How do I into worldbuilding?
I have very little experience with /tg/-related stuff, although I've played a couple tabletop games.
I've got a couple ideas- how do I go about making them interesting and detailed? What should I focus on? What should I avoid, especially in terms of cliches?
Pic unrelated.
bump
Is this place really 99% cyoa/quest threads? Goddamn.
>>44418296
You entered that strange period of time where the Americans are going to bed and the Europeans are threatening to destroy the sun.
The first step of worldbuilding is to read goddamn everything.
It's easy to take a statement and say you're going to make a world around it.
>This setting has the desert tribes of religious fanatics, serving as the smugglers, assassins, and go-betweens for the forest, mountain, and sea kingdoms.
This is alright to start with, but you need detail and stuff to make it come alive. To get that detail and stuff, you get out there and read something about just about anything you find interesting. Take that information, file the serial numbers off of it, and try to arrange that in an interesting fashion.
Here, you say the desert religious people are like Mormons, which implies a religion they're an offshoot from, perhaps from the Forest area. You're studying maps and stuff to realize that deserts and forests don't belong RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER, so you add some plains in the correct areas and maybe some mountains. Reading about rivers reminds you of Lewis and Clark, which reminds you of River Trading along the Mississippi, which isn't cool enough, so you think of the Amazon. The Amazon affects the sea people, and you heard one time that the largest freshwater island on Earth is a place called Marajo, right off the coast of Brazil, and it's a freshwater island because the outflow of the Amazon is that fucking great. This implies a nice place for the Sea People, then something something Pirates to go with all this trade...
And soon, you're connecting dots and making a whole setting. But the first step is knowing or reading up on a lot of shit so you have dots to connect. Come up with rules for the setting based on things you researched, and the setting will come out more naturally than just a bunch of arbitrary notes.
>>44418945
Yeah, probably wasn't the best time to post.
>>44419005
Thanks for the advice, dude.
>>44419043
You're welcome. I've got some PDFs that might be interesting, if you'd like.
>>44419155
Oh damn, I've been here for years but didn't know you could upload PDFs. Is that a /tg/ thing?
Yeah, I'd love to see them. Got a link?
>>44419155
A note on cliches: Don't get worried about them. If you want to worry about them, go to TVTropes. You're gonna find that if you're too worried about them you're just giving yourself a brand of organized autism and whoever you intend to present this world to probably won't care as much about what you did as you do. Just do whatever sounds like a good idea at the time, man.
>>44419199
Yep. This and die-rolling are what sets /tg/ apart. Click on the picture and you'll get the PDF.
Not gonna lie, I suck at making names. This thing has to be the most used DMing and world building tool I have.
This one is probably decent too.
On the topic of reading goddamn everything, there's a reason why /tg/ is full of people who know random crap for no reason.
Here's a collection of random crap /tg/ knows.
>>44418030
>I've got a couple ideas- how do I go about making them interesting and detailed?
What I like to do, is go through a "worldstorming" phase at the beginning:
Get a large sheet of paper and some pencils (for a map), and one or two notebooks (for notes :^)), and just draw/write down everything that pops into your head as "I should totally have this", or "if I have that I should have this too". Don't worry too much about inconsistencies or the very fine details of how those things interact, that's not what this phase is about. It's about building a large portfolio of material that you can build on, expand, improve, and alter later. My first setting, I started with basically a generic DnD fantasy world with my own personal twist, and eight years later I have a complex, nuanced setting with hundreds of pages of written material that's totally my own, and I think it's really wicked cool. You don't have to be as autistic as that, but you get the general idea.
Essentially, get the rough outlines out of the way very quickly, refining comes later.
>What should I focus on?
What you think needs to be the most detailed right away. If the game is set in the far-flung colony of a powerful Old-World empire, you don't immediately need an urban layout of the Imperial Capital. Prioritize what is important for understanding the part of the world your players begin in and the level of detail they'll interact with different aspects of the world. If they spend their time plundering ancient temples, you need a broad map of the countryside. But if they're solving a mystery in the city and only go outside it to very specific locations, you really only need decent maps of those places to start with.
