Uqbar, Tlön editionFAQ:>What is worldbuilding?Worldbuilding is the process of creating entire fictional worlds from scratch, all while considering the logistics of these worlds to make them as believable as possible. Worldbuilding asks questions about the setting of a world, and then answers them, often in great detail. Most people use it as a means of creating a setting or the scenery for a story.>"Isn't there a Worldbuilding general in >>>/tg/ already?"Yes, there is. However, that general is focused on the creation of fictional worlds for the intended purpose of playing TTRPG campaigns. Here you can discuss worldbuilding projects that are not meant to be used for a roleplaying setting, but for novels, videogames, or any other kind of creative project.>"Can I discuss the setting of my campaign here, though?"If you want to, but it would probably be better to discuss it on >>>/tg/ . We don't allow the discussion of TTRPG mechanics, however. If you want to discuss stats or which D&D edition is best, this is not the place.>"Can I talk about an existing fictional setting that is not mine?"Yes, of course you can!>"Does worldbuilding need to be about fantasy and elves?"Worldbuilding, as already stated above, and contrary to what many believe, does not inherently imply blatantly copying Tolkien. In fact, there are many science-fiction setting out there, and even entire alternative history settings which do not possess supernatural elements at all. Any kind of science fiction book has an implied setting at least, which involves a certain degree of worldbuilding put into it.Old thread: >>25285316
Anyone familiar with Didrik Magnus Andersons Forsaken gods?
>>25334870I don't really care about being derivative. In fact, the entire setting was intentionally derivative at the outset because it was just a cliched fantasy background for some erotic short stories I was writing. It had to have elves, dwarves, goblins, halflings, and a some lore about an evil dark lord as something I quickly hacked together.And then I started writing longer stories that weren't even particularly smutty, and I got more interested in explaining the history and making something cohesive and sensible out of it instead of just a collection of stale tropes. He has an actual name and a much better title than "Dark Lord" but that's the stand-in title I use for him because it perfectly describes his role in the larger lore.
>>25339949Obsessing over not being derivative has ironically become more played-out than just being openly derivative. I'm not even joking.
>>25339384Just because I don't feel like you get reminded enough.
>>25340183It's definitely a preoccupation of beginner world builders and beginner writers. They care too much about being "original". When, really, all experienced creators shamelessly steal things. You steal and just twist it to your own purposes. When you get really good at it people can't tell what you're stealing from and think you're being original.
>>25340183Yeah I still refuse to call any of my races Elves or Dwarves, but in most other things I'm basically Tolkienmaxxing in a more Late-Mediaeval setting at this point. Every time I get some really out-there idea I end up discarding it and returning to more standard fantasy. The whole strength of fantasy compared to science fiction is its smaller scale and familiarity anyway; embrace it.
I'm magicbuilding atm
>>25339384> >>>/tg/ I see a lot of the >>>/x/ people do implicit worldbuilding as well since they have to tie all their unfalsifiable ayys stories together into a type of meta-fiction, like a Scifi D&D setting with different alien races and technologies/plot devices and exotic locales etc.
>>25340461In their case, it is for the most part involuntary, so it's not worldbuilding, but mere delusion
I don't worldbuild because I want to tell a story, but becasue I'm narcissistic and have a God complex
>>25340213Like Tolkien and pulp fantasy. Some people get positively offended at the idea that their pure and sacred Tolkien could have been influenced by anything modern, let alone anything from America.
>>25340213This. 100%.>>25340214Amen! Enjoy your writing anon. Wishing you all the best.
Reminder that instead of trying too hard to be realistic you can simply baffle all potential critics with your non-realism. In 40k they have giant walking war machines armed with chainsaws carrying cathedrals on their backs; it's so stupid that you look stupid if you try to criticise it.
>>25340523Tolkien borrowed heavily from folklore and myth, and his religion, as well as contemporary authors. Every author has his inspirations and sources he goes to for ideas. It's only through continuous development of these ideas that they take on a new life.
>>25340466shared delusion.like mass schizoid personality disorder (schizoidism)
>>25340466>>25341285I wouldn't mind if these people separated reality from their fictional worlds; since they seem to be applying fictionally philosophies, outlooks & policies to my non-fictional reality and it sucks bigtime.Like it's hard to fix real world problems is some nut starts bring up outer space green saviors as a solution "out there" (and you ever notice that the aliens are never wise; like they are only as wise as the guy making up the alien story... L. Ron Hubbard tier pseudo-metaphysical slop that starving souls will woof down gladly).
