Recommendations World-building

Discussion in 'I'm Looking For...' started by DiabolicGod, Oct 30, 2018.

  1. DiabolicGod

    DiabolicGod Well-known lazy Member

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    Alright, so I want to write a new fiction and am looking for a world to build for it.
    So please recommend me any novel which has a very good world building or tell me about some idea you have for world building. (like: novel xyz, hgf type of world building. OR: the world is like xy this exists and this is like that etc)
    any and all recommendations appreciated, thanks
     
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  2. Cutter Masterson

    Cutter Masterson Well-Known Super-Soldier

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    Continuation of this one. Highly recommend:
    https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/3972/the-defective-hermit
     
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  3. Macrendil Ysmir

    Macrendil Ysmir Well-Known Member

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    Pick a culture (or more), throw a dart at the world map 5 times and somehow paste the hit countries together. Go to a random name generator site and select country and capital names. If you have a preference for a certain must-have city (Constantinople/Miklagard f.e.) can just be put in as well. I find that it's not that good to dwell too much on it, as it takes away from the plot.

    One more thing, don't do archipelagos (island groups) like parts of Ancient Greece or modern day Indonesia. If it's a somehwta medieval/fantasy setting, transport between islands would be rather bothersome with the repeated use of boats, pirates, storms etc.
     
  4. DiabolicGod

    DiabolicGod Well-known lazy Member

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    actually, I'm not merely looking for countries or names or cultures, like you may assume.
    I'm looking for any setting that interests me enough to churn out an at least 100k words long story
    so whichever thing you can think of, put it here
    1. Apocalyptic world, earth has become inhabitable a few centuries ago and humanity currently resides on a few space-stations. Recently life has been found on earth again, humanity goes to investigate it.
    2. Stellar Transformation: the pyramid structure of the worlds/realms, but add another layer that connects them all and is accessible by anyone from anywhere
    etc.
    basically anything related to the world (how it is/history) you find that would, in your opinion, make the story more interesting or unique than the standard overused fantasy sword and magic/cultivator world that we see every single time we look for asian webnovels
     
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  5. grish99

    grish99 [Pelican Hater] [Hater of Face-Slapping]

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    Tales of Herding Gods
    For me the best world bulding is there were I actually dont know alot of world.
    Mysterius world that is well mysterius is always good
     
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  6. WinByDying

    WinByDying I can count to four

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    Pursuing Immortality - It uses the modern world we are used to ... But with spiritual essence slowly returning, the world slowly changes. Cultivation history is dug up, and those remnants of past cultivation are used to mold the new spiritual world. A combination of past, present and future.

    Not the richest worldbuilding novel but a great, accessible idea.
     
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  7. Cosmic_

    Cosmic_ [Novel Addict] [Lazy Writer] [Meh Editor]

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    :hmm:
    I always felt that besides coming up with ideas on culture, geography, politics, and side characters, a good way to do world building was to have a story centered around the effects of a magic system or a litRPG system. Overlord and Death Mage sorta fit that, but I was thinking more on something like The World After the Fall or I Was Kicked out of the Hero’s Party Because I Wasn’t a True Companion so I Decided to Have a Slow Life at the Frontier. So more on some universal law or power that affects how society works.
     
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  8. Jiggy

    Jiggy I am JiggyliFAP~ the not fat anymore guy.

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    Warhammer x Warcraft crossovers.
     
  9. Macrendil Ysmir

    Macrendil Ysmir Well-Known Member

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    We're having a slightly similar interest then! The easiest thing would be to look at a historical conflict and play with that. Kinda like Game of Thrones did with the Wars of the Roses.

    And looking at other historical fiction novels works great as well, like Bernard Cornwell's "Last Kingdom", Conn Iggulden's "Conqueror", Simon Scarrow's "Eagle" and Christian Cameron's "Long War" series. Different periods, different conlficts and all of them Epic.
     
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  10. Varno

    Varno True Member

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    World Anvil.
     
