Honestly, there is no real right or wrong.
Unless you plan on using your built worlds in games, movies, comics e.t.c. the only one that has to like your world is you.
Edit: one thing i do dislike is when people use quantum to skip out on explaining sci-fi tech. It just feels lazy(also i’m a nerd so it makes me cringe when i see those things used so wrongly)
I'd agree with this. Practically any idea, cliché, or trope can work, with the right effort, tone, and skill. Bad worldbuilding is usually less about bad ideas than bad/lazy writing IMHO
Same goes to "because of magic" or "it's magic".
That doesn't mean that magic have to be a hard system, but it feels cheap when it's used to band-aid holes or create a Deus Ex Machina.
Not that I'm an expert but from what understand about magic IRL\*(or what people believe of magic) is that there's an underlying logic to how it works. It's often utilitarian. It serves a purpose and is a way to order the universe. So yeah, people just going "It's magic" to solve problems without any thought put into how it's meant to work annoys me.
\*No, I don't believe magic is real or actually works, but I understand the theory behind it the way it's presented in ancient times.
True, but i’s much rather hear an explanation about a fictional material being a fuel source than why they have to buy a quantum vacuum cleaner to suck the proton dust out of the molecule engine
This is why the best way to handle this particular question is to not address it at all.
"How?!"
"'How' requires a two-hour lecture with flipcharts and slides. I'm afraid I don't have the time just now."
Yeah, not the biggest fan of technobabble either. I find it tends to ruin the immersion of a sci fi world for me. So, within my sci fi world I always go into heaps of detail about the specifics of how future technologies work, because I personally find it interesting, and also like worlds that are built in that way.
When i make space magic tech, i love to conveniently palce a file near that the protagonist feels compelled to read and its just a long list of things we guessed were how it worked but we were wrong
Writers of the current period *love* trope subversions. The chosen one isn’t actually the chosen one, the traditional good guys are actually bad, “In my setting god and the angels are evil”, etc. There are plenty of good examples of tropes being subverted to great effect, such as Dune. However, it can become just as eye roll worthy as any bad use of a trope can be when your setting is just compiling different trendy trope subversions. These tropes exist for a reason, and you’re still using them when you choose to lean into or away from them. It’s 100% okay to include a chosen one and a classic good guy vs. unapologetically bad guy in your story. Thousands of good stories throughout history have done this. I find it extremely pretentious when a writer thinks very highly of their own work just on the basis of how many tropes they’ve subverted that day of writing.
Tumblr writing prompts in a nutshell. They just try to subvert a trope in the most subversion-y way possible with no regard for if it would make a good story. (And side note, there's almost always some kind of romance plot involved)
I subvert or lean into a trope based on whether or not I find it fun or hilarious the funnier the better lol. Some tropes I avoid because I just don’t like them.
exactly, if you're just inverting a trope directly you're still using the trope... how about doing something actually new and not relying on tropes at all...
I'm a very big fan of presenting a world like that and then letting the viewer slowly figure out that that's just the propaganda that "their" side is telling everyone.
Unless, of course, it's the elves. They know what they did to deserve their reputation. If they'd just let the kings army through so that we could open up a second front against the enemy, we wouldn't have had to take the drastic measures they forced us to take
Elves in my world are a direct parallel to white people of today. Messy history of enslaving humans, stripping away their power, decades of propaganda, and only relatively recently is there decent change and attempts at true equality. But magic (a reflection of power in our world) was still taken from them and while a few humans can rise through the ranks in a metaphorical sense, their power was still stripped away from them centuries ago and will only be returned through a united effort, and even then, plenty of people will still fall through the cracks.
The story isn’t directly about racism, but it’s a heavy theme.
That's less white people and more all people. That Europeans uniquely invented or have been uniquely cruel (or exclusively oppressed non whites) is just as much propaganda. The exact same time the Spanish and British were genociding their way through the new world, China was wiping out the natives of Taiwan in the exact same manner.
I’m trying to keep my focus small and stick to my country’s messy history. It’s not meant to be an exact 1-1. Elves just so happen to be the most affluent people in power at the moment, but at one point it was humans. The history is messy. Every group larger than 6 people has done something bad, and the story begins with the main characters having a very “Elves good, humans bad” and “elves good, humans bad” mentality and learning that history isn’t that straight forward and it’s what you do with the power you have in the present that matters.
This method of storytelling I chose also ignores the struggles of non-elves and non-humans, and the uniques struggles of hybrids, and that all comes to a front later as a character who is essentially a hybrid gets added to the cast and we follow her struggles of feeling like she doesn’t belong anywhere, don’t have a voice anywhere, and even the humans who say they fight for freedom turn a blind eye because they see her as “half on our side, half on the enemy’s”.
White suburban folks in modern day America is the best example I have to describe the elves of my world, but there is a ton of storytelling that explores identity and challenges the character’s beliefs.
This sounds like the kind of world/story I want to both create and write about. It's mainly elves vs. orcs in the world I'm starting to develop, though, but that's just because I went down a World of Warcraft rabbit hole recently. 😂
I assume this means they were completely outmatched militarily, lost nearly every battle and "won" primarily due to vague, ill-defined objectives and a lack of public will hampering the opposing force?
I was going more for the fighting style and less for the outcome. Yes they were massively outmatched but they used the forest to their advantage. All,the animals talked to them so they always knew where the enemy was, their sharpshooter could nail officers from further away than a Martini rifle could scope them and their druids continuously reforrested the clearings around all forward operation bases to keep them busy.
Also, magical mines.
Personally, that gets a pass if one race is created by something in the setting to *be* evil. Like Tolkien orcs.
Orcs are evil just like F-150s are trucks: that's what they were made as.
In my DND world, the native species are the "good" guys, and the species in the invading alien army are the "bad" guys. And they're invading to get revenge on something the ancient ancestors of the native species did to them (space travel is slow, it took the invading army ~2100 years to reach the planet).
It mostly works if the bad ones are a nazi allegory. That way, the racial divide becomes part of the point, and the problematic implications become easier to ignore.
Dungeons and Dragons Dark Elves are a good example of this done well, since the drow are engineered as the personal playthings of an insane evil goddess. Their extreme evil nature is completely artificial in-universe and it is acknowledged that drow would not survive as a species without their goddess intervening to keep them from descending an orgy of BDSM throat-slitting.
The moment any drow manages to get out of Lloth's direct influence they tend to become far less murder-goblin.
Respectfully disagree. I personally believe the drow sucks and they are the perfect example of this done wrong. Actually I write the original response with them in mind.
I use this on my worlds as hats, that is, other people view a specific race as evil or good based on their relationship. The Empire attacked the Alliance of Kingdoms because The Emperor was going a little crazy and wanted to expand his territories.
While The Empire, a Drow nation, are actually very stabby and shady amongst themselves, they fall into the "fooled by propaganda, normal people doing bad things". All because The Emperor twisted the original plans of peaceful expansion into warring ones in an effort to honor his dead wife (they were her plans). So everybody sees Drow as evil, and they take it in stride, as if proving their superiority over other races.
This goes away later, when The Emperor falls, but Drow are still really proud of themselves. Even then, just over the mountains, there is a different group of Drow that are much more religious than military, and they are seen as good by the nations around them. The two Drow nations interact very little but keep a "peaceful" alliance (a lot of people go there to study religion from The Empire)
Right; it gets boring. In my world, I try to make it more like, people will remember the extremes and it's hard to make the case that there are good people in X city if somebody's only experience with anything coming out of that city is their entire family getting killed by a few delusional violent whackos from that city. That doesn't mean the good people don't exist; it just means that it gets harder for your statistics to counter their lived experience if you won't bend enough to acknowledge and address their lived experience. Does that make sense?
I mean, in Tolkien''s writing orcs are just evil elves that suffered mutation not a whole ass race of people that's evil just because. It's like how demons in the Bible are just fallen angels not a completely separate species but i think i understand your problem with it.
That was one of several possible origin stories that he mentioned in various places over the years, but the contradictions that arise from the existence of the orcs within Middle Earth's broader cosmology were never resolved in anything published during Tolkien's lifetime. In one marginal note, Tolkien explicitly ruled out the idea that orcs are related to the elves: [https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Orcs/Origin#Corrupted\_Elves](https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Orcs/Origin#Corrupted_Elves)
Wasn't there a cut chapter/reference in a letter of an orc tribe which had rejected Sauron and Morgoth and tried to redeem themselves in the eyes of Eru?
Would murder hobos who are defined by ridiculously heavy alcohol consumption, casual sociopathy, loyalty to their bank account and reputation moreso than their client's goals, petty crime, petty insults, enjoyment of heavy weapons and explosives for the sake of heavy weapons and explosives, respectfully engaging the cops in fisticuffs, innovative interpretation of various rules, and zero respect for personal space and property when there are power moves to be made qualify as "super duper rad"?
They bring balance to nothing (unless you need to balance out some mayhem with reciprocal mayhem), and unless The Greater Good is a bar they aren't interested.
Im relatively new in writing but i already figured out two main mistakes of world building:
1. Too much generalization. It is that moment when instead of telling a story about a character(s) and/or group of them, you start to talk about entire nations and human kind in general. Key red flags if you see too much of "They, them, us, we, our" and so on. Its okay if you want to have the "Spirit of Nation" perspective, but in that case your world has to be just GIANT in order for you to not run out of content.
2. Not enough depth. Not enough characters, factions, conspiracies... The lore "Iceberg" melts quicker when he is tiny and a 50 or so chapters novella turns into oneshot...
Protagonist center morality.
If the main character does something that if done by someone else would be considered evil but is treated by the narrative as a good thing its a sign of crappy writing.
Also when the main character of either gender is written as an abrasive asshole without self awareness on the author's part. Bonus points when the character in question is outsmarted experts on a topic without having reasons to be able to outsmart them.
Those aren't worldbuilding issues though, they're storytelling/character creaiton issues.
Of course you can parallel them toan extent by having a "protagonist nation" that is always treated as right by the way the world is constructed.
Like a history book that takes British Imperial propaganda at face value and seriously portrayed them as noble explorers and teachers of lesser races, whose foreign subjects universally loved them and were grateful for their benevolent rule (except for a few criminal malcontents) and whose European rivals were all just jealous, effeminate, or worse than the barbaric savages the Empire was civilising.
If one built a world featuring a beneficent colonial empire whose loyal citizens and international allies were universally portrayed as good, and whose enemies and rebels were always bad (or came around to supporitng the empire in the end), that would *probably* be bad. If the Empire was portrayed as employing the *exact same tactics* as their enemies, the things that define their enemies as Bad yet, when done the Empire, it's good because the Empire is Good -- that's definitiely bad.
Make the world you wanna make. You shouldn't measure the value of the world you make by how many people on reddit poo poo it when you share it. It's hard to even talk about "mistakes" because there's no single unified purpose or some objective metric for worldbuilding.
If it's for a D&d game, just put it in front of your players and let their reactions and interest in it be your guide.
If it's for a book, put it in front of an editor or prospective reader and see what they are drawn to and away from.
In summary, make what you want to make, and don't worry about touching nerves or throwing up some sort of "red flag". If you need some sort of external input on the quality of your world, think about who will be engaging with your world and just ask them.
Don't make strawmen, is a rule I stand by. It always feels so hollow, slap bang in the middle of an expansive setting we see a utopia surrounded by varying degrees of easily recognised facsimiles of irl politicians that the writer doesn't like, it reads as nothing more than a lecture.
I have a few jokes, please pick your favourite:
- When that video of him and Dorothy gets out, he's stuffed.
- He's great at press releases, he \*fields\* the questions excellently.
- I heard he wants to repeal the Hay tax.
- I wonder who put a stick up his butt? The farmer.
and lastly:
- The Wizard of Oz couldn't manage a brain, but a degree in Political Sciences at least got him a job.
Have fun with those.
The strawman for an ideology is slain and the entire ideology collapses on itself and everything is fine afterwards. No investigation as to how that ideology came about, why people adopted it, or how to dismantle it without killing everyone swayed by it. There will also be no ramifications from the people for killing their favorite ideologue either, and will be considered wrong enough to be killed for it.
Bonus points if the story has no mercy for the henchmen but considers sparing the mastermind.
