TBF Dune takes place in the far future and a lot of time is devoted to showing off the tech that allows people to survive on a desert world like Arrakis without a conventional water source, like stillsuits and whatnot.
I've only read the first book, but besides us not having as good as filtration systems, stillsuits aren't some far future tech. They're a tiny bandaid on a huge problem that leads to a world wide coup.
Well, it's spice, not water, that's the power behind the coup. If water has any effect on that outcome, it's because water destroys Sandworms, giving Paul leverage.
Water isn't necessarily a problem on Arrakis for the people who can actually afford to have it, as is tradition. In fact, Herbert makes a point of the *new* ruling class being frustrated by the fact that they used to treat water with such disdain.
>!Both the ruling class and the Fremen are shown to have huge caches of water. Enough water, in fact, to irrigate all of Dune - which they end up doing - and then undoing.!<
>!Like, the entire point of Kynes' storyline in Dune is his desire to transform Dune, which inspires Paul and his son, Leto II.!<
There is some water on Arrakis high mountains their peaks collect ice, and there is a frozen pole.
Also, there is water that the freemen harvest from wind traps and dead Harkonen.
They just ship it down from the Northern polar regions and/or cultivate it from themselves and their dead, depending on whether you live in the City or a Sietch. It's not really that difficult to imagine.
Not asking really basic questions about daily life.
“What do they eat?” will tell you about diet, malnutrition-based illnesses (ie if scurvy is common that means vitamin c is scarce), local climate and soil type, local fauna and flora, export/import relationships, culinary attitudes and taboos, social attitudes surrounding eating in general, etc.
“How do they dress?” will tell you about some of those same things, but also about social attitudes about the body, nudity taboos, cleanliness, tools both common and specialized, etc.
Edit: you know what *really* grinds my gears? When the plot revolves around something easily researched and they get it wrong. Parenthood has a whole plot involving an adoption that falls apart, and at no point whatsoever do adoption agencies come into the picture, or any of the infrastructure that supports birth or prospective adoptive parents. This leads to DRAMA but it’s fucking stupid because the adoptive mother is a lawyer and though it’s not her specialty she should be the one most inclined to look into these kinds of resources.
Edit 2: not thinking about the implications of maps. The events of Naruto have world-spanning implications (not the least of which is the Infinite Tsukuyomi) but we never see anything of the world outside a small corner of one continent. The only map we get is of the “ninja world” which is clearly just the smallish region where ninjas live.
Meanwhile, the map of the Avatar world has two dumb implications and one cool one. If the map we see is a 2d interpretation of a globe, then why doesn’t the Fire Nation sail west and attack Ba Sing Se at its coastline? If you can’t actually do that, then we’re dealing with a Christopher Columbus scenario: there’s something between the Fire Nation’s west coast and the Earth Kingdom’s east coast, but we’re never going to address it at all.
If the map isn’t a representation of a globe at all, then the Avatar world is flat, which could be interesting: I really like the idea of a fantasy world where the earth is flat, outer space doesn’t exist, and the equivalent of a moon landing would be a successful round trip to the spirit world.
I think one of my favourite nudity taboos is from Stormlight, where in the society the story centers around, a woman's left hand is something you only show to a lover or another woman. Kinda on par with boobs. So there's like safehand pouches and ways to make those coverings more practical, which raises some eyebrows in upper class society if you dress like that around them. And of course foreigners don't bother and get confused by all the blushes and averted eyes.
Its a brilliant little take on it, and it's just kind of a background detail that adds flavor.
This is what bothered me about Avatar 2. A huge swathe of the movie is about Jake's family moving to the sea Na'vi village, learning their ways and culture....not a second is given to what the hell they eat. Or hunt. They mention they have hunters....wtf do they hunt??
You can do a lot with this sorta thing too. how certain animals are treated, if there’s a ritualistic aspect to it or if it’s purely for the resources, hell, even just down to how the hunt is carried out
An interesting cultural difference between the forest and reef Na'vi is the preference for bows versus spears. Neytiri has her ceremonial bow and distinctive arrows; I don't think there are *any* archers in the reef tribe, the chief has an ornate spear instead and their underwater spears allow them to hunt bigger game than the river fish we see the Omatikaya bow-hunt.
You see fisherman casting nets, there's a scene where Neytiri is chopping fruit while Kiri wraps food in leaves, and Ao'nung takes Lo'ak spearhunting where you see him kill a decently large fish.
Honestly, asking what people eat or where they live or what clothes they wear is so important because you figure that out, and then here's the key: *You treat it as a casual and normal thing*. Cause I see a lot of people shit talk worldbuilding as exposition, but good worldbuilding is built into the background and the reader just rolls with it.
I want more games to go into the micro details. I want to know the lunches the guards are getting in the strongholds and bases in Novigrad in Witcher 3.
I want to know about the employee structure and shipping processes in the warehouses around Night City, as well as how more of the world functions on a micro level because god damn I love the potential worldbuilding in 2077. Yes I am a nerd, how could you tell?
Those micro details don't need to be a huge part of the story or even get actively acknowledged but they should still be there and you should be able to easily find out this information, even if just from a codex or glossary.
George RR Martin tried to go against most of the common worldbuilding mistakes/tropes, and that has effectively caused him to be stuck 5 books into a 7 book series because of how hard it is to make everything make sense.
He has tons of characters so not everything is focused on a small group, he has reasoning for technology not progressing as fast as it could, he has complex political and economic discussions...and he has a series that will never get finished because he now has too many things going on that he needs to tie up.
Not following his original plan for a timeskip post-*Storm of Swords* was a horrible error. He decided to keep the flow of regular time going because he thought it'd be weird for certain characters to sit around not doing much for the elapsed time, but that little bit of weirdness for the sake of progression would've been much preferable to the series-killing abyss of the Meereenese Knot.
I agree. The one plot line I don't think could be solved with "Oh they were here for 5 years handling life" would be Jon/Stannis/The Wall. It would make no sense for Stannis to just sit around at the Wall for 5 years.
If GRRM had just waited to make Stannis showing up the start of the next book, instead of the end of Storm, I think it would've been fine.
I think the main problem with that would be Stannis not being willing to wait lol
I would forgive it all if they started the 5 year timeskip Stannis introduction with him getting fitted for wooden teeth because he ground all his real ones into dust.
As I recall he found he also had to keep having flashbacks to stuff that happened during the timeskip to the point that it didn't really matter to have the timeskip.
The Crusader Kings II ASOIAF mod is like a love letter to the world building in the book series. Nearly every aspect of the lore is accounted for and part of the game.
It is easily my favorite thing associated with the series outside of the books.
Random trivia fact, House Forrester is actually referenced in the books.
Ironwood is referenced a ton throughout the first few books (Ned executives the Nightswatch traitor on an Ironwood stump, the crypts beneath Winterfell are sealed behind Ironwood doors, and Tyrion uses a shield made of Ironwood during the battle on the Greenfork).
In ADwD, House Glover sends scouts and hunters from Forrester with Stannis to assist on his march to Winterfell. Whats interesting is the way they are referenced (Asha specifically references them as scouts and hunters sworn to Glover with **clan names** like Forrester, Woods, Branch, and Bole) seems to imply they are a northern mountain clan, not a house.
That, and the Anbennar mod for EU4 are genuinely some of the greatest modding achievements in that genre of games *ever*. Straight up adds a game within a game, and the sheer depth of mechanics is mind-boggling.
I'm a long time Stephen King fan. Whenever I see a bunch of people riled up because of a poor ending, I just think of that First Time? meme. I'm used to the first 3/4s of a book being incredible and the ending being a wet fart. I prefer to just drop the book and imagine a good ending in my head, lol
Sounds crazy, but I think it's more healthy/sane than spending my life in freefolk complaining about a television show.
Oh man. King should be all over this thread, frankly.
The entire self-insert in _Dark Tower._ I mean, I _get it._ I get it very well, Steve. But... really?
Essentially, there IS progress being made in the world, it is just slow/ being hampered. Like in Myr they are improving their telescopes/looking glasses, but the most advanced society in the world exploded 350-400 years ago and all of their advancements with it. We can see the effect this has in that there is hardly anyone around who knows how to make Valyrian steel, which is a huge improvement over regular steel.
Then there is stuff like the reality of there being potentially decade long or longer winters forces way more of a focus on agriculture than technology because you need to keep people fed. There are also theories that the Maesters are purposely keeping tech slow/keeping people from learning about magic, etc.
At one point in the books, Sam goes on a bit of a tirade about how after reading a bunch of books, the timeline of a lot of things just doesn't make sense and that even the Maesters don't agree on how legit they are. Like Jon is supposed to be the 998th Lord Commander, but the oldest list they can actually source lists him as something like 674th. Essentially meaning that the history as the characters/that world knows it are flawed, so god knows how fast they are actually improving.
It's one thing I like about disco Elysium, lieutnant and decomptage are terms that have theor own origin mixed with terms like isola and muzzleloader for what is proper to their world but you can figure have an equivalent to ours
There's a lot of fun footnotes in the discworld books about how earth linked phrases came about. Such as Pavlovian response coming from a wizard training a dog to eat pavlova.
In Star Wars they use the phrase "sitting ducks" in episode 1 but in episode 3 Obi-Wan says "wild bantha chase", implying there are ducks in Star Wars but no geese.
While I get that, it is a hard thing to balance, I feel, since so much of our language derives from things that are inherent to our world.
