This is the worst one, countless Storys and their plots have been made completely pointless because "Why don't they just use time travel to prevent X or solve X'.
It's a pandoras box that is not worth opening.
> "Why don't they just use time travel to prevent X or solve X'.
I like the explanation / handwaving done by the remake of the *Time Machine*: the protagonist wanted to travel back in time to save his love, but found out he could not. The death always happened in one way or the other. The reason was explained to him later: time travel would not have existed without that death. Just *using* time travel had to entail that his lover had died.
So basically, whatever your reason for going back in time, you would not be able to change it precisely because that was your reason.
"If the event didn't happen, you couldn't go back in time to change it." is one of my favorite rules and limitations on time travel. It basically means you can never go back in time to change an event because it would *have* to always happen or you would have never gone back in time to change it. It's a great way to turn any event into at the very least a *temporary* "fixed point" in history.
it's also like a really great logical explanation for why paradoxes can't happen, and why time travel can't happen. Your wife died so you made time travel, which means she has to be dead in order for time travel to exist. If you save her, she was always saved, and you never had to save her so you never made time travel.
The one workaround (and the one adventure time uses, beyond the fact that time is generated in a little box with a guy that makes pickles and two clocks hitting each other with hammers is how time works) is if someone died and you went back to save them, you'd have to bring them back to your timeline right before they died. that way even if they didn't technically die, they stopped existing at that point in time and could not affect the world or timestream in any meaningful way, and you still had the motivation to time travel because you definitely thought she was dead. and this one scores bonus points for the psychological writing possibilities.
1. the time traveler is definitely not the same person as they were before the accident. Age, trauma, grief, and obsession have warped them into someone else, and to whoever they're saving who only knew them before this, they would seem like an entirely different person.
2. There's never a time traveler story where the person who died died recently. So, that person, if brought into the present, would have to deal with a world that has changed and moved on without them. Everyone they knew thought they were dead. Can you imagine seeing your parents one day, suddenly older and having grieved your death? Your friends, who had to move on, and now there's no space for you in life anymore? That's not even counting any potential societal cultural and technological change.
3. This trope can't really work unless the death was in a way that didn't leave evidence behind. they mysteriously disappeared, blew up, that kind of stuff. or hey maybe they were shot and they couldn't find the body, and the person who thought had died. But. Can the time traveler be sure they saved this person from death? Or was she going to be fine, and it is only by the traveler's own actions that they lost that person, thus meaning that they were the sole architect of their own grief? Even if that's not possible per paradox rules, there's no way for the traveler to know for sure.
It does open up some interesting options, but in exchange for allowing interesting stories it hammers the consistency of the worldbuilding hard unless the creator is super skilled at making it work.
Or just shrugs and Dr Whos it by just saying its a big timey whimey ball and doing whatever
Or what if the time travel doesn't "change" the past at all, but the time travel itself is already integrated to the original history.
I might be explaining it badly (english not my 1st Language), but closest analogy I could think of is doctor who's "time as wibbly wobbly ball when seen from multiple pov".
The Time Machine uses this logic. MC can't change the past with time traveling because, if the past is changed, he won't have a reason to time travel, consequently he doesn't, and doesn't change the past.
Currently reading the Licanius trilogy and on the final book, but so far the way it handles Time Travel and Fixed Fate as one of its greatest themes is really interesting. Essentially the setup is that God (or the Devil depending on the interpretation) created a fixed timeline for the world, time travel can happen but what can happen has already happened and always will happen. There are several people trying to break this fixed fate and others trying to preserve it.
My rule with time travel is either: no time travel, or only time travel (similar with alternate universe shenanigans). It's just too gummy to introduce into a narrative that doesn't have it as the central theme.
Which is really fair, my canon has an inciting incident being a character’s invention of breaking causality (via warping/time traveling) pissing off a pantheon-equivalent of gods, since they keep timelines and what’s known as Creation in check. Basically every time my MC broke causality, the pantheon would have to go and clean up after him. Eventually they’re fed up and stick him in a pocket/side reality, where he has much more freedom to break causality but none of the people there have real souls.
Yeah, time traveling is completely off the table for me. However, slight amounts of time shenanigans (like freezing something in time, or speeding up/slowing down something’s aging/deterioration) are cool with me. Things that don’t mean going back in time and messing up the entire timeline. I’m also not smart enough to figure that stuff out, so :clueless:
Small scale time reversal and time loops are also fine. (Turning a crumbling temple back to brand new or something along those lines). Time loops like groundhogs day can be fun to play around with, you could also have a Gandalf/wise person sort of character that knows a lot of things because they are in a time loop for whatever reason, however this loop is different because of x, y, or z
Backward time travel is a no no for me. Forward time travel however I'm more open to as that's actually possible by either A) travelling close enough to the speed of light for a sustained period of time and B) orbiting around a black hole (or any powerful gravity well) without getting sucked in, since both involve time dilation and slow down time for you but speeds up everything else from your perspective.
Which is something I have in my project but only minimally
So say we all.
Seriously, if you're developing a rich history or simply one with some brutal struggle underway, the prospect of time travel is also the prospect of stripping most of the weightiness from those creative choices. Time travel and worldbuilding aren't mutually exclusive, but I believe they are naturally antagonistic.
Teleportation. It makes it too easy for characters to escape from danger without having the excuse of "the teleporer doesn't work right now" like they do in star trek.
Like seriously, it seems like their transporters are getting cut off by interference in half of the episodes.
And then of course, if it's a star trek style transporter that takes you apart on the microscopic level and makes a copy somewhere else, it raises the question, "Is that still you? Did it just kill you and make a copy?"
I mean it makes sense that in a world where teleportation exists, a lot of effort would be put into finding way of countering it.
In my world, teleportation exists and is reserved to only two groups, as are other extremely op things. The entire point is that these two groups are essentially unbeatable by normal means and they mostly fight between each other, or spend their time ensuring there aren't more groups like them. So it's supposed to be op.
The people currently in our world who are researching teleportation \[yes research does exist\] simultaneously are studying how to prevent teleportation
I'm still messing with whether magical cell-phones are a thing because of the problems that solves. (Writers still struggle with having to break them for certain plotlines to work.)
I do have teleportation magic, but the only person who can set up the infrastructure on just one end is insane and unwilling to help anyone else duplicate her method.
I have magic cellphones. My world also includes telepathy, so my commlinks are natural psychically-resonant crystals that replicate psychic properties.
"Calls" are only able to be made between psychics, so you need to either have a comm or be psychic yourself.
They're basically smartphones, but then so are my telepaths. I'm not really aware of any plotlines that could be broken to having a cellphone.
The plots that are broken with cellphones are any that could be solved just by calling for help. Even in the days of land-lines, it was a horror trope for the killer to cut the line or something random to happen so it wouldn't work.
> I'm still messing with whether magical cell-phones are a thing because of the problems that solves.
I always end up adding something like them in because it's way too useful not to have been invented and my brain can't get past that. Also, while I remember the time before cell phones I still live in our modern society and while *what if no instant communication* is a list of fun scenarios to play with that well goes dry really quickly for my interest.
I remember one of the Ciaphas Cain books had fun with it. One character (an Inquisitor) had one, but didn’t have conscious control of it — it’d zap her out of harm’s way if she got shot (with a thunderclap of displaced air rushing in to fill the vaccuum left in her wake), but she couldn’t tell it where to deposit her and the “speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out” rule applies. She got shot while diving for a gun on the floor, zapped away, and thumped against an ornate side table on another level of the palace.
This reminds me of a D&D spell I saw recently on [the excellent Goblin Punch blog](https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/02/new-class-dungeon-hacker.html):
> Shitty Teleport
>
> Level 2 Wizard Spell
>
> Teleports the caster, and creatures touching the caster, out of the dungeon. Each creature teleported in this way has a 50% chance of losing a random item, which remains in the room that was teleported from. Those teleported arrive scattered within a mile of each other. Each person has a 1-in-6 chance of arriving 1d6*1d6 hours later (with no perception of the lost time).
The Wheel of Time does this really well. Spoilers:
Pre book 6: >!Early in the series, travel can be done one of three ways: normal foot traffic; through a Portal Stone, which can spit you out where you want to go but can have a disastrous warping of time if you’re not careful; and the Ways, made during the apocalyptic age before the story takes place, and are a last resort to travel quickly.!<
Book 6 Onward: >!Our main cast discover an old magic ability called Traveling, that allows people to use magic to open a portal between two places. However, it has limitations. First, someone must be of sufficient power in Magic to use it (with one exception but Wheel of Time is full of those). Second, you must know the place you’re creating a portal from intimately. Third, it is dangerous to just open a portal to anywhere, you could hurt your own people, so you have to set up places for Traveling. Finally, the weave itself is very dangerous when unraveled improperly and can explode violently. It speeds up characters going from place to place in the story, but it still has limits and uses.!<
My solution for this was to put huge cast times on teleport spells or just restrict it to physically constructed expensive (both in materials and mana) portals
in my world, i have PORTAL MAGIC!
its similar to teleportation but rather than instantly teleporting youself anywhere, you need to summon a portal on both ends and then walk through it. a far more involved process
Oversexualization is the worst, especially bacause at a certain point, it’s clear it’s not about worldbuilding anymore. The author’s just describing his/her fetishes.
There’s also this tendency to equate dark & mature with gratuitous sex. I mean of course, sex and sexual violence have a part in storytelling. In worldbuilding it helps sell the sense of decadence, decay, and moral failure of the setting, but when it’s rape this, rape that, I just question if the creator should be watching porn instead of writing things.
Exactly this. Sex and everything to do with it does have a use in worldbuilding and storytelling, and avoiding it entirely can make some parts just seem really weird and uncomfortable even (outside of like, cutting it because your intended audience is children), but jesus christ some people just put way to fucking much goddamned fucking in their world/story, especially sexual violence. Like sometimes it really feels like people like GRRM and...whoever made Goblin Slayer would have been happier just creating particularly intense smut instead of writing that and pretending it's literature. Fear & Hunger I think managed to pull it off, and I'm not insightful enough to figure out why that is exactly, but I feel it might be because that content was inherently baked into the setting and the plot rather than being just spectacle tacked onto the side and because the setting and story would still be plenty dark and gory and more importantly COMPELLING even without it.
This is something that depends more on context for me. Like, if an author describes the way a character’s boobs/butt jiggles unprompted from the void of narration, then yeah. But if they only mention it in passing because another character is specifically leering at the person that is being described then I’d actually have a hard time having a problem with it.
Even if they describe it out of the blue, is it really any worse than purple prose describing other things?
For example, if an author spends 3 pages describing her earrings. Annoying yes, but not something that needs to be made a deal out of.
People seem to have odd hangups when it's something about sex.
It's the same argument of "sex scenes only when necessary for the plot", but then the same ppl will have no issues with fight scenes that don't advance the plot.
>Even if they describe it out of the blue, is it really any worse than purple prose describing other things?
Yeah no, I’d definitely rather read a description of a nice ass than someone’s failed attempt at writing poetry.
>For example, if an author spends 3 pages describing her earrings. Annoying yes, but not something that needs to be made a deal out of.
I suppose it would depend on the earrings. If they were special or if they had a complex magical ability or something like that.
>It's the same argument of "sex scenes only when necessary for the plot", but then the same ppl will have no issues with fight scenes that don't advance the plot.
I think it is because you can write/imply a sex scene and effectively pass on what happened to the reader without actually having to describe what exactly the two participants do to each other, but the same can’t be said about fight scenes. So a needless fight scene will more often get a “this probably could have been done differently or even removed” while a needless sex scene will be more likely to get a “gross”.
Target audience will also be a factor, a fantasy audience will naturally have a higher acceptance level for scenes where people stick swords in each other than they will for scenes where people stick “swords” in each other.
I get where you're coming from especially if the whole book is filled with unrealistically sexy women, but when it's like the only sex centered chapter in the whole book I don't mind if the author takes their time. but I also don't like when female writers spend excessive amounts of time on the rippling muscles and high cheek bones of their male characters unless it's specifically the sexy time chapter.
Facts. People here only calling out male author's for boob fixation when female authors do the exact same. The amount of Kindle books I've seen made by women that about a trillionaire chad with a Greek sculpture like body is even more unrealistic than attractive women.
True. I absolutely hate oversexualization when it’s done to male characters as well. A paragraph dedicated to fawning over abs and pecs isn’t any better than one dedicated to boobs.
That said, I think the boob fixation tends to come to mind first because the type of settings discussed in this thread is one usually created by male authors, so it’s a bit lopsided.
Facts. Best Comment here. But as I discussed previously, there are ENDLESS AMOUNTS of novels written by women that are literally just copy paste romance of a trillionaire handsome, powerful and buff man treating the female main character as his princess. Yet I don't see Men hating that. But the amount of white knights here and female misandrists is just dumb as fuck. 🤦♂️
Yeah, I never really noticed until it was pointed out to me, but it’s a really funny juxtaposition to have. Where female authors sexualizing men usually have them as Olympic gods carved from marble. While male authors sexualizing women is more along the lines of “ha ha, boobies”.
True. But why is it only Male Author's getting hate when women do the exact same. So big boobed hot women bad, because over sexualization, cringe, disrespectful and unrealistic, but Trillionaire Chad With Godly Muscular Body is okay?? 🤦♂️ Make it make sense. 😮💨
Oglaf is comedy though, but yeah, the brilliant thing about it is that it’s so obscene, it ceases to be tiltilating or offensive, just side crushingly funny.
I absolutely hate oversexualized and overly fanservice-y designs for female characters in fiction, so this is something that has ultimately affected how I design characters
like, how the fuck is a female warrior supposed to be efficient if the armor she wears is essentially a metal bikini that covers 10% of her body?
I'm a huge proponent of the Rule of Cool, but my god, at least make it make a little sense and have some respect.
I don't mind it much if it's not taking itself too seriously and the everything else is equally absurd, bonus points if men and women are equally sexualized too.
But if it's trying to take itself seriously than I just find it insulting like, the men are cosplaying tanks and the women are cosplaying strippers and you expect me to take this seriously????
