The difference between a fantasy world that reads like a setting and one that reads like a place is often invisible on first glance. It's in the stains on the tavern table, the way a character adjusts their boots before a long walk, the market vendor who shortchanges tourists but gives locals an extra apple. We asked three of our fantasy and sci-fi authors how they build worlds that feel like someone actually lives there.
On Where World-Building Begins
S4R: When you start building a new world, what comes first?
Economics. I know that sounds boring, but every interesting society is shaped by how people eat, trade, and accumulate power. If I know what's scarce and what's abundant, I know what people fight over, what they worship, and what they take for granted. Magic in my world is tied to ley lines — natural channels of energy that run through the earth. So the cities that grew up along those lines are wealthy, and the ones that didn't are resentful. That single economic fact generates most of the plot.
Geography. I draw maps before I write a single sentence. Not polished maps — rough sketches with mountain ranges and rivers and coastlines. Where the rivers meet, there's a city. Where the mountains block trade routes, there's conflict. Where the coastline is sheltered, there's a port. The physical landscape dictates everything. Once I have the terrain, the cultures that emerge from it feel inevitable rather than invented.
Language. Not constructing entire languages — I'm not Tolkien — but thinking carefully about how people in this world would talk. What idioms they'd use. What concepts they'd have words for that we don't, and what concepts they'd lack. If a culture lives in perpetual twilight, they'd have twelve words for different qualities of dim light and no word for "sunrise." Those linguistic details shape how characters think, which shapes how they act.
On the Details That Sell It
S4R: What's one small detail you've included that made a world feel more real?
Bureaucracy. In one scene, a character needs to cross a border, and the guard makes them fill out a form — with a quill that keeps running out of ink. The form asks irrelevant questions. There's a line. It's tedious and frustrating and completely unnecessary to the plot, but every reader who's been to a DMV recognizes it instantly. That moment of shared annoyance bridges the gap between their world and the reader's.
Food. I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about what people eat. Not feast scenes — those are easy and overused. I mean everyday meals. What does a dock worker eat for lunch? What does a traveling merchant pack for the road? What does bad cooking taste like in this world? When a character sits down to a bowl of something the reader can almost smell, the world gets three times more real.
A world becomes real the moment a reader can imagine being bored in it. Grandeur is impressive. Mundanity is convincing.
Gossip. In every scene where characters are in a public space — a market, a temple, a street — I include background characters having their own conversations about their own problems. The baker complaining about the price of flour. Two kids arguing about a game. An old woman judging someone's clothes. It reminds the reader that this world doesn't revolve around the protagonist. Other people have lives here.
On Avoiding the Info Dump
S4R: How do you convey world-building without stopping the story to explain things?
I follow a rule I call "the iceberg." I build ten times more world than the reader ever sees. Then I let it show through in how characters behave, what they assume, and what they don't bother explaining to each other. If two people who grew up in the same culture are having a conversation, they're not going to explain their own history to each other. They'd reference it obliquely, the way we do. The reader picks it up through context, and it feels more authentic than any exposition could.
Conflict. World-building is most interesting when it's the source of a problem. If the reader needs to understand a political system, don't explain it — show two characters disagreeing about it. If the reader needs to know how magic works, show it failing. Information delivered through conflict is always more compelling than information delivered through description.
I trust the reader to be confused for a while. Not forever — you have to give them enough to keep going — but a little disorientation at the start of a fantasy novel is actually a feature, not a bug. It puts the reader in the same position as a traveler arriving in a foreign country. They don't understand everything yet, and that's what makes them want to keep reading. The worst thing you can do is hand them a guidebook at the airport.
On the Balance Between Familiar and Strange
S4R: How do you decide what to keep familiar and what to make alien?
Emotions stay familiar. Politics and technology can change. If a reader can't recognize the grief, ambition, love, or pettiness of the characters, no amount of world-building will save the story. The world can be as strange as you want — as long as the people in it feel human.
I change one big thing and keep everything else grounded. In my world, the big change is that physical space works differently — distances between places shift depending on conditions the characters can't fully control. Everything else — how people form families, how governments work, how trade functions — is rooted in recognizable patterns. That one fundamental strangeness is enough to make everything feel alien.
I think about what my reader needs to hold onto. There has to be an anchor — something in the world that the reader immediately understands and can use as a reference point. A parent protecting a child. A friend betraying a trust. A stranger showing unexpected kindness. Once that anchor is set, you can get as weird as you want around it.
You can explore the worlds our authors built in our catalog — start with Legacy of the Ley Lines, Rift of Realms, or Veil of Fates.