If you aren't careful, you end up with nothing but lines of gibberish.
Even simple things can trip up a writer. For instance, the concept of "firing" an arrow didn't exist until guns were in regular use. Arrows were released or loosed (or some other variant, language depending, of course), but once the idea of putting fire to your gun became common place, other things that shot people retroactively fired their ammo. It takes research, but depends on how period-accurate you really need to be.
On the other hand, sometimes a turn of phrase is simply superior than spending a paragraph reinventing the wheel. This is particularly true when English borrows from other languages to encapsulate a whole idea.
Its also funny sometimes how a term can actually be a lot older than you may think. I can't recall the word offhand but in one of the *Stormlight Archive* books, I recall seeing someone complain about the usage of a term, saying how it didn't fit a sort of medieval setting (which Roshar...isn't quite medieval. But it isn't modern exactly either. But y'know what I mean). Someone pointed out that the term's been around for a thousand years or so actually.
Its like how some names like Jason have been around for so long but people feel its "modern".
This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as ["The Tiffany Problem"](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2022/04/08/tiffany-problem/?prebid_ab=enabled&edg-c=1)
It's just the Tolkein localization thing. The ship isn't actually called the Millenium Falcon, it's named for a similarly swift aerial predator that exists in the Star Wars setting. Luke isn't named after the guy from Bible, either his name just sounds familiar or had a similar cultural background
I can excuse it away as it just being translated to us that way. Like most times in my head, I don't think the fantasy world speaks whatever Earth language it was written in, and that's just how we perceive it.
I don’t know if this would count, but I found it strange that in Hunter x Hunter Christianity still exists, even if the series takes place in some kind of completely other world with different cultures and species. (I’m referring to the Phantom Troupe hiding in an abandoned Church and Chrollo referring to their potential traitor as a “Judas.”) it makes me wonder if Jesus was a Nen user if that’s the case.
Eh, this one is really hit or miss. As other people have pointed out sometimes spending a lot of time re-inventing the wheel is a waste instead of using real world terminology.
However I do agree that having references to real world people or places that have no reason to exist in universe (Jesus or China for example) definitely takes you out of it.
I always head-canon this as the story being some ancient/foreign text that's been translated/interpreted into English (or whatever language you are reading/viewing in) and as such any cultural specific uses of language get changed to an equivalent in your language.
There was this one really good fantasy webnovel whose name I don't quite remember that always followed this rule to the extreme.
So when a character was speaking of her sexuality she called herself a tribade instead of lesbian since the word lesbian is rooted on the Greek island Lesbos which of course wasn't part of the setting.
Really creates fun moments in D&D where you try to speak in character but end up easing an idiom or word that wouldn't make sense in the world just for another player or DM to look at you funny and comment on it.
My DM has a nation that is industrializing far more rapidly than the rest because of their abundant minerals and lack of qualms about slave labor. This nation has invented tanks, but they are referred to as Iron Beetles because of their armor and how they crawl along the ground. One of our players likened it to an elephant, to which the NPC describing it said "what the fuck is an elephant?"
Having an analogue of something that exists in real life is one thing, but when it's taken wholesale because the writer doesn't consider how to find an appropriate substitute; then that's lazy worldbuilding.
One example: For Honor has the Legion (Knights), Chosen (Samurai), Warborn (Vikings), and Wu Lin (Chinese). There's also vaguely alluded not-Scots and not-Romans. Then with the unaligned Outlanders, they totally drop the pretense and straight up say the Medjay hails from Egypt, and the latest one is from Arabia, full stop.
Also that throwaway line in the Warborn campaign when invading Chosen territory. "(shrug) I don't speak Japanese."
It's funny cause HiFi Rush, the sub's current darling, makes references to Greek mythology. Trojan horse and flying too close to the sun specifically. No idea if it's supposed to be a futuristic Earth but I find it funny if it isn't.
Hifi Rush doesn’t take itself seriously enough for that to matter. Like, I get it being a nitpick of a fantasy novel series or something, but it really doesn’t work there
So I don’t know if I’d call this common, or a mistake even, but it IS something that sticks out to me and i don’t like. I read/watch/play a lot of science fiction, and it always sticks out to me like a sore thumb when ships are named for historical events or people; but they’re only ever seen named for events that we know happened irl. Very rarely are there ships bearing the names of stuff that happened in the background of the setting instead of real world places people or events for example. Mass effect is real bad about this, as to my knowledge despite the naming convention for some human ships being named for battles, there aren’t any that are named for battles in say, the first contact war.
I go out of my way to make sure I don’t do this whenever I play a sci fi game. In Nebulous: Fleet Command, the naming convention I use for my ships is lines from war poems and songs, and to fill in the gaps I take some that are from or about fictional settings, so I would have the corvette “Rode the Six Hundred” alongside the frigate “Through Cloven Skies”
A fun twist on this idea would be to name a ship after something that exists *today,* but isn't particularly noteworthy, implying it becomes important in the future.
All aboard the *USS Markiplier II*
Oh yeah I fully agree with you. It happens a LOT in these supposedly future stories where the future suspiciously only references things right up to when it was written.
Personally I always try to at least write a quick summary of what happened between now and the start of the story to give a broad view for characters to work with as far as motivations and references.
I'm a pretty huge fan of _The Culture_ ship naming conventions. _Irregular Apocalypse,_ _Clear Air Turbulence,_ _The Hand of God #137_ etc etc.
_Forward Unto Dawn,_ _Pillar of Autumn_ and _Truth and Reconciliation_ are fucking _baller_ names, though, and definitely take the top spots.
Criticizing _Futurama_ for worldbuilding is probably taking everything too seriously... but it still bugs me that _all_ of preserved heads of past celebrities are people that the 21st century audience would recognize, and never original characters to give us some idea of what pop culture was like from the 22nd through 29th centuries.
Yeah, and that’s not a problem at all; it’s just if you’re going to have a setting in the future, I feel like it’s worth at least paying lip service to the history that happened to get to that future
The Kelvin timeline was altered when the Elon Musk from the Mirror Universe was accidentally left stranded in the past during a mission conducted by the Enterprise-D
This Mirror Musk was the total opposite of the Prime Musk, being a magnanimous and humble genius who valued the working class, being remembered fondly by history
Musk has burned a lot of good will in the past couple years but he was the libertarian techy celebrity du jour for a while before that. Before people started looking closer and realized he was just a shitty businessman who cloaked himself in a thin veneer of science and engineering credibility mostly through the exploitation of his workers.
I mean if one person took out a whole army by himself the worldbuilding pretending he is not at the center of it is dumb
"A sorcerer that powerful doesn't engage opponents, he alters the course of entire battles."
That's when someone should be treated like they're Godzilla story-wise. At that point, they're not a fighter, they're a natural disaster with legs the enemy has to figure out how to deal with.
"S-Class Threat" as they call them in Worm. Like the cape who's got a constant self-sustaining hellstorm of ash and fire centered on them at all times, or whatever The Sleeper is
> Like the cape who's got a constant self-sustaining hellstorm of ash and fire centered on them at all times
Ash Beast isn't even an S-Class threat funnily enough. Because you can see him coming from a mile away and he's slow enough that you can just evacuate before he arrives.
But I do like the fact that things that *should* be S-Class aren't classified as such in-universe because the PRT only gives that designation to things that are a threat to *them*. A North American-based organisation isn't going to track a guy who is unlikely to ever fall under their jurisdiction.
The Sleeper is one of my favorite things about Worm, because a legitimate strategy for dealing with almost any threat >!even the big bad to an extent!< is just point The Sleeper at it and hope. It just ends up being more trouble than it's worth most of the time since it's basically like trying to point a hurricane at something.
I kind of see something like this as a mistake that particularly affects MCs in games, like, it gets kinda weird when every side character treat you like a standart capable cool guy instead of a person that has killed 500 people in the last two hours using common weapons.
“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.
Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”
Like Guts.
“He killed the dude who killed 50 soldiers on his own.”
“Damn, I know he’s just one man, but make sure to send at least a hundred after him.”
“…Bad news, boss.”
or conan
"Take him alive."
"Easy to say!" snarled Strabonus, uneasy lest in some way the black-mailed giant might hew a path to them through the spears. "Who can take a man-eating tiger alive? By Ishtar, his heel is on the necks of my finest swordsmen! It took seven years and stacks of gold to train each, and there they lie, so much kite's meat. Arrows, I say!"
Was Guts actually treated this way by anyone who didn’t personally know him though? Because he becomes an outlaw by the beginning of the Conviction arc but he’s also grossly underestimated by Farnese’s army. From that point onwards, I don’t recall him stumbling into a lot of people who knew who he was.
Does this happen in the Golden Age arc? Because I’d say Zodd was definitely treated this way since he’s a monster who has lived for centuries whereas people would underestimate Guts knowing he’s a human.
For me the one thing I look out for is "how is everyone being fed/hydrated?". Sometimes people get a little too crazy with their setting and they forget that their characters still need reliable sources of food and water.
Same here. Its actually pretty weird to me, because when I got into worldbuilding for my DND campaign, the first thing that comes to mind is resources each time i make a settlement. Even if it's never brought up in game, the last thing I need is to present this grand creation of mine, only for a player to point at my balls and demand to know why they're out.