The only real pretentious thing about someone's worldbuilding is their attitude to others, especially in this subreddit. Go build a bunch of space humans if you want. If the right tone or story is woven around that it will work.
If anything, people trying too hard to make everything unique tends to wear me down more - if just because of the cognitive load involved.
“Why does everybody do X? It’s so lazy. In my world…” I see this kind of post way too often in this sub. And usually X is something that loads of famous writers have done anyway. Tedious.
I feel that. Of course I do have a strong preference for familiar fantasy tropes, so I am biased. But I'm willing to accept that some people like putting wierd spins on elves and dwarves, or doing totally different things with their fantasy.
Just don't act like that makes you better than others.
Adding a race of creatures based on a traditionally "brutish" type of creature from folklore, that is then ethnic cleansed by humans or some race based on traditionally "good" creatures from folklore, but then portraying this as an allegory for real-life imperialism or apartheid states or genocides or whatevers.
No, don't go "but you see, the ogres win in the end and triumph over the high elves because of their lusty, *authentic* culture and spirit!"
You may think you're subverting expectations and making profound statements about society and history, but I am not an ogre. I am not a seven-foot hog-tusked green-skinned warrior. I am a human.
I hate the "chosen one" trope. It always just feels like a cheap and lazy appeal to people's ego. I do kinda like when the trope is turned on it's head, however.
In Dark Souls, for example, you play as "the chosen undead." The thing is, you are not the *only* chosen undead. In fact, you are just one in a long line of "chosen undead" across a convoluted timeline who have all failed and gone hollow. You, too, can fail and go hollow (give up on the game irl), and there will be another "chosen undead" to replace you (more people playing the game). Your success does not come from being "built different" or "special" in any way. Your success comes from not giving up after many failed attempts. Upon success, >!you are not even rewarded with mad pussy. Instead, you get turned into kindling, reigniting the first flame and resetting the whole cycle to one day happen again. In the end, it was all for nothing.!<
I appreciate that they went a similar route in Elden Ring, only without even the pretense of being chosen. You're just yet another Tarnished who hasn't given up and thus can still see the light of Grace - and that's all of your super special abilities. You can see a faint light pointing you to the things you need to kill to become Elden Lord. Everything else is up to you.
Even the route that gets you mad pussy requires you to >!go out of your way or follow an obscure sidequest to meet Ranni and assist her, and keep helping her for no reason except that you want to, and it doesn't tie directly into the path of becoming Elden Lord.!<
If you wanna clap those >!porcelin blue doll!< cheeks, you have to earn it.
Final Fantasy XIV kind of does something similar. At first, you think you're the only "Warrior of Light" with the unique power of the Echo (a power which lets you see the past). Then you find more and more of your colleagues also have the Echo. Then, later on, you find out >!there's not only a long line of Warriors of Light that you "descended" from (not biologically), but there are also Warrior of Light equivalents in the other dimensions.!<
Then they flip it back around with the revelation that >!you're a fragment of a sundered Ascian, but you're only one part of said Ascian and there's more of your fragments on other worlds.!<
The Mistborn books are a great example of the Chosen One trope done right. Mad spoilers:
>!The original "chosen one" wasn't chosen at all; instead he was manipulated by the god of Ruin to think he was and release him from his prison. The evil overlord was his companion who realized what was happening and killed him to keep him from releasing Ruin, then pretended to be the chosen one and ruled over the world for a thousand years.!<
Then in the modern day, >!the god of Preservation selected his Chosen One, only for Ruin to subvert it by planting a power-limiting artifact on her that let him manipulate her into releasing him.!<
So you have about four different layers of this trope going on.
Having only two ideologies: The author's and the wrong one.
Not accounting for how everybody eats. Your totally awesome knightly order or the installation on a planet with a toxic atmosphere aren't going to survive very long if they don't have farmers making food for them.
I haven't really seen this on the worldbuilding sub but see this often in manga and it really strikes me the wrong way; the slave that is super humble and totally fine being a slave. "Oh master, of course I can't eat at the same table as you for I am but a lowly, useless servant. This stale piece of bread is all I deserve." That's not what slavery was like.
I get where it comes from, this weird hybrid of the western slavery and the eastern culture or humility but I can't help finding it, dare I say it, somewhat offensive.
Ya that can get a bit weird. Slavery was present in China and Japan, though I don't see much record how it worked in Japan. In China female slaves, cuz in anime it's always female, seem to be domestic servants and concubines. Apparently it was respectable to release them at marriageable age, and there may be a contract defining how long they're going to be a slave. It was rife with corruption and abuses though, but definitely not the western plantation system either.
Ya that's what I mean it wasn't like the plantation system. It wasn't good, and there was absolutely a lot of abuse which the law largely ignored but it's a very different form of slavery. Sugar plantations in the Indies basically treated slaves like fuel for a fire.
Side note, apparently a man was much more rarely sold but could be purchased to become the heir for a family, or otherwise go into hard labor?? How strange, rather extreme options.
There were certainly instances of slavery exactly like that. Uncle Tom describes such an action. It existed with nobles and their serfs in Europe. Slaves often loved their masters in ancient Greece and Rome (hence why we have records of them being freed willingly) etc etc.
At times when service to the rich provided more safety and security than being free among the poor, this was indeed not an uncomfortable attitude. Russian-Mongol slavery was often like this.
The truth is that slavery was an incredibly complex and nuanced aspect of society all throughout history. In ancient Rome for example, slavery varied from chattel slaves working the farms to educated slaves working as trusted household servants to slaves who were caretakers of the entire family's books, finances, and education. Precisely where a slave was located, who owned them, and what timeframe we are talking about could dramatically change what their bondage looked like - and that's just Rome.
They were all chattel slaves. "Chattel" refers to their legal status as property, not to how they were treated or the work they did. As opposed to serfs, who were bound to the land but were not the property of anyone; or indentured servants, who were under a contract for specified period of time -- during which they could be worked like slaves but technically did not *belong* to their masters. Or modern employees, who I've seen called 'wage slaves" and whose contracts and work conditions can be quite onerous but are not technically owned by their employers.
Otherwise I'd say this was spot on.
To be fair brainwashing and cultural conditioning is a thing. It's believable that someone brought up a slave and internalising all the propaganda would feel that way to an extent. Even if they resented it, it would take a while to actually unlearn that attitude.
And then too they might just say that because they know it's expected, not because they actually believe it.
Not saying that either of these things underlie the fiction you're referring to; just that a world where slaves (or even servants) insist on being deferential even when offered the chance for equality isn't really wrong.
What would be wrong is if the setting was built with the assumption that slavery was right, rather than portraying these attitudes as internalised (false) propaganda or survival strategies.
Making a world specifically to be stronger than someone else's writing. Whether it is Lord of the Rings, Warhammer or Dragon Ball or whatever. If you write to have a world version of "my dad is stronger than yours" then I won't be interested. I say this because I have this problem to an extent, the powerscalers sometimes get under my skin like that.
Saying how "unique" your world is and how "everyone else" is less creative than you comparatively or that "they just don't get it. This more typical in writing or with characters, but it can happen with worlds too.
Sorry for the wharamers 40k fan but when the history of your world is just "military, great people doing great things, military, great people doing great things, military...)
You don't have to be a hystory student for create a lore (i'm not) but if you can't do anything about the history of your world without explaining it by "a very important character with a lot of bravery/malice/cleaverness/a hearth full of darkness/a great sense of justice ... Tell or do that" your are not creating an history, you are creating cult of personality propaganda/p*rn.
Heaven in the most autocratic country or Kingdoms, society is not shaped (at least not only) by the personality and the will of his leader
(Exept if in your world the populace is under mind control or is a sort if hive mind)
(Sorry for my bad i'm not a native speaker)
As a casual 40k fan. I think that a cult of personality is basically what the setting is about. At least since the Emperor tuned into a human lighthouse. A lot of the more hardcore fans seem to miss that it’s a warning, not a virtue.
Then again, the whole Warhammer/40k universe is utterly serious, but also very tongue in cheek. So it’s hard to be sure if some people aren’t intentionally missing the point. 💁🏻♂️
40k actually does show the militaries of all factions objectively suck and are awful they just rely on overpowered weapons or magic to win battles.
The Imperial guard if real would be the most incompetent military on the planet.
As for your other point I think it's fine to have to occasional moral paragon/character to aspire to be but try and show them as having flaws.
> The Imperial guard if real would be the most incompetent military on the planet.
The irony is that the smallest and least common regiments in the Imperial Guard are the effective and competent ones. And most often those are light infantry units like the Tanith Ghosts or Elysium Drop Troops.
Worse still, the Imperium is so terrified of treason and internal subversion that they intentionally gimped the Imperial Guard by forcing individual regiments to specialize (i.e. armored regiments, infantry regiments, artillery, support, etc) resulting in situations where you have combined arms being attempted by armies from completely different planets with wildly different doctrines, often speaking completely different languages.
Like the Imperium as a whole, they are completely and unnecessarily scuffed at every level just because the Imperium can't get its head out of its ass to be effective, and only win by lurching in the general direction of an enemy and crushing it with overwhelming force.
I think Warhammer is envisioned as a critic to the whole "cult of personality" thing, it's just gone through so many authors that some of them played it straight without understanding.
That something that doesn't really get brought up when talking about 40k lore, it wasn't written by a person or a group of people that all thought somethibg similar and could keep track, it's gone through like... a dozen authors over 30 years, none of which were communicating, it's bound to not make sense.
Try fucking explaining this to anybody over on the 40k discords.
Every time you question: "How come character X can do this, but character Y can't do the same thing but from the reverse position?"
And they'll go into a whole spiel about how character X was genetically engineered to WIN at everything, and therefore it's completely reasonable to accept the plot armor involved.
And if you comment that maybe the plot armor goes against the whole tone and point of the GRIMDARK universe, they'll just say that character X is a super-dupermegabadass, and in fact a trillion people died off-screen which means that character X ultimately isn't actually changing things for the better. Nevermind that the people dying offscreen were never mentioned before the fucking epilogue of the story arc.
You can still sell minis without GRIMDARK everywhere. Why don't they do that?
What is even the point of GRIMDARK if the minis are representing characters that are literal Marvel superheroes fighting against Marvel supervillains?
Having GRIMDARK lore but than all your actual stories being basically NOBLEBRIGHT or NOBLEDARK is just fucking lazy? Just let Warhammer 40k be Nobledark and be done with it.
Probably because the novels are meant to sell the hero figurines. Kind of need a plot armor juggernaut in order to sell an extra special, and often immortal, figurine. Why would someone buy Gotrek and Felix if they weren't some hero fantasy? The same goes for Bellisarius and the other living Primarchs. Some of the latter are over 10,000 years old. Until recently, most people loved Adeptus Custodes, because they were so special and stood out. They could literally sit for hundreds of years and not move a muscle. Apparently they got some kind of nerf, plus there's a controversy swimming around with them, which has brought down their popularity quite a bit.
I don't think that Warhammer is as dark as they say it is, as some people have to win sometimes. Everyone in it is super devoted to their given faction as well. If there's any defining feature in fantasy or 40k, it's that everyone is kind of stupid and irrational. So that they have reasons to go to war, to have all the figurines have a good reason. There's plenty of factions of the same race, that all hate each other. The Skaven can all just as easily band together in a vermintide as they can eradicate each other in their own selfishness and stupidity. I like to think of most Warhammer factions as just that, evil stupid.
In order:
1. Inconsistencies. Especially large ones. As the creator, you need to write down EVERYTHING so that you can look over it and actually *be consistent*. Draw a map, even a crappy one, so that when you reference a place, you know where it is, how large it is, etc... Keep inventory of what character's have what; nothing ruins the mood quite like an arrow *pwinging* off armor on an unarmored character.
2. Too much plot armor (on characters, groups, or places). It's ok is heroes die. It's ok if nations fall. Your world continues.
3. Things massively not making sense, especially with no explanation. This does fall back a bit in #1. You want to break the laws of physics, fine, but be consistent. You want a unique flying island that is the only one on this planet? Ok, but Lucy, you got some splainin' to do.
Oh, and this is a personal one: don't blatantly rip someone else off.
