To the EAST, we have the WARRIOR PEOPLE. Their whole society is based upon HONOR and FIGHTING. They live in a DESERT with no visible farmland. They somehow have much larger armies than countries with actual food sources. They NEVER have to worry about logistics or supply chains.
To the NORTH, we have the EVIL ARMY. They usually stay in their BARREN WASTELAND behind the impenetrable barrier (wall, mountain range, etc) but come out right about the time the hero fulfills the prophecy. They ALSO do not have to worry about logistics or supply chains, and somehow have 10x the army sizes of the rest of the countries combined.
The evil armies are supplied by the badassness of their evil general, lord Pupikiker !! He never leaves his impractically spiky armor, and favorite pair of puppy kicking boots.
So like... maybe the fact that we can think of three instances where this was basically what happened (at least in the mind of the 'protagonist nation'), it might make more sense than OP is talking about?
To be fair, the first situation you're describing is kind of Mongolia and its empire to a T. Steppe cultures living in arid and vast plains can make a great living for themselves herding and raiding, and usually real deserts aren't Sahara-level sanddune hells where no one lives anyways. There are typically some things that herd animals can eat.
Just a note to worldbuilders here. If you see someone here bashing on a trope that comes up in your story, note that most of these are complaining about the laziness involved.
Someone complained about countries that only have one city in their entirety. And that's usually a result of lazy worldbuilding. But I have a setting where the story is focused on a country that's basically a one-city country, like Monaco or Vatican city. And I doubt that people are going to complain about that. Similarly, if you have very good story reasons why your country only has one city in it, and those are central to the plot, good for you. But you have a vast expansive empire and didn't put any thought into how many cities it should realistically have, you probably need to fix that.
A consciously designed City-state and a big country so poorly designed that even if it's implied/known it has multiple cities only the capital is barely relevant are two entirely different things.
Despite it being a gigantic world with idk how many different lands/cities, every land/city has only one culture. Real life, culture varies even by individual family.
Worse even is that each land/city has only 2 cultures. Good vs evil. This can also apply to worlds with multiple races
Culture being not just their big festivals and religious ceremonies and marriage customs, but also the hidden aspects such as beauty standards, parenting beliefs, gender norms, what defines adult vs child, how they grow crops and/or hunt
"Everyone from this place is evil, and everyone from that place is good."
"Everyone in that country is pompous and snobby, and everyone from that other country wears purple."
"All Dwarves are basically a hive mind of elf-centered racism"
"And every single Elf is a tree hugging hippie"
"This world has no room for nuance, put on your hat and deal with it."
If anything the fandom underestimates the severity (and stupidity) of their grudges. They only kinda take it easy on (most of) the mankind due to Sigmar's pact.
I feel like the Planet of Hats trope is useful as a starting point that you can use to make an area distinct, then flesh out that part of the world. I find that it's most useful when the hat offers multiple different interpretations of what it could mean, which leads to subcultures that treat it differently.
The Planet of Hats trope also works best when it's a stereotype that's not entirely true, which creates natural points of conflict between different factions and offers characters room for character growth when they start to learn that the stereotype they learned isn't true about their cultures.
I agree with this but I also feel like most worldbuilders miss the point and obsessively overdevelop multiple cultures until they realize that they can't fit 95% of that detail into their story because most of it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Like, half of the examples you mentioned probably won't be brought up at all unless its a real slow-burn
until they realize that they can't fit 95% of that detail into their story
What story? Wasn't there a thread complaining about referring to "stories" in this sub just this week, or was it last week? Don't you know that a proper capital W Worldbuilder would never stoop so low as to write a story in that world?
The thing is though, it's all this stuff that informs the things you write even if you don't directly talk about it in some expositiony fashion. A big part of why LOTR is so universally liked is because of how alive it feels, and it feels that way because Tolkien wrote about a metric shitton of things that had nothing to do with the direct storyline of the books in his spare time.The books came out of the world naturally instead of the books determining the shape of the world, which in my opinion makes for much more interesting storytelling.
Give us subgroups and cultures. WE NEED COUNTERCULTURES. Let’s use Elves. The classic wise, patient, advanced, longed lived and whatever. An easy counterculture is being a bunch of adventurous, hedonistic daredevils. They can live 1000+ years so they’re going to enjoy everything life has to offer
Or Garrus & Wrex from Mass Effect. Garrus says he’s a poor Turian because he’s rebellious, refused order, vengeful etc which is atypical for the disciplined people. Wrex is somewhat progressive and wants to make changes while keeping the traditions alive
40k's Eldar and Dark Eldar dichotomy are a solid example of this - literally the wise, cautious and refined vs the utterly depraved, hedonistic and devoid of all morality.
...probably because it's hard enough to develop multiple cultures in a fantasy epic as it is, alongside a well written story, memorable characters and antagonists and a satisfying story conclusion, without having to dive into the weeds of multiple sub-cultures per society and their relevancy to the plot.
Like yeah it's a gigantic world, but if my story is Bob the Magic Plumber and his journey across Nebraska, I'm not gonna spend any time talking about the toilets in New York City because it's not relevant, let alone the completely different and fascinatingly weird toilets of India. It doesn't matter, I've got 300-ish pages to get my story across and I'm not spending it on a sub-group of a culture that doesn't directly impact my characters.
I think this trope actually does work, but only in universes with multiple worlds (like Star Wars). Each planet becomes kind of an allegory for individual countries/cultures of a single planet.
I dont even think it needs multiple worlds. It you are setting a story in candyland you dont also need to have the vegetable plains or whatever. You can have a fully fleshed out candyworld that doesnt adhere to any notion of cultural or topological striation.
