In one way or another, economy touches almost everything in a world. Even without currency or capitalism in the sense that we currently know it, the idea of obligations and repayment exert pressure on society. So how can we make interesting worldbuilding choices when it comes to money, debt, gain, and other aspects of economy? Guest Elizabeth Bear joins us to explore the options! Where does money intersect with other kinds of power and privilege? What’s the income equality or inequality like -- ...
Jul 02, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Season 7Ep. 2
It's the start of SEASON SEVEN! And original co-host Rowenna Miller is back to join us in a reflection of how multiple years of doing this podcast has affected how each of us thinks about worldbuilding. What have we learned from our many amazing guests, and how have they inspired us to think about worldbuilding in new ways? Have our worldbuilding interests and focuses shifted? And since the real world we live in has been... um... interesting over the past several years, how has that -- and the c...
Jun 18, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Season 7Ep. 1
It's one of the first choices you'll make when writing a story, consciously or not: what point of view are you writing from? First person singular? Third person limited? Omniscient? Something else? The POV can affect a reader's experience of the narrative and the worldbuilding, either subtly or dramatically -- so how do you decide what's right for this story? Kate Elliott joins us to explore the possibilities! In this episode, we look at how the point of view can shape both what you communciate ...
Jun 04, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 6Ep. 26
We often think about "making things make sense" in worldbuilding and building internal consistency, scientific realism, and other logic-based considerations into our fiction -- But what happens when your worldbuilding principle is “What would be awesome?" Jim C. Hines , who embraced this principle for a forthcoming book, joins us to explore the possibilities! The Rule of Cool, credit to, is defined thusly: "The limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proporti...
May 21, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 25
We often think of worldbuilding happening on a grand scale, with huge maps and the sweeping narratives of nations and world-changing events. But that's not really the stuff that makes a world feel lived-in. The granular choices are what show day-to-day life, and day-to-day life illustrates so much about how a world has developed, how a culture has grown, and how people negotiate the circumstances of their lives. These are the things that, out of genre, creators might not think of as “worldbuildi...
May 07, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Season 6Ep. 24
How can language help shape your worldbuilding? We're not necessarily talking about conlang here -- that can certainly be part of worldbuilding, but it doesn't have to be, and many works of speculative fiction manage perfectly fine without invented languages. But the words you choose in description and dialogue will also communicate something to your reader. There are so many ways that words can create the vibes for your world: the aural quality of different languages, choosing character and pla...
Apr 23, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Season 6Ep. 23
Sometimes, people will say of a book that "the setting is another character". But what does that really mean, and how can a writer craft it? Ai Jiang joins us to discuss creating worlds and settings that have their own personalities! From the physical geography to the architecture, from the scale of the location to its dynamism, writers can make a lot of choices to make their setting feel unlike any other. The setting can do a lot to set the mood and tone of a story. Is it bright and peppy, or d...
Apr 09, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 6Ep. 22
In amazing fantasy and science fiction worlds -- Who's doing the work? Where does the food come from? The clothes? Who does the caregiving? Guest august clarke joins us to discuss the hands and bodies that create a society. Labor is something that’s often sort of invisible in stories if it’s not explicitly the driving focus of a book – So, why is that? How can authors better incorporate labor into their worlds? Labor intersects with so many other components of a world, after all: ideas about cur...
Mar 26, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 6Ep. 21
Worldbuilding means getting to “play god” – so how does that take a different shape when you’re part of a pantheon rather than the One True Ruler of your world? Xen, Matt Roen, and Sara Wile, the creative trio behind Midst , a surreal sci-fi fantasy audio drama now produced by Critical Role Productions, join us to discuss co-creating a world and the stories that happen within it! When working as a team, how do you divide the labor? What's the balance of talents on your team, and how can you best...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Season 6Ep. 20
What happens when the world your characters -- or your readers -- first find themselves in turns out to be not quite what it appears? Marina Lostetter joins us to explore the different ways that a writer can play with an unreliable world. Maybe it means a story of scientific discovery that reshapes how their characters perceive their place in the universe; maybe it means a story where information has been deliberately suppressed and has to be fought for; maybe it's a world where knowledge has si...