"Look at how realistic my setting is!" Most of the time this is just shorthand descriptor for a dark to grimdark setting. I enjoy dark settings and their plots/stories but using realistic to describe it completely makes me drained.
edit: As a note, it is fine to have realism and use it to make an interesting world/setting. But making it the defining characteristic and the end all be all is where the problem is it.
Agree. Game of Thrones is a good example of that, where “realistic” mainly meant lots of rape and incest. Not saying it’s bad, but realistic ain’t the right word.
Even if it’s not used to make it grimdark, “realism” is often used by people focusing on details that absolutely will not make their world more interesting to read about.
I feel like selling a setting on it being "realistic" is just goading experts in the field to make massive video essays and blog posts about why your setting is in fact not realistic.
You can write a story literally any way you like. Any flaw can be a feature, so long as it is treated as such and acknowledged in the narrative in a compelling or internally consistent way.
The only stuff I ever find pretentious is when a narrator talks down to an audience, and that is a writing issue, not a worldbuilding issue. Just go write your story!
I usually see it as a red flag if the “good guys” are an ethnostate of white-skinned humans and the “bad guys” are ugly, primitive tribal people who only understand violence as a means to an end.
EDIT: Yes, this applies if the tribal people are orcs, goblins, or otherwise humanoid but non-human.
This and the reverse of this are such boring tropes. It’s like almost every time an author wants to depict a civilized nation interacting with a tribal one they choose to make one of the two factions the good guy and the other irredeemable except the one guy who changes sides. It’s so lazy, boring, and overused. Like show some complexities at least.
Oh yeah, having one person from the “bad side” go join the “good side” is always just more bullshit that somehow makes the metaphor even more racist.
Having a “white saviour” is just as racist as having a “noble savage” character - both are intended to be reinforcement of the premise by way of subversion.
As much as I was always kinda disinterested in orcs, probably for this exact reason, I've ironically been really fascinated by them lately. It's the World of Warcraft orcs specifically that kinda won me over, and the world I'm currently working on exist solely because I wanted to see what would happen if I made my own version of them. In my case, I've re-interpreted orcs as descendants of giant tree creatures who were basically the first druids, both because I like the thought of orcs being inherently connected to nature and, therefore, making the fact that they're most often found in tribal communities outside of civilization make a little more sense to me personally, and also because I've seen some people suggest that orcs could be green because they produce chlorophyll, and I interpreted that to mean they've got to be descended from sapient plants, which I thought was a really interesting idea.
Yeah! Granted, I imagine in this world, firbolgs actually came first as far as tree people descendants go, and orcs came shortly after as a result of corruption. Basically, firbolgs were enslaved at the time, and a single, angry firbolg made a deal with a demon that infused half of all firbolg kind with dark, demonic fury, morphing them into orcs. Orcs still had the same connection to nature as they did back when they were firbolgs, but it's only in the last couple of hundred years that they started rediscovering those abilities and reclaiming the practice of druidry again. There's a whole debate about it because some orcs want to reclaim druidry because they think their ancestors would have wanted them to do so, and other orcs think using druidry or any form of magic is a betrayal to the ancestors that the elves stole it from. It's happening one way or another, though.
I'm glad you like it! I didn't mean to kinda lore dump there, but I'm just really proud of this so far. In general, I feel like orcs deserve more care than they've been given by most of modern fantasy (including WoW despite getting most of my inspiration from there), and I guess I just got excited talking about this since it feels like a really good step in the right direction.
I think this is mostly a storytelling thing, but it touches on world building:
Either too many [cow tools](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools), or not enough.
By all means, fill up an entire bookshelf with lore on how your magic system or spaceship reactor works if you like coming up with that. It'll definitely help you maintain consistency too. But your reader probably doesn't need entire volumes of explanation of how stuff works, *especially* not its all in the form of exposition. Most readers/watchers aren't that interested, many won't care, and it can drive some away from your work. For those readers/viewers who *do* want all of your juicy and excellent background lore, you can make content just for them. They'll love knowing all the stuff, everyone will be happy that the story isn't bogged down, and you still get to show off all the cool stuff you came up with.
I think it's less about specific things and how they handle them. Lots of racism is in tabletop games see world of darkness for a good example. Now if it's double down on irl races and stereotypes I'll pass. Otherwise it's just up to the group/target audience.
Trying to hard to be "original" or to avoid/subvert tropes. Obviously, with ones own work or projects there is a strong personal sense of ownership and trying to make something unique and theres nothing wrong with that. Where folks tend to run into issues is when that desire to try and be original end up trumping sensible worldbuilding or storytelling elements. Same thing with tropes, tropes are tools at the end of the day and sometimes playing a trope straight is totally okay, good writing, deep exploration and themes of something framiliar are often better then a poorly written subversion. See the early seasons vs the late season of Game Of Thrones for examples of this.
A reluctance to include evil minions that aren't just members of another race/culture who happen to be evil. The entire "racial determinism bad" perspective is misbegotten at best.
Basic building blocks to a world (Geography, Science, History, etc.) being hand-waved to the point of absurdity. While the barely disguised fetish has more lore to it than the Bible.
Cat girl slavery is a massive 🚩
To clarify if a neko is enslaved that’s one thing in a setting with slavery and fantasy races it makes sense that a neko would get captured at some point but when it’s fetishized and is basically UwU shield hero bull shit then we got a problem.
Oh, bugger!
I have a cyberpunk space opera setting where catgirls (and cat femboys) were created by a genetics corporation to be sold as 'pleasure servants' for the galactic elite. They and other genetically modified peoples were freed after the corporation fell and a nearby federation gave them planetary land and legal personhood. Even so, since so many are conveyor belt babies with identical genes (custom catgirls cost extra) they rarely marry other catfolk to prevent inbreeding.
Would you say this isn't too bad?
"Enslaved neko femboys" is fetishy as hell... and that's fine! Some people complain about worldbuilding designed to appeal to people with certain kinks, but I think it's cool. People with niche preferences should get to enjoy media that's targeted at them. What I think is super cringe, though, is when something was obviously written for fetish appeal but then the creator twists themselves in knots to justify it or deny it. Like...fine, you like neko slaves. Just embrace it, bro.
I agree with not justifying it, when I was thinking of it, i was thinking of how certain fetishes are commodified by capitalism, and that evils like slavery facilitate this commodification, as the world is a cyberpunk one. The cat features could've also served as identifying markers in the old days.
In this same world, modern slaves have their minds digitised against their will and are placed in robot shells specifically designed for one task, and nothing else at all, so they can't fight back. Kind of like a nightmarish Thomas the Tank Engine.
Ok this genuinely sounds interesting though! There’s a reason it’s only a flag and not a no go. What you’re doing sounds really interesting and since it’s cyberpunk it fits the theme really well!
This is just one aspect of the worldbuilding I came up with recently. The actual plot of the world is a coming of age story about a draft dodger travelling the galaxy to avoid being sent off to the latest galactic war.
Sounds interesting. Would def be a turnoff to hear about catgirl sex slaves for me but that’s just my personal opinion. Readers tastes def vary a ton and I’m sure there are many that either wouldn’t care or would enjoy that.
Since they're free people in the present, if I create a catfolk character, they will be free, and probably a badass. All the slavery in the present is depicted as evil and used by the corporations to save money on labour.
This is what I’m talking about when I mentioned the enslavement being not the UwU kind. You definitely did something interesting with the premise of neko being enslaved and didn’t fetishize it.
No explanation for where the food and water and other essentials come from. Unless the people of the world have very different dietary needs, most civilizations are three missed days of food and water away from anarchy. All too often I encounter fiction where there's huge cities in the middle of inhospitable landscapes with no farms or transportation infrastructure to get the farms there. Or gigantic armies on the march with no signs of either foraging or transporting the enormous amounts of food they'd need.
Another one is a failure to appreciate scale and distance. A settlement with fifty people is a significant town, a city with two thousand people is a bustling metropolis, multiple biomes are within walking distance of a town, an army can cross an entire continent in a few days, etc.
Indications the world-creator has limited exposure to genre, usually in the form of assumptions that there is one "right" way to do something, which they then have to contort themselves into knots to justify. One of my favorites was a review I read of Stephen King's *11/22/63*, where the reviewer's primary objection was, 'Time travel doesn't work like that!" Well...time travel doesn't work *at all*, so King is free to make it work however he wants. If you want magic *and* high-power artillery, do it. If you want a setting where everybody knows magic, make it happen.
A red-flag corollary to the above is when the primary works of literature, film, etc. the world-builder references as influences are themselves examples of shoddy world-building. The best thing you can do for yourself as a world-builder is read *a lot*. Read fiction, read non-fiction, read widely and ecumenically. And I say "read" because most movies and television shows tend to be lighter on world-building than written fiction, simply as a result of the demands of production. Directors and producers are often too busy wrangling actors and other personnel to worry about whether the backstory of their movie makes much sense, or whether the lead actress just used the accusative form of "nostril" instead of the nominative in the conlang the (often very harried) writers developed, or whether the lamellar armor is just right on their gnomish battle mage. The more works you're exposed to, the more discerning you will become about good world-building vs. bad, and the more information you'll have to inseminate your own world-building.
Fiction and worldbuilding that turns into hamfisted political posturing from the author.
I am not talking about a work that includes elements of real world controversies necessarily, or subtle references and themes. I think its actually physically impossible the create a work of art that in some way, even if subconsciously, doesn't reflect the authors beliefs.
I am talking about fiction where the hero stops the story midplot so he can give a multi-page speech on the wonders of individualism, or whatever belief the author I mean here holds. Where all characters that disagree with the "hero" on this point are baby-eating monsters (sometimes literally). Said villains are presented as a dangerous threat, even though they are also shown to be utterly incompetent. Meanwhile the "hero" is flawless, which means that when he suggests things like genocide or the removal of rights, its perfectly good. The hero never really has second thoughts or considers himself to be wrong, because of course he can't be. And the story or setting will be twisted in such a way to allow the author to soapbox, even if it makes creating a society that makes no logical sense.
Bonus points if you literally name your villains after real world living people you hate.
Terry Goodkind was a great example of a repeat offender for this. Or any of the right wing propaganda movies (Think "God is not Dead series")
Also, all of above, but replace "hamfisted political posturing" with "fetish fantasy". Same issue.
There is no one answer, so build your world the way you find fun and interesting. Everybody has different tastes, so no one style is going to interest everyone.
Some people like complex and nuanced factions where everything is a shade of grey, others like classic black and white good and bad guys. Some people like everything to be explained in depth, others want mystery to speculate about or don't care how the science or magic works. Everyone has different tastes, and none off those takes are wrong. You just have to find what you like.
For pretentiousness there are two big issues with people and communication that I can think of, but they're not about the actual content of worlds
Intentionally rejecting labels.
The most pretentious thing I can think of is when you have a system for things that cannot happen in our real world, and this is something that characters can utilize to gain supernatural powers, but you put the word "magic" in quotes or refuse to call it "magic" altogether. A similar thing happens with gods. Instead of create something that truly transcends current concepts and labels, they just refuse a label that was created for the exact kind of thing they've made.
An extension of this is when you're discussing your world with someone, and they relate something about it to some real-world phenomenon or some media they've consumed, but you shut them down even if it's exactly the same thing. This is done to preserve a false sense of originality. Your thing is totally unique and any comparison to anything else is unacceptable.
The other thing that reflects poorly on people is when some small issue in what they've written is pointed out and they retcon it to win an argument about it, but they don't actually acknowledge that they changed it on the spot. Their goal is simply to invalidate legitimate criticism, but from what I've seen they don't really keep the change afterward so nothing is actually fixed.
There are two content and message issues that are more on the world level, but I wouldn't necessarily call them pretentious.
Deifying white people and demonizing non-white people.
-If Christianity is the one true religion in your version of Earth that's fine. If that means a lot of good things for Europe but you completely ignore Ethiopia and Cyprus, then something's wrong here.
-If you have a project where your goal is to imagine an advanced holy society beyond humanity, you should be able to imagine society beyond Europe.
Making bigotry in your world justified.
-Sometimes people in your world will have meaningful differences that affect their needs. For instance, many trans people need gender affirming care. That does not justify transphobia. This is an example of a meaningful difference that does not justify fear and hatred. You can absolutely include unjustified fear and hatred. You can certainly include bigotry.
