Babby's first worldbuilding

>blackness between planes/planets/realms/realities/dimensions is called The Void
>north is cold, south is warm, either east or west is water, the other is "unknown"
Am I the only one who read these two lines as if they were combined? Because that actually sounds kind of cool.

>The void to the North becomes colder until a glacial wall of frozen gasses envelops the planets.
>The void to the South heats up seemingly infinitely as you travel deeper. Strange plasma beings live on burning stars in the radiant sea of super-heated particles.
>The void to the East is filled with mist and rainclouds that eventually give way to a endlessly deep sea. Sub-ships dive the ocean and ply the depths between drowned planets.
>The void to the West is obscured by a thick black darkness. While matter traverses it easily, light is unable to travel more than a few kilometers before being consumed by an immaterial force.
>Up and down are known as the "life column", a narrow Goldilocks zone that extends infinitely in both directions.

>Contrarianism is too mainstream now, we counter-contrarian now
>I'm going to ignore the "love and effort," probably because all my settings are the exact tryhard bullshit he's complaining about

You both sound awful

>>Contrarianism is too mainstream now, we counter-contrarian now
Does it ever end, or does the vicious cycle just continue?

We're basically at a point where decent writing has taken a backseat to just trying to be as different as possible.

>>north is cold, south is warm, either east or west is water, the other is "unknown"

This is basic fucking geography.

>adventure takes place on a single continent, didn't try to map the whole world
>North is cold because if the tall mountians, beyond thise it's mostly uncharted desert. Dwarves live mostly just south of the mountians. Barbarian tribes of dragonborn wander the desert
>south is mostly water
>west is wooded coastline, most large cities are found to the west. You can find all the standard races but humans are the most common
>southeast is a tropical chain of islands where most elves live
It's my first time GMing. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. Just wanted a simple setting that lends itself to adventures.

Nope. OSR atavism is going to burn itself out during the peak nostalgia window (20-30 years) for Buffy and Firefly and suddenly it's going to be cool to claim you were a TVT editor "back in the day"

>land is covered in ruins and artifacts are passed around from an ancient civilization that disappeared mysteriously
>their disappearance is inevitably revealed to have been caused by the current threat that has reemerged, and is never as interesting as it was when it was a mystery

Yes, it's cool and it turns the Void into Norse mythology

No it isn't, basic geography is
>north is cold, south is cold, east and west wrap

In my experience "babby's first worldbuilding" is more often than not people trying too hard to make their setting different and gradually discovering things like, "Empty spaces between shit are usually called The Void because it's a self-explanatory name for a literal void" and "My players seem a lot less bored when I just use elves and dwarves and try to balance interesting and familiar, instead of having to give several paragraphs worth of exposition just to explain what a shakga'tar is"

>"fairies are tiny winged people"
>proceeds to use victorian art and disney to justify his stuckism
>ignores mountains of actual myths and actual depictions in traditional rpgs

brainlet

/thread

My point was taking the very basic element of "bad entity does bad thing", such as killing and selling it as some grand purist revelation in a masturbatory fashion.

Some classics:

>game is set during least eventful period of setting

>25 steps of world genesis story, but only the last stage at the max has any influence on the ground level

>take random generated heightmap and proceed to slavishly plot the consequences of that random seed without individual input

>I don't like thing. Include it anyway because all boxes have to be ticked.

>literally copy other setting 1:1

The problem is that fairies have always been "tryhard and grimdark" and it's not a reboot at all, they are dumb old spook tales, there might be people who are annoying about it but that doesn't changes the fact that you are the one that is stubbornly clinging to a sanitized version of them.

Goldilocks zone?

>The problem is that fairies have always been "tryhard and grimdark"
No. Unseelie faries are grimdark psychos. Seelie fairies are generally helpful if somewhat mischievous. And of course exceptions existed within both groups.

That hentai was fucking hot. What was it called again?

The distance from a star where the temperature is just right.