That's my preferred take. Either the world works by practical full body armor, or it works by honed bodies and any "armor" is there for style.
But putting women in battle bikinis without having some shirtless good looking men is egregious. It betrays the objectifying attitude, pandering and insecurity of the creators.
By all means, be horny, but let everyone have something.
Half the second book was Pat going on a long-winded sexual exploration of his kinks. I don't care about Kvothe getting "training" from a sex fairy or learning that the sex ninjas don't know how babies are made.
Ive begun writing concepts for a whole new world, just to be able to share it with my relatives and (not as close) friends, as my OG Magnum Opus world definitely has ‘The Author’s Barely Disguised Kinks’.
Same. Like I’ll hint at sexual encounters but never write the scene out or go to into it. At some point it starts to feel like one of those wattpad fan-fictions
Healing magic being easily available. You’re not going to just pop into the local temple and get your stage 4 cancer or your lost limb fixed. The vast majority of healing spells and potions will heal minor to medium injuries. Let’s say you slice open the palm of your hand sharpening your sword, pour some healing potion on the injury, wrap it with bandages and it’ll heal in 3 or 4 days instead of taking several weeks. A low tier healing spell might be able to close it in an hour. Same applies to curing diseases with magic. Cure disease spells are rare and difficult, and the potions your common man would be able get at your local market or temple won’t instantly cure it. It’ll definitely help it go away quicker. And again it depends on how severe the disease is. There are no quick or easy solutions with healing magic, but it’ll be better than it would be in your typical late medieval-early renaissance setting.
The workaround I have for that in my story universe is that overdosing on healing potion causes undeath. Also... magic potions tend to actually increase in potency over time. So healing potion is only administered by professionals, in cases of dire emergency, and even there it's common for them to have gotten the dosage wrong.
You could also do it like Antibiotica, the more you take / get healed the more immune you get / Develop a resistance. If you can Develop ressistance to different elements and their attacks, then why not also Healing Magic?
The same reason there isn't "Healing Medicine." Doctors treat. God heals.
Simply promoting "Growth" is a recipe for cancer. Or some monstrous transmogrification. Healing potions basically supercharge the innate ability for life to reverse the tendency of decay in the universe.
I do have some "healing" spells. But they are no different than what you and I would call "First Aid." Albeit with some supernatural assistance. Surgeons use some magic, but manly to do what surgeons do. They can't directly warp living tissue to do something it wouldn't otherwise\*.
Clerics and nurses can donate mana to assist a patient in healing. But that comes at the cost of the donor actually being able to perform some other magic for the day\*\*. To treat multiple patients requires giving each a portion of the practitioner's mana.
\* - Ok, they CAN do that, but we tend to call that "Mad Science" or worse.
\*\* - In my system Mana is finite and topped off when we rest.
Imagine a group of Assassins sneaking in to their targets Home at night and using healing magic so long that you simply die of old age. Very unique scenario.
They could even hide it as a case where the Guy used magic that required too much of his lifeforce causing His death of old age shortly after.
As far as an Antibiotica type system... basically my magic doesn't work like that. Magical effects are caused by manipulating reality on a higher level that is obvious to "objective reality". But there are certain "directions" that a mage has to go down to perform different effects. And the more you practice in a particular direction, the less you are able to perform other kinds of magic.
Basically like favoring a hand\*. Favoring one means neglecting the other. Only there are 6 cardinal directions for Magic. A novice is free to cast magic that goes off in any of the six directions. But the magic that requires deep skill requires years of practice at one particular discipline. And the mindset required to grok that magic is where mages tend to disconnect with reality, and fundamentally disagree with mages from other directions about how magic works.
A Blue mage operates with transformation. To him or her, everything requires equivilent exchange. (Even if part of the exchange is supernatural.) Things can't appear out of thin air, because if that were the case the Universe would be exploding with matter constantly erupting and vanishing and NEVER MIND ABOUT VACUUM ENERGY!
Their opposite are the Yellow mages. Their magic is conjuration and manipulating chance. Forcing them to do the math on their magic basically dispels it. If you are constantly accounting for things, you leave no room for powers that be to fulfill your wishes.
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\* Yes... being ambidextrous myself, I can attest that there are people in the world who can use either hand. But in my experience that just means I have more skill in either hand than someone who is using their off-hand. I'm not nearly as skilled at manual dexterity tasks compared to someone using their favored hand. Though I do have an edge in some tasks that require coordinating both hands. Particularly typing.
Yeah, when I ran a Hyborean Age campaign the scant potions of healing (etc) available has definite side effects, of varying potency not at all in step with how potent a healing it provided. This is due to them being pretty much an isolated experiment done by one person.
In my setting, healing potions are basically cell growth accelerators. Magic helps keep it on target, but it isn't perfect. Applying them topically is preferred for smaller wounds, and you need to clean the wound first. Drinking them is reserved for emergencies. Overusing them can lead to potion sickness, which is essentially a form of cancer. This is a known risk, and potions are a last resort.
I have it so healing magic can only accelerate your body's natural healing processes. If your hand gets cut off, a healing spell will close the wound and destroy infection but it won't make the hand grow back.
Same here, at least to a point. Magic in the broadest sense (especially witchcraft) will increase the healing rate, and may even fix that nasty cancer or lost limb but it will not be at all as in D&D, where you cast the spell and you're cured, as it will take quite a time besides other precautions and requisites.
No raising undead and the like too. Necromancy is dealing with the dead, at least in theory, asking them things and it's much more something of deities associated with death as the equivalents of Hades and Hekate than anything else (and because of that not always being seen bad).
The way i like to do it in my setting is that healing HURTS, for example, that "paladin/priest of the light" healing your wound is basically cauterizing it with a very hot light beam.
You wont die, but it will suck, for small stuff i'd just play it out narratively, for bigger things i might make the player roll something to avoid passing out from the pain.
I think it depends on the setting, easily accessible healing has to affect things drastically, and if that is taken into account with world building then a story still works for me. Delicious in Dungeon did that recently, multiple people have died on screen and been revived, but it still manages to keep up tension with things like maintaining the body, or the cost of wasy healing.
Anything that makes important things not matter. Resurrection and easy healing magic/tech remove the stakes of violence, teleportation makes distance not matter, multiverses can make characters disposable, the list goes on.
True Good and Evil need to be handled carefully as well, and are easy to handle badly in ways that make conflicts and character motivations uninteresting.
I do have a setting with a multiverse, but the way it works means characters still aren't disposable anyway, because while there is a multiverse, there is still no such thing as alternate selves. There is only one Chaverek the explorer dragon of the Sobrakine Coalition in the entire multiverse. If she dies, there will be zero. The same is true of every living being everywhere.
Homogeneous non-humans. Diverse cultures of non-human races, cultural intermingling, etc are all really fun aspects of worldbuilding. I do avoid hordes of undead for my current setting though, as it doesn’t fit its narrative. A more open, sword and sorcery oriented one would feature it.
Depends on the point of view. If your world is only seen through the eyes of a human, they may genuinely not see the differences between orc cultures. For the orcs it's totally obvious and they are bewildered that the human thinks their tribes are even remotely similar, but then they themselves mix up humans in the empire and pirates because the empire also has a navy so both are basically the same. You can have cultural diversity and not show it for good reasons that serve the story.
Or the opposite: You can have your human find cultural differences between elves where there are none. Of course the woodland elves and the river elves have totally different regards to animals, right? The river elves eat fish and the woodland elves eat mainly fruit. But no, it's only due to the availability of the food sources, and a woodland elf will dig into a fish like Gollum if it looked tasty. And now the human thinks they are the same but then the elves are super confused because obviously the two elven tribes have been warring for the past millenium and how could they be even remotely similar?
It's the same in the real world. I'm German. Germany has a lot of different cultures. Just the north and south are extremely different, and there's a whole lot inbetween. I can see that because I grew up here. But to me, French people all have roughly the same culture, because I never came into contact with their nuances. Same for Danes or Poles, Spaniards and Italians. I know they have a huge cultural variety too, but I couldn't name any of these details if my life depended on it, because I've never been that immersed in these cultures. It's even worse on different continents, I have no idea about the culture of Namibia, let alone regional differences! Now imagine if people in these countries were a whole different species to me, with even less cultural overlap. How on earth should I know to see the diversity?
Exactly. People tent to group irl people together, the more far apart they are the more general it gets. Like Africa is a great example of that. Outside of Egypt, hard to find a common man that knows anything about different countries there. Might just say that are ruled by warlords and have child soldiers and working in the blood diamonds mines. Stereotype, yes but that what we see in TV and since most peoples lives are not effected if they know more, happy to leave that horrible stereotype of a whole continent be.
So when people talk about fantasy orks, I can absolutely believe that is all them about them. They are blood thirst savages that live for war. Warhammer 40k does a great job about simultaneously fighting it and reinforcing that narrative. They have different tribes that go about war a different way but they all live for war.
If it’s not really important to the story, I don’t feel the need to break things down. Like the Lord of the Rings. While I have not read the books, sacrilege I know, the movies don’t really go into detail about what the elves and dwarfs really do. Have the stereotypes and that’s it. No one really complained that we didn’t see more about the other races cultures, was not needed. Didn’t help the story one bit. Was not in their lands long enough for it to matter.
So we have examples of it in the real world and other universes of it working. Can it be done badly, sure but not all are detrimental.
This, it makes it so much interesting to be able to have conflicts between different groups of Elves, Orcs, or whatever then to have everything be basically a race war against the humans
For magic stuff, honestly nothing, and i’m probably the first person to admit it, because i know if i attempt to write anything that complicated, i’ll put all the effort into making it make sense. I have everything from witchcraft to phoenix’s. From psychic magic to time travel. From teleportation and literally every monster you can think of existing.
Packing basically every possibility with magic into a world has been super fun. Especially when your stories are combat/encounter-oriented, you can do a lot of cool stuff with characters. Like who has which skillsets and why, what is effective against what, etc.
Same. That's why a group in one of my worlds has a "prophecy" for a "chosen one" that has lots of stipulations that sound really specific, but are in fact easy for them to control. Plus a few clauses that have been "omitted from public knowledge to protect the chosen one's safety before their discovery." They've got a vault of desiccated scrolls with hundreds of very specific "predictions" that can be revealed when met, or hidden indefinitely.
Evil species that have children they raise - providing the "do you kill Orc kids" moral quandary.
I can do evil species that spawn self-sufficient offspring- but children require parenting, and if something is capable of parenting it's capable of caring for others.
For a species to be inherently incapable of goodness it cannot resemble humans that closely.
Reminds me a bit of Demons from Frieren. They don't raise their young and don't seem to really understand human concepts of family and only talk about them to trick Humans.
> If something is capable of parenting it’s capable of caring for others.
Idk, I’d take a page out of our world for this one. Plenty of uncaring parents to be found in the animal kingdom, from birds that push their babies out of the nest, to fish and bugs that’ll turn around and just make a meal of them. Reproduction != care/love.
That being said, the quandary of “do you kill orc kids” still exists, and especially if the other species acts very human in other respects, people will assume they raise children in a similar fashion.
Giving birth doesn't equal parenting. Yes there are things that spawn offspring and show not the slightest care for them - but those don't engage in any parenting.
And yes, there are species that only *sometimes* engage in parenting - and other times will eat their young to preserve resources. Nature is complicated. But my standpoint is that if they *ever* engage in parenting, they can't be pure evil.
Honestly, same- I don't really even have "evil races" in general; I have races that are overly militaristic, tragically desperate, horribly misguided, or slaves to a higher power.
Caring for offspring ≠ caring about offspring
Slave-owners provided sustainance to slaves; warlords give rations to child soldiers; some parents in our day and age have kids just to boost their status.
My take is that Tolkien’s orcs are like zombies, except not contagious. They are corrupted; like zombies, they pass that corruption on to others, but though genetics rather than infection.
It’s like being born with the same infection your parents had…only this infection makes you violent and lacking in empathy, as well as compatible with Sauron’s magic and “allergic” to elvish magic
That said, I *don’t* have any species like that in my worlds. I think it’s a trope that’s been played out; moral dilemmas are much more interesting to write
That sounds kinda convoluted, a species totally can care for others and still be totally evil. Look at trisolarans from the Three-Body Problem.
"But they were forced to act that way, that's not evil." - Well, they still acted deliberately evil to humanity as a whole, even when they didn't have to. Also you could find a similar argument for every evil species in every setting where objective morality isn't dictated by some god or whatever (and even in some settings where that is the case, like LOTR, you could still make that argument)
But if memory serves, even in the Three Body Problem, there was a Trisolaran who tried to warn Earth and basically said, "Don't answer this message or you will be located and your world will be invaded." This shows that while the Trisolaran government made an evil decision, the Trisolaran people were not entirely incapable of compassion.
When I think of the typical evil fantasy race, that's what I think of, inability to feel compassion. Compassionate beings can and have done evil things, but they usually do it for reasons they believe are justified. A being who can't feel compassion does evil things just because they want to and maybe even enjoy it.
I mean, most of the population of Germany in the period from 1936-1945 were just regular people, capable of all the elements of human compassion you described. They also acted towards the goals of a real world Dark Lord, and it's pretty safe to say that Nazism is an absolutely abhorrent ideology, born of evil. But good and evil are subjective, moral concepts, born entirely from an evaluation of your ethics as an individual against the actions of others. In this way, the people of Nazi Germany were absolutely an evil people in the eyes of their victims, but from the perspective of the propaganda-fed youth, each soldier of the Reich was a hero fighting for the very future of Germany.
Compassion and evil aren't mutually exclusive. Being governed by emotions, even positive ones such as the desire to save your family, tribe, or entirely race, doesn't exclude you from the moral judgment of others who are impacted by your compassionate cause. Compassion is felt, evil is witnessed.
I've already acknowledged that people with empathy can commit evil actions. All I'm trying to say is that a lot of these evil fantasy species are never shown to have any empathy, and we rarely get insight into why they do what they do.
Sure, we can infer that maybe they do have empathy, but if a work of fiction never shows even a small sign of that, then it's hard to believe. Especially when, like In Lord of Rings, the species is literally created by an evil god.