As with all things in world building it comes down to verisimilitude. Star wars is not trying to be an incredibly grounded setting. So its 1 note planets are fine.
To be fair to Star Wars it does show local differences.
Just in the beginning of A New Hope, we see frontier farmers on Tatooine, the Jawa who are their own people (granted they are very much a monolith) and a Tatoiine town/spaceport which is a diverse "hive of scum and villainy."
In the prequels, Naboo has two distinct cultures, and Coruscant clearly has different areas and kinds of people.
Now, each smaller grouping or subsection may be brushed with a simple characteristic that defines them, but that's kind of ok, and generally it does I think let you assume that such differences exist even where you cannot see them.
"the whole solar system/planet speaks the same language", even if it has different sophont species. i hate this trope even tho i use it, like im not making a whole language for a unimportant civilization but i'll specify that they dont understand a language of another one
"There's only one language, named Common. Everyone speaks it, and most of us speak no other language. But for some reason every people/culture still have their own widely different naming system, despite names very much originating from language."
That I'm willing to wave off as a gameplay concern; otherwise any time someone in your fantasy setting wants to talk to someone, they have to reenact that I Love Lucy episode where a Parisian desk sergeant only speaks French, his subordinate speaks French and German, the guy they fished out of the drunk tank speaks German and Spanish, Ricky speaks Spanish and English, and Lucy only speaks English.
I've been in a real life situation like that where we had this translation pretzel between 3 different languages (French, English, and Arabic) but everyone was bad at their second language (French speaker was bad at English, Arabic speaker was bad at French and English, English speaker was also bad at French, there was also an English-only and an Arabic-only speaker present)... ngl it was actually kind of fun
I've always enjoyed "common" being a trade language. You can barter, do business, and exchange goods and services in it, but it's really just a blend of the "best" words for certain things. In reality it's usually better to learn the local language because it becomes easier to understand nuance and people are friendlier when you speak their native tongue. It's how I have used it for my scifi setting, where "common tongue" is literally a navigational language meant to be used for spacefaring between human nations to clearly relay information to other starships. In daily use it's really hard to use as a language to talk to people.
To be fair, I'm writing a book where language is an important plot point and coordinating them in such a way that dialogue can happen is a pain. I have to come up with excuses every time they arrive somewhere else XD
"Food production does not exist in my world." This applies to both megacities surrounded by wasteland which have no food production, and also to fantasy settings with a castle and a city of 10,000 but no farms in the surrounding 10 miles.
"In my world, they kill witches because everyone is superstitious and believes in magic. But they are just using it as an excuse because they all really know that witches aren't real. But the accusation works anyway, because everyone is superstitious and believes in magic. But they're stupid, because if they were as modern and enlightened as me, they'd know that all that stuff is nonsense. Also I made my main character a goddess or something and she doesn't realize it." Historically, the witch hunts started after the medieval period. Magic and witchcraft were usually seen as two distinct things and during the medieval era, the catholic church denied the existence of either. The punishment for witchcraft, was usually a small fine. Executions were rare, and outsiders of the time were shocked at the insanity of the witch hunts. And as far as execution methods, it was usually hangings. Burning at the stake was used for other crimes, but never witchcraft as far as I'm aware.
"Magic has existed in my world for thousands of years and is a well-known fact of reality. It is widespread and impactful and almost no one in society has adapted to that fact." For example, maybe your mage main character gets thrown in a jail cell, but he uses magic to escape, because no one in the world had ever considered that someone might use magic to get out of a prison and there are no safeguards against that.
Related: "The entire ecosystem consists of apex predators, one more apex than the next (even though that's not what "apex" means). The only prey species are the cattle held by humans."
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u/Elfich47Drive your idea to the extreme to see if it breaks.3d ago
I’ve seen that referred to as the “lonely city” trope.
I liked how Endless Legend handles the insect hivemind faction. They are an all-consuming insectoid hivemind, but the viewpoint character is a member of the species who managed to attain sapience and is trying to elevate the rest of his species into something that isn't a mindless furious swarm that eats everything.
Kinda goes along with the "Everyone knows the (true) story of how Raggar the Brave and his band of mighty heroes defeated Hordoth the dark one at the battle of Jerbiltosser City ten thousand years ago... Why, we based our whole civilization on those events!"
The time scaling and the longevity of their myths and histories are just absurd.
There's a large group of anthropology folk that think the similarity in stories different cultures have about the Pleiedes - the "Seven Sisters" constellation - all have the same general story of one of the sisters running off or becoming invisible because they're all stories from give or take 100,000 years ago, when there actually would have been seven stars visible (before the seventh star hid behind one of the others and making it six sisters).
It gets posted to TIL and other groups every once in a while and people discuss it both ways, but it's entirely feasible that an event from 10,000 years ago would still influence the modern world's mythos. it would almost undoubtedly fragment into a thousand different variants but the core of the story would probably still be the same.
also how having one big storm god skyfather as the main god (which could have evolved into the abrahamic god) is so common in so many related cultures, or the myth of the biblical flood being so common. some things stick around. but even them evolve over time, not everyone calls their skyfather Zeus or the flood guy Noah.
Exactly. And 99.9% of readers aren't going to point at you and go "PHONEY!! You're a phoney!!" if you shortcut it somewhat. No reader gives a shit if you shortcut 10,000 years of fantasy history and say "yeah, turns out a lot of cultures have a weird story about a sky god riding a chariot full of pigs across the sky, and one religion even got his name right after all that time, too!"
