/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

"The Dark Lord rides in force tonight,
And time will tell us all...
Side by side,
We await the Might,
Of the Darkest of them All" Edition

Useful Links: sys.Veeky Forums.org/derefer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpastebin.com%2FVwXDe7JX

Previous Thread:Methodology
>When you write a setting with a purpose (novel, game, etc), how much development or effort do you spend towards the "Bad Guys" or major obstacles in the protagonist's/player's way? Less/more/as much as you develop the protagonist or main characters?
>What is the nature of setting obstacles? Are these character's obstacles mortal? Temporal? Philosophical?

Setting
>Does your setting have one Big Bad Evil Guy? Who is he?
>Does your setting have lots of Less Big Bads? Who are they?
>What opposes your heroes/player characters? How/why did you make them?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=OfR6_V91fG8
worlddreambank.org/D/DUBIA.HTM
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Hey, /wbg/, I'm building a sword & sorcery-inspired world that borrows from the likes of Dark Sun's Athas, Warcraft's Draenor/Outland, Conan's Hyboria, and a bit of Mad Max/Fallout: New Vegas.

I created a continent in Inkarnate (yes, yes, I know it's shit) and I was wondering where a good place to establish some mountain ranges would be? I view mountains as the bones of any world and I can't really start worldbuilding until I have them established. I want lots of desert/rocky wasteland somewhere, too. I just can't settle on a good place to drop some mountains.

>Methodology
When am creating a setting I tend to gloss over characters in general. I make most ofr the sake of making them, and the ones for specific stories are usually more collaborative and I am not normally the character person in those cases. Though, obstacles built into a setting are usually going to be based on some cultural idea and how it is shifting within the setting.
>Setting
Evil is too granular for single baddies. Even if there are individuals who are majorly antagonistic they aren’t the only ones. In one there is a secret council of a few submarine cultures that want to turn the world into an infinite ocean by sinking the land. But the details of them are limited. The majority of opposition is built around cultural and societal limitations or issues. This could be injustice in the status quo, a corrupt ruling body, or simply social taboos that seem to exist just to make others of people.

I would probably actually put a substantial range along the left third of he big continent, personally. Leave the NW and S most ortions still open, and jut it into the center of the continent. Put smaller ranges out E, possibly in a semi circle. It chops up areas, forces more seafaring, and allows for more distince cultures to generate if they are more geographically divided.

What are your most compelling villains? I'm having a hard time getting my players to give a shit.

Usually if players aren’t biting on a villain I find it is for one of 3/4 reason, depending on if the last applies.
> The villain provides no personal threat or history to the players
> The villain has nothing the players value/is threatening nothing the players value
> There are other more interesting things to do than deal with the villain
> The villain is just not present enough
The last one is the give-or-take one. Because some villains work from afar and others don’t. Are you running into any of these?

For several moments I thought this was Tamriel and was wondering why it looked so werid. I was all like, "Black Marsh isn't supposed to be a bunch of islands, and where'd Vvarderfell go? Daggerfall is also tiny and... oh wait, that's not Tamriel."

What do you think?

>Does your setting have one Big Bad Evil Guy? Who is he?
The Dark Man is the major threat to the world. His plan is to activate the World Engine, a machine that able to "reset" the world, created in ancient times by the most important man of the planet to protect the world and a few men from being destroyed by wars or infestation (even our current timeline has been already reset). Once the world's being reset, those who survived hiding in the Engine awaken, and start a new civilization. The Dark Man is the last of the creators of the Engine, he survived trought cuntless of different ages and civilization, resetting the world an infinite ammount of time (even the shape of world is different), and now with a major war incoming he's ready to do it again, but the location of the World Engine has been lost, and he must be stopped from reaching it. He isn't a king, he dosn't have an army, he's a wanderer and he's the most dangerous man on the planet

I've spent a lot of time thinking about a major villain from my setting, but once i scrapped all the idea for the classic villain, i realized that i wanted a enemy to be not only dangerous, but also reletable, making the player ask question about his reason and even to question their own mission. Would they stop the Dark Man? would they join him? Would they kill him but reset the world anyway?

What do y'all think?

So, Madara from Naruto? Sounds good so far.

Villains need a clear goal and a personality, once the players can reasonably predict what they might do next, that usually helps with engagement.

