I've done hard worldbuilding all my life, but I've become more allured to soft worldbuilding as time goes on. It feels so much more magical and flexible in practice that the world almost becomes more beautiful for it, imo.
I hadn’t stopped to think about it much until now but looking back it’s glaringly obvious in my worldbuilding, I always try to overexplain everything and it’s frankly one of my biggest flaws XP Thanks for the video man! I can’t wait to buy the new book, your on writing and worldbuilding series has helped me grow up a lot as a writer 🙌
I'm no writer, but writing stuff like this fascinates me. And this video made me feel like I could do this worldbuilding thing! It makes so much sense and clarifies a lot of the process - or at least, a process that I understand.
While designing an antagonist civilization that lives in a swampy area, I had a major epiphany and realization that shook me to my core and realligned all my values: ...They don't like the swamp.
True of cultures in general. In Lawrence of Arabia, a character remarks, "It is you British who love the desert. We Arabs value green things." Cultures adapt to their environment, yet often seek the antithesis of the challenges they face.
That reminds of the Aztecs who lived on a lake because all the surrounding land was controlled by other people (who they would eventually conquer). They stayed because it was a natural fortification
Important to note for writers in the comments: this is like level 5 worldbuilding. If you’re just starting out, the “city by coast worship on mountain” is just fine! Don’t let Advanced Worldbuilding™ stop you from writing the story. Great video!
Basic and advanced depends on the intelligence of the person. A person of high IQ will always learn faster and better than the person with the lower. Your comment assumes everyone has an average IQ.
@@SCARRIOR Except that IQ is so deeply flawed of a concept that it's just bullshit all the way down. It is a harmful concept based on unbelievably poor science rooted in racism.
@@SCARRIOR It has more to do about how much the person invested in more complex worldbuilding and even how much they care about these details (after all this does not really impact much how good a story is) than any idea weird idea about IQ.
It's not a religious thing, but I heard a story about preparing ham for roasting. A boy was watching his mother preparing the ham, and noticed that she always cut off the end of the joint, so he asked why. The mother said she learned from her sister, who is older by about ten years. So the mother calls the sister to ask why, and sister says that their mother (boy's nanna) did it that way. Phone call to Nanna: "That's how my mum did it." Phone call to great grandma, who laughs. "I couldn't fit the joint in the pan otherwise."
I've heard a similar one, but for drinking water,where the family always dumps the last sip in a glass. Turns out their ancestor in 1850s had a not-very-clean well with a bit of sand in it, so said ancestor would dump the last bit because there was literal dregs at the bottom of the glass
I love this topic! It makes me think about Polish traditions my grandfather told me about. Poland is one of the most Catholic nations I have ever been too, but every spring a lot people make effigy of the old goddess Marazanna burn it and throw it in the river. People understand that it is supposed to honor her, but no one knows why we still do it
I’d say it’s the christianity itself that’s the interesting thing here… Baltic slavs were enslaved quite a lot before the whole christianisation of the slavs, but seeing the “barbars” and “under-people” were suddenly *fellow christians* it became somewhat immoral to sell them as slaves (“somewhat” as it didn’t cease completely) and looking at it now, you can see why these people would cling to the religion so much as it protected them... somewhat. It's so fucking sad... Beautiful tho, that at least some of the pagan traditions survived
The Grim tales have pagan christianised gods like "Frau Holle", responsible for the underworld, but when those books were written the brothers Grim had to search for these tales by asking around, so they were already obscured by the centuries of christianisation.
@@ela8665in my experience Polish people have extremely ambiguous feelings about the Christianization of Poland. A lot of people feel like the right to know about our history and culture was taken from us, especially because Slavic people didn’t have a written language to write our culture down before the Christian missionaries came. But, most historians and scholars agree that Polish life expectancy almost doubled after Christianization. That doesn’t even consider that most Polish people really do believe. A lot of us have trouble reconciling that with the fact that the church called the northern crusade to put down Baltic and Slavic people who violently resisted conversion There is this strange middle ground from my experience. Polish people tend to cling to as much of our pre Christian heritage as possible while also believing the conversion was for the best
I feel the need to defend Tolkien's dwarves and point out that alot of the stuff we associate with them got pasted on by adaptations later on. Dwarves in the books are the least fleshed out and one of their main traits is that they're secretive and other races don't know much about them. Which leads me to what I really like about Tolkien's world-building: how the gaps are often a feature. There's stuff he never finished, stuff he changed, and the whole historical document frame he overlays it with makes that stuff that's unfinished or inconsistent feel like part of the world, part of the experience of being in the world and only knowing as much as various intellectual traditions preserved for you to know.
Isn't it also true that Tolkien was creating an English style mythology? My understanding was Middle Earth's similarity to northern Europe was on purpose, not an accident of world building.
I think it's also extremely relevant to point out that the dwarves have a different origin to the other races, they were created by Aulë and not Ilúvatar, and take some characteristics from their creator. Rather than being a result of their environment, their environment was picked for them by other forces, and they chose to stay in the mountains and in the earth. Choice is very important in the Silmarillion.
It's true Tolkien purposefully used gaps and mythology! So in a way these were conscious choices for him, which is cool, but he's often held up as the pinnacle of "realistic" worldbuilding, when that's not always the case - and that's fine! ~ Tim
And there are PLENTY of examples of the kind of worldbuilding Tim's talking about in LOTR. For example, the kings of Gondor have crowns that are basically fancy helmets stylized as seabird wings - because they are descended from Numenorians. Sea-faring has mostly NOT been politically or culturally important to Gondor in general for most of its history, but remnants of that culture remain. Bilbo and Gollum's meeting is marked by their shared riddle-culture, which bonds them despite their respective hobbit peoples having diverged generations ago and become very separate since then.
Also, Dwarves were created to be smiths, so they gravitate to the mountains and took up mining because that’s where and how they get their raw materials.
Tolkien's Dwarves being so immutably tied to mountains makes sense, considering they were designed by Aule to be that way. He was the one who also created the mountains, and wanted the Dwarves to be safe from the evil ruler of Middle-earth, Melkor. Fantasy races should resemble us in some aspects, but if they're completely different in others that's good too.
In some part....except they are not really that tied up, we do see when Dwarves migrated though they were less likely to do so: Dwarves of Longbeards/Durin's Folk were also the ones who basically were the most expansive, in the early Second Age they basically had 'quasi empire' of sorts: “…for the Longbeards had spread southward down the Vales of Anduin and had made their chief ’mansion’ and stronghold at Moria; and also eastward to the Iron Hills, where the mines were their chief source of iron-ore. They regarded the Iron Hills, the Ered Mithrin, and the east dales of the Misty Mountains as their own land.” HoME XII, Peoples of Middle-earth, Of Dwarves and Men ... “It was a brief period in … the Second Age, yet for many lives of Men the Longbeards controlled the Ered Mithrin, Erebor, and the Iron Hills, and all the east side of the Misty Mountains as far as the confines of Lórien; while the Men of the North dwelt in all the adjacent lands as far south as the Great Dwarf Road that cut through the Forest (the Old Forest Road was its ruinous remains in the Third Age)….” The Peoples of Middle-Earth, HoME Vol 12, Part 2, Ch 10, Of Dwarves and Men: Notes, Note 30 ... "In the Dwarvish traditions of the Third Age the names of the places where each of the Seven Ancestors had 'awakened' were remembered; but only two of them were known to Elves and Men of the West: the most westerly, the awakening place of the ancestors of the Firebeards and the Broadbeams; and that of the ancestor of the Longbeards, the eldest in making and awakening. The first had been in the north of the Ered Lindon, the great eastern wall of Beleriand, of which the Blue Mountains of the Second and later ages were the remnant; the second had been Mount Gundabad (in origin a Khuzdul name), which was therefore revered by the Dwarves.... The other two places were eastward, at distances as great or greater than that between the Blue Mountains and Gundabad: the arising of the Ironfists and Stiff-beards, and that of the Blacklocks and Stonefoots. Though these four points were far sundered the Dwarves of different kindreds were in communication, and in the early ages often held assemblies of delegates at Mount Gundabad. In times of great need even the most distant would send help to any of their people; as was the case in the great [War of the Dwarves and Orcs] (Third Age 2793 to 2799). Though they were loth to migrate and make permanent dwellings or 'mansions' far from their original homes, except under great pressure from enemies or after some catastrophe such as the ruin of Beleriand, they were great and hardy travellers and skilled road-makers; also, all the kindreds shared a common language." The Peoples of Middle-Earth, HoME Vol 12, Part 2, Ch 10, Of Dwarves and Men: Relations of the Longbeard Dwarves and Men And we know that since the destruction of Moria, Ered Mithrin and Erebor they for a time had to adapt to life of wandering and seeking new homes (Dunland and then Thorin's Halls in Ered Luin the Blue Mountains). "_Dwarves._ The Dwarves are a race apart. Of their strange beginning, and why they are both like and unlike Elves and Men, the Silmarillion tells; but of this tale the lesser Elves of Middle-earth had no knowledge, while the tales of later Men are confused with memories of other races. They are a tough, thrawn race for the most part, secretive, laborious, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits), lovers of stone, of gems, of things that take shape under the hands of the craftsmen rather than things that live by their own life. But they are not evil by nature, and few ever served the Enemy of free will, whatever the tales of Men may have alleged. For Men of old lusted after their wealth and the work of their hands, and there has been enmity between the races. But in the Third Age dose friendship still was found in many places between Men and Dwarves; and it was according to the nature of the Dwarves that, travelling and labouring and trading about the lands, as they did after the destruction of their ancient mansions, they should use the languages of men among whom they dwelt. Yet in secret (a secret which unlike the Elves, they did not willingly unlock, even to their friends) they used their own strange tongue, changed little by the years; for it had become a tongue of lore rather than a cradle-speech, and they tended it and guarded it as a treasure of the past. Few of other race have succeeded in learning it. In this history it appears only in such place-names as Gimli revealed to his companions; and in the battle-cry which he uttered in the siege of the Hornburg. That at least was not secret, and had been heard on many a field since the world was young. Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! 'Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!' Gimli's own name, however, and the names of all his kin, are of Northern (Mannish) origin. Their own secret and 'inner' names, their true names, the Dwarves have never revealed to any one of alien race. Not even on their tombs do they inscribe them." Lotr appendices
I'm doing that with the races in my stories. The elves, for example, will have a civilization based on the Greeks and Romans of the past, as they saw themselves as superior to other civilizations, just like those empires of the past.
There's a museum in my area focused on Jamestown, the first successful British colony in North America, where they put a lot of emphasis on the cultures of the area and how they interacted and changed over time, which I think provides a pretty good example of how colonialism and evolution impact cultures; when the English first arrived, they started making their houses out of wattle and daub with thatched roofs, even though they were completely surrounded by trees, because that was how they did it in England. By the end of the 17th century, they'd switched to mostly making their houses mostly out of wood, including wooden boards for the walls and wooden clatter boards for the roofs; they adapted to the new landscape. Meanwhile, the indigenous people started out making their houses by bending saplings into a frame and covering the frame with sheets of bark or mats made of reeds; by the end of the century, they were making rectangular cabins with wooden boards in the walls and pointy roofs, just like the English, BUT they were still covering their houses with sheets of bark and incorporating saplings into the structure, as well as using central fire pits instead of fireplaces like in the English houses, blending the colonial influences with their traditional style of architecture.
Heck, I live in california... I always have to explain to visitors from the east coast that we don't have a lot of old brick stuff because if that falls down in earthquakes. XD We absolutely used to have lots of old brick buildings! San Francisco had to rebuild after the great earthquake... so not as many around because it was too pricey xD And the reasons that brick was so popular when the USA was young was because once a fire started in a place made only of wood, you'd be in a similar position of letting disaster take its course. There are countless (former) ghost towns in deserts that got burnt to crisps and never rebuilt to their glory days, and we still lose historic old buildings because of fire or quakes
Post-apocalypse worlds also tend to have a strong "what came before" worldbuilding in which "what happened here" tends to be more important than "where are rivers and mountains right now". What killed those that came before will probably inform next generations of survivors on how and where to rebuild.
Also, in anything with nukes or an equivalent to radioactive Fallout, the areas which were best suited to building mighty cities before the war may now be least suited due to being the most heavily contaminated.
This is my biggest struggle right now. As someone who has been creating homebrew worlds for about 10 years now for D&D, my most recent world is one I'm creating for both my first book and to run games in for my friends. The world building is the most complex I've ever created as I'm not only creating my own fantasy world and races from scratch (loosely based on typical fantasy races), but knowing that the world will be forever changed after the beginning of the apocalypse in the book is nearly instantaneous, only sparing those in light as the darkness washes over the world.
@@RorikH Or in case of New Vegas, it's a remarkable location because there is very little radiation outside of what is introduced by Camp Searchlight and the Nuclear Testing Grounds., despite being in the middle of a desert. And yet, it's *New* Vegas because following the war, all the stuff you'd need to keep a city running would just be gone, and so most of the city is in ruins, and you still need makeshift walls to defend the smaller parts you do have.
interesting thing a buddy of mine did for world building for a novel he wrote: he slowly now and then wrote a history book about his fantasy world where the novel takes place and upon finishing it he tore out half the pages at random and that's how he decided what is known and stayed and what was left and forgotten. it's such extra work but he did it more for his own entertainment.
