Zompist Bboard Again

Worldbuilding is an essential part of any work of fiction. But especially for science fiction or fantasy, it's the lifeblood of storytelling. But when worldbuilding fails, it can wreck your whole story, and leave your characters feeling pointless. Here are seven deadly sins of worldbuilding.

1. Not thinking about basic infrastructure.

How do they eat? What do they eat? Who takes away the garbage? Who deals with their bodily wastes? How do they get around? What do the majority of people do to survive? You're not just constructing a society, you're creating an economy. People don't oppress each other for fun — usually, systems of hierarchy and oppression have an economic component to them. Maybe you need a lot of peasants to grow labor-intensive crops, or maybe you need lots of cannon fodder in your space war. Maybe your only source of protein is a weird fungus that needs to be tended by specially trained people. Maybe everybody's eating algae. In any case, there's nothing worse than a fictional world where there are elaborate social structures, which seem completely separated from the realities of food, shelter and clothing.


For example, even in societies where elites are allowed to kill their slaves freely, most of the elites will not do so just for fun, a society where most people are slaves and every elite kills their slaves for fun is doomed to economically collapse in one or two decades, not to mention that it is against human nature to kill or harm others for fun. Elites oppress slaves, serfs, commoners, etc. because of practical reasons(i.e. their vested interests or the need to uphold the tradition or the official ideology), not because they like it or anything else.

Laws that ignoring basic human needs will be broken by the vast majority of people on a regular basis. For example, in communist countries, a major result of banning trades and the existence of "market" is a thriving underground economy where almost everyone sells and buys something to the black market to support themselves and their families.

Even you work on a world during a war, a great disaster, etc. it is still necessary to depict the daily life of the people, and in these cases, you must think how the war, the disaster, etc. has changed daily life.


2. Not explaining why events are happening now.

Chances are your story revolves around all heck breaking loose in your fictional world. (Or your fictionalized version of the "real" world.) One major worldbuilding flaw is not explaining why heck is breaking loose now, as opposed to 20 years ago or 20 years from now. Why is the dark elf army showing up now? Was there something preventing them from showing up, which has been removed? Will it be too late if they wait another year or two? Often, if your plot is swinging into motion for reasons that feel purely arbitrary, that's actually a failure of worldbuilding. You haven't fully accounted for the things that kept your villain in check, and probably also for the factors that keep other political actors in your society in check as well. And that's a larger issue — every society has checks and balances. Even an absolute monarchy has invisible lines the monarch can't cross. Sometimes you can't figure out how these checks and balances worked in a particular era, without reaching beyond the official history as sanctioned by the people in charge.

On a related note, if you're drawing on real-life history, for your fantasy world or your future history, don't just read works by historians from the dominant culture, or works focusing on the ruling class. Historians have done amazing work on discovering what ordinary people and marginalized groups were doing during a lot of eras, and there's plenty of resources on what was going on in, say, the Middle Ages outside of Western Europe. To the extent that you rely on actual history in your world-building, you should reach beyond the Kings and nobles of a few Western countries. Image by Frederic St-Arnaud/CG Society.

Even your in-world people don't know why things happen, it is still necessary to have explanations for every event in the world.

3) Creating fictional versions of real-life human ethnic groups, that never go beyond one dimension

This is a huge problem that tons of creators seem to struggle with. But as a rule of thumb, if you want to have Belgians in your novel, you're going to have to try and create an accurate view of Belgian society. If you decide that instead of Belgians, you're going to have an alien species called the Bzlgizns — who are basically Belgians except they've got antlers — you still have to try and make them well-rounded and as nuanced as possible. Ditto if you're creating a secondary world where there happens to be a land of magical creatures called The Belge, who are still basically Belgians. Really, you should make sure that any cultural or ethnic group you create has multiple dimensions and a sense that its members have their own subjectivity, and a believable culture. Whether it's the culture that your main characters come from, or a culture that they see as the "other." But it's also a really good rule of thumb that the more your fictional group resembles real-life Belgians, the more you ought to worry about being true to life. Changing "Belgians" to "Bzlgizns" doesn’t actually let you off the hook for presenting a true-to-life portrait of people from Belgium.

4) Creating monolithic social, political, cultural and religious groups.

Everybody in a particular ethnic group agrees about everything. Every member of the ruling class, or the working class, agrees about everything. Every citizen of a particular nation holds exactly the same set of opinions. There is one version of history that absolutely everybody agrees on. Every member of a religion interprets the tenets of that religion in exactly the same way. That sounds plausible, right? Maybe if you've never been around actual humans. In real life, if you get three members of a particular in-group together, you'll probably hear four different opinions on most of the group's major concerns. Asserting that all Christians agree on all matters of doctrine is probably a good way to get laughed out of the room. So when you imagine the ruling class of your world, it's safe to assume that no two members of it will agree on much — and when you retell your fictional history, remember that nobody's likely to agree on what actually happened.


For another example, if you have a elitist country that has an elite caste consisting of about 200,000 people, and the government is fighting against a big uprising from the commoners, there are always some members of the elites joining the uprising side no matter how united the elites are to each other, it is just totally impossible for every member of the elites to fight and die for the government considering the total number of the elites.