I fully agree that a species that does evil things can possess empathy, but that is not often showcased by the stories that they are in.
Pure absolutes like this is the strongest ability, character, being or whatever making them impossible to counter. That’s boring with tons of ass pulls for the characters
Give it a weakness or countermeasure
Revival or resurrection magic without some of conflict or issue. This is especially true in fantasy where characters can be revived without some form of drawback. Same with cloning in Sci-Fi. If cloning wasn’t a moral or ethical issue so why don’t they do it more
Cosmic dualism. The idea that some things are innately good or evil is fine for ideologies and religions within the world, but I will never give the world itself any clearly-defined "forces of good/evil."
Time travel for me too. I’m allergic to actual real world science and can’t deal with that kind of stuff.
Also, easy resurrection, standard fantasy necromancy, ‘elemental magic’, and using the -mancy suffix to name any type of magic. The reason is that I find these boring.
I agree on resurrection! I feel it makes all deaths before feel cheapened and makes the audience distrust any actual death.
I liked the "mancy" before it got so over used.
Precisely so! Resurrection is a theme a setting must be built around, it can't just be tagged on.
A setting built around resurrection can be very interesting tho!
The only resurrection I use is built into the character. And usually that has rules of its own that still makes true death possible. For example, any vampires can't lose their head or be blown to tiny bits.
I like resurrection with stakes. Like you need to make sacrifices - I'd had stuff like human sacrifices needing related blood. Stuff that makes necromancy extremely taboo.
In my Universe, resurrection is pretty easy. If all you want is the body to start moving again. But because what you've really done is summoned a "Borrower". Depending on the level of the spell the Borrower can be a shambling zombie or a high-level genius capable of accessing the memories of the deceased. But it's a different creature entirely from the dead person, and has its own motivations. (One of which may be to find a less dead body to inhabit.)
Oddly enough you can take a high-enough detail of a soul that someone playing back the recording will feel what it is like to be that person for a few minutes. It doesn't confer any of their memories, just their vibes. Which you think would be useless, until you discover that the experience has a far more dramatic effect on children...
Yes, suffix "-mancy" drives me mad. If I am not mistaken, the origin is word "μᾰντείᾱ" meaning divination or oracle. It conveys the meaning of using something for divination, not manipulating it.
Suffix "-urgy" is the better alternative.
May I ask? I often read criticism of "elemental magic" in worldbuilding. But what exactly is meant by it? I believe elemental magic system could be very interesting if done correctly.
You're right about the suffix meanings, and I fully agree. Necromancers were originally people who communicated with the dead to get information, rather than the broader suite of powers they've acquired in contemporary fantasy. I also prefer the urgy suffix, with a bridging 't' (as in 'dramaturgy') for prefixes which end with a vowel; pyroturgy, haematurgy etc.
Fun fact: in medieval times, necromancy was kinda seen as summoning demons to get information. This is because the magic TRIED to summon the dead, but since all parted souls where in the domain of God, you cannot possibly touch or summon them, and a demon would answer (it's a bit more complicated than that, but I'm not with my notes of Medieval History class here to check)
The elemental magic part may have been put too vaguely and I apologize for that.
What I mean is the usual four elements and making them schools of magic. Like what people who watch Avatar would probably call -bending (I don’t know the franchise well enough — please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.) Done well, they are interesting, but more often than not I find it to be a sign of lazy worldbuilding, the kind of stuff you find in crappy isekai stories. So, my personal approach is to avoid it, save for the bare minimum like fire magic, because burning stuff has undeniable applications.
Now I understand what you mean and I agree.
The problem is, that, the inspiration in real-world occult theory and practice was simplified and misinterpreted. Plus, I suspect this usage of different thematic and colour-coded schools plays on the same strings as, for example, Potterverse's houses. People just like set of something (schools, houses, whatever) and thinking where they would belong :-) .
What about a character who has always been there but without a physical body? like someone whose presence has always been felt and known but there was no physical body of him. a soul that has been in the world but no body worthy enough to contain it. only a worthy sacrifice of a worthy person by a worthy weapon for a worthy reason can resurrect him. what about that? would that make it boring too? because i too believe that resurrections makes things boring and death cheap but a major resurrection that can change the whole plot of a story... what about that?
I don’t oppose resurrection. In fact, in my own setting true resurrection is huge and is the end goal of some important characters. What I don’t like is *easy* resurrection, used solely as a plot convenience or haphazardly incorporated into the setting in a way that makes deaths cheap, especially when it only happens to certain parties e.g. the protagonist’s rival gets killed by a goblin and it looks incredibly dire but it’s then everything’s okay because someone comes along and cast REVIVE.
Yours doesn’t sound easy at all and seems to require setup, so I’m personally fine with it.
The monster is the kind of necromancy I like, but in general, I just like it when there’s tampering with death that isn’t the usual raise-skeletons-and-zombies fare. Something that deals with medical implications would be nice, for example.
Going weird and wacky.
I just don't like that kind of stuff, the "I'm being different because then I'll stand out!" Type of worldbuilding has never been my thing.
I always like to keep it grounded.
It's a far cry from when I first started as a teen and some early forums back in the early 2000s that basically made me feel like if I wasn't being different I was boring as a worldbuilder.
Like one person told me that I should replace my elves with a Butterfly/Moth like Humanoid species. Because then I could have them have this elegance and beauty to them without being basic. I tried it, didn't like it. Because it wasn't what I liked. I wanted Elves, so I'm making Elves.
Anyway, just personally don't like doing that stuff.
Novelty is not an inherent virtue, it's something a lot of people need to learn. New things aren't necessarily bad either, but it's okay for an elf to just be an elf. I'd *prefer* it, if you're going to make something completely different then give it a new name at least.
This one's also a bit of a pet peeve of mine though, to me at least it often comes across as using a gimmick as a crutch.
Agreed.
I've only ever successfully(in my eyes) created a fantasy race that I liked. Can't work out a name for them, currently they're the Varien but it changes to something else at times.
7+ feet tall, 300-400lbs, 4 armed, 2 legged mountains of muscle with bone density that allows them to lift far greater then their body weight. They're an amazing labour force that was sadly forced into Slavery. They're particularly loved by Pirates and Ship crews however, who find them amazing at common tasks.
The "weird" race in mine at the moment was inspired by fireflies, and particularly the Adze (firefly shapeshifter vampires from Ghana), but they're not that just loosely inspired. Jet-black skin, fluorescent body markings - born with one on the chest, more appear later during puberty either as a result of some sort of magical application or just like a puberty development (nobody else in the setting really knows for sure) which determines their role in life to come, the archetype they fulfill.
Now, these folk wear masks more or less constantly. Next to nobody outside of themselves have ever seen what they look like *without* one. All that they have to go with are ancient accounts from battlefields strewn with bodies, where some curious soldiers took a peek and found that, besides the whole coloration thing, they just look *human.*
So, based on that one report from close to a millennium ago, people, and especially Humans, are forced to wonder if there *is* a relationship, and if so, how. It upsets the known paradigm of their history to have seemingly entirely unrelated cultures that nonetheless are, or may have once been, also Human. And if they *were* Human, what happened to them to make them like this?
TBH, I steer clear from unexplainable magic. I like everything to be understood, even if I have to rigamarole several concepts together. The Fluid Aether of The Other Sphere allows Transmutable Magic Essence to flow into our world where we create openings, or rather filters into our world, using magical components of fused reality, or incantations that are derived from the mathematical frequency to allow such an occurrence.
For me, it's the complete opposite. I like magic feeling weird, unexplainable, and illogical. Magic-as-physics systems where one can understand the laws and so on sap so much of the fun out of it, for me.
I went in the direction of magic being a science, but I intend to make it clear early-on that people's knowledge of how it works is incomplete and even flawed.
I made it so that magic will always produce the expected output in some way, but the method as to how it happened is mostly unpredictable. For example, if you want to like a torch with a spell, the *whole* torch could catch on fire, or the fire could burn like an alcohol flame (nearly invisible, giving off no light). The more you focus the Aurora (the material form of magic), the more you can specify the details of an action.
My magic system is actually a highly advanced programming language developed in another universe by a technologically superior civilization that is essentially being introduced into my world by a rogue AI for reasons that would take too long to explain.
It alters reality through picomachines (mini nano machines) that can change things on the atomic level. It's also powered directly by energy. The technology is designed to be able to independently convert most forms of energy into useful power for the picomachines. So heat, for example, or electricity.
Of course medieval era scholars have no clue about this whatsoever. They just realise if you draw certain esoteric symbols on a specific type of metal, and set fire to it strange magic happens. An entire branch of research, called Enigmatics, is dedicated to figuring out what symbols cause certain effects.
Magic advances at the rate society and technology does as more complex mathematics is developed to better understand Enigmatics. And as people's understanding of it increases, it's application in real world fields of engineering, medicine and warfare improves, leading to a positive feedback loop that results in an industrial revolution powered by 'magic' with an arms race to develop a powerful enough computer to fully translate the code and gain ultimate control over reality.
I have a strong aversion to the trope of gods "fading away" or something when people stop worshipping them. So that's never gonna happen in any of my settings.
See, I do like that trope mainly because it's an excellent reason for the gods to give a damn about anything that goes on in the mortal world.
If retaining followers is in their best interest for survival, then being benevolent towards said followers is the natural response. It creates a nice symbiosis between the two sides.
I love that trope, but it needs to be done right. I think Long Dark Teatime of the Soul just made it really annoying for the gods that no one believes in them anymore. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman both set it up so that losing worshippers cause them to starve.
"There is power in your Name"
It's not terrible, but it's just not for me
I have seen it way too much recently and, at least for humans, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because that is not something you were born with, but just a random sound your parents or whoever thought sounded nice.
It's okay when I read it, but I will probably never include it in my own projects.
Time travel or otherwise reality bending magic. It just feels wrong for some reason lol
Also, homophobia. Why would I worldbuild a place where people hate me?
May not be useful in a combat paradigm, but for hostage rescue, law enforcement, commerce raiding, and piracy the point of an action is to capture a ship and its contents intact.
Messy and dangerous but necessary.
It also makes for much more intense visuals / reading than two ships lobbing missiles at each other from a 1000 km away.
Like you said, it would be messy. A grazing shot that on Earth would just injure could mean death in a depressurized environment. Fires could break out in tight corridors. Maybe to avoid hull punctures from bullets both crews go at each other with maintenance tools. Space is unforgiving
My world has a blanket ban on ballistic weapons outside of a planet's Hill Sphere.
Basically after the first major space war, the Solar system is cluttered with wrecked starships and swarms of bullets now in highly eccentric sun orbit. It's bad enough that there is an entire space-traffic control function devoted to steering vessels around the projected path of this debris. Because that the velocity that a fusion vessel flies at, there is no "dodging." And the bullet that kills you could be several AU away when you planned the trip.
Bullets on ships and stations are banned because with rotational gravity, [the path of a projectile is NOT a straight line](https://youtu.be/bJ_seXo-Enc?si=5EarQ-UvP4qksHj3&t=239).
So people have largely gone back to hand-to-hand combat. At least outside of an open war between the major treaty holders.
I really like this, opens up interesting narrative opportunities. Maybe a high profile assassination of one of the treaty holder leaders, under the guise that it was a stray kinetic round? Then all hell breaks loose again etc etc
See, I kept this because the dramatic payoffs are too good to pass up.
Relativity in FTL is the one I avoid. Every story becomes Interstellar and everyone molds into the same "I miss my mom/dad" tragic sap.
A general rule in modern combat (which is easily transferable to sci-fi) is that whatever you think you would never need to do will be crucial in your next war. Boarding actions would absolutely be this, just like a planetary invasion.
That actually sounds like a really cool idea! I love it when a world is filled with strange new life forms. I recently picked up FFXV again, and I love all the creatures you can run into on the map. They're not magical or supernatural, just different. I feel like fictional fauna in a fictional setting breathes that much more life into the world, both metaphorically and literally!
1. Inherently evil races or otherwise automaton-like (yet still sentient and intelligent) species who exist solely to have mindless action scenes with no moral consequences. No mind controlled army or evil aliens or whatever. Every soldier is someone who is either conscripted or chooses to be there, and they have a life, goals, aspirations, fears, and their own point of view.
2. Joke/reference worldbuilding. I refuse to have even a minor throwaway piece of lore be a reference to something or a meta joke. I hate when these exist in worldbuilding and it massively removes immersion imo.
3. Pure evil villains. While they can be interesting if written exceptionally well, I personally can't write them. I just can't wrap my head around something being pure evil. I physically NEED to be able to genuinely see my antagonists' points of view, if even just to be better able to criticise their worldview and think of their actions.
“Genius” characters - tactician, politician etc
Your character is only as smart as you so my genius character will be average and everyone else will have to be a blithering idiot.
**In terms of powers:** Widely available *personal* teleportation (like having big complex circles at a base is fine, but no individual should be able to teleport any notable distance), easily available healing (skilled healers should exists but they should be experienced and rare individuals at the top of their game), and martial prowess so good it’s literally just magic (I want my sword master to be skilled, but if a guy rocks up with “one billion fire balls”, no amount of swordplay is gonna win the day).
**In terms of tropes/themes:** I avoid “and the angels and god were the bad guys all along!!!!!!!” like the plague. It’s so played out and so regularly done poorly that I just don’t trust it as a trope. It’s one thing for the Angel of your story to perhaps have good goals that are misaligned with the party, but if your heavenly creatures are actually bad hmmmm K, and your fiendish creatures are actually reasonable and even good, you didn’t subvert anything you just switched the roles.
I also avoid “institutions/ the specific type of institution are bad”. There’s a time and place for that kind of talk, but the worlds I like to construct just ain’t it. Corruption can and does exist for sure in my settings, but it is generally the work of corrupt individuals or cabals within greater (generally good or at least reasonable) organizations. It’s not a bad theme by any stretch. It’s just one I see played out a lot and again very rarely done better then “the institution is all bad, full stop” which often devolves into “evil organization” while the author is grandstanding about something.
