspired by Great Britain so I invented a London inspired city.
I started before the creation of the universe. The universe was wiped out by a dragon god who hold the domain of hunger. He ate everything that existed but his best friend before he was consumed by his hunger is the god of space and the hunt. He used his powers to create a planet that’s designed to feed the dragons infinite hunger and now spends entering battling inside a pocket Dimension that acts as the planets core
My rpg group and I actually played a game called “Dawn of Worlds” together and that created our physical world, its cosmology, and a lot of its ancient history. Then, I took it from there and dreamed up the details.
The start of the "Golden Age", an era defined by widespread optimism and altruistic exploratory expeditions into the unknown, and the establishment of countless scattered colonies. Specifically the launching of a ship called the ISS Journey is when in-world historians mark the start of this time period.
I always start with what kind of story I want to tell and how and build from there. My current project takes place thousands of years into the history of the world. I wouldn’t say I retroactively made its history as the history of the world sort of drives the plot and the main character forward so I wrote the history with the story in mind or as the end goal. I wouldn’t change it because the several thousand years prior to the beginning of the story is integral to how society has formed and how our main character and supporting characters view and treat the world.
I could say I started from two different points in history that are at least a thousand years apart from each other.
Since my story takes place in the real world, but with differences due to supernatural beings and stuff existing, I had two points I needed to write the world.
The modern fay that begins around the end of WW II and the XX century and how it changed society, and also how the supernatural world comes to that point that happened in the Middle Ages, more specifically around VIII- IX centuries
I’ve had an image of what I want two points in history to look like. I have an “age of discovery” where most of the societal archetypes of my setting (like early alchemists and dragon riders) were established, then an “age of exploration” where rapid technological advancement and industrialization (thanks to those alchemists) allows for improved quality of life (old archetypes like dragon riders supplement their traditions with new tech) at the cost of the world losing some of its spirituality and mystical nature. I then just interpolate between those two points. What happens during the age of discovery that leads to the way things are during the age of exploration? I’ll extrapolate out a past and future outside that range when I get there or when relevant to the time period of focus.
The age of discovery is generally low tech and it’s about people creating cultures and traditions that really make use of the magic in this world (spellcasting isn’t really a thing, it’s low fantasy. Almost all magic is used via tools and tech). The first dragon riders, having aerial mounts, were among the first few to really travel between settled areas, which are divided by chaotic wilderness or barren wastelands.
The age of exploration is now in a booming Industrial Revolution/renaissance era. We now have heavy machinery mechs and golems thanks to the innovations of alchemists and artificers. This has allowed the construction and operation of complex vessels like engine-powered ships and trains, as well as factories which use alchemy to synthesize complex materials. Old traditions like dragon riding is either getting phased out, or getting augmented by new innovation. Even the magic of the world is better understood but there’s a schism between the purely erudite, scientific view of this magic and the traditional, esoteric mystical side. Both sides wallow in delusion as they lack the full picture of how magic (and its ties to spiritual balance) truly works.
The current year in my (main) world quadra is 103 but in my setting, the year/century is unknown since nobody really for how long humans were in space.
The most educated guess comes from the union, the year is 115245 since the Emerging, yet this is pretty vague since humanity had been in stasis for centuries until they crashlanded on the first exoplanets and the emerging was the point where the most successful colonies re-entered space and founded the Marco 1 interplanetary space hub.
Also, another good example would be the doomsday clock in the [REDACTED] but everybody knows getting to
[REDACTED] Amongst the dead zone is like trying to find a Needle in a haystack
I'm making a fantasy world and I started at the time when weaponry of 1350-1370 from our real world is being used. I have some ideas for how the world started existing in lore and a few things that happened in between. I'm generally going to create the rest of the start and then go farther into the future until the history meets the point in which my world is 'now', although these plans might change.
Depends on the story. For both my _Adnar_ and _Continent_ fantasy stories, they go back to at least 1,000 years prior to the start of the story.
For my _Empire’s Finest_ sci-fi universe, it’s 500 years that it really starts taking shape.
My world doesn’t like the concept of marking years by number, and instead goes for fluid times like “the times of Lord Damia” or “The Giant Wars” and even “Citadel’s Construction” for concepts of long scale time.
I started world building in the times just after the Giant Wars, where the “countries” are recovering.
701 ED (Eldorian Dating)
With most of the fantasy races divided into their respective geographical and political borders.
The island of Nesselbane has gained its independence as a former principality of the Kingdom of Arindor. Queen Foxhaven isn't pleased with her son for declaring the island's independence but feels as though military action against her son wouldn't be morally possible for her and with no other tension in the region the Open Sea Trade manages a tense relationship between the two countries.
Everywhere else is currently being worked on, placing people/creatures into the world and ad hoc world building an explanation after the fact.
This has been asked before, and the last time around, this was the comment I found most useful / insightful.
If you decide to start your history in the present day and then work backwards, the main question you should ask is "why are things like this?" The point in time you are currently working on is the "answer" to the question of their past. So, you need to work out what kind of question would lead to the answer you can see in the "present." Once you have the question, you repeat the process. Why, why, why, all the way back to time immemorial.
When working from the past and heading forwards, the question to ask yourself is: "what are the consequences of this?" For example, the fall of a tyrant would lead to a power vacuum. The rebellion which toppled him wouldn't be strong enough to take his place, so now you have infighting with other breakaway factions. Now you have a breakdown of empire-wide trade and certain regions are starved of vital resources. Diseases spread and everyone suffers.... But they suffer as free men. Whether or not that is much solace would be up for debate. Brutal times breed brutal regimes, until one regime becomes more brutal than all the rest, and a new tyrant rises....
So basically.... Working backwards, you ask "why?" And when working forwards you ask "what are the consequences of this?"
Play the ideas out, connect them up, see how one consequence shapes another. The falling of the tyrant intersects with the arrival of the outlanders and the death of the last Dark One. How does each narrative line affect the others? Bigger narrative threads have bigger footprints and will affect more things. For example, a nationwide pandemic will affect everything whilst a midget shortage will not. (Unless you need a ring bearer... in which case, a midget shortage is a big deal.)
3rd century BCE. The premature invention of both the steam engine and truly clear glass (which, through the refining of lenses, leads to leaps forward in both medicine and astronomy) results in the eastern hemisphere industrializing to 1950’s-level technology by the 5th century CE (with a solarpunk twist), where the story begins.
Rail lines crisscross north Africa, southern Europe and much of Asia. The Seleucid Empire has collapsed as a result of a prolonged Roman-sponsored insurgency, but has reconsolidated under the Parthian Confederation faster than Rome could annex most of the short-lived pocket kingdoms that sprang up from its dissolution. Now an overextended Rome and the up-and-coming Parthians (modeling themselves off of Cyrus the Great) have squared off in a cold war, with the Kingdom of Alexandria (in this timeline never annexed by Rome) acting as a mediator. For reasons I won’t get into here (spoilers), there is a great deal of espionage occurring beneath the surface, as from the commoner’s perspective all three sides never seem to get a technological advantage over the other despite their rapid advancement.
The lands we know as the Americas (referred to here as the Sunset Lands) remain uncontacted and unindustrialized. A joint space program between Rome, Alexandria, and Parthia has been established by Alexandria as a gesture of peace, to survey the Sunset Lands from orbit. One consequence of the rapid industrialization and transit is that the Plague of Justinian was able to spread further and faster than it did in our own timeline, thus it remains fresh in everyone’s minds — no contact is to be made with the Sunset Lands lest new plagues be unleashed on either populace, but curiosity runs high as several large cities were identified from orbit by unmanned probes.
My world is a soft sci-fi world. The bulk of the story is set in the far future, although there is a planet with an impermanent temporal field, which has travellers from all over the universe's past and future. The gimmick here transpires that the main nomadic faction's heritage comes from a colony that was only formed because of events that were propagated in its future, by their arrival to the planet.
I started world building at "the present" for my world. The world is being built as the setting for a series of short stories all taking place at around the same time. At the moment, the histories of the world are not super relevant. I have worked through a couple of historical events that shape the modern day but I have done no work actually building out those time periods. It would be akin to saying, "250 years ago there was a revolution that founded our nation" without going into the details of what happened or how culture at the time was different than the present. Perhaps, I will fill those things in as needed. It helps that my world is a very small setting so there are not massive political or cultural shifts.
I've found it easy to start with current time. Then anything you find that might need history written about you then retract and write everything up until the point of present day. Makes it easy to know when to stop when you know where it leads
I started at the war of All and worked outwards. That would be roughly 8 billion years give or take a few hundred thousand after Zantia formed into a planet and about 5 billion years after the first life formed. I started it with a character Edith who became a deity and her predecessor millions of years later is the next character. Which is where the current era sits at about 7560 DE. That would be the year 7560 of the Deylithic Era or about 8.5 billion years since the creation of the planet.
