Quote from: Opaopajr;812687Where do find the fantastic? Can you prioritize what it is that moves you? Passion is an infectious, international language. Have faith, leap.

Just a few odd ideas. Right now I'm thinking we have two major groups.

The surface-dwellers have an economy turned towards ice-mining, potentially cheaper and less hazardous than iceteroid mining. This sort of economic activity will probably attract labour from peoples such as Inuits, Yupiks, Samoyeds, Lapps and other populations indigenous to harsh, cold climates on Earth.

They carve underground cities in the ice (rock-hard at Europa's average surface temperature of 110K) and extract oxygen from Europa's thin atmosphere, and even manage a little hydroponic agriculture and pisciculture, but depend on nitrogen imports for life support. They also buy geothermal power from the subsurface ocean dwellers, to supplement their nuclear power stations. But between the radiation (Europa's magnetic field, at 0,000012T, is far from suficient to shield from Jupiter's ruthless radiation), the extreme cold and the eventual icequakes (as the vast ice sheets collide amongst themselves in a similar manner to Earth's tectonic plates), it's a harsh existence that breeds hardy, fatalistic people.

The inhabitants of the subsurface ocean, on the other hand, predate the ice-mining operation by several decades. They started out as scientifc observation stations who sought out (and found) microscopic, extremophile life around Europa's thermal vents. They started taking in refugees (initially friends and family of the workers) during the First Solar Wars and grew into a more typical solar colony.

Most of the ocean population consists of baseline or little-modded humans, living in domed, pressurized ocean habitats. A few habitats are filled with water and inhabited by genetically modified water-breathing strains of human and/or uplifted cetaceans and cephalopods, but they, too, require pressurization and heat.

Power is extracted from geothermal vents, and the economy hinges on the high level of education amongst their population. Europa is one of the Solar System's chief centers in life sciences research.

Good ideas! Premature in the process, but good ideas nonetheless!

See, you already jumped into "internalized Lens answers Everyday problems." That's why you keep making stuff with which you feel dissatisfied. Because you are accepting already-made interlaced ideas, it ends up feeling "already done."

You made good stuff, but this criticism is commenting on process over product here. I am trying to teach you how to fish, as it were. Jumping the process and not showing your work won't isolate where you keep making the move that leaves you disappointed.

To make this productive, work backwards and notice what you already accepted as true about your world:

1. Sci Fi inter-planetary tech age. 2. Human biology for core actors. 2. Colonial exploitation and exploration. 4. Divide between early & late explorers. 5. Hardy & Fatalistic Atmosphere. 6. Tech v. Environment, complete settler dependency.

et cetera, et cetera.

Back up and try again. This time purposefully select 3 to 4 ideas, purposefully deconstruct them, next purposefully choose your priorities, and then purposefully rebuild patterned lens. Finally, after all that, go and answer the everyday problems.

Quote from: Opaopajr;812698See, you already jumped into "internalized Lens answers Everyday problems." That's why you keep making stuff with which you feel dissatisfied. Because you are accepting already-made interlaced ideas, it ends up feeling "already done."

That may indeed explain why my worlds feel same-old. But the "internalized lens" — which I've taken to mean, my baseline assumptions — definitely has something to do with the sort of game I want to run.

If you ask me to do worldbuilding on Europa, I'll default to the building blocks of my go-to SF RPG, Traveller. I'll think about human colonists in a harsh planet and frame things in terms of economics, because that's what makes most Traveller games tick.

If you give me a map of Svalbard Island, blow it up to continent size and place it in the Northern hemisphere with the southern shore edging into the tropics, and northern touching the arctic circle, and ask me to build a D&D world on it, I'm going to build a world that acommodates dwarves, elves, orcs, dragons, paladins, dungeons and enough lawlessness and unclaimed wilderness that an enterprising tomb robber can become landed gentry given enough XP and gold.

I don't really want to divorce myself from these building blocks, at least not entirely. The settings I admire and aspire to emulate, manage to frme these familiar elements into alien and exotic aesthetics. Tékumel is a prime example, an OD&D setting rife with opportunities for dungeon-crawling, and the high-level stronghold-building substituted for a different sort of endgame (owing to a milennial, well-established and highly regimented imperial society) where your "barbarian" foreigner PCs buys himself clan adoption and citizenship and joins a temple, legion or civil service sinecure.

