Is this an example of great worldbuilding?

Well, it's decent. I like GRRM, even if it's cool to hate him now, but geographically and tecnologically he dun goofed many times - it doesn't mean the world is shit, but it's far from perfect.

>aluminium mined in the Iron Islands
>the neck is a hugeass peninsula swamp with a river running in it
>nation-cities apparently having dominion on lands greater than most european nations
>and overall GIVE US A FUCKING SCALE GEORGE GODDAMN

That being said even if it's not his forte I think somethings were really inspired. I adored his new "races" ideas like the Ibbenese for example, or Asshai and the far east as Mordor+Lovecraft. Westeros is kinda meh tough, landscapes are pretty boring (tough I guess that was his idea all along).

There is a scale, user. Just seach for it, but I remember one being there in atleast the first book.

>we'll never know what the bloodless men are

>implying
The cities of the bloodless men were discovered and named by Marwyn the Mage. Qyburn studied under Marwyn before being expelled for his occult curiosities. Then, Qyburn drained Gregor's blood and did unknown things to the body to make it an obedient slave. I feel like GRRM intended for this connection as a bit of intrigue.

Yeah I think the GRRM made a good setting with familiar fantasy tropes, but all of it in the history/myth of Westeros.

I do wish there was more on Essos. I love what little tidbits of the Free Cities we get, and all sellsword companies being born out of their strife and trade wars. Reminds me of a mix of Renaissance Italy and the east. Sadly it's really not enough to make a campaign out of and the SIFRP game is focused almost solely on Westeros. I wish Green Ronin would come out with an Essos campaign guide.

All in all, I really like it.

It's basically a larger Britain that boarders turkey going into to middle east. I think the worlds a lot bigger and they have simoly yet to discover it.

Also via the intro, the world is actually set in a Dysons sphere.

The big book of lore is more or less what you'd use for that.

I hate how all of his Lovecraft references are in the "Far East" or other corners of the world not really well known.

I'd love to see GRRM try his hand at a Lovecraft-inspired story set within ASOIAF.

>The cities of the bloodless men were discovered and named by Marwyn the Mage
Replying to my own post here, I'm pretty sure this is incorrect unless it was in AWOIAF. However I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in the Sam chapters that Marwyn did indeed go beyond the Mountains of the Morn.

>I'd love to see GRRM try his hand at a Lovecraft-inspired story set within ASOIAF.
Have you read the Aeron chapter from TWOW that was released? It looks like Euron is going to cause eldritch destruction in TWOW and ADOS. He's the one who has been sailing all over those lovecrafty locations procuring artifacts while we focused on the rest of the story.

Can anyone make out the name of the island in the Saffron Straits?
>LTO
>UTO

It's Ulos, I have the png version of the image where it isn't blurred

Thanks man.

Eh, you can't really put a Kadath in the middle of the Vale.

I guess you could put an Innsmouth in the Iron Islands (even the Abyssal Priests need to be afraid of something, right?). Or even that damn labyrinth in Oldtown. But I wouldn't do in the Westeros of todays. HPL stories are all about the protagonists that like a moth to a flame are attracted to the mistery; in nowdays Westeros it's all about survival, can't really see that mechanic of "what the hell is that?".

The fantasy cartography in A Song of Ice & Fire is a good example of form following function - in this case, the form is a rectangle because the function is fitting all of Westeros onto two pages of a hardcover novel.

The individual locations are really cool, but the geography is crappy

The geography and sense of scale is pretty bad. The culture and history is very good. This all works out great for a story about armies and intrigue (and more of the latter). It'd be a bad place to run a hexcrawl, though.

You mean
>Let's take British Isles, turn them upside down and connect in the middle
>Oh, and some horizontal rectangle, too

Shit-tier geo
Over-the-top politics
Cultural uniformity over areas so vast it's just not funny.

