Exactly once you have each and every sub atomic law that effects the world then you can determine origins which from their you can calculate the path that each atom takes thus calculating the events of your world
You’re assuming a lot if you just handwave that your world’s laws of physics necessarily preclude things like atoms, subatomic particles, waves and such. Pretty unimaginative and amateurish if all of your worlds contain matter or energy
@@moonlightning8269 Firstly, we need to determine if your world will even contain default terms of matter and energy. If not, you must manually define all laws, building blocks, their interactions, exceptions, oddities, and other things. Then you can start with the creation of the universe.
Actually though this is true in a way. Not that you need to determine this, but that we can assume science as a whole is different. Imagine the medieval times where people didn't know certain scientific principles, as far as they knew there could be so many other explanations for things. When worldbuilding you can just build something that characters don't fully understand and assume that it works somehow. Like they might believe the world was built by gods, hence the volcano in the middle of nowhere, and maybe it was a god. Maybe it wasn't. But it doesn't have to be tectonic plates. Maybe physics is just different and somehow reflects our reality.
@@dutchthenightmonkey3457so we're assuming quantum mechanics aren't a thing then? You might want to solve unification of general relativity and quantum theory before you start, so you know your world's physics functions without it.
step one: set the rules for how the world works. step two: be consistent with applying those rules and don't contradict them unless there is an explanation as too why the rules have suddenly changed. Consistency in sticking to established rules for how the world works is usually enough to suspend disbelief.
@@lisatroiani6119 but in that case there is a explanation like magic works by taking mana from one self and the surrounding. Mana generate on its own. lore state that you can easily drain 99% of the mana in a 20 meter circle as a caster doing some really strong magic over and over again. the enviroment will not show any sign of you know dying or anything at most depenind on when you did this a circle will be formed in the grass colors. the last 1% is impossible to suck up party then get somewhere where the enviroment looks completly out of whack and all mana is gone from the ground. someone manadge to suck up the last 1%. figure out who or what and why and how. some game just new rule every single day.
“You can only put volcanoes on tectonic plate boundaries!” Hawaii, sitting in the middle of the Pacific plate about as far from a plate boundary as you can get: “I guess I don’t exist, then.”
Invalid point. The largest tectonic plate on a planet is an oceanic plate, and at the center is a volcano, because the magma underneath needs an opening to force through in order to escape.
Great point. It's important to present the game to your players as exactly that: a game. We don't ever want them to feel like we're reading them an encyclopedia. That said, spending time on the deeper aspects of your world (which your players/audience may never see) can still be worthwhile. Sometimes the deep background, bottom-up stuff is what gets me really excited about prepping and gives me ideas for the gameplay experience. But, of course, translating that lore into a game that's actually enjoyable is, itself, nontrivial. I hate to plug my own content, but I explore this process in the 'Making Lore Fun' video.
Unless it’s going to be a geology RPG! 😆 I was also thinking, what if your game involved huge time jumps? But even in that case, why wouldn’t you just change the continents around, mushing some together, having some submerge, etc., either “freehand” or at random? It’s not like The Guild of Uptight World Builders is going to send over a shop steward to check your work.
@@Russell_DMYeah I've been working on my own game for a while, been having to come to terms with this more and more. So far, the solution I've found is tease that there's more at points, but don't delve into everything at once.
@@dougthedonkey1805 Berounka. Four rives flow to one city like four fingers to conjoin into a hand, later a thumb joins them and they continue as an arm
"Ok, my fantasy world will be a mix of the cultures from Western Canada, the Mississipi river and southern Brazil. And the villain's land will be based on the Khmer Rouge, because the nazis and soviets were already used to exhaustion as base for the big bads". "What about the tectonic plates?" "Oh, I guess they were controlled by immortal giant dragons that exist under the earth".
I'm from southern Brazil. I want to see these "Mississipian Gaúchos"(Gaucho is how many of the Southern Brazilians and Northern Argentinians are called, since they have very similar cultures. Not everyone here is a Gaúcho, but they have the strongest cultural influence in southern Brazil, Uruguay and Northern Argentina) Funny how in one of my projects, I took the idea that the climate here is similar to Southern France in a way, and made Occitanian Gaúchos set in a fantasy French Revolution. It's even funnier because one of the states here, called Santa Catarina, has the name which is cognate with the Cathar Gnostics of the Albigensian Crusades from Middle Age Occitaine. That's why the name of the kingdom was literally Gatharia, and the provinces were based on the regions the very dialects of Occitanian are spoken in France, I even learned their language a bit.
This is unironically exactly how my worldbuilding process works. I’ll come up with some parts that are very interesting and well-connected and everything makes sense, then just go “oh yeah and the earth is hollow and the inside is inhabited by xenomorph spider demons and the core is a star”
Tbh if anything doesn't make sense, unless you are getting paid or are publishing in physical format, you can later go back and rewrite and fix things if it is bothering you. Doesn't take much science because at the end of the day, you WILL always leave out a critical detail always when trying to make things realistic because you can only make it as realistic as the amount of realistic details you can think of when making or remaking the world. If you forget about erosion?, suddenly that river makes no sense. If you forget about water currents?, welp, suddenly a large portion of the sea ecosystem makes absolutely no sense anymore. If you forgot about how recent chickens are?, welp then suddenly those chickens in the middle of the desert pre-pirate era make zero sense and are a historical inaccuracy. Like the horses in that 10,000 B.E movie (they had not evolved yet into those back then) Just get the details that you like as right as you want them to be and let's go. Also pretty sure that if your world has magic then anything that doesn't make sense can unironically be said to "have been a result of magic being magic" even if no spell was ever cast, wild unmanned magic did it. Either because it wanted it (assuming it is sentient) or because magic forces by accident gathering up in certain ways can suddenly make a cave system literally float up into the sky untouched and become a reverse cubic abyss of sorts. Also, this is a powerful tool because if you ever feel like running out of ideas, you can pull from those unexplained phenomena at will and use it for a new part of the story a continuation, a sequel, a spin-off, and in that one mention new areas like those so you never run out of possible ideas and also leave some stuff unexplained and untouched for the wonder of the reader and your potential brainstorming in the future.
It kinda sounds like the difference in worldbuilding between LOTR and Narnia. Both writers came from similar places philosophically and religiously, but Tolkien began with language and built a world around it, whereas Lewis strove to make a children's series and said basically "I want Santa Claus in this story because he fits the story I'm trying to tell, so now he's there." Both valid, and both beloved.
gatekeeping is relative. too much gatekeeping and the thing fails for having an inherently toxic community unwelcoming to new things. not enough gatekeeping and the thing becomes watered down and loses any cohesion and meaning. or worse commodified to oblivion.
The only bottom up I refuse is population numbers, since if I err too low I'll get an "umm actually, if the capital city only has a population of 200,000 for one of the world superpowers, then the total country population extrapolates to 7 people fewer than would logically be needed to support their army". Meanwhile, if I err too large I'll get an "um actually, if your medieval city has a population of 3 million, that means that they should be undergoing an industrial revolution. The fact there aren't guns and cars everywhere now means you're a terrible world buulder"
Good god, this is some next-level world building. What do you even need this level of detail for (genuine question, I'm actually curious)? I'm sure readers of a novel won't be disappointed if you simply don't mention the exact population of a city, the same with a roleplaying game. I understand people worldbuild as a hobby and like to know every single aspect for the fun of it, but if you're worldbuilding for a purpose, what project would require this kind of detail? Personally I find the more I've learnt about worldbuilding over the years, the more my worldbuilding has become boring. It used to be 'I want to put a city on a mountain because that will be cool'. Now it's 'where should a city actually go? I guess I'll put them all along rivers and the coast because anything else might be wrong'. Trying to worldbuild the 'correct' way can lead to a satisfying and believable world, but it can equally rob the fantastical element out of a setting, making it feel just like another A Song of Ice and Fire type realistic world. Edit: Just realised I got a lot of thumbs up here so I'm taking the opportunity to self-promote. My fantasy novel _Dragonheim: Aurelia's Apprentice_ is avilable on Amazon; sorry for the crudeness of this but I have no money for marketing, this is the best I can do!
@@cheesypoohalo It's not so much planning, it's that if it gets mentioned off hand, then I'm terrified that the James Tulloses of the world will rip the world building apart
@@OtakuNoShitpost Hahahaha now I see what you mean; even though it's not particularly relevant for what you're making, people expect you to know every little detail about the art you make, and if you don't have an answer you're a fraud, right? I think the only solution is to accept you're only human, and striving for perfection in the world building you carry out isn't your 'true goal'; your goal is simply to make your art 'good enough' to serve its purpose and achieve your goal (e.g. to inspire people, to entertain people, or simply for your own self-satisfaction). Perfect world building isn't the goal, and if it becomes your goal it will eat up all the time you could be spending working on your next project!
I would assert that if your populations within an order of magnitude of our reality's trends you shouldn't really worry. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far, but I would consider this level of granularity unreasonable even for a hyper-realistic setting. Unless, of course, it's something you enjoy spending a lot of time on. The larger settlements in my settings tend to be rather fantastical (at least midway up the Weirdness or Magic scales), so trying to match numbers this closely would often be a fool's errand. And, frankly, numbers this exact don't interest me or my players much, so I've never felt the need to provide them with anything more than rough estimates. Happy Building!
@@Russell_DM My personal method is just to have things like this as part of the lore, e.g. 'the census taken last year indicated there were 6000 elves living in the city'. If someone nitpicks just say 'eh, the scholar who presented the census findings added an extra 0 at the end by accident' or 'the elves bribed the institution who made the census' or whatever. From what I've seen, most people who nitpick these details are young teens stuck in that childhood phase of asking 'why' to every little thing, as long as you can give them an answer they're usually satisfied.
My worldbuilding: All of the continents used to be together, but they all got broken apart in places not congruent with the tectonic plates because a literal mountain-sized primordial being got mad and hit the planet, which literally cracked it. Therefore, volcanoes wherever the heck I want, and islands in unnatural shapes. Some other ancient powerful beings tried to fix the planet, and got a bit artistic with their repair work, so some islands are literally shaped like other things. There, I fixed the tectonic plate issue.
My population resolution: Literally just use the averages for climate, resources, and industrialization. I have a prosperous trade kingdom of well over 1,000,000 people because they are right in between three other kingdoms and control the biggest area of agriculturally viable land on the continent. Thus, lots of food and lots of buyers. They are also on a massive gold deposit, to the extent that silver is actually harder to find. Thus, royalty wear silver and gold is seen as a less valuable metal. How did so much gold get there? Primordial being that hit the planet again. Metal/rock deposits all over the place in ways that don't naturally occur due to mountain-sized chunks of land getting shot up into the atmosphere and raining back down.
@@AnotherGuyTheXone Gonna assume you meant to say "volcanoes" and not vulcans, but yeah, there are also volcano hot spots. In my D&D campaign, Red Dragons gathering in an area in high enough numbers can create volcanic hot spots. A dormant volcano actually got re-ignited because a red dragon died near it, and its body fell into a pool of magma.
@@jaydenw9803 1M in population was common to have in your capital. Rome and Constantinople hit 1 Million by 2nd Century AD and 4th Century AD. There was Ctesiphon too.
@@Adventeuan Given that the continent that the kingdom is on is roughly the size of Australia, but near the north pole instead of the warmer regions, having that many people in one place isn't as common. The kingdom overall has closer to 2.4 million by my previous estimations, but almost half of that is concentrated in the main city, where all the trading is done.
It’s all about expectation. If Shawshank Redemption had him escape with him creating a bomb out of tooth picks and a plate then it’d be terrible, but if Wile E Coyote explained the process of ordering dynamite, how to properly store it, his plan for using it, then it would be terrible. It’s just set up -> payoff, you can do pretty much anything in writing as long as you follow that
My golden rule with worldbuilding is that before plate tectonics, prevailing winds, merchant caravan routes, etc. I always start with a "seed" or premise (gimmick, really) that preconfigures all of the earlier stuff into a truly fantastic world but with verisimilitude so the premise is sown into every facet of it. Take Dragonriders of Pern for example, spoilers for a 50+ year old series, but humans have achieved intergalactic travel and had settled on a world of negligible resources (Pern, or Parallel Earth Resources Negligible). The colonists wanted a one way ticket to a planet without mineral resources necessary for flight so they could R E T V R N to an agrarian society, but not before genetically modifying Pernese fire lizards into dragons that form psychic links with their riders so they could destroy the pesky mycorrhizoidal spores that periodically but predictably rained on Pern every few hundred years or so. Out of that catastrophe of the first threadfall, humans had regressed to a feudal/agrarian civilization organized around preparing for survival and return of the thread. All of the sociological organization, logistics, strongholds, etc aka mundane things follow from that fantastical premise. Sorry any hardcore Pern fans if I have butchered that in anyway, I haven't read those books since grade 7.
@@Shiftarus I definitely come at this from a TTRPG background, so in my experience the world is best expressed through rumors/exploitable information and actual mechanics rather than just fluff/exposition.
I want large airships to fight like battleship in the sky so I invented a better gas than helium or hydrogen or whatever that makes it more possible in my world than in the real world. Whatever physics make it possible I don’t fully understand but with enough techno babble I don’t need to because sky battleships are cool and explaining sky battleships is also cool
How I world Build in steps: -Cool Idea -Develop all the intricacies to cool idea -Take an unexplored aspect of the idea and branch it out and develop that aspect -Repeat (maybe branch off from newer branches) Example: -Magic casted by farts -Fart magic can be seperated into wet, dry, and stink magic -That's cool but what about butts? Come up with the idea that butts are coveted in this hypothetical world and the way you fart determines your magic type -Now what about ettiquette (when to fart and when not to)? -Now what about Bathrooms? -Now what about... -Hey this is a pretty big world.
Poop might be condensed magic energy. You can harvest it and prodouce energy. Cows would be powerful creatures, too What a shitty idea😅👍 (in that world the meaning is "powerful idea")
I sort of have a love-hate relationship with super "top-down" built worlds. I love how imaginative they can be with their off-the-wall anything-goes sensibilities, but it also really annoys me when one of the ideas they airdrop in just suddenly makes a bunch of stuff from earlier in the story not make any sense. But with that being said, sometimes when a story tries too hard to stay fully consistent with what they've already established, it can stifle the personality they had built up in the early segments. I imagine it's a really tough balancing act between trying to stay both tonally _and_ narratively consistent.
