/wbg/ Worldbuilding General

Looked at other fantasy political maps and realized my shit is too big and blobby still even though I was worried I was going over the top with the number of polities.

THE
RIDE
NEVER
ENDS

Nice mappe.

I'd say France sized. For roads, while the Romans were ingenious with their design and hard-working I'd think that roads would follow the riverine model of "path of least resistance". Unless going around a forest would add too much time, they'll be more likely to go around woods or isolated mountains. Chains they will have to pass through.

Also I'd think when a river is plentifully available you won't really need a road as much. So you wouldn't have a road literally going parallel to a river.

Also, to answer those questions:

>I'm struggling with that myself. I'm thinking of buying that inkwell coat of arms generator to pump out a bunch of sigils and banners for all the holdings. I just need a program with a lot of elements that doesn't look like a family reunion bull shit machine.

>I've gone out of my way to try and avoid making the culture "not X or fantasy Y." I've tried to blend different mythologies and cultural aspects, but tried to build it complete from the history I made up.

> As far as I've gotten, the campaign is pretty isolated, with their only recent interactions being with their neighbors, who are more like weird cousins than foreign peoples. They've bickered extensively over borders, and the lords of Mormaal have been known to hire armies from the neighboring country to try and hide their involvement in raids and such.

>tfw have literally spent literal years working on a unique setting
>tfw have put autistic detail into religions, cultures, economies, history, etc.
>tfw have developed like a dozen languages
>tfw expected to become rich and famous with my magnum opus
>tfw realize it's basically pointless except maybe as a fun hobby, as fantasy settings are common as dogshit now and most people aren't giant anthropology nerds
>tfw i have no face

Think of the terrain for the roads. Difficult to navigate terrain will have windy roads because it's easier to go around something than it is to remove it. Plains and flat, easy terrain will probably be straighter and more well kept. Roads should also be near an easy source of water and kindling imo, particularly if they're going to be well travelled.

Smaller than Australia, but not crazy small. I feel like I could walk between most adjacent settlements if I dedicated a day or most of a day to it.

> Tfw want to make a fantasy setting
> Can't make anything but generic and kitchen-sinky settings
Is it better if I try to avoid cliches and common tropes?

thanks m8. I'm trying to make the road run through all the regions and by the big trade cities and such, but I feel like the river is a pretty convenient way to travel down to the capital.

And I'll admit that I'm constantly waffling on the size from day to day. One day I think its small, another day I'm like its fucking huge.

Gotcha, winding around shit. and I think one of the size issues is that the icons represent entire holdings, not towns, and forests and rivers are just symbolic of the big ones.

Which then goes on to show that there is a fuck huge forest and fuck huge mountain range that would cover over half of the actually inhabited part of the country, so the civilized part seems smaller than it really is.

That's what I'd recommend. A big part of what makes things like Earthsea and Avatar so engrossing is that they don't play by the same rules as "standard" fantasy. But I wouldn't recommend "NO CLICHES, NO EUROPE, FINAL DESTINATION ONLY"; more like "take a couple things that you see over and over, and make a fantasy world that doesn't use those".

Like, a big thing in my setting is
>equatorial setting
>no medieval stagnation
>very little metal

Or for something like Avatar:
>Chinese-inspired setting
>magic based around physical action and technique rather than intellect
>spirits are common and fairly accessible, not all-powerful

So maybe find a non-European culture and start there. How about Mali?

Here's something I found interesting: in Europe, the people with power were the wealthy and learned, so magic in European traditions is typically associated with learning and academia. In pre-Islamic Mali, the people with power were the craftsmen, so magic is associated with craft. You don't cast spells, you create fantastical objects.

Something like that, just as a jumping-off point. Maybe you could even combine that with a steampunk/dungeonpunk vibe, where craft-wizards have advanced to making mythic machinery.

What I suggest is what I did on my map with setting down a specific scale marker. Have it on a layer separate so you can move it around to take imprecise measurements. And before settling on the scale, determine a RL reference for how large you want/need it to be.

With my scale of 500-600 miles previously the very top of the image was 60 degees north and the very bottom equatorial. That had each 1 inch mark in photoshop be 69 miles, and a 10" on the 100 scale being 690 miles.

So then using this daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-distance-calculator.htm which measures as the crow flies you can get a feel for RL ranges. Case in point:

Northern France (just next to Belgium on the coast) to Southern France (SW or so of Monaco) is 570 miles. Tip of Brittany to the tip of Alsace-Lorraine bulge is 581 miles. So if your scale is France sized you'd aim for the total width or total height being comparable.

