Alright Veeky Forums

Not to mention folklore and mythology

Veeky Forums would know more about that too. This board is only good for arguing about politics nominally more than 50 years old (in reality they are but proxies for arguing about current affairs).

If you're going to ask for ideas, at least listen. Being set in your ways before asking for advice means you don't want advice, you just want affirmation.

Your idea is dumb. Not saying it won't work, because stupid ideas get published all the time. It's nothing I'd read because it doesn't offer anything beyond what Warcraft has already been doing for years.
>but what if Orcs WEREN'T the bad guys
>"wow user that's so cool let me succ ya dicc"
It's been done before. It'll be done again.

You're just looping back around on heavily trodden territory.

Good luck. I'm abandoning thread.

>mfw copypaste frankenstein writers

Elves can be imagined as the civilized culture in whatever circumstance. (The byzantines, chinese, greek-roman.) Orcs can be imagined as the barbaric culture in whatever circumstance (vikings, mongols, germans).

The other races, like dwarves, are really just there to add fantastical elements. No humans live underground like a dwarf.

There ARE humans that lived in many thousands of year old cities, as well as rugged shitlands in turkestsn.

I'm gonna go with this guy You are retreading some very well-trodden ground here. If you want to build a fantasy setting then you should start by reading contemporary epic fantasy. It sounds like you are not very well-exposed to the genre, like you're basing most of your assumptions off of very old conventions that haven't been used in decades. People have been re-imagining orcs since the 80s, to give you an idea of how late to that party you are. What I would suggest is reading some of the big names in epic fantasy from the last 20 or so years: Robert Jordan, Steven Erikson, Brandon Sanderson. Maybe some Tad Williams, R Scott Bakker, or even Terry Brooks. You don't have to like these guys, but seeing how they do it will help you see what the current landscape is like now. I didn't mention GRRM in that list cause his setting isn't really relevant to what you want.

If you're planning to write a genre fiction work then you need to know the genre you're writing for. If you weren't so concerned with that I'd just say write whatever you want, but you're clearly aiming for a particular market here. So study it.

>I was planning on combining real cultures with the races.
The problem with this idea is that you end up reducing 'races' which are pretty huge and ultimately arbitrary groupings of dozens of cultures and genetic heritages.

Like, imagine if you were gonna represent 1860's North America with hobbits who wear big cowboy hats, subsuming the variety of colonial and aboriginal cultures across the continent.

Elves should rule over human subjects period. They should represent the better educated, fed, trained.amd equiped ruling elite (nobility).

Their fall from grace can be linked to inbreeding to remain pure and genetically superior to humans.

Dwarves should be Jews, no homeland but valued/hated as smiths and bankers.

If you're going for a "realistic" setting evil races shouldn't exist. Make them either norsemen, steppe people or desert raiders like arabs or Tuareg

Humans just make them Asian humans and have them be like eastern influence.

Orcs should be actual Humans irl. like make them expansion hungry lords of war that believe in a war god bent on being the strongest you can be. Have the elves be like the natural pagans that from time to time fight back but are in a huge decline. Then have the dwarves in there as like Jews hiding in mountains protecting gold and occasionally be slaughtered by orcs only siding with eastern Humans for trade and gold.

time should be based on around the 1300's in history. do research on this time period in Europe, the middle east/Mediterranean and the East.
During this time in history Christianity was fighting against and reducing the known pagan lands, there was mass conversion and fear for all those who were not christian as the Church rose in power. Ignore the crusades as its hard to write about the crusades in a fantasy style with multiple races without looking racist. and with today's PC standards some how demonizing Muslims is bad.

anywho. Research Pagans, youll find that the way elves are depicted in fantasy ties into a lot of Pagan style although gnomes are more Pagan based. Orcs are supposed to parallel Humans oddly in fantasy as the most evil of beings and the darkest side of human nature.

Look into instances like the rhineland massacre and the Spanish tax riots of 1366 against Jews for references to how Dwaves might be subject to Orc aggression.

can role out something like this.

Orcs are aggressive expansionist >> Establish multiple kingdoms and empires. >> elves try to fight back. >> Elves team up with dwarves. >> humans come into play when trade routes with dwarves are disrupted by Orc aggressors in attempt to boycott Dwarven trade. >> now its Humans, elves, and dwarves vs orcs. >> endgame orcs get btfoed. Kingdoms split up between elves dwarves and humans. >> new age of peace. untill... >>sequel.

Perhaps have your invaders be fleeing something even worse. Such as the Goths fleeing the Huns.

also fantasy is a failing story base. If you want fantasy to work for for a graphic novel. otherwise youre just in for a hurting. No one wants to read fantasy anymore. they already have read every Tolken, Martin, Robins, Dacus, Lenbinstein, and so on.

