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It could be reasonably argued that, to a degree, it's impossible to build a fantasy world without drawing from history. Even those lauded for their originality, such as Tékumel and Glorantha, have fairly obvious inspirations (which is why the whole "too weird to live" line of argumentation feel so foreign -- pun unintended -- to me).

Still, there are degrees of calque at work here. WFRP's Old World is a pretty transparent calque of several historical cultures, usually from an exaggerated, literary viewpoint that very often plays on stereotypes for humor (Bretonnia, looking at you), while BECMI/RC's Known World a.k.a. Mystara is a more sedate, but also very obvious mélange of historical inspirations including Roman, Native American, Norse, Mongol and Arabic stand-ins, to name a few.

Usually, when I build a fantasy world, I default to this sort of obvious substitution. You can expect most of my fantasy (esp. D&D) worlds to feature the kingdom of knights in full plate and fancy postcard-worthy castles; the icy realm of hardy, seafaring, giant-slaying barbarians to the north; the confederacy of mercantile city-state republics to the sun-kissed south; and so on, and so forth.

This method's got its advantages; mainly, that players usually have an easier time grasping and relating to the world, as they have an easier time figuring out what the architecture, dress codes, society, etc. on each of these places might look like.

What I'm looking for is a new equilibrium. I'd like my next designs to not hinge on such obvious calques, and yet to avoid being seen as too exotic or out-there.

I find Glorantha a great example because, decades of canon notwithstanding, the Dragon Pass situation is easy to grasp. There's the storm-worshipping, freedom-loving barbarians (that look and read a lot like Ancient Celts and/or Norsemen), and there's the highly-regimented empire (that feels like Imperial Rome and Gupta India had a theocratic, Kali-worshipping baby) and they're at war. I think what usually confuses people about Glorantha is the metaphysics and mythology and that's a whole other can of worms; the world itself is easy to get into.

This is the sort of feel I'm going after. When I do mash-ups I often feel they come across as too obvious (Arthurian Britain and Late Medieval Southern France! Medieval Italy and the Hanseatic League!), and I have difficulty visualizing what a civilization that combines wildly divergent cultures (Abbasid Caliphate and Song China! Aztecs and Imperial Rome!) might look like.

How 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?

Try something less common than an Arthurian/Medieval Europe pastiche.

Go with a more Dark Ages Europe where instead of the Big Empire being Roman it is Eastern Roman with Cataphracts instead of infantry and the barbarian are Frankish infantry or Visigothic cavalry. You can still have Northmen but now they may be river boat raiders/traders and members of the Varangian guard instead of sea raiders.

Or put Rome (either Western or Eastern version) and China closer together so they interact more easily. Then you get a conflict between two big Empires one familiar and one less familiar. Or use a Warring States period China with mulitiple kingdoms and potential proto unifiers. The PCs could be Westerners who are trying to prevent the Eastern evil, tyrannical Sorcerer who is the potential unifier and founder of an Empire of Evil. Or change it up and the PCs help (or become) potential unifiers and the Western Empire are the evil foreigners who are trying to prevent unification to keep the East weak and divided.

Serious question:

Which is more important... "solid worldbuilding" or "fun game?"

Because I've found (your experience may vary etc) that over 40 years most players just want to jump in and play, and are perfectly happy with a world made up of various tropes that you've Scotch taped together.

And so that's my world now.  Fun game first.

I'm with OG.

The key is accessibility. With familiar tropes, players can absorb material easier and faster, and you can focus on exceptions or instances of familiar stuff.

Spend an hour creating the political hierarchy of the Emeraldine Traansgereld, or an hour developing dukes and barons of the upper Marches along the Brokespine mountains?

It cuts down on the barrier between player and game.
'I circuitine my elo'sh manzar from it's resting crucible and focus the fourth ray on the enemies viewing orbs'
Vs
'I draw my karabela and slash at the duke's face, but I keep a bit back for surprises.'

Over time I think we can become adept at blending things in less obvious ways.


Or, like in scifi, pick a few bits that are wildly different to spice things up carefully.

How about a world with strange geology or other natural phenomena?