It's literally screaming "GENERIC" and "random generator"

It's utter garbage. The continent is so large that in reality the north would have their own dozen or so kingdoms fighting each other and wouldn't care what was happening further down south.

What's so infeasible about grrm's map?

Historically, Earth's map has had all kinds of crazy shapes. There's no law of nature that says a lopsided two-continent world isn't possible.

I dunno. China and Russia seemed (most of time) pretty unified to me.

China had a vast and effective administration based entirely on merit.
Russia didn't became unified or truly large until early 18th century

*on merit in times when everyone was busy with feudalism or nepotism or both

Do you even basic tectonics?
Yes, it's pretty unfeasible to have world in a shape of massive, pretty regular rectangle. Two, to be precise. Shit just doesn't work that way, because you need those plates to connect somewhere, giving mountains somewhere. By the way shit is put, it doesn't make any sense with the bigger rectangle, while the smaller one is literally oversized Britain and Ireland put together, but without taking any accomodation for new geological processes. I mean how the fuck you expect to have glacial processes affecting in the same fucking way something this fucking huge?
Especially when you have right next to it another continent, obviously unaffected by the same glacial periods, since it's just a random rectangle.

And that goes without mentioning the fucked up climate

Literally Civ 2 random map generator gives results more grounded in tectonics, based almost entirely on world size, size of landmasses and erosion.

>And that goes without mentioning the fucked up climate
Pretty sure GRRM has admitted that that's all due to magic so he doesn't have to explain shit.

What are you on? China's only been ultra-homogenous in the years since the Cultural Revolution, and even then Communism and standardized Mandarin still haven't completely stamp out regional differences, languages, cuisine, and dialects. Fujian/Min Nan, Cantonese, and Mandarin all share the same written language but sound completely different.

As for Russia, much of it's landmass is incredibly thinly populated and even then Kazaks are completely different from Russian Inuit who are different from Western Russians.

It's good enough, plus GRRM does a good job of making the more far away lands seem really exotic and mysterious. There's too many fantasy books and media where the characters go everywhere on the map and solve everything, sucking the sense of mystery right out of the story.

plus the map isn't supposed to be entirely accurate, it's supposed to mimic medieval maps somewhat, most of which look wonky as fuck for obvious reasons. so all these super high res maps of the known world are kind of missing the point.

Pretty sure Winter does affect Essos. Could have sworn I remember an Arya chapter while she's in Braavos talking about snow appearing.

None of those two countries got anything to do with Westeros. Don't just say random shit. Try to understand your "example" first and if it applies.

There's too many fantasy books and media where the characters go everywhere on the map and solve everything, sucking the sense of mystery right out of the story.

This. The faggots saying they want to know more of the east don't fucking get what's the point of having a mysterious east.

The North(i.e., the purview of Winterfell) is sparsely populated with most people swearing fealty to the Starks just because that's what they've always known for thousands of years. There aren't enough resources for them to really fight wars over or form their own kingdom over. The whole area is just like Scotland and the current Stark is the guy in charge, but lets the lesser lords have a fair degree of independence so long as they honor their oaths to show up to battle when called.
And it's a big point in the book that the North has little care for the realpolitik bullshit of the Southern Kingdoms. There are far, far more people and resources down South. Far more to fight over, far less subsistence living. Much easier for them to get enough of their shit together and want someone else's shit.

Right, because rather than creating a world that at least has some semblance of sense, it's better to further deprive it out of it with 'wizard did this' bullshit.
In a setting with barely no magic in it.

>aluminium
>mining aluminum in the middle ages

>don't fucking get what's the point of having a mysterious east.
Having an exotic location for no purpose other than having exotic location is part of shit-tier world building. If you don't want people to go to exotic place, you simply don't create one for your setting. Because the moment you mention something, it creates curiosity to learn something about it. By not using this "mysterious far away land" you yourself as a creator are missing the point of putting such locations. Things either play a role in the story, or can be ommited for the better of the story.

tl;dr - it's shit world building

The entire fucking point of the world is that the weather serves as an indicator of how shitty the times are.
It exists blatantly as a plot construct; this is one of the very few times that I *wouldn't* bitch about 'a wizard did it'.

