>>98725680
I have the opposite problem, I have a setting I am extremely engaged in and find working on it rewarding in itself, but I have no people irl with whom to share it. The only real use I have for it is to serve as the setting to which most of my drawings relate in some way. This summer I started to work on a story draft set within the setting as well.

Just get the world builder's guidebook. It may be AD&D centric, but most world building steps can be used for any kind of fantasy.

>>98725734
I wish I had that kind of autism but I can't seem to actually sit down and stick with one vision; I always hate what I make a month or two after I start on it and want to start over.

>>98725680
Post what you have, then.

Throw it at AI add different types of additional context and let it spitball frameworks and interconnection. If nothing else, it helps breaking through a creative blockade.

>>98725745
Trust me, my kind of autism comes with far more negatives than positives. The ability to autimsally work on an useless fictional setting is one of the few questionable boons I have. I'm too asocial to make friends properly thus I have never even played any tabletop rpgs. My only experiences with the social element of /tg/ hobbies are playing 40k at game stores.

>>98725766
Get a homepage and publish what you have in a wiki.

>>98725680
Take an interesting place and point in history and add dragons and elves and shit.

My current worldbuilding project is what if the Qin had made it to the Three Kingdoms era (aka Fusu lives, no Han, no Homo) but also dragons and elves and dwarves.

Basic knowledge of the era and muddle some ethnic stereotypes into my races (my elves are basically just miao (complete with Gu) at this point) and bob's your uncle.

>>98725760
Usually I start by putting in some big ideas, like races and the magic system, maybe using a ink-blot or rice grain randomization system for the map, feels fun and decent enough, but then after like a week my tastes change completely and I want to restart it from scratch.

>>98725680
>>Just start with a dungeon and a town-
>No.
Do it, though.

>>98725836
>but then after like a week my tastes change completely and I want to restart it from scratch.
Also don't do this. "Stick with it" is basic advice for getting anything done. You need to figure out how to keep your focus on a project you want to finish, and I don't think any other advice is going to be all that useful before you've managed to do that.

>>98725909
It's the microscopic vs macroscopic design approach: Either start with a location and expand from there or start with the world and creation myth and then focus downward towards more detail. In the latter you can jump from place to place, filling in pieces as different moods strike you.

>>98725802
I have a deviant art gallery for my autism though this only really contains the drawn stuff. My writings are mostly in goodle docks rather than something I've put out there.
https://www.deviantart.com/screeble/gallery/62271545/mundus-carnis

>>98725680
1. Feelings of exploration and endless possibility are the product of unfamiliarity with a setting.
2. A setting you make yourself is one you are by definition familiar with.
3. To ensure your players/readers/audience retains the feeling of exploration and endless possibility, make sure they never get more than a glimpse at the truth.

My own setting has a whole convoluted theology based loosely on gnostic metaphysics which explains exactly how gods and divinity works and why clerics of different religions can both tap into functional magic.
The best part? My players have no clue. And I'm never going to tell them. But when they poke and prod I make sure to state things their characters DO know and understand. And because I know that its coherent, they FEEL its coherent... Even if its full of apparent contradictions. And since I only ever give them knowledge about the lore that they experience, understand or what NPCs have experienced or understood they are never going to become so familiar with the setting that it becomes boring and predictable.

I did this because thats the experience I want for my players. My soft magic system is hard as fuck, but the hard part is secret and quite permissive to "the will of the being". So it feels like a soft magic system with somehow striking consistency.

>>98725680
>Published settings have a certain kind of juice that mine just don't, and I don't know why.
It's because you can see the sausage being made with yours. Settings written by other people have details you don't already know by heart, things that you had to discover at some point, and that creates an illusion of depth. But, from an authorial position, you know exactly how deep things go, exactly where the walls are hollow, and so on. It's impossible to evoke that same sense of exploration and possibility in yourself because you are necessarily the source for all possibilities that could be explored.

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>>98726116
Good advice from anon.

>>98725680
>Published settings have a certain kind of juice that mine just don't, and I don't know why.
The only thing that they have and you luck is just pair of balls to stop worrying about details and just publish their work.

