I'm the Worldbuilding Sage and this is my channel. My aim is to teach you certain worldbuilding techniques (most of them are about asking the right questions and answering them for an easier time). Since I'm new to video making, I appreciate any critique and I'll gladly read your worldbuilding takes in the comments.
I used Obsidian and World Anvil. I want to add my thoughts. Obsidian is a note taking software on steroids. It is a rabbit hole. If you start with obsidian for your game you might easyly spend 2 Month 6h each day learning about concepts of zettelkasten vs PARA and might re-organize your life. After 2 Month you learned about dataview and templater and then realize you cannot share your information with your players the same way you see on your computer. sure there is a "publish" pay option. But i does NOT support those fancy plugins you learned the last two month. World Anvil is overwhelming at first. It is not intuitive and it is slow in every single aspect. From page loading to editing, to writing, and all other tinkered features. It feels like a total mess of things that somehow looks connected. but they are not. It is extremly frustrating and time consuming and it has a paywall that finally lets you do some things if you pay 120 a year. Imagine: you can specify about 100 things about a npc in its template. but there is no way to filter by the things you entered. Like you define male, likes butter, dogs, horses and lives in ankerville. Do it with 20 npc and then try to filter all males in ankerville that do not like cats. Not possible. In Obsidian you can write a dataview query (SQL basically) and done. WA you can enter all necessecy information but it just sits there. You cannot do anything with the information like you would in a database. it is just there to read by someone. I quit spending to much time there. it is totally pointless. I would love to finaly find something that is a bit like world anvil. Online. Multiplayer compatible. Easy to use. Fast workflow. Cheaper than 100 bucks a year and not beta. (im looking at you Legendkeeper). Right now. Apple Notes and Discord must do the job.
In the world I'm building right now, there are gods that interact with the world. The thing is that these interactions are rare, and the stories have mutated so much that people don't even know how many gods are there. They know they *exist* because the four intelligent races aren't genetically close to any other animal in the world, proving their divine creation (in fact, a bird species gaining sapience through natural selection in a close timeline is something I'd like to explore). One of the main differences are how they conceive these divine appearances. The most prominent religions, yet to be named, are Bitheism and Tetratheism. Bitheism reminds of a Greek-style personification of Yin and Yang (with many differences both in philosophy and theology) and has a structured but not too hierarchical clergy. There's a creator God and a destroyer Goddess. Of the four races in this world, two are considered honorific gifts from the God to the Goddess (viceversa), and two are considered a joined creation. When the different manifestations of the Gods appear, rather than ordering them by attributes, they do it by gender. Because of the details in this theology, Bitheists have managed to be a weirdly non-racist and non-misogynist religion. People attend prayers when they can, as they are celebrated daily. They are kind of somber, but inspiring. Incense is burned, and orthodox believers burn small amounts of hallucinogens. Tetratheism defends that each race has its own creator god, and that achieving a personal relationship with them can't happen through someone else. Religion is kept familiar, with most houses having four little altars at the main room, with the race's god at the top. They are a very popular craftmanship project and some get very intricate, like Cuckoo clocks. Classrooms with little kids often have arts and crafts projects to make some, out of popsicle sticks or clay; they are left for class prayers or to take home. Some days of every month are a holiday, in which offers and small sacrifices are made in these altars. There are religious scholars and monks (kind of like in Islam or Buddhism), but most people don't interact with them too often, only at religious festivals or in faith crises. Just a small summary, but hope I could inspire someone :)
One Empire I am thinking of making is one with a God King dynasty who would be consider godlike in the eyes of regular men and women as though they have supernatural divine authority over the world but they are still impotent and despite their power and supernatural strength and hyper cognitions and senses and competence they still have relative limitations and can be overwhelmed or harmed when confronted with a greater or far more numerous power then themselves. They have created a long lasting authoritarian theocracy and culture, which has become a Imperium mainly defending itself or launching campaigns against less advance nations and peoples they see as a foreign threat to their interests and think endanger the integrity of their nation in some way. Despite their country being the most populated their culture and doctrines encourage and condition it to be rural instead of being urban or suburban and very few vastly populated concentrated cities. The dynasty of supernatural beings are heavily aware of the dangers of secularism, anthropocentric perspectives, ideologies, philosophies lawlessness, antithetical theologies, and technologies uprooting and compromising the culture they have created for to last for over 2 thousand years as well as their survival as a community and reign. So they do everything they can to preserve their Imperium while making sure their human ethnic and national culture who follows them remain separate from the lowly countries they view with pity and mistrust. They are not the Omnipotent creator God but they will make themselves out to be in order to secure their own survival up against the varies vile and principalities of darkness and other antagonistic or deceptive hierarchies whom seek to do harm to them. They centralize the most advance of technologies and weapons to themselves. They are also aware of the dangers of what a declining population pyramid would do to the integrity and cultural and community stability of their nation. So that is why a Rural system has been the way of life to help lower the stakes of such a circumstance in the variables they see. Edit: This nation's people deal in mostly in regional trade as they actively dislike external nations, governments, and cultures viewing them as folk who would take advantage and try to subvert their communities and future generations with a knife behind their backs in the long run. And they extremely dislike the notion and practice of a competitive society and breaking down the family unit. They heavily adhere to complementary relationships and poetry. They are also naturally stronger, faster, and live longer then the majority of the outsider kingdoms. One note. Do not antagonize or try to sabotage them with sedition or seed a rebellion. That will invoke their ire and intention to devastate the instigators and aggressors.
