Hello, everyone! ^^ I’m back with a special Tipsy this Tuesday. I want to share this nifty little table I used to use back in high school for my AP World History course. Whenever we analyzed a civilization, we would use a SPRITE table. SPRITE stands for Social, Political, Religious, Intellectual/Ideological, Technological, and Economic.
I’ve changed this so that it’s a SPLITE table (so it’s now Social, Political, Locational, Intellectual/Ideological, Technological, and Economic). The reason that I replaced the Religious with the Locational is because I felt it made more sense from a worldbuilding point of view to put more emphasis on geography and location. I wanted to present a really basic, essential look at creating fantasy worlds, and location really plays a big role in what it takes to build a world. A fantasy world can be built without religious considerations, but it cannot be built without locational considerations. A story has to take place somewhere, after all, and usually that somewhere has huge bearings on the story itself.
So, before I start rambling on about details, here’s the poster that I created for you to be able to download and use! ^^ (Tumblr reduces quality, so when you click on it you’ll find that it’s actually really high quality, so go on ahead and right-click, download, and use it to your heart’s content!) (For a PDF version, scroll down to the bottom of the post.)
Those are a lot of questions! I squeezed as many as I could in the boxes. Can you tell? ^^’ It’s a bit crowded.
As an overall look at worldbuilding, this should be a good guide to help you get the civilizations in your worlds ready for those discerning readers of yours who’ll want to know more!
But there’s more! Keep reading ^^
However, there are plenty more questions to be added to each list. I realized as I was creating this that this was really only the tip of the iceberg. I’ve been toying around with the idea of creating posters for each of the SPLITE elements. If that’s something you’re interested in, leave me a comment / DM me / send me an ask letting me know so that I can get those ready for you in future Tipsy posts!
Some notes about using the above guide as well as examples of why certain things are important:
As you can see in the image, I’ve formatted it so that the key terms in each section are in bold. This helps them stand out, and it lets you know what kinds of terms you could search for online if you want to get a bit more in-depth knowledge to use in your worldbuilding.
Now, you probably won’t use all of this when creating your world - and even if you do, not everything will make it into your book. That’s okay. The most important thing is that these questions will help you create a mental image of your world, so that you know each civilization so well that that knowledge seeps into your writing - so that everything you write about those civilizations and that world reveals something to the reader they may not have known about them before!
A lot of the questions listed in the poster do have bearing on the daily life of your characters, and it really helps to get that prepared. For example, if you’ve got a totalitarian regime and the main character is in a media-related profession like book publishing, there will probably be censorship efforts and limits to what they can publish - and maybe they end up having to run a secret after-hours publishing & distribution ring because of that! Or, you may have a noble thief character working under a very strict justice system that is completely unforgiving, thus making their job a lot harder than it would otherwise be.
I also created a Print PDF for those who would prefer that instead. I’ve hosted it on my Google Drive, so you can find that here. It's view-only, but you should be able to save it to your own Google Drive and download it to your computer. Please let me know if you have trouble with any of that. ^^
**Note: For those interested in printing this out to keep with you, the dimensions are: width 1400 px / length 2000 px. I’m not sure if that will help at all, but just in case ^^
Tag List: @alsothedorkomen, @livvywrites, @firesidefantasy, @coffee-butler
If I’ve tagged you and you didn’t ask, I’m sorry! I just wanted to make sure I got everybody. ^^’
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There are a lot of questions to use to analyze politics. Here are but a few general Qs that will hopefully help guide your worldbuilding process. Of course, you don’t need to answer them all, and there might be some Qs on there that are not relevant to your story.
Given that politics is kind of my field, I’ve done my best to keep things simple and general, and not to go into too many technicalities in the questions above. However, if you have any questions please let me know! ^^
I hope these help! Coming up next, SPLITE - Locational!
Check out the SPLITE Overview and SPLITE Social tables as well.
It’s finally here! Thanks for your patience, everyone! ^^
You can download the following image with a collection of in-depth questions to help you create a functioning and realistic society while worldbuilding. (For a PDF version, please scroll down to the bottom of the post). As with the SPLITE poster, you probably won’t need to answer everything - you might even only need to answer just a small group of these questions in order to come up with the relevant information for your worlds.
I’ve explained how to further cut down each of the questions in the poster into more detailed questions, so if you’re interested in that (especially if you only want to focus on one or two of the Qs in your worldbuilding), please find that under the cut.
