Creating fantasy worlds can be hard! There’s a lot to consider in universe building and trying to make your fictional world feel fantastical, but also ensure that the world itself does not become a distraction from the story you are trying to tell.
Sometimes it’s a lot easier to make a believable fantasy world if you have some foundation in the world we know so that there’s something familiar to use as a benchmark. Doing this can help make sure that people can get pulled into the narrative rather than wonder about things that might not make sense about the worldbuilding.
Here are a few ideas that you can use to help you figure out how to create that magical world that makes just enough sense by using the real world as a basis.
Magic as a skill
This one is a pretty common strategy. In the same way as you get better at art or education or physical activity with practice, magic can be like that. Some people start out naturally more gifted, but with work it can be built on and grow into specializations. Sometimes there are ways to artificially enhance those skills with outside forces, such as a drug or better tools.
Royalty structure
You do not need to make your own complicated way that power is passed from one person to another unless that is the point of your story. There are lots of different existing hierarchical structures that already exist in history that you can draw from, from the Thai monarchy to the British parliament. If you use something that already exists to form the structure of your royal family or how the government in your universe works, it has the added benefit of already having most of the rules in place in case you want someone to abdicate the throne or marry in!
Foliage
If you want to create some unique foliage for your world that still makes sense, there are some really weird plants out there. If you look up unique plants that currently exist in climates similar to the universe that you are making, then you can use those to pepper your world with your own versions of them that make more sense for how the universe works. Or you can just use them directly and give them some mystical properties, like I am definitely going to do with the Phantom Orchid in a future story.