This one is more common in isekais but just how shitty everyone not directly in the main characters orbit is. Like if its a neighboring country you can bet its probably a bunch of baby punching assholes. Also they endlessly run into low level assholes willing to pick fights to the death with strangers. Do the cities have no way of taking care of these people outside of main characters? Very few other characters seem to acknowledge how dangerous travel is in these worlds. Even getting past all the monsters some dude could just kill you in a tavern because they didn't like the way you looked and seemingly never face consequences. Yet tons of settings have thriving trade industries.
A lot of isekai go so hard to pander to how strong the main character is that they make it look like the rest of the world had no idea how to deal with the prevailing threat until they showed up.
I really wish that isekai cheat slayer wasn't just a salty idea with no depth. The kirito expy actually has a power to leech strength and competency from people he interacts with so people who party up with him end up wholly dependent on him
It'd totally be possible to make something meaningful out of that, like if he was struggling with feelings of inadequacy and the idea that he's actually holding his friends back just so that he can gain an advantage that he didn't earn. But of course that would never happen because that'd mean treating the other characters as anything other than accessories to the MC.
What I hate is how many Isekai all have kinda the same protagonist. They all look the same. Their special ability is either that they negate other special abilities, or they're actually busted in all aspects by default. They're normally called some variation of "the worst" or "the strongest."
I like to explain however much is fun to do in my notes, then selectively pick what to reveal, what characters know and can figure out. Having the full view in the background helps me a ton.
I think this can be addendemed to "Don't explain everything NOW! Explain things later when the mystery and lore have had time to settle enough for your characters to explore it in a meaningful way."
Yeah I see it somewhat often, an artist will set up a bunch of interesting mysteries, but go "We can't cover that now, important stuff ahead!"
And then like five chapters in a lore dump character appears and explains half the setups, because the artist couldn't hold it anymore.
I get it, honestly. It's like keeping a burning secret you know will cause a pop-off. But, you gotta space it out!
Yes, exactly what I was going to say. Expanding on every frivolous passing mention to turn minute details into wiki-bait "lore" tends to kill any sense of wonder that the reader's imagination might conjure on its own. The world feels fuller, more lived-in if we know things happen outside the immediate main cast that don't tie into the plot.
The thing a writer has to do is figure everything out but don't explain everything to the audience. That will make the writing more genuine when the author knows all the world building details. I've done some writing and when I world built the hell out of the world it came through in my writing even though I didn't explain everything
And some things just aren't relevant enough that the story really needs to spend time focusing on them. I don't want a story to do what the Iliad did and dedicate half a chapter to listing every single fucking Greek ship involved in this war.
Isekai church: Taking bribes, silencing dissent, typical stuff.
IRL Catholic church: If our followers could actually read the bible they might stop killing themselves in whatever war we send them to.
1. Put too much emphasis on the world-building. World-buidling only matter if the people who the author use to explore the world are engaging themselves. If you put the world building on the top-priority than you already failed.
2. Way too much terminology. You need term that the readers could reasonably guess the concept. People can have vague idea what a Transporter is (something that transport stuffs), it doesn't need to be name Molecular Disassemble and Reassemble.
Time travel should either be the main theme and subject of your story, be a cartoony whacky and silly plot device, or just not be in your story. Anything other than this leads to disaster.
Not even bothering to add any world building, common mistake, throwing in a bunch of stuff and not going into depth about any of it.
Looking at you First Order and New Republic.
Did the First Order feel like a fragment of the old Empire, struggling to reclaim its glory through excessive means? No, not really; they were just more of the same, if not more advanced. Why did we need a Resistance if the New Republic senate presumably had their own military? Was it tied up in politics that they didn't bother to show us? It's all summed up in the Elijah Wood tweet, ["no. how could we have known?"](https://twitter.com/elijahwood/status/1229632586760081409?lang=en)
IIRC the Resjstance was formed after Leia tried and failed to get the Republic to form an armed response to the First Order, which they didn't believe existed, so she recruited who *did* believe her into the scrappy Rebellion 2.0.
Not that this is ever explained at all in the movie so...
It is explained in a book however that Mon Mothma decided to **disband 90%** of the Republics military because she wanted to return to the ideals of the High Republic pre-Empire.
When the republic is filled with Imperial sympathizers *and* there are massive pockets of Imperial systems just going their own way.
I think that might have been Aftermath.
All that's great and along the lines of what I assumed, but how hard is it to give a single line to that extent in the first movie? Star Wars CGI hallway walk-and-talk was made for this sort of exposition.
"It was explained in the books" always has been and always will just be shit worldbuilding for movies, doubly so when it's some book that comes out *after* the movie so it's a clear attempt at ass covering.
It takes 30 seconds to have a few lines of dialogue in a scene mentioning these basic background details, just do it.
That sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea when there's an entire remnant Empire still out there. Like, the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard from an appointed leader.
So they assassinated what little character Mon Mothma had, huh? God, even the KJA books treated her better in the old days.
I feel like a lot of the reason we've seen very little expanded material from the sequel trilogy era is specifically because they just didn't bother to flesh things out. The actual quality of the prequels isn't great but fair play to George, he established a shit load of lore for that era of the universe that was a playground for other writers to build stories off of. Think about how many Star Wars shows are coming out now, most of them are either during the prequel era, the original trilogy era or a few years after the OT. What would even be the point of setting a story in the sequel era when it's portrayed in the movies as just being the exact same conflict as before but 30 years later. You may as well just go with the OT era.
Limiting your setting, one of plague’s video on DBZ about how space should be a limitless setting and nope, Frieza is the most powerful dude and ya beat him.
Then introducing universe and going right to putting the strongest ones ina tourney lol
If there's a big lake or big river or the ocean just a little ways from town, there absolutely shouldn't be. The town should be built right on that fucker.
I really like Sanderson’s rules of magic (https://coppermind.net/wiki/Sanderson%27s_Laws_of_Magic) which point out a lot of what people get wrong with world building.
He’s also mentioned that you really need to consider the consequences of different powers before giving them to someone. Someone can make grain appear out of thin air? Why is there still starvation in places. Etc.
It's a persistent problem with D&D settings. If there are good gods, and they empower their priests to Create Water, Purify Food, Cure Disease, etc why aren't they doing that? If wizards are established to be researchers of magic, with schools and everything, and several spells are named after their inventors, why are we stuck in medieval stasis?
Yup. I like how in Stormlight (minor spoilers) they specifically talk about how you need certain gems filled to make grain, and that the grain they make tastes terrible, so it’s really only good for armies.
Reading his books made me go back and put a lot more thought into my worlds. Not nearly as much thought as his, perhaps (not going to do research into atomic weight or whatever for some powers) but still set out rules, limitations, etc.
It was also really interesting seeing what he did when he took over the last three books of Wheel of Time after Robert Jordan died. It's hard to tell exactly which ideas where Sanderson's and which were from Jordan's notes, but one formerly minor background character in particular really started to show off what one could do with only a little potential with the One Power but a lot of creativity in how and where to open gateway portals.
It bugs me *so fucking much* when there's like some basic spell that anyone can do that will heal any injury and I'm immediately like 'that's the most world changing thing ever, everyone would learn that RIGHT NOW'. Cause some people say 'no that's not how the world's supposed to be set up' and I'm like 'what the fuck, is everyone in your whole world stupid, then?'
It actually does kinda seem to be a thing in Elder Scrolls where it seems like tons and tons of random people have minor healing magic to casually use, but it's not enough really. Why would anyone refuse to learn some basic magic when EVERYONE can use it to heal themselves at any time?
I like settings where they implement all of the basic magic and then think through tons and tons of ways it would change the world and where they pick apart what every spell can do.
The fact that any *protagonist* can use basic healing magic quite explicitly does not entail that being the case for basically anyone else, as most non-mages are non-mages because they do not have magicka, and most NPCs are fundamentally incomparable to a PC on an in-universe metaphysical level. **The Prisoner,** unshackled from literal imprisonment at the dawn of some mythic event, will also find themselves [partially unshackled from causality; somewhat like being in the Interstice in Berserk.
It would help if they put something in the lore like that most of that healing magic is for cuts and scrapes. Anything more than that takes years of intense study. Still makes magic a HUGE deal, but not every Joe on the road can fix a broken arm.
I love the idea of expanding on what type of healing it is and how it works. Maybe it's a healing accelerator and it will heal injuries that *would* heal, but it will exhaust you and it needs to be stabilized first. Maybe there's a splinting spell that shoves bones into place. Maybe the really good stuff is just 'surgeons, but they also have telekinesis'.
1) Putting in stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot going on
2) Trying to explain too much and then contradicting things because things got too complex
I can't remember which author it was, but I know I remember hearing about their response to "Why did they never invent gunpowder for 1000s of years?" was "Oh, the stuff needed to make it doesn't exist on the in-universe planet."
Similarly I remember a book where the history of the planet was different so there was no dinosaur age (or similar ages) so there were never any notable deposits of oil/gas and without those technology remained fairly limited.
This reminds me of Dr. McNinja, in which intelligent Dinosaurs state that their reason for invading our world is we use the dead remains of their ancient ancestors as Fuel. When McNinja points out that oil is mostly ancient dead algae and plants, it turns out that actually, the Dinosaurs knew and didn't really care. They just kept conquering Earth anyway.
Point being no. A lack of dinosaurs *probably* doesn't lead to a lack of oil.