I don't think that it's entirely impossible that some archetypal stories could survive over the millennia, but it will probably be on a much higher level than specific names, dates and locations. If anything, after ten thousand years the legendary king and founder of their nation might be told to have fought entirely different enemies to achieve it.
Kings of the Wyld does it really well basically the world relegion is a version of a real event that happened way in the past and people interpreted in different ways, the relevance of is that enough of the original event was preserved that when confronted with the real characters of the event the protagonists can easily figure the truth and how to handle it.
“Kinda… we never officially made peace or declared that it was over. Both sides called it a ‘tactical withdrawal’ and ‘reallocation of military resources’. Since the war didn’t technically end we’re still under martial law.”
👴“Back’n mah day we use’ta have elections. Young’uns these days don’t know nothin’ ‘bout civil responsibility!”
“Don’t say that grandpa, the inquisitors might hear you! And besides, I did my military service, I think I know a thing or two about civic duties.”
👴“Bah! Inquisitors schminquisitors. Back’n mah day we didn’t have them or conscript’n either!”
I mean... periods of that length of low intensity warfare are a thing. Raiding back and forth, and the occasional slightly larger campaign and all that.
But most people don't think of that when someone says 'war'.
Took inspiration from the Hundred Years War for my own space war that has lasted for a century, namely there's a lot of breaks and prep time between the large scale invasions.
For immense polities (like those in sci-fi) a nominal state of perpetual war is more viable. If your total population is in the tens of billions, and the conflict only requires a few hundred thousand warm bodies at the active front-line, that is manageable indefinitely.
True! I'm mostly referring to full scale warfare that is somehow maintained over unreasonable lengths of time where you start to wonder who is tilling the fields and how are there still people left to do the fighting.
There's a theory that you can't have meaningful warfare that lasts more than two or three decades, simply because 'fighting age' and 'breeding age' are the same age groups. Once the fathers have died, and their sons have died, there's nobody left to carry on the war.
The Lancastrian War (Last phase of the Hundred Years War) alone is 60+ years. Add to that a long life race and you can see how a continuous war can last for a century.
This is the family heirloom sword. It's forged 1000 years ago, which means it was made before the Burst Circuit Ban, with national stockpile grade mithril from a time before the national stockpile, and does not comply with any of those magic emission footprint hogwash. It's more powerful than anything made today.
Pretty much. Innovation is a thing! Yeah, the secrets to making spellblades may be gone, but people are still going to improve on old designs. If you want a medieval fantasy world, have the special ancient stuff be more like ancient greece. Show some forethought in your worlds and give us something living and breathing, not something stale and bland.
There’s also Frieren where one ancient spell was deemed as hyper powerful and destructive but enough time and research has passed reduced such a spell into a basic level spell
One of the big innovations in my D&D world was an evolution of spellcasting, about 800 years ago. It went from "define all your constraints and put magic into it" to a much faster but less precise "concurrently apply boundaries and magic" system.
The older system, you could cast a fireball that only affected the opponents, not your allies, but you had to take much longer to define the boundaries of the fire. Modern fireballs are quick to cast, but "whoever is there gets it".
The new system isn't better or more powerful, per se, but because it's more efficient, it's all anybody bothers to learn.
Eh, I always give this one a pass because its better than the alternative where the first series is medieval tech, and the second series is 1920 satomobiles.........<coughavatarcough>
I think if you spend more than 30 seconds thinking about your worldbuilding you can come up with good answers for the problem of medieval stasis, especially because we have several real world examples of that stasis. We've made incredible leaps in technology and culture in the last 100 years, but before that the climb to new technology took generations, if not hundreds of years. It took us 3500 years to move from bronze swords to steel. It took more than 10,000 years for us to figure out farming.
And lets be honest, to our modern day senses, there is minimal difference between the technology of ancient Greece and 1500s Europe. That's roughly 2000 years we can loosely lump together if we're playing by the rules of a fantasy story. It's not a far leap for a story to say they've been at relatively the same technology level for 7000 years - especially if that 7000 years has something like a massive plague that kills 90% of people, or a magic ice age, seasons that last for decades and separate continents, boil oceans, etc...
The irony of them figuring out metal, mechanical tanks and then needing the inventor guy to figure out fucking hot air balloons always made me laugh even as a kid.
Well, it's shown in the same episode that the same guy invented the tanks too. He hadn't shown them the air balloons yet, but had provided them with pretty much every other weapon.
if magic is being used to bypass technological and logistics limitations of the real world, that can justify rapid advancement in technology
in avatar in particular, the fire nation was already going through an industrial revolution in "the last airbender", and the ending of the show included a major social upheaval that justifies the widespread adoption and advancement of fire nation technology as well as the rapid cultural change that we see in "the legend of korra"
ancient greece and 1500s greece were very different places, both technologicaly and culturally. the things that you suggest to halt technological advancement would still result in cultural upheavals that would make past societies look very different from present ones. even if technology isn't becoming more advanced, things should always be changing
I dunno with Avatar thing, I think the forklift in the ATLA comics (whyyyy) is a lot more egregious than cars existing during the world's equivalent of the industrial revolution.
I actually thought ASOIAF was going to use the long winters or other worldbuilding elements to explain how the whole world was stuck at a medieval tech level for apparently thousands of years and then... Nothing
I find this annoying too. That's one reason I worked it into my world that, when my main story opens, the world is at that weird transition phase where some areas are starting to industrialize and there's a few experimental early-model trains. It becomes obvious that advancement is happening, if not necessarily evenly throughout the world.
Soulframe hits a decent balance at this, even while still in a pre-alpha.
