World-building Myths

What common misconceptions do you see perpetrated by other world-builders?

>lakes can only have one drainage river
>rivers never diverge or have two mouths
>islands are always volcanic
>deserts always appear on one side of a mountain range
>woodland never grows on two sides of a mountain range
>coasts can never be smooth
>ice sheets/tundra distribute equally across the north at the same latitude
>rivers never start near each other
>rivers never start where another ends
>all rivers need mouths
>lakes without visible drainage will always be salty

Anything else?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=1ZPngwusUZI
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

>A world with tons of geographically perfect continents and con-langs is a substitute for writing interesting stories in that world.

>Your world can't be a flat surface floating in space because that's not how Earth works

I hate this goddamn board sometimes.

If it ain't on the back of some giant animal, it doesn't count.

>factions must be balanced
>a faction can never lose a war so bad it never recovers or gets wiped out right away
>cultures never migrate, split, diverge or assimilate others
>a country is either purely highland, coast or lowland, never a combination
>all borders look like potatoes, no highly irregular borders, exclaves or jagged intrusions happening because of cultural-political reasons explained in game

>all borders look like potatoes, no highly irregular borders, exclaves or jagged intrusions happening because of cultural-political reasons explained in game

Borders are the hardest thing for me. I can't work out where to place borders, since most of my nations claim more than the other admits, so I usually just stick to basic geographic borders (rivers/mountains) and then say those countries are just raiding either side of that line.

Try making countries with subdivisions, counties and the like, its very helpful when youre trying to come up with the internal culture of something and why the borders lie where they are. Then you can add interesting outliers, like Calais was for England or Sundgau for Austria.

>geographically perfect continents
What do you mean exactly by that ?

I mean the shit that OP talks about. Being really pedantic about how real world landmasses form and how they effect climates and shapes.

Oh ok. I totally agree with you then.

Borders were largely an invention of the 19th and 20th centuries. There needs to be a powerful centralised state, geographic barriers, or obviously distinct cultural groups to really draw a clear line. There might be a firm agreed border in the town with the only bridge across the Big River, with checkpoints and taxes, but 6 miles further up you might find a Dullonian speaking town 'outside' the country's border, and a Dullonese speaking town 'inside' it; alternatively it might be totally unclear, as all the citizens of both towns are bilingual and have generated their own hybrid culture of both.

It's mostly a thing that's not important, unless you want to play with the ambiguities of the border itself. If your players are tasked with preventing border raids, or collecting taxes near a border, that's a great time to dive in to this, especially since their mistakes could provoke an actual war. If not... who cares whether Dullwich is Dullonian or Dullonese?

>forest+meadow zone
>icy zone
>desert zone
>mountain zone
>cursed zone

>Borders were largely an invention of the 19th and 20th centuries. There needs to be a powerful centralised state, geographic barriers, or obviously distinct cultural groups to really draw a clear line

100% Bullshit. The borders of fiefdoms were extremely well demarcated even during the medieval ages, down to the individual peasant cottages.

>I don't know enough about geology and geography to work out a coherent map

I think his point is that a coherant map is nice, but if your story is a shitstain the map isn't going to make any difference. On the other hand, a fucking awesome story will remain awesome even with a shit map, and a good map would just be an optional improvement.

>There is nothing original (so you should just replicate already existing settings and not even try.)
Just because you can hack down anything to such a base level that singular elements are identical in a vacuum, that doesn't mean there can't be new combinations.

>Just randomly generating a world and slavishly plotting out the consequences of that random chance are the way to go.
Why start worldbuilding without any vision whatsoever?

>Intelligent species only ever live in the biome they evolved in and are perfectly suited for.

Why would they have them claim more than they admit if they for example lost a war?

Also most borders are based on rivers and mountainsides.

>Why would they have them claim more than they admit if they for example lost a war?

Perhaps his kingdoms are like medieval polities, claiming not land but titles and titles can easily be split amongst several pretenders. There were instances of minor nobility claiming land they werent in control for centuries and sometimes even getting it back.

