Worldbuilding

Kek. Also, checked 'em.

>mfw I literally have "the pass" in my world

NOW I HAVE TO REDO THE WHOLE THING

FUCK

i can't believe you seriously wrote that wow that is fucking awful

Everything you write is just rearranging concepts you already know.

If you're a good writer your story can be interesting even in a derivative world, and if you're a bad writer even the most unique snowflake world in the universe will be crap

he's a mirror man. you're calling out your own insecurities.

Okay, how about this: Labyrithe Men, a race of beings in whom you can become lost

Call it "Archipuppis."

that's a common idea though

even japs draw doujinshi like a man pulls on his side and fucks his mirror image who turned into a woman etc

that's leaving aside through the looking glass etc books

no, he's triggering my disgust of horrible cliche

lose the armchair already you pseud psych hack

all your shit has been old

Book people that read other races and draw literally what they see in themselves.

>that's a common idea though
that's why it's so disgusting
see:
>no, he's triggering my disgust of horrible cliche

dude the whole "x men, men who look like x's" thing is hackneyed and bad.

Maybe you should just embrace the cliche and concentrate on telling a really good story that's written really well?

what about ∞ men. Men who are infinite. So this human slave salesman comes to your door and says I have a slave that's infinite. But the slave isn't human!!! You begin to talk to the slave and realize he has infinite knowledge, so you buy him. But eventually you just leave the slave on the shelf in the library where no one would find him

>all your shit has been old

what about a race of old people who represent our fear of old age and disability?

Become dialectical egoist.

is the infinite slave like that borges' infinite book? if you burn him, will the smoke cover the whole earth?

would i tire of the infinite slave first or would the infinite slave tire of me first?

no, it's like that book by Wallace
you would tire of it first because the slave himself has no discernible talent

You're currently thinking in terms of races. This limits your critivity. Instead think in terms of entities, or some other classifying criteria.

How about this:
Picture this shit:

They're like humans...
but with longer
fingers.

they are like humans, but have a meaty hole between their legs instead of penis

>wasting your time writing fantasy
Why

giving me shivers. i think we're on to something here.

lizard people

Russians with really gnarly foreheads.
Jews with pointed ears.
Blacks with.. umm.. well, just blacks, really.

Holy shit. When I was a DM I made some worlds with loads of these cliches.

>Russians with really gnarly foreheads.
>Jews with pointed ears.

i guess you mean klingons and vulcans?

You write the race uniquely fuckboy. "They were a scaly breed with hefty horns above their eyes, not above the forehead but above the eyes, they snarled with phallic shaped mouth appendages as they secreted a viscous fluid, dangling and flailing about." I just wrote a race of snake people with horns above their eyes and a mouth penis. You can do it to.

Why do you assume that you have the imagination or intelligence necessary to invent some organism that is as complicated and intelligent as humans are? Humans are the result of billions of years of trial and error. The complexity of human civilisation is beyond your comprehension. Some 100 IQ being did not just sit down one afternoon and invent humanity. There is no reason to believe you would be able to do something similar. Give up, or else just mix and match national stereotypes and give them tusks or something like every other fantasy hack has done.

1. Get a random animal generator to pick one animal
2. Learn how it looks and how it functions
3. Repeat step 1 and 2 and combine results
4. ????
5. Profit

Start with a very basic concept and work from there, don't picture them as pointed ears people; cut the fat out, have only what's necessary and detail will come to you.

Don't just differentiate the races by design or behaviour, but also by their fictional history. How did they come into existence? What happened in their past that made them what they are today, and do what they do today? Maybe there was a split between them and another group?

Actually I think this is the best thing that's been said on this thread. Do the opposite of this.

Have you ever played spore? Invent an animal and try to think of what it would be like once it becomes civilized. Don't think in terms of any formula though, just try to think of things.

For example amorphous clouds of gas that can bend light to appear human, but really just consume the ambient magical energy, etc.

What would an elemental or some magical entity that can sustain itself. What would a sentient, intelligent organism do to occupy it's time?

How can magic influence evolution? Are there any sort of special rules to accompany this? Take something less alien and give it a minor power to assist in evading prey, gathering food. Then think of its path through time.

>worldbuilding
>start creating elaborate histories and cultures
>never bother with actual story

>tfw i have a constant stream of unique characteristics for my human cultures along with unique religious beliefs along with a 100% unique concept

fkin plens

>Oh, yeah, they say madness runs in our family. Some even call me mad. And why? Because I dared to dream of my own race of atomic monsters, atomic supermen with octagonal shaped bodies that suck blood...

If you're trying to write fantasy, stop building the world and just try to create unique things to go along with the story. Work your races into the plot.

Don't world build. You're writing a book, not designing a game world.

Wait, this is fucking Veeky Forums? I thought I was on Veeky Forums...

Man, I was going to go full pseud, too.

You really thought you'd get responses saying "kek" from this one didn't you?

giw di the traits relate to the story you are trying to tell
are you just trying to pack your story with as much lore and footnotes as possible?

if they are such special snowflakes then are the challenges they must face because of their traits central to the story. Do their traits mary sue them in some way??

>worldbuilding
There's your mistake.

Let me tell you when worldbuilding is good. Traditional games, and some forms of video game. You need to design a world in which people can interact, and still find """adventure""" wherever they go (and of any flavour they'd like).

In literature, this is not necessary. Even if you are writing for escapism, the key is in the story and the *presentation* of the world, not the world itself.

