/wbg/ World Building General

Worldbuilding, the art of creation, however you want to call it.

What are you working on?
Need ideas and inspiration? We have you covered.

Other urls found in this thread:

pastebin.com/VwXDe7JX
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks
simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiersman
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_(character_class)
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Nice copypasta op

link the pastebin you troglodyte

pastebin.com/VwXDe7JX

Maps give me the most inspiration, I especially like cross sections like this.

I can't blame you for it. I find inspiration in ideas and their visual representation. Right now I'm building a world that is vertical. A tall mountain over and beneath the clouds.

The quality of these threads has gotten almost as bad as its discord

Do you actually read these threads and use them for inspiration, or do you just post without reading and hope somebody strokes your ego?

For most people it's the latter but since most of the people in here are mediocre at best and insist on posting long walls of texts they'll rarely if ever get a response.

I'm writing something cyberpunk involving two existing settings and I'd appreciate any ideas or images relevant to cyberpunk, Crysis, or Worm.

I've always liked the idea of rip-off alien technology. Jury-rigged interfaces between the conventional and the alien, or advanced, sophisticated pieces of hardware being powered by comparatively primitive means.

at least he finally didnt fuck up the title

>space g36 with zip22
for what purpose

How have we had 3 half baked op's in a week?

Link the files and info etc. though I commend you for putting 'wbg' in the subject.

>Working on worldbuilding
>Decide rather than doing it myself I'll try something different
>Start a game of microscope with my roommate
>He goes out of town for a week
Fuck. What can I work on that won't fuck up the microscope game?

Have you ever played A Quiet Year? It's like a quick fun little thing where you draw a map and use a deck of cards to determine events. Might be a fun way to clear out cobwebs on your own.

Can't say I have. Looks like it's more post-apoc though and I'm working with a fantasy world. How agreeable is it to refluffing? And you got a pdf link?

Yo I bought it when it came out but I can't find it, but ya it's not post apoc really. You sort of come up with a place and the cards determine like "an invading force approaches, who are they?" And you think of something.

Fuck I'm actually in this adventure right now. Almost at the end. I'll stop reading this thread now to avoid spoilers.

Here ya go, there are some extra pdfs you can probably find that go with it but all you really need is this and a deck of cards. I played it once with my husband and it was kind of fun, though not too 'advanced' as far as worldbuilding goes. Just something simple that might get your gears turning idk.

I can see it being really fun to play with kids though. Anyway, I'm pretty sure you can play solo. Worst case you waste 10 minutes before you realize you hate it.

>husband
Gay.

Legit though thanks, will check it out. Looks cool at a cursory glance though.

Thinking of a low/mid magic setting where a major though relatively isolated island nation completely collapses during a revolution, the idea being something akin to the french revolution but going completely out of control, devolving into chinese warlord style civil war, and then utterly collapsing from rampant disease/drought/magic fuckery

All that's left of the people and culture are a pair of smaller islands off the coast of the main island. essentially small fishing hamlets and a trading/port village and their solumn populace. The main island is far too dangerous to be resettled by the other nations on the globe despite the treasures of a once great nation and still fairly plentiful resources. A bleak landscape, inclement weather, magically mutated wildlife and totally not STALKER-esque emissions make any visits incredibly hazardous, and permanent settlement utterly impossible.

How would you guys depict a wall, like Hadrian's Wall or the Great Wall of China on a map? What towns or infrastructure get built around it?

Using ancient egypt names in a scifi ice planet setting with giant bug-ish monsters is dumb right? Like size classifications ranging from Pharoah, Vizier, Nomarch, etc.

I feel like I should go for a more norse theme but that seems overplayed.

I read them. I avoid work on my setting and games by throwing out ideas when I have them.

