#worldbuilding advice

[whereserpentswalk]

Hey, young worldbuilders. Here's three peices of advice.

- there is a difference between a speculative fiction element in your world that couldn't exist in real life, and something not making logical sense. Think of it like the faerie and walrus thing, your world should have a minimal amount of walrus moments.

- it's 100% fine to not know things about your world. It's better to have a world that has unexplained elements then a world that's empty because you only put things in you should know something about. If you're filling out a map there should probably be a few countries you know very little on, trust me.

- scale is important in keeping your setting grounded. An entire planet can have multiple civilizations, and a thousand years is a lot longer than you think. With timescale specifically compare it to the real world timescales. Trust me.

[thecrazyworldbuilder]

How to worldbuild:

1: Don't try to do everything at once. Better define a setting by what cannot happen in it rather than what can. A world without tech more advanced than an Archimedes screw water pump is already more defined than a world where all animals can be hybridized.

2: Make things internally realistic, not externally. Unicorns and fairies don't exist in real life, but in your setting? They better be credible.

3: Continuity and consistency. If you put "but" into statements too many times, the picture of the world will be full of exceptions and broken rules, which raises the question - why are they (the rules) there in the first place if they are broken in the next sentence? Put things simply, even the most complex concepts can be explained through metaphors.

4: Reference yourself. Once you've wrote something, attach it to something you wrote previously. Relationships between kingdoms, the effect of this specific material on the economy and technology, why don't mages just hypnotize the monarchs and bind their will and so on.

5: Have fun :D

And lastly, remember that one and the same world will look different from different narratives. A farmer from Ancient Greece will see the world one way, a modern Twitch streamer - in an other way, a shrimp or pillbug will have a completely different worldview too but they all live on the same planet. So narrative matters.

[redd956]

Need to make a last minute fantasy city/town?

I got just the trick for you. Exaggerate a city you’re already familiar with. A hometown? Capital? Friend’s town? Exaggerate it with fantastical elements and maybe even inside jokes. Not too long needs to pass before you got a convincing fantasy city.

A small rural town known for its flowers? A secluded village swallowed by giant boughs of wildflowers, where masterful but painstakingly traditional druids live.

A city with terrible potholes and construction that never ends? Make it a city built upon massive caverns and canyons, repairing the results of constant dangerous dragon attacks.

Detroit? A city of thieves, that upon entering, with each passing hour you yourself become more and more thief-like.

Really do this! Exaggerate more than one element, and you get a place even more unlike with what you started from.

[script-a-world]

Hi, I'm struggling to worldbuild a dystopia since I normally write fantasy. I'm not sure what to include in worldbuilding. Could you help me by suggesting what you'd include in dystopia worldbuilding or link me a dystopia worldbuilding template?

sorry for the awkward phrasing!

Utuabzu: The first, and perhaps most important thing to keep in mind is that both dystopia and utopia are literary devices for critiquing current society. The most successful dystopias had something to say about the culture they were written in. 1984 was written during a period of high censorship, in WWII Britain, and couldn't be published for several years after it was finished because it was considered potentially upsetting to the USSR, which was at the time an ally of the UK. The Hunger Games was written in the 2000s as a critique of the vast amount of reality tv shows and the pointlessness of the Iraq War.

The spray of frankly forgettable YA dystopia novels written in the late 2000s-early 2010s were forgettable because while they had the aesthetic of dystopia, they didn't really have anything to say about our current world. They weren't based on anything other than 'hey, wouldn't it be messed up if-', which just doesn't stick in your head like a dystopia that takes something in our current society and follows it to its logical, awful extreme. The Handmaid's Tale works because it takes the rise of Christian Fundamentalism and its inbuilt misogyny to the logical extreme, and given current events in the US that really resonates.

You also need to consider practicalities. People can live their lives in awful situations. In every dictatorship, no matter how oppressive or dysfunctional, people were still living their lives. Oppressive régimes collapse when the citizenry is no longer able to live their lives. Specifically, when the people upholding the régime are no longer able to get by day-to-day. Revolutions, to paraphrase Victor Hugo, ultimately, are always about bread. Ideals like freedom and justice and equality are just a nice bonus.

If you want your characters to be opposed to the system, you need to ask yourself why they're against it. People don't set themselves against an all-consuming society just for fun. Not really. They might play at being a rebel if there's little real consequence, but if there's serious consequences then most people will keep quiet until the system starts failing.