If you where given a map of earth without any knowledge of real history, would you guess that a biggish island in the north was at one point controlling almost half the landmasses of the globe ? Probably not , but it happened.
@@elhoteldeloserrantes5056 The geography of Japan and England are very different. There's not much you can do with a skinny island with a bunch of mountains rather than a flat island with plenty of farmland and buildable on that. It also doesn't help that United Kingdom united about a whole century earlier than Japan and even then, when Japan finally united there were already other European powers trying to colonize Asia.
Does geography explain why UK united before Japan a century earlier? What would happen if Japan was the one that united first? All these explanations of why Europe succeeded are post-hoc theorizing. Britain having arable flat land surrounded by sea could also mean it's prime target for invasion, and they don't have a good way to defend every inch of that long coastline.
I think my favorite piece of non-environmental world building comes from, of all things, Thomas the Tank Engine, specifically the original Railway Series books. For those who don’t know, the author, Reverend W. Awdry, wrote a book that laid out the “real world” history of the Island of Sodor where the stories take place. In this he reveals how Sodor was historically a victim of constant invasion, this finally ended when England gave them an Earl and attached the Island to the Dutchy of Lancaster, but Sudrians always saw that as a compromise rather than the sovereignty they wanted. This created a culture of quiet resistance that’s remained prevalent enough, that when British Railways were putting pressure on their North Western Region to scrap their steam engines and switch to diesel, the people of Sodor rallied behind Sir Charles Topham Hatt II in his defiance. Cementing the Island of Sodor as a safe haven for steam!
Pretty cool how you used Colombia as a reference. I've been to the capital, Bogota, which is situated at the base of a valley surrounded by mountains on all sides. I was told that the ruling powers were able to win a lot of battles because they would camp out on the mountains and strike the invading forces attempting to invade the capital, which is the most hardcore and fantasy-like piece of history I've ever heard.
Yeah. This is the actual reason. Gunboat diplomacy made Cartagena impossible to have as a capital cos it kept getting invaded all the time. I've never heard it's because of the heat tbh
@@alfonsojaragoAre you sure that's the real reason, or is it an anachronistic post-hoc explanation that's most often said? I wouldn't know one way or another about Colombia specifically, but I do know that people in general have a tendency to do that! If it makes more sense, or makes a better story, often a falsehood gets passed around instead of truth. Alternatively, it could be both are true, the world is complex and usually more than one factor is involved. (also a good world building tip, incidentally -- people are often misinformed about stuff, so having an accepted narrative and what actually happened differ is a very interesting choice)
@sydneygorelick7484 it's the real reason why Bogota is the capital. Cartagena was invaded a bunch of times, it had to be rebuilt more than once, and a lot of investment went to fortify it, so it was decided that it couldn't be the capital. Any invasion of mogota required weeks just to get there.
Environmental Determinism, is only a trap when it is applied incorrectly. The ‘hardest’ world-building is starting with environmental determinism and then playing the game of ‘civilization’ forward while keeping the environmental pressures in mind.
omg this! I was like... no? All of that does matter, you just have to account for history. It doesn't negate the environment, it's just another axis that influences it.
Then stop calling it "determinism". The entire point of that word is to imply that the environment a people lives in WILL ALWAYS produce a particular culture or social order. That such things are pre-determined by the environment. Which isn't true at all. Geography, climate and ecosystem may affect subsistence patterns, but there's so much else that goes into social development besides the necessities of survival.
One of my favourite pieces of worldbuilding is (don't laugh)... The Island of Sodor. I'm not joking. So basically before Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends became Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, it was a book series called 'The Railway Series'. A bunch of short stories by Rev. W. Audrey. And he didn't just make a random island for his engines with faces to be on, he put so much EFFORT into it. So the island itself is situated on the North-West coast of England, snuggled in between The Isle of Man and Barrow-in-Furness, hence the railways name, the North Western Railway. Think of it like an alternate history as it were. And what Audrey did that was so impressive to me is that he didn't just make a world with another history, he INTEGRATED it with already established British history. And he had it all planned out for his railway. Different sediments of rock and how they effected the landscape and industry. Optimal routes of railroads, ports and harbours connected to ancient villages established in the viking ages. Corse ways and valleys that would need tunnels or alternative engines such mountain, Narrow gauge and electric in order to run correctly. How certain places were effected by war, industry and financial collapse. Tourism, destroyed landmarks and drained lakes Exports, imports, heck, its OWN LANGUAGE. Yep, Sodor has its own language; Sudric. And you can see them as the names of stations and castles. J.R.R. Tolkien eat ya heart out. Thats not to say its perfect obviously but I find it so slept upon when it comes to worldbuilding because Thomas is viewed as "babyish". When really it (was) for all ages.
So you are one of those who think others can read your mind or have all the same experiences. So much for your ability to judge writing. I don't care one bit about your weird random island namedrop.
Congrats on the new book! My son and I are both fans. To add another real life example: in Brazil we celebrate Christmas exactly the way it's done in Europe or USA. The funny thing is that in Brazil the temperature in December is around 35oC (95oF). So for one month we can see a lot of cotton 'snow' in the houses and in every shopping mall an old fat guy melting inside red clothes meant for the north pole.
I agree with what you said, but R.R. Martin was actually smarter than most with his world building. As a example, the Ironborn did conquer and settled, what they are now are very embittered remanants holding to what they believe is their glorious pasts, since they are now stuck in their very poor homelands since Aegon conquest. Martin's world is also full of migration and customs that has no know origin or something mythical with grains of truth. The waves of migration have also played an immense part on culture. How in Dorne, mostly desert, people still revere a great river. On how people speak dialects of a dead empire, specially as lingua franca.
Definitely, looking at Iron Islands history, there are times when they do settle lands or trade with people instead of raiding. But inevitably some king decides to bring back “the good old days” of being Vikings. And Dorne is so culturally different from the rest of Westeros because of the Rhoynar who migrated there.
I'll also add in the Blackwoods and Manderlys as examples of Martin's world being dynamic rather than environmentally deterministic. The Blackwoods are a rare stubborn holdout of the First Men south of the neck. They keep to the Old Gods and consistently display gruff 'northern' sensibilities regarding war, life, and politics. When the Andals swept through the Riverland, most of the First Men converted and intermarried with them or else were wiped out and supplanted but the Blackwoods just stubbornly held on to their heritage. The Manderlys on the other hand are exiles. They were once a powerful Andal house in the Reach with lands next to the Mander River, which still bears that name during ASOIAF and which either they were named after or was named after them. Well before Aegons conquest, they got into a major political squabble with a rival house and found themselves forcibly exiled from their lands. They fled north and were taken in by the Starks who made them bannermen and granted them an old fort to occupy. The Manderlys took that land and applied their southern sensibilities to it, over time turning it into White Harbor, the only real city of the North and a major naval trade center. In the present day, the Manderlys are still very much Andals, they worship the Seven, practice knighthood, and generally comport themselves like southern lords, but they have also adopted bits and pieces of northern culture, are fiercely loyal to the Starks, and are far less prone to backstabbing and politics than typical Andals. They still claim titles and honors from their ancient lands but seem quite content with their new home and have no interest in actually trying to reclaim what they lost. GRRM is actually very good about sprinkling in little details like this in the background. He rarely focuses in on them explicitly because his POV characters take them for granted but they're definitely there if you look for them.
@@StathMIA I also found it very interesting how the Free Cities of Esteros kind of culturally relate to Westeros culture. There may be a link through the Andals coming from the east, but it's not that clear. There are significant differences but I've always seen the Free Cities as some kind of exotic Westeros-like places. There is a lot of trading going on across the sea, but I wonder if that's enough to explain it. I could not give proper details because of memory, and it always felt vague so it may have been my reader's imagination seeing stuff that was not there. Nothing more to say about it, I just wanted to share this thought ^^ (sorry for the possible mistakes, I read those books a long time ago, because you know who ditched the series lol, so no opportunity to delve back into it)
@@StathMIA Also interesting is that Blackwoods were kinda like reverse Manderlies, driven from the North by ancient Starks, but they're still the most loyal to Robb out of all the Rivermen (other than Tullys of course)
This is one of the reasons I still find Elden Ring's worldbuilding so compelling, incomplete as it sometimes is. Little details like General Radahn having the knowledge to perceive the threat coming from the stars due to his heritage as a member of the Carian royal family, despite that history being almost a non-factor in the rest of his adult life. GRRM and From Software really did a great job of building this layered, storied world with cultures and individuals that are influenced by multiple historical factors, exactly like you're describing here.
The capital city in my story isn't a port city or situated in naturally defensible mountains, its just kinda chilling in the middle of an open, empty lowland plane. Looks weird at first, but if you look at it's position you'll see its at almost the exact center of the kingdom's major trade routes. Merchants would commonly stop to rest on their travels in this place during ancient times, which saw large amounts of wealth and cultural exchange flow through this one area, which led to development and expansion over time. Water was easy to find because there's a network of underground rivers that flow underneath the land, and it was cheap to import food due to its favorable location. It's exposed position was actually an advantage in the age prior to siege weapons, because it is extremely costly to besiege or attack a well-defended city from all sides in a place that provides no natural cover. When siege weapons became prevalent, the city poured its considerable wealth into building highly fortified castles and walls with counter-siege weapons. This city became the beating heart of a vast trade network, where environment had very little to do with it's development besides it's placement on the map.
ManiaMac is your story available anywhere? It sounds interesting, and I love seeing what kinds of things other writers come up with. I say that like I've written much yet, lol.
Sounds very cool but did the city pop up at the trade route and then evolved into the capital or was it from the start the capitol and than form the routes? Because a trade boom city that evolved into the capitol of a kingdom would be cool origin story how the people that live there see the city.
I'm currently worldbuilding a world inspired by SE Asia, and it turned out to be such a dense and complicated endeavor. When you start reading about real life cultures, you start to understand just how complex and interconnected they all were. I can't just create an archipelagic country inspired by precolonial Philippines and call it a day, it turns out that (1) PH didn't exist before Spanish Colonization and had A BUNCH of individual separate polities (which meant a lot of cultures to individually think about, like which indigenous group from real life would I like to include... Etc.) (2) Southeast Asia was and still is such a complicated and diverse place culturally. The entire place stood at the crossroads between two major super powers that had major influence, i.e. India and China, and I had to consider where and how I would incorporate those countries into the world as well. Which meant there is almost this gradient of influence from India to China. But not so fast, because while China did have influence in the oceans around it, it still conducted it's trade mainly in the land based Silk Road. So there is just so much influence to think about there, and I've got my work cut out for me. 😅
A lot of modern SEA states were really only formed after the colonization of SEA. It is an interesting part of history. As a guy from a minor ethnic group I have really conflicting opinions about this. For example if the British had not lumped us in a state with the Burmese maybe we would not have so much conflict. Though should I blame my ancestors who decided to side with the British to oppress the Burmese? Ethnic divide and conflict usually never have a clear cut answer. There is always reason for the animosity and you should keep that in mind when world building I think. For example why would my ancestors decide to side with the British, from the history I’ve read it seems it was because the Burmese had tried to conquer us previously. That would mean the fued had not started when the British arrived but before that as well. Many blame the current ethnic divide in Myanmar on the British but if I looked at it from a longer history we had always hated each other. It is simply the British who gave my ancestors the get back they wanted at the Burmese. It is important to also note that my ancestors most probably drove out others from their lands as well. To summarize what I want to say when creating a history never think of it as morally binary their is always a reason for it. It is important when creating new worlds to consider why the past was the way it was. For example their has never been a major state only led by women yet there have been for men. If you were to create a female dominated state think why and if it would even be plausible.
As a SE Asian, I can confirm this. There's so much going on and complicated to keep track with, e.g. political interest, culture clashes, border dispute, anthropology, political/religious militanism, ideas of federalism, etc
+1 here. Worldbuilding inspired by the combination of agricultural SE Asia and the maritime part of SE Asia creates a very distinct flavour. We witnessed so much influences from bigger neighboring kingdoms and empires that shaped a big part of our history before the colonial era.
For any of the artsy and must-have-visuals people out there... I created a map for my world, as people do, and had such a hard time figuring out climate, environment, and how geography would play into all of that. I got a world globe, spray painted it white (couldn't find a blank globe) and painted my map onto the globe. It shifted everything into perspective. Oh, this mountain city is in a temperate zone... oh these cities are actually on the equator... oh this region is far more north than I ever realized... oh this jungle should actually be a rainforest... from there, it shifted the culture around those areas to reflect the people's experiences. It shifted architecture, travel, and everything. Definitely that "last puzzle piece placed" feeling.
Geographic location (longitute and latitutde) isn't the only thing that plays a part when it comes to climate, though. How close is the region to the ocean? (The ocean regulates climate, making winters less cold and summers less hot, also, it rains more and there is more fog.) What's the altitude? And the type of rock + climate factors determine what type of soil is formed and the type of soil determines what plants will grow. And the type of rock is determined by geological history, so history dating back millions of years.
