Worldbuilding while not being an autistic sperg

[Of The Deep]

in my opinion the best fantasy often incorporate real world culture, how much of fantasy is based off of myths and such. Find the ones that inspire you, and incorporate bits of it. Also, in making the rules of your world it does not matter how stupid they are, as long as it's consistent.

 

[McMitch]

Honestly, the end-all be-all of world building is understanding that it is, at best, the third most important aspect of whatever media you’re making, behind characters then plot. No one is really going to care about the world you make if they don’t care about the people in it, which is something that modern people trying to world build intentionally ignore. The best way to introduce your lore is organically as things become relevant in your plot. Trying to worldbuild around you narrative will return greater dividends than trying to plot within an already-highly detailed world.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I think a big thing to keep in mind is that you may have a temptation to use every idea that excites you and to try to make everything about your world interesting. I used to tinker a lot worldbuilding a scenario that was like the cartoon Skyland but in a post-apocalyptic dieselpunk Earth. Ended up overcomplicating the setting and losing track of the aesthetic I wanted because I couldn't help but try to give every state an interesting ideology and interesting geopolitics and so on and so forth.

Reality is, a setting needs to be kept skinny enough to be understandable and it needs "normal" things to.

This is probably a really unpopular opinion but I think an instance of this happening to a work that's actually published is the Kaiserreich mod for Hearts of Iron IV. They kept adding more and more shit to try to make every country feel fun and fleshed out that the whole world map is full of lolsoquirky three-sided civil wars and stuff, any one of which would be interesting on its own but collectively is just too much.

Honestly, the end-all be-all of world building is understanding that it is, at best, the third most important aspect of whatever media you’re making, behind characters then plot. No one is really going to care about the world you make if they don’t care about the people in it, which is something that modern people trying to world build intentionally ignore. The best way to introduce your lore is organically as things become relevant in your plot. Trying to worldbuild around you narrative will return greater dividends than trying to plot within an already-highly detailed world.

I think your advice is generally good, but there's a caveat in that you can have a high concept so intriguing that people will forgive other aspects of the work. However, it has to be something you can pitch and get people's attention, something that's immediately interesting and different.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

One thing that I think people don't factor in is proper geography. not just realistic looking landmass, but also tectonic plates, current systems affecting climates, which subsequently affect cultures and geopolitics. I have yet to see a single series with realistic geography.

I probably also mentioned this earlier, but one of my biggest bugbears is a medieval fantasy world with everyone speaking the same language or bring able to travel hundreds of miles and being mutually intelligible with the vast majority of people in that location. in reality, even moving twenty miles from your home town would result in you being in a place with a vastly different dialect from your own. One acceptable workaround is if there's either a pidgin or lingua franca used by certain elites or mercantile classes as a way of communicating with foreigners, but you'd still be limiting your communications with select groups of people.

I might have to disagree with the tectonics and geography part. One of the benefits of fantasy is that you are liberated from realism and can have clearly constructed, orderly worlds, like a world that consists of alternating concentric rings of land and water. Orderly parts of the environment can be explored in their consequences (how does society or geopolitics evolve around this strange landscape?). It can be explained as the gods did it/it just is what it is/fuck off. This all applies to nature, too.

I’ve been toying with the ideas of gyroscope worlds and ring worlds (not science fiction, naturally occurring) that rotate on a ring-axis.

 

[Registration]

I might have to disagree with the tectonics and geography part. One of the benefits of fantasy is that you are liberated from realism and can have clearly constructed, orderly worlds, like a world that consists of alternating concentric rings of land and water. Orderly parts of the environment can be explored in their consequences (how does society or geopolitics evolve around this strange landscape?). It can be explained as the gods did it/it just is what it is/fuck off. This all applies to nature, too.

I’ve been toying with the ideas of gyroscope worlds and ring worlds (not science fiction, naturally occurring) that rotate on a ring-axis.

As someone who studied geography kn university, you have to understand that every action or even inaction is defined by geography/space. Events happen all the time and the potency of such events are also related to the space where it occurs. Lets use a fictional example:

Imagine a society of mermaids undersea, they have a military mermen that uses metal weapons. Where does the metal come from? Are they scalping other boats flor parts? Are they mining it under gigantic pressures? How do they forge the weapons without a forge? Do they trade itens that can be only found undersea for other type of itens? Is it a magic metal? Are they near the coast or down in the deep? All these limitations and implications can be thought just by the idea of space in a realistic approach to a fantasy setting that gives much more life to it rather than just magic.