So for the past few years I've been ruminating on how to make vampires interesting for my setting, as I've been trying to make most of the "common" parts of a fantasy setting, that I include into my setting, interesting in some way. And I think I finally stumbled upon an idea: Etiquette Magic. I am still hashing out what this is, but I take it from the general idea of how vampires are locked behind a lot of silly, seemingly nonsensical laws, like being unable to enter a house if not invited, and I am thinking vampires in my setting will be locked behind a similar concept, where being a vampire means you are bound by the laws of Etiquette Magic

Gib cyberpunk setting ideas. I've done fantasy to death, need to focus on something different.

Does anyone have a torrent for CC3/Campaign Cartographer 3?

A sea of sand, where the desert has been aerated through natural means. Experienced navigators know when and how to avoid dead spots where aeration stops and ships are trapped in still sand.

Is there ever such thing as adding too much history to your setting? It's not required reading as it doesn't have much bearing on the contemporary issues of the setting but I am wondering if it's too much

I don't think so. The more history you add, the more material you have to work with, even if most of it may never see the light of day, it can be used to build upon, or as fluff. You never know when a little tidbit of historical importance will come in handy with a plot.

>Gib cyberpunk setting ideas. I've done fantasy to death, need to focus on something different.

Altered Carbon.
ICE's Cyber Space setting.
Amazing Engine's Kromosome book.

All solid cyberpunk fare. Cyberpunk 2020 is kinda broken, and Shadowrun sucks.

Holy cannoli that's cool AF. Thanks for sharing, definitely gonna use.

>Using ancient egypt names in a scifi ice planet setting with giant bug-ish monsters is dumb right? Like size classifications ranging from Pharoah, Vizier, Nomarch, etc.
>I feel like I should go for a more norse theme but that seems overplayed.

I like the dissonance. I say go for it.

>Need ideas and inspiration? We have you covered.
I posted my "issue" in a previous thread, tried to think through the good suggestions given, but couldn't.

I love settings with monsters and curses and gods and demons but I've found myself gravitating towards modern settings (digital age, modern guns, etc.)

I'm leaning more and more towards "not!standard fantasy setting but 700 years in the future" but am filled with doubt.

A cyberpunk setting where trains are a major part of the infrastructure. Bright, neon coated cityscapes being bustled around on magnetic rail ways by massive trains, with small jet speed trains, ferrying citizens to the various city block trains, bulletting around on constantly changing magnetic tracks coordinated by a ancient (by their standards) scheduling system that no one can understand anymore, so they just let it go. Entire continents covered in railways, and massive, impossibly huge train stations, the only places cities meet, where buildings are unloaded and traded, sold or bought from other trains like merchandise by companies that run specific rail lines

...

All I want is a setting where all my favorite things are stuck together retardedly

Just do that then.

I remember once creating a setting for a story I never wrote, where a super massive continent was developed by an ancient race of people to become one giant race track, covered in countless roads in every manner of environment and situation, from huge loops, to massive valleys with platforming required, and countless other things. Gas stations are fortresses to protect the most valuable resources on the continent, fuel and car parts. The continent is full of dinosaurs, aliens, psychics, super humans with crazy and bizarre super powers, but the main focus is a massive, year long race held every four years, with hundreds of racers.

The setting even included people learning how to use martial arts with their cars and predicting how people drive with super senses.

There was no logic as to why this all was included in one world, but I didn't care, i wanted a setting where anything could happen as people raced across a massive landmass

>Have a vast and rich history for my setting
>Struggle to organize it into a neat and coherent fashion for others to read

Try adobe indesign. You, too, can make a fancy pdf like mine. I can't guarantee your writing will be as bad as mine though, that's up to you.

Hey Veeky Forums

I was working on some alien creatures for some science-fantasy (nothing too hard, more weird than realistic) and I was starting to think that colonial animals, like the man'o'war, might be neat - not just a single alien creature but two or more zooids that live as a single organism.

Has anyone done this before? Have you come up with any cool ideas for this?

Meme magic, user.