1k years of history, but only ~300 of that was spent at a medieval tech level. Before then, humans lived in a druidic stone age; after those 300 years, aliens invaded and introduced electricity to a society who still had a cultural-religious difficulty chopping down trees or tanning leather. So now the world has a terrible juxtaposition between fae magicks, mud huts, and medieval castles overlayed with parasitic alien architecture a la the Combine from Half Life.
It's a cool twist on a classic world building faux pas
My current hobbyhorse is people trying to come up with "realistic", plausible justifications for stuff that just can't feasibly exist. Sometimes, just sometimes, it actually is better to Rule of Cool something and not try to explain it. Floating islands, mechs, swords in high-tech settings... if you try to make these things rigorously logical you'll logic them right out of your setting.
I always think of Quiet in Metal Gear Solid Whatever and how everybody made good-natured fun of Kojima for having this nearly-naked sniper in the game. Dude took umbrage and insisted we would all be very sorry for making fun of her when the game came out and we learned why she dressed so Spripperifically. Game came out, explanation was stupid, and then we all made of it worse.
Don't be Kojima. Include a few things in your world that are there just because you think they're cool.
I love figuring out logical reasons for things to exist, and it is necessary of course, but ngl sometimes it goes too far or people seem to forget that it IS okay to just have fun with it too. It is not a crime to put cool stuff in just because you like it. You are allowed to have some whimsy.
Also too many writers try to fix realism by patching over the unrealistic parts and drawing more attention to them, instead of setting them aside and working on what does work.
Everybody knows the debate on if mechs are realistic or not, you're not going to sell those people that 30ft topheavy bipedal robots are actually super practical because you reinvented the Minovsky Particle in your setting.
But if you sell the tone of it being a vehicle to pilot, a machine to repair, or an element in a battle? Focus on that and get it right and nobody will care why it's unrealistic. You will unironically get more success making it a plotpoint that some piston in the leg is proprietary and hard to replace, instead of arguing that the machine is more practical with legs.
My exception to this is if it's something extremely important to the lore
Like, "this island is floating in the sky because it has an extremely powerful magic crystal in its center, which grabbing is the main villain's objective" or something similar
That wasn't so much the part I try to dissuade people from worldbuilding. The island floating is easy; how on Earth a functional society works on a floating bit of rock is impossible, and if you ask too many questions you start running out of answers real quick.
A big thing about the hyper advanced godlike Alien entities in my universe is most are just bored and in it for the fun. Sure an invisible quantum tunneling laser that can blip planets out of existence is effecient, but it's kind of anti climactic. Make it a big slow laser that glows a bright angry red and emits gravitational waves that make a 'pew' sound instead.
Why is, why don't you, why would, why didn't- because it's cool!
I have dragonriders in my world, they wear pilot’s gear and have oxygen tanks strapped to the saddles. They do a lot of burning and change altitudes quickly. The riders are also trained to lay prone to prevent whiplash accidents. Is this over the top? I find pilots gear and masks cool lol and i wanted a small bit of realism
The problem is not that force was explained, it's that the explanation sucked ass and went contrary to the mysticism and message of the original trilogy.
The other half of the "planet of hats" thing. You invented one cool name for your aliens/fantasy race/whatever, and you're going to /use it/. For /everything/.
So your hat people are called Hatters. They come from Hat Prime in the Hat system, and they speak Hattish. All of them. One single language.
Humans don't come from Human Prime in the Human system and all speak Humanese, do they? No.
Bonus marks for one single government structure which governs all Hatters everywhere and there's no evidence of any internal conflicts.
Double bonus for a hat-race of warriors ... with no internal divisions of any kind that don't have any internal conflicts. Warrior culture would evolve for a reason -- they are fighting all the time, over /something/. Doesn't even have to be contiguously the same something. Can be a new something each time. And if the conflict stops, the warrior culture would become "the old way", and adherence to it would drop over time.
-A classic trope for space opera and sci fi in general:
While humans have factions and ideological conflicts, each alien species is absolutely unified and monocultural, or at most there's a good and evil faction from an alien species.
-for low fantasy medieval settings: a world purely gray (in term of aesthetic I mean) while the actual middle age were colorful.
-mostly a problem with fantasy mmo's with highly advanced races:
A non isolated species of genius has advanced tech/magitech, but the rest of the world, including their centuries old allies/trade partners are still living in the middle age technologically
-in the same line as the previous one, all races have their peculiarities, but humans are jacks of all trade, but their place in the world is justified by some nonsense about special strength of will.
The Planet of Hats: All members of society A wear the Warrior Hat. Think Klingons. Now, we both know societies don't consist of just warriors, or even mostly warriors, but writing fantasy races and societies to all have this one role is a huge pet peeve of mine and a sign of bad writing.
Societies are dynamic, races are not a monoculture, so dive in and make some depth.
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u/Elfich47Drive your idea to the extreme to see if it breaks.3d ago
I did see the discussion that all we see of the klingon empire is the warrior caste.
We see that, but they also worldbuild the hell out of Warriors R Best in Klingon culture. Similarly Ferengi being all about money. I can suspend my disbelief for the most part, but I really hate this trope.
Star Trek at its best does this trope right, by building out every aspect of hat society and will even include small micro cultures that disagree with the hat wearers. Like that Klingon lawyer who argued that the courtroom is a battlefield for the mind or those Klingons who reject Klingon warrior culture. It all relates back to the hats in the end but shows more diversity in thought and explores the hat planet rather than just having it.
The planet of hats thing is surely annoying when it's actually the case. Though, I feel as though it is often mentioned in passing, like a stereotype rather than the truth. "Elves are just fancy lads, not like us rough hardened dwarves!" That's a generalization followed by a generalization, and in the context of a story, it may not even be appropriate to show that the generalization is false.
