Importance depends on what is important to you and to the readers you want to appeal to.
That may be something each author needs to discover for themselves by some combination of:
* enjoying the work of others and seeing what we appreciate, and what we wish was done better or differently
* creating our own worlds and seeing what we like about doing that, what interests us, what we are happy with out own skill level at, and what we’d like to develop in our own worldbuilding skills
* writing and seeing what we like to write about and what aspects of worldbuilding we are interested in, where we are satisfied or dissatisfied with our efforts
* brainstorming and dreaming and seeing what we wish we were working on, ideally
For my own tastes, I like my worlds to make enough sense that they satisfy me that I can believe my imaginary worlds might be the way they are, and that I have at least some idea of how they came to be that way.
I’ve found that it helps me to “just start” and put out ideas and take a shot at some of the details, and then later criticize what I came up with, and then revise or re-do or do something else.
My interests and standards have developed and changed over the years. When I was 11 years old, it was fun and satisfying for me to just have some inspiration from reading and watching fantasy stories, and then to extend the sample campaign map from an RPG book to make new maps adjacent to those, and make up some of what was there, and then run an RPG campaign from it.
After a few years doing that, a friend who had done the same collaborated with me to make a new world and its history, and we went back to modern Earth and extrapolated a timeline that resulted in a new world, and developed several new cultures and their history on that world. That was when I found I wanted to know what the past history was, at least roughly (and more specifically when/where I was interested in the details or had some inspiration for them).
I find that the more context I develop, and the more it makes sense and is self-consistent, the more easily I can create new material that satisfies me because it fits in and makes sense to me.
The aspects that I find most important are the ones that are most interesting to me. Things like geography, history, power structures, cosmology, cultures, and since I’m usually doing it for a game that will involve detailed tactical combat, weaponry, military thinking and related things.
Designing what magic exists (if it exists) and how it works and who knows about it and teaches it to whom and so on is also, like technology, important and necessary (for my requirements for self-consistency) to be woven in to the history and culture and cosmology and spiritual and religious thinking.
With magic and technology, I find it’s important to me to think about the limits of what they can do and what it takes to do those things. In particular, from past mistakes, I have learned to be very careful not to make situations and difficulties disappear from my worlds due to excessively convenient magic and technology. So if I want my maps’ terrain to be relevant, I need to limit how much magic can make travel easy, for example. And I need to think about what divination/scrying/soothsaying can and can’t discover, lest I make spying and information gathering and privacy and schemes obsolete. And if I want combat to be dangerous and consequential even if people don’t die, then I want/need to severely limit how powerful healing magic is. If I want supplies and weather to matter, then I want to avoid spells that make those problems go away. Etc.
Topics:
)“Great Answer”
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)“Great Answer”
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