A question for all the worldbuildingfags out there.
When creating a fantasy world, how different do you make it from our planet or other fantasy worlds? Do normal animals exist, or do alien like creatures roam about? Are humans, elves and the normal fantasy races rule, or are more exotic races king?
Or somthing like that.
Discuss, also general world building thread.
Depends on the type of world I want to build.
One of these days I want to make a really exotic one with no humans and no Tolkien races, and alien animals. Still a medieval fantasy though, just with alien cultures.
Ironically, one of the best places to start making a fantasy setting, in my experience, is to think about it from a scifi perspective.
What kind of planet is it? What kind of system is it in? What's the climate like? How is the gravity compared to Earth? From there you extrapolate, fill niches with lifeforms, and give sentience to some. Then assume magic is real and waiting to be harnessed by sentient beings, and assume that some extra-dimensional beings exist that are exceedingly powerful. These beings could be called gods, but indeed even their considerable power has limits, and they may not have existed for as long as they say. Think of Q from Star Trek in terms of power.
Advance time to the point that the sentient mortal races have medieval level tech and some mastery of magic, and you have a fantasy setting.
I struggled with this for a bit. I think it comes down to understanding that being "original" is hard and pretty fucking overrated. So many ideas have been had in the span of man's existence that if you try to be too original, you pidgeonhole yourself into something stupid.
Overall, do what you wanna do. Nobody's gonna judge you for reskinning a really fucking cool idea for the sake of good fun unless they happen to be an insufferable fuckhead.
Pic related, it's Darth Vader, but somebody made him a CUHRAZY KNIGHT and that's pretty cool, right?
Wait, you mean that's NOT Morzan?
because I'm fairly new to DMing and most of my players have barely or never played a tabletop before, I stick to making my settings be thoroughly influenced by the default races that you could find in dnd, since it's hard to get new players to play anything else. for this reason, naturally the creatures are very earth-like and inspired largely by classical fantasy. however, I have thousands of hours in dwarf fortress and that's been a huge influence in world design, so I also have things like scores of animal people as well as forgotten beasts, which can appear very alien at times. I'm pretty excited to have a playerbase someday to be able to use my own from-scratch system and setting.
the problem with having no earth-like characters, is it largely follows that you have no human-like characters. people generally like to be people, or something like a person, when they are playing games or are in simulations. it would be difficult to get as many people to play a game where you are a small silicate octahedron with ninety-six eyes, no sense of sound, and twenty-four highly flexible tendrils used for manipulating objects. it's much easier to build a playable setting with some sort of "earth" canonical to the setting, for this reason. humans settling the galaxy and terraforming planets is a perfectly good solution for having both humans and completely alien creatures in the same setting. humanoid aliens or aliens that look too much like earth creatures break my suspension of disbelief.
It depends on how autistic I want to be about the worldbuilding. It also seems to matter if I made the characters or the setting first for some weird reason. If I make the characters first, it tends to be closer to earth-like with key aspects changed. If it's setting first, then it tends to go full autismo on creating evolutionary lines, geology, planetary aspects, history, civilizations, cultures, languages, etc. The best results come when I take two things I made with opposite starting points and mash them into a middle ground.
I stick with similar animals to our own, because the wealth of mythos and imagery we've made of animals is too rich to not draw upon. It's also immediately recognizable as both a concept and symbol, with allows for the awesome imaginability factor.
Unrelated worldbuilding question here:
I need a name for a Japanese Corporation.
Yajiroshi Industries.
I wish we didn't keep letting the worldbuilding general die.
FNSS Limited
It stands for Fanshīsūtsu no shinraidekiru shinshi Limited
I'm heavily influenced by Morrowind, so I try to keep my settings in a range of weird, but understandable at the outset, to completely alien if the players delve too deep.
I usually try to set it on our earth. If I absolutely have to use a different setting than I pull a Conan and set it in a prehistoric "lost age" with civilisations not dissimilar to those that existed in our reality but sometimes with fantastical elements. Same with Sci Fi.
I sometimes throw in creatures that I think will be creepy, funny, or interesting. I also detest the use of fantasy races unless I'm GMing a canon setting that comes with the system like Pathfinder's or D&D's. I much prefer just having humans be the only sentient species save for a few Lovecraftian style monsters or aliens just like Howard did in his works. I really like Howard if I didn't make that clear enough already.
Sanjuro Industries a publicly traded subsidiary of Yojimbo Incorporated
I tend to use this weird mixture of fantasy-like stuff and sci-fi stuff. For example, I will have the run of the mill animal people, humans and such, but I will modify these races with some sci-fi stuff depending on the world's climate and condition and shit. For example, in one of my worlds the atmosphere is heavier than Earth by quite a bit, and the sky is reddish-pink. Humans and the other races have odd skin and eye colors that would seem downright alien here, though make complete sense with the climate there. I also tend to have a mix of Earth animals (Though looking SLIGHTLY different with slightly different anatomies and fur/scale color and such) and alien animals that evolved due to the planet's climate.