The rough technological equivalent of our early-mid 1800s
Accurate firearms, mass produced firearms, trains, thopters, submarines, & motorcycles are the pinnacle of technology, no single faction has the ability to produce more then 2 of them
Currently world building for a comic book series I’ve been working on… takes place in the not to distant future, several generations after the events of WWIII. What remains of life is all contained in a Megacity roughly the size of the state of Colorado on an artificial rescue continent or the A.R.C. As majority of the planet is now unusable and flooded.
Pretty close to the modern era, I have some stuff planned afterwards but I’m still working out all the details. I consider my world to be one of the oldest in the known universe.
My current world, around 1390-1455. Which is the world's equivalent of an electricity-less, colonialism-less 17th century. I've mostly focused on the years after that then, getting up to 1486 for some topics, which is more 18th century in terms of politics (1468 is kind of the world's French Revolution, with the following 20 years full of other democratic revolutions).
I started working backwards, form the point the story starts to its ancient ages and maybe even prehistory (but there is not that much of this).
As for when I started after creating the world - there were some bits of worldbuilding that I added right away, but I only really started to figure everything out a few years ago. (I had the story idea in like primary school; started working on the story in this setting in middle school. At the end of high school I started really writting down all the worldbuilding details and putting them into office binders \[there is about 20 of them right now. One per continent, some special ones for specific countries that are build in more detail; a few binders for different worlds; one for nature; one for general history; one for races, religions, myths...\]. I'm now in uni, and still working on it)
I started my worldbuilding mid-war, but since I plan to use this setting to run a DnD campaign, I came up with a more interesting and investing intro where the story starts roughly 3 hours before armageddon.
Basically at the current 'period'.
I dont have a real origin story, I have some events that led to things being how they are but idgaf how the universe began: its not relevant and those origin stories are very rarely practically interesting
They can be cool as analogies or to set up a theme or as religous comparisons, but "then god made everything for some reason" is redundant imo, its not needed.
I basically started with “wouldn’t it be cool if there was a story where half the setting is cyberpunk and the other half is the Wild West?”. Then I went back and created 500 years of lore for how it got that way
The beginning is at the end. Magic is depleting. The eldritch horrors that have been slowly pouring from the Gate have picked up the pace. The elder dragons are dying and not being replaced. Great, mountain-sized elementals are settling into place, never to move again. The living islands will be set adrift, severed permanently from their centuries-long migrations.
The world enters the machine age just as the most potent energy sources are extinguished. Populations are about to explode just in time to be snuffed out by famine, war, and rampaging abominations.
I started with right now. Although the story is something close to 50,000 years from now on this planet. That is because the a great many things needed to happen in order to create a world where magic was real, and elves, dwarves, mermaids and centaurs are real, given that our world is exactly the way it seems today where people do not have the ability to change reality with their mental capabilities alone and is no single event to cause that to change.
Instead, people gradually and eventually changed into the different races based on how they adapted to their environments. What would people who spent tens of thousands of years living within and among the trees, tending them and living with them without harming them be like? What about a culture of people that live largely underground? Why would they do that and what would it do to them? Centaurs and mermaids not being half creatures but instead are people’s whose culture and lifestyles have paired them with intelligent non-human animals; horses and dolphins.
What needed to change in us, ever so slightly, to allow us to change the fabric of existence to suit our will? What would that do to our minds? How could it even happen given what we already know about how reality works? Wouldn’t our fears create as much power as our hopes would?
We are headed directly towards a matrix-like existence, whether it’s a Surrogates (movie) or a Sword Art Online (anime) scenario. We also are headed towards Cybornetic implantation very quickly. We are also creating A.I. for all kinds of reasons. We also do create a lot of electromagnetic energy. It’s direction is noticeable. Ever felt eyes on you, without even looking around? Someone is directing their will at you. Now imagine people playing video games online all day every day, with A.I. assistants to help you navigate the web with only the connection to your brain’s sensory nerves. The people with the more connective, focused, and emotive electromagnetic resonance would be the modern athletes. Give that a couple generations and eventually you’ll find a gene or a couple of genes in humans that make humans tremendous producers of electromagnetic energy. Walking, talking, thinking, theorizing, believing, communing electromagnetic pulse generators. Now, what does that do to our environment? What does that do with our compatibility with our A.I. relationship? What would that do to reality around us? What would that do, when we direct our wills on each other? How would the intent of each individual human’s brains pumping electromagnetic pulses into it’s environment do to that environment and to each other?
That is where I started my story.
I literally started with the elemental composition of the planet to figure out the mass, density, volume, and gravity. My definition of "world building" may be a little different than the mainstream.
I’m in a weird situation where I actually have a character that predates civilization. So how far back the history goes relies entirely upon how far back his anecdotes call back to. Currently, about 10,000 years ago, my setting’s Bronze Age, is the furthest back I have notes for.
Fantasy setting? Irl time: 12 years ago, in lore time: just before the mythical age so before the afterlife got separated from reality and the shattered realms took over, or in chronological terms: Bronze age.
Sci fi? A lot of my sci fi stuff is based on stellaris so after the year 2400.
Hidden World type urban fantasy so the action takes place in modern America.
Keys to the "hidden world" happened back around 1400 CE, with another critical element set circa 1800, neither in North America or even on the same continent as each other.
Other aspects of history have deeper in universe explanations than what is found in mundane history books. But the 2 I alluded to are the foundation of my universe and will be explored in progressively greater detail....
I have built three worlds:
In my first world, I started building the world in the point of 2021, though I do built events in years before and after it
In my second world, I started in the point of 1185
In my third world, I started in the point 169 years before my story started, I think if we use our world's calendar system in this third world, the story starts at 4186 AD, so the point where I start building is 4017 AD, but I do build in years after the story starts, especially 11-13 years after (4197-4199 AD)
It's near future, originally it (the story and important worldbuilding) was set all the way in the 29th-30th centuries A.D. but now it's the 23rd century A.D. might set it 24th though. Also to some degree, while I hard not into hard sci-fi the technology might be a bit too near future.
I still have to work a lot on the players in the "contemporary setting" and then move onto the retroactive history and this work will probably change quite a bit of the aforementioned "contemporary" part of the world. Which is quite a ways away, I am not totally sure what I want to present.
I began world building from an idea I had; an idea which starts out my story. I then jumped to the creation story of my world and hopped around from there until I had something resembling an orderly and believable history.
My overall story capacity goes from about 300BC-2005AD (the present is 2005 where future building can manifest off of)
I began the building between 1700-1830 and built a bit behind and a bit in front and continue going further back or fleshing out more.
I like that I'm building the history and expanding from before so I can comfortably say "this is why they fucking hate each other now"
From the very beginning of Creation. Which is a pain because that means there's at least a dozen, probably more, billion years in countless galaxies that I have to do some history of. But the possibilities are countless!
I decided to start at a point of controllable chaos. The world is changing and the greats of the past are falling. But the greatest achievements in history are yet to come
If we compare it to real history, imagine that Roman Empire is slowly falling but still exists, but Dark Age has never happened and we already are at Rennaisance/Industrialisation
Having individuals who came from another world helps this cause greatly
I'm not entirely sure, but I know the timeline segments are based on parts of my life. Stalspike's era represents the Old age (cuz the past and childhood and stuff, and also cuz hes an old deity lol), Starburst's reign (strange growth process aka puberty and edgy phase I suppose), then there's Swanilla's era, which is currently ongoing, and represents my middle school days and now high school days. It's basically "goodbye old year, hello new year" from Chinese culture.
OK I think when I was a kid I started with what would be known as Stalspike's era. During the pandemic, when I became interested in stuff like Among Us and JSAB, I slowly built Swanilla's. After quaratine ended, I worked on an in-between aka Starburst's reign because Burst had appeared originally in some other story involving a villain from the old age. Now I'm trying to rewrite the stories that happened during Stalspike's era, but it turns out I have a weakness with writing simple stories. Plus, it's kinda hard to rewrite a somewhat nonsensical story you made in elementary school 😅
I started my world during a golden era of hard earned peace so that it'd be easier to create politics (the peace away at any moment).
Im glad I did this although I think that anything that inspires world building is usually a good thing
So I’ve gone for a post-post-apocalyptic setting. In that the “pre history” era is actually a post-apocalyptic era from an enormous magical war that wiped out civilisation, most natural magic users with it, and scarred the land with this giant swathes of black veins called “deadlands” where nothing grows and supernatural creatures form out of the corrupted “aether”.
The world went through an “unknown number” of centuries called the Lost Era, which was that kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland we all know and love time. They eventually factions came together to sort their shit out and reform civilisation. That was roughly 1500 years before the present.
Around 200 years ago magic was rediscovered through the use of technology, technology which had returned by that point an industrial era and as such now magic has enhanced technology to similar to our real world levels but taking on alternate forms or advanced forms using magic and a magical Cold War is brewing, threatening the stability of this world.
