What should be included in a worldbuilding database?
A worldbuilding database holds the rules, geography, history, and culture of your fictional world in a queryable structure. At minimum: places (with spellings and descriptions), peoples (with customs and languages), systems (magic, technology, government), and a timeline. Each entry has a short definition and a cross-reference to the scenes where it appears.
Chapter i·Why it matters
Worldbuilding without a database scales badly. A novelist holds a thousand details in their head during draft one; by draft three or book two, those details have leaked. Continuity drift makes readers stop trusting the world, and series readers are especially unforgiving. The database is the fix.
Chapter ii·What to include
- Places: name, alternative spellings, climate, population, government, key scenes.
- Peoples: appearance, customs, language family, conflicts with other groups.
- Systems: magic rules and their costs, technology limits, religion, currency.
- Timeline: founding events, recent history, the in-story year zero.
- Glossary: made-up words with pronunciation guides.
- A "doesn’t exist" list: things that do not exist in this world (gunpowder? horses? printed maps?).
Chapter iii·Example
A second-world fantasy writer keeps a database with fifty places, twelve peoples, four magic systems, and a 400-year timeline. Each scene she writes references the database by entry number. When she introduces a city in chapter twelve, she opens the database, confirms it has been mentioned in chapters three and seven, and matches the climate description she used before.
Chapter iv·Related questions
WriteLoom’s Plan studio includes a Places, People, and Systems database that links directly into every scene in your draft.
See the Plan studio