Feb 26, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 6Ep. 19
In honor of Valentine's Day, the season of Carnivale, and our own amusement, we bring to you this extra-long episode, where we heat things up and get a little down and dirty with our worldbuilding. What role does sex play in the world you're building -- and how do you depict that? This comes up a lot, obviously, in romantasy and other related subgenres, but even if that's not what you're writing, sexuality and gender dynamics are still part of whatever world your characters inhabit! So what's th...
Feb 12, 2025•1 hr 49 min•Season 6Ep. 18
Mythological retellings have been having A Moment in fiction for a few years now. So, why do we do that? Kritika H. Rao joins us to explore the power and agency inherent in recontextualizing mythology for a modern readership! What is it that we reclaim or rediscover in retelling these stories for ourselves? And, on the other end of the scale, how can the retelling of ancient stories sometimes be weaponized and politicized for a specific purpose? When it comes to respinning our world's mythology ...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 6Ep. 17
The world a character exists in shapes their identity on many axes of power and privilege. So how do those various scales affect the emotional stakes of the story they find themselves in? Guest Sophie Burnham joins us to discuss building a world that suits the characters you have in your head! As a writer who starts with character first, Burnham answers questions about their world after they know who their characters are and what dynamics drive them. If that's your style, how do you then build a...
Jan 15, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Season 6Ep. 16
And obviously the answer is yes! But in this episode, we answer your questions! We talk about the "rules" and common advice of worldbuilding -- and the ways in which we merrily ignore, redefine, or defy them. We pull apart some techniques related to the craft of communicating worldbuilding to a reader and how to achieve balance within a story. We do some shop talk about the publishing world. And we give you our very important opinions about unicorns. We also do a little recap of 2024! From novel...
Jan 01, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 6Ep. 15
How do the people in your world learn things? Lessons learned might come from formalized institutions, but knowledge might also get passed down through families, through guilds and trade organizations, or through the wisdom whispered in a character's ear by the trees. A world's literacy rate will define a lot about how information gets transmitted, preserved, or altered over time. So who controls the access to information, and how do they enforce it? We also poke at the perennially persistent tr...
Dec 18, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Season 6Ep. 14
In this episode, we discuss purely fictional, 100% not-at-all real, nothing to do with contemporary life ideas about rebellions and revolutions. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons is coincidental. Completely. Continuing our "back to basics" series, and jumping off of a lot of the things we've discussed in the recent episodes on governments and politics, we think about what happens when those things break down. What conditions within the world you're building might lead to a ...
Dec 04, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 6Ep. 13
So once you've got a government, what can that government do? What does it regulate, and how is it, itself, regulated? Laws can be created for a lot of reasons, some good and some bad. Sometimes they protect a citizen's opportunity to do certain things, sometimes they present a block to those opportunities, and very often, they aren't applied equally and equitably across all of society. So when you're building a world: How does the law work? From creation to enforcement to justice (or the lack t...
Nov 20, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Season 6Ep. 12
Government is a set of rules agreed upon, and politics is how a society determines those rules. So how do you create the systems by which civilizations negotiate those levers of power in your fantasy or sci-fi world? On the sliding scale of representation to authoritarianism, where do the civilizations in your world fall -- and why? What pressures have shaped society to behave in the ways that it does? How centralized or de-centralized is it? So much of this can depend on the matrix of identity:...
Nov 06, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Season 6Ep. 11
As with the last two “back to basics” episodes, we thought we’d spend some time looking the thing that (usually, though there are exceptions) makes fantasy fantastical – the magic! How do we build magical systems, and what questions do we ask ourselves while doing so? Guest and former WFM co-host Rowenna Miller joins us to discuss how, exactly, we make magic! With magic being a foundational element of a world, when it exists in one, how does it touch all the other things that are in your world? ...
Oct 23, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 6Ep. 10
We’re spending a couple of episodes going back to the basics of worldbuilding, talking about the questions that it’s often fruitful to ask oneself when you’re doing this wild thing. Last time we did the physical world, so now it’s time for the world of people! What are the building blocks of a human life? (Or an alien one, or draconic, or elven, or whatever you've got?) From the most intimate relationships out to the way societies grow and govern, there's a lot to consider and make choices about...