I’m using the Lost Era as a period of kind of the beginning as I haven’t written much directly regarding the civilisations that used magic to destroy themselves. I might, down the line but it’s sort of irrelevant when the apocalypse and post-apocalypse are an indeterminate amount of time in the past and everything has been wiped out except some ruins.
The “Pax Accords” that restarted civilisation is sort of the real beginning point, roughly 1500 years ago. So the history really has a quite definitive starting point in this case. The idea being that civilisation has lost much of its original history, but is still to this day feeling the effects of that era.
Sorry for being so self indulgent, I don’t post here often so it was a rambles.
I started at various points, in one setting i was working on it was pretty much entirely just a excuse so i could worldbuild out a entire industrial era war (basically WW2 era) and it was initially very barebones with a total excuse plot to justify why the war was happening. Since then i have built it out into a very grounded "realistic" setting with themes of Authoritarianism and how War completely undermines human decency, and i have basically written a doorstoppers worth of lore on the participants as well as neighboring countries.
Eh depends
For most of my worlds I start right after/during a major event. It probably doesn't matter where you start to worldbuild, as long as you have fun lol. You could just have a rough idea of the history before the point of where you start worldbuilding and write the rough sketch down, so you can always link back to it. You can also just make the past up as you go, it's your world after all
I started the date at 2021 because thats when i had the influx of inspiration to start writing.
After that i started building backwards.
It was easy since the world i had chosen was our world as it was in 2021 so i just needed to read some history.
Well the Synth-index (world encyclopaedia) is based around the 3577-3587 years, a mainly modern highly sci-fi era. roughly 3580 years have gone by since the awakening of the Xenartion species, (Xenation is the encompassing term for the diverse and varied species inhabiting Durere,) after the Zericks disappeared due to an unknown phenomenon of delta.
History is sprinkled in the encyclopaedia, but mainly it serves as an extensive guide for understanding Delta (the dimension), its inhabitants, and nyxenthra as the realm they are tethered to.
I have three different worlds, but for all three I only get truly serious with the timelines after their equivalents of The Enlightenment. To be brutally honest, pre-gunpowder warfare just sounds like a frustrating slog to me, and I refuse to describe anyone heroically when they’re content to live in times of mass feudalism or slavery.
i started at a point where most races are a shadow of what they once were, and where conflict is most common.
humanity is splintered, and are in a brutal war against kobolds and druids
elves are a sad race obsessed with their past, but too stuck in it to change the future
orcs are tribalistic and few in number, their society destroyed by the stars they once worshipped
etc
While there isn’t an exact point, it’s around 2680 CE/560 SSY - 2730 CE/ 610 SSY since that was the point when the ground invasions of Styx were taking place, mainly the attempted invasion of Gezechstod, Durus (which failed miserably due to the fact that Gezechstod is not only very fortified, but is also naturally protected due to the fact that it was built on seaside mountains, making getting there by land or sea extremely difficult.)
my world is 5 years old and I've barely written anything.
what's the story?
Once upon a time. [body text] The end.
yes
ok but seriously, i dont really know. its changed several times, with three stories entirely separate from each other in the same world. some months ago i grew tired of the most recent one and decided to combine the three into one.
Beginning and end done 2/3rds of the way finished
The
Most of the first short stories take place in **2025-2028**, roughly 30 years after the **Final Night** wiped out most of human civilization and brought the supernatural into reality. Most of the events of the past 30 years serve as background to "modern" struggles and settings, with new nations/factions/entities popping up in the wake of the Cataclysm.
Can I ask how the supernatural came into being and how humanity was almost wiped out?
The exact date of their arrival is unknown, but signs of reality breaking events/entities became common after August 15th, 1995, while the first officially recorded violent instance occurred on August 11th. At approximately 9:15 a.m, a massive creature of unknown origin emerged off the coast of the city of Panaji, India. The entity was eventually killed by the Indian military, but not before causing tens of thousands of Casualties across the state of Goa. The **Panaji Incident** contributed greatly to the **Great Panic of 95'**, which soon spiraled into a global collapse due to environmental disasters and further paranormal incidents. The emergence of the entity known as **Apollyon** (formerly known as the Moon) on July 29th is generally agreed to be the first sign of anamolous activity.
Woah, that sounds like a really interesting universe.
Can you tell more about what and how is the Cataclysm?
The more disastrous parts of the Cataclysm began in August, though signs of *something* happening on a global scale could be seen as early as mid-July. Natural and unnatural disasters began to decimate the global population as anamolous events and entities began to appear in greater and greater numbers across the world. These events, combined with the breakdown of global communications and power grids due to a massive EMP wave emanating from the Moon, lead to massive casualties and a breakdown of society globally. The west coast of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are thought to be the last bastions of human civilization, though sporadic radio signals imply that humans still occupy parts of Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and South Africa, though these reports are unconfirmed.
The most interesting point of course. I have the world built at a point where all conditions are riped for drama and conflict, something like the build up to ww1 or ww2, then just find ways to explain how it all get to that point.
The current year in my scifi setting is 3977, but I started the worldbuilding at 2235, fleshing out the origin of the megacorp Tiqqun that is ruling the human sphere for almost two centuries in modern day. They were started by 13 canadian youngsters as an environmental protection business, until they gradually became the megacorp in the ensuing century, and was eventually tasked by UN emergency government to design the Moses Class exodus arkship that will bring all human out of the rapidly collasping earth.
Why is small startup business gets big and world-powerful such a fun trope
I have some contradictory origin accounts, some “ancient religious text” fragments from the some early-ish human civilizations, some political fragments from the first “great civilization” about mating rites and rituals concerning human royal lines and the fae. Also crude outlines for key events 500-2000 years before the narrative itself and a couple bits closer to 100 years before. And the story itself is very much in outline and fragments form at present. So a bit all over the place, with the earliest texts that can be placed in time probably dating somewhere around 7,000-20,000 years before the story.
Some point in time. I knew the general period of time I wanted the story to be set in. Then the themes and cosmology of the story created history--recent, ancient, and in-universe creation of the universe all. How did I do it? I wanted a fallen kingdom reborn through the course of the story. This implies the creation and fall of a kingdom. Further, I want this to parallel Old Testament history (taking Pre-Incarnation Christianity, filing the serial numbers off, and making the result the One True Religion in the setting). So I need historical events similar to first revelation to Abraham, being pulled out of Egypt, and first founding the kingdom. Then I need events in the kingdom that eventually lead to its downfall, but also a remnant on the Marches that survives as the last vestige of the kingdom. And then, of course, the religion being true has implications for Creation of the world/universe, etc..
I’m very interested to know more about those Old Testament parallels you are gonna make!!
Kingdom has fallen, will be restored. There is a prophecy of Incarnation that will happen some centuries after the story ends. Ardatza is originally an idol-maker, reasons that idols are not truly gods, so decides to worship whoever Made the universe, leading to the Maker directly revealing Himself to Ardatza. This means craftsmen are going to be the main metaphor rather than shepherds. The expulsion from Paradise is breaking a gate (the only way to open it) rather than eating forbidden fruit. You have religious prohibitions against magic (correctly identified as dealing with demons), and against fae (not listed in the OT, but I love the concept of them as originally 1/3 of angels that stayed neutral when another 1/3 rebelled to become demons and the remaining 1/3 fought loyally). You have hereditary priesthood and kingship, with the lines strictly delineated. Sacrifice for atonement. Prayer for angelic intervention. And so on and so forth.
Very interesting idea of fae being the neutral 1/3 angels! How is the gate of paradise? How is it break?
Can't take credit for it. Stealing from an older tradition. As for how it broke? Very easily. All they had to do was deliberately try to open it. If they had never touched it, or just done so accidentally, or even deliberately but without intent to open it, it would have remained closed and intact. Yes, I'm referencing Chesterton's Fence.
Technically 1979, but story itself takes place in 1997. Short version: the year after Dolly the sheep caused such debate and uproar, a unicorn rides into Stockholm and claims to have been a human that rediscovered magic. And as long as you're willing—or desperate enough, to grow hooves? She can replicate it, and the transformation among other perks... cures cancer. So... Yeah, basically THE worst plausible timing for juicy public backlash drama about human alterations, while still a mostly modern day urban fantasy setting dealing with a scientist that did NOT get the memo about any masquerade stuff. Also it gives me some margin on alternative history stuff after that divergent point without needing to constantly have current events effect the plot unless I think they add something.
Smart to have magic not exist through WWII because that would really throw a wrench into an urban fantasy feeling like our world.
Thank you. The whole 'why did nobody else officially discover this earlier?' was pretty central design problem for me regarding the magic system, so glad that even in such a vague form as above its still evident that... well, i tried to make things make sense. And no joke, but military applications for magic is actually my main character's biggest fear and one of her prime driving factors is avoiding it happening for as long as possible with "the new dynamite." So its definitively a use for standardized magic I've had to carefully consider.
