For those fantasy writers, how do you organize your fantasy world information? Say, the names of cities and towns, cultures, races, provinces, etc. I've been looking for a template or form to organize these. Something similar to a character form that looks like this: Name: Age: Gender: Race: Appearance: etc.. I want to get into detail though, meaning, race names, distinctions of the races, cultures, methods of travel. Thanks
Make a map, then have headings for characters, history, cities, races, armies, factions etc. Atleast, that's what I do...
You might want to consult games then, given how thoroughly their information is catalogued. Examples from World of Warcraft: Stormwind: Human City (Alliance) accessible by gryphon, deeprun tram and ships (I haven't played recently enough to know where they go but you get the idea) adjacent to the human territory of Goldshire Ironforge: Dwarven and Gnomish city (Alliance) accessible by gryphon, deeprun tram, adjacent to the dwarven territory of Dun Somethingorother Booty Bay: Goblin City (Neutral) run by profiteers accessible by gryphon and ship to somedamnplace. There's loads of information in the world of warcraft wiki, which I can't link because of board rules.
I think I can relate to your question in a way. I'm not too sure about how to properly orginise the information for my world, but then I can't make my mind up on stuff so that doesn't help me either! Need to work on not changing my mine. But anyways, before I did google about writing Fantasy stories and a website that I went to talked about world Building; it suggested to create a map of the world (as RusticOnion suggessted). On then map you'd have land marks, capital cities and major town as well as important places to your story. It could be as ditailed or not so as you want, but either way, it would at least give you a starting point.
My practice probably isn't the best model to follow, but you have to find a system that works for you. What I normally do is start a text document at the top level, with either nations or continents or what have you, then just keep going down dividing that up into subheadings as needed, both for information about that entity, and a list of sub-entities. Some nations will focus more on one area than another, and often the story will focus more on the details of one nation than another, so I think flexibility is a bigger advantage than neatness.