>What should I avoid, especially in terms of cliches?
Just find which cliches you like and which you don't, avoid the ones you don't.
Personally, I dislike evil races, half-breeds, and the existence of one single "common" language, so I just don't put them in my settings.
I think I'm out of purely worldbuilding PDFs you might find useful. Here's the Homeworld manual, first because it's a great example of worldbuilding, and second because it's just ballin' as shit.
>>44419702
>and eight years later I have a complex, nuanced setting with hundreds of pages of written material that's totally my own
That sounds awesome.
>>44419764
Thanks a lot for the dump, man. This stuff is rad.
>>44419815
You're welcome, man. Check out >>44410592 and other PDF share threads. There's almost always some worldbuilding PDFs dropped in there, especially if you wanted to know all about medieval economics and such.
Personally I build world's very piecemeal, sometimes swapping between two or three and sharing ideas between them.
Best thing? Don't focus on numbers too much. There is no need to list how many goblins live in a burrow, that's the kind of stuff you can make up in an instant while GMing
>>44419815
>That sounds awesome
Well, thank you. It may be the worst shit ever put to writing, but it's mine and I love it.
>>44419427
Gotta say, this is a good book. I like the chapter on map-making especially.
>>44418030
Also, OP. Read "The New World" articles here:
http://www.giantitp.com/Gaming.html
It never got finished, but it's still worth reading.
>>44418030
Is this thread dead?
I might have some ideas to share regarding worldbuilding (it's something I have been preoccupied for many years nowdays), but I'm not sure if there is any point in dumping text if the thread is all but dead at this point...
>>44422800
Lurking. plz dump
>>44422816
OK. You OP?
One thing that I was surprised to see here is that nobody seemed to have mentioned the commonly very first "problem" that is related to world-building, the top-down vs. bottom-up approach to design. Maybe it's mentioned in some of the PDFs, I haven't read all of them.
You familiar with the concept - bottom up vs. top-down?
Oh yeah, and fucking props to whoever posted >>44419764 - the manual to Homeworld is actually one of the best cases of worldbuilding I've seen in gaming history, amazing stuff, even more amazing considering it's literally just a fluff text that most people never even have read.
>>44422816
I'm not OP, but I would like to learn more. I'm not familiar with the bottom up vs top down desu
>>44422868
OK. I'm gonna start a bit broadly, with a bit of dry theory.
So essentially, any world building enterprise can be divided into to parts: "WHAT" - that is the actual description of the settings, and "WHY", which is the internal logic, the "ruleset" that governs the world. It might be in it's history, in it's mythology and metaphysics, or in some kind of symbolism that you utilize - anything that gives order and explanations to why the things in your world are the way they are.
There should always be at least SOME "WHY" to your settings. It's what provides the setting actual depth, and in the long run, it's the why, rather than what, that your audience will want to explore. You can amuse people with descriptions of fantastic places for a limited time, but you can amuse them for hundreds of hours by letting them explore how and where did those fantastic places come to being.
We are also hardwired to enjoy solving puzzles and finding patterns so again: people will actually grow more invested in your settings if they can start to see some kind of pattern, some kind of inner logic to what you present to them. It's what I call the Halo effect: Halo's world building is actually pretty awful, but it's incredibly popular exactly because it has inner logic that people already learned - and that makes it incomparably more appealing to them.
So, the bottom up and the top down design is basically the difference between giving priority to the WHAT or to the WHY. Alternatively, it can be described as the amount of emergence you utilize in your world building. Alternatively alternatively, it's the difference between synchronic and diachronic method, if you ever heard about those. If this does not make much sense to you, don't worry. I'll get to more practical explanation in the next post.
>>44422935
So - top down and bottom up (I've noticed in one of the PDF's this is called "inside out and outside in", but I suspect they mean the same thing).
