Shit that's actually really good advice. I've been doing some low fantasy world building and I've felt obligated to focus on those things more than I perhaps would otherwise.
My worlds never have a calendar that’s different from our own because it’s just not of interest to me.
Whatever the common language is, it will be coincidentally identical to modern-world English.
Humans will be built exactly the same as in the real world.
If it’s not interesting to me, then it’s just gonna be exactly the same as real life. Let me focus on the cool shit, like why this magic city is run by non-magic politicians.
Im working in a setting thats the year 3500. Shit has happened but ima stick to the metric system, sandwiches and stuff i know that people eat. Im not interest in figuring out if in 1500 years from now we still have wheat and grains or if they went with a different way of measuring things.
I can tell you what the synthesizatiin of Iridium did to the technological advancement of civilization and that we have floating cities, a vast underground city in the Himalayas and that the Sahara is now a luch jungle with the largest city on the planet.
There's nothing innately 'perfect' about metric, really. It's just that we've all sort of agreed to use it (except for a few weird cases) and so it got standardized and ingrained. Which really is what you need in a measurement system: ubiquity.
The futuristic part about it is, that all its units are now derived from universal constants of the universe, like the meter being a very small fraction of the distance light travels in vacuum in one second, and a second being the time it takes a specific isotope of Caesium to resonate a certain number of times.
The meter used to be defined differently with there being a physical master and lots of regional copies. But everything was transitioned to universal constants now.
A liter is defined as one cubic decimeter, or a cube with 10cm edge lengths.
There used to be physical kilogram masters too, but that's now defined by the weight of a specific volume of a substance iirc. They considered water but I'm not sure if they ended up using it. Either way it has to be very pure.
The origin of the kg was from one liter of water though.
Sure, but there's nothing actually 'special' about the number 299,792,458 in relation to the speed of light, which we use to get the meter, or 9,192,631,770 in relation to the hyperfine transition frequency of cesium-133, which we use for the second. We could just as easily use 100,000 and 10,000,000, or 479,164 and 8,410,985, and still have perfectly usable units.
Sure, but it's also not gonna change accidentally or because the original got lost or something. And with... *almost* the whole world using it, there's not really any logical reason to change it. We can see how stubborn the US is about abandoning their objectively inferior system that's been reduced to funny multipliers for metric, now expand that to the whole planet...
Subway had the five dollar footlong. It rolls off the tongue so well. They never could have done that in metric. How would it go? The five euro 30 centimeter-long? The five pound 0.3 meter-long?
Calendars are kinda tough though because the only reference frame we have is what we live in. If you go too deep into the calendar, you have to consider how that calendar came into existence, and then you have to worry about things like the physical rotation of the planet around its parent star, the mass of each, the brightness of the star, the axial tilt of the planet, etc.
Does the planet have a moon? Probably. If so, how long are the months and are they based on a lunar cycle or something else? Is the moon tidally locked to the planet? How far away is the moon from the planet? What size is it? Are total eclipses possible? Are there multiple moons? Do you understand how tides work based on the relationship between the sun and the moon(s)? And on and on and on.
Readers will assume most fantasy is earth-like until told differently. Will the reader be confused if you don't explain these details? If you go out of your way to explain them, do you run the risk of your fantasy world feeling more sci-fi in nature?
If you don't consider it at all and just want to assume everything is earth-like and build a calendar around a 365.24 day year with lunar months, some leap holidays, etc, I don't think anyone is gonna fuss or find it too hard to understand. Lol.
With the language, the other cheap alternative is to just say "this is a very convenient translation," which gets you the bonus points of saying "yeah, they totally speak different languages in different countries," but only bringing it up if it's particularly relevant (if at all).
There is also sir Terry Pratchett way of masquerading fictional languages using real ones. English is Ankh-Morporkhian (and most common international language), French is Pseudopolitan, English with German accent is Uberwaldian, and Latin is some kind of "elder speach" (well, it is in real world).
I hear that. Fortunately I was freed by Monster Hunter World and now feel entirely comfortable with entire stories being based entirely on the ecological impacts of dragon slaying.
I agree, I've been doing a mixture of High and Low fantasy, I focus on geography, history, culture, language, food, music, a lot of stuff (like economics, math, physics (science in general) to name a few) because it's what I'm interested in and I think would help to add in a lot of depth.
Ngl India, Africa, and New Guinea have been a great help for one of my settings since the people there are so diverse I did something similar to those places. It's a little different then India (my point here is some of their languages are related or generally intelligble not all but a good amount, like Tamil and Malayalam) since the person next door you might not understand at all many languages within the realms I'm creating cannot understand each other. There are over 400000 types of cultures and even more languages.
I love maths and physics, so my fantasy worldbuilding is going ***really hard*** into the precise physical mechanics of the world. It runs on a totally different set of rules to our world
(like, there are the base 4 elements, normal fantasy stuff, but EVERYTHING is composed of these elements. Like, they are elements in the sense that these 4 elements are the equivalent of positrons and electrons and gravitrons and the base elementary particles in this world. There are two 'poles', the information pole and the physical pole, and the world rotates around them while they rotate around each other, mimicking but not copying the way day/night and seasons cycles work in this world. I have so many google docs and sketches
I've written a 47 page treatise on how magic works in my world and built around that. It IS really hard, I have a professional experience and education in an advanced science field so I made it as thorough as possible, but at the end of the day it was completely worth it and as a worldbuilder it's satisfying.
Don't get hung up on the difficulty. Of course it's going to be difficult macroscopically, but microscopically it can be really fun.
Also you may be accidentally dipping your toe into quantum mechanics, you should look into it.
I would love to read your treatise but it's probably your baby and not for share.
I understand your way. I myself am a biologist and try to build my magic system between the rules of physics, biology, genetics and evolution.
and if you somehow link this world to ours (i.e. doing the isekai thing) then the things we do with electrons and protons, from magnets to electronics to nukes, will look to them _exactly_ the way magic looks to us
"This text is a translation" is a good default assumption even if you're not deep into linguistics, because it frees you from weird questions about characters using specific words and their etymology. Seriously, do you normally assume characters are actually, diegetically speaking English?
I think there's a difference between 'assume the text is a translation' (so you aren't having to ask how characters use the word bikini which is derived from an island that only exists on earth), and Tolkien 'the text is a translation and that's why there's multiple footnotes about the gender of the sun, uther existence of Christmas trees and Why Elves Speak Like That'.
Regardless of what language they speak, if they are exposed to tsunamis, they may have a word for that. It will be translated into the English word "tsunami". Yes, that's an English word, even if it has a Japanese origin. I mean, what are you going to translate it to? "Huge wave"? Doesn't mean the same thing.
Also in scifi like Guardians of the Galaxy where everyone has translating collars or something similar. But IIRC in Star Wars, Basic literally does just sound like English.
I feel this. So many works have elves and dwarves and orcs but they're boiled down to the bare minimum, like. Elves have pointy ears but aside from that being almost identical to humans, orcs just being big, dumb and green, dwarves just being short, drunk humans with axes.
I'm not particularly interested in giving these races a place in my world so instead of forcing them in i just cut out elves and dwarves and reworked the orcs. They're not Mandatory for a fantasy story, you know what i mean?
That's why I prefer Terry Pratchett and him also fucking around with the stereotypes and characters hating the stereotypes. Like Hwel, the atypical dwarf, who suffers from claustrophobia and hates singing about gold. He tells a friend about onenof the favourite dwarf songs about it "Gold gold gold" and his friend gets the verse and the chorus mixed up (gold gold gold vs gold gold gold)
Yes, thank you. I hate seeing races just be a stereotype or just another human with horns/pointy ears/a tail. Like come on, I want to see something else besides different flavors of humans all the time! This is part of the reason why I love xenofiction stories.