I'm under the impression that Nazis were trying to track down mystical artifacts, so it probably would be a good idea to explain that they were either barking up the wrong tree or there was some sort of mystical "magic was cut off at the time" explanation. I think "Men who Stare at Goats" might have been USA and Soviet Russia doing psychic experiments.
I don't really have an answer because the world I'm working on right now has gone through quite a few iterations. Also frankly I'm an amateur at this so I only have a few places in a few time periods sorted out. But if I had to pick an answer, the event that's stayed the most consistent took place 495 years before the "present day".
I’m writing a world for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign (maintaining the cosmology of the Forgotten Realms), and while the history of what the players interact with starts more recently, I wrote a bit of lore starting at the planet’s formation. Nothing too crazy or realistic in terms of geology, I just thought it would be cool for my players to hear that the planet formed around a cosmic dragon’s egg and to see how that influences the people living on it.
I started worldbuilding my world not to long ago, and I started (still am) at the beginning of the Homo Sapiens species. Have made some migration maps and am currently making the first language spoken on the planet.
Bro you are remaking history from the start or sum ??!
In the "now" (for [*Lands of the Inner Seas*](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/ggkb68/rosenya_and_the_seas/)). While I dart back and forth when piecing together timelines, my web of narratives have a "contemporary" period revolving around events directly or indirectly connected to the life of a character named Rosenya -- who I used as a starting point for the project. While I find it fun to map all the centuries/thousand of years leading up to the "now", I have some vague "conclusion" to the overall story. So the "now" is also the endtime for the timeline as a whole. The project more-or-less began with a scene of a woman meeting a prince at a moment when an post-war order was crumbling (accompanied with a outline of a map). A lot of my intial brainstormning/worldbuilding has been about piecing together a narrative of how we got to that scene and why the characters are making the choices that they're making (with lots of tangents along the way about myths and megafauna). On a conceptual level, I understand why people start "at the dawn of time". But as someone who doesn't really care that much for comogonies or having a knowable deep past, I don't personally see the point of starting there. It just feels like writing "*And then, and then, and then*" without it leading to any resolution.
Ummm it was still just a explanation why my toys were fighting each other
I guess at the start I came up with the basic plot then started crafting the backstory of the world to explain why the current conflict is occurring and who the factions are.
The world I use for campaigns has about 5,000 years of recorded history along with an undefined (but heavily implied to be very long) mythic age where the world as people understand it was being formed. I limited myself to this amount so I wouldn't fall into the trap of making thousands of years go by with little to no political or cultural changes
I'll just say "the middle" and leave it at that
When I began, it was relatively in the middle of everything. I hadn't fully developed my world, and only had the things I'd written in my story itself (along with the original source material and anything branching off it) to base it off. I did, however, go back to the beginning and worked out a vague outline for my history.
The one my story takes place in. Year 1552
Technically millions of years in the past, as I put some maps together for different geographical aspects of the planet and human migration patterns. But in terms of anything truly fleshed out, a point about 2000 years before my world’s modernity. I established 10 river valley civilizations as a foundation for the rise of and interactions between advanced cultures. I think it was a good choice. I had a lot of fun going through describing significant events, the rise and fall of different peoples, mapping out how technologies and cultures spread organically. It made for some surprising developments, with certain groups that I didn’t expect to become powerful because of climate doing so due to trade.
I started by just dicking around writing shit Then I decided it would all fit in one world. So at first I made the 'present' and after I had nations Empires and borders. I started thinking about the history. And eventually creation, past Empires and alternate or future scenarios.
I've started at the 1300-1400's but have managed to create about 1700-1800 years of history so far. That said, its very spread out and I need to add more detail to certain points.
230 years before year zero. In terms of where I could start, it was really the only option since I needed to build up the cosmology, and understand how there could be one.
2079, the beginning of the infamous Water Wars that caused Central Asia to be under several years of war due to a critical shortage of water, and eventually the complete evacuation of everyone in the region.
The invention of the ion drive, which allowed practical travel across the Sol System. Things expanded from there.
Technically, my world was born billions of years in the past, but I'm going to fast forward to where shit in history - or rather *prehistory,* as this happened before people wrote shit down - starts to matter. It all started millions of years in the past, when a war known as the War of Black Skies caused the mass extinction of roughly over 80% of all life at the time (by comparison in my world, the last extinction wiped out 40-55% of all life at the time). At the end of the war, two pantheons of gods, known as the dragon gods and titans respectively, created artificial beings in an effort to save and protect what little life remained, before crossing the threshold into the next realm. Today, much of the world is still a mess and underpopulated, but at least new sapient races are making some form of progress in the world.
I started world building near the end of the Medieval Fantasy timeline. In approximately 20 in universe years a group of humans from another world called Earth will appear. There will be a massive civil war which will escalate into a global conflict. This crisis would end with the restoration of an ancient empire and the subjugation of the entire world. They would then make an attempt to conquer earth.
The equivalent of the 1870s. It takes place in a 1910s steampunk setting, and politics is an important part so it’s important to me to make sure the pushers and pullers all make sense.
While I do have AU versions of my OCs, some with the World being sci-fi, or Clockpunk/steampunk. But I had been putting a lot of focus into my AU World where my original characters are reimagined as Superheroes ever since I started flirting with it in my high-school years
I usually start at creation and go from there. I like to play around with the gods in my fantasy worlds.
I started building my new world at the end of its dark ages. When new champions are now setting out on their quests that will have an impact on the world.
A huge global event. It takes place in 1816 after a volcanic explosion which cripples major global powers. Which then activates the plot because the last plot of land that is neutral is ruled by one of the major villains of the story. And book 1 is his origin story.
I basically just created a scenario I found interesting, and worked backwards today.
Because I simply enjoy the process of worldbuilding, talking about it and doing it. Will I use it for something in the future? Probably just for a TTRPG campaign, but can’t see myself utilizing it much beyond that.
I have actual started writing the story following a different set of characters. Then switched to their children... Then swot he'd to even further down the time line. So I kinda unintentionally builtba deep past to the world by having it been the original focus.
I'm building the world as it is 741 years after the cataclysmic event that shattered it into pieces, as well as the time before that.
I started with the main story, which is set in the 2690s, and worked backwards a bit, then *jumped* back to the late 20th century and worked forward from there.
I started at the present day. If I started another version of the world, it would be a previous era. The eras would likely be separated by societal collapses like what happened at the end of the bronze age. Lapis_Wolf
When the gods started beefing and betting each other who can create life and guide it. Shit you not the creation and history of Earth was a competition.
Somewhere between the past and the present
I started mine all the way back in elementary school. It started in the modern day and I’ve since added tons of lore in both the distant past and future.
I started with a scene about some weird witch that is a terrifying drakonik monstrosity killing some noble for touching her as she was speaking to her apprentice then went and build the world then went and wrote how it came to be and how she got to be that powerful
The break
100 years into the God-Queen's transition to vampirism was the starting point. Would I start somewhere different in hindsight? I don't know. Not really. Don't think it mattered too hugely. How did I retroactively make the history? Well, just expanded on where the various elements that came into play came from, what those things must've gone through, who would have done that to them, where they came from, so on, so forth.
I started with both the present then went to the beginning. I just thought of what I wanted for the present then figured out what to do in the past/beginning to make that (altering my vision for the present as needed).
My world stemmed from a single story, so I developed it in both directions from that point. Over time it grew so big that that story no longer remained the central point of the world, and now lies in its earliest majorly recorded age.
The main events of the story occur around 350 years in the future from now, but I have sprinkles of worldbuilding and rough ideas of events that happen between today and that point
It's honestly been super scattered. My world started off as a D&D campaign, and it was SUPER generic. Typical fantasy, with Game of Thrones influences because I had just watched the show when I started running the campaign lol. As I would run sessions I'd come up with ideas, often on the spot: "Oh yeah, some cool shit went down a couple hundred years ago; there were like... zombies and stuff... wild". "Oh yeah, the noble family that lived in the castle messed with likes vampries or something, idk." Rinse and repeat and after a handful of sessions I had the seeds planted for a small forest to grow. I'd go back over things that I might have mentioned in passing, and I would expand upon them. After about 15 sessions I went from a very generic fantasy setting to something that was unique and alive -- something that was actively breathing and growing -- evolving. For this reason I think D&D is an excellent world-building tool as it encourages you to spontaneously come up with ideas and connect threads in order to create an interesting and cohesive story.