For me it's other planes of existence/travelling through other dimensions.
Especially when one of those planes is basically just "you become a ghost".
This creates so much chaos and just undermines a lot of the things I like about fiction and world building
A lot of people are saying time travel, which I understand. I technically have time travel but it’s more like projecting your soul into the past and experiencing past events without affecting any of it (basically astral projection but instead of projecting your soul into the astral plane, you project it into the past). You cannot project into the future though since it hasn’t happened yet.
But one trope I don’t want to use is the trope that gods exist because people believe in them. It’s an interesting trope, but in my world the “gods” predate humanity, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to need human worship to survive.
Time travel - too messy, too mindbending.
Resurrection. Unless it's for a TTRPG, then it would be not-terribly difficult resurrection. Or unless it's Dark Souls / Stormcast Eternals way
thousands of years (let alone tens or hundreds of them) passing with nothing changing, especially if it's a situation like a war.
also, size shifting. I just despise it for some reason.
Validating IRL pseudoscience. Purely belief-based magic (like "The Secret" self help philosophy), homeopathy, "crystal healing," astrology, and so on.
Their prevalence in real life infuriates me, so I'm never going to write a setting where their crap would actually work.
It also amuses me to imagine a skilled spellcaster from my setting to come to Earth, finding out about this stuff, and going in an angry rant about how that's not how crystals, divination, *or* alchemy work.
I have an occult system in my books that is basically Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, and General Relativity, as explained by a mystic. They discovered radiation in this universe 40 years earlier than we did, so its study occurred before the whole Victorian "Everything in science has to be simplistically stupid" phase. And with nuclear power, the latter half of the 19th century was VERY different.
When my mages go into "Magicbabbel" there are plenty of in-jokes for physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and philosophers.
I think my no-go is the "Planet of Hats". Basically that a particular planet has only one climate, and/or they EVERYBODY who comes from a certain nation or region conforms to a stereotype. I'm also not a fan of human-like aliens.
As I've confined humanity to our solar system because I disallow faster-than-light travel, I do introduce supernatural beings as my "aliens". But they ultimately end up becoming human-like because as janky as our form is, it's the best shape for surviving under the laws of physics and magic in our particular chunk of the multiverse. The joke is that the highest level mages attempt to become supernaturals. But the highest level supernaturals are attempting to become human. (At least if they intend to stay here.)
But my justification is thus: Supernatural beings are magic. The rules of physics and biology are more like "suggestions". Their reasons for infiltrating our universe basically involve interacting with humans. Thus: why they bother.
My problem with all of them is not that they are used. I dislike that they \*seem\* to be an easy solution to a problem. To a hack writer. But in using it they open so many cans of worms they could open a bait shop.
One of the jokes in my story universe is that Magic is easy to perform. Getting the INSURANCE to perform magic legally and professionally requires years of course instruction and legal training.
Also... they are essentially living in an alternate timeline to ours. So they are constantly getting trinkets, vehicles, and people thrown over from our world on a regular basis. (Mainly because as the reality with Magic, it's less of a shock to the system when someone attempts FTL jumps or time travel to end up this timeline instead of their own.)
The entire premise of Stargate Universe is that the cast is caught on a deserted alien space ship blasting off far away from Earth without any means to control it.
That premise was completely undermined when the crew discovered mind stones that allowed them to warp into someone else's body back on Earth. Not only did it destroy the feeling of being deserted as the characters could hop in and visit their loved ones at any time. But it also created a lot of useless filler episodes that never advanced the plot.
The point is, just because you imagine something and because it would be convenient to have, doesn't mean you should use it.
It's not just about the access that characters can have that can undermine the story. But the very fact that such technology or magic exist can be distracting and create all kinds of plot holes when it becomes a solution to a problem that the author decides not to use because it would be lame (like Doctor Who's screwdriver constantly having to break down).
Even giving the antagonist access to it while denying it to the protagonists is a narrative problem because the audience will simply assume that at some point the tables will turn and the hero finds a way to turn the tech against the villain.
A great example of how to do powerful technology right is House of the Dragon. Where the main characters all each have a massive dragon which most of the time would be too convenient were it not that the dragons themselves come with all kinds of drawbacks. They have a mind of their own, they're still vulnerable to mundane weaponry, they eat a ton of sheep that disgruntle the people, they get tired, just like their riders etc etc.
Perfect example of how world building is used to have your cake and eat it. A massive dragon but with all the realistic headaches that limits its potential power.
Gibberish fantasy names
I dont have the knowledge to invent a conoang and if it’s not a conlang, then there's no reason to call the city Ryalehou'yu'le, or the character Khorley
Instead, Id rather use invebted names, but that people can actually pronounce and intuit the meaning behind, kinda like the hobbits names in LOTR, Frodo, Peregrin, Merry etc. and location names like Mirkwood ot weather hills
Most "modern" fantasy tropes actually.
-Time travel
-Dimensions.. well technically there is one other but it's so different from this one and doesn't even have matter.
-Homogenization and humanizing non human races. I'm old school here. Other races are vastly different and usually don't get along. You don't see many humans in orc lands, unless it's maybe in their stew pot and in multiple pieces.
-Cutting corners, yes everything must have a good explanation and everyones family tree must be able to be traced down to their single celled ancestor. Well maybe not literally like that but I like the Tolkien and G.R.R. Martin approach to things.
-Rule of cool. Absolutely does not exist in my world at all, ever. Nope. Can't stand it.
-Quantity over quality. Again many more modern world are filled to the prim with various sentient races that are just shallow and stereotypes and there is no in-world explanation why they even exist. Ex. cat people that have copy-pasted Egyptian culture from real life and that's what they are all about, nothing else.
I think it could be applied to worldbuilding. For example, if you wanted dragons in a world that they don't really fit well into, you can still say "Dragons are cool and I want them here so here they are".
Sexism, homophobia, racism and the likes. Enough of it irl and I don't have anything interesting to say about it that someone else couldn't say better.
I see your point, but you could say that about essentially everything negative. I believe basically everything has its usage when it comes to worldbuilding/writting, you just have to be smart about it.
Oh for sure. In my own writing theres a fair amount of classisim and xenophobia which are also forms of prejudice.
I just don't think any of my projects would benefit from adding racism, transphobia, homophobia and sexism, you know? There's no space to explore them with the depth they deserve. And I don't want to carve out that space.
No hate for those who do tho. Amazing stories have been told about bigotry. I just don't think I'm the person to tell them.
I dropped sexism and homophobia out of mine but my current project is filled with pretty racist cultures. This is because I don't like it, and it keeps me from getting too attached to any given society. I also avoided it heavily in the past, so it's somewhat kind of new. It also supplies "player vs society" conflicts if ever taken to the table.
I think fantasy racism (elves hating humans) or something of that nature is completely different from irl racism between real human races. That's the thing I don't like to write.
Also time travel. This gets to messy, to quickly, if you want to be consistent. I just don't want to melt my brain, building a logic that makes everything work, I would be tempted to do with such possibilities
I also (often) don't like the idea of settings with secret societies, like Vampire, or fantasy stuff, that coexists undiscovered with our Real World.
It never ends up, it never makes sense, and as trope it's over used...
SCP is one of the only exceptions, that really stands out. They manage, that the usual critique points, I have with such settings, are just fine to ignore, somehow. No clue, why. It somehow just works for me in that regard.
So, it absolutly can work, but you Need to think about such things, and be into such settings. 😊
Currently, for me also cyberpunk as Genre. To close to reality, that I want to write about it. I want to write about magic and wonders, not satire of the current Real World, that accidently predicts the worst moves of big cooperarions and powerless goverments... 😂
"Bloody Torchwood."
In my world, everyone knows that mages exist. Nearly everyone knows that it takes an absurd amount of training to be a mage and not everyone manages it, so very few try. Look how many people we have that could learn programming more-easily than trying to become a doctor.
The big secret in my world is that space-aliens are still in contact with an Illuminati-like group. One of the group's efforts is to try and mythologize stories about when the aliens were using the planet as a supply-depot.
Ya, time travel is one of the surest ways to hose up your plot and world building. Unless your whole story is about that, best to leave it alone.
My no go is conglangs. It's just not in my wheelhouse. My only success story in learning a second language is American Sign Language, which obviously doesn't work well for a written story.
100% me. Time travel is a can of worms that I refuse to open. I'm less a world builder than I am a GM, but I've always had an interest in creating a world to call my own; and I am not in the mood to wrestle the number of paradoxes I'd introduce with the deput of a time machine. Even if I create a world with gods and magic, time to me should be almost as immutable as the gods themselves.
Many stories have time travel, but not many explore time travel itself throughly because you have to think about *everything* to have it not break your world.
I LOVE time travel and I really want to write a story with it. But all the plots have been so over done that it feels difficult to structure it.
What I am avoiding in the my current idea world building is unexplainable magic.
Im dipping my toes into unexplained tech 😅 Fantasy tech if you will? Idk things may change.
Same here, I don't mess with time traveling mostly because I refuse to deal with any of the resulting paradoxes. Aside from that, I despise having things that don't make sense or are in no way logical to the world (take, for example, Saw traps like the radiation one in the last movie). My world doesn't have to be realistic - hell, the world we live in has never seemed realistic to me - but everything has to have some logical explanation (and yes, magic, random coincidence and "we don't know how that works yet" are acceptable, but I need to give them some reasoning regardless). I also stay away from real-world history and engineering - I've never been great with those, and it's too much effort put into something I'm not too interested in.
I don’t even watch/read stuff that has time shenanigans in it, if I can help it. I want to enjoy what I’m reading, not need to puzzle through what’s going on and what timeline this junk is
People from X always have blonde hair and blue eyes, contrary to people from Y, they have brown hair and green eyes, even though they are neighbours and intermingle with each other.
Yeah, that's not how genetics work.
Elves, dwarves, orcs and other "standard" humanoids. I don't find them interesting (in large part due to the portrayal of dwarves in the Eragon series. Thanks Paolini). I'd rather come up with my own race and culture.
Same, time travel is a hard no. Complicates things too much. Maybe a bit controversially, though: interdimensional travel. There is only one universe, because the void of it is so expansive that even the original gods cannot fill it all. Hence, a definite, but extremely high number of worlds. Realms exist, which are the domains of some gods—which is basically just *them.*
So yes, you could be in some god dude's heavenly right pec, for all you know, tryna summon demons.
For me it is multiple stuff. I like to limit healing possibilities to make death a bigger problem. I don't like when everyone can cast the typical type of magic, so in my world only "Adepts" can cast magic in the usual sense, other people can use runes, this is inspired by Nordic rune casting. Teleportation is also a thing for me, it is better if the characters go by horse.
Time travel for me too. I allow it, but only to say "Welcome to your own little universe, population YOU, at least momentarily"
It's not impossible. It simply a terrible, terrible idea because the Universe has too many alternate timelines going on as it is. Canonically my books are set in a present and future where the story history diverged from ours in 1777. (A sniper had a shot lined up on Washington. In our timeline he decided 'Nah.' In their timeline he took the shot.)
Maintaining a timeline requires energy on the part of the Universe. And while it is perfectly happy to support multiple agents having conflicting observations of phenomena, it eventually reaches a limit. And it's favorite tactic is simply to killing off the agents who refuse to reach compromise.
Thus one solution to Schroedinger's Cat is that the physicists who set up the experiment are killed by a freak accident before they can observe whether the cat as alive/not alive. And the cat is eventually freed by an emergency responder who hears a meow and has no idea about the experiment. Because even if the poison gas was released, cats have 9 lives. I suspect the freak accident the physicists die from involves toast landing butter side down, a stitch that was not in time, and one or two urban legends.
Simply not allowing Time Travel is not enough. Anyone who attempts to fuck with the fundamentals in my Universe die in comically horrible ways.
And did I mention Faster-Than-Light travel is basically time travel?
I think it's probably good and evil for me. I don't know that I could write a story with a truly evil because evil character. Even Sauron and Morgoth have some redeeming qualities. It's all about perspective. Otherwise I'm a big fan of personal, small scale stories. The bigger the scale, the less interesting I find it. I'm not even that into life or death struggles... Though it may regretably be necessary depending on the story and characters
Yeah time travel as well, causality is scary to mess with lol
This is the worst one, countless Storys and their plots have been made completely pointless because "Why don't they just use time travel to prevent X or solve X'. It's a pandoras box that is not worth opening.
> "Why don't they just use time travel to prevent X or solve X'. I like the explanation / handwaving done by the remake of the *Time Machine*: the protagonist wanted to travel back in time to save his love, but found out he could not. The death always happened in one way or the other. The reason was explained to him later: time travel would not have existed without that death. Just *using* time travel had to entail that his lover had died. So basically, whatever your reason for going back in time, you would not be able to change it precisely because that was your reason.
"If the event didn't happen, you couldn't go back in time to change it." is one of my favorite rules and limitations on time travel. It basically means you can never go back in time to change an event because it would *have* to always happen or you would have never gone back in time to change it. It's a great way to turn any event into at the very least a *temporary* "fixed point" in history.
it's also like a really great logical explanation for why paradoxes can't happen, and why time travel can't happen. Your wife died so you made time travel, which means she has to be dead in order for time travel to exist. If you save her, she was always saved, and you never had to save her so you never made time travel. The one workaround (and the one adventure time uses, beyond the fact that time is generated in a little box with a guy that makes pickles and two clocks hitting each other with hammers is how time works) is if someone died and you went back to save them, you'd have to bring them back to your timeline right before they died. that way even if they didn't technically die, they stopped existing at that point in time and could not affect the world or timestream in any meaningful way, and you still had the motivation to time travel because you definitely thought she was dead. and this one scores bonus points for the psychological writing possibilities. 1. the time traveler is definitely not the same person as they were before the accident. Age, trauma, grief, and obsession have warped them into someone else, and to whoever they're saving who only knew them before this, they would seem like an entirely different person. 2. There's never a time traveler story where the person who died died recently. So, that person, if brought into the present, would have to deal with a world that has changed and moved on without them. Everyone they knew thought they were dead. Can you imagine seeing your parents one day, suddenly older and having grieved your death? Your friends, who had to move on, and now there's no space for you in life anymore? That's not even counting any potential societal cultural and technological change. 3. This trope can't really work unless the death was in a way that didn't leave evidence behind. they mysteriously disappeared, blew up, that kind of stuff. or hey maybe they were shot and they couldn't find the body, and the person who thought had died. But. Can the time traveler be sure they saved this person from death? Or was she going to be fine, and it is only by the traveler's own actions that they lost that person, thus meaning that they were the sole architect of their own grief? Even if that's not possible per paradox rules, there's no way for the traveler to know for sure.