Suppose it's an althistory or high fantasy world, or anything where the average reader wouldn't have any real context for all the weirdness.How should a responsible worldbuilder create a faction whose sole purpose is to provide a viewpoint?
>>25341333A viewpoint of what is the question. What are you showing to people? Why?
>>25341417This. Gotta go a layer deeper before anyone can really answer that.
>>25341333There shouldn’t be a faction whose sole purpose is to be a viewpoint. Their reason for existing should be contained within its own universe
>>25341333If you're aiming for an audience surrogate character, the faction should be isolated enough to justify a lot of explanations about things that would be common sense for more connected characters. The faction should also be as similar to the modern world as reasonably practical within the greater setting, especially as far as social mores go, so that the main character's thought processes remain understandable to the reader.The Shire is a good example of a faction like this, although with the passage of time the Shire has started feeling increasingly alien to the average reader. In an isekai story the real world takes a similar function but rarely gets much involvement in the actual plot beyond providing a source for the main character.>>25341212Exactly. I myself am drawing influences from a whole lot of different sources. A hypothetical future scholar would never be able to figure out them all. I think having a lot of diverse influences helps prevent the story from getting stuck in the familiar fantasy rut of repeating the same tropes.
>>25341333No.A POV character is generally fine but a whole faction seems like it's pushing it.
>>25340212Not everybody worldbuilding is doing so for the sake of a story and plenty of people are doing it in and of itself.Even if you are you can focus on whatever element of your writing you want. Either way, sequences of events, character writing and what not are NOT worldbuilding but independent skills, go back to writing general, faggot
>>25340183>baby's first "no u"
>>25342042If you ain't writing shit down you aren't world building, you are day dreaming.
>>25342089Are you being pedantic or stupid?
>>25342096Are you being a cunt or a pussy?
>>25342100So, stupid, then.
>>25342103Pussy
>>25340212moneygrub mindset. some people worldbuild for the fun of it.
>>25342107>samefag tries to restart conversation when he gets pushback>still has no argumentAgain, if you ain't writing shit down it ain't world building. It's just day dreaming. You aren't a world builder. You have no world. You are a daydreamer who gets butthurt when anyone points out what actual worldbuilding is and what's it's generally for.
>>25342042thank you for admitting you are a writing larper
What's a good way to introduce the concepts in my setting at the start of the story? I'm struggling to write the first chapter after having written stuff taking place later because I can't pin down a good way to show how things work without just telling the audience that it is so.My story is about mind readers who work for the government rather than magic systems or sci fi tech or something.
>>25342221Write a prologue about a mind reader that is disconnected from the main story except for the mind reading part
>>25342221Tell me about the main character.Is he/she new? Could he/she be showing a new assistant the ropes?You don't have to explain everything up front btw. The reader can figure out quite a lot from context and just seeing characters do stuff. Like mind readers working for the government isn't super hard to figure out even if you don't spell it out. So just showing a character using mind reading early on while doing spycraft stuff would get the point across almost instantly without need of a info dump. Then once you are deeper into the story and the reader is already hooked, if you still feel it's necessary, you can then do a bit of exposition for a scene to two. Like during a mission brief or the MC doing a research investigation and comes across background information of the setting. Regardless, showing characters doing stuff gets the point across about how your world works in a far more interesting way (especially at the beginning of the story) then explaining stuff to the reader when they aren't yet invested in the story. You have to make the reader care first to earn their tolerance or interest in a exposition dump. If you really and truly think the reader won't be able to comprehend what is going on without a explicit and direct explanation of what exactly is going on, then having a "new guy" character is a way to justify having characters in world explain stuff to "the new guy" and thus to the reader. It's a cliche because it works.