>Everything has to be absolutely related to this one plotline or it shouldn't be in there!

Jesus fuck, you missed the entire point of world building.

Aluminum is generally smelted from alumina and not mined straight out of the ground...

You confused story telling with worldbuilding there man.

So, yeah, I stand correct.

That's why I pointed to that, user.

We don't actually mine "aluminium" now, even.

So, like Conan never went to Khitai in REH stories?

Maybe the same folks that get angry in the worldbuilding thread when other people don't worldbuild according to their guidelines.

Geographically it looks like shit because of the 90 degree angle.

He has a terrible grasp of numbers and scale.

He's a good storyteller and it illustrates the setting needs to serve the story. I say that as someone who has setting before story, but a mistake a lot of worldbuilders do is try to focus too much on the world and not on the story.

I shope hope Euron does that. I have a real concern that the ending will be some fairytale Jon and Dany get together and hooray the winter is dispelled and it's an eternal summer again. I hate about-face thematic shifts. There was another book that was gritty in setting but bright in cast and then all of a sudden book 4 has a death-count like the red fucking wedding

You ought to have parts of the world which are not well known or traversed because otherwise it presents a world far smaller and more interconnected than we have ever been prior to the 18th-19th century. That would be like suggesting that the trojan war should exist on a world that is nothing but Greece, Anatolia, Egypt and Thrace because the rest of the world doesn't matter. And old stories abound in such exotic far off locales - Palamedes being son of the King or some noble of Babylon yet serving in Arthur's court, Herodotus remarking about Xerxes' vast levies the world over even though they play basically no part in the story (and Herodotus is as much a storyteller as a historian).

An example of a world that you're espousing is the shithole that is sanctuary in Diablo. It looks like a shithole you could road trip through in a few days not an entire planet.

No, I didn't. You see, if you are doing world-building for the sake of world-building, you would describe such place IN DEPTH. Their culture, politics, history, language and so on and forth. That would be world-building for itself.
Then comes the part about competent writing, when you create things within the scope of the story, so you don't introduce half-baked elements into the world, as it leaves fuck-huge areas of said world unknown or pointless for the story. In this case, Essos could be half its size and it would worked exactly the same, without all those "but what's over there" questions.
But that assumes the world is not created by a hack that doesn't give two squats about own setting and literally made most of it using map of Britain, because hey, who needs world-building, right?

Well, it has to fit in an endpaper.

are you new to speculative fiction or something?

It's literally one of the worst, poorly-made and created without any planning or insight, "mainstream" setting. It's so bad it makes shit from Witcher look good by comparison, but that at least had a writer who outright said he doesn't care about the setting at all, so as far as everyone is concerned, the world ends with Blue Mountains and there is nothing beyond

Upside down UK with a War of the Roses with the serial numbers filed off?

So now he should have filled pages and pages with information about these places not relevant to the plot? Make up your damn mind.

The Neck was magic n' shit though.

You don't get it, do you? Unless you are creating encyclopedia exposita, you don't throw such stuff at all into your book. Does it affect in the slightest the plot? No? Then you drop it. Do you need it for any reason at all aside "Map Filling Empire #97"? No? Then you drop it. And so on and forth. And if you are adding it for flavour, then give it some flavour, rather than an offhand remark in tune of "here be lions".

it's literally just throwaway shit to give your world a little more depth, why are you getting so triggered about this? no one's saying that background characters should just randomly come up to the protags and be like, "Yo did you know that there's a goddess with like ten titties and thirty vaginas in the east, k thanks bye".

most people will have some conception of the world outside of where they live, because contrary to what you may believe, people (even medieval people) do not live in a giant vacuum where they never hear anything about the outside world or wonder what's out there.

you're not spending such a huge amount of time on it that you're derailing your own plot. it's a small quick thing that's makes your world seem more real, because hearing fantastical things and then filling in the blanks in your own mind is a very natural thing to do.

