A delight as always! I love the idea of "overlaying" a bunch of different borders for different considerations to find distinct socio-geographic regions, that's a really great technique to apply to something I've always figured had to be either deeply crunchy, or just purely vibes-based. Thank you!
This is a very helpful guide, thank you so much for sharing this with us. I think it's great that you placed the agency and the awareness of the people living in these environments front and center, as you mentioned some sources like Guns, Germs, & Steel occasionally don't. The idea of cultural clustering and overlaying different regions on top of one another is a great way to add granularity to a map!
I like to be inspired by real life history when worldbuilding cultures, history & society. I also like to study it, so it doesn't feel like I'm doing it FOR the worldbuilding, I also just like learning about history in general.
Hey Madeline, great to see you up and about, hope your back gets back to proper health soon. Well said with the "brief" warning, I'm glad to see you approaching this with a conscientious and nuanced approach. My only comment about the cultural and civ barriers is about the inclusion of the Bronze age in the section from 15:00, in that the Bronze Age is as much a cultural era as a technological one, with the widespread use of bronze developing more from the emergence of a large-scale trade network as it contributed towards it. Iron usage occurred alongside and even in the absence of bronze, and (especially in speculative projects like these) a "bronze age" shouldn't necessarily be approached as a historiographic certainty, but instead a route that could be taken if the conditions were right before the widespread adoption of iron (which due to its ubiquity, ease of use, and the eventual development of steel is much more certain to become widespread than simultaneous alloying of copper and tin/zinc for Bronze/Brass). In our history we only saw Bronze become widespread across the main cradles of civilisation because of large-scale trade networks that allowed for the economical sourcing of both copper and tin, and it was only the disruption of those trade networks that allowed early iron to compete with the qualitatively superior Bronze (though we saw iron displace stone tools without an intermediate step at bronze in various locations that lacked the trade networks to acquire its constituent metals). I hope I don't come across as nitpicky here, but the unique conditions of our Bronze Age are fascinating to me! I don't really have any comments on the mapping section, beyond noting that it was more good work in the vein of your previous season. I look forward to more.
Oh that's a good thing to think about. Honestly I went sort of... Lazy? With how I got the technological eras because I just pulled a list from the reference I linked in the blog post, but I've already chatted about it on the discord and I'm going to use a different technological era list/grouping that is more worldbuilding relevant later in the guide when it's necessary again. But I will definitely keep this bronze age stuff in mind, thank you!
@@madelinejameswrites Appreciate you taking criticism so well! Lots of world builders can be really stubborn or rely on not so great old timey ideology :) You’re on the right path!
Even though the geographic determinism arguments are completely false, that doesn't mean your societies on your world won't use them to justify their own expansions. So they're still good to keep in mind.
This was great! I was building a world last year and was working on cultural expansion and trade, and I completely forgot about physiographic barriers. It makes sense that such things would prevent major cultural exchange. It also helps to create some dominant cultural groups in a simple way, like you showed in the maps near the end. Looking forward to the rest of this series! Geographic determinism can be good for providing character justification. In other words, certain groups of people in the world justify their self-proclaimed superiority on their climate, and that opinion affects how they interact with people from different climates (perhaps to their detriment if an "inferior" group is militarily or technologically superior). Such topics don't need to be heavily discussed in any writing of the world, simple one-off lines from characters about another group is sufficient. Characters may not need to justify their own sense of superiority, and such justification is rarely correct anyway, but geographic determinism and some of the arguments within that group can be good inspirational seeds for conflict, character background, or challenges to overcome as part of character growth. Just avoid treating this topic too seriously... thanks for the time stamp on the warning but I'm also glad you put the warning in there.
I'm so glad you enjoyed and thank you! I think there is so much you can do with this stuff. Definitely could be taken advantage of by in world characters/groups for sure!
Very nice video, thanks. One factor that could greatly impact travel/trade between geographical regions is pack animals (donkey, horse, camel, yak, etc.). How would one society’s domestication of a pack animal affect the spreading of their culture to otherwise isolated societies?
Historically, I think geographic determinism wasn’t up against “human choices,” it was put up against “racial determinism,” the even more problematic that peoples were “primitive” because they were genetically inferior. It was a response opposed to prevalent racism.
I have one more video (at least) planned in the other series on the global scale (ores/minerals) but I don't currently need that for what I'm working on so it's a bit back burner at the moment! There will also be regional physical worldbuilding videos at some point here soon too!
You say the copper age started at 2500-ish BC, but the sumerinas were using copper from around 5000 BC. What part of the world did you base the timeline on?
Hmm, I'm not sure where I got that from, I'll have to look through those notes. You're definitely right though. I've been working on ores and mineralogy, and metal access through the technological ages and my ranges there are based on near east/cradle area which I think is much more accurate. I'll have to go back and update this!