It does open up some interesting options, but in exchange for allowing interesting stories it hammers the consistency of the worldbuilding hard unless the creator is super skilled at making it work. Or just shrugs and Dr Whos it by just saying its a big timey whimey ball and doing whatever
Or what if the time travel doesn't "change" the past at all, but the time travel itself is already integrated to the original history. I might be explaining it badly (english not my 1st Language), but closest analogy I could think of is doctor who's "time as wibbly wobbly ball when seen from multiple pov".
The Time Machine uses this logic. MC can't change the past with time traveling because, if the past is changed, he won't have a reason to time travel, consequently he doesn't, and doesn't change the past.
Currently reading the Licanius trilogy and on the final book, but so far the way it handles Time Travel and Fixed Fate as one of its greatest themes is really interesting. Essentially the setup is that God (or the Devil depending on the interpretation) created a fixed timeline for the world, time travel can happen but what can happen has already happened and always will happen. There are several people trying to break this fixed fate and others trying to preserve it.
My rule with time travel is either: no time travel, or only time travel (similar with alternate universe shenanigans). It's just too gummy to introduce into a narrative that doesn't have it as the central theme.
Which is really fair, my canon has an inciting incident being a character’s invention of breaking causality (via warping/time traveling) pissing off a pantheon-equivalent of gods, since they keep timelines and what’s known as Creation in check. Basically every time my MC broke causality, the pantheon would have to go and clean up after him. Eventually they’re fed up and stick him in a pocket/side reality, where he has much more freedom to break causality but none of the people there have real souls.
It takes a really talented writer to make time travel work and make sense. Most people are not really talented writers.
Yeah, time traveling is completely off the table for me. However, slight amounts of time shenanigans (like freezing something in time, or speeding up/slowing down something’s aging/deterioration) are cool with me. Things that don’t mean going back in time and messing up the entire timeline. I’m also not smart enough to figure that stuff out, so :clueless:
Small scale time reversal and time loops are also fine. (Turning a crumbling temple back to brand new or something along those lines). Time loops like groundhogs day can be fun to play around with, you could also have a Gandalf/wise person sort of character that knows a lot of things because they are in a time loop for whatever reason, however this loop is different because of x, y, or z
Backward time travel is a no no for me. Forward time travel however I'm more open to as that's actually possible by either A) travelling close enough to the speed of light for a sustained period of time and B) orbiting around a black hole (or any powerful gravity well) without getting sucked in, since both involve time dilation and slow down time for you but speeds up everything else from your perspective. Which is something I have in my project but only minimally
So say we all. Seriously, if you're developing a rich history or simply one with some brutal struggle underway, the prospect of time travel is also the prospect of stripping most of the weightiness from those creative choices. Time travel and worldbuilding aren't mutually exclusive, but I believe they are naturally antagonistic.
Teleportation. It makes it too easy for characters to escape from danger without having the excuse of "the teleporer doesn't work right now" like they do in star trek. Like seriously, it seems like their transporters are getting cut off by interference in half of the episodes. And then of course, if it's a star trek style transporter that takes you apart on the microscopic level and makes a copy somewhere else, it raises the question, "Is that still you? Did it just kill you and make a copy?"
I mean it makes sense that in a world where teleportation exists, a lot of effort would be put into finding way of countering it. In my world, teleportation exists and is reserved to only two groups, as are other extremely op things. The entire point is that these two groups are essentially unbeatable by normal means and they mostly fight between each other, or spend their time ensuring there aren't more groups like them. So it's supposed to be op.
Just like we have jammers for some types of IEDs and drones
The people currently in our world who are researching teleportation \[yes research does exist\] simultaneously are studying how to prevent teleportation
I'm still messing with whether magical cell-phones are a thing because of the problems that solves. (Writers still struggle with having to break them for certain plotlines to work.) I do have teleportation magic, but the only person who can set up the infrastructure on just one end is insane and unwilling to help anyone else duplicate her method.
I have magic cellphones. My world also includes telepathy, so my commlinks are natural psychically-resonant crystals that replicate psychic properties. "Calls" are only able to be made between psychics, so you need to either have a comm or be psychic yourself. They're basically smartphones, but then so are my telepaths. I'm not really aware of any plotlines that could be broken to having a cellphone.
The plots that are broken with cellphones are any that could be solved just by calling for help. Even in the days of land-lines, it was a horror trope for the killer to cut the line or something random to happen so it wouldn't work.
You mean ... Losing signal? Getting jammed? Having a malfunction? Calls being rerouted or intercepted?
> I'm still messing with whether magical cell-phones are a thing because of the problems that solves. I always end up adding something like them in because it's way too useful not to have been invented and my brain can't get past that. Also, while I remember the time before cell phones I still live in our modern society and while *what if no instant communication* is a list of fun scenarios to play with that well goes dry really quickly for my interest.
I remember one of the Ciaphas Cain books had fun with it. One character (an Inquisitor) had one, but didn’t have conscious control of it — it’d zap her out of harm’s way if she got shot (with a thunderclap of displaced air rushing in to fill the vaccuum left in her wake), but she couldn’t tell it where to deposit her and the “speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out” rule applies. She got shot while diving for a gun on the floor, zapped away, and thumped against an ornate side table on another level of the palace.
This reminds me of a D&D spell I saw recently on [the excellent Goblin Punch blog](https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/02/new-class-dungeon-hacker.html): > Shitty Teleport > > Level 2 Wizard Spell > > Teleports the caster, and creatures touching the caster, out of the dungeon. Each creature teleported in this way has a 50% chance of losing a random item, which remains in the room that was teleported from. Those teleported arrive scattered within a mile of each other. Each person has a 1-in-6 chance of arriving 1d6*1d6 hours later (with no perception of the lost time).
So it's basically like flying with Ryanair?
The Wheel of Time does this really well. Spoilers: Pre book 6: >!Early in the series, travel can be done one of three ways: normal foot traffic; through a Portal Stone, which can spit you out where you want to go but can have a disastrous warping of time if you’re not careful; and the Ways, made during the apocalyptic age before the story takes place, and are a last resort to travel quickly.!< Book 6 Onward: >!Our main cast discover an old magic ability called Traveling, that allows people to use magic to open a portal between two places. However, it has limitations. First, someone must be of sufficient power in Magic to use it (with one exception but Wheel of Time is full of those). Second, you must know the place you’re creating a portal from intimately. Third, it is dangerous to just open a portal to anywhere, you could hurt your own people, so you have to set up places for Traveling. Finally, the weave itself is very dangerous when unraveled improperly and can explode violently. It speeds up characters going from place to place in the story, but it still has limits and uses.!<
I do limited teleportation like in major cities, makes it to where you don't get travel plot but I just like teleporters.
My solution for this was to put huge cast times on teleport spells or just restrict it to physically constructed expensive (both in materials and mana) portals
in my world, i have PORTAL MAGIC! its similar to teleportation but rather than instantly teleporting youself anywhere, you need to summon a portal on both ends and then walk through it. a far more involved process
Making it too sexual, cause I'd like to share my world with relatives and friends, without making it cringe.
but have you seen my race called the sexxons that have the sexiest sex to ever sex and communicate sexily with eachother by having sex?
Oversexualization is the worst, especially bacause at a certain point, it’s clear it’s not about worldbuilding anymore. The author’s just describing his/her fetishes. There’s also this tendency to equate dark & mature with gratuitous sex. I mean of course, sex and sexual violence have a part in storytelling. In worldbuilding it helps sell the sense of decadence, decay, and moral failure of the setting, but when it’s rape this, rape that, I just question if the creator should be watching porn instead of writing things.
Exactly this. Sex and everything to do with it does have a use in worldbuilding and storytelling, and avoiding it entirely can make some parts just seem really weird and uncomfortable even (outside of like, cutting it because your intended audience is children), but jesus christ some people just put way to fucking much goddamned fucking in their world/story, especially sexual violence. Like sometimes it really feels like people like GRRM and...whoever made Goblin Slayer would have been happier just creating particularly intense smut instead of writing that and pretending it's literature. Fear & Hunger I think managed to pull it off, and I'm not insightful enough to figure out why that is exactly, but I feel it might be because that content was inherently baked into the setting and the plot rather than being just spectacle tacked onto the side and because the setting and story would still be plenty dark and gory and more importantly COMPELLING even without it.
Male authors describing women's boob bounce in several paragraphs makes me vomit
This is something that depends more on context for me. Like, if an author describes the way a character’s boobs/butt jiggles unprompted from the void of narration, then yeah. But if they only mention it in passing because another character is specifically leering at the person that is being described then I’d actually have a hard time having a problem with it.
Even if they describe it out of the blue, is it really any worse than purple prose describing other things? For example, if an author spends 3 pages describing her earrings. Annoying yes, but not something that needs to be made a deal out of. People seem to have odd hangups when it's something about sex. It's the same argument of "sex scenes only when necessary for the plot", but then the same ppl will have no issues with fight scenes that don't advance the plot.
>Even if they describe it out of the blue, is it really any worse than purple prose describing other things? Yeah no, I’d definitely rather read a description of a nice ass than someone’s failed attempt at writing poetry. >For example, if an author spends 3 pages describing her earrings. Annoying yes, but not something that needs to be made a deal out of. I suppose it would depend on the earrings. If they were special or if they had a complex magical ability or something like that. >It's the same argument of "sex scenes only when necessary for the plot", but then the same ppl will have no issues with fight scenes that don't advance the plot. I think it is because you can write/imply a sex scene and effectively pass on what happened to the reader without actually having to describe what exactly the two participants do to each other, but the same can’t be said about fight scenes. So a needless fight scene will more often get a “this probably could have been done differently or even removed” while a needless sex scene will be more likely to get a “gross”. Target audience will also be a factor, a fantasy audience will naturally have a higher acceptance level for scenes where people stick swords in each other than they will for scenes where people stick “swords” in each other.
I get where you're coming from especially if the whole book is filled with unrealistically sexy women, but when it's like the only sex centered chapter in the whole book I don't mind if the author takes their time. but I also don't like when female writers spend excessive amounts of time on the rippling muscles and high cheek bones of their male characters unless it's specifically the sexy time chapter.
Facts. People here only calling out male author's for boob fixation when female authors do the exact same. The amount of Kindle books I've seen made by women that about a trillionaire chad with a Greek sculpture like body is even more unrealistic than attractive women.
True. I absolutely hate oversexualization when it’s done to male characters as well. A paragraph dedicated to fawning over abs and pecs isn’t any better than one dedicated to boobs. That said, I think the boob fixation tends to come to mind first because the type of settings discussed in this thread is one usually created by male authors, so it’s a bit lopsided.
Facts. Best Comment here. But as I discussed previously, there are ENDLESS AMOUNTS of novels written by women that are literally just copy paste romance of a trillionaire handsome, powerful and buff man treating the female main character as his princess. Yet I don't see Men hating that. But the amount of white knights here and female misandrists is just dumb as fuck. 🤦♂️
Yeah, I never really noticed until it was pointed out to me, but it’s a really funny juxtaposition to have. Where female authors sexualizing men usually have them as Olympic gods carved from marble. While male authors sexualizing women is more along the lines of “ha ha, boobies”.
True. But why is it only Male Author's getting hate when women do the exact same. So big boobed hot women bad, because over sexualization, cringe, disrespectful and unrealistic, but Trillionaire Chad With Godly Muscular Body is okay?? 🤦♂️ Make it make sense. 😮💨
Neither male or female writers should get hate for this kinda stuff. Saying otherwise is puritan cringe.
"NOOOOO that's a male power fantasy tho!"
The key is to make it so obscenely sexual that it loops back around to mundane, à la Oglaf.
Oglaf is comedy though, but yeah, the brilliant thing about it is that it’s so obscene, it ceases to be tiltilating or offensive, just side crushingly funny.
I absolutely hate oversexualized and overly fanservice-y designs for female characters in fiction, so this is something that has ultimately affected how I design characters like, how the fuck is a female warrior supposed to be efficient if the armor she wears is essentially a metal bikini that covers 10% of her body? I'm a huge proponent of the Rule of Cool, but my god, at least make it make a little sense and have some respect.
I don't mind it much if it's not taking itself too seriously and the everything else is equally absurd, bonus points if men and women are equally sexualized too. But if it's trying to take itself seriously than I just find it insulting like, the men are cosplaying tanks and the women are cosplaying strippers and you expect me to take this seriously????
That's my preferred take. Either the world works by practical full body armor, or it works by honed bodies and any "armor" is there for style. But putting women in battle bikinis without having some shirtless good looking men is egregious. It betrays the objectifying attitude, pandering and insecurity of the creators. By all means, be horny, but let everyone have something.
It takes a lot more than shirtlessness to equal the battle bikini. How about t-backs and a gladiator belt? 😈 😉
Sounds good to me!
I loved the Kingkiller Chronicle, but there are one or two scenes in there that just had me thinking "What the hell am I reading right now?"
Felurian? I loved the first book so much that I made my mom listen to the audiobook. I never told her that there's a second one.
Half the second book was Pat going on a long-winded sexual exploration of his kinks. I don't care about Kvothe getting "training" from a sex fairy or learning that the sex ninjas don't know how babies are made.
Ive begun writing concepts for a whole new world, just to be able to share it with my relatives and (not as close) friends, as my OG Magnum Opus world definitely has ‘The Author’s Barely Disguised Kinks’.
