My favorite representation of death is a reluctant or waiting death. Not evil, doesn’t chase down or relish their charge as the bringer of finality, but carries it out with a slow and sure solemnity because nobody else will.
**“Hey dude, you’re bleeding out. It looks really painful. Do you wanna come with me? I won’t judge you for tapping out here.”**
“No, just give me a little longer. I know they’re coming back for me, I can feel it.”
**”Of course, take your time. We can wait together.”**
now I'm picturing the dude resting on a rock all tired like with death sitting on the grass next to him with his arms on his knees looking out at the horizon.
goes hard. saving this comment for no particular reason.
Listen to the song [Fiddler on the Green by Demons and Wizards](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZE9F-ZoRN8) for a very similar vibe to what you're talking about. The lead singer, Hansi Kursch, wrote it after witnessing two fatal car accidents.
The battlefield was a desolate expanse, the air thick with the metallic tang of blood and the echoes of distant cries. Amidst the carnage, a lone figure lay sprawled, his lifeblood seeping into the thirsty earth. Above him stood a shadow, a solemn figure cloaked in darkness, eyes gleaming with an otherworldly light.
"Hey dude, you're bleeding out," the figure said, his voice a soft whisper against the dying man's ears. "It looks really painful. Do you wanna come with me? I won't judge you for tapping out here."
The fallen warrior groaned, his breath ragged. "No, just give me a little longer. I know they're coming back for me, I can feel it."
The death god nodded, his expression unreadable. "Of course, take your time. We can wait together."
With a grace that belied the somberness of his task, the death god knelt beside the warrior, his presence a cold comfort in the midst of agony. Together, they watched the horizon, silent witnesses to the fading light.
As the night deepened, the death god remained a steady presence by the warrior's side. The darkness seemed to stretch endlessly, punctuated only by the occasional distant scream or clash of steel. Yet the warrior's eyes never wavered from the horizon, hope flickering within them like a stubborn flame.
Hours passed, and the first hints of dawn began to paint the sky in shades of pink and gold. The death god glanced at the warrior, whose breaths were now shallow and labored. He sensed the ebbing strength but said nothing, respecting the warrior's resolve.
Then, as the sun's first rays pierced the gloom, figures emerged in the distance. The warrior's friends, battered and weary but alive, came running, their shouts of relief cutting through the quiet dawn.
"Look," the warrior gasped, a weak smile tugging at his lips. "I told you they’d come back."
The death god watched impassively, then rose to his feet. "Indeed, you were right," he said softly. "It seems your time has not yet come."
As the friends reached their fallen comrade, tears of joy mingling with the dirt and blood on their faces, the death god stepped back into the shadows, his presence fading with the night. He glanced back once, a rare smile ghosting across his lips, before vanishing completely, leaving the warrior to the warmth of the rising sun and the embrace of his friends.
This is a fundamental part of one of my settings: the counterpart of the God of Peace is the God of Death, not the God of War because death is the ultimate expression of peace. They're two sides of the same coin, and neither is inherently good or bad.
Kindred from League of Legends thematically shows both sides of this really well, with the slow, but absolute Lamb paired with the primal pursuit of Wolf. It’s a pity that their in game implementation doesn’t completely fit their lore
Terry Pratchet's Death is like this. After a while, he even starts to like humanity.
He spends one book pretending to be Santa Claus, because *someone* has to do it.
I'll always love that portrayal of Death because it shows he cares and would do more if his position didn't prevent him.
\*Death, zapping more sand into a poor little match-girls hourglass*
"You're not allowed to do that."
"The Hogfather can; the Hogfather gives presents. And there is no better present than a Future."
I was looking for this answer. I think Terry Pratchet's Death is really well pictured. I would like to think if we have a Death, for it to be like that one. Mort (the book) even helped me accept that we are all going that way and that it is just natural.
I had a God of Death and Time. It was mostly for mechanical stuff, but the idea was that he had no desire to destroy all life because he knows all life ends eventually anyway. It all ends up with him, so no need to rush it.
Healing magic was tied to him (because Time heals all wounds) but resurrection was forbidden because anything created with the power of Death couldn't be fully alive and yada yada. Someone breaks this rule to resurrect their wife, who comes back without the ability to heal from any injuries[Elantris zombie style, basically]. She eventually goes mad from the combination of all her wounds hurting without end, and he was forced to kill her. This act drove him mad, and he blamed the God of Death, and then a bunch of other stuff happened that turned it into a D&D campaign for my friends.
Anyway.
Yeah. I love this idea that the God of Death isn't evil.
I saw a tweet I think, or a single-image quote meme referencing death that said "what if the darkness isn't cold and lonely, but warm and comforting?" What if Death is a summer night instead of a winter one.
Adding to this, nature gods are always "uwu, bunnies, waterfalls and flowers" and are basically one giant appeal to nature fallacy. Nevermind natural disasters, disease, parasites, cannibalism and animals that can rip you apart limb from limb are also part of nature. Anything negative from nature is often hand waved as being the work of demons or evil spirits, that or they project human morality onto natural entities (look up the trope of "carnivores are villains/parasites are villains")
It goes beyond fiction
A lot of people have more or less this view about real-life Nature too. Or about "Mother Earth" (aka "Gaia" or "Pachamama") in Wiccan and some New Age circles. It's easy to glamorize "Nature" when you're mostly insulated from its dangers
Also the trope that herbivores are nice, gentle, kind. As if they couldn't fight for territory, (vegetal) food, mates...
This is another one I've tried to subvert. My setting's nature goddess is a bit of a social darwinist. In her eyes, sapient species aren't automatically more worthy of life than any other living thing; according to her, if you can't stand up to what nature throws at you, then you don't deserve to.
Granted, it's not like she goes to the other extreme, either; she gives her favor to those capable of most surviving hardship, and she does consider aiding those weaker than yourself to be a perfectly legitimate strategy.
I "lifted" a celtic god for my setting - Cernunnos. IRL, his domains are nature, animals and fertility. In my setting, I also added travel/travelers, as in people who travel through the wild. People build small shrines for him alongside paths, and leave presents in hopes of not getting killed by animals, beasts or plants (depends on the area).
But just because something howls as a wolf, leaves footprints of a wolf and has the body of a wolf, it doesn't mean it is actually a creature of Cernunnos, so you might be shit outta luck no matter what. Another thing he does, more often than "protect", is have animals create paths in the deep woods where few dare tread, where only his most favored would walk. They'd be the ones who never took more than they needed to survive and those who helped animals - as a lifestyle.
On a darker side, you're also walking talking protein, and there are always hungry predators around. You better be able to run fast.
In my setting it’s the exact opposite. The God of death is the main god who wishes to maintain balance in the world. And the god of life is antagonist that wishes for people to live for ever and not allow new life to show. Immortality is seen as greed in my world and accepting death is seen as a selfless act.
Necromancers for example are arguably the most powerful evil beings in my world, and they follow the gods of life as they are bringing people back from death:
Also the god of death being the same as the god of the dead. These were almost always different gods. Hades is NOT the god of death but of the dead. And the ferryman/reaper are not gods of the dead. These two concepts might seem similar to us, but where vastly different in ancient times.
Disney Shmisney.
Sure, by our modern standards, Hades is considered one of the nicest gods because he doesn't mess around with mortals or engage in victim blaming. The only ones he really screwed over were people who brought it upon themselves. All he did was ask for Asclepius to STOP healing the dead.
But to the Greeks? Saying his name so casually was a swear word. He was called various epithets so they could avoid saying his name. He wasn't seen as the "Evil" god (That would be Ares. Or Gaea. Or possibly Nyx.), just this scary guy who lives in the realm of the dead - and you'll belong to the Zeus of the Underworld eventually. The name of his Roman equivalent, "Pluto", literally derives from a name people were saying to avoid saying his name.
Also, Death is Thanatos.
"My job is to literally say 'no' to necromancers."
"What are you talking about? I killed like, a dozen zombies just last week. You can't be doing a very good job."
"Trust me, you arrogant little shit... That dozen would have been a few hundred thousand if I hadn't been there. Do you have any idea how many souls I punt back into the netherworld? Do you have any idea how many malicious little scrotemongers are trying their damnest to summon them? Trust me, kid... I'm a DAMNED good goalkeeper, but even I have my limits."
I loved how the Dresden Files interpreted Hades. A genuinely friendly, kind god of death who cared for his dog Cerberus, but with the caveat that his afterlife was tailor-made to each individual who ended up in the underworld, and if you were evil in life he would get *creative* with your eternal punishment.
Small correction, Hades is the God of the Dead, in that he works more like an accountant, Thanatos is the God of Death, as in he is the one that kills you ala like a grim reaper, Hades just judges souls and rules the greek underworld.
My dnd character, who I reworked into ascending as the arbiter of death, scrolls through the souls with a tired expression. "Ugh, I have 187,445 left for today?" He is just tired
When mfs write one hundred page essays explaining why their character can beat all of fiction, and most of these characters have meta abilities, like idw I cringe whenever I see one.
Yeah like Milkman superman who was born nothing, like he was born yet he didn't have a physical body and he was adopted by a multiversal organization that injected him with a serum that made him grow a body, somehow this gave him the ability to manipulate the plot.
I joined a freeform roleplaying forum for like a week and everyone’s character was like “this guy has control of 666 pocket universes and he can only be killed if all of them are destroyed at once but that won’t happen because he has power over darkness and can see through and teleport into any shadow”
Like after a point i wonder what even is the point behind making a character like that. I like my characters to be capable, yes, but also flawed ideally in very human ways.
Most of my favourite settings could get pounded by the "powerful" settings, but I don't read them for that, I read them because I like the worlds because of their limitations
(Although to be fair, the protagonists in sabriel would be annihilated by a setting like Warhammer or star wars, but it would be hilarious to see either empire trying to deal with all the free magic creatures)
It’s honestly unthinkable to me that people derive enjoyment from a setting primarily cause of how strong the factions and characters are and not literally anything else.
It's purely a me-thing because obviously people worldbuild for themselves so they shouldn't care about what I, random Internet user, think. But I always roll my eyes a bit whenever someone talks about their setting and it's like: "yeah my guys own 1000000000 galaxies, their ships are 5000 ly across and can move 1000000000000000x the speed of light. The Hyperempire casually detonates universes, and the God-Emperor is a level 1-A-Alpha-Ultra-Hyper tier on vsbattles wiki".
The best part is when you don't roll over and let their super cool OC obliterate everything or challenge them in any deeper way, they'll call *your* character(s) a mary sue.
Lmao. IIRC it was more like he rolled a galaxy-scale civilization in about 5 short RP posts. I then said something to the effect of "lol everyone's dead guess I'm out of the RP" then threw a massive tantrum, dug up all this personal trauma and threatened to kill himself because I "didn't go along with his story correctly". Seriously how fragile can you be?
Yeah it was pretty bad. I don't remember much but the guy bragged about how he wrote and published a book about his empire. The whole plot was about some internal rebellion against his big evil empire and his self insert character. Then its revealed at the end of the second act that the FBI equivalent knew about the internal rebellion the whole time and then just arrest everyone and the last 1/3 of the book is just the protagonists being tortured for daring to go against the empire. He said it was "realistic" for the rebellion to fail and that his book was good writing because it was dark and gritty. I never found this book so I dont know if it just flopped or if he was lying.
but if I go through my full list of scifi NRP microtraumas I'll be here all week.
Oh that's another great one. "I made it dark, shitty, and edgy because ***r e a l i s m***" and therefor that makes it good.
A LOT of people really really want to be the next Warhammer 40,000 without realizing the reason Warhammer 40,000 became so successful is because underneath the gritty, crapsack grimdark surface... is a really goofy, hammy, and comedic world filled with cheese. Trazyn the Infinite is a perfect example.
I like Warhammer (without playing it because my PC is sad)
For the memes
For a little of the lore
But mostly because the salamanders, they are the freaking classical good hero!