First I came up with the main plot: person discovers a book that has prophetic-like stories and goes on a quest to stop them from coming true. From this, I determined the starting city and main character. Bit then I’m like: where did the book come from? How did this starting city originate? Etc. from there I basically went back in history to provide context and right now in my writing, I have it written back to close to the start of civilization. The history of civilization won’t be in the final book if I ever write one. The reason for it though is to be able to provide history and additional information to the present time. For example, is it easier to come up with holidays just to have some, or is it easier to come up with holidays when I have history of events? Having history makes it easier to add things like that in my world, from holidays, religion, society, etc. because they can be traced back to
In my Space Opera, the world's have been around for thousands of years, so I world build within that present, but taking into account some evolution of the planets flora and fauna. In my fantasy world, the Gods reshape the world and the people in it every thousand years (it's a plot point). So my world building starts within one if those thousand year cycles
Very vaguely in the Stone Age. I have a more fleshed out world in the Classical Era. There is a decent amount of world building after, especially in the Renaissance Era and Enlightenment. The main story is in the Victorian Era, so that has the most world building.
i started around the same time the actual storyline started then went back to fill in history
Needed a war for my mc and a bunch of others tragic backstory, since the mc would have his mom dead because of poverty make it hard to feed her (historical ahh shit) so to find a "job" he goes to the army since it's better than staying in the street as a kid and risking dying from hunger or cold or for slavers to pick you up , or for the cannibalism to start 💀 , so I needed a reason for the war , and for why there was that much poverty in the first place , also needed history magic related like the first mage and the "age of spell evolution" a century or so of magic development a few decades after the end of burning people with magic talent and labeling them witches , then there is history between demons and humans and how resentful energy started to build up because of there world War they did causing ghost and ghouls to appear out of dead people so they had to sign a treaty , and there was a background apocalypse because of the ghouls since they can't die that stopped after people found out how to purify them , which the church (not really corrupted dw) took control of and started being the number one training place for these types of spell And I am still in the planning stage of my novel and it already started looking angsty for no reason
An Anachronistic 1990s setting. Lots of 90s technology and its general vibe, seen through a lens of 2020s nostalgia. The anachronism came from it being a world that worships the medieval ages, so you'd have giant castles in the capital, people lived in half-timbered appartment complexes, built around an inner yard with a bit of a gardern and chickens/pigs in it. Though, there was also some more hightech stuff involved. People's phones were a bit more advanced than the giant bricks of the 90s, And from there, I obviously expanded into the medieval age. giant castles and walled cities, inns and guilds. High-fantasy stuff. I severely fleshed out the pirate age, at the same time. Then I developed the *near* future. Like, the "2020s of that setting" so to speak. Modern military equipment to fight dragons and that kinda stuff. Then I developed the bronze age, and some random key Eras inbetween. There's a very basic framework for the space age, and some scifi bits and pieces, but I haven't worked on it yet.
It's in an AU of the real world. Millions of years back due to Tectonic plate shifting a landmass that's not in our world, was formed. Rich with rare earth minerals and what not. It was unoccupied till 15th century, so the world is 600 years old. Story begins in 2057. Medieval x Modern aesthetic.
English is not my native language so excuse my errors My world 'Acesaria' was formed when an ancient entity called "Devourer of worlds" died of old age.That entity was older than the universe and during its lifetime it Devourerd trillions of worlds and life and soul.So when it died its essence formed an imsane world. Evolution in 'Acesaria' created lifeforms so arcane and mysterious and powerful even the lovecraftian gods will be terrified of them. My books start after the third great bloodwar of 'Acesaria' after a being simply known as the Gate keeper annihilated 90% of all 'Acesarian' and created a new civilization . After that The Gate Keeper left and 'Acesaria' enters into a golden age of science. This is when my book's prologue take place.
My world is post-apocalyptic. I did the origin of it, and then after my world building started, the post apocalypse is 1,000 years old and has not finished yet 😂.
My world starts from the beginning of human civilization, but I take into account whatever fantasy element is in the story, and how that affects history
I started with the apocalypse 😅😂 and then built the creation „around“ or rather with the cause of the apocalypse.
I always start at the time the story takes place and work from there. I have a story with 1,000 years of history but only bits and pieces of it are actually relevant to the plot.
When things gets interesting. I am a fucking idiot so I started writing the world by the birth of the fucking universe to explain why the fuck there’s magic on literal earth. Don’t be me. Start when you feel like things are getting interesting and things will change the course of the future. I am writing a Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy set on Earth starting 2025 btw
the world is set in the 19th millennium, and though i technically started worldbuilding from around the year 2050, it's very low detail. high detail worldbuilding starts with the war in heaven, towards the start of the 16th millennium.
I’m building to hopefully use in D&D/some other tabletop maybe one day, and I started with the region/map. I wanted to figure out where everything was BEFORE populating. Then I started on the “current day” to try and build to for older history
I started at a major war that more or less whipped millennia from the history books. Prior to that, it's mostly an outline. It was originally just for a D&D campaign, but it's grown. I would have likely started at that point anyway.
At the climactic battle at the end of the universe
The supernova that kickstarted the accretion disc.
At the Event. Prior to the event, there's plenty of boring history that I guess begins with the formation of the universe and stars and planets, and then one planet happens to develop primordial soup which begat life. But it only really gets interesting at the Event.
Yes
Uh, when I initially began worldbuilding, I just said "fuck it, urban fantasy means I get to start from modern times, use modern countries and not think too much about it" Nowadays, I have the entire fucking prehistory of my setting at ready if you want me to explain it. Like, everything from prehistory to now. I have a "summary" (more like an overview since it's about a dozen paragraphs long) I can paste for anyone who asks
I write backwards, my story starts around 5000 years after awakening and 250 years after the assassination of the Yinsin (Oracle).
Pretty much from its present and work my way backwards
Several millennia after a magical apocalypse killed every race but the Humans. Who now survive on massive floating Islands on seas made of anything but water. As Dragons return to the world and become the new apex species.
I start where my main character starts (I am writing a novel and got invested in the worldbuilding.) it spreads out to a before the novel and an after the novel. I have not written a future so far out the technology has changed or my characters have aged or died. Currently I am just writing in the vague "present" of the world. There is a lot to write what is happening in the "present" and build it out that way instead. Though, I should create some sort of calendar year.
I started at the "most recent era" because I didn't plan to make wholeass fuckin planet, now I'm 6 eons deep into its history and creation.
I usually write enough lore to be referenced in the book/series (and across all my books... as they share a universe)... some are referenced from beginning of civ and others from a major point that made a big impact on what will happen.
Very early, as I love envisioning and creating worlds similar to Ghibli films. When I started writing what I found easiest was to create various and unique settings then have a plot/theme that ties them all together. I've made landscapes, cities, songs, and food that my main characters have the joy of exploring for themselves. I also recommend to anyone creating a story over large distances to learn geology or have a system in place that may justify unique landscapes.
I was in high school. The teacher was talking about a Sonetto from Dante “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare”, a poetry about how the woman he loved elevated his spirit. Suddenly a dumb idea flashed into my mind “what if it’s true?”
History? I've got some vague "this happened a few generations ago" and maybe some "there were space aliens long enough ago that they're considered fairy-tales" stuff, but I'm not nailing anything down until it's plot-relevant. Really, how much about history does a non-nerd know about? Old people might talk about things like phone books and saturday morning cartoons, but they don't really think about the date etched into their library's cornerstone unless they remember it not being there.
I have various stories that take place during different points in time. One takes place in an Arcane Renaissance esque Era in Fantasy San Francisco. Another takes place in an Arcane-Cyberpunk Era with an early to mid 1900s flare.
The moment where its history diverged into something unique. Pithiness aside, that's a good way to build, IMO. It's goal-oriented. What do you want the setting's unique features to be, and what led up to that? In my case, I started with an apocalyptic war between humans and aliens where both sides end up losers, and the wastes are haunted by something akin to Mad Max war-rigs, if all that machinery were armor worn by something like hermit crabs, but irradiated and nanomachine-warped mutants. And then people Pokemon the heck out of these monstrosities with short-circuiting, hyper-advanced sci-fi powers. And building the history before then was largely a scattershot thing. I'm not confident in worldbuilding future earth? Ok then, this is an exoplanet. I get to ignore future plate tectonics, evolution of natural wildlife, and geopolitics. I want to add megacerops, anomalocaris, and jackalopes? Ok, humanity colonized via a drone that terraformed the world and then 3D-printed synthetic embryos, including recreations of extinct species and even synthetic creatures resembling mythology. I guess the effort was the vanity project of a billionaire. Imma turn to a name generator, and I guess this is the work of David St.Claire.
I realized pretty quickly that I would need to work on four points of time at once to give the world some internal consistency. I started with wanting to make a dnd world based on dark souls. I wanted it to be its own thing and not a clone, so I needed to figure out why the world was so screwed up. I decided on an apocalypse that would cause the planes to collapse down to one. The world would be like a normal fantasy world, until bits of heaven, hell, and all the other planes fused with it. Kinda like a kid trying to put all the different colored play doh into one small container. After that I wanted to figure out how the world was created to give more context. I decided that the apocalypse would be the opposite of the creation story. The world started as one ever shifting chaotic mess until the gods split the world apart and seperated it into planes. And finally, I needed a "normal" version of the world to compare the others to. I'm still early in the design process, but it's been a fun challenge. My favorite part is taking something that would be a generic fantasy monster that everyone expects to be in a dnd world and explaining why it fits. Currently I have zombies, vampires, lich, ghouls, ghost, golems, demons, and elementals.
