Deciding what is best in life is only easy if you’re Conan. The
rest of us have to consider loads of other factors, especially when you’re
making a top-five list. Ask me my top-five movies or albums, and I’d
immediately be at a loss. After a few flustered moments I’d then ask if I could
drill down a bit, perhaps by making it my top-five movies about prison romances,
or maybe top-five songs with “it’ll be alright” in the chorus. I ran into this problem again when trying to pick out my
top-five worldbuilding books, such that I eventually had to quantify my
top-five. Overall, I probably gleaned more worldbuilding info from Mark J. P. Wolf’s textbook Building
Imaginary Worlds than anything else, but would definitely not foist this upon
anyone except expert worldbuilders who already have all the basics down pat.
Same with Tolkien’s lectures or Le Guin’s essays on the subject. These
were more books dealing with the theory of worldbuilding, which was the focus
of my first book: Worldbuilding for Fantasy
Fans and Authors.
Fantasy
Worldbuilding Workbook (Forging Fantasy Realms 2) It was as I was working on my second book in the series,
Fantasy Worldbuilding Workbook, which contains a host of how-to strategies,
tricks, and over 750 writing prompts, that I refined my top-five worldbuilding
books to similar worldbuilding books that were aimed at actually making a world
rather than assessing them. And after spending quite a few pennies researching worldbuilding
for a few years now, I thought I’d keep this list on the cheap side since most
fantasy authors starting out are on a budget. So, without further ado, here are my top-five worldbuilding
books for new authors:
On
Writing and Worldbuilding, by Timothy Hickson Hickson has a
very popular worldbuilding and fantasy YouTube channel called hellofutureme,
and this book is an adaptation of his scripts. He’s got some wonderful insights
into fantasy worldbuilding, including how soft magic and character development
are tied, how hidden worlds function, and how to scale powers. Because this is
a collection of scripts, it can be a bit scattered at times, but this probably
has the most amount of quality worldbuilding info available for the price.
World
Builder’s Guidebook, by Richard Baker This is an old (’96 is old now?!) AD&D sourcebook, but
is an incredible resource for thinking about your worlds, and included all
sorts of actionable theories, approaches, and more randomized tables than you
can shake a stick at. Just pick a page at random and see if you don’t find inspiration
from one of those tables. It’s also the source of one of my favorite
infographics of all time, which I swore I learned about in college. So I sent
my friend who teaches philosophy and religion scouring through her textbooks to
find this understanding of deity interaction, only to realize much later that
it came from this book. It’s out of print, but is worth getting the pdf for at
DriveThruPRG.
A
Magical Society: Guide to Mapping This is the best value on the list because it’s a free
pamphlet that shows you the basic ins-and-outs of designing a continental map.
Down to the continental drift and how this can affect your fantasy races and
even language drift. It’s intuitive and not overwhelming, which is hard to
believe since it deals with the world on such a massive scale.
A-Zs
of Worldbuilding: Building a Fictional World From Scratch, by Rebekah Loper There are nearly a dozen worldbuilding prompt books out
there, but if I had to recommend one other, it would be this one. It’s adapted
from a blog challenge she did years ago where she compiled a A-Z list of
writing prompts, and it’s one of the most well-thought-out and exhaustive
collections I’ve seen. However, this alphabetization is also a curse since it’s
counterintuitive (at least to me) when I’m trying to look up a subject and
don’t remember what letter it’s listed under. That said, it’s the best bargain
when it comes to good questions for the price.
Guns,
Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond Chances are you’ve already heard about this book even though
it’s not fantasy in the least. It won the Pulitzer Prize and has a blurb quote
from Bill Gates himself. The premise is how world geography has affected human
civilizations throughout time and caused much of the inequality that we know
today. It’s an absolutely fascinating read, and brings up some great points
about how continent orientation affects domestication of plants and animals,
which affects the human civilizations in turn. There’s also a certain degree of
backlash against it in the social sciences for being too simplistic; which is a
valid argument in those fields. However, we deal in fantasy worlds where
everything has to make sense to the author and audience, which means his
conclusions can be a godsend when designing your worlds. So there you go. Like all top-five lists, it was difficult
to whittle this down, and there were so many that were cut for either not being
books (Sanderson’s Writing
Excuses Podcast), not being structured for new authors (Marie
Brennan’s New Worlds series), or just not enough value in terms of
questions per dollar spent (won’t list those here). But there are gobs more books
and resources out there for burgeoning worldbuilders, including my own series,
Forging Fantasy Realms, which I hope you’ll give a gander, either:
Official
Author Information: Never passing up the
opportunity to speak about himself in the third person, M.D. Presley is not
nearly as clever as he thinks he is. Born and raised in Texas, he spent several
years on the East Coast and now waits for the West Coast to shake him loose.
His favorite words include defenestrate, callipygian, and Algonquin. The fact
that monosyllabic is such a long word keeps him up at night.
His flintlock fantasy series Sol’s Harvest can
be found on Amazon and should (hopefully)
conclude by next year.
3:00 AM | 
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