On the core of a world and why you should find it.
Introduction
Every world—real or fictional—stands on something. An idea, a principle, a myth, a fundamental essence. If you don’t know what your world stands on, it will eventually start to wobble.
What is the most important thing in my fictional world? What is its foundation? What makes it exist? What is its core, its center of gravity, its axis around which everything revolves?
That’s what I’ll try to answer today.
Searching for a World’s Core
Every fictional world—just like the real one—follows its own rules. They can differ, but they always exist. In my opinion, a good world needs solid foundations: laws and ideas it rests upon.
I don’t mean general consistency or adherence to physics, but a central premise—the one idea that drives the entire world and determines what it looks like.
Even the choice of genre—science fiction, fantasy, or alternate history—shapes how we perceive a world. We expect spaceships in sci-fi, and in fantasy we accept magic or elves with ease.
I chose low fantasy, so I expect my world to have magic—but in a limited form.
Still, the genre alone isn’t enough. I need something deeper, something that grounds me not just in the genre, but in this specific world.
So I asked myself: what makes my world unique? What makes it this world, not just another one with magic and knights?
To find that out, I also asked where and why? Where does magic come from in this world? Why do people use melee weapons? What was the spark that shaped the world—and perhaps still shapes it now?
This is what I call the core of the world—something so fundamental that it influences every other aspect. Something the world couldn’t exist without.
What can serve as such a core? Perhaps a natural resource—a mineral discovered long ago that changed the course of history and warfare.
Or a unique being—a god, monster, genius, or ruler whose influence touched the entire civilization.
There are many possibilities, and each can reshape a world in its own way.
My world’s axis—the thing everything revolves around—will be the Creator.
How the Core Shapes the World
Some time ago I created a myth describing how the world came to be. I’ll use it to show how a core can shape everything.
In short, it goes like this:
A being awoke in a silver-violet expanse, alone and unaware of its own nature. It wandered until it reached a place of darkness and discovered it could shape the substance of that space.
It experimented—creating stars, planets and, eventually, the world I’m working on. It made oceans, continents, mountains and organisms, and finally humanity. It wanted to create a being like itself and place a shard of its power within it, but its essence was too great. A single human could hold only a fraction of it, so the being created many humans and placed a piece of itself in each of them.
Since then, the Creator watches humanity, hoping to understand its own nature through them.
The myth doesn’t explain everything, but it’s enough for a start.
Choosing the Creator as my world’s core explains why the world looks the way it does.
Knowing that everything was shaped by this being helps me ask the right questions:
How did it react? What did it want? What motivated its actions?
These questions help me expand the myth and shape the direction of the world itself.
Had I chosen a magical mineral instead of a being, I would ask different questions:
How would people use it? How would it change society, religion, the economy?
It’s always about the same thing: understanding the nature of the core to understand how it shapes everything else.
After choosing the Creator, I focused on understanding its nature—its mindset, its actions, its emotions. Thanks to that, whenever I get stuck, I can simply ask: what would the Creator do?
This creates the boundaries of my world. Only things the Creator could create can exist within it.
Those boundaries are like a coloring book, and my ideas are the colors I fill it with.
Summary
I decided that my world will be a fantasy world created by the Creator—a powerful being trying to understand itself through humanity.
While building it, I will strive for realism, but always ask myself: what would the Creator do?
The Creator is the axis of my world—its heart and point of reference. Thanks to this, the world remains coherent both in realism and narrative.
Now a question for you: what makes your world unique?