Fantasy writers think small

Let us take a sampling of humans from the 5,000 years ago from earth and transplant them to another world in recreations of their villages with plenty of supplies and so forth. Said world is broadly similar to earth in terms of gravity, temperature, water coverage, atmosphere, etc and has been terraformed with earth wildlife, though the continents are laid out differently (with each group getting their own continent to live in in a climate like that they dealt with at home) and there are three moons in the sky.

What happens is that each minor enclave would grow in population, expand it's territory, establish new farms and villages. Soon they would have groups splinter off. They would refine their tools and methods. Villages grow into towns, towns into cities and cities build kingdoms, empires and republics. The nations of this world would have their own styles of government, languages, clothing, art, philosophies, religion, custom, organization, values and so forth which would shift as they rise and fall and how their cultures would inevitably change and shift. Especially when each broad group begins to interact. By the present day, this world would have developed a wide variety of cultures, each distinct from anything that existed on earth due to evolution in isolation

This is natural and logical and it just has people doing things differently in a place where the topography is laid out differently. But when most fantasy writers are asked to come up with a fantastic world it's always like this...
>Durrr! It's just like the pop culture's idea of medieval Europe/Ancient China/Arabian Knights era Middle East but with Orcs and Dragons and stuff!

Because no-one wants to read long, winding explanations how a culture works before starting on the plot. That's why you say stuff like 'Roman Empire but with orcs' so everyone is immediately on the same page and can go on to the fun from the start.

Actually user, they write that way because most people are interested in human stories through a common cultural lens rather than attempting to understand alien cultures and values. Hope this helps.

Feel free to write the next great fantasy novel.

Good luck!

you're wrong, user.
most cultures don't expand and grow into towns and then cities, most cultures have stayed in the same villages and tribal groups and liked it that way.


its only racemixed people who need civilisation

Do you understand how much work it is to create 30 new cultures, not to mention how hard it is if you're so hellbent on trying to avoid any reference to cultures in our own past and present?

also, what makes you think readers care that much about these made up cultures?

>playing with brainlets

>Because no-one wants to read long, winding explanations how a culture works before starting on the plot
So don't give that explanation. Personally, I get far more invested when I jump right into the middle a long complex narrative and have to puzzle out the details of how the world works myself than when I follow with it from the beginning.

Think of it as this way: when you say 'Roman Empire' it's like sending a zip file to your reader's brain, compressing thousand years of history and culture into two words. It's about efficiency of presenting information. The information density of referring to existing cultures is simply staggering and far superior to building one from scratch.

Human cultures are very different in some respects but incredibly similar in other respects, even completely alien cultures of humans would be broadly speaking, very similar to our own.

Besides, in order to determine what would be different on such an alien world, you'd have to imagine events and circumstances that fueled those changes, and if you have the time to spare then cool, but that's an incredibly daunting task if you just wanna get a game going.

You write that rant user, but I bet tree fiddy that you don't have a degree in history and anthropology. Even if you did, and you don't, you would need to be a very smart person, way above average, who received above average education in those fields, just so you would be able to list the major factors that you'd have to take into account.

To actually factor everything you need in order to 'realistically' assess and estimate how those cultures could realistically have formed and finding how geographical circumstances led to this or that form of government you would need to know:
>Every possible thing there's to know about the terrain they are. Climate, resources, type of soil, type of trees, type of animals. How fast animals and plants reproduce, how many calories their fruits yield, what type of metal is available and which variety of it....
>Every possible thing there's to know about how the circumstances above affect society development.

And even if you manage to succeed in this impossible task that is the first, then (and here's why I know you aren't a historian) you would find out how the second part is just impossible. Some guys, hundreds of guy, way way smarter than you, have dedicated their entire lives in reading every possible source, studying every possible detail about the italian peninsula e the romans, and trying to explain why their empire was successful were many failed. And you have as many different answers as people who research it. Whatever answer YOU believe in right now, someone else wrote it, and three other guys wrote very intelligent arguments about why that's wrong.

That's History as a science for you.

So, anyone with time to write a fantasy novel, can't possibly be the Uber-Historian-Anthropologist needed to satisfy your insanely demanding criteria.

To be fair, if you are the god-writter of your world, you can literally make up how and why things went a certain way.

But I think all but the most autistic readers would just tell you to go fuck yourself after having to read about the butterfly effect for the 30th time in a row.

Nobody have time to spare. The number of hours needed to appreciate reasonably all those factors is greater than the number of hours in a human life. You have several historian who dedicated their whole lives to the study of a thing, and there's still academical debate and uncertainty about how the thing even came to be. We are talking about 30 plus years of the life of a competent professional solely focused in ONE culture, and sometimes ONE aspect of it. And then multiply it by several professionals world wide.