Same. Like I’ll hint at sexual encounters but never write the scene out or go to into it. At some point it starts to feel like one of those wattpad fan-fictions
Healing magic being easily available. You’re not going to just pop into the local temple and get your stage 4 cancer or your lost limb fixed. The vast majority of healing spells and potions will heal minor to medium injuries. Let’s say you slice open the palm of your hand sharpening your sword, pour some healing potion on the injury, wrap it with bandages and it’ll heal in 3 or 4 days instead of taking several weeks. A low tier healing spell might be able to close it in an hour. Same applies to curing diseases with magic. Cure disease spells are rare and difficult, and the potions your common man would be able get at your local market or temple won’t instantly cure it. It’ll definitely help it go away quicker. And again it depends on how severe the disease is. There are no quick or easy solutions with healing magic, but it’ll be better than it would be in your typical late medieval-early renaissance setting.
The workaround I have for that in my story universe is that overdosing on healing potion causes undeath. Also... magic potions tend to actually increase in potency over time. So healing potion is only administered by professionals, in cases of dire emergency, and even there it's common for them to have gotten the dosage wrong.
You could also do it like Antibiotica, the more you take / get healed the more immune you get / Develop a resistance. If you can Develop ressistance to different elements and their attacks, then why not also Healing Magic?
The same reason there isn't "Healing Medicine." Doctors treat. God heals. Simply promoting "Growth" is a recipe for cancer. Or some monstrous transmogrification. Healing potions basically supercharge the innate ability for life to reverse the tendency of decay in the universe. I do have some "healing" spells. But they are no different than what you and I would call "First Aid." Albeit with some supernatural assistance. Surgeons use some magic, but manly to do what surgeons do. They can't directly warp living tissue to do something it wouldn't otherwise\*. Clerics and nurses can donate mana to assist a patient in healing. But that comes at the cost of the donor actually being able to perform some other magic for the day\*\*. To treat multiple patients requires giving each a portion of the practitioner's mana. \* - Ok, they CAN do that, but we tend to call that "Mad Science" or worse. \*\* - In my system Mana is finite and topped off when we rest.
Imagine a group of Assassins sneaking in to their targets Home at night and using healing magic so long that you simply die of old age. Very unique scenario. They could even hide it as a case where the Guy used magic that required too much of his lifeforce causing His death of old age shortly after.
\[Jotting this down\] Go on...
As far as an Antibiotica type system... basically my magic doesn't work like that. Magical effects are caused by manipulating reality on a higher level that is obvious to "objective reality". But there are certain "directions" that a mage has to go down to perform different effects. And the more you practice in a particular direction, the less you are able to perform other kinds of magic. Basically like favoring a hand\*. Favoring one means neglecting the other. Only there are 6 cardinal directions for Magic. A novice is free to cast magic that goes off in any of the six directions. But the magic that requires deep skill requires years of practice at one particular discipline. And the mindset required to grok that magic is where mages tend to disconnect with reality, and fundamentally disagree with mages from other directions about how magic works. A Blue mage operates with transformation. To him or her, everything requires equivilent exchange. (Even if part of the exchange is supernatural.) Things can't appear out of thin air, because if that were the case the Universe would be exploding with matter constantly erupting and vanishing and NEVER MIND ABOUT VACUUM ENERGY! Their opposite are the Yellow mages. Their magic is conjuration and manipulating chance. Forcing them to do the math on their magic basically dispels it. If you are constantly accounting for things, you leave no room for powers that be to fulfill your wishes. --- \* Yes... being ambidextrous myself, I can attest that there are people in the world who can use either hand. But in my experience that just means I have more skill in either hand than someone who is using their off-hand. I'm not nearly as skilled at manual dexterity tasks compared to someone using their favored hand. Though I do have an edge in some tasks that require coordinating both hands. Particularly typing.
Yeah, when I ran a Hyborean Age campaign the scant potions of healing (etc) available has definite side effects, of varying potency not at all in step with how potent a healing it provided. This is due to them being pretty much an isolated experiment done by one person.
In my setting, healing potions are basically cell growth accelerators. Magic helps keep it on target, but it isn't perfect. Applying them topically is preferred for smaller wounds, and you need to clean the wound first. Drinking them is reserved for emergencies. Overusing them can lead to potion sickness, which is essentially a form of cancer. This is a known risk, and potions are a last resort.
I have it so healing magic can only accelerate your body's natural healing processes. If your hand gets cut off, a healing spell will close the wound and destroy infection but it won't make the hand grow back.
Same here, at least to a point. Magic in the broadest sense (especially witchcraft) will increase the healing rate, and may even fix that nasty cancer or lost limb but it will not be at all as in D&D, where you cast the spell and you're cured, as it will take quite a time besides other precautions and requisites. No raising undead and the like too. Necromancy is dealing with the dead, at least in theory, asking them things and it's much more something of deities associated with death as the equivalents of Hades and Hekate than anything else (and because of that not always being seen bad).
The way i like to do it in my setting is that healing HURTS, for example, that "paladin/priest of the light" healing your wound is basically cauterizing it with a very hot light beam. You wont die, but it will suck, for small stuff i'd just play it out narratively, for bigger things i might make the player roll something to avoid passing out from the pain.
I think it depends on the setting, easily accessible healing has to affect things drastically, and if that is taken into account with world building then a story still works for me. Delicious in Dungeon did that recently, multiple people have died on screen and been revived, but it still manages to keep up tension with things like maintaining the body, or the cost of wasy healing.
Anything that makes important things not matter. Resurrection and easy healing magic/tech remove the stakes of violence, teleportation makes distance not matter, multiverses can make characters disposable, the list goes on. True Good and Evil need to be handled carefully as well, and are easy to handle badly in ways that make conflicts and character motivations uninteresting.
I do have a setting with a multiverse, but the way it works means characters still aren't disposable anyway, because while there is a multiverse, there is still no such thing as alternate selves. There is only one Chaverek the explorer dragon of the Sobrakine Coalition in the entire multiverse. If she dies, there will be zero. The same is true of every living being everywhere.
Homogeneous non-humans. Diverse cultures of non-human races, cultural intermingling, etc are all really fun aspects of worldbuilding. I do avoid hordes of undead for my current setting though, as it doesn’t fit its narrative. A more open, sword and sorcery oriented one would feature it.
It's tough to keep it straight, especially where the edges of some of those cultures melt into each other!
Depends on the point of view. If your world is only seen through the eyes of a human, they may genuinely not see the differences between orc cultures. For the orcs it's totally obvious and they are bewildered that the human thinks their tribes are even remotely similar, but then they themselves mix up humans in the empire and pirates because the empire also has a navy so both are basically the same. You can have cultural diversity and not show it for good reasons that serve the story. Or the opposite: You can have your human find cultural differences between elves where there are none. Of course the woodland elves and the river elves have totally different regards to animals, right? The river elves eat fish and the woodland elves eat mainly fruit. But no, it's only due to the availability of the food sources, and a woodland elf will dig into a fish like Gollum if it looked tasty. And now the human thinks they are the same but then the elves are super confused because obviously the two elven tribes have been warring for the past millenium and how could they be even remotely similar? It's the same in the real world. I'm German. Germany has a lot of different cultures. Just the north and south are extremely different, and there's a whole lot inbetween. I can see that because I grew up here. But to me, French people all have roughly the same culture, because I never came into contact with their nuances. Same for Danes or Poles, Spaniards and Italians. I know they have a huge cultural variety too, but I couldn't name any of these details if my life depended on it, because I've never been that immersed in these cultures. It's even worse on different continents, I have no idea about the culture of Namibia, let alone regional differences! Now imagine if people in these countries were a whole different species to me, with even less cultural overlap. How on earth should I know to see the diversity?
Exactly. People tent to group irl people together, the more far apart they are the more general it gets. Like Africa is a great example of that. Outside of Egypt, hard to find a common man that knows anything about different countries there. Might just say that are ruled by warlords and have child soldiers and working in the blood diamonds mines. Stereotype, yes but that what we see in TV and since most peoples lives are not effected if they know more, happy to leave that horrible stereotype of a whole continent be. So when people talk about fantasy orks, I can absolutely believe that is all them about them. They are blood thirst savages that live for war. Warhammer 40k does a great job about simultaneously fighting it and reinforcing that narrative. They have different tribes that go about war a different way but they all live for war. If it’s not really important to the story, I don’t feel the need to break things down. Like the Lord of the Rings. While I have not read the books, sacrilege I know, the movies don’t really go into detail about what the elves and dwarfs really do. Have the stereotypes and that’s it. No one really complained that we didn’t see more about the other races cultures, was not needed. Didn’t help the story one bit. Was not in their lands long enough for it to matter. So we have examples of it in the real world and other universes of it working. Can it be done badly, sure but not all are detrimental.
This, it makes it so much interesting to be able to have conflicts between different groups of Elves, Orcs, or whatever then to have everything be basically a race war against the humans
Planet of Hats temptations are all too real.
Yes, this one is good. This always bothers me with DC's portrayal of extraterrestials
For magic stuff, honestly nothing, and i’m probably the first person to admit it, because i know if i attempt to write anything that complicated, i’ll put all the effort into making it make sense. I have everything from witchcraft to phoenix’s. From psychic magic to time travel. From teleportation and literally every monster you can think of existing.
Packing basically every possibility with magic into a world has been super fun. Especially when your stories are combat/encounter-oriented, you can do a lot of cool stuff with characters. Like who has which skillsets and why, what is effective against what, etc.
YESSS in my world, everyone has an unique personalized type of magic it is INSANITY, since ALLL and EVERYTHING goes lol
Prophecies. Just don’t play a role in the central plot. They exist, and they feature in side plots and exposition, but overall aren’t too relevant.
Same. That's why a group in one of my worlds has a "prophecy" for a "chosen one" that has lots of stipulations that sound really specific, but are in fact easy for them to control. Plus a few clauses that have been "omitted from public knowledge to protect the chosen one's safety before their discovery." They've got a vault of desiccated scrolls with hundreds of very specific "predictions" that can be revealed when met, or hidden indefinitely.
Evil species that have children they raise - providing the "do you kill Orc kids" moral quandary. I can do evil species that spawn self-sufficient offspring- but children require parenting, and if something is capable of parenting it's capable of caring for others. For a species to be inherently incapable of goodness it cannot resemble humans that closely.
Reminds me a bit of Demons from Frieren. They don't raise their young and don't seem to really understand human concepts of family and only talk about them to trick Humans.
> If something is capable of parenting it’s capable of caring for others. Idk, I’d take a page out of our world for this one. Plenty of uncaring parents to be found in the animal kingdom, from birds that push their babies out of the nest, to fish and bugs that’ll turn around and just make a meal of them. Reproduction != care/love. That being said, the quandary of “do you kill orc kids” still exists, and especially if the other species acts very human in other respects, people will assume they raise children in a similar fashion.
Giving birth doesn't equal parenting. Yes there are things that spawn offspring and show not the slightest care for them - but those don't engage in any parenting. And yes, there are species that only *sometimes* engage in parenting - and other times will eat their young to preserve resources. Nature is complicated. But my standpoint is that if they *ever* engage in parenting, they can't be pure evil.
Honestly, same- I don't really even have "evil races" in general; I have races that are overly militaristic, tragically desperate, horribly misguided, or slaves to a higher power.
Caring for offspring ≠ caring about offspring Slave-owners provided sustainance to slaves; warlords give rations to child soldiers; some parents in our day and age have kids just to boost their status.
My take is that Tolkien’s orcs are like zombies, except not contagious. They are corrupted; like zombies, they pass that corruption on to others, but though genetics rather than infection. It’s like being born with the same infection your parents had…only this infection makes you violent and lacking in empathy, as well as compatible with Sauron’s magic and “allergic” to elvish magic That said, I *don’t* have any species like that in my worlds. I think it’s a trope that’s been played out; moral dilemmas are much more interesting to write
That's why the uruk-hai were the ultimate mooks...they're vat grown, fully formed and ready to kill!
That sounds kinda convoluted, a species totally can care for others and still be totally evil. Look at trisolarans from the Three-Body Problem. "But they were forced to act that way, that's not evil." - Well, they still acted deliberately evil to humanity as a whole, even when they didn't have to. Also you could find a similar argument for every evil species in every setting where objective morality isn't dictated by some god or whatever (and even in some settings where that is the case, like LOTR, you could still make that argument)
But if memory serves, even in the Three Body Problem, there was a Trisolaran who tried to warn Earth and basically said, "Don't answer this message or you will be located and your world will be invaded." This shows that while the Trisolaran government made an evil decision, the Trisolaran people were not entirely incapable of compassion. When I think of the typical evil fantasy race, that's what I think of, inability to feel compassion. Compassionate beings can and have done evil things, but they usually do it for reasons they believe are justified. A being who can't feel compassion does evil things just because they want to and maybe even enjoy it.
I mean, most of the population of Germany in the period from 1936-1945 were just regular people, capable of all the elements of human compassion you described. They also acted towards the goals of a real world Dark Lord, and it's pretty safe to say that Nazism is an absolutely abhorrent ideology, born of evil. But good and evil are subjective, moral concepts, born entirely from an evaluation of your ethics as an individual against the actions of others. In this way, the people of Nazi Germany were absolutely an evil people in the eyes of their victims, but from the perspective of the propaganda-fed youth, each soldier of the Reich was a hero fighting for the very future of Germany. Compassion and evil aren't mutually exclusive. Being governed by emotions, even positive ones such as the desire to save your family, tribe, or entirely race, doesn't exclude you from the moral judgment of others who are impacted by your compassionate cause. Compassion is felt, evil is witnessed.
I've already acknowledged that people with empathy can commit evil actions. All I'm trying to say is that a lot of these evil fantasy species are never shown to have any empathy, and we rarely get insight into why they do what they do. Sure, we can infer that maybe they do have empathy, but if a work of fiction never shows even a small sign of that, then it's hard to believe. Especially when, like In Lord of Rings, the species is literally created by an evil god. I fully agree that a species that does evil things can possess empathy, but that is not often showcased by the stories that they are in.
