How do you make an original world for your story?
>>7934917
I study archaeology so ancient civilisation's perceptions of the world form most of my inspiration
>>7934917
causation, causation, causation
You don't include an isolationist nation of proud ivory tower elves because something something 'tolkein did it it must be good,' you include it because X led to that situation Y. If you don't have a good reason for X, you shouldn't include Y. Worldbuilding is less a matter of drawing a map and more a matter of timelines and falling dominoes.
>>7934917
Get inspired by history. Have a solid understanding of geography, meteorology, physics, economy, technology and languages.
Also preferably ignore all other works of fiction, world building in these ranges from bad to worse.
If you can help it, don't bother with creation of your own world at all.
You don't. You just put it in the real world because you're not some stupid nerd
Just do it?
Or not...
>>7934964
except fiction is never set in the real world. Every sentence is worldbuilding.
>>7934917
You start by choosing not to write genre fiction.
>>7934917
I do a big ass mindmap. I make sections for culture, religion, economy, races, etc. and then branch off from those. Then you have to see if there are any clashes or contradictions.
Thats what I do. I also like looking at architecture since that helps me most in imagining the locations and such. Video game concept art is usually quite good.
>>7934917
Worldbuild with a purpose. What tone do you want your story to be? What *kind* of world do you want? Work to that; don't just aimlessly worldbuild.
>>7934941
But you can and should manipulate these dominoes as you see fit. Make sure the setting makes sense thematically, narratively, as well as just -- factually.
>>7935072
Check out this pleb.
The world should follow your story rather than you building a world and then setting a story in it. Trying to create a fictional world that holds up to superficial checks of plausibility isn't literature it's the basis of games. I really don't mean this derogatory but all of this "think of what they eat" and "which nations are they at conflict with" and "how do they punish infidelity" is not what you should be concerning yourself with if you're writing a novel unless it is relevant to its themes and conflict. Those questions are very useful if you're building a setting for a pen and paper rpg but if you do that check out /tg/.
>>7935819
You're exactly right, except it's not even useful for /tg/. You should do the same thing if you're building for a game, too. Players care more about story than food just as much as readers.
>>7934917
Put elves, dwarves, dragons, and all that other shit in there; just call them something else.
>>7935836
Yeah that's true but with players you don't completely guide the story. Someone might ask you something you didn't think was essential to the scene and now you're either quick to make it up completely on the spot or you already have a firm idea of the world that helps you answering that.
Is there a single fantasy setting with a map that doesn't look absolutely stupid?
>>7935941
>he cares about maps
>>7934917
I like to draw maps in my spare time and try to make them as 'original' as possible. Randomness is the key, also you can't be too spooky.
Just think of a thing, unrelated to a world, then use that as the foundation of your world. Using randomness to generate it. Then once the foundation are built you can just populate it how you imagine it would be populated. Then come up with some gay names.
>>7935996
When the visual representation of your world looks like it's from a shitty video game then yeah I do care.
>>7936065
But why?
>>7934917
Copy and paste different cultures.
Take one of my earlier creations: Empire Romans, vikings, assyrians, Republic Romans
>>7935941
The one that dosnt have a map
Tolkien is one of the few exceptions since its canon that the gods can and have literally shape the world like play-do.
>>7936093
>>7935941
>>7935941
>Is there a single fantasy setting with a map that doesn't look absolutely stupid?
>>7936128
its just europe on its side
>>7936128
are you serious?
I watch Artifexian.
Read a lot of history books and use them as influence.
It worked very well for Morrowind.
>>7936090
This pretty much. Don't directly copy though, make sure it fits
>>7936128
I was wondering what dumbass this picture could possibly be targeted at, like who would fall for it and then have a realization. There you are.
>>7936288
>just add pointy ears
Just kidding, still solid advice.
>>7936121
>Weird jagged coastline. Who designed this, an alien?
>mfw
>>7936121
kkkekekk
great pic
>>7936329
Nobody ever notices the elves in Lappland.
>>7936366
Is secret
>>7936366
I noticed them, it just seemed too obvious to be worth mentioning.
