/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

How's your world coming along?

Have you written any stories which take place in it?

Other urls found in this thread:

clanwebsite.org/games/rpg/Dawn_of_Worlds_game_1_0Final.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Flemish
youtube.com/watch?v=aTL5zcD3Kq0
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

I like the world I'm creating, I'm working on the various cultures and technological developments but I cannot for the life of me think of a story.

It's so weird, having a world full of people but nobody is really doing anything

What about you, user?

>It's so weird, having a world full of people but nobody is really doing anything

I see you're going for the "realism" approach.

hahaha you got me there.
idk man I'm a stickler for verisimilitude.
I have the basis for a story, but I feel like each step forward the plot takes, the world-building has to take 10 steps to cover it. Characters can only move within a world, so im spending more time constructing shit than developing plot

Adding to my bestiary a creature called Nigger, it was created by Jove as a mediate between man and beast.

I like this idea. Can I use it in my world? Its called "Planet Earth".

link plz

link to what

how do i create a map

Already did the world. But the market for stone-age, low-fantasy is rock-bottom. Doubly so when you're not trying to rip off R. E. Howard

I just do it all in my head.
I'll draw it up later, but even then it'll be rough. I have no need for a map beyond a reference while writing

I keep redoing fundamental elements of the world but I think it gets better every time. I've trashed my old proto-indo european inspired theology and replaced it with a much simpler system centered around expressions of Apollo and Dionysus. Originally all of my races had their own pantheon of gods but now they just interpret these dualistic forces in different ways.

For example my lizard men are chiefly Dionysian, they worship water for its formless, ever flowing nature. They gather rain on the rare occasions it falls in their land and consider rainwater to be holy, make springs into holy sites and live along rivers and oases. The ocean is a taboo though and even to gaze out at a sea is considered to be bad luck. The apparently endless sea is the abyss, its waters are briny and cannot quench thirst. All pure water heads towards the sea as all life heads towards death.

The Dwarves are strongly Apollonian in their outlook and can't stand to live in an environment that isn't heavily constructed. They hate the surface world because of its ambiguities, the chaos is unveiled to them. Underground everything is there because the Dwarves have put it there (the first caverns were mineshafts dug by ancient ayylians who both dwarves and elves descend from), there is a reason for everything.

I've also trashed a bunch of my races because they felt forced, like Pandaren in Warcraft. They were just there without adding to the aesthetic. Now every remaining race represents something. Lizard men and bug men are Dionysian, native to the world, more primitive in some ways yet more advanced in others. Elves and Dwarves are Apollonian, alien to the world (though this fact has faded into the mists of time and mythology).

Humans represent a balancing of the forces, they are born of the Elves infected with a disease created by a lizard man sorcerer who was resentful of their immortality. They are the least abominable of the abominations, which are a large class of beings created by lizard man sorcery before the Elves put a stop to that shit.

My world almost doesn't even feel like a world, I don't have very much conceptually in terms of nations/species/etc, but rather organizations according to philosophies and their respective gods, who are more abstract than real. I have basically three fleshed-out protagonists (all of which are separate from one another), and maybe a half-dozen antagonists, with moral quandaries defining their existences rather than simple lore/backstory.

Official Worldbuilding Tutorial:
1.) Render clouds
2.) Posterize
3.) Recolour

wow you troled me

I have so many nations and stories and lore I don't even know, but it's mostly all in my head.

My world shifts from light-hearted to dark, from high to low fantasy depending on the period, as it's rather unstable because reasons.

Plot twist: the creator of this world is the main character from my first novel, who is actually a wealthy man from Prague.

my world is a mansionscape that spans an impossible amount of space and humans live in 'towns' within the mansion that is merely a designated amount of rooms deemed safe and protected from the roaming terrors in its halls.

Doing alright. Definitely developing the fastest it has been since it's earliest, sad incarnations when I was an edgy teen a decade ago.

That said, I'm shit at culture and names. One if the big last steps I need to take is to lay out all the countries, name them and detail them, which I'm putting off as much as I can, honestly.

This is exactly how worldbuilding should be done. It's not about the fucking food they eat, or the marriage customs or whatever shitty details you think are important in a world; that only matters in presentation, not as you're designing the world. Yes, the reader will be immersed if you talk about the food, but only *if* you talk about the food, and they won't actually care about the Muh Realism of it anyway (just the sensory detail).

whatever you do avoid country names that end in an A.

Or any that end in "land". Or "stan", don't want those. Avoid Ys on the end, too, and you should never, ever prefix names with "upper" or "lower".

But
Why?

Because I'm taking the piss out of . Or, more accurately, saying that he's rusing .

What the fuck have you done to iberia

I can support this. Names are important. They give the first impression so dont give it a lazy one.

Fuck you.

This is gold

My story is about kraken. Its just about it and nothing else. Kraken is primordial ancient alien being and a Leviathan who came to Earth frozen in water in meteros. He is like 7 billion years old but by the time he got on Earth that was -whenever- water appeared and he also created life over time so he could feast on something, this time it was dinosaurs and humans. He ate all dinosaurs over time every 10 000 years some. He perceives time differently and is very sleepy, so he wakes up every 10 000 years to feast on billions of people that reproduced over time. Last time he woke up was in the time of Atlantis when he ate 7 billion people. He can take a human form too, so he ruled there as a king of Atlantis. He woke up relatively recently to his perception and is now hidden in plain sight in the form of Hillary Clinton. He's trying to win the presidential campaign so he can let as much people as it is possible in the US and feast on them. She literally must not win. Kraken's only known enemy and his only rival in the universe is a dragon, who can also take human shape. Dragon is Donald Trump and he is wrongly perceived as Satan in the old books, but he is the savior of mankind from kraken. Nobody knows exactly how dragon came to be, but he is maybe the embodiement of ancient dinosaur collective consciousness bent on revenge against the kraken for destroying all dinosaurs.