In practice, the extremes of the two attitudes are as follows: In top-down approach, you focus on the what first, and only when you are done with it, you start retroactively answering the "why" in a way that justifies the already existing "what". To put it eve more simply:
You have a vision of your world, often very detailed one, and only once you have everything laid out, you start to come up with logic that would justify the already existing world. For an example:
You might dream up a world where there is no planet, and everything is on flying islands, which are actually floating bodies of dead gods, and people who are on rough medieval level of technology travel between them on huge airships or fly at the backs of hippogryphs. Once you have that figured out, you start to ask: OK, so what might be the reason that the gods died, and why do their bodies float? How come people can build airships but still wear medieval clothes and use swords?
In the bottom up approach, you do the opposite, you start asking the fundamental "why's" and then see speculate, based on those "why's", what kind of world would that lead to.
So in regards to the above mentioned idea, you start by defining metaphysical laws regarding gods, their morality or immortality, physical laws, emergence of technologies.
You might, for an example, say: in my world, there are no planets and physical laws (such as gravity) are actually replaced by metaphysics - magical principles that were established by the Divine Creators. Gods are physical beings in this world, and they are mortal: they might die if enough acts of heresy towards their beliefs are commited. But bodies of gods aren't subjected to gravity because they were created before the magical rule that "thigs fall down" were formulated by the Divine Creator. (cont.)
>>44423045
Now, with these rules laid out, you actually just let the world's logic "do it's thing" and see where it will lead you. So god's are physical being, mortal, and not subjected to gravity. What happens to them when one of them dies? Well, logically, his body will stay afloat. And if that happens several time, by the logic you have laid out for yourself, this would result in world where giant bodies float in the air.
So the difference is:
>In top-down, you have an idea of what the world looks like, and you retroactively figure out the reason why it looks like it looks.
>And in bottom-up, you don't have an idea of what the world will look like, but you have idea of how it should work, and you let it's actual appearance EMERGE from the logic of it.
Of course, the reality is that you almost NEVER use one approach exclusively. You use both. But it's important to know at every point which one you are using right now: which elements are there because top-down logic (something "Cool" you just want to have in your world, even if it contradicts the logic of the world), and when you should apply the bottom-down to give things more depth, or to let details emerge on their own. It's important to know which one you want to use MORE, because ultimately, while both will be present, one will dictated the TONE of your settings.
I think having this distinction on mind at every point, knowing what is the forming principles of each details, makes the major bulk difference between good and poor world building. Bottom-up approach is good for giving your world depth and consistency, while top-down is good for adding "rule of the cool" stuff.
So, any of this seem useful, or is it just a bunch of pretentious gibberish? Anyone even reading it?
>>44423106
I'm reading it. And I'll probably screencap it for future anons if you don't mind, considering it's really quite helpful. Thanks! Now Imma die for eight hours.
>>44423125
>And I'll probably screencap it for future anons if you don't mind, considering it's really quite helpful.
Sure, that would be ideal.
I actually have quite a lot of other stuff and ideas about world building (there are some entirely alternative ways too look at world building, particularly the narrative perspective) and ton of smaller assorted ideas, but I guess this is quite enough for now.
If there as anyone now, or anyone who stumbles on this thread later on and is interested though, just let me know: I'll be happy to share whatever thoughts I have on the subject.
>>44423106
I just realized one more thing I should have said - examples of how this affects the "feeling" of individual fictional worlds on real world and known cases.
So, I think a good example of a world that is predominantly bottom up (or at least aims to have "bottom up feel") would be:
>Game of Thrones
>All hard and most hard-ish sci-fi, including the Homeworld Manual example somebody provided
>Some Japanese space opera (Legends of Galactic Heros, Crest/Battleflag series)
> Movie examples: Blade Runner, Children of Man (movie, not the book), Ghost in the Shell (movie, not the manga), District 9...
Examples of strongly top-down worldbuilding would be:
>Planescape settings
>Most superhero comics settings
>Majority of japanese fantasy (right now I can think of only game and anime examples, such as Final Fantasy, Sceptra Core, Haibane Renmei)
>Some Japanese space opera (Battle Cruiser Yamato, Galaxy Express)
And I'd argue also
>Shadowrun (but feel free to argue that one, since I'm actually not all that familiar with it)
GOOD examples of both principles ballanced:
>Most of Tolkiens work
>The Elder Scroll Universe
>Divine Divinity settings
BAD examples of combination of both, done without enough forethought:
>Forgotten Realms
>Dragon Age world
And once again arguable,
>The Witcher universe (I like the witcher, but I don't think either the books or the games have good WORLDBUILDING) to them.
