/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

Shield wall would probably be uncommon for them as most of their combat activity comes from raiding generic kingdom for supplies [hence the perception of them being evil, but some are good, some are evil, but barbarism does permeate their culture] They do have access to large amounts of metal where they live and tend to wear heavier armour not only due to their abundance of metals, but also to match dwarven armour in function, not necessarily aesthetically.

In raiding, the heavy armour and endurance from travelling/training in harsh conditions of the badlands means they can defeat militia/town guard by using heavily armoured raiding parties with few members that fight in loose groups.

Perhaps there's a sort of "On-Off" switch with these orcs and the way they fight. Like, their martial code dictates that they fight only when there is honor to be gained, i.e., by matching strength and prowess against a roughly equal or superior foe. If you run away when orc warriors show up, that's fine. You're less than them and not worth their time anyway; an orc's blade recoils at the taste of lesser blood. But if you raise arms against an orc warrior, well, guess what? You just said, "I think I'm better than you."

So, if you go toe-to-toe with an orc, you better be able to kill him, because he won't let that insult stand.

How about some kind of raider code of honour like "never take more than the people can bear. Burned and salted fields grow no further crops". It would make sense for raiders to not completely wipe out settlements and let them recover and be raided again later.

My setting has a number of city states in a region that are isolated by nature of the planet they exist on's environment. Their nobility is awfully inbred and resoundingly mad and because of this on a whim the current queen has banned the use of wheeled vehicles under the auspices of a dream where she was run over with one. Walkers are the mandatory transportation there and has been for the past 50 years and as such, pilots trained there are considered some of the best worldwide. Want to know more?

Non specific ideas
>Certain weapons are forbidden from use (e.g projectiles, unbladed ones etc)
>Requests for mercy may only be granted if the victor had their blood drawn by the requester
>'taking of a life' can be interpreted and fulfilled by the 'murderer' replacing the opponents job, status and role in society. This extends and is adhered by family and friends too. interesting from a role play point of view where someone might after killing some guy now inherit their family, job and position in a town
>Poison is the most noble of weapons
>Armour denotes rank and ability. The more important acts the warrior has achieved, the less armour they wear
>If an opponent loses their weapon or is disarmed you are obliged to either retrieve it back for them or drop your own.
>If blackpowder is a thing/if not coal might work; a group worship it and its creation. Inhaling fumes from its combustion is considered communion with god with devoted 'Blackjaw Clergy' eating it raw
>Orcs try to fight in family groups of three. Usually Father Mother Child or Grandparent Parent Child
>Dead enemies equipment is meticulously cleaned and presented where they fell, the bodies are discarded. Touching the equipment later is considered taboo.
>Throwing food at someone is the highest insult as it mirrors a mythological event where a weak and pathetic individual was thrown scraps from the gods table in mockery

>>'taking of a life' can be interpreted and fulfilled by the 'murderer' replacing the opponents job, status and role in society. This extends and is adhered by family and friends too. interesting from a role play point of view where someone might after killing some guy now inherit their family, job and position in a town

Explain this further, please?

Like, if you kill someone you can acquire their job and status and shit?

that's ridiculous

Instead of killing someone the loser of a battle/challenge/game of chance can choose to forfeit their life and become an 'Unnamed' (that is unless they decide to defeat someone else and take their life).

The victor takes the losers previous name, status, job and property but also their debts, enemies and responsibilities. People might go through multiple lives by choice and are usually obliged to take a life at least once unless they want to prevent the Oedipal nightmare of replacing a parent. This could easily spiral into a very fucked up society full of schizophrenics

seems like a decent thing to do would be run a gambling ring, where people play eachother for lives instead of money

employ people who buy other peoples lives and live as like, some kind of deluxe mannequin.

Say you got big dick casino
>BDC runs tournament style games of all kinds for all walks of life, from chess anachronisms to gladiatorial shit (that doesn't even have a red line under it, I thought I made it up lmao)
>you play in tournaments where 25/50/100/1000 people
>tournaments can be unnamed or otherwise, with the general value of the life that everyone is playing for dictating how many people have to enter the tourney
>there are consolation prizes, you can choose to either play with your life (if you're down and out) or you just pay a fee equal to the value the casino would place on your life
>there could even be another service where the casino will buy your life for you and replace it one of equal or lesser value?
>say a CEO whos life is all sorted out feels accomplished, sets up a deal to step down to a humble farmer somewhere he can live an easy retirement, decides to strike a deal and BDC pays him a lump sum for his current life based on his net worth and what they can get for him, and boom, transaction finished everyone is happy