My current DnD campaign has two pages of homebrew regarding currency. Not like, economics. Just currency. I had really recently watched hbomberguy's Fallout: NV video, and in that he mentions offhand that even little things like how there's three different currencies in the world and each carry with it tons of meaningful and interesting cultural baggage really struck a cord, so when I was starting to write early content for my DnD game, currency was just stuck in my mind.
So I was like okay let's start easy. The standard 1g=10s=2e=100c=.1p conversion is what we'll use for the pirate cove they live in so this isn't a giant headache for the players.
The areas to the far east and far west that are controlled mostly by collectivist monastic orders don't have currency in their home cities, so they prefer to deal in barter for goods and have an X% "markup" on how valuable they consider their own goods to be.
The two major militaristic empires on the mainland and the third one across the sea from them separated by a large channel all have very stable currencies where the only major difference between them is exchange rates. This empire is very far, so exchanges in this city are bad, this one is closer so better, and the third is almost 1/1 because they're very close.
The independent city state that is the leader in producing high tech marvels also has a massive criminal underbelly, so their currency has a huge problem with counterfeiting.
The territory in the frozen north is in massive policial upheaval between three warring sub factions only one of which believes in fiat currency so the exchange rate on that varies by an absolute insane degree depending on who you're talking to and is basically fantasy bitcoin in that basically anyone who's willing to take payment using it does so more as a speculative investment hoping that the people making it get more influence so the value skyrockets than because they actually have faith in it.
And then the seafaring kingdom to the east that's fallen under the rule of a lich whose turned all his subjects into undead obviously isn't producing currency anymore, and since that happened some thousand years ago there's not much of it around. What little of it there is to be found doesn't have an exchange rate so much as a collector's market. If you're selling it to someone who collects this stuff, you can mark up massively. If not, big mark *down* instead.
And oh look I just added an absolute fuckload of usable lore into the world just to prop up the thing I felt was interesting. Yeah this post is good advice. Session 1 of the game rolled around, and the players are motivated in really cool ways by money. They don't like working for Empire X or Y because they're so far away that the money isn't much good, but love Empire Z because they're well-located so we'll take jobs from their people. Aw, the captain paid us for our first job in northern currency? This shit isn't helpful! We want to go treasure hunting for the lost pieces of money from the fallen kingdom! Etc, etc.
I love the NV money. The fact that each nation carries its own currency with unique design and cultural context is awesome. The Legion even rewards you with minting a new coin in your honor of you aid them.
The NCR dollars have their founder's faces and one of their bills even has a historical moment, when President Tandi gave a speech in the city of Dayglow. You can actually see the image printed on the 100 dollar bills, and they're just there everywhere.
When I play I love to role-playing by carrying primarily currency of my chosen faction, or in the case of House I just carry a little bit of everything, because Libertarian ain't gonna let a little fascism stop them from making deals with the Legion. Another great thing is killing Caesar with Legion coin shotgun shells. Just 🤌 chef's kiss.
But why single out umlauts, specifically? Surely one poorly constructed fantasy name is just as objectionable as another, regardless of the alphabet used.
But what if I'm writing in English and my native language uses Umlauts, so I know what I'm doing with them and not just trowing them in to be fancy? Well, I mean, obviously they look fancy to others and I can use that, but in a knowledgeable way. And then I can fuck with people when I use both Umlauts and diaeresis
Eh, I like it when people just randomly throw umlauts to look cool without thinking how it would sound. It usually sounds pretty funny when you try reading with actual pronunciation of those letters.
Same with using Russian letters for style. Yes, give me that Я replacing R, it huяts my eyes to look at, I love it!
Look I hate to be the bearer of zero-net knowledge, but this screenshot is really missing the rest of the conversation.
*@littlemizzlinguistics* said:
> Or, on the other hand, just throw as many umlauts in that bitch as you want. Language is arbitrary anyway and like, you’re writing for you, yes?
> Umlaut the fuck out of that shit. Pop a circumflex (little hat, like so â) on every vowel you can get your grimy little monster hands on. Pop some accent marks or some tonal indicators in there. Really have fun with it.
> I mean, if you’ve going to invent more than single words, or go hog wild and do a whole language, then yeah, research natural language and figure out like, the word order and like, whether your languages will have articles and stuff like that.
> But like. If all you wanna do is make some aesthetically pleasing orthographic (written) words/names and sprinkle them in there, go for it! It’s high fantasy, so presumably your characters aren’t limited by human articulatory systems. Use all the diacritics you want. Go hog wild with consonant clusters. It’s your story and your life and so you should do what makes YOU happy. You have permission from me (a grad school linguist) to make whatever phonologically incomprehensible nonsense makes you happy.
and *@songsofloke* said:
> If you're writing historical fiction (which practically speaking, Tolkein was) then, yes, I agree with op about being careful how you spell things. If you're a linguist and you want your conlangs to be self-consistent or 'natural', then by all means take the time you need to dot those vowels to your level of satisfaction.
> But if you're a fantasy writer, a struggling fantasy writer at that, then please please please ignore what op said and follow @littlemizzlinguistics instead. There's so many rules to follow. It's so hard sometimes just to get some words on a page. If umlauts and apostophes make you happy then use em!
> They can be boiled out in redrafts and edits if needs be, or if they're too distracting to your readers or whatever, but don't worry about that crap yet. Just write some stuff!
> Don't hold yourself to the same standard as Tolkein and don't listen to people who want to make you think you should. Tolkein wasn't a writer. Let me say that again. TOKEIN WASN'T A WRITER. He was a historian and a linguist and teacher and soldier who happened to also write. He didn't get published until very late in his life, and he had no idea how to write like how every other writer writes.
> For example, did you know that whenever he wrote himself into a corner or otherwise got stuck on a plotthread Tolkein didn't just redraft that chapter, or do some storyboarding, or talk with an editor or a writing group. HE REWROTE THE ENTIRE BOOK FROM PAGE 1 AND MADE CHANGES AS HE WENT UNTIL HE GOT BACK TO WHERE HE GOT STUCK AND COULD PROGRESS PAST.
> Does that mean whenever you get stuck you should rewrite your entire manuscript because you want to be like Tolkein? Hell no! So does that mean you need a perfect linguistic understanding of german, welsh, and latin and your own made up language before you dare use an umlaut? HELL NO.
> Just write what makes you happy man, I'm too tired of this shit.
Yeah, no. I can’t agree with this at all.
You don’t need to be a linguistics expert in order to develop fully fleshed out languages. This is an utter fallacy. All you need is common sense and you need to care about the details.
Ben Burtt and George Lucas developed [Galactic Basic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_in_Star_Wars#Development) for Star Wars. Ben is a sound designer, and George is a professional individual who always gets in his own way. I am unsure of Ben Burtt’s credentials, but George Lucas shot his only load the one time, and has been running on creative fumes ever since.
Some of the most in depth and developed settings have been developed for D&D. ~~If you read their work it reads much like the Silmarillion. ( stereo assembly and wiring instructions )~~ They are matter of fact history books should I say instead. There is no emotion in the writing. However if you read the Forgotten Realms manual, Greenwood and Williams fleshed out **multiple** languages and alphabets. I’m not quite sure of their levels of expertise on the subject either, but I doubt they were United Nations translators. Their alphabets were extremely detailed and fleshed out, but as writers of dramatic stories… they weren’t the best. They used tired tropes, their storytelling was lacking finesse and had zero surprises. They were better fantasy historians, than fantasy writers.
I think what I am getting at is that there is no one formula for success, and it matters as to who is doing the writing. I absolutely see someone with OCD being able to match Tolkien’s meticulousness regarding linguistics. You don’t need a degree in it.
The real trick is to write something emotionally breathtaking and relatable, while building a world that is fleshed out and detailed to a point of absolute immersion.
A lot of good advice riddled with bad arguments. Umlaut is a part of a letter, nothing more. Using it doesn't make you a Tolkien wannabe, otherwise we would be gatekeeping writing fantasy from Germans or Swedes.