  11. erikvio

    erikvio Well-Known Member

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    One of the more interesting worlds I've come across recently that you might find inspiration from is from the Kate Daniels urban fantasy series by Ilona Lewis. In it, magic and technology swing on a pendulum - when one dominates, the other becomes inert. Something happened a millennia ago in our history, and the pendulum swung too far to the side of technology. Magic disappeared and the Age of Enlightenment came upon us. However, the pendulum has started swinging back to magic, and now the creatures and mythological figures of old are emerging from the woodwork. The balance is unstable, though, and it swings back and forth every few days, rendering either magic or technology useless depending.

    Another work with fantastic world building is the Broken Earth series by NK Jemisin.
    Taken from a review I read, the series is "set in a world called the Stillness, where catastrophic natural disasters occur on a semi-regular basis. These events, called Seasons, have wiped out most of humanity before, but through some dint of extreme good luck there is always some fragment of humanity that survives to repopulate the world. However, given that these Seasons do occur semi-regularly, human society has been shaped by such harsh circumstances into something equally harsh. This is especially true when it comes to orogenes: people who have the power to manipulate and control the powerful tectonic activity that causes the Seasons to occur. Derogatorily called “rogga” by a hostile population, orogenes are either killed, or tightly controlled by the government, so that their talent for tectonic manipulation can be used to keep the rest of humanity safe." The world is littered by evidences of extremely advanced past civilizations. However, everyone ignores these things because obviously, whatever those people accomplished didn't work, or else they wouldn't have died out. It's a very harsh world where everyone focuses solely on their survival.

    If you want to look more towards novels, I really enjoyed the world building in Superstars of Tomorrow. It's post-post-apocalyptic. Humanity has triumphed over the apocalypse, and the world is now hyper futuristic. A lot of its culture is dominated by honoring the major generals and martyrs that played crucial roles in conquering the apocalypse, but as with any history, the populace is beginning to forget the bitter struggles their predecessors had to go through. E.g. one of the countries is focused heavily on agriculture, and farmers/landowners are incredibly well off because food was such a rare commodity during the apocalypse, and no one wants a repeat of that. The people in this country have sheep herding as a national sport because the general that founded the country was a sheep herder pre-apoc. Dogs are highly revered as a result.

    Edit:
    Of course, there's the wonderful standard that is the Avatar: The Last Airbender world. I don't think I need to explain it.

    You can also take a familiar generic setting, and really play with the socioeconomic, political, and religious issues and relations, and have them really matter to the story. This is how D. D. Webbs approaches the worldbuilding in his webfiction "The Gods are Bastards" which comes off as a very generic Dungeons & Dragons fantasy world at first.

    You can begin with a magic/power system, and build a society around how people would apply it in reality. (I've NEVER found the concept of sects/immortals and the stuff you find in a lot of wuxia/xianxia realistic in the slightest in terms of world-building). You might look towards Brandon Sanderson's works (Mistborn Trilogy, Stormlight Archives), or maybe to the webfiction "Mother of Learning" for examples.
     
    Last edited: Oct 31, 2018
  12. anom123

    anom123 Well-Known Member

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    What fanfiction?
     
  13. DiabolicGod

    DiabolicGod Well-known lazy Member

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    not a fanfiction, for that, I would just use some story I have already seen and can recall atm and put an OC into it as the MC
    No, I want to write an original with own potential and something that is 'mine' so to say. Fanfictions make it much harder for the author to actually write what they want while maintaining the quality and focus they want because the background and most characters are from another person who writes and thinks differently. That is why it is easier to write a fanfiction than an original since there is a basis, but harder to make a very good fanfiction that doesn't follow the main plot too closely, since you have to decide what to change where, when etc and can't follow your own script without clashing with the original story which would put the reader off. Imagine a Naruto fanfic where the sharingan is utter bullshit (weak af) and Sasuke is very social and good friends with Naruto but still does most of the things he does in the anime. Offputting, right? It is easier imo to just make your 50 actionpoint script and then write according to it. You can fix plotholes easily, change things however you like and still have a story that makes sense. (as long as you don't constantly pull bs outta ur ass)

    now that I wrote all this, I can't seem to remember why I wrote it at all instead of a simple 'I want to write an original, not a fanfiction.'...

    GN and thanks @erikvio @Macrendil Ysmir @Cosmic_ @WinByDying @grish99 @Cutter Masterson (@Varno @Jiggy) for the responses
     
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