I think Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams describes the need for internal consistency quite well.
Quote:
"Say you're a die-hard romantic who wants to design a pre-technological universe full of color and adventure. Say you want high, craggy mountains, because they're beautiful and wild and inspiring and also because you can hide lots of orcs in them. Say you also want a mountain loch to reflect your beautiful high-Gothic castle, and a fertile plain to provide lots of foodstuffs that you can tax out of your peasants—many of whom are brain-clones of yourself, by the way, with a lot of the higher education removed, and inhabiting various specially grown bodies of varying styles and genders."
"You know," said Daljit, "I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the medieval scholars and the Compulsive Anachronists, or whatever they were called, discovered that they couldn't afford their own universe without financial aid from the fantasy gamers, and that their tidy little re-creation was now going to be full of trolls and dinosaurs."
Aristide grinned. "Perhaps you're underestimating the percentage of medievalists who play fantasy games."
"Perhaps."
"But in any case, the fertile valley has to be adjacent to the ocean, because the river's got to go somewhere, and in the meantime you've got this mountain range with its romantic tarn over here . . . so what goes in between?"
She looked at him. "You're going to tell me it's a squinch."
"Bingo. By the time you've got all your computations done and dumped all the energy into inflating a wormhole from the quantum foam . . ." Aristide made little rubbing gestures with his fingers, as if he were sprinkling alchemical powders into an alembic. " . . . and you've stabilized the wormhole gate with negative-mass matter, then inflated a soupçon of electrons and protons into a pocket universe complete with a flaming gas ball in the center . . . Once you've got your misty mountain range and your moisty river valley, what goes between the mountain range and river valley is implied by the architecture, and is in fact a high desert plain, like the Gobi, only far less attractive . . ."
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