All the things and events that happen in our world has an explanation for it to happen. For example, sand and soil is the result of billions and billions of rock being destroyed. If you said that god created a planet with all these things already. It would bother me to no end.


Ah of course, the same applies to language, some words have a known origin like democracy from the greek demos, how do you explain the language being used outside the context of real life, do you chose to ignore or create an explanation to it?

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

As someone who studied geography kn university, you have to understand that every action or even inaction is defined by geography/space. Events happen all the time and the potency of such events are also related to the space where it occurs. Lets use a fictional example:

Imagine a society of mermaids undersea, they have a military mermen that uses metal weapons. Where does the metal come from? Are they scalping other boats flor parts? Are they mining it under gigantic pressures? How do they forge the weapons without a forge? Do they trade itens that can be only found undersea for other type of itens? Is it a magic metal? Are they near the coast or down in the deep? All these limitations and implications can be thought just by the idea of space in a realistic approach to a fantasy setting that gives much more life to it rather than just magic.

All the things and events that happen in our world has an explanation for it to happen. For example, sand and soil is the result of billions and billions of rock being destroyed. If you said that god created a planet with all these things already. It would bother me to no end.


Ah of course, the same applies to language, some words have a known origin like democracy from the greek demos, how do you explain the language being used outside the context of real life, do you chose to ignore or create an explanation to it?

Yeah but all that shit in your second paragraph doesn't require you to have realistic geology, that's just basic worldbuilding and thinking through how the society/economy works. Which, admittedly, a lot of settings don't do.

My Skylands-like constructed world, for example, had an Earth shattered into chunks of floating rock (these chunks varying in size from little boulders to entire counties), some moving, suspended around the Earth. The water of the oceans flooded back down to the core and settled into a single formless ocean.

The setting thought through the implications of this, of course the climatology was completely made up since there's no way to seriously try to deal with that, but there was things like farmland being extremely valuable and requiring huge amounts of irrigation while rare metals were plentiful (since the world is cracked open), and huge oil skims on the ocean that would be scraped up by oil harvesters.

The setting was driven by its alien geography (with physics handwaved), but it had economics and geopolitics that flowed out of the implications of its terrain.

Language is a massive problem and should generally just be ignored, there are a ton of common objects and verbs that have origins in some specific culture that if you are being consistent you have to completely mangle your writing. It's only really needed where you're dealing with some overly specific, more modern term.

 

[Gog & Magog]

I forgot this thread existed.
I asked Q&A if putting restrictions around racemixing in my own worldbuilding is too autistic. Here are their answers!
I appreciate everyone who responded. Even the one who told me to kill myself.
Edit: Realized I left some details out of my sperging which makes things a bit confusing. I do have a framework for the world, making it all both interesting and consistent with itself is important to me. I really do appreciate everyone who bothered to respond to my inane question.

 

[Pascal's Wagie]

You cannot do worldbuilding without being an autistic sperg. Whenever someone constructing a narrative participates in worldbuilding they participate in being autistic—regardless of medically recognizable developmental delays. To be autistic and to suffer from it is to be imprisoned in your own internal world. In order to do the stepped-down version of that, you have to be a little autistic; sometimes that's in you already or you train your normie brain to do it. Either way, it's not a bad thing.

So, you can do as much worldbuilding as you like. Research and outline for years. Let your world bible surpass the scholars of the Septuagint. Draft dozens of manuscripts. And show it to no one. Then will it finally stand firm when it rests on the bedrock only you can see. But what's the point of writing if not to share? The reader is going to enter the temple you've built to your mind. He or she is going to demand things from that world and test it. And if like in the story of Samson your world crumbles from the unexpected stress on this perfect yet undisturbed balance, you have only yourself as the author to blame.

If you know your world is a little shaky, then it's fine to let your reader see only the exterior things. But then like passing through a small no-name town surrounded by miles of fields, you better be traveling at highway speeds, blasting the radio, and laughing with your friends in the backseat to make up for it. Otherwise you're on the Oregon Trail, which ends with you vomiting and shitting water while also starving and dehydrated.

In the end, it's trial and error. You can do whatever you want, but what you can get away with is what counts.

 

[Raul Bloodworth]

if you absolutely must do a fair bit of world bulding, concentrate the autism within the narrative, focus it:

in-universe news broadcasts delivered by breathless autists, documentaries/ceremonies with long winded explanation built into the proceedings naturally/traditionally, gossip between characters (have both participants be your autists then fuck 'em off post-exposition if need be) figures of authority telling whoever what the score is parents explaining shit to (idk maybe autistic?) kids that kinda jazz

i guess my point is if you're worried you'll sound like a sperg then just carve out some sperg space that's not just narration.