Here comes a plot hook for a player vs BDC campaign
>BDC also has a team of nobles who can abolish various wrongdoings and pay off debts and unsavory mercenaries who can kill enemies that wont be sated with a payoff, which is all deeply buried and used only in secret to acquire wealth for a necromancer that in the process of buying lives off of people who are stepping down, or just need money and dont mind being unnamed (maybe its like bankruptcy?) also steals their life force
>he of course is going to try some bullshit with all that juicy life force, the rest is up to you

WE KAIJI NOW

oh shit, is that already a thing?

not really but the stakes of your entire self is very much like something that would be gambled with in that show

huh, great minds or whatever.

also, an open letter to the guy who didn't like the dookie swirl that has been around forever, I'm changing it

desu I always kidna regretted that it fucked up the coastlines crispyness but I never wanted to commit to changing it, thanks for pushing me over the edge

once I get done redoing the coastline to look more like it was defined with thick gouges of land laid low by the blast, but only in lanes skimming above what would end up being the new sea level, and then I'm gonna make the stinky water a bit more low contrast by making the seawater more green in general, as a background thing, but with the water only getting really brown once its far inland, and near the coast

What should I do if I come up with a really cool concept for "doing dwarves right", but have no real aim of ever doing a classic fantasy setting? I think I could assimilate the idea for some other race in another setting, but I dunno, the idea just fits so well (in my mind, at least) to the classic dwarf race.

So, how about a society where the males are the picky maters? That was basically my first idea for why Dwarven women would also have beards. I just like the idea a lot.

So I came up with this...

>Dwarves have this innate ability they call Desolation Rage
>When they consciously activate Desolation Rage, they outmatch pretty much anyone on the battlefield, it's like they become inhumanly strong proportionate to their own size
>Desolation Rage is only active when a Dwarf is infertile, and every male has long bouts of infertility between relatively short (1-2 year) periods of fertility
>During these periods of fertility, the males stay at home, "working the anvil" as they say, and attempt to naturally get their mates pregnant, sometimes even twice during one period
>They never send fertile people to the battlefield
>Most Females are always fertile, and only have Desolation Rage while pregnant, and fighting while pregnant is not usually a good idea
>However, there are always edge cases, Dwarves who are born completely infertile. These rare individuals, called the Desolated, are absolute beasts in the battlefield and really valuable individuals
>Most of the Desolated are female, because there is no certain way to know whether a male is desolated

>Anyway, this leads to their society being built on the pillars that infertile men and the desolated run the battlefields, while the fertile men and women do the heavy lifting back at the cities

Wait, did I accidentally make this shit into a matriarchy? Well, that was not supposed to happen.

What you have is fine but if you take some time to make them initially unrecognisable from dwarves/elves or orcs way more creative ideas can be generated from that base. At the moment you've got 'dwarves that value fertility and reverse gender roles in battle' which is fine if you just want dwarves with a twist. If you wanted something completely different and very rarely used:

They could be Blemmyes, Monopods, people with exceedingly long arms but tiny legs, scale covered heads that propel themselves with their tongue, 8ft people with eyes forming a ring around their head, a race of twins, hell, a race of animate beards that can shoot iron hard hair and have a complex culture based on braids could fill the dwarf vacuum while still being vaguely relatable.

Original would be nice but when you are making 8+ cultures it gets kinda annoying.

I prefer historical if it pays homage to under used cultures/nations. Rome, Indea, China especially, get little to no exposure in games for example.

I asked yesterday and didn't get much help. Anybody have any ideas on powers and abilities which fragarach may have beyond being able to cut through any defence (including healing faster than normal), striking true, holding people in place while forcing them to answer truthfully, and controlling winds?

Also I was originally going to be running a game for nine people (insane, I know) but it seems like three won't be able to play and one missed session 0 (I'll try to get him caught up if he shows this week but who knows) which is having me consider something stupid, opening up the game to some new players to replace them since we're playing at a gaming group we're part of.

you can cut open a hole in space and walk through it, to teleport anywhere

Allowing it to cut holes into and out of Faerie would make sense, well not necessarily into Faerie but most places you used it would lead there.

>Which do you prefer? Nations that mirror real-world historical ones with some added fantasy OR nations that merely borrow some influences from the real-world but otherwise draw no comparison?

