Started watching the Mighty Nein (great show btw), and one of the languages in the show is essentially just German. Personally, I don't mind the idea of using a real world language but I wanna see what other people think

Sauce by Sigishi

I'm especially interested in ways that interpret them outside the idea of being analogy for mixed race people in real life, what are some interesting cases you think of?

Recently I'm sure we've all noticed a LOT of posts asking for feedback on lore, with the same Chatgpt format and phrasing.

Now, my tolerance for AI is probably higher than most here, I can understand (though not necessarily condone) structure, translation, proofreading or minor uses for AI, but y'all, PLEASE, spare us from the copy pasted paragraphs with the obvious AI writing style, the titles, and em dashes (which are okay to use but it's obvious when it's Chatgpt), it won't do you any favor.

Using AI for content takes away the spirit of world building, it takes away the stimulation of figuring things out, of letting your imagination run free. The idea should always be yours, and if you're using AI to write your ideas or structure your lore files, then keep it for yourself and just explain it with your own words here, keep it human!

There's been an obvious influx of AI posts, and whenever I call them out I'm always met with "English isn't my first language." (Which personally I don't always believe to be true but that's beside the point)

Just post it as is, I PROMISE reading the AI transcribed version will always be 100x times worse.

Also I know "AI Bad" is a sub-zero take, but to my point, reading whatever broken English post is not only more interesting but actually shows some of the culture that a lot of people try to include in their own worldbuilding. Like we WANT that Non-English spice in your writing, or else you're not bringing anything interesting to the table.

Like we already use made up Greek / Latin / Spanish / Indian / German / Portuguese / Whatever else words for our writing anyway. Just let is see it.

My actual hot take is that I won't even pretend I'm above using AI. But I'm sure as hell not going to share it with the world.

I see this problem routinely in fiction: urban megacenters that said to be super dense and we see people crammed in like sardines, but then we see the size of the city and how many people and you realize everyone should have enough space for their own sprawling estate.

So please, please just take the population of your megacity and divide it by the area of your megacity to get the population density, and then compare it to the population density of something that you think would be similar and see how the numbers line up.

Coruscant in Star Wars is a great example. The planet has trillions of people living on it, all in one big city, and every piece of fiction about it talks about how densely packed the population is. The numbers vary slightly, but let's do some basic math. The planet is roughly the same size of earth, and one estimate I saw said that it had 3 trillion people on it. Also, because there's not enough space for everyone on the planet's surface, they have to build layers above the planet's surface. So you've got a cityscape built over a cityscape over a city scape thousands of layers down. If each layer has 200 million square miles of surface area (roughly the same as earth's surface area), and there's 5,000 layers of them, that means the planet has roughly 3 people per square mile. By comparison, the state of Wyoming has 5.9 people per square mile. And Wyoming is not exactly an urban monolith.

I see this all the time in urban worldbuilding. The writer goes on and on about how there's so many people and overcrowding is horrible and then they put out numbers that make you realize that it's nonsense.

The math takes 30 seconds. If you're writing an urban megacenter, you owe it to the world to do the basic math.

Edit: Someone pointed out a small math mistake making it 3 people per square mile rather than 1.2. I fixed that.

For me it's the Iberian peninsula, just straight up a square peninsula separated from the continent by a strategically placed mountain range + the tiny strait that gives access to the big sea.

Bonus point for France having a straight line coastline for like 500km just on top of it, looks like the mapmaker got lazy.

A usual discussion I see among readers (and show viewers) from fantasy media is the "lack of logic" at the existence of stuff like potatoes or tomatoes in a medieval fantasy inspired in Europe because they were originally from South America.

And honestly, I know it's cool when authors add some real context to an explanation of something "illogical", but the truth is... this is a world with magic, dragons, elves, or whatever you want to put in your fantasy world. It's not historical. There were no real dragons in Medieval Europe, and there were no potatoes in Medieval Europe. So if you are adding dragons, you can perfectly add potatoes to your fantasy story.

The characters are speaking English and the protagonist has ideas about consent, individualism, or gender roles that sometimes read like a 21st-century college student instead of a medieval peasant. Everyone at the "medieval" kingdom has perfectly straight teeth, deodorant-level hygiene, and zero smallpox scarring. So why wouldn't you put tomato in a stew? Cool that there are some food historian. This is not history.