I remember seeing an entire fan project built around ‘fixing’ an online series that was entirely comprised of the soyjacks in that meme. Like, these people had spent thousands of words describing tectonic plates and the intricate political history of dozens of tiny little kingdoms and countries (themselves all just carbon copies of various dictatorships that the user base liked)… but not a single thing had been written conclusively about what the ‘fixed’ plot would be like or even what the ‘fixed’ characters would be like.
Are you talking about that guy’s RWBY fan fiction? I’d say the whole thing was like reading Harry Turtledove, but Harry Turtledove actually has characters as thin as they are.
@@samueltitone5683 It was a Discord server - started out as one guy trying to 'outcompete Rooster Teeth' or some shit, then they got lazy and passed the buck to a bunch of weirdos.
@@glarnboudin4462 If they wanted to outcompete rooster teeth, all they would've had to do is tell a competent story that actually lives up to expectations it sets for itself. People on the internet are so silly, I swear.
@@YouCanCallMeIz Yeah, RWBY isn't that hard of a thing to nail the style of. It's like Doom - killing badass monsters with badass weapons to awesome music.
I think what you call Bottom Up worldbuilding is kind of the Method Acting of fiction writing. Very meaningful and enriching to the process of those who have a desire to delve into it, but ridiculous and inefficient for those who don’t. I think one concept that partially determines where someone lands in that regard is the purpose of their writing/creating. If you write from the perspective that theme is the driving force of a work of fiction, nothing in a world has any reason to exist that isn’t in service to enabling the work’s concept to convey the work’s themes. You might end up with a lot of world, but it doesn’t have much to do with science or verisimilitude, rather with reinforcing message. Every piece of world and trivia outside of that can muddy and distract from the message, no matter how realistic or interesting. If you come from a perspective that lends more power to concept, and less so to theme, you’re going to find it interesting what geothermal forces forged the nooks and crannies of a made up world. You’ll have parts of the world that don’t do much other than world, and that’s really all they need to do. Parts of the world are in service to being neat scene dressing or an interesting-on-it’s-face function to move the plot. These are definitely matters of taste. One approach can’t be better than the other. There are different kinds of writers/creators and different kinds of readers/viewers/players.
I was bout to laugh at how over the top simulating plate tectonics for a volcano was, until I realised I actually did make a world that centered the current biggest geopolitics of the world around the splitting of a continent in half
I have started with tectonic maps in the past, but then I realised it was doing more to make me feel constrained and frustrated than make my world better, so fuck it, the mountain god pulled the cool ass volcano in the middle out of the ground because I want one there.
@@plebisMaximus if you start learning more about societal and economic changes that continent structure begins, you'll find a lot of creative things to write about
My natural speaking cadence is pretty fast with a bit of a Texas drawl. I figured it would be easier to understand me if I adopted the "edu-tainment" intonation and diction. (Though I still hear the drawl creeping in now and then while editing) Hopefully it doesn't sound so unnatural as to be off-putting.
@@Russell_DM Not off-putting by any means! It's one of those things I've only recently noticed and I'm seeing it everywhere. It's not a bad thing, it's just an interesting observation. I just realized my initial comment may have come off more disparaging than I intended!
My method: 1. Yeah that looks like a cool landmass 2. Oooo, this is gonna be the site of an ancient battle, lets make it destroyed! 3. Oh fuck i forgot to add a thing, lets put it over there! Yeah that'll work 4. I enjoyed the dragonaries in The Summer Dragon, im gonna put some here 5. Okay, and heres where im gonna have the gods ve a metaphor for the unchanging upper elite who deny progress to keep their power 6. Heres the city where everyone is kissing each other
I mostly just write for my own personal enjoyment because I don't have the focus or dedication to fully flesh out anything/no organization system for my writing. but I do have several worlds I enjoy playing around in, and my approach is Character-first. I find that worldbuilding evolves most organically for me from the backstory and interests of the major characters. One thing I'm particularly proud of is how the 'centerpiece' set of stories of one of my worlds is purposefully designed to explore many aspects of the world. The main character works for an elderly rare book dealer as a 'book agent', going out to negotiate the buying and selling of books, as well as negotiations on sales of new books which keep the bookstore functioning day to day. The story is also set in a 'free city' that serves as a crossroads of world trade and a safe harbor for refugees, political dissidents, apostates, weirdos, and wealthy people escaping strict regulatory states (the latter category are most frequently the villains). For, I would say at least the first third of the overall story, it's episodic, centered around a particular sale/acquisition and the complications that arise, or sometimes an errand or favor done for a friend/frequent business partner of the book dealer. The genre and tone shift quite a bit, allowing for explorations of different textures of the world. but how this worldbuilding evolves for me is through the characters. there's a bit of a mercenary thinking 'how does the world need to work for this character to make sense', and then it is a series of puzzles that have to be solved, so it's definitely kind of both top-down and bottom-up at once. One thing I don't love about a lot of fantasy settings, but I completely understand, is Monoculture. it makes sense in stories where there's not a ton of trade and migration, but I just find melting pots more interesting - the clash of different cultures allows for a better understanding of each culture than viewing it in isolation, because we stop judging the culture purely by reference to our own real culture, and instead within the context of the world.
It sounds like you've created a setting ripe for dozens of low-fantasy stories. A very Pratchett-esque of approaching it is to let each story be geographically proximal to, but not necessarily closely associated with, each other. That way the most important aspect of the setting depends on the priorities of each story's protagonist. One of the tonal examples I used in the video was 'Going Postal,' which I would wholeheartedly recommend. It's a great example of character-driven Worldbuilding. Happy Building!
1 - Plate tectonics aren't as simple as the meme makes it out to be either, look up a tectonic map of earth and note where Hawaii is. It's on a lava plume instead of a fault line. Likewise the Urals are nowhere near any fault lines because fault lines aren't static and mountains will stay even when plate tectonics change. It's like the similar bell curve meme, where "dummies" will just put mountains wherever because it looks cool, midwits will cry and scream about plate tectonics and erosion and then the "smarties" at the end will just put stuff wherever looks the coolest because it's not like geography cares either. Map design is a lot more fluid than these people trying to dictate how you can and cannot make your world would make it seem. 2 - It's a hobby, it's supposed to be fun. If you don't care to make realistic geography because you just find island design or whatever fun, then just do what you want to. If it's for a greater work like a book, movie, game, etc, then you still really don't have to care. Tolkien put a giant box shaped mountain chain in the world for the highest selling work of high fantasy ever, nobody except the elitists are going to care. You should just have fun with it and if it makes no sense, then fuck it, it's magic. The 186th mountain god of your pantheon of 10000 carved the dick shaped mountain chain because he thought it'd be funny.
For my (geographic) world building I take the approach that its often way more interesting to have some kind of mythology for a place than to take a realistic approach. Here in Germany there are a lot of places with folklore like "these rivers where created when Satan plowed the earth" or "this mountain was created by a giant throwing a rock at a rider who stole his treasure." This gives places a soul and a connection to the people living in it and often players can better imagine places like this. And who knows, this is a wacky fantasy world, who says that these folklore tales aren't actually true, and then any kind of pretense of realistic geology goes out the window anyway
Worldbuilding for gaming is fundamentally different from worldbuilding for storytelling. Games struggle to have themes, because you can’t predict the players’ actions - and when in doubt, you’d rather give them a sandbox to play in than to railroad them back into whatever fixed story outcome you may have had in mind for thematic reasons. Depending on the roll of a few dice, your players may get away with theft, murder, or other crimes. Or conversely, a random encounter may end with a TPK. Probably not what most authors outside of grimdark would intentionally set out to write. But in a game, it has to be part of the possible scenarios, or there are little to no stakes. One of the major problems we face as readers these days is that a lot of fantasy and sci-fi authors approach their worldbuilding like a dungeon master. They develop their setting’s geography and history like for students of these subjects - not for English majors who came for a story first and foremost, with an underlying theme that ties everything together, gives us a reason to care about the characters and engage with the story in the first place. Ever wondered why so many movie adaptations of video games suck? Or conversely, why hardly any video games are famous for being faithful adaptations of a film story? This is why. A story with well-thought-out character arcs gives you much less of a sandbox to play with, and in turn, a sandbox doesn’t give you a story. A few games may get close, like Baldur’s Gate III. However, it’s one thing to have engaging characters in your sandbox along the road - and a wholly different challenge of leading them all to a satisfying ending. Even Larian evidently struggled with this repeatedly, and more infamously, so does G.R.R. Martin.
I'm always grateful for video ideas, and "Theme in D&D" is as good as any idea I've had in the last several months. This is a pretty big topic, and one that deserves a complex answer. Here are a few of my initial thoughts: 1. "Worldbuilding for gaming is fundamentally different from worldbuilding for storytelling." I would argue that a more apt assertion would be: "worldbuilding is fundamentally different from storytelling." A well-developed setting isn't a compelling story, nor is it an Adventure. 2. "Depending on the roll of a few dice... a random encounter may end with a TPK." You're making a lot of assumptions about TTRPGs. There are some tables that function like this, and are essentially dungeon-run style ARPGs. Personally, I consider this style of play a bit old-fashioned. 3. "Games struggle to have themes...." I'm not sure I could disagree more. TTRPGs inherently require player buy-in to function. This buy-in includes understanding the adventure the DM has put in front of you and that you should be interacting with it. So, while players can certainly be unpredictable, they are generally answering the questions you have asked them. There is a reason that, when explaining D&D or similar games to beginners, we often use the phrase "Collaborative Story-Telling." It is true that an Adventure is a different medium than film or literature. But it is also a different medium than a videogame. The process of establishing a theme in an Adventure differs from that of a novel, but that doesn't mean it's not there. DMs spend hours asking our players the Adventure's thematic question; the strength of the medium shines through when we listen to their answers. As for a lot of the points in your second paragraph, I agree that I have seen this trend of "themeless" narrative, which seems more like a simulation of an alternate-reality than a story. This, in my opinion, is a fad. _Because_ ASOIAF was so popular, its style is going to be emulated for a decade or so. Or, at least, until people get tired of it (which it sounds like you have). There is a lot more on this topic. Thanks for the food for thought!
@@Russell_DM Thanks for your detailed response! 😉 If you manage to factor theme into your adventures (such as posing ethical dilemmas to your player group, requiring them to resolve them somehow, akin to a Star Trek episode), that’s great to hear! I dare to wager you might be the exception - but perhaps I’m just negatively biased by listening to a lot of power metal, where vapid lyrics are the norm, and most of these sound like the lyricists just took a chart of fantasy words and rolled a d20. It really often feels like both the musicians themselves and the fans listening are primarily players of fantasy video games, who have never thought about the symbolism of fantasy from a writer’s / thematic perspective at all. The success of games like Skyrim, the worldbuilding of which often feels “wide, but shallow”, exacerbates this problem. If you make that video on theme in TTRPGs, I’m curious to watch it! 😃
I am genuinely doubting if you've ever actually even looked at a listing of video games. Most video games _are not sandboxes._ Most games allow players a very narrow scope of choice - and most game stories are very set and rigid. I am also baffled by the fact that you can go from acknowledging that the death of all the protagonists is almost never a real stake in fiction, and then immediately claim that games _must_ have it be a real stake.
@@somdudewillson Have you ever played a video game in which death is *not* a real stake? I have. In Bionicle: Heroes, when you lose all your masks (=lives), you just get a few new ones. You can’t actually die. Once you know that, the stakes are completely gone. Luckily, I never got to that stage, so I always played it as if the game was over when all your masks are lost. With regards to “sandboxes”, I thought it would be obvious that I was talking about role-playing games here - an for pen & paper in particular, the DM needs to be able to accommodate pretty much anything the players come up with. The video game equivalent to this would be something like Skyrim, where the options are so many that some people seem to be living separate virtual lives in there - probably the main reason why they accrue so many hours of playtime. In contrast, video games with a rigid storyline that you are being railroaded into - something I’ve been criticising in particular with regard to e.g. NieR: Automata - don’t really deserve the label “role-playing game” to begin with, as there is no role for you to play, and the story outcomes are not dependent on your choices. Heck, I’ve felt more freedom watching an interactive *movie* (Scourge of Worlds), a “choose your own adventure” kind of thing, than I’ve felt playing NieR: Automata. And Scourge of Worlds only has four endings, not five / twenty-six.
@@cosmicprison9819 you can't just make generalized statements like "Worldbuilding for gaming is fundamentally different from worldbuilding for storytelling" or "Games struggle to have themes" and when someone rebutts, respond with "I thought it would be obvious that I was talking about role-playing games here" it sounds like you didn't consider games with rigid stories because you personally don't like them, and i respect that opinion, however as somebody who obviously doesn't understand the appeal of a rigid story in a video game, you shouldn't be speaking for the entire medium.
Been writing fantasy for decades. Literally have no map. I just sort of have a vague idea of where all the countries are in relation to each other because my only concern was for how their proximity affects their political relationships. I'm pretty sure some of the stuff, if you tried to set it in stone, wouldn't make literal sense, but my attitude there is "why should anyone care?" I like to explore ideas, not geography.
Finding out that both plains and deserts form in annoyingly similar contexts was a moment where I gave up on thinking to hard about tectonics and just dropped down whatever is useful for a town to exist.
Or you could make the evil area near the tectonic plates since likely the villain grew up in a poor condition...say a mining town, where the object they are mining is sulphur since it is used in a spell or potion that the empire can use. But how you worldbuild is your style and how you want ment for you and your target audience so don't pay attention to anyone mocking your style!😊
@@joshuadonahue5871 there would probably be southern "moon truthers", similar to how we have "flat earthers" people in the southern hemisphere who believe that the moon doesn't exist and It's all just a giant conspiracy by the north.
Bad world building is basically not doing anything interesting with the setting, like having a frog-human civilization and not thinking about how the children would be mostly orphans. Not a ‘tHiS iSnT rEaLiStIc!’