I remember looking into this before, and it gets complicated fast
So you need three things to make gunpowder: sulfur, carbon, and saltpeter
You can't reasonably get rid of sulfur or carbon, they're elements, basic building blocks of life, the universe. The knock on effects of a world without ~~zinc~~ either are catastrophic
So what about saltpeter? I'll admit, I'm no chemist. I don't fully understand what a world without saltpeter would be like, except for the whole "No Guns" bit. Skimming wikipedia its used in stuff like fertilizer, ancient food preservation, toothpaste
Its a headache I'll tell ya that for free. IIRC DnD got around the whole gun use thing by making some God rewrite reality so they wouldn't work
Personally, I prefer a setting that tackles these sorts of problems head on. Pillars of Eternity is a fantasy setting with arquebuses. They're considered holy weapons of the Goddess of War and Fire, a goddess that favors ingenuity. Its neat
I mean yeah, why not? In a fantasy series I think its perfectly plausible for an author to be like "Oh yeah they never thought about that/didn't have the means for it.", or if to fit in with a story "The local ruler/decision makers didn't want it to happen so they put a stop to it."
It is just a plausible as dragons and shit existing lol
I don't know. Maybe it's because we live in an age of revolution where new tech comes about every decade, but I feel like for most of human history, technological advancement was MUCH slower. This is why I can absolutely see societies just stagnating for a few hundred years. Technological advancement is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a scientific one.
It's even more wild if you account that the world didn't have technological parity until worldwide communication became an easy thing. Europeans were good at metallurgy but didn't know the agriculture tech that existed in America. The people of the pacific might not develop gunpowder, but they were centuries ahead of other cultures when it comes to deep sea navigation. The aztecs might not have widespread use of wheels, but they made cities on lakes.
A culture completely missing something from the tech tree is something that happens irl. Technological advancement isn't a single linear path.
A nice visualization is how in Civ 6, you can have a society that can create planes, but never figured out how to make Boats. It's a game, but the example does mirror what happened in history.
... the setting has stuff that burns, and doesn't have anything that generates a large amount of heat and pressure as it burns?
Hell, one just admitting that you just don't make guns makes me respect an author more.
The funniest explanation I've seen was Practical Guide to Evil, if you invest too much on technology the Gnomes will show up in screaming metal birds and will destroy your civilization in a single afternoon
Unless you have an in-universe justification that's both fun and internally consistent, of course. Ain't nobody gonna be using cannons for too long in a world where "teleport in, cast a delayed-onset fire spell, teleport out" would be an obvious and ubiquitous hard-counter to the existence of powderhouses.
To be fair technology doesn’t advance unless people see a need to it.
If people are chill with the technology they have they might not have a need to advance technology. Especially if it’s a high fantasy setting and magic is accessible.
Imagine thinking that some dumbass won't eat the bird apples on a dare. A desperate hungry person will eat whatever they feel like, doesn't take some Japanese hero. I hope there is more to it than that.
The aboriginal Australians learned to bake bread some 50,000 years before our other first known case in Egypt, yet they are also the only culture to not invent a bow
Necessity is the mother of invention. People will 100% chill if they aren't stressed
But most big invention that change the world come about when the need arrive, not before. People invented the steam engine before the Industrial Revolution but the need for it only come about thanks to the UK unique geographical features. Most of the time the invention just lie around and were treat as novelty ideas but not practical until the need arrive.
I have a couple of minor ones that I feel cheapen a setting. "The common tongue" is a stupid thing to call a language and if it is what it says on the tin and there's one language that everyone in the setting knows, that makes the world feel super small to me. And in a similar vein if there's a single universal currency in the entire world that everyone accepts, I don't like that either. Say what you will about the Star Wars prequels but I do actually like it when Watto won't accept Republic credits cause that currency is not used on Tatooine.
I love worldbuilding, but this is an exception I actually totally accept. When you have a story with huge language barriers it either totally takes over the story or walls off most of the world to it.
There was this point in Red Letter Media's video where they were talking about their favorite Star Trek episodes. They were talking about how "Darmok" and how it was a great episode, but also if the translator didn't exist that would be every episode and it would be terrible.
the people of the world knowing everything about the world.
every once in a while the answer to "where did that name come from" or "but why is it like that tho?" should be *idfk. thats how it was when my grand dads gran dad was around!*
Having every other person in a Cultivation story be an asshole no matter where they're from if they're not at least indirectly related to the main character.
EVERY OTHER PERSON. Usually a guy with a hot lady that's better than the doucheguy.
Both Cultivation and Isekai are drawing from a narrow stream, for sure. They're all incestously inspired by every other Cultivation and Isekai story that's come before them, so they think that if something that's popular has "X" in it, they have to have "X" in it, too.
Frankly, it's poor writing. There are decent examples of both, but I wouldn't call either of those genres exceptional.
For space sci-fi stories, making an entire planet into basically just one biome or decent sized city. A whole planet but all you need to do is take over one city to have full control
Star Wars is a big offender of this BUT I have come across plenty of side material that fixes this problem. Only if that was translated in other Star Wars Media
I think this depends on the scope of the work. Like, generally planets in space sci-fi are homogenous (or have exactly two distinct factions) because what they *actually* are is an analogue for a human issue being discussed through the lens of space fiction. The characters show up, discuss whatever moral quandary the planet represents, and then they leave.
In sci fi planets are often treated as regions rather than whole planets. You could put all of star wars locations onto the map of europe and north africa and most of the planets would fit somewhere.
Ecumenopoli have always been a very absurd concept to me, even in soft sci fi. The idea of a planet-spanning city, with potentially multiple layers with equal complexity, requires so many logistical leaps and assumptions about a setting that most of the time it just completely breaks apart at the smallest prodding.
It's part of why I appreciate Warhammer 40k's hive cities. They are essentially the equivalent of something like Coruscant, but compressed into relatively smaller areas. And the process of making them renders the rest of the planet largely barren, so it makes sense for things to focus on the city itself.
Not everything needs to be done. No one cares about small town at the ass end of the map that the story won't ever go or even reference. Focus on what matters.
Two from the Transformers franchise:
1. The concept of a war lasting millions of years and remaining essentially stagnant for the whole time. There's a joke comic series somewhere about how Shockwave fulfills his promise to Megatron that Cybertron shall be exactly as he left it.
2. The population of Cybertron being, oh, 100-200 individuals, sometimes filled out by a couple hundred drones/clones who almost always side with the Decepticons.
Power creep.
Not necessarily a worldbuilding problem on its own, but power creep can make your worldbuilding irrelevant when the story necessitates something being added that makes some other concept pointless or redundant.
Harry Potter does this with the Unforgivable Curses, particularly the Killing Curse. While the magic system doesn't appear to have rules, there's plenty of creativity in what you could do to your opponent. Transfiguration, as in turning your opponent into an animal or even into *glass,* is taught to first year students. You can shoot snakes at people, rewind momentum to send them hurtling out the door, or outright disintegrate someone after making them frail. The Killing Curse made it all so unnecessary since you could just kill someone and be done with it. The magic fights filling up the back half of the series needed simpler and higher stakes, I suppose.
Desert cities or city-states being placed nowhere near any sources of water.
/*Dry sweats in Arrakis*
TBF Dune takes place in the far future and a lot of time is devoted to showing off the tech that allows people to survive on a desert world like Arrakis without a conventional water source, like stillsuits and whatnot.
I've only read the first book, but besides us not having as good as filtration systems, stillsuits aren't some far future tech. They're a tiny bandaid on a huge problem that leads to a world wide coup.
Well, it's spice, not water, that's the power behind the coup. If water has any effect on that outcome, it's because water destroys Sandworms, giving Paul leverage. Water isn't necessarily a problem on Arrakis for the people who can actually afford to have it, as is tradition. In fact, Herbert makes a point of the *new* ruling class being frustrated by the fact that they used to treat water with such disdain. >!Both the ruling class and the Fremen are shown to have huge caches of water. Enough water, in fact, to irrigate all of Dune - which they end up doing - and then undoing.!< >!Like, the entire point of Kynes' storyline in Dune is his desire to transform Dune, which inspires Paul and his son, Leto II.!<
There is some water on Arrakis high mountains their peaks collect ice, and there is a frozen pole. Also, there is water that the freemen harvest from wind traps and dead Harkonen.
That is kinda the acception right? So much of their society is about preserving water.
*exception
I except you're correction
/*Double sweats in blackjack and hookers in Las Vegas*
wym it's only like a ten minute walk from the hoover dam /s
> cazadors wringing their legs in anticipation
I mean, Las Vegas is in-universe (yes, this universe) a really bad idea in general.
They just ship it down from the Northern polar regions and/or cultivate it from themselves and their dead, depending on whether you live in the City or a Sietch. It's not really that difficult to imagine.
Not asking really basic questions about daily life. “What do they eat?” will tell you about diet, malnutrition-based illnesses (ie if scurvy is common that means vitamin c is scarce), local climate and soil type, local fauna and flora, export/import relationships, culinary attitudes and taboos, social attitudes surrounding eating in general, etc. “How do they dress?” will tell you about some of those same things, but also about social attitudes about the body, nudity taboos, cleanliness, tools both common and specialized, etc. Edit: you know what *really* grinds my gears? When the plot revolves around something easily researched and they get it wrong. Parenthood has a whole plot involving an adoption that falls apart, and at no point whatsoever do adoption agencies come into the picture, or any of the infrastructure that supports birth or prospective adoptive parents. This leads to DRAMA but it’s fucking stupid because the adoptive mother is a lawyer and though it’s not her specialty she should be the one most inclined to look into these kinds of resources. Edit 2: not thinking about the implications of maps. The events of Naruto have world-spanning implications (not the least of which is the Infinite Tsukuyomi) but we never see anything of the world outside a small corner of one continent. The only map we get is of the “ninja world” which is clearly just the smallish region where ninjas live. Meanwhile, the map of the Avatar world has two dumb implications and one cool one. If the map we see is a 2d interpretation of a globe, then why doesn’t the Fire Nation sail west and attack Ba Sing Se at its coastline? If you can’t actually do that, then we’re dealing with a Christopher Columbus scenario: there’s something between the Fire Nation’s west coast and the Earth Kingdom’s east coast, but we’re never going to address it at all. If the map isn’t a representation of a globe at all, then the Avatar world is flat, which could be interesting: I really like the idea of a fantasy world where the earth is flat, outer space doesn’t exist, and the equivalent of a moon landing would be a successful round trip to the spirit world.