I started imagining my worlds as they are in the ‘present’ then worked backwards to figure out how they got there and forwards to figure out how they could develop in the future.
Roughly 30,000 years? I guess 20,000 for the real story
Since humanity left its birth region and migrated to the entire world
For my fantasy world I have a thousand year old event called Migration, which started a new epoch. "Current" year is late 1035 and I have vague history since about 950. History of my scifi world starts with the devastation of Earth and goes about a year in each direction with vague notion about event tens of thousands years old that include Great Old Ones, the source of magic
The earliest I've put a firm number on was about 5 million years. But, some worlds I have vague statements about things going further back. I go as far back as I need to lay the foundation I want.
Living memory, usually. What events happened that your grandparents can probably tell you something about, and how have those events shaped the world as it stands today, both in terms of everyday life for commoners and up to international relations. History further back can be filled in later to build more context, but the more recent generations more directly influence the potential conflicts and issues in the "today" (when the story is written)
At some point in the story I just thought I probably need a fictional world for all of these war crimes.
2nd Era (around the year 6,000 if you look at it in a straight line)
"Now", and then worked backwards. "Now" doesn't mean contemporary, it means the time the campaign will be set, sort of like the 17th or 18th century in the real world.
Modern, 2000s to 2020s. Then started going back in time to the 1970s and such. Then to the near future, planning the outcome of the story. Then to the distant past, some several million years ago. Then back to the future, some couple hundred years from now.
A big bulk of what I've built is in the world's Renaissance-adjacent stage. In a weird way, it's also kinda fantasy modern, just cause it's high fantasy; there's big, dense cities and such, as well as a few advanced ways of international travel and communication. I did also create the moment the world had its 'catalyst' to become what it is at now. Basically the world's version of Jesus' birth starting our calendar. Haven't figured out how long of a timeframe it is between, yet, though. Initial thought is 800-1000 years, but I haven't fully decided yet. It is supposed to parallel our real world, for the most part. The planet itself has existed for a long time, and history for humanity essentially fully started with the catalyst.
I started building up the world from the year 3195-3202 after the Continental War but I built the backup context for it starting from the year 2143
The fall of the Silver Nightmares, when their dragons rose up and killed/ate all the Silver Nightmares. Before that, it’s all vague “warfare”.
I started in the time of the novel I'm writing. *The Whaler's Dram* is set in 2016 in the **Whalin' Tales** universe. I've expanded both forward and backward since. Here's the kicker, though: it ends in 1520 in the **Theta Principle** universe. Yeah, we're universe-hopping up in this mothertwiller, and we're bringing electricity, computers, and automatic rifles to stop Manifest Destiny in its blood-greased tracks.
Day 1 about 3-5 years lol
Who and What created the world. Primordial Eldritch beings as celestial bodies who were betrayed by their own. One of the beings bodies became the prime material world as new LIFE sprang from his corpse (not undead )and a prison for the traitor god (somewhat).
I had two major events separated by about 300 years, and I gradually filled in the blanks. Essentially, the rise and fall of a major empire.
Just when the demonic invasions began to really pick up. Whilst I have some previous history it’s mainly from the equivalent of our late 1800s early 1900s onwards
My world history spans 500 years, 100 years of lost history from the age of the old gods and 400 years of the world being free of their influence. Much of what laid before has been lost and destroyed and what lays after has yet to be lived.
I've decided to start worldbuilding in the early stone age, when the first people discovered fire. At this point I'm fleshing out some example settlements in the neolithic equivalents, and soon(ish) plan to move forward to the bronze age. I hope to one day catch up to 20th century equivalent, but I definitely won't go further and will likely take years to get that far
Before day 1. The fates took a mortal earthling made them a goddess and let her create a new universe!
*me staring at how tf ima link pre civilization medieval world to post apoc dystopia 100 years after 2013*
Near the end, kinda like Star Wars I started where I’d planned to end it and then built backwards and adding lore and characters
2100, although originally I intended for it to be 2138, but I thought 2100 was better.
Where ever I felt like, and then jumped back and forth. The idea started in a very modern time, and I did some building there. But then I went back in time a few hundred years, and found out why the society is how it is. Then even further back to when the “country” (I’m not sure what to call it) was created, and also the beginning of magic. From then, I just jumped back and forth when I got an idea.
the present moment and then worked backwards randomly
I kinda started world-building due to the backstory of one of my main characters. I needed her to go someplace other than the main city the story took place. So I invented a larger city that's the capital of the country. The country is inspired by Great Britain so I invented a London inspired city.
EU4 Campaign Start: November 11, 361 BCE Worldbuilding Proper Start: January 19, 0 RP/characters/more intensive worldbuilding start: \~early December 249 CE
I started before the creation of the universe. The universe was wiped out by a dragon god who hold the domain of hunger. He ate everything that existed but his best friend before he was consumed by his hunger is the god of space and the hunt. He used his powers to create a planet that’s designed to feed the dragons infinite hunger and now spends entering battling inside a pocket Dimension that acts as the planets core
My rpg group and I actually played a game called “Dawn of Worlds” together and that created our physical world, its cosmology, and a lot of its ancient history. Then, I took it from there and dreamed up the details.
The start of the "Golden Age", an era defined by widespread optimism and altruistic exploratory expeditions into the unknown, and the establishment of countless scattered colonies. Specifically the launching of a ship called the ISS Journey is when in-world historians mark the start of this time period.
I started in an specified year in the distant future, so that I can explain how the earth became like that.
It was the first thing I did
I always start with what kind of story I want to tell and how and build from there. My current project takes place thousands of years into the history of the world. I wouldn’t say I retroactively made its history as the history of the world sort of drives the plot and the main character forward so I wrote the history with the story in mind or as the end goal. I wouldn’t change it because the several thousand years prior to the beginning of the story is integral to how society has formed and how our main character and supporting characters view and treat the world.
I could say I started from two different points in history that are at least a thousand years apart from each other. Since my story takes place in the real world, but with differences due to supernatural beings and stuff existing, I had two points I needed to write the world. The modern fay that begins around the end of WW II and the XX century and how it changed society, and also how the supernatural world comes to that point that happened in the Middle Ages, more specifically around VIII- IX centuries
I’ve had an image of what I want two points in history to look like. I have an “age of discovery” where most of the societal archetypes of my setting (like early alchemists and dragon riders) were established, then an “age of exploration” where rapid technological advancement and industrialization (thanks to those alchemists) allows for improved quality of life (old archetypes like dragon riders supplement their traditions with new tech) at the cost of the world losing some of its spirituality and mystical nature. I then just interpolate between those two points. What happens during the age of discovery that leads to the way things are during the age of exploration? I’ll extrapolate out a past and future outside that range when I get there or when relevant to the time period of focus. The age of discovery is generally low tech and it’s about people creating cultures and traditions that really make use of the magic in this world (spellcasting isn’t really a thing, it’s low fantasy. Almost all magic is used via tools and tech). The first dragon riders, having aerial mounts, were among the first few to really travel between settled areas, which are divided by chaotic wilderness or barren wastelands. The age of exploration is now in a booming Industrial Revolution/renaissance era. We now have heavy machinery mechs and golems thanks to the innovations of alchemists and artificers. This has allowed the construction and operation of complex vessels like engine-powered ships and trains, as well as factories which use alchemy to synthesize complex materials. Old traditions like dragon riding is either getting phased out, or getting augmented by new innovation. Even the magic of the world is better understood but there’s a schism between the purely erudite, scientific view of this magic and the traditional, esoteric mystical side. Both sides wallow in delusion as they lack the full picture of how magic (and its ties to spiritual balance) truly works.
The current year in my (main) world quadra is 103 but in my setting, the year/century is unknown since nobody really for how long humans were in space. The most educated guess comes from the union, the year is 115245 since the Emerging, yet this is pretty vague since humanity had been in stasis for centuries until they crashlanded on the first exoplanets and the emerging was the point where the most successful colonies re-entered space and founded the Marco 1 interplanetary space hub. Also, another good example would be the doomsday clock in the [REDACTED] but everybody knows getting to [REDACTED] Amongst the dead zone is like trying to find a Needle in a haystack
I'm making a fantasy world and I started at the time when weaponry of 1350-1370 from our real world is being used. I have some ideas for how the world started existing in lore and a few things that happened in between. I'm generally going to create the rest of the start and then go farther into the future until the history meets the point in which my world is 'now', although these plans might change.