>>7936288
>>7936319
That said lads don't forget to actually make it somewhat original. Start with a ripoff then un-ripoff it.
Let's, for the sake of my autism and this thread, make a culture that looks like it's from scratch but is actually just stolen from so many sources it becomes hard to actually liken it to any culture in specific.
We'll make dwarves. So, you know, short, stocky, and bearded creatures with a cramped, scrunched-up face. They like to dig holes, like dwarves do in general.
Let's first start with an aesthetic. I saw a picture of this dude a while ago and he looked perty kelw, so let's give our race some kind of Assyrian feel. Personally, I think his clothing looks as if it mixes different styles and fabrics left and right. Reminds me of a wordly merchant. So let's make this race.. Well, a race of merchants. Spread almost evenly across the world. I'm imagining that their dwarven "fortresses" would be placed along trade routes or near gems and other expensive luxuries.
Around now I realized I'm making a race of jews, so I decide to incorporate some of my own paranoid suspicions. They deal with outsiders a whole lot, but they're still somewhat family-oriented, only showing the front of the store to their customers, so to speak. If you're a foreigner, prepare to be treated with a professional politeness and maybe even charm, but not much more. Don't count on actually seeing the parts of their mountain hold they don't want to show you.
Tadaa, already more fleshed out than most genre fiction races.
>>7936311
>I was wondering what dumbass this picture could possibly be targeted at
It's actually targeted at people who criticize worldbuilding maps as being unrealistic and cliché, when in fact the real world is rife with these "unrealisms".
>>7936384
>Make it somewhat original!
>Here's how I reinvented stereotypical jews
>>7934917
You decide not to write fantasy and thus do something better with your life.
>>7936402
The difference would be that jews don't have a homeland, whereas these dwarves expand like Prussia getting an enema
>>7936421
I'll write fantasy and call it some meme shit like magical realism
>>7936484
What *is* magical realism?
From the name, it sounds like something my setting might conform to.
>>7936495
Basically you have the same shit as fantasy stories but play it completely straight like its realism
less emphasis on adventure and more on phenomena in itself
>>7936517
You mean, following the day-to-day life of a poor magicstonium-miner's family in a sootstained northern town?
>>7936482
Oh, well, that's totally different then! OC do not steal, right?
>>7936532
could be that, why not. There's usually some sort of speculative aspect to it as well.
Example being most of Borges stories like Library of Babel or Funes the Memorious
>>7936402
>>7936482
>>7936539
Honestly, originality is easier done through interaction than through the actual things doing the interacting. A powerful dwarfish empire that builds tunnels straight-as-an-arrow from hold to hold, but rules above ground through a system of satraps -- is more original than the same race given a more traditional role.
>>7936549
So, you mean kind of like -- works in which the fantasy is used as a device to make a point?
>>7936562
Pretty much, Gene Wolfe put it perfectly
>Magical Realism is just fantasy written by people from South America
>>7936539
Fantasy and sci-fi both built entirely on RL and older fantasy tropes though.
>>7936558
The fact that you're thinking about using dwarves at all is a problem.
>>7936578
The stagnant, unoriginal stuff that you should be trying not to emulate is built on worn out tropes and cliché, yes.
What i'm currently doing is this
Usually i look at the type of creatures i've come up with, and what cultural opinions is logical that would've developed
Sometimes i also take small aspects from real-world cultures and combine them with completely different cultures, to make it seem like something new.
Like redoing the idea of sins, but with a different logic behind them. Or the idea of immortal gods
>>7936590
>shitting on originality
Hahah oh wow.
I would suggest you develop an imagination.
>>7936607
>Throw it out even though it's not broke
>>7936628
Have fun with your trash.
>>7936607
That surreal painting looks great so i look up peter white's other shit and it's all bland trite still life shit with no variability in color. What did I do wrong?
>>7936641
He used to do much better stuff but he's been working in vidya development for too long now. I think he's primarily a (physical) sculptor anyway, so colour variability wasn't a focal point.
