Why can't world building be something you can make a career out of? We'd all be rich men...

>Because literally anyone can do it.
But not everyone is good at it.
Hence GRR Martin, Rowling, Tolkien, Howard and Pratchett are all names you've probably already heard.

It's called being a professional writer, shitlord.

There's probably a way to make decent cash out of worldbuilding already that neither you nor I are aware of. Salvatore got hired to build the Amalur setting and I don't think he did any serious writing for it.

Of course when a writer does this shit he has a name and a commission. For average folk here, there's no way to prove one world-builder is better than another short of putting in the time required to even propose a setting. I'm sure the route for this stuff is round-about, but if it isn't out there I can imagine a dedicated person creating it.

so probably not any of ours on Veeky Forums

>Where did you bury them?
I perform a purge of all my materials every five years. Build a big old pyre and in the notebooks go.

They died when I needed a major operation in school.

I still remember my old settings though but don't really have plans for them

People haven't been paid to beta test games since 2004, user. Hell we're living in a fucking age where people are lining up to PAY companies to let them ALPHA test.

What happened user?

It's called writing, and you very much can make a career out of it. It's just extremely difficult to succeed.

I work IT
I write daily for my game, paid to do it essentially, 7/8 hours a day

Git good op

>I'm a game writer
>I gave up a career in oil for it
laughcrying.jpg

>What are your dreams and aspirations Veeky Forums?
I was going to be a writer in television.
>Where did you bury them?
I got diagnosed with 'your immune system is going to try and kill everything including you' syndrome and lost everything. I didn't bury them, I flushed it down the toilet.

I'll be a wageslave from here on out, probably.

You can, be a schlock writer and self-publish on amazon

>What are your dreams and aspirations Veeky Forums?
Enough wealth so I don't need to work for living. Job in research. Maid to take care of mundane tasks around the house. Cute girl half my age that's into petplay and bondage. (the latter two can come as 2in1)

Buried 2007 due to health problems, exhumed 2011 because while doctors were useless, my body fixed itself somehow.

OP here
I'm a web developer and get paid to write for my games too, but that's not exactly what I had in mind when I made this thread.

When I was a child i dreamed of conquering the world with a robot army. Then I grew up and realized I just liked the idea of conquering the world as I had no heart for the amount of pain it would cause and no patience to build an army.

No I work a minimum wage job, play video games and jerk off all day.

I'm pretty content, all things considered.

I'm like 90% sure you're my newest player.

I would hate myself if I were in your position.

Impossible, I haven't played in like 3 years.

I did for a while! Then I got over it because there are a lot of people with a lot less than I have.

If I had bond-villain money, I'd pay to have an open-world MMO created with no inherent plotline, and then hire half od Veeky Forums to work with the built-in tool so that new events/stories/lands/planets/planes/etc were constantly opening up.

My dreams always have consisted of doing or accomplishing magical things that have no basis in reality.

I refuse to throw them away, so I live a bitter jaded life thinking about how the world should be rather than how it can be.

>Why can't world building be something you can make a career out of?
Literature
Movies
Video Games

All billion dollar global industries where that exact thing is done.

>If it's fun, nobody's going to pay you for it

Explain prostitution.

Artifical scarcity of vajayjay.

It's all fun and games until the client wants to do some weird shit and you need to make your quota.

I will continue working on my setting until I die, it is too important to me to give up but too autistic to publish.

Adapted it for savage world's and even planned campaign where the PC's might meet and interact with several main characters but then I realized it was too weird and autistic and went back to working on my 500 page novel.

Worldbuilding for money sounds like a cop out to me but maybe that's just cause I'm not any good at it.

You can't become a writer just with world-building. If Tolkien couldn't get a lot of his shit published even AFTER he became world-famous then most likely neither could you. You have to actually tell a compelling story and milk all that background you autistically built for all its worth, which is what most people fail at.