I'm going to assume you're not aiming too high. Your world should *always* supplement the story, instead of the other way around. Races ultimately totally don't matter unless you use them to fulfill a role; that is, you should invent races to serve you, rather than invent races and then determine how to hammer them in.

why not literally a special snowflake race? a sapient race with bodies of methane ice or something

What purpose would it serve?

There's something to be said about consistency. If a character revisits a place or culture within the same story or set of stories there should be some level of shared experience.

kek

kek

>worldbuilding
>races
>snowflake
Jesus Christ, I was 100% certain I'd accidentally walked into Veeky Forums.

what purpose everything serve?

it might be the man question of the book which a special methane snowflake thinker would try to solve doing some snowflake thingies, i dunno, loving an underage snowflake (cold of his loins) or preparing to visit to a nearby coldhouse or something

>Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out

>GLOUCESTER, MA—As he neared completion this week on his latest novel, By The Water's Edge, author Edward Milligan marveled aloud to reporters how he was able to flesh out, in meticulous detail, every single corner of his book's vast and stunningly shitty world.

theonion.com/article/novelist-has-whole-shitty-world-plotted-out-21193

It's funny, because Veeky Forums hates it, too. Not worldbuilding, but difference for the sake of difference, and pigeon-hole races which don't serve the campaign.
What purpose does being a snowflake serve in any of those situations?

Do like china Melville and put animal heads on people bodies.

I'm sure you are an Americlap, put the bald eagle on a person's body and have that race be the physical representation of frreeeedom and justice.

Have them live high up in the mountains in an utopia, and have your MC travel to them for knowledge or help or something.
I know Klapistan likes to help other countries, make sure the MC's home land is rich in natural resources the bald eagles can extort.

Make the whole thing a subtle commentary on current affairs in Klapistan.

You're welcomed .

>What purpose does being a snowflake serve in any of those situations?

to investigate how it would differ to be a snowflake and a human

thanks, imma pirate this for my novel

You can't. Everything's already been done before. All you can do is try to make it interesting.

Base races on real-world peoples, but onl obscure ones in Africa, Papua Latin America and certain parts of India.

No Native Americans, Mongolians or major civilisations, those have been done to death.

Once you've got your cultures picked out, find out some of their mythology, make a hybrid of the real world culture with physical and magical aspects from the mythology, now try and imagine what kind of mythology your new people would have.

Otherwise just study a load of anthropology and mythology, find out the common threads and build your culture from there.

do this, call them womemes

t. George RR Martin.

Shallow and Inconsistent settings are shit.

Martin did the exact opposite of what I said.

youtu.be/k9PWq0fx_eg

Book a ticket today.

You really need to ask yourself questions about that race first. Where are they from, how does that affect them, what's their history, how are they shaped by it etc.
On top of that admit that you're a human being with a limited capacity to invent new things, and just blend very different/distant cultures together from the get go so it doesn't come out looking copypasted from one part of the real world, then iron out the parts that don't fit or seem out of place.
I promise that will come out much more original than trying to be original will.

>focusing on worldbuilding and not prose

Worldbuilding is an exercise of exhausting creativity before its work is done. Make story structure, then world build, then make the meat of the story.

>fantasy writers can't do both
>fantasy writers can even into prose
oh boy.

Very good question OP.

Are our characters merely a reflection of our humanistic qualities?

WHen we create, we base it off something real and concerete, and for us that is human qualities.

Now think of another species that could exist on our plane, given the dinosaurs bones you've seen on this planet.

If we never dug, we would have never seen them.

Within their world, they will have to follow physical rules to exist. Despite what we think of causality, with or without human influence, it is merely the observation of time, so if they have some sort of will or the capacity to organize and even exert resourcefulness within their own measurements of survival, life can exist in the oddest of places where our human affairs seem so "troublesome" compared to a truly simpler life form.

why are SFF writers so obsessed with everything being "just so" in their "worlds" ?

like, the dwarves came from deep in the mountain so it only makes sense that they have the racial ability to sense iron because their blood is more attuned to magnetic waves and shit, and the elves blah blah blah everything fits together nicely and neatly and all characters can be reduced to stereotypes of their racial attributes and we are supposed to judge them based upon their level of fulfillment of those stereotypes and not on their actions and thoughts as individual beings

how about, idk, focusing on the prose? on character development and dialogue?

have the classics taught you nothing? plot (and other considerations like your obsession with worldbuilding) literally doesn't matter. the plot of classics doesn't even make sense half the time. it's usually like oh, my family died, so i went to live in another country, and then i came back without knowing it was my home country because i wanted to sell my peaches in their market, and then everyone got stabbed to death for absurd reasons that have nothing to do with anything--the end. this is because what happens DOESN'T REALLY MATTER THAT MUCH. what matters is HOW THE CHARACTERS REACT TO WHAT HAPPENS. what do they say? how does their language heighten or lower? how is their emotional state affected?

Character. Development.

Dialogue.

Vivid. Prose.

Those are what matter.

Worldbuilding, like plot, is incidental by comparison. Don't sweat it.

If you do a lot of worldbuilding beforehand, your prose will end up like Tolkeins, where he spends pages explaining how the different races go about their business and it becomes made up anthropology and stops being literature for like 50 pages of exposition.

You want to avoid that.

>prose is the only thing that matters

People actually believe this meme?

It really depends on the scale of time and physical existences that are set on a world for it to have a baseline of its existence.

You can go even deeper and design how they exist on a given setting provided the writer is good enough.

The best Fantasy is when everything is rooted in poignant realism.

Prose is important, sure. But the quality of the ideas carry the meaning and thus the essence of the piece of language, stop bitching and read it.

kek

wolfe