This is probably because I like having worlds that are enough like Earth that people aren't completely weirded out, but unique and odd enough that they stick out.
the ichigo mashimaro
I literally used a slightly modified cut up Pangea and stole lines to describe the world out of Wikipedia in some cases. Normal animals definitely exist. Alien creatures also roam about. Humans are the main race, but others exist. They're just very rare. Some dwarves live in the capitol of the current protagonist empire though.
A setting I've grown fond of has about 50/50 ratio between the real(istic) world environments and full magical realm environments or ayy lmao areas. Excluding humans, elves and trolls all the ''races'' (more precisely species) are all more less alien, or simply unconventional.
Normal animals exist alongside abnormal, alien creatures. There a no ''king'' races, since a lot of the races stick to their own places and business, and humans most certainly are not the rulers of their world (even if some of them are deluded to think so).
I wouldn't consider my setting original in the least, since all the prementioned environments and races are basically just direct rip-offs from other settings and lores; the crystallized woodlands where even animals have pieces of glass growing from them = Macalania Forest from FFX, as well as a plain peppered by constant thunderstorms (Thunder Plains, also from FFX), a desert where the sand behaves as though it's liquid = The Sand Sea from FFXII...
I basically did what this user did , and started the foundation of the fantasy setting first from a scifi perspective, from the ground up.
Sometimes however, having a setting with lovecraftian ayy lmaos and more esoteric elements gets kinda overwhelming and you find yourself wishing for a more traditional fantasy setting. Unsurprisingly I almos always have a dozen different and separate scifi/fantasy settings, so when I'm fed up with one I just start to work with another.
Weirando-Yutani
Also how many races do you guys think is appropriate for one fantasy setting?
I just counted the ones in mine and there's like approx. 17 races (sentient species using language, tools, with distinguishable cultures etc.)
Doing away with conventional "solar systems" and "galaxies" is a good one, for one.
>Geocentric universe
>Sun/Moon are unique entities with a deliberate, controlled movement
>placement of Sun causes the South Pole to be 100% daylight, North Pole to be 100% darkness.
>Stars are just pinpricks of magic, or something similar, not more "Suns"
It always relates back to food, water, and shelter. Usually I take some base assumptions about the world that differ fundamentally from ours but then find ways to make basic human needs sustainable. Recursively playing off of the results is how technological improvement works in that universe. If I want a globalized result (e.g. everyone must be on the move), then I use the minimum amount of base assumptions to generate that result and proceed from there.
So it's not really a given race dominates my worlds, it's agriculture tech. Races are flavoring.
I like the generic races and I lack the creativity to deviate very much from an milky way model of reality, so most things end up looking pretty vanilla. I'm far more interested in unusual cultures and religions so it doesn't bother me much.
But I also like tossing in exotic beasts/races and sci-fi stuff viewed through thick fantasy goggles, so there's that too
>unusual cultures and religions
Like what for example?
>A semi-nomadic, sort of caste based society where your place is decided by your birthmarks, which relates to which of their chief god's three wives favors you the most
>Halflings that believe their trickster god discovered how to pierce the veil of time while he was trapped in mortal form and taught them the same trick, leading to their old society being governed by a council of ancestor ghosts that took turns possessing their living descendants
>Orcs that believe their god's twin brother stole one of his eyes while in the womb, which now sits in the sky as the moon to curse/bless them with madness and will one day fall back the planet to make everyone kill each other
>Matriarchal hobgoblins ruled by a reincarnating god-queen who has to repeatedly murder her twin sister to re-establish her link to divine power
>A population of elven refugees fleeing from a world where a parasitic undead tree is killing it and half the remaining population is addicted to it's sap
>Vampires that function like a spiritual pyramid scheme not so secretly lording over northern feudal kingdoms
>Hiveminded subterranean bug people that worship psionic crystals which are actually fragments of an old god fallen from space, which dwarves also discovered and used to power their most advanced golems
It's very much a work in progress, though I'm particularly proud of the orcish mythology so far.
I thought you meant real-world strange cultures or religions but whatever...
Sorry.
If it's any consolation, half of them are just making shit up and have no real gods.
It depends.
I have made bog-standard fantasy settings, historically influenced fantasy settings (various ages) mythological stuff, full on Tolkien-autism and worlds that are essentially Sword and Sorcery Science fiction.
At the end of the day, it's about what your setting brings to the sessions, if all it really does is pile a bunch of trivia on your players that they have to know, when the game still ends up feeling like any other setting except with trickier names on all the animals, it doesn't really serve a purpose.
99% of players would be SO MUCH HAPPIER if worldbuilders focused on stuff that matters to the average person in the setting.
I see so many people going nuts about creation myths, magic systems and maps, while being unable to answer basic question that are important for the average person on the street.