I forget where I heard it but someone described a world where the air was "normal" in thick forests but thinned out beyond them. So everyone lived in the forests and the oceans and plains were no-mans land.

How about a "Riverworld" type of planet? Either one long endless river or a world of many mountains and most of every continent is a network of rivers?

A world where there are no continents, just lots of islands everywhere.

A world where there are frequent earthquakes. So much so that building anything beyond villages and towns is pointless. No one uses stone in construction except for a foundation.

A world where things were normal for a long time then some disaster occurred. A string of volcanoes blew or an asteroid impact and now the skies are darker and the air is colder and many plants and animals are perishing.

Or you could remove something we take for granted. What if there were no dogs in the world? Or no cats to control the rat populations? No horses? A world of weak magic where the best that can be achieved is stuff like creating water, light, healing a couple points at a time, etc. And even those spells are a strain on the casters.

Play around with religion. I'm playing a PbP game where there is a massive war between gods going on, a whole pantheon vs. "the one true God". Or have two pantheons actively warring against each other. Or the gods have had enough of human shenanigans and are now making increasing demands on them. ("Nice temple. Build me a bigger one. And you will start sacrificing animals to me every month.")

How about a world where reincarnation isn't just a belief but has been proven and they can figure out who you were in a past life? A person can will their valuables and possessions to their next body. Grudges and hatreds occur not just between families or clans but individuals and can last across hundreds of years and generations.

Quote from: Old Geezer;810327Serious question:

Which is more important... "solid worldbuilding" or "fun game?"

That's not really where I'm stuck. It's less about consistency or detail (beyond a minimum), and more about evoking cool imagery.

In any case, I don't think those are mutually exclusive. I just want to find a new "balance point" outside the same-old same-old.

Quote from: Doughdee222;810350How about a world with strange geology or other natural phenomena?

That's one way to go about it, but tracking down all the ripples from those changes (across society, economy, etc.) is more work than I'm looking for.

Quote from: Old Geezer;810327Serious question:

Which is more important... "solid worldbuilding" or "fun game?"

Quote from: The Butcher;810379That's not really where I'm stuck. It's less about consistency or detail (beyond a minimum), and more about evoking cool imagery.

In any case, I don't think those are mutually exclusive. I just want to find a new "balance point" outside the same-old same-old.

Without the work of making it consistent, it might leave people puzzling over or complaining about the inconsistencies rather than enjoying the imagery.

Quote from: Doughdee222;810350How about a world with strange geology or other natural phenomena?

Quote from: The Butcher;810379That's one way to go about it, but tracking down all the ripples from those changes (across society, economy, etc.) is more work than I'm looking for.

I think there are only four ways to achieve cool imagery outside the same-old same-old that is either consistent with the consequences of its basic premises or so cool that nobody cares about consistency:

• Put in a lot of work.
• Be super talented/skillful/creative.
• Get really lucky.
• Get it from someone who has done one of these four things.

Choose three random elements from the game rules you're using--spells, skills, classes, player races, nonplayer races, magic items, game mechanics, whatever; choose a fairly short time limit; within that time limit describe why those three elements are the most important things in the world (at least at that moment in the world's history). This has worked for me at the adventure design level; maybe it could work for world building. :idunno:

At the world level, I usually steal stuff from several sources (#4), and hope it fits together and is obscure enough that nobody figures out where it came from (#3).

My campaigns tend to be either 'scotch taped' (cf. previous Savage Worlds game thread) or basically CBF quasi-European fantasy monoculture but there's always building-from-first-principles. Work out your geography and whatnot, imagine some primitive cultures that would appear in those locations a few thousand years back, guess how the environment would affect their mores and cultures, then think about how their technology has evolved (and the impact of that - maybe trying to mix up what developments appeared first compared to IRL society) and how they spread and adapt (expansion, war, etc). Throw in a few natural disasters and world shakeups every so often. Giving you cultures like 'desert nomads now adapted to seafaring, who abhor agriculture as the source of the great desert', or 'tropical islanders who spread to the icelands after their volcanic island sank below the waves'. Basically building a new world procedurally with the hope it'll evolve along different lines to Earth.