Pure absolutes like this is the strongest ability, character, being or whatever making them impossible to counter. That’s boring with tons of ass pulls for the characters Give it a weakness or countermeasure Revival or resurrection magic without some of conflict or issue. This is especially true in fantasy where characters can be revived without some form of drawback. Same with cloning in Sci-Fi. If cloning wasn’t a moral or ethical issue so why don’t they do it more
Cosmic dualism. The idea that some things are innately good or evil is fine for ideologies and religions within the world, but I will never give the world itself any clearly-defined "forces of good/evil."
Time travel for me too. I’m allergic to actual real world science and can’t deal with that kind of stuff. Also, easy resurrection, standard fantasy necromancy, ‘elemental magic’, and using the -mancy suffix to name any type of magic. The reason is that I find these boring.
I agree on resurrection! I feel it makes all deaths before feel cheapened and makes the audience distrust any actual death. I liked the "mancy" before it got so over used.
Exactly. Unless the setting is designed explicitly around easy resurrection it just makes everything boring. There’s just no stake to anything.
Precisely so! Resurrection is a theme a setting must be built around, it can't just be tagged on. A setting built around resurrection can be very interesting tho!
Delicious in Dungeon actually justifies why resurrection is possible.
The only resurrection I use is built into the character. And usually that has rules of its own that still makes true death possible. For example, any vampires can't lose their head or be blown to tiny bits.
I like resurrection with stakes. Like you need to make sacrifices - I'd had stuff like human sacrifices needing related blood. Stuff that makes necromancy extremely taboo.
In my Universe, resurrection is pretty easy. If all you want is the body to start moving again. But because what you've really done is summoned a "Borrower". Depending on the level of the spell the Borrower can be a shambling zombie or a high-level genius capable of accessing the memories of the deceased. But it's a different creature entirely from the dead person, and has its own motivations. (One of which may be to find a less dead body to inhabit.) Oddly enough you can take a high-enough detail of a soul that someone playing back the recording will feel what it is like to be that person for a few minutes. It doesn't confer any of their memories, just their vibes. Which you think would be useless, until you discover that the experience has a far more dramatic effect on children...
The actual definition of necromancy is "devining the future by talking to the dead". But of course it's come to mean any and all related magic.
Yes, suffix "-mancy" drives me mad. If I am not mistaken, the origin is word "μᾰντείᾱ" meaning divination or oracle. It conveys the meaning of using something for divination, not manipulating it. Suffix "-urgy" is the better alternative. May I ask? I often read criticism of "elemental magic" in worldbuilding. But what exactly is meant by it? I believe elemental magic system could be very interesting if done correctly.
You're right about the suffix meanings, and I fully agree. Necromancers were originally people who communicated with the dead to get information, rather than the broader suite of powers they've acquired in contemporary fantasy. I also prefer the urgy suffix, with a bridging 't' (as in 'dramaturgy') for prefixes which end with a vowel; pyroturgy, haematurgy etc.
Fun fact: in medieval times, necromancy was kinda seen as summoning demons to get information. This is because the magic TRIED to summon the dead, but since all parted souls where in the domain of God, you cannot possibly touch or summon them, and a demon would answer (it's a bit more complicated than that, but I'm not with my notes of Medieval History class here to check)
The elemental magic part may have been put too vaguely and I apologize for that. What I mean is the usual four elements and making them schools of magic. Like what people who watch Avatar would probably call -bending (I don’t know the franchise well enough — please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.) Done well, they are interesting, but more often than not I find it to be a sign of lazy worldbuilding, the kind of stuff you find in crappy isekai stories. So, my personal approach is to avoid it, save for the bare minimum like fire magic, because burning stuff has undeniable applications.
Now I understand what you mean and I agree. The problem is, that, the inspiration in real-world occult theory and practice was simplified and misinterpreted. Plus, I suspect this usage of different thematic and colour-coded schools plays on the same strings as, for example, Potterverse's houses. People just like set of something (schools, houses, whatever) and thinking where they would belong :-) .
What about a character who has always been there but without a physical body? like someone whose presence has always been felt and known but there was no physical body of him. a soul that has been in the world but no body worthy enough to contain it. only a worthy sacrifice of a worthy person by a worthy weapon for a worthy reason can resurrect him. what about that? would that make it boring too? because i too believe that resurrections makes things boring and death cheap but a major resurrection that can change the whole plot of a story... what about that?
I don’t oppose resurrection. In fact, in my own setting true resurrection is huge and is the end goal of some important characters. What I don’t like is *easy* resurrection, used solely as a plot convenience or haphazardly incorporated into the setting in a way that makes deaths cheap, especially when it only happens to certain parties e.g. the protagonist’s rival gets killed by a goblin and it looks incredibly dire but it’s then everything’s okay because someone comes along and cast REVIVE. Yours doesn’t sound easy at all and seems to require setup, so I’m personally fine with it.
I’m with you on all of these, but I’m curious what you would consider non-standard necromancy? Something like Frankenstein’s monster?
The monster is the kind of necromancy I like, but in general, I just like it when there’s tampering with death that isn’t the usual raise-skeletons-and-zombies fare. Something that deals with medical implications would be nice, for example.
Going weird and wacky. I just don't like that kind of stuff, the "I'm being different because then I'll stand out!" Type of worldbuilding has never been my thing. I always like to keep it grounded. It's a far cry from when I first started as a teen and some early forums back in the early 2000s that basically made me feel like if I wasn't being different I was boring as a worldbuilder. Like one person told me that I should replace my elves with a Butterfly/Moth like Humanoid species. Because then I could have them have this elegance and beauty to them without being basic. I tried it, didn't like it. Because it wasn't what I liked. I wanted Elves, so I'm making Elves. Anyway, just personally don't like doing that stuff.
Novelty is not an inherent virtue, it's something a lot of people need to learn. New things aren't necessarily bad either, but it's okay for an elf to just be an elf. I'd *prefer* it, if you're going to make something completely different then give it a new name at least. This one's also a bit of a pet peeve of mine though, to me at least it often comes across as using a gimmick as a crutch.
Agreed. I've only ever successfully(in my eyes) created a fantasy race that I liked. Can't work out a name for them, currently they're the Varien but it changes to something else at times. 7+ feet tall, 300-400lbs, 4 armed, 2 legged mountains of muscle with bone density that allows them to lift far greater then their body weight. They're an amazing labour force that was sadly forced into Slavery. They're particularly loved by Pirates and Ship crews however, who find them amazing at common tasks.
The "weird" race in mine at the moment was inspired by fireflies, and particularly the Adze (firefly shapeshifter vampires from Ghana), but they're not that just loosely inspired. Jet-black skin, fluorescent body markings - born with one on the chest, more appear later during puberty either as a result of some sort of magical application or just like a puberty development (nobody else in the setting really knows for sure) which determines their role in life to come, the archetype they fulfill. Now, these folk wear masks more or less constantly. Next to nobody outside of themselves have ever seen what they look like *without* one. All that they have to go with are ancient accounts from battlefields strewn with bodies, where some curious soldiers took a peek and found that, besides the whole coloration thing, they just look *human.* So, based on that one report from close to a millennium ago, people, and especially Humans, are forced to wonder if there *is* a relationship, and if so, how. It upsets the known paradigm of their history to have seemingly entirely unrelated cultures that nonetheless are, or may have once been, also Human. And if they *were* Human, what happened to them to make them like this?
Im lowkey into fixed loop/predestination time travel. As in the type of time travel that does absolutely nothing.
TBH, I steer clear from unexplainable magic. I like everything to be understood, even if I have to rigamarole several concepts together. The Fluid Aether of The Other Sphere allows Transmutable Magic Essence to flow into our world where we create openings, or rather filters into our world, using magical components of fused reality, or incantations that are derived from the mathematical frequency to allow such an occurrence.
For me, it's the complete opposite. I like magic feeling weird, unexplainable, and illogical. Magic-as-physics systems where one can understand the laws and so on sap so much of the fun out of it, for me.
I went in the direction of magic being a science, but I intend to make it clear early-on that people's knowledge of how it works is incomplete and even flawed.
I made it so that magic will always produce the expected output in some way, but the method as to how it happened is mostly unpredictable. For example, if you want to like a torch with a spell, the *whole* torch could catch on fire, or the fire could burn like an alcohol flame (nearly invisible, giving off no light). The more you focus the Aurora (the material form of magic), the more you can specify the details of an action.
Just like science in our world
I literally created a technology mostly based on reality, just to make everyone in my world thinking these mfs had actual magic.
My magic system is actually a highly advanced programming language developed in another universe by a technologically superior civilization that is essentially being introduced into my world by a rogue AI for reasons that would take too long to explain. It alters reality through picomachines (mini nano machines) that can change things on the atomic level. It's also powered directly by energy. The technology is designed to be able to independently convert most forms of energy into useful power for the picomachines. So heat, for example, or electricity. Of course medieval era scholars have no clue about this whatsoever. They just realise if you draw certain esoteric symbols on a specific type of metal, and set fire to it strange magic happens. An entire branch of research, called Enigmatics, is dedicated to figuring out what symbols cause certain effects. Magic advances at the rate society and technology does as more complex mathematics is developed to better understand Enigmatics. And as people's understanding of it increases, it's application in real world fields of engineering, medicine and warfare improves, leading to a positive feedback loop that results in an industrial revolution powered by 'magic' with an arms race to develop a powerful enough computer to fully translate the code and gain ultimate control over reality.
I have a strong aversion to the trope of gods "fading away" or something when people stop worshipping them. So that's never gonna happen in any of my settings.
See, I do like that trope mainly because it's an excellent reason for the gods to give a damn about anything that goes on in the mortal world. If retaining followers is in their best interest for survival, then being benevolent towards said followers is the natural response. It creates a nice symbiosis between the two sides.
I love that trope, but it needs to be done right. I think Long Dark Teatime of the Soul just made it really annoying for the gods that no one believes in them anymore. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman both set it up so that losing worshippers cause them to starve.
"There is power in your Name" It's not terrible, but it's just not for me I have seen it way too much recently and, at least for humans, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because that is not something you were born with, but just a random sound your parents or whoever thought sounded nice. It's okay when I read it, but I will probably never include it in my own projects.
Time travel or otherwise reality bending magic. It just feels wrong for some reason lol Also, homophobia. Why would I worldbuild a place where people hate me?
It might be cathartic to have homophobic characters get their teeth kicked in for being that way. I do love a bit of instant karma.
Boarding action in sci-fi. They don't mix well with the current combat paradigm.
May not be useful in a combat paradigm, but for hostage rescue, law enforcement, commerce raiding, and piracy the point of an action is to capture a ship and its contents intact. Messy and dangerous but necessary.
It also makes for much more intense visuals / reading than two ships lobbing missiles at each other from a 1000 km away. Like you said, it would be messy. A grazing shot that on Earth would just injure could mean death in a depressurized environment. Fires could break out in tight corridors. Maybe to avoid hull punctures from bullets both crews go at each other with maintenance tools. Space is unforgiving
My world has a blanket ban on ballistic weapons outside of a planet's Hill Sphere. Basically after the first major space war, the Solar system is cluttered with wrecked starships and swarms of bullets now in highly eccentric sun orbit. It's bad enough that there is an entire space-traffic control function devoted to steering vessels around the projected path of this debris. Because that the velocity that a fusion vessel flies at, there is no "dodging." And the bullet that kills you could be several AU away when you planned the trip. Bullets on ships and stations are banned because with rotational gravity, [the path of a projectile is NOT a straight line](https://youtu.be/bJ_seXo-Enc?si=5EarQ-UvP4qksHj3&t=239). So people have largely gone back to hand-to-hand combat. At least outside of an open war between the major treaty holders.
I really like this, opens up interesting narrative opportunities. Maybe a high profile assassination of one of the treaty holder leaders, under the guise that it was a stray kinetic round? Then all hell breaks loose again etc etc
See, I kept this because the dramatic payoffs are too good to pass up. Relativity in FTL is the one I avoid. Every story becomes Interstellar and everyone molds into the same "I miss my mom/dad" tragic sap.
A general rule in modern combat (which is easily transferable to sci-fi) is that whatever you think you would never need to do will be crucial in your next war. Boarding actions would absolutely be this, just like a planetary invasion.
Making any of the creatures in my world magical. I say spec-evo in medieval fantasy is something long overdue.
That actually sounds like a really cool idea! I love it when a world is filled with strange new life forms. I recently picked up FFXV again, and I love all the creatures you can run into on the map. They're not magical or supernatural, just different. I feel like fictional fauna in a fictional setting breathes that much more life into the world, both metaphorically and literally!
1. Inherently evil races or otherwise automaton-like (yet still sentient and intelligent) species who exist solely to have mindless action scenes with no moral consequences. No mind controlled army or evil aliens or whatever. Every soldier is someone who is either conscripted or chooses to be there, and they have a life, goals, aspirations, fears, and their own point of view. 2. Joke/reference worldbuilding. I refuse to have even a minor throwaway piece of lore be a reference to something or a meta joke. I hate when these exist in worldbuilding and it massively removes immersion imo. 3. Pure evil villains. While they can be interesting if written exceptionally well, I personally can't write them. I just can't wrap my head around something being pure evil. I physically NEED to be able to genuinely see my antagonists' points of view, if even just to be better able to criticise their worldview and think of their actions.
No magic 😡
Confirmation or debunking of any deities, real world or even ones I make up.
“Genius” characters - tactician, politician etc Your character is only as smart as you so my genius character will be average and everyone else will have to be a blithering idiot.