Just search how many historians try to properly understand the key to roman military success over others and where it came from. If you find 20 different guys writing about it, there will be 20 different theories. And whichever you like most, 10 of those guys refute that one with solid arguments.

Yes, and it's what most authors do. That's Martin did and that's what OP is criticizing. An author wants to dump a medieval world into a new geography, with medieval values, that's fine by me. He wants to make something new entirely? Also cool.

But trying to calculate what would 'naturally' realistic arise from human beings in a different place? That's preposterous. In the end, fiction is about making things up. It's a bit arrogant to think like OP that there's a 'objectively superior way' of making things up.

The end result, in this case the novel, will determine what works better, not the background it is laid on, in this case the setting.

>when you say 'Roman Empire' it's like sending a zip file to your reader's brain
I know, and I don't like it, because my brain processes it and comes up with the result "this is fake world made up of plastic and styrofoam."

>thinking you need a single massive info-dump to explain the setting
>not using the story to do it as you go

This is why you will not become a great fantasy writer

Doesn't need to be an infodump. Just include mentions of imperial legions and gladiator games to the text, and the reader goes 'a-ha, this place is like fantasy Rome!' Easy peasy.

Thing is, if I'm reading a fantasy novel and it establishes the setting as being "not-Rome", my response would be to put it down and go read a history book about Rome instead.

Except that's exactly how Martin and Tolkien did it.

This.

By that logic pure blooded people are naturally inferior. They don't rise to greatness. They don't thrive. They don't invent. They don't build. They stay in their mud-huts in ignorance satisfied by their own low standards until mixed race people have to civilize them.

You're stupid and/or full of shit. Depends if you actually believe the diarrhea that just rolled of your fingers.

Like fuck it is.

Tolkien never tried to be 'realistic' and martin copy pasted stuff in a way that didn't even make sense. How dense are you, user?

>You write that rant user, but I bet tree fiddy that you don't have a degree in history and anthropology.
DESU, a setting just needs to look like the writer's done his homework. It needs to have the right level of original donut steel background details so autistic wankstains can pat themselves on the back for reading 'properly researched literature'. God forbid they acknowledge fantasy for the cheap escapism it actually is.

And it better explain the tax system!

Is large-scale civilization really a forgone conclusion?
Couldn't very similar cultures to the ones on earth still arise if everything else is so similar, and the people are the same?

Assume everything is possible in the infinite multiverse and stop asking bitter, spiteful neckbeards like me questions like these.

This is a legit concern for the fermi paradox. Whether large scale civilization is a lesser or a great filter, or none whatsoever.

Well it's hard to have such an exceptional person that knows: 1) How to write. 2) History. 3) Creativity. 4) Worldbuilding. 5) Linguistics. 6) Sociology. 7) Anthropology.

Optionals: Geography, mythology knowledge, psychology.

Tolkien knew how to write, worldbuild, he was creative and knew a lot of linguistics. But he lacked a general sense of history and sociology, and he sucked at geography. Though he was the first to adapt so much mythology to a new world.

Martin based his world in the Tolkien/D&D stereotype but with more realist. He is creative, knows how to build a world, and some psychology. But he isn't that good at the rest.

Greg Stafford for example created Glorantha, an exceptional fantasy world that is very realistic, but he is not creative and doesn't know how to write shit. His fluff sucks.

Infinite tries don't really give you infinite variety. They just insure the same practical, efficient solutions will show up a near infinite number of times. With maybe one black swan in a billion.

I wish I had free time to do like 1% of these things,

You don't understand infinity.

Even one-in-a-billion events will occur literally countless times in an infinite multiverse.

But when do you actually get to the fantasy writing?

SO since you're a revolutionary genius who's the only one who understands how things SHOULD be done, why not write a novel and corner the market with your brilliance?

Good to see a brainlet demonstrate themselves.

Because they care more about the adventure than the world.

They are writing a story, you know.

Not him, but he's right saying that the racemixed created civilization, albeit the race is question is the modern human specie, wich is a product of different shades of miscegenation between Neanderthals, Africans and Denisovan. Since then, humans slowly created civilization, some in a more primitive form like the Sub-Saharian race, some more advanced like the middle-eastern. However, since the ancient times, civilization spreaded also to the most primitive (e.g. scandinavians) by trade, conquest or imitation.

>Personally,
By acknowledging that it is a personal opinion you are admitting it is not necessarily a majority opinion and that it is a subjective answer and not an objective one, which to some degree invalidates your complaint in the first place.