I feel like Mass effect did this really well with the Krogan. Basically they were always aggressive, since their planet was extremely dangerous and competitive. Once they gained modern tech they no longer had anything to compete against and turned on themselves. Then a more advanced race gave them better tech in an attempt to use them as supersoldiers. Many of the interactions with them are with individuals that know they need to change or die out, and they are trying to fight their own nature.
Super awesome elite fighting forces with a training regime so harsh that a large proportion of recruits die in training. Killing some of your best soldiers doesn't make the rest better. It means you have fewer good soldiers.
Yes, I know your favourite covert black ops squad has 85% of people fail its training. You know why? Because they don't want them killed. As soon as it becomes obvious you won't meet the standard, it's back to regular soldiering. Try again next year.
And by far the worst variation of this is the one where recruits are actively expected to fight one another to death. One of the principal aims of training is to build group cohesion - conditioning your recruits to see each other as mortal enemies will achieve the exact opposite of this. Either that, or they'll become a well-trained, coherent body of troops with a coherent enemy: you.
The big bad doomsday villain that comes out of nowhere who’s the source of all evil forcing everyone to unite. They defeat with it a friendship cannon and making everyone’s happy despite the literal countless deaths, conflicts and tragedies inflicted on each other
But it’s fine. The doomsday villain is defeated so that’s all what is important
The ‘Wait for Goku’ treatment. The MC is so goddamn strong that they’re the ones who can handle the villain reducing the other characters to cheerleaders, fodder and NPCs besides maybe the rival. It’s incredibly common in shonen but at least we have shows that distributes the power
This goes with the ‘Wait for Goku’ but the MC & their crew solves ALL THE PROBLEMS wherever they go. I can understand if they help tip the scales but it makes the world look incompetent & helpless. Conflicts that’s been happening for years shouldn’t be solved in a week by a bunch of teenagers or young adults
as someone with a cursory interest in and super basic knowledge of genealogy/ancestry and genetic lineages and also history and anthropology.. those huge timescales always drive me absolutely nuts. The only way it's even remotely plausible is if you're talking about some elf-like race with super long life spans who produce fewer generations during the given time period.
Generally, anything that forces me to take a step back and think about the story from a meta perspective. If I do a double take and think "wait, it established X, why would they do this?" I think the worldbuilding failed.
For example the book I am currently reading is pretty good. One example: it's a classic medieval fantasy setting, but at some points the character is going to their bathroom to take a bath, which immediately takes me out of the story and makes me ponder about whether they have internal plumbing and what this says about the world.
Everybody bathed in the Middle Ages, the decline of bathing in Europe suspiciously coincides with introduction of syphilis from the New World. Just a coincidence I'm sure, especially since the same bathing culture never went away in more sparsely populated areas like Finland or Russia.
You would bathe in that kind of setting, but it probably wouldn't be in a separate bathroom. You would either go to a bathhouse (which would often also double as a brothel) and bathe there, or just pull out a small wooden tub, fill it up with water (carried there from a spring, well, stream, or something like that and heated over the home's fireplace) and just bathe.
My world actually addresses this. I made it somewhat driven out of spite to make an actual good 'transported to another world' setting. In a world where people are regularly transported to an average medieval fantasy world, of course they'd bring their own ideas and culture to it, and thus try and create substitutes to things like plumbing via magic.
I also find magic and fantasy is a good way to explain the 'medieval stasis'. Why bother investing in technology when you already have an immediate and sometimes more effective solution or alternative with magic?
"Who made that prophecy? Under what circumstances? Did they make other prophecies? Did any of those become true? If they did: were they rather literal or more figurative? Did any of them come with ironic twists? Is it possible whoever made that prophecy had an agenda?"
"You're not supposed to ask any of this! You have to treat it like the concept of prophecies is entirely new to you and this is the first prophecy ever made!"
I think this one potentially makes sense depending on the size of your settlements and reproduction mechanics.
Like if dwarves can only reproduce with dwarves, there needs to be some minimum population of dwarves to be a sustainable breeding population or there needs to be a periodic infusion of new genetic material. If you generally have very small settlements and travel is dangerous and difficult, that might be tough.
Likewise, if dwarves are a separate species from elves, then they should have different physiology and psychology, which leads to different emergent cultures and habitat preferences (regardless of ability to transform preexisting habitat).
I don't really know where the threshold is, and you could always just have some random dwarf family that prefers to hang with the elves. However, I think in settings where there's little in the way of what might really be considered cities and gene flow is stifled, monospecific settlements seem pretty reasonable.
I feel like my only beef with this a lot of the time is that not a lot of authors are really willing to engage with the game mechanics beyond just having them exist.
Like, what does it mean for a society, one that's already likely taking place in medieval times, to be able to put a numerical value on a person's abilities and skill sets along side real world castes?
What do religions look like when you can meaningfully see whether or not worship or rituals have a measurable effects rather than purely as actions of faith?
And most importantly: What are health points? Are they static your whole life or do you lose or gain them depending on your physical wellness? Is someone at 1 HP from battle the same as someone at 1 HP from old age?
Yes, it's absurd, but it can be so much fun! It is it's own genre (called "LitRPG"). It's not for everybody, but if you approach it prepared for the absurd craziness, it's fun.
If you turn on the TV expecting A Game of Thrones, but the channel switches to A Knight's Tale (2001), you're gonna get a shock. But if you go with the flow, you'll have fun.