I really like worlds where the cultures are recognizable, but something's there that throws it in a weird direction. Dark Souls might be a silly and overused example, but it was a really good idea to mix gothic/renaissance European designs with things unexpected things like the Primordial Serpents and huge sprawling cities where almost nobody lives and the like.

I have this bad habit /wbg/ where I tend to segregate my cultures a little too much. I'll have a not!greece where pretty much only sirens and satyrs and cyclops live and then not!scandinavia where giants and trolls and dwarves live. How do I make my world seem more seamless and fluid where they don't just feel like separate worlds?

Know how transitions work. Unless there's an impassable wall in between them, cultures will mix. In your specific example, giants from Not!Scandia will find themselves wandering into Not!Greece for the sunshine and decent booze, while harpies will migrate north for the summer.

>Which do you prefer? Nations that mirror real-world historical ones with some added fantasy OR nations that merely borrow some influences from the real-world but otherwise draw no comparison?
I like something in the middle of these extremes. Nations that have a clear parallel with a historical culture but which are also distinct from that historical culture.

Rate my fantasy culture/political map, pic related!

For reference, the colors correspond to cultural groups:

Blue is Altisian (inspired by Graeco-Roman and later Italian culture),

Red is Sidonian (inspired by ancient Assyrian culture, also an elven supremacist culture),

Purple is Pythian (mainly inspired by Byzantine culture, it's also partly a cosmopolitan conglomerate of Altisian and Sidonian cultures, hence it being red+blue),

Orange is Tarakan (inspired by Scythian and Turkish culture),

Yellow/gold is Fysian (inspired by Carthaginian culture, also has a good deal of overlap with the Tarakan culture, hence the similar color),

and lastly, green is Valberickten (inspired by a combination of Batavian, and Burgundian cultures mixed with fairly standard Dwarven society).

Generally, the lighter the color the less exclusively part of that culture the nation is. In most cases the origin of the culture is, as expected, where it's strongest, except for Sidonian and Altisian cultures, because their ethnogenic centers declined and then changed over time.

In my setting people actually crumble into ash when they die. Not animals or plants, just people.

There's a reason for it. I haven't given much thought how funerals are treated because of this yet, though. It was born of the consequences of the magic system rather than decided on alone.

Rate my map so far. What's the worst thing about it?

No, "square thingy" that shows what are the important cities and such. Also, more ofa personal thing, the mountains are dots instead of a single defined "line" of sorts, I know its suposed to be a mountain range, but the space in between then throws me off, but its not bad.

Hm. What else could represent cities? And would it look better with closer mountains?

From what i tell, the green squares are cities and organe squares are castles, but I am talking about one those infograps on bottom of the pic, telling which is which, thats what I am talking about. You don't really need to make the mountains close, but I would apreciate it.

Also, some detail to show farmland and forests.

Orange is major cities. Green are minor. Blue is farming centers and local communities.

Funny, I thought those were castles. but you see what I mean? A small chart on the bottom telling what square means what would be good.

Good point. I'll add that next. Is the border alright? I'm conflicted.

if you mean the red square, i'd say its fine.

Cool. Was worried.

all those names sound cool except for shattered crowns

Mirrors are fucking boring because everything is going to be one standard deviation from normal from real life. It's fucking lazy too because you're just copying an existing framework and adding in your oc donutsteel bullshit.
>Woow it's egypt but everyone is a bird
>Nothing is different despite everyone being a bird.

I tend to take at least geopolitics from real life.

Hello? you made the edits? Also, how big is that lake is supposed to be? like the great lakes tier ofbig or something?

what?

do edits, I produce original content (this map) and brainstorm ideas with people mostly

I guess I do edit the coastlines and stuff a lot, nothings ever set in stone. This swamp for instance hadn't been touched in about eight months, give or take, up until now

my bad, replied to the wrong person, meant for him. Sorry ringanon.

So I have a group of people that live outside of the environmentally protected Habitat city zones and hold no particular allegiance with them but still trade and deal with them as and when required.

I'd like them to be a bit different to 'they're like Fremen' but other than mongols what other nomadic sources can I draw from?

The planet itself has an atmosphere that is unbreathable without filtration or oxygen mixing equipment. The region on the map has a lot of above-ground crystal formations, stretches of alkali salt lakes dotted with patches of incredible dense coral-like forest

no problem satan, I misquote people all the tim

generally its because I just click on a post number to bring up the quick reply box and then delete the little >>post number boy and start writing.