Quote from: Opaopajr;812698Back up and try again. This time purposefully select 3 to 4 ideas, purposefully deconstruct them, next purposefully choose your priorities, and then purposefully rebuild patterned lens. Finally, after all that, go and answer the everyday problems.

I'll work on it when I get back from work. Thanks!

Ahh, good self-analysis. Yes, you "default." That is why you find yourself not fully embracing the leap.

Now, the challenge is to get to those amazing worlds that awe us. And to do that note where they fly! with baseline assumptions. But also note they also, as you say, don't alienate you from the experience.

Somehow these building blocks are doing an alchemy of relatable alien-ness. But how can you do this for yourself? Very simple, don't mimic the product as a whole, mimic the process that makes the whole.

First you need stuff you like. Second you need to know what parts you like most about what you like. Third you need to find something approachable. Fourth you need to reconstruct your "own building block." Fifth, that newly constructed block of baseline assumptions answers coherency questions in your world.

Quote from: Von;812675You've just described about 60% of my campaign world. Great minds?

Quote from: The Butcher;812689No, that's exactly it! Amazing stuff.

QuoteIf you think the culture pairings I put forward aren't divergent enough, what would you use?

There has to be some contrast for me; if the two are too much alike, it's like taking the same thing twice. Phoenicians and Italian merchant princes - I got nothing. So what to pair them with instead? Some variety of missionary (traveling in common, but divergent motivations)? Maybe 19th century robber barons (wealth but from a different source)? The other two had enough differences to work from. But if they'd been too different I'd probably be complaining about that.

Unlike Opaopajr, I don't have a method for distilling stuff I like so I'm keenly interested in seeing how that plays out.

Quote from: Opaopajr;812710Now, the challenge is to get to those amazing worlds that awe us. And to do that note where they fly! with baseline assumptions. But also note they also, as you say, don't alienate you from the experience.

Somehow these building blocks are doing an alchemy of relatable alien-ness. But how can you do this for yourself? Very simple, don't mimic the product as a whole, mimic the process that makes the whole.

My usual approach is absolutely teleological; I shape my process around the desired outcome. I wouldn't know how to "splice" the building blocks only for the sake of worldbuilding, though I'm okay with doing it explicitly for running a different sort of game.

For instance, if you handed me the same map I mentioned above for a D$D game and told me, "build a world for a D&D campaign that focuses on fantasy courtroom drama instead of dungeon-crawling", I'd cover the whole world in a vast continent-spanning city as if SW's Coruscant and M:tG's Ravnica had a baby, ruled by a council elected by hundreds of guilds and city ward officials in byzantine multi-tiered elections, with elves and dwarves reskinned as weird Mievillesque inhuman races, XP for GP derived from judicial awards instead of loot, questing through Borgesian "Library of Babel"-like archives for lost jurisprudence, criminal gangs the size of national armies staking out nation-sized turfs, the tomb-robber-to-landed-gentry social ladder replaced by an ambulance-chaser-to-district-attorney-to-judge career pathway...

I don't, and maybe can't, do worldbuilding for its own sake. My loss, I know. But only as a tool for a game, with the gameplay premise as its foundation. Hence my trouble with "taking the leap" and cranking the alienness up to 11.

Quote from: rawma;812776There has to be some contrast for me; if the two are too much alike, it's like taking the same thing twice. Phoenicians and Italian merchant princes - I got nothing. So what to pair them with instead? Some variety of missionary (traveling in common, but divergent motivations)? Maybe 19th century robber barons (wealth but from a different source)? The other two had enough differences to work from. But if they'd been too different I'd probably be complaining about that.

To be honest, if dress, religion and everyday custom are the entirety of the difference at work here, I'm satisfied. The "alienness" I seek is less about building a world that works differently from the traditional alternative, and more about creating something that feels (looks, sounds, smells) different.

Quote from: LordVreeg;812392Making grand, sweeping 'differences' is not always needed.  I enjoy taking familar tropes and subtly turning them on their side.  Delve deeply nto politics, guilds, linguistics, the logic behind magic, faiths vs the peculiar idea of patron deity, etc, and you'll make some deeper, more meaningful change3s that PCs will actually glom onto.

