What do you think?
Rate this book
The Art of World Building #2
Creating Places
Creating a unique, immersive setting one place at a time
A guide for authors, gamers, and hobbyists
CREATING PLACES (THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING, #2) is a detailed how-to guide on inventing the heart of every imaginary world - places. It includes chapters on creating planets, moons, continents, mountains, forests, deserts, bodies of water, sovereign powers, settlements, and interesting locales. Extensive, culled research on each is provided to inform your world building decisions and understand the impact on craft, story, and audience. You’ll also learn how and when to create history and maps. Experts and beginners alike will benefit from the free templates that make building worlds easier, quicker, and more fun.
Learn the difference between types of monarchies, democracies, dictatorships and more for realistic variety and believable conflict. Understand how latitude, prevailing winds, and mountains affect climate, rainfall, and what types of forests and deserts will exist in each location. Consistently calculate how long it takes to travel by horse, wagon, sailing vessels, or even dragon over different terrain types and conditions.
CREATING PLACES is the second volume in THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING, the only multi-volume series of its kind. Three times the length, depth, and breadth of other guides, the series can help fantasy and science fiction creators determine how much to build and why, how to use world building in your work, and whether the effort to create places will reap rewards for you and your audience.
A guide for authors, gamers, and hobbyists
CREATING PLACES (THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING, #2) is a detailed how-to guide on inventing the heart of every imaginary world - places. It includes chapters on creating planets, moons, continents, mountains, forests, deserts, bodies of water, sovereign powers, settlements, and interesting locales. Extensive, culled research on each is provided to inform your world building decisions and understand the impact on craft, story, and audience. You’ll also learn how and when to create history and maps. Experts and beginners alike will benefit from the free templates that make building worlds easier, quicker, and more fun.
Learn the difference between types of monarchies, democracies, dictatorships and more for realistic variety and believable conflict. Understand how latitude, prevailing winds, and mountains affect climate, rainfall, and what types of forests and deserts will exist in each location. Consistently calculate how long it takes to travel by horse, wagon, sailing vessels, or even dragon over different terrain types and conditions.
CREATING PLACES is the second volume in THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING, the only multi-volume series of its kind. Three times the length, depth, and breadth of other guides, the series can help fantasy and science fiction creators determine how much to build and why, how to use world building in your work, and whether the effort to create places will reap rewards for you and your audience.
- GenresWritingNonfictionGaming
374 pages, Paperback
Published November 15, 2017
172 people are currently reading
176 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 8, 2017
Creating Places brings another great entry to the The Art of World Building series. This time, Ellefson guides us through planets, continents, land features, sovereign powers, settlements, traveling, timeline and historical events, places of interest and a bonus chapter with suggestions on how to draw maps.
There's also an introductory chapter with 3 case studies from the author's fantasy world. It's an amazing behind-the-pages look at his process. We can see how he managed to put all the book's lessons together while getting ideas to get started.
The book helps you to create settlements, governments and to give them dimensions, making them come alive. The topics go beyond what you could imagine. I mean, you probably expect things like population, size, water supply, all this common sense stuff, but Ellefson leads us to subjects like what are the place's secrets? What is the local lore? How is the settlement's zoning? What are the people like, what is the government's symbols, who are the neighbor cities and what is the history between them? And this is just a sample.
The spreadsheet contained in Creating Places is the most helpful thing for calculating distances in your own world, if that's something you want to do. Not only that, but also transforming inches on a map to miles, determining travel time from and to the main places in your story, and much more. The system presented makes it all become automatic.
This volume just made me even more sure that this series is the best guide to world building. It's a book for reference, not for reading cover to cover (although you can, and I did). Ellefson's suggestions are very helpful to get us started and thinking outside the box.
World building can be overwhelming and make you despair. There is so much information out there that it's easy to get discouraged before even starting. I honestly think this series is the best approach to the process. The books aren't a definitive resource, of course, they couldn't be, but they have all the points necessary to get us going and, most important, finishing. If you need to research deeper in a subject, you can, but at least you already know what's missing for you instead of pulling teeth trying to figure out what you could be forgetting.
The Art of World Building really brings order to the chaos.
There's also an introductory chapter with 3 case studies from the author's fantasy world. It's an amazing behind-the-pages look at his process. We can see how he managed to put all the book's lessons together while getting ideas to get started.
The book helps you to create settlements, governments and to give them dimensions, making them come alive. The topics go beyond what you could imagine. I mean, you probably expect things like population, size, water supply, all this common sense stuff, but Ellefson leads us to subjects like what are the place's secrets? What is the local lore? How is the settlement's zoning? What are the people like, what is the government's symbols, who are the neighbor cities and what is the history between them? And this is just a sample.