Major peeve sof mine

>monocultural races
>monocultural kingdoms
>borders of cultures and kingdoms are perfectly the same

I am guilty of all of these

>What common misconceptions do you see perpetrated by other world-builders?
Probably the "because this feature is technically possible, your map should depict it or you're a bad designer, even though this scale only shows six rivers on the entire continent" people like OP.

Except I said nothing like that, so calm down.

Most of my nations are currently bordering an expansionist not!Roman Empire, so borders aren't hard set. They keep pushing each other back and forth with every new wave of war. I use rivers as a sort of "last stand" for the losing side, where they can better hold ground, then they push the enemy back later to the next river. Sort of like a no-man's land between two major rivers, where everything is up for grabs but neither can hold it indefinitely.

>>There is nothing original (so you should just replicate already existing settings and not even try.)
>Just because you can hack down anything to such a base level that singular elements are identical in a vacuum, that doesn't mean there can't be new combinations.

>>Just randomly generating a world and slavishly plotting out the consequences of that random chance are the way to go.
>Why start worldbuilding without any vision whatsoever?

>>Intelligent species only ever live in the biome they evolved in and are perfectly suited for.

Are you in the wrong thread? I said nothing like those in the slightest.

How does one tell a good story? Does it what?need to be unique, or just have good characters, or what?

This thread is about worldbuilding myths according to your post and I used the same formating for the points as you laid out. I liked to OP, as is customary when adding to a list of op points.

So I believe I am in the right thread.

Fuck.

>Does it need to be unique, or just have good characters, or what?

I hate when people dismiss other people's maps for things clearly inspired by actual places.

I don't know if that's the joke but that's just Europe rotated like 90 degrees counterclockwise isn't it?

Good job.

You know like those plebs that criticise maps for things they don't realise are perfectly valid? That's what the OP image is about.

not only rotated, but with minor changes

That's a pretty fuckin' broad question

>>a faction can never lose a war so bad it never recovers or gets wiped out right away
Historically speaking, a culture getting wiped out right away is really rare.

The closer you get to modern times, the more common it gets (ramping up during the early-modern period, becoming commonplace during the colonial era, and reaching critical self-extermination levels during the cold war), but for most of human history wiping out a faction was really fucking hard.

In fact, from a long-term historical perspective, it were typically the losers that won the war.

Just look at the Turks in Turkey. They came from Central-Asia to pillage the Christians and Muslims in Anatolia. Now they're Muslims that genetically are almost identical to the Christians that used to live in the East-Roman Empire.
Same goes for the Rus Swedes that invaded the Slavic lands of what is now known as 'Rus'sia.

A military caste that invades new land always loses - in the end.

>Turks are genetic Romans

I wonder who's behind this post...

>deserts always appear on one side of a mountain range
>woodland never grows on two sides of a mountain range

This should be the case a fair amount of the time though, are you just complaining about it being treated like a hard and fast rule with no deviation?

Certainly not a Turk or a Greek. Either of those two will go apeshit if you imply they're genetically the same shit.

youtube.com/watch?v=1ZPngwusUZI

>How does one tell a good story?
Get drunk and wing it. There's probably more to it, but there ain't enough room in this thread to give you a proper answer.

>are you just complaining about it being treated like a hard and fast rule with no deviation?
Looks like that's exactly what he's complaining about.

>if they for example lost a war?

There's plenty of reasons.

The war was illegal from their point of view so the enemy had no right to claim the spoils. The terms of the pacts were ambiguous and/or interpreted differently by both sides. One country has a culture where international relations are interpersonal, so the recent change of ruler invalidates prior peace pacts.

It Sounds like he's complaining about a failed attempt at realism than a lack of realism.

This is a "common misconceptions" thread, not a "passive-aggressively complain about lazy writing in a common misconceptions thread" thread

>lakes can only have one drainage river

Examples?

>rivers never diverge or have two mouths

True dat, but I don't think it's nearly common enough. Interestingly it's relatively simple when doing hydraulic engeneering at least at a Renaissance tech level.

>islands are always volcanic

Wait, who the fuck thinks this?

>deserts always appear on one side of a mountain range

Decent point, but most people don't give a fuck about distribution of rainfall on eastern side vs western sides of continent.