>Methodology
I don't spend much in the development of the "Bad Guys". They're rather generic enemies tied to a specific sort of theme. The obstacles however, are more physical in the form of varying enemies and traps. Aside from that, I want to explore the aspect of not seeing the light of day for extended periods of time, and the aspect of isolation as the players are the only things alive in this setting. As for the development of the players, I seek to use puzzles where they must use teamwork to accomplish them. Puzzles that put all their lives at risk. The nature of all of the obstacles are going to be physical in nature, unless I decide to throw a curveball that uses hallucinations.

>Setting
This setting has no BBEG. Nor does it have a set of lesser bad guys. The premise of this campaign is of a fabled dungeon opens up once more. The dungeon is said to contain the gifts and riches of anyone's desires, and that those who are able to reach the end of the dungeon will recieve those gifts. If the player does not seek for splendour, the existance of this dungeon has cursed the land around it, and made the ground poor for harvest. The local villages are just getting by, but if this keeps up they would have to move out. If a player desires so, if they reach the end of the dungeon they can lift the curse off the land. A player can also come in search for a long lost loved one. The dungeon had claimed many lifes in the past, many of which came after treasure, and others have already come for their loved ones. All who have entered the dungeon have never come out.

How does town designing work? The way I imagined it is a bunch of settlers with different skill sets build their own huts or whatever then as more people settled, it grows and they gradually expand outward. Issue is when you move on to walls, how do they decide whether or not to allow more building inward? Like there's usually multiple rings of walls, so that assumes people who wanted to settle just stuck outside for a while because they had no other choice until it became large enough that they built another wall for protection. Then there's other stuff like accounting for soil which I haven't really researched into yet, but apparently fertilizer is like soil on hyper potions. And a river which due to water flow gradually expands too I think and there's different species of trees which I'm not sure how they group together as well as different ferns, bushes, fungi and whatever else.

>When you write a setting with a purpose (novel, game, etc), how much development or effort do you spend towards the "Bad Guys" or major obstacles in the protagonist's/player's way? Less/more/as much as you develop the protagonist or main characters?
Less, if I do set up a villain at all. Like heroes, villains belong in campaigns, not in settings.

>When you write a setting with a purpose (novel, game, etc), how much development or effort do you spend towards the "Bad Guys" or major obstacles in the protagonist's/player's way? Less/more/as much as you develop the protagonist or main characters?
Even though I worldbuild for fun mostly, quite a lot. A setting needs a villain even if I don't end up telling stories about it.
>What is the nature of setting obstacles? Are these character's obstacles mortal? Temporal? Philosophical?

Setting
>Does your setting have one Big Bad Evil Guy? Who is he?
Yes and no. There is a singular malevolent and sentient driving force behind evil people, and maybe even behind gods' less savoury acts. And it is trapped in particular place, and can manifest at times, or interact with the world, add a personal touch here and there. But it is so unimaginably powerful and so ingrained in the nature of the world, and so alien in midnset that it can't be treated as a singular enemy, less so as one that can be stopped.
>Does your setting have lots of Less Big Bads? Who are they?
The Big Bad's top leutenants, the four demonlords (used to be five, but one got killed by a goddess). Plus various evil warlords and sorcerers, dime a dozen, there's plenty of them.

wbg I need some help with my map.
So far I have made a general outline of my map and the fill some forest/hills and mountain, but there is something about the placement that seem off, is there anything to change to it


Setting wise is your simple fantasy country with the story about a civil war brewing

>Big Bad Evil Guy?
In the setting I'm currently working on, there's Apophis, who is basically Satan crossed with Jormungandr, and taking quite a bit from his namesake, as well. He's the Anithesis, the Serpent of Infinite Eyes, the One Who Watches the World. He exists outside the mortal plane, encircling it, and takes the form of a leviathan snake covered in eyes. Because of all those eyes, he is able to survey the world in its entirety, but cannot interact with it due to his nature being fundamentally incompatible with the physical plane. He's actually a pretty affable guy, even if his ultimate aim is to undo the "shackles" of spacetime and so achieve true omnipotence. He sells his unparalleled intelligence abilities to those brave enough to contact him, and with the mortal world in the midst of a cold war between three superpowered nations, there's plenty who are willing to gain such advantages.