>>44423255
Oh yeah, and in the ballanced category, I'd also include
>Dune world.
>>44419324
Clichés are actually very useful tools to work with.
They are extremely recognisable, which makes them easy for your players or readers to go along with. Saving the xandarstas plane from the clutches of the mindless elder startdustelemental will be harder to get across than saving the kingdom from a dragon. It's the same kind of adventure though.
Clichés are only boring when your players have experienced them too much.
That's when you just add a little twist: the dragon you are fighting is young welp without a mother, desperately trying to find a female role model in the princes he was kidnapped.
You can even just stick more clichés together in unexpected ways: The dragon-cliché + The druid protects animals-Cliché = a feral dragon terrorising a kingdom protected by druids who believe the humans are harming this majestic creature.
Wait, we were talking about world-building, not storytelling... Well, the idea still applies.
>>44423342
>Clichés are actually very useful tools to work with.
I strongly disagree. So might argue this is merely a semantic distinction, but I genuinely believe it's more than that:
There is a difference between cliché, trope, and an archetype. Clichés are always bad - tropes are never good, though not always necessarily bad, and archetypes, archetypes are something that can be incredibly beneficial to your fiction.
The difference is partially contextual, and many people (most, in fact) will have problems telling one from another. After all, most tropes and clichés were archetypes originally. I even believe one concept can be a working archetype in one fiction and a terrible cliché in another.
The difference I think lies in two elements:
>A) relevance.
Clichés and tropes exist regardless of their actual relevance to the rest of the fiction. Orks, for an example, are a functional and quite great archetype in Tolkiens fiction, because their one-sided nature fits the epic and metaphysical nature of the entire settings. Orks and their presence is relevant to the entire story - the story could not work without them, in fact.
But they are a trope and nothing more than a trope in Forgotten Realms, and an awful cliché in most homebrewn fantasy settings.
>B) actual meanigfulnes
Again a good example is Tolkien, this time with Dragons. Now, the way Tolkien uses dragons is meaningful - they represent a RELEVANT concept for humans (psychologist called Jordan Peterson has a wonderful explanation of Hobbit from a psychological perspective). They represent simple an incredibly formidable problem, the thing that stands between you and happiness or sense of real achievement.
In many later fantasy, dragons lost that actual role. They became just "another thing" populating the world. They lost their meaning (ultimate obstacle), and became tropes, and clichés even.
Keep in mind though, I really like to overthink things.
>>44423414
>this is merely a semantic distinction
I believe this is the case here, since I have not yet thought about the distinction between clichés, tropes and archetypes (English isn't my native language so nuances of words like these are still lost on me sometimes).
Also, I feel like the most clear distinction you make is the way these clichtropytypes are implemented in a setting. They are of the same nature, but they become good archetypes or bad clichés based on the way they fit in the setting, am I right?
That's why I'll restate: Clichés (without the distinction from archetypes) are useful tools. But a good tool does not guarantee a good result, the way you handle these tools does.
So yeah, you are right, but it's a semantic thing to me.
I'm an arts-student and a teacher once preached that an artist must always fight against clichés and be 100% original. Which is of course absolute bullshit to me.
>Keep in mind though, I really like to overthink things.
Who doesn't?
>>44423484
>I'm an arts-student and a teacher once preached that an artist must always fight against clichés and be 100% original.
Dear God, I'd take an edition of Eco's "Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale" and beat that teacher to death with it.
That's just awful. Seriously, from an art teacher in particular that is awful.
I think the distinction is not really semantical, but actually semiotical. But again, language is a tricky thing, especially if we discuss concepts in languages that are not native to us (I'm not a native speaker either, by the way).
I was trying to make two points there - one is the one on which we definitely agree: the fact that certain concept is well establish and appears frequently within the fiction does not mean it's bad. In fact, it can be on the contrary.