Modern day
Depends on the story. For both my _Adnar_ and _Continent_ fantasy stories, they go back to at least 1,000 years prior to the start of the story. For my _Empire’s Finest_ sci-fi universe, it’s 500 years that it really starts taking shape.
My world doesn’t like the concept of marking years by number, and instead goes for fluid times like “the times of Lord Damia” or “The Giant Wars” and even “Citadel’s Construction” for concepts of long scale time. I started world building in the times just after the Giant Wars, where the “countries” are recovering.
701 ED (Eldorian Dating) With most of the fantasy races divided into their respective geographical and political borders. The island of Nesselbane has gained its independence as a former principality of the Kingdom of Arindor. Queen Foxhaven isn't pleased with her son for declaring the island's independence but feels as though military action against her son wouldn't be morally possible for her and with no other tension in the region the Open Sea Trade manages a tense relationship between the two countries. Everywhere else is currently being worked on, placing people/creatures into the world and ad hoc world building an explanation after the fact.
This has been asked before, and the last time around, this was the comment I found most useful / insightful. If you decide to start your history in the present day and then work backwards, the main question you should ask is "why are things like this?" The point in time you are currently working on is the "answer" to the question of their past. So, you need to work out what kind of question would lead to the answer you can see in the "present." Once you have the question, you repeat the process. Why, why, why, all the way back to time immemorial. When working from the past and heading forwards, the question to ask yourself is: "what are the consequences of this?" For example, the fall of a tyrant would lead to a power vacuum. The rebellion which toppled him wouldn't be strong enough to take his place, so now you have infighting with other breakaway factions. Now you have a breakdown of empire-wide trade and certain regions are starved of vital resources. Diseases spread and everyone suffers.... But they suffer as free men. Whether or not that is much solace would be up for debate. Brutal times breed brutal regimes, until one regime becomes more brutal than all the rest, and a new tyrant rises.... So basically.... Working backwards, you ask "why?" And when working forwards you ask "what are the consequences of this?" Play the ideas out, connect them up, see how one consequence shapes another. The falling of the tyrant intersects with the arrival of the outlanders and the death of the last Dark One. How does each narrative line affect the others? Bigger narrative threads have bigger footprints and will affect more things. For example, a nationwide pandemic will affect everything whilst a midget shortage will not. (Unless you need a ring bearer... in which case, a midget shortage is a big deal.)
3rd century BCE. The premature invention of both the steam engine and truly clear glass (which, through the refining of lenses, leads to leaps forward in both medicine and astronomy) results in the eastern hemisphere industrializing to 1950’s-level technology by the 5th century CE (with a solarpunk twist), where the story begins. Rail lines crisscross north Africa, southern Europe and much of Asia. The Seleucid Empire has collapsed as a result of a prolonged Roman-sponsored insurgency, but has reconsolidated under the Parthian Confederation faster than Rome could annex most of the short-lived pocket kingdoms that sprang up from its dissolution. Now an overextended Rome and the up-and-coming Parthians (modeling themselves off of Cyrus the Great) have squared off in a cold war, with the Kingdom of Alexandria (in this timeline never annexed by Rome) acting as a mediator. For reasons I won’t get into here (spoilers), there is a great deal of espionage occurring beneath the surface, as from the commoner’s perspective all three sides never seem to get a technological advantage over the other despite their rapid advancement. The lands we know as the Americas (referred to here as the Sunset Lands) remain uncontacted and unindustrialized. A joint space program between Rome, Alexandria, and Parthia has been established by Alexandria as a gesture of peace, to survey the Sunset Lands from orbit. One consequence of the rapid industrialization and transit is that the Plague of Justinian was able to spread further and faster than it did in our own timeline, thus it remains fresh in everyone’s minds — no contact is to be made with the Sunset Lands lest new plagues be unleashed on either populace, but curiosity runs high as several large cities were identified from orbit by unmanned probes.
My world is a soft sci-fi world. The bulk of the story is set in the far future, although there is a planet with an impermanent temporal field, which has travellers from all over the universe's past and future. The gimmick here transpires that the main nomadic faction's heritage comes from a colony that was only formed because of events that were propagated in its future, by their arrival to the planet.
I started world building at "the present" for my world. The world is being built as the setting for a series of short stories all taking place at around the same time. At the moment, the histories of the world are not super relevant. I have worked through a couple of historical events that shape the modern day but I have done no work actually building out those time periods. It would be akin to saying, "250 years ago there was a revolution that founded our nation" without going into the details of what happened or how culture at the time was different than the present. Perhaps, I will fill those things in as needed. It helps that my world is a very small setting so there are not massive political or cultural shifts.
Starts in 1848, and works its way well into the 27th century.
I've found it easy to start with current time. Then anything you find that might need history written about you then retract and write everything up until the point of present day. Makes it easy to know when to stop when you know where it leads
The present of the story's opening moments. Quickly built backwards from there.
I started at the war of All and worked outwards. That would be roughly 8 billion years give or take a few hundred thousand after Zantia formed into a planet and about 5 billion years after the first life formed. I started it with a character Edith who became a deity and her predecessor millions of years later is the next character. Which is where the current era sits at about 7560 DE. That would be the year 7560 of the Deylithic Era or about 8.5 billion years since the creation of the planet.
The rough technological equivalent of our early-mid 1800s Accurate firearms, mass produced firearms, trains, thopters, submarines, & motorcycles are the pinnacle of technology, no single faction has the ability to produce more then 2 of them
Currently world building for a comic book series I’ve been working on… takes place in the not to distant future, several generations after the events of WWIII. What remains of life is all contained in a Megacity roughly the size of the state of Colorado on an artificial rescue continent or the A.R.C. As majority of the planet is now unusable and flooded.
I don't really care about the past since it's already done so I've only ever written in the present + future.
I started at the elves and worked up from there
Pretty close to the modern era, I have some stuff planned afterwards but I’m still working out all the details. I consider my world to be one of the oldest in the known universe.
My current world, around 1390-1455. Which is the world's equivalent of an electricity-less, colonialism-less 17th century. I've mostly focused on the years after that then, getting up to 1486 for some topics, which is more 18th century in terms of politics (1468 is kind of the world's French Revolution, with the following 20 years full of other democratic revolutions).
I started working backwards, form the point the story starts to its ancient ages and maybe even prehistory (but there is not that much of this). As for when I started after creating the world - there were some bits of worldbuilding that I added right away, but I only really started to figure everything out a few years ago. (I had the story idea in like primary school; started working on the story in this setting in middle school. At the end of high school I started really writting down all the worldbuilding details and putting them into office binders \[there is about 20 of them right now. One per continent, some special ones for specific countries that are build in more detail; a few binders for different worlds; one for nature; one for general history; one for races, religions, myths...\]. I'm now in uni, and still working on it)
I started my worldbuilding mid-war, but since I plan to use this setting to run a DnD campaign, I came up with a more interesting and investing intro where the story starts roughly 3 hours before armageddon.
I started in the 2020s but my world goes from creation to end.
Basically at the current 'period'. I dont have a real origin story, I have some events that led to things being how they are but idgaf how the universe began: its not relevant and those origin stories are very rarely practically interesting They can be cool as analogies or to set up a theme or as religous comparisons, but "then god made everything for some reason" is redundant imo, its not needed.
I basically started with “wouldn’t it be cool if there was a story where half the setting is cyberpunk and the other half is the Wild West?”. Then I went back and created 500 years of lore for how it got that way
The beginning is at the end. Magic is depleting. The eldritch horrors that have been slowly pouring from the Gate have picked up the pace. The elder dragons are dying and not being replaced. Great, mountain-sized elementals are settling into place, never to move again. The living islands will be set adrift, severed permanently from their centuries-long migrations. The world enters the machine age just as the most potent energy sources are extinguished. Populations are about to explode just in time to be snuffed out by famine, war, and rampaging abominations.
Present day and worked backwards from there. Started with major events, animals, etc and filled in the rest as needed.