I increasingly suspect that this is a more likely way to achieve what I seek.

Hmm, but goal-oriented creation feels self-serving. It is explicit and thus lacking mystery. It is like that complaint about boring +1 swords. The magic is gone by being direct in its end use.

Maybe you cannot find that feeling of originality you seek until you break yourself of this teleological mindset. This was your OP's stated desire, finding more originality. Conceding defeat to one's habit is an option, but also a sad personal realization after all this talk.

But we do what we can to our capacity.

Edit: Can you think of six impossible things before breakfast?

Quote from: Opaopajr;812825Hmm, but goal-oriented creation feels self-serving. It is explicit and thus lacking mystery. It is like that complaint about boring +1 swords. The magic is gone by being direct in its end use.

Maybe you cannot find that feeling of originality you seek until you break yourself of this teleological mindset. This was your OP's stated desire, finding more originality. Conceding defeat to one's habit is an option, but also a sad personal realization after all this talk.

But we do what we can to our capacity.

Edit: Can you think of six impossible things before breakfast?

I think you're projecting your viewpoint onto The Butcher. What he seems to want, and seems to have found some in this thread, is creativity that serves his needs, not creativity that meets your standards. He's looking for variations, not an entirely new musical form.

Quote from: Opaopajr;812710First you need stuff you like. Second you need to know what parts you like most about what you like. Third you need to find something approachable. Fourth you need to reconstruct your "own building block." Fifth, that newly constructed block of baseline assumptions answers coherency questions in your world.

This is the gist of what I've been advising, expressed with significantly more clarity. However, I'm not without sympathy to the goal-oriented process, provided that the goal is incorporated in the whole process rather than set up at one end of it.

• I like the elf mechanics from early D&D, in which class boundaries are treated as more permeable for this particular kind of non-human and restrictions (particularly on armour) are relaxed.
• I like them because they suggest a sentient being which is more holistic, less specialised, more in tune with its range of potential, not so linear in its thinking.
  
• 'Something approachable' - I'm not 100% sure I've parsed this step correctly, but in this context I think it means "so how do we approach the things we identified in step #2?" The automatic assumption is 'longer lifespan' - whether because of the "it's not if, but when" phenomenon of Woolf's Orlando or because of reflexive associations with the elf. Chucking the reflexive associations is how you get to step 4... OK, so rather than it being a non-human creature you have a very different cultural/spiritual tradition to the rest of the world that demands a different kind of personal development. This is vague not out of necessity but because I'm too sleepy for details right now, and that's why there's no #4 or #5 yet - creativity demands that the creator be awake.
  

Quote from: The Butcher;812807My usual approach is absolutely teleological; I shape my process around the desired outcome. I wouldn't know how to "splice" the building blocks only for the sake of worldbuilding, though I'm okay with doing it explicitly for running a different sort of game.

For instance, if you handed me the same map I mentioned above for a D$D game and told me, "build a world for a D&D campaign that focuses on fantasy courtroom drama instead of dungeon-crawling", I'd cover the whole world in a vast continent-spanning city as if SW's Coruscant and M:tG's Ravnica had a baby, ruled by a council elected by hundreds of guilds and city ward officials in byzantine multi-tiered elections, with elves and dwarves reskinned as weird Mievillesque inhuman races, XP for GP derived from judicial awards instead of loot, questing through Borgesian "Library of Babel"-like archives for lost jurisprudence, criminal gangs the size of national armies staking out nation-sized turfs, the tomb-robber-to-landed-gentry social ladder replaced by an ambulance-chaser-to-district-attorney-to-judge career pathway...

I don't, and maybe can't, do worldbuilding for its own sake. My loss, I know. But only as a tool for a game, with the gameplay premise as its foundation. Hence my trouble with "taking the leap" and cranking the alienness up to 11.

If you always make a beeline for what the game demands, the result is a functional world that serves the game well, but there's no room for anything alien. It's like demanding that all your player characters be perfectly, maximally effective--you lose most of the characters you might be able to play, and other players can hear half the details of your character and fill in the rest of the choices you must have made; there are no surprises.