This is why in my story the setting is small and closed in (an isolated, agrarian republic with about ~250,000 people total.) It greatly simplifies the worldbuilding because a tiny republic like this wouldn’t have a ton of complex bureaucracy or huge amounts of class stratification. The people in charge are no more wealthier than the average adult (it also helps that land ownership is widespread, so no serfdom.)
What happens if population explodes? Do they cull, or is reproduction regulated? Are species like coyotes that adjust litter size based on population numbers or something etc?
@@dylanbuttera Reproduction is very much **not** regulated - ‘have babies like crazy’ is pretty much their motto. However, the presence of carnivorous dinosaurs does make expansion somewhat difficult, so most of the population is concentrated inside two cities, with only a couple of outlying villages - and this is *after* they culled the pterodactyls.
Personally, I find building an interesting nation as something to be treated more as an afterthought - maybe not as one outright, but close enough to one. The problem with trying to build interesting is that nations are based on ideals, and what those ideals are ultimately do not matter, at least not over what would make the nation compelling. That can make it easier to come up with a nation, but making an interesting nation out of whatever you use is a whole other matter and often leagues harder. You might find yourself just lazily going with tropes, which is not inherently a problem, but it can very easily be poisonous to whatever you are building, especially if they do not fit with the world. That is why I find it easier to focus more on people, because as someone existing, you already have actual references to real examples of people in your mind, whereas for nations, you are largely just stuck with whatever the propaganda was (and let's be honest, nearly everything we know about a nation in our world, even - sometimes especially - our home nation, is propaganda perpetuated by some nation irrespective of which nation it is). Because a nation cannot exist without people, it is generally better - or at least easier - to focus on characters. A few key characters are important for the specific story being told, but there still need to be supporting characters (and not necessarily in the political sense). Granted, this does not require all the characters (main, side or whatever) to be named or given a complete backstory, but the more characters you can present going about their own lives while life itself just goes on, with or without their input, the more the world feels alive, and that arguably does more to make a world and the nations within it interesting than anything else. The people of a nation can practice their purported ideals, or there can be some sort of disconnect between them. The former is often easier to write, as it requires less attention towards crafting what is done in the nation; when having to choose between one set of ideals for a nation versus two sets, which sounds easier (but not necessarily better) to go with? Complex or simple, grounded or cartoonish, real-world inspiration or fanciful fantasy - any and all of these can work. It just comes down to the world being built and the approach to it, particularly regarding the story/stories taking place in it. That might be my advice on this topic: just build stories, however big or small they might be, and just figure out how to connect them together, whether they are integral to each, are little more than passersby, or anything in between for any amount of storytelling, for eventually, it will give way to worldbuilding, and the more storytelling you do, whether or not it is the same stories as before, the more potential for interest the nation will have. Or to put it another way, just build it, and it will come.
It really depends on the story you're trying to tell. In a story that has barely any politics in it, a country doesn't need to be the most fleshed out part of the worldbuilding. Yet it still helps to make the world more alive by just thinking about the factors I've talked about in the video. Two of which are arguably just "characters" and "Plot" anyway.