So your problem is when people only use grimdark fairies?, I would agree it's shitty but then again there are lots of people who insist on portraying fairies as only cute, friendly and necessarily related to nature and that's equally shitty. Maybe the reason people go overboard with one flavor or the other it's because they are being reactionary to each other.

I just want a fun setting. I don't give a fuck about tropes or lack of them. I want a world that has fun, interesting character to it.

Ah, enlightened traveller. You wish to inhabit the plane known as The Edge, a deep and introspective realm where merely defining a thing causes it to exist only in the past.

In the northern hemisphere, sure. Which seeing as most standard fantasy is euro-centric in its roots, makes sense.
The complaint is extra pedantic because the only way to get around it is to just make it set in the southern hemisphere, with south being cold and north being hot. Not incredibly revolutionary.

Define Contrarian subversion bullshit, can you give me some examples?

Sounds fine, don’t let pedantic assholes ruin your fun.
Just whatever you do, WHATEVER YOU FUCKING DO, don’t let your rivers split.

You're just as bad as those pedantic assholes

Rivers split in many examples in real life.

>hemispheres
I know its normal for people to write what they know, but there's no reason for the setting to take place on a planet unless you are planning on space travel being involved. Not that there's anything wrong with either option, but it does annoy me when someone waltzes in to a map thread and REEEEEEEEEES at something not consistent with the geography of a spherical planet.

We had this discussion on another board a while back.
I think the example that ended up being come up with that wasn't either switching West and East or North and South was South American, where it's Jungle North/North East, Ocean West, Alpine South/South East.
I guess if you wanted to avoid the trope you could use other kinds of terrain we don't normally see, or make the place landlocked. Like "Plains to the North, Tundra to the West, Humid Jungle to the South and Mountains to the East" or something, but you're still boiling down to "Hot in this direction, cold in this direction, a different culture in this direction and something big to explore in this direction".

This. Good worldbuilding deftly utilizes the familiar concepts. They’re familiar and common for a reason. Going full contrarian and forcing yourself to not use any of the fantasy tropes is just stupidly robbing yourself of powerful tools.
This mostly applies to making settings for tabletop games of course. If you’re writing a standalone story, make the setting as unique and doughnut steel as you want as long as you can write proper exposition.

What about
>Mysterious Nation pretty much fucked itself over. Making itself pretty much not-relevant outside of the very few artifacts still left behind.

It was a jest, friend.

A JEST TO YOU MAYBE GOOD SIR

To be fair that's happened in real life too. Bronze Age Collapse was a thing, after all.
I never got the hate for "Ancient Civ with advanced tech" because that's not actually all that rare in real life - we STILL don't know how to make Roman Concrete or Greek Fire, and after Rome collapsed things kinda went to shit for a while, and Roman teachings in medicine were considered the most advanced in the field for a long time.

That being said, bringing back the thing that killed a civ is rarely interesting if you try to explain it. Great unknowable threat is interesting because it's great and unknowable, but having the Sea People who caused the Bronze Age collapse show up and be Atlanteans spoils the intrigue, and thus the interest.

While I love it when some dork just got about of geography 101 and is all excited that his mountains have rain shadow deserts joining them just like in real life, the truth is I don't give a shit. As long as the places in the setting are cool, I don't care where they are.

>but there's no reason for the setting to take place on a planet unless you are planning on space travel being involved
really? can you not think of any whatsoever? what about day and night? stellar objects? not confusing the fuck out of your players with something that adds nothing to the story?

How do you suggest having a great unknowable threat from the past be a large part of your campaign while making it interesting?

You can have that stuff just be there in whatever form you want user, was my point. You can literally have the sun be a boat sailing off over the sea each night captained by the sea god in search of treasure each night if you want, its a fantasy setting. What does the setting being round add to the story? I've never had a pc attempt circumnavigation (although I would fucking love to do a campaign on that now that I think about it).