>woodland never grows on two sides of a mountain range

Well, duh.

>coasts can never be smooth
Duh 2. But they will never be totally regular either.

>ice sheets/tundra distribute equally across the north at the same latitude

Of course.

>rivers never start near each other

True, but not that common.

>rivers never start where another ends

An example?

>all rivers need mouths

If they're not the Okawango... yes, they do?

>lakes without visible drainage will always be salty

True.

Are you a lake without visible drainage? Boring "Kingdom of Protagonistia" "Evilbad Empire" "Elfland" "Desetarabia" and "Norseland" generic blobs are the fucking worst

>Examples?

Look up "bifurcation lake".

>True dat, but I don't think it's nearly common enough. Interestingly it's relatively simple when doing hydraulic engeneering at least at a Renaissance tech level.

It's more common than people would have you believe.

>Wait, who the fuck thinks this?

This is a common thing I find from people around here. They only like island chains or similar, never islands formed through other processes (rising sea levels, glacial action, erosion, etc).

>Well, duh.
>Duh 2. But they will never be totally regular either.

This is the point of the thread. They're misconceptions.

>True, but not that common.

More common than impossible, though.

>>rivers never start where another ends
>An example?

Checkout pic for some fun.

>If they're not the Okawango... yes, they do?

And the Helmand. It's completely endorheic. And the Hari, which strangely enough ends in a desert.

I don't really see how the pic should illustrate a river ending next to where another starts. It does show many rivers starting next to another, but...

Also I don' recall that much rivers bifurcating anyway, unless it's a braided river.

Is this any good?

Amazing, they even got the color of your averge spanish or italian player right

>desert and jungle right next to each other
>a bazillion rivers connecting to a single lake
>special snowflake factions resigned to arbitrary locations
>nonsensical names
0/10, at least try to put some effort

>I don't really see how the pic should illustrate a river ending next to where another starts. It does show many rivers starting next to another, but...

You need to just look at the sections of landlocked colour. Those are endorheic basins. So where some rivers start, others are ending.

>Also I don' recall that much rivers bifurcating anyway, unless it's a braided river.

Look up distributaries.

On a side note, are you that same guy from the map thread that can't link a post?

What even is this, Alternate-Earth Africa?

Every last village kept track of its exact borders, even among each other.

f course, when villages are few and far between in the wilderness, such borders become less important or exact, but still matter

>Lake Chad
guess it doesn't contain frogs

>How does one tell a good story?
That is an extremely broad question. I can tell you one thing is definitely false: it does not need to be unique. In fact, 99% of all stories in existence are just re-telling of older stories. Originality counts for nothing. What matters is how relevant the tale is, how well is it told, both of which will determine how well does it resonate with the audience.

Generally speaking, a story needs to reflect something that is of relevance to a reader. The safest way to achieve that is to have good characters. In fact, plenty of "classic" literature scholars will tell you that book is always as good as it's characters are. While I think that is an overstatement, it's not entirely wrong:
Writing good characters will INSTANTLY make the story relevant to the reader, give him a reason to care about what is going on. You can write entire stories where fuck all happens but as long as you have good characters, it's going to be enjoyable for most people.

The other things is going to be very broad: it's just plain meaningfulness. Elements of your story must represent - in literal or symbolic sense - some aspect of reality that the player will identify and be able to relate to himself. In fantasy, it's the reason why most of stems from mythology, as mythological tales are build on profound symbolic stories that people found relatable for thousands of years. If you analyze Tolkien, you'll find that it's entirely based on extremely old iconic imagery and (pre-)psychological intuitions about world, and that is why it is so god-damn appealing.

So basically: I think that to tell good stories you need to be observant and realize that no matter how strange, magical or surreal your tale is getting, it needs to in some way a meaningful reflection of real world. That characters must resemble real people, their stories reflect things that happen in real world, even if through strange or magical lenses.

I'm guessing it's prehistoric Africa, back when the Sahara desert was still jungle...