This is what a lot of Veeky Forums doesn't get. You don't need a interesting setting to be a good work of literature, and most interesting settings are not used in good works of literature. Making a setting for a tabletop game is vastly different from making one to be published. If some random wannabe writer who has never been published before shows up pitching his Silmarilllion for the deepest lore of his monstergirl setting he's going to get laughed out of town, no matter the attention to detail that was put or how masterfully written it is (most homebrews aren't even good let alone masterful).

Most people aren't going to read 10000 pages about the evolution of the different breeds of dropbear in a setting unless you give them reasons to CARE for those dropbears before.

It's all about the bantz bruh. These day people don't want Excitingly different worlds where awesome things happen unless that shit reads like a damn soap opera.

Fucking this. You can't get buy with just worldbuilding because unfortunately most of the writing community likes characters better than well-made settings or worlds.
I'm trying, OP. I really am. I value world and setting over characters in stories and am planning to be a professional writer but everyone I talk to just writes/reads for characters instead of interesting settings and worlds. It really sucks when the modern SFF community is made up of SJW faggots who just want a new special snowflake Mary/Gary Sue/Stu to tickle their buttholes.

>We'd all be rich men
No, because most of the OC here is garbage. The only settings that appeals enough to Veeky Forums not to REE it out of the board are just fantasy tropes with badly learned history tacked onto it.

I wanted to make kid's shows. I went down the career path I thought my family would be the most proud of me and would make a good living.

I don't know if I should have done what I wanted, but I know I made a wrong choice in what to do.

such as?

It's called writing a book.

Porn actors frequently get desensitised to the actual act of sex. Same would apply to prostitution, and that is if you even went into it "for fun" and not out of desperation.

>unfortunately
No matter how interesting your setting, I'm not going to read a novel where a cast made of pure boredom do nothing interesting for 300 pages.

If the setting is interesting, then the actions the characters preform will be interesting as well. That's how good premises and settings work.

No, that's not how anything works. Having a good setting doesn't magically make what your characters do interesting.

>What are your dreams and aspirations Veeky Forums? Where did you bury them?

Never had any, I'm a simple beast never ascending beyong Maslows third step.

You can. It's called "Being a Writer".
The better question is "What happened to YOURS"?
Don't tell me you've given up just because you've seen the mountain, "because it's their"
And I won't insult you with the Type A Personality fallacy either- no, life is struggle but that struggle makes you strong and it makes you cunning. The whole fucking world is going to tell you that you can't do something and you bow to it- you eat that shit up like it was real- whatever the fuck "real" means
Things like justice and mercy aren't real- we make them real by believing in them- so if world building as a career isn't "real" do you know what to do then? You look at all the people telling you "you can't" and tell them to FUCK OFF THE EDGE OF YOUR DICK and do it anyway
Die poor
Die alone
But die a success in spite of literally everything and every one trying to negate you- success is measured in how brightly your star burns

Yes it does. How is that so hard to understand. Settings define actions. A person that is in a backwater town will have different actions than one living in a big city. This isn't a hard concept to understand.

Whose?

I don't even know man, gotta fly tomorrow, can't sleep, gotta vent with some hot nonsense

but lovable characters save a shit setting and boring characters will kill a great setting

This thread seems as good as any to ask this question (it's been bugging me for a while), so:
I have a setting which is for the most part of my own design, but originated with someone else (I ended up making most of the setting). Say I wanted to write up a series of adventures in that setting and sell them as PDFs or something. How would I go about legally separating myself from the person who created the baby steps for the setting?
Could I just say 'Welp, these adventures are original content, even though they technically exist in a setting I didn't entirely make, so I can sell them without issue'?

As long as you don't seek to copyright the setting or names you have collaboreted on there should be no problem.

It worked for Derleth.

owe.com/resources/legalities/28-copyright-ownership-collaborative-projects/

Coolio.
I'm just wondering if I could earn a few bucks writing decent Adventure Paths.