>I never got the hate for "Ancient Civ with advanced tech" because that's not actually all that rare in real life
I don’t particularly mind the cliche but there’s a difference between
>they had cool concrete
and
>they had laser gun robots

The dead civilization is always Atlantis, never Rome.

>we STILL don't know how to make Roman Concrete or Greek Fire
Balls. We know exactly how to make all the variants of Roman concrete we've bothered to analyse properly, and since nobody knows exactly what Greek fire was there's no way to know if it's been made since or not. It's a bit like me saying "aha, user still doesn't have the secrets of my Dongleberk Humpwranglers whilst I've been enjoying its salty benefits for decades, what a complete penis!". I might be making snacks, I might be jizzing in my own mouth, you've no way to know.

What if the Great Unknowable Evil that brought down the old world is just Systems Collapse and the party must find a way to reinvigorate the economy, culture, and military of the current civilization before the next big invasion/natural disaster hits?

steps of world genesis story, but only the last stage at the max has any influence on the ground level

I don't quite grasp what you mean by this, though that may be because its 3am and I'm tired as fuck.

>north is cold, south is warm
Southern hemisphere here, this shit is fantastic and mysterious for us, fuck you seppo

I think the key thing is to keep them one or two steps removed from everything the party does. They might find people who are willing to trade the fate of the current civilisation for a chance that the old ones will spare them.
They find that a group of people have gotten their hands on something dangerous that hasn't been seen before - except in a museum, and now it's working, and the only people who would know how to make it are all supposedly dead.

I might get some flak for this, but an example would be the Reapers from the original Mass Effect game. They're responsible for all the tech we use, they're using it for some nefarious purpose even if we don't fully understand why, and they seem to have had a hand in everything and is the reason the enemy have so much weird shit going on with them lately. The Reapers are a big deal, but outside of one conversation you're always dealing with them a step removed from them directly, and that intrigue around them made them far more interesting than in later ME games when they actually invaded in one form or another and you had to deal with them directly.

Not him but given the context I assume he's generally refeering to worldbuilders who care more about being original than substance.

That's good to know, thanks for the tip.
Currently working on a campaign where an old cult of tharizdun has gotten hold of the power (a city) to fuck with leylines and as a result fuck up the world in various ways if unchecked. They still need to act someone discreetly however as the ability to fuck with the leylines is very old knowledge and only known to a few small groups.

First time DM so i don't give a shit about going down trope-street as my players arent the kind to pick out tropes, but ill keep your advice in mind to try and keep it interesting

>I don't like thing. Include it anyway because all boxes have to be ticked.

I'm guilty of this but it's because I often find a way of liking them later on, for example I originally abhorred the idea of having speshul elves like sea and sky elves in my setting but after tweaking the cosmology of elves I found a way to implement them in a way I liked.

I second this, I have no idea what you are trying to say there.

I'm not saying you should nick a load of shit from Thief, but it sounds like nicking a load of shit from Thief might be on the cards here.

To clarify, the whole campaign wont take place in a city, the city is a place on the map, only the few small groups know of what its capable of. Ive enver looked into thief though, might do that

...

Name it. I've never seen it except for your gay strawmans on Veeky Forums

>le you shouldn't try to be creative!
>le it only matters is the writing quality!

Why do you faggots refuse to realize, even after all these years, that sticking to boring and generic tropes IS shit writing?

If you blindly stick to Tolkien elves and dwarves, generic fantasy tropes and magic, and generic monsters and adventures- YOU are a bad worldbuilder and writer. You are aping something else that has already done, endlessly regurgitating the same "content" over and over and yet smugly claim that you are being so original for taking zero risks and not putting any actual effort or creativity into your worlds.

You've never defined what nebulous factors go into the "quality" that is apparently so important to you. You've never stated as to how you can have quality whilst doing noting with the medium. You are a fucking contrarian.

