Building my next world, society restrictions, and choosing my setting || Worldbuilding Vlog 

Just an FYI, I was playing around with geographic trends for civilizations (like where you'd see traveling nomads vs wheat farming people) and that research definitely isn't done yet, so there are for sure mistakes. This process is NOT done yet and is going to be a lot less geographically deterministic in my guide.

Something really cool was how potatoes affected culture and military in Europe. Wheat, once ripe, has to harvested and placed in grain houses; while potatoes can stay in the ground ready to be picked and rated. These wheat grain houses were perfect for supplying pillaging enemy armies with food. With the introduction of potatoes, armies could not easily pillage cropland. For farmers this meant safer food supplies. For the military, this meant stronger reliance on supply train, and overall decrease in army speeds

Island continent for sure. Ideally having it be the island off the coast. Best isolation balance. I like the "coastal temperate" area across the sea as the invaders. But the mediterranean culture might be fun too. Maybe this invasion forces the island out of relative isolation with it's other neighbors. Good luck on the new project. Love your work!

As you were speaking about a culture with a more tight family structure, and achieving that through agriculture, I kept thinking about rice farming, and I'm glad you were thinking the same thing! Listening to you is like broadening my horizons of what I think I'm "allowed" to do, and is inspiring as well.

This is the exact worldbuilding stuff I've been looking for, was actually making my own kind of version of this but this is awesome to like compare my version to and see what I missed. Thank you for the perspective.

The climate and biome maps for this world look excellent!

I'd pick the northeast: I could easily see a story of the more western wheat-people invading the eastern/northern wheat-people (maybe the other wheat-people have good resources like rich mining activity on their side of the mountain range or something) and then progressing to attack your rice people next.

Hi, I'm back. Your videos have great rewatchability evidently, I was thinking about a specific people group now (and handsewing, which occupies my hands while your videos occupy my mind) and they're macaw winged people in the rainforest canopy, and I was thinking about if they'd build houses, and why, and how their society would look, and I'm arriving at communal platforms in the canopy layer with some higher ones in the emergent layer, and they also shape trees they choose to continue to build on (so I have to decide on if I'll have realistic slow growing trees that require generations to shape or if I'll have fast growing ones that need just a few decades), but recent human incursions make them build in more defensible areas or they have to leave entirely, but they're understandably attached to their land. Imagining their interaction with humans over time and how human exposure changes their culture is fascinating to me and I want to draw some scenes from it now. Maybe the discord would be a better place to talk about this, currently it's just friends' DMs and a wing fan server for me.

This video is great and I learnt a lot. Thanks!

Alright I guess I want to talk about what is a "reasonable" possibility of invasion. Invasions don't happen in a vacuum, they happen during periods of weakness, during civil wars, famines, and plagues. Sometimes two major powers will exhaust themselves against each other only for a third party to opportunistically prey on both. Sometimes even between relatively equal powers a tactical revolution or a military reform makes a couple of decisive battles complete blowouts. These events are both great historical upsets, completely unforeseeable by the majority of people living through them AND also so obvious in hindsight that they're seemingly inevitable. I'm not saying that it's bad to think about how plausible certain outcomes are. Indeed having a fictional story that had as many coincidences as real life come out as a satisfying narrative would require pretty incredible writing. Rather what I'm trying to say is that whatever needs to happen to make the invasion "reasonable" is fine as long as it's interesting, executed well, and tied into the themes of the story. For instance having the invasion take place either during or in the immediate aftermath of a civil war could be a pretty interesting way to explore the politics of the kingdom and whatever clan the main characters are a part of. Did the clan take part or try to stay out of it? Was the clan unified or did it split and fight on different sides? Maybe the divisions of this war continue to echo even now after they've been conquered by an outsider. It seems you've thought a lot about the particulars of land, it's climate, and it's agriculture. An interesting way to convey this information might be with a dramatic example of all of it going catastrophically wrong- natural disaster into famine. That could serve narrative dual purpose as the thing that causes the moment of weakness that prompts the invasion. I went most of my life not knowing what a monsoon really is (my definition was either "rainy season" or "asian tropical storm") and if you want your audience to know what a monsoon is you may need to show them. A short monsoon one year with a heavy monsoon the next year means you can go from drought to drowning, and all your carefully laid out terrace farm swept away reduced to a torrent of mud. Also you've got this potion system system to work with maybe a good way to introduce that would be in the context of a plague. What can potions do? what can't they do? how easy are they to make? who can make them? if you want to answer these questions early on showing the reader how the apothecaries work via a disaster like a disease outbreak could be a dramatic way to do so, while at the same time neatly setting up the weakness that leaves them vulnerable to invasion. On the other hand most casualties in military history are due to disease and that's especially true in tropical regions. You could have there be a disease that was a nuisance to locals but deadly to outsiders and the invading country recently discovered a cure for it and that's what made the invasion possible. I'm not saying that those are all incredible ideas, and I wouldn't throw more then one of those in a story. I'm trying to say that if you need one of your fictional countries to beat another one of your fictional countries, and you need a contrivance to make that happen, you can still end up well within the realm of what I'm willing to believe. If you do it elegantly enough, in a way that directs my attention to other interesting elements of the setting I doubt that I'd even be able to recognize it as a contrivance at all.