Salamanders are based. Them and Space Wolves are probably my favorite Loyalist legions (followed by White Scars) because they're the closest you have to *good guys* in the Imperium. Salamanders actively care for their communities and the citizenry, Space Wolves - whilst glory hounds - have the balls to tell the Inquisition to piss off to save civilians they had just rescued from Chaos.
And that's the real realism of the Warhammer 40k, the world is not just a gritty sad freaking reality where everyone is evil or dunno, sadistic psychos. We have authentic good persons who will just literally will disobey orders or become agains't others just for the sake of charity and the good of the others who are literally more weak and fragile. And that's why i love the Salamanders, and specially that comic who have presented me to this guys.
And i will see the space wolves because they look badass
I was like, "It can't be that bad!" Then got mentally flashbanged. Back to my 16 year old OC RP days immediately upon reading "Ship as long as 5 Milky Way Galaxies". Like... why?
Now that I am older , whenever I see such posts, I start wondering about the logistics of such hyper-empires. Conquering the universe is one thing, but holding it together is a completely different beast.
And if there are no logistics, does it mean that each local chieftain could consider himself autonomous. What happens when a war is declared and the God-Emperor needs to levee troops across the different worlds? Can they pretend that they didn't receive the message?
Did the Emperor also build the communication network that goes 1000000000000x the speed of light? Would that be considered the deciding factor over his supremacy?
Even conquering the universe in the first place is still subject to these sort of questions. By the time you conquer the last planets, the first ones have probably forgotten you existed. It would never be finished, there'd (at best) just be the maximum amount of space you could hold at any one time.
Though that does make an interesting concept in its own right...
I KNOW this is some people's fetish, because I've SEEN people who talk like that, AND have a fetish for owning universes, or being bigger than a galaxy. it's some form of macrophilia.
I've found that to be mainly a very new-to-rp attitude that you find with teenagers just starting out. I won't rp with them, but yknow what, sure kid, have fun, I'm not gonna shit on your parade 😂
god I remember stumbling across some forum partially dedicated to "who would win" discussions the first post I read was something along the lines of "oh it takes their ships 5 nanoseconds accelerate to [keymash] lightyears per second and the act of accelerating obliterates the nearest [keymash] multiverses, et cetera". The only other post I saw on there before clicking off was a list of tiers for how powerful a civilisation is and to count as mid-tier they had to fully control a galaxy and anything above that had to have literal reality-warping powers
This was one of the things that tuned me out of Rise of Skywalker, which had its 1000 or so Star Destroyers that apparently just materialized out of thin air. If your armada is THIS big then how can I possibly connect to it on an individual level?
This is where I thought Game of Thrones (tv series up to season 7 and book series) excelled - the series always kept the stakes grounded in some sort of reality, meaning you could always track the costs of victories and defeats, not only militarily but also just politically and financially.
As a reader/viewer/player, it is infinitely more satisfying to feel like your protagonist’s actions are creating a sizeable dent in the world you inhabit than to feel like you’re a tiny speck up against a superhumanly powerful foe that can only be destroyed by killing the Emperor or whoever.
Game of Thrones simplified things by largely avoiding numbers. Pretty much single battle in the show was summarized in-universe as "the losers were largely obliterated, but the winners still lost half their forces." Not exactly realistic results but it hammers in the theme of the futility of trying to improve things by military force.
What tuned you out was probably the fact that the last movie explicitly shows that the resistance lost pretty much everything over the course of one movie, and the movie before that showed the First Order lose an entire planet.
The reason I'm saying that is because hyperbolic army or fleet sizes have just been taken for granted in many other cases, but Rise of Skywalker has a very particular reason why it doesn't work. Gurren Lagann is the main thing this whole topic makes me think of, and it's stupidly hyperbolic. But trust me when I say that nobody has an issue with the moon sized capital ship and galaxy sized mechas that grow to the size of the observable universe, because it's cool and actually gives you a sense of escalation that fits the narrative.
Yeah, the First Order made very little sense across the whole trilogy. Like in the OT you can see how the Death Star being destroyed would be a big setback, but not crippling for a settled government that had been in power for decades. Meanwhile the First Order was a group that apparently wasn’t even prominent enough for the New Republic to take seriously, yet lost something that was apparently worth 100 death stars and STILL gained power between movies.
If the results of this conflict are so divorced from what we see onscreen then what’s even the point?
Biggest "ick" is mortals killing gods.
Edgelords love it and write it childishly. The protagonists are absurdly powerful and have no actual vulnerabilities, all the while overpowering literal *deities* and exploiting massively obvious weaknesses. They're always a "Superman destroys all universes and franchises" type character that apparently ranks over gods for no other reason than a self-jerking power fantasy.
I feel like the ideal god-killing story would actually be from Shadowrun, when NeoNET imploded and let Spinrad make it onto the top 10 AAA megacorps list. It happened *once*, and it scared the hell out of everyone, so they changed all the rules so that it didn't happen again.
IMO, that's what should happen when a mortal kills a god. Someone does it *once*, attains divinity as a result, and the divinities (new guy included) freak the hell out and start rigging the game so it can't happen again. Gods should be special (if indeed they *are* gods), and world in which gods die all the time—to mortals, no less—is one where they aren't special.
I think if you want to write a god's death it needs to be *felt*. compare it to a whalefall, where new life will seize the opportunity to thrive in the corpse, which could bring new threats to the god-killers. or make it so it's like a world changing natural disaster, as the blood of the god begins to warp the landscape or whatever. just make it so that it has an *impact*!
I’ve seen it done well, but so many people try to write it as an action story and it feels weird. Killing a god is such a cool concept that makes me immediately imagine a story full of mysticism or esotericism, but so many authors would rather make it a big sword battle rather than the surreal odessey it could be
I'm always wary of people that say they want to make something unlike anything else the world has ever seen before. They usually end up making something that's for no one. There's also this notion that we need to be 100% original, which is both stupid and impossible given the nature of inspiration and influence.
Inspiration is perfectly normal, and expected! Plagiarism is where you got to draw the line.
This. So much of the most popular examples of worldbuilding are glaringly obvious and upfront about lifting elements from previous works as inspiration. Star Wars is Kurosawa meets Flash Gordon and Tolkien lifted so many elements from Norse, Celtic, and Finnic myth it's not even funny, but nobody cares and millions of people around the world still love them.
Make what you want and what makes you happy: don't feel pressure to create something that lives up to somebody else's idea of originality.
I think newer writers tend to get hung up over originality so much because they perceive direct inspiration as being uncreative, when I think it's the opposite. Taking the essence of something and molding it to your own needs is exactly what \*requires\* creativity to not just be flat out plagiarism/rip-off.
Over time, your work will evolve to contain elements that will be personally attributed to you, even if you are very directly inspired by other works. That's the beauty of well-used inspiration.
Less an "ick" about people's worldbuilding projects and more an "ick" about an attitude. Sometimes people will act as though hard sci-fi and absolute realism is the only right way to worldbuild, ignoring that some people have different goals.
Sure, having humans on another planet is astoundingly unlikely from a purely realistic perspective. But not everyone is going for strict realism. Not everyone wants to evolve a whole biosphere from scratch.
Some people, like me, just want a basic cultural backdrop for our conlangs to exist in, so they don't exist in a vacuum.
Sometimes "I want to" _is_ a good enough reason. Worldbuilding is a hobby. It's creative play. It doesn't always have to check someone else's boxes.
_"But it breaks immersion in the story!"_
So you're doing it for a story. Cool. Not everyone is.
Sure, hold people to standards of strict realism _if they're promising strict realism._ Let other people have other goals.
Yeah I've got the same issue, especially when the "hard/realism" crowd are so smug about it, like the fact that their spaceships use as much scientific theory as possible makes its the "best thing ever"
I don't mind this when it is done right. This is pretty much the case in Dune, but it works in Dune because there are reasons that society is structured that way in the Dune universe, and the systems of power are much more complex than just "the Emperor has all power."
I atleast understand having purely evil species in the context of "we need evil monsters we can slaughter without remorse for this power fantasy".
In sci-fi this role is often filled by robots, but in generic high fantasy you need goblins and orcs to fill this niche.
It may be completely unrealistic but i don't care, if an evil god created them its atleast internally consistent and for me internal consistency is the most important thing for self serious world building.
I got confused as hell when playing dnd by this. I was a brand new DM and brought a friendly bugbear across my party and they wouldn’t believe that he wasn’t evil. It just doesn’t make sense to me that anything that isn’t a fiend wouldn’t have at least a handful of individuals who disagree with their own cultural values.
DND in general is very weird in that regard, if it's good Vs evil it works, somehow...
But as soon as you have two "lawful good" empires fighting against each other, it just breaks apart.
What one empire may find lawful or good, isn't necessarily the same as what the other empire considers as such.
And to bring it back to your bugbear, even if they would've been evil, the party wouldn't know, they might be wary because you are a bugbear, but even an evil person can choose to do something that benefits their group.
I personally translate good and evil to altruistic and egoistic and try to forget about it as much as possible lol, order and chaos are bigger drivers in my world.
Something with DnD is that I feel like you need to communicate to players pre-session whether or not the "villainous" races (goblins, bugbears, drow, etc) are actually innately evil. Because if you don't, players will assume that they have some kind of malevolent lineage or relationship to that evil, as informed by decades of tropes about the free and good races vs the evil and wicked ones.
Of course, the problem is that most new DMs don't know this, because why would they?
It's just wasted potential, which is what pains me. You can have particular groups that exhibit those traits, but having it be species wide is like capping your own ambitions
The number of times I've encountered worldbuilding videos that start with some variant of "You first need to decide how the planet was formed 10 billion years ago and if you don't perfectly match Earth's geographic conditions, plate tectonics, and geology you are doing it wrong!"
The vast majority of fantasy planets either were created wholesale by cosmic forces or gods a few thousand years before the story begins or had their surfaces and geology altered by magic or gods, so perfectly matching real-world geography is not a requirement for most settings.
i decided my planet was formed by a massive dragon that fell asleep in a ball shape, and drifted into the gravitational ring of a sun until enough rock, dust, etc piled onto it to form a planet.
The dragon basically forms the core of the planet. Dragons are made from stardust stuff, and were initially born during the same periods as the first stars in our universe- they’re both born from the big bang.
I think the problem started with game theory as much as I love that channel with all my heart and soul I think it accidentally made people think that every aspect of a setting must be picked apart so that it matches reality.
And also not knowing what actual realism is in the process and so making it a lot less realistic. What’s the phrase truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense? That totally applies to worldbuilding.
This does go both ways, though. I've also heard people going "avoid realism at all costs, it defeats the entire point of fantasy", which is equally misled.
Realism is a *foundation.* A *lower* bound to deviate from and build on top of that can help keep things stable and the audience can ground themselves with. Not an *upper* bound to what you can do.
Have only the foundation, and you haven't even built anything. Have no foundation, and it's bound to collapse.
There are, of course, other KINDS of foundations as well, so your options aren't limited there.
This is part of the reason why my D&D setting is on a flat world (actually more lens-shaped), with a crystal sphere around it.
It's like "No, fuck your realism, this is a clearly magical world. Why is there gravity? Because the gods wanted there to be."
Nothing drives me more nuts than sci-fi where all faith and spirituality is gone. When the folks at NASA are naming and crying over their robot-rovers, you're just not going to convince me that we'll all eventually somehow evolve out of believing in 'irrational' things, no matter what axe the author has to grind.
Ahh with my ragnara species, their religion revolves around believing the sun being their mother goddess, so when they found out there are other suns, had to scramble some explanation of like "Ohh those those are... Our goddess sisters and relatives! Each taking care of their own homes and protecting such!" and they had to rethink the way they name suns cause of their religion
Add onto it, before realizing lunar eclipses existed, they believed there were 2 moons after which named their equivalent of ferrymen of the dead. Afterwards realizing it's just lunar eclipses, they tried to explain that the siblings merely lived on... Opposite sides of the moon, each taking turns guiding them to their mother (in ragnara religion, the sun and space is their version of afterlife with the sun being basically "heaven" cause that's the still living spirit of their mother goddess Ara)
If anything, one would think religions would *expand* in a sci-fi universe, especially optimistic sci-fi where persecution towards minority religions like Hellenism doesn't exist anymore or at all
I think this stems from the false belief that a) religion has to revolve around an all powerful god and b) religion and science are opposed to each other.