>>25342284I have 3 'main' characters. One of them is a mind reader who passed training about 6 months before the story starts, so he's pretty new to it compared to his peers. The second is his handler/partner, who is not a mind reader but whose job is basically to keep the first character on track, make sure he gets the information that is needed and not random other stuff, and pull him out if things go wrong (since in the setting mind reading is physiologically taxing and can be physically dangerous). The last character is the mind reader's sister, who is pretty close to her brother but doesn't know what he does other than what he tells her and what she infers from his actions. I've tried writing an in media res chapter depicting the first two characters doing an operation a couple times now but I either end up trying to work in too much information too soon or get bogged down in trying to make the details exactly right/internally consistent with the setting rather than making them easy to pick up for the audience. I want a reader to pick up on the fact that mind reading exists, has existed long enough for there to be a whole agency built around it, and is physically hazardous all in the first chapter, because the character arcs are all set up to be downstream of those facts.
>>25342345> I want a reader to pick up on the fact that mind reading existsCan be as simple as showing someone use it in the first chapter. > has existed long enough for there to be a whole agency built around itYou can get away with implying that in the first chapter then expanding on it later. A single line referencing or hinting at a organization can be enough to get the point across enough for the first chapter. I mean the reader will have likely heard of the concept or similar before anyway. So the faintest hint that such a organization exist will likely be taken without resistance by the reader. > and is physically hazardousWhen you are showing someone use it show the physical hazards too. Honestly all those goals could be accomplished in a paragraph during a single scene. Hold off on detail explanations til later. Depending on the kind of story being told and how well you show stuff, detailed explanations might not even be necessary, and you just keep the details to yourself as a way to keep things consistent throughout the whole story. However if you want to exposition dump then you can later in the book once the you already got the reader invested. I would advice holding off on exposition dumps until you are one third of the way in to the story if you can help it.
>>25342345You know you can always edit the chapter later, and cut stuff out? You don't have to worry about writing it perfectly in one shot. In fact, it's better to over-write the chapter on your first draft because it's far, far easier to pare writing down than it is to go back and add to stuff in the middle. What I like to do is not limit myself when I write early chapters. I know I'm dumping way too much exposition that is distracting from the events going on, but I just roll with it until I get to the conclusion of the scene. Then I go back and cut / paste all that exposition out of the chapter into a separate document, then sew up the remaining parts of the chapter, rereading the whole thing a few times to make sure the scene still makes sense and is understandable. If I find that some parts are simply not possible to figure out without some exposition, I go back and look at the stuff I cut out, and figure out how to condense the most necessary information to use in the chapter. This requires thinking about your writing differently, from the perspective of a person who is reading it for the first time, and what questions they'd have about unfamiliar terms and concepts, and then how you might answer those without completely halting the flow of the story. Sometimes this means giving incomplete information, only a general gist that hints at a larger explanation that you can deliver later. This can actually serve to whet the appetite of the reader. A general rule for experienced fantasy and sci-fi readers, is that we tend to cut the author a lot of slack for made up jargon. I trust the author will explain it to me, eventually, if he doesn't exposit the information immediately. Name dropping unfamiliar terms and concepts is basically a sign post to your readers that you have some juicy world building for them to nibble on, later.
>>25342345>>25342557Oh and I forgot to mention: that other document with the excerpted exposition, I usually save that to work into a later chapter. If I really like the way it's written, I might use it as a prompt to write the "exposition chapter" and end up reusing a lot of it, verbatim. Or I might drop in parts of it in different chapters, as it becomes relevant. Sometimes it never becomes relevant enough to include in the story, and it just sits in a separate document I use as a reference for the story.
>>25339384I have been wondering how small city-states exist next to much bigger countries?Like why don't bigger countries just conquer them?I feel like the only possible explanation is that every small country is an extremely defensible fortress city. But that seems kinda lame lore for every small country.
>>25343169History from earth likely has more examples than you can shake a stick at.I mean look at places like Litchinstine or Vatican city. Both are micro nations smaller that city states, yet because reasons have endured for hundreds of years. I think you just need a good ol fashion Wikipedia rabbit hole deep dive for inspiration.
Can a space station be kept secret? Context: It's a big rotating cylinder somewhere in Saturn orbit. The government has been instructed to hide it from the common citizen to the best of their abilities, while also hiding WHAT they're hiding. In case you're wondering, it's a magic school. Microgravity and vacuum are considered the best place to teach young wizards, especially since any disasters are unlikely to cause much collateral damage.
>>25343169Why would bigger countries conquer them? Real life isn't a strategy game; nations don't conquer other nations just for the hell of it.
>>25343240*Sorry, the EARTH government has been instructed to hide it. The government of the colony obviously knows what it is.