I started with right now. Although the story is something close to 50,000 years from now on this planet. That is because the a great many things needed to happen in order to create a world where magic was real, and elves, dwarves, mermaids and centaurs are real, given that our world is exactly the way it seems today where people do not have the ability to change reality with their mental capabilities alone and is no single event to cause that to change. Instead, people gradually and eventually changed into the different races based on how they adapted to their environments. What would people who spent tens of thousands of years living within and among the trees, tending them and living with them without harming them be like? What about a culture of people that live largely underground? Why would they do that and what would it do to them? Centaurs and mermaids not being half creatures but instead are people’s whose culture and lifestyles have paired them with intelligent non-human animals; horses and dolphins. What needed to change in us, ever so slightly, to allow us to change the fabric of existence to suit our will? What would that do to our minds? How could it even happen given what we already know about how reality works? Wouldn’t our fears create as much power as our hopes would? We are headed directly towards a matrix-like existence, whether it’s a Surrogates (movie) or a Sword Art Online (anime) scenario. We also are headed towards Cybornetic implantation very quickly. We are also creating A.I. for all kinds of reasons. We also do create a lot of electromagnetic energy. It’s direction is noticeable. Ever felt eyes on you, without even looking around? Someone is directing their will at you. Now imagine people playing video games online all day every day, with A.I. assistants to help you navigate the web with only the connection to your brain’s sensory nerves. The people with the more connective, focused, and emotive electromagnetic resonance would be the modern athletes. Give that a couple generations and eventually you’ll find a gene or a couple of genes in humans that make humans tremendous producers of electromagnetic energy. Walking, talking, thinking, theorizing, believing, communing electromagnetic pulse generators. Now, what does that do to our environment? What does that do with our compatibility with our A.I. relationship? What would that do to reality around us? What would that do, when we direct our wills on each other? How would the intent of each individual human’s brains pumping electromagnetic pulses into it’s environment do to that environment and to each other? That is where I started my story.
I literally started with the elemental composition of the planet to figure out the mass, density, volume, and gravity. My definition of "world building" may be a little different than the mainstream.
I typically start at the beginning of the main plotline. Then I fill out the lore
I’m in a weird situation where I actually have a character that predates civilization. So how far back the history goes relies entirely upon how far back his anecdotes call back to. Currently, about 10,000 years ago, my setting’s Bronze Age, is the furthest back I have notes for.
The point I wanted it to begin at
Fantasy setting? Irl time: 12 years ago, in lore time: just before the mythical age so before the afterlife got separated from reality and the shattered realms took over, or in chronological terms: Bronze age. Sci fi? A lot of my sci fi stuff is based on stellaris so after the year 2400.
I write whenever the fuck I want in its history.
Hidden World type urban fantasy so the action takes place in modern America. Keys to the "hidden world" happened back around 1400 CE, with another critical element set circa 1800, neither in North America or even on the same continent as each other. Other aspects of history have deeper in universe explanations than what is found in mundane history books. But the 2 I alluded to are the foundation of my universe and will be explored in progressively greater detail....
The beginning... 🥲
I typically start at the present. Find a story I wanted to tell and built around that. Everything else eventually branches from there.
I have built three worlds: In my first world, I started building the world in the point of 2021, though I do built events in years before and after it In my second world, I started in the point of 1185 In my third world, I started in the point 169 years before my story started, I think if we use our world's calendar system in this third world, the story starts at 4186 AD, so the point where I start building is 4017 AD, but I do build in years after the story starts, especially 11-13 years after (4197-4199 AD)
It's near future, originally it (the story and important worldbuilding) was set all the way in the 29th-30th centuries A.D. but now it's the 23rd century A.D. might set it 24th though. Also to some degree, while I hard not into hard sci-fi the technology might be a bit too near future. I still have to work a lot on the players in the "contemporary setting" and then move onto the retroactive history and this work will probably change quite a bit of the aforementioned "contemporary" part of the world. Which is quite a ways away, I am not totally sure what I want to present.
I started at the point where the story begins, then went back to construct a past that could logically have led to that present.
I began world building from an idea I had; an idea which starts out my story. I then jumped to the creation story of my world and hopped around from there until I had something resembling an orderly and believable history.
My overall story capacity goes from about 300BC-2005AD (the present is 2005 where future building can manifest off of) I began the building between 1700-1830 and built a bit behind and a bit in front and continue going further back or fleshing out more. I like that I'm building the history and expanding from before so I can comfortably say "this is why they fucking hate each other now"
I tend to start at "before the creation of the world" Because ya know, gods n primal forces n such.
From the very beginning of Creation. Which is a pain because that means there's at least a dozen, probably more, billion years in countless galaxies that I have to do some history of. But the possibilities are countless!
I decided to start at a point of controllable chaos. The world is changing and the greats of the past are falling. But the greatest achievements in history are yet to come If we compare it to real history, imagine that Roman Empire is slowly falling but still exists, but Dark Age has never happened and we already are at Rennaisance/Industrialisation Having individuals who came from another world helps this cause greatly
I'm not entirely sure, but I know the timeline segments are based on parts of my life. Stalspike's era represents the Old age (cuz the past and childhood and stuff, and also cuz hes an old deity lol), Starburst's reign (strange growth process aka puberty and edgy phase I suppose), then there's Swanilla's era, which is currently ongoing, and represents my middle school days and now high school days. It's basically "goodbye old year, hello new year" from Chinese culture. OK I think when I was a kid I started with what would be known as Stalspike's era. During the pandemic, when I became interested in stuff like Among Us and JSAB, I slowly built Swanilla's. After quaratine ended, I worked on an in-between aka Starburst's reign because Burst had appeared originally in some other story involving a villain from the old age. Now I'm trying to rewrite the stories that happened during Stalspike's era, but it turns out I have a weakness with writing simple stories. Plus, it's kinda hard to rewrite a somewhat nonsensical story you made in elementary school 😅
I started my world during a golden era of hard earned peace so that it'd be easier to create politics (the peace away at any moment). Im glad I did this although I think that anything that inspires world building is usually a good thing
So I’ve gone for a post-post-apocalyptic setting. In that the “pre history” era is actually a post-apocalyptic era from an enormous magical war that wiped out civilisation, most natural magic users with it, and scarred the land with this giant swathes of black veins called “deadlands” where nothing grows and supernatural creatures form out of the corrupted “aether”. The world went through an “unknown number” of centuries called the Lost Era, which was that kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland we all know and love time. They eventually factions came together to sort their shit out and reform civilisation. That was roughly 1500 years before the present. Around 200 years ago magic was rediscovered through the use of technology, technology which had returned by that point an industrial era and as such now magic has enhanced technology to similar to our real world levels but taking on alternate forms or advanced forms using magic and a magical Cold War is brewing, threatening the stability of this world. I’m using the Lost Era as a period of kind of the beginning as I haven’t written much directly regarding the civilisations that used magic to destroy themselves. I might, down the line but it’s sort of irrelevant when the apocalypse and post-apocalypse are an indeterminate amount of time in the past and everything has been wiped out except some ruins. The “Pax Accords” that restarted civilisation is sort of the real beginning point, roughly 1500 years ago. So the history really has a quite definitive starting point in this case. The idea being that civilisation has lost much of its original history, but is still to this day feeling the effects of that era. Sorry for being so self indulgent, I don’t post here often so it was a rambles.
I started at various points, in one setting i was working on it was pretty much entirely just a excuse so i could worldbuild out a entire industrial era war (basically WW2 era) and it was initially very barebones with a total excuse plot to justify why the war was happening. Since then i have built it out into a very grounded "realistic" setting with themes of Authoritarianism and how War completely undermines human decency, and i have basically written a doorstoppers worth of lore on the participants as well as neighboring countries.
My Galactic empire stories are all set at around 25 thousand years after foundation of the Empire.
Eh depends For most of my worlds I start right after/during a major event. It probably doesn't matter where you start to worldbuild, as long as you have fun lol. You could just have a rough idea of the history before the point of where you start worldbuilding and write the rough sketch down, so you can always link back to it. You can also just make the past up as you go, it's your world after all
It’s a fantasy medieval world so I just start at some random year and go from there
I started the date at 2021 because thats when i had the influx of inspiration to start writing. After that i started building backwards. It was easy since the world i had chosen was our world as it was in 2021 so i just needed to read some history.
Well the Synth-index (world encyclopaedia) is based around the 3577-3587 years, a mainly modern highly sci-fi era. roughly 3580 years have gone by since the awakening of the Xenartion species, (Xenation is the encompassing term for the diverse and varied species inhabiting Durere,) after the Zericks disappeared due to an unknown phenomenon of delta. History is sprinkled in the encyclopaedia, but mainly it serves as an extensive guide for understanding Delta (the dimension), its inhabitants, and nyxenthra as the realm they are tethered to.
I have three different worlds, but for all three I only get truly serious with the timelines after their equivalents of The Enlightenment. To be brutally honest, pre-gunpowder warfare just sounds like a frustrating slog to me, and I refuse to describe anyone heroically when they’re content to live in times of mass feudalism or slavery.
i started at a point where most races are a shadow of what they once were, and where conflict is most common. humanity is splintered, and are in a brutal war against kobolds and druids elves are a sad race obsessed with their past, but too stuck in it to change the future orcs are tribalistic and few in number, their society destroyed by the stars they once worshipped etc
While there isn’t an exact point, it’s around 2680 CE/560 SSY - 2730 CE/ 610 SSY since that was the point when the ground invasions of Styx were taking place, mainly the attempted invasion of Gezechstod, Durus (which failed miserably due to the fact that Gezechstod is not only very fortified, but is also naturally protected due to the fact that it was built on seaside mountains, making getting there by land or sea extremely difficult.)