World Building Resources

Last Updated March 2011
Please let us know if we've missed an especially good Worldbuilding Resource!


Atomic Rocket
Just what the name says: ATOMIC ROCKETS. How cool is that?

Basilicus
Basilicus is a world-building project focused in the Basilicus Prime Galaxy, a fictional galaxy home to both advanced and feudal societies. Although several civilizations have ventured off into neighboring star systems; several others have not reached the technological knowledge to traverse the four corners of their own planet.
Step By Step and Building Worlds are suggested as beginning articles to get you started if this project appeals to you.

Celestial Architect Spreadsheet
A really handy spreadsheet for building planets, comes in Open Office format.

Color of Plants on Alien Worlds: NASA
It's NASA, so they ought to know what they're talking about...

The Division of Territory in Society
Very interesting work rooted in sociology that helps plot out who got what land and how/why.

Earth Impact Effects Program
The Earth Impact Effects Program is an easy-to-use, interactive web site for estimating the regional environmental consequences of an impact on Earth. This program will estimate the ejecta distribution, ground shaking, atmospheric blast wave, and thermal effects of an impact as well as the size of the crater produced. This program needs to be seen to be believed.

Fantasy Worldbuilder's Forum
A forum devoted to people who build imaginary worlds and can't keep their mouths shut about it, like most of us...

Jacmus-Prime Worldbuilding
They have a nice article on What is Worldbuilding?

The Language Construction Kit
DIY pseudo-gibberish. It doesn't get more nerdy than this, does it? But at the same time, it is handy to cuss people out without anyone knowing exactly what you're saying, some times...

Magical World Builder
A fairly basic intro to building a fantasy world.

The Metaverse
A tremendous resource for Constructed Languages, Synthetic Cultures, Worldbuilding and all manner of other creative crimes against normalcy.

The Planet Construction Kit
371 pages for about $15 -- a bargain, really. Check out Yonagu Books.

Planet Designer
A really handy online resource to help with the math involved in designing worlds.

Qaiyore
A Fantasy-oriented Worldbuilding site. Qaiyore is a game in which the players take the roles of societies, rather than playing individual characters. The players invent a society with its culture, and guide its development and interaction with the world. Emphasis is placed on developing a detailed history and cultures for Qaiyore, along with myths and legends. Too bad it hasn't been updated since 2004...

Rabiki
One Guy's efforts at SciFi worldbuilding. He's also writing a novel and doing other stuff.

Ray Winniger's Dungeoncrafting Articles
This is a 29-part series of articles that originally appeared in Dragon magazine from 1997 to 1999. It was (and still is) a comprehensive look at the process of traditional dungeon-based game-mastering, which is a form of Worldbuilding in and of itself.

Rish Staat's RPG/Worldbuilding Articles
Some interesting stuff to look over here. The piece on Structure in Gaming is well worth a look.

Roleplaying Tips: Worldbuilding Articles
Quite a selection of articles on worldbuilding--and a lot more--at this site.

Stars and Habitable Planets
An excellent site for getting deeper into the nitty-gritty of planet formation, types of stars, and all that fun science stuff. The Earth-like Planet section is handy, as are the sections on Water Worlds and Super Earths.

Star Types at Enchanted Learning
A nice primer on the various types of stars that are out there.

This Orb
A Worldbuilder's blog. Home of the Celestial Architect spreadsheet.

Virtual Verduria

Wikipedia: Solar System

Wikipedia: Stellar Classification

Wikipedia: Worldbuilding

World Builder Projects
A bunch of links to all sorts of worldbuilding across the WWWeb.

Worldbuilding
Some nice resources at the Fantasist.net site.

Worldbuilding Links

Kepler-11

"Scientists using NASA's Kepler, a space telescope, recently discovered six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11, which is located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth." For more details go to the Kepler Mission Pages over at NASA.

Incredible stuff. Kepler-11's six planets are all larger than Earth and most are in much closer to their sun than anything in our system. This solar system challenges a lot of conventional thinking about how planets form and how they take up orbit around their stars.

