#your worldbuilding is bland

[ignus-moth]

ok so i was thinking about the trope of being sorted into different groups and stuff in media, (those dystopia books, fantasy based on element stuff, the owl house, guilds/classes in games, harry potter) and… what the hell do the houses in harry potter do except draw the line between good and bad?? putting a kid not doing so well with a bunch of other kids that are bullies or not doing so well IS A BAD IDEA

you know what would have been way more interesting?

HOUSES BASED ON THE WAND CORES

unicorn, dragon, pheonix (common, uncommon, rare). but that is only 3, so maybe add in kraken scales (id add that between uncommon and rare) or something so it’s four.

SO harry can still be special boy, phoenix core, but there should be drawbacks and different pros and cons of the cores so it’s not super unbalanced.

Unicorn cores maybe have a better time with aim and control, and as such is good with spells that are ranged or need precision. However the precision means powerful spells are more difficult to cast and requires more practice. Maybe they take an extra class about how to learn and practice spells specifically for unicorn cores.

Dragon cores are more powerful in short bursts, like explosions and such, so prolonged spells are more difficult so require more attention and endurance. The short explosions of energy means they are better for straight combat. The easiest to get used to, despite being the second most common. They have a class for practicing spell endurance.

Kraken cores work best when manipulating large physical objects and mass. Levitation, moving things around, and manipulating shape is easiest. Manipulating anything organic is much more difficult to learn, but ultimately easier. Manipulating the mind is just as hard as usual. Has an extra class about healing, as they are the best healers.

Phoenix cores are incredibly difficult to use, not just skill-wise but mentally. The core stores magic the best but humans are squishy and can’t take that magic very well. It is more powerful but, if used too much, can seriously damage the brain with concussion-like symptoms. It is easiest to loose control with this core and hurt people, so they have a few extra classes on how to control this. Phoenix core spell casters must see a doctor and therapist once a month, and again if there is any incident.

[icewindandboringhorror]

I have a big google doc thing where I keep track of media and stuff (putting everything in loosely ranked categories), which is mostly just for my own reference so I know what tv shows I've already seen before, etc. and I never really look back through it, typically just a quick "okay, watched two movie in the past 8 months, need to quickly slap them somewhere in the lists. okay. done. save document. exit". But today I was actually reading through some of the old notes and there are like... MULTIPLE places where my comment is basically "It would have been good if it were about elves" or "I wish there was a fantasy show made in this same style" or "It's well made, but I just keep thinking about how I would like it more if everyone was an elf or was in old 1700s costumes" or etc like...... lol.... Most biased media ranking system on earth blatantly made by someone with an extremely hyperspecific range of narrow interests. It'd be like if a food reviewer only had 5 foods they actually liked, so they'd just go to a pizza place and be like "eh, the pizza was okay, but I just think it would be better if it was cereal instead. :/ ...2 out of 10"

[cinnabeat]

still thinking abt fairy tail like idk if i can actually articulte why i wouldnt recommend it to anyone despite liking it so much? like its a generic shounen story but i did in fact enjoy it (until the end but thats like a staple to the genre at this point i think) but gun to my head i wouldnt be able to tell you what abt it i would change to make it better

[themanwhomadeamonster]

me reminding dd players that so much of the worldbuilding and lore is inferred from npc dialogue and their routines and that you really should be paying attention to what anyone and everyone has to say because the series design intentionally wants you to look out for these things rather than just drop it on your lap and that's not necessarily a design flaw that's just their way of storytelling to line up with the game's thesis

[maaaxx]

I have two more wips that I do not have time for rotating in my brain like a chicken

One is a modern au (im sorry but I love those) where lu ten is still alive and its pretty stereotypical but its how i want it to be and yeah

One is an au where ozai makes an attempt to be a good father (hes not perfect and actually royally fucks up zuko and azula still but he does care about them and love them and stuff)

Anywho you guys should tell me which of these you'd be more interested in

[ulyuxe]

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

[sweetheartsoldier]

Tired of stories where the author worldbuilds a whole religion only to chicken out at the last moment by making the main character a skeptic. You mean to tell me that there’s all this richness in lore and culture, but you’ve trapped me with the one person in this society who doesn’t care about it? So bland. I could meet an agnostic easily enough by walking down the street, but your story is my one chance to hear the perspective of someone who follows whatever religion you’ve contrived. You made this whole world; convince me that your character really is from there.