What about original animal life?
How do you guys come up with that?
So far, i've just taken extinct stuff and made them less fucky
>>7934941
>you include it because X led to that situation Y.
Absolutely!
Though so far, i've come up with the world i want for my book, and gone backwards, talking about what caused this and that to come into power, and sometimes it can be a little difficult
I mean, i feel as if my main reason for something happening is "someone attacked!"
Is this shitty?
>>7934917
Tectonic plates dictate land masses over a globe. Overlapping plates either push one under or shove up to create mountains. Glaciers and ice covered continents form at and near polar extremes due to extreme temperature and climate scenarios. Rivers form from mountains. Natural (or unnatural) climate alterations cause glaciers to carve lands and also form rivers. Vocanoes and molten vents create islands or alter mass. Plant life forms near rivers. Animal (don't forget bugs [such as atmosphere effects size]) life loves oxeygen Civilizations tend to form near rivers or where rivers meet oceans/lakes seas or simply originating near an ocean, sea, or large lake. Determine downfalls, conflicts, apocalypses and their opposites (whether natural happenstance or struggle/war/sacrificial) in order to form a small or large history for the world. It's at this point you can decide fictitious status of this world.
>>7934927
>>7934962
>>7935764
>>7935795
>>7936288
All these are great in conjuction with what I was meaning by conflicts and fictitious status. The real blood and guts of the world you built.
>>7936657
You can do. It's quite fun to start at the beginning of evolutionary time and do little sketches of life as it develops over time.
Skipping that, you can pick some features (for example, most Earth life has reflectional symmetry; two arms, two legs, divided by a spine), you can find some other features and see what variations you can come up with on them (for example rotational symmetry). Just play around with that. The drawings don't have to be good enough to show anyone, just so you have some idea what you're doing.
Obviously the intelligent life on that world would reflect the animal life, as we do ours.
Create a dwarf fortress world and look though legacy mode
>>7936703
I was about to suggest this. Maybe mess with the raws to to simulate interesting behaviour. I wonder how a world where no creature can see would work, for example.
>>7936384
In my setting I made Dwarves the descendants of ancient ayylians who set up a mining colony on the planet but were utterly destroyed by a civil war combined with an invasion from some nameless horror of the void of space.
Their mythology was irreligious in nature and contained an abstracted telling of these events. All of the caves that Dwarves lived in were just ancient mining shafts that had slowly been dug and eroded out into less regular shapes, so they talk of their ancient heroes being the ones who fell from the stars and using their mighty echoing hammers broke holes into the world, so they might have a place to find shade from the sweltering sun and shelter from the intrigues of the surface world's races.
I also made humanity a pathology. There were two original sentient surface races, a race of lizard men and a race of elves. The lizard men came from an arid steppe/desert and the elves lived in the jungles, the lizards developed civilization and the ideology of superiority above nature that comes with it, discovered the immortal elves living basically as animals and became confused and resentful as to how a race of savages could have what they did not.
They start enslaving the Elves and using sorcery/alchemy to experiment on them to discover the secret of immortality, but eventually the number of slaves gets out of hand, the Elves rebel, flee to the forest and build their own civilization. Immortality and civilization's protection from nature allows their population to grow unchecked and a rogue lizard scientist cracks the puzzle and creates a virus that causes the children of the infected Elves to be mortal.
The Elves figure out how to cure it but not before a lot of people are infected and have permanent genetic damage. They intermarry and create humans. Humans become the untouchable caste of Elven society due to their crude and mortal natures, as a result humans reproduce mostly with one another until their lifespans fall into the normal human range while the Elves, many of whom were rendered effectively sterile by the virus (consider an immortal race considering whether or not it would be moral to produce a non-immortal sentient child), remain immortal.
I have a few other intelligent monster races in the mix (namely bug people, minotaurs, dragons and trolls) but they're mostly peripheral and for flavor. Dwarves, Humans, Elves and Anu (the lizards) make up the core of the world area that I've developed. There are of course various subraces and cultures of these groups as well.