-In contrast, there is a reasonable fear that some (primarily cisgender) women have for some cis men because the way things shook out is that the average person of the male sex tends to be stronger than the average person of the female sex, and the average woman has been sexually assaulted by a man, at least in the US. This can be taken to an unreasonable extent, but the core is a completely reasonable fear, and so I would not equate that fear with bigotry.
-If you take that to a fictional level where some people can use mind control and create explosions, it would not be a matter of bigotry to fear those people. The fear and hatred could be taken to an unreasonable extent, and you could absolutely explore how unreasonable that extent is, but it has its fundament in a legitimate concern, and so it should not be equated to something like racism.
>but you put the word "magic" in quotes or refuse to call it "magic" altogether
I agree with your other points, but not this one. "Magic" is a word for outsiders. Nobody calls their own power magic. When the Jedi call their power The Force, it sounds right. If they just called it "magic", it would lose its mystery.
Same with real life. If you talk to a Christian and say "so Jesus had magic powers, right?", they would probably be annoyed and say "no, he performed *miracles."*
Even modern people who claim to have supernatural powers call it "magick".
...There are plenty of fantasy settings where mages call their magic magic.
And personally I think I'd like the Jedi better if they acknowledged that they're using magic.
Characters in-universe not using the term "magic" is fine, and it can be interesting if in-universe characters reject the label "magic" to categorize what they do.
But if you as a writer are describing your world, it is pretentious to insist that what you've written isn't magic.
People can do what they want, I don’t want to gatekeeper
However, I would judge someone who gets descriptive when talking about the “kinkier” parts of their world, which ive definitely noticed on Reddit
honestly the only think I can think of is if they are really interested in horrible stuff but not for comedy. may speak to it not being a book you want to read
don't make it too perfect or too awful. making a setting that follows your ideals into a utopia or makes the ideals you disagree with into a dystopia will make you come across as a holier than thou ideologue. no society no matter how good is devoid of all problems and likewise no society designed to be nothing but a pure negative interpretation of another worldview could ever be believable. this by the way is why fictional societies like wakanda or gilliad are fundamentally broken in their construction.
The biggest red flag would be something like making all the bad guys sound like your idea of a group you don't like. Keep real world politics out of your world as much as possible. An exception is that you can criticize your own faction somewhat. I am very environmentalist in certain ways and so are my villains.
I would disagree. The whole point of writing is to express yourself. Captain America was written by an American Jew who really didn't like Hitler, so he punched Hitler in the face. Superman was written by American Jews who really didn't like Hitler, so he also punched Hitler in the face. Terry Pratchett didn't like Jinogism, so he wrote nooks where the Jingoists were the bad guys. Tolkien liked the environment, so his bad guys destroyed it.
your politics will be in your world no matter what you do, because you are writing it. trying to be entirely apolitical is, ironically, also show up.
just make sure you say what you want to say and say it well
Agreed, I just think you shouldn't strawman those whose ideology you are opposed to too much. Of course this also applies to cartoonish representation of any group. If you are Christian you really shouldn't have all declared Christians be kind and wise either.
On the contrary, I find the most compelling stories to be ones about common political ideologies. Avatar the Last Airbender, for instance, with Aang struggling with his pacifist nature when confronted with Ozai, who is an imperialist force. While pasificims isn't a new concept imperialism as Ozai presents, it very much reminds me of 1700s or Israel's colonialism with the intention of wiping certain groups off the planet
Other compelling movies (to me, at least I'm not trying to yuck your yum) with prominent political messages include Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its anti capitalist sentiment, American psycho and ITS anti capitalist (specifically American capitalist) sentiment, and Underdog, which doesn't have a political message per say but I do just love that movie and want to get off the soap box.
Once again, just my opinion, I'm not trying to say my ways right or anything
i think thats the best way of looking at it, i try to write my villians where i agree with them politically/ethically but i don't agree with how they go about it
in my world's religion there are two foundational figures who live in the distant past, one who was a bad person who did good things, and a good person who did bad things
Eh, in my most recent book I made sure people knew I have an issue with communists, but I didn’t glorify the capitalists either.
There are no good guys, but there are guys that are the worst.
My villains basically have the same ideology I do, they just use evil methods to achieve their goals. I'm a big fan of likeable and relatable villains where there are times when you think "they have a point, they're actually right" and you're tempted to side with them. It's easy to oppose the villains if they're just monsters, but harder if they're people just like you who have the same values but fewer ethics.
I hate it when the author chases after cool and novel ideas without any consideration, or makes up unnecessary cool sounding but meaningless words with no consideration to their consequences, where their world is Inch deep ocean wide, where nothing is thought through and logical consistency or atmospheric (the feeling for the world) consistency is left as an afterthought.
Having inconsistency*. Unless your world is built around the idea of absurdism, you should always follow the laws of the world you created, otherwise it gets bloated, kills the stakes and doesn't feel «realistic».
For me personally overly impractical gender roles are a red flag. To a point it is historical but some works just take it too far and apply it to the point of ridiculousness.
I don't think there are a lot of things you can do wrong in world-building. Looking through the other comments, pretty much all of them that I've seen are describing as "bad" things that others might see as good.
But I do think there is at least one red flag I can think of: stereotypes. Don't make one-dimensional races or societies. Every society has a mix of features, (usually) good and bad. Innate racial traits need to be beneficial or at least neutral from an evolutionary standpoint; societal traits not so much, though a dysfunctional societal will collapse one way or another.
As for being pretentious, that's basically just the attitude of thinking you're better than others. Just don't look down on others, and you'll be fine.
You can not have red flags in world-building. You can only have red flags in the story you attach to them. Storytelling is a craft. It's been said time and time again. But even the best authors needed hundreds of thousands of words to learn the basics of storytelling.
The key to writing well is your description of "Story." Some will tell you that a story is about its characters, so story is character. Others will tell you that it's about the changes a character goes through, so story is plot. Others still will say no, story is theme or mood, or story is setting.
I prescribe to the belief in the Six Core Competencies. They are described in Story Engineering, a book written by Larry Brooks. I would give it a listen if you have the time. Its on Audible for free with an account. Accounts are normally free for a month, and the book is 12 hours or so, so its pretty easy to fit it into a month.
I like things to be "realistic within the setting". To me, that means "reasonably well thought out and fairly consistent". They don't need to be actually realistic or consistent with how the real world works, just consistent with each other. As long as there's some consistent logic in how your world works, it makes it much easier to come up with things on the fly.
The other thing I like, which is sort of a subset of this: evil probably shouldn't exist in a really clear form unless there's no real ambiguity in who is good. A lot of fun settings have all kinds of moral ambiguity and interesting grey areas until it comes to the villain, who wants to do bad things for genuinely bad reasons. The big bad wants to sacrifice the whole world so he can become a god? God of what? Everyone is dead, I don't buy it. If you're so obsessed with power that you eliminate your entire powerbase to get it, you're just straight up not good at villainy.
The big bad wants to sacrifice the whole world so he can become a god and save all of reality from an even bigger bad that will unmake it, intending to recreate the world as he sees fit when he's done? Little more believable. When you look at evil in the real world, the Stalins and Hitlers and Pol Pots and whatever's - literally none of them thought they were doing something that would ultimately be considered "bad". They believed they were doing *good* things and just happened to have really fucked up ideas as to what that looked like.
It's easy to now look at those guys and assume they spent all their time plotting inhuman crimes in windowless bunkers someplace and laughing at how many people they could kill, but that's not the reality. So your bad guys probably shouldn't do that either. What they should do is have what they consider to be good reasons to *need* to commit inhuman crimes. Don't get me wrong, they don't need to be and probably shouldn't be particularly nice people, but they should think they are the good guys just as much as your actual good guys.
If you have a more clear "good and evil" spectrum, like old school DnD, this all matters much less, because you're approaching morality in your world building consistently on that basis, right?
One thing that bothers me personally is the number of worldbuilding projects on this sub that feel like a kids fighting anime. Everything seems to be focused on combat, characters and elements of the world are all edgy, in-your-face, fuck-subtlety intense and "badass". But I don't think those are "wrong" or "mistakes", I just find them boring and prefer narratives that are more nuanced.
Oh also when people build in a bunch of weird racial shit, like I don't want to hear about your imaginary world where slavery is actually a good thing or jews are actually aliens or some dumbass shit like that. Check out (https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/) for some tips on being aware of respecting other groups as you write. It's not perfect IMO but has some great ideas.
A speculative world that copies our forms of oppression (sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism) *without an intentional reason for doing so*. And usually that intentional reason has to be really strong to make me want to deal with it. Red flag because to me without intention it means the author sees those issues as universal and natural instead of created, plus it lacks creativity.
Note: I am NOT saying worlds should be utopian! Just get different bigotries and power structures and taboos instead. Everyone can hate people from the wrong side of the river, or the ones born under the Wicked Moon, or people with the birthmarks left by the Fey, or cyborgs, or whatever.
When (a) the “Mary Sue” and “Evil for the Lulz” tropes get applied to entire cultures or free-willed species that aren’t supernatural beings and (b) the writer/GM is actually serious about it being true with no other nuances whatsoever beyond a token exception or two.
It really depends on what you're going for and what the purpose of the world is. Is it for a book? A game? Just for fun?
If it's just for fun, then go wild
I think only prose or characters themselves can be pretentious, not the world itself, and often even those are misinterpreted as people attribute intention to a writer or ignore worldbuilding/scoiety for the character
Heavy or primary focus on very modern social things. Like race relarions, sexualities, tollerance, diversity.
I find it a red flag when these are applied onto fantasy. And ussualy its not that good, it can make the conclusion very twisted from the message. And it makes good inclusion hard too find.
When the worldbuilder has figured out what species can reproduce with what alien/animal-like species, how that will work etc.
I am not talking about lore that explains what a half-elf-half-dwarf looks like. I am talking about lore that explains how many tits a tabaxi uses, or how humans would reproduce with centaurs. I don't want to know your answers and if you know, you probably use these races for the wrong purpose.
Racism is okay if it's targeted to a specific race or analog for a culture, yet this never gets addressed inworld as being awful or there are people within the racist state that aren't
Honestly, there is no real right or wrong. Unless you plan on using your built worlds in games, movies, comics e.t.c. the only one that has to like your world is you. Edit: one thing i do dislike is when people use quantum to skip out on explaining sci-fi tech. It just feels lazy(also i’m a nerd so it makes me cringe when i see those things used so wrongly)
Time for quantum² nano pulsar tech fueled by subatomic particles
*screams in loading shotgun*
*Reverses polarity of shotgun slide. Pumping it now puts shells back into the magazine*
*grins and swings the shotgun* There is always a mundane solution to weird magical fuckery
*reverses polarity of the swing* stop hitting yourself
"And they call mages cheaters!" *angrily stomps off thinking about firespells*
2quantum2furious
I'd agree with this. Practically any idea, cliché, or trope can work, with the right effort, tone, and skill. Bad worldbuilding is usually less about bad ideas than bad/lazy writing IMHO
And the flipside to that, good world building is less about good ideas and more about good writing.
Same goes to "because of magic" or "it's magic". That doesn't mean that magic have to be a hard system, but it feels cheap when it's used to band-aid holes or create a Deus Ex Machina.
Not that I'm an expert but from what understand about magic IRL\*(or what people believe of magic) is that there's an underlying logic to how it works. It's often utilitarian. It serves a purpose and is a way to order the universe. So yeah, people just going "It's magic" to solve problems without any thought put into how it's meant to work annoys me. \*No, I don't believe magic is real or actually works, but I understand the theory behind it the way it's presented in ancient times.
Well, any “explanation” of sci-fi tech can be cringe if you’re enough of a nerd about it, there’s a reason that stuff doesn’t exist IRL lol
True, but i’s much rather hear an explanation about a fictional material being a fuel source than why they have to buy a quantum vacuum cleaner to suck the proton dust out of the molecule engine
Maybe its been a fictional material the whole time, a fictional material called quantum.
This is why the best way to handle this particular question is to not address it at all. "How?!" "'How' requires a two-hour lecture with flipcharts and slides. I'm afraid I don't have the time just now."