The other is that a further distinction can be drawn, and that there is a tangible (albeit difficult to define) system by which you can tell a "good" cliché from a "bad" one.
>>44423106
Pretty spot on anon
>>44425370
Thanks, although reading it now again makes me think it's still overtly reductionalistic and rather confusingly put together.
There is an entire, completely different way to look on the world building process that makes many of the points moot or irrelevant, but I've typed quite enough for one thread, I think.
>>44418296
Yup. Also, dime-a-dozen fetish threads are A-OK while a civil, constructive, and on-topic discussion of sex and gender within the context of roleplaying games will get 404'd ASAP. Dank 40k memes which have been around since the nazimod days are cool as well, gotta have some variety.
Once in a while /tg/ still gets an actually decent thread resulting in OC being produced, but by and large it's better to stick to the generals and/or liberally filter everything. /tg/ was never good but nowadays it's officially shit. Cheers.
>>44422834
>>44422935
>>44423045
>>44423106
>>44423255
Went to bed, woke up to find my thread not only still alive, but filled with really thoughtful advice.
You guys are pretty cool.
>>44426193
One of the advantages of /tg/ is that threads live for reasonably long time, and can accumulate a lot of stuff in the process.
I wrote all of that, by the way, so if there is anything that you don't understand/disagree with/find confusing/want to know more about, feel free to ask, I'll be sticking around for a while more.
I don't think I'm actually any kind of authority on the subject matter though - these are really just thoughts I've been collecting for a while.
>>44426220
No, I think it's actually pretty interesting, and puts to words a lot of what I've been thinking.
If you've got any other ideas (and it seems like you do), I'd love to hear them.
Wish I had more to contribute to the thread, to be honest.
>>44426788
>If you've got any other ideas (and it seems like you do), I'd love to hear them.
OK, so there is I guess one more thing I wanted to mention, as far as "worldbuilding theory" goes. And that is the one that largely renders top-down and bottom-up logic irrelevant if you subscribe to it:
The narrative approach to world building.
Simply put, there the theory is that it does not matter how you approach the particularities, as long as you remember that you are ALWAYS DOING IT TO TELL A STORY. And that applies even when you don't think of what you are doing as storytelling: even when you are jotting down details on the particular embroidery patters of a particular ethnic groups (been there, actually): You are still creating some form of a narrative - even if you are telling story through seemingly disjointed bunch of details.
So from a narrative theory perspective, when you make a world, the number one question you should CONSTANTLY ask yourself is:
>"What does it tell me?"
Alternative formulations can include "What do I mean by this?", "What is the message here?" or my favorite "Why would anyone care about this shit?"
The fun thing here is that when you think hard enough, you'll discover that the answer is almost never "Nothing" or "No reason". Even the fucking embroidery can and in a way inevitably will tell a story.
To put what I've wrote earlier into context: Bottom-up approach would be, "A story about how small things work.", while a top-down approach would be "A story about how things are." but in both cases, the emphasis is on the purpose of the exercise: storytelling. Odd, disjointed, chaotic as world building materials inevitably end up, but all the pieces together still add up to each other, they still tell the audience something.
The point of this way of looking at worldbuilding really is to help people keep some kind of a frame to their work, and perhaps more importantly, it helps giving the work a sense of meaning. (Cont in a few mins.)
>>44427017
To illustrate this, I'm gonna offer something I already shared in a thread a while ago and people seemed to remember it for a while: a way I tackled the naming conventions when it came to names of geographical locations.
In my current world building project, I named parts of the landmass after body parts of a bull - there are "Spine", "Ribs", and "Teeth" mountains, "Horn" peninsula, lowlands called "Veins", "Guts", "Neck" and "Gullet", and the entire region is separated into larger areas called "Head", "Body", "Belly", "Guts" etc...
The reason why I decided to name them like that is because I wanted the names to be part of a story - in this case a story about how the oldest explorers of the world believed in a myth in which all landmass was formed during a sacrifice of a great divine Bull - a tradition which itself is a story of how these predominantly cattle-driving nomads rationalized their lifestyle (the divine sacrifice of a bull is a mirroring their own daily "sacrifices" of bulls they butcher for survival).