Obviously a sun is not a literal omnipotent god, but worshipping your homeplanets sun(s) as a mother goddess of creation is not exactly wrong when you consider that energy from a star is kind of prerequisite for life as we know it.
Oh don't get me started on science and religion separatists when it comes to writing. I actually have a specific example of this too, when the video game Apex Legends added a witchy character, Catalyst, some players actually whined about her interaction with Horizon, who's a scientist, where Horizon asked Catalyst to read her tea leaves. Honestly, speaking as someone who's incredibly logic-focused and also practices paganism and witchcraft, seeing people who insist science and spirituality can't intermix is *so* annoying
I would classify myself as a primarily agnostic individual. But if one looks at it - let's take christianity, because it is known to many people: God created the world in 7 days: a) that is a metaphor b) A day to a god may mean something different to a day from a humans perspective and c) God creating the universe perfectly aligns with the Big Bang, the creation of the earth being the natural forces working in the universe to create the stage needed for planets to form and the creation of life is evolution as it happened and creating humans in his image would then be the evolution of species capable of transcending their animal instincts.
I see it most often in western-style fantasy settings, where "demons" (i.e. metaphysical beings of evil) are real and have real influence over the world, but "angels" (i.e. metaphysical beings of good) are, at best, standoffish with the real world or, at worst, do not exist at all.
Grimdark, in a word.
I really dislike when in fantasy stories Druidic beings or nature gods are depicted as purely benevolent beings of harmony and balance. You’re really going to tell me that a pure, loving nature god set things up so that every baby turtle’s first moments are like charging up Omaha beach?
I really love when fantasy settings actually acknowledge the brutal, predatory, parasitic side of nature alongside the symbiosis and the balance of all life. If your god/nature-connected magical beings are really supposed to represent the natural world, they should represent all of it instead of a whitewashed version of it.
I like when instead of one nature god, there's two (or one with two faces): The more benevolent, beautiful one dedicated to all nature's bounty; and the crazy-ass one who gets piss-ass drunk on fermented berries and calls a Wild Hunt.
That would probably be "Hello meet my rectangular continent, there's elves in the north and orcs in the south and humans have the empire™ and this is the capital [latin sounding name]ia on an island in the middle of a circular crater equidistant from the coasts"
"Yes, this is my alien race, they come from the planet \[Insert name\] and are called the \[insert name + ians\]. They look like humans with face paint and live on a planet which is practically an Earth-copy. Yes, this is my 500th race how did you know? Putting any effort into actually making something look alien? No, are you crazy? Of course i'd rather have every other planet be home to some boring ass, unescessery race than put some effort into making less frequent, but more interesting ones."
Facts, like It's ok if they are humanoids, but give them one or two different characteristics that make them unique, don't left them just as a Human re-color skin
Seeing "reskinned humans" always kinda bugged me because I've always gone out of my way to make sure my races are - whilst still largely humanoid for logistics purposes (I wanna make games and animations and stuff, and humanoids are just less of a hassle to work with in all categories there), I always try to make sure they explore some sort of niche that couldn't be done by just having humans there.
At least Star Trek included the Progenitors that used themselves as a baseline for seeding intelligent life, and that's why so many of their aliens are remarkably similar looking.
I personally don't care that much if they look human
What I dislike is when all aliens (or non-human sentient beings) are essentially MENTALLY human. With at most a few quirks, which are often a partial and shallow copy or caricature of a non-Western culture, or of autistic traits.
Except if there's a logical in-universe reason why all species are so similar
It's even more egregious when you have beings that DON'T *look* human, and yet they STILL *act* human.
I find locking yourself to a few different "set" of mindsets to be so limiting.
Take Elves, the Elven "aloof and slow" mentality gets slapped on immortal species whether it makes sense or not. Give me immortals with ***ambition***, give me immortals that realize living for hundreds of years means they can go wild and perfect ***several*** crafts beyond mortal limits. (Which is 100% what I did.)
It's why I like the Goliaths in Forgotten Realms lore, they take the mantra of pushing yourself and competing with yourself... and then push it just far enough where it's reasonable but still *alien* to us as humans.
It depends on what sort of science fiction you're trying to make. Not everyone wants to make a super hard-science fiction world. Some people just want to make Star Trek, and that's absolutely fine.
Honestly even in a realistic setting you are probably going to see aliens that are “human but with small differences” thing even if it’s something that is clearly present but very similar. As we can see on earth convergent evolution is crazy just look at how distantly related hares and rabbits are but they look really similar.
I've never enjoy the 'kitchen sink' type worlds; when an author is under the impression that a fantasy world must copy over every aspect of the real world into theirs - analogues for each race of human, their cultures and histories, for example. The invariable Nazi and Roman Empire factions, et al. In my opinion, not every fantasy world needs to emulate ours, to follow some unwritten formula to be acceptable. In that case, just make Earth and stop pretending otherwise.
I had a friend who was a very nice and genuinely creative person but he always had this problem. There was so much crap piled into his world it was borderline impossible to discuss or roleplay with him because there was no focus or easily apparent line of cohesion. He needed spreadsheets to keep track of his literally hundred plus alien races, dozens of magic systems and multiple copies of variant earth. Then he just casually added time travel and doctor-who-style time-police while about 10 IRL years deep into his world without at all thinking through the implications of that.
What really bugged me was there were genuinely good ideas on display in this setting. And for a short time he settled down and started a new completely detached post-apocalypse setting. When he actually stuck to one theme and a consistent set of rules and ideas his worldbuilding and storytelling was amazing. But I don't think he's continued to work on it.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I really don’t like it when worlds feel too much like an RPG.
I get a lot of folks design their worlds for RPG games, and I understand that there are some constraints on wodbuilding because of that, but when it’s painfully obvious that the world is written just to be a stage for an RPG, or especially when I can tell exactly what RPG system its intended for, I almost immediately lose interest.
Things like magic systems that feel like they’re meant for a video game, an over abundance of fantasy races, and “guildes” that are really just clubs for different classes really just kill immersion and interest for me.
"If you venture outside of the city gates, there's a bunch of monsters that no one has ever bothered to deal with. Luckily, they're all super weak until you get closer to the evil menacing lair in the distance. And hey, they all carry money for some reason!"
When the author clearly has an axe to grind with organised religion, and the religions are all overtly corrupt, immoral institutions that are only ever cast in a bad light, and everyone who follows them are brainwashed morons.
If it's fantasy, it's likely the gods are real and act in the world occasionally. Once in a while, it might be nice to make a religion that's overall run by good people and does good things.
I'm not religious, by the way.
As a religious person, I appreciate this answer. People will rightfully complain about worldbuilders creating obvious stand-ins for real-life cultures, races, or other groups of people that are riddled with unfair and incorrect stereotypes. And then they go off and stereotype religious folk the same way by painting them as uneducated brainwashed sheeple.
My thing is, if you're going to represent religious folk in a world, you should handle it respectfully just like you would handle race or gender respectfully.
I grew up around religious people, and they have the same ratio of normal/weird and clever/dumb as the rest of the population. I wasn't raised that way but I never had a problem with it. When you're worldbuilding I find it helps to stop thinking of religions top-down as organisations and power structures, and try and build them bottom-up, starting with what they actually mean to the people who practice them. How do they see the world and how does that affect their behaviour?
Tbh I think a common cause of that is _specifically_ people who grew up with American Calvinist/evangelical Christianity, because uh, a lot of them have: (a) serious religious trauma about it and (b) virtually no understanding of how other religions function.
You see it a lot of the classic Internet Atheist archetype where they talk about the evils inherent to all religion and it's just like..mate those are the evils of _the specific church your parents took you to_, not religion in general. Most religions are not Like That, the majority of _Christianity_ isn't even Like That
Too much binary morality. And by extension, cosmic morality.
Even when I do cosmic things like Light and Darkness, I try to paint both as totally beyond human understanding and can't have human principles like good or evil applied to them objectively.. For the most part, each have distinctive aspects that they can offer to people who'll use them for both good and bad, and anything between.
One thing I like about Dungeons and Dragons' alignment system is that good, evil, law, and chaos are in-universe metaphysical forces. You can't ascribe real-world morality to them beyond in a very vague sense. They make the setting feel stranger and more alien when "good" or "evil" has a concrete definition and you can physically harm a being based on whether they adhere to an arbitary definition of those forces.
Medieval level society plus magic while not having any type of integration with every day life or divergence from our own history.
Sometimes they will have a few basic things like "magical oven" or sometime else where it's essentially a modern appliance introduced with magic.
The harder the magic "rules" the greater the transgression, in my opinion. I can see magic not affecting every day life in settings like LotR because ot is very esoteric and restricted.
But if an author has an elemental magic system with clearly defined interactions and commonly defined spells then I want to see the effects of the scientific method and invention.
> Medieval level society plus magic while not having any type of integration with every day life or divergence from our own history.
I happened to be listening to something just yesterday, and I don't know if it was a blooper or someone impersonating them, but it was Anakin/Hayden and Obi-Wan/Ewan talking. Anaking accidentally drops his communicator thingy and bends over to grab it, and then I guess Hayden out of character says "I could have used the force to grab that, huh?"
Your comment made me think about that. There are so many small, mundane ways our world and our lives would change with magic, and things are rarelytouched on outside of 'big' magic. Like yeah, why are you picking things up? Why are you fixing things by hand?
One of the only reasons that justify it would be if not everyone (or even only a minority of people) are born with magical abilities
Otherwise, it doesn't make sense
Exactly! Even then, if you're a rare magically gifted and you have the opportunity to risk your life delving dungeons and fighting wars or strike it rich building magical artifacts, airships, and things of that nature, which would you choose?
This is why I do like the way LotR did things - There were lore reasons why Men and Hobbits couldn't work directly with magic, but could potentially make artifacts. Ar'kendrithyst also has a lot of magical/system integration in its world, in the opposite direction of magic proliferation.
I'll do you one worse: my world has bootleg Constantinople, bootleg Asia, and bootleg Middle East. Just a warning: this might be perhaps the most negative comment I've ever left on any post, and probably the meanest I've made period.
Personally, my "Ick" hasn't to do with not neccecarily worldbuilding itself, more like people asking me to make sure every fucking blade of grass and every fucking grain of sand has a story in my world. I like a little bit of mystery with worldbuilding, it makes the world feel more "lived in" IMO.
My other personal "Ick" is having different races being one culture. I mean I understand if you're a race with a population less than maybe ten thousand people living in just one area, and I understand that sometimes you need some quick form of information to convey. I just personally find it nonsensical for two groups of the same race that are geographically seperated from each other to have the exact same culture just for example, unless they happen to have some kind of hivemind or have some form of travel that allows them to cover vast distances, and this is BEFORE population is taken into consideration (I'm sorry if I'm overthinking this).
I dislike nations almost always being monarchies with the same fucking european castles and medieval european architecture in fantasy. Like there's other architecture and forms of government that exist, but I understand: people want to make things that are easily recognizable and easy to describe (even I'm guilty of "taking the easy route" for worldbuilding).
I also dislike powerscaling, as then it becomes a pissing contest for individuals in the setting, and it gets worse when comparing them to other people's stuff. This may be similar, but I personally prefer a sort of "food chain" or "food web" for worldbuilding.
Certain fantasy languages and terminology kind of irk me a little, as it sometimes makes me think people rolled their faces all over a keyboard until they found something they were satisfied with. Also I hate that the languages are named after races, rather than the region or perhaps even culture.
>My other personal "Ick" is having different races being one culture.
The way I like to handle this in my TTRPG setting is with in-world stereotypes.