>Less Big Bads?
Plenty. This setting is meant for superhero-type stories, so there's a large Rogues' Gallery to choose from. There are servants of Apophis, of course, who don't realize that simply coming in contact with him means he starts exerting control over their mortal form and using them to further his own ends in the physical world. But there are also plenty of other magical foes to be had, from time-displaced Spartan elf warriors, to body-snatching slime demons, to angry fire dragon therianthropes. This is to say nothing of the conventional threat posed by the large armies of the world, all of which pose an ever-present danger to the city-state which serves as the central setting.

>how much development or effort do you spend towards the "Bad Guys" or major obstacles in the protagonist's/player's way?
As a general rule, I don't really do "Bad Guys". I do examine what conditions makes one group of people seem as the bad guys to another group of people, but I tend to avoid more absolute forms of evil. If anything: the whole "ethos" of my story is that everything comes at a price, and that your only chance is to learn to live in an ambiguous world, filled with tragedy: to find solace and acceptance of that.
This applies to both general themes of my world, and individual characters that it presents.
As for obstacles... well, that is a different thing. In my world, the world itself is an obstacle. It's a rough place to live in. Much like real world.

>What is the nature of setting obstacles?
For the most part, it's just inherent unfairness and tragedy of life itself. People are flawed, cooperation is hard, and there isn't enough resources to go around for everyone: that is, roughly speaking, the gist of virtually all of the obstacles that are in my world.
It has only recently been pointed out to me that my world has a very strongly buddhist connotations to its philosophy that I myself was never really aware off.

>Does your setting have one Big Bad Evil Guy? Who is he?
Plenty of people will be able to point out to one guy or one faction and say they are the big bad evil guys, but in reality... nah. Though some people and faction might do more awful things than usual.

>Does your setting have lots of Less Big Bads? Who are they?
Pretty much anyone in charge of a faction that is not on your side, usually. They are like most relevant characters in my settings, just regular humans.

>What opposes your heroes/player characters?
The lands themselves are what is throwing most sticks under the inhabitants feet. It's just... not very hospitable, and there is little to no agriculture there.
Makes living harsh.

I can't decide if my world should be flat or round.

Just make it the same is earth

>same is earth
which is? there's controversy on the subject, you know!

oh I hadn't heard, well that is a pickle

Does it matter? Will people be going around it? Will people be going to space? Are there other planets or realms?

If it doesn't matter don't bother answering the question.

Do you sods seriously not know the world is cylindrical?

Cpt. Harlock?

Best world shape

it matters because I'm mapping in rectangular projection and getting to (ant)arctic regions
while round world would be nicer overall, with flat world I could just extend map up and down without bothering about projection

although I'm thinking about doing just that and still claiming world is round because fuck geometry

What do you think is off about it? Where are the major cities located?

>made up some countries and places with stuff that just seemed cool
>made up a history with more cool shit
>geography made no sense
>politics made no sense
>weather made no sense
>literally tore that world apart into pieces
>post apocalyptic fantasy world with remnants of the old world scattered into independent demiplanes
>immune to /wbg/ critique

>post apocalyptic fantasy world with remnants of the old world scattered into independent demiplanes
Mmm, Allods, classic. At least before MMO hit, that is.

Setting
>Does your setting have one BBEG? Who is he?
Not really. There are multiple BBEGs, most of which are completely separate from each other. The two main ones are Qagenar, the Hellfather, and Maralux, the Lich King of the South
>Does your setting have lots of Less Big Bass? Who are they?
Also yes. They range from Qoabohr, Lady of Corruption, and daughter of Qagenar above, to Redllyn the Grim, a lesser Lich and Maralux wannabe, to Golg Gut-Grinder, a particularly nasty orc warlord. All depends on how high up the food chain you want to aim your shots
>What opposes your heroes/PCs? How/why did you make them?
It varies on the PC. I’ve only run a sort of separate party game thing, and most had various questlines tailor made for them. The half orc detective made an archnemesis of a master thief, while a wood elf ranger actually had a run in with the Redllyn guy up above and had an adventure of trying to foil him

I also have a question for others:
>Do you like having weird little gribbly stuff in your settings? And if so, where do they come from?

I feel there are part that feel naked, like a bald patches

In regard to the major sites, each city is ruled by a house of duke/duchess ranking with the exception of the magic academy and church HQ ( magic school on the lake and church HQ being on the island)

missing updated map

without rivers placing cities is meaningless anyways

I am assuming I need river close by any city i place

Do you want your world to be teeming with monsters where cities are the only refuge or do you want it to be mostly settled with dukes battling for power? Think about what would go on in the bald patches: ruins, orc tribes, farmland, fishing villages.