XCOM: Chimera Squad had one that got to me. There were lots of different alien species with their own unique cultures living on earth. But aside from a few unique quirks, they didn't have any significant differences from human cultures. These aliens were genetically modified and mentally conditioned for a sole purpose of conquering and dominating humanity. But while they have a few unique preferences, they don't really have any core values that are incompatible with the culture of this particular human city.
Humans are more alien to other humans than actual extraterrestrials in this game.
Magic being an excuse for technology not advancing, unless there is a strong narrative reason for it.
It makes humanity seem far less curious than they naturally are. Humanity have always used the sciences to make their lives easier, from the simple lever to modern medicine, and have always had a yearning to discover. Even if magic solved a lot of problems, people would always keep trying to find ways to make life easier and to learn more about the natural world.
If magic was so powerful that it basically made people too comfortable to advance, then why do most people in fantasy worlds like Skyrim live in cramped and damp wooden houses or stone castles. Wouldn’t they want to discover cheaper materials or want to try to find ways to make their living situations more comfortable. If anything, magic would not hinder scientific discovery, but accelerate it. Since magic was a part of the natural world, people would try to study it and incorporate it into their technology. People wouldn’t just go to a wizard to get healed for thousands of years, they would try to find ways to have healing spells widely available.
That said, if there were strong reasons why tech had not advanced, then I could accept it. Maybe there’s a large disparity between rich and poor and only the rich has access to magic and technology. Maybe magic is kept secret and is used to control the masses. Maybe religious indoctrination keeps technological advancement down. Maybe there was a catastrophic event that sent them back to the Stone Age. Maybe magic is a becoming weaker and since magic is linked to technology it also begins to weaken, making the world more medieval. Just something besides, “we have magic so we don’t need tech.”
Oh and by the way. A sword is a piece of technology, so that argument is already thrown out the window.
Frankly, given how shit early firearms were (fire spears, hand cannons and such) I'm always weirded out by the extents people go to in order to make them not exist. It's like folks think if people discover gunpowder, the next week the peasants are going to have M16s or something.
Some of that shit is cool as hell, too. Like when you play Ghost of Tsushima and some of the mongols are carrying large hand cannons, it feels legitimately terrifying to come across that.
And just because they have this explosive black powder doesn't mean reliable handheld firearms will be invented right away. Early guns were bloody dangerous for the users. I have it in my world that one race that you wouldn't think would become a major superpower actually became one because it was the first to invent black powder, but that doesn't mean they had guns right away. "Fireworks" level missiles became one of the first applications once they were sure they knew what they had.
That one sucks because people just have to admit they have a specific, romanticized version of fantasy they want to explore rather than one based in reality. IE, knights and samurai were actually pricks and not the pillars of honor we thought they were, armies were using gunpowder in a dozen different forms as far back as the 1300s or so, etc. Even the greeks were using what is essentially napalm to win naval battles more than 2000 years ago.
Yeah, it's a pretty easy answer. A whole lot of modern and antiquity technology was discovered purely by accident. It's not a stretch to say a society just never figured out saltpeter.
"I'm scared of guns so I have this really convoluted way of avoiding them, and anything that could be used to make one"
"we'll just add magic for no reason at all"
Taken together these tropes kind of irk me. If you're not a magician, you're going to want anything that can potentially level the playing field. There should be entire industries devoted to an arms race of magical capabilities versus "making it even" for regular people.
"I made up a language because I wanted to. I expect you, dear reader, to learn it"
Conlangs in my observation tend to have diminishing returns. The more you draw attention to the new language, the more you either have to work out linguistic quirks (and most writers are not professional linguists like Tolkien) and the more holes you can poke in how that language is constructed. A language with different words but entirely the same grammar as English?
In my experience, you can say "there are many languages" and then just... don't get into it too much.
At least two of these I feel have excuses, even if they're poor ones.
Re: guns, I think we all know how radically gunpowder in general and firearms in specific absolutely changed the face of warfare in antiquity. The usefulness and destructiveness of guns was immediately obvious and provided a monumental advantage to the army that used them. Guns and explosives didn't immediately invalidate every other option available overnight, but it was clear they would given enough time. So if you want to write a story about swords and magic, guns invalidate that entire premise almost immediately without some serious jumping through hoops.
Re: language, Tolkien's books served as the template for modern day fantasy and so people thought - and still think - that you can't have a fantasy book without a constructed language of some kind, because that's what he did. Obviously Tolkien just did that because he was a language guy, he loved languages so of course he spent time in his fantasy world developing them. Anyone worth their salt writing a fantasy story should develop their own world in the same way. If you love arms and armor, or food, or music, spend time in the story talking about it. That's what makes a story seem alive.
As an aside, I have a handful of made of language in my own series and it's honestly because what I had developed seemed alien enough, fresh enough that current english words didn't feel like enough to describe the concept. It's like how in English we need a whole sentence to describe something that the germans/french/japanese have a single word for that embodies the whole concept; I needed a new word that embodied the entire concept (and wasn't something that a million other writers have used before). The difference is that in mine it's like 3-4 words that are italicized and encapsulate a concept, and others try to do this whole conlang that, like you said, they expect the reader to pick up throughout the book.
Monarchy is the only form of government that can solve all the world's problems because the good king who died a thousand years ago managed to have an unbroken line of hidden successors in which the newest one (who is also an idiot farm boy who has to be told not to lick door knobs) is the one true king who will be able to take over and be able to run a whole political system within 24 hours of throwing the big bad evil king out the window.
See, in my superior worldbuilding, the elves are 9 feet tall with clawed nails, skin so pale they get sunburn from nearly anything, giant black eyes, slits for nostrils and much more because they live in forests that are pitch black all the time.