>>25343240>Can a space station be kept secret?In theory yes.In practice probably not due to the number of people involved in such a undertaking would mean it's improbable that every single person would actually keep their mouths shut and no leaks happen. But for the sake of a story I can easily suspend disbelief.
>>25343244I wanted to minimize the level of magic necessary. I feel a lot of fantasy settings suffer from the flaw of overdoing the magic until it loses its aura. I can totally make it so they just make a "don't notice the giant rotating cylinder" ward or something, but I'm trying to keep to some principles here.
>>25343254Secret space station is fine in a story.
>>25343240Many of Saturn's moons were first discovered by a space probe. If your cylinder is smaller than those moons and painted black, it should be almost impossible to discover with a telescope located on Earth's surface.The flights to and from the cylinder would be much harder to hide. A secret space program with capabilities vastly superior to the official space program would be required unless the wizards have some way of stealthy space travel all by themselves.>Microgravity and vacuumSo, are the young wizards able to survive unaided in vacuum? If no, the cylinder sounds like a death trap for everyone involved unless the cylinder's material (including the possible electronics for a life support system) can resist magic somehow in which case the question becomes whether it might be possible to build a wizard school on Earth and just reinforce it very carefully. (Maybe the cylinder's material is unaffected by magic but also lets the magic pass through so that there is still danger to the surroundings?)In any case the cylinder has no particular need to rotate around its axis if it doesn't need to simulate gravity.
>>25343300>The flights to and from the cylinder would be much harder to hide. A secret space program with capabilities vastly superior to the official space program would be required unless the wizards have some way of stealthy space travel all by themselves.It's meant to be self sufficient, and population never rises above a million anyway. >So, are the young wizards able to survive unaided in vacuum?To be a wizard at all means to be able to survive in hard vacuum. Magic only ever works because wizards have an artificial reality that encompasses their body, and can be extended onto realspace for temporary effects.You could see it as each wizard being a pocket universe and the corporeal flesh and blood part just being the interface between it and the larger universe.>In any case the cylinder has no particular need to rotate around its axis if it doesn't need to simulate gravity.It's just more comfortable for humans.
>>25343169The city could be extremely important as a religious site of pilgrimage, and so trying to occupy it with soldiers would spark international outrage that the would-be conqueror did not want to deal with. It could also be a haven for financial institutions and merchants, able to maintain its independence by playing its powerful neighbors off each other so that they never have time to turn their attention to the small city state.
>>25343300>whether it might be possible to build a wizard school on Earth and just reinforce it very carefully.It's child's play. It's just that a planet isn't quite as good as a space colony, and wizards are perfectionists.
>>25343300So...>The wizards are all utterly OP and could probably face-tank a nuclear blast>Even the untrained newbie wizards are utterly OP>The wizards like Earth-like surroundings>There are unknown millions of wizards>There are no standard spells to turn away attention or modify memories like in Harry PotterSeriously, the existence of the wizards should have become public knowledge long before the beginning of the story. I also think calling these entities "wizards" is stretching the term beyond the breaking point.
Need to come up with a really good name or term for a sanctioned society of mages in a roman empire-like state.
>>25339384Repeating the last thread questions, because I’m not familiar with that in the slightest.>What major myths and legends exist in your setting? And how much truth is there to them?>Where do you look for inspiration for said myths? And what have you taken from existing mythologies and legends from our world, do you have any particular favorites?>How do you create the gods and religions of your worlds, and what are they like? Are there any particular pieces of advice you have?
>>25344062I meant to quote this post: >>25343332
>>25343210Vatican hasn't been a microstate for very long.It was created as a microstate by Mussolini.Before Italian unification, papal states ruled third of Italy
>>25344211I mean reply to that post. I'm just too tired right now apparently...
How might people in the middle ages have feasibly supplied blood at regular intervals to a group of vampires without being able to store it for very long or transport it very far? Let's say this is taking place under the authority of the Catholic Church, beginning around the year 1230.Constraints: a population of between 1500 and 2000 vampires spread across Europe, but centered around southern/eastern France, each requiring around 2 pints per month on average, unevenly distributed across convents, monasteries, hermitages, and Church-owned properties in groups of between 2 and 30.
>>25343241why wouldn't conquer?
