Genre + Theme tell you what your world feels like. Conflict tells you what’s wrong and why anything happens.
If you haven't taken a look at the previous blog about genre and theme, I'd highly recommend it before reading about conflict. If you're still interested in reading about conflict, I'll give you a quick summary of genre and theme to help you know what's important to set up before deciding on your conflict. Genre tells you what kind of experience your world delivers, and theme tells you what ideas your world keeps testing and returning to. Together they form a solid foundation for your world. After you've decided upon your genre and theme, you use conflict to make your world active.
Conflict is not just “a war” or “a villain.” Conflict is a force that creates friction.
It’s the reason:
If your world feels like a museum, then your conflict probably isn't doing enough work. A museum is something that's interesting but static. You want to find a balance between your world feeling like a museum and feeling like a theme park.
Keep it clean. You want something you can repeat and build from.
If you’re having trouble coming up with a conflict, use this template:
“A [force/group/event] threatens [something people need/value], causing [a clear kind of pressure].”
Here are a few examples:
If your sentence doesn’t suggest immediate consequences, you can always tighten it.
You'll find that most world conflicts fall into one or more of these categories. You don't need all three, but knowing about them helps.
This is pressure from outside forces:
Best for: big stakes, faction play, large-scale change.
Examples: Avengers: Infinity War, Independence Day, Attack on Titan
This is pressure from inside the system:
Best for: intrigue, moral choices, “everyone’s complicit” worlds.
Examples: The Hunger Games, Arcane, Andor
This is pressure that hits individuals directly:
Best for: emotional hooks, relatable stakes, character-driven stories.
Examples: The Last of Us, Breaking Bad, Fight Club
Conflict becomes useful when it generates content automatically. There are a few ways that you can do this. The first way is to make conflict about something that people need.
Needs create immediate stakes:
If you can name what people lose when the conflict escalates, you’re in a good place.
Another thing you can do is to define the pressure in plain language. Pressure is what people feel day-to-day, and the easiest way to define it is by asking questions.
This can turn a cool concept of your conflict into a usable reality for your world.
Adding a ticking clock, even a simple one, is another way to make a conflict. Tensions rise as time passes, and a conflict becomes sharper when it's getting worse. With a ticking clock, you don't need exact numbers. All you need is momentum, things growing worse as time passes. A few examples would be:
The final thing you can do is decide who benefits and who suffers. This is the shortcut to factions. For any conflict, you just need to identify the winners, the losers, and the fixers.
This creates politics without you forcing it.
Here are a few examples of conflict types that you can use. These are brought on purpose, with each one being able to fit many different genres and themes.
Example statement:
Example statement:
Example statement:
Example statement:
Example statement:
A strong conflict should break down naturally.
Use this ladder:
Here's a quick example of a conflict ladder using resource scarcity in a fantasy setting, specifically targeting water:
If your conflict can’t do this, it’s probably too vague.