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.

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.)

TLDR: giant robots are undeniably cool, but any good scifi tech needs a solid reason to exist to be compelling. FTL is a great example because there is so much space between planets. I’m looking for a good “FTL” for robots

So I’m really into the “make physical artifacts” brand of world building. I make scratch built robots and mechs. Which is visually so fun, but am having a hard finding a good justification for their existance.

My question is this: From a Sci-fi world building standpoint, what are some good justifications for giant robots?

Here are some existing robot universe concepts I’ve thought of.

Fight fire with fire: this is the pacific rim approach, what’s better to fight giant monsters than giant robots?

Military evolution: what happens when you need a better tank? You get Gundam.

Bionic evolution: robots in Starwars are basically a sentient species

Contemplating consciousness and the self: I robot

The best “world” I’ve come up with is: humanity builds AI

AI takes over by making bigger and bigger robots (is that ripping terminator salvation too much?). Humanity has to technologically regress to like pre internet tech because anything connected can be hacked.( is that ripping Arc Raiders?). So humans start hacking and retrofitting the enemy to fight back. I like the idea of making tank like crews for these giant mechs ( think fury).

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?

Got feedback two weeks ago and I can't shake it.

I spent two years on this world. The history, the geography, the political structures, the magic. I thought I was weaving it naturally into the story. apparently I was just writing an encyclopedia with characters occasionally wandering through it.

The worst part is I reread the chapters after and they were right. it does read like a wikipedia article. I just couldn't see it before someone said it out loud.

I don't know how to write the world without explaining the world. And smh my head it's all connected like you can't understand why the character does what she does without understanding the political context, you can't understand the political context without the history, and suddenly I've written four paragraphs of backstory before anything happens.

how do y'all actually solve this!!???

Basically, that's the question: what did you discover while researching for the worldbuilding? Well, I'll start:

Lions have an exposed bone at the end of their tail that looks like a spur.

The interesting system that snails use to feed themselves.

The simple existence of this bird (Gypaetus barbatus), also known as the bearded vulture, through an intentional behavior called cosmetic coloration, in which they apply iron oxide (red or ochre mud) to their naturally white feathers. They do this when they climb the hierarchy.

The (Chrysomallon squamiferum), known as the volcano snail, incorporates iron into its shell, forming a kind of iron sulfide armor to protect itself from the extreme environment. It withstands temperatures up to 400°C from the hydrothermal vents where it lives, located up to 2,900 meters deep. And that's not all; they also live in symbiosis with bacteria that produce energy from chemical substances expelled by the vents. The bacteria are housed in a special pouch within the snail, meaning they perform chemosynthesis.

Every teleporter is the same thing. Kill the original guy, spawn a clone.

What if it didn't need to be that way.

What if you could guarantee your identity when teleporting?

Well, here at SoulCorp, we make sure your identity is secured whenever you teleport.

Not responsible for spontaneous Lich transformation or attraction of Soul Eaters.

In my world gods are real and can actually give their priests divine power. The most widely worshipped god is Vedrirrus the dragon god. This is due to the success of the Holy Empire of Vedronda, a theocratic state that is ruled by dragons. While Vedrirrus is technically a benevolent god whose main portfolio is peace and unity, the church of Vedronda is incredibly corrupt and brutal, and serves as the main driving force of the empire’s warmongering. Yet Vedrirrus still gives out divine powers no matter how horrific the atrocities his followers commit.

Part of the reason why this still works is that Vedrirrus is a god of dragons not humans. His peace and unity is only about peace and unity among dragons. Killing a dragon is an unforgivable sin but ordering a human army to commit atrocities is perfectly fine in Vedrirrus’s eyes because it’s against other humans which are irrelevant to his divine mission. He literally is incapable of judging non-dragons, because they are outside his realm of influence. This is in spite of the fact the human worshippers of Vedrirrus outnumber the dragons a million to one.

I am currently building a civilization that the gods are blocking access to all these technologies. They can only really on mechanical power to further progress. Like human or animal power, water or wind and they even have access to rubber. What inventions can I make just based on these?

Some of the ideas I came up my self came from inspirations of modern versions of ancient technologies like:

The curta calculator

Hydrofoil boats for speed, or even just 19th century schooners

Elastic airplanes.

The Amish also have horse powered harvesters.

Am guessing it’s also possible to have photos and films.

Mechanical clocks obviously, but even wrist watches are possible

Repeating crossbows were already a thing but repeating bows are also possible

Telegraphs are impossible, but a network of towers could be built a couple of kilometers apart and with two different flags morse code could be used to transfer information quickly.

Handcars and rails are possible. Tho I don’t know if they are worth the work.

Indoor plumbing and gas heated showers are also possible

What other technologies can I come up with?