To get what you want, you have to embrace strangeness and detail for its own sake; make some portion of the world strange in ways that do not serve the game functions. But! You can still leverage your natural tendency; throw on a few orthogonal details with or without a game mechanical effect and explore the consequences, pursuing the desired outcome as you normally would but subject to that peculiar constraint.

Quote from: rawma;812967If you always make a beeline for what the game demands, the result is a functional world that serves the game well, but there's no room for anything alien. It's like demanding that all your player characters be perfectly, maximally effective--you lose most of the characters you might be able to play, and other players can hear half the details of your character and fill in the rest of the choices you must have made; there are no surprises.

Well, I think that's just not true. You can CharOp the hell out of your character sheet and still come up with a character that's interesting to roleplay.

And in terms of setting, again, I point to Tékumel and Glorantha, two settings the hit the sweet spot of measured unfamiliarity I'm seeking while preserving easily relatable situations and structures I can hang a game on.

Or as Opaopajr said, "paint the familiar in vivid colors".

Quote from: The Butcher;810320How does one go about breathing life into a fantasy world without making it a patchwork of explicit imitations of Earth history with fantasy stuff thrown in for good measure?

I'm not sure I've ever quite succeeded, but one thing I do is start with a core cosmology and history and try to demand that all the material I draw on, be consistent with that. So if I have a place inspired by ancient rome, that is fine, but it is going to be shaped by the specifics of the cosmology and setting history also. That usually creates enough change for me, and it also has a funny way of producing somewhat unique cultures I wasn't really expecting to emerge. Another thing to do is track the flow of people and places over quite a bit of time (even if it isn't in the official history of the setting). I take about 2-,4000 years of time, do maybe 10 or 12 copies of the map, then see how all the different races and peoples move around, establish cities and states, etc. That forces me into a weird situations where maybe my Hindu inspired gnomes are migrating into my viking Kingdom. The core bits remain familiar but you also get something new.

Quote from: apparition13;812934I think you're projecting your viewpoint onto The Butcher. What he seems to want, and seems to have found some in this thread, is creativity that serves his needs, not creativity that meets your standards. He's looking for variations, not an entirely new musical form.

Maybe that's it. Wanting more Verdi, Mendelssohn, & Strauss than Stravinsky, Gershwin, & John Cage. I was perhaps more Yellow Magic Orchestra, Afrika Bambaataa, & Ziggy Stardust.

Well, the methodology is still here whenever the spirit moves one.

Quote from: The Butcher;812989Well, I think that's just not true. You can CharOp the hell out of your character sheet and still come up with a character that's interesting to roleplay.

And in terms of setting, again, I point to Tékumel and Glorantha, two settings the hit the sweet spot of measured unfamiliarity I'm seeking while preserving easily relatable situations and structures I can hang a game on.

Or as Opaopajr said, "paint the familiar in vivid colors".

I exaggerate, and there is a lot of free variation that has no real game effect: "Bob VIII is totally different from Bob VII! His favorite color is green not blue, and he doesn't like spicy food." And certainly standard characters, even if selected only from a small range of viably optimized characters, can still be interesting to roleplay. And some clever optimizer eventually comes up with a new approach based on some feat that nobody thought could work towards optimization.

In a point build game, optimizing players tend to choose the same disadvantages (maximum points for minimum inconvenience), the same advantages (minimum points for maximum effect) and undercut the character's back story by not putting any points into "useless" skills or contacts or whatever implied by their own background. And the result is fairly similar characters.

I like game balance and game utility, but I think you have to be willing to risk it with substantial changes to game world elements to get beyond trivial rebranding. Consider faux Vikings; if they affected powdered wigs and elaborately ornate costumes they would seem weird, but if you refuse to let it compromise their effectiveness at raiding or alter their conduct in some meaningful way then it seems to me it's only a superficial thing that players would quickly ignore. (But if you still want them to be faux Vikings then you have to explain how they can or would still fill that role; an additional opportunity for creativity.)

Another example: in Ancillary Justice, the main character is from an empire that does not distinguish genders; everyone is "she", period. The protagonist struggles in interacting with people of other cultures that do distinguish gender because of ignorance of gender cues; the result is, for me, far more alien and compelling than books where everyone uses zhe or per, which I just tune out once I figure out what they are.