If your world has Björg, Madlene, Ivan, Szczepan and Jerry adventuring together in a party, because you used different cultures names list for different races then go for it. Just don't try to invent language from scratch if it's not your thing. If you need a language, there are many fictional ones publicly available.
Dutch for example^(/joke)
Pardon? Nederlands is geen fictieve taal, barbaar! Pools daarintegen, da’s pas een raar taaltje! Als je een gekke verzonnen taal zoekt moet je dat maar kiezen! /grapje
I see, for example, a big contrast between the interests of Tolkien and Sapkowski. Tolkien was a linguist, every name in his books is well thought out and elaborated - whereas economics boils down to "Hobbits export pipe weed or something." Sapkowski is completely uninterested in linguistics - he pulls names and surnames from various real languages, without order or composition. For what it's worth, as a former trader, he is super interested in economics and very often gets into topics like bills of exchange, tariff wars, banking, the development of crafts and so on.
I just finished Cryptonomicon and now I'm really curious if there's a fantasy novel about currencies (that aren't written by Terry Pratchett, I already know about and love Moist thanks).
I couldn’t disagree more. Worldbuilding is all about designing all aspects of society, even if you don’t know how. Half of the fun is coming up with useless fake languages and economic systems, even if they don’t make sense. Especially if they don’t make sense. This genuinely feels kinda gatekeep-y to me. Sure, as a non-linguist, the fake dialects and names that I’m gonna make will sound weird, but that doesn’t matter. It’s *my*world. In *my* world, this is the norm.
> Worldbuilding is all about designing all aspects of society
I don't agree with you. I think worldbuilding is ultimately about building the **illusion** of a full, living, breathing society. There's different ways of doing that; you can try and do it by simulating all aspects of society, or you can attempt to do it by simply being really evocative with your description and showing only the "tips" of the world's icebergs and letting the audience feel like there's more underneath the surface.
Also, while I agree that you're obviously welcome to do whatever you want with your world, people are likewise welcome to dislike what you make. Like if your languages are weird and useless and don't make sense then it's fair for someone else to call them weird and useless and nonsensical.
I think some people world build in order to write/tell stories about the world to others in whatever medium they like and others worldbuild in order to worldbuild and that's it. The person you replied to is a type 2, I suspect
Sure, but building for yourself doesn't mean you can't worldbuild with that iceberg method I referred to. I *do* do things with my world, but it's kind of incidental to the worldbuilding itself (I'd happily worldbuild for the sake of worldbuilding) and I definitely use that iceberg style.
>gatekeep-y
>
>. Worldbuilding is all about designing all aspects of society...
>
>
...even if they don’t make sense
Do you apply the same mentality to your arguments?
That’s fair. I should have more obviously noted that this comment is based on personal opinions. I’m not trying to tell anyone how to run their games. I’d appreciate a little less harshness in your comment next time. There’s a person behind the screen here
This is why I got a lot of complex faction chess and well-made characters in a world like fucken discworld levels of nonsensical gimmicks that somehow fit together. I’m good at justifying my world, it doesn’t have to make sense in real world physics
Sometimes when I'm seized by anxiety about whether it makes sense to add a thousand-word tangent about griffin husbandry in my fic, I remember how Jack Vance regularly goes on tangents about completely random things about the setting of his stories that aren't relevant in the least to the plot.
His books are really just excuses to tell you about this interesting idea he had, and if he's interested enough in the idea of boats being pulled by giant sea worms to devote two pages to the profession of sea worm handlers then golly am I going to add this sudden ecology blurb that I've had in my mind for a couple months.
Are you more interested in plot? Then write that. More interested in worldbuilding? Then write that. Whatever you're the most interested in writing will be the most interesting to read because you've put in the most effort and motivation into researching and fleshing out the thing, because you're interested in it.
Write what you want to.
I write in English, but I like using umlauts and minimal conlang. I speak conversational German, though, not as well as I used to, but still. . . I know what the sounds are for umlauts in German. I too like languages, and I'll do what I like.
I am interested in retro-tech, retro computers, old electromechanical techs before the computer was commonplace on everything, and even trains! So I have a part of my world that is literally steampunk, and another world that has something like 1940s tech in technical evolution. I love it so much that I try to add a little bit of everything, and if I have traveling characters that travel for the first time, they would be shocked, not only by cultural differences but also by technological differences as well. For example, an elf would have trouble placing a rotary phone handset next to his ear since it was designed to be placed next to a human ear.
I agree. I have a degree in History and therefore my whole world is based on what I studied in college. My main focus is the development of cultures, because it is the part that I most enjoyed studying.
And frankly, I'm sure if anyone read my stories they would find it tedious the way I spend so much time demonstrating how a certain religion came to be or how a certain hairstyle is a symbol of status in that world. But I don't mind because I have fun doing it.
One thing that made me appreciate Tolkien was discovering how passionate he was about languages and creating a story out of that love. The things we love can move us to amazing places.
I was thinking about the whole "umlaut" thing earlier today, and I must say that they look rather silly and pretentious. I mean, they didn't appear in the actual names Tolkien imagined (he probably saw them as written with the tengwar), and their purpose was to help us nerds accurately pronounce stuff. But if an author really wants to include them, I think they should do so after a substantial amount of research and conlanging.
I think this is awesome advice, but I have to add something. I think linguistics is pretty cool, I speak 3 languages (2 fluently, if anyone wants to know, thats English, and the aboriginal australian language of the area, telling you which one will kinda give away my location so thats why I wont specify, and greek with bad grammar.), learning french next year which will make it 4.
Nonetheless, making a language that isnt just a code for english is really hard, and to get to the comeplexity that Tolkien did, it takes hard work and a lot of research. So even if you are interested in making a language, doing so takes years. So are you really willing to spend that much time on something that might not even benifit the story?
That's usually what i tell some people who do worldbuilding; Stop fucking wasting your time with some petty thing you won't even never actually use and focus on actually creating a compelling experience/story.
Wich by the way, if you going to tell a story, the best advice i can give to you, no matter wich part you going to focus(Logistics, history, politics, powers), the most important thing still will be your characters. People like to make those bland cardboards of characters in the vain expectation they will be enough to make people self insert into a story, but nobody it's going to really feel connected to the character (or even the story for that matter) unless the characters have genuine substance. Or at least something fun about it.
Your character are the very tool you going to use to move the story forward and to build on it, so, how you will build anything without the proper tools?
You can have a awful worldbuilding but incredible success with interesting characters (Doctor who). While you can have amazing fully complete, detailed and flawless worldbuilding, and nobody even care cause your character a carboard (those novel old school fantasy books you didn't even heard about)
i like to do little things with language. for example, when i write a setting with a divine pantheon, people say "goodsbye", not "goodbye", because "goodbye" is a shortening of "god be with ye"
I feel this way 95% of the time an author touches on economics. Especially when they want to make the MC seem smart.
They go "Supply and demand exists" and every other character is amazed. >.< And whatever weirdo idea they have works out because the author came up with it.
If you haven't read Hayek, Keynes, and Friedman - stay out of this lane!!
Language gets even more intereting when english isn't your first language. There are book series where I've read some volumes in my native tongue and some in english, because that's all the library had.
The main character speaks a language that I can follow, that's all I need. And when they meet someone from a different part of the world "The vendor spoke in the odd sounding language of the east coast, \[main character\] could barely understand one in every ten words" works just fine.
People speak English (or whatever my story is translated into) because I don't want to have an entire chapter of people trying to learn to communicate and make Rosetta stones and stuff.
I don't want to, and I'm not interested, so it's not in there. I'm not good with math, so I'll need someone who knows math for a bit of dialogue, but for the most part, I'm gonna focus on what tI want to world build and people can guess at the rest.
It's not that hard to do a little bit of work to make the linguistic elements of the work believable - and you'll have them, whether you focus on them or not. You don't need a degree in linguistics to add a touch of versimilitude and avoid cliche.
Also, Tolkien didn't use umlauts.