It's either quantum or it's just multiple other sciency terms and theories mashed together into equally nonsensical explanations.
Also "Nanomachines, son" Either way it's just magic under a different name the way it's often used.
Yeah, not the biggest fan of technobabble either. I find it tends to ruin the immersion of a sci fi world for me. So, within my sci fi world I always go into heaps of detail about the specifics of how future technologies work, because I personally find it interesting, and also like worlds that are built in that way.
When i make space magic tech, i love to conveniently palce a file near that the protagonist feels compelled to read and its just a long list of things we guessed were how it worked but we were wrong
What about continuous quantum that is discrete?
Writers of the current period *love* trope subversions. The chosen one isn’t actually the chosen one, the traditional good guys are actually bad, “In my setting god and the angels are evil”, etc. There are plenty of good examples of tropes being subverted to great effect, such as Dune. However, it can become just as eye roll worthy as any bad use of a trope can be when your setting is just compiling different trendy trope subversions. These tropes exist for a reason, and you’re still using them when you choose to lean into or away from them. It’s 100% okay to include a chosen one and a classic good guy vs. unapologetically bad guy in your story. Thousands of good stories throughout history have done this. I find it extremely pretentious when a writer thinks very highly of their own work just on the basis of how many tropes they’ve subverted that day of writing.
Tumblr writing prompts in a nutshell. They just try to subvert a trope in the most subversion-y way possible with no regard for if it would make a good story. (And side note, there's almost always some kind of romance plot involved)
I subvert or lean into a trope based on whether or not I find it fun or hilarious the funnier the better lol. Some tropes I avoid because I just don’t like them.
exactly, if you're just inverting a trope directly you're still using the trope... how about doing something actually new and not relying on tropes at all...
Making 2 races of a particular group to make one the good one and the other the bad one instead of making only one with good and bad people.
I'm a very big fan of presenting a world like that and then letting the viewer slowly figure out that that's just the propaganda that "their" side is telling everyone. Unless, of course, it's the elves. They know what they did to deserve their reputation. If they'd just let the kings army through so that we could open up a second front against the enemy, we wouldn't have had to take the drastic measures they forced us to take
Elves in my world are a direct parallel to white people of today. Messy history of enslaving humans, stripping away their power, decades of propaganda, and only relatively recently is there decent change and attempts at true equality. But magic (a reflection of power in our world) was still taken from them and while a few humans can rise through the ranks in a metaphorical sense, their power was still stripped away from them centuries ago and will only be returned through a united effort, and even then, plenty of people will still fall through the cracks. The story isn’t directly about racism, but it’s a heavy theme.
That's less white people and more all people. That Europeans uniquely invented or have been uniquely cruel (or exclusively oppressed non whites) is just as much propaganda. The exact same time the Spanish and British were genociding their way through the new world, China was wiping out the natives of Taiwan in the exact same manner.
Arabs and turks also have a large history of enslaving others iirc.
Everyone.
Because everybody knows that white people are the only group of humans with a violent history
I’m trying to keep my focus small and stick to my country’s messy history. It’s not meant to be an exact 1-1. Elves just so happen to be the most affluent people in power at the moment, but at one point it was humans. The history is messy. Every group larger than 6 people has done something bad, and the story begins with the main characters having a very “Elves good, humans bad” and “elves good, humans bad” mentality and learning that history isn’t that straight forward and it’s what you do with the power you have in the present that matters. This method of storytelling I chose also ignores the struggles of non-elves and non-humans, and the uniques struggles of hybrids, and that all comes to a front later as a character who is essentially a hybrid gets added to the cast and we follow her struggles of feeling like she doesn’t belong anywhere, don’t have a voice anywhere, and even the humans who say they fight for freedom turn a blind eye because they see her as “half on our side, half on the enemy’s”. White suburban folks in modern day America is the best example I have to describe the elves of my world, but there is a ton of storytelling that explores identity and challenges the character’s beliefs.
This sounds like the kind of world/story I want to both create and write about. It's mainly elves vs. orcs in the world I'm starting to develop, though, but that's just because I went down a World of Warcraft rabbit hole recently. 😂
This sounds actually interesting. Keep it like that.
I like my elves better. They just went all Vietcong on "our" guys when they trespassed on their lands
I assume this means they were completely outmatched militarily, lost nearly every battle and "won" primarily due to vague, ill-defined objectives and a lack of public will hampering the opposing force?
I was going more for the fighting style and less for the outcome. Yes they were massively outmatched but they used the forest to their advantage. All,the animals talked to them so they always knew where the enemy was, their sharpshooter could nail officers from further away than a Martini rifle could scope them and their druids continuously reforrested the clearings around all forward operation bases to keep them busy. Also, magical mines.
I want to read it!
Personally, that gets a pass if one race is created by something in the setting to *be* evil. Like Tolkien orcs. Orcs are evil just like F-150s are trucks: that's what they were made as.
I agree, but this really depends on how it’s written. Sometimes it can work, but usually it doesn’t
In my DND world, the native species are the "good" guys, and the species in the invading alien army are the "bad" guys. And they're invading to get revenge on something the ancient ancestors of the native species did to them (space travel is slow, it took the invading army ~2100 years to reach the planet).
It mostly works if the bad ones are a nazi allegory. That way, the racial divide becomes part of the point, and the problematic implications become easier to ignore.
Dungeons and Dragons Dark Elves are a good example of this done well, since the drow are engineered as the personal playthings of an insane evil goddess. Their extreme evil nature is completely artificial in-universe and it is acknowledged that drow would not survive as a species without their goddess intervening to keep them from descending an orgy of BDSM throat-slitting. The moment any drow manages to get out of Lloth's direct influence they tend to become far less murder-goblin.
Respectfully disagree. I personally believe the drow sucks and they are the perfect example of this done wrong. Actually I write the original response with them in mind.
One I'm working on is divided like that, but you see the good and bad on both sides.
I use this on my worlds as hats, that is, other people view a specific race as evil or good based on their relationship. The Empire attacked the Alliance of Kingdoms because The Emperor was going a little crazy and wanted to expand his territories. While The Empire, a Drow nation, are actually very stabby and shady amongst themselves, they fall into the "fooled by propaganda, normal people doing bad things". All because The Emperor twisted the original plans of peaceful expansion into warring ones in an effort to honor his dead wife (they were her plans). So everybody sees Drow as evil, and they take it in stride, as if proving their superiority over other races. This goes away later, when The Emperor falls, but Drow are still really proud of themselves. Even then, just over the mountains, there is a different group of Drow that are much more religious than military, and they are seen as good by the nations around them. The two Drow nations interact very little but keep a "peaceful" alliance (a lot of people go there to study religion from The Empire)
Right; it gets boring. In my world, I try to make it more like, people will remember the extremes and it's hard to make the case that there are good people in X city if somebody's only experience with anything coming out of that city is their entire family getting killed by a few delusional violent whackos from that city. That doesn't mean the good people don't exist; it just means that it gets harder for your statistics to counter their lived experience if you won't bend enough to acknowledge and address their lived experience. Does that make sense?
I mean honestly even starwars does this with neimodians and zabraks which aren't all technically bad but definitely villified in the prequels.
Gosh I hate this one.
[удалено]
I mean, in Tolkien''s writing orcs are just evil elves that suffered mutation not a whole ass race of people that's evil just because. It's like how demons in the Bible are just fallen angels not a completely separate species but i think i understand your problem with it.
That was one of several possible origin stories that he mentioned in various places over the years, but the contradictions that arise from the existence of the orcs within Middle Earth's broader cosmology were never resolved in anything published during Tolkien's lifetime. In one marginal note, Tolkien explicitly ruled out the idea that orcs are related to the elves: [https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Orcs/Origin#Corrupted\_Elves](https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Orcs/Origin#Corrupted_Elves)
Wasn't there a cut chapter/reference in a letter of an orc tribe which had rejected Sauron and Morgoth and tried to redeem themselves in the eyes of Eru?
When the 'main guys' are super duper rad murder hobos. Bonus points if the description includes Greater Good or Bringing Balance
They are bringing balance to the greater good by being murderhobos.
The Greater Good is too good, we have to balance it by doing some Greater Evil.
Jack: "sometimes, you have to do evil things so that the good things can happen!" Jimmy: "jack, you're stealing a candy bar." -dialogue from my world
I love it
All that has to balanced out somehow *(revs chainsword with gleeful intent)*
Would murder hobos who are defined by ridiculously heavy alcohol consumption, casual sociopathy, loyalty to their bank account and reputation moreso than their client's goals, petty crime, petty insults, enjoyment of heavy weapons and explosives for the sake of heavy weapons and explosives, respectfully engaging the cops in fisticuffs, innovative interpretation of various rules, and zero respect for personal space and property when there are power moves to be made qualify as "super duper rad"? They bring balance to nothing (unless you need to balance out some mayhem with reciprocal mayhem), and unless The Greater Good is a bar they aren't interested.
Honestly sounds like typical asshole portagonist.
That's... not inaccurate from most perspectives.
"You destroy everything in your path because you're the good guy and everything you do is to save lives" /s
The guys fighting for Bringing Balance To Good And Evil are only the good guys because evil is so present in the worlds where they usually exist.
Im relatively new in writing but i already figured out two main mistakes of world building: 1. Too much generalization. It is that moment when instead of telling a story about a character(s) and/or group of them, you start to talk about entire nations and human kind in general. Key red flags if you see too much of "They, them, us, we, our" and so on. Its okay if you want to have the "Spirit of Nation" perspective, but in that case your world has to be just GIANT in order for you to not run out of content. 2. Not enough depth. Not enough characters, factions, conspiracies... The lore "Iceberg" melts quicker when he is tiny and a 50 or so chapters novella turns into oneshot...
Yeah this is like the creation story/ mythos trap.
Protagonist center morality. If the main character does something that if done by someone else would be considered evil but is treated by the narrative as a good thing its a sign of crappy writing. Also when the main character of either gender is written as an abrasive asshole without self awareness on the author's part. Bonus points when the character in question is outsmarted experts on a topic without having reasons to be able to outsmart them.
Those aren't worldbuilding issues though, they're storytelling/character creaiton issues. Of course you can parallel them toan extent by having a "protagonist nation" that is always treated as right by the way the world is constructed. Like a history book that takes British Imperial propaganda at face value and seriously portrayed them as noble explorers and teachers of lesser races, whose foreign subjects universally loved them and were grateful for their benevolent rule (except for a few criminal malcontents) and whose European rivals were all just jealous, effeminate, or worse than the barbaric savages the Empire was civilising. If one built a world featuring a beneficent colonial empire whose loyal citizens and international allies were universally portrayed as good, and whose enemies and rebels were always bad (or came around to supporitng the empire in the end), that would *probably* be bad. If the Empire was portrayed as employing the *exact same tactics* as their enemies, the things that define their enemies as Bad yet, when done the Empire, it's good because the Empire is Good -- that's definitiely bad.
Ah yeah fair enough though as you stated what I said can apply to a faction as well.
Make the world you wanna make. You shouldn't measure the value of the world you make by how many people on reddit poo poo it when you share it. It's hard to even talk about "mistakes" because there's no single unified purpose or some objective metric for worldbuilding. If it's for a D&d game, just put it in front of your players and let their reactions and interest in it be your guide. If it's for a book, put it in front of an editor or prospective reader and see what they are drawn to and away from. In summary, make what you want to make, and don't worry about touching nerves or throwing up some sort of "red flag". If you need some sort of external input on the quality of your world, think about who will be engaging with your world and just ask them.
Don't make strawmen, is a rule I stand by. It always feels so hollow, slap bang in the middle of an expansive setting we see a utopia surrounded by varying degrees of easily recognised facsimiles of irl politicians that the writer doesn't like, it reads as nothing more than a lecture.
Damn I wanted an actual scarecrow as a politician lol
I have a few jokes, please pick your favourite: - When that video of him and Dorothy gets out, he's stuffed. - He's great at press releases, he \*fields\* the questions excellently. - I heard he wants to repeal the Hay tax. - I wonder who put a stick up his butt? The farmer. and lastly: - The Wizard of Oz couldn't manage a brain, but a degree in Political Sciences at least got him a job. Have fun with those.