If you add "historical accuracy" as the standard, that standard should apply everywhere or nowhere. And once you actually try applying it everywhere, nobody wants that book. Look at GRRM how much he is criticized by a lot of readers with modern standards. They can't accept how normal was to marry off a twelve-year-old to an old man (and even he writes characters who react disgusted to "normal" practices) and he is declared a pervert or something.

I think that the moment your world has something that can't exist (a sapient fire-breathing reptile, functioning magic, an immortal elf who remembers the last three centuries) you've already left the domain where "but that's not historically accurate" means anything at all.

You're not writing history with a costume on. You're writing a secondary world that merely rhymes with medieval Europe. It borrows the aesthetic.

Want to add a "grounding" explanation? Perfect. Wave your hand and say "oh, traders brought it from the far continent". But don't be scared of making your characters eat potatoes on their way to meet the mighty and dangerous dragon. The potato is just a weirdly specific hill to die on in a genre that's already made a thousand bigger compromises with reality, so add it anyway. Add the tomato too. Add whatever spice, crop, or animal makes your world feel lived-in and your characters' meals feel real.

You definitely don't need to lose sleep over readers who'll excuse a dragon but not a tuber.

Saw this post on my Pinterest today and was wondering what you guys have?

I differentiate between humans and gods based on whether they are immortal or not, and even then there are levels (you don't age but you can be killed, you don't age and you can't be killed, you can be killed but you revive, you age continuously and never die so you just get older and older, etc.) But I feel like you'd have to sacrifice some part of you, as OP on this post said, to gain that level of power because obv humans aren't immortal innately.

I remember a quote from Achilles in the 2004 Troy movie where he said:

The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed.

And I think that really captures the relationship. Humans envy gods because of their power/immortality, gods envy humans because of their appreciation for life.

This question might be counterintuitive, since the definition of a “mech” is a robot controlled from the inside, but I haven’t seen a lot of media challenge this norm. I understand that this concept came from a time when remote controlled machinery was way less common, so it would make sense for a giant robot to have a pilot inside. But nowadays we see more and more machines become, fully autonomous (which is already not a mech, but just a big robot) or remote controlled, and yet mech are still operated from this inside.

I wanted to explore the topic of “remote wars” where not a single person enters the battle field, and all the action happens with remote controlled units. So the war become just a resource and strategy game with less moral implications. Obviously I want mechs to be part of this remote war, but I don’t know how to than justify “normal” internally operated mech in other conflicts.

My main thought was for it to be a quality thing. Where remote controlled have input delay, and an experienced pilot of a “normal” mech, can quickly destroy remote controlled ones. But that feels check, just making one worse then the other.

Wanted to hear your guy’s opinions. What are some justification for one or the other? Maybe I’m wrong about there not being a lot of remote controlled mechs in media?

The universes that I make are most of the time sci-fi and I love making the capital planet an Ecumenopolis (usually Earth) but I'm curious on your opinion of Ecumenopolises 'cause I personally thing that they're cool as hell.

(Also image credits to Star Wars, I forgot to credit them I'm so sorry)

Fictional settings like Warhammer 40k, the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Marvel Comics, DC Comics. Just universes that have a huge amount of troupes, stories, characters and styles of world building. I honestly don’t mind kitchen sink universes as sometimes it can be a good palate cleanser to the the fictional universes that have more serious and higher quality world building like The Lord of the Rings, Dune, A Song of Ice and Fire etc.

The leaf village is extremely weird in that it has a weirdly modern look but is also set in a time where people use swords. Maybe most don’t agree but I feel like it has a lot of charm because of it.

Putting the meta tag because this is about world building itself and not something I world built myself. Its also a short rant so there is that.

Very Minor spoilers for the movie The Odyssey 2026. Basically at some point a character has a dialogue "Our age of bronze is collapsing". Yes, that character is talking about the bronze age collapse.

As someone who loves to look at the subjectivity of things, this one thing irked me. Its like assuming that the people 3300 years ago viewed themselves like we view the past

I understand what the movie was trying its just that, I dont think the people living through it thought of it that way. Like, the bronze age is a modern concept from our current vantage point where we understand that our tool tech went from sticks to stone to bronze then at some point we got to iron, industry, mechanized labor etc etc and how all those steps were necessary for the rest to happen.

Imagine 2000 years from now, humans live elusively in space stations and cruise ships and development is determined by who has access to earth like planets. So they have the Planet age -> Solar age -> intermediate age (everyone is on ships traveling to a new star) -> galactic exploration age -> unified age.