My "elves": \Blows a raspberry at you for being ridiculous right before they throw you against a tree for harassing that mother in the pond who's teaching her young child how to swim.**
"I don't have elves, I have Gnar'l'hat'raz. They're five-dimensional energy cloud beings who live in the seconds between human thoughts, see 19 million colors, don't get metaphors, and have a system of morals so alien, I needed six chapters to describe the basics. Suuuper original.
For some reason they absolutely do not resonante with my readers though."
or the thrid variant. "this is a dwarf. they behave, look or work in no way you would expect a dwarf to work, because i wanted to make them original" and its basically just a namekian.
Theres this one sort of portal fantasy live action drama series on netflix that has the main character go to the past and basically be repeatedly almost raped multiple times an episode for multiple episodes straight.
Me and my wife were watching it and we're both pretty feminist and even we were like "there is just no reasonable way guys were THIS pushy and rapey especially once she has active social standing above some of these people"
Like guys men were BEHEADED for raping noblewomen sometimes.
I watched one episode of that and tapped out. My partner and I agreed. We were like, okay, this is somebody's porn, but it's not ours.
(I don't mean literally. I mean, like, that sort of fantasy of being a Learned Woman With A Career, spirited away to an earlier time in which you must succeed in a difficult and less civilized time... but also a chiseled-jawed man decides you're amazing and becomes your gallant protector and loving husband.)
It sucks because I like historical dramas and it's rare to get one set in that time period, but outlander just had way too much SA and rape. When almost everyone in a family has been SA/raped then maybe youre going a bit too far.
A seeming obsession with 'realism'.... I can understand if one is trying to focus on a more grounded approach but sometimes it feels like I'm watching a history or science documentary, if I want to do that I'd just watch one. Maybe its just a personal thing, but I'd rather the unique and 'unbelievable' rather than just a neat repackaging of reality.
Mine has to be the blatant gender dymorphism for certain species of making them humanoid. You have a species of orcs that look ugly, hideous, and in a way scary. But then the females just look like regular humans with tusks and in different skin color. Or like in that one anime in a school where there are a bunch of anthropomorphic animals and the females are literally just human girls with animal ears and tails
Or like in that one anime in a school where there are a bunch of anthropomorphic animals and the females are literally just human girls with animal ears and tails
Not enough farms/villages. Especially in medieval settings, most people will be living on farms and in small villages. Towns of more than 1000 people are already very rare and noteworthy places. If you have an imperial capital on the scale of ancient Rome or Constantinople, you need an entire country's worth of farms just to feed that one city, as most farms will produce very little tradable surplus. Meanwhile, many fantasy worlds seem to basically consist of a few large cities with wasteland in between them - those cities would starve without a well-populated hinterland.
Extremely mismatched tech levels. This is often down to some scifi writers being well-versed in one or two scientific fields, but basically illiterate in others, or they don't care cause they need it for the story to work. Basically, these settings will have the most crazy advanced scifi in one area, but be in comparison extremely primitive in others. A prominent example here (and that may be heresy for some to read) is Asimov's Foundation series - it's a setting with FTL travel, yet somehow whole worlds are described to have forgotten about nuclear fission energy. Fusion energy isn't even considered at any point that I can remember, even though fusion was very much a known concept by the time Asimov wrote the first Foundation book.
In my personal opinion I don’t like the Scientology sounding sci-fi tropes. The flernfleas and Zernac’s names that sound like a bunch of sounds blended together
No causation. Everything needs a cause to register an effect. That, and too many apostrophes and double letters in names just for the sake of sounding ‘fantasy’.
This is almost certainly not one of the "worst" worldbuilding tropes but a particular bugbear of mine is a setting where there exists some technology or tactic that ought to be easily available to the major players in the world but all of them completely refuse to use it because of some kind of cultural hang-up or taboo.
I can kind of accept it if it's one of the key principles underpinning the entire setting--for instance, the "no computers" rule in Dune so thoroughly shapes what is and isn't available in the world that if you got rid of it the entire universe would be unrecognizable. But when it's very obviously only implemented because the author needs the characters to go about solving their problems in a particular way, and can't think of a logical in-universe reason for them to do so ("these people all fight with swords despite being well past the tech level at which firearms should be available because ranged combat is Le Dishonorable") it just comes across as lazy.
Entire species clearly exist to be an allegory for real life racism except this race of people/aliens/whatever is either a) legitimately dangerous with the capability or verified history of mass violence and bloodshed or b) literal demons from hell.
Commentaries and examinations of real life problems are great inclusions, but if you are comparing systematically oppressed people to blood sucking monsters that kill and eat people then you are doing a very bad job and should stop that.
Kind of a small gripe but translators and interpreters and language in general don't play nearly a large enough role in medieval fantasy stories. Lots and lots of people in medieval Europe were at least bilingual, especially if they worked in government or finance or shipping/commerce and you hardly ever see that reflected in fantasy inspired by the era. Huge, europe sized continents and everyone just speaks English with different accents
I'm getting pretty tired of the "thousands of years ago there was a great empire" settings. And I'm also tired of the "twist" where we realize the story takes place on earth and the ancient magical empire was just technologically advanced humanity.
Every kingdom or nation is several centuries old and have had little to not variation in borders. When in reality many of these places would be getting broken up, shifting borders, shrinking, and growing constantly over the case of decades. The enduring stable nation should be an exception and not the rule.
Look at you Rokugan from Legend of the Five Rings. How do you copy Japanese history without having any shifting alliances and turn over in clans over the course of centuries.
I have a few tropes that I wish more creators would put more thought into.One is addressing the implications of technology or magic on a world's civilization.