In other words, either your conpeoples are humans or your non-human conpeoples will very likely to possess some nature similar to that of humans. Alien sentient species who are totally dissimilar to human beings are very hard, if even possible, to depict. Therefore what happens to real human societies will also happen to your conpeoples, and you should never forget that. Full stop.


5) Inventing a history that is totally logical

n an imaginary world, the strongest side always wins and the people who are in charge are always the descendants of the people who were in charge 100 years ago. But real life isn't like that — history is full of odd quirks and happenstances, and powerful people often make huge miscalculations that wind up costing them dearly. Just think about weird happenstances like Ireland being divided in half. Or Korea. Or Germany, for nearly five decades. Why is WashingtonDC the capital of the United States instead of Philadelphia? Why did the Portuguese have their own colony in India until 1961? History is weird. And things that seem inevitable in retrospect usually seemed anything but at the time. So a totally logical history will never pass the "smell" test. And speaking of smell...


While history does not always make sense, it does not mean one can do whatever they want. Some basic senses should exist. Considering 2), all seemingly nonsenses must have extraordinary but still in-world sensible explanations.

For example, look at this map:



Hux Kham will always have a sizable standing army and probably a conscription system, even its army regularly involves in politics(like causing coup d'etats), the people has a strong pacifist culture, and the country has a good relationship with all its neighbours. This is Hux Kham is a landlocked and relatively small country between larger countries like Qonklaks, Naria and Yerlan, therefore, politicians and most people in Hux Kham will support the existence of military forces.

For another example, look at this map:



If Lake Khuda was an origin of agriculture and a kind of writing system, then ethnicities of surrounding areas would have adpoted writing systems early on, for example, all major ethnic groups in Ebo Nganagam would have a long tradition of writing down their own languages regardless of their initial attitudes towards writing.



6) Not really giving a strong sense of place, like what it smells like after it's been raining.

You can spend hours and hours thinking about the history and culture and mores of your imaginary land, and how people interact and the ways that different religious and ethnic groups collide. But if you don't make me feel the dirt under my fingernails, then you still haven't created a real place. If the reader doesn't get a little lightheaded from the stench of the polluted river, or transported by the beauty of the geometric flower gardens, then something is missing. Most of all, there should be a few spots — bars, taverns, crypts, spaceports — where the reader really feels "at home," as if you could imagine hanging out there for real. The purpose of worldbuilding isn't just to do a cool exercise, but to give a sense of place — and all of your thought experiments absolutely have to result in something vivid and alive.

7) Introducing some superpower, like magic or insane tech, without fully accounting for how it would change society.

If your pitch is, "It's just like our world, except everybody can turn invisible at will," then you've already failed. Because if everybody could turn invisible at will, it wouldn't be anything like our world. Especially if this power had been around for more than a few months. Whether you're creating an alternate history or a secondary world or a far future, any technology or power you introduce is going to have far-reaching effects — not just first-order effects, but second- and third-order effects, too. Going with the "invisibility" example, you'd have people using it to spy on each other — but you'd also have a huge boom in heat sensors. We'd start redefining the whole concept of privacy, and pop culture would be massively transformed. There would be whole art forms based around invisible performers, and it might be legal to shoot an invisible intruder on sight (on smell?). You could be here for hours imagining all the ways that the universal power of invisibility would change the world, and you'd probably still just be scratching the surface.


For example, if you have technologies or powers that create a human society with gender imbalance where there are much more females than males, female dominance in these societies will become very likely. Considering 5), it is still possible that males still dominant in a society where most of its members people are females, but in such societies, male dominance will need extraordinary but still in-world sensible explanations.


Some add-ons:


8) Making a society that nearly 100% satisfies your fantasies, hates or fears, be it something based on your sexual fantasy, your fetish, your political ideology, an utopia(your dreamland), a dystopia(the society that you dislike the most), or anything else.

All societies that work, including all of your own con-societies, have goods and bads, fantasies, hates and fears are either too good or too bad considering how the real world works. While your own fantasies, hates or fears can be a good start for worldbuilding, trying to make a society exactly or mostly based on your own fantasies, hates or fears will always make you lost and end up making your own world no more than a pile of nonsenses.

For example, making a society where every male has tons of beautiful girls(all societies that can work have old women and some guys that are unpopular among girls), or making a society of immortal mermaids(except for organisms with a simple body plan, like jellyfish, aging and death will always be a part of life, that is, all sentient beings are subject of aging and death as sentient beings would require a rather complex body plan) in a rather realistic setting will surely make your world tons of nonsenses.


Some more add-ons, they are not just deadly sins for worldbuilding, but deadly sins for anyone who wants to do something:


9) Being stubborn with your own thoughts

This is the most basic of everything. Even it is your own conworld, you must listen to others’ criticisms and ask people constantly(but don’t ask the answered questions again) about everything if you want to make a serious and sensible conworld.

For example, in a realistic worldbuilding project, if you have a small island country that you love a lot, and you want it to have a Japan-like culture and a strong economy, and people tell you that your country should not have a strong economy because it contrays to the general plan for the project, you should not insisting to have a strong economy for it no matter how much you love it.

This has happened in the collaboration of Sahar, the ConWorkShop planet, someone with a country called KMA wants to make it a Japan-like country with a strong economy, while a developing country-level economy and a polynesian-like culture fits it more, and the owner of it does not want to change even everyone else wants the owner of KMA to lower the GDP per capita of KMA significantly.

10) Being uncooperative or trying to vandalize in a collaborative project

Even you don't agree with your co-workers(by co-worker here I mean anyone who collaborates with you to create a world), or even have a beef with them, you have no rights to reject their ideas when their ideas are accepted as a consensus, not to mention that you throw a tantrum, going off on them or even trying to vandalize the whole collaborative project and spreading rumors about your co-workers. Throwing a tantrum or going off on your co-workers or even trying to vandalize the whole project and spreading rumors about them because you don't agree with someone is wrong and there's no excuse for causing such a toxic and nasty drama.

If you do so, no matter what reasons you have, you are toxic and should be judged by the drama caused by yourself, and people will have the rights to be mad at you, to make fun of you and to tell a third party about you and the drama, because causing a toxic drama shows that you have a major personality flaw that most people don't have.

This has happened in Sahar collaboration and caused a very toxic and nasty drama during late 2017 and 2018, you might ask its main participants about the details of the drama in Sahar collaboration.

Also, while people can often mistake Sahar as a project of an insular community with toxic participants, it is just a very rule-based and realistic collaborative worldbuilding project, in short, Sahar is nothing more than a no-nonsense project. If you want to join a project and can't comply with the rules completely, Sahar or other project alike, you deserve to get banned or ridiculed by its participants.

In short, always interact with others with your common sense, if you don't have common sense, learn it. Full stop.


Most of the contents above are taken from https://io9.gizmodo.com/7-deadly-sins-o ... -998817537 , with some examples and add-ons added.

Sorry, is there a governing council of conworlding now, to lay down these laws?

Why are you just copy-pasting someone else's work? The virtue of hyperlinks is that you don't have to copy-paste, you can share a link you find interesting and everybody else can read the original directly.

These "rules" range from things to which there are clear exceptions, through to things with no validity at all.

What is this in response to? Do you have criticisms of one person's work in particular?

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 6:17 am What is this in response to? Do you have criticisms of one person's work in particular?

Their own.

pork wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 5:35 am Most of the contents above are taken from https://io9.gizmodo.com/7-deadly-sins-o ... -998817537

An understatement, imo.

Very nice thoughts. I didnt sleep well last night so I dont feel up to writing a full reply but I just wanted to add that, on point #8, I violate that to some extent by writing in-world religious texts where the utopia is real, and write a parallel summary of the events in my normal writing style.

To go into a little more detail:

1. Infrastructure

Who deals with the bodily waste? Who cares? Tolkien never once addresses the question of sewerage infrastructure, and it didn't hurt his popularity. Ditto the Brothers Grimm.

The two things I think it's important to keep in mind when worldbuilding are purpose and style. It is legitimate to want to make every place a fully-functioning economic case-study, but that is a decision of style and taste. It's not inherent to the nature of storytelling: yes, you can tell social-realist, verismo stories, but you can also tell fairy tales. What matters is not that there is a correct amount of worldbuilding to do, but that the amount and type of worldbuilding complements the chosen style. In other words, it's not about making sure you can answer any question a reader might ask, it's about guiding the reader to only actually ask the questions you already know the answers to. So that can mean knowing about the socioeconomics of the nightsoil economy, or it can mean telling your story in such a way that the reader is just not asking the question, "what happens when they go to the toilet and what are its political implications?" - and that's partly a matter of narrative voice, and partly a matter of content (don't open a door for the reader unless you know what's behind it).

And then there's purpose. Why are you worldbuilding? These guidelines seem directed as novelists, in which case they are probably worldbuilding primarily to support their narrative. In which case, working out the finer details of the guild of dunnykindivers and nightsoilmen is a complete waste of time. There comes a point when the worldbuilding you do as a writer should not be put in the text, because it detracts from the story instead of adding to it; and there comes a point when worldbuilding you do as a writer and don't actually put in your text is just a way of procrastinating from your actual writing. A general guideline in my opinion is to do all the worldbuilding you expect to show your reader, do a little extra worldbuilding to have in reserve just in case your plans may change as you write, and then do a little extra worldbuilding behind that, so that every fact you tell your reader is supported by a fact you don't tell your reader, because this makes the facts you do tell your reader more nuanced and believable. This extra is the scaffolding that holds up the set. But of course, if you're writing in a style where you're not telling your reader much about worldbuilding anyway, you don't need a lot of scaffolding anyway. And even if you do need scaffolding, you need to be careful that you're not wasting all your time building scaffolding instead of building the actual set. Not just because it wastes your time, but because everything you set in stone about your world is a bollard hemming in the course of your story, making it harder for you to follow your story where it wants to go.

Of course, in a place like this, we worldbuild for the fun of it - we just like scaffolding a lot. But if we're just doing it to interest ourselves, then there are no rules about what we should build or why. You want to talk about toilet technology? Great. But someone else might want to talk about the history of vexilological terminology...


2.Explaining why events are happening now

Again... why? And frankly, this seems a little hubristic. Actual historians very often can't point out why a think happened one year rather than the next year, or ten years later, or a century later, even if they can identify the general trends that meant it was likely to happen at some time. A lot of history is, as it were, probabilistic rather than deterministic. Of course it's never a bad idea to ask "why?", but making sure to always have a clear-cut answer that question can be as problematic as never having any - it can lead to overly mechanical histories.