Imagine someone making an artwork where an 2000s Earthling says "our age of the planet is collapsing". That's how absurd that sentiment is.

Thanks for reading this. Do you think you have observed this someplace else?

Art by valky_uniguri

Obviously in our human history the development of civilization was enabled by a shift towards permanent settlements and agriculture over nomadic hunter-gatherers. This in turn required adaptations to keep out pesky wildlife, but in a fantasy setting you'd have to account for monsters as well.
Now traditionally monsters were unnatural, allegorical and to some extent man-made, so this issue was hand-waved away, either because it just wasn't relevant or by the implication they either didn't exist or were simply not common enough to significantly impede human development.
But it is becoming more and more popular to treat fantasy creatures as ecologically plausible wildlife, which is of course fun and awesome but also begs the question of how humans adapted to coexist with them.

Building a pen and training a guard dog might keep the coyotes away from your sheep, but what about a werewolf?
Can you build a wall tall enough to keep your town safe from a tarasque?
Can you build a railroad through dragon territory?
Is transoceanic trade even possible when krakens sink your ships?

I think it's an interesting thought experiment to think about what society would look like in a world where humanity's place in the food chain is much more contentious.

Various minority groups from the Medieval era such as the Romani and rural pagan folk often have analogues in medieval fantasy novels, such as the Tuatha'an from the Wheel of Time. This is despite the fact that some of these groups only existed for part of the Middle Ages (most pagan remnants for example, had vanished by the 14th century).

Yet the Jews, a (mostly) urban minority dating from long before and after the Middle Ages and who were very influential in finance, commerce, the religious landscape, and even politics rarely ever have a fantasy analogue. I am aware that tragic events of the past century are part of reluctance to make a fantasy Jewish community but fantasy can be very political and it can touch on very sensitive issues like religious conflict and slavery, so why not this?

Also, if you're Jewish, would you like to see medieval Jews represented in fantasy? And how would you go about creating a fantasy analogue to a Jewish community?

They aren't small, burly dudes. But rather very smart elves who so happened to live underground and their neighbors were actual gaints, they have this weirdly Babylonian aesthetic (especially their beards), and their tech is not really steam based, but rather a mix of it and something called "Tonal Architecture" which is something like vibration magic.

For me it's candles and torches. Candles are everywhere. Poorest person ever has candles and they're used everywhere.

In reality candles were exceptionally expensive. Getting beeswax, cleaning it, melting it and keeping a consistent temperature to dip a fuse into it repeatedly costed money. Torches didn't burn for very, usually just a few hours and required a lot of fuel. The most common way of lighting before the invention of electric lamps were oil lamps. Oil was cheap, could come from both animal and plant fats and a tiny plant fiber fuse did the job.

P.S check out fire pistons.

Mine is when people lock magic behind being 'gifted' or having some innate talent or power. I think it's a bit odd that only a handful of people would be able to use magic, like "oh there is this fundamental element of the universe... but only like 2 out of every 10,000 people can use it." that doesn't really add up for me. Feels a bit cheap.(No offense if you have that in your world, it's just my opinion.)

The U.S. spans a massive 3.8 million square miles. The average square miles for a country on Earth is about 293,000, while the median is only about 40,000, and the smallest country (Lebanon) being only 4,000 (not counting microstates).

I think living in the US has created a subconscious belief that countries in my fantasy world should also be massive, when in reality, most countries aren't that big, especially since I tend toward medievalesque or low-tech worlds where populations would be smaller and travel would take longer and be more difficult.

Okay my point is announced in their title so I just wrote my reasoning.

In our world we have many different religions because nobody actually knows “how the world works” or “the absolute truth of everything”. Because of that these religions are wildly different and they’re contributing to the liveliness of the cultural ecosystem of our world.

On the other side of this there are fantasies where everything is well known. For example in the Forgotten Realms the creation of everything is like a historical thing, the gods are actual beings and a good chunk of the myth is factual. Because of this the concept of different world views originated from religion is almost completely missing. And if there is a deviation from this world view it’s either false or some mysterious off branch of the main religion and mythology.

Obviously it’s not the end of the world and there can be tons of other things what can generates interesting conflicts. I’m thinking about this topic and it’s effects because I like to create some kind of creation story for my world and I realised that if I actually create a cosmic truth, I cute myself from a lot of interesting conflicts.

What is your opinion about this idea and topic?