>My question for you Veeky Forums is just how I should work on creating the cultures for the races? I'm planning on using actual cultures for each race but how should I combine them?

short answer, just don't. It's a lost cause trying to find analogies because these fantasy cliches and staples have their own cultural bagage already. Dwarves, Orcs, Elves and such are Tolkien stuff which he borrowed from Northern European stuff and made them stick to a single consistent presentation. Southern Europe, eastern Europe, the middle East, Asia, they all have their own variations of the same things you mentioned, and these myths had their own roles in the world views of these societies, more than often, ones that don't match 1:1. You can never plug all the holes, and cover all the bases, because you're working with stereotypes that can't adjust to subtler realities of history.

What you can DO however is create subcultures within races and have every race have their own politics and ways of life that shift and struggle. The Elder Scrolls is good at this, and is also a rather deep universe overall.

Why the typical meme races?

Wait, isn't that just a map of the world rotated 90 degrees?

WOW that is SO original NOBODY EVER thought of that before

you are gonna make a hole in the world lad

>a Fantasy world with multiple races (humans, orcs, elves, dwarfs, ect.) but here's the thing about it: It's supposed to be a direct parallel to human history and an analysis on historical events and civilizations.

If you are doing that then it's going to be a really bad parallel to history. Humans, orcs, elves, dwarfs etc. are different species' with different biologies. Real human cultures are fluid concepts that can change vastly due to historic events and people assimilate from one culture to another all the time.

Let's say you decide elves are Romans and Celts are dwarves. Then you get to the imperial period where conquered Celtic people got assimilated into Roman culture, people with Gaulic and Hispanic descent started to consider themselves Roman, some even became emperors. Now you are going to either have to write about dwarves turning into elves, suddenly growing taller and gaining immortality, at which point, why even bother with fantasy races? Just use humans and come up with some fictional cultures. Or you can claim talk about those people not being "real, biological elves/Romans", which just sound like some pseudoscientific racial theory.

So yeah, real cultures don't work the way fantasy races do, trying to create a parallel between the too is a stupid idea.

I checked the Veeky Forums thread and they are being elitist hipsters as expected. Your work doesn't have to have a message or any profound meaning or 'something you want to say'. All you have to do is take the readers for a walk down Feels street.

And worldbuiling always takes the backseat to prose, characters and the plot. Rarely will readers care about geopolitical details, parallels and clever twists and jabs more that base character drama. If you delve too deep into into it you will come across as a wanka and risk alienating your dumb readers who just want to see the twins fuck again.

So the world can literally be a patchwork full of holes as no one will ever peer-review it on an academical level. Leaving some things vague will help the readers fill in the gaps to their own comfortable level which you can then subvert at your own leasure.

As for some practical advice - start of with an actual quote/passage from Herodotus, Tacitus, the Sagas etc. where they describe far-off lands being inhabitied by monsters and beastly, different people and just go with it. That's your premise and all the credence you will ever need. And then just go tell a cool story about monsters and men fucking up our familiar Earth.

And for Goddess' sake don't draw any dumb maps. You will fuck up the geographic and historic consistency and no one will care anyway, except those who and will only be triggered by it.

>And worldbuiling always takes the backseat to prose, characters and the plot.
Not OP, but what if I couldn't care any less about dumb fucking characters and just care about the setting? Am I fucked?

I'd personally suggest avoiding a lot of worldbuilding autism. People treat fantasy as just a crude simulation of a world, but you should aim for something more abstract and metaphorical.

Yes.

>I checked the Veeky Forums thread and they are being elitist hipsters as expected.
Lit is a shithole, actually one of the worst boards on this site, but their utter rejection of OP's plainly retarded idea, and their emphasis on fiction having an actual purpose and meaning is correct. You yourself actually kinda contradict here:
The "Profound meaning" or "having something to say" is actually what makes something a "feels street". Either that, or exploitation, which is not what you ever want to celebrate in literature.

You'll have to ask Veeky Forums about continents and climates.

In our world civilization began in regions where few alterations to the environment were needed to allow intensive agriculture. This happened in several places, though some species like taro are not very productive.

Domestication of goats and sheep occurred before the domestication of wheat. It is not known whether this is a coincidence, one led to the other or each spurred on the development of the other, it is possible they began clearing land near flood plains to increase grazing then expressely cultivating grasses for the seeds, settling on wheat as the favored crop.

Generally civilization began at similar latitudes, Incas and Aztecs are about the same distance from the equator, north and south. In our world most old world civilization was north of the equator and it took some time for intensive agriculture to reach South Africa, which it did after the "great exchange", unfortunately the African Kingdoms did not have long before other polities conquered them. Some climates like jungle are counter-intuitively difficult for agriculture. Pests and disease inhibit productivity.

Civilization then expanded to new climates as agricultural practices and technology developed. The arrival of agriculture in a region was always very disruptive as well as other waves of change. Europe was a backwater before the heavy plow and 3 field crop rotation. It is theorized that agricultural practices influence society, nomads had more freedom, delicate systems of irrigation need a more cooperative society and to resolve disputes through bureaucracy

The bronze age lasted 1000s of years. The development of iron appears to be largely due to chance, though some disruptions like the invasions of the sea peoples may have spurred them on. It is unknown whether iron is the result of the bronze age collapse or part of the cause, it was certainly a disruption in its own right, decentralizing the production of arms.

