Transcript
Hi, my name is Austin Ardor and I’ve been a professional worldbuilder and writer for half a decade. After spending most of my life either reading books or writing them, I want to help new writers learn the ropes so that they can do their stories justice. I want to see more good stories in the world, and I’m going to teach you how to do it. I’ve done all the heavy lifting so you can skip straight to the good part.
This podcast is all about fiction writing;. How to make epic fantasy worldbuilding on mind-blowing scales, keeping tension with fast-paced cyberpunk thriller plots, and the buzzwords behind slow-creeping psychological horrors. If you want to learn how to do it, the Ardor podcast is for you.
Hello, and welcome back to today's installment of the podcast, I’m your host Austin Ardor, and we have some good stuff to cover today. A good friend of mine reached out recently and asked me what the absolute fundamentals of fantasy worldbuilding are. The things that absolutely cannot be missed. The core components that actually make it fantasy worldbuilding. It’s almost impossible to talk about fantasy as a genre without talking about worldbuilding. For most people, their first experiences with worldbuilding are inside fantasy stories. In order to talk about the essentials, we need to break down the genre to it’s bare bones.
Fantasy itself is speculative fiction that is defined by the characteristics of unrealistic and imaginary elements. It often involves magic, set in a fictional universe and often inspired by mythology or folklore. When we talk about Fantasy as a genre, everyone has their own personal picks to throw into the ring: Lord of the Rings, the Cosmere, Song of Ice and Fire, and so on. However, Fantasy is also the umbrella term for all of it’s subgenres too: High Fantasy, Flintlock, Grimdark, Urban Fantasy, Wuxia, on and on.
But, what specifically from this list makes fantasy… fantasy? How little or how much can you have before the line starts to blur? Why can you call stories so different by all one name?
in order to answer that, let’s go back to the beginning.
I’ve always been deeply interested in mythology and folklore. According to Euhemerus, a Greek mythographer in the 4th century BC, myths originated as a retelling of stories that became more and more exaggerated as they were passed along, sort of like a game of telephone. Bernard de Fontenelle, from the 16th century CE, posited that myths existed to explain the natural phenomena that ancient peoples encountered. Folklore, as a derivative of that idea, is the gathering of the smaller beliefs and rituals shared between people. Where myths explained why the sun crosses the sky every day, folklore became a cultural expression for the smaller unexplained phenomena they encountered. The combination of these two, the place where the tide of the ocean of myths washes up on the shores of folklore, created a world that was neither ours nor theirs.
Some examples might be sailor’s warnings of what to do when you encounter sea monsters, fabled small-town warnings not to go into the woods at night due to some monster, elves that steal your shoes, fae that steal your children, and too many dragons for anyone’s health. These stories passed great wisdom down, but left behind the ripples of a magical underlying world that only the brave or the unlucky ended up witnessing. They gave us stories such as One Thousand and One Nights, Beowulf, and even the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Modern fantasy began as collections and retellings of these stories, the myths and the folklore—their ideas all folded neatly into a story. Back then (which is now considered ‘Pre-Tolkien’), they were simply known as fairy tales. Stories such as Alice in Wonderland, Dickens’ Christmas Carol, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan hit the shelves. Although there was a presence of darker or more gothic fairy tales, the majority of publication was targeted toward children, hence beginning the trend of reserving fairy tales for children instead of as folklore warnings for adults.
Fantasy as we know it truly began in Tolkien’s time. Tolkien was a professor of philology at the University of Oxford and frequently found himself buried in ancient literature. He took the old legends of elves and dwarves and magical items and dark things lurking in the woods and crafted a world with reimaginations of these core concepts. C.S. Lewis, a contemporary of his, followed suit with creating a world of centaurs, fauns, evil ice witches, and four prophecied High Kings and Queens in his Narnia series. Their publication in the 50s transformed fairy tales into high fantasy for adults and set the stage for a rush of Sword and Sorcery stories in the 1960s.
In our Post-Tolkien world, we get to enjoy all the benefits of those trailblazers, including a true exploration of what fantasy is, and what fantasy could be. For worldbuilding specifically, we need to look at a breakdown of how a world becomes a fantasy one.
There are certain hallmarks that are very cut-and-dry fantasy. Dungeons and Dragons was birthed from the Sword and Sorcery era of fantasy and evolved alongside the fantasy writing revolution. They maintain classic elements of grand old wizards, dragons, huge cities, undead vampires skulking in caves, and a million other discoveries along the way. While it’s helpful and fun to put classic fantasy elements into your story, you also aren’t forced to. You could have a severe absence of magic and dragons and it could still be a fantasy story. It depends on how you approach your worldbuilding.
For fantasy worldbuilders, our world is considered the “primary” world. The primary world is where all of us are living out our lives, whether that be driving to pick up groceries, working at a desk somewhere, or doing the dishes. Primary world fantasy is a classification for stories that exist just under the surface of our own world such as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, or The Last Witch Hunter. Commonly inside this trope, the rest of the world has no idea that this magical world exists under our noses.
