How do you stay motivated when worldbuilding? I've been working on a setting for the better part of 5 years, and this entire time it feels barely more than stagnant. I seem to only be able to work on it in spurts of activity before loosing my will to keep on building and creating. Maps end half designed, character bio's remain little more than paragraph long descriptions with poor motivations. I'm a mediocre writer as well, so I don't even know how to focus on a single story within this world.
When they are able to drag me into it my friends love having me run games, and I get lots of praise from them. I'm pretty convinced its because they haven't had an actual competent game master before. While I do just fine on little one-shot plots, my ability to weave a cohesive, sensible, and interesting larger story falls flat. I feel like a sham, running games when I am always flying by the seat of my pants. This has caused me to begin to avoid roleplaying altogether recently.
So how do you guys out there do it?- What keeps you going when you hit writers block? How did you learn to make fun stories for your players?
>Pic related is one of my partially developed maps I had laying around.
Nathaniel Rodriguez
Coffee
Cameron Wood
Plagiarism and profuse amounts of caffeine.
Evan Gonzalez
This. My preferred caffeine source is Monster but choose whatever you prefer.
Eli Harris
I'm pretty good at creating geography and geopolitical structures when worldbuilding, but when I try to make the story behind it I just freeze and come up with something that's always not as good as the world. How can I make myself a better writer? The present is always easy, but the past makes me want to shoot myself. Also, how to /pantheon/ without having 20+ gods on medieval fantasy?
Nicholas Wright
Just generate a world in Dwarf Fortress and use it as a template.
Aiden Watson
This. The names might not be great, but it's an awesome world-build engine.
Josiah Campbell
You can steal plotlines and characters indiscriminately, y'know. The more obscure the reference the better, btw.
Hudson Bailey
I could never do that! What would you recommend?
Nathan Sanchez
Well...it depends on the setting, desu.
Angel Howard
Mythology, even if they find out they will instead think you as well read.
Gabriel Scott
I'm going for a more adventure driven medieval fantasy: hidden temples, unexplored islands, thieves and old artifacts, the classic world we see in books. I just want the players to have fun this time, we recently got out of a very tiring campaign
Colton Cox
Conan, or farfahd and the grey mouser.
Chase Perez
It's a good idea. Would it be too edgy if I went for something different from Greek, Norse or Egyptian? If not, do you have any tips on things you'd like to play?
Jason Peterson
Well....if you want mystical voyages, anything from Greek mythology would be pretty good. If it's island-heavy you could maybe base the island cultures on stuff from Earthsea (just don't take Earthsea and paste it on there). Also Conan up the ass, cause that dude's the master of hidden temples and mystical artifacts being tempered with.
Xavier Perez
As long as you're subtle enough about it, then it's not too edgy, I suppose. Like, take concepts instead of names and stuff.
Benjamin Brown
No, I don't think that's edgy at all. Why would it be? As for mythologies that have a lot of adventure theme, the journies of Sinbad or The epic of gilgamesh.
Eli Sanders
If you're looking for swords and sandals kinda fun I'd say steal from the old 1920s stuff, like Connan and the like. Added bonus a huge chunk of the old Weird Tales stuff is public domain now, so you can get decent audio books from places like Librevox for free. These days I have audio books on my phone and listen to them on my commute, and just make notes of the bits I like and want to lift for my campaigns.
Charles Lewis
Also, if you're gonna do that it's gonna have to be a pretty low-magic world and stuff.
Colton Watson
I'm thinking about playing DnD but stop leveling up the players at level 6, making them stronger every so often, what do you think?
Caleb Nguyen
Wait, why level 6 and how are you gonna compensate for them not getting buffed as much from that point onward?
Ayden Flores
Mainly because of the buffs that most classes get on that level. I wouldn't compensate, I would just keep escalating the adventure, but still keep it low power (kind of like how on the good adventure stories the hero isn't eventually able to kill anything that moves) but I would start to put some artifacts and other ways to gain power around the place