Quote from: rawma;810420Without the work of making it consistent, it might leave people puzzling over or complaining about the inconsistencies rather than enjoying the imagery.

Hence, "beyond a minimum." As in, a minimum of consistency. Just enough to suspend disbelief (and to get the ACKS economy sim to work out, but that's actually the easy part).

Quote from: rawma;810420At the world level, I usually steal stuff from several sources (#4), and hope it fits together and is obscure enough that nobody figures out where it came from (#3).

That's more or less what I had in mind and it's mostly the "fits together" part that I'm agonizing over.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;810524Basically building a new world procedurally with the hope it'll evolve along different lines to Earth.

Blimey, that's a shitload of work! :D I'd rather start off with the cool imagery and build backwards from there.

One possibility is to look at the world as seen by various cultures: their geographies and mythologies.

To "file off the serial numbers" can be accomplished by changing the very artifacts - names, clothing styles, etc. - that serve as intentional cues in mashups such as the Known World or the Old World.

Considering magic may help.

Quote from: Phillip;810570To "file off the serial numbers" can be accomplished by changing the very artifacts - names, clothing styles, etc. - that serve as intentional cues in mashups such as the Known World or the Old World.

Now that sounds intriguing. Care to elaborate?

This would actually be easier with more detail. What do you have so far?

Quote from: The Butcher;810320[...]I find Glorantha a great example because, decades of canon notwithstanding, the Dragon Pass situation is easy to grasp. There's the storm-worshipping, freedom-loving barbarians (that look and read a lot like Ancient Celts and/or Norsemen), and there's the highly-regimented empire (that feels like Imperial Rome and Gupta India had a theocratic, Kali-worshipping baby) and they're at war. [...]

This is the sort of feel I'm going after. When I do mash-ups I often feel they come across as too obvious (Arthurian Britain and Late Medieval Southern France! Medieval Italy and the Hanseatic League!), and I have difficulty visualizing what a civilization that combines wildly divergent cultures (Abbasid Caliphate and Song China! Aztecs and Imperial Rome!) might look like.

How 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?

Sounds like you want to paint vividly the vaguely familiar in new forms.

Easiest way? Splice wholes into composite idea parts. Patchwork the ones you want together in a humanized (relatable) pattern. Reach for that new form by sinking that core relatable pattern with its vivid composite colors into yourself. Let it marinate.

Then, being in that head space, that lens, do the basics of life's logistics. Let your new alien lens and life's fomenting needs bubble forth necessary consistency. Let it create its own logic. Remember, 'would it make sense to them', and then commit to paper as much as you can.

It also helps to have been previously insane or have done hallucinogenics at some point in life. Being impassioned, inspired, or hopelessly in love does qualify.

Quote from: Opaopajr;811478Sounds like you want to paint vividly the vaguely familiar in new forms.

Ultimately you have to expand a description of your mash-up into something that feels real. I think it's best to start with a very short description: easier to have a handle on (especially when players explore some corner that you hadn't thought about and you go back to the underlying idea) and includes fewer assumptions from the sources. And then you have to expand it enough that the underlying simple idea isn't easily visible and it makes sense. And it comes down to  work, talent, luck or getting someone else to make it, as I suggested earlier.

QuoteIt also helps to have been previously insane or have done hallucinogenics at some point in life. Being impassioned, inspired, or hopelessly in love does qualify.

Or insanity or hallucinogens. Which of impassioned, inspired and hopelessly in love is insanity and which is drugs?

Quote from: rawma;811639Or insanity or hallucinogens. Which of impassioned, inspired and hopelessly in love is insanity and which is drugs?

Does it matter? ;)

However, I do feel a walk-thru example for The Butcher would help. First we'd need his input of what he wants to work with. And of that, what will be familiar and what will be alien. A brainstorm of prioritized words will do.

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've been blogging about this for a while (https://kaptainvon.wordpress.com/tag/impressionist-fantasy/page/2/) but here's the gist of what I've come up with so far.