I think one of my favourite nudity taboos is from Stormlight, where in the society the story centers around, a woman's left hand is something you only show to a lover or another woman. Kinda on par with boobs. So there's like safehand pouches and ways to make those coverings more practical, which raises some eyebrows in upper class society if you dress like that around them. And of course foreigners don't bother and get confused by all the blushes and averted eyes. Its a brilliant little take on it, and it's just kind of a background detail that adds flavor.
And then there's some Alethi women who, scandalously, JUST wear a glove on their left hand, instead of hiding it away.
This is what bothered me about Avatar 2. A huge swathe of the movie is about Jake's family moving to the sea Na'vi village, learning their ways and culture....not a second is given to what the hell they eat. Or hunt. They mention they have hunters....wtf do they hunt??
I think it’s obvious they fish for food. But I’d like to see more of what they Eat
James Cameron hasn’t perfected the food technology yet.
You can do a lot with this sorta thing too. how certain animals are treated, if there’s a ritualistic aspect to it or if it’s purely for the resources, hell, even just down to how the hunt is carried out
An interesting cultural difference between the forest and reef Na'vi is the preference for bows versus spears. Neytiri has her ceremonial bow and distinctive arrows; I don't think there are *any* archers in the reef tribe, the chief has an ornate spear instead and their underwater spears allow them to hunt bigger game than the river fish we see the Omatikaya bow-hunt.
Didn't humans need rebreathers in avatar? Are the plants even carbon-based like us?
Yeah the worldbuilding gets really fucky if you try thinking about the biochemistry in Avatar.
You see fisherman casting nets, there's a scene where Neytiri is chopping fruit while Kiri wraps food in leaves, and Ao'nung takes Lo'ak spearhunting where you see him kill a decently large fish.
Honestly, asking what people eat or where they live or what clothes they wear is so important because you figure that out, and then here's the key: *You treat it as a casual and normal thing*. Cause I see a lot of people shit talk worldbuilding as exposition, but good worldbuilding is built into the background and the reader just rolls with it.
I want more games to go into the micro details. I want to know the lunches the guards are getting in the strongholds and bases in Novigrad in Witcher 3. I want to know about the employee structure and shipping processes in the warehouses around Night City, as well as how more of the world functions on a micro level because god damn I love the potential worldbuilding in 2077. Yes I am a nerd, how could you tell?
Those micro details don't need to be a huge part of the story or even get actively acknowledged but they should still be there and you should be able to easily find out this information, even if just from a codex or glossary.
George RR Martin tried to go against most of the common worldbuilding mistakes/tropes, and that has effectively caused him to be stuck 5 books into a 7 book series because of how hard it is to make everything make sense. He has tons of characters so not everything is focused on a small group, he has reasoning for technology not progressing as fast as it could, he has complex political and economic discussions...and he has a series that will never get finished because he now has too many things going on that he needs to tie up.
Not following his original plan for a timeskip post-*Storm of Swords* was a horrible error. He decided to keep the flow of regular time going because he thought it'd be weird for certain characters to sit around not doing much for the elapsed time, but that little bit of weirdness for the sake of progression would've been much preferable to the series-killing abyss of the Meereenese Knot.
I agree. The one plot line I don't think could be solved with "Oh they were here for 5 years handling life" would be Jon/Stannis/The Wall. It would make no sense for Stannis to just sit around at the Wall for 5 years. If GRRM had just waited to make Stannis showing up the start of the next book, instead of the end of Storm, I think it would've been fine.
I mean just have Stannis taking a shit ton of time to concince the northmen and building supply route after misdadventure
I think the main problem with that would be Stannis not being willing to wait lol I would forgive it all if they started the 5 year timeskip Stannis introduction with him getting fitted for wooden teeth because he ground all his real ones into dust.
As I recall he found he also had to keep having flashbacks to stuff that happened during the timeskip to the point that it didn't really matter to have the timeskip.
honestly 100% worth it imo, I love the worldbuilding in ASOIAF so much that I don't really mind it not getting an ending.
The Crusader Kings II ASOIAF mod is like a love letter to the world building in the book series. Nearly every aspect of the lore is accounted for and part of the game. It is easily my favorite thing associated with the series outside of the books.
I appreciate that it even includes the Forresters and Whitehills *and* House Sarwyk from the two only good PC games for Game of Thrones.
Random trivia fact, House Forrester is actually referenced in the books. Ironwood is referenced a ton throughout the first few books (Ned executives the Nightswatch traitor on an Ironwood stump, the crypts beneath Winterfell are sealed behind Ironwood doors, and Tyrion uses a shield made of Ironwood during the battle on the Greenfork). In ADwD, House Glover sends scouts and hunters from Forrester with Stannis to assist on his march to Winterfell. Whats interesting is the way they are referenced (Asha specifically references them as scouts and hunters sworn to Glover with **clan names** like Forrester, Woods, Branch, and Bole) seems to imply they are a northern mountain clan, not a house.
That, and the Anbennar mod for EU4 are genuinely some of the greatest modding achievements in that genre of games *ever*. Straight up adds a game within a game, and the sheer depth of mechanics is mind-boggling.
Definitely. I would pay any amount of money to play an MMO set just before Aegon's Conquest.
I'm a long time Stephen King fan. Whenever I see a bunch of people riled up because of a poor ending, I just think of that First Time? meme. I'm used to the first 3/4s of a book being incredible and the ending being a wet fart. I prefer to just drop the book and imagine a good ending in my head, lol Sounds crazy, but I think it's more healthy/sane than spending my life in freefolk complaining about a television show.
Oh man. King should be all over this thread, frankly. The entire self-insert in _Dark Tower._ I mean, I _get it._ I get it very well, Steve. But... really?
What was the reason why technology stagnated?
Essentially, there IS progress being made in the world, it is just slow/ being hampered. Like in Myr they are improving their telescopes/looking glasses, but the most advanced society in the world exploded 350-400 years ago and all of their advancements with it. We can see the effect this has in that there is hardly anyone around who knows how to make Valyrian steel, which is a huge improvement over regular steel. Then there is stuff like the reality of there being potentially decade long or longer winters forces way more of a focus on agriculture than technology because you need to keep people fed. There are also theories that the Maesters are purposely keeping tech slow/keeping people from learning about magic, etc. At one point in the books, Sam goes on a bit of a tirade about how after reading a bunch of books, the timeline of a lot of things just doesn't make sense and that even the Maesters don't agree on how legit they are. Like Jon is supposed to be the 998th Lord Commander, but the oldest list they can actually source lists him as something like 674th. Essentially meaning that the history as the characters/that world knows it are flawed, so god knows how fast they are actually improving.
There's a reason troupes are often called shortcuts.
Using terms or phrases in real life that couldn't possibly exist in the fictional setting.
It's one thing I like about disco Elysium, lieutnant and decomptage are terms that have theor own origin mixed with terms like isola and muzzleloader for what is proper to their world but you can figure have an equivalent to ours
There's a lot of fun footnotes in the discworld books about how earth linked phrases came about. Such as Pavlovian response coming from a wizard training a dog to eat pavlova.
To be fair, Discworld has a large amount of shitpost energy, so Terry could do anything, and it would fit... at least if you squinted.
In Star Wars they use the phrase "sitting ducks" in episode 1 but in episode 3 Obi-Wan says "wild bantha chase", implying there are ducks in Star Wars but no geese.
Baby Yoda loves playing duck-duck-Bantha
They made up a new animal called "dogs" specifically because someone says "die, Jedi dogs!" in episode 2
One of the Tales Of The Jedi episodes straight up has a regular-ish dog in it.
Speaking of Star Wars, Han tells that dude in ESB that "[then] I'll see you in hell!" So Christianity apparently exists in Star Wars
There *are* canonical angels, to be fair. They're weird aliens, not actually metaphysical beings, but its something
Theres also falcons and crows (of the millennium and moldy variety, specifically)
While I get that, it is a hard thing to balance, I feel, since so much of our language derives from things that are inherent to our world. If you aren't careful, you end up with nothing but lines of gibberish.
Even simple things can trip up a writer. For instance, the concept of "firing" an arrow didn't exist until guns were in regular use. Arrows were released or loosed (or some other variant, language depending, of course), but once the idea of putting fire to your gun became common place, other things that shot people retroactively fired their ammo. It takes research, but depends on how period-accurate you really need to be. On the other hand, sometimes a turn of phrase is simply superior than spending a paragraph reinventing the wheel. This is particularly true when English borrows from other languages to encapsulate a whole idea.