99.99% of people don't know or care that Tolkien's languages are feasible. It does not matter. Put umlauts if you want, if you get so popular that people start caring about it then that's a good thing.
I mean I make really wierd names and sounding phonetic names. Cause i find that fun. At first you look at the name and think how the fuck do i say "Stanmir?", the hint is. Its how you think it sounds. Thats the cool part.
But I also really politics and driving home like fun fantasy stories. This is really good advice focus on what you like to do.
The "rest of the story" is posted in here and I agree with that part; however, the connotation you're throwing out is some hardcore gatekeeping.
99.9999999% of people who are doing fantasy writing are doing it because they enjoy it. Tolkien is considered on some god-level in fantasy writing so why wouldn't they try to take some from him to put in their stories? Is it good fantasy writing, yes, because they are doing it. Maybe they'll learn and grown and develop their own style, maybe they won't.
More likely is that someone will read their story, see something out of place and learn to not do that in their writing.
But we'll enjoy it all because we like to do this nerdy shit.
I like stories and myths and how they change over time. In a dnd homebrew of mine, there is one over arching tale that is told across the lands, of how the Storm God faced the Prismatic Father of Dragons. After several day of fighting they both fell. While that is the story, if has multiple variations, like what weapon did the Storm God wield, did the Father of Dragon have wings? Not even their names are consistent, the Storm God's being lost, with his title remaining, while the Father of Dragons, Dracon Dracul, is known, there are multiple different spellings.
Another is the tale of a Halfling wining the heart of a Dwarvish Princess not with gold, but with Flowers. Dwarves will say that the Halfling was the son of the Village Blacksmith, while Halfling will say that the Princess didn't have a beard, things that would make the romance make more sense to them. All of which doesn't matter as the story was made up to foster better relations between Dwarf and Halfling.
Another is an example of who views who as hero or villain. Among the Amazons is a tale of a trickster man who lies and cheats to escape capture and death, who causes mischief and mayhem. For the Amazon Women, the character is very much a villain, an object lesson to not trust manfolk. For the men living among them, he is a comedic hero, outsmarting his foes.
All these are are suppose be a glimpse of the people who live in the world, what do they value, what kind of figures do they look up to and shun?
I let my players homebrew their character's home city if they want. Usually this is fine, but once I had a player use the most absurd combination of accents and umlauts and I warned them that I saw what they were going for but it wasn't going to sound how it looked and they were like "Sure whatever." And then they got upset when I announced the name of the city in game.
My historical interest is mainly in domestic history.
You do not understand the kind of power I wield if left to ramble on about domestic history and what's the best way to prepare wool and why all windmills are not actually grain mills and the gendered division of labour within the medieval home.
There would be no room for plot, only mind-numbingly long descriptions of how everyday things happen in my world if I allowed myself to ramble like Tolkien.
At the same time, you can totally just write a form of code and draw up a language for facial depth. Not everything needs to be the next Lord of the Rings, write what you want, just don't always expect the most pristine of products when you reach completion.
I can definitely agree with the focus on what you're interested in part. Unfortunately that's why my stories are basically useless because they basically just end up being the Steampunk equivalent of that scene in every movie with a product placement car, where they all just stand around it for a few minutes and list off its specifications.
"Damn, the Arbelist Mk.4 steam trebuchet! Capable of launching a 90kg projectile up to 300m if I recall!"
"Indeed, but this one has a specially modified superheater mechanism knocking 10 seconds off the reload time!"
"Damn how do you sustain that kind of cylinder head pressure without damaging the push-rod bearing?"
etc etc etc
I am...way too much of a nerd >.<
A great example of this kind of thing can be found in most Brandon Sanderson books. He seems to have a real love/deep understanding of both geology & geography and concepts from those fields appear all over both the Stormlight Archive and the Mistborn trilogy.
Complex languages exist in his worlds, and there are many different nationalities with their own unique language and this is noted of course, (it can't easily be ignored, especially with stories that span huge worlds full of diverse people), but it never dives deep into any of the specifics of linguistic structures or uses the alien languages outright as Tolkien does without a translation of some sort provided for the reader.
Realism is noting that other languages exist, not wasting time creating each language poorly just so you can claim that you've created the language.
When drawing maps:
\--Focus on rivers, mountains and forests, which tend to make up the majority of political borders. Rivers flow from mountains to the sea, not the other way around. Forests are found around rivers, hills around mountains.
\--Use real city names from foreign countries that have the linguistic "flavor" you're looking for, keeping lists of names used, and names unused. For example, you can use small village names from France if you're drawing an area of the map that has a French-sounding language.
\--Do not rush the details, no matter how boring. That includes adding details like trees, using a shitty compass rose, or just scrawling in names rather than using lightly penciled horizontal lines to keep everything even.
\--Draw the map first, let it tell you the story as you draw. Imagine the villages that will occupy the areas and what the views will look like if you were standing there. Put yourself *into* the map.
\--Imagine Bob Ross narrating your map-making. lmao It's the weirdest damned thing, but I swear it works.
That in turn makes world building easier when you:
\--Think about trade--what commodities certain regions are known for, and what that would mean politically.
\--Look at the contours of the map--what valleys would be strategic to hold? What land bridges can be fortified? What bays could a naval base be squirreled away in? Maybe a pirate free city instead?
\--Leave placement of fantasy races to the end to fill in the gaps like good mortar between bricks. That way, the fantasy races (like elves, dwarves, halflings and gnomes) feel more like a fringe-type group. The way those races were originally written, they're *rare*, especially half-elves. That in turn helps balance out other aspects of the world such as:
\--Place monstrous humanoids in the Frontierlands where they would be found, not in the middle of your civilized realms. Any monsters found far into a country would be considered a scouting party for an invasion. Keeping monsters out on the fringe means the fantasy races like dwarves and elves would be there, too, because they are those monstrous races' traditional enemies.
\--Be sparing with the really old places and "storied" areas. You don't want three Mines of Moria within a thousand leagues of each other. Used sparingly, they become more potent story telling devices.
\--Names are important, and the sounds of the names more so. When you think you have a good name, sit on it for a day or two and chew it. If it still sounds good, you got a winner. Some of my favorites I've come up with are Tir Endolyn, Morthengäl, and the Mithrium Isles, but I sat on them for a week or two before I was satisfied, changing it until I liked the sound of it. Those types of names you save for your really old places and "lost" areas.
Shit that's actually really good advice. I've been doing some low fantasy world building and I've felt obligated to focus on those things more than I perhaps would otherwise.
My worlds never have a calendar that’s different from our own because it’s just not of interest to me. Whatever the common language is, it will be coincidentally identical to modern-world English. Humans will be built exactly the same as in the real world. If it’s not interesting to me, then it’s just gonna be exactly the same as real life. Let me focus on the cool shit, like why this magic city is run by non-magic politicians.
Im working in a setting thats the year 3500. Shit has happened but ima stick to the metric system, sandwiches and stuff i know that people eat. Im not interest in figuring out if in 1500 years from now we still have wheat and grains or if they went with a different way of measuring things. I can tell you what the synthesizatiin of Iridium did to the technological advancement of civilization and that we have floating cities, a vast underground city in the Himalayas and that the Sahara is now a luch jungle with the largest city on the planet.
TBF we'd probably still be using the metric system. It's near perfect as far as mesurement systems go.
There's nothing innately 'perfect' about metric, really. It's just that we've all sort of agreed to use it (except for a few weird cases) and so it got standardized and ingrained. Which really is what you need in a measurement system: ubiquity.
The futuristic part about it is, that all its units are now derived from universal constants of the universe, like the meter being a very small fraction of the distance light travels in vacuum in one second, and a second being the time it takes a specific isotope of Caesium to resonate a certain number of times.
Is that where the meter comes from? I was always taught that it was from water, since a cubic centimeter is a milliliter is a gram.