Oct 09, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Season 6Ep. 9
Every once in a while, it's good to go back to the basics. And for us, that means the basics of worldbuilding! When you're getting started out with a new project, building a world from the ground up, there are a lot of things you can take into consideration! This episode is not so much about finding the answers as figuring out how to ask the questions and what kinds of questions you want to ask. How much do you need to know before you start? And how might that be related to how much the people i...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Season 6Ep. 8
A villain may not have excuses for their behavior -- but they probably have reasons. How can worldbuilding feed those reasons? Antagonists are often those characters who are both the most willing and the most able to seize control of power structures and take advantage of their privileges. So what pressures in your world have created those structures, and how does your Big Bad maniuplate them? Guest Chloe Gong joins us to explore how to build a world that fits your villain and a villain that fit...
Sep 11, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 6Ep. 7
We were all in the same room! And that room was in Scotland! In this episode, your WFM co-hosts were able to record a special episode at WorldCon . We chat about ourselves, our works, the Traveling Light anthology, and our favorite components of a world to build. And then, we take some audience questions! (We apologize that some of them are a little hard to hear; they had a mic, but it seems it was not always picking up super-well) We discuss political worldbuilding, neurospiciness in characters...
Aug 28, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 6
What can translation and transmission of ideas and stories over time teach us about a society -- and about storytelling? Guest Ken Liu joins us to talk about the intertwining of philosophy, imagination, and translation. As writers, we can never fully translate the story that plays out in our heads onto the page, because every reader will imagine something a little different. How do we embrace that and celebrate it as a lovely part of the human condition? This plays into how we construct our fict...
Aug 14, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Where does mythology come from? How does it tie us together? What does one world's mythology tell us about its people, how they view themselves, and their interactions with the divine? We speak to Nalo Hopkinson about myths, mythologies, folklore, and the stories that we tell each other as well as the stories we invent. [Transcript TK] Our Guest: Nalo Hopkinson is the award-winning author of numerous novels and short stories for adults. Nalo grew up in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana before moving...
Jul 31, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Season 6Ep. 4
A perennial question that our listeners often have is: How do you organize your worldbuilding? Do you have templates to use? Charts to fill out? Once you start imagining all your fantastic choices, how do you keep track of them all and then weave them along with your plot? Well, the answer to all of this, as with so many writing questions, is "do what works for you" -- but how do you even figure out what that is, or if it's the same from one project to the next? In this episode, guest M.J. Kuhn ...
Jul 17, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 3
A lot of the time, fantasy worldbuilding invokes huge maps, spanning civilizations and continents, with characters traversing vast distances on their epic quests. But what about the worldbuilding that happens with a tighter focus on an intimate, even insular location? Guest Cherie Priest joins us to discuss creating small towns just ripe for gothic mysteries, peculiar traditions, and weird, haunting circumstances. What does isolation -- either naturally developing, imposed by larger-scale condit...
Jul 03, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Season 6Ep. 2
It's the start of our sixth season! And we've got some projects going on. The Traveling Light anthology , which we Kickstarted -- with the help of many of you listeners! -- at the start of the fifth season, is now almost complete! We've finished the page proofs and are about to turn this into a Real Book. In this episode, you'll get to hear from the anthology authors about their amazing, exciting, super-creative contributions! And if you missed the Kickstarter, fear not! It will be available for...
Jun 19, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Massive worlds require massive worldbuilding -- or do they? Sometimes, a narrower, character-centric scope can create a tight and compelling narrative while still crafting an expansive world. Guest Rebecca Roanhorse joins us to discuss how knowing your characters can help you konw your world. What does it mean to let character lead worldbuilding? How does that define your scope and how much worldbuilding you show the reader? How does this change wth a single versus a multi- POV story? When you l...
Jun 05, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 26
"Traditional" fantasy novels often hold themselves to a pre-gunpowder/pre-steampower level of tech. So, what’s fun about setting a fantasy world in an era that has anything from the printing press to cell phones? Guest Hana Lee joins us to explore incorporating the technological into the magical world! How can the harnessing of magic be similar to or dissimilar from channeling other kinds of power, like electricity? What story-driving tensions and conflicts can arise from eras of rapid change? A...
May 22, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 5Ep. 25