Absolutely not.

It's not perfect, but I like it. Especially the pulpier stuff that got added in the lore book.

>Throw-away shit
>Gives depth
Because it's precisely how you spot shit-tier worldbuilding. Rather than actually creating something coherent, it relies on throw-away shit to add "depth". Depth that serves no real point or purpose and the introduced elements often don't even fit in any explainable way, but since the author made it on spot, he/she don't care.

holy shit tho

>reading genre fiction

I like the world he's built, except for Dorne
Its like a fucking utopia

look, I understand that you're like some robot with no imagination, but you do realize that hearing a weird rumor and then extrapolating things based off it is something that most people just naturally do (and by extension writers and the characters they write because they're usually based on normal humans), right?

it adds depth because it brings your world closer to a real world, because real actual human beings do this thing and they can relate to it. literally no one besides you looks at one quick line about a foreign culture, and immediately decides that it's bad worldbuilding, because 1) they don't care that much, and 2) they probably know little to nothing to about it and have no basis to decide whether its coherent or not.

It doesn't add depth you fucking moron, it just expands the universe. What good is an ocean if it's only an inch deep

This.

Fuck Dorne.

whelp, I tried. i'll be on the lookout for your book where there's no world outside of where the main characters go, it'll be a pretty odd shape I imagine.

It's an iconic example of shit worldbuilding, and I don't understand why plebs think its good.

>shallow characters
>shit war
>no economy
>little to no culture
>dumb stereotypes though, got those

I'll grant him detailed food descriptions, but that's not something to be enthusiastic about. Ed Greenwood owned that shtick since 2e D&D.

>no world outside of where the main characters go
Where the fuck did I say that? If you're going to mention a location or whatever it needs to be part of the plot. Otherwise it's bullshit.

>detailed food descriptions
I will never understand.

I've literally used "smoked fish with carrots" to describe a meal in writing.

You probably have that common disorder where you're incapable of imagining the tastes of described food or lack the normal mirror neurons for getting hungry by watching someone eat, or getting joy out of seeing others enjoying food.

Usually this is caused by childhood malnutrition or prolonged starvation, or alternatively one of the several empathy emotional disorders.
Basically if you're the kind of person that doesn't get food television where people eat things.

Could also be too much masturbation or sex without recovery times, which for some can deaden the ability of the brain to care about tasting food, which is chemically akin to starvation's effects on sexual desire.

Or like me you just don't give a fuck about writer's wanking their food lore and skip it because you don't want to read the mental break they took between shit actually happening.

I'm not entirely sure why people are so dead-set on assuming the shapes of the continents are the exact square rectangles we're presented with. Other than because that's what we're presented with. As far as I know (this isn't a subject I've delved into at all really) we don't have any information on what projection the map uses or even what map making technology is available in the setting. I think they mention a sextant once but I don't remember magnetic compasses. I could totally be wrong on that though.

imgur.com/gallery/VXADz

There's a lot of things I don't like about this theory and I think it's fairly obvious that it isn't the correct answer. But it's the type of answer that I personally like.

Now again, I don't know enough about ASoIaF to make any sort of complete theory but I have a small inkling that the the far north of the map connects to the far north east. This is just based off of the far-east legends of the Long Night matching those told in Westeros and my own assumption that the Five Forts are the easter equivalent of the Wall. If these barriers are holding back the same threat, and if that threat was once defeated by the same hero, then it would make sense for the two places to be connected. This is all just speculation off of this video: youtu.be/Ih_ZAGCfMY0?t=449

Honestly that's a lot of words that could be read as saying "No guys, GRRM totally knew what he was setting up when he drew the map!" That's not what I'm trying to say. It's a dumb map. But I also don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that we have been mislead and that there's stuff going on we don't know about.