Oh. Back issues. I have so many over the years. And since I have been building. It acts up once and a while. World building the best part of creating an engaging story. Love maps and creating comcept art.

First off, sorry to hear about your injury! Back problems are the worst, they mess *everything* else up. On-topic, I just wanted to say that I love, love love love your northeastern continent. I'm a sucker for diagonally-oriented continents, because you get that sweet diversity in climate from a north-south-oriented continent, but also those long "belts" of climates from east-west continents. The northwestern shore especially caught my eye, imagining the cultural interactions between societies in the steppe and Df region with those from Cfb. Augh, climate! Culture! It's just so... AUGH! You get what I'm saying, right?

Nothing wrong with watching a little Poldark to clear you mind. I'd lean towards the island option... I like islands.

Hu, Madeline. I think it'd be best if I could say this on the Discord but I cannot access it. For somecreason my home Internet is out and my ISP has decided not to provide tech support on weekends! Further, I am having issues trying to access via my phone app so cannot log on there either. That said, what I saw of this video (my Internet failed partway through) I did see a problem with your map I wanted to suggest. This is a problem I've had myself, and is part of the reason I decided to physically paint planets upon Earth globes I buy. If you look at your southernmost continent, it comes close to touching the 90°S line. That continent should appear on your map at that latitude smeared across the full width of the map, much as Antarctica gets smeared. You should also consider how your near-polar regions of your northern continents would be distorted. I created a design for a planet once and only discovered my error when I tried globe-painting it. I hope this helps, but in a way that causes few if any headaches! Cheers!

Hi Madeline, loved the video. Great to see your thought process laid out like this. Something to consider with your two civilisation options would be how they would impact on the potions system you mentioned earlier in the video. I'm thinking of how the two regions would access "exotic" ingredients from far away, and how the southern civilisation, despite being much smaller, may have a far greater access to a wider range of potions ingredients than the northern one due to their seafaring nature and the trade links with the two nearby continents, while the northern one being much more isolated as a region would be much more reliant on "local" ingredients as they'd have a lesser ability to access ingredients from far away without major naval trade links; especially if the nomadic region that would likely serve as a major intermediary is disrupted by the war (or involved in the war themselves). Now, I'm not sure which of those could be more useful to you as a writer and the story you're wanting to tell, but they would be different impactors and ones you may want to consider since you're wanting the potions system to be of some importance. Another thing to note would be that the seafaring nature of the southern continent would likely mean that while rice and wheat were the staple crops for the continent, especially along the abundant coasts you could see fishing being a major competitor as a food source, especially with the 1700s technology level you mentioned towards the beginning of the video meaning your coastal communities would likely be beginning the shift towards the development of trawlers and dories that allowed for easier access to more distant fishing grounds. Culturally that could mean differences in culture between the larger family/community oriented rice farmers and the more individualistic fishers, while militarily it would mean ready access to a large number of craft and crew able to transport armed men around as invasion forces (alongside a plethora of other things, but those two directly address points you mentioned in the video!). Conversely the northern continent could be much more culturally homogenous, without a major alternative food-producing profession than farming.

This is more about the geographic map series: Suppose I have a regional map in mind (size of a country maybe). How do I build a world map that suits that regional map? Because I want to expand the map in a logical way but... I got the impression that the process is a little hard to predict what I get out as world.

My vote goes to the southern continent. The Eastern Wheat people could look for somewhere warmer, hence the invasion. The tiny island could become highly miliaristic and try to expand their sub-culture onto the bigger island. The bigger island could be unprepared for the small islanders. That continent confies quite a bit of different cultures. There are "sufficent" geographic barriers, which can be bypassed. The mountains could be a source of iron for wepons. The wheat civ could sell the rice people "useless" rocks (coal); unbenownst to the wheat civ, they could trigger the industrial revolution in the rice people. The rice people could invade the wheat people (as a plot twist) to gain access to the coal. I hope your back gets better, and I'll see you on discord.

Its interesting that you want both relative isolation and technological parity. Isolated societies tend to fall behind technologically.

So, a couple of thoughts. First, I wouldn't be super quick to rule out nomadic invaders. China was taken over by alliances of semi-nomadic tribes twice. It might not be exactly the kind of occupation you want, though, as they did have to basically install themselves as emperors and co-opt the existing bueaucracy. Also, if you're going with 1700s, long-distance sea invasions are not out of the questions. By that time, we had overseas colonial empires, including the destruction of indigenous civilized empires. But otherwise, I feel like of your options, the one on that northern is probably the best bet. There are more routes to invade, and its possible somebody could have already built an empire out of the wheat cultures to the north.

@3.09. I wonder if your society having moved from an agrarian society to a more evolved society set up a system where an individual spends time with their second cousins, and/or third cousins, to keep the kinship alive. Watching more before I post. Oh, another idea based on something my family does, we all get together to help with the harvest at the family orchard, so my parents, my siblings, our children and, now with the arrival of Henry, their children. So, maybe harvest time is when the whole family gather (in many meanings), which allows freedom and movement afterwards. Obviously, I'm at the start and you've got more to say based on your research.

Atomic bearhugz, only not literally... Until your back gets better! 8-P

Oh wow how coincidental, you threw your back out around the same time as my boss! Oh wait, this is an "everyone taking their Christmas trees and decorations down on Epiphany" thing isn't it?

When you make this a playlist make sure it's from first to latest

first