While I share your enjoyment of scenarios like that, many, many people do not. Simple as that.

Also, pureblood races are not inherently inferior, because they can survive without civilization and are generally phisically superior.

Stop responding to the obvious troll.
Jesus Christ Veeky Forums has gotten retarded. Used to be that we'd call bait bait back in the day but it's like all the smart people left and all that's left are the retarded mouth-breathers who think that because they have a mentally-focused hobby due to a lack of physical fitness that they're smart instead of just average at best.

Sorry, i'm a newfag and i have an hard time recognizing bait.

Here's an easy tip; if literally your first reaction to a post is a knee-jerk emotional response or a desire to counter-post to what they just said, there is a very high percentage it's bait because a baitposter's entire goal is to get you to respond.

Actually apply that rule to real life and you'll be a lot less likely to do stupid shit on average; every time someone tells you or says something to you and your first knee-jerk reaction is a retort or an emotional response, shut the fuck up and hold on a second and engage in some critical thinking and ponder WHY this person would say that to you. Important people do it because they want you to do something for them, political people do it because they want your support, and salesman so it because they want you to buy something, and finally some people are literally just looking for a fight and thus by arguing and letting them feel self-righteous you are giving them what they want.

Do you want the Isac Asimov of fantasy? A writer who clearly and succinctly presents a coherent world that makes logical sense if you accept the base premises? A writer like that would probably be able to cover the issues you raise, but how do you make that interesting to read? Asimov's books retain some broad appeal because they're describing a possible future. A pure fantasy version would probably only appeal to hardcore worldbuilding enthusiasts.

I had a GM who would put us in settings where cultures were entirely different from the real world. What ended up happening is we would try to do things and nothing would turn out how we expected because the culture was so alien to us we couldn't foresee consequences for anything.

How'd that work out for most of the Celts, Gauls, and other barbarian tribes that the Romans went up against?

discipline and intelligence>physical ability

Roman soldiers weren't "weak" either.
They had a legitimate training regimen, pretty much the same as any halfway functioning modern military. The Gallic of Celtic or whatever soldier learned by doing and probably had limited and non-formalized training in a militia style thing where the person fighting was a part-time warrior who's training, equipment, and experience varied wildly between them.
The Romans were all trained and equipped up to a certain basic standard so that none of them would suck and they could genuinely perform at least as well as each other.

Anyone who's paid attention in life will tell you that talent is cheap; it's a thing for anime and manga and movies to give Hand-wavy shortcuts in the plot to not show a protagonist going through training times like everyone else or as a way to explain their heroicness.

In actuality talent is HELPFUL, but the shittiest guy in the world at a task can easily become better if you beat the task into him over and over and he does it for a long enough time, which is literally the entire point of our species developing such advanced brains in the first place, so we could LEARN SHIT.

Try coming up with a culture of your own, you will inevitably end up adding stuff from existing cultures and will feel derivative

Human creativity is really limited and overrated, we are just like blenders that mix up everything we see

nigger, Tolkien races are completely flat, the only reasons their cultures feel unique is because they are not cultures at all, they are hiveminds

First of all Large scale urban centers emerged in China, the Middle East and the Americas independently.
Second People will be inclined to increase agricultural productivity. Either to have more wiggle room in case of disasters or to feed their more numerous children better who can't move away. Once you get more people, you get more people getting by not on farming but on making stuff and trading. Their skills improve, leading to better tools to till the land and thus more output per hectare and more people. Once the population reaches beyond a certain size, leadership becomes more formalized. Big Men give way to Chiefs and their Lieutenants, which give way to Monarchs, their Courts and vassals.

So did the ancestors of the civilized people. There have been people in the middle east for 60,000 years. People had been farming in the Middle East for 12,000 years.

This is always something i'm worried about when I have to DM.

Vercingetorix trained the Gauls into a professional army when he rebelled against the Romans and he still got BTFO. But he had to do it all himself from scratch, working with people who had never gotten such a treatment before, and he did manage to defeat Caesar a couple of times before finally losing.

In a vacuum, this is a very fun gedanken that can be independently entertaining. However, I've always found that trying to apply this sort of logic first to a story or game detracts from the quality of the story or game. The world should serve as a tool to drive the plot, doing the reverse and using the plot as an excuse to expose the details of your setting is masturbatory and literally what's wrong with so many modern fantasy authors.

Nobody cares about your setting at all but you until you've got people invested, and they only get invested because of good STORIES, not because of the setting itself.

Tell a good story. If you did it well, people will start asking question. Then, start fleshing out your world by answering those questions in new and interesting ways.