Joke's on you my cities start with "A" or "land".

Oh shit nigga I've read this one.

...

>He can take a human form too, so he ruled there as a king of Atlantis
This is where it went to shit desu

Of course, the point is that both of them are equally horrible to you, a human, and the only thing to do is take matters into your own hands.

Too late.

Hyldholm represent

Post heraldry

>having a world full of people but nobody is really doing anything
My writing in a nutshell

>mostly all in my head
> mostly
Is that some schizophrenia?

'Sup Funes.

I have a notebook half full with notes and drawings and a little tinbox with my earliest sketches.
If I put it very simply my idea is as follows: colonialism-fiction. In my world a big empire finds a big island with loads of resources they could use for their war with other empires. A mountain chain splits the island from north to south and none of the natives have any idea what's on the eastern side. Most elders warn of a people called the Dwomani who are led by their Taus (religious leader) so they can appease their death god. Whilst the western tribes are squabbling over how they'll overthrow their colonial overlords, the Dwomani swoop in and capture almost 3/4ths of the western part of the island. The protagonist now needs to figure out how he'll free his people from the colonist whilst the Dwomani pose an even greater danger.

this idea has been floating in my mind for three years but I still need to figure out how to start my story and how it needs to end.

>dwomani
Is their leader called Vag' Hi Nah?

Is Dwomani already used somewhere? I just mixed the words for 'death' and 'people' in my dialect together.

no, I was making a joke because there is "woman" in "Dwomani" so I imagined a race of women like the amazons. Hence Vag' Hi Nah (vagina).

Oh shit, haven't thought about that. It should be pronounced Dwo (o sounds like oa in boat) - ma -(a sounds like a in german when saying man) ni. (i sounds like y in money). Should i put accents on it to clarify?

Spent two years or so building a world using this clanwebsite.org/games/rpg/Dawn_of_Worlds_game_1_0Final.pdf with 5+ people over ther webz. Incredibly aggravating.

I don't know about accents on vowels other than "e". I usually ignore them when I encounter them in non-fiction. If the reader doesn't know how to pronounce it he'll pronounce it wrong but don't dumb everything down. I say keep Dwomani like it is.
When you talk about your dialect, is it a real dialect from where you live or one you made for your book?

It's a real dialect (West-Flemish), it's very distinct in comparison to the other Dutch/Flemish dialects. To other people from the Dutch speaking world it sounds like we're speaking another language. It's one of the last dialects in the country that is still widely spoken in the province. If you're interested in it I suggest you read the wiki page or/and watch this video of this guy who makes people listen to it and asks their opinion on how it sounds. It has been a the biggest inspiration and influence of how my world looks,sounds and feels.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Flemish

video of people giving their opinion
youtube.com/watch?v=aTL5zcD3Kq0

Write something like a detective noir or thriller but convert all the variables into characters and locations in your world.

The time and place is inconsequential. Do a story about anything and set it in your nerd world.

Familiarize yourself with the International Phonetic Alphabet. It has really helped me in keeping the sounds of things I've created consistent. It irks me when fantasy writers don't keep to a scheme when coming up with fantasy names. Knowing how your things sound and taste in the mouth (so to speak) can be very useful and can help you pick out things that don't quite sound right and should be changed.

I imagine Dwomani is pronounced /dwomaːni/.

correct and thank you for the advice

I guess I'm the opposite of you guys. I create worldstuff mostly in response to my characters' personalities for contrast and similarities, conflict and safeharbor. Of course I've come up with culture based on some non-character ideas but I always think narrative first.

well my world's a small planet with a tidally locked orbit around its sun and three distinct cultures. The planet is populated by humans that fled earth in huge arks to flee an eartwide plague, repopulating this terraformed planet. Cultures are heavily influenced by old-earth, same with religion, government's nice and corrupt, got some old-world technology in the mix, but u just don't want to write sci-fi/fantasy. I don't like fantasy, but it's hard to evade that sort of writing in this setting.

oh and it's a comic, not a novel.

>How's your world coming along?
All I need to know if creating a artificial island in the pacific ocean is believable.

>they are born of the Elves infected with a disease created by a lizard man sorcerer

seems familiar

That's how I thought it was pronounced when I first read it (I think. I have no idea how a German says man). I don't think you need to give any indicators, and in reality it doesn't even matter. If people mispronounce it in their heads, so what?

Do you know anything about artificial island building? No? Then it's believable.
Better advice: write out a conflict in your world.

You've got *something*. There are mercenaries scrambling to survive in a barren mess of a war somewhere, or you've got a succession crisis going at some point, or there's a merchant trade route people have to travel, or *something*. Just use one of these as a vehicle for Veeky Forumsshit. [This is better than just going detective because it's more directly tied into your world; however, using one of these world-conflict-things *as* a detective story works too]

lmao come to think of it, it does. The only Tolkien I've actually read was The Hobbit but I can see the fallen Elf parallel now. The similarity is mostly surface level though. The Elves don't know the true cause of their ailment and a bunch of religious movements have evolved out of it.

The Elves are leaving the world, but not to some outside world as in Tolkien, they are becoming human, degenerating from a race of immortal beings to a race of fleeting becomings searching for answers to questions they once thought were solved