The secret to interesting worldbuilding: everything has a cost

There's a question I use more and more to check my worlds: does the world I created affect the characters' decisions and, through them, the course of the story? If the answer is no, then I didn't do worldbuilding; I just put up a backdrop.

The core idea is simple and powerful: in a fictional world, everything has a cost. Every feature of the world should involve some effort, a burden, and that burden has to be persistent, constant and, above all, normalised for the people who live there. Not even utopias are free.

I don't just mean money. The cost is the effort it takes for a stone to become a kitchen utensil, for a plot of land to feed a family, or for a well-told story to stir collective memory. That's where lore comes in.

The example that sums it up best is a broken clay pot. Whether the character says "bring me another", "let's make another" or "there isn't another" makes a huge difference: it tells you about the character, their surroundings, their culture and the context, all in one line.

I'm also not convinced by repeating "conflict, conflict, conflict" as if it were the only law. Conflict isn't a wrong concept, but it isn't the only one, and it isn't mandatory. Thinking in costs seems a finer tool to me: the world shapes the characters, deforms them, informs them and gives them purpose.

When the world resembles ours, the characters move like we do and it doesn't take much effort. But when it doesn't, it's worth asking, scene by scene, what each character pays for what they do.

Source: Guajars