Ever since I started The Wheel of Time last year, this world is been building itself inside my head, your videos help me give it some guidance, but soon I'm gonna need to direct its construction, I'll use your books however I can.
Discworld ended up being this remarkable blend of all different kinds of worldbuilding approaches, partly because Pratchett started out going between extreme ends of soft worldbuilding ("you can't map a sense of humour") and hard worldbuilding ([how do you go about designing a fantasy city?] "First you have to work out how the water gets in and out"), partly because he started working with Stephen Briggs, who slowly convinced him to start taking worldbuilding seriously, first with mapping out Ankh-Morpork and then the rest of the Disc, partly because key to Ankh-Morpork's identity is being built on itself and all its layers of history, as well as its cultural melting-pot nature as a hub of immigration and industry, and finally partly because over the history of the books AM and the Disc themselves both evolve tremendously. It's perhaps a great example of how to blend all different kinds of worlbuilding together.
One of the things Pterry doesn't get enough props over IMO is how Discworld societies actually evolve and change over his many novels, new inventions are being made, country leadership is overthrown, wars are being fought and resolved, even religions have some major changes to their theology and practices. And it's really enjoyable to track these changes from book to book
The Iron born did settle across large parts of central Westerose, The Iron King Harren the Black had one of the largest kingdoms before the dragons burnanated him and his castle. A large part of their objectives are to reclaim their past empire.
Their past empire is weirdly irrelevant though. Ironborn culture/religion doesn't seem to have had any influence on any of the places they conquered - especially the Riverlands, which was a huge missed opportunity. The culture of most of the places the Ironborn ruled over feels like it would be exactly the same if they'd just been continually raided instead (with the exception of Harrenhall - but even then the way the Ironborn managed to exert enough control to build Harrenhall and yet still leave no trace of their culture, religion or bloodline in the Riverlands is remarkable).
@@eddiea8468Not so weird when you consider said empire didn't really last long enough to embed too much of a legacy in the region. Harwyn Hoare conquered the Trident, and was succeeded by his son, Halleck. Halleck Hoare, in turn was succeeded by his son, Harren. The same Harren who built Harrenhal. Harren, of course, never really got to enjoy Harrenhal, as the very day that the last stone was laid in its construction was the same day that Aegon the Conqueror and his two sister wives landed, with their dragons, at the estuary where the Blackwater Rush empties into Blackwater Bay.
I first understood that concept when I saw how Dwarf Fortress not just generates you a map to play on but instead map starts evolving before you. Time passes, cities are founded and abandoned, mountains form and erode, people migrate, rivers change their paths and you can stop it at a point and drop in to play. This is, ideally, how hard world building should be done. Like Robert Jordan basically started in the prior era even before the Saidin got tainted. Worlds like this always feel like they are just alive and not a matte painting for a backdrop of a story
Taking into account the history of a place can be really fun, especially if instead you have an idea for a location but need to _reverse_ engineer the history to get there I did a bit of worldbuilding once where i wanted to have a tavern atop a big hill, problem was it was miles from anywhere (it was near a major road so it wasn't totally out of place) and bringing in supplies would be expensive, so I thought "maybe they make their own drinks?" cool, slap an apple orchard and a lake nearby, cider and mead a plenty! "Where does the water that forms the lake come from?" Hmm, underground rivers wouldn't make much sense... Maybe it's rain fed? "Why would there be a giant hole on top of a mountain?" Idk, a meteor crashed there a couple hundred years ago? Which then led to me looking up how different metals affect the flavour of the water they're dissolved in. Huh, calcium makes the water harder which in turn makes some meads taste better... Oh and they have purple tails, dope! "Wouldn't a giant purple flash streaking down from the sky be noticed though? What are the wider effects?" And that friends is why the mead that the starting tavern is particularly sweet, _and_ why the robes of the priests in the major religion are purple, because a calcium rich meteor hit a mountain a couple hundred years ago that no one remembers (it's in some ancient books if the PCs care to research it though, nice little call back)
Every time you make one of these videos I think "Well that makes so much sense, I could have figured that out". I never would have, but the way the information is presented makes it very easy to draw that conclusion
This is why I love the worldbuilding in Wheel of Time, there are two groups of people that were later reveal to had been one once and became opposite societies, but when you pay attention to detail both still share fundamental cores. They both like to DANCE pretty well.
Oh yeah, that bit absolutely blew my mind at the time, but it totally makes sense, because cultures are not static and in the span of a few hundred years in a completely different environment you'd hope that people will change
@@lauroralei I really like the scene when one prominent member of one of those cultures glimpses a possible future, no idea if that will make it into the show but fingers crossed
I was hoping to see someone say something abt WoT, I'm rereading the series as I love it so much but never really got past book 8 so hoping to finish the series this time 😎
06:00 (ish) They roll the cheese down the hill because of an old law that said you could only be charged with the crime of theft if you were caught with the stolen item. If the item was more than 50 paces away, there was no proof you possessed it. So people would steal from the local market, and if a guard chased them, they would run to a nearby hill and roll the stolen goods down the hill. When the guard would approach them and demand the stolen item, they would fall back on the law that says the item at the bottom of the big hill is too far away to count as being possessed by them.
This is why one of my primary world building tools is this fun little RPG called "Mappa Imperium" It allows you to set up the inital culture and environment, then allows you to progress through the Eras. Exploration, Colonization, a simple War system. Then, once you have these basic notes in place, you can flesh things out later.
Funny story: Washington State is divided by the Cascade Mountains and those mountains in many ways are a political border. The politics of Eastern and Western Washington, which is what we call it, are generally very opposed to each other these days. Western Washington is coastal and urban and holds the state capital. Eastern is generally more arid and rural. So even though the state is unified technically, the Cascades provide a pretty solid border between lifestyles.
Romania, which was brought up in the video, is similarly divided between the mountainous West which has substantial ethnic minorities (mostly Hungarian, but also German and others) and the more "unified" East where the capital and most of the urban centers are.
A few ideas that came to mind after hearing this video... Don't forget that the 'famously colonial' British were Colonised themselves four times and that is a foundational part of our culture. First came the Bronze Age Beaker People - whose cattle grazing turned the land opposite my house from Woodland to soil-poor Heathland and turned the population from dark skinned to light skinned. Then you have the Romans, who founded a future Capital City where Environmental Determinism hadn't placed one before (it was all a bit marshy and tidal). Then you have the Anglo-Saxons etc. who impacted what the Romans built toward the end of their occupation and caused major switching around of towns,cities, agriculture etc. and separated Wales from England culturally. Then you have the Scandinavians (Vikings/Danes/Whotnot) who did it all again and caused a major cultural divide. And then you got the jolly old Normans who changed language, laws and did lots of other things, like depopulating a huge chunk of 'The North' and reserved large areas of land so their Nobles could go hunting, making it difficult for the pre-Norman population of those parts to make a living. And that is ignoring things like the conquest of parts of southern Iron Age England by the Belgae from Gaul (there is a reason the Romans called a later English Capital, Winchester, Venta Belgarum), or the conquest of the Picts by the Irish Scotti, or the conquest of parts of Wales by Vikings from Ireland. Or the time English Kings were more French than English, and how later we had a Spanish King, and later a Scottish King, and later a Dutch King, and later a German King... Meanwhile I am basing a draft RPG mini-campaign on Visigoth colonists of coastal Gaul in a, still barely functioning, Roman Empire. The Visigoths then, of course, conquered and Colonised what became Portugal and Spain, and then got Colonised by the Moors. In between they grabbed, and then lost to another bunch of Colonising/Conquering Germanic types, the Franks, a big chunk of what became France (Frankia). The point: Nothing is static and everywhere has history in depth. (Also, the 'real' history may not be the locals view of what the history is at any given point in time).
LotR period is static for sure. But on the time scale of Silmarillion and especially with focus on Elves there is plenty of processes that you are describing in this video. And intentionally for that matter given the fact that Tolkien created migration history of elves to explain language differences.
I think there are a few instances of this in the Third Age period. Arnor fragments and gets deserted, the Hobbits migrate, the Rohirrim start off as a settled kingdom of Rhovanion to a semi-nomadic tribal band back to a settled state again with a heavy cavalry tradition.
@@KillahMate I feel like it is intentionally slowed down quite a lot, as part of the main premise and what drives a lot of the conflict and story is the Elves wanting to keep everything static (cause ya know, they don't really age) and lots of very powerful forces pushing the trajectory of the world in a very specific direction, albeit sloooooooowly because they can't intervene too directly. The ridiculous timescales dealt with over LotR, Silmarillion, and other Middle Earth stories also mean that too quick of change and too much detail about that change would make it basically impossible to keep anything coherent and the reader would quickly get disoriented. I would say that LotR being dynamic but on a slow timescale is a very strategic move.
Pretty cool how you used Colombia as an example for this video's topic. As a Colombian that has been following your content for over 6 years now it made me happy that you used my country as a reference, I've always been a fan and forever will be. Me and my friends would watch you How to train your dragons videos back in the day and aways talked about how your accent helped us dive in your videos better. Love you brother, stay safe.
When you shared about the Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling I couldn't help think about something close to home that caused a celebration that is completely random. It's called Frozen Dead Guy Days. In short, a family was keeping their father's corpse frozen in the hopes that eventually they could be revived. Eventually the community got involved and now there is a celebration every year. The celebration includes events themed around death, like coffin races, or cold, like a polar plunge. This celebration has become so well intended, that the small town that used to host it can no longer accommodate everyone, so now it happens at a larger city that does not have the frozen dead guy. So yeah, crazy traditions and culturally significant events can happen regardless of the geography.
When you started off with Colombia's map I was so surprised cause I'm from Colombia, and I've been your fan for a while now. I wish I could buy your books in the bookstores in Bogotá. And what you commented about population is completely true. Our temperature in the costal and low lands is usually around 30 to 40+ degrees Fahrenheit. It's really hard to live in especially this time of the year, and also Bogotá (the capital) is among the most massive cities on earth.
Mountains are hard to climb. It is easier to maintain power to both sides of the mountain range if the capital is in the mountains. This is what the Spanish did. Plus, due to the centralized government style they had, it is a better idea to live near the capital, so you can do all your paperwork without a long travel up the mountains. And this stood even with a walled city that defended the country in the north coast being economic center, sparking point of the first attempt at revolution, and once proposed as new capital. (I'm Colombian)
Also probably worth mentioning that the need to flee from the lowlands is somewhat of a colonial issue, as the Spanish didn't have the natural resistance to disease or a lifestyle well adapted to hot wet tropics with dense rainforest like the Amazon or Choco. There are plenty of disease ridden, hot lowlands with high populations (West Africa, Southeast Asia, or southern India are good examples of this) and a high population density in the mountains is mostly a weird quirk of colonialism. I think the one major counterexample I can think of is in New Guinea, where the highlands are more populated since they were easy to subsistence farm and relatively disease free so the high mountain farming cultures flourished, but this is a very unique situation. Basically, even this video really oversimplifies the situation, turns out history and geography are complicated.
@@StuffandThings_ Most of the disses came with the Spanish. On the other hand the Americas weren't riddled by disease, as here weren't high populated areas, nor livestock. And, yes, sure there are some endemic diseases now, but if you track them, they came from Africa. I suppose I don't need to tell you how.
@@Theraot Yes, the Spanish definitely helped create the problem, but they still didn't have immunity when things _became_ disease riddled. There were also some truly endemic diseases to the tropical Americas, like Chagas. Of course those new diseases were also notorious for devastating the natives, but the Spanish didn't have any cultural precedent for staying in the lowlands so they settled the mountains.
this is why i love the worldbuilding in the dragon age games/franchise. it has a real sense of history & cultural evolution/transfer i have yet to see replicated to the same extent
Oh as a mosquito tech who works for Orange County in Florida, it was a little exciting hearing you talk about why Colombians tend to live at higher elevation to avoid the mosquitoes. Yeah, before mosquito control was present here Florida was described as “uninhabitable.”
I'm doing a master's degree on environment and development and I love the concept of environment we have there: environment is not just ecosystems, but the synergy between ecosystems and culture, and how they affect each other. That's what I'd call this topic “ecosystemic determinism”, rather than “environmental”. But anyway, I think this is a very nice way to explain one of the most common traps of worldbuilding, since environment is not just landscape and biomes, but also the culture and people.
Oh, and I'm Colombian, you got me from the start. And as a Colombian worldbuilder, it has always bothered me that flatland bias, since I've lived my whole life among mountains, my beloved homeland is the Andes (though obviously there are people from gorgeous flatlands here too). Mountains in most Colombians have united us as much as they have divided us, so Thank you for pointing that out! 🇨🇴
Great video. I like the idea of environmental determinism as a starting point, then using all the factors you listed to move further and further away from environmental determinism as is appropriate for that society's level of technology or colonial influences or whatever.
I live in Bogotá Colombia and yes, here we're far away from the heat and the "dangers" of the Amazon rainforest or the huge savannas on the east (it's also freezing cold up here). We also benefit from the access to multiple natural resources, almost all out electrical supply comes from big rives that flow down the mountains, our cities and tows are built almost exclusively with bricks and concrete, a lot of our agriculture is better suited for high altitudes. There sure are more reasons that I don't know of but understanding all of them, can really bring realism to a fantastic world. Amazing video!!!