By comparison, Brisbane to Perth is 2255 miles. Melborne to northernmost tip of queensland is 1871 miles. To compare, Rome to Baghdad is about 1850 miles, new Delhi to Lebanon is 2400 miles.

Then consider travel overland (river/water makes it extremely fast and convenient) for meaningful interaction.It seems that the average march distance for soldiers not on break-neck pace is about 20 miles a day. Horses seem to be 30-40 on average.

So crossing france's width or length is about 28 days. If you were to march entirely overland from Rome to Baghdad it would be 92 days.

Damn user, that's really impressive, I'll try and give that a shot, thanks.

Or alternatively:
>open Hexographer
>use an RNG to make really weird random generation parameters
>use the result as your starting point (you can tweak it later)

I have yet to use a map, to be honest. I don't feel it's an especially important part of my worldbuilding, but then again, I've never tried it, so eh.

Appreciate it. At the end of the day I think we worry too much about climate/realism when popular fantasy doesn't really give two shits about it so long as everything is within reasonable layout. Even then Hyboria had silly mountains and nobody minds. Just do the rough ballparking for your own sanity's sake more than for accuracy's.

Also if it's taking place within a france dimensions then it limits your possible climates unless the world is much smaller than ours or more magical. At 570 miles it's short of 10 degrees latitude. So France is about 51 north to 43 north. You can manage a mediterranean climate and a northern european climate, but not say a desert climate and a northern european climate. Unless the desert is Mongolia Gobi desert style which is the result of being high latitude and wind-stuff. Which is rather complicating.

The one thing I did for wind that I am satisfied with is a transparent layer with curving arrows to reference the coriolis effect's wind patterns. See pic but look closely for the faded transparent arrow. Basically:
-Northern Hemisphere is Clockwise, south is counterlcockwise BUT
-North of 27-30 degree north the wind pattern is more from the south to the north curving eastward.
-South of that point but north of equator the wind pattern is more from the north to the south curving westward.

Wind coming from/near water will bring moisture. Wind coming from land will bring less if any. Mountains have that whole wet side (the side getting the wind) and dry side (the side opposite the wind). But if the mountains aren't Himalaya sized they can end up encouraging more rainfall further afield past the rain-shadow on the dry side. That was what I came across when I was trying to figure out the Monsoon dynamics - the ghats running down the western side of India (next post)

I think I'm mistaken on the Ghats. Was going to say while they cause a rain shadow behind them they raise the land height behind them. But I think the more important thing is the Himalayas creating a barrier to monsoonal winds which cause the massive downpouring.

And the monsoon is the seasonal reversing of wind-patterns. Happens almost everywhere, just more famous and noticable for Southeast Asia

>I don't feel it's an especially important part of my worldbuilding
Oh, mon ami. Lemme bust the door wide open for you. The map can be EVERYTHING. Geography has a massive influence on culture.

The Egyptians lived by a steady, consistent river, and imagined steady, consistent gods. The Mesopotamians lived between two wild, unpredictable rivers and imagined wild, unpredictable gods.

China invented the steam engine before the English, but the English needed to make refinements to the steam engine to pump water out of their coal mines; Chinese coal was much easier to mine, so they never had to do that. Yadda yadda yadda England curbstomps China.

Less than 25% of the landmass of Japan is habitable, which is why fully 1/5 of their population lives in their largest city. The city has been morphed by needing to accommodate these crowds so you get bullet trains and massive fast food restaurants and multi-story schools.

The high, weaving mountains of West Virginia made travel from town to town very difficult, leading to extremely small, isolated towns and even individual families.

The Himalayas create a barrier which forces rain back out over the Indian ocean, creating the monsoon season. This lead to a massive trade network in the area, resulting in a spread of ideas and now Indonesia is predominantly Muslim.

The Inca Empire was built along the Andes, which meant that wheeled vehicles wouldn't have been much help; instead, their long-range communication was built around people running long distances, and thus carrying messages conveyed by a series of knotted ropes, which were easier to carry over those long distances.

I could go on.

>inb4 my examples are ridiculously oversimplified

Start with the geography. It's a huge deal in building a culture.

Yeah, yeah, I know all that. Just, with fantasy, you don't need to necessarily worry about all that because magic. Or, if you do, you can add what you want for flavor and leave the other bits out. I just never bothered to get into that sort of thing.