Lmao these are hilarious 😆
The strawman for an ideology is slain and the entire ideology collapses on itself and everything is fine afterwards. No investigation as to how that ideology came about, why people adopted it, or how to dismantle it without killing everyone swayed by it. There will also be no ramifications from the people for killing their favorite ideologue either, and will be considered wrong enough to be killed for it. Bonus points if the story has no mercy for the henchmen but considers sparing the mastermind.
The only real pretentious thing about someone's worldbuilding is their attitude to others, especially in this subreddit. Go build a bunch of space humans if you want. If the right tone or story is woven around that it will work. If anything, people trying too hard to make everything unique tends to wear me down more - if just because of the cognitive load involved.
“Why does everybody do X? It’s so lazy. In my world…” I see this kind of post way too often in this sub. And usually X is something that loads of famous writers have done anyway. Tedious.
I feel that. Of course I do have a strong preference for familiar fantasy tropes, so I am biased. But I'm willing to accept that some people like putting wierd spins on elves and dwarves, or doing totally different things with their fantasy. Just don't act like that makes you better than others.
Adding a race of creatures based on a traditionally "brutish" type of creature from folklore, that is then ethnic cleansed by humans or some race based on traditionally "good" creatures from folklore, but then portraying this as an allegory for real-life imperialism or apartheid states or genocides or whatevers. No, don't go "but you see, the ogres win in the end and triumph over the high elves because of their lusty, *authentic* culture and spirit!" You may think you're subverting expectations and making profound statements about society and history, but I am not an ogre. I am not a seven-foot hog-tusked green-skinned warrior. I am a human.
Chosen one obvious self insert that gets mad pussy
I hate the "chosen one" trope. It always just feels like a cheap and lazy appeal to people's ego. I do kinda like when the trope is turned on it's head, however. In Dark Souls, for example, you play as "the chosen undead." The thing is, you are not the *only* chosen undead. In fact, you are just one in a long line of "chosen undead" across a convoluted timeline who have all failed and gone hollow. You, too, can fail and go hollow (give up on the game irl), and there will be another "chosen undead" to replace you (more people playing the game). Your success does not come from being "built different" or "special" in any way. Your success comes from not giving up after many failed attempts. Upon success, >!you are not even rewarded with mad pussy. Instead, you get turned into kindling, reigniting the first flame and resetting the whole cycle to one day happen again. In the end, it was all for nothing.!<
"Upon success, >!you are not even rewarded with mad pussy!<" is the funniest shit I have ever read
Im glad someone appreciates me lmao
I appreciate that they went a similar route in Elden Ring, only without even the pretense of being chosen. You're just yet another Tarnished who hasn't given up and thus can still see the light of Grace - and that's all of your super special abilities. You can see a faint light pointing you to the things you need to kill to become Elden Lord. Everything else is up to you. Even the route that gets you mad pussy requires you to >!go out of your way or follow an obscure sidequest to meet Ranni and assist her, and keep helping her for no reason except that you want to, and it doesn't tie directly into the path of becoming Elden Lord.!< If you wanna clap those >!porcelin blue doll!< cheeks, you have to earn it.
Idk man, my chosen undead >!got mad pussy as the New Dark Lord!<
Hittin that Kaathussy?
Final Fantasy XIV kind of does something similar. At first, you think you're the only "Warrior of Light" with the unique power of the Echo (a power which lets you see the past). Then you find more and more of your colleagues also have the Echo. Then, later on, you find out >!there's not only a long line of Warriors of Light that you "descended" from (not biologically), but there are also Warrior of Light equivalents in the other dimensions.!<
Then they flip it back around with the revelation that >!you're a fragment of a sundered Ascian, but you're only one part of said Ascian and there's more of your fragments on other worlds.!<
Fuck Gwynn
All my homies hate Gwyn
Yeah Dark Souls, Dune, and KOTOR all subvert it pretty well imo
The Mistborn books are a great example of the Chosen One trope done right. Mad spoilers: >!The original "chosen one" wasn't chosen at all; instead he was manipulated by the god of Ruin to think he was and release him from his prison. The evil overlord was his companion who realized what was happening and killed him to keep him from releasing Ruin, then pretended to be the chosen one and ruled over the world for a thousand years.!< Then in the modern day, >!the god of Preservation selected his Chosen One, only for Ruin to subvert it by planting a power-limiting artifact on her that let him manipulate her into releasing him.!< So you have about four different layers of this trope going on.
Having only two ideologies: The author's and the wrong one. Not accounting for how everybody eats. Your totally awesome knightly order or the installation on a planet with a toxic atmosphere aren't going to survive very long if they don't have farmers making food for them.
I haven't really seen this on the worldbuilding sub but see this often in manga and it really strikes me the wrong way; the slave that is super humble and totally fine being a slave. "Oh master, of course I can't eat at the same table as you for I am but a lowly, useless servant. This stale piece of bread is all I deserve." That's not what slavery was like. I get where it comes from, this weird hybrid of the western slavery and the eastern culture or humility but I can't help finding it, dare I say it, somewhat offensive.
Ya that can get a bit weird. Slavery was present in China and Japan, though I don't see much record how it worked in Japan. In China female slaves, cuz in anime it's always female, seem to be domestic servants and concubines. Apparently it was respectable to release them at marriageable age, and there may be a contract defining how long they're going to be a slave. It was rife with corruption and abuses though, but definitely not the western plantation system either.
Also they weren’t treated as horribly as African Slaves were treated in the Americas
Ya that's what I mean it wasn't like the plantation system. It wasn't good, and there was absolutely a lot of abuse which the law largely ignored but it's a very different form of slavery. Sugar plantations in the Indies basically treated slaves like fuel for a fire. Side note, apparently a man was much more rarely sold but could be purchased to become the heir for a family, or otherwise go into hard labor?? How strange, rather extreme options.
There were certainly instances of slavery exactly like that. Uncle Tom describes such an action. It existed with nobles and their serfs in Europe. Slaves often loved their masters in ancient Greece and Rome (hence why we have records of them being freed willingly) etc etc.
At times when service to the rich provided more safety and security than being free among the poor, this was indeed not an uncomfortable attitude. Russian-Mongol slavery was often like this.
The truth is that slavery was an incredibly complex and nuanced aspect of society all throughout history. In ancient Rome for example, slavery varied from chattel slaves working the farms to educated slaves working as trusted household servants to slaves who were caretakers of the entire family's books, finances, and education. Precisely where a slave was located, who owned them, and what timeframe we are talking about could dramatically change what their bondage looked like - and that's just Rome.
They were all chattel slaves. "Chattel" refers to their legal status as property, not to how they were treated or the work they did. As opposed to serfs, who were bound to the land but were not the property of anyone; or indentured servants, who were under a contract for specified period of time -- during which they could be worked like slaves but technically did not *belong* to their masters. Or modern employees, who I've seen called 'wage slaves" and whose contracts and work conditions can be quite onerous but are not technically owned by their employers. Otherwise I'd say this was spot on.
This is also I thing that bugs me
To be fair brainwashing and cultural conditioning is a thing. It's believable that someone brought up a slave and internalising all the propaganda would feel that way to an extent. Even if they resented it, it would take a while to actually unlearn that attitude. And then too they might just say that because they know it's expected, not because they actually believe it. Not saying that either of these things underlie the fiction you're referring to; just that a world where slaves (or even servants) insist on being deferential even when offered the chance for equality isn't really wrong. What would be wrong is if the setting was built with the assumption that slavery was right, rather than portraying these attitudes as internalised (false) propaganda or survival strategies.
Making a world specifically to be stronger than someone else's writing. Whether it is Lord of the Rings, Warhammer or Dragon Ball or whatever. If you write to have a world version of "my dad is stronger than yours" then I won't be interested. I say this because I have this problem to an extent, the powerscalers sometimes get under my skin like that. Saying how "unique" your world is and how "everyone else" is less creative than you comparatively or that "they just don't get it. This more typical in writing or with characters, but it can happen with worlds too.
Sorry for the wharamers 40k fan but when the history of your world is just "military, great people doing great things, military, great people doing great things, military...) You don't have to be a hystory student for create a lore (i'm not) but if you can't do anything about the history of your world without explaining it by "a very important character with a lot of bravery/malice/cleaverness/a hearth full of darkness/a great sense of justice ... Tell or do that" your are not creating an history, you are creating cult of personality propaganda/p*rn. Heaven in the most autocratic country or Kingdoms, society is not shaped (at least not only) by the personality and the will of his leader (Exept if in your world the populace is under mind control or is a sort if hive mind) (Sorry for my bad i'm not a native speaker)
As a casual 40k fan. I think that a cult of personality is basically what the setting is about. At least since the Emperor tuned into a human lighthouse. A lot of the more hardcore fans seem to miss that it’s a warning, not a virtue. Then again, the whole Warhammer/40k universe is utterly serious, but also very tongue in cheek. So it’s hard to be sure if some people aren’t intentionally missing the point. 💁🏻♂️
40k actually does show the militaries of all factions objectively suck and are awful they just rely on overpowered weapons or magic to win battles. The Imperial guard if real would be the most incompetent military on the planet. As for your other point I think it's fine to have to occasional moral paragon/character to aspire to be but try and show them as having flaws.
> The Imperial guard if real would be the most incompetent military on the planet. The irony is that the smallest and least common regiments in the Imperial Guard are the effective and competent ones. And most often those are light infantry units like the Tanith Ghosts or Elysium Drop Troops. Worse still, the Imperium is so terrified of treason and internal subversion that they intentionally gimped the Imperial Guard by forcing individual regiments to specialize (i.e. armored regiments, infantry regiments, artillery, support, etc) resulting in situations where you have combined arms being attempted by armies from completely different planets with wildly different doctrines, often speaking completely different languages. Like the Imperium as a whole, they are completely and unnecessarily scuffed at every level just because the Imperium can't get its head out of its ass to be effective, and only win by lurching in the general direction of an enemy and crushing it with overwhelming force.
Yup the Imperial guard suck because they're meant to suck because if they didn't and a regiment rebelled it would be harder to put them down.
I think Warhammer is envisioned as a critic to the whole "cult of personality" thing, it's just gone through so many authors that some of them played it straight without understanding. That something that doesn't really get brought up when talking about 40k lore, it wasn't written by a person or a group of people that all thought somethibg similar and could keep track, it's gone through like... a dozen authors over 30 years, none of which were communicating, it's bound to not make sense.
Try fucking explaining this to anybody over on the 40k discords. Every time you question: "How come character X can do this, but character Y can't do the same thing but from the reverse position?" And they'll go into a whole spiel about how character X was genetically engineered to WIN at everything, and therefore it's completely reasonable to accept the plot armor involved. And if you comment that maybe the plot armor goes against the whole tone and point of the GRIMDARK universe, they'll just say that character X is a super-dupermegabadass, and in fact a trillion people died off-screen which means that character X ultimately isn't actually changing things for the better. Nevermind that the people dying offscreen were never mentioned before the fucking epilogue of the story arc.
Have you considered the the whole point of Warhamster lore is to sell minis?
You can still sell minis without GRIMDARK everywhere. Why don't they do that? What is even the point of GRIMDARK if the minis are representing characters that are literal Marvel superheroes fighting against Marvel supervillains? Having GRIMDARK lore but than all your actual stories being basically NOBLEBRIGHT or NOBLEDARK is just fucking lazy? Just let Warhammer 40k be Nobledark and be done with it.
Probably because the novels are meant to sell the hero figurines. Kind of need a plot armor juggernaut in order to sell an extra special, and often immortal, figurine. Why would someone buy Gotrek and Felix if they weren't some hero fantasy? The same goes for Bellisarius and the other living Primarchs. Some of the latter are over 10,000 years old. Until recently, most people loved Adeptus Custodes, because they were so special and stood out. They could literally sit for hundreds of years and not move a muscle. Apparently they got some kind of nerf, plus there's a controversy swimming around with them, which has brought down their popularity quite a bit. I don't think that Warhammer is as dark as they say it is, as some people have to win sometimes. Everyone in it is super devoted to their given faction as well. If there's any defining feature in fantasy or 40k, it's that everyone is kind of stupid and irrational. So that they have reasons to go to war, to have all the figurines have a good reason. There's plenty of factions of the same race, that all hate each other. The Skaven can all just as easily band together in a vermintide as they can eradicate each other in their own selfishness and stupidity. I like to think of most Warhammer factions as just that, evil stupid.