>>25343169It can be extremely useful to have a neutral party that can act as a middle man between two rivals and faciliate trade. A neutral diplomatic ground is another possibility, or maybe an important religious site is located there, or it's located in a strategic chokepoint, maybe there is an uneasy peace and nobody wants to make the first aggressive move for the fear of a coalition if you will.I have a faction in my setting that has a near monopoly on maritime trade precisely because of that, they don't get involved in wars, they do the job if you pay them, it's so absolute that most factions don't even bother building ships, they just rent them. Nobody has invaded them in literal centuries because of that.
>>25339384I want to write a fantasy western where sheriffs/deputies ect. are a sort of monk caste, that live in abbeys and sheriffs fulfil a religious role. I really like it and I'm gonna use it, but I just want your thoughts on it. Good or stupid?
Out of curiosity is it possible to create a slave-owning nation that isn't reprehensible to modern sensibilities?
>>25344478What you are describing is basically what the Gunslingers are in the Dark Tower books.
>>25344478>Good or stupid?Any idea can be good or stupid based on how it is presented. The Adam West Batman show and the Tim Burton movies have the same basic premise, but are presented in very different ways.
>>25344299>How might people in the middle ages have feasibly supplied blood at regular intervals to a group of vampires without being able to store it for very long or transport it very far?Bringing living sacrifices to the vampires.ESPECIALLY if that blood sacrifice are things like animals, since animal sacrifice would be a return to ancient religious practice in a way. >Let's say this is taking place under the authority of the Catholic ChurchThat would make things more complicated since the Church explicitly forbids the drinking of blood and has historically disavowed vampires during middle ages and early modern period. If they had proof positive that vampires existed, unless those vampires really explicitly remained devoted Catholics the church would not look favorably on them. >Constraints: a population of between 1500 and 2000 vampires spread across Europe, but centered around southern/eastern France, each requiring around 2 pints per month on average, unevenly distributed across convents, monasteries, hermitages, and Church-owned properties in groups of between 2 and 30.Vampire: The Dark Ages is what you are looking for. https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Ages:_Vampirehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Dark_AgesYou can find/ask for source books from /tg/.
>>25344801Anime and manga seem to get away with it a lot. So it's possible. I guess it depends on context, genera, and how the slavery is presented in the story. I have a few half formed plots relating to the subject, but they are all built around the assumption that slavery is bad (brave I know). So I haven't personally thought about slavery in a neutral light in the context of my own world or stories.
>>25344801No but you shouldn’t care about that
>>25344896I was trying to create a nation that does horrible things, but never out of cruelty, only out of a sense of pragmatism. They don't enjoy burning down villages or crucifying criminals, but they'll do it if they think it is necessary. I was thinking about making them a slave-owning nation, but I think instead I will make it so they abolished slavery simply because the slaves kept revolting and it was easier to simply keep them in line by voluntarily employing them and supplying them with meager wages instead.
I made this map in like 45 minutes for no particular reason.I feel this strange pride in it.
>>25344930Eastern mountains has no city in it but the purple country in the west that's just a mountain range has a city right in the center. Is that dwarves?Or am I looking at your map wrong
>>25345067It's supposed to be like a mountain pass; there are smaller settlements in the mountains, but those are dependent on the mountain pass town. Does that make sense?I'm not too happy how the mountains turned out. "Fragmented rocks" look might be quite realistic, but I feel like I'm not sure how else I'm supposed to depict mountains with this style.
>>25344062They're very good at hiding their traces and like being left alone. As one does when dealing with inferior life forms you don't want to deal with.
>>25344879It's for a story I'm writing. Only human blood will do. The Church's position is complicated because vampires in the story are a little more like another species than like cursed humans or monsters, and due to historical circumstances the Church ended up with authority over the entire vampire race all at once, as a result of the settlement of a long quasi-war between vampires and humans. They have all the proof they could want, but it's all theologically messy instead of tidy.There are both practicing Catholics and pagans among the vampires, and the question of culpability over acts performed to satiate vampiric hunger is hotly debated in-universe because all vampires were forcibly turned by another vampire at some point in their past, but no one knows how the chain started. I'll take a look at the stuff you linked.
