Sindarin 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.
Without supernatural powers, what is a plausible way to escape from ADX Florence? The best I can come up with would be to get some friends to infiltrate the prison as guards and help you escape.
>>25531358bump
>>25532180Guards are rotated, also they are not allowed to speak to prisoners.
Behold, the greatest worldmap of all time.
>>25532180>>25534335>Without supernatural powers, what is a plausible way to escape from ADX Florence? The best I can come up with would be to get some friends to infiltrate the prison as guards and help you escape.Battalion level assault engineer commando assault. This is the usual answer to trivial problems such as this. Personally I'd use Wiley Pete and Phosgene.
Why is /tg/ an absolute plague upon every board it comes in contact with? Why are these people so insufferably retarded?
>>25534814>Why is /tg/ an absolute plague upon every board it comes in contact with? Why are these people so insufferably retarded?Wis dump stat
>>25534814In what way? The worldbuilders on /tg/ are not the same as the ones on /lit/ and the ones on both are not that same as Puckee/bumpfag on /tg/ who just ruins the board on purpose and is protected by the moderation staff.
>>25532180>Without supernatural powers, what is a plausible way to escape from ADX Florence?Thioacetone grenades delivered by drone. Prison would have to be evacuated. Then hit the evac bus.
What should I research if I want to develop a world that takes place in the real world but 100 years in the future? Obviously I can’t predict everything but yeah
It's going to be a pain in the ass to slowly and naturally introduce the 3 magic systems in my current project. There is the very fleshed out hard magic system based around craftingThe soft system that is more or less psionics, mainly telepathy. Then there is the one in the middle based on augmentation of magic force fields that expanded out until it became a system all on its own.I tried to wrangle the 3rd back into the first but looking over my outlines and notes, even if it wasn't it's own system the applications would still make it stand out as it's own thing functionality regardless.Oh well.
>>25536660I think you should try to narrow your scope to stuff you know most about then extrapolate out based on advancement of that particular thing. Then make the story mainly about that one thing, expanding out only when it's vitally important to the story. That way you don't have to research a million different things to guess at the future as a whole. That or pick a category that fits the themes of the project you want to tackle, and look into that.
>>25534814Do you have any examples to explain why you feel that way?
>>25534646It's obvious you just changed some things in a map of our world seen from above the north pole.
>>25538555>>25534646Ok forget the "seen from above part". Not-Australia and Not-Antarctica being far apart made me think that way.
>>25538593Kino slanderpiece. I will be keeping this.
World building doesn't matter. Write confidently and people will accept any bullshit.
>>25539117What have you written?Hell, what speculative fiction have you read?Because your comment is just ignorant.
So, I have almost completed my first draft (only the epilogue needed to write) and I still need to hone my worldbuilding.The story takes place in a city resembling early 17th century Venice and Amsterdam. It used to be a Duchy which turned into an Oligarchic Republic (ruled by a council of oligarchic noblemen).The whole idea is that this Republic was conquered by a theocratic nation, and the protagonists, the leaders of the social underclass, rise against the foreign occupiers. In doing so they ally themselves with a third party of exiles, pirates, smugglers, corsairs etc, who are funded by certain influential merchants and bankers from the cityIn the end, it turns out said merchants/bankers used the protags to not only liberate the city, but also take it from the control of the aristocrats who ruled it for centuriesin the end, the newly established council is comprised of the protags' faction (representing the social underclass), the merchants/guildsmen, the bankers, the military and the church (four of each)Does this make sense? How different, in terms of status and wealth, would a noble be from a "merchant prince"? Is the difference only in the way they make their money? (generational wealth and landowning vs wealth established within a lifetime?) Didn't noblemen also own ships and stuff?
>>25541858I don't know about real world history, but it sounds believable enough to me.
>>25541858you could just make it so the distinction between them is>nobilityhereditary class>merchantsnewfound wealthboth could be dealing in the same stuff (ships, plantations, etc) and an oligarch could be richer than an aristocraft (even if they did inherit, let's say, their father's ship), but the lack of political power by the former due to the latter's noble blood and prestige that comes with it would create that distinction and thus the need of rebellion
Not sure where else to ask, but: What's the most efficient pre-modern winter architecture style in history for comfort and warmth? Preferably from coastal peoples. The nordics have their long houses, the inuit their igloos, and I'm reasonably convinced the slavs persist on spite alone.
>>25531358When worldbuilding a more limited space how can you tell if you are cramming too many elements into it? I'm workshopping this place in my head, but I keep finding myself trying to stuff more and more clashing elements, which I fear will ruin the whole thing. I don't want to succumb to scope creep but neither do I want to just do a one note setting. While we are on the topic, how do you judge if several elements you are trying to unite are congruent with eachother? Should you take into account themes in the process of building a setting?