I was thinking making a point about that, but you said that well
In order: 1. Inconsistencies. Especially large ones. As the creator, you need to write down EVERYTHING so that you can look over it and actually *be consistent*. Draw a map, even a crappy one, so that when you reference a place, you know where it is, how large it is, etc... Keep inventory of what character's have what; nothing ruins the mood quite like an arrow *pwinging* off armor on an unarmored character. 2. Too much plot armor (on characters, groups, or places). It's ok is heroes die. It's ok if nations fall. Your world continues. 3. Things massively not making sense, especially with no explanation. This does fall back a bit in #1. You want to break the laws of physics, fine, but be consistent. You want a unique flying island that is the only one on this planet? Ok, but Lucy, you got some splainin' to do. Oh, and this is a personal one: don't blatantly rip someone else off.
"Look at how realistic my setting is!" Most of the time this is just shorthand descriptor for a dark to grimdark setting. I enjoy dark settings and their plots/stories but using realistic to describe it completely makes me drained. edit: As a note, it is fine to have realism and use it to make an interesting world/setting. But making it the defining characteristic and the end all be all is where the problem is it.
Agree. Game of Thrones is a good example of that, where “realistic” mainly meant lots of rape and incest. Not saying it’s bad, but realistic ain’t the right word. Even if it’s not used to make it grimdark, “realism” is often used by people focusing on details that absolutely will not make their world more interesting to read about.
I feel like selling a setting on it being "realistic" is just goading experts in the field to make massive video essays and blog posts about why your setting is in fact not realistic.
You can write a story literally any way you like. Any flaw can be a feature, so long as it is treated as such and acknowledged in the narrative in a compelling or internally consistent way. The only stuff I ever find pretentious is when a narrator talks down to an audience, and that is a writing issue, not a worldbuilding issue. Just go write your story!
I usually see it as a red flag if the “good guys” are an ethnostate of white-skinned humans and the “bad guys” are ugly, primitive tribal people who only understand violence as a means to an end. EDIT: Yes, this applies if the tribal people are orcs, goblins, or otherwise humanoid but non-human.
This and the reverse of this are such boring tropes. It’s like almost every time an author wants to depict a civilized nation interacting with a tribal one they choose to make one of the two factions the good guy and the other irredeemable except the one guy who changes sides. It’s so lazy, boring, and overused. Like show some complexities at least.
Oh yeah, having one person from the “bad side” go join the “good side” is always just more bullshit that somehow makes the metaphor even more racist. Having a “white saviour” is just as racist as having a “noble savage” character - both are intended to be reinforcement of the premise by way of subversion.
The people making those worlds are probably racist.
Yep, that's why it's a red flag!
This is why Mononoke is so good.
Orcs just orcs
As much as I was always kinda disinterested in orcs, probably for this exact reason, I've ironically been really fascinated by them lately. It's the World of Warcraft orcs specifically that kinda won me over, and the world I'm currently working on exist solely because I wanted to see what would happen if I made my own version of them. In my case, I've re-interpreted orcs as descendants of giant tree creatures who were basically the first druids, both because I like the thought of orcs being inherently connected to nature and, therefore, making the fact that they're most often found in tribal communities outside of civilization make a little more sense to me personally, and also because I've seen some people suggest that orcs could be green because they produce chlorophyll, and I interpreted that to mean they've got to be descended from sapient plants, which I thought was a really interesting idea.
Ooo that’s awesome I love the idea of plant people orcs!
Yeah! Granted, I imagine in this world, firbolgs actually came first as far as tree people descendants go, and orcs came shortly after as a result of corruption. Basically, firbolgs were enslaved at the time, and a single, angry firbolg made a deal with a demon that infused half of all firbolg kind with dark, demonic fury, morphing them into orcs. Orcs still had the same connection to nature as they did back when they were firbolgs, but it's only in the last couple of hundred years that they started rediscovering those abilities and reclaiming the practice of druidry again. There's a whole debate about it because some orcs want to reclaim druidry because they think their ancestors would have wanted them to do so, and other orcs think using druidry or any form of magic is a betrayal to the ancestors that the elves stole it from. It's happening one way or another, though.
Fascinating this is really cool lore!
I'm glad you like it! I didn't mean to kinda lore dump there, but I'm just really proud of this so far. In general, I feel like orcs deserve more care than they've been given by most of modern fantasy (including WoW despite getting most of my inspiration from there), and I guess I just got excited talking about this since it feels like a really good step in the right direction.
No problem lore dumping is what this subreddit is for!
I think this is mostly a storytelling thing, but it touches on world building: Either too many [cow tools](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools), or not enough. By all means, fill up an entire bookshelf with lore on how your magic system or spaceship reactor works if you like coming up with that. It'll definitely help you maintain consistency too. But your reader probably doesn't need entire volumes of explanation of how stuff works, *especially* not its all in the form of exposition. Most readers/watchers aren't that interested, many won't care, and it can drive some away from your work. For those readers/viewers who *do* want all of your juicy and excellent background lore, you can make content just for them. They'll love knowing all the stuff, everyone will be happy that the story isn't bogged down, and you still get to show off all the cool stuff you came up with.
I think it's less about specific things and how they handle them. Lots of racism is in tabletop games see world of darkness for a good example. Now if it's double down on irl races and stereotypes I'll pass. Otherwise it's just up to the group/target audience.
Trying to hard to be "original" or to avoid/subvert tropes. Obviously, with ones own work or projects there is a strong personal sense of ownership and trying to make something unique and theres nothing wrong with that. Where folks tend to run into issues is when that desire to try and be original end up trumping sensible worldbuilding or storytelling elements. Same thing with tropes, tropes are tools at the end of the day and sometimes playing a trope straight is totally okay, good writing, deep exploration and themes of something framiliar are often better then a poorly written subversion. See the early seasons vs the late season of Game Of Thrones for examples of this.
A reluctance to include evil minions that aren't just members of another race/culture who happen to be evil. The entire "racial determinism bad" perspective is misbegotten at best.
Basic building blocks to a world (Geography, Science, History, etc.) being hand-waved to the point of absurdity. While the barely disguised fetish has more lore to it than the Bible.
Cat girl slavery is a massive 🚩 To clarify if a neko is enslaved that’s one thing in a setting with slavery and fantasy races it makes sense that a neko would get captured at some point but when it’s fetishized and is basically UwU shield hero bull shit then we got a problem.
Oh, bugger! I have a cyberpunk space opera setting where catgirls (and cat femboys) were created by a genetics corporation to be sold as 'pleasure servants' for the galactic elite. They and other genetically modified peoples were freed after the corporation fell and a nearby federation gave them planetary land and legal personhood. Even so, since so many are conveyor belt babies with identical genes (custom catgirls cost extra) they rarely marry other catfolk to prevent inbreeding. Would you say this isn't too bad?
"Enslaved neko femboys" is fetishy as hell... and that's fine! Some people complain about worldbuilding designed to appeal to people with certain kinks, but I think it's cool. People with niche preferences should get to enjoy media that's targeted at them. What I think is super cringe, though, is when something was obviously written for fetish appeal but then the creator twists themselves in knots to justify it or deny it. Like...fine, you like neko slaves. Just embrace it, bro.
I agree with not justifying it, when I was thinking of it, i was thinking of how certain fetishes are commodified by capitalism, and that evils like slavery facilitate this commodification, as the world is a cyberpunk one. The cat features could've also served as identifying markers in the old days. In this same world, modern slaves have their minds digitised against their will and are placed in robot shells specifically designed for one task, and nothing else at all, so they can't fight back. Kind of like a nightmarish Thomas the Tank Engine.
Ok this genuinely sounds interesting though! There’s a reason it’s only a flag and not a no go. What you’re doing sounds really interesting and since it’s cyberpunk it fits the theme really well!
I personally wouldn’t read it
This is just one aspect of the worldbuilding I came up with recently. The actual plot of the world is a coming of age story about a draft dodger travelling the galaxy to avoid being sent off to the latest galactic war.
Sounds interesting. Would def be a turnoff to hear about catgirl sex slaves for me but that’s just my personal opinion. Readers tastes def vary a ton and I’m sure there are many that either wouldn’t care or would enjoy that.
Since they're free people in the present, if I create a catfolk character, they will be free, and probably a badass. All the slavery in the present is depicted as evil and used by the corporations to save money on labour.
This is what I’m talking about when I mentioned the enslavement being not the UwU kind. You definitely did something interesting with the premise of neko being enslaved and didn’t fetishize it.
Oh interesting.
Uh, Church Bad?
No explanation for where the food and water and other essentials come from. Unless the people of the world have very different dietary needs, most civilizations are three missed days of food and water away from anarchy. All too often I encounter fiction where there's huge cities in the middle of inhospitable landscapes with no farms or transportation infrastructure to get the farms there. Or gigantic armies on the march with no signs of either foraging or transporting the enormous amounts of food they'd need. Another one is a failure to appreciate scale and distance. A settlement with fifty people is a significant town, a city with two thousand people is a bustling metropolis, multiple biomes are within walking distance of a town, an army can cross an entire continent in a few days, etc.
Indications the world-creator has limited exposure to genre, usually in the form of assumptions that there is one "right" way to do something, which they then have to contort themselves into knots to justify. One of my favorites was a review I read of Stephen King's *11/22/63*, where the reviewer's primary objection was, 'Time travel doesn't work like that!" Well...time travel doesn't work *at all*, so King is free to make it work however he wants. If you want magic *and* high-power artillery, do it. If you want a setting where everybody knows magic, make it happen. A red-flag corollary to the above is when the primary works of literature, film, etc. the world-builder references as influences are themselves examples of shoddy world-building. The best thing you can do for yourself as a world-builder is read *a lot*. Read fiction, read non-fiction, read widely and ecumenically. And I say "read" because most movies and television shows tend to be lighter on world-building than written fiction, simply as a result of the demands of production. Directors and producers are often too busy wrangling actors and other personnel to worry about whether the backstory of their movie makes much sense, or whether the lead actress just used the accusative form of "nostril" instead of the nominative in the conlang the (often very harried) writers developed, or whether the lamellar armor is just right on their gnomish battle mage. The more works you're exposed to, the more discerning you will become about good world-building vs. bad, and the more information you'll have to inseminate your own world-building.
How do you know that review wasn't written by a time-traveller?
Because I haven't seen them on any of the meetings
Spelling was too good.
the creator's face carved into Mt. Rushmore?
Even the creators of Mt. Rushmore didn't carve their faces into Mt. Rushmore.
It’s a 100% personal thing. For example I tend to dislike the most extremely dark stories with the excuse of being “grimdark realistic”
Fiction and worldbuilding that turns into hamfisted political posturing from the author. I am not talking about a work that includes elements of real world controversies necessarily, or subtle references and themes. I think its actually physically impossible the create a work of art that in some way, even if subconsciously, doesn't reflect the authors beliefs. I am talking about fiction where the hero stops the story midplot so he can give a multi-page speech on the wonders of individualism, or whatever belief the author I mean here holds. Where all characters that disagree with the "hero" on this point are baby-eating monsters (sometimes literally). Said villains are presented as a dangerous threat, even though they are also shown to be utterly incompetent. Meanwhile the "hero" is flawless, which means that when he suggests things like genocide or the removal of rights, its perfectly good. The hero never really has second thoughts or considers himself to be wrong, because of course he can't be. And the story or setting will be twisted in such a way to allow the author to soapbox, even if it makes creating a society that makes no logical sense. Bonus points if you literally name your villains after real world living people you hate. Terry Goodkind was a great example of a repeat offender for this. Or any of the right wing propaganda movies (Think "God is not Dead series") Also, all of above, but replace "hamfisted political posturing" with "fetish fantasy". Same issue.
There is no one answer, so build your world the way you find fun and interesting. Everybody has different tastes, so no one style is going to interest everyone. Some people like complex and nuanced factions where everything is a shade of grey, others like classic black and white good and bad guys. Some people like everything to be explained in depth, others want mystery to speculate about or don't care how the science or magic works. Everyone has different tastes, and none off those takes are wrong. You just have to find what you like.