[catcatb0y]

I'm procrastinating fuck

[spookygibberish]

Last year I listened to a worldbuilding podcast that was very queercore hopepunk (2/3 of the hosts were straight...) and I have kind of come to detest the ideology, as well as all these nitty little microgenres. the podcast itself was not bad per say, but it was so utterly bland and the kind of writing advice that almost seems to discourage people from making challenging or transgressive art via prioritization of escapism as the ultimate goal for a fantasy work + the repeated adage that "realism is no excuse". You can set out to make a cozy, fluffy, fantasy world where people never behave in evil ways, are ever selfish or cruel, and never fight over resources and ideology, but if your love for human beings is conditional on human behavior only ever being perfect and good all the time then idk if you actually have much love for human beings at all. it's the kind of advice that encourages easily digestible fluff over all, and if you actually internalize it your never going to get out of it the power to write something like The Dispossessed, Left Hand of Darkness, or Parable of the Sower. is all.

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/769955412784119808/i-was-reading-a-fic-and-encountered-this?source=share

Hate to break it to you, but this kind of thing is a tell for AI.

Gramatically correct, the words follow naturally and the phrases themselves make sense, but the whole sentence is redundant or contradicts itself. That's the kind of mistake an AI actually makes.

It isn't a sure tell, tons of humans make that same kind of mistake. And since this particular fic has good worldbuilding it's more likely that this one is a case of the author gettig sloppy on a proofreading pass than anything else.

AI can do grammar, sentence structure, and even some basic storytelling, but what it can't do is cohesion. It can't worldbuild in a way that makes sense, and it can't spot redundancy and contradictions.

An AI is just using an incredibly complex algorithm is predict which word comes next, like a fancy version of how your phone suggests "am" after you type "I". It doesn't know that "and with her death, she dies" is silly. All it knows is that it should follow up "And with her death" with a description of an accident, and that a description of an accident should be followed with a statement of a death of injury.

The actual tells for AI aren't weird grammar and misspellings, those are tells for humans. The tells for AI are redundancy, contradictions, generic bland voice, and lack of cohesion within gramatically correct paragraphs.

--

[flamsparks]

The Importance of Hate being an Option

From someone who's worst is "neutral" and struggles with that too

Numbers regarding how many players on average go for the evil alignment in RPGs change depending who you ask to. But there's a general consensus that they're low.

The fact that evil runs are often less rewarding (closed off quests, lost companions, and so on) surely plays a roll in the choice. But I can guess many players - like me - are just the definition of this:

I am the kind of player who manually saves before starting most conversations with companions, to try again if I fuck up the first time.

And yet.

How I missed the rude option (the real one, not that mildly-direct-still-nice bullshit that was the crossed-armed option) in Veilguard.

Not because I would have used it.

But because, certainly at least most of the times, I would not.

To get Dorian to bring you along to meet his father, you need to have a relatively high approval. And this makes sense. In that moment, Dorian is making himself vulnerable, and you find yourself in a situation where you can hurt him. Truly. You can be awful to him. And the fact that you can makes the whole situation much more real, and makes you understand why Dorian is so worried about what you’re gonna do. You can be evil then. And that’s why choosing not to be makes the whole scene so real. Because I had a choice, and I chose to be decent.

In DAO, you could choose to be literally anything and everything: racist, sexist, blasphemous, EVERYTHING! And you can choose not to be any of them.

The value of being good lies in the freedom of choice only an evil option provides. And the worth of loving is only given by the possibility to hate. One exists only as long as the other is an option.

There's a character in the franchise whose personality really gets on my nerves. I really don't stand them. And yet, can you believe that I love that character? Because they feel real. And that's exactly why I don't stand them: because they feel like a real person, a person I wouldn't get along with irl. And that's why I love their character, and it's one of those I hold dearest in the entire franchise.

You know you've succeeded in writing a character who feels real when there are people who love it and people who hate it. Because that's how people work irl. You can't like everyone you encounter, you can't dislike everyone.

There's ofc nothing wrong with having one or few characters who are just genuinely likeable. Varric was written the way he was to compensate for a group of companions who were otherwise perceived as too antagonistic, at least in the beginning of DA2. And even then, he was still no knight in shining armour. But there's a difference between having a few overall agreeable characters to smoothen out your experience some and outright avoiding any crease in every personality to minimise chances of disliking any characters.

When you write characters trying to make them palatable to everyone, you're inevitably simplifying them to give them only traits people will like and reduce their "flaws" to minor inconveniences at best. But a person's flaws are as much a part of them as their qualities. Again, remove one or the other, and what you have is an empty, painted-over husk.

And this is what I hate most of companions in Veilguard. They are bland, superficial, struggling for tridimensionality. And they feel so incomplete that not only I can't get myself to care for them. I can't even get myself to hate them. You can't hate a sheet of paper for being bidimensional.

I demand my right to hate.