• Reject the first idea you have about anything.
• If you think something is cool, identify what it is about it that makes you feel that way, and use those qualities rather than the thing itself.
• Focus on impressions rather than nitpicky details.
• If you're going to use a map of a real place, trace it, flip it through ninety degrees, and invert some features; a lake becomes a plateau, a forest becomes a mountain range, whatever.
• Go back to the basic options of whatever game you're using - for instance D&D - and put them to some new purpose without reinventing the wheel. In my campaign elves are degenerate barbarians with a Conanesque wildness and swagger to them - no mechanics have been altered, I've just decided to play off a different sterotype for them.

Those are a few things that are starting to work for me. The people who say 'fun game first' are half right, but I find the game is more fun for me if I'm having to do a bit of re-imagining and stretch myself beyond the tired old saws that we've all seen a thousand times before. Many of my players have expressed similar sentiments - the stock tropes have become tired for them - and so the challenge for me is making the setting interesting without stressing over needless house rules and petty details.

Quote from: Opaopajr;811699Does it matter? ;)

Insanity says yes, but there are probably drugs that would make the answer no.

QuoteHowever, I do feel a walk-thru example for The Butcher would help. First we'd need his input of what he wants to work with. And of that, what will be familiar and what will be alien. A brainstorm of prioritized words will do.

Yeah, that would probably be the only way to be more helpful. And it would be interesting in its own right.

Quote from: Opaopajr;811478Sounds like you want to paint vividly the vaguely familiar in new forms.

I wouldn't have put it better myself. :)

Quote from: Opaopajr;811478Easiest way? Splice wholes into composite idea parts. Patchwork the ones you want together in a humanized (relatable) pattern. Reach for that new form by sinking that core relatable pattern with its vivid composite colors into yourself. Let it marinate.

Quote from: Von;811722

• Reject the first idea you have about anything.
• If you think something is cool, identify what it is about it that makes you feel that way, and use those qualities rather than the thing itself.
• Focus on impressions rather than nitpicky details.
• If you're going to use a map of a real place, trace it, flip it through ninety degrees, and invert some features; a lake becomes a plateau, a forest becomes a mountain range, whatever.
• Go back to the basic options of whatever game you're using - for instance D&D - and put them to some new purpose without reinventing the wheel. In my campaign elves are degenerate barbarians with a Conanesque wildness and swagger to them - no mechanics have been altered, I've just decided to play off a different sterotype for them.

Great advice! Much obliged, gentlemen.

Quote from: Opaopajr;811699However, I do feel a walk-thru example for The Butcher would help. First we'd need his input of what he wants to work with. And of that, what will be familiar and what will be alien. A brainstorm of prioritized words will do.

Quote from: rawma;811823Yeah, that would probably be the only way to be more helpful. And it would be interesting in its own right.

Sounds like fun! Where do we start?

Let's make a culture on Europa.

Part 1: Color Palette & Representative Shapes
1. Give me at least two cultures, real or tropes, to mash up (but no greater than four).
2. At least one of these be vaguely relatable to humanity -- something players can latch onto as a reality anchor.
3. From those listed cultural tropes give me a Prioritized List of Words of desired components.

Part 1 is a) selecting existing lenses that please you, and b) latching onto at least one which is easily recognizable, then c) picking interesting forms and colors from within the others.

With that we'll chat on how we'll progress to Part 2: Stained Glass Patterns.

Quote from: Opaopajr;812213Let's make a culture on Europa.

The Jovian moon? Are we doing SF?

Quote from: The Butcher;812224The Jovian moon? Are we doing SF?

I read it as meaning a fantasy version of Europe, perhaps from some setting or game I don't know about. Partly because I prefer fantasy RPGs and partly because your original post talked about fantasy worlds.

Perhaps we could start with the default list from the original post:

Quote from: The Butcher;810320Usually, when I build a fantasy world, I default to this sort of obvious substitution. You can expect most of my fantasy (esp. D&D) worlds to feature the kingdom of knights in full plate and fancy postcard-worthy castles; the icy realm of hardy, seafaring, giant-slaying barbarians to the north; the confederacy of mercantile city-state republics to the sun-kissed south; and so on, and so forth.

So, Charlemagne/King Arthur; Vikings/Norse mythology; various Mediterranean nations? Choose one, and throw in extra cultures to mash up with it. I'm not sure what "Prioritized List of Words of desired components" would be - perhaps magics or technology available or common, what the economy is based on, what professions or institutions hold the most power, what sort of adventuring hooks you expect, maybe just color?

Quote from: The Butcher;810573Now that sounds intriguing. Care to elaborate?

Contrast how much is so obvious in Howard's Hyborian Age vs. Leiber's Nehwon (in which the Mingols and Fafhrd's northern barbarians stand out, but the latter have as I recall a matriarchal spin).

Now, part of this is that Leiber - along with Lord Dunsany, Jack Vance and others - often starts with satire that takes on a life of its own. One way it does that is by carrying through the supernatural and other elements that are notably different from Earthly starting points. The Street of Gods, and the gods of (vs the gods in) Lankhmar, for example.

With such a grab bag as D&D,  deciding what not to lump into a given world can also be significant. For instance, your world will stand out if it doesn't feature the usual set of Tolkien-ish races (dwarves, elves, halflings, orcs). Literary fantasy worlds tend to focus on certain conceits and inspirations.

Narnia: medieval Christian cosmology, but applied to a different creation; Talking Beasts; Classical and Norse mythological creatures. Calormen is very Arabian Nights, and the Telmarines are from Earth, but everthing gets a touch that makes it Narnian.

Earthsea: True Names; Polynesia; Taoism. Note that the technology and such don't stand out as Polynesian, nor is anything explicitly Taoist; other factors than the props are what work their way in.

Witch World: the Old Race; Gates; animal-human bonds (a Norton hallmark).

Young Kingdoms: the Lords of Chaos (and Law, and elements and beasts).

Recluce: another take on Order vs. Chaos

I think the fundamental real-world connection is perennial human nature. Cultural manifestations are rather parochial, familiarity leading us to regard as 'normal' things that may strike others as bizarre.

Dragons are notably different in Tolkien, Lewis, LeGuin, McCaffrey, Delaney, Stafford, etc.

What do dragons mean to you? Tolkien found wonder in the forest; what is magical to you?  What visions appear in your dreams?

Put your personal stamp on what is otherwise familiar, and you add a fresh dimension that builds up element by element.

Quote from: Opaopajr;812213Part 1: Color Palette & Representative Shapes
1. Give me at least two cultures, real or tropes, to mash up (but no greater than four).
2. At least one of these be vaguely relatable to humanity -- something players can latch onto as a reality anchor.
3. From those listed cultural tropes give me a Prioritized List of Words of desired components.

Part 1 is a) selecting existing lenses that please you, and b) latching onto at least one which is easily recognizable, then c) picking interesting forms and colors from within the others.

With that we'll chat on how we'll progress to Part 2: Stained Glass Patterns.

Quote from: rawma;812278So, Charlemagne/King Arthur; Vikings/Norse mythology; various Mediterranean nations? Choose one, and throw in extra cultures to mash up with it. I'm not sure what "Prioritized List of Words of desired components" would be - perhaps magics or technology available or common, what the economy is based on, what professions or institutions hold the most power, what sort of adventuring hooks you expect, maybe just color?

Let's keep this one simple. Bog-standard classic D&D campaign, with an eye towards stronghold building and rulership at higher levels, so a feudal background with decent swathes of unclaimed (or more accurately, lost to banditry and monsters) wilderness are a must.

My usual history-calqued approach is expedient, but lately it feels a bit too much like a theme park. What I'm looking for is color. The "not in Kansas anymore" feel.

Let's offer a non-Western element, albeit with some resonance, for each of these four nations.

For the knightly realm (Charlemagne/Arthur as filtered through chivalry romance, i.e. with the look and feel of 13th- or 14th-century CE Southern France), let's add a dash of another fragmented nation filtered through literature: Warring States China as seen by wuxia literature.

For the Viking/Norse equivalent, let's pair them with another seafaring, slave-taking Proud Warrior Race: the Maori.

For the Italian merchant princes, how about their Mediterranean forerunners, the Phoenicians?

Quote from: The Butcher;810379That's not really where I'm stuck. It's less about consistency or detail (beyond a minimum), and more about evoking cool imagery.

