The Journey is the Destination: Making Travel Matter in Your Worldbuilding
This week is all about transportation! Haly's looking at some of the more common reasons behind travel, including survival, trade, and exploration and how these can inspire your own fictional worlds!
Manic Monday: Travel in Worldbuilding
In a far away place and a long ago time, a group of heroes gathered to receive a precious MacGuffin. Because the MacGuffin was the fabled property of a person of power, they set out on a perilous journey to deliver said MacGuffin to the finish line where, we presume, they were richly rewarded for their time and effort.
Any guesses on which movie I’ve just (very loosely) described? That’s right! It’s Pulp Fiction! Or Lord of the Rings. Or any of countless other stories where the very heart of the plot is about the journey itself, the experiences and adventures that only come from travel, and the way the characters change along the way.
Even if travel plays only a small part in your story — a chapter or a scene — the motives for and means of travel in your world are excellent ways to add complexity and depth to your storytelling and setting!
Why We Travel: The Motives Behind Movement
Throughout human history, people have traveled for many reasons, from survival to tourism. These real-life motives can provide an excellent starting place for the fictional people in your stories to be on the move, either as individuals, as a community, or as a society.
Survival: Ancient peoples often had to follow the migratory patterns of their primary food source. Following a herd of grazing ruminants across the plains isn’t as easy as it might sound, especially if there are no easy sources of fresh water. Shelter also becomes an issue, especially if migratory patterns are related to seasonal and weather changes.
What resources are scarce or plentiful in your world and how does that affect where people live and how they move?
Trade and Commerce: The exchange of goods and services is a powerful motivation for movement and travel. In the real world, empires rose and fell on the movement of luxuries such as coffee, spices, and tea. Moving these goods across endless oceans to meet demand was costly and dangerous. The VOC was famed for their custom ships and expert navigators, being able to move more tonnage, faster.
What goods are traded in your world and what kind of transportation facilitates that trade?
Exploration and Discovery: From finding out what’s on the other side of the wall, to seeing what’s on the other side of the mountains or the ocean or on the far side of the moon, exploration has been a driving motivation for travel for as long as people have been people. Maybe even before. From Lewis and Clark to Neil Armstrong, the drive to explore the unknown is integral to some people.
What undiscovered regions exist in your world, and what motivates people to explore them?
These are, of course, just a few of the most common reasons why people travel. Conflict and warfare, pilgrimages, and social or political reasons are other travel motivations, each of which might require — or even restrict! — specialized modes of transportation. I’m certain you can all think of others!
Tomorrow
For tomorrow’s Twisted Tuesday, we’ll talk about means and modes of transportation, from walking on our own two feet, to zipping through the cosmos in a personal spacecraft, to magical flight on household items such as broomsticks, carpets, and beds!
In the meantime, let me know in the comments about the unique forms of transportation you’ve created for your world! And don’t forget to share this newsletter with a creative friend!!
So 👏
In my newest world of Mytharae, the only method of traversing between the Upside and Downside realms is through the Gates. There are six of them, each arranged in a circular form around the edges of the world (and when I say "edge", I mean LITERALLY. Fall off and you'd be floating in the Cosmos.)
These Gates cannot be accessed by ANYONE other than the Vanguard, a set of highly-trained soldiers—handpicked by the Gods themselves—responsible for ensuring the Gates remain intact and no one comes near it.
However, there is another way the Gates can be opened, and that's the Flip, a strange event that occurs every millennium. While it's not a literal flip, it does facilitate movement between the realms by deactivating the Gates.
The goal of my main character is to get to the Gates so she can reach the Downside, and because of everything mentioned above, she has two options—wait for the next Flip (which will happen 400 years later but she can't live that long) or somehow find a way around the Vanguard (they are instructed to take out anything that gets near the Gates).