>>25542428The longhouse recurs so often in various forms across the entire northern hemisphere it's probably some iteration of that.
>>25542505I use the simple test of>will adding this be directly useful to the project overall or am I just making more work for myself?If it is useful then it will fit. If it isn't than it's going to stick out and take a lot of unnecessary work to make it fit.I have to constantly do this for details on the production of common objects and the logistics of the world.Totally not relevant to the story but something I enjoy researching and daydreaming about. However I don't let it eat up my writing time or creep into my project because it wouldn't fit the kind of stories I am trying to tell.I am writing a fantasy action horror serial. Not a encyclopedia on a fantasy industrial revolution.
>>25542520Yeah, apparently it's the smoke and the way they partitioned it during winter, plus animals off in one corner. Small surface area, no windows, lots of respiratory issues because the smoke in the ceiling is a feature for preserving food, not a bug. They were a bit short on chimney technology. Issues to the point you could see it in their skeletons.
>>25542531The Amerinds also had long-houses of several types and materials. And they also followed that configuration more or less. Sans of course the animals. Instead, entire social cohorts lived inside the things comunally.
>>25542529How do you gauge usefulness? Take details that do not feed into the general story but ty to establish an athmosphere, would that be worth it?>Not a encyclopedia on a fantasy industrial revolution.Unrelated, but what are your go-to resources for researching and studying industrialization, production, and logistics?
>>25542555>How do you gauge usefulness?I think about things in the context of story telling and in scenes. I have a rough plot and characters. If the added element isn't relevant to the plot, doesn't aid in characterization, doesn't add to any story line, and doesn't enrich a particular scene I am working on or have planned; then I don't add it. If I still really like the idea then I will make a note of it and put it in a file I keep for miscellaneous worldbuilding and story ideas. That file I can come back to if I am doing a different project in the future. >Unrelated, but what are your go-to resources for researching and studying industrialization, production, and logistics?YouTube and wikipedia if I am totally honest about what I use the most often. There is a decent amount of detailed informational stuff on youtube if look for it and avoid the ai slop. Seeing stuff visually and in motion aids in visualization and imagination. Wikipedia is usually decent when avoiding political stuff. Fantastic for looking up old and obscure terms and items or learning a overview of a technical subject. Plus links to related stuff, references, and it's nice to know what is the mainstream understanding of the subject.
Yurits?
My approach to depicting my setting in the narrative I'm working on has basically been just be street view take to the setting and not explaining any of the weird shit in it unless it is relevant to the actual ignorance of the characters in question. As the narrative pov snaps between different characters different areas of ignorance can be shown that way and given that two of the primary characters are basically street urchins that never went to school and shit, thus they are legitimately ignorant about a lot of strange things in the setting so more educated characters can do some loredumping on them. I am not sure if this is ultimately a good way of going about the setting but as my other writings on it are just massive documents full of lore, I can't exactly just cram all of that shit into the story and that shit propably wouldn't interest most people anyways.
https://nightash.net/We've got a literature section. free speech (with common sense please, not 4chan crude style) and no judgement. I made this for high quality discussions. come join.Think of the rules like very early Reddit or Digg.as it grows i'll add more custom functionality to it and maybe an email service.
>>25534814It’s more accurate to say there is a concerted effort by various groups to ruin it, intentionally or unintentionally. A decade ago /tg/ was one of the better boards.
Opinions on Sanderson-style worldbuilding? I was recommended his work because he's supposed to be a "hard" worldbuilder who's built a literary empire but I found Stormlight Archive to fall far below my expectations. I can't tell you the shape or color of the Unclaimed Hills around the Shattered Plains, unless they're all crem-taupe and shaped like piles of sludge. I don't know what it means for a "forest" of anemone-like trees to stand in clusters or grow together, nor whether their fronds are solid, translucent, curling, or what. I can't tell you what shapes and forms shalebark grows into that makes it worth keeping in a garden, nor the smell of its fringes or the way different forms adapt to light or its scarcity. So much of Roshar feels like a void. And the magic isn't much better. Why does aluminum work to stop spren? Normally a culture will come up with some story it tells itself about the way certain spells work, but there's none of that here. It's just an accepted truth; craftsmanship without the trade secrets.
>>25545615>Sanderson-style worldbuilding?What does this even mean?
>>25545627You list a bunch of facts and say "that's the setting of the story, enjoy my deep world."