To hate a character, an idea, a plan, an institution. I demand my right to tell people to fuck off, to tell someone they are an idiot, that their plan is bullshit, that I detest what they stand and fight for. I demand a chance to disagree and fight with characters over ideas and ideologies. Not because I would, but because this is what allows for a deep worldbuilding that feels real under every aspect, and gives you characters who feel like real people you can love or hate.

People had questioned in BG3 what was the point of forcing devs to implement evil choices when the vast majority of players wouldn't make them.

This is why. And I missed it awfully in Veilguard.

[octosan]

Working on one of the videos for my drinking game series and I got mad and wrote a whole rant that I realized was a little too much for a drinking game post.

I just hate this script so much you guys. I hate SO MUCH how much they simplified the dialogue, the worldbuilding, the puzzle solving in this game.

I've seen a lot of complaints about fans being illiterate towards the story and to that I say of course they are! The game doesn't ask them to think! Rather than throwing up your hands saying "maybe they had a good reason to dumb down the dialogue and spoonfeed you this stuff"

consider that critical thinking is a muscle

and players do not exercise it when the game is afraid you will forget the core premises of the game, or individual missions, and so repeat them constantly.

When your companions all get along and share the same basic principles beyond bland culture differences, and their principles are all ones deemed acceptable to "modern" audiences, so you never have to think about what life experiences might have led them to feel that way.

When you have your companions constantly patting you and the other companions on the back and saying "nice job!!" in combat as if we wouldn't understand that they are friends otherwise.

When you constantly have characters make juvenile comments like "this is evil, even for the venatori!" or "they did that just for power?/greed?" or "man this makes me hate the venatori even more!" (even more?? these are fantasy nazis!!! you didn't hate them already??) and then don't give the evil factions any nuance because they're afraid you won't get that these factions are eeeeeevil. (The Venatori were never very nuanced outside Calpernia but at least there was lip service that they were a symptom of broader issues, not the convenient cause.)

When you're constantly explaining to the player how many blight pustules they still need to pop, how many crystals you have left, and oh!! the gate's open now! go through the gate! or look! there are darkspawn there where your camera is already pointed! Even late in the game they were doing this! Even at the end of Bellara's questline she was explaining that laser mechanic to me!

When they present you with lore reveals that have been highly anticipated for decades, as well as multiple memories which are meant to add to our interpretation of a core character, and they literally just tell you what to think about them and how to interpret them, at length, in that godawful regret questline. (And tbh even Solas' memories in the Crossroads did not tell me anything I did not already know)

And then Mythal saying "hey those murals are not 100% reliable memories" in a single missable dialogue option that we don't address any further, rendering even that agonizing bit of handholding pointless. Like okay what does it MATTER that they are not 100% reliable? because the redemption ending relies on your interpretations of it being 100% correct!! what purpose does that line serve except to give the writers deniability?

When you don't even bother to GIVE new worldbuilding details when they could absolutely be relevant at the time, except when it makes the writers' job easier like "turlum" or Bellara's clan's funeral practices being indistinguishable from ancient elven ones even though that's literally not what we were told about Dalish practices in the past, guess the Emerald Graves don't exist anymore-. Like just as one example that has stuck in my head, Elgy and Ghilly use terms like The Blight, Archdemons, Darkspawn, the Crossroads, etc. despite being from time periods that predate those terms and presumably having their own words for those same concepts. You can't tell me that Ghilly honestly thinks of her beloved hell children as "darkspawn", or that she would tolerate other people calling them that. You can't tell me that Elgy would agree to call his instrument of reshaping the world, which he is trying to convince people is a good thing, the Blight.

When the game actively punishes people who are familiar with the prior materials with their worldbuilding, punishes people who are reading the codex entries and looking for minor throwaway lines that acknowledge previous shit like the fact that Crows are literally tortured as part of their training and killed if they fail contracts, by having it not be remotely relevant to the story and make it much harder to have the appropriate reaction to what's happening in it (like Rook has no choice but to be happy Jacobus is taking in more orphan crows??) This is low-hanging fruit but it's so illustrative of what I mean.

What other outcome is this all going to have but players who do not look further than the surface? Who miss and ignore little details they have been trained to think do not matter and largely do not inform the broader story and characters? Players who are easily stumped on puzzles because they were not allowed to figure anything else out by themselves?

Are you going to claim that the Orzammar questline in Origins didn't teach anybody a lesson about paying close attention to the social structures and culture of a society when you pick the person who's going to rule it, as opposed to picking the guy who the narrative frames as wise and kind and the other guy framed as a power hungry third child? Are you going to claim that the Archon choice teaches anything remotely as useful?