So, most income comes from sea trade, right?So, that creates an opportunity for pirates, and in order to combat pirates, a state needs a fleet.And a fleet is expensive to maintain, which means it drains resources from the land army. Which in turn means the land army can easily become overstretched.This is why most countries steered either one direction; trying to balance army and fleet was really difficult.
How can I assure audiences that the unrest and disasters that led to a coup weren't false flags or conspiracies?Context is that Interpol (International Police) basically took over most space colonies because the ordinary police was unable to fight the massive drug cartels and pirate gangs with the resources of a single space colony. Interpol eventually stopped pretending to be subordinate to the civilian government and had a President and his administration executed, and then shot protesters that tried to force them out of power. Since the police basically have all the spaceships and heavy weapons on their side, plus significant support from the Megacorps controlling the colonies and are considered the Lesser Evil by most middle class people (that form the core of their forces), they pretty much turned the entire Solar System into a literal Police State.My only contention is that I wanted to make the point that dictatorship of the police is an inevitability in a lawless anarchy, no matter how benevolent the (powerless) elected government is. I don't want anyone to think the Police were part of some conspiracy and things could have gone differently.
>>25345123There's no point in playing complicated hiding games when the difference in power is so extreme that all the armies and intelligence services in the world can't even dream of defeating the world's equivalent of Year 1 Harry Potter let alone the actually skilled wizards. (Maybe it would be possible to poison a wizard's food? I have a feeling that the answer is going to be a clear and resounding "no" given the level of unashamed OP-ness that has already been demonstrated to exist in the setting.) The wizards in Harry Potter hide because they would lose in an open war against the muggles. Making the wizards entirely too powerful fatally undermines the entire premise.Also, your wizards fail as characters if they all have the exact same personalities. Is there really none among them who thinks that it's kind of pointless to sneak around when open force is so much simpler? In fact that should have happened long before the start of the story and dramatically altered the world history. This would have resulted in something like the world of Vampire Hunter D, maybe.
>>25345549The reason they sneak around is simply because they don't want to fight the normies at all, regardless of how easy it would be. It's less fear and more just....not wanting to be bothered.Live and Let Live, basically. There's nothing they need from normies that they can't just buy, and little actual threat to their interests. Isolation is the easiest path forward for anyone that isn't irrationally obsessed with normies.
>>25345514Have POV characters from both sides of the conflict who think about their motives on the page. Make sure to include the head of Interpol as a POV and have him think about how he would have liked to resolve things differently but couldn't think of a better option.If you want to go with just a single POV, have him be familiar with the background of the conflict from first-hand experience such as having grown up surrounded by the criminals and familiar with the way they used to operate. Have that first-hand experience be close and detailed enough to exclude any secret cooperation with Interpol. Perhaps the main character could have been the underage son and heir of an important crime boss.
>>25345565MC wasn't even born when this happened; the main reason I'm having trouble with this is that the primary actors died decades ago and the only information we can get is from second hand sources curated by the government.And the government obviously has incentives to lie, which means they can't be trusted. Especially not by modern audiences, which suspect all authority figures of being secretly evil. The reason it's important to establish the fact that this wasn't some false flag is because one of the main themes of my setting is that if the good guys won't deal with the villains threatening normal people out of a sense of....I don't know the name of the phenomenon, but how lots of modern activists feel more sympathetic for terrorists and criminals than their own people.....then the evil guys will, and that's bad for everyone. And if the Lawful Evil guys are defeated without addressing the Chaotic Evil guys that led to their rise, humanity will be doomed to cycles of violence. That's why the factors that led to Interpol's takeover need to be a real problem, and not just some Reichstag Fire thing. It's supposed to be a warning.
>>25345514What if the chaos was actively harming Interpol long before they pulled the coup? The coup, in this case, would be framed as the obvious reaction to an existential threat that the existing system couldn't have handled.
>>25345576You can start the story with a multi-POV prologue about how the situation came to pass and then do a timeskip to the main story.You can include a POV character who is somehow alive past his original era, for example because of cryogenic freezing or having benefited from time dilation on an experimental spaceship.You can have the main character find his ancestor's old-fashioned hand-written diary that was never meant for the eyes of others.You can have the descendants of the criminal gangs be still surviving underground, guarding the lore with video evidence and holding to the old enmity. Maybe they worship Santa Muerte or something.Or I suppose maybe you could just use old-fashioned omniscient narrator.