>GRR Martin
>Good worldbuilding

These posts are not eerily similar and probably made by the same fag or anything

Honestly familia you just illustrated why almost nobody in academia takes fantasy seriously other than a few select series

If you have a real point to make you don't need a "interesting" setting, and if the only draw to your writing is your worldbuilding and nothing else you're going to be seen as a writer of escapist drivel. There's a reason Tolkien is praised while nobody knows what the fuck Glorantha is. Glorantha was specifically made to be a deep and interesting world but at such fails to make any sort of statement, just being a made-up world that happens to be very carefully made, while Middle-Earth was made for Tolkien to make some points about christianism, blow some steam about his wartime experience and practice his linguistics and mythological knowledge with the depth being a happy side effect.

You need to read a lot to become a good writer, and seeing that you think a interesting setting is not only good but something you can at all times use as a crutch to compensate for the story you're telling being on itself completely uninteresting, I think you need to read more. Preferably not fantasy or science fiction this time.

I'm not disagreeing with you. Good characters are necessary to have a good story. Maybe it's just a difference of opinion but I honestly value the plot over the characters. But I do see your point. A good setting is worthless without something driving that, whether that being a good plot or good characters.
>at such fails to make any sort of statement
And it's for this exact reason plot is a thing. Through a story the plot is able to make a point about life or the greater world in the context of an imaginary space to the reader. While you are correct that just a good setting will you get you nowhere, and that you need good characters and a good story as well to make up for all that, I firmly believe the setting should come first in terms of priorities and importance.
>eeing that you think a interesting setting is not only good but something you can at all times use as a crutch to compensate for the story you're telling
Now you're just projecting. I never said that. A good book needs all of its aspects working in tandem to be successful.
>Preferably not fantasy or science fiction this time.
Go fuck yourself. This stupid idea of "hur dur SFF is so dumb and childish" is so fucking outdated and retarded that you honestly have your own head so far up your own ass.

(Different user.) How a work of literature is written is infinitely more important than what it is written about. Even well-respected sci-fi authors like Herbert and Dick are fairly mediocre in terms of their prose.

Which doesn't mean that sci-fi is bad, or even childish. It's just more focused on telling a particular story than creating something beautiful.

My dream was to make Germany proud again. But those damn Jews had ti take it all away....

because 99% of Veeky Forums's worldbuilding ends at "what if succubus was good" and "what if human was actually word for shamanist persian lizardman"

Worldbuilding is fun but ultimately pointless, the players don't care and the DM will be so caught up in his cute little world that he ignores the players and they don't have a fun time.

Your response was half projecting and half ignoring, or perhaps not understanding, the relevant parts of my post, please try again

>And it's for this exact reason plot is a thing. Through a story the plot is able to make a point about life or the greater world in the context of an imaginary space to the reader
Yes, the problem is if your plot says absolutely fucking nothing, as is the case for most fantasy/sci-fi. I can't even think about what you thought I meant in that sentence. SFF is regarded lowly because the overwhelming majority of it IS pulpy genre fiction that only has value as cheap entertainment. You can't learn much from the stagnant pool of inbred Tolkien/Howard rip-offs that is fantasy itself.

user, you are exercising your human potential through creativity, instead of raping the natural world. You are a hero.

>he doesn't get paid for worldbuilding

Let me tell you, the first time a game company contacts you out of the blue offering to pay you actual money for something they want you to write... it is a good feeling.

Oh, yes, and about sci-fi you get STEM inspired hard sci-fi which doesn't even ATTEMPT to tell a interesting story or give a meaningful message, just depict a story where the scientific elements are fairly accurate. That's fine and it can be entertaining to read, but as a work of literature it's below even the simplest of fables

Well I won't argue that you are correct on the issue of how something is written over what is actually there, even if I disagree (mainly because that's what the majority of the writing community believes). It is important to be a good writer in terms of prose as well as one who recognizes the importance of character and setting.
>the problem is if your plot says absolutely fucking nothing
You are assuming that every plot or story or book has to have some great overreaching message to people that is life-changing. Yes you are right that a lot of SFF doesn't SAY anything about the world. But the appeal of it is that it's fun. People can like things because it appeals to them and because >fun things are fun
>You can't learn much from the stagnant pool of inbred Tolkien/Howard rip-offs that is fantasy itself.
Now you are just being pretentious. A lot of stuff in SFF is very imaginative in terms of premise, setting, and plot but if you haven't read a lot of SFF or delved deep into it you wouldn't know that.
> but as a work of literature it's below even the simplest of fables
You are so retarded. Not every story has to has to have some theme that will be central to the story. Stories can be interesting and that's exactly why people read them. By confining books to simply "you MUST have a plot that fits my definitions" you are destroying what makes literature fantastic: freedom of expression and the ability to enjoy whatever you like regardless of what it is. Go fuck yourself.