Common reasons for turning against the system could be falling through the cracks and seeing the hypocrisy of the ruling ideology, being the victim of the injustices of the system, having something to gain from the régime's fall. Or they could be part of an underclass that doesn't benefit from the system in any real way but is too beaten down to resist, in which case you need to ask what made this character's life under the system unbearable, when the rest of their group's life is terrible but bearable enough.

So, my checklist would be:

What is the dystopia critiquing? What does it want to say?

How does this work in practice? What do the people upholding the system gain from this? How is the system being upheld? Why are people putting up with this?

What are the system's flaws? What hypocrisies are in the underlying ideology? Why are most people not noticing them?

Why are characters against the system? What made them turn against it?

Is the dystopia going to collapse or endure? If it's going to fail, why and how? If it's going to endure, why and how?

Tex: To compare and contrast genres a bit, let’s look at J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth series (1930s to 1960s, ish) and C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia (1940s to 1950s). These are major establishments for the modern interpretation of the fantasy genre, but also contained many dystopic elements as a part of their narrative.

Dystopia in Tolkien’s works was featured as the aftermath of terrible tragedy, and the people who lived in the times following it - the falling of great cities and civilizations brought a downfall of peace, economic stability, and certainty in the future. There are as many characters that lived in the times transitioning period that an apocalypse incurs as those who have never known the heights their world had reached in terms of prosperity.

Dystopia in Lewis’ works was used as a parallel - the main characters are children that came from a London in the middle of war and the accompanying poverty and existential fear, where the fantastical world of Narnia occupies a narrative place of distance that allows the characters to see a world equally as devastated but whose devastation occurred, comparatively, in the far past. The trauma that the characters have from living in a dystopia allows them the skills needed to navigate the fantasy world and bring about several critical plot points that allow the story to progress.

In a way, dystopia is the inverse of fantasy, where time is make-believe. The difference is that the past is perceived with different forms of wistfulness - in a fantasy it is romantic, in a dystopia it is tragic. Both are full of speculation and yearning for simpler times, but full of emotion of what could have been, and what could still be.

Because of this, there is no formula for a dystopia, as it is a genre built upon other genres that borrows others’ tropes and gives them a bit of a twist from a removed perspective.

[oh-hush-its-perfect]

hey if you're worldbuilding and there are multiple cultures you want to display and those cultures have different aesthetics but you don't know how to differentiate between them, make pinterest boards. especially for fashion. it can show how cultures are different and how they're similar and also it's fun.

[netherworldpost]

Received permission to share -- from a client project on world building

A fast way to show a LOT about the world you are building (if dragons exist) -- How big are they? How powerful are they? Are they huge (building-size) or pet size? Are they beasts or are they demi-gods?

Dragons are often used as shorthand for "magic" in a world. They are frequently used to bend the reality, given their size/power. Or not!

Sometimes they are just big ol' weird lizards replacing dinosaurs because you want big + can fly + maybe breath weapon.

In a non-D&D setting, especially if your dragons are demi-gods, you run the risk of feeling pressured (internally or via hecklers) to follow D&D chromatic rules (red = fire, white = ice, blue = lightning)

You CAN do this

You don't HAVE to

Also, reading any D&D novel with a Monster Manual in your lap to compare how well the author syncs their story to the lore is going to be an experience rooted in frustration, so, even when writing a D&D-thing, give yourself some leeway, everyone else does

Finally, "shapeshifting vs. physics"

Having dragons-in-human (or other)-form is a great way to showcase the scale of magic (no pun intended, but also, I cannot resist)

If your dragons are huge/magical/beasts, consider giving them the ability to shape-shift (huge advantage hunting) but maintain most if not all their dragon-form physical weight (balancing disadvantage -- will shatter trees, set off avalanches, shake ground when jumping, etc.)

If your dragons are demi-gods, and you want to give them a balancing disadvantage, then consider Ant Man rules. Or Honey I Shrunk the Kids rules.

You are used to interacting with the world at a different scale -- physically. Possibly magically, too.

I frequently build dragon size as a magical gravity well -- which is to say, the larger the dragon, the more magical energy they have.

This either be an outward flow (dragon = energy producer) or an inward pull (dragon = sucks in local energy).

Go forth and dragonize!

[thecruxarm-personal-blog]

Hi! Do you have any tips on worldbuilding? Where do you start?

Thanks!