For those who might be familiar with the game, I'll freely admit that I "inspired" myself (Ripped off wholesome) this idea from a game named Pathologic.
The point here being: it can be very useful to stop yourself and ask: "Why am I making up things that I'm making up here?" The nice thing about this way of looking at world building is that it always helps to give things meaning.
One thing I cannot stress out here though is this:
>There is no such thing as an element of worldbuilding that DOES NOT TELL A STORY!
Things that you put into your world will be viewed and interpreted as story elements even if you never intended for them to be such. The issue is in keeping control, and being conscious of the stories are (intentionally or unintentionally) telling.
Even a seemingly completely random element that has no bearing on anything else in the world will tell a story, but the story might be "I did not give much fucks when thinking this up".
worldbuilding is a very strange thing.
it's not writing a story, as that requires characters and a plot. It's almost like writing fiction history, and the best worldbuilders usually understand history well. I'm not a historian but the advice I can give you is to keep everything at its heart, simple.
One core issue I find with worldbuilders is that they imagine events, not worlds. For instance, a mighty battle atop a mountain between two mighty kinds. They builder will continue to describe the two kings, their nations, their army's, and their motives, but this isn't always the best way to go about things. I can't give any real advice on what you should focus on as everything varies massively given scenario, but here's a solid bit of advice I've had passed onto me:
Wikipedia. Wikipedia, or a historical text, are excellent tools for world building. For instance, for that battle I mentioned, so go on the wikipedia page for the battle of Waterloo, and look at all the subheadings. This is what you should write about, the specific things that actual historians (albeit on Wikipedia) focus on. Don't get wrapped up in flags, special swords, or if their is magic, the specifics of it. Focus on what would be fact, and weave what isn't into it as best as you can.
I agree with advice anon.
Two things to remember:
Perfection is not achieved when there no more to, but when there is -also- no more to take away.
No project is ever completed, only closed.
>>44422800
ITS THE HAT WIZARD FROM ASPERGISTAN!
>>44427864
"no more to add"
Fuck, I hate phones
can we /shortstories/ please? I always get chased off /lit/, and it's not like there's anywhere else I can post my musings.
Posted this a few weeks ago, not had time to add much else.
>>44423045
>>44423106
It seems to me that the terms "top down" and "bottom up" should be switched.
"Top" really implies more of the metaphysics of the world, creation myths, gods, procession of the heavens, ancient history, etc., and "bottom" feels more like "the situation on the ground", how people live their lives and go about their business.
Unless you're trying to imply that the more immediately relevant things that are actively going in in the world is "top" because it's more important, but that is more of a hyper-pragmatist approach, i.e. that the only things that really matter are what the players need to know. I'm not sure that I would agree with that in absolute.
Like I said here >>44419702 , you may want to prioritize those immediately relevant details for gameplay purposes, but I'm not sure they're inherently more important.
I've always advocated a "middle out" approach: get the broad details of everything very quickly, and then begin "moving out". Like, I might say "I want Orcs to engage in Hellenic-esque contractual demon worship", and then I would figure out both how that came about and what it's practical implications are simultaneously. "Oh, maybe they inherited the worship when they deposed the Tiefling empire, but changed it form an organized religion to 'yo I give you sacrifice you give me strength in battle sound fair?', and maybe their religious caste are a mix of shamans and lawyers who can spot and iron out loopholes in runic arraignments.
>>44427017
>narrative approach
I suppose also this to some extent
>"what do I mean by this?"
That'd be the /tv/ approach
>>44429425
>It seems to me that the terms "top down" and "bottom up" should be switched.
I'm not the one who invented the terminology (I'm pretty sure Tolkien himself already used it). The logic is that the "bottom" is the foundations (which, as logic has it, generally tends to be down) - the "founding" or "anchoring" principles of your settings. From these most FUNDAMENTAL (see how it works) principles, you go up to more concrete and superficial stuff, untill you reach at the very top - chaotic cluster of what the world really is. I think a tree or house analogy is really appropriate here.