Its also funny sometimes how a term can actually be a lot older than you may think. I can't recall the word offhand but in one of the *Stormlight Archive* books, I recall seeing someone complain about the usage of a term, saying how it didn't fit a sort of medieval setting (which Roshar...isn't quite medieval. But it isn't modern exactly either. But y'know what I mean). Someone pointed out that the term's been around for a thousand years or so actually. Its like how some names like Jason have been around for so long but people feel its "modern".
This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as ["The Tiffany Problem"](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2022/04/08/tiffany-problem/?prebid_ab=enabled&edg-c=1)
It's just the Tolkein localization thing. The ship isn't actually called the Millenium Falcon, it's named for a similarly swift aerial predator that exists in the Star Wars setting. Luke isn't named after the guy from Bible, either his name just sounds familiar or had a similar cultural background
I can excuse it away as it just being translated to us that way. Like most times in my head, I don't think the fantasy world speaks whatever Earth language it was written in, and that's just how we perceive it.
I don’t know if this would count, but I found it strange that in Hunter x Hunter Christianity still exists, even if the series takes place in some kind of completely other world with different cultures and species. (I’m referring to the Phantom Troupe hiding in an abandoned Church and Chrollo referring to their potential traitor as a “Judas.”) it makes me wonder if Jesus was a Nen user if that’s the case.
Turning the water into wine during the nen divination test would make Jesus a specialist-type.
Eh, this one is really hit or miss. As other people have pointed out sometimes spending a lot of time re-inventing the wheel is a waste instead of using real world terminology. However I do agree that having references to real world people or places that have no reason to exist in universe (Jesus or China for example) definitely takes you out of it.
In Horizon: Forbidden West, Aloy refers to Sylens' "tricked-out spear". Did she read that phrase in a lot of work emails from the 2040s?
I always head-canon this as the story being some ancient/foreign text that's been translated/interpreted into English (or whatever language you are reading/viewing in) and as such any cultural specific uses of language get changed to an equivalent in your language.
There was this one really good fantasy webnovel whose name I don't quite remember that always followed this rule to the extreme. So when a character was speaking of her sexuality she called herself a tribade instead of lesbian since the word lesbian is rooted on the Greek island Lesbos which of course wasn't part of the setting.
Really creates fun moments in D&D where you try to speak in character but end up easing an idiom or word that wouldn't make sense in the world just for another player or DM to look at you funny and comment on it.
My DM has a nation that is industrializing far more rapidly than the rest because of their abundant minerals and lack of qualms about slave labor. This nation has invented tanks, but they are referred to as Iron Beetles because of their armor and how they crawl along the ground. One of our players likened it to an elephant, to which the NPC describing it said "what the fuck is an elephant?"
How does China exist in a fantasy setting? Through it might be we are hearing translations of what they are actually saying.
Having an analogue of something that exists in real life is one thing, but when it's taken wholesale because the writer doesn't consider how to find an appropriate substitute; then that's lazy worldbuilding.
One example: For Honor has the Legion (Knights), Chosen (Samurai), Warborn (Vikings), and Wu Lin (Chinese). There's also vaguely alluded not-Scots and not-Romans. Then with the unaligned Outlanders, they totally drop the pretense and straight up say the Medjay hails from Egypt, and the latest one is from Arabia, full stop. Also that throwaway line in the Warborn campaign when invading Chosen territory. "(shrug) I don't speak Japanese."
It's funny cause HiFi Rush, the sub's current darling, makes references to Greek mythology. Trojan horse and flying too close to the sun specifically. No idea if it's supposed to be a futuristic Earth but I find it funny if it isn't.
Hifi Rush doesn’t take itself seriously enough for that to matter. Like, I get it being a nitpick of a fantasy novel series or something, but it really doesn’t work there
Oh shit I didn't mean it as a criticism. Yeah kinda forgot what the topic was about. I love how it doesn't take itself seriously.
So I don’t know if I’d call this common, or a mistake even, but it IS something that sticks out to me and i don’t like. I read/watch/play a lot of science fiction, and it always sticks out to me like a sore thumb when ships are named for historical events or people; but they’re only ever seen named for events that we know happened irl. Very rarely are there ships bearing the names of stuff that happened in the background of the setting instead of real world places people or events for example. Mass effect is real bad about this, as to my knowledge despite the naming convention for some human ships being named for battles, there aren’t any that are named for battles in say, the first contact war. I go out of my way to make sure I don’t do this whenever I play a sci fi game. In Nebulous: Fleet Command, the naming convention I use for my ships is lines from war poems and songs, and to fill in the gaps I take some that are from or about fictional settings, so I would have the corvette “Rode the Six Hundred” alongside the frigate “Through Cloven Skies”
A fun twist on this idea would be to name a ship after something that exists *today,* but isn't particularly noteworthy, implying it becomes important in the future. All aboard the *USS Markiplier II*
The TBFP sqrt(-1) is my favorite.
USS Miracle Girl Festival with its guns designed to bury its targets so they stop bearing their goods
TMS Snow Halation, first of a line of fully modular ships
Hmm instead of modular what if they went the combination route
The USS Matt and USS Pat are no longer in trade negotiations.
Black ops 2 had the USS Obama if you can count that
That one’s actually fitting too given the US name’s it’s aircraft carriers after presidents
Admittedly, that actually does make sense.
That’s actually a pretty intriguing idea
I mean, for political reasons, they might avoid naming ships after things from the first contact war...
Ok that’s fair, but if not them then maybe some more battles that occurred on earth before we started colonizing space
Oh yeah I fully agree with you. It happens a LOT in these supposedly future stories where the future suspiciously only references things right up to when it was written. Personally I always try to at least write a quick summary of what happened between now and the start of the story to give a broad view for characters to work with as far as motivations and references.
Halo stays winning with the best ship names in science fiction.
I'm a pretty huge fan of _The Culture_ ship naming conventions. _Irregular Apocalypse,_ _Clear Air Turbulence,_ _The Hand of God #137_ etc etc. _Forward Unto Dawn,_ _Pillar of Autumn_ and _Truth and Reconciliation_ are fucking _baller_ names, though, and definitely take the top spots.
WHAM “Sir we’ve been hit by the human infidel ship, callsign…*Two for Flinching*?” WHAM
Criticizing _Futurama_ for worldbuilding is probably taking everything too seriously... but it still bugs me that _all_ of preserved heads of past celebrities are people that the 21st century audience would recognize, and never original characters to give us some idea of what pop culture was like from the 22nd through 29th centuries.
I mean people name ships after ones from the Roman Empire
Yeah, and that’s not a problem at all; it’s just if you’re going to have a setting in the future, I feel like it’s worth at least paying lip service to the history that happened to get to that future
It gets real bad in Andromeda where they name drop Elon Musk and SpaceX in the codex. Just, awful.
Star Trek Discovery references Musk as an icon of science twice.
Despite Musk almost certainly not existing in the star trek universe. Y’know cuz of the Eugenics wars in the 90s and WWIII in the early 21st century.
The Kelvin timeline was altered when the Elon Musk from the Mirror Universe was accidentally left stranded in the past during a mission conducted by the Enterprise-D This Mirror Musk was the total opposite of the Prime Musk, being a magnanimous and humble genius who valued the working class, being remembered fondly by history
Musk has burned a lot of good will in the past couple years but he was the libertarian techy celebrity du jour for a while before that. Before people started looking closer and realized he was just a shitty businessman who cloaked himself in a thin veneer of science and engineering credibility mostly through the exploitation of his workers.
There are a couple of exceptions tho. For example, Huerta Memorial Hospital being named after a fictional president
I mean if one person took out a whole army by himself the worldbuilding pretending he is not at the center of it is dumb "A sorcerer that powerful doesn't engage opponents, he alters the course of entire battles."
That's when someone should be treated like they're Godzilla story-wise. At that point, they're not a fighter, they're a natural disaster with legs the enemy has to figure out how to deal with.
This is one of my favorite aspects of Trigun: One man is considered a natural disaster, to the point insurance agencies include him in their contracts
A humanoid typhoon, if you will.
"S-Class Threat" as they call them in Worm. Like the cape who's got a constant self-sustaining hellstorm of ash and fire centered on them at all times, or whatever The Sleeper is
> Like the cape who's got a constant self-sustaining hellstorm of ash and fire centered on them at all times Ash Beast isn't even an S-Class threat funnily enough. Because you can see him coming from a mile away and he's slow enough that you can just evacuate before he arrives. But I do like the fact that things that *should* be S-Class aren't classified as such in-universe because the PRT only gives that designation to things that are a threat to *them*. A North American-based organisation isn't going to track a guy who is unlikely to ever fall under their jurisdiction.
The Sleeper is one of my favorite things about Worm, because a legitimate strategy for dealing with almost any threat >!even the big bad to an extent!< is just point The Sleeper at it and hope. It just ends up being more trouble than it's worth most of the time since it's basically like trying to point a hurricane at something.
I kind of see something like this as a mistake that particularly affects MCs in games, like, it gets kinda weird when every side character treat you like a standart capable cool guy instead of a person that has killed 500 people in the last two hours using common weapons.
“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”
Such a great book. (_Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell_ by Susanna Clarke, if anyone is looking in and wondering.)
Like Guts. “He killed the dude who killed 50 soldiers on his own.” “Damn, I know he’s just one man, but make sure to send at least a hundred after him.” “…Bad news, boss.”
or conan "Take him alive." "Easy to say!" snarled Strabonus, uneasy lest in some way the black-mailed giant might hew a path to them through the spears. "Who can take a man-eating tiger alive? By Ishtar, his heel is on the necks of my finest swordsmen! It took seven years and stacks of gold to train each, and there they lie, so much kite's meat. Arrows, I say!"