Ok so it doesn't matter

No, actually the world is the inside of a hollow sphere such that you are being pushed 'outwards' by the center, where the ground extends out into space for thousands of miles, after which is empty void. If you should tunnel through all of this, you will fall out of the world.

I updated with some river

It's not an absolute requirement and plenty of cities do form away from large rivers. However rivers do make trade and importing food easier, meaning that the larger a city is the more likely it has access to a waterway. Even small rivers will suffice for many medieval cities if they are navigable enough to allow boats and barges to supply cheap food, and may not be otherwise notable enough to mark on a map depending on the scale.

Cities with water access also don't have to be built directly on the riverbanks or seashore. They could have a satelite settlement to function as a port while the main city is located some distance away, Athens was the dominant sea-power for much of Ancient Greece but the city was 5 or 6 miles inland from the port of Piraeus. Although depending on the scale, the icon will probably still be next to the river. Large riverine cities also commonly formed on the estuary rather than at the mouth, or if they were upriver had a satelite port on the coast (Rome and Ostia) where goods would be moved off seagoing ships and placed on river barges headed for the city.

Cities on rivers is a good starting point, but reality can be a little more complex and allow variation.

>Like heroes, villains belong in campaigns, not in settings.
sounds like a boring design mantra. there should always be something happening somewhere in your setting. without heroes and villains, your world is dead.

I want two worlds- the fantasy one and earth. Should I also add additional realms in order to make this less anime? I think a realm for each god makes sense, but maybe there should be a few more weird ones. The "real world" also won't be literally real world earth, I'll probably have some weird urban horror style stuff going on there. Idk.. I like the earth/fantasy world crossover thing but I'm not sure if I need other worlds to make it work better. I also have no justification for this in the cosmology of the fantasy world, or a real reason for the fantasy people to not pop over and murder all the regular folk with magic or break the 'masquerade' so to speak. Because at that point we're saying that earth has its own gods that don't want that shit to come over and enforce it. Which is a solution but it's kind of a cop out. I'm just thinking out loud at this point.

>Does your setting have one Big Bad Evil Guy? Who is he?
The Starless Bible Black, a fallen paladin and something of a god now. He served the gods until he realized that not only he but all of creation were pawns, their dangerous world and all of their conflicts completely meaningless except as a means to weed out the weak and make humanity stronger. So he defected, killed the Goddess of Love for her power, and has been hiding ever since. He bestows upon his disciples a bastardized form of the Goddess of Love's powers, using raw emotion as a source of power for their Black Magic.
>Does your setting have lots of Less Big Bads? Who are they?
Vasilisa, also known as the Golden Fiend of the Battlefield, the Degenerate, and the Skullfucker, was a Landsknecht Antimage sporting magic-absorbant gilded arms and armor, whose perverted tendencies and violent habits gained her infamy when she served in a mercenary band. She raped, she pillaged, and she stopped only to drop an unwanted child off at an orphanage and continue on with her hedonism. No two of her kids had the same father, but the one trait you could identify one of the Degenerate's children is the vile amount of smug, superior air in their shit-eating grins. From Vasilisa, many villains were born, but unlike their mother, there's at least a small glimmer of kindness and humanity in their hearts. They take offense at being compared to their mother, at least.
>What opposes your heroes/player characters? How/why did you make them?
Bible Black's minions are few and far between, and Vasilisa's children are far too manipulative to not do everything they want to do by their own hand. They work for the Degenerate's descendents, fighting gangsters, barbaric goat men, and pagans in the wilderness.

>bible black

is that a nod to that ridiculous hentai? cause it sounds like it is

youtube.com/watch?v=OfR6_V91fG8
There's at least 3 characters inspired by King Crimson songs, a couple inspired by Diablo Swing Orchestra, and random bits here and there for the rest of my taste.

