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From
io9
Worldbuilding is an essential part of any work of fiction. But especially for science fiction or fantasy, it's the lifeblood of storytelling. But when worldbuilding fails, it can wreck your whole story, and leave your characters feeling pointless. Here are seven deadly sins of worldbuilding.
Via The Digital Rocking Chair, association concert urbain
Really helpful checklist for the novelist (or screenwriter or playwright).
How do they eat? What do they eat? Who takes away the garbage? Who deals with their bodily wastes? How do they get around? What do the majority of people do to survive? You're not just constructing a society, you're creating an economy. People don't oppress each other for fun — usually, systems of hierarchy and oppression have an economic component to them. Maybe you need a lot of peasants to grow labor-intensive crops, or maybe you need lots of cannon fodder in your space war. Maybe your only source of protein is a weird fungus that needs to be tended by specially trained people. Maybe everybody's eating algae. In any case, there's nothing worse than a fictional world where there are elaborate social structures, which seem completely separated from the realities of food, shelter and clothing.
click to read them all -
Having worked on an even smaller RPG project, I've had to build out and consider all aspects of our world both visually and wrt narrative. Responding to situations required designing the society mindset. Without that mindset, we wouldn't have known how to visually represent our world economically, socially aesthetically and politically.