You don't need anything profound to invoke feels. Profound in the sense of groundbreaking or never-before-seen. The story doesn't have to be a, say, portrait of the 21st century man as seen throught the lens of our contemprary fantasy cliches and tropes set against the formative years of our civilisation unconciously ingrained deep within us. It can be about something as simple as friendship and unrequited love and incestuous monozygotic long-lost lesbian twins.

It doesn't have to be deep, it just has to be good and falsely advertised.

Fock.
>not falsely advertised
is what I meant to say.

>Profound in the sense of groundbreaking or never-before-seen.
That is literally not what "profound" means. Profound means "deeply rooted" you moron. It means fundamentally relatable. Did you ever even read a classic literature piece in your life?

There's a place for you bit it's not fantasy literature.

I thought it meant full of meaning? Deep insight? Significant?

Fundamentally relatable? Feels sort of off to me. I guess it sort of is one of its meanings but would that invalidate the way I used it? Can me point to the definition? I can't find anything on it meaning relatable, I'm afraid. Rather the opposite.

Also, can it with the sass, shithead.

>full of meaning? Deep insight? Significant?
Relevance is the constituent of meaning. For something to mean to us, it must be relevant to us in some way or form: it must be associable with our own existence. "Deep" insights are those who most fundamentally relate to us: to how we look at the world, to what matters to us etc... Significance is just another word for that.
Whenever that is a psychologically relatable insight, a philosophical notion or somehow valuable observation about reality does not matter. What matters is that what ever is told has the potency to influence us: either by reminding us of something that forget or failed to acknowledge, or by showing us a new perspective on reality. A story about love or friendship usually fall into the first category. A good love story reminds us of the benefits or impacts forming a relationship to others has to our lives. Philosophical stories usually fall into the other category, and show us connections that we may have not been aware before.

As for this type of definition: it actually goes all the way back to Wittgenstein, Saussere and Grice (an interesting, but less accurate theory is also provided by Pierce.
If you want more contemporary theories of meaning, in literary sense there is a decent philosopher named Koťátko. In more general sense, there is "Theory of Relevance by Daniel Sperber", and in more pragmatic form there are fantastic lectures by a psychologist and philosopher named Jordan Peterson of Toronto philosophy. Problem with Peterson is that while he has a book (named Maps of Meanings) it's kinda difficult to read: his lectures are much better, but his theories are spread all over his courses, making difficult to recommend one single individual lecture. All of his lectures are however loaded up on Youtube.
A very different way of saying the same thing can be also found in essays by Jorge Luis Borges.

I see.

This leaves me wondering how to amend my previous statement. I want to say, now, that a story doesn't have to be complex to be profound, but I find myself sightly miffed.

>Barbarian Horde Orcs
D&D did that already. Both as regular barbarian horde (Forgotten Realms) and as Mongolians (Kara-Tur).
Whatever you think you could do here, it is quite likely it was already done as some supplement for AD&D 2.0

I think that saying "the story does not need to be complex or speculative, it just needs to be meaningful and honest (that is: it needs to resonate with human experience, it must be accurate - in some way - to real world experieces).
There is a reason why many literary snobs will eventually tell you: "All classic literature is exclusively about well developed characters." While this is NOT TRUE, it's a completely understandable stereotype, because there is nothing more humanly relatable than a human whose qualities resemble our own. That makes it the easiest and most common way to create a narrative that will resonate with people.

This is why speculative literature, as well as genre fiction such as most fantasy, is looked down upon. It's because much of it speculates up concepts that aren't really relevant (relatable, useful etc...) to most people. Reading a story of Krock the Mighty and the intricate histories of how he gained the Crystal of Knowledge, defeated the Evil Sorcerer of Brackish Water and became the ruler of the multiverse is generally going to leave you with nothing of worth, because super heroes, crystals of knowledge and evil man shooting lightenings from their hands translates poorly to what you might face in a real world (it can, on certain symbolic and abstract level, but abstraction is a fiddly thing).

Basically, I'm trying to point out that "deep" does not mean complex, or philosophical, but rather "well observed" or "useful". Of course, it's often easier to provide good observations or useful theories through more complex means than it is through minimal structure.
But keep in mind that Kafka, Borges or Hemingway are considered some of the most "deep" authors of all times: and their best texts often do not extend past fifteen pages.

This is going slight off topic, but I'm gonna add this anyway.

One of my favorite pieces of scifi is a tiny short story where the most scifi it gets is 'sunbathing in Scotland'. This is the perfect example of how much worldbuilding is required.

Elves = romans
Orcs = germans
Dwarfs = celts
Humans = slavs

>Humans = slavs
well there's a first time for everything