Genuinity > originality

>lakes can only have one drainage river
>rivers never diverge or have two mouths
While neither of these are perfect rules, they are correct roughly 90% of the time. Most lakes do have only one drainage river, and absolute majority of rivers does not bifurcate. It's much better to treat these principles as rules if you don't know what you are doing than ignoring them.
Bifurcating rivers in particular are incredibly common fault of most map-making I've seen, and 99% of the time it just looks completely riddiculous.

>islands are always volcanic
Obviously bullshit, but stemming from a reasonable misconception: most island chains, specially those farther from mainland coast are products of tectonic raises, and often have a lot of active volcano's around them.

>deserts always appear on one side of a mountain range
>woodland never grows on two sides of a mountain range
Stupid. But again a misconception stemming from simplified understanding of rain-shades.

>coasts can never be smooth
Define smooth. But generally, yeah, that is just wrong.

>ice sheets/tundra distribute equally across the north at the same latitude
Over three years of worldbuilding and map-making threads around here - and I've never heard anyone say anything like that.

>rivers never start near each other
Stupid, but again I've never heard anyone claim that.

>rivers never start where another ends
This, however, makes mostly sense. Rivers usually end in a large body of water. You don't usually have rivers springing up on coast and then flowing away from it.
Honestly, most of these river based misconceptions can be pretty fucking easily cleared up if you understand BASIC hydrophysics. Water flows down. Understand that and you should never really struggle with this shit again.

>all rivers need mouths
They... do, actually. The water must flow SOMEHWERE.

>lakes without visible drainage will always be salty
Fair enough, this is nonsense.

Thank you so much for the input!

Another question: do you think it'd be better to incorporate things /ideas I find meaningful in the real world into the game and hope the players find meaning in them too, or try to incorporate only stuff they find meaningful into the game, stuff that may not matter to me much/at all?

I'll be honest here, I was more thinking about storytelling in a passive medium, literature above all else. Storytelling in an active medium, especially one as loose as Tabletops can get is a bit trickier proposition. I actually think that in such emergent or semi-emergent medium, focus on characters has to be even stronger than ever, because good character has to be consistent, and such consistency allows for certain stable "anchor" points from which you can further developed the improvised and emergent storyelements. Basically, what I'm saying is that well-defined characters help a LOT with giving your campaign some kind of direction and structure, without robbing your players of agency.

As for your question: I'd say this guy has it right: genuinity is a good way to go around it. Of course, you have to keep in mind your players and their experience, but I'd say go with your own gut feelings rather than trying to speculate what you think will be relevant to them.
I'd say that most "relevant" things generally have a very universal appeal. If you think your theme or subject is strong enough, then just go with it. If you will be trying to make a "statement" (Or just "observation") about something you personally don't feel strongly about or can't really relate to, I think you'll easily end up just not doing a very good job capturing it. If you yourself just can't relate to tragic love stories, I think attempting to create one as part of your plot because you know your players like that can easily end up with you failing to capture it properly.
So I'd say go with things that seem like they matter to you. And hope for the best. You'll have greater chance that you'll capture them well, and that makes the chance that it will resonate with your audience higher.

But keep in mind that I'm a complete idealist when it comes to fiction.

There are no changes, it's only rotated. The point is a lot of world builders making fictional maps have their own little sub culture full of misconceptions because studying real maps and geography is some how not relevant to the interests of people making fake maps.

>all rivers need mouths
>They... do, actually. The water must flow SOMEHWERE.
Look up the Kasai river...

Sorry, meant Okavango... Damn, my African geography is getting faulty these days...

>While neither of these are perfect rules, they are correct roughly 90% of the time.

I'll take 10% over 0%.

>Over three years of worldbuilding and map-making threads around here - and I've never heard anyone say anything like that.
>Stupid, but again I've never heard anyone claim that.

I have.

>You don't usually have rivers springing up on coast and then flowing away from it.

But they do still occur. For example, look at the Thames. Starts right near the mouth of the Severn on the west side of England and then flows all the way across to exit on the east side.

>Water flows down. Understand that and you should never really struggle with this shit again.

Exactly. But many here view rivers as needing to flow "outward".

>They... do, actually. The water must flow SOMEHWERE.

Endorheic basins don't have the water flowing anywhere. There are at least two of these rivers in Afghanistan alone.