I tried to start with plate tectonics and work my way up but after three months of planning all my monsters were algae and all the playable races were brainless flatworms with proto-teeth
I tried to start with plate tectonics and work my way up but after two years of planning, all one of my characters does is make videos about worldbuilding
*Your definitions of top-down/bottom-up are off.* These terms are less about grounding and justification, and more about scope. Top-down is when you start with a large-scale idea (eg., "I want two opposing empires") and then you fill in the details to make those work. Bottom-up is when you start with small details (eg. "I want a cool village in civil war") and then extrapolate the larger context (in this case, two empires) out from that. I think the best way to describe what you're talking about is *diachronic vs synchronic worldbuilding.* Diachronic meaning that you create a starting condition and evolving it, synchronic meaning that you come up with a cool idea and retroactively justify it. *But I actually think this whole discussion is outside the scope of the meme,* which I interpret as saying "a setting doesn't need to be grounded in justifiable ideas." This is of course, a matter of taste.
@@Russell_DM I haven't heard anyone else use it in that way (largely because I haven't heard anyone talk about this as a difference of worldbuilding methods). But these terms are super common in the conlanging community where a purely diachronic method is very popular (though also controversial). So I think it fits this well.
Confusingly, top-down/bottom-up have at least two different definitions floating around the worldbuilding sphere. The one used in the video is a definition that arises from card design in Magic: The Gathering. Top-down - art inspires the mechanics. Bottom-up - mechanics inspires the art. These terms are rooted entirely in the layout of a Magic card, separate from how the terms are used in many other fields.
I think it's very rare to find a context where 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' are unambiguous, it really depends on what you're ordering this abstract lattice by. Similar terms are 'high-level' and 'low-level'. You can think of 'large-scale ideas' in terms of 'physically large', vs lots of individual small details that are 'numerically large', but there's also 'conceptually large' where two individuals could have more important concepts involved in them than whole nations. In design and modelling I see dichotomies like 'abstract vs concrete', 'theory vs model', 'declarative vs imperative', 'structural vs constructive', 'behavioural vs structural', 'implicit vs explicit', 'prescriptive vs descriptive'. It might help to come up with more particular terms to make the dichotomy clearer.
@@ShrodingerFu For magic you could say the dichotomy is aesthetic vs functional, but even then maybe the mechanics were designed to be cool rather than to have a particular role in the overall game so there'd be another dichotomy for that
Eh, this might change soon. I am loathe to do all of the non-video-making stuff associated with content creation, but I think it's pretty undeniable that a larger online presence is beneficial. But I'm certainly putting it off for as long as possible.
“Lord Lisolus of wipés, a member of the court of king claen the bald” -me creating names by looking in the cleaning aisle instead of creating complex family trees and histories
limitation breeds creativity i imagine bottom up design is creating the boundaries that allows for top down design to thrive - hard to imagine one without the other
You are a better person than me, I see a "My thing guud, your thing baaad" image, I throw it in the trash and consider any argument from it irrelevant, whatever it's talking about.
I mean, is weirdness even ordinarily associated with lightness and deviations are considered to be subversions? I feel like when a story gets extremely weird, it can go into extremely unnerving and even disturbing horror territory like in Men, Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, or Inland Empire. Whether the movie is going to be a lighthearted comedy like Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Ace Ventura, or a Monty Python production, or if it is going to go into a surreal horror direction, or go in a surreal half serious and extremely disturbing and half absurdist dark comedy satire direction like in Brazil, The Thirteen Monkeys, Fight Club, and Wanted, or if it is going down the purely silly comedy kind of childish kind of dark route like Beetlejuice, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Labyrinth, The Cable Guy, or Jumanji feels like an equal 4-way split. When it is a purely sincere and serious drama that isn't trying to invoke horror or hilarity is when the high level of weirdness is at its most unusual and unexpected, though, like Dune, The Truman Show, The Tree of Life, Enemy, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Then again, I always get surprised when movies and TV shows are incredibly dead serious when they are set in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, like even the original Star Wars had whimsy and had Chewy and Han providing witty banter with only occasional serious scenes scattered throughout, whereas The Last of Us video game had tons of banter but in the show Joel almost never cracked a smile, the show was almost downright nihilistic, even the couple's happy ending involved a mutual double suicide because living is that bad and not worth it in that world, it's not like a fun zombie story where killing zombies is joyous like in Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland, like Dune, Dredd, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Game of Thrones, Altered Carbon, Westworld, Black Mirror, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Sunshine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Truman Show, The Creator, all have weirdly serious tones despite being set in bizarre fantasy or sci-fi settings. At the highest level of weirdness, most movies are comedies, horror movies, or horror comedies, though, there are a few straight dramas with zero levity and zero horror, but they are exceptionally rare. Definitely equally likely to be horror as comedy, though, practically a 50/50 split. Also, the world building isn't going to make any sense if it is at the absolute maximum level of absolute surrealness. If it makes even a microscopic amount of sense, it isn't going to be maximally surreal, is it? Try making sense of the worlds that the Earthworm Jim 1 and 2 games, Jazzpunk, and Thank Goodness You're Here take place in, literally impossible, trying to formulate a solid footing for logic, let alone magic or physics, or even geography isn't going to be possible, even that which is possible to do changes on a constant basis, even what is and is not possible changes in an inconsistent way on a moment-by-moment basis. Even the proportions of objects and beings changes constsntly without any apparent reason or acknowledgement. I mean, good luck trying to make a world like that work and be compelling in a D&D setting, but attempting it would be a very valiant thing to attempt considering that I know literally 0 things about D&D, but I'm pretty sure it is firmly founded on consistent and logical rules. It would be interesting to have a medieval fantasy set on Earth. So, the history is different, but it has normal Earth's geography, gravity, weather patterns, seasons, and getting colder the further from the equator, same length of second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year. Also, no dragons, and they can shoot fireballs, but they can't use any particularly powerful magical spells. So, the same creatures as Earth, and the conflict is between human factions, so the only stuff made up are the stories, the characters, the history, and the ability to cast mildly powerful and mildly destructive magical spells, and the factions and conflicts, and that's it. I've tried writing stories before, just for my own edification, but I had ideas for scenes but could never connect the scenes together in order to coalesce them into a coherent story. Ideas are great, but getting down into the nitty gritty of actually fleshing them out into a coherent and compelling narrative is where the good and the bad writers get separated out into their own respective camps. I feel like you can get away with executing the basics well enough if the acting is good when it comes to action movies, as long as you have sufficiently well executed action scenes. If the action scenes are boring, the characters have no clear motives, and the acting is wooden and flat, well then you're still snookered. I was surprised how little of the world is established in Dredd it all takes place in a single apartment complex with no outside world stuff interacting with the events of the movie, it was surprising how little world building there was. It was presented in the same straightforward, "Survive the onslaught whilst trapped inside a building and try to figure out a way out," concept as a movie set in contemporary times like The Raid despite the presence of sci-fi weaponry. It was very unique. This whole "bottom-up" thing I am not very familiar with. It sounds like the kind of thing you might experience reading books or playing D&D or RPG video games. I mean, I imagine the world of Dune is carefully thought out, being based off a book, but in the Denis Villeneuve movie adaptations, it is just presented without explaining the intricacies of how exactly the magic and the technology works in that world apart from plot relevant magic that is new to the main characters themselves. I mean, I guess the minutiae might be thought out but not shown? I guess in my experience, most indie movies don't have the budget for grand sci-fi or fantasy settings, and most Hollywood movies don't have the originality needed to make a unique setting without basing it on a book somebody actually imaginative has written. Almost everything Hollywood makes is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, soft reboot, remaquel, part of a pre-existing franchise, based off a book or a series of books, a comic or series of comics, a video game or s video game franchise, or a real life event. I guess there must have been one point where they made original movies in order to make sequels based on them, otherwise Hollywood couldn't have made Psycho, the Godfather trilogy, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Bill and Ted 1 and 2, Labyrinth, Jumanji, Total Recall, Terminator, Star Wars, Brazil, 12 Monkeys, or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (or I am at least assuming they aren't based on any books or real life events). So, whether the world is top-down or bottom-up would then depend on the source material, not the movie itself. Either way, the intricacies are never laid out. You don't learn every single fine detail of how the society works, you just get the gist of it because otherwise that would be boring. I don't know if you have to do bottom-up in your world building to keep things cohesive even if you won't be showing any of it, but I can't imagine that it has to go that far. Well, you certainly won't see any of it in the movie adaptations, that's for sure. I'm pretty sure the lore and everything else is spelled out in excruciating details in Tolkien's Simulacrum or whatever the book is called? I think diving into the world building that deeply and specifically rather than focusing on the characters and the plot is kind of the sort of thing that only turbo nerds would actually care about. I guess that lack of patience is why I'm a movie fan, not a book fan... I'm pretty sure for purely lore based books for additional context adjacent to the main story, they probably do use a purely 100% bottom-up style approach. I don't know how far they want to go back in time in covering the history of the world that they created or how deeply they want to get into how physics and magic works in their universe. The start of the universe? The fundamental forces and the subatomic particles, how those subatomic particles ineract with each other, what those subatomic particles' mass, spin, and electric charge are? I dunno...
Bottom up design has the flaw that it has a good starting point but goes in a random direction. We're just as likely to be at a random point on Ganymede hundreds of billions of years after the sun dies as we are to be in an interesting place and time on Earth following interesting characters. Meanwhile, top down design has the flaw that it produces something more based on superficial vibes that becomes less coherent and well thought out the longer you look at it. Very much like AI slop.
I find it that when planning a campaign to run, you technically automatically have an audience, the players. And in that situation I like using the bottom-up approach because it means that the players can actually figure things out. Since everything in the world is in there because of some other reason. So even though I have no guarantee that the party will even get to level 5, I still started designing the campaign from the BBEG meant to be fought at really late levels. (Roughly level 18) Because now I can start building a web of influence that the BBEG has, and the grand plan seems ever-present, and has clues about it all over the place, the players can do some proper thinking and investigating that feels rewarding. Rather than having the players encounter individual, isolated encounters/quests here and there, that have no connection or effect on each other except whatever xp and levels the party gain to make further adventuring easier. If I had done it the other way around and planned a chunk of campaign for levels 1-5, and the players enjoyed it and wanted to continue after reaching the end of the planned chunk, I would have to essentially start from scratch, things would very easily feel disjointed and tacked on, rather than flowing naturally from previous events in the story. Easier to avoid big plotholes this way I think.
I totally agree. The worst feeling as a writer or DM is feeling like you've written yourself into a corner. So, as you say, I also start with an incredibly zoomed-out view when Adventure writing. But knowing your table and their preferences is vital. I've noticed that, while my party enjoys investigating and solving mysteries, sometimes they just want a fun area to explore and experience. I'm naturally predisposed to include a ton of mystery and uncertainty in my game, so I've actually had to index a little more towards the Top-Down approach while writing my previous two adventures. Now and then they really do seem to just want something big and shiny to play around and RP in (e.g. a Hybrid animal race track which had the vibe of a Monster Truck rally).
Island shaped like [unusual shape for a landmass] is the hallmark of first time fantasy authors. I think because so many people start with making a map.
I am absolutely a bottom-up worldbuilder but I often plant ideas into the world, especially since I do larp so a lot of my ideas are based on how I can use the materials and props I already have. However what I like to do usually is write down the cool idea that I had on my timeline, and eventually it meets with my linear process and I find a natural way to incorporate it - this usually means changing a lot of stuff about the idea but keeping the essentials there. This is how I plant cool bizarre or tropy fantasy elements I like into my conceptually “gritty realistic” (I’m sorry) sword and sorcery project while still making it feel like a natural part of the world.
A friend of mine is an animation and film studies student and said to me once 'There isn't good or bad use of something, we use artistic tools. You wouldn't say a hammer is bad, but you can use a hammer wrong' And I think that's the general principle of this video.
In my setting everything has gone wrong because a lesser god made a universe model and when they presented it to the greater god above them for advice the greater god just made it real instead of giving feedback. This is an issue because half the things in it were placeholders instead if the final product. Like the various races were just copied from other worlds without any fine tuning to fit the new one. So the lesser god is stuck trying to make this mess work because if all sentients on it die out they have to spend another 10 billion years in service to the greater god before they can get a new one.
For volcanos, you can just use hotspots. Yes, there should be volcanoes at plate boundaries because they go there, but you can put hotspot volcanoes at whatever arbitrary position you want, since hotspots can form anywhere you want.
The first post was me and my cousin trying to worldbuild together… we agreed the world existed in the real universe as a planet so far away we would never be able to discover it but then she wanted to make them live on a floating island with a waterfall that goes into the ocean. I asked her “considering this world is supposed to feel like an alien planet whose sapient species is in their primitive age, how does that even scientifically work?” She said “Magic.” We haven’t discussed the world in a month.
I just dont get it with the whole tectonic plates thing. Tectonic plates could literally be any size, shape, and be moving in any direction you may want them to to form whatever landscape you draw
Plus, you don't have to use plate tectonics at all, Earth is the only planet we know of that has them at all. And even then, Earth didn't have plate tectonics for most of its existence. You could just as easily use plume tectonics or lid tectonics for your world.
It's an overstatement for the purposes of making one side of the argument look pedantic. Like, looking at making your geography roughly earth-like by understanding WHY earth looks how it looks is one method of "bottom up" worldbuilding, but no one outside the characters of a Wojak meme have made the argument that that's the ONLY way to worldbuild.
@@nerdorama009 not to mention the fact that having a volcano in the first place implies that there really is a plate boundary underneath it anyway, unless it's explicitly stated to not be the case. Still, it's meant as a joke anyway, best not to read too much into it I suppose.
I'm working on a full scale retelling/reboot of sonic the hedgehog and I went on a huge rabbit hole/ world building brickwall trying to culturally justify clothing on furries.
My approach to TTRPG world building: 1) Write 200+ pages of notes exploring every little detail I can think of about politics, economics, religion, housing, agriculture, holidays, street food, art 2) Write a 2-3 page summary of bare essentials. Hand this to players, make it optional reading. 3) Inevitably throw the original 200+ page document out the window, its more fun to tailor the world to the characters than visa versa.