Unless you're literally taking Tolkein word for fuckin' word, you ARE doing something with the medium, even if only a little.
Everything we produce is a combination of all the other media we've consumed up until that point (even Tolkein was inspired by regular-ass folklore), we all just tell it in different ways.
That's how a medium evolves - little changes, little different ideas, all eventually culminating into being something different. So sure, have a few tropes, a few generic ideas - it's not about creating something WHOLLY original, it's about creating something original and distinct ENOUGH.

I hate the Tolkien tropes as much, if not more, than you do. Believe me. I think the professor would be devastated to know that the fantasy he dreamed up in his spare time has replaced thousands of years of cultural tradition about what an "elf" really is. Which is why in my own writing, I'm trying to return to the source material. This stuff is almost all we have of our pre-christian past, and it's practically been erased in the public conscious for a SECOND time.
That being said, one of the things that you need to realize about writing (though maybe to a lesser extend setting construction) is that there are no new stories. There are no new characters. And there are precious few new aesthetics, which are quickly done to death about a decade or two after they're discovered.
A good writer is as much trying to create something new as they are trying to fool the reader into thinking that they are reading something novel. They're trying to dress up archetypes as people with their own lives and personalities. Trying to disguise well charted plot lines as organic paths chosen by the characters, with consequences unknown. Trying to build a world that is more than a backdrop, that seems to live and breathe with the story.
Being different is good. It breathes new life into the ancient artform of storytelling. But when you get extremely different, it's jarring. When you stay extremely mundane, it's boring. In both cases, the storyteller needs to dedicate the sum of their skills to make their tale extremely inviting. To sit the reader/viewer down at the table, give them comfort, a hot drink, and welcome them in. Because the reader needs to be convinced to set aside their boredom, or be convinced that it's worth relearning and reimagining things. The easiest way to do this is to hook them with solid characters that they can quickly empathize with, and want to see the fate of. Harder, but equally viable, is to inspire in them a sense of awe with the world.

>Great unknowable threat is interesting because it's great and unknowable, but having the Sea People who caused the Bronze Age collapse show up and be Atlanteans spoils the intrigue, and thus the interest.
Eh. Maybe.
What is great and unknowable is mildly interesting, at best. It's navel gazing. What makes it interesting is that there is, presumably, an answer. In most settings, however, this isn't the case.
If a storyteller leaps from "great unknowable thing" to "entity/people with clearly defined goals for X reasons" or "event that occurs for X reasons" then they've done a poor job. And I think that's what most storytellers do these days.
Firstly I think that relying on mystery is sort of a crutch. You're not writing something, and you're doing it for the sake of making your writing more compelling. You're leaving readers to wander in circles because you're operating under the assumption that they could create something more interesting than you could. Maybe, maybe not, but I sort of see that as giving up before one has even begun.
Mystery shouldn't be viewed as a binary on/off switch. It comes in degrees.
I would sprinkle subtle clues that it was atlanteans. I would make resolving the mystery part of the plot, with dead ends and false trails. And when their identity is revealed, we're faced with a new problem: what are the motivations of this insular, reclusive culture? How can we learn their goals? Can we negotiate?
I'm of the opinion that pretty much anything can be made compelling and interesting, if one is only willing to put in the work. But it IS a lot of work, and there is no way around that.
Even so, I will concede that mystery has an aesthetic element that resolution does not. If you are trying to achieve such an aesthetic, no amount of detail will save you. Detail becomes counterproductive past a certain point.

>Space between things is called "that space where things aren't are"
wow yeah this triggers me too.

I mean, It is more accurate and informative to refer to it as interplanetary/stellar/galactic/dimensional space (the first three are actually very different), but there will always be colloquial names for that sort of shit, and outer space is described by "void" perfectly as far as the common man is concerned.

>Cardinal directions corresponding to changes in geography and climate
I'll agree with the east/west thing, I'd love some nice Mediterranean fantasy, but you have to have a warm direction and a cold direction or it'll all feel samey, and they're going to be diametrically opposed, so what's the issue with north/south?