This whole video reminds me so much of my cultural and physical anthropology classes in college. They were highly detailed. I learned so much about worldbuilding that I tried to apply to my writing. You made me feel like I'm back in class.
Curses! I came into this video after long weeks of working out the extensive and detailed history of cultural evolution in my world to better understand how things are in the present, and with the title I was expecting you to say something like "don't worry too much about worldbuilding every single hard detail, you'll fall into an endless rabbit hole" and free me from the grave I'm digging myself into. But instead, you come out telling me to do exactly what I've been doing! In all seriousness, thanks for the great advice and the reassurance that I'm on the right track.
I built my world with the main races in Malaysia as influences (Malay, Chinese, and Indian). And when you mentioned that the fantasy races are too static for what they believe in the mainstream setting, that got me thinking about changing more of my world-building. I will implement each fantasy race with the specific influences unique to Malaysia. It's not that I dislike the default Western approach, but I've noticed it's quite prevalent in much of the writing I've encountered.
Well i think its static in american media too, im from México and the population of this country its totally mixed, in the colonization at some parts like Veracruz, black people came but it was a very little fraction compare to USA or Colombia, and here the mixed fast with mexicans, spanish and french colonges, and people with all looks and colors came from that part. In other parts of the country european mixing with natives (like Michoacan) make that part of the country really, REALLY white even in indigenous communities. And chinese have a big flow of inmigration last century so they came to Puebla, and they have a lot of chinese ancestors in there; even now there its a big flow of Korean and Japanese, specially in the city. I dont know why, but in México these comunities rarely are close for long, these people marry or just have kids with mexicans and everything get in the mix.
@@SNN95understandable Mexicans like me are diverse in facial features and some of us may have some facial features like yours while having different elsewhere. I'm hairy light brown, have no almond shaped eyes but another Mexican is less hairy, has light light skin more native American features facial and eyes (almond shaped) and another is like them but dark and another like me but dark light. So many dif features tbf
4:06 Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I'm very sure yellow was the color of Chinese emperors, not red. Red probably held great significance for them or the imperial court, but a bright golden yellow was the emperor's
The real world examples you provided aren't really helping. The Colombian example *IS* a case of an environmental effect shaping the culture, just not the one effect you thought. 😅 The Romanian example *IS* a case of the environment shaping the borders of countries and *HAS BEEN FOR CENTURIES.* Wallachia and Moldavia were to the south and north-east of the mountain range, while Transylvania (the part inside of the mountain curve) was a part of Hungary for most of its history. The formation of the larger nation of Romania was only possible in modern times and it was meant to be a (partial) unification of different peoples inside a common group... but it was exactly because of those mountains that they were different in the first place. 😉
Yeah, dude doesn't really know what's he's talking about... Lists all time great series with great world building as a cautionary example... Feels like cope
The Colombia thing reminded me of Spore adventures (custom missions) by a guy called Parkaboy, who made a lot of worldbuilding showcase adventures. One of the first was about a race of insectoids who lived in the high cliffs of their world bc the lowlands were full of sweltering hot fog and murderous wildlife. He might've been inspired by Colombian population map too
Oh I'm so excited for your 3rd book !! The two first ones are a gold mine for my work ^^ I'm writing a video game world with my partner and he's a hard worldbuilder and I'm a soft. We fight a lot about it but that's what makes the world we're creating a bit more nuanced I believe :D
My favourite part in my world is how some of the parts were "cut out" and placed elsewhere, one of them being a town. That town used to have a river but well, that obviously originated elsewhere, so now there are two useless bridges and a pond lake at one of the bends--
Great video. I do think the biggest trap people get into, especially a lot of young writers is TOO much world building and not enough writing of the dang story.
This, for sure, I can spend hours having fun playing with world building without ever making an actual story. While it is very fun to do this, it does not help when it comes to making an actual story, at least from my experience. of course, your millage may varry
GRRM describes this as being an architect vs. a gardener. He obviously built the world but he is more of a gardener in the sense that he lets the story go where it wants to, rather than constructing every piece of it
Listening to this reassures me that I’m doing the right thing with my own story. I feel like in think of things so minute that it could be a detriment ( it probably still is) but I feel like I’m on the right track. Thank you for the confidence and information!
8:10 But England's geography could be considered to be a factor as to why it started to colonize. Being an island nation naturally lead it to form a strong naval tradition to defend said island. Naval tradition lead to naval exploration and expansion overseas. Also, as for Romania. For a large portion of that country's history it was divided at the Carpathian mountains. Transylvania was to the west of the mountains and to the east were the states of Moldavia and Wallachia. I'd say that even Colombia is shaped by it's environment because like you said the reason they live in the mountains is because the lowlands are far less hospitable.
And yet the Japanese, despite also being an island nation, wasn't nearly as expansionist and colonialist as the English were, and at one point they even became isolationist. There's also European nations like Portugal and Spain which are land-bound, and yet also engaged in colonialism.
@@StrikeNoir105E Japan is thin and mostly mountains and didn’t unify until after colonialism was in full swing. Japan was also influenced by the isolationist culture of China, who was the great power of Japan at the time
@@StrikeNoir105E Nonsense. Japan tried to be as expansionist and colonialist as English. The difference is they failed. Also, being not unified mess for a lot of their history didn't help. You also need to look up what land bound means. Portugal and Spain is the opposite of landbound. Water on three sides, and mountains on fourth., Might as well be an Island.
I don’t know if it’s relevant but the town I grew up in only exists where it is because people travelling on their way to somewhere else needed to stop before they crossed the river. Before there was a bridge the river was dangerous to cross, and people often needed to wait for the water level to drop a bit before attempting it. Those people were just passing through but they influenced the placement of the town.
The evolution part is so true, I'm from Thailand, we have water festival in April. It start as our old New year day, just like April fool origin. We pure water on the hand of higher-ups and elders as a sign of respect and submission. Our culture use water a lot, even drinking a holy one together for swearing an oath. Then January become new year. Instead of making April an April fool like the west, *conservatives* separate old calendar for festivals. Then the young's sarcasticly pouring a lot of water to each other. Play pretend or something IDK, but it's fun because it's hot so let's continue doing it. Boom, now everybody throwing water at each other for fun everywhere for three days a year with party music's and stuffs.
I love your first 2 world building books. When I get stuck, both in worldbuilding and plot, I go to the relevant topic and read them. I'm absolutely excited for the 3rd. More info at my fingertips! Yay!
Ok I just wanna say that in the game of thrones the Iron born may seems statics compared to real Vikings but in the books it is told that iron borne used to be conquerors and they tried to escape the isles and live in the Westeros mainland but the were beaten back by the Aegon Targaryen.
I really needed that video. Lately, I've been trying to rewrite or 'upgrade' my fantasy setting and so, of course, I started with the map XD I ended up studying different climates and how they are spread out on Earth, where exactly some species of animals and plants can be found etc. And then I took a break and realised: 'wait... why am I even doing this?'. I was so focused on 'things making sense' in my worldbuilding that it pretty much became just me copying Earth-rules to my fantasy world. This is where I understood that it limited me more than it actually helped me. Now I try to keep in mind that things in that world do not need to make sense to me, as a human from Earth but to my characters that live in this world and know its rules, not the other way around.
I'm quite proud of the world I've designed for my short stories. Over the years I managed to make a pretty realistic world because I started early in the timeline and iterated on it. The setting of one or two stories became the lore of the new setting, and so on, and now I have 4000 year timeline where each period functions pretty well on its own.
This is an amazing lesson. I feel like I partially do this right but without ever actually finishing anything ("world-builder's disease"), still I fully get the temptation to be bogged in land, and its always where I do start myself. Still I do 'soft' enough world building to make sure things really click with the needs. Start off from one point, fill out some info, some basics, figure out the culture, do some writing, and come back later to fill in the blanks. Often after some rough writing and figuring out organically what your character and world is missing, you can then figure out "Hey, there's this country over here that actually hangs its magic users." And then as you start that, you realize you can do something real fun if they set out to seas, land, fight, and then rebel against their own home. Nothing to do with the land other than where they docked, but it sure means trouble and culture were stirred and rearranged, and helps me fill a huge gap in the map. There's only but so many ideas you can do with a coastal line society, given there's going to be a lot surrounding the entire land masses anyway, so might as well start thinking about what happens when things skewer and change them. Same with mountains, grassy fields, deserts, etc. What's more fun to you, a desert place where they just really intensely have for some reason lived in this terrible land for hundreds of years, or they were sent there and broke free of an old banishing ritual from another land they have mystified onto their new generations?
Geography is destiny. In my world building geography creates a baseline that local cultures will shift back too without outside pressure. Few cultures are an island. And so geography and history often interact to create unique stuff.
I think this needs to be talked about more, just general culture worldbuilding and everything that goes along with it. Your magic system is neat, that hole in the world where gods once fought is fantastic, those countries in a three-way tie for getting the important trade city is intriguing and all. But what's your holidays? Whats your festivals and remembrances? Your birthdays, baptisms, coming-of-ages, weddings, and funerals? What do the kids get excited for? What's the brightest point in a young man's(or woman's) life? What little things do the elders get all catty and backstabbing over? I've seen too many things that answer just one of these and call it good and get back to 'the real meat of the story' by stabbing a dragon.
Another amazing video, sir! Finding that balance between hard and soft worldbuilding is difficult but once you do, the ideas, themes, and stories begin to write themselves!
It's pretty common for hot tropical environments to have most of the population living in the mountains, which is not only true for Colombia but also for Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, in addition to a bunch of other tropical countries. This rule of thumb may be useful for writers who are worldbuilding in the tropics.
I think we’re moving into periods in Sanderson’s writing where it will have more of that soft worldbuilding flair. The Stormlight Archive is filled with enormous amounts of holdovers from past cultural mingling, and lost reasons for things.
Brandon has said in a q&a that he has absolutely no idea why alethi women cover their left hand… it’s just culture, and he doesn’t have a deeper reason in mind
I have the first two books... I lent volume one to a friend's kiddo who is loving how easy it is to dive into... Thank you... I am waiting for volume three... and getting it, because your work is awesome!
All great advice, except for the environmental determinism part. At the start of the video you talk about how 50% of the world's population lives near the coast, then say DON'T use the environment in a broad way like that. If you don't have a standard, exceptions aren't interesting, and if you don't use the environment, you're missing out on a lot of character for a place. And especially in a fantasy where cities aren't as old as they are now, triumph over environmental conditions won't be as common. Columbia is a fun example because it defies the norm. Cities that thrive despite changing conditions are special and important. Starting with the question of "what will the environment support and why" is important. At least in my opinion.
I think theres also something to be said for simplistic cultures based entirely on their environment. Simplistic cultures can be poetic, or symbolize something. Theres also something fun about trying to worldbuild with these limits
Fascinating. Just the other day I was thinking about a world I've been toying with off and on. The dwarves in this world live in the mountains, and are very good at diverting rivers to suit their purposes. I was considering adding an abandoned elven city at the base of the mountains, where a river that the dwarves had diverted long ago used to flow. Perhaps I should have the city not be abandoned, just that the people adapted when the water stopped but retain some traits one might expect from a city on a river.
Ooh! Maybe they worked out how to efficiently collect rainwater and distill water from humidity. If you look at real life, mountain ranges near coasts can keep a lot of that water on the side near the coast, making a desert on the other side. Or there could be a large body of water like the great lakes or something that provide moisture to drive the weather. Also, how plant life adapts can be an interesting avenue to explore as well.
If I can make a suggestion, perhaps having this be the start of a conflict where the elves and dwarves go to war for this reason and making it part of how they relate to each other or having traces of this conflict change the area, such as having fortified cities or seeing ruins of settlements abandoned due to the conflict or seeing the impact it had on the lives of the people in the area, it could help make the area more interesting and add another layer to their culture
I think one of the reasons writers are drawn to stories that take place in the past is that we subconsciously miss the connection we used to have to the natural environment.
I had assumed that the largest and most important factor in the cultural and technological differences between different human societies was the geography in which they reside. Including climate, diseases present, the minerals and ores in the ground, the terrain, presence of nearby water bodies and fertile land, the wildlife including domesticable animals… Thank you for challenging my perspective with this video!
This is legit a thing I've been hammering at in my setting for years. I'm also a history nerd, so the ebb and flow of cultures in an area is something that has driven me mad as I've built it.
9:41 This is less environmental determinism and more divine determinism. Aule the Smith made the dwarves and hid them under the mountains, and when illuvatar gave them life, their natural inclinations were to work with stone to honor Aule. Dwarves didn't like stone because they lived in the mountains, they chose to live in mountains because they loved stone, and that's where they could get the most.
Love this topic! I have a hard time with balance. Sometimes I get really bogged down in obsessing over every little detail, then can’t write. Often I have to just write and hope that details will emerge as I gain steam.