>Does your setting have one Big Bad Evil Guy? Who is he?
No
>Does your setting have lots of Less Big Bads? Who are they?
Whoever the players decide to make enemies out of
>What opposes your heroes/player characters? How/why did you make them?
See the previous answer. Also monsters, bandits, and organizations whose interest it is to eliminate them

nice

Because they're all hoping their posts will be part of an "epic" screencap that'll be posted on r/Veeky Forums so they can get upvotes when they go back there

repostan moist map
worlddreambank.org/D/DUBIA.HTM

Is there any kind of medieval city creation "guide"?
Like where should market square be, what buildings should be in rich districts, etc?

It's not completely perfect, but it's pretty good and more than enough for RPGs.

As for the streetplan, look at actual medieval city maps and where things are placed. As GM you have a lot of leeway as medieval settlements tend to evolve organically over time with the odd burst of land clearance to make space for prestige projects. Sustained urban planning is not unheard of but is certainly less common.

Still working on my apocalyptic Canaan pantheon/Christian redux. Setting is based of the Canaanite pantheon with large christian injections. Using christianity as an updated story of said pantheon. Also allows for other mythos to bleed in as Yewah's conquests (Christian conquests of pegan lands and peoples would be the IRL comparison)

>>What is the nature of setting obstacles? Are these character's obstacles mortal? Temporal? Philosophical?
I'd say a good mix of all three. There will be death. Though they are in a realm of the gods so things aren't always straight forward. With so many gods dead and the realm left in ruin it'd be hard not to say Philosophical too.

>>Does your setting have one Big Bad Evil Guy? Who is he?
He could be a Big Good Caring Guy or a Big Bad Evil Guy depending on the point of view. Either way he's just an old man looking to start over.

>>Does your setting have lots of Less Big Bads? Who are they?
Mostly left over demons and angels left to wander the realm after the great battle. Some still care about those sorts of things others don't see the point.

>>What opposes your heroes/player characters? How/why did you make them?
Haven't really gone too far into this. The two I could think of with no real context would be Beelzebub and Peter. Beelzebub seeing the heros as a threat to what little order there is left and Peter being the gate guardian.

fuck, this is awesome
a lot of very useful info
got any more like that?

...

...

The mountain placement seems arbitrary. Especially where they meet the coast. Coastal mountains exist, but not as weird walls that arbitrarily block off the coast, but as, you know, mountains. there should be peaks and valleys, and as you get to the coast, short river valleys, fjords, rocky island chains. The one tile wide mountain wall looks particularily bad. Unless it was magically or artificially created in setting. You should look into making it variable width and not hug the coast so closely. For your other coastal mountains I think the best way to make them more believable would be to add a few tiles of lower elevation on their coastal side to show that there is a gradient in some places rather than a sharp cliff the whole coast through

Where are those tiles from?

I love gribbly things.

Big one in my setting so far is the common practice of summoning imps and other familiars. Such creatures are bound to the summoner with an instruction to carry out a simple or mundane action. The biggest use of them are by mages in order to carry supplies, scribe runes for spells, or generate and hold arcane charge like a battery for the mage's use. These creatures take asymetrical semi-fluidic forms, with movements reminiscent of ink dropped into water. They only have a basic level of intellegence and act like automatons or simple animals, though some do show quirks and curiosity for their surroundings.

A bound imp only has enough energy to perform the task it was summoned for, though they can be pushed to do it more efficiently; an imp bound to carry books could be pushed to carry heavier items, but would burn out quicker. Once an imp runs out of energy, they dissolve fron this world and return to where they came from.

Powerful wizards can summon and bind over a dozen of these creatures at one time, or summon more powerful and more intellegent beings, such as the Djinn, an intellegent and clever creature with much more flexibility than a simple imp, but is limited in how many times it can carry out a command before returning, and they tend to have mischievous personalities. Extremely powerful mages can even summon an Efrit, arrogant and dangerous beings, though binding them is another matter. What little can be gleaned from these creatures is that they come from the "Beyond", though what that is or why they are so willing to serve is unknown.

Another gribbly thing is what happens to the wildlife that wanders too close to a dragon. Dragon emit an aura that affects all around it. The landscape starts to turns barren and lifeless, while the creatures start mutating into reptilian forms. The closer to the dragon, the stronger the aura becomes, causing chaotic changes and growths. Many things can not survive the sudden changes, and those that do are driven mad.

Luckily, dragons tend to stay in one spot, sleeping and feeding on leylines. The last known migration of a dragon was when the cataclysmic arrival of Pyrisia disrupted the dragon, and it left to find a new resting spot. This alone, however, was enough to devastate the region it passed over for the next few decades. The region was turned grey and twisted, the local wildlife in agony as newly sprouted scales and horns tore at flesh and new appendages grew form their bodies.