Not him but, reality did, most likely.

I had thought to type a very long reply, but then I realized you're just a dumbass. You've moved the goalpost so fucking far in this discussion, and contradicted your original point that setting is more important that characters and that a good setting not only is more important than characters but also makes it so that all the actions of the characters are intrinsically interesting (before you ask, it's here and no, you won't convince anyone that you meant something else than what you obviously said before you realized that was a indefensible load of shit) so many times over in every single fucking thing you have posted I won't bother.

Now you're babbling about how fun is fun and people like fun ergo you're wrong right after, again, saying almost the opposite of your original argument.

You are most likely not ever going to get published and this argument has made it very clear why.

And you are a retard, an idiot, and a prick who doesn't understand what means to be a writer. Touche.
I won't bother writing out a long response because you obviously have no understanding of my point nor of my opinions.

And a side note: none of what you just said proves anything about how I will never become a writer, which moreso proves that you are just a Veeky Forums crossboarder that has very skewed ideas about literature and writing, as well as worldbuilding in its relation to SFF and setting.

You haven't even been published. Any random idiot has as good a "understanding", or lack thereof, of being a writer as you. It's just that you're ignorant in literature as well, and more willing to blame the general public or the industry for your failure rather than yourself, making you even less qualified than some of the already non-qualified.

When you are capable of formulating a proper response rather than just random namecalling that does not adress anything in my posts I'll respond to you again. Which is to say, not anytime soon, at least not before the thread is pruned.

>Yes, the problem is if your plot says absolutely fucking nothing, as is the case for most fantasy/sci-fi

WHat does a sci-fi setting is supossed to say?

It's a contraction of reality with our technological ideal expanded to see what would happen if they're applied in extreme measures. Thats all sci-fi usually has to offer because it was designed to be that.

You could go to the lowliest lows of sc-fi enterntaiment and that theme would be just intrinsical.

So the question is; what do you expect it to say? If a sci-fi setting goes beyond their technological setting and goes to the very roots that conform our soul, like any other work out there, then the sci-fi is purely aesthetic and you could change it to any other setting, since you're not asking what would happen if we apply this technology or if we discover that, but rather you would be asking things about what is love in modern societies, how do we cope the sense of emptyness in a industrialiced society or describing new form of organizations... in any of those themes you can put them in the past with fantastical settings and there it will be exactly the same message but under other enviroment.

Thats why sci-fi is ultimately going for Hard science. Because you're diferenciating from fantasies based over your imagination, you're putting emphasis over the matter and the rules that conform our universe. You're entering true science fiction and you're limiting what can be done or not with those rules, so the message that you're trying to transmit comes as more coherent, pure and comprehensive to people under the sci-fi story/setting you are trying to comuncate. Why? Because SCIENCE fiction has to be materialistic, science studies what is real and measurable, if you take this part and skip it in your story/setting the message you're trying to convey comes out as either misguided or corrupted. Why again? Because is not science fiction, as a genre but rather as a vehicule or aesthetic.

What game?

All art should express some human truth or experience. Scifi and fantasy usually does so by allegory.

What kind of curriculom/portfolio do they usually look for?

Do you at least earn enough to buy breadcrumbs at the end of the week?

> If a sci-fi setting goes beyond their technological setting and goes to the very roots that conform our soul, like any other work out there, then the sci-fi is purely aesthetic.

This is my point. Science fiction and fantasy when used in good literature (or at least widely praised and respected, to prevent yet another shitstorm) are mostly an aesthetic. The genres create an enviroment that doesn't nurture or encourage good writing above merely amusing concepts or ideas with no regard towards execution, which is why worthwhile works in sci-fi and fantasy are even rarer than in other genres.