@@worldbuildingsage Fully agree there, though I will add the slight qualifier that even politics does not need to be fleshed out in order to make a world feel alive - it still helps to do so most of the time, sure, but technically, it is not needed, and it comes back to what you said, the story being written. Do you need to flesh out the politics going on at the time the president orders his security detail to get him a slushie from the closest 7-11? Not really, but maybe, just maybe, it could bring up how the opposition uses the story of how the agent tasked with it ended up in a traffic pinball gag straight out of Looney Tunes. And just FYI, the example I gave came from a Resident Evil 4 fanfic called "Mission: Almost Impossible," and that example is from what I personally consider to be the funniest chapter. Mind you, there is no mention of the opposition party, but I had thought, "What if" over that after re-reading and laughing for the... I would say, 75th time, but I am likely underestimating - it was just a "How much more hilariously stupid could this have been if..." kind of thing.
Having not watched the video yet; I have to say poorly copied Catholic fictional and fantasy religions can be ‘the whole point’. It’s less creative than more original ideas. But ‘the whole point’ is that a driving purpose or inspiration for the worldbuilding/writing IS TO DIRECTLY CRITICIZE the Roman Catholic Church and organization! It’s changed enough to make the author feel safer to rio the religion a new one! Authors often change things to feel safer expressing very real points criticizing facets of the real world. Why do you see so many barely changed Roman Catholic fantasy religions? Exactly because there is much to critique about that real organization now and historically. Behind the veil of ‘it’s not “really” Catholic…. I’m planning on doing this in my writing precisely for the reason I just explained. I’ll be critical of all of Earths real religions. Intentionally. That’s the point. But it feels unsafe, even dangerous and also rude to not really alter things enough on my alternate earth to have plausible deniability. It also lets me be more original and add in new things or mash two religions together. Authors have to do what feels safe and still stays true to the inspirations theme and motivation. Even barely changed we can add original elements. But too changed and I’m no longer able to make the critique I’m aiming for. His dark materials series IS a critique of such religions so it had to be similar enough to still express that theme and meaning. Also the benne Jesuit in Dune are a critique of the Roman Catholic Church as well this is the ‘point’ it’s extremely intentional. Just changed enough so the author is safe. And can say ‘wow I never said it was Catholic so you think they are similar Hugh what does that say about the real religion?’ Of course I may not even ever publish the books I’m referring too, but still. Dude that can be the whole and entire point!
Dune is more about hating on Islam and arabs more than anything , While golden compass is atheist preaching And vast majority of Catholic Church cheap copies are done because the author is lazy
I'll admit, this was easily one of the toughest parts of building my fantasy world, maybe even the toughest. By and large, the world is largely unified under their goddess-queen, and the biggest nobles, the twelve Great Families, are particularly loyal to her. That said, the goddess-queen is beloved and trusted by the people, and she refuses to violate that trust, with this extending through to the Great Families, especially the three most involved with the military. While all three of these Great Families join together as the crux of the military, military matters, particularly war, ended up being rare, so fortress and bases, while still present, are nowhere as numerous as on Earth, and those that do exist tend to focus more on protecting against disasters (usually of the natural variety) rather than standing armies. Even with this unity, there are still some notable differences, though bear in mind that none of them are set in stone. Outside of what few military matters there are, one of these three Great Familes focused on cities, essentially becoming their world's police force, so their fortresses (or what could perhaps charitably be called such) function more like police stations, jails, and prisons - though thanks to national policy, the number of incarcerated remained low. Another Great Family focused on the countryside, essentially becoming their equivalent of the Parks and Wildlife Service in the US, so their fortresses are not only the most sprawling, but are the equivalent of the various bases used predominantly for training in the US due to this Family being the foremost experts in wilderness survival. The third Great Family watches over the seas and thus became not so much a navy as it is a coast guard, protecting anyone who went out to sea from the most dangerous of sea life and rescuing any survivors of lost ships. Outside of the Great Families, there are other fortresses, but these are always smaller - not because of any law, but because the more minor nobility recognized that it is best to not try to oppose any of the aforementioned three of the Great Families, as what standing military units there are function more like special forces than a traditional army, so they would get through any fortification built, regardless of how long it took or the method(s) used. It became a belief among the populace that if someone was building any sort of fortress and were not part of the Great Families, that someone had something to hide. As for the one and only palace, the one where the goddess-queen resides, it is quite different. In terms of size and function, it is much closer to the White House than to, say, Versailles. The goddess-queen is the only resident of the palace (for reasons I delved into in the story for which I built this world, and I will not be including these or else this post would be much longer), and what servants that are there function more like the staff at the White House. Styling is closer to that of Versailles, but that was done at the insistence of the Great Families rather than the goddess-queen (again, for reasons from the story). Regardless, despite the comparatively small size of the palace and its luxurious yet welcoming design and layout, it is arguably the most defensible location in all of this fantasy world, akin to how modern embassies are designed and built, and it is made even more so by the loyalty of the Great Families and the people in the town surrounding it. So yeah, you can see how coming up with these fortresses was pretty difficult, especially when I also included technological advancement for this fantasy world (and I am not including this for the same reasons regarding the palace, but feel free to imagine how that goes). Still, it was... maybe not so much fun as it was interesting and thought-provoking. It really made my inner military history buff ponder long and hard about so much.
