All worldbuilding advice falls into three categories.
- procedure
- slushpile
- categories
The good ones do one category very well. The rest can't pick a lane.
Procedures are ordered lists of tasks, ideal for when one has too many ideas to write down.
A good procedure is specific and arbitrary. No room for questions or hesitation or reasoning, nothing to distract from the numbered list. Compromise is the enemy: you get a drill sergeant dragging you thru the muck towards the finish line.
And waiting for you at the finish line is a satisfying result. Maps, random tables, stats, pretty pictures, published blog posts: these are the dopaminergic rewards for doing the work. This is essential because I deserve a little treat for doign a good job
(Morgan "Horse girl" Dungeonfruit is very good at these.)
Slushpiles are the opposite of procedures. These are for when one has lots of drive but no ideas.
A good slushpile is all vibes. It's shapes and colors, sounds and smells. It's dragon sex on the moon. It's poetry and rabbit holes and dyks. It's fun to say (makes you smile when you mouth the words). It's not wasting your fucking time.
A great slushpile is just a leeeeeeeeetle bit shit. The friction between you and them is what rubs the ideas out of their head and into yours.
(Semi "Demonetized Again" urge is very good at these.)
Categories are complete bunk. Tier lists, personality tests, tvtropes: astrology at best, hobby phrenology at worst.
These exist only to waste your time.
* * *
The worst worldbuilding advice is "Think."
Think about tectonic plates. Think about rain shadow. Think about where food and water come from. Think about how religion informs culture informs religion. Think about real world history. Think about art that inspires you. Think about biology and physics. Think about purpose built architecture.
Thinking is detailing is connecting is fixing is editing. Thinking is not worldbuilding. You cannot think a blank page full.
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| weed's fractal gallery |
Here's a fractal worldbuilding procedure.
Start with 5/7 words. (generate randomly, then replace the lame ones)
- talkative
- plastic
- linear
- microscopic
- thinking (/neg)
Assign a wizard to each.
- blabboth, the rambling skeleton
- griatina, grandcaster crustacean
- EVIL SWORD LESBIAN
- rb, mnscl
- james L. magrotype, first of the braincels
Zoom in on the most interesting one. Griatina. What's she like?
- She talks to crabs.
- She has a false eye.
- She has a toy sword that can actually kill you. All of her tools are toys that work too well: things so fake they loop back around to being superreal.
- Her children are half-crabs because she a freak. They are called orcs.
- Her evil plan is to become immortal and huge, like, planet-sized.
Okay, what about EVIL SWORD LESBIAN?
- She talks to swords.
- She has a false corpus callosum. Exposure to the sword dimension gets her cut in half all the time, but she's learned to just zwoop the halves back together. Her right and left halves are rarely on the same page.
- She has a lot of swords (duh, jesus, listen to yourself)
- Her children are pushmipulyus: things she cut in half and put back together wrong.
- Her evil plan is to get back together with her ex.
What about the map? I want some kind of, uh, island chain. What's up on those?
- Singing rocks.
- Artificial transplant cities trying to blend in.
- Bamboo forests.
- Germ countries, germ politics. Giant colored algae mats disputing borders with salmonella clouds.
- Poor sad troglodyte people trying not to get uplifted by annoying missionary scientists
I like the germs! Tell me about the germs!
- They get together at an evil disease forum every month when the moon is full.
- One of them is a prion disease that turns you into a raggedy ann doll.
- One of them is rust
- They live very short lives. Talking to a disease is very annoying to the disease, because you talk so slow.
- They were, like the troglodytes, forcibly uplifted by those damn missionaries, no doubt related to JLM, that scoundrel.
Zoom in further. A dungeon! A 5-room dungeon! :^)
- Puzzle: Tracking down and isolating the germ in charge at one of these evil disease forums. Pretend to be cholera?
- Trick: It's a masquerade ball, complicating the above.
- Conflict: Chronic Wasting Disease is here. Gotta kill her to save the elk population. Unfortunately she has two swords and knows krav maga.
- Entrance: Giant nose obelisk full of diseased bats. Crawl up the nostril and you'll shrink to germ size.
- Reward: Germs present that are useful to contract/recruit/befriend, like autism BAD JOKE DELETE LATER
Stop. Zoom out. What's going on one level above the wizards?
- Songs on the wind, the symphonia cirrostrata.
- Morphic continents being pushed around by rogue giants, still building the world (how meta!)
- Giant orthocerid tower to heaven (100 floor mmojrpg hogwash with cambrian angels and shit)
- Sooooo many tiny islands, like sooooooo many. Someone broke all the continents apart (which is why the germs are so specialized, and the animals too, everything's filling weird ecological niches)
- Of course, there's the petty, shitty wizards and their thoughts (/neg)
- And a secret sixth thing: the bottom of the ocean, where the elves do.
Get it? Zoom in, zoom out. Fill the pattern, break the pattern. Chase interest, reuse, recycle. Write now, think later.
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| eat your fackin vegetablrs |