Like!!!!

GOD

Inquisition had plenty of this stupid handholding too btw. You can argue all of the games had it by degrees. but it wasn't even remotely this bad.

[werewolfetone]

My demands for the next big thinly veiled british history ripoff high fantasy tv show that gets popular after hotd inevitably ends:

Some sort of wales equivalent and some sort of ireland equivalent in the worldbuilding. I'm sick of worldbuilding where the main country is Just England and maybe some hint of scotland if the authors are feeling goofy... if you're going to make me sit through your world which is obviously just mediaeval britain with the labels filed off I am NOT also watching you pretend like england is the only place the exists again, especially since acting like british history would be even kinda the same without wales or ireland is ridiculous

More accent diversity. once again, there are other places that are not england that exist in the world. and more language diversity I'm not having the whole everyone ever speaks ~common~ shite again

More racial and religious diversity. put black people in there. if the sole significant religion is some sort of bland protestant xianity with catholic aesthetics again I'm killing the hostages

Codpieces

Those slut breeches they wore in like the 1500s that were like the puffier version of short shorts

Lesbian sex onscreen to make up for the fact that I don't think we're getting it in hotd

Ok that's it actually I can't think of anything else

[katyspersonal]

You are so right about Malenia fans. They constantly mischaracterize Radahn and when you say anything good about him they come down on you like a rabid dog.They have a discord dedicated to Malenia and they act collectively on Twitter, No Radahn fan acts this crazy.

What makes me even more bitter is that I am a fan of Malenia too! Both of the twins, actually, but her more! Don't let that surprise you, there is a multitude of reasons why I do not openly post about my blorbos 24/7 like normal fans of anything or anyone do, and instead look like I am ONLY after story/worldbuilding in general xD

Not being able to socialise with "my" type of fans is kind of hard (ok that's a lie, I became severely asocial since spring 2024 anyway). And yes, it is something I see particularly about female characters or yuri ships! I like this female character? I like this yuri ship? So do these lovely people who constantly post hate, spread toxicity, throw buzzwords such as "media illiterate" or "misogyny" every time they have to hear anything even slightly different from their preferred puddle deep girlboss/cottagecore vision, take adding nuance to a male character involved in their story as a personal attack and generally act elitist and take PRIDE in making fellow fans uncomfortable and discouraged should they be deemed "weirdos". And don't forget how self-vindicating they act should someone speak against this behavior! Why fans of male characters don't act like this? Why fans of yaoi or male x female ships don't act like this? Miquella is absolutely unprecedented case of a male character causing this behaviour too, on the virtue of both being "just a baby" and being involved with Malenia, of course!

The girlboss cottagecore tragic sapphics squad is just bad. When they get bored of making a scene about "fighting misogyny" by making the fandom a worse place, they start eating their OWN. There is that lesbian who likes Finlenia who posted multiple vents about how upset they were that fellow fans of this ship treated not shipping it as lesbophobia. There is my ex mutual, also a lesbian and a huuuge Malenia fan, who admitted feeling UNSAFE about NOT shipping Finlenia. *shakes u* UNSAFE!! UNSAFE about shipping preference! Do you UNDERSTAND how insane it is??? UNSAFE!!! Bullying Radahn fans who demand that he is treated with nuance and attention just like other characters instead of being written out like "sexist redditors mascon", is not enough. When they do manage to discourage his fans out of their "proper and media literate circles". They start. EATING. THEIR. OWN. 🤦‍♂️

Anyways get bad faith bland Radahn "portrayals" out of your system and read this incredibly based mini-essay by @heraldofcrow about Radahn instead ( x )

[sumerianlanguage]

I do a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, and I have fairly regularly used the conceit that various cultures draw from various real-world historical cultures and languages.

There is a species in D&D called "dragonborn". I decided that Sumerian would be a reasonable source for this species (especially given some of the lore associated with this group as having had a major empire in the deep past), e.g. I use names from the Sumerian king list for dragonborn characters. (Dragonborn are humanoids who were created by or descended long ago from real dragons.)

But "dragonborn" is incredibly bland and generic and of course would not reflect their own name for themselves. So I found a Sumerian vocabulary list (transliterated not cuneiform), and found "ushu, ushud" for dragon, and a word for "slave", or "servant" or something like that, which seemed to be interpretable as "lower class born", with a -tud element in the last place. I was way out on a limb here, but I combined the two to make "ushutud", which is at least a lot more interesting than "dragonborn".

So the question is: What would you suggest for a Sumerian noun that has similar meanings and connotations as "dragonborn"?

Thanks!