I like the way castles are integrated into your setting. More so than just for usual defense! The goddess being the sole resident makes it quite unique compared to... well Versailles.
Honestly I make analogues to irl religions in many of my world building projects and I don’t find them boring. Sure if you make it purely aesthetic it can be boring but I like copies of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, etc. I try to study dharmmic religions and I utilize inspiration from that lore for my world building via reincarnation cycles and autothiesm. But the reason I do this is so it’s recognizable. Humans like to recognize what they are looking at. Something that looks like a face in a tree gives a reaction from humans who may find it amusing. Therefore having “copies” of religions isn’t necessarily boring in my opinion
If your armies are fighting in a medieval fantasy setting, there's only one fact that decides the realism vs. the rule of cool question. A few dozen peasant conscripts are never going to defeat a dragon. Bronze and Iron Age warfare had pretty standard strategies and production methods when it came to the kinds of units every nation could muster. Cavalry, spear/pikemen, archers, siege weapons/artillery. These strategies went out the window whenever anyone showed up to the battle with a bunch of elephants. Elephant cavalry changed warfare in the era before cannons entered common use. That only becomes even more blatant once you throw fantasy beasts and non tamable animals into the mix. Rhino mounted knights. Dragon Air Force. Indricothere cavalry. Griffon or wyvern mounted knights. Hill giant infantry. Then you have magic users, and all hope of realistic military tactics goes out the window. Which side was able to call in a favor from the mage academy? Which ruler made a deal with a hag coven? Who brought a lich to the battle? What do you mean all of our dead soldiers got up and joined the enemy army? When it comes to tabletop gaming, lots of people try to make compelling rules for mass combat that you really don't need. Sure, mention the cool special units that set the army on the PC's side apart from just peasants with sticks. Have the PCs recruit those units. Make them quest to get three dragons on their side. Quest to gain the loyalty of a legendary craftsman who makes magic weapons for the army. Extract an NPC from an enemy prison who knows the secret of taming special beasts. At the end of the day, the battle itself is less important. The outcome needs to be decided by the players' choices. You don't need an extra round of dice rolls and minigames when the battle is decided by the PCs sneaking into the enemy base for a decapitation strike.
I break cults down into two camps. Cults that worship a banned, dead, traitor, or outcast god. Basically all the gods who make their entire gimmick turning their problems into everyone else's problems. Cults that worship something that isn't a god. This has been percolating ever since warlock was added to D&D in 3.5. Gods have clerics. Other immortal creatures have warlocks. In my setting there are Goddesses who live on and protect the mortal world. They enforce the rules that prevent the pain in the ass gods from growing cults. When a large cult is found the armies of the Daughters burn them out. The PCs come into play when a town thinks a cult might be forming and needs it stopped, or when it's too late to save a town full of cultists and one of the Daughters or their generals want something or someone exteacted. God cults range from generic evil death cult tropes to full parodies of modern American Evangelicals. Warlock patron cults can be literally anything from a small village worshipping a shinto style lake spirit, to the hounds of The Goblin King who join their Arch Fey lord as he leads the Wild Hunt every harvest season.