>see this
>the far south of the world in my setting is darker than the central/north because it has a different sun (these suns are tiny and move in circles/ovals above a flat plane)
>the south is also hot and jungly despite the dimmer sun
>no equator or N/S pole, only one single pole
Am I fucked? Or is the stuff about the darkstar and the south of planetos being darker just speculation?

Pure speculation, also every idea you've ever had has already been implemented better than you're capable of many times before. Don't worry about it.

Even the idea that love can bloom?

Nah actually I think that one's new.

I was only joking since to an extent that's romeo and juliet.

>muh realism
yeah, realistic tectonic plates is key to a good setting

that is the fantasy genre and people like it

it's funny how, when questioned about the quality of world-building, the assholes in here start to rant about geography which is utterly unimportant when it comes to the former. i guess they need to show off their assumed geographical knowledge. well, one thing is for sure: they have to clue about what it takes to make good stories.

>it creates curiosity to learn something about it.
intended effect realized. end of story.

>is part of shit-tier world building
as if you know anything about that subject.

Geography shapes cultures like it shapes the land and sea, user. Egypt only ever became more than a few villages because of the Nile river and its flood-basin. Greece spent so long as a splintered collection of city-states because the mountains and sea made travel so damn difficult and left no room for rulers to extend their reach on land. The United States of America only survived to become the culture(s) and superpower it is because had two fuck-huge oceans protecting its flanks and no real threats on its land-borders.

But Scotland did have multiple kingdoms competing with each other.

But they were eventually united under Robert the Bruce, aka, the real Braveheart.
Incidentally, against a Southern asshole who claimed to own them all.

I've never been to Russia.

I must not mention Russia

>I think the worlds a lot bigger and they have simply yet to discover it.
The World of Ice and Fire, a big lore book that GRRM and some people from the wiki released, featured Sothoryos, a southern continent full of jungles, orcs, diseases, megafauna, dinosaurs, elder gods and various other reasons not to go there, as well as the Lands of Always Winter to the north of Westeros, which are pretty much the North Pole but with possible giants and ice dragons.

Look at westeros.
Look at the map of the UK. cut in half, rotate and turn upside down, join together.

Tada, england and scotland. Geography of westeros isnt crappy, its real.

Well, if you count only westeros and pretend nothing exists, otherwise it does become "what, did you ever looked at a map or too geography?"

Better not. That'll learn ya.

fucking this

since RPG settings are only a backdrop for games and early RPGs prove that you can run good scenarios without much of setting information, all of that is just intellectual posturing

What about the Iron isles and their "drowned god"?

Actually, Westeros sans North and Dorne is specificallly upside down Ireland.

Not making this up. It's a detailed map of Ireland turned upside down, with the Reach being Ulster, Westerlands - Leinster, Stormlands + Crownlands - Connaught, the Vale - Munster.

Not every setting has to be a simulation. I have a setting where everything happens on an archipelago that floats in a literal bowl held by literal gods. It also has close to no D&D-style magic. And I don't believe I have to worry about geography all that much there

Fucking kerning. I was searching for 'DoMe' for ages

There's something to what you say, but you're assuming the players won't start making noise about "immersion" and "verisimilitude" and "proper backstory and RP hooks". A lot of OSR games might be able to get away with that kind of bare-bones worldbuilding, because most players know it goes with the territory and buy into it as an inherent part of playing OSR, but other games? Book-series like ASOIAF?

Thing is, world building goes beyond tectonics and geography. A world can be well built even if it is entirely unrealistic. Take a look at the Creation from Exalted. It's ludicrously detailed but nothing about it's geography is realistic (its land floats in unformed reality held up by 5 elemental poles; it has a Russia-sized island in the middle) or meant to be

Dorne is running out of water, this is mentioned in the books.