Basically, considering the emergent assets - in bottom-up logic you put the seeds (the core rules or principles) into a ground, a watch how the whole tree emerges from the ground. While with the top-down, you look at the tree-tops and try to figure out what the undeground part of the plant looks like.
>>44427815
Although, if you get deep into mythopoesis (writing the stories that people in the world would tell, rather than just the story of the world itself), epics and war poems about powerful kings and legendary swords clashing are completely appropriate. And that kind of thing can really give your world life.
In line with this, adding some uncertainty to the history is a nice touch. As the story spreads, different people will hear different versions of it, possibly alter it to push their viewpoint, have different perspectives on it, or just be missing large amounts of information. This is one of the few things I think ASoIaF does extraordinarily well in: whenever a big event happens, it takes several weeks for the news to spread, and even then people argue over the details and add in stupidly untrue things based on hearsay and lack of a complete picture. We only know the "truth", and even that heavily shaded because the characters are partially unreliable narrators, because we actually watched it happen.
>>44430007
Mm, okay, we're just thinking about it differently. I'm looking at it like the gods and other fundamental beings are "on top" (sometimes literally sometimes not), and what actually goes on day to day is on the bottom, physically lower to the earth (again, not necessarily literally)
>>44430120
>In line with this, adding some uncertainty to the history is a nice touch.
This is why I personally prefer to bottom-up approach to design - it encourages one (I think) to think about history as a series of causal events and free's one to play with the perception and interpretation of said events later down the line. It's not impossible to think of such things as historical ambiguities and uncertainity in a top-down approach, but I find it a lot harder, as in a top-down approach, one starts with a rather concrete idea of how things are. In the bottom-up, various possible interpretations of history are just another causal step you make as you follow the "history-making-process" - if that makes any sense.
I've recently being trying to get into a habit of writing "snippets" or "postcards" or "traveler's diaries" from my world. The idea is to take some kind of inconsequential moment - a random day of a random month in some random place - from major city to completely forgotten village, and then just jot down the immediate impressions a random, inconsequential person could have that very moment on that specific place.
There is no story to them, but the point of the exercise is to force myself think more closely about the "mundane" details of the settings. Things like "what do the houses look like?" "where do they wash their clothes?" "What makes them laugh, or despair?".
One of the reason why I like some of the Japanese world builders (Miyazaki, Abe, Ashinano) is because they have these kinds of details all nailed down.
>>44427943
I'm not the best one to judge, as english is not my native language. Seems waaay too short to judge on, though. Some wordings seem a bit awkward, but nothing that could not be ironed out, but there is just too little to go off. I'm wondering if you aren't wasting a little too much time focusing on "what might sound rude" within the core dialogue. In general, I think the core dialogue needs to be a bit snappier.
>>44419005
This guy really hit it on the head. One of the most useful ways to come up with history for a fictional country is to look up history on Wikipedia, find a country that has no relation to the culture on which the fictional country is based, and then steal it. Then, for neighboring countries, find bits of history from other countries that do not neighbor the country whose history you stole--and, again, are not related to the culture on which the relevant fictional countries are based--and fit them in so that the region's history is contiguous.
Now, one of the most important steps is iteration. Stealing large chunks of history and detail is fine for your broad-strokes worldbuilding, but you're probably going to want relevant recent history. So, after you have everything worked out, rewrite it. Use a different organizational schema, try rewording everything, whatever. Just rewrite it. Expound on details that were previously just summarized without looking at outside sources, just making up details and narratives. Fill in the gaps.
Keep doing this. Cut long passages where you added in details in previous steps, but let their changes continue to influence other parts--or else reference them in other sections. Expand more details. Cut unnecessary details. Refill in places that you cut. Emphasize different parts of the histories.
Iterate enough times, and you'll move further and further towards something completely your own, but rooted in factual history. You might have started with a Slavic city-state historically based on Renaissance Florence adjacent to a Russo-Asian nation historically based on the Holy Roman Empire, which is itself bordered by a more Mongolian-inspired kingdom historically based on Scotland, but what you end up with might bear only passing resemblance to any of those elements.