To me (as someone who is working towards becoming a published author), it is a matter of how much time you have. You can build a big world with complex ecosystems for your story, but if you're on a time crunch or don't have the skills/knowledge/creativity to approach evolution, you'd find yourself hard pressed to do more than skim the surface or simply elude at something more complex which you can later on expand as the story progresses or as more work you place into potential sequels. Thankfully, I have friends who are passionate about world building and who help me with some aspects of this, so I don't leave a big hole in world building in my book.
a nonsensical world only really bothers me if it draws too much attention to itself. an excessively detailed and cohesive world doesn't bother me if it feels like it still does a good job setting an exciting stage for the story
I think it's important not just to have naturalistic bottom up approach to make your world feel like it arises naturally, but also to figure out what kind of audience you're constructing through your writing. I think of the audience as 4 different flavors of 4 different art movements; realists (who are interested in conveying how pragmatic and utilitarian complications arise and tell stories about those complications), idealists (who are interested in the unquantifiable meaning and questions about truth of your setting), romanticists (who are interested in the cathartic and emotionally heightened beats of your story) and naturalists (who are interested in seeing the world's relative banality and intuitionism). For example, I initially started making a world inspired by speculative evolution and mythology, exploring what would happen if you took the creatures from myths and then let them evolve outside of the bonds of the narratives that created them. It was a foundationally naturalistic approach, but my romanticist approach was going to be that nature of brutally sublime and bizarre. The results of the speculative evolution of creatures many people have fond feelings for (myself included) started to feel too cynical to be engaged the way I wanted to engage with them. It distracted from seeing nature as a brutal and sublime tapestry and instead made it feel like a gallery of tragedies. So, I instead focused on the success stories from my previous process and doubled down on making my own chimeras. The next conflict was between conveying the ecological complications, versus the romanticism of being insignificant to the natural landscape. I felt like being a hunter should have consequences on the ecosystem when you kill big predators, but that would complicate how readily my players would kill potential targets. So I tried to make it a setting about conservation, which was drifting very far from the initial intention of a setting where the players were small players relative to capital N Nature. So I came upon the idea that there's a cabal of priests who resurrect the hunters' prey once the various substances had been harvested in a grizzly esoteric process. That way, the romanticism would become more layered and the complications could be explored on a more micro-level of animal behavior rather than evolution. So that's what I recommend people do. Consider how you can please 3 or 4 of realism, naturalism, idealism, and romanticism (or their antitheses) to construct a kind of mental coalition of audience members who you're writing for.
Look, I'll make this simple. Make your world make sense. That doesn't mean make it be hyperreal and simulate 4 billion years of history. It means don't put a delta in the middle of a river. If people know what a delta is -and I'm hooping anyone that went through school does- then they'll be taken out of the story. Again, no need to simulate billions of years of tectonic movement. Just make sure anything you do makes sense to anyone with a basic understanding of geography. Ie. no springs lower than the river, no deltas in the middle of a river etc. The natural world is weird enough as is. Surprise people with things they might have never visited in real life, not with things that would make a 10 year old say "but that's wrong". IF you've never seen a picture of an atol or visited one you'd be shocked by seeing one for the first time. A perfectly circular atol will look incredibly unrealistic. And there are hundreds that are inhabited right now in our world. You don't need to simulate a world to cherry pick what interesting geographical features you want your story to be set in. You just need to make sure things sound PLAUSIBLE to a non-expert.
To play devil's advocate a tad - if you must do things that make a ten year old go "this is wrong", have a reason for it. A perfectly circular atol would be weird in the real world, but so would a wizard and/or a dragon. If you have those in your world, one of them that's especially powerful could make a circular atol. I think that your advice is generally applicable, and that it's one of those situations where the adage of "follow the rules unless you know what you're doing when you break them" applies. And depending on the medium that the world is being built for, it might be the case that you do make a mistake (it happens to everyone at some point that you just forget some minutia and don't catch the mistake) but can spin it into something interesting. IMO it leads to more fun conversations and role playing opportunities (if you're discussing a work or playing a game that has this sort of element) to take something like this and, rather than say "Oh, this is just the (author/screenwriter/DM/whoever) not knowing how this works", instead say "what weirdness can be going on to make things this aberrant?"
Actually your world building should add to the meaning, themes and feeling of your story and nothing else. Realism in itself is a pretty useless goal, it has to add something of substance to the story, and there are many cases where it doesn't.
@@stevencowan37 There is a fine line between people being in awe at the magic of your wizards and them wondering why magic isn't being used to solve the problem magic should obviously be able to solve. Giant falcons and whatnot. IMO it's easier to believe flying mountain size islands than it is to believe rivers flowing backwards... despite the fact that in the real world tides can make some rivers seem to flow backwards at the mouth.
My way of worldbuilding involves using my creative wishes, figuring out what I need to justify that, and then using that. I have rift valleys because I want them and then use the geological impacts of those.
Quick as fuck summary, reverse engineer rule of cool "Oh I want a chainsaw leg prosthetic" => "corporations replace their workers limbs with chainsaws so they can chop wood faster"
I think he said this already, but I think you can have a very structured approach where plot comes first and world building is altered to support the plot, or vice versa. Or more unstructured approaches. One example is "grimdark" stuff where the world building can sometimes come across as contrived, even if it's very detailed and consistent, because choices are always made to support a particular tone / plot structure.
Fun Fact: Im banned on the Worldbuilding Subreddit. And all i did was ask why someone described a cartoonishly evil villain in their fantasy story as "Fascist", instead of just calling it an Evil Villain. I love Reddit. 😊
Medium is the single most important element to me. First and foremost: what is your world for? A book? A game? A movie? A series of paintings? Multimedia? Just a big world building document for fun? Each of these require differing levels of detail, different parts to focus on, and different intended audiences with specific expectations. Movies are meant to be brisk affairs usually, a world that is mostly aesthetic works perfectly fine for them and paintings. This is because the audience absorbs these things more passively. What the scenes actually entail in the movie and the paintings are the only parts you need to flesh out. Everything else is secondary. For books or multimedia, you might need something a little more robust. Something that gives you as well as the audience a playground to look around in and find detail. Something that allows you to tell multiple stories within the framework of what genre and content you think suits the setting. It doesn't necessarily need to go beyond that, but you need it to at least work for those wider and more in-depth perspectives. For a game, what you do in the game is the most important factor. A hack and slash video game or tactical combat ttrpg does not need a ton of world-building in regards to the food people eat in the setting. It can be a nice touch to have that fleshed out, but it is certainly not necessary. An adventure game is going to need a lot more put into the actual setting they're running around in, while a social game is going to need to focus more on the politics and viewpoints of the people. Magic or technology beyond what the player is capable of doing is often superfluous. People tend to think that ttrpgs need to be hardcore simulations of a reality, but that's only one genre of them. What's more, incomplete world building can be an advantage to a ttrpg. If it evokes a creative response from its player base they'll put their own stamp on it. Game worlds that people can customize are some of the most powerful in ttrpgs. This is part of the reason that people like so much to just remake elves and dwarves infinitely. The baseline concept of the elves and dwarves is fun, but it invokes a creative response making people want to customize them. Finally, obviously if you are world building just to make a world for no specific art except this guide to a fictional world and your own head? DO LITERALLY WHATEVER YOU LIKE. If you are not selling or presenting it to people outside small social circles, THAT IS ART JUST FOR YOU. I personally can't stand not sharing my art, once I start writing or creating something I need to show everyone it once I feel proud of it. However if you are making something just because you enjoy the act of making it, tell everyone who tells you to change how you do it to burn in a fire. Constructive criticism is obviously something you should take, but any asshole being like "errrr uhmmm, you can't make a setting that is a flat earth, that's not scientific--" then hurl them into the Sun.
I like to combine both. Make evil mountain a crater lake volcano and the hand shaped island is in the middle of the crater lake. Tectonic boundaries make mountainous chains, not singular volcanoes, you can put those literally anywhere in the water (hawaii). But it gives a good guide, like giving the idea to tuck the big kingdom into a mountainous valley on the coast. That boundary gives me tons of biomes to work in deserts, peaks, forests, islands, and most of the cities are oriented vertical. So I do like to start with plate tectonics, but only insofar as to find my biome, shape of coast, etc. I can't make whole continents like that, so I stay regional with any contrivancy I can like an impassable forest, infinite desert, rock and ice walls or monster infested ocean and sea. Let's me chew on the world longer by pushing the boundaries out bit by bit by maybe going through the impassable forest so I can take my time with world building and not have to figure everything out at once.
The thing with world building is that it's only really important when it has an impact on the story. If the world has 0 impact on the overall story, its importance is equal. The more impact your world has on the story the you need to need to explain it. If you can pick up and drop your story into any other world, it's probably not that important. That is largely how I see it.
One feeds the other. In a world which has depth and consistency, the weird becomes weirder. And exploring either of them becomes fun. Abandon that, especially when building for interaction, and I'll ask "how is that cathedral 300 m tall? Was it built by magic? Was it built over a thousand years?" And so on.
I just make whatever I'm obsessed with, and whatever helps further that in the way i want. After, i look at it and say "does this naturally unfold into a story?" And "do i like this?" And if the amswer to the first one is no, i either rework it, or make up things that lend to natural story-unfolding, and if i don't like it, i rework it or scrap it
Step one: Chose a singer for your soundtrack. Step two: Go to a bar for inspiration. Step three: Your crew gets into a barfight and you are kicked out. Step four: Someone screams Jamaica. Step five: You wake up and think: Who am I and why am I on a beach?
Worldbuilding is inherently about limitations, so it's not about imposing them, but others imposing them on you. And it's often more effective to impose those limitations _after_ brainstorming ideas and engaging with the raw unbound creative process.
For my personal worldbuilding projects, I focus more on the science of it when I'm writing fantasy. I go less into it for fantasy especially for worlds that have magic. The fantasy story I'm currently working on was heavily influenced by gods. If something doesn't make sense, it's because of magic and probably has some in-world history behind it.
What I find is the best way to go about World building, at least for me, is using the butterfly effect. I find an idea that I like, and then create a world by justifying it. Why is this happening, or is this profession common? By justifying things, it expands your world, while also setting out clear cut rules that you can be consistent with when telling the story. It's a fantasy world, it doesnt need to follow real world physics or history. But it should be consistent to the rest of your world.
Tbh created ending then beginning which then followed with lore and timeline then a map was my process. I do recommend map 🗺️ because once I had landmarks (no tetonic plates 😂) and places it made it easier to write. It helped a lot
some of my favorite worldbuilding in stories can go in two completely polar opposite directions, from deep and complex systems that make the world feel real to the whimsy of multiversal bullshit
Its easy
1. Your kink
2. Your political power fantasy
3. Esoteric magic system
4. Characters (optional)
1 Matriarchal drow femdom socialist state, coming up
5. Profit
@@SpoopySquidLOL if only...
I was gonna make a joke about not understanding how you'd build a world based on your mom but then It clicked
Shit
Take memes seriously and get into fights with strangers.
-The Buddha
"You really think someone would do that? Just go on the Internet and lie?" - Abraham Lincoln
Infinite boundless compassionate wisdom for all beings. Thanks, Buddha.
@@EpicMiniMeatwad AND he was sexy too
Sit out front of the local 7-11 and beg until people give you enough money to buy a super big gulp.
-Siddhartha Gautama
“Gay son or Thot daughter.”
-Karl Marx
First we have to determine how subatomic physics work in the universe you are creating. This will determine everything else.
Exactly once you have each and every sub atomic law that effects the world then you can determine origins which from their you can calculate the path that each atom takes thus calculating the events of your world
You’re assuming a lot if you just handwave that your world’s laws of physics necessarily preclude things like atoms, subatomic particles, waves and such. Pretty unimaginative and amateurish if all of your worlds contain matter or energy
@@moonlightning8269 Firstly, we need to determine if your world will even contain default terms of matter and energy. If not, you must manually define all laws, building blocks, their interactions, exceptions, oddities, and other things. Then you can start with the creation of the universe.
Actually though this is true in a way. Not that you need to determine this, but that we can assume science as a whole is different. Imagine the medieval times where people didn't know certain scientific principles, as far as they knew there could be so many other explanations for things. When worldbuilding you can just build something that characters don't fully understand and assume that it works somehow. Like they might believe the world was built by gods, hence the volcano in the middle of nowhere, and maybe it was a god. Maybe it wasn't. But it doesn't have to be tectonic plates. Maybe physics is just different and somehow reflects our reality.
@@dutchthenightmonkey3457so we're assuming quantum mechanics aren't a thing then? You might want to solve unification of general relativity and quantum theory before you start, so you know your world's physics functions without it.
"Make an island shaped like a hand."
That's not even farfetched, I live on a peninsula shaped like a hand.
heyy, same! Michigan?
@@a-bird-lover yep, Mitten state born and raised.
Babytronland
You live on a evil mountain?
@@Jedimasta21Lead water
step one: set the rules for how the world works.
step two: be consistent with applying those rules and don't contradict them unless there is an explanation as too why the rules have suddenly changed.
Consistency in sticking to established rules for how the world works is usually enough to suspend disbelief.
Amen. This right here is the right answer. The genre's called fantasy, breaking real world rules is expected, just be consistent.
@@plebisMaximusyeah, realism isn being consistent with real rules in a fantasy setting, it’s being consistent with the settings rules
or, break some rules if you want something to feel unnatural or alien
@@lisatroiani6119 but in that case there is a explanation like magic works by taking mana from one self and the surrounding.
Mana generate on its own. lore state that you can easily drain 99% of the mana in a 20 meter circle as a caster doing some really strong magic over and over again.
the enviroment will not show any sign of you know dying or anything at most depenind on when you did this a circle will be formed in the grass colors.
the last 1% is impossible to suck up
party then get somewhere where the enviroment looks completly out of whack and all mana is gone from the ground.
someone manadge to suck up the last 1%. figure out who or what and why and how.
some game just new rule every single day.
FİNALLY
“You can only put volcanoes on tectonic plate boundaries!”
Hawaii, sitting in the middle of the Pacific plate about as far from a plate boundary as you can get: “I guess I don’t exist, then.”
Put the evil volcano on an evil magma plume
WOOOO, volcanic hotspots lets go!
@@Weldedhodag Oh yeah wifi in the middle of pacific!
@@BIGSEGGSWTHQUASO free wifi in yellowstone too, there's a volcanic hotspot there
Invalid point.
The largest tectonic plate on a planet is an oceanic plate, and at the center is a volcano, because the magma underneath needs an opening to force through in order to escape.
The quip I heard and stuck with me is “you’re not building a world, you’re designing a game board”(in the rpg context).