Forgot to mention the Drak'iiron Tribes, cultists that live near the dragons and hunt the more stable mutated animals for blood rituals, where their warriors consume the tainted blood for strength, slowly infecting themselves and accepting the draconic mutations as gifts.

I also wanted to have goatmen satyr clans living in the mountains, and I'm not sure if I want them to be rivals, or just combine the 2 ideas into one.

Hexographer

>Drak'iiron
Why are people so lazy with their ethnonyms?

Imagine if the average food-crop harvest in the middle ages was doubled and disease mortality was halved

How much larger would populations be?

>bigger population in the medieval period
>disease is somehow less prevalent

>Easy shit answer
Slightly less then four times as much due to war and accidents and such.

>Actual answer
Depends on what you want. In my opinion, cultures with better access to food and less disease may have less children- or based on access to magic may allow for contraceptive magic. A large portion of the population could also be in the non-working class due to more food, leading to a higher division of labor. You could see a VERY large portion of the population being celibate or focused on martial/magical arts instead of having families, at least in comparison with actual medieval societies.

What?

if u can quote in the post where i said disease is less prevalent i will personally email you $100 pesos

>disease mortality was halved
I want my 100 pesos paco

>10 people get disease, 4 die
>10 people get disease, 2 die

if u can explain how mortality means prevalence ill personally paypal you £763 rubles

That is one issue that would distort the feudal paradigm--more food per farmer generally means farmers have more power and there are less farmers

Hey /wbg/
Does anyone here have a good newsanchor/broadcaster voice that can record some dialog on vocaroo? I'm wanting to throw in a little snippet into the end of my party's mission just for a bit of fun. Feel free to change it around or throw extra stuff in if you want.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help!

>"...are listening to Free World Broadcasting. Unnamed FWBC sources report that a federation relay on the plantic Tracix 93 has been attacked by rogue terrorist forces. More on this story in the next hour. In completely unrelated news, federation broadcasts to the Solveig System have halted completely. Stay tuned to Free World Broadcasting for these stories and more..."

>Does your setting have lots of Less Big Bads?
Yepperoni. They mostly consist of local warlords or regional rulers, allthough some powerful families and organisations would also qualify.
>Who are they?
I'll mention a few as there are really too many to count:

>Am Lau
One of the most successful warlords ever to be born on the Endless Steppe. He started out as the prince of a minor tribe but through conquests and assimilations managed to gather a vast horde of merciless fighters who sacked and pillaged their way east. Currently Am Lau has set himself up as the ruler of a strip of land between the powerful Suhwamzeik Soghanate and the ludicrously wealthy merchants of Sari.

>Leifner I Hafnur Camellius
The first emperor after the founding Vorastian dynasty, who gained the throne after emerging victorious from the civil war that followed the extinction of the imperial line. Having spent most of his adult life in the military he ruled the Empire of the Tetrarchy as if it was just a wast military camp, expecting total obedience and handing out swift and harsh punishment for the smallests of infractions. He ruled for 17 harsh but competent years before dying of old age and during his reign some significant expansions of the territory of the realm took place. His son and successor was assassinated after just two years on the throne as the senate couldn't bear another emperor like his father.

The part of my setting I'm currently working on is the conspiracy behind the murder of Leifner I's son. If anyone is interested I could post what I've gotten thus far. To summarise it it's basically a cabal of wealthy and influential families from newly aquired territory who want to see citizenship expanded who uses bribes, leverage and influence to get powerful senators and various other important nobles in the capital of Nyhem to organise a secret and hidden coup which will after the deed come to secretly rule the empire for a time.

It is a fair start. But when you're looking to create real geographic divides you gotta go farther. So here are some lines where I would have had ridges. Possibly plateaus between some of them.

I really shouldn't post when I'm this sleepy. Hopefully you guys can still read that atrocity.

Leave it like that. Ignore that other fag with a million mountains.

Make the leftmost valley, between the coast and mountains, the fertile plains of civilization. The area between the two mountain ranges in the center of the landmass is the big desert. To the north can be the frozen tundras and black forests, to the south along with those islands can be the swamps and jungles. Finally, the east-most fertile area between the mountains and coast can be the exotic foreign culture.