Gods are fueled by prayer, and sooner or later, someone's going to accidentally meme the names of the ancient dead gods on the internet and suddenly you've got a pic related scenario.

So I'm about to show my former fandoming here,

In the show Supernatural there's this angel named Castiel, right? So, in an episode 2 seasons before he shows up the guys are doing some latin chanting and part of it calls upon a being called 'Castiel.' Probably a total coincidence? Maybe they just reused the name or liked it or they knew where they were going with the plot? But the little headcanon was that they got his attention during that spell and he was the one that banished the spirit or whatever.

So yea, it was a neat idea that they had sort of 'awoken' him with that spell accidentally and that's why he was the guy assigned to their case, or whatever.


Think it was the one with... some pirate..ghost..type thing... Bella gets cursed I think? idk if you guys watch that show.

I don't know if I posted this latest layout after /gd/user gave me some advice, but I made some changes. A little more font diversity, some adjustments on size/spacing. I might go all-caps on the headers eventually but I kind of like the smallcaps. Some of the gods have longer names and it looks right on them. I'm sure I'll change everything over time.

But for now, I need to fill in the blank spaces on some pages. And redo some of the art.

Anyway, what do you guys think of the layout/look?

You won't find people who watch Supernatural because we're all fat autistic men here, not fat autistic women.

Holy fuck, I love this. I adore the whole idea of a city with a ceiling, ever since I played Deus Ex HR.

So I'm having trouble with coming up with gods for my 5e homebrew setting. The basic idea is that it revolves around a single nation and the surrounding environment, primarily the capitol city in a mountain river valley. At the moment, I have three gods:
>Otar, LG dragon god of fertility, healing and storms. Bro-tier, primary deity in the nation the setting revolves around.
>An unnamed dwarf god of innovation, invention and fire. Bros with Otar, secondary deity of Otaria.
>An unnamed (in-setting, speaking the name is punishable by death and all records of its name were expunged) worm/wurm god of plagues, destruction and rebirth. Takes the place of Lolth for the Drow in this setting (change their spider motifs to serpentine dragons). Was sealed away by the other two gods centuries ago.

These are the three big gods, but what else should I think of adding to the setting?

>Train cities, buildings traded

This shit sounds balls out amazing. Have you thought a reason for this bizarre world? I'm guessing it's like which also sounds friggin' awesome. Great ideas, smar/tg/uys!

Other than hive insects, I've never heard of such a thing!

/gd/-type dude here.

The body text font is good, the sans-serif font you're using for the heads is too modern and severe.

Also, try to make the spatial padding even around all things. For example, make sure it's the same (maybe 6 points?) from the left of "Kwill" to the teal border, from the top of "Kwill" to the edge of the pale-teal color block, from the bottom of "Kwill" to the edge of the pale-teal color block, from the the edge of the pale-teal color block to the top of the "Lorem ipsum" paragraph, from the left of the "Lorem ipsum" paragraph to the teal border, etc.

Generally briddy güd though!

...

Well I'm stealing this, thanks.

Perhaps it's just a result of one business growing out of control
>Far, far in the past, with the invention of high speed magnet trains and rail reconstruction for instantaneous rerouting on the fly, public transit and long distance travel has become even greater
>One company, seeing a profit in this, buys up rail ways and train companies and starts building them up more and more, replacing buses, ferries, and out doing trucks and ships in terms of long distance deliveries
>Improve on the trains, making them bigger, faster, better, to the point that whole towns can be supported on one train as it travels around the world in hours, delivering goods and services anywhere
>Other companies jump on this, pushing for more rails, improved railway systems, faster, more on the dot schedules, bigger trains, more trading and commerce
>Companies buy out other travel businesses soon enough, seeking ways to improve or integrate into this train based boom, until things like train only cars are being sold, for quick travel across train cars!
>Years pass, decades pass, the trains get bigger, the rails grow longer, planes are now being pushed aside as trains can get there faster with more on board
>Possible future wars that mess the landscape up, cities getting bombed and destroyed gave some company the idea to make cities on the go, put them on the biggest trains, and now cities can move around and lessen the chance of getting caught in the attacks
>Train stations get bigger and bulkier, as people raid the trains to try and take them over or steal from them as terrorism acts, becoming massive fortresses to protect and repair these monster trains

Thanks! I'm really inexperienced with indesign and am obviously pretty amateur in general, so it's helpful to have advice from someone who obviously knows their shit. I only just realized I can add padding right into a text box, which should help with that.