What an interesting arrangement this system has, with very large bodies orbiting in really close like that...some of these planets might be worth a bit of exploration. Who knows what all might be lurking down in the cooler depths of a vast, rocky canyon-world just at the edges of the Goldilocks-Zone like Kepler-11g?

12 Virtues from Balthazar Gracian

"So is all said at once. Virtue is the link of all perfections, the centre of all the felicities. She it is that makes a man prudent, discreet, sagacious, cautious, wise, courageous, thoughtful, trustworthy, happy, honoured, truthful, and a universal Hero. Three HHH's make a man happy--Health, Holiness, and a Headpiece. Virtue is the sun of the microcosm, and has for hemisphere a good conscience. She is so beautiful that she finds favour with both God and man. Nothing is lovable but virtue, nothing detestable but vice. Virtue alone is serious, all else is but jest. A man's capacity and greatness are to be measured by his virtue and not by his fortune. She alone is all-sufficient. She makes men lovable in life, memorable after death."

Aphorism 300
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
Balthazar Gracian

So there I was, taking a moment to clear-out some email and attend to comments, etc. and this popped into the in-box.  Talk about synchronicity. I've been outlining the Riskail zodiac (and corresponding Tarot), which is based upon a slightly shifted re-distribution rooted in the orientation of the Degrees of the Houses to the Decans and some other obscure and opaque terms/concepts I won't bore you with now. Suffice it to say, I've been wracking my brain for a suitable way to bring more of the right sort of versimilitude into the mix.  Balthazar's twelve virtues helps to flesh out the Aristotlean and other systems very nicely. Since this system is at the very root of a great deal of sorcery, magic, spell-casting, rites & rituals, even character development (remember Chivalry & Sorcery?), then I definitely need to have the proverbial ducks all in a row and Balthazar Gracian has come to my rescue in this endeavor, even if he has been dead for several centuries....

1. Prudence
2. Discretion
3. Sagacity
4. Caution
5. Wisdom
6. Courage
7. Thoughtfulness
8. Trustworthiness
9. Happiness
10. Honor
11. Truthfulness
12. Heroism

 I'll be going into this in more detail at the Riskail blog in about a week, once some more of the accompanying illustrations/sketches are ready to post...

Of Ley-Lines and Such

In 1921 Alfred Watkins, a photographer, amateur archaeologist and antiquarian, delivered a paper to the Woolhope Club that dealt with what he termed 'Early British Trackways, Moats, Mounds, Camps and Sites.' It was in this presentation that Watkins introduced the concept of 'the old straight track,' what came to be known as ley lines. Based upon actually hiking about, taking photographs and making personal observations, Watkins' theory was essentially the notion that there were prehistoric trading routes that criss-crossed the British landscape based upon a series of straight lines that connected the dots of various sighting points of specially notable landscape features that served as markers, or landmarks for geographical navigation. Being incredibly useful for the development of re-usable routes and thus something that was repeatedly used, communicated to others, and shared in common, the old straight tracks that connected the original landmarks took on a historical significance that persisted even after the older, navigational significance was lost, forgotten or destroyed. There wasn't the slightest newage puffery or nonsense regarding energies, vortexes or aliens in the mix at all. If anything, it was, and still is, fairly dry, straight-forward and not all that particularly challenging in that it makes some sense, in Watkins' original conception.
However ley lines were not destined to remain quite so straight-forward as the tracks described by Watkins originally. Early British Trackways was published in 1922 and it set things into motion, The Old Straight Track was published in 1925, Ley Hunter's Manual was published in 1927, and there were several clubs and a measure of notoriety for Watkins surrounding his life-long championing of the theory of ley lines, but for all intents and purposes it pretty much died out around the 1930s, except amongst the usual crowd of pseudo-Theosophists, pulp-fiction writers and the like.
 
You can find another version of Early British Trackways here.  It's a bit stuffy, but it is the real deal, from the first guy who published his ideas and set forth the foundational parameters of the theory we've inherited in a vastly distorted form.