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>>98725909
>Do it, though.
I know this is supposed to be blanket good advice but I've done it before just starting with a small scope the problem is if I introduce an element that I later don't like you can't really easily go back and change it once it's been established a live group. On top of this you can't really do things like hint at larger Mysteries or connections between things unless you sprinkle the clues in on purpose early on and things like sweeping histories or geography and stuff like that are even harder introduced when you're just going piecemeal. I understand it's supposed to be good advice but it just doesn't work for me and what I want.

>>98725680
Write pieces of lore, tales about gods and heroes, then start making the map around the locations mentioned

>>98725836
>but then after like a week my tastes change completely and I want to restart it from scratch
You have ADD.

I did
And the key ingredient was probably that I built the world weekly from session to session.
It was just a map of a world in the beginning with a few parts outlined. No city or country really had fixed leaders or inhabitants yet.
Having to come up with everything from the beginning is more of a chore if you have to focus on it.

>>98725680
Just pander to your audience. Best buddy is a weeb? Cool, samurai mermen live over there in giant coral cities. Other likes stalker? Cool, the setting is post apocalyptic fantasy set a century after the death of the sorceror king and half funtioning demon gates and mysterious artifacts litter the landscape. Nuns? Sure, we got nuns. They mummify all their abbesses and use speak with dead magic to maintain hundreds of years of "living" memory. Yes your girlfriend can have a psychic wolf, the collapse of the sorceror king's empire caused a massive psychic awakening.
You can't weave a tapestry without some threads. Steal their ideas and gaslight them in thinking they were your ideas.

>>98728811
>On top of this you can't really do things like hint at larger Mysteries or connections between things unless you sprinkle the clues in on purpose early on
What? You absolutely can. Just don’t explain every single little detail at stage one and you’ll have a ton of hooks left that you can latch onto later to stitch things together. I’ve literally done it mid-campaign, tying subsequent developments back to early events in a way that felt like true foreshadowing.

>>98730198
Tell us more, anon. What did you do?

>>98725680
What problems has this caused you in play? Is it something your players have complained about, or a vague sense of dissatisfaction you have with your own work?
If it's the latter then you're just overly self-critical, holding your work to an unreasonable standard. If the worlds you've made are good enough to game in, they're good enough.

>>98730575
NTA but I agree about the self-critical note. I like to tell myself that if I don't believe my stuff is cool no one else will either. Of course then you've gotta be careful that it is actually cool instead of self-delusion but y'kno.

>>98725680
Its ok, no-one else have either.

A few years ago I started designing a setting for a campaigns in D&D, I made a map of it and placed all the polities and wrote about the history of the region and got all hyped about it just in time for COVID to turn my friends into overly paranoid shut-ins so I never got a chance to use it yet. I've been knocking around an idea to de-D&D it so I could write a novel set in it but I have barely worked on it in months.

>>98730690
>you've gotta be careful that it is actually cool instead of self-delusion
Do you though? Your audience is presumably a handful of sweaty nerds across the table. Enthusiasm is probably more important the competence. If you have the social intelligence to notice which things they're interested in - a low bar but not guaranteed around here - you can lean into them. The bar just isn't that high.

>>98730511
>walk us through all the minor details you wove together over the span of three years
It doesn't necessarily summarize snappily because it wasn't written in bullet point format, but I'll try to give some highlights.
>player rolls up with a traumatized character who has become somewhat of a violent nihilist
>player is not actually capable of playing that for very long and ends up acting more in line with the character's pre-trauma backstory
>meanwhile, a princess from a neighboring kingdom is still mourning her father, who was killed some years prior after a failed rebellion against the empire
>he explicitly was not the original heir to the throne, but his older sibling disappeared
>eventually, I hit upon the explanation for the PC's character shift: when he was traumatized, that opened the door for a malevolent influence to dominate him until the party's early social interactions slowly brought him back to himself
>that influence, I realized, was the same one that had driven the princess's father to rebel against the empire
>because the PC was the son of the missing older sibling, who had fled the kingdom and the throne after witnessing their father (the PC's grandfather) performing dark and twisted rites in a secret chamber beneath the palace
>another PC's estranged uncle had already been established as being close with that princess
>have him get back in contact with the party because he's concerned about her acting erratically
>this involves him sticking his neck out and agreeing to answer for various offenses in order to secure their assistance, which that other PC had really been trying to make happen
>party ends up dealing with the blood curse and the not-quite-dead husk of grandfather, thus revealing things about one character's backstory and tidying his arc as part of furthering another's
I mean, I have hundreds of pages of notes I could dig through, but the trouble is that there's so much context to get through in order to present an example.