I’ve also prepared a list of additional sources of varying levels of detail/depth that elaborate on a lot of these Qs, explaining certain terms, and give you an idea of the different kinds of societies/social elements there are, and giving you even more ideas for worldbuilding. There are 10 - I’ve just recently learned that there’s a limit to links and I want to make sure that I don’t reach or pass that limit. You can find those resources under the cut. ^^
Ah, my friends. There are so many questions to ask about societies. This is like the tip of the iceberg, but I tried to get a little something for many different aspects of society, and hopefully you find these helpful! ^^
Social elements tend to overlap with other elements because almost everything manifests itself in our societal values, structure, and daily lives. So, there are some elements here that would also help in the creation of the other SPLITE elements as well as the Social element.
DIVING DEEPER INTO EACH QUESTION:
Each question can be further subdivided into more detailed questions. However, by breaking them down, it becomes a lot clearer how the different SPLITE elements can overlap into one another. An example using one of the Qs in the poster:
Is the society individualistic or collectivist?
If the society is individualistic, what does it take for one to be successfully independent?
How do people show that they are unique?
What does it take to be self-sustained in this society? Is it easy or hard to be autonomous?
How does this manifest in terms of resource distribution, legal rights, household units, and financial responsibilities, among other things?
If the society is collectivist, what values and general goals do the group (the society) consider important to the development of the society?
In what ways does the society place the group above the individual?
How does collectivism manifest in terms of resource distribution, legal rights, household units, financial responsibilities, etc.?
What kind of philosophical/social movements have arisen to support this notion of collectivism - or was it established as a result of a dominant movement?
As you can see, there are “sub-questions” that actually fit quite nicely under the other SPLITE categories, and that’s important to keep in mind because realistically speaking, everything affects everything.
Most importantly, for each question that you look into and want to use for your worldbuilding, you should answer one extremely vital question: How does this affect your character?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Society - New World Encyclopaedia
Social, political, and environmental characteristics of early civilizations - Khan Academy
Social Hierarchy - ScienceDirect
Elements of Society - Jack Krupansky on Medium
Individualistic Cultures & Behavior - Kendra Cherry on VeryWell Mind
What’s a Household? What’s a Family? - Joseph A. Mcfalls Jr. on PRB
Folkways, Mores, Taboos, and Laws - Ashley Crossman on ThoughtCo.
Diversity leads to greater social coherence and well-being - Lotte Holck on ScienceNordic
Society and Social Interaction - OpenStax on Social Studies LibreTexts
Social Barriers to Change - The Resistance to Change
Like I mentioned above, I didn’t want to put too much on here because of the whole link limit, but basically the bolded key terms in the poster should serve as good terms to search in case you’d like more info about any particular thing. Otherwise, just send me an ask, and I’d be more than happy to include more links in the reponse!! ^^
PDF version can be found and downloaded here. It should be sufficiently high-quality for printing out as well, if that’s something you are interested in doing. Just be careful with the dimensions if you’re printing it on normal-sized paper, since it’s a lot bigger in size. (Also, you probably want to be careful with margins and such.)
And voila! As always, feedback and thoughts are super appreciated, and I sincerely hope this helps my fellow writers out with their worldbuilding ^^
Tag List: @alsothedorkomen, @livvywrites, @firesidefantasy, @coffee-butler, @theemberarchive, @every-book-has-a-secret
If you’re on the list but would prefer not to be, please let me know! My tag lists have been a bit messy recently ^^’ If you’re not on the list and would like to be tagged in future Tipsy posts, let me know! (If you’ve previously asked to be on there but aren’t, please do send me a message or leave me a comment and that shall be rectified!)
I’m really excited for next week’s Tipsy because as I mentioned before I’m going to be creating a special one about how to use a modified version of the SPRITE analysis in your worldbuilding! ^^ I modified it slightly, so now it’s actually SPLITE, because I felt it worked better for worldbuilding.
So, SPLITE stands for Social, Political, Locational, Intellectual/Ideological, Technological, and Economic. This is essentially a guide you can use to create your world and make sure you check off all the Big Things people might want to know about it!
Looking forward to sharing it with you because I’m making a helpful sheet you can download and save for future reference! ^^ Let me know if you want to be tagged in this upcoming Tipsy!
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