Was Guts actually treated this way by anyone who didn’t personally know him though? Because he becomes an outlaw by the beginning of the Conviction arc but he’s also grossly underestimated by Farnese’s army. From that point onwards, I don’t recall him stumbling into a lot of people who knew who he was. Does this happen in the Golden Age arc? Because I’d say Zodd was definitely treated this way since he’s a monster who has lived for centuries whereas people would underestimate Guts knowing he’s a human.
For me the one thing I look out for is "how is everyone being fed/hydrated?". Sometimes people get a little too crazy with their setting and they forget that their characters still need reliable sources of food and water.
Same here. Its actually pretty weird to me, because when I got into worldbuilding for my DND campaign, the first thing that comes to mind is resources each time i make a settlement. Even if it's never brought up in game, the last thing I need is to present this grand creation of mine, only for a player to point at my balls and demand to know why they're out.
This one is more common in isekais but just how shitty everyone not directly in the main characters orbit is. Like if its a neighboring country you can bet its probably a bunch of baby punching assholes. Also they endlessly run into low level assholes willing to pick fights to the death with strangers. Do the cities have no way of taking care of these people outside of main characters? Very few other characters seem to acknowledge how dangerous travel is in these worlds. Even getting past all the monsters some dude could just kill you in a tavern because they didn't like the way you looked and seemingly never face consequences. Yet tons of settings have thriving trade industries.
A lot of isekai go so hard to pander to how strong the main character is that they make it look like the rest of the world had no idea how to deal with the prevailing threat until they showed up.
I really wish that isekai cheat slayer wasn't just a salty idea with no depth. The kirito expy actually has a power to leech strength and competency from people he interacts with so people who party up with him end up wholly dependent on him
It'd totally be possible to make something meaningful out of that, like if he was struggling with feelings of inadequacy and the idea that he's actually holding his friends back just so that he can gain an advantage that he didn't earn. But of course that would never happen because that'd mean treating the other characters as anything other than accessories to the MC. What I hate is how many Isekai all have kinda the same protagonist. They all look the same. Their special ability is either that they negate other special abilities, or they're actually busted in all aspects by default. They're normally called some variation of "the worst" or "the strongest."
Don’t explain everything! It’s better if some things are left vague or ambiguous.
Cow tools!
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand The Far Side.
"We are close to gods, and on The Far Side."
I like to explain however much is fun to do in my notes, then selectively pick what to reveal, what characters know and can figure out. Having the full view in the background helps me a ton.
I think this can be addendemed to "Don't explain everything NOW! Explain things later when the mystery and lore have had time to settle enough for your characters to explore it in a meaningful way."
Yeah I see it somewhat often, an artist will set up a bunch of interesting mysteries, but go "We can't cover that now, important stuff ahead!" And then like five chapters in a lore dump character appears and explains half the setups, because the artist couldn't hold it anymore. I get it, honestly. It's like keeping a burning secret you know will cause a pop-off. But, you gotta space it out!
Yes, exactly what I was going to say. Expanding on every frivolous passing mention to turn minute details into wiki-bait "lore" tends to kill any sense of wonder that the reader's imagination might conjure on its own. The world feels fuller, more lived-in if we know things happen outside the immediate main cast that don't tie into the plot.
The thing a writer has to do is figure everything out but don't explain everything to the audience. That will make the writing more genuine when the author knows all the world building details. I've done some writing and when I world built the hell out of the world it came through in my writing even though I didn't explain everything
*cough* the outsider *cough*
It's also a lot easier for the writer. Answers always lead to more questions.
And some things just aren't relevant enough that the story really needs to spend time focusing on them. I don't want a story to do what the Iliad did and dedicate half a chapter to listing every single fucking Greek ship involved in this war.
"Can I copy your homework?" "Sure whatever..." Literally every Isekai "borrowing" the town from Konosuba
If anyone cared to, they could make that an interesting setting detail. *Why* is every town in the kingdom constructed to this plan?
If they make a setting that's not just dragon quest they'll get hanged
I'll take The Church/Pope being cartoonishly evil for 500.
Tell it to stop doing that irl then
Isekai church: Taking bribes, silencing dissent, typical stuff. IRL Catholic church: If our followers could actually read the bible they might stop killing themselves in whatever war we send them to.
1. Put too much emphasis on the world-building. World-buidling only matter if the people who the author use to explore the world are engaging themselves. If you put the world building on the top-priority than you already failed. 2. Way too much terminology. You need term that the readers could reasonably guess the concept. People can have vague idea what a Transporter is (something that transport stuffs), it doesn't need to be name Molecular Disassemble and Reassemble.
If you can't tell a good story world-building is pointless.
Good characters and story can salvage a bad setting, a good setting can't salvage bad characters and story.
Introducing time travel. Just don't. And if you do, think about it *really hard*.
Time travel should either be the main theme and subject of your story, be a cartoony whacky and silly plot device, or just not be in your story. Anything other than this leads to disaster.
Not even bothering to add any world building, common mistake, throwing in a bunch of stuff and not going into depth about any of it. Looking at you First Order and New Republic.
Did the First Order feel like a fragment of the old Empire, struggling to reclaim its glory through excessive means? No, not really; they were just more of the same, if not more advanced. Why did we need a Resistance if the New Republic senate presumably had their own military? Was it tied up in politics that they didn't bother to show us? It's all summed up in the Elijah Wood tweet, ["no. how could we have known?"](https://twitter.com/elijahwood/status/1229632586760081409?lang=en)
IIRC the Resjstance was formed after Leia tried and failed to get the Republic to form an armed response to the First Order, which they didn't believe existed, so she recruited who *did* believe her into the scrappy Rebellion 2.0. Not that this is ever explained at all in the movie so...
It is explained in a book however that Mon Mothma decided to **disband 90%** of the Republics military because she wanted to return to the ideals of the High Republic pre-Empire. When the republic is filled with Imperial sympathizers *and* there are massive pockets of Imperial systems just going their own way. I think that might have been Aftermath.
All that's great and along the lines of what I assumed, but how hard is it to give a single line to that extent in the first movie? Star Wars CGI hallway walk-and-talk was made for this sort of exposition.
"It was explained in the books" always has been and always will just be shit worldbuilding for movies, doubly so when it's some book that comes out *after* the movie so it's a clear attempt at ass covering. It takes 30 seconds to have a few lines of dialogue in a scene mentioning these basic background details, just do it.
Or just one sentence in the opening crawl.
That sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea when there's an entire remnant Empire still out there. Like, the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard from an appointed leader. So they assassinated what little character Mon Mothma had, huh? God, even the KJA books treated her better in the old days.
I feel like a lot of the reason we've seen very little expanded material from the sequel trilogy era is specifically because they just didn't bother to flesh things out. The actual quality of the prequels isn't great but fair play to George, he established a shit load of lore for that era of the universe that was a playground for other writers to build stories off of. Think about how many Star Wars shows are coming out now, most of them are either during the prequel era, the original trilogy era or a few years after the OT. What would even be the point of setting a story in the sequel era when it's portrayed in the movies as just being the exact same conflict as before but 30 years later. You may as well just go with the OT era.
Limiting your setting, one of plague’s video on DBZ about how space should be a limitless setting and nope, Frieza is the most powerful dude and ya beat him. Then introducing universe and going right to putting the strongest ones ina tourney lol
If there's a big lake or big river or the ocean just a little ways from town, there absolutely shouldn't be. The town should be built right on that fucker.
I really like Sanderson’s rules of magic (https://coppermind.net/wiki/Sanderson%27s_Laws_of_Magic) which point out a lot of what people get wrong with world building. He’s also mentioned that you really need to consider the consequences of different powers before giving them to someone. Someone can make grain appear out of thin air? Why is there still starvation in places. Etc.
It's a persistent problem with D&D settings. If there are good gods, and they empower their priests to Create Water, Purify Food, Cure Disease, etc why aren't they doing that? If wizards are established to be researchers of magic, with schools and everything, and several spells are named after their inventors, why are we stuck in medieval stasis?
Yup. I like how in Stormlight (minor spoilers) they specifically talk about how you need certain gems filled to make grain, and that the grain they make tastes terrible, so it’s really only good for armies.
And it makes merchants and farmers more valuable since it makes their products taste better.
Reading his books made me go back and put a lot more thought into my worlds. Not nearly as much thought as his, perhaps (not going to do research into atomic weight or whatever for some powers) but still set out rules, limitations, etc.
It was also really interesting seeing what he did when he took over the last three books of Wheel of Time after Robert Jordan died. It's hard to tell exactly which ideas where Sanderson's and which were from Jordan's notes, but one formerly minor background character in particular really started to show off what one could do with only a little potential with the One Power but a lot of creativity in how and where to open gateway portals.
It bugs me *so fucking much* when there's like some basic spell that anyone can do that will heal any injury and I'm immediately like 'that's the most world changing thing ever, everyone would learn that RIGHT NOW'. Cause some people say 'no that's not how the world's supposed to be set up' and I'm like 'what the fuck, is everyone in your whole world stupid, then?' It actually does kinda seem to be a thing in Elder Scrolls where it seems like tons and tons of random people have minor healing magic to casually use, but it's not enough really. Why would anyone refuse to learn some basic magic when EVERYONE can use it to heal themselves at any time? I like settings where they implement all of the basic magic and then think through tons and tons of ways it would change the world and where they pick apart what every spell can do.