In any case, I don't think those are mutually exclusive. I just want to find a new "balance point" outside the same-old same-old.



That's one way to go about it, but tracking down all the ripples from those changes (across society, economy, etc.) is more work than I'm looking for.

This is what I saw immediately.

Firsr off, worldbuilding is a creative enterprise, and like any, creates a kind of satisfaction in itself.  So while good players can jump into anything, creating something that makes the GM want to run it do to the GM's interest will also make for a better game.

Secondly, the devils are in the details.  Making 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.

Oh poo, I was hoping you'd stay with the process for a while at least. You've already beelined into a tried pastiche. Stay with it and see if you can make magic.

Of course I meant the Jovian moon. And of it being SF? Does it matter? It is merely a location. Technological epoch (let alone humanity) is another matter.

Shall we try to mash up a compromise?
Keep Europa. It's very "not in Kansas anymore."
Add two or three of your medieval countries, or their stand-ins.
(I like the idea of Vietnamese Boat People, too, just to throw that out there.)
Splice the elements from each, including Europa, that you want to use.
Highlight one element that humanizes the location.

Next we'll stitch together Patterns!

Quote from: The Butcher;810320What I'm looking for is a new equilibrium. I'd like my next designs to not hinge on such obvious calques, and yet to avoid being seen as too exotic or out-there.

... I have difficulty visualizing what a civilization that combines wildly divergent cultures (Abbasid Caliphate and Song China! Aztecs and Imperial Rome!) might look like.

How 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?

Quote from: The Butcher;812356Let's offer a non-Western element, albeit with some resonance, for each of these four nations.

For the knightly realm (Charlemagne/Arthur as filtered through chivalry romance, i.e. with the look and feel of 13th- or 14th-century CE Southern France), let's add a dash of another fragmented nation filtered through literature: Warring States China as seen by wuxia literature.

For the Viking/Norse equivalent, let's pair them with another seafaring, slave-taking Proud Warrior Race: the Maori.

For the Italian merchant princes, how about their Mediterranean forerunners, the Phoenicians?

You want to combine wildly divergent cultures, and you throw together very similar cultures in each case? Maybe that's part of the problem.

The only thing that jumps out at me in the first is the Warring States part; a civil war conducted entirely through chivalric combat, perhaps even through tournaments of skilled champions -- the common people united and at peace while the knights and paladins and monks battle in arranged melees, with elaborately decorated armor and ever more bizarre weapon designs, to advance the interests of one region over another - the first faction to abandon this tradition and engage in conventional warfare would be brought down by all the others and by angry mobs of the common people. If that's not satisfactory, throw in ancestor worship in the form of ghosts and other undead that act to enforce the traditions when necessary, with elaborate ceremonies and festivals to placate them the rest of the time. But even so, beneath the surface, some or all of the regions engage in vicious campaigns of espionage and assassination.

For the second, I liked the movie Whale Rider; so I envision Vikings who eschew ships in favor of aquatic beasts: rather than whales, modestly sized amphibious kaiju (I want something with legs so they can be a possible enemy even away from the sea), and Vikings living farther north than possible without magic dressed as if for the tropics - their command of elemental magics of sea and storm protect them and even allow them to breathe underwater while traveling with their beasts. I leave unresolved the question of whether they have domesticated the sea monsters, command them with magic or have formed a pact with them or some other power that commands the beasts. The warring states maintain castles to house and protect the immense weapons that drive off the larger kaiju and the raiding parties riding them; most of the castles occupy commanding sites near the seashore.

For the third: ancient merchant kingdoms with a history of innovative practices, faced with the Polar Barbarians' command of the seas, would turn to methods of flight for their trade, and perhaps even enchant floating cities to protect them from the strengths of the other kingdoms (invasion by land or raids by sea). So, flying ships of trade but not war, maintained at great expense to bring home the even greater profits of trade.

Is this the sort of thing you want, or is it too basic and old hat for you?

Quote from: rawma;812634You want to combine wildly divergent cultures, and you throw together very similar cultures in each case? Maybe that's part of the problem.