Hello! Thanks for asking me this haha, this is a little vague but ill do my best to answer anyway!

Worldbuilding can be pretty intimidating to start doing at first, but its by no means a fine science. My first suggestion would be to think ahout what sort of worls you want in the first place; do you want a high fantasy magical world? A hard-science sci fi setting? A steampunk post apocalyptic future with zombies? A slice of life urban setting with monster people? Go for whatever you want!! Theres no limits for what theme you can go with, mish mash any asthetivs or settings you want! Just keep in mind this will be indicative of everything else to do with your world

From there on, my best advice would be to have fun. You can have an overarching narrative in your world, though this isnt strictly necessary either. You can just have a world for the sake of having a world. Its important, though, to consider how this world will *work*, be it by developing a magic system or by following real world physics, or something in between that, do whatever you want really! Alternatively, you can also have a wacky world with no dead set rules either if thats what youre going for! Just keep in mind the way your world works will affect everything else about it, like the people who live in this world, the places they live in, the cultures/societies/technology they create or the life that will live in this world etc

So to summarize, my best advice is to think of a theme, a setting, and make up rules for what can and cant happen (if you want!) And last but not least, to just have fun :)

Also, if theres any other more specific questions you had that this didnt help with, id recommend checking out artifexian and biblaridion and curious archive on youtube; the first two have various videos on worldbuilding, such as speculative biology, geography, conlang and more, whereas curious archive reviews worldbuilding settings and projects by other people and anaylses these worlds, he reviews a ton of neat stuff also worth checking out!! Honestly lots of the projects reviewed in his videos serve as big inspiration in my projects, so its worth checking him out along with biblaridion and artifexian if you havent already! Hope this all helped! Sorry for the textwall dickfksodixudisis

[the-world-annealing]

Alright, let's wade into "Is it Bad, somehow, to have potatoes in your high fantasy world and not explain their origin or realistically extrapolate the social consequences of crops that don't require communal harvesting efforts" discourse. And the answer to that question is obviously "No, write whatever you want, nobody can stop you".

But I think that there's a consistent preference for worlds that do address those questions, and it goes somewhat deeper than being a sneering poindexter.

The first is simple: everyone wants stories to make sense, we just draw the line at different points. Somewhere between 'dream logic word salad' and 'worldbuilding bible with a bibliography longer than any story you wrote with it' lies the sweet spot of any given person.

The second is that incongruous elements are useful, and that something can only be incongruous if the rest of the world makes sense. A murder mystery needs to make sense for the clues to be recognizable as such. A foreshadowed twist warps the world in a way that will only make true sense once the twist is revealed. To understand your characters, the audience needs to understand their expectations about the world, which becomes harder the less sense that world makes.

The third is that any writer's perspective is very very limited, and 'letting a setting element force you to research realistic consequences' is actually a very fun and reliable tool to step outside your box of personal tropes (in my opinion). Someone whose only experience is Standard European Fantasy can declare 'in MY setting people have rice as their staple crop', but if the result is Standard European Fantasy Except With Rice... why bother? That's just playing mad libs with tropes; doing some research into the relative benefits and downsides of both agricultural systems would probably result in something much more interesting.

Now, this doesn't mean the world needs to be perfectly coherent and explicable. You can handwave stuff, you can leave stuff ambiguous, you can straight-up Not Have An Explanation For Something, you can have magic that violates conservation of energy or FTL drives or fleas with human intelligence. But I think it's good writing practice to have the world stay Like Reality Unless Noted, however vague that noting might be, because it's useful to have an audience that understands what does or doesn't make sense in the context of the story.

[kramerblogrealgood]

the most important question a worldbuilder needs to ask themselves is what their world's equivalent to Overwatch porn is. In a medieval setting this would be lewd illuminated manuscripts based on whatever fictional play is most like overwatch. In a sci-fi setting, of course, this may very well be a full-dive VR "sexperience" that takes the user into the world of overwatch widowmaker and the korean one too. There is no excuse not to do this

[marigoldispeculiar]

Matthew Colville is a source of great advice

This guy runs a tabletop gaming company and dnd youtube channel, but he's also a writer, and a lot of his advice is also applicable to writing!

Here's an example:

This and his other videos on creating politics are great and have permanently changed how I think about worldbuilding!

