Lore

How do I create interesting, deep, and useful lore for my fantasy world?

Get drunk and wing it whenever the PCs ask. If they ask at all.

Look up obscure cultures from Earth. Tweak them a bit. People have already been doing weirder shit than you could ever come up with.

Way to not try. And then people complain about the not!culture paintjob.

Get down your concept first before looking for inspiration. That way you don't dilute your individual flavor with whatever you just read.

>And then people complain about the not!culture paintjob.
Literally who but overambitious and pretentious people who don't even GM do this?

So wanting some fresh fantasy not written by Wikipedia is overambitious and pretentious now.

Get wrecked off your ass, write down everything that comes to mind, and then when you sober up figure out how all these ideas relate to one another.

>fresh fantasy
Yeah, you're probably not inventing that from a scratch. At least one anybody would be interested in.

Oh, don't be so cynical about creativity.
I know the whole "there is no original idea" spiel, but that really only refers to the fundamental combinatory mechanics of human thinking. Doesn't mean there aren't any new things to be put together.

Don't worry to much about whether something is original and just use and combine concepts you think are cool. If you can get your players to add shit they think is cool, alls the better.

Figure out why everything is the way it is afterwards.

>Firstly think about what concepts you think will be important to your game, make a list.
>Then write down a series of setting elements which the PCs will be interacting with, types of NPCs, places, individuals, organisations, anything the players will be seeing and learning about during the game, you'll be adding to this list as the game goes on obviously.
>Thirdly you join up the two and make sure that every important feature is connected to at least one key concept (although the more concepts you can reasonably tie them to the better).
>Then you figure out how that concept will be expressed in play (worldbuilding the players can't see isn't worldbuilding) for each key feature, a way it looks, acts, reacts to different actions by the PCs anything which informs the players about its nature more.
>Next you explain why each key feature is the way it is, this will consists of histories, mythologies, personal backgrounds that sort of thing.
>Finally you flesh them out more by thinking about how else the backgrounds you've now established would have affected the setting.

Being stifled by the thought of being like something existing certainly isn't productive. But I maintain that neither is dropping the aspiration to do something new altogether.

Read.

Read enough? Double that.

Let all that knowledge ferment into your skull until it inebriates you.

Distill it through your fingers and mouth.

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Isn't that actually Golarion?

close
it is generic after all

Read a lot. Read fantasy, mythology, history, anthropology, biology, geography, anything and everything. Read and understand. And then, once your head's full of all the whys and hows, make a thing.

OP start with a small map and make up some bullshit and rumors as time goes on, then build your world and history out from there. It will feel much more organic and suited to the players. Just make sure to have rivers gather from mountains, not split off, and draw your maps in the right order: landmasses, then mountains, then rivers, then cities and towns, then hills and forests and shit.

I can fap to this...