Setting

The Setting of your geofiction is the world's environment. The environment and the interactions with it, can help to create unique characteristics for your World.

It may be a very flat environment or it could be all encompassing. A traditional earth-like world might be more likely to have a flat one dimensional sphere of reality with aspects of religion, mythology and science providing it with a more rounded environment and moments of insight into multi-dimensions.

If you are making your fictional world for a role-play game it is important that you provide your players with a set of boundaries and rules regarding the games setting, unless you want spontaneous creativity to change your world. The setting's boundaries represent the limits to the physical space in which your world exists. This is the area of your world which holds importance to you. Anything outside of this is space is relatively inconsequential but may occasionally throw in challenges. Knowing and making players of RPGs aware of the worlds spatial limits can help reduce unwanted conflict and undesirable plots from emerging, in unscripted RPGs.

Macro Level:
A typical earth-like world will most likely have a setting consisting of a number of continents. These continents may either be inhabited or uninhabited, discovered or not yet discovered. Your world, may include one or two satellites above the earth-like world such as the moon or the Sun.

Micro Level:
If you are creating your fictional world for the setting of a book or similar work, then you might want to narrow down your setting to a micro level. If your world has undiscovered area's for the sake of time, you may want to narrow your aspect further to the scenes that you expect to explore in your story.

Settings outside of the 'Norm'

If your fictional world is a not a realistic earth-like world than your setting may be very varied to the traditional land, sea and sky portraits.

Planes

Many fantasy role-play games and some books includes different planes of existence in their settings. These different settings might exist for a particular race or archetype of races exist such as Fae and Fae-like characters. Another popular plane setting is one that includes the dead and half-living, such as Hades, the Underworld or a Shadowrealm.

Landscapes

Similar to planes, the use of landscapes provide a fantasy themed geofiction with the ability to create a variety of settings that may be linked together through a portal. Each landscape can have diverse characteristics and boundaries.

Enid Blyton, a popular twentieth century children's author and fantasy writer, makes an interesting use of landscapes in her series of books based around the Faraway Tree series.

Floating Islands in the Air & Settings in Space

These are a popular choice for creating fantasy settings with subtle differences and could be likened to worlds that might exist within comets that might be more familiar in a science fiction setting or space stations and other similar facilities.

Consider Your Worlds Space

1. Create a list of limitations regarding your world's space.
Example of limitations:

• Nothing exists outside the hemisphere of your world.
• Apart from the seventh moon on planet X, there are no other worlds with life forms in your solar system.
• Your world has three moons.
• Your world is a floating island on the back of a turtle.
• The sun's colour changed to purple many years ago and it will never blaze so brightly again.
• Though water doesn't exist, there is a yellow fluid of a similar nature, which is consumed by inhabitants as a necessity.
• The world is flat.
• The world encompasses five different levels or planes.
• It's an Ant's world located in my back yard and which extends into my neighbour's on the right.

Links

Wikipedia - Science Fiction
How to write a Novel - Setting
Writing World - SF Setting
Novel Writing Help - Fictional Settings
How to Build a Fictional Setting