Boom. You've got a kick ass map right there my dude.

>immune to /wbg/ critique
Nothing is immune.

>Do you like having weird little gribbly stuff in your settings?
I try to avoid them in a "by design" sense but do tend to try to be creative with pests or vermin so that they aren't just pulling from the real world point for point.

Are you looking for critique in regard to just being an interesting map or more like a realistic world from human understanding of landmasses and geographical features?

Are you intending to actively use any of these other realms? Having two realms isn't necessarily limited to the animes. It is mostly about what works for you regarding tone and function. And if you want to have a notion that there are more but they are unimportant to the core setting, then maybe only the one has been documented or has any exposure and other realms are postulated but not defined.

You don't even need people in a world to have a living world, bruv. Limiting yourself to development through archaic good/evil dichotomies sounds like a boring design mantra for dead worlds.

A lot of it is based on geography and cultural things. Europe didn't really do city planning until near-modern time frames. However Mesoamerica was filled to the brim with grid patterns and planning. Those PDFs have good info, but don't forget that in a fantasy setting you might have settlements forming in old ruins or have other cultures which have developed entirely differently.

the later critique, but if there anything that could make it interesting, I am all ears

>one big bad?
Yes, it is an aboleth trying to drain the world of its water to cast a massive summoning spell to its home plane and allow water in to drown the world.
>less big bads?
Kind of. There are the six ancient mummy lords who originally caused the collapse of their once great empire and threw the known world into chaos by trying to treat with the unknown to gain power. The great old ones destroyed and cursed the mummy lords and while the mummy lords could not stop their own destruction they were able to banish the great old ones back to their origins. Unfortunately, the aboleth got through and is now stuck.
>opposes heroes
A mix of chuul controlled by the aboleth and the mummy minions. The heroes will have to gain entry to and treat with our loot each of the six mummy lords' tombs to find the pieces of the spell to get rid of the aboleth and banish it like the mummy lords did to the great old ones.

Then the first thing to ask yourself is what kind of mountain formation is a mountain. An easy way to do this is to look at a real world mountain formation (I am particularly fond of the mountains of Southern Alaska as an example) given that most of how we understand them to form is via plate tectonics.

You don't need a degree that field to be able to make reasonable mountain ranges. Following that the other common reason for a mountain is volcanic activity. Most cases of solitary mountains are going to be due to volcanic activity as a simple rule of thumb.

The next thing to consider for your map is water. Low lying areas tend to have water. Some coasts are even the results of a tectonic plate going under another, forming a mountainous coastline. Sometimes this will also create mountainous island chains. These will all influence your climate. A quick rule of them is the temperate regions will have access to coastal winds to some degree, allowing for more balanced temperatures and seasons. So you'll have much more extreme and often arid regions on the non-coastal sides of mountains.

Then you include rivers which tend to flow down the coastal side of mountains or other areas where they have elevation. If there isn't a path for it then eventually it will probably feed into a lake. For this reason the connected river in the bottom right of your landmass doesn't logically follow. You're more prone to get a lot of smaller tributaries off the side of the mountain forming into larger rivers with possible minor forks in rockier/mountainous terrain and deltas and flood planes in flatter reagions. Your mountain range in the top right would probably not form with a linear cut through it with steep edges without a reason. So that is a fair location to run a river through it, assuming that the open region above it is at a higher elevation, even if only slightly.

This is a lot of info, use what works for you.

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I decided to kinda go half and half on your advice because I did want my mountains to look a little less arbitrary/artificial but I didn't want too many.

How does this look so far? Any tips? Feedback?

For everyone who's running a game in their setting, how do you introduce players to it? Nice light monologue at the start, or do you whip up a small PDF describing life in certain nations around the setting?

I make a pdf, but no one reads it. So I do a light monologue to begin, but no one listens.

Definitely better. Though with the mountains, etc. you won't have any major geographic divides between regions. So make sure that you account for that by making trade and travel really prevalent and you should be fine to do it that way. You'll just have to come up with other explanations if you want any major cultural differences at all.

I provide them nothing but whatever initial story framing device is required. The standard "You're in an Inn/Tavern/Diner/Bus Station" or whatever. Some world details will be present, but mostly I prefer to explore those things as the players would learn them. Other details which are character important would already be covered during creation.