Again, my recommendation here would be to bear in mind the congruence of style and content. If you adopt a narrative voice that leads the reader to think that you know everything, and that leads the reader to think that you will explain everything to them, then failing to explain the reason for something big is indeed very noticeable. But in good writers, given that they don't know everything and can't explain everything, this is instead a big part of why they choose other narrative voices. Either their narrative voice is not omnipotent, but embedded in a perspective that would not know the answer to these questions, or their narrative voice is omnipotent but not omnibenevolent, and intentionally withholds information from the reader.

In particular, if you're worldbuilding for a story, it's worth bearing in mind that most characters in most stories will not know - and often will not care - about the precise reasons for the situation they find themselves in. So if your narrative voice is closely tied to the characters, it's worth asking what good it is having a lot of worldbuilding that never finds its way into your story...

3. Caricature

This is nothing to do with good or bad worldbuilding; it's purely a political issue.

4. Monolithic cultures

Again, it depends what story you're telling, and what you're telling it about. Some styles call for more realism, others for less - and the less realism, the less complexity is needed (which is not to say that pure fairy tales are easy; indeed, they're very hard to do well). Likewise, the closer something is to the place or people you're focusing on, the more complexity you need; the further from the focus, the more it's OK to be simplistic. In particular, a good writer is always bearing in mind their narrative perspective: what matters is whether a group seems monolithic from the perspective from which you're choosing to tell the story.
And of course, not all people in fantasy are humans, and not all humans are Americans. Not all people, therefore, will work the same way. If you're dealing with an insectoid hive mind, maybe their culture really IS monolithic!

5. Logical histories

This is nonsense. The authors here are basically saying "I don't understand history, so I guess it's illogical!"

It's true that some specific details are path-dependent - though both the possibility of the path and the dependency of the path must still be logical. But in any case, such things are relatively few. There are, pace the alt-history crowd, very few moments in history that have truly had long-term and substantial ramifications, and frankly all of them are debateable. I, for instance, once wrote an alt-history of the premise that Henry V didn't die young; it's a plausible branching point, because if Henry hadn't died so alarmingly soon after conquering France, the French might not have been able to win back their independence, and Europe might have had a giant Lancastrian Empire spanning Britain, France, and probably the Burgundian territories to boot, and that in turn could have had great ramifications. But even then, it's all debateable. Given the history of France and the history of England (the Wars of the Roses!), it's probably more likely that, had Henry V not lost France, Henry VI would have done anyway. In the long term, given the relative sizes and economies of England and France and the presence of the channel and the cultural differences, it was probably impossible for France and England to remain permanently combined.

The examples given here are foolish. How is the partition of Ireland a "weird happenstance"!? That's just ignorance. Ireland was partitioned because of Protestant settlement of Ireland from Scotland over hundreds of years, as a result partly of the demographics of Scotland (its population growth outstripped its ability to support the population) and Ireland (it was more fertile, but disunited) and partly of the intentional policies of the monarchy (Scottish monarchs were happy to send people to Ireland, as it got rid of troublemakers while extending Scottish influence, and then in particular Protestant English monarchs (who ruled Ireland) were very happy to settle Protestants in Catholic Ireland). This settlement was disproportionately based in the northeast, because that's the part closest to Scotland. When Catholic Ireland rose up, the Protestant northeast remained loyal to Protestant Britain. The exact details of the outcome were of course up in the air - it's even posisble to imagine, for instance, an Ireland in which the Pale went with the North - but nothing illogical happened here.
Likewise, Germans were predicting the division of Germany between the Western Powers and Russia in the 19th century. There's nothing illogical about it having happened!
Why is Philadelphia not the capital? Because very often in confederacies, the most powerful member is denied the capital because all the other members don't want their influence to be too great, and so the capital is either in an otherwise unimportant member or else is put somewhere 'neutral'. [this also applies more generally with powerful cities]. In other words, Washington is the capital for more or less the same reasons that Brasilia is the capital, and Canberra is the capital, and Brussels is the capital both of Belgium and of the EU, and why although the Dutch 'capital' is indeed Amsterdam the government is instead in Den Hague, and why the Weimar Republic had its capital in Weimar, and West Germany its in Bonn, and why South Africa ended up with three different capitals, none of which are Johannesburg. This isn't illogical, it's a perfectly commonplace principle! [also because ruling elites often like to rule from near but outside the largest population centres, which tended to be more independent and dangerous for the elites].


6. Smell

This has nothing to do with worldbuilding, but is a question of narrative voice.

7. Ramifications of technology

Again, it's all about style and voice. If you're writing a social-realist epic, then sure, it's important to carefully outline the logical ramifications of magic and technology. But if you're writing magic realism, then it's equally important not to carefully outline the logical ramifications of magic and technology!

There's room in the world for lots of different types of story!

And just to quibble with an example here: no, in a world in which there are more females than males, female dominance is probably less likely, rather than more. Power (on average, on the societal scale) derives from economics. If you have more women, then women are cheap; if you have fewer men, they are expensive - the demand for men is higher, and the supply is lower, therefore the price is higher. If men are more expensive - i.e. more valuable - they have more economic power, which they can leverage into more personal power, or at least more personal comfort.

Thus, in societies in which there are many female slaves and few male slaves, female slaves are cheap and given little value, while male slaves are prized; contrariwise, where male slaves are commonplace they are worth little, and female slaves are more valued. It's just the same with free people.

What I suspect would actually happen in an unbalanced world is one of two things: either men would have all the power and prestige and treat women like shit (ten women competing for one man means the women have to try very hard to please the man, and the man doesn't have to worry much about offending the women), or else the men would all be slaves. But even if the men were all slaves, they'd be very pampered and powerful slaves (it's easy to think of slaves being powerless, but that's only really the case when they're only needed for things that don't require much engagement on their part, like manual labour. Societies that keep slaves for more coopterative purposes have to treat them better. For instance, societies in which female slaves are expensive tend to blur the lines between slavery and family, and basically offer co-operative female slaves promotion into full family membership. In this world, male slaves needed for, at least, their erections, and in practice probably their romance, would end up very well cared for and influential indeed. They'd be the equivalent of courtesans, not field workers).

I suspect, regardless of whether the men on cushioned thrones were officially owned by women, or owned women, the result would actually be similar on the ground, and you'd probably end up with effectively three genders: an indolent but sheltered gender of men (if men are expensive, you don't risk them in the fields!), a matriarchal, 'feminine' gender of women who have access to the men and have the babies, and a 'neuter' gender of female people without access to men, who do all the actual work. It'd be an interesting scenario, come to think of it.



8. Making things you like

What's wrong with this? Sure, it's unrealistic that everything would be wonderful. But who said worldbuilding had to be realistic? Besides, you can like what you like - there's nothing stopping you from liking realistic things, in which case a realistic society could indeed 100% satisfy your fantasies.

The examples, meanwhile, are bad.
There's nothing incoherent in the concept "every male has tons of beautiful girls" - indeed, your scenario of extreme sex imbalance would probably lead to this. The existence of age does not contradict this - old women, if they exist at all (and of course they could all just be strangled) could simply be replaced by more young women. And even with humans, there are almost zero males who aren't attractive to some female and vice versa. Massively decrease the number of males, and they all become more attractive. And we needn't even be dealing with humans. If there are a million women to every man and every man's semen is literally heroin, then sure, it's perfectly plausible that every man might have a hundred or more women fawning on him. Not to mention, who said that the women had to consent anyway? Or that consent was even a concept - in a world, for example, in which men all had limitless mind-control powers over women?

Now sure, such a fantasy world has quite a narrow and specific target audience. But there's nothing inherently 'nonsense' or 'lost' about it, and indeed this sort of writing is quite perennially popular.

Similarly, there's no reason at all why everybody has to be mortal. That's how evolution has worked out, but it could have worked out differently - or it could be a world without evolution. Maybe God did it that way. You yourself mention "organisms with simple body plans, like jellyfish" - well, jellyfish can be massive, and really quite complicated. There's nothing incoherent about a jellyfish with an unusually developed nervous system, and nothing incoherent about a jelly-like being having a more human-like shape. Or maybe your protagonists are mountains, and their minds exist on an ethereal plane...

9. You need to ask people constantly about everything

No, you don't. Indeed, that's quite annoying. There's plenty of stuff out there for you to read yourself without asking me about it. Don't get me wrong, most of us welcome well-meaning questions, but there is a limit!

Nor is everyone even trying to make a "serious and sensible conworld".

If someone tells you you can't have a culture like Japan and a strong economy - well, first of all, they're clearly an idiot. Just look at Japan, which is very like Japan, yet has a strong economy. But more importantly: everyone tells you it's impossible? Fuck them. If everyone tells you something is impossible, that is indeed a good reason to look into whether it's impossible. But it might just be that you're talking to too small a group of people who know too little - so look into it yourself. And in the end, if you find it IS impossible - that still doesn't mean you can't do it! First, you can start with your desired state and then ask what else might have to be the case to MAKE it possible. Indeed, that's how a lot of good conworlding gets done. And second... who said your conworld had to be possible?

In this case, for instance, "the owner of KMA" is doing a good job of pursuing their own interests despite the bullying of others, and the fact that you've come to an entirely different forum to badmouth them really says a lot more about you than about them.

10. Cooperation

Of course, if you're collaborating then to some extent there's more than just your own interests to consider. But every group works differently. Some groups work by giving individuals as much freedom as possible within a basic shared framework. Others, by agreeing every tiny detail through consensus (or dictat!). Some groups work by having maximally respectful, consensual deliberation; others, by encourage a robust exchange of views.

In this case, I think it's important to stress: we are not your mother. Ranting about people we don't know from an entirely different place and how they aren't playing nice with you does not gain you sympathy. Deal with it yourself; coming running to us makes you look like an infant. Indeed, saying that this person we don't know "is toxic and should be judged" and that you have a right to make fun of them and complain to us about them, and that they have "a major personality flaw" is liable only to lead people here to think that you have a personality flaw yourself, that you're a very unpleasant person, and that you have no self-awareness. Because trying to spread "drama" from one place to a completely unrelated place, while insisting to everyone that you're perfectly entitled to act like an arsehole to this person we don't know, is a pretty good example of "toxic". Indeed, I think we used to have a rule about that, but it got lost somewhere along the way because it didn't seem necessary - because most people already recognise what an egregious violation of netiquette that is.

In particular, I'd say that stealing a long post from someone else, reposting it word-for-word in a forum you've never been to before, giving it minimal attribution but then blurring without attribution what is your own addition and what is the work of another, and then using it as the platform for antisocial ranting about somebody most of us here don't know and what they did in a place most of us here don't go to, seems to be a really, bizarrely, strange way to make your introduction to a community.

Regarding collaboration itself, my suggestions would be: communicate openly with other participants about what your ambitions are both within the project and for the project as a whole, and if the ambitions of the group as a whole aren't compatible with your own, you should leave. And if the ambitions (or style) of one member seems incompatible to the rest of the group but they themselves don't realise it, this should be made plain to them politely, and in the rare cases where they are unable or unwilling to play by your rules once they're clearly laid out to them, they should be asked to leave. This can be a rapid and drama-free process, since if they truly are incompatible this is obvious to everybody, including rapidly themselves, and so there is no opportunity for "drama", as you put it. "Drama" generally arises when one person attempts to speak for the group in order to overrule others, but does not in fact have a mandate to do so, leading to dissent and schism. Or when one person abandons civility and resorts to flaming (or as you put it "ridiculing" and "making fun") - that is, when they put their ego and shallow need for validation through the belittling of others above the needs of the group as a whole.



Just a few thoughts to be going on with there. As you can see, in most of these cases I don't disagree that the person whose thoughts you're stealing had some interesting thoughts that are often worth bearing in mind, but I do disagree with their/your dogmatism and lack of flexibility, and the lack of respect for other worldbuilders that this implies.

I read the initial post, and started thinking about how my limited conworlding measured up to it, and then I read the initial reactions and wondered if I should post here at all. I completely agree that people shouldn't copy-and-paste very long excerpts from other websites.

That said, the only "sin" in the original post where I'm simply guilty as charged is probably Point 6. As of now, I'm doing history, not novels or movie/TV scripts, so I'm not big on describing specific places.

As for Salmoneus's objections, they kind of made me think of this old blog post by zompist:

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2014/12/2 ... d-fantasy/

One of the best book series, let alone books, that I've ever read SPECIFICALLY in regards to world building broke a lot of these "rules" so even if I weren't convinced this was self-restricting, unimaginative bull without that, I certainly do with that bit of proof.

Just because YOU (or the author of something you agree with) don't think a certain kind of worldbuilding can be good, or that you couldn't make a good world that way, or even if you downright hate a certain kind of worldbuilding, that doesn't stop people making good conworlds that way.

I don't mean to pile on, but I started looking at those maps, and had things to say.

First: nice maps, whoever did them! Attractive, clear, and inviting. The contour lines are a nice, simple way of showing relief (though not too convincing in detail.)

Could use more work on linguistic diversity— and Qgam is weird— but not bad either.

Bigger problem: the empty spaces. Maybe there's a good worldbuilding reason, but on Earth we rarely just have blank spaces near major empires. There would be 'barbarians' there— and barbarians have a huge impact on neighboring states.

But what I wanted to talk about was the presumed lessons in geographic destiny.

Hux Kham will always have a sizable standing army and probably a conscription system, even its army regularly involves in politics(like causing coup d'etats), the people has a strong pacifist culture, and the country has a good relationship with all its neighbours. This is Hux Kham is a landlocked and relatively small country between larger countries like Qonklaks, Naria and Yerlan, therefore, politicians and most people in Hux Kham will support the existence of military forces.

At best, this is thinking in modern terms. Hux Kham is a mountainous state. Yerlan can't get to it except through Naria. And Naria and Qonklaks look like agricultural empires oriented toward the south. Mountains in premodern times are difficult places, which are usually a threat to their neighbors rather than vice versa (cf. Iran vs Mesopotamia, Afghanistan vs medieval India, Tibet vs medieval China, the Andean Incas vs. the coastal Chimú), or else backwaters that no one really wants or can occupy for long (the Caucasus, Scotland in Roman times). The country offers no strategic advantage to its neighbors: if Naria and Qonklaks want to fight, it's the longest route and likely to starve their armies. They'll go through Riyana instead.

If you look at any historical map with nice clean borders— it's a lie. Or less dramatically, it's a graphological convenience, but one that's convenient to the bureaucrats in the capital, who are the ones who sponsor the histories and mapmakers. A 'civilized state' (from Sumer to Rome to China) is largely a tax farming operation. As such, states love grain-producing regions and hate regions that aren't farming-based, or which farm hard-to-tax goods like manioc. A region like Hux Kham is likely to be very hard to tax, and for that matter hard to conquer.

From this perspective, the mapmaker is making some perplexing decisions. Why does Hux Kham have such a convoluted border to the west, bordering... nothing? If something caused 'civilization' to extend to this mountainous region, why is the region between Hux Kham and Qonklaks unorganized?

All along I'm assuming that Hux Kham is a mountain culture. But perhaps the intent was that it's based on the lake and the river by Hux Mlak. In which case: why does it bother to occupy the mountains at all? And why does it include a fringe of flat land north of the mountains? Even if it's desert up there, there's a nice river valley to settle.