When looking at most tribal societies from places other than mainland Europe, a common trend seen is grouping most of the non cis and non hetero members of the population into the Shamanic or spiritualist cast. Many Native American tribes used the term "Two Spirit" for their LGBTQ populations. In my setting, there are many gods that live on the outer planes and are related to the four Elemental Primes, and there are 8 Goddesses who live on the material plane. The two Divine Mothers and their six Daughters. The Slayer, Hero, Trickster, Scholar, Healer, and Storyteller. When figuring out how the Daughters regulate which outer planar gods get to solicit worship from the material plane, I chose to turn the standard sex tropes from Greek Mythology on their head. I also looked at ways to work the Summoned Monsters from Final Fantasy games into the mechanics of Cleric's divine intervention. The avatar of Bahamut is summonable by the worshipers of the six Daughters because Bahamut was the first god slain by the Daughters for attempting to conquer the material plane. Odin is summonable by worshipers of the Daughters, and his fellow Norse gods can be freely worshipped by mortals because he was the first god to show deference and respect to the Daughters. Odin also gave the Slayer Sif's favorite labrys, which became her holy symbol, and she gave Odin the sword that slew Bahamut. After that, every god and familial pantheon fell into one of three camps. Gods willing to bend a knee to the Daughters and the Divine mothers. These were given free reign to grow their faiths in the mortal world. Gods too arrogant to bend a knee, but were related to Goddesses who caught the eye of the Daughters. Zeus is too arrogant and sex crazed to ever bow to any of the Daughters, but he's allowed to draw some worship from mortals for one reason. The Daughters have banged every Goddess in the Ancient Greek pantheon. They didn't go after Odin's wife because Odin knows how to behave. Zeus, not so much. Then, lastly, there are the gods who actively hate the Daughters and seek to conquer the mortal world, or were simply too foolish to see the writings on the walls and had no related Goddesses to vouch for them. These gods are banned from trying to gain worship from mortals, and when any cults of theirs are found, they get hunted down by the armies of the Daughters. Making all 8 of the Goddesses that guard the mortal world lesbians also has significant cultural implications for each society in the material plane. Homophobia only really exists in the fanatical death cults of the hostile banned gods. Same sex couples can have children relatively easily by simply getting a blessing from the Daughters. Magic allows trans folks to transition easily, and social acceptance of trans folks is common because sermons dedicated to the Storyteller are basically just her priests bragging about the times she and the other Daughters banged various Goddesses, including all the times that Loki became a woman and conceived children with one or more of the Daughters. Usually, the Trickster.
i was watching and was like "did i leave stellaris open in the background" as i could hear a song form the gam , but then paused the video to realise that ur using it in the background
I am one of those people who are making their lives unnecessarily hard by using paper for no good reason. I just really like writing stuff down physically and therefore am doomed to suffer!
I find it helps me to focus versus typing. I transcribe it later to a computer file, but for sitting and writing I do it by hand so I don't get tempted to do other things on the computer
As a Catholic who idolizes Tolkiens writings (another Catholic) I’ve always been intrigued by how he depicts matters of faith among men and his seeming contradictions that inspire great mystery. There are no temples in middle earth, nor are there any grand text to pull from inside the universe. Polytheism and monotheism both exist in form of Eru (the distant creator) and the Valar (the nature “gods” who live among the world). Despite the waning of the elves, many men still hold the traditions from when they were taught by the Elvish kingdoms in Beleriand. While I favor Tolkiens idea of “sub creation”, I still admire his knack for exploring faith beyond his Catholic roots (even though he inserted Christian imagery here and there). My own world that I’m creating is, I hope, a display of various religious beliefs that developed both separately and influenced one another or derived from others. My main focus faith, while loosely based on Catholicism, is still varied and I only developed it this way because that is the biggest reference for faith that I have. I hope that by taking classes in theology (real, varied theology) and doing external research will allow me to create a multi faith world that feels authentic.
I just started to reimagine orcs for my own world... And Inever heard about japanese pig orcs, I thought that my pig idea was more niche 😅 I gave them.also horns and elephant skin, so maybe it will even it out!
I have multiple empires and smaller states in my world. Military conquest is very common, even among the smaller kingdoms. They don't generally see this as inherently evil. It's just a common method. For one of the empires, some eastern provinces rebelled during a transfer of power to the heir and these rebellions were crushed. There was some military conquest in the immediate aftermath. Crushing the rebellion was easy and swift considering their knights could be taken by train now. In recent times, some countries in the westernnear the border requested and even rushed to join the empire and/or become willing protectorates for protection from another empire that sought to not just conquer, but erase the practices of the region.
I started with a star and a planet to go around it. I made the planet bigger and more massive than Earth too so i had a bigger map to play with. And *then* I started focusing on one region of one continent. 😂😅
