worldbuilding-research

name	worldbuilding-research
description	Builds, validates, and maintains fictional world lore — cultures, magic/tech systems, timelines, and internal consistency. Trigger phrases: "worldbuilding", "lore bible", "magic system", "fictional culture", "timeline consistency", "world bible", "canon check", "fantasy setting", "sci-fi universe design", "consistency audit". Do NOT use for: real-world market or industry research (use market-research), generating visual art prompts for existing worlds (use image-prompt-direction), or writing prose/dialogue (this skill builds the world, not the narrative).
license	Apache-2.0
compatibility	{"clients":["openai-codex","gemini-cli","opencode","github-copilot"]}
metadata	{"owner":"codex","domain":"worldbuilding-research","maturity":"draft","risk":"low","tags":["worldbuilding","lore","fiction","consistency","creative-writing"]}

Purpose

Design, document, and validate fictional worlds with internally consistent lore, cultures, systems, and timelines. Every world element must be traceable through a canon hierarchy, and every new addition must pass a consistency check against established lore.

When to use this skill

• The user asks to create, expand, or audit a fictional world, setting, or universe.
• A repo contains world-bible files (e.g., docs/lore/, world-bible.md) that need new entries or consistency checks.
• The task involves designing a magic system, technology framework, or power system with rules and limitations.
• The user needs a culture, faction, or civilization designed from environmental first principles.
• A timeline needs construction, extension, or paradox/conflict auditing.
• The user asks to validate whether a new story element is consistent with established canon.

Do not use this skill when

• The task is real-world market, industry, or competitor research — use market-research.
• The user wants to generate image or art prompts for an existing world — use image-prompt-direction.
• The request is to write narrative prose, dialogue, or plot outlines — this skill builds the setting, not the story.
• The task is purely about character personality or arc design without world-system interaction.
• The user needs data analysis on a fictional game's statistics — use starcraft-data-analysis or spreadsheet-analysis.

Operating procedure

Step 1 — Establish canon hierarchy

Before creating or modifying any lore, establish the canon tiers for the world:

Tier	Canon level	Definition	Override behavior
P	Primary canon	Author-approved, published material; core world-bible entries	Cannot be contradicted
S	Secondary canon	Supplementary material, approved expansions, author notes	Yields to Primary if conflict found
I	Inferred canon	Logical deductions from P and S material; gap-fills	Yields to S and P; must be flagged as inferred

When adding new lore, explicitly tag its canon tier. When a conflict is detected between tiers, the higher tier wins and the conflict must be documented.

Step 2 — Culture generation (geography-first framework)

Build cultures from environmental causation, not from aesthetic borrowing:

1. Geography & climate — Define terrain, weather patterns, natural boundaries, and key resources.
2. Resource base — What can be grown, mined, hunted, or harvested? What is scarce?
3. Economy & trade — What does this culture produce, what must it import, and who are its trade partners or rivals?
4. Social structure — How does resource control shape power? Who rules and why? What class or caste divisions emerge from economic realities?
5. Beliefs & values — What worldview arises from the relationship between people and environment? What do they celebrate, fear, or consider taboo?
6. Aesthetics & expression — Only after the above are established, derive art, architecture, clothing, and language patterns as expressions of the deeper structure.

Document each step's causal chain so that the culture can be stress-tested for coherence.

Step 3 — Magic / technology system design

Use the cost-limitation framework (referencing Sanderson's Laws as a structural guide):

1. Sanderson's First Law (resolution): An author's ability to solve problems with magic is proportional to how well the reader understands that magic. → Define clear, documented rules for any system used to resolve conflict.
2. Sanderson's Second Law (limitation): Weaknesses and limitations are more interesting than powers. → Every capability must have a cost, limit, or trade-off. Document these in a constraints table:

Capability	Cost / fuel	Hard limit	Side effect	Who can access it

3. Sanderson's Third Law (expansion): Before adding new powers, explore the implications of existing ones. → Before introducing a new system element, audit existing capabilities for unexplored consequences.
4. Internal consistency rule: The system must not contradict itself. If fire magic requires ambient heat, it cannot work at full power in a frozen wasteland without an established exception mechanism.

Step 4 — Timeline construction and paradox checking

1. Create a master chronology with entries formatted as: [Year/Era] — [Event] — [Canon tier] — [Causal link to prior event].
2. For each new entry, run a paradox check:
   • Does this event contradict any Primary canon event?
   • Does the causal chain hold? (Can event B happen if event A's consequences are followed through?)
   • Are character lifespans, travel times, and technology levels consistent with the stated era?
3. For time-travel or prophecy elements, document the temporal model explicitly (fixed timeline, branching, bootstrap paradox allowed, etc.) and validate all events against that model.