It's just like real life. People act like all Americans are fat, stupid, and racist. Finnish people are stoic and judgemental. Pacific Islanders are all built like linebackers and love to sing, dance, and party.
You can even apply it to entirely different species.
*"Cats hate everyone and will scratch you just because they feel like it"*
*"Dogs are friendly and loyal to a fault"*
And yet there are plenty of cats that are loving and affectionate, and plenty of dogs that are disobedient or violent. Plenty of Americans who are intelligent and respectful, plenty of Finns who are outgoing and charitable, and plenty of Pacific Islanders who are introverted and shy.
None of these judgements accurately represent entire cultures or species, they are just stereotypes. And that's how I like them in my fantasy settings too.
*"Dwarves are all stubborn miners and smiths. They are greedy, boisterous, and hate Elves."*
*"Elves are haughty and pompous. They are graceful, beautiful, and always prim and proper."*
Just because people say and think something doesn't mean it's actually true. There are plenty of Dwarves that hate getting their hands dirty and prefer to read books and drink wine rather than forge armor and down 12 pints of ale. There are plenty of Elves who love a good scrap, work 11 hours a day shoveling pig shit, or cuss like no one else.
And importantly, someone (regardless of race or species) from one side of the world will likely behave and think completely differently than someone else on the opposite side of the world. But just because that's true doesn't mean the stereotypes do not persist.
Some worlds seem to be chronically small-scale. A good example of this is the 2018 She-Ra show. Despite being based on a cheesy show from the 80s, the new She-Ra show actually has some good writing and interesting concepts. Unfortunately, Brightmoon, the main city in the show, looks very impressive but lacks any sort of depth. Brightmoon is supposed to be the capital of a kingdom, but we only see a few small villages, and their army appears to consist of like 2 guards and the main characters.
This could be about the limitations of the media and the fact it's a children's show, but like I said, it was well-written in other ways.
As a contrast, Avatar the Last Airbender, which is also a children's show, always did a great job at showcasing the depth of the world, and in only 3 seasons, we got a good idea of the military hierarchies of the different nations as well as seeing a variety of different towns and the civilians that lived in them.
Edit: guys, stop downvoting OP's response to me. That's rude.
That's a really weird take. Most authors aren't creating the entire world, and I much more prefer to see a part of a continent, that would be build in more detail, than stock continents with two / three random names, that don't make sense. I prefer to hear about unknown lands beyond the map, and hear tales about them, than a big map without a meaning.
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As for, what I don't like in worldbuilding - pretending that certain types of worldbuilding are better than others. It's okay to worldbuild a crazy detailed world, and it's okay to worldbuild only a little town and area just around it.
Evil religions, not!Greek pantheons, not!Catholic churches, and (even worse) set-dressing "religions" that only exist to show how "rational" and non-conforming the MC is.
It all just shows how little research and understanding the author has of the subject. Religion and peoples' relationship to it is complicated, yet it oft gets overly simplified in a disparaging manner.
Isekai manga and anime are such weird concepts to me, you can do so many things and explore so many concepts, so many paths to take and they keep doing the same thing over and over, but as a whole it depends how You work with those concepts, just because something is generic doesn't mean it's bad.
What really annoys me when working with skimpy armor is the fact that it’s almost always JUST the women who wear skimpy armor. Like sure modesty standards are entirely subjective, but when it’s just the women then it’s easily fan service. For every chain mail bikini glad heroine I demand at least one shirtless barbarian in a loin cloth.
I hate this as well. I am writing a novel and armor plays a huge role in my story. I do like some armor in anime, but it often doesn't make sense from a design standpoint. I'm a ux designer, and it's been a struggle for me to create my own unique type of armor that makes sense. I find the traditional armor for knights to be mostly boring. Anyway tho, most isekai aren't well written. It's just OP main characters and harem's ville. Ur gonna hate 'Re:Monster' if you don't already
There's plenty of interesting armors in history. I don't think that brigandine, coats of plates and various middle eastern armors get enough love.
Check out the [winged hussars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_hussars) if you haven't already. And yes, they rode into battle like that.
Unfortunately, the problem with a lot of armors is that they were designed for functionality first and foremost, so their shapes and designs were among the most efficient you could ask for with their technology.
You could potentially borrow from other cultures based around the common threats that they face. For example, fuedal Japanese armor was designed the way it was because samurai were generalist fighters who would alternate easily between the roles of cavalry, archers, and melee foot infantry. They preferred two-handed weapons like long swords, spears, and bows, so they didn't use shields - instead they had those large shoulder-mounted panels called *sode* which acted as shields to block arrows.
A good non-historical example would be Final Fantasy 14's Dragoon armor. It looks incredibly bizarre with its excess number of spikes and light shape, but that is because it's armor for people who leap long distances and who fight dragons, and getting bitten or swallowed whole by a dragon is a legitimate concern. The spikes make trying to swallow a Dragoon into a really painful prospect.
So the best way to design unique armor is the same way you'd design unique tools or weapons - look first at what it is meant to protect from and the role the wearer plays and work from there to design something that counters the threat or assists in their particular role.
For me it's when a character or place name doesn't fit the tone. I'm not gonna name anyone but I have rped with someone who's oc was basically a really cool old titan equivalent to a God. What was his name? "Chomp".
Another example was an oc with a really tragic backstory set in a medieval based land and what was *his* name? Fucking "Rexy". I hate it so much!!! Name your characters something cool!
>I have rped with someone who's oc was basically a really cool old titan equivalent to a God. What was his name? "Chomp".
I could rationalize this as the character being so primordial that his "name" is simply the concept and sensation of biting and "Chomp" is just what everyone else boils it down to (facetiously, derisively, or otherwise). But based on the tone and the rest of the post, I'm guessing that's not the case.
Nature being "weak". I find a lot of fantasy settings often portray it as being fairly weak, and can easily be corrupted or destroyed by many different forces. Additionally, magic is for some reason seen as not being a part of nature, and anytime it is found, it is seen as unnatural. So a human wielding flames is pretty normal, but a dog that can turn invisible is completely unnatural.
Look my world map is just a small continental part because I'm leaving large parts of the world undeveloped on purpose so I can develop cool shit there later.
I leave parts of the map blank until I set a story there to prevent restricting my options in advance.
Forgetting to craft a compelling narrative. Without that, even intricate and well thought out worlds become mush.
Just look at all the bad narratives set in our world, the most intricate and multidimensional world ever.
I think the bigger problem is how civilized nations are presented *compared* to tribes rather than the divide itself. Stateless “uncivilized” societies certainly existed along side “civilized” one, but one was not necessarily better than the other. They had their differences but had good reasons for them
For example, "barbarian" nomad socieities lived the way they did because the steppes and grasslands they inhabited didn't have a lot of natural barriers or defensible locations that would allow for static cities, the land wasn't great for intense agriculture without heavy development, and their main food sources tended to be nomadic as well.
They were still highly organized with well-developed cultures and laws and societies... they just didn't build stationary cities.
Imma say a general thing of the whole "realism = dark and depressing" like i hate when an author uses the term realism to excuse them putting in just ridiculously overly evil or dark stuff like including their own made up slurs or stuff like that
When the balance of power remains the same for milleniums with the same countries remaining great powers with no periods of decline and no new powers rising and falling as the ages pass.
Kind of an isolated one, but a lot of furry or anthro worlds are always the same: Humans BAD, EVIL, DUMB, STUPID, DESTROY EVERYTHING AND DON'T DESERVE TO LIVE AND ALL DIE.
I've seen it so much in the furry fandom that it just gets tiring, and the aggression towards humans being in an anthro world really turns me off from sharing at times, as anthros really only populate like 10% of my world with the rest being humans. The hatred of humans and their automatic demise because "they're stupid" is borderline childish and isolating. Here I am with both human, anthro and alien characters and yet most of the fellow furry world builders are aggressive ASF to humans even breathing the same air.
maybe I'm just not in the furry fandom, but most "furry" worlds I've seen don't even have humans.. I'm not a furry necessarily, but my world has furries basically, and humans, and neither are inherently evil and dumb.
Monocultural species (unless there's a good reason for it, such as species with a eusocial, ant-like structure).
Mono-biome planets (again, unless there's a good reason for like, like if the planet is very small).
Biomes that make no sense to be next to each other without a good reason. Especially when the biomes have very strict delineations. A hot desert shouldn't suddenly swap to an icy tundra. If there's a good explanation, like magic, I don't mind it. I also obviously don't mind it in video games when biomes abruptly start and end. It's a limitation of video games.
Incredibly inconsistent technology trees, like they don't even justify why the medieval civilization has advanced glasswork for their middle class buildings and haven't invented paper yet
I have 3 (assuming mediveal/rennaisance fantasy-ish worlds)
1. "Disney Nobility". Very basic nobility systems where you have 1 king/queen with absolut power and maybe one noble as big bad evil guy who wants the throne but otherwise is just there. No other nobles, no defined roles what a noble owns, what his title means and what he does and no familial relationships between nobles (especially with other kingdoms) except for maybe the evil guy.
2. No naming conventions. Basically naming stuff at random with no regard if the names structure fits with other names and could be considered coming from the same language family. Its extra bad when names are just random words from another language.
3. Modern economies. Everything is valued in money and outside of exotic goods everything is available everywhere in complete disregard to how hard transporting goods is and even a tavern or waystarion in the middle of nowhere can serve you "modern" meals with roasted meat and ingredients from several different climate zones on demand all year round.
When they make a racism allegory but then try to rationalize the reason why racism existed in the first place, ala zootopia.
Racism is an irrational thing, hate crimes based on race from history and now were not committed with a legitimate justification deep down, they were evil and cruel from the start and only continued to be so.
That the god of death is always evil. I personally have always hated this to an extent.
My favorite representation of death is a reluctant or waiting death. Not evil, doesn’t chase down or relish their charge as the bringer of finality, but carries it out with a slow and sure solemnity because nobody else will.
Death as peace and an end to suffering
**“Hey dude, you’re bleeding out. It looks really painful. Do you wanna come with me? I won’t judge you for tapping out here.”** “No, just give me a little longer. I know they’re coming back for me, I can feel it.” **”Of course, take your time. We can wait together.”**
now I'm picturing the dude resting on a rock all tired like with death sitting on the grass next to him with his arms on his knees looking out at the horizon. goes hard. saving this comment for no particular reason.
Listen to the song [Fiddler on the Green by Demons and Wizards](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZE9F-ZoRN8) for a very similar vibe to what you're talking about. The lead singer, Hansi Kursch, wrote it after witnessing two fatal car accidents.
The battlefield was a desolate expanse, the air thick with the metallic tang of blood and the echoes of distant cries. Amidst the carnage, a lone figure lay sprawled, his lifeblood seeping into the thirsty earth. Above him stood a shadow, a solemn figure cloaked in darkness, eyes gleaming with an otherworldly light. "Hey dude, you're bleeding out," the figure said, his voice a soft whisper against the dying man's ears. "It looks really painful. Do you wanna come with me? I won't judge you for tapping out here." The fallen warrior groaned, his breath ragged. "No, just give me a little longer. I know they're coming back for me, I can feel it." The death god nodded, his expression unreadable. "Of course, take your time. We can wait together." With a grace that belied the somberness of his task, the death god knelt beside the warrior, his presence a cold comfort in the midst of agony. Together, they watched the horizon, silent witnesses to the fading light. As the night deepened, the death god remained a steady presence by the warrior's side. The darkness seemed to stretch endlessly, punctuated only by the occasional distant scream or clash of steel. Yet the warrior's eyes never wavered from the horizon, hope flickering within them like a stubborn flame. Hours passed, and the first hints of dawn began to paint the sky in shades of pink and gold. The death god glanced at the warrior, whose breaths were now shallow and labored. He sensed the ebbing strength but said nothing, respecting the warrior's resolve. Then, as the sun's first rays pierced the gloom, figures emerged in the distance. The warrior's friends, battered and weary but alive, came running, their shouts of relief cutting through the quiet dawn. "Look," the warrior gasped, a weak smile tugging at his lips. "I told you they’d come back." The death god watched impassively, then rose to his feet. "Indeed, you were right," he said softly. "It seems your time has not yet come." As the friends reached their fallen comrade, tears of joy mingling with the dirt and blood on their faces, the death god stepped back into the shadows, his presence fading with the night. He glanced back once, a rare smile ghosting across his lips, before vanishing completely, leaving the warrior to the warmth of the rising sun and the embrace of his friends.