I think he means that the setting has a shit ton of history and lore, but nothing but the most recent "age" has any impact

>There are no new stories!
>You shoudln't be too different, just different enough! Good writing bro

I like how BOTH of you repeated this statement as though it gave you legitimacy for the rest of your argument- while you completely ignored what I said.

Nobody is disagreeing with you. Nobody is arguing that you should make your elves le purple tree swinging squid. The only people who do shit like that and try to be "wholly original" are people that you STRAWMAN. Nobody wants to do that.

But what is not a strawman is the actual, unironic opinion that doing anything but traditional tolkien fantasy races and concepts, or even having anything besides humans, is special snowflake and bad. I HAVE seen people argue this, and retards like you actually defend them by pretending there is some kind of counterpart.

If you don't even try to switch up your tolkien races, you are a boring and shitty worldbuilder. End of discussion.

And I'd agree. But none of the people you responded to were arguing that they want nothing original at all.
They were arguing against random contrarianism and expressed enjoying interesting worlds and not caring what parts are generic and what aren't. That isn't saying that they want to never use anything different ever.

People feel the need to write this flowery sequences of light splitting from darkness and gods birthing magic and sculpturing the world that have numerous stages but each new step invalidates what happened before and in the end the world is just a standard world. Nothing of the cosmic ballet performance hat any lasting impact on the nature of the setting. By the time the world starts it's mortal history proper it is no longer relevant that the world was once a cocoon and the 4 elements got through tainting and purifying trice.

>north is cold, south is warm,

Thats how It works North of the equator. If it's south it works in reverse. Sounds like a really minor fucking complaint.

You are the only one strawmanning people here you retard.

I'm the second post you replied to.
How did I ignore any of what you said? I agreed with you. Nor did I ever say you shouldn't be "too different." That's is absolutely not what I said. I said that if you're going to be extremely different, then you absolutely need to back that up with good writing, because for the reader extreme trope subversion is WORK. Done well, it's also FUN. And I would argue that this is a GREAT THING that should be done AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE.
Does the caps help you see the extent to which I agree with you, even if I want to add a caveat indicating the importance of quality writing?
Chill out a little bro. Maybe if you just skimmed what I said, expecting disagreement, you could have reached the conclusion you did. But had you actually read it, I think it would have been pretty obvious I was on your side.

>not making a generic world interesting with the stories you tell.
You can add your *totallynottheorcs* and your special unique race with nine arms and one leg which they tap to communicate and vibrates when blue shiny tallarath crystals rain from the perpetually boreal sky. That is perfectly okay. It is also okay to grab basic archetypes and ideas and make subtle changes that make it unique and immersive in the eyes of your readers. The world of Warhammer is not the Middle Earth or Narnia or your average Korean MMO world. Things are different if you pay attention, and if you make it so.

I think I know who this is.
I refuse to change my edgy baby eating fairies Tom.

you don't need a big fancy original setting with a billion pages of back story. just make your campaign and come up with shit on the fly as the players go off the rails before directing them back, onto the rails.

As a bonus, you could have the regions expand and contract or even shift around. That way you get uncovered regions that get rushed before they're consumed again, areas that were normally habitable plunged into time of danger, and a long slow change in where people normally live. It'd make "city at the center of everything" make sense too, since if it never gets dangerous there it's the most attractive area.

>hating on classics that work well

There's a reason they've persisted.

>hating on classics that work well

There's a reason they've persisted.

If you're subverting things for the sake of subverting them, you're doing no better than if you adopt them just for the sake of them being there.

>If you're subverting things for the sake of subverting them, you're doing no better than if you adopt them just for the sake of them being there.
I'd claim you're doing a lot worse. The "standard" elements have persisted because they work fairly well, so adopting them without understanding why they're there at least guarantees you a functional setting. If you subvert shit without understanding it you're likely to end up with an awful mess.

Or Shadow of war.

>north is cold, south is warm, either east or west is water, the other is "unknown"

Given a spherical planet, there's literally nothing wrong with this.