>>25345557"Live and let live" is based on reciprocity. You let live, the other person lets you live, and so you both get to live rather than get into lethal combat over some trivial insult. The bottom falls through when the other person isn't capable of being even a hypothetical threat.Like, what is the effort difference between the wizard infinite money hack and just killing someone and taking their stuff? What if the other person doesn't like to sell? What if the wizard wants the Mona Lisa? Or the Malibu Beach minus all the people and their ugly buildings? Are the wizards a single-personality species with no villains whatsoever? How are you planning to formulate a plot when your characters think alike, avoid conflicts, and are invincible from the start?
>>25345623By just ignoring the normies and focusing on conflicts between wizards. Attacks on normals are effectively just hate crimes.
>>25345645And btw, I don't believe intelligent people would start killing their fellow humans just because.
>>25344829That's interesting. I've never read it, but I've been meaning to.
>>25344478It's an interesting idea. I'd look into the Danites for inspiration.
Open question for the thread: why make races instead of nations? By races i mean the standard DnD or tolkien set up, dwarves, elves, goblins, that sort of things. I always thought it to be a bit boring, not only because it's derivative but also because having an entire species behave in a certain way is just odd. Say that you want a group of mountain dwelling smiths who are also tough fighters. You could do dwarves, but combining elements of incas, tyroleans, vikings and georgians would be, imo, much more interesting and original. I know I'm biased, i almost went on to study anthropology, but i'd be interested in what other anons think.
>>25339384Hey, given that it’s Pride month, how do you handle LGBT individuals in your settings and stories, and what are some good ways to justify the cultures in your setting being more open/accepting of said LGBT individuals and their relationships besides things like having one or more gods that are LGBT themselves?
>>25346579>how do you handle LGBT individuals in your settings and stories"Here's John and his husband Jerry">what are some good ways to justify... being more accepting... besides having gay godsWhy would you have to justify it? It's just a feature of the world, just as murder is a feature of the world, just as childbirth is a feature of the world, just as water freezing into ice is a feature of the world. You don't need to have a GOD OF MURDER to "justify" why your writing features murder, or a GOD OF SOLID WATER to "justify" why your writing features ice.
>>25346477Because it's more interesting. There's a lot more you can do with a race instead of just an ethnicity or a nation. It's more interesting to me when customs and culture are informed not just by differences in geography and local history, but in fundamental differences in species, like lifespans, natural abilities, and magic.But that's not to say I ignore nations. There are many human nations in the setting I've been working on, though most are hardly developed in detail and exist as background flavor at the moment. And some of the nonhuman races have nations of their own, which of course do not encompass the entirety of their race. However I created a third way people become distinct, and that is their religion. In this setting people don't worship immaterial gods, they worship beings they can actually see, and who provide an immediate, tangible benefit to them. As such, "worship" ends up being more like oaths of fealty with supernatural enforcement and consequences. One of the consequences of binding yourself to a God is the nature of the blessing he bestows upon you, which can change the very essence of your being, transforming you into a new race. Sometimes this can result in two entirely different races becoming very similar to one another, physically, if they both pledge to the same deity.
>>25346579Most cultures would deem it 'sexual deviancy', and hetero-normative sexuality tends to be enforced by either law or tradition in most places. There's a few places where LGB people would be more at home, but these are seen as rather lawless areas or else are notorious as dens of vice and inequity. It's a bit different when you start talking about other races, though, that fall outside the bounds of human cultural norms. The few surviving elves don't procreate through sex, so for them it's a kind of atavistic bonding ritual where the genders of the participants don't really matter at all.There's a few races that have more insistent breeding cycles than humans do, so in their cultures there's a kind of suspension of propriety during the mating period. Sometimes same-sex couplings happen when everybody's all worked up. Nobody gets judged for it, even if it's not an ideal outcome. Sometimes it leads to surprising new relationships, sometimes it leads to recriminations. It depends on the specific situation.And then you have the type of species where breeding is so strictly controlled and regulated due to their physiology (and magic) that nothing like human relationships is really possible.
>>25346579I think I'd never write a gay character into a novel, I just write as though that stuff doesn't exist. People say to write what you want to read, and I never like seeing that in fiction.
>>25346579Some characters in my scifi setting are "work gay" since space habitats and stations tend to skew towards one gender depending on what industry they specialize in.