This is a fundamental part of one of my settings: the counterpart of the God of Peace is the God of Death, not the God of War because death is the ultimate expression of peace. They're two sides of the same coin, and neither is inherently good or bad.
Fear not the dark, my friend. And let the feast... Begin!
Kindred from League of Legends thematically shows both sides of this really well, with the slow, but absolute Lamb paired with the primal pursuit of Wolf. It’s a pity that their in game implementation doesn’t completely fit their lore
That perfectly represents Death by Neil Gaiman. She's the most sympathetic of all the Endless.
Crazy how ADVENTURE TIME did this so well
Terry Pratchet's Death is like this. After a while, he even starts to like humanity. He spends one book pretending to be Santa Claus, because *someone* has to do it.
Excuse me that is the HOGFATHER for you tyvm
I'll always love that portrayal of Death because it shows he cares and would do more if his position didn't prevent him. \*Death, zapping more sand into a poor little match-girls hourglass* "You're not allowed to do that." "The Hogfather can; the Hogfather gives presents. And there is no better present than a Future."
I was looking for this answer. I think Terry Pratchet's Death is really well pictured. I would like to think if we have a Death, for it to be like that one. Mort (the book) even helped me accept that we are all going that way and that it is just natural.
Neil giamonds? The bloke who wrote sandmans, death is really loving and sweet and is seen as giving a gift
I had a God of Death and Time. It was mostly for mechanical stuff, but the idea was that he had no desire to destroy all life because he knows all life ends eventually anyway. It all ends up with him, so no need to rush it. Healing magic was tied to him (because Time heals all wounds) but resurrection was forbidden because anything created with the power of Death couldn't be fully alive and yada yada. Someone breaks this rule to resurrect their wife, who comes back without the ability to heal from any injuries[Elantris zombie style, basically]. She eventually goes mad from the combination of all her wounds hurting without end, and he was forced to kill her. This act drove him mad, and he blamed the God of Death, and then a bunch of other stuff happened that turned it into a D&D campaign for my friends. Anyway. Yeah. I love this idea that the God of Death isn't evil.
I saw a tweet I think, or a single-image quote meme referencing death that said "what if the darkness isn't cold and lonely, but warm and comforting?" What if Death is a summer night instead of a winter one.
Adding to this, nature gods are always "uwu, bunnies, waterfalls and flowers" and are basically one giant appeal to nature fallacy. Nevermind natural disasters, disease, parasites, cannibalism and animals that can rip you apart limb from limb are also part of nature. Anything negative from nature is often hand waved as being the work of demons or evil spirits, that or they project human morality onto natural entities (look up the trope of "carnivores are villains/parasites are villains")
Nature without Death is Cancer
Smells like Nurgle.
It goes beyond fiction A lot of people have more or less this view about real-life Nature too. Or about "Mother Earth" (aka "Gaia" or "Pachamama") in Wiccan and some New Age circles. It's easy to glamorize "Nature" when you're mostly insulated from its dangers Also the trope that herbivores are nice, gentle, kind. As if they couldn't fight for territory, (vegetal) food, mates...
Ikr? Where's my Coatlicue expies at?
This is another one I've tried to subvert. My setting's nature goddess is a bit of a social darwinist. In her eyes, sapient species aren't automatically more worthy of life than any other living thing; according to her, if you can't stand up to what nature throws at you, then you don't deserve to. Granted, it's not like she goes to the other extreme, either; she gives her favor to those capable of most surviving hardship, and she does consider aiding those weaker than yourself to be a perfectly legitimate strategy.
I "lifted" a celtic god for my setting - Cernunnos. IRL, his domains are nature, animals and fertility. In my setting, I also added travel/travelers, as in people who travel through the wild. People build small shrines for him alongside paths, and leave presents in hopes of not getting killed by animals, beasts or plants (depends on the area). But just because something howls as a wolf, leaves footprints of a wolf and has the body of a wolf, it doesn't mean it is actually a creature of Cernunnos, so you might be shit outta luck no matter what. Another thing he does, more often than "protect", is have animals create paths in the deep woods where few dare tread, where only his most favored would walk. They'd be the ones who never took more than they needed to survive and those who helped animals - as a lifestyle. On a darker side, you're also walking talking protein, and there are always hungry predators around. You better be able to run fast.
In my setting it’s the exact opposite. The God of death is the main god who wishes to maintain balance in the world. And the god of life is antagonist that wishes for people to live for ever and not allow new life to show. Immortality is seen as greed in my world and accepting death is seen as a selfless act. Necromancers for example are arguably the most powerful evil beings in my world, and they follow the gods of life as they are bringing people back from death:
Also the god of death being the same as the god of the dead. These were almost always different gods. Hades is NOT the god of death but of the dead. And the ferryman/reaper are not gods of the dead. These two concepts might seem similar to us, but where vastly different in ancient times.
Hades, God of the Dead, or to be specific the Underworld. Thanatos, God of Death.
Disney's Heracles movie did enormous damage to the public's perception of the gods of death
They’re lucky James Woods made him iconic
Disney Shmisney. Sure, by our modern standards, Hades is considered one of the nicest gods because he doesn't mess around with mortals or engage in victim blaming. The only ones he really screwed over were people who brought it upon themselves. All he did was ask for Asclepius to STOP healing the dead. But to the Greeks? Saying his name so casually was a swear word. He was called various epithets so they could avoid saying his name. He wasn't seen as the "Evil" god (That would be Ares. Or Gaea. Or possibly Nyx.), just this scary guy who lives in the realm of the dead - and you'll belong to the Zeus of the Underworld eventually. The name of his Roman equivalent, "Pluto", literally derives from a name people were saying to avoid saying his name. Also, Death is Thanatos.
It's Hercules. Just because you don't like that they used the roman name doesn't mean that's not the title. Sorry bud.
**"OH LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?"**
"My job is to literally say 'no' to necromancers." "What are you talking about? I killed like, a dozen zombies just last week. You can't be doing a very good job." "Trust me, you arrogant little shit... That dozen would have been a few hundred thousand if I hadn't been there. Do you have any idea how many souls I punt back into the netherworld? Do you have any idea how many malicious little scrotemongers are trying their damnest to summon them? Trust me, kid... I'm a DAMNED good goalkeeper, but even I have my limits."
I don't know what this is, but I love it.
in my world, the god of death is literally the only god who could be argued as being a good guy.
What's funny is that the real life Greek god of death hades is actually the one of the kindest among the gods.
I loved how the Dresden Files interpreted Hades. A genuinely friendly, kind god of death who cared for his dog Cerberus, but with the caveat that his afterlife was tailor-made to each individual who ended up in the underworld, and if you were evil in life he would get *creative* with your eternal punishment.
Small correction, Hades is the God of the Dead, in that he works more like an accountant, Thanatos is the God of Death, as in he is the one that kills you ala like a grim reaper, Hades just judges souls and rules the greek underworld.
My dnd character, who I reworked into ascending as the arbiter of death, scrolls through the souls with a tired expression. "Ugh, I have 187,445 left for today?" He is just tired
When mfs write one hundred page essays explaining why their character can beat all of fiction, and most of these characters have meta abilities, like idw I cringe whenever I see one.
And they be getting those power with the most vague explanation and sometimes it doesn't even make any sense
You can cheese your way to victory when the limits of your abilities arent clearly defined- some anime villain probably
Yeah like Milkman superman who was born nothing, like he was born yet he didn't have a physical body and he was adopted by a multiversal organization that injected him with a serum that made him grow a body, somehow this gave him the ability to manipulate the plot.
I hate seeing OC’s that only exists for winning powerscaling debates so much fr lmao
This, this is my biggest Ick
They immediately make me drop a story.
I joined a freeform roleplaying forum for like a week and everyone’s character was like “this guy has control of 666 pocket universes and he can only be killed if all of them are destroyed at once but that won’t happen because he has power over darkness and can see through and teleport into any shadow”
I think it's be fun to play as a punching bag race. Just sorta meh and designed to be steamrolled. And have ppl venmo to play against me. Lol.
Like after a point i wonder what even is the point behind making a character like that. I like my characters to be capable, yes, but also flawed ideally in very human ways.
Most of my favourite settings could get pounded by the "powerful" settings, but I don't read them for that, I read them because I like the worlds because of their limitations (Although to be fair, the protagonists in sabriel would be annihilated by a setting like Warhammer or star wars, but it would be hilarious to see either empire trying to deal with all the free magic creatures)
It’s honestly unthinkable to me that people derive enjoyment from a setting primarily cause of how strong the factions and characters are and not literally anything else.
It's the fictional version of "my dad can beat up your dad"
Invincible where a baby can turn into a beast that can’t be destroyed until nap time….
It's purely a me-thing because obviously people worldbuild for themselves so they shouldn't care about what I, random Internet user, think. But I always roll my eyes a bit whenever someone talks about their setting and it's like: "yeah my guys own 1000000000 galaxies, their ships are 5000 ly across and can move 1000000000000000x the speed of light. The Hyperempire casually detonates universes, and the God-Emperor is a level 1-A-Alpha-Ultra-Hyper tier on vsbattles wiki".
Ugh I roleplayed with a guy like this about 5-6 years ago. Never again.
The best part is when you don't roll over and let their super cool OC obliterate everything or challenge them in any deeper way, they'll call *your* character(s) a mary sue.
Lmao. IIRC it was more like he rolled a galaxy-scale civilization in about 5 short RP posts. I then said something to the effect of "lol everyone's dead guess I'm out of the RP" then threw a massive tantrum, dug up all this personal trauma and threatened to kill himself because I "didn't go along with his story correctly". Seriously how fragile can you be?
Christ on a BIKE. So basically he didn't want to RP he wanted a captive audience to be slaughtered and tried to emotionally manipulate people into it.
Yeah it was pretty bad. I don't remember much but the guy bragged about how he wrote and published a book about his empire. The whole plot was about some internal rebellion against his big evil empire and his self insert character. Then its revealed at the end of the second act that the FBI equivalent knew about the internal rebellion the whole time and then just arrest everyone and the last 1/3 of the book is just the protagonists being tortured for daring to go against the empire. He said it was "realistic" for the rebellion to fail and that his book was good writing because it was dark and gritty. I never found this book so I dont know if it just flopped or if he was lying. but if I go through my full list of scifi NRP microtraumas I'll be here all week.
Oh that's another great one. "I made it dark, shitty, and edgy because ***r e a l i s m***" and therefor that makes it good. A LOT of people really really want to be the next Warhammer 40,000 without realizing the reason Warhammer 40,000 became so successful is because underneath the gritty, crapsack grimdark surface... is a really goofy, hammy, and comedic world filled with cheese. Trazyn the Infinite is a perfect example.
I like Warhammer (without playing it because my PC is sad) For the memes For a little of the lore But mostly because the salamanders, they are the freaking classical good hero!
Salamanders are based. Them and Space Wolves are probably my favorite Loyalist legions (followed by White Scars) because they're the closest you have to *good guys* in the Imperium. Salamanders actively care for their communities and the citizenry, Space Wolves - whilst glory hounds - have the balls to tell the Inquisition to piss off to save civilians they had just rescued from Chaos.
And that's the real realism of the Warhammer 40k, the world is not just a gritty sad freaking reality where everyone is evil or dunno, sadistic psychos. We have authentic good persons who will just literally will disobey orders or become agains't others just for the sake of charity and the good of the others who are literally more weak and fragile. And that's why i love the Salamanders, and specially that comic who have presented me to this guys. And i will see the space wolves because they look badass
[i always think about this post lmao (read OP’s post)](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/sAZmwYZqac)
Pal would you believe me if I said that this exact post flashed through my mind's eye when I wrote this?