>There are no changes
wrong, Iceland is moved and rotated, Ireland removed, Spain squashed into france, Turkey squashed upwards

Compare it to pic related which is a map of europe (from wikipedia) simply rotated

Okavango river is a completely unique exception, and it does have a drain. It ends in a marshland (Okavango Delta), which is basically a very shallow lake. It's also heavily seasonal - during wet season, it actually flows into Batuli (I think), the water continues to flow into Ngami lake and several other major swamp lands.
And as far as I know, it's the only river that does not end up in some kind of solid surface body of water. Though there are other rivers that end in underground lakes.

>I'll take 10% over 0%.
Actually, you are taking 10% over 90%.

>But they do still occur. For example, look at the Thames.
Thames springs on the other side of fairly major highland, which is what matters. And 40 km is not exactly "right next to" either. Especially if there are hills between them.

>Endorheic basins don't have the water flowing anywhere.
But with the exception of Okavango, they have some place where the water accumulates. Lake or other large body usually.
It seems to be you who mistakes "having a mouth" with "flowing into a sea or an ocean" here.

Really activates my almonds how weird looking europe is. Peninsulas coming out of peninsulas, random chokepoints, mountain ranges and islands everywhere, weird internal sees etc.

Literally no one could get away designing a continent looking like that.

>Actually, you are taking 10% over 90%.

No, I'm taking 10% over 0%, as in the fact that it occurs over the claim that it doesn't.

>Thames springs on the other side of fairly major highland, which is what matters. And 40 km is not exactly "right next to" either. Especially if there are hills between them.

That was one example. The map I linked here has enough enclosed river basins to show rivers can start near the mouth of another.

>But with the exception of Okavango, they have some place where the water accumulates. Lake or other large body usually.

Nope. Look up the River Helmand. Doesn't accumulate.

>It seems to be you who mistakes "having a mouth" with "flowing into a sea or an ocean" here.

No, a mouth is where a river joins another large body of water (lake, sea, or ocean). But there are rivers that do not have mouths, meaning they do not join a lake, sea, or ocean. So no mistake to be had, not that there was ever any suggestion of one to begin with.

>No, I'm taking 10% over 0%, as in the fact that it occurs over the claim that it doesn't.
It occurs so rarely and under so specific conditions that it's largely negligible. Unless you know precisely what you are doing, you should simply avoid doing it at all: you can't make a mistake by not having your river bifurcating, but you are almost guaranteed to make a mistake when you use bifurcation. That is why the "don't split your rivers" rule makes perfect sense: those who know there are exceptions don't have to worry about this (because they are already probably educated enough to know the conditions under which it happens): for everybody else, saying "just don't do it" is a completely logical way of viewing things.

>has enough enclosed river basins to show rivers can start near the mouth of another.
You do realize that that map is intentionally exaggerated. Again: just fucking consider that river needs to A start somewhere, usually at higher elevation, and B flow for long enough to accumulate enough water to be relevant, and C as it follows the "flow downward" rule, there must be a geological divide between it and another larger river so that they don't end up joining.

>Helmand Doesn't accumulate.
I'm sorry, but are you retarded? Lakes and Marshlands Hamun don't exist all of a sudden? What the fuck... where do YOU think the water goes?

>But there are rivers that do not have mouths
One. And even then most of the time, it actually properly flows into a major body of water, only during dry season it flows into marsh that does not have a solid surface, but it's STILL a major water-collecting region. And it's still viewed as a complete hydrological curiosity.

>It occurs so rarely...

It occurs. End of, really.

>... there must be a geological divide between it and another larger river so that they don't end up joining.

You're really hung up on elevation, when I've already told you that isn't the misconception. The misconception is that rivers have to flow "outward", to the nearest coast. The map, and the examples, show this is clearly wrong. Don't get so hung up on a different point.

>I'm sorry, but are you retarded?

Now you're getting angry for no reason at all. Calm yourself down.

>... where do YOU think the water goes?

Underground. Diffusion. Hamun Lake is a misnomer.

>One.

Multiple. Check out the Hari River, too. I'd give you more, but I'm not a personal search engine. You can do that yourself, once you've regained your composure.