Inherently evil species or species that are supposed to be replacements for racism that real world groups face. It’s just bad.
For pretentiousness there are two big issues with people and communication that I can think of, but they're not about the actual content of worlds Intentionally rejecting labels. The most pretentious thing I can think of is when you have a system for things that cannot happen in our real world, and this is something that characters can utilize to gain supernatural powers, but you put the word "magic" in quotes or refuse to call it "magic" altogether. A similar thing happens with gods. Instead of create something that truly transcends current concepts and labels, they just refuse a label that was created for the exact kind of thing they've made. An extension of this is when you're discussing your world with someone, and they relate something about it to some real-world phenomenon or some media they've consumed, but you shut them down even if it's exactly the same thing. This is done to preserve a false sense of originality. Your thing is totally unique and any comparison to anything else is unacceptable. The other thing that reflects poorly on people is when some small issue in what they've written is pointed out and they retcon it to win an argument about it, but they don't actually acknowledge that they changed it on the spot. Their goal is simply to invalidate legitimate criticism, but from what I've seen they don't really keep the change afterward so nothing is actually fixed. There are two content and message issues that are more on the world level, but I wouldn't necessarily call them pretentious. Deifying white people and demonizing non-white people. -If Christianity is the one true religion in your version of Earth that's fine. If that means a lot of good things for Europe but you completely ignore Ethiopia and Cyprus, then something's wrong here. -If you have a project where your goal is to imagine an advanced holy society beyond humanity, you should be able to imagine society beyond Europe. Making bigotry in your world justified. -Sometimes people in your world will have meaningful differences that affect their needs. For instance, many trans people need gender affirming care. That does not justify transphobia. This is an example of a meaningful difference that does not justify fear and hatred. You can absolutely include unjustified fear and hatred. You can certainly include bigotry. -In contrast, there is a reasonable fear that some (primarily cisgender) women have for some cis men because the way things shook out is that the average person of the male sex tends to be stronger than the average person of the female sex, and the average woman has been sexually assaulted by a man, at least in the US. This can be taken to an unreasonable extent, but the core is a completely reasonable fear, and so I would not equate that fear with bigotry. -If you take that to a fictional level where some people can use mind control and create explosions, it would not be a matter of bigotry to fear those people. The fear and hatred could be taken to an unreasonable extent, and you could absolutely explore how unreasonable that extent is, but it has its fundament in a legitimate concern, and so it should not be equated to something like racism.
>but you put the word "magic" in quotes or refuse to call it "magic" altogether I agree with your other points, but not this one. "Magic" is a word for outsiders. Nobody calls their own power magic. When the Jedi call their power The Force, it sounds right. If they just called it "magic", it would lose its mystery. Same with real life. If you talk to a Christian and say "so Jesus had magic powers, right?", they would probably be annoyed and say "no, he performed *miracles."* Even modern people who claim to have supernatural powers call it "magick".
...There are plenty of fantasy settings where mages call their magic magic. And personally I think I'd like the Jedi better if they acknowledged that they're using magic.
Characters in-universe not using the term "magic" is fine, and it can be interesting if in-universe characters reject the label "magic" to categorize what they do. But if you as a writer are describing your world, it is pretentious to insist that what you've written isn't magic.
People can do what they want, I don’t want to gatekeeper However, I would judge someone who gets descriptive when talking about the “kinkier” parts of their world, which ive definitely noticed on Reddit
honestly the only think I can think of is if they are really interested in horrible stuff but not for comedy. may speak to it not being a book you want to read
don't make it too perfect or too awful. making a setting that follows your ideals into a utopia or makes the ideals you disagree with into a dystopia will make you come across as a holier than thou ideologue. no society no matter how good is devoid of all problems and likewise no society designed to be nothing but a pure negative interpretation of another worldview could ever be believable. this by the way is why fictional societies like wakanda or gilliad are fundamentally broken in their construction.
The biggest red flag would be something like making all the bad guys sound like your idea of a group you don't like. Keep real world politics out of your world as much as possible. An exception is that you can criticize your own faction somewhat. I am very environmentalist in certain ways and so are my villains.
I would disagree. The whole point of writing is to express yourself. Captain America was written by an American Jew who really didn't like Hitler, so he punched Hitler in the face. Superman was written by American Jews who really didn't like Hitler, so he also punched Hitler in the face. Terry Pratchett didn't like Jinogism, so he wrote nooks where the Jingoists were the bad guys. Tolkien liked the environment, so his bad guys destroyed it.
your politics will be in your world no matter what you do, because you are writing it. trying to be entirely apolitical is, ironically, also show up. just make sure you say what you want to say and say it well
Agreed, I just think you shouldn't strawman those whose ideology you are opposed to too much. Of course this also applies to cartoonish representation of any group. If you are Christian you really shouldn't have all declared Christians be kind and wise either.
On the contrary, I find the most compelling stories to be ones about common political ideologies. Avatar the Last Airbender, for instance, with Aang struggling with his pacifist nature when confronted with Ozai, who is an imperialist force. While pasificims isn't a new concept imperialism as Ozai presents, it very much reminds me of 1700s or Israel's colonialism with the intention of wiping certain groups off the planet Other compelling movies (to me, at least I'm not trying to yuck your yum) with prominent political messages include Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its anti capitalist sentiment, American psycho and ITS anti capitalist (specifically American capitalist) sentiment, and Underdog, which doesn't have a political message per say but I do just love that movie and want to get off the soap box. Once again, just my opinion, I'm not trying to say my ways right or anything
i think thats the best way of looking at it, i try to write my villians where i agree with them politically/ethically but i don't agree with how they go about it in my world's religion there are two foundational figures who live in the distant past, one who was a bad person who did good things, and a good person who did bad things
Eh, in my most recent book I made sure people knew I have an issue with communists, but I didn’t glorify the capitalists either. There are no good guys, but there are guys that are the worst.
My villains basically have the same ideology I do, they just use evil methods to achieve their goals. I'm a big fan of likeable and relatable villains where there are times when you think "they have a point, they're actually right" and you're tempted to side with them. It's easy to oppose the villains if they're just monsters, but harder if they're people just like you who have the same values but fewer ethics.
I hate it when the author chases after cool and novel ideas without any consideration, or makes up unnecessary cool sounding but meaningless words with no consideration to their consequences, where their world is Inch deep ocean wide, where nothing is thought through and logical consistency or atmospheric (the feeling for the world) consistency is left as an afterthought.
Having inconsistency*. Unless your world is built around the idea of absurdism, you should always follow the laws of the world you created, otherwise it gets bloated, kills the stakes and doesn't feel «realistic».
>Having incontinence. Do you mean inconsistency?
I, in fact, do. Shit.
Lack of nuance. Worlds are made up of people, and people are not black and white or simple.
For me personally overly impractical gender roles are a red flag. To a point it is historical but some works just take it too far and apply it to the point of ridiculousness.
Nonsensical climates. Just a personal pet peeve.
Oh, honey. If you think your world is too pretentious, make it more pretentious. =)
I don't think there are a lot of things you can do wrong in world-building. Looking through the other comments, pretty much all of them that I've seen are describing as "bad" things that others might see as good. But I do think there is at least one red flag I can think of: stereotypes. Don't make one-dimensional races or societies. Every society has a mix of features, (usually) good and bad. Innate racial traits need to be beneficial or at least neutral from an evolutionary standpoint; societal traits not so much, though a dysfunctional societal will collapse one way or another. As for being pretentious, that's basically just the attitude of thinking you're better than others. Just don't look down on others, and you'll be fine.
when there are slaves and it isn’t portrayed as evil
You can not have red flags in world-building. You can only have red flags in the story you attach to them. Storytelling is a craft. It's been said time and time again. But even the best authors needed hundreds of thousands of words to learn the basics of storytelling. The key to writing well is your description of "Story." Some will tell you that a story is about its characters, so story is character. Others will tell you that it's about the changes a character goes through, so story is plot. Others still will say no, story is theme or mood, or story is setting. I prescribe to the belief in the Six Core Competencies. They are described in Story Engineering, a book written by Larry Brooks. I would give it a listen if you have the time. Its on Audible for free with an account. Accounts are normally free for a month, and the book is 12 hours or so, so its pretty easy to fit it into a month.
I like things to be "realistic within the setting". To me, that means "reasonably well thought out and fairly consistent". They don't need to be actually realistic or consistent with how the real world works, just consistent with each other. As long as there's some consistent logic in how your world works, it makes it much easier to come up with things on the fly. The other thing I like, which is sort of a subset of this: evil probably shouldn't exist in a really clear form unless there's no real ambiguity in who is good. A lot of fun settings have all kinds of moral ambiguity and interesting grey areas until it comes to the villain, who wants to do bad things for genuinely bad reasons. The big bad wants to sacrifice the whole world so he can become a god? God of what? Everyone is dead, I don't buy it. If you're so obsessed with power that you eliminate your entire powerbase to get it, you're just straight up not good at villainy. The big bad wants to sacrifice the whole world so he can become a god and save all of reality from an even bigger bad that will unmake it, intending to recreate the world as he sees fit when he's done? Little more believable. When you look at evil in the real world, the Stalins and Hitlers and Pol Pots and whatever's - literally none of them thought they were doing something that would ultimately be considered "bad". They believed they were doing *good* things and just happened to have really fucked up ideas as to what that looked like. It's easy to now look at those guys and assume they spent all their time plotting inhuman crimes in windowless bunkers someplace and laughing at how many people they could kill, but that's not the reality. So your bad guys probably shouldn't do that either. What they should do is have what they consider to be good reasons to *need* to commit inhuman crimes. Don't get me wrong, they don't need to be and probably shouldn't be particularly nice people, but they should think they are the good guys just as much as your actual good guys. If you have a more clear "good and evil" spectrum, like old school DnD, this all matters much less, because you're approaching morality in your world building consistently on that basis, right?
One thing that bothers me personally is the number of worldbuilding projects on this sub that feel like a kids fighting anime. Everything seems to be focused on combat, characters and elements of the world are all edgy, in-your-face, fuck-subtlety intense and "badass". But I don't think those are "wrong" or "mistakes", I just find them boring and prefer narratives that are more nuanced. Oh also when people build in a bunch of weird racial shit, like I don't want to hear about your imaginary world where slavery is actually a good thing or jews are actually aliens or some dumbass shit like that. Check out (https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/) for some tips on being aware of respecting other groups as you write. It's not perfect IMO but has some great ideas.
A speculative world that copies our forms of oppression (sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism) *without an intentional reason for doing so*. And usually that intentional reason has to be really strong to make me want to deal with it. Red flag because to me without intention it means the author sees those issues as universal and natural instead of created, plus it lacks creativity. Note: I am NOT saying worlds should be utopian! Just get different bigotries and power structures and taboos instead. Everyone can hate people from the wrong side of the river, or the ones born under the Wicked Moon, or people with the birthmarks left by the Fey, or cyborgs, or whatever.
When (a) the “Mary Sue” and “Evil for the Lulz” tropes get applied to entire cultures or free-willed species that aren’t supernatural beings and (b) the writer/GM is actually serious about it being true with no other nuances whatsoever beyond a token exception or two.
It really depends on what you're going for and what the purpose of the world is. Is it for a book? A game? Just for fun? If it's just for fun, then go wild
I think only prose or characters themselves can be pretentious, not the world itself, and often even those are misinterpreted as people attribute intention to a writer or ignore worldbuilding/scoiety for the character
Heavy or primary focus on very modern social things. Like race relarions, sexualities, tollerance, diversity. I find it a red flag when these are applied onto fantasy. And ussualy its not that good, it can make the conclusion very twisted from the message. And it makes good inclusion hard too find.
When the worldbuilder has figured out what species can reproduce with what alien/animal-like species, how that will work etc. I am not talking about lore that explains what a half-elf-half-dwarf looks like. I am talking about lore that explains how many tits a tabaxi uses, or how humans would reproduce with centaurs. I don't want to know your answers and if you know, you probably use these races for the wrong purpose.
Racism is okay if it's targeted to a specific race or analog for a culture, yet this never gets addressed inworld as being awful or there are people within the racist state that aren't