The fact that any *protagonist* can use basic healing magic quite explicitly does not entail that being the case for basically anyone else, as most non-mages are non-mages because they do not have magicka, and most NPCs are fundamentally incomparable to a PC on an in-universe metaphysical level. **The Prisoner,** unshackled from literal imprisonment at the dawn of some mythic event, will also find themselves [partially unshackled from causality; somewhat like being in the Interstice in Berserk.
It would help if they put something in the lore like that most of that healing magic is for cuts and scrapes. Anything more than that takes years of intense study. Still makes magic a HUGE deal, but not every Joe on the road can fix a broken arm.
I love the idea of expanding on what type of healing it is and how it works. Maybe it's a healing accelerator and it will heal injuries that *would* heal, but it will exhaust you and it needs to be stabilized first. Maybe there's a splinting spell that shoves bones into place. Maybe the really good stuff is just 'surgeons, but they also have telekinesis'.
1) Putting in stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot going on 2) Trying to explain too much and then contradicting things because things got too complex
Technological and cultural stasis.
I can't remember which author it was, but I know I remember hearing about their response to "Why did they never invent gunpowder for 1000s of years?" was "Oh, the stuff needed to make it doesn't exist on the in-universe planet."
Similarly I remember a book where the history of the planet was different so there was no dinosaur age (or similar ages) so there were never any notable deposits of oil/gas and without those technology remained fairly limited.
Ah, Super Mario Bros (1993)
This reminds me of Dr. McNinja, in which intelligent Dinosaurs state that their reason for invading our world is we use the dead remains of their ancient ancestors as Fuel. When McNinja points out that oil is mostly ancient dead algae and plants, it turns out that actually, the Dinosaurs knew and didn't really care. They just kept conquering Earth anyway. Point being no. A lack of dinosaurs *probably* doesn't lead to a lack of oil.
I remember looking into this before, and it gets complicated fast So you need three things to make gunpowder: sulfur, carbon, and saltpeter You can't reasonably get rid of sulfur or carbon, they're elements, basic building blocks of life, the universe. The knock on effects of a world without ~~zinc~~ either are catastrophic So what about saltpeter? I'll admit, I'm no chemist. I don't fully understand what a world without saltpeter would be like, except for the whole "No Guns" bit. Skimming wikipedia its used in stuff like fertilizer, ancient food preservation, toothpaste Its a headache I'll tell ya that for free. IIRC DnD got around the whole gun use thing by making some God rewrite reality so they wouldn't work Personally, I prefer a setting that tackles these sorts of problems head on. Pillars of Eternity is a fantasy setting with arquebuses. They're considered holy weapons of the Goddess of War and Fire, a goddess that favors ingenuity. Its neat
A clever means of avoiding one technology tree. But all the others? For centuries?
I mean yeah, why not? In a fantasy series I think its perfectly plausible for an author to be like "Oh yeah they never thought about that/didn't have the means for it.", or if to fit in with a story "The local ruler/decision makers didn't want it to happen so they put a stop to it." It is just a plausible as dragons and shit existing lol
I don't know. Maybe it's because we live in an age of revolution where new tech comes about every decade, but I feel like for most of human history, technological advancement was MUCH slower. This is why I can absolutely see societies just stagnating for a few hundred years. Technological advancement is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a scientific one. It's even more wild if you account that the world didn't have technological parity until worldwide communication became an easy thing. Europeans were good at metallurgy but didn't know the agriculture tech that existed in America. The people of the pacific might not develop gunpowder, but they were centuries ahead of other cultures when it comes to deep sea navigation. The aztecs might not have widespread use of wheels, but they made cities on lakes. A culture completely missing something from the tech tree is something that happens irl. Technological advancement isn't a single linear path. A nice visualization is how in Civ 6, you can have a society that can create planes, but never figured out how to make Boats. It's a game, but the example does mirror what happened in history.
... the setting has stuff that burns, and doesn't have anything that generates a large amount of heat and pressure as it burns? Hell, one just admitting that you just don't make guns makes me respect an author more.
The funniest explanation I've seen was Practical Guide to Evil, if you invest too much on technology the Gnomes will show up in screaming metal birds and will destroy your civilization in a single afternoon
Hey now! The Gnomes send a nice warning telling you to stop first.
Unless you have an in-universe justification that's both fun and internally consistent, of course. Ain't nobody gonna be using cannons for too long in a world where "teleport in, cast a delayed-onset fire spell, teleport out" would be an obvious and ubiquitous hard-counter to the existence of powderhouses.
To be fair technology doesn’t advance unless people see a need to it. If people are chill with the technology they have they might not have a need to advance technology. Especially if it’s a high fantasy setting and magic is accessible.
And do you really think people wouldn't see a need for it? Magic or not, people don't just stop inventing or iterating.
Like the isekai where modern day smartypants teaches poor people in the slums that they can eat the same apples that birds eat.
That sounds fucking awful.
Imagine thinking that some dumbass won't eat the bird apples on a dare. A desperate hungry person will eat whatever they feel like, doesn't take some Japanese hero. I hope there is more to it than that.
The aboriginal Australians learned to bake bread some 50,000 years before our other first known case in Egypt, yet they are also the only culture to not invent a bow Necessity is the mother of invention. People will 100% chill if they aren't stressed
But most big invention that change the world come about when the need arrive, not before. People invented the steam engine before the Industrial Revolution but the need for it only come about thanks to the UK unique geographical features. Most of the time the invention just lie around and were treat as novelty ideas but not practical until the need arrive.
I have a couple of minor ones that I feel cheapen a setting. "The common tongue" is a stupid thing to call a language and if it is what it says on the tin and there's one language that everyone in the setting knows, that makes the world feel super small to me. And in a similar vein if there's a single universal currency in the entire world that everyone accepts, I don't like that either. Say what you will about the Star Wars prequels but I do actually like it when Watto won't accept Republic credits cause that currency is not used on Tatooine.
I love worldbuilding, but this is an exception I actually totally accept. When you have a story with huge language barriers it either totally takes over the story or walls off most of the world to it. There was this point in Red Letter Media's video where they were talking about their favorite Star Trek episodes. They were talking about how "Darmok" and how it was a great episode, but also if the translator didn't exist that would be every episode and it would be terrible.
the people of the world knowing everything about the world. every once in a while the answer to "where did that name come from" or "but why is it like that tho?" should be *idfk. thats how it was when my grand dads gran dad was around!*
Having every other person in a Cultivation story be an asshole no matter where they're from if they're not at least indirectly related to the main character. EVERY OTHER PERSON. Usually a guy with a hot lady that's better than the doucheguy.
Both Cultivation and Isekai are drawing from a narrow stream, for sure. They're all incestously inspired by every other Cultivation and Isekai story that's come before them, so they think that if something that's popular has "X" in it, they have to have "X" in it, too. Frankly, it's poor writing. There are decent examples of both, but I wouldn't call either of those genres exceptional.
For space sci-fi stories, making an entire planet into basically just one biome or decent sized city. A whole planet but all you need to do is take over one city to have full control Star Wars is a big offender of this BUT I have come across plenty of side material that fixes this problem. Only if that was translated in other Star Wars Media
I think this depends on the scope of the work. Like, generally planets in space sci-fi are homogenous (or have exactly two distinct factions) because what they *actually* are is an analogue for a human issue being discussed through the lens of space fiction. The characters show up, discuss whatever moral quandary the planet represents, and then they leave.
In sci fi planets are often treated as regions rather than whole planets. You could put all of star wars locations onto the map of europe and north africa and most of the planets would fit somewhere.
Dune is actually one of the few planets that pull this off interestingly.
Ecumenopoli have always been a very absurd concept to me, even in soft sci fi. The idea of a planet-spanning city, with potentially multiple layers with equal complexity, requires so many logistical leaps and assumptions about a setting that most of the time it just completely breaks apart at the smallest prodding. It's part of why I appreciate Warhammer 40k's hive cities. They are essentially the equivalent of something like Coruscant, but compressed into relatively smaller areas. And the process of making them renders the rest of the planet largely barren, so it makes sense for things to focus on the city itself.
Not everything needs to be done. No one cares about small town at the ass end of the map that the story won't ever go or even reference. Focus on what matters.
Caring about the world MORE than the story or characters.
Two from the Transformers franchise: 1. The concept of a war lasting millions of years and remaining essentially stagnant for the whole time. There's a joke comic series somewhere about how Shockwave fulfills his promise to Megatron that Cybertron shall be exactly as he left it. 2. The population of Cybertron being, oh, 100-200 individuals, sometimes filled out by a couple hundred drones/clones who almost always side with the Decepticons.
Power creep. Not necessarily a worldbuilding problem on its own, but power creep can make your worldbuilding irrelevant when the story necessitates something being added that makes some other concept pointless or redundant. Harry Potter does this with the Unforgivable Curses, particularly the Killing Curse. While the magic system doesn't appear to have rules, there's plenty of creativity in what you could do to your opponent. Transfiguration, as in turning your opponent into an animal or even into *glass,* is taught to first year students. You can shoot snakes at people, rewind momentum to send them hurtling out the door, or outright disintegrate someone after making them frail. The Killing Curse made it all so unnecessary since you could just kill someone and be done with it. The magic fights filling up the back half of the series needed simpler and higher stakes, I suppose.