>>7936753
How can elves have children if they are immortal? Wouldn't the ecological balance get disturbed? Why am I posting on /tg/?
You can always just find a photo of a rusty surface and fuck about with it in photoshop.
>>7936773
It's pretty fun.
>tfw you setting isnt a world but a place
>>7936780
>tfw only circa 20% of your setting has ever been mentioned in your works or been written down at all
>>7936767
Elves CAN live forever. They are not immortal.
>>7936773
>>7936776
Awesome.
>>7936583
>>7936588
>>7936607
>>7936632
>originality
>the same old meaty Lovecraftian space creatures
Hey I liked the Mist too, but let's not replace our slightly shorter or slightly taller humans with pointy ears with the same shit over and over again.
>>7936929
Any creature that isn't the antanogist of a horror story should be very easy to imagine.
>>7936929
It's only the same shit to you because you're used to human faces. A slightly different human face (pointy ears) looks more different to you than two creatures with entirely different anatomies - you just file them away as "the same old meaty Lovecraftian space creatures" because you're unable to tell the difference.
>>7936851
Thanks. I made it a bit less shit for you. I can't remember how to do the atmospheric light diffusion properly though. I'm a bit rusty (get it?).
>>7936951
>It's only the same shit to you because you're used to human faces. A slightly different human face (pointy ears) looks more different to you than two creatures with entirely different anatomies - you just file them away as "the same old meaty Lovecraftian space creatures" because you're unable to tell the difference.
That's because I'm a human. As are you and will be all of your readers. I would suggest you tailor your art to human brains rather than the cosmological objective truth in which only a bunch of random pixels is the most original.
>>7936981
Oh please. It's not the shape of them that's important. Look at >>7936632 it's quite insectoid and spiderlike. But the book it's from, Embassytown (while quite poorly written in terms of story and prose) is an exploration of their language and psychology which is something entirely novel and interesting to try to wrap your brain around as they function so differently to humans. There's nothing Lovecraftian about it. These aren't unknowable cosmic entities, these are realistic, original, psychologically sound alien species. Even something as old as Niven's Puppeteers are more interesting than the mildly reworked elves and dwarves that you're suggesting. Yes, something like the Arieki or an Emperor Sea Strider might look "Lovecraftian" at first glance, but you're seeing them from a biased point of view, without the context of the works that they're from. If you read about them in a story, they wouldn't seem even remotely Lovecraftian.
>>7936981
Go directly to jail
>>7937003
Nice. What is that? Google says no.
>>7937015
dustmites i think
>>7935795
>Worldbuild with a purpose. What tone do you want your story to be? What *kind* of world do you want? Work to that; don't just aimlessly worldbuild.
That is very counter to what many people who endorse world building say. They'd insist that if you only world build to meet the demands of the story then it's very hollow and won't seem real to the reader. This is why you need to flesh out EVERYTHING from what kinds of foods they eat to who cleans the toilets.
>>7937046
alot of that shit can be improvd or moved in during editing
you're only getting in your own way by taking a topdown approach before at least getting your basic plot own
>>7936767
They lived as tribal savages, they killed each other during wars, were killed by the hazards of the jungle, but they simply never grew old. So I suppose I should have clarified it was biological immortality and not true immortality.
Once they became a civilized society these issues did come to light and were solved by the plague of humanity. The Elf/Lizard rivalry goes a bit deeper as well, as the Elves live in the jungles where it constantly rains while the Anu live in a desert and traditionally saw rains as a miraculous blessing from their goddess who lived in their equivalent of the Nile. Whenever it rained everyone would run outside with any container they had to collect as much rain water as possible to use for superstitious purposes, curing of illnesses, baptizing hatchlings, ect.
Then they encounter the Elves who get this blessing every day. I should add that the technological level of the Anu when they found the Elves was basically late iron age, plus magic and alchemy which made certain fields of study much more advanced. The era of the world that I use for pathfinder based adventures with my fellow neckbeards is late medieval during a relatively peaceful period. Elves are still dominant, but the Anu have reconciled their differences with them and engage in trade and the like. Humans are becoming more and more populous and are beginning to strike out and form colonies in uncharted lands to escape their place at the bottom of Elven society.