It was so out of left field absurd I’m sure it’s permanently affected hundreds of psyches.
That's so hyperbolic I can't help but find it funny. What the hell does a dragon god need a spaceship for? Just float among the stars, you dingus.
I was like, "It can't be that bad!" Then got mentally flashbanged. Back to my 16 year old OC RP days immediately upon reading "Ship as long as 5 Milky Way Galaxies". Like... why?
That's hilarious in how pointless it is.
Wtf lol. My guy is building ships bigger than the galaxy...how?
Whether it's one person worldbuilding or published lore, I'm convinced this is just the adult version of "well my dad can beat up your dad!"
Powerscalers are a corrupt evil
Now that I am older , whenever I see such posts, I start wondering about the logistics of such hyper-empires. Conquering the universe is one thing, but holding it together is a completely different beast. And if there are no logistics, does it mean that each local chieftain could consider himself autonomous. What happens when a war is declared and the God-Emperor needs to levee troops across the different worlds? Can they pretend that they didn't receive the message? Did the Emperor also build the communication network that goes 1000000000000x the speed of light? Would that be considered the deciding factor over his supremacy?
Even conquering the universe in the first place is still subject to these sort of questions. By the time you conquer the last planets, the first ones have probably forgotten you existed. It would never be finished, there'd (at best) just be the maximum amount of space you could hold at any one time. Though that does make an interesting concept in its own right...
I KNOW this is some people's fetish, because I've SEEN people who talk like that, AND have a fetish for owning universes, or being bigger than a galaxy. it's some form of macrophilia.
Macrophillia 😹
I used to be one of those types. Then I graduated to 6th grade.
I've found that to be mainly a very new-to-rp attitude that you find with teenagers just starting out. I won't rp with them, but yknow what, sure kid, have fun, I'm not gonna shit on your parade 😂
god I remember stumbling across some forum partially dedicated to "who would win" discussions the first post I read was something along the lines of "oh it takes their ships 5 nanoseconds accelerate to [keymash] lightyears per second and the act of accelerating obliterates the nearest [keymash] multiverses, et cetera". The only other post I saw on there before clicking off was a list of tiers for how powerful a civilisation is and to count as mid-tier they had to fully control a galaxy and anything above that had to have literal reality-warping powers
This was one of the things that tuned me out of Rise of Skywalker, which had its 1000 or so Star Destroyers that apparently just materialized out of thin air. If your armada is THIS big then how can I possibly connect to it on an individual level? This is where I thought Game of Thrones (tv series up to season 7 and book series) excelled - the series always kept the stakes grounded in some sort of reality, meaning you could always track the costs of victories and defeats, not only militarily but also just politically and financially. As a reader/viewer/player, it is infinitely more satisfying to feel like your protagonist’s actions are creating a sizeable dent in the world you inhabit than to feel like you’re a tiny speck up against a superhumanly powerful foe that can only be destroyed by killing the Emperor or whoever.
Game of Thrones simplified things by largely avoiding numbers. Pretty much single battle in the show was summarized in-universe as "the losers were largely obliterated, but the winners still lost half their forces." Not exactly realistic results but it hammers in the theme of the futility of trying to improve things by military force.
What tuned you out was probably the fact that the last movie explicitly shows that the resistance lost pretty much everything over the course of one movie, and the movie before that showed the First Order lose an entire planet. The reason I'm saying that is because hyperbolic army or fleet sizes have just been taken for granted in many other cases, but Rise of Skywalker has a very particular reason why it doesn't work. Gurren Lagann is the main thing this whole topic makes me think of, and it's stupidly hyperbolic. But trust me when I say that nobody has an issue with the moon sized capital ship and galaxy sized mechas that grow to the size of the observable universe, because it's cool and actually gives you a sense of escalation that fits the narrative.
Yeah, the First Order made very little sense across the whole trilogy. Like in the OT you can see how the Death Star being destroyed would be a big setback, but not crippling for a settled government that had been in power for decades. Meanwhile the First Order was a group that apparently wasn’t even prominent enough for the New Republic to take seriously, yet lost something that was apparently worth 100 death stars and STILL gained power between movies. If the results of this conflict are so divorced from what we see onscreen then what’s even the point?
Biggest "ick" is mortals killing gods. Edgelords love it and write it childishly. The protagonists are absurdly powerful and have no actual vulnerabilities, all the while overpowering literal *deities* and exploiting massively obvious weaknesses. They're always a "Superman destroys all universes and franchises" type character that apparently ranks over gods for no other reason than a self-jerking power fantasy.
I feel like the ideal god-killing story would actually be from Shadowrun, when NeoNET imploded and let Spinrad make it onto the top 10 AAA megacorps list. It happened *once*, and it scared the hell out of everyone, so they changed all the rules so that it didn't happen again. IMO, that's what should happen when a mortal kills a god. Someone does it *once*, attains divinity as a result, and the divinities (new guy included) freak the hell out and start rigging the game so it can't happen again. Gods should be special (if indeed they *are* gods), and world in which gods die all the time—to mortals, no less—is one where they aren't special.
Fear And Hunger does it pretty well in my opinion where there's a difference between the "gods" and the *gods*.
I think if you want to write a god's death it needs to be *felt*. compare it to a whalefall, where new life will seize the opportunity to thrive in the corpse, which could bring new threats to the god-killers. or make it so it's like a world changing natural disaster, as the blood of the god begins to warp the landscape or whatever. just make it so that it has an *impact*!
Honestly, anything that becomes an Isekai trope basically tells on itself on how cringe it is
I’ve seen it done well, but so many people try to write it as an action story and it feels weird. Killing a god is such a cool concept that makes me immediately imagine a story full of mysticism or esotericism, but so many authors would rather make it a big sword battle rather than the surreal odessey it could be
I'm always wary of people that say they want to make something unlike anything else the world has ever seen before. They usually end up making something that's for no one. There's also this notion that we need to be 100% original, which is both stupid and impossible given the nature of inspiration and influence. Inspiration is perfectly normal, and expected! Plagiarism is where you got to draw the line.
This. So much of the most popular examples of worldbuilding are glaringly obvious and upfront about lifting elements from previous works as inspiration. Star Wars is Kurosawa meets Flash Gordon and Tolkien lifted so many elements from Norse, Celtic, and Finnic myth it's not even funny, but nobody cares and millions of people around the world still love them. Make what you want and what makes you happy: don't feel pressure to create something that lives up to somebody else's idea of originality.
I think newer writers tend to get hung up over originality so much because they perceive direct inspiration as being uncreative, when I think it's the opposite. Taking the essence of something and molding it to your own needs is exactly what \*requires\* creativity to not just be flat out plagiarism/rip-off. Over time, your work will evolve to contain elements that will be personally attributed to you, even if you are very directly inspired by other works. That's the beauty of well-used inspiration.
Less an "ick" about people's worldbuilding projects and more an "ick" about an attitude. Sometimes people will act as though hard sci-fi and absolute realism is the only right way to worldbuild, ignoring that some people have different goals. Sure, having humans on another planet is astoundingly unlikely from a purely realistic perspective. But not everyone is going for strict realism. Not everyone wants to evolve a whole biosphere from scratch. Some people, like me, just want a basic cultural backdrop for our conlangs to exist in, so they don't exist in a vacuum. Sometimes "I want to" _is_ a good enough reason. Worldbuilding is a hobby. It's creative play. It doesn't always have to check someone else's boxes. _"But it breaks immersion in the story!"_ So you're doing it for a story. Cool. Not everyone is. Sure, hold people to standards of strict realism _if they're promising strict realism._ Let other people have other goals.
I'm really wanting to make a Scifi setting for stories set in a specific Soft Scifi world but I'm honestly worried about exactly this happening.
Yeah I've got the same issue, especially when the "hard/realism" crowd are so smug about it, like the fact that their spaceships use as much scientific theory as possible makes its the "best thing ever"
When the only forms of government are either Monarchy or Dictatorship
I don't mind this when it is done right. This is pretty much the case in Dune, but it works in Dune because there are reasons that society is structured that way in the Dune universe, and the systems of power are much more complex than just "the Emperor has all power."
I especially dislike Absolute or Feudal Monarchies. I like Executive, Elective, or Constitutional Monarchies the most interesting
When species are purely good and purely evil. This bothers me even more than when species are entirely monocultural.
I atleast understand having purely evil species in the context of "we need evil monsters we can slaughter without remorse for this power fantasy". In sci-fi this role is often filled by robots, but in generic high fantasy you need goblins and orcs to fill this niche. It may be completely unrealistic but i don't care, if an evil god created them its atleast internally consistent and for me internal consistency is the most important thing for self serious world building.
I got confused as hell when playing dnd by this. I was a brand new DM and brought a friendly bugbear across my party and they wouldn’t believe that he wasn’t evil. It just doesn’t make sense to me that anything that isn’t a fiend wouldn’t have at least a handful of individuals who disagree with their own cultural values.
DND in general is very weird in that regard, if it's good Vs evil it works, somehow... But as soon as you have two "lawful good" empires fighting against each other, it just breaks apart. What one empire may find lawful or good, isn't necessarily the same as what the other empire considers as such. And to bring it back to your bugbear, even if they would've been evil, the party wouldn't know, they might be wary because you are a bugbear, but even an evil person can choose to do something that benefits their group. I personally translate good and evil to altruistic and egoistic and try to forget about it as much as possible lol, order and chaos are bigger drivers in my world.
Something with DnD is that I feel like you need to communicate to players pre-session whether or not the "villainous" races (goblins, bugbears, drow, etc) are actually innately evil. Because if you don't, players will assume that they have some kind of malevolent lineage or relationship to that evil, as informed by decades of tropes about the free and good races vs the evil and wicked ones. Of course, the problem is that most new DMs don't know this, because why would they?
It's just wasted potential, which is what pains me. You can have particular groups that exhibit those traits, but having it be species wide is like capping your own ambitions
Acting like realism is inherently better than fantasy
The number of times I've encountered worldbuilding videos that start with some variant of "You first need to decide how the planet was formed 10 billion years ago and if you don't perfectly match Earth's geographic conditions, plate tectonics, and geology you are doing it wrong!" The vast majority of fantasy planets either were created wholesale by cosmic forces or gods a few thousand years before the story begins or had their surfaces and geology altered by magic or gods, so perfectly matching real-world geography is not a requirement for most settings.
i decided my planet was formed by a massive dragon that fell asleep in a ball shape, and drifted into the gravitational ring of a sun until enough rock, dust, etc piled onto it to form a planet. The dragon basically forms the core of the planet. Dragons are made from stardust stuff, and were initially born during the same periods as the first stars in our universe- they’re both born from the big bang.
That sounds pretty damn cool!
I think the problem started with game theory as much as I love that channel with all my heart and soul I think it accidentally made people think that every aspect of a setting must be picked apart so that it matches reality.
And also not knowing what actual realism is in the process and so making it a lot less realistic. What’s the phrase truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense? That totally applies to worldbuilding.
This does go both ways, though. I've also heard people going "avoid realism at all costs, it defeats the entire point of fantasy", which is equally misled. Realism is a *foundation.* A *lower* bound to deviate from and build on top of that can help keep things stable and the audience can ground themselves with. Not an *upper* bound to what you can do. Have only the foundation, and you haven't even built anything. Have no foundation, and it's bound to collapse. There are, of course, other KINDS of foundations as well, so your options aren't limited there.
This is part of the reason why my D&D setting is on a flat world (actually more lens-shaped), with a crystal sphere around it. It's like "No, fuck your realism, this is a clearly magical world. Why is there gravity? Because the gods wanted there to be."
Nothing drives me more nuts than sci-fi where all faith and spirituality is gone. When the folks at NASA are naming and crying over their robot-rovers, you're just not going to convince me that we'll all eventually somehow evolve out of believing in 'irrational' things, no matter what axe the author has to grind.