I'm starting to think I can make any setting besides a generic scifi or fantasy setting. Everything else turns out cool and unique and they just kinda end up...boring. Or overly complicated, in the case of any scifi setting I've tried to make.

>I'm starting to think I can make any setting besides a generic scifi or fantasy setting.
Explain what you mean by that.

Don't be afraid of using cliches and common tropes where necessary. Look at something like Berserk as an example - on paper, Medieval Europe, kings and demons and elves and ogres and etc. It's the stuff taken from elsewhere (in Berserk's case, the bonus cultural blindness of it being written by a Jap, as well as all the Hellraiser everywhere) and melded with the traditional tropes that makes it interesting.

So cursory glance put my country in the 1 - 1.2 million square mile range (with the major population centers i.e. not the great frontier and discounting the cliffs area being just slightly bigger than france at 750,000 miles). It would allow for a large distance to travel and some climate change between the sugarcane coast and the great frontier, but still being most temperate / European climate.

I'm not familiar with the square miles since I dunno how to do it for irregular terrain but that sounds good by me. I forgot though that you can look at other parts of the world climatically than just the European land you're basing it on. Like LA to Seattle is about 950 miles, or about Tangiers Morocco to Paris. So at a minimum of around 17 degrees or so you can have northern european climate and desert, or temperate rainforest seattle and desert LA. Higher latitudes make it even easier to achieve that - Switzerland and Austria are closer to the Maghreb than Paris but I naturally think of Paris as warmer (not mediterranean, but not cool alpine).

Likewise Boston is Dfa Humid continental warm summer climate yet is 450 or so miles from southern Virginia which is cfa humid subtropical climate.

keep this bumped for tomorrow lads

So in the near-future apoc setting I'm working on, I have mutant feral humans known a Morlocs. I'm trying to come up with names that soldiers would call various versions of them. I've got a few things, like Trogs, Brutes, Reavers, and such. Any ideas for others to use?

Well, I have an urban fantasy setting, a weird post-apocalyptic kinda horror kinda superheroic setting, a kinda anime fantasy setting vaguely based around the zodiac, I have a sci-fantasy setting I haven't written down yet, and I couldda sworn I had a different post-apoc setting sitting around somewhere, that I all like. They don't feel boring - they're not anywhere close to finished because I hop projects every once in a while so I don't burn out, but they're cool, to me.

Sci-fi settings always end up too big and complicated or I focus too much on the details - ends up with me tossing it out the window. With fantasy settings, I guess I just try to add in too much stuff. I know I can make separate settings to chop things up so it won't so kitchen sink-ish, but I dunno. I never do.

What do they do? Since their mutants, do their appearances vary? What're their habits, how do they hunt, stuff like that. Helps in the nicknaming process.

Need a big ol' space theme park map for a ravnica style moon, with themes similar to Disney/Nuka world, to fill with a bunch of zombie mutants

The basis is in the near-future, humanity finds a new power source, leading to a golden age. Unfortunately, they abuse this new energy, which causes massive overloads in the network of power plants using it. The Morlocs are humans that survived the meltdowns and were altered by exposure. Most became pale, gangly, and malformed, but the effects very. Most remain in the ruins of the old cities, hiding in the sewers and rubble, feeding on anything they can find, even each other. Occasionally, powerful and cunning Morlocs are able to bully and subjugate lesser ones, becoming Morloc Kings.

Ghouls, meatheads, rats, roaches, scabs. That's all I got off the top of my head.

Thanks.

.

How's this for a world map?

The setting is a combination of Venus Wars, Maschinen Krieger, Dragon's Heaven (particularly the art style) and a sort of post-AlphaCenturi world with players taking the roll of mercenary pilots. Basically mechs, tanks and large vehicles everywhere in this case to counteract the harsh and unpredictable environment of the planet.

Initial colonisation of the planet was a difficult affair and what started as differing colony companies has evolved over around 1000 years (not sure about time would this seem reasonable?) into distinct civilisations and countries that are now in a state of constant bickering conflict.

Despite the sudden changes of temperature, airspeed, rain acidity etc native life does exist there but has found ways to adapt itself for example, most trees have almost chameleon-like leaves that can change to accommodate sudden weather differences and incredibly deep roots to anchor themselves in strong winds, seed dispersal is normally air-based so a common hazard is being caught in a seed storm and having engines clogged so because of this, flight and aircraft is mostly low altitude.

Technology wise its all over the place with a general mixture of the super advanced colonial tech and haphazard knockoffs built with what could be best described as archaic understanding (a basic AI might produce its quantum calculations via reels of punchcards and tape.)