Sounds like a way to start a mess. So, the QR box is really popular eh?

Yeah, that'll be because Shattered Crowns is actually a region, rather than a country. It's made up of 17 smaller fiefdoms, but I didn't really have either much a way or a strong reason to split it up on this map.

alright so if the guy from last thread is still here, I made the color change a little easier on the eyes, and made it a little smaller

I guess, I dunno if its a vanilla Veeky Forums thing because I've had either 4chanx or appchan for the last like, 6 years but its way easier than scrolling all the way to the top of the page

I think there is a hotkey to just bring up a new post box, but I'm more focused on learning useful chrome hotkeys for shit like auto googling with ctrl k

bummer then, maybe do like 50% opacity lines along where the borders are? If you've got names for them all that will fit in the little spaces, go for it.

if you really wanna get detailed, think of banners for all of them and have them also overlayed at a low opacity, goes for the other countries too if you're up for it.

bump

Lore-wise what exactly is the swirl again?

>Put simply: historical or original?
I mean, if someone's copying from history 1:1, they're an idiot. But designing a culture from the ground-up tends to result in a culture that's bland and very, very 21st century in its values and understandings of the world. I prefer to take elements from each individual culture and use the geographic location/race/time period of the culture in question to inform what I take. To take the example of , that would be incredibly boring if the Egypt being used is pop culture's idea of pyramids and sphinxes and mummies and nothing else. But if, say, in order to stabilize a society where everyone can fly away from their responsibilities, a religion developed where the bird-people work in the same mass-scale slave-farms ruled by a religious aristocracy which keeps the bird-people from flying away by convincing them that the leader is a literal god? That's a whole lot more interesting, and any bird player is going to have a lot of character conflict built in.

Sorry, had to sleep. Roughly Caspian sea sized. Maybe sliiiightly bigger.

Market cities and trading posts where those races can intersect maybe?

That might give it a sense of steady transition when you go from one place to another.

I don't think the river implied by that image would be large enough for ships of that size.

Wolf beastmen with their own culture or werewolves with a subculture; which one would you use in a setting?

Read Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series.
Starting in book 2 he introduces a wolf-people race.

Werewolves subculture is terrible. Between Twilight and those terrible Underworld movies, the whole concept of a werewolf culture is dead and buried.

neither
wolf beastmen with multiple cultures and nations

>'oh boy YA trash with yet another boyhood hero's journey by the protagonist to has the super special unique ability nobody else has'
>read a brief synopsis
>shit that sounds pretty cool

It went better than I expected. Thanks user!

I am a fan of the WoD werewolf games but you are right, I think your examples and WoW, the idea of werewolf civilization is probably dead. Or will it least put off enough people to turn them away from that part of the setting.

This I can do. I am trying to avoid the trope of one race = one nation/culture. So carefully avoiding having to many races because of that (why wouldn't they genocide each other during prehistorical times??)

yea, the mouth looks really short and shallow. But it was just to illustrate a trade port.

Need some ideas for sci-fantasy items similar to what you'd find in stuff like destiny, star wars. Doodling some and i've hit the 'wall' so to speak.Pic related is a good example of what the world looks like.

like this?

>Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series.
I wanted to like it a lot more than I did.

The biggest issue, I think, was the completely uninteresting ultimate antagonist. I liked the book more when they were fighting off invading wolfmen who used blood magic rather than LITERALLY 100% the Zerg

I mean, alone they still wouldn't have been very good, the queen in particular fell flat, but they were the Zerg.

Hivemind
Insectile
Produced creep
Took genes from things they consumed and recombined them into new forms
Led by sociopathic bitch queen who looks mostly human

Oh, and the audiobooks being red by Kate Reading didn't help one bit

She's really bad at it and I'm pissed that the Stormlight Archive books are half read by her. I'm not sure why they needed two people since Michael Kramer read for women in Mistborn just fine.

I'm have a race of sentient, talking wolves. They're not anthros or anything, they're still quadroped hunters that live in the woods with no semblance of civilization, they just speak. They're also very expressive. They are often seen doing what is best described as a sassy strut toward wimpering prey. Because of how they are all by nature smug fuckers, they live lives of solitude and small families. Sometimes they share their opinions on civilization with travelers, often providing thoughts that are almost sagelike, just uninformed. One guy managed to band together a bunch of them and base an army off his own personal wolf-pack, which he banters with in his down-time.