 

[Pascal's Wagie]

i guess my point is if you're worried you'll sound like a sperg then just carve out some sperg space that's not just narration.

Exactly. A wonderful exemplary nugget of Hideo Kojima's genius is that Snake is a crypto-autist. (New subtext to Solid's inoculations in MGS1.) Kojima's sperging through Snake doesn't break Snake's character because anyone can easily clock Snake as a massive autist. The biggest mistake you can do is give a character encyclopedic knowledge of the world, or great skill in whatever fantastical technique outside of their realistic limits of experience and not give them the necessary trade-offs many autistic people deal with in the real world. Solid Snake is the ultimate soldier whether he wanted to be or not. It's written into his genetic code. But so is his father's latent autism now blossomed thanks to the Patriots' "vaccine"; in Solid's "inferior" recessive genes it is now in full flourish.

Maybe the unlocked and limitless autism was the only hope Solid could lean on to defeat Liquid. Did the Patriots know that, even if it meant their eventual destruction? Is autism a mysterious black box enigma that even a machine like GW can't crack? I bet the collective computing power of the global military-industrial complex couldn't compute the reasons why Snake didn't tap that Silverburgh ass.

Bravo Kojima.

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

It's very disappointing to see that this is not a conversation about how awful r/worldbuilding is.

Something Terry Pratchett did was to start out by taking typical fantasy tropes and asking awkward questions. For instance, he took Tolkien-style dwarves and asked questions like, if male and female dwarves are outwardly identical, what would their equivalent of gender politics look like? If there’s a Thieves’ Guild, what does that say about the criminal justice system in this state? How could a reptile breathe fire? Why don’t wizards solve everyone’s problems? As a result, what started out as a fantasy parody became a vividly-realised world in its own right.

I think looking into the implications of the way your world differs from ours is a good way to add depth.

The worldbuilding-heavy Discworld books were the least funny, and therefore the worst since it was a comedy series.

 

[Pascal's Wagie]

It's very disappointing to see that this is not a conversation about how awful r/worldbuilding is.

I don't browse specific subs, but I do google "(specific question) + reddit" sometimes. What sticks out about r/worldbuilding beyond it being on reddit?

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

Well, most people treat the sub solely as a venue to talk about their own projects, but it's rare for anyone to post enough material for users to start any serious conversations about, just "here's a map of the planet Xyz, hope you enjoy it!" or a spergy deep dive into cutlery in a world where people have only four fingers. Right now the most upvoted post on the front page is an illustration of different models of coffeemakers from a guy who spams his sketches of robots on a half dozen different subreddits. The narcissism of the posters really comes out when you see dozens of posts in one thread that start with "in my setting..." with no replies.

Also, the posters there waste massive amounts of time on TV Tropes and think that genre fiction is produced by adding up different tropes and cliches, which I guess isn't too far from the truth when it comes to YA (the missing ingredient is political indoctrination), which they consume in massive quantities, so you often come across posts with nonsense like "the BBEG in my dieselpunk/biopunk world is secretly an alien space bat with a dash of magnificent bastard". Story generating algorithms in the future will construct YA lit in a similar manner, I suppose.

 

[Erwin Rotten]

I don't browse specific subs, but I do google "(specific question) + reddit" sometimes. What sticks out about r/worldbuilding beyond it being on reddit?

R/worldbuilding and even r/magicbuilding are great in intention but terrible in execution. They give people the excuse to bring up all of this vague nonsense about their world and it usually results in them saying something like "how can I make a fantasy world without those disgusting European white people themes?" or "how do I make a magic system that's the cliche 4 elements without being cliche?"

The "builders" there don't write or make anything. They are just noise and remain unknown because reddit writing has been taken over by the mentality of "I'm doing this for me and for me to feel happy" which results in empty upvotes rather than an actual accomplishment.

I guess another way to put it is that people try to follow the examples provided from the hot posts and then they never intended on actually making anything or what they do want to make has zero consistency/focus.

As for actually world building without being a sperg about it, the key is emanation. Once I learned this technique, world building has been more simple than ever and my worlds tend to get praised.

The entirety of a world consists of only 4 things:

1. philosophy

2. geography

3. ecosystem

4. culture

You start with the philosophical idea(theme), you give it the setting, make the characters, and provide them with a culture that relates to the theme and something in real life.