The next classification is ‘secondary’ worlds. These worlds exist completely independently to our own world, and are by far the most common worlds you’ll find in Fantasy. These feature their own original environments, histories, characters, magic systems, and everything else. You’ll know this from LOTR, Kingkiller Chronicles, Six of Crows, Westeros, and so on.
The final classification is ‘portal’ fantasy, which doubles as a subgenre and a trope in of itself. This marks a story where the characters pass from a primary world into a secondary one through a portal of some kind. Think of Gaiman’s Coraline,Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, Narnia, or Neverwhere.
Fantasy leans towards the magical and supernatural. Whether this means magical powers, imaginary creatures, mythic races, rewritten physical laws, or whatever else, this is Fantasy.
Through all this, embedded deep in in Fantasy is a question; some sort of the sense of something that is not quite as it seems, the sense that your imagination might actually be telling the truth about what unnatural thing exists beneath the waves. Preserving this sense of wonder and an unexpected reality is key in writing Fantasy.
So, what do you actually need in order to pull off that feeling?
Something that we can call The Rule of 2:
Something mythic related to the natural world
Something mythic related to the supernatural world
The natural world in this case is a catch-all term we’ll be using to refer to the physical environment, any natural laws like gravity or time, and things related to the daily life of the average character. This could be things like enchanted items, mythical creatures running around in the woods, and so on.
The supernatural world refers to anything above, below, or behind the scenes of the natural world. This includes things like gods, realms of existence, and so on.
Magic systems could fit into either of these realms depending on the system and the world. If magic is the essential property responsible for The Floating Islands of Malzividan, then it’s considered a natural world magic system. If you only get magical powers when the undying ghost of a cursed elf possesses you, then it’s definitely supernatural.
These elements can be mixed and matched against each other, but as a general rule of thumb, you should have at least a few examples for each criteria that we can judge fantasy from. The distance from our regular world into your magical one is the path to writing fantasy.
For example, lets say you’ve decided to write a new fantasy book for NaNoWriMo this year. You grew up on Harry Potter, but want to make something that has the same level of political intrigue that Game of Thrones has. It’s settled: You’re going to make a magical academy coming-of-age story where making allies and overcoming strange challenges is part of day to day life. Start with the question of “What would a magical academy create or need to encourage students to make alliances?”. If the students need to collaborate in some sort of competition, then they might build alliances through some sort of training regiment or offering things of value. You can choose which of the two categories to draw inspiration from for this:
Natural world
the campus of the academy itself is sentient and will occasionally offer up clues or advantages. The combination of these clues or advantages gives certain teams an edge in competition.
there’s a dryad in the woods that teaches students a certain kind of magic that they can use in competition.
the academy is on an island filled with magical creatures that students can befriend or fight, sort of like Spy Kids 2.
Supernatural world
The academy is run by a secret council of wizards of ambiguous moral alignments that seem to be holding secrets.
There is an ancient immortal trapped inside of a mirror in the basement.
The main character has dreams of dead students wandering the halls that seem to warn him about something.
Whether or not the students at this academy actually have magical abilities is no longer the deciding factor of what makes this story fantasy either. Your fantasy doesn’t need a magic system as long as it has magical elements to suspend your reader’s imagination.
For example, in A Song of Ice and Fire, there is no real overarching magic system. In fact, there are multiple smaller magic systems; Bran’s Warging, Dothraki Blood Magic, and a few others. The absence of a fully-explored or understood magic system makes the series extremely interesting, but they could have suspended disbelief with making it ambiguous as to whether magic actually exists or not. Maybe Khal Drogo would’ve just done that regardless of the ritual. A majority of the fantasy elements comes from the introduction of other mythical elements: Dragons, Giants, Whitewalkers, the Drowned God, son on and so forth.
The same rules apply to portal fantasy or primary world fantasy as well: tweaking simple things pushes it towards fantasy. Normal life is normal life for Bella until she finds out vampires are real. It uncovers a world of immortality, werewolves, and other hidden things. It also doesn’t push too far with slamming classic elements of fantasy into the story in order to make sure you know it’s trying to be fantasy.
If you want a great example of a fantasy story set in a secondary world that doesn’t have a magic system, dragons, or wizards, but does feature extremely different natural laws, mythical races, and a very different culture, you can rewatch (or re-read) The Grinch. Or a portal fantasy world with a huge supernatural underworld with Cat-In-The-Hat. Both of those qualify as fantasy because they fulfill the core essentials.
As long as you keep The Rule of 2 things in mind when you’re worldbuilding, you’ll lean in the right direction and cover the absolute fundamentals of fantasy worldbuilding.
That’s all I have for you today, I hope you enjoyed as much as I did, and I hope you use some of the ideas in this podcast to improve your own writing. If you want to support me, you can follow me at AustinArdor on all socials. If you liked this podcast, rate 5 stars and send it to a friend, and follow me for more.
I do offer ghostwriting and writing coaching services on my website of the same name as well if you or a friend want the extra creative boost to bring you to the next level. You can also support other small authors at The Myth Dimension, a hybrid publishing company designed to support authors with a much larger royalty payment and marketing training to help you build the business side of writing a book. Thank you for everything, and I’ll see you in the next one.