I'll look for more fonts, it's definitely modern but I felt like a serif font was sort of pretentious looking, like that fake-old look you see with papyrus menus, especially since the teal and everything else is so sleek. I have thousands of fonts though so I'm sure I can find one that feels right.

Here's another page from a different section. The header font seems a little better here, but idk. I'll try some things tomorrow.

Thanks again for all the help.

>Years pass, decades pass, wars are over, things are forgotten
>Companies now own the rails, hundreds of rails, thousands of them, uncountable trains, each owned by companies and corporations, and now cities are a form of trading good. Corporations trade and buy companies, businesses, tourist attractions, neighborhoods, swapping them from train to train.
>The whole system is run by one program, older than any city, that started as a simple scheduling program, and has been split apart, put back together, reconfigured, expanded, a Frankenstein's monster of a program that now runs the whole worlds train systems in complex algorithms that people have long since gave up trying to untangle.

Love it. Fund it!!

Cheers mate.

Glad you like it, off the top of my head

Iunno - maybe a small but poisonous creature that is attached to a larger one immune to it? The poisonous creature can kill other animals and then gets a little bit of the food, while the big organism provides mobility?

What are the cossacks, rangers, or frontiersman like in your setting Veeky Forums?

The what?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks
simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiersman
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_(character_class)
Hope this helps user!

Alright Veeky Forums I'm tossing up between designing either a:
>hyper-realistic kinda fucked up post-apoc
>old-school WHFB rip-off
>down-right weird grimdark sci-fi

Secondly how to you guys get creative? Like I want to make something completely fucking foreign and have no idea where to start.

People don't have ideas, ideas have people.

>Secondly how to you guys get creative?

''Dude, imagine x, but with y and å instead of ö''

>completely fucking foreign and have no idea where to start.

Start with things that ARE completely foreign to you irl, whether it's foreign cultures, weird technologies or bizarre works of art.

Like a poisonous gas it emits that the big guy, who in my head looks like ludo from labyrinth because of the name you picked, is immune? The gas causes some animal he couldn't get to die and then he scavenges. So like monkeys in the trees or some squirrel comes out of its hole.

Where do gods come from?

What are their spheres of influence?
Nature, Moon, Seas, War, Invention, Healing, Thievery, Decay, Kittens, etc.

11 to 13 deities is a good option for a classic fantasy game.

3 or 4 evil gods and as many evil demigods as needed for cult temples.

I haven't quite gotten into the backstory, but the idea I had was that all the gods were mortal beings at one point that ascended. So Otar was a regular dragon, the unnamed dwarf god (who really needs a name, any ideas?) was a dwarf, etc. It's incredibly difficult for something to become a god, so there aren't THAT many out there.
At the moment, I have storms/fertility/healing, fire/invention/creativity and death/plague/rebirth (basically Nurgle).
I was thinking I don't need an entire world's supply of gods since it focuses on a small area of around ~1000-1500 square miles, but maybe add some minor gods. Or just let players that want it invent their own gods and I finangle them into the setting.

3 Big ones and 4 or 5 minor deities sounds good. Let your players help.

There are multiple name generators in the pastebin, which is the best?

Sure, but I was maybe thinking an animal with poisonous spines or stingers too.

Another idea is maybe a non-aquatic creature has a symbiotic animal that can let it go underwater for short periods, acting like a filter - this lets both creatures get at some food that they like only underwater. Or possibly a reversal.