Step 5 — Character-world interaction validation

When a character interacts with world systems, validate:

• Access: Does this character have established access to the magic/tech/resource they're using?
• Cost: Is the character paying the established cost? Are consequences shown?
• Knowledge: Does the character know what they'd need to know, given their background and the world's information-flow rules?
• Impact: Does the character's action have ripple effects consistent with the world's established systems?

Flag any interaction that requires a new rule or exception, and escalate for canon-tier decision.

Step 6 — Gap analysis and expansion recommendations

After any audit or new-entry session:

1. Identify underdeveloped areas — regions, time periods, cultural practices, or system edge-cases that lack documentation.
2. Prioritize gaps by narrative impact — which gaps are most likely to cause a consistency error if a story passes through that area?
3. Recommend specific world-bible entries to fill high-priority gaps.

Decision rules

• Canon conflicts are errors, not flavor. Never paper over a contradiction; document it, identify which tier wins, and update the losing entry.
• Cultures must have causal depth. If a cultural trait cannot be traced back through the geography-first framework to at least Step 2 (resources), it needs reworking or explicit justification.
• Magic/tech systems must close. Every capability needs a documented cost and limit before it can be used in narrative context. Open-ended powers are flagged as incomplete.
• Timelines are append-only at the Primary tier. Primary canon timeline entries cannot be silently modified; changes require a retcon entry that documents what changed and why.
• Inferred canon is provisional. Any I-tier entry can be overridden without a retcon process, but the override must be documented.
• Real-world cultural borrowing requires transformation. Never map a real-world culture 1:1 onto a fictional one. Use the geography-first framework to build from first principles, borrowing structural patterns at most.

Output structure

Every worldbuilding deliverable must use one of these formats:

World Bible Entry

## [Entry Title]
- Canon tier: P / S / I
- Category: Geography | Culture | System | History | Faction | Species
- Connected entries: [list of related world-bible entries]
- Summary: [2-3 sentence overview]
- Detail: [full description with causal reasoning]
- Open questions: [unresolved elements flagged for future development]

Consistency Check Report

## Consistency Check: [Element Being Checked]
- Checked against: [list of canon entries examined]
- Status: CONSISTENT / CONFLICT FOUND / INSUFFICIENT DATA
- Conflicts: [if any — entry vs. entry, with tier comparison and resolution]
- Assumptions made: [any I-tier inferences required to complete the check]

Gap Analysis

## Gap Analysis: [World / Region / System]
- Coverage: [% of expected world-bible categories documented]
- Critical gaps: [gaps that could cause narrative consistency errors]
- Recommended entries: [prioritized list of entries to create]
- Estimated effort: [scope of work to fill critical gaps]

Anti-patterns

• Kitchen-sink worldbuilding: Adding detail for its own sake without narrative or structural purpose. Every entry should serve either consistency, immersion, or plot enablement. If it does none of these, it's clutter.
• Inconsistent power scaling: A character or faction's power level fluctuating without in-world justification. If a mage struggles with a locked door in Chapter 3 but levels a fortress in Chapter 7, the system must explain the difference.
• Culture-as-costume: Giving a civilization distinctive clothing, food, and architecture without underlying economic, geographic, or historical reasons. Aesthetics without causation reads as shallow and risks offensive stereotyping.
• Floating timeline syndrome: Events that have no anchored dates or causal links, making it impossible to determine sequencing or detect contradictions.
• Retroactive power-ups: Introducing a new system capability specifically to solve a plot problem, with no prior foreshadowing or cost structure. This undermines the system's credibility.
• Monoculture planets/continents: An entire landmass or species sharing one culture, one language, one government. Real diversity emerges from geographic variation — apply the same principle to fictional worlds.

Related skills

• image-prompt-direction — Translating established world-bible visual descriptions into art generation prompts.
• competitor-teardown — Analyzing published fictional worlds for structural patterns (when used as creative research).
• cv-cover-letter — No direct relation (negative example: do not route here).

Failure handling

• If the existing world bible is incomplete or contradictory, begin with a consistency audit before adding new material. Document all found conflicts as a Consistency Check Report.
• If the user's request would contradict Primary canon, present the conflict explicitly and offer alternatives: retcon (with documented cost), reinterpretation, or abandonment of the proposed element.
• If the genre or system type is unfamiliar (e.g., hard sci-fi thermodynamics, specific mythological traditions), state knowledge limits and recommend external reference material rather than fabricating plausible-sounding but incorrect rules.
• If the scope is too broad ("build me a whole world"), negotiate a starting scope: one region, one era, one culture, then expand iteratively.