>>98725680
Just rip off shit from niche media that you consumed and you know your players haven't. The work will already have been done for you regarding quality, your players will think you're a genius for a while, and you can use the opportunity to introduce your kinos to your group after the campaign

This is good advice: >>98726116

>>98725836
OP, your problem seems to be that you're completely aimless. You're never going to have a setting because you don't even know what you want. You shouldn't be using randomizers for anything while you do a setting, that is garbage. Probably you need time for yourself and read/watch/play fantasy stuff or sci-stuff that you're interested with. From there you can know what you want to do and start getting better. Try to never use random anything to make your setting.

>>98725680
>I've always wanted to make a fully realized and well-connected fantasy setting to run games in, not just use something someone else made, but I don't know how and not sure if I can.
Same. I've learned I can enhance the worlds of others, even exist in the cracks within them, but cannot craft one wholly from scratch. I guess I'm a helper, not a builder.

>>98725680
A fully fleshed-out setting isn't something you just bang out in a week or even a month. It's something that you build over a span of years, typically running several games in it along the way. And those games are crucial--they'll put you in positions you weren't expecting and present you with questions you hadn't thought about, bringing in influences form outside the echo chamber of your own skull. Your players will also be more invested in a world that they've left their fingerprints on--or even one that other players have shaped--giving them incentive to engage with it more fully.

Your goal should never be to "finish" the setting, but to work on it. Flesh out the details of a particular culture in a particular corner of the world, devote some time to the writing script used in a particular region, work on the myths of different religions and where they do and don't agree with each other, and build the setting brick by brick. As the author, the wonder and exploration are found in the process of filling in those unknowns, finding where different elements you'd previously added click together, and seeing how the actions of players ripple through and change the world. If you ever find yourself frustrated by the amount left to do, remember that Tolkien never finished the Silmarillion. It isn't a race, it's an opportunity to explore the uncharted vistas of the blank page.

Finally, as much as possible, avoid ironclad "rules" in the early stages. The facts of the setting as understood in one part of the world should always be recorded as the understanding of local scholars. Those understandings can differ from region to region, so long as each worldview is consistent with the evidence available. That can also set you up for impactful moments when player characters realize that certain "truths" were approximations, forcing them to confront a different way of looking at the world.

>>98725680
The trick is to make something that feels lived in, which unfortunately just requires you to work by feel. There is no magic formula for it.

My best advice is to think of worlds in terms of 'strata', which is to say different historical eras that built on top of each other. What we are doing here is essentially fake archeology, establishing past eras that you can 'dig down' and find remaining evidence of that is reflected in the modern setting without ever needed to be explicitly mentioned as such. Aim for 3 major strata. if you can nail this approach to worldbuilding, you'll find that a lot of stuff sort of grows out from it naturally.

So, for example, lets imagine a new setting. You want there to have been a a big important empire that is no longer around for reasons. So what should your archeological strata be?

Obviously, you want the Big Empire to be one of the strata... but should it be the OLDEST one? Personally, I would say no. There must have been a time before the empire, and there should be evidence of that time even if its rare. Civilizations that were rivals and contemporaries of the empire in its early days that got wiped out as the empire expanded. Most of this can be lost to time, but very few things of such a scale are ever *completely* forgotten.

Then you have the Imperial Strata, defined by the high point of this culture you wanted to include. Whatever came to mind when you first thought of the empire, it goes here.

And then, lastly, the death of the empire. This is the strata that defines the period of time during which the empire ceased to be, and the evidence of it should serve as a kind of autopsy of the empire's cause of death. Quarantine wards and mass graves from a plague, ancient battlefields from a war, different and evolving noble crests from families that split up in a succession crises and power struggle, etc.

Layer these on top of each other, establish connections between them, and your world has a history now.

>>98733059
I mean, that sounds pretty swell already.

But it's focused more on characters than the rules of how the world works.

But I think that the idea/tree you're showing, that if you let enough grass grow you might notice some of the roots and shoots entangling to make sensible looking trees, is highly applicable at every stage of storytelling. I've had a few disparate elements in my own world building that were separate 'click' together in a similar fashion to what you're describing.

Thanks for sharing, anon

>>98725680

Don't worry anon, neither did /tg/ ever.