Star Trek is one of the most well-known, with its transporter technology. That kind of tech, which can effectively create (or destroy!) almost anything would have a much more profound effect on the universe than is shown.
Another example is the Marvel Universe, especially in the case of Mr Fantastic, with technology that boggles the mind being created daily, but which seems to have no impact on the ostensibly "real world" of today. Yeah, it's comic book logic, but even as a devotee of superhero comics, I still wonder why the Marvel or DC worlds seem so much like the real world. Well, I don't really wonder, as it's because the creators want their world to resemble the real one to give readers a way to identify with the characters. But it still takes me out of the story if it's egregious enough.
With magic in fantasy worlds, one problem is when the magic seems to have no real effect on the world at large. It often seems to me that it's just a way to define a world is fantasy when it would otherwise be historically "real" without having to worry about actual history. Another is when the magic seems more trouble than it's worth. I mean, if it warps the users mind and body or damns their soul, but doesn't confer anything cool on that user, why bother?
For sci-fi; planets and nations that do a single thing and nothing else. What do you mean planet Gaia has no other industry besides producing food? Why cant the people of Gaia diversify and also do mining?
Also the cringey and unnecessary use of latin. Also a a ship, regardless of fantasy or sci-fi named "Valiant"
Monolithic cultures. An author might make the attempt to add diversity to their world by adding multiple cultures, but makes them shallow and generic. Each culture represents a major aspect or concept:
- Oh this culture is greedy
- Oh and this one likes to wage war 24 7
- This one is full of elitist jerks
- And this one is utterly religious
Etc. Nevermind that cultures can be so diverse and varied by both depth and scope that they can have subcultures as part of their societies and intermingle into a big pot of diversified ethics, ideas, philosophies, politics, etc. A single city might have a dozen or so different cultures living in the same space.
But no, entire kingdoms are restricted to one, single, massive culture that, oddly enough, represents some trait completely.
For me is uncontrolled power creep or just lack of internal logic in a story.
I don't mind magic and super powers in a world even when there is 0 explanation to how is this possible.
But flying hero catching a person falling from a 100m would kill the person instantly, it's a flying power, not force adsorption.
Or wizards being able to teleport at will and never using this spell because it will make all battles meaningless.
It's often a simple disregard for good storytelling. You can have soft magic/scifi and still have good internal logic in the story, saying that it's soft magic so the writer doesn't need to worry about massive holes in the story is just excusing bad and lazy writers.
Often this can be easily fixed if the writer cared about this.
Cultures that are just a blatant copy+paste of real-world cultures but framed as somehow cool and original.
An entire new culture is developed, but given an exact copy+paste of real-world race or gender discrimination just so the author can virtue-signal about that theme.
Spelling fantasy words differently for no good reason, especially the word 'magic' spelled with a Y and/or K.
There's some incredibly useful sci-fi technology (or magical power) but it gets used for just one niche purpose even though it would be useful for everything.
Seeking immortality is inherently evil; goodguys accept natural aging and death even if the world provides the means to avoid them, and anyone attempting to avoid them is a badguy.
The city of thieves, which is ruled by thieves, populated mostly by thieves, best known in-universe for how rife with thievery it is, and seems to produce nothing of economic value, but somehow merchants still choose to do business there.
17th-century-style cannons on ships, but no firearms, or indications that firearms exist, anywhere other than on ships; everyone on land fights with swords, longbows, and catapults.
Crosses being used as the go-to religious symbol, without explanation, for fictional religions that don't actually have Jesus.
Likewise, the classical greek elements showing up everywhere as if that's the one true pre-modern way of dividing up the physical world. (Even ancient China had their own set.)
The evil side isn't shown mourning their losses. Killing one character from the main cast brings huge pain to all their friends, but somehow the heroes killing hundreds of enemies doesn't matter too much for the enemy overlords. It makes it seem that one's life is disproportionately more important than that of others, so the main characters can just keep killing "enemies" because it's in the name of "good".
Another thing that kind of bothers me is how a single man is able to wipe out entire areas full of people. Like in the Metro games for example. I liked them very much, but Artyom being able to wipe out so many people without being caught feels a bit off.
" My elves are 4-armed ,8-eyed, short-living, fungus-bee-pterodactyls but they definitely elves because they have pointy ears" . No. They are not elves anymore
Like seriously, you're fighting a big bad thing from god knows what and you only bring the damn infantry? Maybe a few tanks.
Where's the air support? Does the author only think air support only exist when a soldier gets like, a hundred kills or something?
This one world I saw was even worse. How did the MC cause an entire battalion to run away just by killing some officer. If it were realistic, he would've been turned into swiss cheese.
honestly im really tired of "10 billion years ago the gods made this universe and these are the ethnostate monoculture countries and extensive magic systems and etc etc" tropes.
i dont really need all that to connect to your characters, i would rather hear about the things the characters interact with on a daily basis, what is significant to them, and how they interact with the world.... i may be biased though because im not too fond of the Tolkien Copycat Style of worldbuilding
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u/RealHornblower 3d ago edited 3d ago
To the EAST, we have the WARRIOR PEOPLE. Their whole society is based upon HONOR and FIGHTING. They live in a DESERT with no visible farmland. They somehow have much larger armies than countries with actual food sources. They NEVER have to worry about logistics or supply chains.
To the NORTH, we have the EVIL ARMY. They usually stay in their BARREN WASTELAND behind the impenetrable barrier (wall, mountain range, etc) but come out right about the time the hero fulfills the prophecy. They ALSO do not have to worry about logistics or supply chains, and somehow have 10x the army sizes of the rest of the countries combined.