World-Building – Miscellaneous

Something is crucial to your world-building if your story is dramatically changed when you remove that thing.

 
Not everything tied to world-building is major. Except when it’s a central element to a story, meaning removing it dramatically changes your story.

That noted, here are some miscellaneous world-building items to be aware of.

Fun (Sports, Leisure, Music, Free Time Activities)
“Fun” is based on culture and language. A funny joke in English bombs in Mandarin and is completely flat in Hopi. All “leisure” time activities will be culture based, and much of that will be predicated on climate/weather.

However, leisure time concepts may translate well. Fishing is both a vocation and avocation on Earth. Imagine a water planet or a planet where the dominate life is aquatic in nature. They may go mammaling. Transpose everything from this world’s fishing to that world’s mammaling and you could have a fascinating first-contact story.

A telekinetic culture may have sports like ours but players will be heavily penalized if they use telekinetics. They may be allowed to bludgeon opposing team members with their hands and feet (if they have them) but hurling rocks at them telekinetically results in a 3-game penalty.

Music is heavily culture based, but beyond that we have “music” because our environment supports the transmission of longitudinal (compression) waves. Western music is based on the thirteen notes but non-western music systems vary on the number of notes and variation is reflected in the difference in tunings and instruments themselves. Other worlds may support lifeforms with hearing vastly different from ours, hence their music will be vastly different. If those cultures developed in environments that don’t support longitudinal waves, is there music at all? Or what would they have that we’d consider “music”?

Leisure time activities tend to be sensory-dependent as a rule (hence music would be different if the other culture’s ears weren’t designed to detect longitudinal waves). A Jovian would “paint” using radium-based “paints” as their “vision” developed on a planet where our visible spectrum couldn’t penetrate the clouds and the planet radiates like a sun-in-the-making; they wouldn’t have eyes like ours, or what served as eyes would be radiation detectors (perhaps Geiger counter like stalks?).

Life forms


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