The spreadsheet contained in Creating Places is the most helpful thing for calculating distances in your own world, if that's something you want to do. Not only that, but also transforming inches on a map to miles, determining travel time from and to the main places in your story, and much more. The system presented makes it all become automatic.
This volume just made me even more sure that this series is the best guide to world building. It's a book for reference, not for reading cover to cover (although you can, and I did). Ellefson's suggestions are very helpful to get us started and thinking outside the box.
World building can be overwhelming and make you despair. There is so much information out there that it's easy to get discouraged before even starting. I honestly think this series is the best approach to the process. The books aren't a definitive resource, of course, they couldn't be, but they have all the points necessary to get us going and, most important, finishing. If you need to research deeper in a subject, you can, but at least you already know what's missing for you instead of pulling teeth trying to figure out what you could be forgetting.
The Art of World Building really brings order to the chaos.
May 28, 2020
Amazing Book About Creating Places
As someone who writes romance for a hobby (but loves to read speculative fiction), I'll admit when I first saw this book that I was curious how detailed and relevant it would be to speculative fiction. Did places really need an entire book—and a lengthy one at that? After having read this book, I can say that “places” actually do need an entire book like this one, and I even found information that would be helpful for me as I write my non-speculative fiction. The author perceives place in several different ways. It is both a physical place and a sense of place. The author starts with a physical on the very grandest scale, planets and other celestial bodies like comets before breaking it down into more earth-sized in manageable components like continents and land features (like bodies of water and forests). This section is so detailed and so well-researched. I learned a lot about the Earth in this section, which I'll be able to use in my stories. Now I know the difference between a bog and a fen (described and with pictures as well), among other things! There are certainly some parts of the section that look like an Earth science textbook, but it is fast and fascinating reading. Next, the author gets to what I'm calling a sense of place. After all, a place is not just what it is physically but what it represents and how it is configured. So he talked some about sovereign powers, settlements, and travel among other things. He wraps up the book by discussing whether you should create a map for your imagined world and offers some suggestions about how to do so. I heartily recommend this book to any speculative fiction author and even non-speculative fiction authors like me who have a fascination with science and the proper names of things.
I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.
My book blog: https://www.readingfanaticreviews.com
As someone who writes romance for a hobby (but loves to read speculative fiction), I'll admit when I first saw this book that I was curious how detailed and relevant it would be to speculative fiction. Did places really need an entire book—and a lengthy one at that? After having read this book, I can say that “places” actually do need an entire book like this one, and I even found information that would be helpful for me as I write my non-speculative fiction. The author perceives place in several different ways. It is both a physical place and a sense of place. The author starts with a physical on the very grandest scale, planets and other celestial bodies like comets before breaking it down into more earth-sized in manageable components like continents and land features (like bodies of water and forests). This section is so detailed and so well-researched. I learned a lot about the Earth in this section, which I'll be able to use in my stories. Now I know the difference between a bog and a fen (described and with pictures as well), among other things! There are certainly some parts of the section that look like an Earth science textbook, but it is fast and fascinating reading. Next, the author gets to what I'm calling a sense of place. After all, a place is not just what it is physically but what it represents and how it is configured. So he talked some about sovereign powers, settlements, and travel among other things. He wraps up the book by discussing whether you should create a map for your imagined world and offers some suggestions about how to do so. I heartily recommend this book to any speculative fiction author and even non-speculative fiction authors like me who have a fascination with science and the proper names of things.
I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.
My book blog: https://www.readingfanaticreviews.com
February 3, 2023
Terrific resource. Ellefson has essentially assembled a reference with all of the information a world builder needs to know regarding geology, climate, computing travel times, etc, with Ellefson's helpful tips and examples. All 3 of the Art of World Building books have been fun to read and informative, but this is the one I'll probably return to again and again as a repository of useful info.
April 21, 2018
Good Reference
It's a good reference if you plan on creating a world. I found the section on climate and weather especially useful.
It's a good reference if you plan on creating a world. I found the section on climate and weather especially useful.
December 31, 2019
Great resource and companion to his Creating Life book. I like how the book is organized to make it easy to find what you specifically need.
July 9, 2020
Follow on
More good thought processes and ideas. Making my Dungeon Master itch need scratching. Natural sequence to book one. Highly recommended.
More good thought processes and ideas. Making my Dungeon Master itch need scratching. Natural sequence to book one. Highly recommended.
May 20, 2021
A lot of typos, mixed words, I.e reign and rain. Also, author needs to understand how life expectancy works. A lot of vague suggestion with little in the way of concrete examples.
January 28, 2024
This is part of a really great world building series. If you are creating worlds or writing fiction I highly recommend Randy's books.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews