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An interesting take on this might be a society where technology continued to grow in such a place that also wasn't interrupted by outside colonization or being conquered but they still maintained their primitive lifestyles and values.

The society that took over Data in the episode "Masks" where they access the alien archive and Data ends up personifying all the different assets of that society including Masaka, the sun goddess. The ancient society itself was an interesting one in that its technology perhaps surpassed our own at the time, yet they still maintained their highly ritualized culture. They probably scientifically discerned that they was no humanoid-type goddess in their sun and yet they worshiped her with the same reverence and fear as their people always have.

Most interesting. This reminds me of a picture I saw a while ago. Though work doesn't mean it has to happen up front. Many fantasy writers jump in and start writing their story, and discover what kind of world they need as they go.

In fact, fussing too much with world building can be a form of procrastination. And nicely said about cities needing a reason. I think that's something that's often missing in fantasy books, and certainly in rpgs. Someone will put a teeming city smack dab in the middle of the desert or high atop a mountain because it's cool, but there really doesn't seem to be a way for the people there to support itself.

Now if the desert city is along a river that floods regularly, or if the mountain city guards a pass that's an important trade route, and they survive by extorting, er, exacting tithes from caravans and merchants that pass You don't have to explain all this in detail.

If your characters live in this city, they'll take most things about it for granted though if any are visitors or newcomers, they may think about things more. It's often more about the little things that fit together. Like having someone complain about the smell that comes from the dyers' shops, or mentioning that a number of people go around with their arms stained up to the elbows as per Nyki's example or something like that.

This thread has generated surprising conversation. A world can be rich in history and culture before the story begins. Not just geographically. Your characters have a story, but each town, each kingdom has a story. The swamps are littered with the ruins of human fortifications from war long ago, a once lush forest is now a parched desert, leaving behind scorched berren trees as evidence to its past. An elusive race of winged elves live high in uncharted peaks.

Two warring nations send their populace into fudal anarchy as they ravage the landscape, consuming all resources. There is nothing wrong with spending time creating a world. Especially one that will be part of series. The world is a constant. Just like life, we have are stories, but there are many stories at once.

The characters may or may not encounter a good percentage, but those other stories, they beg to be told. To me the world is a big part, especially in the epic fantasy stile.

But the characters have just as much impact on the world as the world does on them. There is beauty in world building. Whether you have it as an afterthought or a breathtaking showpiece, the world you characters live in should be as diverse and dynamic as they are. Totally agree that the world should be diverse and dynamic.

The reader should get a sense that there's a wide world out there with varying cultures and people etc. References to mythology, history, religion, old conflicts, and something as simple as showing the diversity of people teeming around a local seaport all add to the color of your world. But there's a big difference between offering people these peeks, versus getting sidetracked into exhaustive descriptions of stuff that's happening off camera.

And you don't have to fill in your entire map or know every detail of your world's geography and history to be able to give readers that sense of depth. It would be impossible, really.

Think of our own world. Hundreds of nations and cultures in existence now. There were even more historically. Thousands of years of human history.

Even in the modern world, most people know their own homeland's history best and may not have any real idea or may even have wrong ideas about why we fought some war, or why a particular religion or whatever is most common in one country and not another.

What you show your reader will be through the perspectives of your pov character or characters. And there are many things you can discover about your world as you write your story, and they're all things that may or may not figure into what you show the reader directly.

For example, there was a war that happened about four hundred years before the beginning of the story I'm writing. It's important, because some of the things that were outcomes of that war led to the current situation in the world and are behind the major issues facing my protagonist.

I refer to the war and a couple more recent ones that also contribute to some of the tension in the story on several occasions, and some relevant information is discussed and considered at a couple of points.

But I don't at any point describe the whole war. Heck, I couldn't do that right now if I wanted to, as I haven't written that story yet. Absolutely not, but it doesn't need to be all done and dusted before you start writing the stories. Partly because that would mean not writing anything for years, and you may well have outgrown your world by the time you're ready.

Partly because writing stories can itself generate inspiration for world-making. A fleeting reference to a distant place or an ancient event, put in purely for colour, can lead you into a whole new area of world-making. I created my world years ago, it simply was too dear to me to let it fade. Years later, I wanted to write a novel, I couldn't think of any other world to write it in. I never lost my connection to the world.

Writing the first volume of the temporal wars saga only strengthened that bond. The world fundamentally stayed consistent with its previous state. It evolved though. Since my novel, the histories are more detailed and rich, the people's has distinction and personality. It didn't get stale, it got more interesting. Writing a story in that world gave me different perception of it.

It was no longer a staticmap of a continent. It became as vibrant and full of life as the characters wi him it. Like I said, everyone has their stiles, I can't say either one is wrong. My experience has been similar and opposite if that makes sense. I've been creating my world for 45 years this Easter but it started as a couple of vaguely realised countries for a story to take place in, and has proceeded by a method that could be described as stories and world-building leapfrogging one another.

It's only within the past year or two that it's reached a point where I could draw a complete world map I'd love to get a globe and draw it on that, but I haven't got around to it and there's still a huge amount of detail to be filled in. I don't anticipate ever finishing it, but the world-making is largely triggered by stories. The nucleus of my world started as a D and D continent also. But I've found I've had to change a lot of things, such as country and place names trying to make for more coherent language roots , plus getting rid of the more cliche ridden fantasy elements that are there more for customizable gaming experience than storytelling elves and all that.

And the magic system is very, very different even than the highly modified one we used in D and D. There, I tried to give my players lots of options for different kinds of characters, including magi. But for a story world, I wanted a magic system that was more self-contained and limited. Same for the world's religions. I had to kill a lot of darlings, as they say. But I did retain a core element of their being two countries that were once united but were now split due to religious differences on the west coast of a smallish continent that was located in the temperate zone.

Once I started writing this story, though, lots of other things came to me. Then I had the fun of figuring out where these different people the story needed came from and where their values, beliefs and so on came from.

Serious question. I know some shy away from it while others embraced it. Personally magic is slightly different in my world. Evocation is dominant among humans and elves, while necromancy is limited to one culture. Most of my spells are my own creation, aside from the classics like healing or lightning bolt. If you recall , many of the races, cultures, and stories Tolkien wrote about were inspired by Norse mythology. And DND was inspired by Tolkien's work. I understand that going too cookie cutter can be off putting, but what if there is enough differences to make your story different?

I've wracked my brain on this for weeks. I thought, even though its not stated in my novel, it is heavily influenced by years of DND.

I think to myself, what if people read it and see too much influence and not want to read. I considered changing those elements in some points and completely removing them in I her instances. When I looked at some of my story arcs, I couldn't bring myself to omit them.

For instance, one such story arc i struggled with was when Kulu a necromantic witch , and Scar Her Orc companion enter the city of Blackdawn. In the city they encounter an illithid mind flayer as far as I know, this race is only found in DND. The problem is that its important for my two characters development. The encounter strengthens their mother son like bond. I added more of an alien element to the illithid. It was not native to my world and its death may start a new story arc when the rest of its race finds out what happened.

I know of many authors that completely rolled with DND novels, like r. Salvatore, Douglas Niles, to name a few. I don't know if I should embrace my influences or go out of my way to avoid them. Any advice? On the whole, it would be quite difficult to get a novel published these days with elves, dwarves, orcs etc unless you've done something very different with them.

For instance, in my trilogy, I originally many years ago had an episode where the hero had to go into Hell. I quickly decided that wasn't appropriate, so I made it the Underworld instead, envisioning it as a traditional underworld. I still have a foray into the Underworld, but it's not like any Underworld you've read about before.

Perhaps, in the same way, you could customise your elves and orcs into something that's very different but still works with the characters and concepts. I think I see your point. Like orcs, maybe making hem more demonic in apearence and giving them a new name.

Or taking my standard elves and simply referring to them differently. Change their culture so they are similar to elves but a race all in their own. I think a lot of the problems can be fixed with subtle changes.

It depends who you ask. Many of the best known writers of secondary world fantasy in recent years have steered clear of traditional elves, dwarves etc.

I don't know if this is because readers have no interest in them anymore, or if it simply represents a shift to a grimmer, darker style of fantasy where humans provide all the needed pathos and conflict on their own.

They often take the approach of the old mythologies having a basis in truth and these races actually live among us, visible to only a select few humans with special powers. One traditional fantasy writer who's been successful with the older tropes in recent years is Michael Sullivan.

He has elves and dwarves in his world, and I'll admit my first reaction was "Really? Elves and dwarves? Is this a video game? These races play an important role in the story and are not just window dressing. Another is Kristen Britain the Green Rider books.

Her elves or fae or whatever they are, and their situation, is darker than one often sees, and she deals with the consequences of their longer lifespan in an interesting way.

And of course there's Paolini, though he published Eragon a while back now, and I believe his folks had connections in the publishing industry. I felt like his elves and dwarves were cribbed from Tolkien and WoW, though, and his dragons were a bit too much like McCaffrey's, but it didn't stop the books from being popular. I think that's the real thing. If the existence of some or all of the traditional fantasy races are essential to your story, then they can certainly work.

Novels are usually more focused on specific people and their doings. But if a crowded world with lots of different kinds of being are part of your cool factor for storytelling, chances are it will come through. Old style fantasy tended to present human and nonhuman societies as very homogeneous culturally and racially. All orcs are evil, cruel and bestial and have terrible breath, but they lust after human women etc. Elves living in treehouses, dwarves living in halls of stone, ho hum.

Superpowers aren't necessarily bad, but they can be if they get the characters out of more trouble than they get the characters into. Oooh, we were about to die, but then, I tapped into my elf magic that I inherited from my grandmother and turned us all into birds. Now, this could be cool if protagonist with elf powers has no idea how to cast spells in bird form and now can't turn herself and her friends back into humanoids.

Now I will say have a fantasy race in my world. It's loosely based on one of the more obscure D and D races, but I've tweaked it biologically and culturally, so it's very different from that race as it appears in any game I've played that has them and is much more closely based on the biology of the mammals they resemble. We'll see how they fly. Very good advice. I'm glad I joined this group before beginning the revision process.

I think I have some ideas now. Thank you all for the advice. Sometimes change is good, I feel these changes to my world are beneficial. The thing is, to not let us, or anyone else, be a buzzkill. Every idea has its detractors, and every trope can be annoying if used badly, but successful if done well. There was a thread on another writer's forum where people were ranting about how much they hate romantic subplots in fantasy. Well, I find stories where no one is attracted to anyone or falls in love to be rather unrealistic and flat a lot of the time come on, are a group of people of varying genders and orientations are really going to spend months together without anyone pairing off.

I started to get depressed, because there's a relationship between two of my characters that is important to the plot, though it's not a romance.

I had to comfort myself with the knowledge that none of my actual readers many of whom were male disliked the relationship aspect or felt it was shoehorned in or "too girly," whatever that means. And when I read between the lines of the rants, most of them were directed at ways of handling or portraying romantic attraction that are not in my story. Once you get a reasonably clean draft of your story, you should start posting chapters here one at a time, with a week in between, as per the FWO guidelines for feedback.

Readers can tell you if the story works for them and whether any of the fantasy elements feel cliched to them. But even so, be aware that no writer, and certainly no trope in fantasy, is loved by all.

The only way you could hope to use those in a published work would be to get picked up by WotC as an author for their tie-in novels, which from what I've heard, is incredibly difficult. For myself, I'm definitely one to roll my eyes at seeing Dungeons and Dragons tropes being used in a fantasy novel, like Roxx mentioned, painting a more diverse spectrum of human morality and cultural mores makes for a much more fulfilling story to me, than what usually ends up being tokenistic 1 or 2-note races there simply as an indicator that I'm reading a fantasy novel.

If you want a good the best, in my opinion reference as to how the standard races can be re-imagined and incorporated into an original world, I highly recommend you check out Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen. He has what can be seen as "orcs", "dark elves", "undead", etc, but they have been treated with such a sympathetic and meticulous hand in realizing their individual cultures and histories, that they're truly unrecognizable and far more rich in character than the stock races he may have been inspired by.

Consequently, they stand to me as the crowning use of unhuman races in fantasy fiction. Something else you said that concerns me was about magic.

While it might not technically cross any legal lines if you mask the mechanics well enough in narrative, it will still come across as very standard. I don't know if you read much in the way of reviews on Amazon. For the most part, readers want a narrative and literary experience, even if they like fantasy roleplaying, as they have a separate medium actual roleplaying games to experience that through.

When I first began seriously writing fantasy I was doing something very similar -- I was perhaps 16 at the time and thought R. It took probably 5 years and branching out into the more literary avenues of the fantasy genre as well as other genres in general to grasp what I was doing wrong, and I do largely thank Mr.

Erikson and his works for showing me how a story could still be true to those epic themes while standing wholly apart and in many ways above the shackles of genre convention.

I still haven't written that particular novel but I am at least confident now that it stands very well on its own should I ever decide to return to it. I find more and more anymore that I alter Dungeons and Dragons' rules to fit my own setting ideas since it is such a wonderfully modular gaming system , than I try to make anything fit within the paradigm they present.