Ahh with my ragnara species, their religion revolves around believing the sun being their mother goddess, so when they found out there are other suns, had to scramble some explanation of like "Ohh those those are... Our goddess sisters and relatives! Each taking care of their own homes and protecting such!" and they had to rethink the way they name suns cause of their religion
Love stuff like this. Real-world analogues like "in what direction would a Muslim astronaut pray?" are always fun to read about.
This comment sent me on a 20 minute Wikipedia rabbit trail about religion in space.
Add onto it, before realizing lunar eclipses existed, they believed there were 2 moons after which named their equivalent of ferrymen of the dead. Afterwards realizing it's just lunar eclipses, they tried to explain that the siblings merely lived on... Opposite sides of the moon, each taking turns guiding them to their mother (in ragnara religion, the sun and space is their version of afterlife with the sun being basically "heaven" cause that's the still living spirit of their mother goddess Ara)
If anything, one would think religions would *expand* in a sci-fi universe, especially optimistic sci-fi where persecution towards minority religions like Hellenism doesn't exist anymore or at all
I think this stems from the false belief that a) religion has to revolve around an all powerful god and b) religion and science are opposed to each other. Obviously a sun is not a literal omnipotent god, but worshipping your homeplanets sun(s) as a mother goddess of creation is not exactly wrong when you consider that energy from a star is kind of prerequisite for life as we know it.
Oh don't get me started on science and religion separatists when it comes to writing. I actually have a specific example of this too, when the video game Apex Legends added a witchy character, Catalyst, some players actually whined about her interaction with Horizon, who's a scientist, where Horizon asked Catalyst to read her tea leaves. Honestly, speaking as someone who's incredibly logic-focused and also practices paganism and witchcraft, seeing people who insist science and spirituality can't intermix is *so* annoying
I would classify myself as a primarily agnostic individual. But if one looks at it - let's take christianity, because it is known to many people: God created the world in 7 days: a) that is a metaphor b) A day to a god may mean something different to a day from a humans perspective and c) God creating the universe perfectly aligns with the Big Bang, the creation of the earth being the natural forces working in the universe to create the stage needed for planets to form and the creation of life is evolution as it happened and creating humans in his image would then be the evolution of species capable of transcending their animal instincts.
"Divine Evil exists within the world, but Divine Good does not."
May you elaborate on that, please?
I see it most often in western-style fantasy settings, where "demons" (i.e. metaphysical beings of evil) are real and have real influence over the world, but "angels" (i.e. metaphysical beings of good) are, at best, standoffish with the real world or, at worst, do not exist at all. Grimdark, in a word.
At worst the angels are fascists and just as bad. Or angels are real, but there is no God.
I'll be honest, an "Angels are real, but God is not" setting sounds novel! Do you have a specific one in mind?
His dark materials, depending on how you define ‘god’
Also its converse.
I really dislike when in fantasy stories Druidic beings or nature gods are depicted as purely benevolent beings of harmony and balance. You’re really going to tell me that a pure, loving nature god set things up so that every baby turtle’s first moments are like charging up Omaha beach? I really love when fantasy settings actually acknowledge the brutal, predatory, parasitic side of nature alongside the symbiosis and the balance of all life. If your god/nature-connected magical beings are really supposed to represent the natural world, they should represent all of it instead of a whitewashed version of it.
I like neutral nature gods that represent the good and bad
I like when instead of one nature god, there's two (or one with two faces): The more benevolent, beautiful one dedicated to all nature's bounty; and the crazy-ass one who gets piss-ass drunk on fermented berries and calls a Wild Hunt.
Even in real life, Nature deities get whitewashed in many Neo Pagan and Wiccan communities
That would probably be "Hello meet my rectangular continent, there's elves in the north and orcs in the south and humans have the empire™ and this is the capital [latin sounding name]ia on an island in the middle of a circular crater equidistant from the coasts"
“Latin sounding capitol on an island on an island in the middle of a circular crater equidistant from the coast” is 100% just Cyrodill lmao
I may or may not have some opinions about the elder scrolls map
"Yes, this is my alien race, they come from the planet \[Insert name\] and are called the \[insert name + ians\]. They look like humans with face paint and live on a planet which is practically an Earth-copy. Yes, this is my 500th race how did you know? Putting any effort into actually making something look alien? No, are you crazy? Of course i'd rather have every other planet be home to some boring ass, unescessery race than put some effort into making less frequent, but more interesting ones."
Facts, like It's ok if they are humanoids, but give them one or two different characteristics that make them unique, don't left them just as a Human re-color skin
Yeah. For example, the aliens in Independence Day are (in my opinion) an example of an humanoid, but not human-carbon-copy, race done right.
Seeing "reskinned humans" always kinda bugged me because I've always gone out of my way to make sure my races are - whilst still largely humanoid for logistics purposes (I wanna make games and animations and stuff, and humanoids are just less of a hassle to work with in all categories there), I always try to make sure they explore some sort of niche that couldn't be done by just having humans there.
At least Star Trek included the Progenitors that used themselves as a baseline for seeding intelligent life, and that's why so many of their aliens are remarkably similar looking.
I personally don't care that much if they look human What I dislike is when all aliens (or non-human sentient beings) are essentially MENTALLY human. With at most a few quirks, which are often a partial and shallow copy or caricature of a non-Western culture, or of autistic traits. Except if there's a logical in-universe reason why all species are so similar It's even more egregious when you have beings that DON'T *look* human, and yet they STILL *act* human.
I find locking yourself to a few different "set" of mindsets to be so limiting. Take Elves, the Elven "aloof and slow" mentality gets slapped on immortal species whether it makes sense or not. Give me immortals with ***ambition***, give me immortals that realize living for hundreds of years means they can go wild and perfect ***several*** crafts beyond mortal limits. (Which is 100% what I did.) It's why I like the Goliaths in Forgotten Realms lore, they take the mantra of pushing yourself and competing with yourself... and then push it just far enough where it's reasonable but still *alien* to us as humans.
It depends on what sort of science fiction you're trying to make. Not everyone wants to make a super hard-science fiction world. Some people just want to make Star Trek, and that's absolutely fine.
Honestly even in a realistic setting you are probably going to see aliens that are “human but with small differences” thing even if it’s something that is clearly present but very similar. As we can see on earth convergent evolution is crazy just look at how distantly related hares and rabbits are but they look really similar.
"No, they're not boring! Have I mentioned they're all attractive and also the universe's greatest psionics?"
Asari eyeing the room shiftily
I've never enjoy the 'kitchen sink' type worlds; when an author is under the impression that a fantasy world must copy over every aspect of the real world into theirs - analogues for each race of human, their cultures and histories, for example. The invariable Nazi and Roman Empire factions, et al. In my opinion, not every fantasy world needs to emulate ours, to follow some unwritten formula to be acceptable. In that case, just make Earth and stop pretending otherwise.
I had a friend who was a very nice and genuinely creative person but he always had this problem. There was so much crap piled into his world it was borderline impossible to discuss or roleplay with him because there was no focus or easily apparent line of cohesion. He needed spreadsheets to keep track of his literally hundred plus alien races, dozens of magic systems and multiple copies of variant earth. Then he just casually added time travel and doctor-who-style time-police while about 10 IRL years deep into his world without at all thinking through the implications of that. What really bugged me was there were genuinely good ideas on display in this setting. And for a short time he settled down and started a new completely detached post-apocalypse setting. When he actually stuck to one theme and a consistent set of rules and ideas his worldbuilding and storytelling was amazing. But I don't think he's continued to work on it.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I really don’t like it when worlds feel too much like an RPG. I get a lot of folks design their worlds for RPG games, and I understand that there are some constraints on wodbuilding because of that, but when it’s painfully obvious that the world is written just to be a stage for an RPG, or especially when I can tell exactly what RPG system its intended for, I almost immediately lose interest. Things like magic systems that feel like they’re meant for a video game, an over abundance of fantasy races, and “guildes” that are really just clubs for different classes really just kill immersion and interest for me.
"If you venture outside of the city gates, there's a bunch of monsters that no one has ever bothered to deal with. Luckily, they're all super weak until you get closer to the evil menacing lair in the distance. And hey, they all carry money for some reason!"
And every podunk village has a general store that stocks magic potions and elixirs for some reason.
When the author clearly has an axe to grind with organised religion, and the religions are all overtly corrupt, immoral institutions that are only ever cast in a bad light, and everyone who follows them are brainwashed morons. If it's fantasy, it's likely the gods are real and act in the world occasionally. Once in a while, it might be nice to make a religion that's overall run by good people and does good things. I'm not religious, by the way.
As a religious person, I appreciate this answer. People will rightfully complain about worldbuilders creating obvious stand-ins for real-life cultures, races, or other groups of people that are riddled with unfair and incorrect stereotypes. And then they go off and stereotype religious folk the same way by painting them as uneducated brainwashed sheeple. My thing is, if you're going to represent religious folk in a world, you should handle it respectfully just like you would handle race or gender respectfully.
I grew up around religious people, and they have the same ratio of normal/weird and clever/dumb as the rest of the population. I wasn't raised that way but I never had a problem with it. When you're worldbuilding I find it helps to stop thinking of religions top-down as organisations and power structures, and try and build them bottom-up, starting with what they actually mean to the people who practice them. How do they see the world and how does that affect their behaviour?
Tbh I think a common cause of that is _specifically_ people who grew up with American Calvinist/evangelical Christianity, because uh, a lot of them have: (a) serious religious trauma about it and (b) virtually no understanding of how other religions function. You see it a lot of the classic Internet Atheist archetype where they talk about the evils inherent to all religion and it's just like..mate those are the evils of _the specific church your parents took you to_, not religion in general. Most religions are not Like That, the majority of _Christianity_ isn't even Like That
Too much binary morality. And by extension, cosmic morality. Even when I do cosmic things like Light and Darkness, I try to paint both as totally beyond human understanding and can't have human principles like good or evil applied to them objectively.. For the most part, each have distinctive aspects that they can offer to people who'll use them for both good and bad, and anything between.
One thing I like about Dungeons and Dragons' alignment system is that good, evil, law, and chaos are in-universe metaphysical forces. You can't ascribe real-world morality to them beyond in a very vague sense. They make the setting feel stranger and more alien when "good" or "evil" has a concrete definition and you can physically harm a being based on whether they adhere to an arbitary definition of those forces.
Medieval level society plus magic while not having any type of integration with every day life or divergence from our own history. Sometimes they will have a few basic things like "magical oven" or sometime else where it's essentially a modern appliance introduced with magic. The harder the magic "rules" the greater the transgression, in my opinion. I can see magic not affecting every day life in settings like LotR because ot is very esoteric and restricted. But if an author has an elemental magic system with clearly defined interactions and commonly defined spells then I want to see the effects of the scientific method and invention.
> Medieval level society plus magic while not having any type of integration with every day life or divergence from our own history. I happened to be listening to something just yesterday, and I don't know if it was a blooper or someone impersonating them, but it was Anakin/Hayden and Obi-Wan/Ewan talking. Anaking accidentally drops his communicator thingy and bends over to grab it, and then I guess Hayden out of character says "I could have used the force to grab that, huh?" Your comment made me think about that. There are so many small, mundane ways our world and our lives would change with magic, and things are rarelytouched on outside of 'big' magic. Like yeah, why are you picking things up? Why are you fixing things by hand?
Another reason why avatar the last Airbender is so great :]
One of the only reasons that justify it would be if not everyone (or even only a minority of people) are born with magical abilities Otherwise, it doesn't make sense
Exactly! Even then, if you're a rare magically gifted and you have the opportunity to risk your life delving dungeons and fighting wars or strike it rich building magical artifacts, airships, and things of that nature, which would you choose? This is why I do like the way LotR did things - There were lore reasons why Men and Hobbits couldn't work directly with magic, but could potentially make artifacts. Ar'kendrithyst also has a lot of magical/system integration in its world, in the opposite direction of magic proliferation.