Great point. It's important to present the game to your players as exactly that: a game. We don't ever want them to feel like we're reading them an encyclopedia.
That said, spending time on the deeper aspects of your world (which your players/audience may never see) can still be worthwhile. Sometimes the deep background, bottom-up stuff is what gets me really excited about prepping and gives me ideas for the gameplay experience.
But, of course, translating that lore into a game that's actually enjoyable is, itself, nontrivial. I hate to plug my own content, but I explore this process in the 'Making Lore Fun' video.
Unless it’s going to be a geology RPG! 😆
I was also thinking, what if your game involved huge time jumps? But even in that case, why wouldn’t you just change the continents around, mushing some together, having some submerge, etc., either “freehand” or at random? It’s not like The Guild of Uptight World Builders is going to send over a shop steward to check your work.
@MarcosElMalo2 does that mean the gnome who came to audit me was lying?
@@Russell_DM
That's boring
Give me 3 hours of info dump lore or I don't want it
@@Russell_DMYeah I've been working on my own game for a while, been having to come to terms with this more and more.
So far, the solution I've found is tease that there's more at points, but don't delve into everything at once.
“Make an island shaped like a hand” is great
It's funny that in my country there is actually a river shaped like a hand.
@@anoNEMOs what river?
@@dougthedonkey1805 Berounka. Four rives flow to one city like four fingers to conjoin into a hand, later a thumb joins them and they continue as an arm
@@dougthedonkey1805 youtube keeps deleting my comment
@@dougthedonkey1805
Go to the wikipedia page "List of rivers of the Czech Republic". There is a map and the river is in the west.
I don't care how realistic a world is as long as it doesn't contradict itself
ie: "Don't tell fire burns then have it deal no damage"
Consistency. That's all I ask for.
Suspension of disbelief is built with internal consistency
Yeah, some people mistake a need for internal consistency with a need for consistency with the real world
Well it burns, it just doesn't burn things down.
“Fire burns and deals no damage” Like in anime
"Ok, my fantasy world will be a mix of the cultures from Western Canada, the Mississipi river and southern Brazil. And the villain's land will be based on the Khmer Rouge, because the nazis and soviets were already used to exhaustion as base for the big bads".
"What about the tectonic plates?"
"Oh, I guess they were controlled by immortal giant dragons that exist under the earth".
I'm from southern Brazil. I want to see these "Mississipian Gaúchos"(Gaucho is how many of the Southern Brazilians and Northern Argentinians are called, since they have very similar cultures. Not everyone here is a Gaúcho, but they have the strongest cultural influence in southern Brazil, Uruguay and Northern Argentina)
Funny how in one of my projects, I took the idea that the climate here is similar to Southern France in a way, and made Occitanian Gaúchos set in a fantasy French Revolution. It's even funnier because one of the states here, called Santa Catarina, has the name which is cognate with the Cathar Gnostics of the Albigensian Crusades from Middle Age Occitaine. That's why the name of the kingdom was literally Gatharia, and the provinces were based on the regions the very dialects of Occitanian are spoken in France, I even learned their language a bit.
@@Bronze_Age_Sea_Person Dude hell yea
As a History nerd, I'D LOVE TO SEE A KHMER ROUGE THEMED PLACE!
It was one of the worst tragedies in History, and NO ONE talks about it.
This is unironically exactly how my worldbuilding process works. I’ll come up with some parts that are very interesting and well-connected and everything makes sense, then just go “oh yeah and the earth is hollow and the inside is inhabited by xenomorph spider demons and the core is a star”
The first worldbuilding mistake you can make is not having fun.
anything else, doesn't really matter.
That's my go to rule for this sort of stuff. It's a hobby of making up shit.
Tbh if anything doesn't make sense, unless you are getting paid or are publishing in physical format, you can later go back and rewrite and fix things if it is bothering you. Doesn't take much science because at the end of the day, you WILL always leave out a critical detail always when trying to make things realistic because you can only make it as realistic as the amount of realistic details you can think of when making or remaking the world.
If you forget about erosion?, suddenly that river makes no sense.
If you forget about water currents?, welp, suddenly a large portion of the sea ecosystem makes absolutely no sense anymore.
If you forgot about how recent chickens are?, welp then suddenly those chickens in the middle of the desert pre-pirate era make zero sense and are a historical inaccuracy. Like the horses in that 10,000 B.E movie (they had not evolved yet into those back then)
Just get the details that you like as right as you want them to be and let's go.
Also pretty sure that if your world has magic then anything that doesn't make sense can unironically be said to "have been a result of magic being magic" even if no spell was ever cast, wild unmanned magic did it. Either because it wanted it (assuming it is sentient) or because magic forces by accident gathering up in certain ways can suddenly make a cave system literally float up into the sky untouched and become a reverse cubic abyss of sorts.
Also, this is a powerful tool because if you ever feel like running out of ideas, you can pull from those unexplained phenomena at will and use it for a new part of the story a continuation, a sequel, a spin-off, and in that one mention new areas like those so you never run out of possible ideas and also leave some stuff unexplained and untouched for the wonder of the reader and your potential brainstorming in the future.
definitely agree
the greatest writers started by just having fun. no way to get good at anything if you dont enjoy it
It kinda sounds like the difference in worldbuilding between LOTR and Narnia. Both writers came from similar places philosophically and religiously, but Tolkien began with language and built a world around it, whereas Lewis strove to make a children's series and said basically "I want Santa Claus in this story because he fits the story I'm trying to tell, so now he's there." Both valid, and both beloved.
Gatekeeping good, but my version of gatekeeping is telling people to get back to their population density calculators.
Gatekeeping good, but my version is what Horace of Llanthur does as a member of the city guard.
Gatekeeping shit
gatekeeping is relative. too much gatekeeping and the thing fails for having an inherently toxic community unwelcoming to new things.
not enough gatekeeping and the thing becomes watered down and loses any cohesion and meaning. or worse commodified to oblivion.
@@gusty7153 it gets taken over by the woke mob and becomes corporatised and political in the worst ways
@@gusty7153Too much gatekeeping sounds a lot worse
The only bottom up I refuse is population numbers, since if I err too low I'll get an "umm actually, if the capital city only has a population of 200,000 for one of the world superpowers, then the total country population extrapolates to 7 people fewer than would logically be needed to support their army".
Meanwhile, if I err too large I'll get an "um actually, if your medieval city has a population of 3 million, that means that they should be undergoing an industrial revolution. The fact there aren't guns and cars everywhere now means you're a terrible world buulder"
Good god, this is some next-level world building. What do you even need this level of detail for (genuine question, I'm actually curious)? I'm sure readers of a novel won't be disappointed if you simply don't mention the exact population of a city, the same with a roleplaying game. I understand people worldbuild as a hobby and like to know every single aspect for the fun of it, but if you're worldbuilding for a purpose, what project would require this kind of detail?
Personally I find the more I've learnt about worldbuilding over the years, the more my worldbuilding has become boring. It used to be 'I want to put a city on a mountain because that will be cool'. Now it's 'where should a city actually go? I guess I'll put them all along rivers and the coast because anything else might be wrong'.
Trying to worldbuild the 'correct' way can lead to a satisfying and believable world, but it can equally rob the fantastical element out of a setting, making it feel just like another A Song of Ice and Fire type realistic world.
Edit: Just realised I got a lot of thumbs up here so I'm taking the opportunity to self-promote. My fantasy novel _Dragonheim: Aurelia's Apprentice_ is avilable on Amazon; sorry for the crudeness of this but I have no money for marketing, this is the best I can do!
@@cheesypoohalo It's not so much planning, it's that if it gets mentioned off hand, then I'm terrified that the James Tulloses of the world will rip the world building apart
@@OtakuNoShitpost Hahahaha now I see what you mean; even though it's not particularly relevant for what you're making, people expect you to know every little detail about the art you make, and if you don't have an answer you're a fraud, right?
I think the only solution is to accept you're only human, and striving for perfection in the world building you carry out isn't your 'true goal'; your goal is simply to make your art 'good enough' to serve its purpose and achieve your goal (e.g. to inspire people, to entertain people, or simply for your own self-satisfaction).
Perfect world building isn't the goal, and if it becomes your goal it will eat up all the time you could be spending working on your next project!
I would assert that if your populations within an order of magnitude of our reality's trends you shouldn't really worry. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far, but I would consider this level of granularity unreasonable even for a hyper-realistic setting. Unless, of course, it's something you enjoy spending a lot of time on.
The larger settlements in my settings tend to be rather fantastical (at least midway up the Weirdness or Magic scales), so trying to match numbers this closely would often be a fool's errand. And, frankly, numbers this exact don't interest me or my players much, so I've never felt the need to provide them with anything more than rough estimates.
Happy Building!
@@Russell_DM My personal method is just to have things like this as part of the lore, e.g. 'the census taken last year indicated there were 6000 elves living in the city'. If someone nitpicks just say 'eh, the scholar who presented the census findings added an extra 0 at the end by accident' or 'the elves bribed the institution who made the census' or whatever.
From what I've seen, most people who nitpick these details are young teens stuck in that childhood phase of asking 'why' to every little thing, as long as you can give them an answer they're usually satisfied.
oh my god, they escaped the meme
He is the crying zoomer wojak 😅
My worldbuilding: All of the continents used to be together, but they all got broken apart in places not congruent with the tectonic plates because a literal mountain-sized primordial being got mad and hit the planet, which literally cracked it. Therefore, volcanoes wherever the heck I want, and islands in unnatural shapes. Some other ancient powerful beings tried to fix the planet, and got a bit artistic with their repair work, so some islands are literally shaped like other things.
There, I fixed the tectonic plate issue.
My population resolution: Literally just use the averages for climate, resources, and industrialization. I have a prosperous trade kingdom of well over 1,000,000 people because they are right in between three other kingdoms and control the biggest area of agriculturally viable land on the continent. Thus, lots of food and lots of buyers. They are also on a massive gold deposit, to the extent that silver is actually harder to find. Thus, royalty wear silver and gold is seen as a less valuable metal. How did so much gold get there? Primordial being that hit the planet again. Metal/rock deposits all over the place in ways that don't naturally occur due to mountain-sized chunks of land getting shot up into the atmosphere and raining back down.
When it comes to vulcans, hotspots are a thing too
@@AnotherGuyTheXone Gonna assume you meant to say "volcanoes" and not vulcans, but yeah, there are also volcano hot spots. In my D&D campaign, Red Dragons gathering in an area in high enough numbers can create volcanic hot spots. A dormant volcano actually got re-ignited because a red dragon died near it, and its body fell into a pool of magma.
@@jaydenw9803
1M in population was common to have in your capital.
Rome and Constantinople hit 1 Million by 2nd Century AD and 4th Century AD.
There was Ctesiphon too.
@@Adventeuan Given that the continent that the kingdom is on is roughly the size of Australia, but near the north pole instead of the warmer regions, having that many people in one place isn't as common. The kingdom overall has closer to 2.4 million by my previous estimations, but almost half of that is concentrated in the main city, where all the trading is done.
It’s all about expectation. If Shawshank Redemption had him escape with him creating a bomb out of tooth picks and a plate then it’d be terrible, but if Wile E Coyote explained the process of ordering dynamite, how to properly store it, his plan for using it, then it would be terrible. It’s just set up -> payoff, you can do pretty much anything in writing as long as you follow that
My golden rule with worldbuilding is that before plate tectonics, prevailing winds, merchant caravan routes, etc. I always start with a "seed" or premise (gimmick, really) that preconfigures all of the earlier stuff into a truly fantastic world but with verisimilitude so the premise is sown into every facet of it.
Take Dragonriders of Pern for example, spoilers for a 50+ year old series, but humans have achieved intergalactic travel and had settled on a world of negligible resources (Pern, or Parallel Earth Resources Negligible).
The colonists wanted a one way ticket to a planet without mineral resources necessary for flight so they could R E T V R N to an agrarian society, but not before genetically modifying Pernese fire lizards into dragons that form psychic links with their riders so they could destroy the pesky mycorrhizoidal spores that periodically but predictably rained on Pern every few hundred years or so.
Out of that catastrophe of the first threadfall, humans had regressed to a feudal/agrarian civilization organized around preparing for survival and return of the thread. All of the sociological organization, logistics, strongholds, etc aka mundane things follow from that fantastical premise.
Sorry any hardcore Pern fans if I have butchered that in anyway, I haven't read those books since grade 7.
I feel similarly. A story needs a hook, and some of the best hooks are ones that frequently overlap with the worldbuilding
@@Shiftarus I definitely come at this from a TTRPG background, so in my experience the world is best expressed through rumors/exploitable information and actual mechanics rather than just fluff/exposition.
People use "gimmick" like it's a bad word but I think it's a good explanation
Blah blah (derogatory)
Make a dragon rider call him dragon man make his dragon big red and breathe fire 😼
I want large airships to fight like battleship in the sky so I invented a better gas than helium or hydrogen or whatever that makes it more possible in my world than in the real world. Whatever physics make it possible I don’t fully understand but with enough techno babble I don’t need to because sky battleships are cool and explaining sky battleships is also cool
How I world Build in steps:
-Cool Idea
-Develop all the intricacies to cool idea
-Take an unexplored aspect of the idea and branch it out and develop that aspect
-Repeat (maybe branch off from newer branches)
Example:
-Magic casted by farts
-Fart magic can be seperated into wet, dry, and stink magic
-That's cool but what about butts? Come up with the idea that butts are coveted in this hypothetical world and the way you fart determines your magic type
-Now what about ettiquette (when to fart and when not to)?
-Now what about Bathrooms?
-Now what about...
-Hey this is a pretty big world.
If I was dropped onto your world I will be 100% a stink mage
@@Cye_Pie Stink Mages are held in high regard they can clear a room in mere milliseconds.
Taking the "world building is just your kink" joke seriously huh
pyrocynical world
Poop might be condensed magic energy. You can harvest it and prodouce energy.
Cows would be powerful creatures, too
What a shitty idea😅👍 (in that world the meaning is "powerful idea")
I sort of have a love-hate relationship with super "top-down" built worlds. I love how imaginative they can be with their off-the-wall anything-goes sensibilities, but it also really annoys me when one of the ideas they airdrop in just suddenly makes a bunch of stuff from earlier in the story not make any sense.