Now, the question: What do I call them? Do I come up with some prefix-wolf name, come up with a new name, keep stealing the name from something shit (sergals), or is this a bad idea to begin with?

>Put simply: historical or original?
The simplest answer, historical but far from just "Japan with dragons."

In my Western setting, major powers certainly have some inspiration from chunks of real nations and groups but it's mostly a twisted jumble of different aspects along with new introductions and the like which spin them even further from their origins. For instance, I've got a setting that's sort of based around Deseret, but also with twingles of Reconstruction-era South, the Taliban, and Massachusetts Puritans. Toss in magic and the effects of that world's history, you end up with something that could be described by taking chunks of these real-world ideas but then smashing them around until they become only a loosely recognized hybrid.

Same with the actual dominant power, which is a magocracy that is one part Civil War Union, one part Victorian England, one part Nazi scientists, one part East India Trading Company, with the philanthropy of mid-1800's business tycoons and the New Poor Law of 1834. With a dusting of eugenics and social Darwinism.

Sounds like they should be called the Cynics.

pretty much but more classical architecture of that culture thrown in.

Well, I like making parallels sometimes, but I kinda wanna get away from it and make it much more fantastic than it is currently. It feels bit dry at the moment.

You can probably start by looking at other languages like 'lupus' or try finding some mythological related name like 'Remus', 'Fenrir' or whatever and start twisting or combining it from there (ex. Remunri). Or things they are associated with, like moon.
Naming is hard, and I have just random names for some of my things and gotta come up with replacements for some placeholders.

Yo satan, if you're still here, how's this look now? I've toned down the city colors, and altered the mountains to look more closed in. Is this better?

just swampwater playing in the currents of the ring, not necessarily involved in all the magic hijinks that created it, just nature doing nature in the wake of a calamity

Any other feedback? Here's another map of the other big continent. The colors mean the same thing, but the new color, gray, indicates Litzer culture (inspired primarily by Germanic culture).

I like the color scheme. It's not too glaring or muddled.

Remember your boundaries are probably going to be based more on rivers and other natural land barriers preventing groups from migrating about easily. There will be some cross proliferation regardless but usually they stay segregated within rough National boundaries.

idea:

>city by the coast with a fairly shitty port, mostly dull brown crops, and a bleak stone city with a couple of drab red accents
>to the north of a strip of land known from coast to cliff as a permanent warzone, two kingdoms just straight up fucking hate eachother and cut off the north of the continent because of how difficult travel was through their countryside
>everything is destabilized, many towns are raided by bandits nightly, or worse are used as inns by a rival kings men because there is never a friendly knight when you need one
>passing through is dangerous because not only will bandits want fresh shit, but even the locals will try to steal your shit just because they're so desperate
>southern kingdoms turn away anyone from the region because they're dirty gypsies
>golden forest and the cut and pasted wall/plateau city with its extended wall to the cliffs keeps the rifraff out (thinking about extending the wall through the woulds, but should i bisect it? wall it all in? wall it all out?
>even after they get through they have to go through heavily watched rivers because the black swamp gate castle is always sending patrols to them, and receiving patrols from them while they work in tandem to scour the rivers for anything that got out of their respective "bad shit on the other side of this wall y'hear" enemies
>now all the land from up north moved to the coasts or is in decline/a ruin because nobody can send caravans reliably, and most prefer to sail
>but the strong winds and currents shove everything into the pirate infested sea to the west, which pirates patrol longways, leaving west-south-west towards the island chain to the southwest from the inlet in between the graveyard and the start of that sandy penninsula on the north end of the landmass

Yeah, that's reflected in the physical map. There's mountains, wetlands, rivers and lakes that define the borders.

>golden forest and the cut and pasted wall/plateau city with its extended wall to the cliffs keeps the rifraff out (thinking about extending the wall through the woulds, but should i bisect it? wall it all in? wall it all out?

Beautiful map, as always. I feel like it makes sense for the walls to extend along whatever line is easiest to build while providing the most protection. In this case, though maybe I missed something on the map, it looks like a wall extending out to the river by shortest means would be the most logical.

This place sounds like a real shitter as well.

My question would be is why does that rage ability exist? Where does that come from and why is it tied to fertility?

is that a heart?