>>7936999
That's nice, but you say "original". The problem is make one of your species like that sure, make five of them like the four pictures you posted and they are not any more original than different breeds of pointy ears. By human standards three humanoid species one with fur and pointy teeth and one with blue scales and one with an extra pair of arms and big mustaches are more varied and interesting than three species that share their flesh and lack of human shape and odd geometric features and odd number limps and odd tentacles. Because we do define things in relation to us humans not an objective base shape.
>>7937046
Those people are full of shit. I mean what does worldbuilding like that create? Word documents and excel sheets? Is that the goal product?
>>7937075
An interesting world readers want to find out more about`?
>>7937083
characters > world
but admittedly they tend to go hand in hand
>>7937064
Nonsense, you could write a whole story about aliens with odd numbers of tentacles, provided they behave sufficiently differently to each other.
You're writing a book, not illustrating it. How different they are is in their behaviours, not their faces. Compare the earlier "redesign" of dwarves in this thread, making them Jews with a homeland (identical to gnomes in the Forbidden Realms world) to the Ariekei and the Puppeteers. They're both going to seem very different due to their psychologies, despite neither seeming anything like humans physiologically. Lovecraft sort of had the right idea, but he never actually gave his creations psychologies - just told us theirs were weird. I'm just saying that sticking with High Fantasy tropes is boring and never going to accomplish anything worth reading. It can and has been done better.
>>7937083
So an rpg setting then?
>>7937075
I met a guy who was boasting how he had notebooks full of history for his world and that he was building a Wiki to organize it all. When I asked him why he was bothering he said "you need your story to take place in a believable world." So I asked him about his story ... "I'm still trying to figure that out."
>>7937092
So you're saying when the way your species looks is just a sidenote they can be as crazy is you like? I wouldn't disagree with you here mate but you were posting pictures to illustrate your point and were defending how they "only look the same to me because I'd a dummy human".
>>7937099
There's nothing wrong with that.
If anything, all games should have rich lore, or at the very least a believable backdrop.
>>7937107
rip
at least he's primed to be a /tg/ fag
i dont know where people got to thinking good worlbuilding means you have a good story
>>7937112
I can see how the images would be misleading that way. The point is just to aspire to doing something new. Hell, if the Ariekei had been elves but behaved and thought the way they do that still would have been more interesting than any generic reworking of Tolkeinesque elves - but when we see an elf, we have a preconception of how they'll act. The image is tied to a set of tropes.
t b h you already messed up in using elves and dwarves, who really cares how you used them
might as well start off with its a dark and stormy night
>>7937127
The use of stock things is not necessarily the problem. Look at early modern theatre with its archetypes. It's how you use them that's important.
Also, who are you talking to?
>>7937138
Anonymous, but I get you.
>>7937126
>To get that, you'd have to consciously make the world interesting.
Well.. Yeah. Not to sound rude but isn't that sort of the challenge (and thus the fun) in worldbuilding? Making a believable and still awesome world?
>>7937150
Worm Ouroboros isnt really "believable" but still live as fuck
Honestly just go out and play it straight, I wouldn't care to much about making it "plausible" to people. What makes it authentic are the characters.
>>7937116
>i dont know where people got to thinking good worlbuilding means you have a good story
"Tolkien invented a language for his books!"
And of course more recently there's all the praise heaped on A Song of Ice and Fire for its worldbuilding, which means a character can't take a shit without the reader being assaulted by a wall of text about the epic history of the latrine they're using.
>>7937157
I just find it hard to enjoy if I keep noticing how shoddy the world the characters are in seems.