I dunno, I think this has just added to my anxiety provoked perfectionism. More and more layers of hard world building, mixed and matched, redefined and half forgotten with additional layers if soft world building, subtext and metaphors. And after all of that I'd still have to create compelling characters, plots, dialogue, scenes and themes. Hopefully with an interesting enough twist or combination of features that it's somewhat interesting 🤞
If it helps any, I've taken inspiration from how Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games work. If you look at what all GMs have to do you can see it's possible to create a compelling story even when you don't know ever detail or your meticulously planned encounter is subverted by the players in a way you didn't expect, and the ad-libbing that comes out of that can make for really fun and creative events and solutions.
I know you're aware that it's perfectionism, but you only really have to nail a few of those things and the rest should come naturally. The characters being compelling will come in part from the plot and the dialogue, as well as well-written scenes. Not everyone cares about plot. Not everyone cares about characters. Not everyone cares about worldbuilding. So you can choose one or two of those things to work the story around and not everything even gets to make it into the story. You could do all the stuff that HFM mentions in the video and most of it may never be explicit on the page because it doesn't come up. And you can also do each thing over time. So start with a plot you feel good about and the basic outlines of interesting characters. Once you have the story written out once, you can find places to expand on the worldbuilding, you can think of character traits that would make the story more interesting. Then write a new draft that builds on that. Maybe after that draft, you realize one part of the plot is weaker and some of your worldbuilding and character ideas actually take the story in a different direction. Then you can change it. tl;dr you don't actually have to nail everything and you don't have to nail it all at once. Personally I've found it easier when I'm writing drafts to get the skeleton down. Then it's easier for me to see what gaps to fill.
Just remember your story is your own and only do what you WANT to. A lot of people don't care about this stuff and that's okay, and most of the time people will never notice! I love soft worldbuilding that cares less for this stuff. If it's giving you anxiety, just know you don't need this ❤ ~ Tim
Good characters are the most important thing. Then plots, dialogue, and scenes, and then themes. These things will save a story with weak worldbuilding more than immaculate worldbuilding can save a story with bland characters or a boring plot. Then, what worldbuilding does exist becomes very interesting, because it’s attached to a story and characters that people like and connect with. Star Wars really doesn’t have that great of worldbuilding, but people love the Star Wars universe and delve deep into the lore because they want to learn more about the world that produced such memorable characters and exciting adventures.
I start with cool ideas before the map. Then find a way for them to be viable on the map, and hold space for things to be unique and stem from lore. Kaliningrads and pre-1990ms Hong Kongs have an outsized and interesting impact on the world.
“English is the language of power in the world less because England had a favorable geography…” I would push back against this somewhat. England was an island nation with large amounts of farmland and large deposits of coal and iron. The climate and soils gave them a large population, the resources allowed them to industrialize early on, plenty of access to wood for ship building, being an island meant they were somewhat isolated from the effects of the wars on the continent and it also made them heavily reliant on sea power which made it easier to spread their power over the globe. All of these are environmental factors that shaped the course of history and gave England a boost in the colonial age, making their dominance slightly more likely. It certainly wasn’t inevitable that they would emerge as the global super power, but it was more likely for them to do so than a landlocked country like Switzerland for example.
what? The dwarves were literarily FORCED out of their mountains, and had to adapt to a new diasphoric world, just like the Jews that were Tolkien's isnpiration for them. They migrated far and wide, and while some would colonize other parts of the world, others ended up as the local blacksmiths where they made their living by becoming the best craftsmen wherever they ended up setting up shop. Thorin Oakenshield spent the majority of his life as a blacksmith in the west, before deciding to gamble it on retaking Lonenly mountian.
I just started the beginnings of a story, i’m starting with the map, i chose to start with the map because i learned a lot about maps from my AP human geography class. HOW DID I ALMOST FALL INTO THIS TRAP?!? That same class that made me decide to start with a map talks about environmental determinism, migration, sequent occupancy, colonialism, post colonialism border drawing, cultural effects of the germans migrating to part X of america during Y, possibilism, and other stuff along these lines. I like the class a lot too! By all means i should have caught myself, thank you for happening to appear in my recommended with this, you’re setting me on the coarse i somehow didn’t chart.
I finde the evolution of Christmas a very good example of how customs evolve. Originally, it most likely came from the tradition of mid-european and northern european tribes where people would gather on/around winter solstice. The christmas decoration such as a christmas tree or a mistle toe probably started very simply because winter were cold, dark and without colour, so people used still green branches to decorate their huts. Additionally, coming to gather to celebrate in winter provides the advantage of more warmth and you can share the scarce food with each other. Nowadays we don't celebrate solstice anymore, but christmas a few days later. The colour red got its boom due to the coca cola commercials while santa clause is inspired by Saint Nicholas, a christian bishop. In Germany we also have the custom of Saint Martin's day. De customs differ, but much of it stems from what the germanic tribes used to do to celebrate the end of harvest season/beginning of winter. In some regions people gather in a large group and walk through the streets with lanterns and sing songs. In others children play games. In most regions you have a fire around which people gather. In some they play the story of Saint Martin, which is the christian story the church made up because people wouldn't stop with their "pagan" traditions. In others children jump over the fire as a game. Traditionally, you eat goose on Saint Martin's day, which stems from the middle ages where peasants had to pay their feudal lords with geese before the winter. The church somehow incorporated them into the story of Saint Martin to give a christian-appropriate explanation for it.
This is an extremely common myth, but none of it is true. Christmas was first performed by Roman christians, and was passed onto the rest of Europe as it christianised. Some of the features of these local traditions got mixed in. The christmas tree was invented in the 16th century, and has as much to do with paganism as the Japanese christmas tradition of KFC. We don't know how, if at all, trees were important to ancient European cultures. The only culture that has evidence of this are the celtic peoples.
Jol wasn't on the solstice either until Hakon moved it there. For untold centuries it was the first full moon after winter began -- a seasonal AND lunar system that barely had any bearing on timekeeping. All those handy landscape features were the lunar calendar the ancestors used to keep time and set dates for events. Christianity did everything in its power to erase the old ways, just as they did to all the native Americans and Australians and on and on... including trying to use integration. Just as the Romans before them. Bust Christmas as we know it is largely a modern invention, basically dated to the 20s-50s ad campaigns. The traditions before that were pretty germane. It wasn't stolen from the heathens. Instead it paved them over with small local adaptations lter granted greater significance. It's also not true at all we don't know how important trees are to the old norse, Ask and Embla, Donnar's Oak... the Germanic people's believed humanity was made from trees, and trees, literally a world tree, tied the cosmos together. That bishops targeted those trees and groves and hofs, to destroy them, should tell you all you need to know. To destroy the heart of a community in the north, you kill their sacred trees.
While a good point, I would put this argument the other way around. When trying to design interesting worlds, you have a lot more options than you might think you have, because you can also invent history and culture to explain what would otherwise be contradictions. Even further: just like a good story, an interesting world has inbuilt tension, things that are under pressure to change, which in turn are natural sources of conflict. A world that doesn’t make sense when looking at the map probably has constant pressure to change, which is often good for stories.
I'm curious if you've read The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker because it has the most developed version of Hell in fiction. It feels like an actual society throughout.
ok you just got me an idea for my world, i was stuck at step -5 because i didn't know if i should make a "globe" or a "something else" and i think i got an idea. thanks, man OwO
Loved it on Nebula, loved seeing it here :) I'm a big sucker for getting deep into the science of worldbuilding. It's a great way for me to keep my knowledge sharp while being creative with it. So maybe it's a matter of philosophy, but I don't actually mind leaning into environmental determinism a little bit. It also allows me to think for a moment of what kinds of possible ways cultures could develop. If tribe A conquered tribe B in a region, or vice versa, how would that shape culture, religion, and possibly even their attitude towards knowledge and exploration. All fun things to play with. Also, I think if you're going to go the hard worldbuilding route, REALLY do your research. Study some geoscience and anthropology, or ask a friend with solid understandings of those subjects for advice. Because poor research can result in a "planet of the hats" problem, which can result in some pretty nasty stereotypes.
For those curious about the map software he used, it's called Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator. If you ever want a really fun way to make a map, do the following; - Get Space Engine - Find a random planet and export its heightmap - Import the heightmap to Azgaar's and define heights by colors
Thank you for this interesting video. I think I've fallen into this "trap" a time or two, if I've even thought that hard about it to begin with. God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)
Of the many things I expect to pop up in my yt feed, between my political interests (all left -leaning) and my pop culture interests (mainly nerdy stuff), to find a nerd creator speaking about writing and fantasy with a really nuanced perspective on how human beings use spaces and not taking geography for granted by detatching ir from history, was one that I least expected. That was a really nice surprise, by the way.
Oda (creator of One Piece) created a world that justifies whatever new setting he wants to drop in, and masterfully makes it so they never feel out of place. You've got the Lost World, Atlantis, islands in the clouds, island chains made of food, and literally Japan coexisting!
I love the worldbuilding in one piece, it’s so clear that Oda is just having fun and he’s basing his world around what he enjoys drawing. That sense of fun really translates to the reader and it adds to the themes of freedom and adventure!
In my DnD world, the home territory of most of the fantasy races were severely impacted by natual disaster 5000 years ago. The human continent was least affected, and also the strongest bent towards exploration trade and colonization. Hence humans are now the most common and widespread ancestry. This video has really helped my work this more into the cultures of my setting.
Saying England """chose""" to colonize the world makes it sound like it was just an idea someone happened upon and everyone was like, "okay." The development of capitalism inn England --- and hence colonialism --- was the product of historical factors that ran away from human choice, and environment played no small part.
A part of me thinks that a better approach to worldbuilding is to actually work our way backwards - start out with what we want and need, and to fill in the blanks after-the-fact or even allow others to fill that in for themselves. For the parts that are expected (e.g. subterranean folk who are miners), it fits and comes naturally, and for the unexpected (e.g. subterranean folk who are miners but worship a sky god), it draws people to wonder and/or speculate how that arose.
England was able to colonize the world because of their favorable geography. It was not bound to the endless wars of the continent and thus was able to concentrate on itself and overseas expansion.
You do know France, Portugal and Spain also had multiple colonies (which is why their languages spread around the world too) and were part of the continent and its "endless wars"? Britain geographical situation certainly had an effect, but the political decisions at the time and especially Britain's head start in the Industrial Revolution were much bigger factors.
@@dr.antonius8350 Iberia was practically and island because of the Pyrenees separating them from the rest of Europe. France got colonies because they couldn't let the English one up them an because France was the richest and most populous country in Europe up until the 19th century. Britains geostrategic situation was the defining factor as to why it was able to colonize most of the world. Britain had already colonized most of the world before the industrial revolution. Furthermore, the industrial revolution was made possible by Britains favourable geography. From the coal necessary, to stability fostering economic growth and innovation to the ideal water ways to construct canals. In addition to that, Britain, being an island, naturally makes it have lots of sea faring experience and sailors to draw from.
i feel like its always fun just running a trial version of the world and thinking about what people would get up to and then building the actualy world ontop of those "ruins" or ideas thinking how that trial run evolves into something practical
![Coheed and Cambria - Searching for Tomorrow [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hDsYGLbmadg/mqdefault.jpg)
All comments/likes are appreciated to help the video! Have you ever fallen into the hard worldbuilding trap?
I've done hard worldbuilding all my life, but I've become more allured to soft worldbuilding as time goes on. It feels so much more magical and flexible in practice that the world almost becomes more beautiful for it, imo.
I hadn’t stopped to think about it much until now but looking back it’s glaringly obvious in my worldbuilding, I always try to overexplain everything and it’s frankly one of my biggest flaws XP
Thanks for the video man! I can’t wait to buy the new book, your on writing and worldbuilding series has helped me grow up a lot as a writer 🙌
ok
I probably had, but everything is still trap inside my head.
I'm no writer, but writing stuff like this fascinates me. And this video made me feel like I could do this worldbuilding thing! It makes so much sense and clarifies a lot of the process - or at least, a process that I understand.
While designing an antagonist civilization that lives in a swampy area, I had a major epiphany and realization that shook me to my core and realligned all my values: ...They don't like the swamp.
This is great!
~ Tim
The Dutch be like:
True of cultures in general. In Lawrence of Arabia, a character remarks, "It is you British who love the desert. We Arabs value green things." Cultures adapt to their environment, yet often seek the antithesis of the challenges they face.
Their Ogre neighbors: "THAN WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MUH SWAMP?"
That reminds of the Aztecs who lived on a lake because all the surrounding land was controlled by other people (who they would eventually conquer). They stayed because it was a natural fortification
Important to note for writers in the comments: this is like level 5 worldbuilding. If you’re just starting out, the “city by coast worship on mountain” is just fine! Don’t let Advanced Worldbuilding™ stop you from writing the story.
Great video!
Basic and advanced depends on the intelligence of the person. A person of high IQ will always learn faster and better than the person with the lower. Your comment assumes everyone has an average IQ.
@@SCARRIOR Except that IQ is so deeply flawed of a concept that it's just bullshit all the way down. It is a harmful concept based on unbelievably poor science rooted in racism.
@@SCARRIOR It has more to do about how much the person invested in more complex worldbuilding and even how much they care about these details (after all this does not really impact much how good a story is) than any idea weird idea about IQ.