The incredibly efficient and engines, high tech energy weapons and autonomous AI over time these wonders have been lost, devolved into icons, destroyed and forgotten or simply normalised to the point of banality (travelling nomads while being considered backwards would always carry with them an advanced solar-collector-water-purifier combo devices)

Also how do you like your mechs to be controlled - standing up hardwired into a nervous system or sitting down pulling at levers like a tank. A combination of both?

What other features should I flesh out?

>1000 years

aside from the other things, think about where we were on earth 1000 years ago, and how the advancement of technology grows faster the more advanced we grow

>Oh, mon ami. Lemme bust the door wide open for you. The map can be EVERYTHING.
NEVER start with geography. Ever. Make the interesting parts that people care about first—bend the map to suit the world, later. Forcing your world to conform to a randomly generated geography is pretty much the worst idea I have ever heard.

Anyway: what do people think of Fountain?

>Anyway: what do people think of Fountain?
let me know where I can find it and I'll let you know

Oh, sure. The blog's here: mavichist.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/official-release-with-documentation/ with a link to the github page, and a few other images below.

...

Wait, we had a discord? I wonder how it compares to the reddit one.

what the hell is this? it looks pretty cool.

Fountain. As linked here:. Developed by some impressively autistic Redditor. Seems better than the other stuff I've seen, but it's very barebones.

I still prefer just using a pencil and paper.

reddit's worldbuilding community has extreme autism in general, really. it's the mix a single-minded regard for "realism" and absolutely no artistic direction whatsoever

This is what I have usually found. They've gotten much better recently, thank God, but they're still fixated on moving from cause to effect. They also think originality is valuable in itself.

It is very useful for figuring out what not to do, but I also use it as a place to develop my setting without players potentially seeing it on here. And, unlike us, Redditors get irrelevant but nice shit done (like Fountain).

Brief reminder that Inkarnate isn't that bad.

Hexographer is better than Inkarnate, and it's a fucking hexmap builder.

I mean if I want competence I'll look towards the OSR grognard enclave, honestly

And a second brief reminder to do everything in pencil first.

it looks better in pencil even though you didn't even try

I didn't know there was one. What's their main failing, if Reddit's is realism and ours is realpolitik?

it's impossible to have a discussion with them since everything is moderated by a combination of google+ and long-winded blog posts

This—it'd look much better if you scanned the drawing and used that. Much quicker and easier, too. Or even if you just took a closer picture.

That's my main problem with these tools—they're all just worse than drawing it yourself.
Oh, the Tumblr/forum problem. I was assuming you meant the OSR general here, actually.

>wbg

Hohoho it's been a while!

Anyone else making some near future sci-fi settings? I love discussing questions and themes, especially if it's sci-fi set exclusively in a human environment or just our solar system.

Currently writing Chapter two of my supposed life's work piece set in the 3500s, where the factions of a broken and directionless Solar System seek answers to what lies beyond an induced wormhole out beyond Pluto, a remement of the time when Earth was still the great power in the System, before the secession of the other planets.

I'm pretty happy with my setting, but if anyone wants to just chat in general about theirs then let's go.

Open to suggestions and discussion about culture too.

How do you guys make your banners and sigils? I was looking at the inkwell coat of arms generator, but not sure if I want to shell out 20 bucks for it.

I'm writing a sci-fi world for fun and I drew some inspiration from 40k. But does a faction of humanity who despises all alien life and is genetically modified to be slightly buffer than average humans sound too much like the imperium of man/space marines?

Forget modern rectangles, that's a fairly recent idea.
I like to go back to squares or different proportioned rectangles. If I want something novel try a diamond or circular design.

If you mean purely designs:
>Paint
>If not good enough, Photoshop
>If not poor enough, Gimpshop

You don't need a website to design your banners for you user, get creative

Well, what are your themes? What's each thing do, and how does it relate to them (assuming you're not just hammering themes into everything)?
You have no idea how much of 40k sounds too much like something. As long as you use your spacenazis in an interesting way, it doesn't matter that they're spacenazis.
I have never found anything. The best there is is getting some drawfag to shit out your banners, and that's a once in a blue moon thing. I just gave up and don't use them myself. Because is right (but I am lazy).

I think it depends on the amount of g-moding we're talking about.
Xenophobic human factions aren't exclusively 40k, and as long as you avoid the gothic looks and Roman-esc designs you should be fine.

It would be nice if there were other factions of humans too though, like g-mod purists of some more xenophilic ones.