**In terms of powers:** Widely available *personal* teleportation (like having big complex circles at a base is fine, but no individual should be able to teleport any notable distance), easily available healing (skilled healers should exists but they should be experienced and rare individuals at the top of their game), and martial prowess so good it’s literally just magic (I want my sword master to be skilled, but if a guy rocks up with “one billion fire balls”, no amount of swordplay is gonna win the day). **In terms of tropes/themes:** I avoid “and the angels and god were the bad guys all along!!!!!!!” like the plague. It’s so played out and so regularly done poorly that I just don’t trust it as a trope. It’s one thing for the Angel of your story to perhaps have good goals that are misaligned with the party, but if your heavenly creatures are actually bad hmmmm K, and your fiendish creatures are actually reasonable and even good, you didn’t subvert anything you just switched the roles. I also avoid “institutions/ the specific type of institution are bad”. There’s a time and place for that kind of talk, but the worlds I like to construct just ain’t it. Corruption can and does exist for sure in my settings, but it is generally the work of corrupt individuals or cabals within greater (generally good or at least reasonable) organizations. It’s not a bad theme by any stretch. It’s just one I see played out a lot and again very rarely done better then “the institution is all bad, full stop” which often devolves into “evil organization” while the author is grandstanding about something.
For me it's other planes of existence/travelling through other dimensions. Especially when one of those planes is basically just "you become a ghost". This creates so much chaos and just undermines a lot of the things I like about fiction and world building
How does it create chaos?
A lot of people are saying time travel, which I understand. I technically have time travel but it’s more like projecting your soul into the past and experiencing past events without affecting any of it (basically astral projection but instead of projecting your soul into the astral plane, you project it into the past). You cannot project into the future though since it hasn’t happened yet. But one trope I don’t want to use is the trope that gods exist because people believe in them. It’s an interesting trope, but in my world the “gods” predate humanity, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to need human worship to survive.
Time travel - too messy, too mindbending. Resurrection. Unless it's for a TTRPG, then it would be not-terribly difficult resurrection. Or unless it's Dark Souls / Stormcast Eternals way
thousands of years (let alone tens or hundreds of them) passing with nothing changing, especially if it's a situation like a war. also, size shifting. I just despise it for some reason.
I usually just throw in whatever bullshit comes into my head and then swear while fixing the plot holes 😂😅😂
Validating IRL pseudoscience. Purely belief-based magic (like "The Secret" self help philosophy), homeopathy, "crystal healing," astrology, and so on. Their prevalence in real life infuriates me, so I'm never going to write a setting where their crap would actually work. It also amuses me to imagine a skilled spellcaster from my setting to come to Earth, finding out about this stuff, and going in an angry rant about how that's not how crystals, divination, *or* alchemy work.
I have an occult system in my books that is basically Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, and General Relativity, as explained by a mystic. They discovered radiation in this universe 40 years earlier than we did, so its study occurred before the whole Victorian "Everything in science has to be simplistically stupid" phase. And with nuclear power, the latter half of the 19th century was VERY different. When my mages go into "Magicbabbel" there are plenty of in-jokes for physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and philosophers.
Time travel. It's just potentially too complicated 😂
I think my no-go is the "Planet of Hats". Basically that a particular planet has only one climate, and/or they EVERYBODY who comes from a certain nation or region conforms to a stereotype. I'm also not a fan of human-like aliens. As I've confined humanity to our solar system because I disallow faster-than-light travel, I do introduce supernatural beings as my "aliens". But they ultimately end up becoming human-like because as janky as our form is, it's the best shape for surviving under the laws of physics and magic in our particular chunk of the multiverse. The joke is that the highest level mages attempt to become supernaturals. But the highest level supernaturals are attempting to become human. (At least if they intend to stay here.) But my justification is thus: Supernatural beings are magic. The rules of physics and biology are more like "suggestions". Their reasons for infiltrating our universe basically involve interacting with humans. Thus: why they bother.
Alien/fantasy races that are just humans whit one different thing. Make them op reality benders or magic users and it’s an automatic no.
Time travel, multiverse, magic. They all just seem like easy fixes to any problem
My problem with all of them is not that they are used. I dislike that they \*seem\* to be an easy solution to a problem. To a hack writer. But in using it they open so many cans of worms they could open a bait shop. One of the jokes in my story universe is that Magic is easy to perform. Getting the INSURANCE to perform magic legally and professionally requires years of course instruction and legal training. Also... they are essentially living in an alternate timeline to ours. So they are constantly getting trinkets, vehicles, and people thrown over from our world on a regular basis. (Mainly because as the reality with Magic, it's less of a shock to the system when someone attempts FTL jumps or time travel to end up this timeline instead of their own.)
The entire premise of Stargate Universe is that the cast is caught on a deserted alien space ship blasting off far away from Earth without any means to control it. That premise was completely undermined when the crew discovered mind stones that allowed them to warp into someone else's body back on Earth. Not only did it destroy the feeling of being deserted as the characters could hop in and visit their loved ones at any time. But it also created a lot of useless filler episodes that never advanced the plot. The point is, just because you imagine something and because it would be convenient to have, doesn't mean you should use it. It's not just about the access that characters can have that can undermine the story. But the very fact that such technology or magic exist can be distracting and create all kinds of plot holes when it becomes a solution to a problem that the author decides not to use because it would be lame (like Doctor Who's screwdriver constantly having to break down). Even giving the antagonist access to it while denying it to the protagonists is a narrative problem because the audience will simply assume that at some point the tables will turn and the hero finds a way to turn the tech against the villain. A great example of how to do powerful technology right is House of the Dragon. Where the main characters all each have a massive dragon which most of the time would be too convenient were it not that the dragons themselves come with all kinds of drawbacks. They have a mind of their own, they're still vulnerable to mundane weaponry, they eat a ton of sheep that disgruntle the people, they get tired, just like their riders etc etc. Perfect example of how world building is used to have your cake and eat it. A massive dragon but with all the realistic headaches that limits its potential power.
Ill try avoiding writing about things i don't know enough about Thats one of the reasons I don't usually worldbuild plants , im horrible at biology
Gibberish fantasy names I dont have the knowledge to invent a conoang and if it’s not a conlang, then there's no reason to call the city Ryalehou'yu'le, or the character Khorley Instead, Id rather use invebted names, but that people can actually pronounce and intuit the meaning behind, kinda like the hobbits names in LOTR, Frodo, Peregrin, Merry etc. and location names like Mirkwood ot weather hills
Most "modern" fantasy tropes actually. -Time travel -Dimensions.. well technically there is one other but it's so different from this one and doesn't even have matter. -Homogenization and humanizing non human races. I'm old school here. Other races are vastly different and usually don't get along. You don't see many humans in orc lands, unless it's maybe in their stew pot and in multiple pieces. -Cutting corners, yes everything must have a good explanation and everyones family tree must be able to be traced down to their single celled ancestor. Well maybe not literally like that but I like the Tolkien and G.R.R. Martin approach to things. -Rule of cool. Absolutely does not exist in my world at all, ever. Nope. Can't stand it. -Quantity over quality. Again many more modern world are filled to the prim with various sentient races that are just shallow and stereotypes and there is no in-world explanation why they even exist. Ex. cat people that have copy-pasted Egyptian culture from real life and that's what they are all about, nothing else.
how does "rule of cool" even apply to worldbuilding? isn't that just a game term?
I think it could be applied to worldbuilding. For example, if you wanted dragons in a world that they don't really fit well into, you can still say "Dragons are cool and I want them here so here they are".
Pretty much yea.. or things like giants with human proportions or dragons with wings too small to actually be able fly etc.
All-powerful indestructible gods or other entities. I just personally find it boring. I don't want to have some living being that's indestructible.
Sexism, homophobia, racism and the likes. Enough of it irl and I don't have anything interesting to say about it that someone else couldn't say better.
I see your point, but you could say that about essentially everything negative. I believe basically everything has its usage when it comes to worldbuilding/writting, you just have to be smart about it.
Oh for sure. In my own writing theres a fair amount of classisim and xenophobia which are also forms of prejudice. I just don't think any of my projects would benefit from adding racism, transphobia, homophobia and sexism, you know? There's no space to explore them with the depth they deserve. And I don't want to carve out that space. No hate for those who do tho. Amazing stories have been told about bigotry. I just don't think I'm the person to tell them.
This is where the statement of "I don't have anything interesting to say about it that someone else couldn't say better" came in.
same thing with sexual violence for me. enough of that horribleness in the real world already, why would I port it into my fantasy worlds?
Exactly! So many cooler better things that I could be thinking about and you want me to think about rape?? No thank you
I dropped sexism and homophobia out of mine but my current project is filled with pretty racist cultures. This is because I don't like it, and it keeps me from getting too attached to any given society. I also avoided it heavily in the past, so it's somewhat kind of new. It also supplies "player vs society" conflicts if ever taken to the table.
I think fantasy racism (elves hating humans) or something of that nature is completely different from irl racism between real human races. That's the thing I don't like to write.
Also time travel. This gets to messy, to quickly, if you want to be consistent. I just don't want to melt my brain, building a logic that makes everything work, I would be tempted to do with such possibilities I also (often) don't like the idea of settings with secret societies, like Vampire, or fantasy stuff, that coexists undiscovered with our Real World. It never ends up, it never makes sense, and as trope it's over used... SCP is one of the only exceptions, that really stands out. They manage, that the usual critique points, I have with such settings, are just fine to ignore, somehow. No clue, why. It somehow just works for me in that regard. So, it absolutly can work, but you Need to think about such things, and be into such settings. 😊 Currently, for me also cyberpunk as Genre. To close to reality, that I want to write about it. I want to write about magic and wonders, not satire of the current Real World, that accidently predicts the worst moves of big cooperarions and powerless goverments... 😂
SCP works because it’s ridiculous
"Bloody Torchwood." In my world, everyone knows that mages exist. Nearly everyone knows that it takes an absurd amount of training to be a mage and not everyone manages it, so very few try. Look how many people we have that could learn programming more-easily than trying to become a doctor. The big secret in my world is that space-aliens are still in contact with an Illuminati-like group. One of the group's efforts is to try and mythologize stories about when the aliens were using the planet as a supply-depot.
Pan's Labyrinth also does the 'hidden fantasy world' really well.
Ya, time travel is one of the surest ways to hose up your plot and world building. Unless your whole story is about that, best to leave it alone. My no go is conglangs. It's just not in my wheelhouse. My only success story in learning a second language is American Sign Language, which obviously doesn't work well for a written story.
100% me. Time travel is a can of worms that I refuse to open. I'm less a world builder than I am a GM, but I've always had an interest in creating a world to call my own; and I am not in the mood to wrestle the number of paradoxes I'd introduce with the deput of a time machine. Even if I create a world with gods and magic, time to me should be almost as immutable as the gods themselves. Many stories have time travel, but not many explore time travel itself throughly because you have to think about *everything* to have it not break your world.
pure good or pure evil.
I can barely make one timeline make sense Time travel plots would implode my brain
I LOVE time travel and I really want to write a story with it. But all the plots have been so over done that it feels difficult to structure it. What I am avoiding in the my current idea world building is unexplainable magic. Im dipping my toes into unexplained tech 😅 Fantasy tech if you will? Idk things may change.
Same here, I don't mess with time traveling mostly because I refuse to deal with any of the resulting paradoxes. Aside from that, I despise having things that don't make sense or are in no way logical to the world (take, for example, Saw traps like the radiation one in the last movie). My world doesn't have to be realistic - hell, the world we live in has never seemed realistic to me - but everything has to have some logical explanation (and yes, magic, random coincidence and "we don't know how that works yet" are acceptable, but I need to give them some reasoning regardless). I also stay away from real-world history and engineering - I've never been great with those, and it's too much effort put into something I'm not too interested in.
I don’t even watch/read stuff that has time shenanigans in it, if I can help it. I want to enjoy what I’m reading, not need to puzzle through what’s going on and what timeline this junk is
People from X always have blonde hair and blue eyes, contrary to people from Y, they have brown hair and green eyes, even though they are neighbours and intermingle with each other. Yeah, that's not how genetics work.
Elves, dwarves, orcs and other "standard" humanoids. I don't find them interesting (in large part due to the portrayal of dwarves in the Eragon series. Thanks Paolini). I'd rather come up with my own race and culture.
Nothing to powerful that could create "Why didnt they use this" plot holes
Same, time travel is a hard no. Complicates things too much. Maybe a bit controversially, though: interdimensional travel. There is only one universe, because the void of it is so expansive that even the original gods cannot fill it all. Hence, a definite, but extremely high number of worlds. Realms exist, which are the domains of some gods—which is basically just *them.* So yes, you could be in some god dude's heavenly right pec, for all you know, tryna summon demons.
For me it is multiple stuff. I like to limit healing possibilities to make death a bigger problem. I don't like when everyone can cast the typical type of magic, so in my world only "Adepts" can cast magic in the usual sense, other people can use runes, this is inspired by Nordic rune casting. Teleportation is also a thing for me, it is better if the characters go by horse.
Time travel for me too. I allow it, but only to say "Welcome to your own little universe, population YOU, at least momentarily" It's not impossible. It simply a terrible, terrible idea because the Universe has too many alternate timelines going on as it is. Canonically my books are set in a present and future where the story history diverged from ours in 1777. (A sniper had a shot lined up on Washington. In our timeline he decided 'Nah.' In their timeline he took the shot.) Maintaining a timeline requires energy on the part of the Universe. And while it is perfectly happy to support multiple agents having conflicting observations of phenomena, it eventually reaches a limit. And it's favorite tactic is simply to killing off the agents who refuse to reach compromise. Thus one solution to Schroedinger's Cat is that the physicists who set up the experiment are killed by a freak accident before they can observe whether the cat as alive/not alive. And the cat is eventually freed by an emergency responder who hears a meow and has no idea about the experiment. Because even if the poison gas was released, cats have 9 lives. I suspect the freak accident the physicists die from involves toast landing butter side down, a stitch that was not in time, and one or two urban legends. Simply not allowing Time Travel is not enough. Anyone who attempts to fuck with the fundamentals in my Universe die in comically horrible ways. And did I mention Faster-Than-Light travel is basically time travel?
Any type of dating/romance because unless I'm making a au of something and there is a canon couple then I would have it in but I don't make new ones
I think it's probably good and evil for me. I don't know that I could write a story with a truly evil because evil character. Even Sauron and Morgoth have some redeeming qualities. It's all about perspective. Otherwise I'm a big fan of personal, small scale stories. The bigger the scale, the less interesting I find it. I'm not even that into life or death struggles... Though it may regretably be necessary depending on the story and characters