And yours assumes you have an above average one. But mostly you just sound obnoxious. @@SCARRIOR
Agreed! The perfect is the enemy of the good. Get something on the page, fix it later.
It's not a religious thing, but I heard a story about preparing ham for roasting. A boy was watching his mother preparing the ham, and noticed that she always cut off the end of the joint, so he asked why. The mother said she learned from her sister, who is older by about ten years. So the mother calls the sister to ask why, and sister says that their mother (boy's nanna) did it that way. Phone call to Nanna: "That's how my mum did it." Phone call to great grandma, who laughs. "I couldn't fit the joint in the pan otherwise."
That's great. Little details like that really make things be more alive. :)
Robert Rodriguez tells a version of this story about his family, which may be where you heard it. But similar stories have been around for a while.
I've heard a similar one, but for drinking water,where the family always dumps the last sip in a glass. Turns out their ancestor in 1850s had a not-very-clean well with a bit of sand in it, so said ancestor would dump the last bit because there was literal dregs at the bottom of the glass
Dalinar moment.
@@bradleygalo4775Yes!
I love this topic! It makes me think about Polish traditions my grandfather told me about. Poland is one of the most Catholic nations I have ever been too, but every spring a lot people make effigy of the old goddess Marazanna burn it and throw it in the river. People understand that it is supposed to honor her, but no one knows why we still do it
What's next? Salem witch trials were done to celebrate feminism?
I’d say it’s the christianity itself that’s the interesting thing here… Baltic slavs were enslaved quite a lot before the whole christianisation of the slavs, but seeing the “barbars” and “under-people” were suddenly *fellow christians* it became somewhat immoral to sell them as slaves (“somewhat” as it didn’t cease completely) and looking at it now, you can see why these people would cling to the religion so much as it protected them... somewhat.
It's so fucking sad... Beautiful tho, that at least some of the pagan traditions survived
The Grim tales have pagan christianised gods like "Frau Holle", responsible for the underworld, but when those books were written the brothers Grim had to search for these tales by asking around, so they were already obscured by the centuries of christianisation.
@@ela8665in my experience Polish people have extremely ambiguous feelings about the Christianization of Poland. A lot of people feel like the right to know about our history and culture was taken from us, especially because Slavic people didn’t have a written language to write our culture down before the Christian missionaries came. But, most historians and scholars agree that Polish life expectancy almost doubled after Christianization.
That doesn’t even consider that most Polish people really do believe. A lot of us have trouble reconciling that with the fact that the church called the northern crusade to put down Baltic and Slavic people who violently resisted conversion
There is this strange middle ground from my experience. Polish people tend to cling to as much of our pre Christian heritage as possible while also believing the conversion was for the best
Burning Marzanna is to get rid of Winter. She's the goddes of Winter/ death
I feel the need to defend Tolkien's dwarves and point out that alot of the stuff we associate with them got pasted on by adaptations later on. Dwarves in the books are the least fleshed out and one of their main traits is that they're secretive and other races don't know much about them.
Which leads me to what I really like about Tolkien's world-building: how the gaps are often a feature. There's stuff he never finished, stuff he changed, and the whole historical document frame he overlays it with makes that stuff that's unfinished or inconsistent feel like part of the world, part of the experience of being in the world and only knowing as much as various intellectual traditions preserved for you to know.
Isn't it also true that Tolkien was creating an English style mythology? My understanding was Middle Earth's similarity to northern Europe was on purpose, not an accident of world building.
I think it's also extremely relevant to point out that the dwarves have a different origin to the other races, they were created by Aulë and not Ilúvatar, and take some characteristics from their creator. Rather than being a result of their environment, their environment was picked for them by other forces, and they chose to stay in the mountains and in the earth. Choice is very important in the Silmarillion.
It's true Tolkien purposefully used gaps and mythology! So in a way these were conscious choices for him, which is cool, but he's often held up as the pinnacle of "realistic" worldbuilding, when that's not always the case - and that's fine!
~ Tim
And there are PLENTY of examples of the kind of worldbuilding Tim's talking about in LOTR. For example, the kings of Gondor have crowns that are basically fancy helmets stylized as seabird wings - because they are descended from Numenorians. Sea-faring has mostly NOT been politically or culturally important to Gondor in general for most of its history, but remnants of that culture remain. Bilbo and Gollum's meeting is marked by their shared riddle-culture, which bonds them despite their respective hobbit peoples having diverged generations ago and become very separate since then.
Also, Dwarves were created to be smiths, so they gravitate to the mountains and took up mining because that’s where and how they get their raw materials.
Tolkien's Dwarves being so immutably tied to mountains makes sense, considering they were designed by Aule to be that way. He was the one who also created the mountains, and wanted the Dwarves to be safe from the evil ruler of Middle-earth, Melkor.
Fantasy races should resemble us in some aspects, but if they're completely different in others that's good too.
In some part....except they are not really that tied up, we do see when Dwarves migrated though they were less likely to do so:
Dwarves of Longbeards/Durin's Folk were also the ones who basically were the most expansive, in the early Second Age they basically had 'quasi empire' of sorts:
“…for the Longbeards had spread southward down the Vales of Anduin and had made their chief ’mansion’ and stronghold at Moria; and also eastward to the Iron Hills, where the mines were their chief source of iron-ore. They regarded the Iron Hills, the Ered Mithrin, and the east dales of the Misty Mountains as their own land.” HoME XII, Peoples of Middle-earth, Of Dwarves and Men
...
“It was a brief period in … the Second Age, yet for many lives of Men the Longbeards controlled the Ered Mithrin, Erebor, and the Iron Hills, and all the east side of the Misty Mountains as far as the confines of Lórien; while the Men of the North dwelt in all the adjacent lands as far south as the Great Dwarf Road that cut through the Forest (the Old Forest Road was its ruinous remains in the Third Age)….”
The Peoples of Middle-Earth, HoME Vol 12, Part 2, Ch 10, Of Dwarves and Men: Notes, Note 30
...
"In the Dwarvish traditions of the Third Age the names of the places where each of the Seven Ancestors had 'awakened' were remembered; but only two of them were known to Elves and Men of the West: the most westerly, the awakening place of the ancestors of the Firebeards and the Broadbeams; and that of the ancestor of the Longbeards, the eldest in making and awakening. The first had been in the north of the Ered Lindon, the great eastern wall of Beleriand, of which the Blue Mountains of the Second and later ages were the remnant; the second had been Mount Gundabad (in origin a Khuzdul name), which was therefore revered by the Dwarves.... The other two places were eastward, at distances as great or greater than that between the Blue Mountains and Gundabad: the arising of the Ironfists and Stiff-beards, and that of the Blacklocks and Stonefoots. Though these four points were far sundered the Dwarves of different kindreds were in communication, and in the early ages often held assemblies of delegates at Mount Gundabad. In times of great need even the most distant would send help to any of their people; as was the case in the great [War of the Dwarves and Orcs] (Third Age 2793 to 2799). Though they were loth to migrate and make permanent dwellings or 'mansions' far from their original homes, except under great pressure from enemies or after some catastrophe such as the ruin of Beleriand, they were great and hardy travellers and skilled road-makers; also, all the kindreds shared a common language."
The Peoples of Middle-Earth, HoME Vol 12, Part 2, Ch 10, Of Dwarves and Men: Relations of the Longbeard Dwarves and Men
And we know that since the destruction of Moria, Ered Mithrin and Erebor they for a time had to adapt to life of wandering and seeking new homes (Dunland and then Thorin's Halls in Ered Luin the Blue Mountains).
"_Dwarves._ The Dwarves are a race apart. Of their strange beginning, and why they are both like and unlike Elves and Men, the Silmarillion tells; but of this tale the lesser Elves of Middle-earth had no knowledge, while the tales of later Men are confused with memories of other races.
They are a tough, thrawn race for the most part, secretive, laborious, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits), lovers of stone, of gems, of things that take shape under the hands of the craftsmen rather than things that live by their own life. But they are not evil by nature, and few ever served the Enemy of free will, whatever the tales of Men may have alleged. For Men of old lusted after their wealth and the work of their hands, and there has been enmity between the races.
But in the Third Age dose friendship still was found in many places between Men and Dwarves; and it was according to the nature of the Dwarves that, travelling and labouring and trading about the lands, as they did after the destruction of their ancient mansions, they should use the languages of men among whom they dwelt. Yet in secret (a secret which unlike the Elves, they did not willingly unlock, even to their friends) they used their own strange tongue, changed little by the years; for it had become a tongue of lore rather than a cradle-speech, and they tended it and guarded it as a treasure of the past. Few of other race have succeeded in learning it. In this history it appears only in such place-names as Gimli revealed to his companions; and in the battle-cry which he uttered in the siege of the Hornburg. That at least was not secret, and had been heard on many a field since the world was young. Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! 'Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!'
Gimli's own name, however, and the names of all his kin, are of Northern (Mannish) origin. Their own secret and 'inner' names, their true names, the Dwarves have never revealed to any one of alien race. Not even on their tombs do they inscribe them." Lotr appendices
I'm doing that with the races in my stories. The elves, for example, will have a civilization based on the Greeks and Romans of the past, as they saw themselves as superior to other civilizations, just like those empires of the past.
There's a museum in my area focused on Jamestown, the first successful British colony in North America, where they put a lot of emphasis on the cultures of the area and how they interacted and changed over time, which I think provides a pretty good example of how colonialism and evolution impact cultures; when the English first arrived, they started making their houses out of wattle and daub with thatched roofs, even though they were completely surrounded by trees, because that was how they did it in England. By the end of the 17th century, they'd switched to mostly making their houses mostly out of wood, including wooden boards for the walls and wooden clatter boards for the roofs; they adapted to the new landscape. Meanwhile, the indigenous people started out making their houses by bending saplings into a frame and covering the frame with sheets of bark or mats made of reeds; by the end of the century, they were making rectangular cabins with wooden boards in the walls and pointy roofs, just like the English, BUT they were still covering their houses with sheets of bark and incorporating saplings into the structure, as well as using central fire pits instead of fireplaces like in the English houses, blending the colonial influences with their traditional style of architecture.
This is such a wonderful little detail!
~ Tim
Heck, I live in california... I always have to explain to visitors from the east coast that we don't have a lot of old brick stuff because if that falls down in earthquakes. XD
We absolutely used to have lots of old brick buildings! San Francisco had to rebuild after the great earthquake... so not as many around because it was too pricey xD
And the reasons that brick was so popular when the USA was young was because once a fire started in a place made only of wood, you'd be in a similar position of letting disaster take its course. There are countless (former) ghost towns in deserts that got burnt to crisps and never rebuilt to their glory days, and we still lose historic old buildings because of fire or quakes
not to be confused by JONEStown.
Post-apocalypse worlds also tend to have a strong "what came before" worldbuilding in which "what happened here" tends to be more important than "where are rivers and mountains right now". What killed those that came before will probably inform next generations of survivors on how and where to rebuild.
Also, in anything with nukes or an equivalent to radioactive Fallout, the areas which were best suited to building mighty cities before the war may now be least suited due to being the most heavily contaminated.
This is my biggest struggle right now. As someone who has been creating homebrew worlds for about 10 years now for D&D, my most recent world is one I'm creating for both my first book and to run games in for my friends.
The world building is the most complex I've ever created as I'm not only creating my own fantasy world and races from scratch (loosely based on typical fantasy races), but knowing that the world will be forever changed after the beginning of the apocalypse in the book is nearly instantaneous, only sparing those in light as the darkness washes over the world.
@@RorikH Or in case of New Vegas, it's a remarkable location because there is very little radiation outside of what is introduced by Camp Searchlight and the Nuclear Testing Grounds., despite being in the middle of a desert. And yet, it's *New* Vegas because following the war, all the stuff you'd need to keep a city running would just be gone, and so most of the city is in ruins, and you still need makeshift walls to defend the smaller parts you do have.
@@TheYahooProductions How did your homebrew world go? Curious to hear any updates of newfound realizations from your creation process.
interesting thing a buddy of mine did for world building for a novel he wrote:
he slowly now and then wrote a history book about his fantasy world where the novel takes place and upon finishing it he tore out half the pages at random and that's how he decided what is known and stayed and what was left and forgotten. it's such extra work but he did it more for his own entertainment.
realistic
If you where given a map of earth without any knowledge of real history, would you guess that a biggish island in the north was at one point controlling almost half the landmasses of the globe ?
Probably not , but it happened.
Britain has fantastic geography
Yes, Its not hard to imagine a country with an ocean of natural borders would be very successful.
@@winzyl9546 Japan was very poor for a lot of time. Domined by china.
@@elhoteldeloserrantes5056 The geography of Japan and England are very different. There's not much you can do with a skinny island with a bunch of mountains rather than a flat island with plenty of farmland and buildable on that. It also doesn't help that United Kingdom united about a whole century earlier than Japan and even then, when Japan finally united there were already other European powers trying to colonize Asia.
Does geography explain why UK united before Japan a century earlier? What would happen if Japan was the one that united first? All these explanations of why Europe succeeded are post-hoc theorizing. Britain having arable flat land surrounded by sea could also mean it's prime target for invasion, and they don't have a good way to defend every inch of that long coastline.