Is it too cliche to have the ancient unremembered empire being the source of the world's greatest magic/technology/etc? And it was 'lost to the ages'?

The best way to use a cliche is to simply use it and not present it as a great idea that deserves focus. It's just a truth of the world.

This. Cliches aren't bad if you use them sparingly/right.

To be honest, I only really like Books 1, 3, and 4. Largely for the reason you say. Then again, what really annoyed me was how much Tavi would bend over for other races. Apparently he's the only fucking person in the world capable of realizing the end of the world is more important that bullshit social stuff.

Also, to be fair, it was kind of neat seeing Zerg in a fantasy setting. Can't recall having seen that before.

I couldn't get into Way of Kings (that's the first Stormlight book, right?). A third of the way in I stopped reading the apprentice girl's stuff, and half way through I dropped the nobles as well. Instead, I just read the chapter summaries so I'd still know what's happening.
Then three quarters of the way in I just lost all interest in the book entirely.

Fucking Mistborn was great, though. Easily one of my favorite fantasy books.
Never got around to reading the sequels. I've been burned by sequels and prequels and such so often that I rarely ever read more than the first book of a series these days.

Warbreaker was fun, too. I doubt I would read it again, but it was a fun go the first time.

>Never got around to reading the sequels
Honestly, the Mistborn sequels are pretty great. I'd recommend giving them a chance if you have the time.

>A third of the way in I stopped reading the apprentice girl's stuff
Shalan is bad. She does get better in the second book but I still find her really irritating
>I dropped the nobles as well
See, that's my favorite part. I enjoy Dalinar basically having to deal with a bunch of stupid children. In the second book he eventually gives up being nice and starts slapping people. He even beats up the king to prove a point. Also Saddius getting stabbed in the brain by Adolin was hype as fuck.

I will say that I feel as though Sanderson is stretching things out too much. Way of Kings and the Words of Radiance are basically one book split in half anyway. It should have been one huge book instead of two huge books. I have it on audiobook though so it being super long is alright with me because I spend less money that way.

I'll also say that one of the blurbs for Oathbringer (the third book) worries me. It's insinuating that one of the main characters is going to sympathize with the Parshmen.

Lemmie explain why that's stupid in spoiler text:
Parshmen turn out to be voidbringers. They're inhabited by spren from an evil god and have tried to wipe out humanity 999 times in the past. In the current age they are reduced to mindless servants so will-less that if they weren't enslaved by humanity they would starve to death. At the end of the second book the Parshmen are inhabited by evil spren again and are poised to go on a worldwide genocidal rampage.

But the book blurb implies that their plight as a slave race is going to move Kaladin somehow even as he rushes home to save his family from getting butchered by these people.

>Never got around to reading the sequels.
They're fun. I won't say they're as good as the initial trilogy but fucking nobody does late 19th, early 20th century fantasy settings ever so there's novelty in that alone.

Maybe I'll give 'em a go, then.

Yeah, not really selling me on the series. And that Oathbringer stuff just sounds bad.

Stormlight might just have novelty for me because I've never read an epic fantasy series. Oathbringer might not have the issue framed like how I expect, but the blurb makes it sound that way so I'm wary.

Between Mistborne and Stormlight it kinda kindled my own desire for worldbuilding so I enjoy them both.

I'm a fan of Sanderson's worldbuilding as well. His magic systems alone are almost like characters in and of themselves.

However, his style only really works for a few kinds of stories. I'm sure you've read his theory on magic systems, specifically the bit about making sure the rules are very, very well defined.
Doing that works for his kind of stories since learning about the magic is half the fun, but he completely disregards the "magical" part of magic.
His magic systems are basically science. I wouldn't bat an eye if someone told me he was the one to come up with the alchemy in Full Metal Alchemist.
In a Sanderson book, magic has to play center-stage. The plot is largely guided by the magic system, relying on it.

That works for his kind of stories, but there's little wonder in it. The likes of Tolkien and Martin do a great job of hinting at magic, and by keeping it out of most characters' hands they can focus on telling other stories. Magic is around, but it's not the end-all, be-all. Even Sauron going after the magic ring and he White Walkers coming back aren't too terribly important compared to the characters' journeys.

I think Le Guin (Earthsea) may be the best halfway point. She defines it, and makes it a huge part of the story, but it's still not that well defined. It feels magical, and it's not the defined aspect of her novels.