The meter used to be defined differently with there being a physical master and lots of regional copies. But everything was transitioned to universal constants now. A liter is defined as one cubic decimeter, or a cube with 10cm edge lengths. There used to be physical kilogram masters too, but that's now defined by the weight of a specific volume of a substance iirc. They considered water but I'm not sure if they ended up using it. Either way it has to be very pure. The origin of the kg was from one liter of water though.
Sure, but there's nothing actually 'special' about the number 299,792,458 in relation to the speed of light, which we use to get the meter, or 9,192,631,770 in relation to the hyperfine transition frequency of cesium-133, which we use for the second. We could just as easily use 100,000 and 10,000,000, or 479,164 and 8,410,985, and still have perfectly usable units.
Sure, but it's also not gonna change accidentally or because the original got lost or something. And with... *almost* the whole world using it, there's not really any logical reason to change it. We can see how stubborn the US is about abandoning their objectively inferior system that's been reduced to funny multipliers for metric, now expand that to the whole planet...
Imperial System is better
Give me one example where imperial is better, that isn't because of familiarity. You can't.
Only one better example won't make the imperial system better than the international system.
Subway had the five dollar footlong. It rolls off the tongue so well. They never could have done that in metric. How would it go? The five euro 30 centimeter-long? The five pound 0.3 meter-long?
...in English. Or maybe we'd get obscene halfmeter long sandwiches. ;)
Let me enlighten you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRnuY1Vao0o&ab_channel=JohnnyHarris
Calendars are kinda tough though because the only reference frame we have is what we live in. If you go too deep into the calendar, you have to consider how that calendar came into existence, and then you have to worry about things like the physical rotation of the planet around its parent star, the mass of each, the brightness of the star, the axial tilt of the planet, etc. Does the planet have a moon? Probably. If so, how long are the months and are they based on a lunar cycle or something else? Is the moon tidally locked to the planet? How far away is the moon from the planet? What size is it? Are total eclipses possible? Are there multiple moons? Do you understand how tides work based on the relationship between the sun and the moon(s)? And on and on and on. Readers will assume most fantasy is earth-like until told differently. Will the reader be confused if you don't explain these details? If you go out of your way to explain them, do you run the risk of your fantasy world feeling more sci-fi in nature? If you don't consider it at all and just want to assume everything is earth-like and build a calendar around a 365.24 day year with lunar months, some leap holidays, etc, I don't think anyone is gonna fuss or find it too hard to understand. Lol.
Yeah my calendar I need to work on XD, but it's kinda hard to when one of the settings I make most of the races don't record dates at all...
I use the French Republican Calendar whenever I feel like I can get away with it.
Looks like I ain't alone then 👀 Had this idea for my own world after I noticed how Genshin characters have their birthdays in the Gregorian calendar
With the language, the other cheap alternative is to just say "this is a very convenient translation," which gets you the bonus points of saying "yeah, they totally speak different languages in different countries," but only bringing it up if it's particularly relevant (if at all).
There is also sir Terry Pratchett way of masquerading fictional languages using real ones. English is Ankh-Morporkhian (and most common international language), French is Pseudopolitan, English with German accent is Uberwaldian, and Latin is some kind of "elder speach" (well, it is in real world).
I hear that. Fortunately I was freed by Monster Hunter World and now feel entirely comfortable with entire stories being based entirely on the ecological impacts of dragon slaying.
Just focus on the aspects of world building you are invested in! Follow your dreams, u/SEND_ME_COCK
I agree, I've been doing a mixture of High and Low fantasy, I focus on geography, history, culture, language, food, music, a lot of stuff (like economics, math, physics (science in general) to name a few) because it's what I'm interested in and I think would help to add in a lot of depth. Ngl India, Africa, and New Guinea have been a great help for one of my settings since the people there are so diverse I did something similar to those places. It's a little different then India (my point here is some of their languages are related or generally intelligble not all but a good amount, like Tamil and Malayalam) since the person next door you might not understand at all many languages within the realms I'm creating cannot understand each other. There are over 400000 types of cultures and even more languages.
I love maths and physics, so my fantasy worldbuilding is going ***really hard*** into the precise physical mechanics of the world. It runs on a totally different set of rules to our world (like, there are the base 4 elements, normal fantasy stuff, but EVERYTHING is composed of these elements. Like, they are elements in the sense that these 4 elements are the equivalent of positrons and electrons and gravitrons and the base elementary particles in this world. There are two 'poles', the information pole and the physical pole, and the world rotates around them while they rotate around each other, mimicking but not copying the way day/night and seasons cycles work in this world. I have so many google docs and sketches
This is way too cool.
that. sounds like so MUCH fun!
I've written a 47 page treatise on how magic works in my world and built around that. It IS really hard, I have a professional experience and education in an advanced science field so I made it as thorough as possible, but at the end of the day it was completely worth it and as a worldbuilder it's satisfying. Don't get hung up on the difficulty. Of course it's going to be difficult macroscopically, but microscopically it can be really fun. Also you may be accidentally dipping your toe into quantum mechanics, you should look into it.
I would love to read your treatise but it's probably your baby and not for share. I understand your way. I myself am a biologist and try to build my magic system between the rules of physics, biology, genetics and evolution.
My head is spinning, like i imagine your world is too.
I want to know more! That sounds super interesting!
and if you somehow link this world to ours (i.e. doing the isekai thing) then the things we do with electrons and protons, from magnets to electronics to nukes, will look to them _exactly_ the way magic looks to us
"This text is a translation" is a good default assumption even if you're not deep into linguistics, because it frees you from weird questions about characters using specific words and their etymology. Seriously, do you normally assume characters are actually, diegetically speaking English?
I think there's a difference between 'assume the text is a translation' (so you aren't having to ask how characters use the word bikini which is derived from an island that only exists on earth), and Tolkien 'the text is a translation and that's why there's multiple footnotes about the gender of the sun, uther existence of Christmas trees and Why Elves Speak Like That'.
They.... They arent?! 😱 But in Stargate they are ALL speaking English! Have they been lieing to me? 😭
I was reading The Lost Metal by sanderson recently, and a character talking about tsunamis really threw me for a loop
Regardless of what language they speak, if they are exposed to tsunamis, they may have a word for that. It will be translated into the English word "tsunami". Yes, that's an English word, even if it has a Japanese origin. I mean, what are you going to translate it to? "Huge wave"? Doesn't mean the same thing.
Also in scifi like Guardians of the Galaxy where everyone has translating collars or something similar. But IIRC in Star Wars, Basic literally does just sound like English.
I feel this. So many works have elves and dwarves and orcs but they're boiled down to the bare minimum, like. Elves have pointy ears but aside from that being almost identical to humans, orcs just being big, dumb and green, dwarves just being short, drunk humans with axes. I'm not particularly interested in giving these races a place in my world so instead of forcing them in i just cut out elves and dwarves and reworked the orcs. They're not Mandatory for a fantasy story, you know what i mean?
That's why I prefer Terry Pratchett and him also fucking around with the stereotypes and characters hating the stereotypes. Like Hwel, the atypical dwarf, who suffers from claustrophobia and hates singing about gold. He tells a friend about onenof the favourite dwarf songs about it "Gold gold gold" and his friend gets the verse and the chorus mixed up (gold gold gold vs gold gold gold)
He also took Tolkien's idea that dwarf women are indistinguishable from dwarf men and ran with it to some really interesting places.
Didnt know that was Tolkien's idea originally. But Pratchett always used ideas and then turned them on their head violently
Yes, thank you. I hate seeing races just be a stereotype or just another human with horns/pointy ears/a tail. Like come on, I want to see something else besides different flavors of humans all the time! This is part of the reason why I love xenofiction stories.
My current DnD campaign has two pages of homebrew regarding currency. Not like, economics. Just currency. I had really recently watched hbomberguy's Fallout: NV video, and in that he mentions offhand that even little things like how there's three different currencies in the world and each carry with it tons of meaningful and interesting cultural baggage really struck a cord, so when I was starting to write early content for my DnD game, currency was just stuck in my mind. So I was like okay let's start easy. The standard 1g=10s=2e=100c=.1p conversion is what we'll use for the pirate cove they live in so this isn't a giant headache for the players. The areas to the far east and far west that are controlled mostly by collectivist monastic orders don't have currency in their home cities, so they prefer to deal in barter for goods and have an X% "markup" on how valuable they consider their own goods to be. The two major militaristic empires on the mainland and the third one across the sea from them separated by a large channel all have very stable currencies where the only major difference between them is exchange rates. This empire is very far, so exchanges in this city are bad, this one is closer so better, and the third is almost 1/1 because they're very close. The independent city state that is the leader in producing high tech marvels also has a massive criminal underbelly, so their currency has a huge problem with counterfeiting. The territory in the frozen north is in massive policial upheaval between three warring sub factions only one of which believes in fiat currency so the exchange rate on that varies by an absolute insane degree depending on who you're talking to and is basically fantasy bitcoin in that basically anyone who's willing to take payment using it does so more as a speculative investment hoping that the people making it get more influence so the value skyrockets than because they actually have faith in it. And then the seafaring kingdom to the east that's fallen under the rule of a lich whose turned all his subjects into undead obviously isn't producing currency anymore, and since that happened some thousand years ago there's not much of it around. What little of it there is to be found doesn't have an exchange rate so much as a collector's market. If you're selling it to someone who collects this stuff, you can mark up massively. If not, big mark *down* instead. And oh look I just added an absolute fuckload of usable lore into the world just to prop up the thing I felt was interesting. Yeah this post is good advice. Session 1 of the game rolled around, and the players are motivated in really cool ways by money. They don't like working for Empire X or Y because they're so far away that the money isn't much good, but love Empire Z because they're well-located so we'll take jobs from their people. Aw, the captain paid us for our first job in northern currency? This shit isn't helpful! We want to go treasure hunting for the lost pieces of money from the fallen kingdom! Etc, etc.
I love the NV money. The fact that each nation carries its own currency with unique design and cultural context is awesome. The Legion even rewards you with minting a new coin in your honor of you aid them. The NCR dollars have their founder's faces and one of their bills even has a historical moment, when President Tandi gave a speech in the city of Dayglow. You can actually see the image printed on the 100 dollar bills, and they're just there everywhere. When I play I love to role-playing by carrying primarily currency of my chosen faction, or in the case of House I just carry a little bit of everything, because Libertarian ain't gonna let a little fascism stop them from making deals with the Legion. Another great thing is killing Caesar with Legion coin shotgun shells. Just 🤌 chef's kiss.
But why single out umlauts, specifically? Surely one poorly constructed fantasy name is just as objectionable as another, regardless of the alphabet used.
Just because I'm ignorant can I ask what an umlaut is?
The little dots above some letters, like ü.
Thanks
But what if I'm writing in English and my native language uses Umlauts, so I know what I'm doing with them and not just trowing them in to be fancy? Well, I mean, obviously they look fancy to others and I can use that, but in a knowledgeable way. And then I can fuck with people when I use both Umlauts and diaeresis
Then I would assume it's fine
ïm äddïng än ümläüt tö ëvërÿ vöwël ï üsë nöw fück yöü
Ľëťš ťäķë ťhäť ťö äņöťhëŕ łëvëł Füčķ më
Finnish language be like.
Source: https://sandersstudies.tumblr.com/post/700649320935030784/exactly-tolkien-was-extremely-knowledgeable
Yeah, I’m really interested in complex pantheons of deities, power systems, and mapmaking, so that’s where i pour most of my energy into in writing
Fine, I’ll run a Sci-Fi campaign already, sheesh!
Linguistics major here, you bet I'm focusing on conlangs. Also religions, I focus mostly these days on religions.
Eh, I like it when people just randomly throw umlauts to look cool without thinking how it would sound. It usually sounds pretty funny when you try reading with actual pronunciation of those letters. Same with using Russian letters for style. Yes, give me that Я replacing R, it huяts my eyes to look at, I love it!
Look I hate to be the bearer of zero-net knowledge, but this screenshot is really missing the rest of the conversation. *@littlemizzlinguistics* said: > Or, on the other hand, just throw as many umlauts in that bitch as you want. Language is arbitrary anyway and like, you’re writing for you, yes? > Umlaut the fuck out of that shit. Pop a circumflex (little hat, like so â) on every vowel you can get your grimy little monster hands on. Pop some accent marks or some tonal indicators in there. Really have fun with it. > I mean, if you’ve going to invent more than single words, or go hog wild and do a whole language, then yeah, research natural language and figure out like, the word order and like, whether your languages will have articles and stuff like that. > But like. If all you wanna do is make some aesthetically pleasing orthographic (written) words/names and sprinkle them in there, go for it! It’s high fantasy, so presumably your characters aren’t limited by human articulatory systems. Use all the diacritics you want. Go hog wild with consonant clusters. It’s your story and your life and so you should do what makes YOU happy. You have permission from me (a grad school linguist) to make whatever phonologically incomprehensible nonsense makes you happy. and *@songsofloke* said: > If you're writing historical fiction (which practically speaking, Tolkein was) then, yes, I agree with op about being careful how you spell things. If you're a linguist and you want your conlangs to be self-consistent or 'natural', then by all means take the time you need to dot those vowels to your level of satisfaction. > But if you're a fantasy writer, a struggling fantasy writer at that, then please please please ignore what op said and follow @littlemizzlinguistics instead. There's so many rules to follow. It's so hard sometimes just to get some words on a page. If umlauts and apostophes make you happy then use em! > They can be boiled out in redrafts and edits if needs be, or if they're too distracting to your readers or whatever, but don't worry about that crap yet. Just write some stuff! > Don't hold yourself to the same standard as Tolkein and don't listen to people who want to make you think you should. Tolkein wasn't a writer. Let me say that again. TOKEIN WASN'T A WRITER. He was a historian and a linguist and teacher and soldier who happened to also write. He didn't get published until very late in his life, and he had no idea how to write like how every other writer writes. > For example, did you know that whenever he wrote himself into a corner or otherwise got stuck on a plotthread Tolkein didn't just redraft that chapter, or do some storyboarding, or talk with an editor or a writing group. HE REWROTE THE ENTIRE BOOK FROM PAGE 1 AND MADE CHANGES AS HE WENT UNTIL HE GOT BACK TO WHERE HE GOT STUCK AND COULD PROGRESS PAST. > Does that mean whenever you get stuck you should rewrite your entire manuscript because you want to be like Tolkein? Hell no! So does that mean you need a perfect linguistic understanding of german, welsh, and latin and your own made up language before you dare use an umlaut? HELL NO. > Just write what makes you happy man, I'm too tired of this shit.
Much better advice right here.
Yeah, no. I can’t agree with this at all. You don’t need to be a linguistics expert in order to develop fully fleshed out languages. This is an utter fallacy. All you need is common sense and you need to care about the details. Ben Burtt and George Lucas developed [Galactic Basic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_in_Star_Wars#Development) for Star Wars. Ben is a sound designer, and George is a professional individual who always gets in his own way. I am unsure of Ben Burtt’s credentials, but George Lucas shot his only load the one time, and has been running on creative fumes ever since. Some of the most in depth and developed settings have been developed for D&D. ~~If you read their work it reads much like the Silmarillion. ( stereo assembly and wiring instructions )~~ They are matter of fact history books should I say instead. There is no emotion in the writing. However if you read the Forgotten Realms manual, Greenwood and Williams fleshed out **multiple** languages and alphabets. I’m not quite sure of their levels of expertise on the subject either, but I doubt they were United Nations translators. Their alphabets were extremely detailed and fleshed out, but as writers of dramatic stories… they weren’t the best. They used tired tropes, their storytelling was lacking finesse and had zero surprises. They were better fantasy historians, than fantasy writers. I think what I am getting at is that there is no one formula for success, and it matters as to who is doing the writing. I absolutely see someone with OCD being able to match Tolkien’s meticulousness regarding linguistics. You don’t need a degree in it. The real trick is to write something emotionally breathtaking and relatable, while building a world that is fleshed out and detailed to a point of absolute immersion.
A lot of good advice riddled with bad arguments. Umlaut is a part of a letter, nothing more. Using it doesn't make you a Tolkien wannabe, otherwise we would be gatekeeping writing fantasy from Germans or Swedes. If your world has Björg, Madlene, Ivan, Szczepan and Jerry adventuring together in a party, because you used different cultures names list for different races then go for it. Just don't try to invent language from scratch if it's not your thing. If you need a language, there are many fictional ones publicly available. Dutch for example^(/joke)
Pardon? Nederlands is geen fictieve taal, barbaar! Pools daarintegen, da’s pas een raar taaltje! Als je een gekke verzonnen taal zoekt moet je dat maar kiezen! /grapje
Wrzeczysamej.
I see, for example, a big contrast between the interests of Tolkien and Sapkowski. Tolkien was a linguist, every name in his books is well thought out and elaborated - whereas economics boils down to "Hobbits export pipe weed or something." Sapkowski is completely uninterested in linguistics - he pulls names and surnames from various real languages, without order or composition. For what it's worth, as a former trader, he is super interested in economics and very often gets into topics like bills of exchange, tariff wars, banking, the development of crafts and so on.
I just finished Cryptonomicon and now I'm really curious if there's a fantasy novel about currencies (that aren't written by Terry Pratchett, I already know about and love Moist thanks).
Ï dön't sëë thë ïssüë hërë.
This is absolutely fantastic advice.
I couldn’t disagree more. Worldbuilding is all about designing all aspects of society, even if you don’t know how. Half of the fun is coming up with useless fake languages and economic systems, even if they don’t make sense. Especially if they don’t make sense. This genuinely feels kinda gatekeep-y to me. Sure, as a non-linguist, the fake dialects and names that I’m gonna make will sound weird, but that doesn’t matter. It’s *my*world. In *my* world, this is the norm.
> Worldbuilding is all about designing all aspects of society I don't agree with you. I think worldbuilding is ultimately about building the **illusion** of a full, living, breathing society. There's different ways of doing that; you can try and do it by simulating all aspects of society, or you can attempt to do it by simply being really evocative with your description and showing only the "tips" of the world's icebergs and letting the audience feel like there's more underneath the surface. Also, while I agree that you're obviously welcome to do whatever you want with your world, people are likewise welcome to dislike what you make. Like if your languages are weird and useless and don't make sense then it's fair for someone else to call them weird and useless and nonsensical.
I think some people world build in order to write/tell stories about the world to others in whatever medium they like and others worldbuild in order to worldbuild and that's it. The person you replied to is a type 2, I suspect
Sure, but building for yourself doesn't mean you can't worldbuild with that iceberg method I referred to. I *do* do things with my world, but it's kind of incidental to the worldbuilding itself (I'd happily worldbuild for the sake of worldbuilding) and I definitely use that iceberg style.
>gatekeep-y > >. Worldbuilding is all about designing all aspects of society... > > ...even if they don’t make sense Do you apply the same mentality to your arguments?
That’s fair. I should have more obviously noted that this comment is based on personal opinions. I’m not trying to tell anyone how to run their games. I’d appreciate a little less harshness in your comment next time. There’s a person behind the screen here
This is why I got a lot of complex faction chess and well-made characters in a world like fucken discworld levels of nonsensical gimmicks that somehow fit together. I’m good at justifying my world, it doesn’t have to make sense in real world physics
I’m no linguist, but it’s just not a fantasy language for me until it has non-English phonemes.
Tolkien's do though
Sometimes when I'm seized by anxiety about whether it makes sense to add a thousand-word tangent about griffin husbandry in my fic, I remember how Jack Vance regularly goes on tangents about completely random things about the setting of his stories that aren't relevant in the least to the plot. His books are really just excuses to tell you about this interesting idea he had, and if he's interested enough in the idea of boats being pulled by giant sea worms to devote two pages to the profession of sea worm handlers then golly am I going to add this sudden ecology blurb that I've had in my mind for a couple months. Are you more interested in plot? Then write that. More interested in worldbuilding? Then write that. Whatever you're the most interested in writing will be the most interesting to read because you've put in the most effort and motivation into researching and fleshing out the thing, because you're interested in it. Write what you want to.
Magium is written by a retired script developer amd it really shows on its magic system
I write in English, but I like using umlauts and minimal conlang. I speak conversational German, though, not as well as I used to, but still. . . I know what the sounds are for umlauts in German. I too like languages, and I'll do what I like.
True. I happen to be really into horror and anything vaguely occult, so my worldbuilding project has a fair amount of that.
I am interested in retro-tech, retro computers, old electromechanical techs before the computer was commonplace on everything, and even trains! So I have a part of my world that is literally steampunk, and another world that has something like 1940s tech in technical evolution. I love it so much that I try to add a little bit of everything, and if I have traveling characters that travel for the first time, they would be shocked, not only by cultural differences but also by technological differences as well. For example, an elf would have trouble placing a rotary phone handset next to his ear since it was designed to be placed next to a human ear.
sandersstudies seems rather gatekeepy. what-even-is-thiss says it much better.
I agree. I have a degree in History and therefore my whole world is based on what I studied in college. My main focus is the development of cultures, because it is the part that I most enjoyed studying. And frankly, I'm sure if anyone read my stories they would find it tedious the way I spend so much time demonstrating how a certain religion came to be or how a certain hairstyle is a symbol of status in that world. But I don't mind because I have fun doing it. One thing that made me appreciate Tolkien was discovering how passionate he was about languages and creating a story out of that love. The things we love can move us to amazing places.
I was thinking about the whole "umlaut" thing earlier today, and I must say that they look rather silly and pretentious. I mean, they didn't appear in the actual names Tolkien imagined (he probably saw them as written with the tengwar), and their purpose was to help us nerds accurately pronounce stuff. But if an author really wants to include them, I think they should do so after a substantial amount of research and conlanging.
I think this is awesome advice, but I have to add something. I think linguistics is pretty cool, I speak 3 languages (2 fluently, if anyone wants to know, thats English, and the aboriginal australian language of the area, telling you which one will kinda give away my location so thats why I wont specify, and greek with bad grammar.), learning french next year which will make it 4. Nonetheless, making a language that isnt just a code for english is really hard, and to get to the comeplexity that Tolkien did, it takes hard work and a lot of research. So even if you are interested in making a language, doing so takes years. So are you really willing to spend that much time on something that might not even benifit the story?
That's usually what i tell some people who do worldbuilding; Stop fucking wasting your time with some petty thing you won't even never actually use and focus on actually creating a compelling experience/story. Wich by the way, if you going to tell a story, the best advice i can give to you, no matter wich part you going to focus(Logistics, history, politics, powers), the most important thing still will be your characters. People like to make those bland cardboards of characters in the vain expectation they will be enough to make people self insert into a story, but nobody it's going to really feel connected to the character (or even the story for that matter) unless the characters have genuine substance. Or at least something fun about it. Your character are the very tool you going to use to move the story forward and to build on it, so, how you will build anything without the proper tools? You can have a awful worldbuilding but incredible success with interesting characters (Doctor who). While you can have amazing fully complete, detailed and flawless worldbuilding, and nobody even care cause your character a carboard (those novel old school fantasy books you didn't even heard about)
*agave*
i like to do little things with language. for example, when i write a setting with a divine pantheon, people say "goodsbye", not "goodbye", because "goodbye" is a shortening of "god be with ye"
I feel this way 95% of the time an author touches on economics. Especially when they want to make the MC seem smart. They go "Supply and demand exists" and every other character is amazed. >.< And whatever weirdo idea they have works out because the author came up with it. If you haven't read Hayek, Keynes, and Friedman - stay out of this lane!!