I think my favorite piece of non-environmental world building comes from, of all things, Thomas the Tank Engine, specifically the original Railway Series books. For those who don’t know, the author, Reverend W. Awdry, wrote a book that laid out the “real world” history of the Island of Sodor where the stories take place. In this he reveals how Sodor was historically a victim of constant invasion, this finally ended when England gave them an Earl and attached the Island to the Dutchy of Lancaster, but Sudrians always saw that as a compromise rather than the sovereignty they wanted. This created a culture of quiet resistance that’s remained prevalent enough, that when British Railways were putting pressure on their North Western Region to scrap their steam engines and switch to diesel, the people of Sodor rallied behind Sir Charles Topham Hatt II in his defiance. Cementing the Island of Sodor as a safe haven for steam!
Well then. I think my special interests have come full circle
The amount of worldbuilding that man put into some children's stories about talking trains is just mind-boggling.
Train lore
@@katherinespezia4609tolkein irl
holy shit?
Pretty cool how you used Colombia as a reference. I've been to the capital, Bogota, which is situated at the base of a valley surrounded by mountains on all sides. I was told that the ruling powers were able to win a lot of battles because they would camp out on the mountains and strike the invading forces attempting to invade the capital, which is the most hardcore and fantasy-like piece of history I've ever heard.
Yeah. This is the actual reason. Gunboat diplomacy made Cartagena impossible to have as a capital cos it kept getting invaded all the time. I've never heard it's because of the heat tbh
@@alfonsojaragoAre you sure that's the real reason, or is it an anachronistic post-hoc explanation that's most often said? I wouldn't know one way or another about Colombia specifically, but I do know that people in general have a tendency to do that! If it makes more sense, or makes a better story, often a falsehood gets passed around instead of truth. Alternatively, it could be both are true, the world is complex and usually more than one factor is involved. (also a good world building tip, incidentally -- people are often misinformed about stuff, so having an accepted narrative and what actually happened differ is a very interesting choice)
@sydneygorelick7484 it's the real reason why Bogota is the capital. Cartagena was invaded a bunch of times, it had to be rebuilt more than once, and a lot of investment went to fortify it, so it was decided that it couldn't be the capital. Any invasion of mogota required weeks just to get there.
@@alfonsojaragoThat explains why the capital was moved. Why does everyone else who lives in the mountain live there?
I was born in Colombia but was adopted by and is currently living with white parents. This makes me wish I knew more about the land I was born in.
Environmental Determinism, is only a trap when it is applied incorrectly. The ‘hardest’ world-building is starting with environmental determinism and then playing the game of ‘civilization’ forward while keeping the environmental pressures in mind.
omg this! I was like... no? All of that does matter, you just have to account for history. It doesn't negate the environment, it's just another axis that influences it.
Thank you! I felt like that point was overlooked throughout the video.
Glad other people are seeing this
Then stop calling it "determinism". The entire point of that word is to imply that the environment a people lives in WILL ALWAYS produce a particular culture or social order. That such things are pre-determined by the environment. Which isn't true at all. Geography, climate and ecosystem may affect subsistence patterns, but there's so much else that goes into social development besides the necessities of survival.
That's a definition you have put on the word. The modern concept of environmental determinism doesn't hold such an idea.@@tbotalpha8133
One of my favourite pieces of worldbuilding is (don't laugh)... The Island of Sodor.
I'm not joking.
So basically before Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends became Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, it was a book series called 'The Railway Series'. A bunch of short stories by Rev. W. Audrey. And he didn't just make a random island for his engines with faces to be on, he put so much EFFORT into it.
So the island itself is situated on the North-West coast of England, snuggled in between The Isle of Man and Barrow-in-Furness, hence the railways name, the North Western Railway. Think of it like an alternate history as it were. And what Audrey did that was so impressive to me is that he didn't just make a world with another history, he INTEGRATED it with already established British history.
And he had it all planned out for his railway.
Different sediments of rock and how they effected the landscape and industry.
Optimal routes of railroads, ports and harbours connected to ancient villages established in the viking ages.
Corse ways and valleys that would need tunnels or alternative engines such mountain, Narrow gauge and electric in order to run correctly.
How certain places were effected by war, industry and financial collapse.
Tourism, destroyed landmarks and drained lakes
Exports, imports, heck, its OWN LANGUAGE. Yep, Sodor has its own language; Sudric. And you can see them as the names of stations and castles.
J.R.R. Tolkien eat ya heart out.
Thats not to say its perfect obviously but I find it so slept upon when it comes to worldbuilding because Thomas is viewed as "babyish". When really it (was) for all ages.
I have seen people rank villain tier lists for the Thomas series. I'm not really sure what's going on, but they are cooking with something.
I'm not at all surprised that someone created a detailed backstory for their model train set.
of course the creator of Autism Trains cared so much about detail lol
not knocking btw am autismo myself, its just so obvious its funny
That was uncalled for.
So you are one of those who think others can read your mind or have all the same experiences. So much for your ability to judge writing. I don't care one bit about your weird random island namedrop.
Congrats on the new book! My son and I are both fans.
To add another real life example: in Brazil we celebrate Christmas exactly the way it's done in Europe or USA. The funny thing is that in Brazil the temperature in December is around 35oC (95oF). So for one month we can see a lot of cotton 'snow' in the houses and in every shopping mall an old fat guy melting inside red clothes meant for the north pole.
I agree with what you said, but R.R. Martin was actually smarter than most with his world building. As a example, the Ironborn did conquer and settled, what they are now are very embittered remanants holding to what they believe is their glorious pasts, since they are now stuck in their very poor homelands since Aegon conquest. Martin's world is also full of migration and customs that has no know origin or something mythical with grains of truth. The waves of migration have also played an immense part on culture. How in Dorne, mostly desert, people still revere a great river. On how people speak dialects of a dead empire, specially as lingua franca.
Definitely, looking at Iron Islands history, there are times when they do settle lands or trade with people instead of raiding. But inevitably some king decides to bring back “the good old days” of being Vikings. And Dorne is so culturally different from the rest of Westeros because of the Rhoynar who migrated there.
I'll also add in the Blackwoods and Manderlys as examples of Martin's world being dynamic rather than environmentally deterministic.
The Blackwoods are a rare stubborn holdout of the First Men south of the neck. They keep to the Old Gods and consistently display gruff 'northern' sensibilities regarding war, life, and politics. When the Andals swept through the Riverland, most of the First Men converted and intermarried with them or else were wiped out and supplanted but the Blackwoods just stubbornly held on to their heritage.
The Manderlys on the other hand are exiles. They were once a powerful Andal house in the Reach with lands next to the Mander River, which still bears that name during ASOIAF and which either they were named after or was named after them. Well before Aegons conquest, they got into a major political squabble with a rival house and found themselves forcibly exiled from their lands. They fled north and were taken in by the Starks who made them bannermen and granted them an old fort to occupy. The Manderlys took that land and applied their southern sensibilities to it, over time turning it into White Harbor, the only real city of the North and a major naval trade center. In the present day, the Manderlys are still very much Andals, they worship the Seven, practice knighthood, and generally comport themselves like southern lords, but they have also adopted bits and pieces of northern culture, are fiercely loyal to the Starks, and are far less prone to backstabbing and politics than typical Andals. They still claim titles and honors from their ancient lands but seem quite content with their new home and have no interest in actually trying to reclaim what they lost.
GRRM is actually very good about sprinkling in little details like this in the background. He rarely focuses in on them explicitly because his POV characters take them for granted but they're definitely there if you look for them.
Also you can look and see how the politics and culture of the Ironborn has changed because of colonisation, under the Targaryens
@@StathMIA I also found it very interesting how the Free Cities of Esteros kind of culturally relate to Westeros culture. There may be a link through the Andals coming from the east, but it's not that clear. There are significant differences but I've always seen the Free Cities as some kind of exotic Westeros-like places. There is a lot of trading going on across the sea, but I wonder if that's enough to explain it. I could not give proper details because of memory, and it always felt vague so it may have been my reader's imagination seeing stuff that was not there. Nothing more to say about it, I just wanted to share this thought ^^
(sorry for the possible mistakes, I read those books a long time ago, because you know who ditched the series lol, so no opportunity to delve back into it)
@@StathMIA Also interesting is that Blackwoods were kinda like reverse Manderlies, driven from the North by ancient Starks, but they're still the most loyal to Robb out of all the Rivermen (other than Tullys of course)
This is one of the reasons I still find Elden Ring's worldbuilding so compelling, incomplete as it sometimes is. Little details like General Radahn having the knowledge to perceive the threat coming from the stars due to his heritage as a member of the Carian royal family, despite that history being almost a non-factor in the rest of his adult life. GRRM and From Software really did a great job of building this layered, storied world with cultures and individuals that are influenced by multiple historical factors, exactly like you're describing here.
That’s cause there are teams of a lot lot lot of people who dedicate their life to this stuff, it’s very complicated and an art.
@@joshjacob1530George rr Martin helped with that
The capital city in my story isn't a port city or situated in naturally defensible mountains, its just kinda chilling in the middle of an open, empty lowland plane. Looks weird at first, but if you look at it's position you'll see its at almost the exact center of the kingdom's major trade routes. Merchants would commonly stop to rest on their travels in this place during ancient times, which saw large amounts of wealth and cultural exchange flow through this one area, which led to development and expansion over time. Water was easy to find because there's a network of underground rivers that flow underneath the land, and it was cheap to import food due to its favorable location. It's exposed position was actually an advantage in the age prior to siege weapons, because it is extremely costly to besiege or attack a well-defended city from all sides in a place that provides no natural cover. When siege weapons became prevalent, the city poured its considerable wealth into building highly fortified castles and walls with counter-siege weapons. This city became the beating heart of a vast trade network, where environment had very little to do with it's development besides it's placement on the map.
This is SO weird bcoz this is EXACTLY the history of where I live
@@AugustRx Where do you live?
ManiaMac is your story available anywhere? It sounds interesting, and I love seeing what kinds of things other writers come up with. I say that like I've written much yet, lol.
Sounds very cool but did the city pop up at the trade route and then evolved into the capital or was it from the start the capitol and than form the routes? Because a trade boom city that evolved into the capitol of a kingdom would be cool origin story how the people that live there see the city.
@@Raletia My book is nearly done, hopefully I can get it published in the very near future.
I'm currently worldbuilding a world inspired by SE Asia, and it turned out to be such a dense and complicated endeavor. When you start reading about real life cultures, you start to understand just how complex and interconnected they all were. I can't just create an archipelagic country inspired by precolonial Philippines and call it a day, it turns out that (1) PH didn't exist before Spanish Colonization and had A BUNCH of individual separate polities (which meant a lot of cultures to individually think about, like which indigenous group from real life would I like to include... Etc.) (2) Southeast Asia was and still is such a complicated and diverse place culturally. The entire place stood at the crossroads between two major super powers that had major influence, i.e. India and China, and I had to consider where and how I would incorporate those countries into the world as well. Which meant there is almost this gradient of influence from India to China. But not so fast, because while China did have influence in the oceans around it, it still conducted it's trade mainly in the land based Silk Road. So there is just so much influence to think about there, and I've got my work cut out for me. 😅
A lot of modern SEA states were really only formed after the colonization of SEA. It is an interesting part of history. As a guy from a minor ethnic group I have really conflicting opinions about this. For example if the British had not lumped us in a state with the Burmese maybe we would not have so much conflict. Though should I blame my ancestors who decided to side with the British to oppress the Burmese? Ethnic divide and conflict usually never have a clear cut answer. There is always reason for the animosity and you should keep that in mind when world building I think. For example why would my ancestors decide to side with the British, from the history I’ve read it seems it was because the Burmese had tried to conquer us previously. That would mean the fued had not started when the British arrived but before that as well. Many blame the current ethnic divide in Myanmar on the British but if I looked at it from a longer history we had always hated each other. It is simply the British who gave my ancestors the get back they wanted at the Burmese. It is important to also note that my ancestors most probably drove out others from their lands as well. To summarize what I want to say when creating a history never think of it as morally binary their is always a reason for it. It is important when creating new worlds to consider why the past was the way it was. For example their has never been a major state only led by women yet there have been for men. If you were to create a female dominated state think why and if it would even be plausible.
China and India are not superpowers, they are regional powers
As a SE Asian, I can confirm this. There's so much going on and complicated to keep track with, e.g. political interest, culture clashes, border dispute, anthropology, political/religious militanism, ideas of federalism, etc
As a Southeast Asian, I have to say I'm interested in hearing more about your world.
+1 here. Worldbuilding inspired by the combination of agricultural SE Asia and the maritime part of SE Asia creates a very distinct flavour. We witnessed so much influences from bigger neighboring kingdoms and empires that shaped a big part of our history before the colonial era.
For any of the artsy and must-have-visuals people out there...
I created a map for my world, as people do, and had such a hard time figuring out climate, environment, and how geography would play into all of that. I got a world globe, spray painted it white (couldn't find a blank globe) and painted my map onto the globe. It shifted everything into perspective. Oh, this mountain city is in a temperate zone... oh these cities are actually on the equator... oh this region is far more north than I ever realized... oh this jungle should actually be a rainforest... from there, it shifted the culture around those areas to reflect the people's experiences. It shifted architecture, travel, and everything. Definitely that "last puzzle piece placed" feeling.
