I am building the world for my campaign, what are the bare essentials to create a believable world

I am building the world for my campaign, what are the bare essentials to create a believable world

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Are we talking believable as in "this could have actually occurred if events in history were different
" or believable as in "Elves are a thing because the background of the world supports their existence"

The latter

In my experience, you'll need:
A Map
Some Names
A bottle of vodka
A bottle of rum
A bottle of whiskey
A bottle of sake
A bottle of tequila
More booze
An audience of players with the ability to be willing to not disbelieve your world
Even more booze
Some orange dream bars

And that's it.

Countries, sentient races that inhabit them and cultural practices (bare bones), common belief systems, government structures (basic), and any pertinent legends/history between the areas.

A hundred yards around the players, beyond that they will not even realize.

Everywhere people live needs to have food, water and access to transportation. Most settlements should be on a coast or on a river that could be navigated by barges.

Large settlements require small agricultural communities that feed them, typically nearby on planes or in valleys, with good water and good roads to reach them.

Your world's technology matters a lot here. Can you have huge grain ships? Rome, for example, was fed in large part by food from Egypt. In the modern world a mix of large ships, trains and heavy trucks allows huge amounts of food to be moved economically.

I'll tell you, what makes a settlement/setting believable is if you can tell how it gets food, how it gets water, and how it gets rid of shit.

People always have a reason for doing something. With insane people, they still have a reason, but the logic behind it might only make sense to them and only them. No one does shit for the 'lulz'.

>No one does shit for the 'lulz'.

Um.

Just do a "kitchen sink" style of setting and throw in a bit of everything you like and then try to weave it all together.
Alternatively, play a game of Dawn of Worlds or Microscope RPG with your players.

An important question might be the level of civilisation in your world. Do people not even lock their doors like pre-immigration Sweden, or are we looking at a Fallout-style world where you can't walk from one town to another without getting attacked by dozens of monsters and bandits?
On a similar level, how respected is the local law? Are town guards loved as the only defence against the horrors in the forest or are they hated as faceless goons working for unfeeling megacorporations? If your players pick a fight with local authorities (and they probably will) this will be important to decide how willing people are to help them after the battle. People might refuse to serve them entirely or offer services for free, depending.

Op here I was thinking of creating languages to use for root words is that too far?

If you are having fun doing it then no. If you want your language to be appreciated by your players then you are asking for too much.

I don't expect my players to give a fuck about the "features" of my world at best I want to be able to answer questions they my have about names for certain things, and additionaly give places fantasy names

More power to you, I tend to favor picking words that define the character or location and changing the letters or sounds around as well as just using random name generators.

Languages are difficult. They don't have their own discipline of science for nothing
You're not going to be creating a fictional language with its own morphology, phonetics, syntax, alphabet, ortography, grammar and vocabulary and semantics.
You can cobble up interesting sounding sentences, utterances and individual words that have relation to each other at the bare minimum of common morphemes, sentence structure, and some words that you deem to be common in that language.
Pay attention to the phonology and morphophonology when thinking up anything. You will want to have your "language" sound consistent, otherwise for your players it will be nothing but random gibberish you pulled out your ass.

It's a world

It's got people in it

Those people make sense.

Internal consistency is the most important part. A world becomes believable when the players can infer the working of it through the things they see.

There is no such thing. Level of detail matters not, it is if those details make sense and relate to each other. The setting must be organic wholeness, not patchwork of detached ideas.
In my opinion it is not lack of detail which usually makes setting unbelievable. It is plenty of detail, but when those details are mostly just bunch of stupid autism tier shittery. Forgotten Realms is blatant example of that - enormously detailed setting, but during reading through those details, you facepalm over authors' stupidity way too often and wish that it were more vague and leaving space for custom interpretation instead.

I think there is an even further issue with world-building than level of detail, or even consistency (though consistency does play a role, it's often overrated).
This will be an unpopular point of view, but the real problem of worldbuilding lies in lack of MEANINGFULNESS.

Like it or not, world-building, and fantasy world-building in particular are STILL forms of storytelling. You might be telling your story in a different way: through details, backgrounds, in a generally non-linear fashion, but in the end, you are still just enticing the viewer/reader/player to put together a STORY in their head - the story of your world. And stories need to be meaningful. They must mean something to the audience, they must be relevant to them. It must connect to something that has value and importance to the audience, even if it's things the audience themselves were never really paying attention to.

So much world-building fails to be interesting because it's often a complex system of consistent ideas, but that actually lack any real relevance to the audience. This doubly true for fantasy world-building that does not really even have the excuse in being a speculative exercise.

Fantasy itself does not exist for speculative reasons. It does not exist to create self-contained consistent frameworks. It exists to expand on mythological perspective on world, where we communicate deep or relevant ideas, notion and observations through symbolic imagery and language. And the more fantasy forgets that, the more pointless it is becoming.

So if you want to do good world-building, make sure first that you HAVE something to tell in the first place. Look around real world, and seek interesting things, notions, ideas there. Look for beauty and consider what makes those things beautiful - look around grand stories and consider what made those stories so captivating in the first place.

That is how you do good world-building.

...

The single most important essential is that you play something that's not D&D. If you pull at least that much off, you'll have a good time.

Shows how degenerative RPG tg players are that art

Focus on making the world fun instead of believable.

I'm still struggling to decipher that sentence. Translation, please...