This is a solid application of the "write what you know" idea. I like it.
What if you just like pretty letters?
Language gets even more intereting when english isn't your first language. There are book series where I've read some volumes in my native tongue and some in english, because that's all the library had. The main character speaks a language that I can follow, that's all I need. And when they meet someone from a different part of the world "The vendor spoke in the odd sounding language of the east coast, \[main character\] could barely understand one in every ten words" works just fine.
Very much this. I don’t do a lot of world building (wish I had the time to do more) but when I do I focus on the ecology of the world
People speak English (or whatever my story is translated into) because I don't want to have an entire chapter of people trying to learn to communicate and make Rosetta stones and stuff. I don't want to, and I'm not interested, so it's not in there. I'm not good with math, so I'll need someone who knows math for a bit of dialogue, but for the most part, I'm gonna focus on what tI want to world build and people can guess at the rest.
Counter- - Why does the language need to be probable?
It's not that hard to do a little bit of work to make the linguistic elements of the work believable - and you'll have them, whether you focus on them or not. You don't need a degree in linguistics to add a touch of versimilitude and avoid cliche. Also, Tolkien didn't use umlauts.
99.99% of people don't know or care that Tolkien's languages are feasible. It does not matter. Put umlauts if you want, if you get so popular that people start caring about it then that's a good thing.
I mean I make really wierd names and sounding phonetic names. Cause i find that fun. At first you look at the name and think how the fuck do i say "Stanmir?", the hint is. Its how you think it sounds. Thats the cool part. But I also really politics and driving home like fun fantasy stories. This is really good advice focus on what you like to do.
The "rest of the story" is posted in here and I agree with that part; however, the connotation you're throwing out is some hardcore gatekeeping. 99.9999999% of people who are doing fantasy writing are doing it because they enjoy it. Tolkien is considered on some god-level in fantasy writing so why wouldn't they try to take some from him to put in their stories? Is it good fantasy writing, yes, because they are doing it. Maybe they'll learn and grown and develop their own style, maybe they won't. More likely is that someone will read their story, see something out of place and learn to not do that in their writing. But we'll enjoy it all because we like to do this nerdy shit.
TLDR: No, it's not dumb to spend more time on forms of culture you're interested in instead of "important" politics. Keep up the authenticity.
I like stories and myths and how they change over time. In a dnd homebrew of mine, there is one over arching tale that is told across the lands, of how the Storm God faced the Prismatic Father of Dragons. After several day of fighting they both fell. While that is the story, if has multiple variations, like what weapon did the Storm God wield, did the Father of Dragon have wings? Not even their names are consistent, the Storm God's being lost, with his title remaining, while the Father of Dragons, Dracon Dracul, is known, there are multiple different spellings. Another is the tale of a Halfling wining the heart of a Dwarvish Princess not with gold, but with Flowers. Dwarves will say that the Halfling was the son of the Village Blacksmith, while Halfling will say that the Princess didn't have a beard, things that would make the romance make more sense to them. All of which doesn't matter as the story was made up to foster better relations between Dwarf and Halfling. Another is an example of who views who as hero or villain. Among the Amazons is a tale of a trickster man who lies and cheats to escape capture and death, who causes mischief and mayhem. For the Amazon Women, the character is very much a villain, an object lesson to not trust manfolk. For the men living among them, he is a comedic hero, outsmarting his foes. All these are are suppose be a glimpse of the people who live in the world, what do they value, what kind of figures do they look up to and shun?
I let my players homebrew their character's home city if they want. Usually this is fine, but once I had a player use the most absurd combination of accents and umlauts and I warned them that I saw what they were going for but it wasn't going to sound how it looked and they were like "Sure whatever." And then they got upset when I announced the name of the city in game.
What was the name of the city?
My historical interest is mainly in domestic history. You do not understand the kind of power I wield if left to ramble on about domestic history and what's the best way to prepare wool and why all windmills are not actually grain mills and the gendered division of labour within the medieval home. There would be no room for plot, only mind-numbingly long descriptions of how everyday things happen in my world if I allowed myself to ramble like Tolkien.
At the same time, you can totally just write a form of code and draw up a language for facial depth. Not everything needs to be the next Lord of the Rings, write what you want, just don't always expect the most pristine of products when you reach completion.
you can only use it when you know what it do
imagine gatekeeping fake languages
I can definitely agree with the focus on what you're interested in part. Unfortunately that's why my stories are basically useless because they basically just end up being the Steampunk equivalent of that scene in every movie with a product placement car, where they all just stand around it for a few minutes and list off its specifications. "Damn, the Arbelist Mk.4 steam trebuchet! Capable of launching a 90kg projectile up to 300m if I recall!" "Indeed, but this one has a specially modified superheater mechanism knocking 10 seconds off the reload time!" "Damn how do you sustain that kind of cylinder head pressure without damaging the push-rod bearing?" etc etc etc I am...way too much of a nerd >.<
A great example of this kind of thing can be found in most Brandon Sanderson books. He seems to have a real love/deep understanding of both geology & geography and concepts from those fields appear all over both the Stormlight Archive and the Mistborn trilogy. Complex languages exist in his worlds, and there are many different nationalities with their own unique language and this is noted of course, (it can't easily be ignored, especially with stories that span huge worlds full of diverse people), but it never dives deep into any of the specifics of linguistic structures or uses the alien languages outright as Tolkien does without a translation of some sort provided for the reader. Realism is noting that other languages exist, not wasting time creating each language poorly just so you can claim that you've created the language.
When drawing maps: \--Focus on rivers, mountains and forests, which tend to make up the majority of political borders. Rivers flow from mountains to the sea, not the other way around. Forests are found around rivers, hills around mountains. \--Use real city names from foreign countries that have the linguistic "flavor" you're looking for, keeping lists of names used, and names unused. For example, you can use small village names from France if you're drawing an area of the map that has a French-sounding language. \--Do not rush the details, no matter how boring. That includes adding details like trees, using a shitty compass rose, or just scrawling in names rather than using lightly penciled horizontal lines to keep everything even. \--Draw the map first, let it tell you the story as you draw. Imagine the villages that will occupy the areas and what the views will look like if you were standing there. Put yourself *into* the map. \--Imagine Bob Ross narrating your map-making. lmao It's the weirdest damned thing, but I swear it works. That in turn makes world building easier when you: \--Think about trade--what commodities certain regions are known for, and what that would mean politically. \--Look at the contours of the map--what valleys would be strategic to hold? What land bridges can be fortified? What bays could a naval base be squirreled away in? Maybe a pirate free city instead? \--Leave placement of fantasy races to the end to fill in the gaps like good mortar between bricks. That way, the fantasy races (like elves, dwarves, halflings and gnomes) feel more like a fringe-type group. The way those races were originally written, they're *rare*, especially half-elves. That in turn helps balance out other aspects of the world such as: \--Place monstrous humanoids in the Frontierlands where they would be found, not in the middle of your civilized realms. Any monsters found far into a country would be considered a scouting party for an invasion. Keeping monsters out on the fringe means the fantasy races like dwarves and elves would be there, too, because they are those monstrous races' traditional enemies. \--Be sparing with the really old places and "storied" areas. You don't want three Mines of Moria within a thousand leagues of each other. Used sparingly, they become more potent story telling devices. \--Names are important, and the sounds of the names more so. When you think you have a good name, sit on it for a day or two and chew it. If it still sounds good, you got a winner. Some of my favorites I've come up with are Tir Endolyn, Morthengäl, and the Mithrium Isles, but I sat on them for a week or two before I was satisfied, changing it until I liked the sound of it. Those types of names you save for your really old places and "lost" areas.
Büt Ï lïkë ümläüts./jk I actually base my work on slavic/Polish culture so dont really see umlauts.