I think it's fine to borrow handily from history. The important thing for a fantasy culture is that it is affected and informed by the fantasy elements of your world. That's what is the most interesting to me. That's why I like the term scifi/fantasy. They both ask the question "What if..."

>I'm sure you've read his theory on magic systems, specifically the bit about making sure the rules are very, very well defined.
What I read was how there are different systems of magic and if you want characters to use magic to solve a problem, you need that magic to have understandable rules so it was in the scope of possibility that the reader could guess what they characters would do before they did it or at the very least have what they did make sense when the reader thinks about it.

Basically soft vs hard magic.

In soft magic systems you want magic to create problems. Magic is unknowable and doesn't conform to rules that humans can understand. That is fine when you have it creating a problem, but if you solve a problem with magic that the reader couldn't possibly see coming it feels like the dreaded "asspull".

Sanderson likes to bring up this comparison in LotR. It's not a magic system but it gets the point across. It's the resolution of the Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith fights. In the Helm's Deep fight, Gandalf tells Aragorn that if they survive three days, he will return with the lost army of Rohan to save them. That means the goal isn't to beat the orcs but survive until Gandalf comes back. In the Minas Tirith fight this resolution doesn't exist, the goal of that fight was to defeat the orcs. That fight is resolved by Aragorn's invincible magic ghost army that comes out of nowhere and disappears after it solves the problem. Nobody was waiting for the ghosts to kill the orcs so the resolution feels anticlimactic.

Anyone else wanna rate?

Rites of passage aren't usually mortal combat. Especially not against a single specific combatant. If the youth succeeds, the special combatant has died. If he fails, he has died.

And here's a quote for him to explain why he does what he does:
>"I consider my own magic systems to be perhaps 80% hard, maybe a bit more. My own paradigm is to develop a complicated magic system which can be explained as simply as possible, but which has a lot of background and ‘behind the scenes’ rules. Many of these workings don’t get explained in the books, particularly at the first. The characters have some good understanding of the magic, but they rarely understand its complete form. This is partially because I treat my magics like sciences, and I don’t believe that we will ever completely understand all of the laws of science. Partially, also, I do this so that I can have discoveries and revelations in the novels. I like mystery more than I like mysticism.
So, following this, we have my own Mistborn series. In them, I outline many rules of the magic, then offer up a few unexplained exceptions or inconsistencies which I proceed to explain in further books."
Mistborn doesn't do anything to explain how hemulurgy REALLY works, even though I believe he has planned and understands it. It has to do with how everyone has a physical, cognitive, and spiritual component and you're basically stealing someone's spirit and nailing it to your own spirit to use their ability to create investiture.

Those are very human values, desu. Already real. I would make the Orcs extremely physically powerful, and CRIPPLE them with an honor code. Make it the main reason they ever lose.

Humans drop values about five seconds into battle and take any advantage they can get if there is no way they'll be reprimanded or harmed back from doing it.

You escalate if you can get away with it unscathed. You don't if they'll be doing nasty stuff back to you. And whenever possible, you take captives to ransom or enslave, otherwise they're just a problem wasting your resources and forcing you to watch them all hours of the day.

>Orcs extremely physically powerful, and CRIPPLE them with an honor code. Make it the main reason they ever lose.
Slapping restrictions on shit always makes it more interesting

>Idea that's bouncing around my head

World is technically post civilization/cyber punk but the visuals are all off.
Most people on earth are dead from unspecified disaster. All political bases have fallen, and cooperations are all in power. But the world only looks more "modernized" and hasn't turned to shit.

Large stretches of asphalt from high-way to high-way and no one on them. All road are still maintained as well as can be by crews/drones. Titanic-lly large parking lots stress to the nearest department store. Which is still run and open during normal business hours.
High rise buildings has mostly been torn down for their resources, there are still a few but the world is now mostly the flat grey top of pavement, and yellow lines.

Raiders, bandits and normal folk buy food, and the new brand of armor and bullets, which all end up looking like tougher nerf gear, but can actually kill you, from your local Walmart!
The Walmart themselves have auto gun turret placements for customer protection from raiders. Small pockets of nice urbans area still exists and are patrolled by mercenary units that the community pay for to keep away raiders.

The world outside the "safe zones" even looks nice. Cooperations put on Eco-awareness events. Volunteers strapping in rad-suits to go planet row after row of nice trees in the red zone. So if you are accidentally wondering out there at least when you die of radiation poison it'll be in an ideally looking orchard.