>>7937170
I can think thats valid for First Law since its basically a series of action movies pretending to be "epic fantasy"
He might as well have just made it a series of one-shots like he did after the trilogy to begin with
>>7937150
Plenty of people don't do it. They get caught up in the process of worldbuilding, and start adding things in purely because "well it's what would happen". Or worse -- they add things in because they feel like their world needs to have them. They don't consider that the world is as much a device as *anything* else, and you need to treat it like one. Have things happen because it aids the story, and while this should (generally) be something believable, it shouldn't be *just* believable. You should never build to build a world. You should never include stuff because you think it "fleshes it out". It doesn't. It pads it out, it's filler, it's the dry bread of the worldbuilding world and it's nothing any reader/player/viewer will care about.
>>7937170
I find it hard to get into shallow worlds. Shallow, because they've thought about the food, what they write with, how inheritance works -- but not how it plays together. It's just a facsimile of a world, a cargo-cult world. You've worked out all the bits you've been told to have in your world, without considering how the shitdicks it's meant to work together, or just what you're fucking doing to begin with.
What do you mean by shoddy?
>>7936121
got me
>>7934941
True. The only thing I can add is the difference between problems that are in the cards and problems of circumstance.
Game of Thrones has two good examples. The old problem is Viserys Targaryen not giving up his claim on the throne. A circumstancial problem is Robert Baratheon yanking Eddard Stark to King's Landing.
>>7937210
>What do you mean by shoddy?
Let's take the domination of Draka for example.
Alternate universe where fascist slave owning nietzschean colonists end up conquering the world. It starts out with the Cape Colony becoming very densely populated, and this little backwater colony then conquers all of Africa (The entire continent) without any kind of repercussions from the British empire, which it was still part of, and secedes the british empire without any repercussions, and then manages to industrialize an entire continent without any repercussions, while still being slave-owning pricks from the very beginning, without any repercussions. It ends up conquering the entire world.
I find that hard to believe.
>>7937344
lol that is bad
>>7937344
I don't see what this has to do with making a world with a specific aim/s in mind vs. just generally building. That's more just -- shitty writing. It's a shitty aim (let's make a Sue bad guy state, and let's not use it to make a point) and shitty execution (i.e. it's a Sue, and more to the point one you just reject out of hand rather than sympathise with or hate).
>>7937356
The author was also incredibly smug towards the understandable critics. I can't remember exactly how, though.
>>7937429
Just that I can't read stuff with bad worldbuilding is all. Making a point that willing suspension of disbelief only goes so far before you throw your hands up and put the book down.
Found the smug quote btw
"There’s a small internet industry of ‘proving’ that the Domination couldn’t happen. I consider this a complement [sic]. How many people go on at great length trying to prove that vampires and werewolves don’t exist?[4]"
t. Wikipedia
>>7936682
>(or unnatural) climate alterations
Coming to a fantashit novel near you
>>7936121
>>7936107
Top kek!
>tfw swedish policy was for a long time to escape the danish chokehold
And check this out. What does this remind you of?
>>7934927
I study archaeology too. If I decided to start some fantasy world, it would probably be inspired by the actual world view and the life of the people in the Bronze Age civilization before the so called Dark Age. It was such a comfy period. Different distant empires at their height trading a lot while the rest of the world remains largely undiscovered and forests, seas and mountains dangerous and untamed.
I would definitely set a part of the story in the lands where true civilization still didn't expand, equivalent to mainland Europe of that time.
But I dunno, maybe not. Late Medieval/early colonial seems good enough too, although that's out of my expertise.
>>7937502
Whatever you're going for, you're doing it poorly. Disregarding currently non-fictitious scenarios, there's always bio attack plagues, nuclear destruction, alien conquest, etc.
Grow up.
>>7936396
>It's actually targeted at people who criticize worldbuilding maps as being unrealistic and cliché, when in fact the real world is rife with these "unrealisms".
DESU, Europe has the most interesting geography of the world. Lots of inland seas, mountain ranges, penninsulas and large isles that makes everything more interesting.
>>7936107
my sides
>>7937689
Also the reason we're so awesome.
Thanks Diamond
>>7937107
that's pretty funny. I figure at best he'd probably end up doing some monomythic shit, provided he knows the first thing about the monomyth.