[krakendm]

I want to recommend a story I just finished reading. Specifically I want to highlight its worldbuilding (as this blog more d&d focused), but the whole damn thing is great! Ilhen's Seventh Deathtrap (link below) is a masterpiece of modern sword and sorcery, and while it’s big strength is it’s characters, the glimpses of the wider world are tantalizing.

It has fairly classic sword and sorcery magic, which if you’re not familiar- basically magic has some cost, which can be fatal. Magic is also rare, highly valued, but the cost dissuades most people. This is a stark difference from traditional D&D wizardry, or Vancian magic (from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series), but can help us as world designers to give additional magic to NPCs. Ilhen's Seventh Deathtrap has a lot of different disciplines, some of which we see and are familiar, like illusion magic or divination, and some that we don’t see like glaciomancy and lithomancy. Magic itself is gained from going to a spire and talking to a god (I’m summarizing a bunch but it gets discussed in depth in the novel. RAFO). This magic is strong but specialized- which is perfect for an enemy or npc.

It gives us as worldbuilders a connection from “angry ice mage, wants to kill party” to a spire where this magic is taught. We can go from a generic npc wizard to where they were taught, why they only cast x or y element spells, and why the party’s wizard (or other magic user) can or cannot learn this method of casting. It also helps us give a unique “class” that players can’t access but could have exotic spells that they can learn. To continue with the example of the angry ice mage- maybe they’re a high challenge enemy but we lack good spells that really fit “ice mage”. Well a high level glaciomancer would be able to control ice, or summon a glacier, or speak a word of power and freeze their foes. While we don’t have spells written out, we can adapt the classic spells from d&d and either reflavor them or adjust their power. Power Word Stun, an 8th level enchantment could become Power Word Freeze, a 7th level spell that does pretty much the same thing but freezes them for 1d4 rounds (or something, I’m not trying to balance a spell that will only be used by enemies, I am trying to run combat not write a book).

Additionally most spires are known, but there are some hidden ones that may be protected by death traps, or dungeons as we would call them. While I’m not going to go as in depth about dungeons as I went about magic, I will say that Ilhen's Seventh Deathtrap is about dungeons and has a good explanation of why people build dungeons, and how they go about it. It’s not the first book to feature the idea of dungeon makers, but it does talk about what kinds of death traps are made and has a bunch of examples of puzzles that you can steal.

Anyway to sum up this post- you should read Ilhen's Seventh Deathtrap. It’s FREE, about 260 pages long, has good worldbuilding, and amazing characters.

Also it’s not a litRPG which is nice cause a ton of modern fantasy (that I find at least) is plagued by numbers and stats.

[whereserpentswalk]

Do you have any tips for people worldbuilding for the first time ?

1: It's easier to worldbuild low fantasy and near future scifi. Figuring out how a few new elements interact with a world like ours is easier then figuring out how societies work in a world where things are entirely different.

2: don't just copy paste things from settings you know without considering the consequences. Be willing to remove things once you start to not like them.

3: social structures, cultures, religions, etc. are way more important to understand than things like ecology and geology.

4: care about your world. You have to treat it like a real serious place. If you treat it like something silly that shouldn't be cared about too much, everyone else will too.

5: draw from the real world before you draw from other people's worlds.

[heehoothefool]

Considering making a side blog to talk exclusively about my fantasy stuff that I've been making.

For anyone unaware, I'm currently working on a fantasy novel series AND a homebrew dnd campaign/setting that takes place 10 years after the events of said series.

I'd also use the blog to offer up worldbuilding tips and advice, and to answer any questions anyone may have about it or just about my stories in general (if anyone takes interest).

If I end up making that side blog I'll make a new post about it or smth, idk. We'll see ig

[redd956]

3 Amazing Youtube Channels for Worldbuilders/Writers

I myself and another victim to the glorious yet cruel oversight of Youtube, and have a depressing amount of hours heaved into it. When stumped on creative ideas I often turn to Youtube Channels dedicated to writing, art, and worldbuilding. Here are some of my favorites, and why I think you should check them out

Tale Foundry

Tale Foundry is a very down to earth world building and writing channel. Their cast frequently goes into the depths of world building and writing on the stories, books, and concepts they cover. Their videos are accompanied by a kindly sounding narrator, and beautiful art, making their videos incredibly calming to listen to and watch. 

They tackle and talk about many unique writing concepts, especially with settings, which I sometimes struggle with. They also run the world building lofi stream. Some of their videos are straight up tutorials or advice videos about writing and world building. They also touch on folk lore and folk tales, which I always love indulging in.