Ok so maybe not 1000 years, what about 100?. Enough to devolve from advancement into mess while still retaining bits of history.

Basically I'd like to suggest that things went:
>Planet gets colonised by various groups but its environment prevents quick establishment
>The colonies start bickering, unable to leave and rapidly realising they made a mistake
>Big planetary colony war puts the final nail in any sense of unity there and wipes out a good percentage of the population
>Remaining surviving groups leave each other alone and establish themselves best they can over a few generations, eventually becoming civilisations and factions of their own as they readopt and reintegrate the colony technology for long-term and alternate use.

>tfw expected to become rich and famous with my magnum opus
Found the problem.

If you want to be rich and famous, you either make something of legit worth or you pander like fuck.

There are other factions, the other one beings one which sees the value of all life, not just that of humans and seeks to protect them. I'm trying to portray neither side as the "good" side though.

What does lie beyond the wormhole?

A few hundred years is enough for differing cultures, but you don't have to limit yourself. There's plenty of ways to increase the time, like the cliched "we lost contact with Earth" or battletech style repeated nuclear wars, and much more if you want. You might want to go down the route of "weird, quasi-bronze age people with mecha and railguns", or you might not, but you can do either.

The lore of the world revolves largely around AI, and it was Earthen development of superpowered AI that caused the secession war. (Among other factors)

Once the secession war was won, the AIs were all banished from the solar system, to an Earthlike planet (But much larger) they had discovered elsewhere in the galaxy. The wormhole was the pinnacle of Earthen science at the time, and achieved through their super AIs, hence the AIs exile was somewhat ironic.

Since then science has stagnated thanks to both economics and religion. However, the AIs which were banished are assumed to have continued their research and now possess godlike powers of matter and time dilation, FTL, gravity tech, and supreme sub-atomics.

This isn't really Veeky Forums at this point, as while this entire idea began as a game for me it's progressed to essentially being a narrative for a story I'm trying to write.

Also in reply to your first comment (Both were me), how are you portraying spacenazis as good? 40k barely gets away with it and only through HFY. What's your method?

>This isn't really Veeky Forums at this point
A lot of this thread isn't really Veeky Forums at this point.

So do the AI want to kick humanity's ass or what?

The discovery of alien life came with the colonization of a far off star system, note worthy for it's huge gas giant. The main motivation for the "space nazis" is to preserve the human identity in a place where intelligent life exists, and can pose a threat to the way of life of the humans living there. Anything that is a danger to their humanity must be dealt with because what is a person without that which makes them human?
plus they're good when compared against the humans who believe all life is valuable and fight for it at the cost of pretty much betraying the entire human race and themselves by going much further with body modification and going as far as to fight alongside the aliens.
I guess my reasoning is a slightly more sane version of HFY.

Nah, my AIs are philosophical mainly. Although of course variation exists.

I like the sound of your Spacenazis, and their lack of a zealous nature will further help distance them from the 40k Empire.

You mostly sound like a nationalist. Not a bad thing unless we're getting political, but it definitely comes out to anyone who might be looking at your work (if you're worried about that).

How do we feel about the Stellaris method of faction design?

Everyone has that fantasy of making it big but don't let it motivate or guide you. Unless you're aiming to pander and even then I'd say there is no guarantee of -what- to pander to unless you do young adult with a female lead. Even then there's a shit-load of books in that domain but it's one with the greatest chance for 30 minutes of fame.

Google images for suitable heraldric animals or whatever, too.

google.com/search?q=boar heraldry&num=100&espv=2&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS704US704&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjLj-PGhIXPAhWDFx4KHXr-DYAQ_AUICCgB&biw=1920&bih=960 boom shitloads of boars.

bird heraldry, bear heraldry, dolphin heraldry, eagle heraldry, dropbear heraldry, ectera.

From a political and cultural standpoint it's far too simplified to be of use. From a worldbuilding standpoint it's far too structured to provide anything ""artistic"".

Best I could see it used for is a kind of codebook quick approximation for your respective states.

"X is this"
"Y is that"

Not referred to in literature but rather used as a codebook reference

I guess, but I'm not sure that's a major concern. If you need to quickly reference those things, you probably don't actually need to reference them at all.

I like the idea of 'quasi bronze age' but maybe a bit further ahead time wise.