The philosophical idea usually starts with ontology (being) which is in the form of 3 main categories:

1. Materialism(everything is of a physical world)

2. Idealism(there is a sort of dream world above the physical world)

3. Monism(physical and dream world are together and a third substance is above as a spiritual and mysterious world)

We like anthropomorphic animals in stuff like cartoons because animals are symbols and relatable, not because they are a strange creature that walks and talks. The relatability is from their humanization.

People get autistic about this when they do NOT relate to the audience. They instead do their own thing, have no real message or aesthetic, and it becomes a nonsensical mess.

One thing that fascinates me to no end is how autistic stuff like Sonic the Hedgehog is. It's an animal that's blue and wears big shoes which cause an ungodly amount of foot fetish porn.

The creators designed sonic so close to what they thought kids would like, that, lo and behold, kids liked it. Autismo kids went bonkers for it, because it's not realistic at all but it has all the symbolic things they enjoy. Sadly this is mostly fetishes, because autismos are trapped in their own toon world, and I do see it in a bit of a Freudian way where it's sexual even at a young age.

At least for how an autistic person becomes a sonic fan in the first place.

My point with that is that it's hard to avoid appealing to the autismo as a creator, but appealing to such doesn't mean the process was autistic.

The creators knew their direction, they understood the world they made, and that didn't go away until new knuckleheads came in and ruined it.

Same goes for current woke nonsense like Rings of Power. They went full sperg trying to get that show to be the propaganda it is. They didn't care about having the world make sense, they just wanted to spend money for their agenda. If anything, the best takeaway is to realize that whatever companies are doing now with race swapping and gender bending, just go for what was in the past.

We have tons of classics from the past. We haven't had many classics in the last 30 years or so. That speaks volumes. Not to throw the 90s under the bus, a lot of good came out of that time, but that was when world building was on its last limb.

The main reason is because modernism allowed the writer to work with emanation and postmodernism is a rejection of that.

Emanation has you go from the most broad concept towards the little things. Postmodernism begins with the little things and makes a structure with the broad concept maybe appearing.

Modernism was inspired by stuff like religious stories and romanticism which allowed it to all fit in a secure structure that a culture already was attached to.

Postmodernist stories now are more like "hey, I have an idea, and it's a rejection of what was popular somewhere. But it's okay because I'm adding minorities, so I'm sure the majority will care."

I can go on if anyone wants more information on any of the matters, but as you can see, the sperg aspect is attached to current postmodernist nonsense, despite the fact that postmodernist stories can have good world building when the person knows what they're doing. The problem is getting the postmodernist to pick a damn direction to begin with that isn't just pure propaganda and indoctrination.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I saw a genius example of worldbuilding the other day.

In the science fiction legal thriller The Unincorporated Man, there was this major event in the backstory called the Virtual Reality Plague, which basically was when virtual reality (in this setting, more like lucid dreaming than like a video game; you plug a computer into your head that is capable of simulating, with complete sensation, whatever your mind wants at the moment) became so popular that the world economy collapsed from everybody becoming NEETs. Because you could artificially simulate anything, people rapidly became extremely addicted to their fantasies and would do nothing but the absolute bare minimum to stay physiologically alive, and even then many of them would stay plugged in until they'd die of thirst or starvation. Because of that, the people of the future have cracked down hard on VR like how the people of Dune cracked down on AI. Along with other crises, the VR Plague played a major rule in creating a new dark ages.

In many a lesser work this would have been explained either in an infodump the first time VR plague/VR dictates are mentioned, or it would be brought up in natural conversation with the fish-out-of-water main character.

Instead, what the author has happen is that the character (a man awoken out of a several hundred year suspended animation) is brought to the Museum of Virtual Reality, a facility that all children are brought to (like Holocaust education in Germany). In it he's put through a 60-hour (but it feels like years) simulation where first it goes through normal fantasies, like someone using VR for real would have, and then it transitions into the life of a pre-Plague worker. He sees the way that the family is first exposed to VR through expensive yearly vacations, then the price comes down and it becomes affordable to purchase home sets, and they become more dependent on it. The miraculous nature of the technology is shown off. But then it also goes into their gradual degredation and addiction, how they and the people around them retreat inwards, stop eating dinners together, stop going out to meet with friends, stop doing anything but sitting in there with nothing but an occasional break. And the society rotting around them as the economy collapses (who is there to sell to), politics and diplomacy spiral out of control (no one is paying attention), and the whole world falls apart into nuclear exchange and famine and logistic collapse. Finally, it reaches a point where the father of the family decides to commit what has become a common form of suicide, disconnecting the new feeding tubes (that pump nutrients directly in) and overriding the safeties so that they will, without even realizing it, waste away to death - a mercy-killing in their unsustainable world - while drifting in their fantasies.