Terrible Writing Advice

Now I know what you’re thinking. With that title that sounds like the last channel I’m looking for, but hear me out. Terrible Writing Advice is a hilarious channel which purposefully strives to give great writing advice by doing the opposite. With the great use of reverse psychology and excellent humor, they quickly teach you the pitfalls and traps of writing.

Their videos point out many bad tropes, and secretly how they’re made. Often the narrator pauses in goes into sudden depth about how these bad decisions gets made, and what good decisions and writing pondering sounds like, only to jokingly throw that all out the window. If you can handle good reverse psychology, and love crude humor, this is the channel for you.

Map Crow

Map Crow is a newer channel. They primarily focus on TTRPG world building, and I love their creativity and great ideas. I also adore their art, and strive to be able to draw something like them. I myself really like drawing maps too, so they’re amazing to watch while doing that.

Map Crow’s creativity is infectious. They show the concept design process, and how that can branch into many great creative ideas. They also tackle bland by not inherently looking at them as something bad but showing how you can crazily improve upon anything to make it dynamic for either stories, art, world building, and especially TTRPGs.

[script-a-world]

Is tumblr an ok-ish place to just like, info dump about my world and it’s lore, or is there a better place I could do it?

Tex: You can put anything on tumblr so long as you don’t violate the Terms of Service - I’ve seen moodboards, essays, sketches, stories, bullet point lists, gif sets, audio clip compilations, and pretty much anything that the various posting formats can support.

It’s not necessarily something like a catch-all or one-size-fits-all, but I think it helps to think of various websites as boxes with different utilities, much in the same theme as scrapbooking parts. For example, tumblr supports images well, Archive of Our Own (AO3) supports text well, and have the shared similarity of ability to tag posts or works for organizational purposes.

The internet is one, very useful, format to worldbuild, because it has the ability to utilize tools such as hyperlinking and digital archiving. In a previous post, there is a detail about how to organize a digital file structure for one’s worldbuilding to keep track of things, available here. One practice I have noticed among some worldbuilders is the blend of digital and physical spaces; or rather, online and offline.

Offline digital worldbuilding is such things as word documents, saved images, and programs that perform the function of notebooks that don’t require internet access and/or an internet browser. This is frequently supplemented by personal archiving habits, such as a dedicated peripheral drive like a USB, and regularly copying over digital files onto that device whenever significant changes are made or else on a schedule. This is useful for happenstance events like computer failure, websites going defunct, or related issues.

Offline physical worldbuilding is such things as notebooks, drawings or paintings, boxes of ephemera, scrapbooks, and physical copies of the canon media (if the worldbuilding has its roots in fandom). This can include CDs, DVDs, photos, and craft items such as textiles or sculptures. For people that have had difficulties in maintaining digital records in particular, physical copies are often a good method of maintaining linearity of thought - i.e. printing out a Google Doc and putting that into a folder.

Because there’s so many different medias and platforms you can use for worldbuilding, it’s more a matter of which suits you best and for which purpose. Tumblr is a useful component of a worldbuilding methodology portfolio because of its capability to create dedicated posts that can be mixed media, tagged, and archived if one wishes it. As of this time of posting, users cannot currently download an individual post, but it’s impossible to predict a website’s roadmap as it adapts to the changing needs of digital spaces.

One thing I would note is that tumblr need not be engagement driven, in the same way other online spaces tend to be (e.g. twitter). You can make a blog, add restrictions in the form of locking viewing to only logged-in users or adding a password to view the blog, and with the recent update (as of this posting), users can also toggle preferences on how public a post is and also ability for others to reblog a post.

If you’re looking for engagement, this is fuelled by reblogs, which generally depends on the blogs that you follow and interact with, usually by reblogging their posts and also by talking to them. That is, however, a subject of micro-cultures and subcultures therein, which becomes a little bit off-subject to your question and not really within our domain.

[cathartes-aura-shitposting]

Gonna say this right now. one of the best ways to get some worldbuilding inspiration:

Go to an educational type of attraction..

Seriously, go to a local museum or someplace educational. Living history? Natural history? Art? Aviation and aerospace? Zoos and aquariums even? Doesn't matter, whatever you have available. Do the local stuff as well.

Now try applying some of the stuff you saw and learned about to your fictional world's. It doesn't have to be exact: it could be loosely based on or inspired by it.