Why pick? Do a post-apocalypse scenario caused by some grimdark sci-fi, where humanity has just managed to get back to WHFB levels of technology. But older tech stuff and horrible mutants are still around and take the role of "monsters" and there are still human-hating aliens in space that visit which are seen as "demons'.

Just do like a way darker version of Canticle for Liebowitz, but with demon-aliens.

Not sure if this is too small of a question for worldbuilding, but I need an idea for an interesting conflict in my dnd campaign.

Tl;dr the sky is dark, kind of post-magical-apocalypse, and the few humans that are left live in a few strongholds on the landscape. The party is travelling to meet an artificer, who'll help with a problem of shapechangers infiltrating a village (long story).

They've met a couple nice people in the forest, but the world is gritty so I think they should meet some sort of betrayal there.

Also I'd like to introduce warforged as a race the artificer created but I'm tired of the "omg technology is dangerous" trope (pic related).

Any ideas?

Quick gut feeling Question. Are surnames needed? I'm currently going forward with cultures either using kennings or their town name.

Plenty of real world cultures have made do without, so why would they be necessary for fantasy ones?

Danke user

A mix wouldn't hurt. Some creatures could have just the one name, others surnames, other "[Dad]'s Son" or "Guy From [Town]" etc. Some might have long ass names, like if you look at British Royales from back in the day- "Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa" was Victoria's first daughter, and that's not even including a surname.

>Secondly how to you guys get creative? Like I want to make something completely fucking foreign and have no idea where to start.
Nature documentaries, documentaries about foreign cultures, real life photos of exotic places and exotic people, various anthropological literature and media, real-world strange and exotic landscape pictures.
Sometimes I spend hours on google earth just going through photos of various odd locations from South America, Central Asia, Melanesia and Africa.
Other times I spend ours in virtual galleries of classic art (late 19th and early 20th century Romantic exoticism inspires me a lot - authors like Goodall, Gerome, Bredt, Rosati).
Or I just get stuck in an endless cycle of reading wiki articles on various cultures, places, weird natural phenomena, or even food.

I also read fiction - often various forms of magical realism (Borges, Pavić, Ajvaz and Calvino were so far the greatest sources of inspiration for me) or mythological and folklore stories.

I tend to avoid genre fiction (not because I think it's bad, it just does not inspire me very well), though I tend to make exceptions for some Japanese stuff: some kinds of anime are also my inspirational guilty pleasure. Manga's like Shuna, Nausicaa, Yokohama Shopping Diaries and anime like Kino No Tabi, Mushishi and Haibane Renmei had a massive impact on me and I occasionally re-watch them just to get into the right creative mood.

I also tend to listen to a lot of thematic music. There is way too much in there to list, but I guess soundtracks to Nausicaa and Mononoke's Symphonic Suite rarely fail to get me creative. I also like a lot of slavic, celtic and central-asian folklore music.

Oh hey - I really love Borges but aren't too familiar with those others apart from Calvino - any book recommendations (sorry, I just like to get good recommendations).

Also while I generally agree that often genre fiction is lackluster in inspiration, that's not always the case. I'd recommend giving older science fiction and fantasy a shot at least - especially the stuff pre-Wheel of Time, which significantly shifted the fantasy genre, and not for the better I feel. But if you want really inspiring genre fiction, you gotta go back and get your Peake, Wolfe and Zelazny.

Made some changes. What do you thing /tg?

>Digital God

What does this term make you think of?

>not!Africa is the Chaos Wastes
Well, you get points for realism at least.

>read through this post thinking this user atleast knows what he’s doing
>b-but muh gook cartoons are also an inspiration

>any book recommendations (sorry, I just like to get good recommendations).
Well, Pavić has a book that is very profoundly inspired by several of Borges'es stories, called "Chazarian Dictionary". To be honest, the book is absolutely bonkers and really not easy to read (it is contrary to it's title, written as an encyclopedia of a semi-fictional country). It is full of amazing ideas and strange poetics, and I borrowed quite a few ideas it has for my own purposes.