I don't have the patience to write a true novel so most of what I write in my world is short stories ranging from 5 to 15 pages, and those are generally kept private. But my world is mostly a reaction to D&D settings getting increasingly boring and races refined into hyper-tropes. There's nothing wrong with using Elves, Dwarves, ect. They're set pieces developed by ancient mythology refined into what we know now mostly by Tolkien.
Worldbuilding is highly overrated as a fantasy methodology to be honest. If I were to build a world for a fantasy story, I'd keep the 'built' portions of the world related directly to the events within the story and leave the rest a framework and nothing more. It allows you to build things out in new ways as you evolve as a person, the worst thing you could do would be to create the entire canon of your universe in one go and then just write stories from character perspectives about established canonical events ad infinitum.
>>7937502
Fuck you, my world is literally the bones of dead snakes.
Why do everyone's gay fantasy stories always take place over several continents? Why not just set things in a single town or valley or some shit?
Make your protagonist an idiot pig-farmer. It will be guaranteed loads more interesting than anything else.
ITT: http://www.theonion.com/article/novelist-has-whole-shitty-world-plotted-out-21193
>>7934917
I've been tweaking one for about a decade now. The more I studied the relevant subjects, the more it began to change and improve. I went from something that was basically just one big blob of a continent to one that was practically the same layout as our own planet. And it was all because the science behind it was pushing it that way.
So I would say the easiest thing to do is just to take parts of the existing world, deform them a bit, redraw the coasts a bit, flip them if rotate them if necessary, and then go for it. The more you try to deviate from what we already have, the less it looks possible.
>>7937971
>a whole article for someone to piss and moan about their own lack of imagination
>>7938010
>missing the point this badly
They're not annoyed that the hypothetical guy is creating a setting, they're annoyed that it takes precedence over literally everything else in the story and an inordinate amount of time and pages is devoted to irrelevant shit (most of which has been done before).
>>7937978
>about a decade now
Jesus Christ m8 write the damn novel
>>7937615
>almost two hours
>can't see that it looks like
Really?
>>7938032
I'm not a good writer, I do it as a hobby.
Maybe the most important thing about world-building isn't an encyclopaedic approach, but instead a method where you actually write a novel. You could always briefly establish the rules of the setting and some basic geography, and then as you develop your writing check everything is plausible. It strikes me as a bit limiting and irrelevant to toil over every detail before you put pen to paper
>>7938065
I agree. Normally the planning stage should just include a list of Dramatis Personae, a brief gross outline of the plot, rules for any setting devices (if relevant) and what your book is about 2bh with you boku no kazoku.
>>7938065
Yeah, but if you don't have at least some firm grip on the world you're writing in, you'll end up with some prick called Azream being from a Celt-like nation called Golnia, and then you end up buried under mismatching nonsense names. Who the fuck cares about Sinishera when they can't even remember what character that is out of the dozens of other stupidly named sods?
The amount of fantasy stories I find where they've just got a bunch of stupid names from a random generator that don't fit is unbelievable. I think that's why G.R.R Martin did so well, since he just took all the existing names and just changed a letter. It made it just different enough to feel like fantasy, but similar enough for people to understand easily.
just leaving this creature design tutorial here for you guys
>>7937694
All hail the Eurasian east-west geographical axis.
Also this>>7937615: It's the baltic region. The region is called The Three Seas. The Baltic Sea can be divided into 3-4 regions.
Baltic Sea
Gulf of Finland
Gulf of Bothina + Sea of Bothnia
The Nron and Ciron islands are equivalents to Åland, Gotland and Öland.
>>7937969
This. I started out flexing my writing muscles by writing fantasy. My characters would travel over whole continents, hey would hail from different cities, stated, I wrote a thousand kingdoms.
But the more I write and read, the less I wanted to stretch my story over a whole world. An entire world became one continent, then one nation, then one refion, then one.city, then one potion within that city. A thousand characters from the ever-present arabian-like thief character that speaks about himelf in the third person, to Gor'zogg the destroyer, to the knights and so on, the number of characters in the story lessened and as a result, the few characters that remained became more interesting, detailed, fleshed out.