But with that being said, sometimes when a story tries too hard to stay fully consistent with what they've already established, it can stifle the personality they had built up in the early segments. I imagine it's a really tough balancing act between trying to stay both tonally _and_ narratively consistent.
this is the best channel talking into a sock i've ever seen
I aim to impress. And to use pop filters which are machine-washable.
I remember seeing an entire fan project built around ‘fixing’ an online series that was entirely comprised of the soyjacks in that meme. Like, these people had spent thousands of words describing tectonic plates and the intricate political history of dozens of tiny little kingdoms and countries (themselves all just carbon copies of various dictatorships that the user base liked)… but not a single thing had been written conclusively about what the ‘fixed’ plot would be like or even what the ‘fixed’ characters would be like.
Are you talking about that guy’s RWBY fan fiction? I’d say the whole thing was like reading Harry Turtledove, but Harry Turtledove actually has characters as thin as they are.
@@samueltitone5683 It was a Discord server - started out as one guy trying to 'outcompete Rooster Teeth' or some shit, then they got lazy and passed the buck to a bunch of weirdos.
@@glarnboudin4462 If they wanted to outcompete rooster teeth, all they would've had to do is tell a competent story that actually lives up to expectations it sets for itself. People on the internet are so silly, I swear.
@@YouCanCallMeIz Yeah, RWBY isn't that hard of a thing to nail the style of. It's like Doom - killing badass monsters with badass weapons to awesome music.
@@glarnboudin4462doom isn't just that. There's also the gritty art style, spooky atmosphere, mix of scifi and fantasy monsters, etc.
I think what you call Bottom Up worldbuilding is kind of the Method Acting of fiction writing. Very meaningful and enriching to the process of those who have a desire to delve into it, but ridiculous and inefficient for those who don’t.
I think one concept that partially determines where someone lands in that regard is the purpose of their writing/creating.
If you write from the perspective that theme is the driving force of a work of fiction, nothing in a world has any reason to exist that isn’t in service to enabling the work’s concept to convey the work’s themes. You might end up with a lot of world, but it doesn’t have much to do with science or verisimilitude, rather with reinforcing message. Every piece of world and trivia outside of that can muddy and distract from the message, no matter how realistic or interesting.
If you come from a perspective that lends more power to concept, and less so to theme, you’re going to find it interesting what geothermal forces forged the nooks and crannies of a made up world. You’ll have parts of the world that don’t do much other than world, and that’s really all they need to do. Parts of the world are in service to being neat scene dressing or an interesting-on-it’s-face function to move the plot.
These are definitely matters of taste. One approach can’t be better than the other.
There are different kinds of writers/creators and different kinds of readers/viewers/players.
I was bout to laugh at how over the top simulating plate tectonics for a volcano was, until I realised I actually did make a world that centered the current biggest geopolitics of the world around the splitting of a continent in half
I have started with tectonic maps in the past, but then I realised it was doing more to make me feel constrained and frustrated than make my world better, so fuck it, the mountain god pulled the cool ass volcano in the middle out of the ground because I want one there.
@@plebisMaximus if you start learning more about societal and economic changes that continent structure begins, you'll find a lot of creative things to write about
Just discovered this channel, great video! Can’t wait for more and to binge past ones!
Thanks!
Has anyone else noticed that tons of content creators have adopted the vocal cadence and delivery of 90s news reporters?
My natural speaking cadence is pretty fast with a bit of a Texas drawl. I figured it would be easier to understand me if I adopted the "edu-tainment" intonation and diction. (Though I still hear the drawl creeping in now and then while editing)
Hopefully it doesn't sound so unnatural as to be off-putting.
@@Russell_DM Not off-putting by any means! It's one of those things I've only recently noticed and I'm seeing it everywhere. It's not a bad thing, it's just an interesting observation. I just realized my initial comment may have come off more disparaging than I intended!
Not disparaging at all, no worries. It's just something I've given a bit of thought, so it's good to hear some feedback!
I wish we would return to the 1950s Radio voice
It would be incredibly funny
@@Russell_DMdon't be ashamed of the drawl, don't let bad people Steal your way of speech
I love the southern drawl it should be reclaimed
You know I man knows his stuff with a white board, 6 custom maps and a sock as a pop filter.
Brilliant vid as always
What matters to me is depth. I don't care whether you start from the top or the bottom; what matters is how deep and/or high you're willing to build.
My method:
1. Yeah that looks like a cool landmass
2. Oooo, this is gonna be the site of an ancient battle, lets make it destroyed!
3. Oh fuck i forgot to add a thing, lets put it over there! Yeah that'll work
4. I enjoyed the dragonaries in The Summer Dragon, im gonna put some here
5. Okay, and heres where im gonna have the gods ve a metaphor for the unchanging upper elite who deny progress to keep their power
6. Heres the city where everyone is kissing each other
I mostly just write for my own personal enjoyment because I don't have the focus or dedication to fully flesh out anything/no organization system for my writing. but I do have several worlds I enjoy playing around in, and my approach is Character-first. I find that worldbuilding evolves most organically for me from the backstory and interests of the major characters. One thing I'm particularly proud of is how the 'centerpiece' set of stories of one of my worlds is purposefully designed to explore many aspects of the world. The main character works for an elderly rare book dealer as a 'book agent', going out to negotiate the buying and selling of books, as well as negotiations on sales of new books which keep the bookstore functioning day to day. The story is also set in a 'free city' that serves as a crossroads of world trade and a safe harbor for refugees, political dissidents, apostates, weirdos, and wealthy people escaping strict regulatory states (the latter category are most frequently the villains). For, I would say at least the first third of the overall story, it's episodic, centered around a particular sale/acquisition and the complications that arise, or sometimes an errand or favor done for a friend/frequent business partner of the book dealer. The genre and tone shift quite a bit, allowing for explorations of different textures of the world. but how this worldbuilding evolves for me is through the characters. there's a bit of a mercenary thinking 'how does the world need to work for this character to make sense', and then it is a series of puzzles that have to be solved, so it's definitely kind of both top-down and bottom-up at once. One thing I don't love about a lot of fantasy settings, but I completely understand, is Monoculture. it makes sense in stories where there's not a ton of trade and migration, but I just find melting pots more interesting - the clash of different cultures allows for a better understanding of each culture than viewing it in isolation, because we stop judging the culture purely by reference to our own real culture, and instead within the context of the world.
It sounds like you've created a setting ripe for dozens of low-fantasy stories. A very Pratchett-esque of approaching it is to let each story be geographically proximal to, but not necessarily closely associated with, each other. That way the most important aspect of the setting depends on the priorities of each story's protagonist. One of the tonal examples I used in the video was 'Going Postal,' which I would wholeheartedly recommend. It's a great example of character-driven Worldbuilding. Happy Building!
1 - Plate tectonics aren't as simple as the meme makes it out to be either, look up a tectonic map of earth and note where Hawaii is. It's on a lava plume instead of a fault line. Likewise the Urals are nowhere near any fault lines because fault lines aren't static and mountains will stay even when plate tectonics change. It's like the similar bell curve meme, where "dummies" will just put mountains wherever because it looks cool, midwits will cry and scream about plate tectonics and erosion and then the "smarties" at the end will just put stuff wherever looks the coolest because it's not like geography cares either. Map design is a lot more fluid than these people trying to dictate how you can and cannot make your world would make it seem.
2 - It's a hobby, it's supposed to be fun. If you don't care to make realistic geography because you just find island design or whatever fun, then just do what you want to. If it's for a greater work like a book, movie, game, etc, then you still really don't have to care. Tolkien put a giant box shaped mountain chain in the world for the highest selling work of high fantasy ever, nobody except the elitists are going to care. You should just have fun with it and if it makes no sense, then fuck it, it's magic. The 186th mountain god of your pantheon of 10000 carved the dick shaped mountain chain because he thought it'd be funny.
For my (geographic) world building I take the approach that its often way more interesting to have some kind of mythology for a place than to take a realistic approach. Here in Germany there are a lot of places with folklore like "these rivers where created when Satan plowed the earth" or "this mountain was created by a giant throwing a rock at a rider who stole his treasure." This gives places a soul and a connection to the people living in it and often players can better imagine places like this. And who knows, this is a wacky fantasy world, who says that these folklore tales aren't actually true, and then any kind of pretense of realistic geology goes out the window anyway
Worldbuilding for gaming is fundamentally different from worldbuilding for storytelling. Games struggle to have themes, because you can’t predict the players’ actions - and when in doubt, you’d rather give them a sandbox to play in than to railroad them back into whatever fixed story outcome you may have had in mind for thematic reasons. Depending on the roll of a few dice, your players may get away with theft, murder, or other crimes. Or conversely, a random encounter may end with a TPK. Probably not what most authors outside of grimdark would intentionally set out to write. But in a game, it has to be part of the possible scenarios, or there are little to no stakes.
One of the major problems we face as readers these days is that a lot of fantasy and sci-fi authors approach their worldbuilding like a dungeon master. They develop their setting’s geography and history like for students of these subjects - not for English majors who came for a story first and foremost, with an underlying theme that ties everything together, gives us a reason to care about the characters and engage with the story in the first place. Ever wondered why so many movie adaptations of video games suck? Or conversely, why hardly any video games are famous for being faithful adaptations of a film story? This is why.
A story with well-thought-out character arcs gives you much less of a sandbox to play with, and in turn, a sandbox doesn’t give you a story. A few games may get close, like Baldur’s Gate III. However, it’s one thing to have engaging characters in your sandbox along the road - and a wholly different challenge of leading them all to a satisfying ending. Even Larian evidently struggled with this repeatedly, and more infamously, so does G.R.R. Martin.
I'm always grateful for video ideas, and "Theme in D&D" is as good as any idea I've had in the last several months. This is a pretty big topic, and one that deserves a complex answer. Here are a few of my initial thoughts:
1. "Worldbuilding for gaming is fundamentally different from worldbuilding for storytelling."
I would argue that a more apt assertion would be: "worldbuilding is fundamentally different from storytelling." A well-developed setting isn't a compelling story, nor is it an Adventure.
2. "Depending on the roll of a few dice... a random encounter may end with a TPK."
You're making a lot of assumptions about TTRPGs. There are some tables that function like this, and are essentially dungeon-run style ARPGs. Personally, I consider this style of play a bit old-fashioned.
3. "Games struggle to have themes...."
I'm not sure I could disagree more. TTRPGs inherently require player buy-in to function. This buy-in includes understanding the adventure the DM has put in front of you and that you should be interacting with it. So, while players can certainly be unpredictable, they are generally answering the questions you have asked them. There is a reason that, when explaining D&D or similar games to beginners, we often use the phrase "Collaborative Story-Telling."
It is true that an Adventure is a different medium than film or literature. But it is also a different medium than a videogame. The process of establishing a theme in an Adventure differs from that of a novel, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
DMs spend hours asking our players the Adventure's thematic question; the strength of the medium shines through when we listen to their answers.
As for a lot of the points in your second paragraph, I agree that I have seen this trend of "themeless" narrative, which seems more like a simulation of an alternate-reality than a story. This, in my opinion, is a fad. _Because_ ASOIAF was so popular, its style is going to be emulated for a decade or so. Or, at least, until people get tired of it (which it sounds like you have).
There is a lot more on this topic. Thanks for the food for thought!
@@Russell_DM Thanks for your detailed response! 😉 If you manage to factor theme into your adventures (such as posing ethical dilemmas to your player group, requiring them to resolve them somehow, akin to a Star Trek episode), that’s great to hear!
I dare to wager you might be the exception - but perhaps I’m just negatively biased by listening to a lot of power metal, where vapid lyrics are the norm, and most of these sound like the lyricists just took a chart of fantasy words and rolled a d20. It really often feels like both the musicians themselves and the fans listening are primarily players of fantasy video games, who have never thought about the symbolism of fantasy from a writer’s / thematic perspective at all. The success of games like Skyrim, the worldbuilding of which often feels “wide, but shallow”, exacerbates this problem.
If you make that video on theme in TTRPGs, I’m curious to watch it! 😃
I am genuinely doubting if you've ever actually even looked at a listing of video games. Most video games _are not sandboxes._ Most games allow players a very narrow scope of choice - and most game stories are very set and rigid.
I am also baffled by the fact that you can go from acknowledging that the death of all the protagonists is almost never a real stake in fiction, and then immediately claim that games _must_ have it be a real stake.
@@somdudewillson Have you ever played a video game in which death is *not* a real stake? I have. In Bionicle: Heroes, when you lose all your masks (=lives), you just get a few new ones. You can’t actually die. Once you know that, the stakes are completely gone. Luckily, I never got to that stage, so I always played it as if the game was over when all your masks are lost.
With regards to “sandboxes”, I thought it would be obvious that I was talking about role-playing games here - an for pen & paper in particular, the DM needs to be able to accommodate pretty much anything the players come up with. The video game equivalent to this would be something like Skyrim, where the options are so many that some people seem to be living separate virtual lives in there - probably the main reason why they accrue so many hours of playtime.
In contrast, video games with a rigid storyline that you are being railroaded into - something I’ve been criticising in particular with regard to e.g. NieR: Automata - don’t really deserve the label “role-playing game” to begin with, as there is no role for you to play, and the story outcomes are not dependent on your choices. Heck, I’ve felt more freedom watching an interactive *movie* (Scourge of Worlds), a “choose your own adventure” kind of thing, than I’ve felt playing NieR: Automata. And Scourge of Worlds only has four endings, not five / twenty-six.
@@cosmicprison9819 you can't just make generalized statements like "Worldbuilding for gaming is fundamentally different from worldbuilding for storytelling" or "Games struggle to have themes" and when someone rebutts, respond with "I thought it would be obvious that I was talking about role-playing games here"
it sounds like you didn't consider games with rigid stories because you personally don't like them, and i respect that opinion, however as somebody who obviously doesn't understand the appeal of a rigid story in a video game, you shouldn't be speaking for the entire medium.
Been writing fantasy for decades. Literally have no map. I just sort of have a vague idea of where all the countries are in relation to each other because my only concern was for how their proximity affects their political relationships. I'm pretty sure some of the stuff, if you tried to set it in stone, wouldn't make literal sense, but my attitude there is "why should anyone care?" I like to explore ideas, not geography.