Working on a realistic 20th-21st Century Earth setting with fictional nations. One country is the successor state of a former genocidal chudface.jpg fantasyland that is now democratic(TM); the other is the country where they tried and failed to enact billions must die and whose national policy is now eternal asshurt revenge against their former occupier's people. They are able to weaponize sympathy on the world stage to get insane amount of foreign aid, sophisticated armaments, etc. all of which they redirect to undermining ex-chudtopia which the world is reluctantly warming up to.Ex-chudtopia is decently easy to write since there are so many well-documented examples of post-totalitarian countries in history and literature. The other country seems a bit one-dimensional since its only focus seems to be revanchism. I added a religious element (chudland destroys holy sites and makes martyrs during occupation) to it so it seems more like a holy war, but it still doesn't feel like enough.
>>25541858>It used to be a Duchy which turned into an Oligarchic Republic (ruled by a council of oligarchic noblemen).It is definitionally not a republic if power rests with hereditary nobles. That's just a vanilla aristocracy (aristocratic oligarchy). Also, that's a rare as fuck government type that has generally only existed in very small nations.As for your replacement ruling council, generally the underclass would be excluded and then the military would either take power themselves or back the merchants or church. Seeing as the military would likely be the mercenaries funded by the merchants and they just fought a war against a theocracy, the church would be suppressed and you'd end up with a plutocratic oligarchy.Also all the old nobles and their families would be purged for cooperating with the occupation whether they did or not to prevent them from becoming a threat in the future, as would anyone that objected too strongly to the new power structure. Your main characters would likely be declared traitors that sabotaged the liberation efforts and then killed or forced into exile (and then killed).Genuinely why in the love of fuck would you write plutocrats at the head of a victorious mercenary army giving up power?
I’m trying to make a fucking sci-fi universe, I have a general idea of what I want to do but going into detail on how to develop territory in space as well as individual planets it’s pretty difficult. Not to mention I am basing the two main factions off of Rome and Britain. Any advice?
>>25546489This comment is very vague but I'm going to take a crack at it.Depending on how hard you want your science fiction trying to keep track of space In outer space is basically impossible because there are no natural barriers if you can already travel The speed of light I guess except for things like black holes question mark but for the most part It's just a bunch of very very small islands Surrounded by nothing So the only way to really keep control of territory is to either have patrols Or have electronic signals To sort of Mark out territory since you can't really erect walls or go with natural guidelines Period what I do is I have every legitimate space government has beacons outside of their territory and then their solar systems they've claimed which Release A signal that shows hey this is owned by someone and there's communication so that if you try to go in there it'll alert them to what you're doing and they can send a task force to deal with you But Interstellar space Is Vast And there's nothing there so people can actually live inside of another Empire's territory just in the interim space This is a good place to have things like Smugglers and Your criminal underground Sort of stuff period Also depending on how your faster than light stuff works you can also have a sort of Ftl engine trap where if you try to travel through this area Faster than light like in hyperspace it'll bring you down to regular space so they can actually catch you and this is the only way to really like have choke points In this sort of setup but once again It's very Difficult to do because of space you have to kind of adjust your priorities
>>25546535Sorry for being vague, I'll elaborate. When I say territory I mean like the space which is more or less designated as belonging to either of the empires and I guess what I mean by that is the areas which there are systems which have planets which can be occupied/useful in some way to them, as well as having areas which are neutral or not officially incorporated which is massive, I am looking at this two dimensionally I will admit as I am not knowledgeable when it comes to things like astronomy and the cosmology but I will say that a lot of stuff will not be abiding by the laws of physics, planetary formation, or how space in general does IRL. Pic related is a map I made, it is extremely basic and more or less just to sort of have something to help visualized and be built upon later, more just trying to get a feel for how things will be split up and divided rather than hard border per say. Orange/dark green represent the core territory of the two empires respectively, red and light green are frontier, light blue belongs to neither empire, the purple line us a great rift which splits the galaxy apart so to speak and messes with FTL travel and navigational systems, dark blue is the center (thinking it should be a sort of enigmatic place) and grey is as the name implies completely uncharted territory, more or less unknown to all. >I have every legitimate space government has beacons outside of their territory and then their solar systems they've claimed which Release A signal that shows hey this is owned by someone and there's communication so that if you try to go in there it'll alert them to what you're doing and they can send a task force to deal with you But Interstellar space Is Vast And there's nothing there so people can actually live inside of another Empire's territory just in the interim space This is a good place to have things like Smugglers and Your criminal underground I dig this, I was also thinking something like space stations which function as outposts that monitor the equivalent to trade lanes or maybe having FTL work kind of like Mass Effect where its not individual ships that have FTL capability but they have devices which can slingshot ships to different points in space.
>>25541858The merchants would end up controlling all the others through bribes or blackmail, merchants have a way of doing such things.
How do you cope with knowing that you'll never have an audience for whatever you do with your setting and it will die with you?
>>25546571I don't care, atleast I'm having fun
>>25546571Pessimism isn't useful or accurate. Do the hard work and stop coping.