None of that. They'll either get it by playing in the setting, or by osmosis when I talk about it before or after just in a "this is what I'm working on/thinking about right now" kind of sense.

condense your world into a 100-200 word "pitch". This is all your players need to know. Send it via email or wherever you post the game. Read it before the first session.

Provide a large-scale world map. Each country and major city should have a very short description (20 word max). Ask each player to pick a city or region for their character's backstory.

If a player wants to make a character particularly involved with your setting (a prince, knight, etc.) then you can have a discussion during character creation.

What's your setting's precursor civilization like? What happened to them? What impact did they leave on the setting's current inhabitants?

The precursors of my setting were an entire universe in and of themselves. Then someone realized that reality is the shared dream of sleeping gods and wanted to meet/join them. While a party of adventurers was sent to stop him, he succeeded, only to find the gods were pissed about him wrecking their dream. The party helped remake the world as best as they could, but only got about 4% the same.

Said 4% is still visible scattered across the world, and ranges from glowing rocks and floating ruins, to oil rigs and early 20th century motorvehicles. Modern natives can't really tell the difference between such artifacts of the Ancients.

The main city in the campaign so far was built on ruins leveled by a green dragon before recorded history. Its denizens are underground below the sewers of the current city, which are actually ancient canals.

Are my coasts ok or do I need to tryhard that shit?

Would like a quick critique in general if anyone's got time, just playing with it atm. This is just part of the whole world, it's meant to be the primarily-human country.

Purple is the area controlled by undead (lich taking over) yellow is what's still controlled by the humans.

I actually like it. Nice looking map.

My unified setting has the Naga. The Naga were a Bronze-age civilization and in one story, also a Space-faring civilization. They ended up, essentially, magicking themselves out of existence. They left some relics of their civilization, though, including ruins and --- for those who were prevented from being magicked out of existence --- there are actually a few left. However their ruins are mostly buried since it has been tens or hundreds of millions of years since they roamed the earth. Their relics, on the other hand, are consistently fairly powerful, though notably they are made of bronze rather than modern steel.

My unified setting also has the Aboleths. The Aboleths preceded the Naga by a couple hundred million years. The Aboleths, being aquatic, never tamed fire or used metal, nor did they need it. Though as a result, and because they live underwater, there is almost no evidence that the Aboleths lived pretty much everywhere in the oceans and freshwater during their time... Except for the Aboleths themselves. They found a way to make themselves immortal. Most of them, over the next millions of years, killed themselves. The few who didn't are irrevocably insane and frighteningly intelligent.

There's also, in my unified setting, the Mind Flayers. They aren't precursors, though. Instead, humanity is a precursor of the Mind Flayers. Millions of years in the future, after the fall of humanity, the Mind Flayers exist. But then Something will happen and to avoid that Something, the Mind Flayers travel back in time in hopes of preventing it.

I'm not claiming all of my ideas are exactly original here.

It's shit senpai

The main setting I have with a precursor civilization actually has them still around. They're basically the dwarves of the setting. They predate most of the myths of the modern world as they "carved from the stones of the earth" before the dawn of recorded history. But they receded to the mountains and hid for centuries after one of their kind committed a number of great evils. They know it to be true, but most of the other current cultures assume that it is shared myth from the old histories and religions of their cultures.

This is intriguing. At least the attempting to remake the last world part.

Is this a "for the game" map or an in-world representation? Either way the details of the coasts only need to be to the degree required for their use. Are the coasts substantially important to the setting?

I would probably actually detail out more of the areas where you have undead/human frontlines, given that geography is usually a major contribution to why one force cannot press in against another.

It's for a story eventually but for now just having fun making maps/world. The coasts are not important except in a few specific areas where I'll of course go in and make those spots perfect. Just wanted to make sure they didn't look lazy/shit.

I agree about the borders. I tried to have the water sources like the lake in the mountains and the rivers and good ports controlled by the humans more since they would actually fight for that, and the major cities that existed there before the undead showed up would have been strong enough to remain. Thanks for the advice, I'll definitely take that into consideration.

Here's the full map, need to go in and do all the details of course.

how does one go about making good world building
i have no social circle to throw criticisms my way and i essentially start with the art races/people and deity's before i do the lands

>This is intriguing. At least the attempting to remake the last world part.
The gods each have differing reactions to this, which I'm still fleshing out.