I'm confused by the wording at 19:40, where you say there are natural barriers between the following biome types: desert/steppe, scrublands, grasslands, deciduous woodlands, and evergreen woodlands. Are you suggesting a barrier between grassland and scrubland, but not between desert and steppe? This seems confusing because a steppe is a kind of grassland. Are you able to rephrase which biomes (or groups of biomes) should probably have a barrier drawn between them? Thanks for the great new series! Really looking forward to the next videos.
Steppe tends to be a transition region between desert and other things, and I don't typically see there being separate groups there. If you had a big area of steppe that wasn't just transition then you could probably make it a separate area.
Treating an idea as problematic just because it doesn't fit the modern Western progressive narrative is.. ehhh not good in my opinion. I personally get quite lazy when it's hot and I don't have access to AC, and it's worse when it's hot and humid. Historically the development around the tropic has lagged and the biggest monuments in Egypt, India, Cambodia, Mexica were built by slave labor. Lee Kuan Yew the first president of Singapore and the man who turned it into a developed country said "Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency." Of course this isn't an argument in favor of slaving anyone, if that even had to be said. But, tropical and hot weather cultures tend to be less productive and more reliant on slave labor. This is seen even now in places such as Qatar where a wealthy few employ a workforce under what would be considered barely legal conditions in any developed country, if even that.
I think you missed my point about the nuisance here. There is a big difference between discussing the living conditions and adaptations of different environments and discussing the innate flaws of the people from said environments. I think it is very good and important to recognize that calling a people lazy is fundamentally different than saying heavy labor is more difficult in hot environments. Someone from England would have the same difficulties in a desert.
@@madelinejameswrites Oh for sure, I wouldn't call the people lazy but I would definitely expect their cultures to be more reliant on forced labor, less productive and with more leisurely hours during the day. And anyone writing fiction can come up with a plausible reason why something akin to AC is available. Some historical cities were particularly well designed to maximize cooling, using mashrabiyas and rowshans, planning streets to conduct airflow and strategically placing green belts, adding evaporative earthenware water pots, and windcatchers, etc. Some regions in the Middle East had extremely efficient cooling and were influential and productive cultural and scientific centers. You can see some of those features like trees and windcatchers in places such as the Cairo University even today. And if you're writing fantasy the sky's the limit.
I am honestly not sure yet. It might at a later stage if that ends up being something I look into. At the very least it would be fairly easy to incorporate where you will likely see similarities based on cultural clusters, isolation, and empire expansion later on. I do have a video on naming languages that should be coming out in a bit but it's not part of the guide. I haven't done enough research into conlanging beyond naming languages for writing yet.
3:50 I don't understand this widespread dislike of geographic determinism, since the only other possible explanation of the different outcomes of history would be racism; if you don't buy that, for example, the aboriginal australians didn't form great empires because of their geography, then what other reason could there be? note: accepting it can be used to justify racism but rejecting it inevitably leads to racism.
It isn't a dislike of geographic determinism just because it's been used to justify racism and imperialism and the general othering of different peoples, but because it does all that AND it's not actually correct regardless. Geographic determinism (vs say geographic possibilism) ignores many of the important factors that have led to state-building and the development of society. It is taking an extremely narrow look at history and ignoring a ton of factors, in a way that also does a lot of harm. As for Australia, most of my research hasn't touched on the societies there specifically yet, but there have been other places where empires formed that were more unlikely. Take the Incans in the Andes. It's not geography that explains how the Incans came to be.
@@madelinejameswrites Yes it does; everything from Quechua being a lingua franca in the region to potatoes existing as a food source to the harsher climate requiring coordination led to the Inca, much like porous rock did for the Maya, though they obviously aren't the same similar pressures caused similar outcomes
I know that we use humans to populate fictional maps because our audience is human, but this (culture) is the point (though I haven't reached it yet) in which I struggle the most. To my mind, every non-real planet would have non real species that populate it. We humans are from this planet and it is because of this planet that we are all here. While I think It would make sense if a species evolves into a more humanoid form because it seems useful (in a evolutionary sense), actual humans are unlikely to exist in other planets.
Definitely true. Going very non-human is not something I've ever been interested in so far personally just because I like to really focus on other aspects. I like to think of my worlds as what earth could be if the geography was different and there was magic. I use earth-like worlds, earth-like animals, and earth-like people for the most part because it doesn't require a deep dive into the differences and how they work (people already know what a dog is) so I can spend my page time on other worldbuilding aspects. That said, I think it's awesome when people create worlds on non-earth like planets or make their own animals and humanoid species. Very fun! Maybe one day I'll give it a try myself!
@@madelinejameswrites @Biblaridion was doing a specualtive biology series some time ago, but then he reched "part 14 - mass extinction" and hasn't go back to it. No species there adapted like we did, so no complex societies there.