I hadn't really considered 'earth' at all in the setting further than a distant memory or origin story. Possible origin reasonings

>An exodus from an unlivable earth and they never had any intention on going back
>The colony was just one of a myriad of splinter colonies sent to different regions of space and wound up on a planet that prevented any subspace communication with other groups by chance (wind, weather and environment making signals impossible at the time)
>An initial civil war between colonists that lived out of the ships and those that went native

Others? I don't think a nuclear war would be something that could be returnable from but some other kind of weapon ruining things?

>How (if at all) do you handle flags, banners, insignias, or any other form of representative icons in your world?
If need arises, I design them.
>How often are your world's cultures similar to real-world cultures in similar areas (i.e. desert civ #928 = persia)
Sometimes I guess. West is rather similar to 1930s America/Europe. Desw empire might be bit similar to India with the castes and reincarnation and whatnot.
>What territorial disputes are present in your world?
In the East Desw have seized large regions over past millenia, which has caused lot of upset, but no one has really military strength to take them on. The west went through many wars recently, so some border disputes remain, although it is relatively peaceful time.

I really like the world map.

Probably no one here.
And personally, I don't care. I do it for fun, and perhaps I'll use it for my traditional games, video game or comic. With just a setting you are not getting anywhere.

Works for videogame, but might not be necessary for a traditional game / setting.

>tfw expected to become rich and famous with my magnum opus
You should never expect that with anything. World is a fickle thing.

Depends lot how you depict them. I am not very familiar with the setting, but there are those heavy religious influences, stagnation and whatnot.

Mind me asking what tools you used to make the map or was it totally from scratch?

Now i wonder if i can incorporate that into the inkwell stuff.

Bump

How do you guys keep your cultures from being just Scotts elves or Romans in space?

discord.gg/uUHyP

Question time!

Remember that you can skip questions you've answered before or which aren't relevant to your setting.

What's something considered stereotypically masculine? Stereotypically feminine?

How are boy children and girl children raised differently?

How tall is considered "tall" for a human?

What's a natural feature or historical landmark many people would like to see in their lifetime?

What is one of the most popular books/plays/movies/holograms/whatever in your setting? What's it about? What makes it popular?

Is there a new money/old money divide? How do they view each other?

What's a technology in your world that could theoretically exist in ours but doesn't? What's a technology in your world that couldn't possibly exist in ours?

What's a common old wives' tale or folk cure?

What's a staple of a peasant's diet? What's a delicacy of the rich?

How do farmers irrigate their crops?

Are there constellations? Moons? Other unique celestial features?

What proportion of the population is religious?

How much does the average dirt farmer know about magic?

What are some fuel or power sources other than muscle/animal power?

What's a plant you see in almost every town or on every street corner? Why?

Are there festivals or carnivals? What are they like?

This seems dead as fuck.
We don't need more answerspams.

Well what do we need?

>This seems dead as fuck.

Well now how could we possibly change that?

Discussion about worlds and worldbuilding.
Death spirals can only be beaten by big events. One person, even two or three people, can't beat the spiral.

>Anyone else making some near future sci-fi settings?
I am, but mine is set in only the next few decades, and closer to sci-fantasy than pure sci-fi.

>Discussion about worlds and worldbuilding.
And a questionnaire does not count because...

There is no discussion involved. People just shit out their answers and leave.

Because 2-6 people spewing answers at you isn't discussion?

That hasn't been my experience at all, though. I like reading through other people's answers, and I've found a lot of interesting things worth discussing further in the past.

I've tried to design the questions to be things the creator probably hasn't thought about yet. The point is to force them to think about the little nooks and crannies of their universe rather than just looking at everything in faint detail from on high, which is a big part of what makes an engrossing fictional universe.

It's fun and often provides a jumping-off point for further conversation. I'm not talking in hypotheticals here, I'm saying what's happened in past threads.

Nice quads. And i like questionaires - its a chance to attract interest and initiate discussion about your world, or give ideas for development if you dont have answers

Follow this guide.
-Skip the water portion besides doing the blue layer and clouds, but skip the terrain of the ocean until you are 110% done with the map's lands. As in, you are almost done with the map in total. I've edited the physicality of the map more times than I can count.
-Skip river guide, follow this one instead that I will link next

> I'm saying what's happened in past threads.
Not these threads. We have an archive. You can check. I'll eat my own hat if even 5% of answer sprawls in the last several threads even received a reply, let alone one that lead to anything.

Worldbuilding General has been slow/dead for a couple of weeks. I figure a lot of the posters are students and fall semester just started.

Follow this river tutorial or my abridged version on this album: imgur.com/a/7mwR8

Color overlays are just layer shenanigans, I will explain them if you need me to.