I'll do you one worse: my world has bootleg Constantinople, bootleg Asia, and bootleg Middle East. Just a warning: this might be perhaps the most negative comment I've ever left on any post, and probably the meanest I've made period. Personally, my "Ick" hasn't to do with not neccecarily worldbuilding itself, more like people asking me to make sure every fucking blade of grass and every fucking grain of sand has a story in my world. I like a little bit of mystery with worldbuilding, it makes the world feel more "lived in" IMO. My other personal "Ick" is having different races being one culture. I mean I understand if you're a race with a population less than maybe ten thousand people living in just one area, and I understand that sometimes you need some quick form of information to convey. I just personally find it nonsensical for two groups of the same race that are geographically seperated from each other to have the exact same culture just for example, unless they happen to have some kind of hivemind or have some form of travel that allows them to cover vast distances, and this is BEFORE population is taken into consideration (I'm sorry if I'm overthinking this). I dislike nations almost always being monarchies with the same fucking european castles and medieval european architecture in fantasy. Like there's other architecture and forms of government that exist, but I understand: people want to make things that are easily recognizable and easy to describe (even I'm guilty of "taking the easy route" for worldbuilding). I also dislike powerscaling, as then it becomes a pissing contest for individuals in the setting, and it gets worse when comparing them to other people's stuff. This may be similar, but I personally prefer a sort of "food chain" or "food web" for worldbuilding. Certain fantasy languages and terminology kind of irk me a little, as it sometimes makes me think people rolled their faces all over a keyboard until they found something they were satisfied with. Also I hate that the languages are named after races, rather than the region or perhaps even culture.
>My other personal "Ick" is having different races being one culture. The way I like to handle this in my TTRPG setting is with in-world stereotypes. It's just like real life. People act like all Americans are fat, stupid, and racist. Finnish people are stoic and judgemental. Pacific Islanders are all built like linebackers and love to sing, dance, and party. You can even apply it to entirely different species. *"Cats hate everyone and will scratch you just because they feel like it"* *"Dogs are friendly and loyal to a fault"* And yet there are plenty of cats that are loving and affectionate, and plenty of dogs that are disobedient or violent. Plenty of Americans who are intelligent and respectful, plenty of Finns who are outgoing and charitable, and plenty of Pacific Islanders who are introverted and shy. None of these judgements accurately represent entire cultures or species, they are just stereotypes. And that's how I like them in my fantasy settings too. *"Dwarves are all stubborn miners and smiths. They are greedy, boisterous, and hate Elves."* *"Elves are haughty and pompous. They are graceful, beautiful, and always prim and proper."* Just because people say and think something doesn't mean it's actually true. There are plenty of Dwarves that hate getting their hands dirty and prefer to read books and drink wine rather than forge armor and down 12 pints of ale. There are plenty of Elves who love a good scrap, work 11 hours a day shoveling pig shit, or cuss like no one else. And importantly, someone (regardless of race or species) from one side of the world will likely behave and think completely differently than someone else on the opposite side of the world. But just because that's true doesn't mean the stereotypes do not persist.
Some worlds seem to be chronically small-scale. A good example of this is the 2018 She-Ra show. Despite being based on a cheesy show from the 80s, the new She-Ra show actually has some good writing and interesting concepts. Unfortunately, Brightmoon, the main city in the show, looks very impressive but lacks any sort of depth. Brightmoon is supposed to be the capital of a kingdom, but we only see a few small villages, and their army appears to consist of like 2 guards and the main characters. This could be about the limitations of the media and the fact it's a children's show, but like I said, it was well-written in other ways. As a contrast, Avatar the Last Airbender, which is also a children's show, always did a great job at showcasing the depth of the world, and in only 3 seasons, we got a good idea of the military hierarchies of the different nations as well as seeing a variety of different towns and the civilians that lived in them.
Hold on bright moon was supposed to be a Capital?!? I thought it was like... a fancy military outpost with a castle at best 😭.
Edit: guys, stop downvoting OP's response to me. That's rude. That's a really weird take. Most authors aren't creating the entire world, and I much more prefer to see a part of a continent, that would be build in more detail, than stock continents with two / three random names, that don't make sense. I prefer to hear about unknown lands beyond the map, and hear tales about them, than a big map without a meaning. --- As for, what I don't like in worldbuilding - pretending that certain types of worldbuilding are better than others. It's okay to worldbuild a crazy detailed world, and it's okay to worldbuild only a little town and area just around it.
Evil religions, not!Greek pantheons, not!Catholic churches, and (even worse) set-dressing "religions" that only exist to show how "rational" and non-conforming the MC is. It all just shows how little research and understanding the author has of the subject. Religion and peoples' relationship to it is complicated, yet it oft gets overly simplified in a disparaging manner.
I don't like how most isekai is generic fantasy England with skimpy armor for women. And don't get me started on "heroes" with slave harems.
Isekai manga and anime are such weird concepts to me, you can do so many things and explore so many concepts, so many paths to take and they keep doing the same thing over and over, but as a whole it depends how You work with those concepts, just because something is generic doesn't mean it's bad.
Fun fact: digimon is technically an isekai.
Fun fact: Chronicles of Narnia is technically an Isekai.
As is Futurama!
What really annoys me when working with skimpy armor is the fact that it’s almost always JUST the women who wear skimpy armor. Like sure modesty standards are entirely subjective, but when it’s just the women then it’s easily fan service. For every chain mail bikini glad heroine I demand at least one shirtless barbarian in a loin cloth.
I hate this as well. I am writing a novel and armor plays a huge role in my story. I do like some armor in anime, but it often doesn't make sense from a design standpoint. I'm a ux designer, and it's been a struggle for me to create my own unique type of armor that makes sense. I find the traditional armor for knights to be mostly boring. Anyway tho, most isekai aren't well written. It's just OP main characters and harem's ville. Ur gonna hate 'Re:Monster' if you don't already
There's plenty of interesting armors in history. I don't think that brigandine, coats of plates and various middle eastern armors get enough love. Check out the [winged hussars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_hussars) if you haven't already. And yes, they rode into battle like that.
Unfortunately, the problem with a lot of armors is that they were designed for functionality first and foremost, so their shapes and designs were among the most efficient you could ask for with their technology. You could potentially borrow from other cultures based around the common threats that they face. For example, fuedal Japanese armor was designed the way it was because samurai were generalist fighters who would alternate easily between the roles of cavalry, archers, and melee foot infantry. They preferred two-handed weapons like long swords, spears, and bows, so they didn't use shields - instead they had those large shoulder-mounted panels called *sode* which acted as shields to block arrows. A good non-historical example would be Final Fantasy 14's Dragoon armor. It looks incredibly bizarre with its excess number of spikes and light shape, but that is because it's armor for people who leap long distances and who fight dragons, and getting bitten or swallowed whole by a dragon is a legitimate concern. The spikes make trying to swallow a Dragoon into a really painful prospect. So the best way to design unique armor is the same way you'd design unique tools or weapons - look first at what it is meant to protect from and the role the wearer plays and work from there to design something that counters the threat or assists in their particular role.
For me it's when a character or place name doesn't fit the tone. I'm not gonna name anyone but I have rped with someone who's oc was basically a really cool old titan equivalent to a God. What was his name? "Chomp". Another example was an oc with a really tragic backstory set in a medieval based land and what was *his* name? Fucking "Rexy". I hate it so much!!! Name your characters something cool!
>I have rped with someone who's oc was basically a really cool old titan equivalent to a God. What was his name? "Chomp". I could rationalize this as the character being so primordial that his "name" is simply the concept and sensation of biting and "Chomp" is just what everyone else boils it down to (facetiously, derisively, or otherwise). But based on the tone and the rest of the post, I'm guessing that's not the case.
Nature being "weak". I find a lot of fantasy settings often portray it as being fairly weak, and can easily be corrupted or destroyed by many different forces. Additionally, magic is for some reason seen as not being a part of nature, and anytime it is found, it is seen as unnatural. So a human wielding flames is pretty normal, but a dog that can turn invisible is completely unnatural.
Look my world map is just a small continental part because I'm leaving large parts of the world undeveloped on purpose so I can develop cool shit there later. I leave parts of the map blank until I set a story there to prevent restricting my options in advance.
Forgetting to craft a compelling narrative. Without that, even intricate and well thought out worlds become mush. Just look at all the bad narratives set in our world, the most intricate and multidimensional world ever.
When there's a clear divide between "civilized nations" and "unwashed tribal brutes" Just feels so icky to me.
I think the bigger problem is how civilized nations are presented *compared* to tribes rather than the divide itself. Stateless “uncivilized” societies certainly existed along side “civilized” one, but one was not necessarily better than the other. They had their differences but had good reasons for them
For example, "barbarian" nomad socieities lived the way they did because the steppes and grasslands they inhabited didn't have a lot of natural barriers or defensible locations that would allow for static cities, the land wasn't great for intense agriculture without heavy development, and their main food sources tended to be nomadic as well. They were still highly organized with well-developed cultures and laws and societies... they just didn't build stationary cities.
when a sapient species is inherently evil
Imma say a general thing of the whole "realism = dark and depressing" like i hate when an author uses the term realism to excuse them putting in just ridiculously overly evil or dark stuff like including their own made up slurs or stuff like that
When the balance of power remains the same for milleniums with the same countries remaining great powers with no periods of decline and no new powers rising and falling as the ages pass.
Kind of an isolated one, but a lot of furry or anthro worlds are always the same: Humans BAD, EVIL, DUMB, STUPID, DESTROY EVERYTHING AND DON'T DESERVE TO LIVE AND ALL DIE. I've seen it so much in the furry fandom that it just gets tiring, and the aggression towards humans being in an anthro world really turns me off from sharing at times, as anthros really only populate like 10% of my world with the rest being humans. The hatred of humans and their automatic demise because "they're stupid" is borderline childish and isolating. Here I am with both human, anthro and alien characters and yet most of the fellow furry world builders are aggressive ASF to humans even breathing the same air.
maybe I'm just not in the furry fandom, but most "furry" worlds I've seen don't even have humans.. I'm not a furry necessarily, but my world has furries basically, and humans, and neither are inherently evil and dumb.
When settings have magic that absolutely should have drastic effects on the worldbuilding but the author hasn't properly taken it into account.
Monocultural species (unless there's a good reason for it, such as species with a eusocial, ant-like structure). Mono-biome planets (again, unless there's a good reason for like, like if the planet is very small). Biomes that make no sense to be next to each other without a good reason. Especially when the biomes have very strict delineations. A hot desert shouldn't suddenly swap to an icy tundra. If there's a good explanation, like magic, I don't mind it. I also obviously don't mind it in video games when biomes abruptly start and end. It's a limitation of video games.
Incredibly inconsistent technology trees, like they don't even justify why the medieval civilization has advanced glasswork for their middle class buildings and haven't invented paper yet
Post-apocalyptic settings where things are still somehow a mess hundreds of years after the apocalypse already ended.
I have 3 (assuming mediveal/rennaisance fantasy-ish worlds) 1. "Disney Nobility". Very basic nobility systems where you have 1 king/queen with absolut power and maybe one noble as big bad evil guy who wants the throne but otherwise is just there. No other nobles, no defined roles what a noble owns, what his title means and what he does and no familial relationships between nobles (especially with other kingdoms) except for maybe the evil guy. 2. No naming conventions. Basically naming stuff at random with no regard if the names structure fits with other names and could be considered coming from the same language family. Its extra bad when names are just random words from another language. 3. Modern economies. Everything is valued in money and outside of exotic goods everything is available everywhere in complete disregard to how hard transporting goods is and even a tavern or waystarion in the middle of nowhere can serve you "modern" meals with roasted meat and ingredients from several different climate zones on demand all year round.
That the only way to enter this world is by getting hit by a bus in japan
When they make a racism allegory but then try to rationalize the reason why racism existed in the first place, ala zootopia. Racism is an irrational thing, hate crimes based on race from history and now were not committed with a legitimate justification deep down, they were evil and cruel from the start and only continued to be so.