The only thing that jumps out at me in the first is the Warring States part; a civil war conducted entirely through chivalric combat, perhaps even through tournaments of skilled champions -- the common people united and at peace while the knights and paladins and monks battle in arranged melees, with elaborately decorated armor and ever more bizarre weapon designs, to advance the interests of one region over another - the first faction to abandon this tradition and engage in conventional warfare would be brought down by all the others and by angry mobs of the common people. If that's not satisfactory, throw in ancestor worship in the form of ghosts and other undead that act to enforce the traditions when necessary, with elaborate ceremonies and festivals to placate them the rest of the time. But even so, beneath the surface, some or all of the regions engage in vicious campaigns of espionage and assassination.

For the second, I liked the movie Whale Rider; so I envision Vikings who eschew ships in favor of aquatic beasts: rather than whales, modestly sized amphibious kaiju (I want something with legs so they can be a possible enemy even away from the sea), and Vikings living farther north than possible without magic dressed as if for the tropics - their command of elemental magics of sea and storm protect them and even allow them to breathe underwater while traveling with their beasts. I leave unresolved the question of whether they have domesticated the sea monsters, command them with magic or have formed a pact with them or some other power that commands the beasts. The warring states maintain castles to house and protect the immense weapons that drive off the larger kaiju and the raiding parties riding them; most of the castles occupy commanding sites near the seashore.

For the third: ancient merchant kingdoms with a history of innovative practices, faced with the Polar Barbarians' command of the seas, would turn to methods of flight for their trade, and perhaps even enchant floating cities to protect them from the strengths of the other kingdoms (invasion by land or raids by sea). So, flying ships of trade but not war, maintained at great expense to bring home the even greater profits of trade.

Is this the sort of thing you want, or is it too basic and old hat for you?

You've just described about 60% of my campaign world. Great minds?

I realize I should give an example on how to splice a full element into component parts, and that Europa is quite an irregular order, so I should give example. This can illustrate how to break down and then prioritize material in preparation for making new Patterns.

Europa (so far known),  not prioritized:
1. satellite of a gas giant, middle-far distance from the system's star.
1a. gas giant planet will dominate skyline.
1b. gas giant's other satellites (and rings) will dominate after that.
1c. system's star would be faint, followed by planets and distant stars, etc.

2. smooth ice surface. high albedo. ice likely incredibly deep.
2a. periodic water vapor plumes (geysers?) of 120 mi.
2b. thin, mostly oxygen atmosphere.
2c. massive Lineae (lines) cross satellite, Lenticulae (freckles) dot some areas.

3. induced magnetic field, likely to massive ocean lube between ice & crust.
3a. tidal flexing between Europa & Jupiter & other satellites. ice tidally locked to Jupiter, iron core? & silicon crust? lubed by saline ocean? to spin. magnetism.
3b. ice plate tectonics. only other solar system body known to have similar tectonics.
3c. theory between massive liquid ocean or semi-solid ice slush ocean.

You have your own "plausible" aquatic Hollow World (AD&D 1e setting). People settling underneath 'continents' of ice watching (sonar-ing) the changing crust in the darkness "above." Thin atmosphere at the surface, a surface with big, crossing grooves, chaotic rippling, and vapor geysers far taller than Mt. Everest amid a sky dominated by the violent swirling bands of storms on Jupiter. And both separated by who knows how many 'dungeon levels' of labyrinthine ice.

All you need now is an anchor to make it feel "human enough" to play.

Take Ideas, break them down into Colors & Forms. Use the Colors & Forms to create a new Pattern. Select at least one Recognizable Form to anchor the fantastic to humanity. Use the new Pattern as a new Lens to solve the Everyday.

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

Quote from: rawma;812634Is this the sort of thing you want, or is it too basic and old hat for you?

No, that's exactly it! Amazing stuff.

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

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.

:o

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. :o

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.

I sometimes do the flip on cultures.

Take the icy realm of hardy, seafaring, giant-slaying barbarians to the north and flip them with the confederacy of mercantile city-state republics to the sun-kissed south

And you get something like
 The sun-kissed realm of hardy, sandfaring, giant slaying barbarians city-states of the south.