>What are naming conventions like here?
>What's the most common job/industry/trades?
>What are the views on family, country and faith for the average person?
It doesn't matter if you have the entire evolutionary tree mapped out for all the major races, or have mapped out the creation of the world, if you can't tell your players how people live, what they eat and what they're called, and what the latest news are in the area they live in.
When I'm writing fantasy I usually end up making everything abstract and/or surreal, because if I don't my autism will compel me to write science fantasy, which is fun, but takes way more effort to flesh out than I'm usually willing to put in. Does anyone else do this?
As a player I'm far more interested in a people's creation myth than what kind of vegetables they eat at dinnertime
Sort of this. I've never understood people who build from a micromanaging and scientific perspective. People who figure out populations, crop yields, weather patterns and tectonic plates. It seems so irrelevant to me.
I try to build up from myth and religion. Culture. Society.
My maps are always copies of real-world landmasses. I'm not great with geography, so I figure it's easier to familiarize myself with real-world places than to draw a squiggly blob map by hand or use a program to generate one and then try to work out where people might grow and live. Also, I can reuse terrain maps and shit.
North America is a beautiful place.
As with every fantasy everything has a cost.
Your players are human, and thus understand human things like:
>motivations
>societies
>etiquette
>social roles
>diets
And so on. Using humans as a dominant race in your setting is a quick way to make things easy to understand for your players.
Where are the cities? On the coast or at obvious geological junctions that would make decent trade routes. Because we move things by vehicle and boats are faster than land transport. Players natural get that and don't question it.
If you made a race that could fly and therefore had all your cities on mountain peaks, you'd have to explain how that worked. Not a big deal.
However I find that shit adds up provided you're not just reskinning existing things.
If you made a whole world that was completely alien you would have to explain so much that not only would it be time consuming to do so, it would be hard for your players to remember all the nuances. Not to mention harder for them to relate to the people there.
All that said, I keep my world building pretty traditional fantasy because:
>people know it and get jump in quickly
>it already has the ability to cover ever human relateable scenario that the players might find engaging.
I use some Bullshit, like singular beasts that are far too large or be realistic, or hand wave some biology/ food chain stuff (how does a dragon eat if it lives in an inhospitable volcano and never leaves? Who cares, magic yo)
I like to stick to mainly hospitable environments to make it feasible for my players to move around and opt into less hospitable ones. Though those come in different flavors (if beginning in a desert setting, I have them equipped to handle that).
I dunno... I guess I have a tendency towards including islands / seas more than most world builders I know .
I do sci-fi, so this might not count here ,but I try to make creatures alien. On the Human colony world of Novosibirsk,a cold prairie world. There are herbivorous land crabs (Well ,crustaceans). They travel in great herds and are hunted for their delicious, tender meat. New laws have been made to help stop their extinction.
I don't really do games (or have friends), but I do build Scifi worlds that take detail to insanity, slowly branching into fantasy as reality warping phonic is a thing now.
I talks with others I find three types of world, (grumps made off the cuff, so forgive the lack of detail, it more for getting ideas)
1. name changing, (it is a lizard you ride like a horse, but it is not a horse because it is a lizard). That is nice and all but those are just skin changes.
2. physics changes, these try to be deeper as some rule of reality is altered. However just like giving someone a bag of holding, abuse can quickly follow. So all the outcomes need resolution, which is very hard to do right. Often seen with too powerful tech or magic.
3. Social changes, these are the rare ones that people have a very hard time understanding. This is were some social norm is altered, and the way the people live is effected. Like a bank that gives real zero interest credit cards if you get a GPS tracker implant, it could be done in our wold but the ramification would be too foreign and numerous for most to understand. After a few of these it can be very alien, but given the subtly other often don't get it. Like when a race of pacifist are attacked and nobody can understand why they don't fight as they get slaughtered.
Be very careful with such clams, I deal with such "day to day" stuff. But people had so much trouble understanding how trade and barter works, that gold coins were introduced to make things easier and more understandable.
Sure, the creation of the world and the magic system is interesting to the players, but my point was that more effort should be spent on the things that let the players play their characters well and get immersed in the setting. Most people in a fantasy setting will not have the encyclopedic knowledge of the setting that you get by reading the whole sourcebook.
There's also something to be said for limiting the players knowledge to that of the character to aid role-playing.
In one of the best campaigns I ever played in, only the sorcerer type character had any idea about how magic worked, the scholar had the most formal education type knowledge (geography, language etc) and the hunter/adventurer was the only one who had any real idea about most of the monsters and so on.
The other players literally did not have the same information as me, about the things my character was good at and vice versa, and it was really great to feel like the characters learned from each other. It added another level to the character interactions and did a lot to lessen that whole feeling of just playing a game and having all the info and then play stupid in-character.
The player who joined halfway in got to play a villager who'd never been more than a few miles from where he was born, and learned everything as we played, just like the player.