World building is full of many avenues, from something as big as planets to something as small as characters and creatures. However, one element of world building that we always need to pay attention to is the setting. I’ve already discussed planet design in another post and I’ve also talked about city design before, but country design is very important as well. I talked about this in my post on designing a government, where the country is the biggest source of laws and influence. Today, I’ll explain how you can design countries for your world easily and how you can make them unique and interesting.
What is a Country?
If you don’t really know what a country means, I’ll help you out. A country can be basically defined as a territory that is considered a nation since it has a government and distinct culture and defined population. Countries have lots of rules, structures, and systems that allow for it to function. On Earth, we have 195 official countries.
You need to understand that designing a country is not a simple feat. It takes time. The reason I jumped from city to country is that designing things like townships or counties is basically just designing a bunch of cities together, either big or small ones like villages. Villages aren’t tough to design. You just make smaller cities with more farming-based economies and you’re basically good.
However, a country requires lots of ins and outs, so you need to really understand that when we take a look at all of this information.
1. Remember your City? Expand on it.
Okay, we designed a city in our last workshop. We essentially created a city and designed how it would look and what its economy would be based on. If you followed along and created your own city, use it in this article. This is a good way to start keeping track of your new world. I recommend journaling all of this down somewhere.
I don’t know about you, but as much as I type, I need a cool physical journal to really get my world building work done. I found an interesting one online that I definitely would buy if I didn’t have a million at home already.
So, if you’re looking for a journal, go for something interesting and cool.
Alright, now let’s get into the real work!
1. Define your Country
I’m going to use an example, just like I did last time. Firstly, I’m going to define my genre, because this will help put me on the track to making my country. My genre in this case will be high fantasy.
Now that we know this, I’m going to assume my country will not be a standard country like we have nowadays. It’ll probably be a kingdom. Alright, so we get that now.
Since I have a kingdom in this case, I’m going to define the economy as being feudalism. If you don’t know what feudalism is, here’s an infographic I designed to explain it using Canva, which, if you use my link you can get a 30-day free trial of Canva Pro so you can make excellent infographics and designs like me. Canva Pro offers so many features, like better images, text, and design features. I recommend it any day:
Hopefully that helped you understand what Feudalism is. AP World History did a lot for me, evidently so.
Now that we know our economic system, we can really start to narrow down the way this society is built. We know that the richest people are on the top and the poorest are on the bottom of the social ladder. This is really what feudalism is, honestly. There’s not a lot of room in terms of social mobility.
2. What is the Culture and Language?
Now that we know the economy and the genre, we need to think about these defining parts of our country. A country needs to have a culture and a language that defines its identity. When I designed this kingdom, which we will loosely name The Kingdom of Ervana because the name just came to me, I knew I wanted it to be based off of medieval Europe.
Okay, so we know that it’s in Europe somewhere. I decided to keep it on Earth for the sake of simplicity. Now, we know it’s fictional, so we have the liberty to slap this kingdom wherever we want. Let’s just say it’s in medieval France/Frankia. So, the culture is based off of the Franks. Then, their language would be old French.
I think we’ve defined this piece well and we’ve established our culture and who the Ervanans are.
3. What is the Religion
I think you’re starting to notice that I’m working through this systematically, right? Good, I based this guide off of my first guide and I’m just expanding on it to fit a country-sized world.
Okay, since this kingdom is fictional, I want to create a fictional religion. I decided that I’m going to make this religion a pagan one since there’s a lot of room to design a pagan religion. I’m not going to use Frankish mythology/paganism, since my country isn’t really Frankish, but it’s loosely based on the Franks. I hope that makes sense.
I’m not going to go into detail on the religion, but let’s just say that their religion is based off of nature and their pagan gods are nature-based as well. Their main god will be based off of the element of fire and they have fire festivals. These are just basic ideas I’m throwing down to help you see how I work through this piece of country-building.
4. Does this Country have any Political Conflicts?
In the spirit of all things French, I decided that this country will be having a lot of internal conflict versus external conflict. Meaning, Vive la Revolution. The peasant class hates being suppressed, so they’re revolting. And some peasants don’t want to revolt. So, we’ve got ourselves a civil war as well. Maybe a few lords wanted to revolt and got the peasants to do the heavy lifting.
So, I decided that their relations with other countries isn’t as important since they’re more focused on fixing the internal state.
5. Okay, but you didn’t talk about architecture! Or art! Or any of that!
Alright, alright, here’s the thing, sometimes, authors imply the way some places look. If we understand that The Kingdom of Ervana in this post is based off of medieval Europe, then we can probably infer that we’ve got castles and all that good stuff. As readers, we infer the world because the author doesn’t have to write every single detail unless they really want to.
As such, I don’t think we need to discuss some minute details. You can do that in your own project if you like, but I’m not an architectural expert. I know basic things, so I understand that castles and villages existed a lot in this time.
6. But you said it’s Fantasy!
Yes, I’m getting to that :).
Okay, so we know our country is a fantasy world. We can then decide that our nation has magic in it. Maybe then, we can determine that the nobility are the magic-wielders. Maybe the knights have magic and the nobility doesn’t. Whatever fits our story, we do. Maybe our magic system is based off of birth and not learning. It really depends on what you like.
Do you need more than one magic system? I recommend it. I think that having more than one is fun and allows for some more conflict in your story. However, if you don’t think you can handle writing too many, start with one and flesh it out then move on to the others.
I will make a post about magic systems, so stick around for that of course!
Each piece I talk about in this post, I will go in-depth with in another post soon. I want you to understand the bigger picture things first, because the little details can come along later. I started with cities and now countries, so next we’ll talk about planets. And then, we’ll reverse course and start talking about smaller details like religion, language, magic, social structures, etc…
Until the next time, happy world building!
Check out Book 1 of my new SciFi/Dark Fantasy series! Also available in paperback on Amazon!