Those settings always seem to feel clustered and overcrowded with innumerable bizarre creatures and species that don't really tie together into a cohesive, holistic world ecology that holds up under analysis. I always found that even when I did run games based on the standard setting, I would admit the vast majority of monsters as I simply couldn't conceive of how they'd possibly fit into the world with all the other creatures already there.

Something to think about. I have already began work on fundametaly changing my world. The story will be the same, but in light of new knowledge, the wheels have set in motion. Characters and races will be more dynamic and unique. I'm doing away with the Tolkien template entirely. My world will have a whimsical, alien quality unique to the world. There will still be familiarity.

WS humans are the dominant race. But I'm doing away with elves, dwarves, orcs entirely. The characters will change in apearence but not the core of who they are. I have a lot of interesting ideas that I'd like to get feed back on.

I'll post some things up in the appropriate threads when I have them ready. Thanks everyone, my passion is stoked and burning bright. Good luck with it. It sounds like fun. That's not an issue limited to speculative fiction. If I set a story in the place and time where I'm now living, the setting should matter in some way - - at least in a novel length work.

Raises some good points. I'd add a couple more reasons of my own to his list, though these overlap with the above. These can extend to mores, cultures, people, religions, gods, magical systems, laws of physics, and yes creatures and races, that never were in our world but are fun to imagine and take to their logical conclusions. As a reader, these are some of the things I enjoy about fantasy, so I suppose I'm trying to write what I like to read.

I've had a goblin society go from a patriarchal culture where females were considered property to a matriarchal fertility cult, and all it took was deicide and introduction of a powerful new leader. That falls into my 3.

DrG asked about types of businesses. Someone else rightly said it depends on the era, but I can give a small point of reference. These PDF files are digitally watermarked to signify that you are the owner. A small message is added to the bottom of each page of the PDF containing your name and the order number of your purchase.

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Password forgotten? Click here. Advanced Search. World Builder's Guidebook 2e. From Wizards of the Coast. Watermarked PDF. Average Rating 29 ratings. Some of the features you'll find in the World Builder's Guidebook include: An introduction to the art of world building Guidelines and random tables for creating continents, kingdoms, societies, local areas, towns and cities, ecologies, pantheons, histories, and sites of interest A pad of 32 copyable forms, mapping paper, and hex sheets?

You're the master architect of an entire world. What are you going to build? Customers Who Bought this Title also Purchased.

Reviews 9. Please log in to add or reply to comments. You musta check is videos!! And yes, a POD is really needed!! Hello people! Let's see if you can help me figure something out. However, I'm afraid the polyhedral world maps are not! Does anyone know what the original labelling was? My only complaint is that map grids are in solid black rather than the grey that originals were in.

Makes them a bit unusable. This is a great book that is really system neutral. A must have for brainstorming a campaign. March 24, pm UTC. I thought I was buying the full 32 page booklet with the PDF.

Honestly this was the only reason I bought it as I already have a physical copy of the book. Ok, never mind. The PDF does in fact have all the material, its just that it only has the first few bookmarked and the rest you have to scroll down to. Would delete my comment if I could.

Sorry everybody. Great job. Does this PDF include the blank maps? I still own and love my old physical copy of this book, but the map blanks have long since disappeared.

If they are included, it would absolutely be worth the five bucks to buy the pdf simply to have the option of printing them off as needed. If you're referring to the various polar display and polyhedral maps, yes it does. The purchase comes with two PDFs--one for the book and one with 16 maps. Ryan H. This is an ideal tool for worldbuilding at almost any scale. It's got you covered. Want a new content, it's got you covered. Want to start a whole new world from [ Sensible C.

I've been using this since dinosaurs roamed Gaia. It covers advanced topics like geology, tectonics, biomes, city life, pantheons, yadda yadda. I love this book and have bought it multiple times. It comes with handy sheets to help you develope [ Ryan D. Personally, I love this book. Its got everything you need to build your own setting, and lays it all out for you in a systematic order. It also provides nice hex and grid maps, which i use constantly in my games.

And its system agnostic technically [ James J. I have physically owned this about 3 times, it is my go to for designing campaigns for any system, except modern, or wild west. THere are some areas in the text that [ William E. If an individual is interested in world building this is an awesome supplement. There are tables for randomness, or an individual may use the items in the tables as inspiration. The book will take an individual from a macro top down , or micro bott [ See All Ratings and Reviews.

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