In the Sixties, John Michell published The View Over Atlantis and ley lines once more floated to the top of the popular lexicon of quacks, frauds and newage peddlers of obscure revelations delivered in breathless tones of barely-hushed hyperbole.  The mystical elements that academics find so repellent, objectionable and distasteful were grafted onto Watkins' theories and what was once considered speculative became ridiculed as academia distanced itself from the mumbo-jumbo of the psychics and their oh-so-willing marks.

But Watkins' theory has survived this descent into the irrational, and alignments based upon ceremonial, astronomical, and other factors have been discovered in a variety of locales outside of Great Britain.  Whether or not the various pyramids are aligned to constellations, the ancient ruins in Guatemala or Chile were aligned to cosmic forces, the mystery scratched into the arid soil around Nazca were ceremonial or drug-induced works of hyper-art (or UFO landing strips), or they are all geographically scattered expressions of Watkins' old straight tracks, is up for grabs.  Theories abound and intellectual fist-fights break out amongst experts who can get catty and petty over what most see as incomplete trivia or the rantings of frustrated romance novelists seeking to make a buck off of the gullible.  Everyone has a theory, especially the ones who are flogging their books, but no one really, truly, knows. 

And that is perfect for the purposes of fiction and RPGs both.

Old Straight Tracks that can be used to map out prehistoric trade routes and other sorts of alignments, be they astronomical, ceremonial, or some obscure flow of Chthonic/Terrestrial Energies that can be tapped into, accessed or harnessed for technologies either sorcerous or materialst is an awesome notion and a wonderful idea to incorporate into a system of magic.  It is so cool that numerous authors are deeply committed to expounding upon this theory as part of a realworld, functional system that somehow has gotten merged into dowsing, western geomancy, and Taoist-rooted systems of Feng Shui or the less well-detailed (in the West/English-speaking market) Indian art of Vashtu which is far more susceptible to quackery and outrageous claims due to it not being quite so well-established in the US yet.   Don't get me wrong, I find outrageous claims as fun as the next guy, and they can be a lot of fun to play around with in terms of the good old 'What If...' practice of seeing where such things could lead that was a major component of the older forms of speculative fiction, back before orthodox English Majors and money-making Clarion Grads made it all about Plot, Character, and so on.  Like with most such human endeavors, there probably isn't a single answer, nor One Right And Only approach that works every time for everyone.  However you approach writing, it is an act of creation intrinsically linked to language and it partakes of the most ancient and primitive forms of magic symbolism as much as it delineates the forms of rational discourse.  But this is about ley lines, not language or writing.

Earth Mysteries, the geography of consciousness, shamanic landscapes--one of the foremost researchers and experts on this sort of thing is Paul Devereux, a true gentleman and scholar who has spent decades digging into the reality of ley lines.  Literally just about everything anyone needs to know or could want to ask about ley lines is summed up in Devereaux's summarized presentation on the subject which you can find by simply clicking on the Ley Lines link on his home-page.  It's all there.

Upon reflection, Paul Devereux, Colin Wilson and Simon Schama are three of the most significant rational influences on my work with Riskail, while Charles W. Leadbeater, James Churchward, and Andre Breton (A, B, C) are three of the core influences that inform the more irrational aspects of my current work.  There are others, but these six form a very potent mixture of skepticism, imagination and scholarship that I find particularly engaging and useful, for now.  Tomorrow I will probably brood over the work of Goya or delve into the hyper-verbose obscurities of Madame H.P.B., but for now, for today, these are six of the giants upon whom I derive a great deal of inspiration as I discover the realms of Riskail and act as a conduit for the stories that come from this place where Surrealism forms the heart and soul of sorcery and imagination is an active component of day-to-day life, not some muzzled dog kept on a tight leash by the soulless walking-wounded enslaved by tyrant-accountants and the abstract daemons they serve blindly, unquestioningly.

In a later post, I'll share some of the ways that I have integrated ley-lines into my sorcery/magic system, and offer a couple of quick-and-easy methods for slipping them in at the last minute without disrupting an already in-progress game.  It's actually super-easy.  I just want to get some graphics done to make it more understandable, pictures being worth tons of explanation.  Take a look at Devereux's site.  Just reading through that alone can keep most people busy for a considerable amount of time.  It is sure to give you ideas.