>Thats why sci-fi is ultimately going for Hard science. Because you're diferenciating from fantasies based over your imagination, you're putting emphasis over the matter and the rules that conform our universe.You're entering true science fiction and you're limiting what can be done or not with those rules, so the message that you're trying to transmit comes as more coherent, pure and comprehensive to people under the sci-fi story/setting you are trying to comuncate. Why? Because SCIENCE fiction has to be materialistic, science studies what is real and measurable, if you take this part and skip it in your story/setting the message you're trying to convey comes out as either misguided or corrupted

It should still be possible to give some sort of meaningful message through a more grounded setting, which is what most strictly hard sci-fi neglects in favor of realism. The history of the real world has far more meaning and depth than any work of fiction, and by definition it follows the rules that conform our universe.

When have I ever blamed the industry? The majority of people like things one way, I like things another way. There's nothing wrong with that. You sound like a pretentious asshole and I'm sure no one you know has any enjoyment being around you.

Actually I regret saying the things in that post. That was uncalled for and I'm sorry, but I don't think either of us wants to keep arguing at this point.

On very general terms, yes. They're both contraction of our realities but the similarities end there. Once you get deeper into each other you have to develop them well enough to distinguish one from the other. For example; If you're talking about cibernetics you shouldn't just asume how they work and add magic-like capabilites; in that case you're just creating a magician of somekind and the message becomes mixed with an idea that we have seen for milenia; the power concentrated in the individual hands is too corrupting.

But what if you add realistic rules? Future implant don't have to be about you becoming a walking weapon dangerous for everybody, but rather a tool. A much new theme is the idea that such implants violate our privacy, but they also make our lifes much more easier? How much is worth that privacy then?Or the price of progress is privacy?

This is the one that comes first to my mind, and to that you should add real technologies and referents. Then it just doesn't become just a mesage about privacy in the future but in the now, and by adding technologies that we already know realistically you're also explaining to the common folk how do they work on a material level so they can actually understand the complete message.

Then after all the introduction and development, its possible to add the conclusions.

That is sci-fi, not fantasy.

It's ok. And I agree, let's end this argument here.

>The genres create an enviroment that doesn't nurture or encourage good writing above merely amusing concepts or ideas with no regard towards execution, which is why worthwhile works in sci-fi and fantasy are even rarer than in other genres.

Well its also my point but I ran out of words... thats why you might feel that sci-fi settings get lesser or simply meaningless messages, because they're not used properly but are usually mixed or the service of watherver bullshit the author has to say(and an author should be always humble in this regard, everyone is stupid and so probably you)

>It should still be possible to give some sort of meaningful message through a more grounded setting, which is what most strictly hard sci-fi neglects in favor of realism

But then the question, is what kind of message? Thats also the point, if that message deviates from the sci-fi you're not using it right or not as a central idea. So no, is not possible unless you give the so called "concesions" or "suspension of disbelief".

>The history of the real world has far more meaning and depth than any work of fiction, and by definition it follows the rules that conform our universe.

The ability to understand, transform and transmit such history and rules are the definition of a good writer. Knowledge is the base of creativity after all, the way it is applied also defines a genre.

>This is why vidya programmers are paid loadsa money
A lot of them don't get paid much either, at the entry level, because just about everyone wants to do games programming.

To anyone who cares, it's not too late to enjoy life.

Find a job you can put your heart and soul into and fucking do it. Be the best. Take a chance. If that means taking more college classes then dammit take those classes. Don't waste 10 years on regretting what could have been.

Take the plunge.

Unified Veeky Forums setting, every fucking homebrew I read about that includes fantasy.

Even if something new is used, it turns to shit. Take Machinum Dei, the Roman Themed giant mecha wargame. Maybe had potential, but they literally had the Huns everywhere but there the actual fucking Huns actually were. Instead of learning about the Huns, they were just rethought as ancient mongols and then they didn't even add any mongol elements.

Faced with this fact, they always responded "lol yeah but we're too dumb to know that and its too late" which really shows how fuck-all we're good at really.