Michal Ajvaz is one of the few authors from my home country that actually even made to english translations, though I'm not sure how many of his works did make it.
His most famous (and from a world-building perspective most notable) book is called "The Golden Age".
It's also very, very strange and not easy to read. And also very strongly influenced by Borges and Kafka. It's insanely slow and it takes literally several hundred of pages before it starts picking up (it's also a description of fictional, "magical" country), but towards the end it starts racing ahead and teaming with insane, incredibly beautiful and creative world-building ideas.
He also wrote a fairly fun book called "Second City", which has more of an urban fantasy vibe, and I love his very Kafka-esque micro-stories in a collections called "Murder in the Hotel Intercontinenta" and "Return of the Old Komodo Dragon", though I'm not entirely sure if those were ever translated.
Speaking of Urban Fantasy vibes, if you had not yet, go read Master and Margarita by Bulgakov if you are interested, it's glorious.
Oh yeah, and I also think I should recommend one game:
Pathologic, by russian developer Icepick Lodge. Though you might want to wait for the remake (confusingly named Pathologic 2 even though it's not a sequel, but a remake). Also one of the most influential things I've ever encountered.

I can kinda understand those sentiments, but really: Check out those works. They are pretty exceptional.

Its also a bit of the middle East. The world is kind of twisted a bit so the India/China are directly East & Not!Jerusalem is directly South

Thanks! I've been to the Czech Republic only once, but Kafka was always a big influence on me, I'll have to check out Ajvaz.

If you're into Urban Fantasy I guess I should toss out my own favourite of the genre, Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Lieber if you haven't checked that out already.

If you haven't read any Gene Wolfe you sound like the sort of person you would really like his Book of the New Sun series.

(Also pretty sure that other guy is just trolling)

Ive been worldbuilding my game and putting it all in a blog for easy reference/use/logging

Thoughts? Concerns? Suggestions?

www.kendelyzer.wordpress.com

[please excuse the freeware blog format. It was fee]

So, calendars. Any tips on those? I've been pondering how to do one commonly used one. One of ny first ideas was going about 402 day year, divided to 8 seasons/months with minor season of end-of-year festivities (perhaps placed on harvest) of about 16 days.
The setting has two moons, so I had bit of idea synchronizing week into motions of greater moon. 8 days, perhaps.
But don't know. Maybe I should look more into religious significances and work some elements from there.

Thanks! I'll check those out.
Just a small correction: the other book by Ajvaz is not called "Second City", but "The Other City", in english, I messed that up. I never finished it, but it's mostly about weird, magical "shadow Prague" full of bizarre sights.
I can't even stress out how weird and slow Ajvaz is though. He literally opens his Golden Age by flat out saying "this book is about the most boring place in the world, and if you expect anything exciting to happen, just pick up something else to read". And most of the book does live up to it.
It's about a country that has an entire religion based around worshiping the sublime beauty of stains on the wall.
It is ultimately worth reading, but... well it makes Castle look like a thriller.

As for the other guy - I don't know. I'm an ex-weeboo, but I can't stand most of anime nowdays, and while I don't condone it, I have certain degree of understanding for people who really have an issue with Anime, especially if they haven't seen the right ones.

Fortresses, obviously.

Decide on how long days are. Then give arbitrary divitions. For me I have a 365 year with 12 months, 30 days in a month & a five day week of celebration at the closing/begining of the year. Leap year days have a six day celebration week

Well hey, I'm trying to convince you not all genre fiction is trash so its fair you try and convince people not all anime is trash.

But I think both genre fiction and anime have taken a steep nosedive in quality.

working on a low fantasy setting and trying to figure out how magic works. I know I want some, but not quite sure to what extent or how to properly integrate it. what settings have done 'low' magic well? Trying to find inspiration. As far as technological level is concerned it would be equivalent to 13th century I guess.