Basically the more I wrote, the less sheer volume there was. At the beginning I could fit a whole trip from town to town +an epic battle in one page. Now I barely seem to finish the introductory dialogue piece.
>>7937969
assistant pig-keeper has already been done.
it is a beloved classic.
>>7938036
writing is a learned skill. if you devote the time, you could become at least a decent writer (if not more)
>>7938106
This was cool. Thanks
>>7938106
Jesus fuck, try describing that thing in the end in one small paragraph.
>>7935005
You're an idiot.
>>7937971
I did recognize some of my thoughts when I was younger in this. Feels good to grow out of it.
>>7938080
I still think the house names are genuinely impressive. They do sound like you'd imagine medieval names would sound like, Lannister and Tyrrel and all. Stark and Targaryen excepted; those are bullshit.
>>7937969
Most small fantasy stories take place in one location. I've written one in a city, one that goes between a town and a city, and another that's a journey from a taiga town to the tundra.
But epic fantasy stories inherently require a larger setting, mostly because the forces at work would deal with a more global agenda. A threat to the world is pointless if it's just concerned with a tiny sliver of it that the only person capable of defeating them happens to be in.
It's why Harry Potter never made any sense, with Voldemort focusing on taking over Britain and hiding all his horcruxes there. He should have been taking over the weaker countries to form an army and hidden his shit all over the place. Fuck it, he could put it on the moon. But no, he messed around with a single island and got his shit wrecked for it.
>>7936929
>Because they look messed up they are the same lovecraftian stuff over again
>>7940050
Even those were just stolen from history.
Lannister is based on Lancaster, and Stark is based on York. Tyrell is probably from Tudor. Even Targaryen isn't as weird as houses like Plantagenet were. All he needed to do was look up historical royal houses, tweak a few letters, follow the same logic, and end up with an entire list of options.
How about this, guys
I'll put the frozen areas in the SOUTH and the hot tropical jungles in the NORTH
Nobody ever seems to do that, so why not?
>>7940330
The problem being subverting the already existing associations in people's minds. An Australian or Argentinian might be able to pull it off, but if you're from the northern hemisphere, north is associated with cold, and south with hot. It's the same with east and west.
>>7940340
Alright, but what would be the problem in writing a novel where the south is cold and north is hot?
It's supposed to feel unusual, isn't it?
>>7940327
Stark comes from Tony Stark you dumb fuck. Tyrell sounds nothing like Tudor. The problem with Targaryen is that it doesn't sound like any real house, or like any of the other houses (although this is probably intentional, given their background).
The fact they sound like real houses is the whole point.
>>7940330
Why not, sure, but why do it, either?
>>7940356
Lad, GoT is literally just a war of the roses fanfic.
>>7940361
Okay.
>>7940353
The more unusual it feels, the more unbelievable and engaging it becomes. You end up with your readers being pulled out of their immersion because you wanted a story where rain goes upwards instead of down. It's Warcraft level fantasy.
>>7940356
So angry for no reason. Stark came from York. Lannister came from Lancaster. Tyrell was probably from Tudor. Targaryen is as weird as Plantagenet. You don't need to cry about it.
>>7940365
You're literally comparing a different placing of the continents with rain going up
>>7940368
Except it doesn't. And if it did, it wouldn't be a problem.
>>7940371
I'm literally telling you that readers have pre-existing associations, and deviating from them for no reason makes work look shit.
>>7940376
And how about this
the story takes place only in the hot norths, and the cold south is only mentioned in passing
that way the reader will know the south is cold, without being fully subjected to it
>>7940381
And why is the north hot and the south cold? If your answer is 'to be different', then you're doing it wrong.
>>7940384
because they are the center of the story, and i wanted the center of the story to be tropical
>>7940384
>not fighting cultural imperialism
>>7940356
Where did you get the idea that Stark comes from Tony Stark...
>>7940384
??
The north and the south have the same temperature you dumbass. However 67.29 percent of land surface area is on the northern hemisphere, and northern continents go up much further north than southern continents go south.