Of course, if you want a particular outcome, you can add constraints to get there. E.g. if you want Hux Kham to be hotly contested, you give it huge resources of lapis lazuli or silver...

If Lake Khuda was an origin of agriculture and a kind of writing system, then ethnicities of surrounding areas would have adpoted writing systems early on, for example, all major ethnic groups in Ebo Nganagam would have a long tradition of writing down their own languages regardless of their initial attitudes towards writing.

It could happen, sure. But it need not. Mesopotamia and Egypt had writing for millennia before Canaan did, to say nothing of the Sakas, or Kush. For that matter, note that though cuneiform was dominant in the ancient Middle East and was adopted across many language families, the Phoenicians didn't adopt it, but created their own unrelated system.

On an even more micro level, states that haven't reached the kingdom level don't need or use writing even if their neighbors have it. E.g. around 1100 BCE Phoenicia had writing but Canaan didn't (or barely used it). Around 850, Israel was writing but Judah was not. (Biblical literalists will be surprised at that, but that's what the archeology tells us.)

Anyway, the main point is— there are a lot of lessons Earth history can teach us, but they're complicated, and depend on the period, on the technology, and all sorts of things.

Ah sorry, one more thing. History is weird, but that doesn't mean that there are no reasons for things! Yes, the Portuguese had territory in India. Absolutely not surprising— they were the world's dominant maritime power in the 1500s and had bases all over the world. The lesson shouldn't be "just throw in enclave of Country X halfway around the world." It's that such enclaves have a story.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 6:03 pm Bigger problem: the empty spaces.

These are maps of Sahar, the ConWorkShop collaborative conworld. Those blank spaces are areas that are not currently claimed by any user.

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 7:27 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 6:03 pm Bigger problem: the empty spaces.

These are maps of Sahar, the ConWorkShop collaborative conworld. Those blank spaces are areas that are not currently claimed by any user.

All the more reason not to draw eternal lessons from that one country! A lot depends on whether it's wasteland, or steppe, or another large agricultural state...

I think the "deadly sins" bit got off on the wrong foot. I mean, I'm happy to offer worldbuilding advice, and I believe in learning as much as possible about the world. But I've also consistently said that it's an art, and there's no one true path.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 9:48 am and you'd probably end up with effectively three genders: an indolent but sheltered gender of men (if men are expensive, you don't risk them in the fields!), a matriarchal, 'feminine' gender of women who have access to the men and have the babies, and a 'neuter' gender of female people without access to men, who do all the actual work.

Bees!

The only deadly sin is to persist with something you feel uncomfortable with, for whatever reason, especially when there's a more convincing alternative.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 10:03 am
As for Salmoneus's objections, they kind of made me think of this old blog post by zompist:

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2014/12/2 ... d-fantasy/

I wouldn't have placed so much emphasis on the first-half "fantasy must be based in realism" message, but I don't fundamentally disagree with Zompist's points there, though I may have phrased some of them differently.

I think an important point is that we should avoid a false dichotomy of "realism" and "anything goes". Everything follows rules - if they're not the rules of reality, they're just other rules. In particular, folk stories, including European fairy tales, tend to quite strongly follow 'rules' of narrative structure that limit what can happen, even if reality itself is not much of a limiting factor. In many ways, realism is a useful crutch for writers, because its rules are easy to learn, whereas the rules of fairy tales (and other non-realistic genres) are much vaguer and harder to pin down...


--------

Regarding Hux Kham: pork is clearly talking about Switzerland, but even Switzerland has a history many people don't understand. The Swiss have not always been military. They suddenly became an unstoppable killing force in the late 15th century (having practiced a bit, mostly against themselves, in the 14th century). And they haven't always been neutral - they were generally expansionist until the 16th century, when a series of defeats forced them to reassess their policy and opt for non-engagement instead.

Regarding its bizarre nature: I wonder whether control of the mountain passes to the Grey Zone may be central to its existence? It looks like a pass there might be the easiest route from this southern cultural zone to the nations of the northeast, particularly if the western sea has pirates or storms, or if Naria is unwelcoming to through-trade. This could explain why Hux Kham has bothered controlling not only the mountains but also a narrow strip northwest of them (controlling the towns where people stock up and rest before/after crossing the mountains, and where smugglers would like to be based).


On mountain areas as threatening: a big factor to consider is the capacity of the land. Infertile areas have limited capacity; but this does not inherently lower the local birthrate. These areas may therefore quickly become overpopulated. In the long term, birthrate may indeed lower to match the environmental constraints, but in the short term (which may last centuries!) the local society may attempt to deal with its excess population by sending them away - which may be peaceful migration, but may also be done by invading all the nearby areas. These invasions may be made easier by the practice warfare that tribes in infertile areas may have to do against each other to fight over the limited resources in the area.