Unless your setting focuses on an equatorial region, one of either north or south is going to be hot, and the other cold. It can't be east or west, because "east" literally means "the direction the sun rises from", so east-west has to be the direction the planet rotates.

Which of north and south are cold vs. hot depends simply on which hemisphere you're in. Since the vast majority of the world's population, both now and historically, lives in the northern hemisphere, the association of north with cold climates and south with warm is quite familiar and ingrained for most people. Unless you happen to be from the southern hemisphere writing for a southern audience, why would you go against the grain of audience expectations by putting the setting focus in the southern hemisphere where the usual associations of north and south are reversed? Just to be weird and different for its own sake? What benefits does that afford to the types of stories you can tell in that world? What meaningful implications does it really have beyond just being oh so super original?

Being different simply for the sake of being different is the epitome of "babby's first worldbuilding".

As for east and west, you really only have three options: You can be in the middle of a big continent, on an island (or archipelago) far from other land, or to one end of a big continent.

In the first case, you've got "unknown" on both sides, because it's simply not practical or necessary to flesh out an entire vast continent in full, and in a premodern setting distant lands are quite naturally going to be mostly "unknown". And you have a problem: You can't run any seafaring stories.

With an island, it's sea on all sides. Potentially neat, but also limiting.

And in the last case, it's what you describe: Sea to one side, "unknown" to the other.

>blindly stick to Tolkien elves and dwarves
Nobody does this. Nobody.

Play Warhammer. The setting is earth but with the serial numbers filed off.

any chance of source?

seconded

a ring around the wold that is a safe zone, protected from beasts and the such. Then there is a perpendicular ring of land. It creates to pieces of land opposit of each other but are available via sea travel.

Empires are interesting. Homogeneous kingdoms battling each other are boring.

Empires are interesting. Homogeneous kingdoms battling each other are boring.

>Does it ever end
No. The problem is. people identify a problem; and that is hack writers trying to disguise their lack of talent and hard work by simply jumping on the latest trend, but rather than realizing that the problem is the hack writers they believe the problem to be whatever the trend happens to be.

I like this.
I'm also kind of tempted to flip the "city at the center of everything" into "ruined capitol of the fallen empire".

Why on earth wouldn't you have the equator in your "worldbuilding" though?

>>take random generated heightmap and proceed to slavishly plot the consequences of that random seed without individual input
What am I supposed to do?

The Sellie and Unseelie isn't a real distinction of "Good" and "bad" they were just different types of fae. People just kind of latched onto the idea that Seelie are more friendly because Unseelie sounds negative. Both would fuck you over and steal your children, leaving deformed retards in their place

>euro-centrism
Not gonna deny it exists, but look at the world map. The north=cold, south=warm thing goes well beyond Europe. Half the Americas, North Africa and the vast majority of Asia have this. The absolute majority of nations and cultures you could use as inspiration had this notion very ingrained into them.

>Ah, enlightened traveller. You wish to inhabit the plane known as The Edge, a deep and introspective realm where merely defining a thing causes it to exist only in the past.
The Edge was actually a pretty good setting, in spite of all the donut steel in it.

Any setting that allows for the term "Sky Pirate" to be a thing without it being sci-fi is automatically good in my book.

>to sum it up in two words: Fairy Meat
Is this a worldbuilding challenge?

Are you saying we should be innovative and develop a setting based entirely around faeries and meat?

Is the Bologne Court at war with the Salami Court? Are there Hamburger Elves merrily tooting in the forest? Maybe there should also be fungal Unseelie, a pervasive rot that consumes all meat. Maybe there are Meat Brownies. That sounds delicious!

>His setting includes rivers, mountains, trees, oceans, or grasslands anywhere

Get some creativity man, god.

I think he refers to this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_Meat

The thing is, the Wikipedia summary even sounds fun.
And then you realize the writer's a vorefag.

>Name it

The Last Jedi

by posting that comic you found a way to feel superior to all 3 of them
and I get to feel superior to all 4 of you, until someone replies to me and the cycle continues