Building Worlds: The Simple Approach

You already carry stories. This book helps you build the world they need.

Building Worlds: The Simple Approach gives you a clear, flexible method for creating original settings and expanding existing ones into story-ready form. Each tool supports character arcs, story structure, and emotional consequence. You’ll build places that carry risk, respond to action, and remember what’s been lived.

This book focuses on worlds that act. You’ll create environments that shift with the story, reveal conflict, and demand change. Every tool is here to help you design for pressure, direction, and consequence.

Each chapter gives you three kinds of support. You’ll get focused exercises that generate story-driven detail, targeted prompts that surface tension and belief, and genre-based examples that show how tone and structure adapt across different kinds of settings.

You can use this book to build a campaign, shape a novel, support solo play, or refine a setting already in progress. The method works across formats because it centers emotional weight, escalation, and choice. If your world shapes decisions and reflects change, it’s doing the work.

Some builders begin with a clear idea. Others arrive with fragments, ready to take shape. This book helps you define direction, clarify intention, and create a world that moves through action and response.

If you’re not sure where to begin, follow what shifts. Every setting starts in motion. This book helps you keep it moving.

Genres

This book supports six foundational genres. Each one includes room for subgenres and tonal variation, so your setting stays personal and specific.

• Fantasy: Stories shaped by invention, myth, and wonder. Includes cozy, epic, pastoral, sword-and-sorcery, and invented-world fiction where the arc of magic and memory defines what moves.

• Modern: Contemporary stories set in grounded places where language, labor, and daily routine shape tension. Includes crime, romance, slice-of-life, espionage, and quiet social realism.

• Occult: Stories centered on the unseen, where mystery and pressure build through hidden forces. Includes horror, magical realism, folklore, ghost stories, and secret supernatural beliefs.

• Science Fiction: Stories focused on systems, distance, and survival. Includes cyberpunk, solarpunk, interstellar arcs, near-future shifts, and speculative change shaped by technology and scale.

• Historical: Stories grounded in real places, eras, and struggle. Includes faithful re-creation, alternate history, memory-based fiction, and culturally specific settings shaped by lived context.

• Literary: Stories built on theme, emotion, and character weight. Includes metafiction, quiet realism, experimental forms, and fiction where language and structure carry dramatic purpose.

Structure and Support

Each chapter includes three linked tools to help you build tension, shape tone, and guide meaningful motion.

• Exercises: Focused tools that build usable setting detail fast. Each one helps you shape tension, define pressure, or create story weight through structure, motion, or emotional consequence.

• Prompts: Targeted questions that reveal memory, friction, or change. Use them to reframe scenes, create pressure, deepen tone, or guide discovery during prep, revision, or live play.

• Examples: Short setting sketches that show how tension works across genres. Each one gives you a model for structure, tone, and story weight that can be adapted to fit your own world.

What You’re Building Toward

This book helps you design a setting that stays alive in play. A strong world moves with the story, shapes character arcs, and carries emotional weight. It builds tension, reveals values, and frames every decision. By the end, your world will remember what happened, hold what still matters, and create space for what comes next.