Regarding Portugal:
a) it is a coastal country
b) its inland border was with a more powerful country, blocking expansion
c) its inland border was with a less fertile area, making expansion less appealing anyway
d) it was peripheral to European trade networks, making it necessary to look elsewhere for any trade gains
e) it was historically subject to raids by Vikings and seaborne Franks, providing an element of maritime culture

Therefore, naturally,
f) it became a leading maritime power

Therefore,
g) it established colonies around the world, chiefly en route to its main trading destination, India. Hence the colonies in Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, and eventually in India itself

However:
h) it was always a relatively small nation, and it did not benefit from either early modernisation or from great natural resources

Therefore:
i) it was unable to defend (relatively) large colonies against other European nations - so, rather than a vast empire, it instead developed relatively small trading colonies

Plus:
j) although, unlike colonial powers like Courland, it managed to remain independent, its relatively small size meant that it was not a particular threat to the great powers. Therefore, it was allowed to keep its scattered colonies, rather than being forced to hand them over to the British and/or French. [the greater power of France is, paradoxically, why the French were forced to give up their Indian colonies to the British; because Portugal was not a threat, it was allowed to keep Goa]


Thus, the Portuguese possession of Goa until the 20th century is not in any way weird or illogical, but rather the perfectly logical development of the underlying economics. Very similar logics likewise explain why the Dutch possessed (most of) Indonesia until the 20th century (although the different, more settler-friendly, environment of South Africa explains why the Dutch colonies there became independent early, and hence swallowed up by other European powers later on).

Now, the one sort of illogical thing is Brazil. Brazil is not a small trading colony en route to India! Brazil was actually discovered entirely by accident, and given to Portugal out of ignorance; it was not until much later that they actually began to expand into the interior. I suspect Brazil was able to survive due to the Spanish: because the Spanish controlled South America, they were the chief threat to Brazil; but the Spanish didn't want all-out war with the Portuguese because they were neighbours (i.e. it wouldn't stay in south america), and the other powers didn't want Spain to be able to annex Brazil anyway...

My understanding was that Brazil was given to Portugal out of sympathy. The original explorers didnt know where the newly discovered land would end, so they drew a line on the map and gave what they thought was a fair share of it to Spain and to Portugal.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... rtugal.png

When their maps got better, they realized how ridiculously unfair the original agreement would be, and so the Catholic Church intervened to expand Portugal's claims at the expense of the much better-off Spanish.

Or was that just a cute story they told us in history class to make it more interesting?

Most of these are rules I try to follow myself, but some of them are abject nonsense, for example this one:

For example, in a realistic worldbuilding project, if you have a small island country that you love a lot, and you want it to have a Japan-like culture and a strong economy, and people tell you that your country should not have a strong economy because it contrays to the general plan for the project, you should not insisting to have a strong economy for it no matter how much you love it.

There's all kinds of stuff in real world history that isn't "realistic" at all though. If the history is built up around why something is an exception and it makes sense in context, it absolutely can work. Like you mentioned though, there will be consequences.

In my world I really really wanted a particular society that lived in very tall self-sufficient towers. This didn't make any goddamn sense in the context of the world up to that point, so I invented a whole elaborate backstory / technology chain to explain it. There are also inevitable consequences from this as well -- rigid (but mobile) caste systems, near-continuous social strife, and the ever-present threat of tall fragile towers being toppled.

Not just because it wastes your time, but because everything you set in stone about your world is a bollard hemming in the course of your story, making it harder for you to follow your story where it wants to go.

This is why I prefer letting stories tell themselves. Build a world, populate said world with precarious dominoes, let things unfold organically.

Just for some context, the maps that are being referred to are part of conworkshop's 'Sahar' collaborative conworld. As Kat mentioned, the blank spaces are unclaimed territories (that are assumed to be countries that just don't exist yet.)

Furthermore, the user is referring to some of their old countries - Hux Kham nor 'KMA' exist on Sahar anymore, as do neither Yerlan, Naria and several other countries on this list. Ebo Nganagam still exists but was handed over to other users to work on. This is a post is basically a self-flagellation, as all of the criticisms the user is making are of their own countries. There was some drama a few years ago that led this user to leave the collaboration but they've been referring to it ever since in these weird self-critical ways, like they took some minor criticism from other users to heart and feel the need to 'prove' their countries were terrible.

I am under the impression they already have an account on this website and that this account seems to have been made with the express intent of creating this criticism post. I don't know if that breaks any of the site rules and I don't wish to get them in trouble for doing this, so I won't name them, but it's part of a recurring trend of creating false accounts merely to engage in hyperspecific criticisms of their own work.

Interesting, thanks. I was surprised by the negative reactions here at first, but upon reading the first post more thoroughly I could see how it looked like an attempt to embarrass one or more of the people at ConWorkShop. It's much rarer that you see someone anonymously criticizing themselves, instead.

I still think the original essay from 2013 makes a lot of good points, but I wouldnt claim that theyre absolutes, either.

Pabappa wrote: ↑Mon Sep 02, 2019 10:34 am My understanding was that Brazil was given to Portugal out of sympathy. The original explorers didnt know where the newly discovered land would end, so they drew a line on the map and gave what they thought was a fair share of it to Spain and to Portugal.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... rtugal.png

When their maps got better, they realized how ridiculously unfair the original agreement would be, and so the Catholic Church intervened to expand Portugal's claims at the expense of the much better-off Spanish.

Or was that just a cute story they told us in history class to make it more interesting?

That’s a very New-World-Centric evaluation.
Look at all the Portuguese spheres-of-influence in Africa and Asia and the East Atlantic and Indian Ocean and West Pacific.