It's fucking genius, the author creates this fascinating museum that's a super cool concept in its own right and uses it to "show" the backstory through a flashback that's justified in-universe (and is harrowing to read, it was giving me chills), and he ties that exposition into later plot development.

Then, a while later in the story, when a minor character is found to be a VR addict, it hits with a whole different level of significance than if he'd brought it up before.


There's also another really cool museum in the book, not significant as writing but just creative, the Empire State Building has been encased in a hollowed-out super-skyscraper and is turned into a massive living history museum where every floor is dedicated to a different year from New York history.

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

New fantasy authors spend too much time worldbuilding. The setting isn't a story. No one will care about your ideas if the story isn't entertaining. You need likeable characters, and good pacing and tension to keep the reader turning the page. Interesting ideas are a side dish, not the main dish. If big ideas and cool settings were what made people read novels, then we'd be talking about Starship Troopers today. Nobody is talking about Starship Troopers today. People still talk about 1984, not because it has big ideas, but because it is a well paced story with tension that keeps the reader engaged from beginning to end. If Starship Troopers had a good story, it would be way more popular today, and it'd still have all of those big ideas.

What made the original Star Wars trilogy great was the character drama. If you look at the scripts, the scripts cut a lot of the worldbuilding in favor of having more character drama.

(This assumes people even release their book in the first place. It seems too many people are perfectionists who are afraid to release their book out into the wild and face unkind remarks, so they never release it. Or they create a dozen drafts and the end result has all of the magic washed out. You're going to become a better writer by turning out stories one after the other rather than just sitting on one story for years on end.)

Anyway, worldbuilding techniques: one of the reasons why Middle-Earth was so immersive was because EVERYTHING had a name. They cross a river, it has a name. They meet a character, he/she has a name. It gives a huge amount of depth to the setting, makes it feel like everything matters and has its place in the world. However, Tolkien's books were not about the worldbuilding. They were about the story. When his characters come to a new place, Tolkien introduces the name of the place, maybe a little bit of history, and moves on. He only goes into depth about things that are relevant to the story. In a Bradon Sanderson story, he stops the plot to spend several pages explaining the elaborate backstory of irrelevant things. Sanderson sucks at telling a fun story. His stories meander and the characters are off doing the wrong things rather than advancing the plot.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

World building is not writing a story. Conceptualize a plot then build off that. Think of elements you want to include and then think how those elements would affect the world your story is set in. You can then use the consequences to further the plot.

 

[Ingmar Aspergman]

in my opinion the best fantasy often incorporate real world culture, how much of fantasy is based off of myths and such. Find the ones that inspire you, and incorporate bits of it. Also, in making the rules of your world it does not matter how stupid they are, as long as it's consistent.

I’ll add a caveat that I am really sick of seeing worlds where the cultures are pretty close parallels to real ones, it would be nice to see some that can’t be so easily compared but usually in fantasy those are non-human.

 

[DoubtTheDictator]

R/worldbuilding and even r/magicbuilding are great in intention but terrible in execution. They give people the excuse to bring up all of this vague nonsense about their world and it usually results in them saying something like "how can I make a fantasy world without those disgusting European white people themes?" or "how do I make a magic system that's the cliche 4 elements without being cliche?"

The "builders" there don't write or make anything. They are just noise and remain unknown because reddit writing has been taken over by the mentality of "I'm doing this for me and for me to feel happy" which results in empty upvotes rather than an actual accomplishment.

I guess another way to put it is that people try to follow the examples provided from the hot posts and then they never intended on actually making anything or what they do want to make has zero consistency/focus.

Last time I hopped on to r/worldbuilding I saw some guy posting about a 1d world and how the creatures point the middle finger or some shit.(even though if a creature exited on 1d wouldn't it be just a fuckin point?) It feels like either there is questions on there was answered on world building stack 5 years ago or some fag telling people to ask what they think of their unoriginal world.

 

[$80 Nude Haircut]

>how do I build an elaborate believable fictional setting people will get invested in?
>no I don't want to do that nerd shit like read history or analyze/break down every little thing that goes on around me
>just tell me how to make people invested in what I wrote without having to think too hard about it

P.S. if you are actually scared of being viewed as an autistic sperg you are NGMI, ever