WFrpg/Zweihander are the best

>Well hey, I'm trying to convince you not all genre fiction is trash so its fair you try and convince people not all anime is trash.
I don't think all genre fiction is trash. Though I am a literary snob, there is no point in hiding it, I've also enjoyed a lot of genre fiction (Bradbury and Sapkwski being probably my favorite). By the way, Borges once claimed to believe that Bradbury is equal, if not superior to Poe and Well's.

I just rarely feel inspired by genre fiction, and I'm kinda weary of how much (not all!) of it is based on circulation of the same tropes that gradually lose all meaning over the course of time. It's my massive pet peeve that often drives me into very nasty arguments around here: I'm extremely weary of semantically vapid elements of fantasy. Orks, elves, even most forms of magic that exist for the sake of being there as staples of fantasy, with no consideration where those ideas originally came from and what made them meaningful and relevant to people in the first place.
But I'm completely 100% open to the notion that there is plenty of genre fiction worth reading/watching/experiencing. I'm just getting too lazy to search for it myself these days.

Might be an odd suggestion, but I think Sapkowski's "Hussite Trilogy" does low-key magic really rather well.
That said, I'm not entirely sure it was ever translated in english.

Oh absolutely - I feel that "kitchen sink" fantasy, as spread through DnD and especially Pathfinder, is throttling the genre. I do honestly like Tolkien (never gotten the current hipster fad of disparaging him) but his elements don't often work well outside of his work with its very specific purpose and purview.

I do want to branch out into more sci-fi - if you want a fun sci-fi book, Bester's "The Stars My Destination" is great fun.

Tolkien is absolutely undeniably awesome, but I am absolutely sick to death of anyone who tries to recreate the magic. They never succeed.

As for Sci-fi: I used to read a LOT of it as a kid, mainly hard-sci-fi (Clarke, Crichton, Forward) but also some weird more out-of-this-world stuff. Bradbury I've already mentioned. Aldiss and his Nonstop made a massive impact on me (if you haven't, read it, it's amazing). His Hothouse and Supertoys did also leave an impression, though much less healthy and positive one. I remember reading Heinlein and Asimov too, but I never really liked them for some reason.

Today, I feel like I should be mostly partial to certain specific types of space opera, though I very rarely find one that really satisfies me. I always loved Herbert's Dune, even though the follow-up books really lost me pretty fast. I did also incredibly enjoy Homeworld, a game that shows a lot of inspiration by Dune.

And speaking of space opera, I can strongly recommend the Crest/Banner/Battleflag of Stars: both the books and the anime. It's often overlooked, mostly due to it's bigger, older and more epic cousin LoGH, but it has levels of subtlety and clever elements that are well worth checking out.

I also did read fucktons of cyberpunk, mostly for school assigments. Egan, Chiang, Ellison, Sterling, Bear.
Ted Chiang I think might be right now my absolute favorite sci-fi writer. I don't think he has a single bad story. Not generally great for world-building unless you want to do cyberpunk, though some of his ideas in The Story of Your Life could certainly inspire one.

But I personally can't do proper sci-fi world-building. The world I have been working on for last few years is technically sci-fi, but it is the a sci-fi the same way Nausicaa or Shuna are. Or let's not beat around the bush - it was a pure rip-off of Shuna with few elements from Nausicaa borrowed. Anyway - hardly a proper sci-fi.

Now I'm thinking of heavily re-building it.

If you don't know how to handle the genre please don't touch it. We have most of the shitters contained to high fantasy and I'd like to keep it that way

Made some adjustments based on your advice, think we good now. Just went with thicc Garamond for the header, it's classy enough I think.

Now on to finishing the actual writing and art, not procrastinating by worrying about this.

Thanks for all the help.

The red text jumps out at me like "I NEED to know the minority folks in this description...for some reason"

maybe counter that with some Deep green on the majority?