Finding out that both plains and deserts form in annoyingly similar contexts was a moment where I gave up on thinking to hard about tectonics and just dropped down whatever is useful for a town to exist.
Or you could make the evil area near the tectonic plates since likely the villain grew up in a poor condition...say a mining town, where the object they are mining is sulphur since it is used in a spell or potion that the empire can use. But how you worldbuild is your style and how you want ment for you and your target audience so don't pay attention to anyone mocking your style!😊
When I was in middle school, I came up with a planet with a moon that doesn’t orbit, but hovers above the North Pole suspended on a giant geyser.
Pretty sick ngl
Global southerners coping and seething rn
@@joshuadonahue5871 there would probably be southern "moon truthers", similar to how we have "flat earthers"
people in the southern hemisphere who believe that the moon doesn't exist and It's all just a giant conspiracy by the north.
Bad world building is basically not doing anything interesting with the setting, like having a frog-human civilization and not thinking about how the children would be mostly orphans. Not a ‘tHiS iSnT rEaLiStIc!’
Why would they be orphans though
@@TheSweetSpirit When amphibians are born, they aren’t raised by their parents like mammals.
@@TheSweetSpiritFrogs lay around 3 to 6 thousands eggs. You can't possibly take care of all of them
Well this lovely to have found.
I tried to start with plate tectonics and work my way up but after three months of planning all my monsters were algae and all the playable races were brainless flatworms with proto-teeth
I tried to start with plate tectonics and work my way up but after two years of planning, all one of my characters does is make videos about worldbuilding
@@Russell_DM go to bed without me honey a landmark new paper just upended bird taxonomy and tomorrow's adventure was supposed to feature achaierais
*Your definitions of top-down/bottom-up are off.* These terms are less about grounding and justification, and more about scope.
Top-down is when you start with a large-scale idea (eg., "I want two opposing empires") and then you fill in the details to make those work. Bottom-up is when you start with small details (eg. "I want a cool village in civil war") and then extrapolate the larger context (in this case, two empires) out from that.
I think the best way to describe what you're talking about is *diachronic vs synchronic worldbuilding.* Diachronic meaning that you create a starting condition and evolving it, synchronic meaning that you come up with a cool idea and retroactively justify it.
*But I actually think this whole discussion is outside the scope of the meme,* which I interpret as saying "a setting doesn't need to be grounded in justifiable ideas." This is of course, a matter of taste.
I haven't heard those terms used in this context, but it seems that they do more closely reflect what I was describing. The more you know!
@@Russell_DM I haven't heard anyone else use it in that way (largely because I haven't heard anyone talk about this as a difference of worldbuilding methods). But these terms are super common in the conlanging community where a purely diachronic method is very popular (though also controversial). So I think it fits this well.
Confusingly, top-down/bottom-up have at least two different definitions floating around the worldbuilding sphere. The one used in the video is a definition that arises from card design in Magic: The Gathering. Top-down - art inspires the mechanics. Bottom-up - mechanics inspires the art. These terms are rooted entirely in the layout of a Magic card, separate from how the terms are used in many other fields.
I think it's very rare to find a context where 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' are unambiguous, it really depends on what you're ordering this abstract lattice by. Similar terms are 'high-level' and 'low-level'.
You can think of 'large-scale ideas' in terms of 'physically large', vs lots of individual small details that are 'numerically large', but there's also 'conceptually large' where two individuals could have more important concepts involved in them than whole nations.
In design and modelling I see dichotomies like 'abstract vs concrete', 'theory vs model', 'declarative vs imperative', 'structural vs constructive', 'behavioural vs structural', 'implicit vs explicit', 'prescriptive vs descriptive'. It might help to come up with more particular terms to make the dichotomy clearer.
@@ShrodingerFu For magic you could say the dichotomy is aesthetic vs functional, but even then maybe the mechanics were designed to be cool rather than to have a particular role in the overall game so there'd be another dichotomy for that
Goated already for not being on Twitter
Eh, this might change soon. I am loathe to do all of the non-video-making stuff associated with content creation, but I think it's pretty undeniable that a larger online presence is beneficial. But I'm certainly putting it off for as long as possible.
“Lord Lisolus of wipés, a member of the court of king claen the bald”
-me creating names by looking in the cleaning aisle instead of creating complex family trees and histories
I don't even play d&d but this was interesting to listen to, and now I want to create my own world
It's working...
When the fantasy world has a big ass tree in the middle:
*rubs hands together while an evil smirk is plastered on my face*
Zoomer haircut really did make an entire video over a joke, what a legend.
"And I took that personally..."
limitation breeds creativity
i imagine bottom up design is creating the boundaries that allows for top down design to thrive - hard to imagine one without the other
You are a better person than me, I see a "My thing guud, your thing baaad" image, I throw it in the trash and consider any argument from it irrelevant, whatever it's talking about.
the shirt change was the most unexpected thing
I was as surprised as anyone.
@@Russell_DM a wizard did it
*Italy and Sicily looking like a boot kicking a triangle:* "Yeah! What the monk said!"
I like the worldbuilding of "it's gonna change and evolve as I see fit, any current decision is not set in stone"
I mean, is weirdness even ordinarily associated with lightness and deviations are considered to be subversions? I feel like when a story gets extremely weird, it can go into extremely unnerving and even disturbing horror territory like in Men, Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, or Inland Empire. Whether the movie is going to be a lighthearted comedy like Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Ace Ventura, or a Monty Python production, or if it is going to go into a surreal horror direction, or go in a surreal half serious and extremely disturbing and half absurdist dark comedy satire direction like in Brazil, The Thirteen Monkeys, Fight Club, and Wanted, or if it is going down the purely silly comedy kind of childish kind of dark route like Beetlejuice, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Labyrinth, The Cable Guy, or Jumanji feels like an equal 4-way split. When it is a purely sincere and serious drama that isn't trying to invoke horror or hilarity is when the high level of weirdness is at its most unusual and unexpected, though, like Dune, The Truman Show, The Tree of Life, Enemy, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Then again, I always get surprised when movies and TV shows are incredibly dead serious when they are set in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, like even the original Star Wars had whimsy and had Chewy and Han providing witty banter with only occasional serious scenes scattered throughout, whereas The Last of Us video game had tons of banter but in the show Joel almost never cracked a smile, the show was almost downright nihilistic, even the couple's happy ending involved a mutual double suicide because living is that bad and not worth it in that world, it's not like a fun zombie story where killing zombies is joyous like in Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland, like Dune, Dredd, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Game of Thrones, Altered Carbon, Westworld, Black Mirror, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Sunshine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Truman Show, The Creator, all have weirdly serious tones despite being set in bizarre fantasy or sci-fi settings. At the highest level of weirdness, most movies are comedies, horror movies, or horror comedies, though, there are a few straight dramas with zero levity and zero horror, but they are exceptionally rare. Definitely equally likely to be horror as comedy, though, practically a 50/50 split.
Also, the world building isn't going to make any sense if it is at the absolute maximum level of absolute surrealness. If it makes even a microscopic amount of sense, it isn't going to be maximally surreal, is it? Try making sense of the worlds that the Earthworm Jim 1 and 2 games, Jazzpunk, and Thank Goodness You're Here take place in, literally impossible, trying to formulate a solid footing for logic, let alone magic or physics, or even geography isn't going to be possible, even that which is possible to do changes on a constant basis, even what is and is not possible changes in an inconsistent way on a moment-by-moment basis. Even the proportions of objects and beings changes constsntly without any apparent reason or acknowledgement. I mean, good luck trying to make a world like that work and be compelling in a D&D setting, but attempting it would be a very valiant thing to attempt considering that I know literally 0 things about D&D, but I'm pretty sure it is firmly founded on consistent and logical rules.
It would be interesting to have a medieval fantasy set on Earth. So, the history is different, but it has normal Earth's geography, gravity, weather patterns, seasons, and getting colder the further from the equator, same length of second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year. Also, no dragons, and they can shoot fireballs, but they can't use any particularly powerful magical spells. So, the same creatures as Earth, and the conflict is between human factions, so the only stuff made up are the stories, the characters, the history, and the ability to cast mildly powerful and mildly destructive magical spells, and the factions and conflicts, and that's it.
I've tried writing stories before, just for my own edification, but I had ideas for scenes but could never connect the scenes together in order to coalesce them into a coherent story. Ideas are great, but getting down into the nitty gritty of actually fleshing them out into a coherent and compelling narrative is where the good and the bad writers get separated out into their own respective camps. I feel like you can get away with executing the basics well enough if the acting is good when it comes to action movies, as long as you have sufficiently well executed action scenes. If the action scenes are boring, the characters have no clear motives, and the acting is wooden and flat, well then you're still snookered.
I was surprised how little of the world is established in Dredd it all takes place in a single apartment complex with no outside world stuff interacting with the events of the movie, it was surprising how little world building there was. It was presented in the same straightforward, "Survive the onslaught whilst trapped inside a building and try to figure out a way out," concept as a movie set in contemporary times like The Raid despite the presence of sci-fi weaponry. It was very unique.
This whole "bottom-up" thing I am not very familiar with. It sounds like the kind of thing you might experience reading books or playing D&D or RPG video games. I mean, I imagine the world of Dune is carefully thought out, being based off a book, but in the Denis Villeneuve movie adaptations, it is just presented without explaining the intricacies of how exactly the magic and the technology works in that world apart from plot relevant magic that is new to the main characters themselves. I mean, I guess the minutiae might be thought out but not shown? I guess in my experience, most indie movies don't have the budget for grand sci-fi or fantasy settings, and most Hollywood movies don't have the originality needed to make a unique setting without basing it on a book somebody actually imaginative has written. Almost everything Hollywood makes is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, soft reboot, remaquel, part of a pre-existing franchise, based off a book or a series of books, a comic or series of comics, a video game or s video game franchise, or a real life event. I guess there must have been one point where they made original movies in order to make sequels based on them, otherwise Hollywood couldn't have made Psycho, the Godfather trilogy, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Bill and Ted 1 and 2, Labyrinth, Jumanji, Total Recall, Terminator, Star Wars, Brazil, 12 Monkeys, or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (or I am at least assuming they aren't based on any books or real life events). So, whether the world is top-down or bottom-up would then depend on the source material, not the movie itself. Either way, the intricacies are never laid out. You don't learn every single fine detail of how the society works, you just get the gist of it because otherwise that would be boring. I don't know if you have to do bottom-up in your world building to keep things cohesive even if you won't be showing any of it, but I can't imagine that it has to go that far. Well, you certainly won't see any of it in the movie adaptations, that's for sure. I'm pretty sure the lore and everything else is spelled out in excruciating details in Tolkien's Simulacrum or whatever the book is called? I think diving into the world building that deeply and specifically rather than focusing on the characters and the plot is kind of the sort of thing that only turbo nerds would actually care about. I guess that lack of patience is why I'm a movie fan, not a book fan...
I'm pretty sure for purely lore based books for additional context adjacent to the main story, they probably do use a purely 100% bottom-up style approach. I don't know how far they want to go back in time in covering the history of the world that they created or how deeply they want to get into how physics and magic works in their universe. The start of the universe? The fundamental forces and the subatomic particles, how those subatomic particles ineract with each other, what those subatomic particles' mass, spin, and electric charge are? I dunno...
Bottom up design has the flaw that it has a good starting point but goes in a random direction. We're just as likely to be at a random point on Ganymede hundreds of billions of years after the sun dies as we are to be in an interesting place and time on Earth following interesting characters.
Meanwhile, top down design has the flaw that it produces something more based on superficial vibes that becomes less coherent and well thought out the longer you look at it. Very much like AI slop.
I find it that when planning a campaign to run, you technically automatically have an audience, the players. And in that situation I like using the bottom-up approach because it means that the players can actually figure things out. Since everything in the world is in there because of some other reason. So even though I have no guarantee that the party will even get to level 5, I still started designing the campaign from the BBEG meant to be fought at really late levels. (Roughly level 18)
Because now I can start building a web of influence that the BBEG has, and the grand plan seems ever-present, and has clues about it all over the place, the players can do some proper thinking and investigating that feels rewarding. Rather than having the players encounter individual, isolated encounters/quests here and there, that have no connection or effect on each other except whatever xp and levels the party gain to make further adventuring easier.
If I had done it the other way around and planned a chunk of campaign for levels 1-5, and the players enjoyed it and wanted to continue after reaching the end of the planned chunk, I would have to essentially start from scratch, things would very easily feel disjointed and tacked on, rather than flowing naturally from previous events in the story. Easier to avoid big plotholes this way I think.
I totally agree. The worst feeling as a writer or DM is feeling like you've written yourself into a corner. So, as you say, I also start with an incredibly zoomed-out view when Adventure writing.
But knowing your table and their preferences is vital. I've noticed that, while my party enjoys investigating and solving mysteries, sometimes they just want a fun area to explore and experience. I'm naturally predisposed to include a ton of mystery and uncertainty in my game, so I've actually had to index a little more towards the Top-Down approach while writing my previous two adventures. Now and then they really do seem to just want something big and shiny to play around and RP in (e.g. a Hybrid animal race track which had the vibe of a Monster Truck rally).
Island shaped like [unusual shape for a landmass] is the hallmark of first time fantasy authors. I think because so many people start with making a map.
I am absolutely a bottom-up worldbuilder but I often plant ideas into the world, especially since I do larp so a lot of my ideas are based on how I can use the materials and props I already have.
However what I like to do usually is write down the cool idea that I had on my timeline, and eventually it meets with my linear process and I find a natural way to incorporate it - this usually means changing a lot of stuff about the idea but keeping the essentials there.
This is how I plant cool bizarre or tropy fantasy elements I like into my conceptually “gritty realistic” (I’m sorry) sword and sorcery project while still making it feel like a natural part of the world.
A friend of mine is an animation and film studies student and said to me once
'There isn't good or bad use of something, we use artistic tools. You wouldn't say a hammer is bad, but you can use a hammer wrong'
And I think that's the general principle of this video.
In my setting everything has gone wrong because a lesser god made a universe model and when they presented it to the greater god above them for advice the greater god just made it real instead of giving feedback. This is an issue because half the things in it were placeholders instead if the final product. Like the various races were just copied from other worlds without any fine tuning to fit the new one. So the lesser god is stuck trying to make this mess work because if all sentients on it die out they have to spend another 10 billion years in service to the greater god before they can get a new one.
