SPLITE for Worldbuilding

 I want to share this nifty little table I used to use back in high school for my AP World History course. Whenever we analyzed a civilization, we would use a SPRITE table. SPRITE stands for Social, Political, Religious, Intellectual/Ideological, Technological, and Economic.

I’ve changed this so that it’s a SPLITE table (so it’s now Social, Political, Locational, Intellectual, Technological, and Economic). The reason that I replaced the Religious with the Locational is because I felt it made more sense from a worldbuilding point of view to put more emphasis on geography and location. I wanted to present a really basic, essential look at creating fantasy worlds, and location really plays a big role in what it takes to build a world. A fantasy world can be built without religious considerations, but it cannot be built without locational considerations. A story has to take place somewhere, after all, and usually that somewhere has huge bearings on the story itself.

Now, the poster itself is really quite large, so it's best to open it here in its original size in order to view all the questions that I created in order to help guide worldbuilders. You don't have to asnwer all the questions, because sometimes that's not possible - nor are they all going to be relevant to your story. But you should have answers to questions that deal with subjects and areas of interest that directly impact your plot, characters, or specific scenes.

Some notes about using the above guide as well as examples of why certain things are important:

• As you can see in the image, I’ve formatted it so that the key terms in each section are in bold. This helps them stand out, and it lets you know what kinds of terms you could search for online if you want to get a bit more in-depth knowledge to use in your worldbuilding.
• Now, as I mentioned above, you probably won’t use all of this when creating your world - and even if you do, not everything will make it into your book. That’s okay. The most important thing is that these questions will help you create a mental image of your world, so that you know each civilization so well that that knowledge seeps into your writing - so that everything you write about those civilizations and that world reveals something to the reader they may not have known about them before! 
• A lot of the questions listed in the poster do have bearing on the daily life of your characters, and it really helps to get that prepared. For example, if you’ve got a totalitarian regime and the main character is in a media-related profession like book publishing, there will probably be censorship efforts and limits to what they can publish - and maybe they end up having to run a secret after-hours publishing & distribution ring because of that! Or, you may have a noble thief character working under a very strict justice system that is completely unforgiving, thus making their job a lot harder than it would otherwise be.

Hope this poster helps my fellow writers - or anyone interested in creating their own world!