The World Context Card
Four lines that let a stranger meet your world on its own terms. Most worlds posted with no context are read against the reader’s default — usually a generic medieval Europe they did not choose and you did not write. The card costs you five minutes and buys you a reader who arrives already standing in the right weather. Fill it in, keep it with the world, and paste it above anything you post.
Genre — what shelf it sits on
name it plainlyNot a mood, a category. Say the thing a reader could find in a shop, then say the one way yours bends it. “Secondary-world fantasy” tells a reader where to stand; “epic” tells them nothing they can use.
Tone — what it feels like to be there
two or three words, then one lineThe register a reader should hold while reading. Two or three adjectives do most of the work — pick the ones that would be wrong for a neighbouring world, because those are the ones that are actually describing yours.
Point of view — whose eyes, and how close
who is telling thisWhose story this is, and how near the reader stands to them. Say whether the world is shown through one person, a rotating few, or a cold narrator — and say how much the teller is allowed to be wrong.
Key conflicts — what is actually pulling
three, at three scalesName one at each scale: something the world is doing to itself, something a faction is doing to another, and something one person cannot put down. If you cannot fill the third, that is useful to know before a reader finds out for you.
What a reader should not expect
optional, and often the most useful lineThe one or two things your world deliberately has none of. Naming the absence saves a reader from spending the first chapter waiting for something that is never coming.
Context is a courtesy, not a summary
This card is not a blurb and it is not a pitch. It exists because a world posted without context gets read against whatever the reader already had in mind, and that default is almost never yours. Four lines — genre, tone, point of view, conflicts — are enough to move a reader from the wrong world into the right one before they have read a single sentence of it.
Keep it short on purpose. A card that runs to a page is a document nobody reads at the top of a post. If you find yourself wanting more room, that is a sign the world has a page of its own to write — the card is the doorway, not the room. Revise it in place as the world changes so there is only ever one, and readers who came back find the version that is true now.
The same four lines work as a table artifact. Read them aloud at the start of a session and everyone knows what weather they are standing in — which is the whole reason the card is printable.