>>25546569that's precisely what ends up happening and it kinda sets up a probable sequel where the protag now has to face his former allies
>>25546136the mercenary army is small in comparison to the mob that rose up alongside the commune, and the plutocrats need the leader of the revolt as a puppet figure to increase their legitimacy and popularity in the new regime
>>25546136you're a moron
>>25541858>Does this make sense? How different, in terms of status and wealth, would a noble be from a "merchant prince"? Is the difference only in the way they make their money? (generational wealth and landowning vs wealth established within a lifetime?) Didn't noblemen also own ships and stuff?It's a fundamental difference in class, i.e. , in prestige. Landowning vs commercial enterprise is part of that distinction, because in some cases land cannot be "owned" except through patent of nobility, you can't simply buy land, unless the law allows you to. The merchants might have as much or even more money and power than the old aristocracy, but they lack the social standing, the inherent respect given to them by old institutions and by a population which has ingrained deference to their social betters through generations of cultural subservience to the nobility. It's a very hard habit to break.For nobility, money comes with the title, but being rich doesn't make you a nobleman. Being part of an old, hereditary bloodline with a title does that. The money is more of a side-effect, because owning a lot of land (which the titles of nobility were based on) was an easy way to amass a fortune, through rent, tribute, fees, etc. It took a massive shift in the underlying economy of Europe to see the hereditary nobility begin to lose their agricultural revenues to the urban centers of trade and commerce. This does bring something to mind though: it might be a good idea to have a new Republic grappling with shrugging off old, feudal mindsets. Not just for the aristocracy, who will understandably still feel entitled to all their historic privileges and rights, but for the commoners as well, who have a generations-deep ingrained fear of the nobility's wrath, and a natural tendency to cower and scrape around them, that can make finding commoner statesmen willing to stand up to them difficult.
>>25547709What is the level of technology here? It's much easier to justify untrained rabble beating professional soldiers if we're talking about firearms, even primitive muskets. In that case, the lack of experience and training by the mob is more than made up for by sheer numbers, and if they're fighting on their home turf, there's almost no way for a numerically inferior force to beat them, even if they are professionals.But if we're talking high medieval technology, with no gunpowder to speak of, then the skill, equipment, and experience gap between the mercenaries and the mob becomes a much bigger issue. A lot still depends on circumstances, but in general, a troupe of hardened, veteran mercenaries led by a good captain is worth as much as 10x their numbers in militia rabble. The math changes if we're talking about a properly armed and drilled militia with access to an armory, and changes again if they have competent and experienced leadership. Pretty much the only way you'd see effective militia in pre-gunpowder is when they are well-equipped and led by a mercenary commander or by a hardened core of experienced warriors, who form a kind of officer corps and keep the militia organized. Hugely overwhelming numbers can get the job done, but for militia in particular that is not something you can maintain very long. Militias almost constantly bleed deserters due to the lack of institutional discipline. People just go home whenever they feel like they're done, there's nothing to stop them.
>>25546571The setting is for me and an abstraction of my experiences and people/organizations I know. It's my form of psychotherapy to make some sense of my life. It's probably better that it never becomes public since most of the real life inspo material (people) are going to be really fucking mad at the way their in-universe entities are portrayed.
>>25547709>the mercenary army is small in comparison to the mob that rose up alongside the communeThen how did they win? If mobs could fight off invading armies, cities would never get sacked. An occupation is just a better fortified and supplied invasion.>the plutocrats need the leader of the revolt as a puppet figure to increase their legitimacy and popularity in the new regimeThis is a period of hereditary nobility. They have a victorious army and the previous rulers just lost a war they joined on the side of occupiers and are therefore turbofucked unless the occupying nation moves to retake the country in time to save their necks.There is no such thing as a revolution by the lowest classes against entrenched upper classes that ends successfully without one or more higher classes assuming control after the chaos. Mobs don't take power, they transfer power. Or they try to take power, get shitcanned without a base of support from the upper classes, and then the original power structure is reinstated. You need 3 things to hold power, money, weapons, and a bureaucracy to distribute both to where they are needed. Peasants have none of the above and are lucky to seize one or two.To provide an example, the Haitian Revolution is commonly portrayed as a successful slave revolt, but the people that took power afterward were the free Black people who turned around and suppressed the former slaves in a brutal, highly stratified dictatorship despite being heavily outnumbered.Power structures erode; they aren't torn down all at once. If you want your mob to be a legitimate threat of becoming an alternate power structure, then you need some sort of competing powerbase for them to rally around like some sort of civil council where they have an ounce of political power. The aristocracy and the plutocracy need to have already lost at least some power prior to the war.
>>25536660>>25536660Just research current day South Africa and the Subcontinent. Then look at any city and imagine what it would look like if no maintenance was performed for 100 years and Wah-la, there's you're worldbuilding.