For volcanos, you can just use hotspots. Yes, there should be volcanoes at plate boundaries because they go there, but you can put hotspot volcanoes at whatever arbitrary position you want, since hotspots can form anywhere you want.
My worldbuilding strat:
Step one: think of cool shit with seemingly no connections or logic
Step two: MAKE IT have logic
0:51 why did you mention it bro now I will spend the rest of the video thinking about that
The first post was me and my cousin trying to worldbuild together… we agreed the world existed in the real universe as a planet so far away we would never be able to discover it but then she wanted to make them live on a floating island with a waterfall that goes into the ocean. I asked her “considering this world is supposed to feel like an alien planet whose sapient species is in their primitive age, how does that even scientifically work?” She said “Magic.” We haven’t discussed the world in a month.
You're definitely going to have a 100K+ sub channel. Good stuff
Thanks for the kind words!
I just dont get it with the whole tectonic plates thing. Tectonic plates could literally be any size, shape, and be moving in any direction you may want them to to form whatever landscape you draw
Hotspots exist too
So vulcans can be everywhere
Plus, you don't have to use plate tectonics at all, Earth is the only planet we know of that has them at all. And even then, Earth didn't have plate tectonics for most of its existence. You could just as easily use plume tectonics or lid tectonics for your world.
It's an overstatement for the purposes of making one side of the argument look pedantic. Like, looking at making your geography roughly earth-like by understanding WHY earth looks how it looks is one method of "bottom up" worldbuilding, but no one outside the characters of a Wojak meme have made the argument that that's the ONLY way to worldbuild.
@@nerdorama009 not to mention the fact that having a volcano in the first place implies that there really is a plate boundary underneath it anyway, unless it's explicitly stated to not be the case.
Still, it's meant as a joke anyway, best not to read too much into it I suppose.
@@robokill387Lid tectonics creates the issue of your world being habitable, though
he is using a sock as a pop filter 11/10, im going to do that
As a writer, I personally like going for "rule of cool" balanced with "yeah, but how would that cool shit function or effect the people too?"
I'm working on a full scale retelling/reboot of sonic the hedgehog and I went on a huge rabbit hole/ world building brickwall trying to culturally justify clothing on furries.
This is my first time finding this channel so i am not sure if the sock is an insiders joke but i love it, subscribing fr
My approach to TTRPG world building:
1) Write 200+ pages of notes exploring every little detail I can think of about politics, economics, religion, housing, agriculture, holidays, street food, art
2) Write a 2-3 page summary of bare essentials. Hand this to players, make it optional reading.
3) Inevitably throw the original 200+ page document out the window, its more fun to tailor the world to the characters than visa versa.
To me (as someone who is working towards becoming a published author), it is a matter of how much time you have.
You can build a big world with complex ecosystems for your story, but if you're on a time crunch or don't have the skills/knowledge/creativity to approach evolution, you'd find yourself hard pressed to do more than skim the surface or simply elude at something more complex which you can later on expand as the story progresses or as more work you place into potential sequels.
Thankfully, I have friends who are passionate about world building and who help me with some aspects of this, so I don't leave a big hole in world building in my book.
He's literally doing the meme.
HE EVEN LOOKS LIKE THE SOYJAK
a nonsensical world only really bothers me if it draws too much attention to itself. an excessively detailed and cohesive world doesn't bother me if it feels like it still does a good job setting an exciting stage for the story
The moral of the story is that you can make your world to be anything, so long as it is internally consistent
I think it's important not just to have naturalistic bottom up approach to make your world feel like it arises naturally, but also to figure out what kind of audience you're constructing through your writing.
I think of the audience as 4 different flavors of 4 different art movements; realists (who are interested in conveying how pragmatic and utilitarian complications arise and tell stories about those complications), idealists (who are interested in the unquantifiable meaning and questions about truth of your setting), romanticists (who are interested in the cathartic and emotionally heightened beats of your story) and naturalists (who are interested in seeing the world's relative banality and intuitionism).
For example, I initially started making a world inspired by speculative evolution and mythology, exploring what would happen if you took the creatures from myths and then let them evolve outside of the bonds of the narratives that created them. It was a foundationally naturalistic approach, but my romanticist approach was going to be that nature of brutally sublime and bizarre.
The results of the speculative evolution of creatures many people have fond feelings for (myself included) started to feel too cynical to be engaged the way I wanted to engage with them. It distracted from seeing nature as a brutal and sublime tapestry and instead made it feel like a gallery of tragedies.
So, I instead focused on the success stories from my previous process and doubled down on making my own chimeras.
The next conflict was between conveying the ecological complications, versus the romanticism of being insignificant to the natural landscape. I felt like being a hunter should have consequences on the ecosystem when you kill big predators, but that would complicate how readily my players would kill potential targets. So I tried to make it a setting about conservation, which was drifting very far from the initial intention of a setting where the players were small players relative to capital N Nature. So I came upon the idea that there's a cabal of priests who resurrect the hunters' prey once the various substances had been harvested in a grizzly esoteric process. That way, the romanticism would become more layered and the complications could be explored on a more micro-level of animal behavior rather than evolution.
So that's what I recommend people do. Consider how you can please 3 or 4 of realism, naturalism, idealism, and romanticism (or their antitheses) to construct a kind of mental coalition of audience members who you're writing for.
Look, I'll make this simple. Make your world make sense. That doesn't mean make it be hyperreal and simulate 4 billion years of history. It means don't put a delta in the middle of a river. If people know what a delta is -and I'm hooping anyone that went through school does- then they'll be taken out of the story. Again, no need to simulate billions of years of tectonic movement. Just make sure anything you do makes sense to anyone with a basic understanding of geography. Ie. no springs lower than the river, no deltas in the middle of a river etc. The natural world is weird enough as is. Surprise people with things they might have never visited in real life, not with things that would make a 10 year old say "but that's wrong". IF you've never seen a picture of an atol or visited one you'd be shocked by seeing one for the first time. A perfectly circular atol will look incredibly unrealistic. And there are hundreds that are inhabited right now in our world. You don't need to simulate a world to cherry pick what interesting geographical features you want your story to be set in. You just need to make sure things sound PLAUSIBLE to a non-expert.
To play devil's advocate a tad - if you must do things that make a ten year old go "this is wrong", have a reason for it. A perfectly circular atol would be weird in the real world, but so would a wizard and/or a dragon. If you have those in your world, one of them that's especially powerful could make a circular atol.
I think that your advice is generally applicable, and that it's one of those situations where the adage of "follow the rules unless you know what you're doing when you break them" applies.
And depending on the medium that the world is being built for, it might be the case that you do make a mistake (it happens to everyone at some point that you just forget some minutia and don't catch the mistake) but can spin it into something interesting. IMO it leads to more fun conversations and role playing opportunities (if you're discussing a work or playing a game that has this sort of element) to take something like this and, rather than say "Oh, this is just the (author/screenwriter/DM/whoever) not knowing how this works", instead say "what weirdness can be going on to make things this aberrant?"
maps are so last century anyways
My aunt literally lives in a delta in the middle of a river. Tell your 10 yo to git gud
Actually your world building should add to the meaning, themes and feeling of your story and nothing else. Realism in itself is a pretty useless goal, it has to add something of substance to the story, and there are many cases where it doesn't.
@@stevencowan37 There is a fine line between people being in awe at the magic of your wizards and them wondering why magic isn't being used to solve the problem magic should obviously be able to solve. Giant falcons and whatnot.
IMO it's easier to believe flying mountain size islands than it is to believe rivers flowing backwards... despite the fact that in the real world tides can make some rivers seem to flow backwards at the mouth.
My way of worldbuilding involves using my creative wishes, figuring out what I need to justify that, and then using that. I have rift valleys because I want them and then use the geological impacts of those.
Gatekeeping is good. Ive lost so many gates over the years. Its attached to a fence! Where does it go?
Subscriber no. 758 reporting for duty!
Welcome, and Happy Building!
Quick as fuck summary, reverse engineer rule of cool
"Oh I want a chainsaw leg prosthetic" => "corporations replace their workers limbs with chainsaws so they can chop wood faster"
I think he said this already, but I think you can have a very structured approach where plot comes first and world building is altered to support the plot, or vice versa. Or more unstructured approaches. One example is "grimdark" stuff where the world building can sometimes come across as contrived, even if it's very detailed and consistent, because choices are always made to support a particular tone / plot structure.
Good worldbuilding is when you have fun with it
you: "the person on the left... ...is in the wrong."
neal stephenson: "how dare you!!"
Evil mountain is definitly a good start tbh
1:12
"I am a great magician. Your clothes are now RED!"
Fun Fact: Im banned on the Worldbuilding Subreddit. And all i did was ask why someone described a cartoonishly evil villain in their fantasy story as "Fascist", instead of just calling it an Evil Villain. I love Reddit. 😊
Amazing video! Just subbed.
Rule One of Creation: Have fun creating what you enjoy to create.
Medium is the single most important element to me. First and foremost: what is your world for? A book? A game? A movie? A series of paintings? Multimedia? Just a big world building document for fun?
Each of these require differing levels of detail, different parts to focus on, and different intended audiences with specific expectations. Movies are meant to be brisk affairs usually, a world that is mostly aesthetic works perfectly fine for them and paintings. This is because the audience absorbs these things more passively. What the scenes actually entail in the movie and the paintings are the only parts you need to flesh out. Everything else is secondary.
For books or multimedia, you might need something a little more robust. Something that gives you as well as the audience a playground to look around in and find detail. Something that allows you to tell multiple stories within the framework of what genre and content you think suits the setting. It doesn't necessarily need to go beyond that, but you need it to at least work for those wider and more in-depth perspectives.
For a game, what you do in the game is the most important factor. A hack and slash video game or tactical combat ttrpg does not need a ton of world-building in regards to the food people eat in the setting. It can be a nice touch to have that fleshed out, but it is certainly not necessary. An adventure game is going to need a lot more put into the actual setting they're running around in, while a social game is going to need to focus more on the politics and viewpoints of the people. Magic or technology beyond what the player is capable of doing is often superfluous.
People tend to think that ttrpgs need to be hardcore simulations of a reality, but that's only one genre of them. What's more, incomplete world building can be an advantage to a ttrpg. If it evokes a creative response from its player base they'll put their own stamp on it. Game worlds that people can customize are some of the most powerful in ttrpgs. This is part of the reason that people like so much to just remake elves and dwarves infinitely. The baseline concept of the elves and dwarves is fun, but it invokes a creative response making people want to customize them.
Finally, obviously if you are world building just to make a world for no specific art except this guide to a fictional world and your own head? DO LITERALLY WHATEVER YOU LIKE. If you are not selling or presenting it to people outside small social circles, THAT IS ART JUST FOR YOU. I personally can't stand not sharing my art, once I start writing or creating something I need to show everyone it once I feel proud of it. However if you are making something just because you enjoy the act of making it, tell everyone who tells you to change how you do it to burn in a fire. Constructive criticism is obviously something you should take, but any asshole being like "errrr uhmmm, you can't make a setting that is a flat earth, that's not scientific--" then hurl them into the Sun.
I like to combine both. Make evil mountain a crater lake volcano and the hand shaped island is in the middle of the crater lake. Tectonic boundaries make mountainous chains, not singular volcanoes, you can put those literally anywhere in the water (hawaii). But it gives a good guide, like giving the idea to tuck the big kingdom into a mountainous valley on the coast. That boundary gives me tons of biomes to work in deserts, peaks, forests, islands, and most of the cities are oriented vertical.
So I do like to start with plate tectonics, but only insofar as to find my biome, shape of coast, etc. I can't make whole continents like that, so I stay regional with any contrivancy I can like an impassable forest, infinite desert, rock and ice walls or monster infested ocean and sea. Let's me chew on the world longer by pushing the boundaries out bit by bit by maybe going through the impassable forest so I can take my time with world building and not have to figure everything out at once.
The thing with world building is that it's only really important when it has an impact on the story.
If the world has 0 impact on the overall story, its importance is equal. The more impact your world has on the story the you need to need to explain it.
If you can pick up and drop your story into any other world, it's probably not that important. That is largely how I see it.
One feeds the other. In a world which has depth and consistency, the weird becomes weirder. And exploring either of them becomes fun.
Abandon that, especially when building for interaction, and I'll ask "how is that cathedral 300 m tall? Was it built by magic? Was it built over a thousand years?" And so on.
I just make whatever I'm obsessed with, and whatever helps further that in the way i want. After, i look at it and say "does this naturally unfold into a story?" And "do i like this?" And if the amswer to the first one is no, i either rework it, or make up things that lend to natural story-unfolding, and if i don't like it, i rework it or scrap it
Step one: Chose a singer for your soundtrack.
Step two: Go to a bar for inspiration.
Step three: Your crew gets into a barfight and you are kicked out.
Step four: Someone screams Jamaica.
Step five: You wake up and think: Who am I and why am I on a beach?
They create names by looking at history and taking inspiration from others.
I create names by using any gibberish that comes to mind.
Worldbuilding is inherently about limitations, so it's not about imposing them, but others imposing them on you. And it's often more effective to impose those limitations _after_ brainstorming ideas and engaging with the raw unbound creative process.
For my personal worldbuilding projects, I focus more on the science of it when I'm writing fantasy. I go less into it for fantasy especially for worlds that have magic. The fantasy story I'm currently working on was heavily influenced by gods. If something doesn't make sense, it's because of magic and probably has some in-world history behind it.
What I find is the best way to go about World building, at least for me, is using the butterfly effect. I find an idea that I like, and then create a world by justifying it. Why is this happening, or is this profession common? By justifying things, it expands your world, while also setting out clear cut rules that you can be consistent with when telling the story. It's a fantasy world, it doesnt need to follow real world physics or history. But it should be consistent to the rest of your world.
The real based move is to just use maps of Earth millions of years ago, like Pangea.
Tbh created ending then beginning which then followed with lore and timeline then a map was my process. I do recommend map 🗺️ because once I had landmarks (no tetonic plates 😂) and places it made it easier to write. It helped a lot
some of my favorite worldbuilding in stories can go in two completely polar opposite directions, from deep and complex systems that make the world feel real to the whimsy of multiversal bullshit