Hello! I'm not sure what wordlist you're using but it's slightly off - the word I know for "dragon" is ushum or ushumgal ("great ushum"). (Ushu means "caterpillar" or "sunset, eveningtime" depending how it's written, and ushud would mean something like "prayer pasture").

Tud is a verb meaning "to be born" (along with other meanings), and it is used at the end of a few words meaning "born as..." - for example, an amaatud (or emedu) was a slave born (tud) to an enslaved mother (ama), in contrast to someone enslaved at a later point; while an urtud was a type of domestic slave or indentured servant, perhaps one who was born in debt (ur) and would work until the debt was paid off. I could see it being used for "born of...", but my first thought on seeing ushumtud would be that it's a "person enslaved due to having a dragon for a parent".

Instead, the more neutral (and frequently-used) way I'd express this uses dumu, the word for "child" or "descendant", as the root noun. My translation would be dumu-ushuma or dumu-ushumgala "descendant of dragon(s)".

Or a worldbuilding thought - dumu-ushumgala could work as the neutral-to-positive general term ("dragonborn"), while ushumtud can coexist as a derogatory term ("dragonspawn"?) Thanks for your question, and let me know if that works for you!

[wanderingswampbeast]

Long Post: Why I Don’t Like The Drow

I’ve been ranting about this to a friend on discord (a lot of points I make will come from him) but I’ve finally figured out what my issue with the drow is outside of inherently evil groups being dumb.

The drow are boring. Drow lore is less of a dive into a unique culture and more of a list of fucked up things they do. Like, I cannot name a single interesting aspect of typical drow society that does not directly involve murder, sexism, or slavery, or Lolth. And even then, most of those things are written about in an incredibly bland fashion with them.

The Drow don’t really have much depth to them, and are just kind of evil for evil’s sake (or “because Lolth said so”). They do slavery, but the only real purpose of doing slavery for them is “because Lolth said so”. It isn’t for cheap labor, it’s to be more evil. They betray each other purely because that’s what evil people do. They’re misandrist, not for any real societal reason, but because Lolth hates men. There’s none of what would make slavery an interesting topic or story element, no justification for why they should be allowed to commit one of the worst injustices possible, no real economic reason for it. They just do it because Lolth says they should, and from a writing perspective it hammers home the fact that they’re evil. They aren’t evil because they enslave and murder, they enslave and murder because they’re evil, if that makes any sense.

Them being written as comically evil as they are also hurts them from a worldbuilding perspective. They’re so reliant on slaves for menial labor that the lower class of their society struggle to get jobs. Drow culture so obsessed with betrayal and dumbass house wars that even when actively under attack from the outside they sabotage each other. They’re so decadent that their buildings are held up with magic and semi regularly collapse when a spell fails. To put it bluntly, drow society feels like one that should have collapsed in a few centuries, which, funnily enough, is way longer than D&D elves live.

Their culture being so monolithic also makes writing anything about them difficult. Every drow antagonist is going to have near identical motivations, methods, and ideologies as every other drow antagonist. Every drow protagonist is going to ultimately feel very similar to Drizzt, because leaving their fucked up society to become a do-gooder is such a common backstory element that they added a whole extra god just for doing that. In fact, you can divide 90% of drow characters from any official materials into these categories:

Manservant

Ambitious male, usually a wizard (5 bucks says he has long hair and a widow’s peak)

Dommy Mommy Warcrime Woman

Drizzt Do’Urden or one of his many duplicates

Self-loathing and/or resentful Drider

And finally, their existence almost purely to be humanoid enemies you can fight at nearly any levels is just kind of lazy. This is a problem that I have with the “evil races” of a lot of fantasy but having a group that’s evil by birth just feels like an excuse to not have to write actual motivations for your antagonists. It’s the difference between “go attack this camp of soldiers because they’re part of the SkullMurder army and their general wants to use our land to build a dread fortress” vs “go attack this camp of soldiers specifically because they’re drow/goblins/orcs/the dreaded peepee-poopoo folk”. Using stuff like this just feels like an excuse to not have to write an actual antagonist since it comes pre-written in the group’s lore. This has the side effect of whenever such a group is the antagonist of the plot, the players or audience know near exactly what to expect. The orc is here to conquer, the goblin is here to steal, and the drow is here to enslave or do some dark ritual.

I’ve legitimately heard people say “well if XYZ can’t be inherently evil anymore, who will we use as bad guys?” It’s very simple: whoever the fuck we want. Write an evil queen, or a scheming wizard, or an underground slave trade network. For God’s sake, anyone can be evil, you don’t need to tie that to a specific ethnic group and write it as “they’re just like that”. Write an actual character for your antagonist.