Love this idea! ~ Tim
For people who don't want to bother with a DIY globe - you can use Substance Painter to paint directly on a 3D sphere on PC.
Geographic location (longitute and latitutde) isn't the only thing that plays a part when it comes to climate, though. How close is the region to the ocean? (The ocean regulates climate, making winters less cold and summers less hot, also, it rains more and there is more fog.) What's the altitude? And the type of rock + climate factors determine what type of soil is formed and the type of soil determines what plants will grow. And the type of rock is determined by geological history, so history dating back millions of years.
@@hannahl.4494Yes, I think they understand that...
Why use a physical globe for something that basic graphic program would solve alot faster?
Ever since I started The Wheel of Time last year, this world is been building itself inside my head, your videos help me give it some guidance, but soon I'm gonna need to direct its construction, I'll use your books however I can.
Can you make one of the islands penis shaped?
Discworld ended up being this remarkable blend of all different kinds of worldbuilding approaches, partly because Pratchett started out going between extreme ends of soft worldbuilding ("you can't map a sense of humour") and hard worldbuilding ([how do you go about designing a fantasy city?] "First you have to work out how the water gets in and out"), partly because he started working with Stephen Briggs, who slowly convinced him to start taking worldbuilding seriously, first with mapping out Ankh-Morpork and then the rest of the Disc, partly because key to Ankh-Morpork's identity is being built on itself and all its layers of history, as well as its cultural melting-pot nature as a hub of immigration and industry, and finally partly because over the history of the books AM and the Disc themselves both evolve tremendously. It's perhaps a great example of how to blend all different kinds of worlbuilding together.
One of the things Pterry doesn't get enough props over IMO is how Discworld societies actually evolve and change over his many novels, new inventions are being made, country leadership is overthrown, wars are being fought and resolved, even religions have some major changes to their theology and practices. And it's really enjoyable to track these changes from book to book
Love Terry Pratchett! Thanks for the insightful comment
The Iron born did settle across large parts of central Westerose, The Iron King Harren the Black had one of the largest kingdoms before the dragons burnanated him and his castle. A large part of their objectives are to reclaim their past empire.
Their past empire is weirdly irrelevant though. Ironborn culture/religion doesn't seem to have had any influence on any of the places they conquered - especially the Riverlands, which was a huge missed opportunity. The culture of most of the places the Ironborn ruled over feels like it would be exactly the same if they'd just been continually raided instead (with the exception of Harrenhall - but even then the way the Ironborn managed to exert enough control to build Harrenhall and yet still leave no trace of their culture, religion or bloodline in the Riverlands is remarkable).
Yeah there are exceptions but I wouldn't say it's a huge part of their culture. They're still probably the most static civ in Westeros.
~ Tim
@@eddiea8468 The funeral customs of House Tully share a remarkable parallel with their former overlords the Ironborn.
@@HelloFutureMe I feel like them being static is probably a set-up to how their current King is the only atheist in the entire series
@@eddiea8468Not so weird when you consider said empire didn't really last long enough to embed too much of a legacy in the region. Harwyn Hoare conquered the Trident, and was succeeded by his son, Halleck. Halleck Hoare, in turn was succeeded by his son, Harren. The same Harren who built Harrenhal. Harren, of course, never really got to enjoy Harrenhal, as the very day that the last stone was laid in its construction was the same day that Aegon the Conqueror and his two sister wives landed, with their dragons, at the estuary where the Blackwater Rush empties into Blackwater Bay.
I first understood that concept when I saw how Dwarf Fortress not just generates you a map to play on but instead map starts evolving before you. Time passes, cities are founded and abandoned, mountains form and erode, people migrate, rivers change their paths and you can stop it at a point and drop in to play. This is, ideally, how hard world building should be done. Like Robert Jordan basically started in the prior era even before the Saidin got tainted. Worlds like this always feel like they are just alive and not a matte painting for a backdrop of a story
Taking into account the history of a place can be really fun, especially if instead you have an idea for a location but need to _reverse_ engineer the history to get there
I did a bit of worldbuilding once where i wanted to have a tavern atop a big hill, problem was it was miles from anywhere (it was near a major road so it wasn't totally out of place) and bringing in supplies would be expensive, so I thought "maybe they make their own drinks?" cool, slap an apple orchard and a lake nearby, cider and mead a plenty! "Where does the water that forms the lake come from?" Hmm, underground rivers wouldn't make much sense... Maybe it's rain fed? "Why would there be a giant hole on top of a mountain?" Idk, a meteor crashed there a couple hundred years ago? Which then led to me looking up how different metals affect the flavour of the water they're dissolved in. Huh, calcium makes the water harder which in turn makes some meads taste better... Oh and they have purple tails, dope! "Wouldn't a giant purple flash streaking down from the sky be noticed though? What are the wider effects?"
And that friends is why the mead that the starting tavern is particularly sweet, _and_ why the robes of the priests in the major religion are purple, because a calcium rich meteor hit a mountain a couple hundred years ago that no one remembers (it's in some ancient books if the PCs care to research it though, nice little call back)
Look up the history of purple dye, btw
@@justinokraski3796there's a reason it is called Royal Purple
Every time you make one of these videos I think "Well that makes so much sense, I could have figured that out". I never would have, but the way the information is presented makes it very easy to draw that conclusion
This is why I love the worldbuilding in Wheel of Time, there are two groups of people that were later reveal to had been one once and became opposite societies, but when you pay attention to detail both still share fundamental cores. They both like to DANCE pretty well.
Oh yeah, that bit absolutely blew my mind at the time, but it totally makes sense, because cultures are not static and in the span of a few hundred years in a completely different environment you'd hope that people will change
@@AlleonoriCatYeah, Jordan did a really good job with making that seeming contradiction make sense.
Watching that separation happen is probably the thing I am most anticipating in the TV show, it's easily among my favourite scenes in the book
@@lauroralei I really like the scene when one prominent member of one of those cultures glimpses a possible future, no idea if that will make it into the show but fingers crossed
I was hoping to see someone say something abt WoT, I'm rereading the series as I love it so much but never really got past book 8 so hoping to finish the series this time 😎
06:00 (ish)
They roll the cheese down the hill because of an old law that said you could only be charged with the crime of theft if you were caught with the stolen item. If the item was more than 50 paces away, there was no proof you possessed it. So people would steal from the local market, and if a guard chased them, they would run to a nearby hill and roll the stolen goods down the hill. When the guard would approach them and demand the stolen item, they would fall back on the law that says the item at the bottom of the big hill is too far away to count as being possessed by them.
This is why one of my primary world building tools is this fun little RPG called "Mappa Imperium"
It allows you to set up the inital culture and environment, then allows you to progress through the Eras. Exploration, Colonization, a simple War system.
Then, once you have these basic notes in place, you can flesh things out later.
That sounds interesting :0
Is mappa for free?
@@SolisDiemFREE!!!!!
Been looking for more people to play the game and upload it to RUclips. I uploaded a video of my world before. It was a blast!
@@SolisDiem 100% Free! :D
It's a "Pay what you want" sorta thing. You don't have to pay a thing if you don't want.
ooh, someone mentioning this! I've used this myself, quite fun.
Funny story: Washington State is divided by the Cascade Mountains and those mountains in many ways are a political border. The politics of Eastern and Western Washington, which is what we call it, are generally very opposed to each other these days. Western Washington is coastal and urban and holds the state capital. Eastern is generally more arid and rural. So even though the state is unified technically, the Cascades provide a pretty solid border between lifestyles.
A similar thing also happens in Oregon, immediately to the south.
It's so bad either Washington or Oregon, or both had some proposals alongside Idaho for the Eastern Areas to join the more culturally similar Idaho.
Romania, which was brought up in the video, is similarly divided between the mountainous West which has substantial ethnic minorities (mostly Hungarian, but also German and others) and the more "unified" East where the capital and most of the urban centers are.
@@Drave_Jr. Yeah. Though it's unlikely to actually get anywhere, that is a relevant thing to say in this context.
A few ideas that came to mind after hearing this video...
Don't forget that the 'famously colonial' British were Colonised themselves four times and that is a foundational part of our culture. First came the Bronze Age Beaker People - whose cattle grazing turned the land opposite my house from Woodland to soil-poor Heathland and turned the population from dark skinned to light skinned. Then you have the Romans, who founded a future Capital City where Environmental Determinism hadn't placed one before (it was all a bit marshy and tidal). Then you have the Anglo-Saxons etc. who impacted what the Romans built toward the end of their occupation and caused major switching around of towns,cities, agriculture etc. and separated Wales from England culturally. Then you have the Scandinavians (Vikings/Danes/Whotnot) who did it all again and caused a major cultural divide. And then you got the jolly old Normans who changed language, laws and did lots of other things, like depopulating a huge chunk of 'The North' and reserved large areas of land so their Nobles could go hunting, making it difficult for the pre-Norman population of those parts to make a living.
And that is ignoring things like the conquest of parts of southern Iron Age England by the Belgae from Gaul (there is a reason the Romans called a later English Capital, Winchester, Venta Belgarum), or the conquest of the Picts by the Irish Scotti, or the conquest of parts of Wales by Vikings from Ireland. Or the time English Kings were more French than English, and how later we had a Spanish King, and later a Scottish King, and later a Dutch King, and later a German King...
Meanwhile I am basing a draft RPG mini-campaign on Visigoth colonists of coastal Gaul in a, still barely functioning, Roman Empire.
The Visigoths then, of course, conquered and Colonised what became Portugal and Spain, and then got Colonised by the Moors. In between they grabbed, and then lost to another bunch of Colonising/Conquering Germanic types, the Franks, a big chunk of what became France (Frankia).
The point: Nothing is static and everywhere has history in depth. (Also, the 'real' history may not be the locals view of what the history is at any given point in time).
LotR period is static for sure. But on the time scale of Silmarillion and especially with focus on Elves there is plenty of processes that you are describing in this video. And intentionally for that matter given the fact that Tolkien created migration history of elves to explain language differences.
I immediately thought of Gondolin during this video, but basically every "new" kingdom in Beleriand would fit
I think there are a few instances of this in the Third Age period. Arnor fragments and gets deserted, the Hobbits migrate, the Rohirrim start off as a settled kingdom of Rhovanion to a semi-nomadic tribal band back to a settled state again with a heavy cavalry tradition.
Yeah I'd say LotR is overall not so much static as it is much _slower_ than most settings (or the real world).
@@KillahMate Which makes sense, given how the power players are almost always either immortal or very long lived (dwarves, numenorians)
@@KillahMate I feel like it is intentionally slowed down quite a lot, as part of the main premise and what drives a lot of the conflict and story is the Elves wanting to keep everything static (cause ya know, they don't really age) and lots of very powerful forces pushing the trajectory of the world in a very specific direction, albeit sloooooooowly because they can't intervene too directly. The ridiculous timescales dealt with over LotR, Silmarillion, and other Middle Earth stories also mean that too quick of change and too much detail about that change would make it basically impossible to keep anything coherent and the reader would quickly get disoriented. I would say that LotR being dynamic but on a slow timescale is a very strategic move.
Pretty cool how you used Colombia as an example for this video's topic. As a Colombian that has been following your content for over 6 years now it made me happy that you used my country as a reference, I've always been a fan and forever will be. Me and my friends would watch you How to train your dragons videos back in the day and aways talked about how your accent helped us dive in your videos better. Love you brother, stay safe.
When you shared about the Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling I couldn't help think about something close to home that caused a celebration that is completely random. It's called Frozen Dead Guy Days. In short, a family was keeping their father's corpse frozen in the hopes that eventually they could be revived. Eventually the community got involved and now there is a celebration every year. The celebration includes events themed around death, like coffin races, or cold, like a polar plunge. This celebration has become so well intended, that the small town that used to host it can no longer accommodate everyone, so now it happens at a larger city that does not have the frozen dead guy.
So yeah, crazy traditions and culturally significant events can happen regardless of the geography.
When you started off with Colombia's map I was so surprised cause I'm from Colombia, and I've been your fan for a while now. I wish I could buy your books in the bookstores in Bogotá.
And what you commented about population is completely true. Our temperature in the costal and low lands is usually around 30 to 40+ degrees Fahrenheit. It's really hard to live in especially this time of the year, and also Bogotá (the capital) is among the most massive cities on earth.
Do you mean Celsius?
Mountains are hard to climb. It is easier to maintain power to both sides of the mountain range if the capital is in the mountains. This is what the Spanish did. Plus, due to the centralized government style they had, it is a better idea to live near the capital, so you can do all your paperwork without a long travel up the mountains. And this stood even with a walled city that defended the country in the north coast being economic center, sparking point of the first attempt at revolution, and once proposed as new capital.
(I'm Colombian)
makes trade harder. enemies usually have a kot of cover but no siege reach. Terrain is hard to build upon tho
Neat!
Also probably worth mentioning that the need to flee from the lowlands is somewhat of a colonial issue, as the Spanish didn't have the natural resistance to disease or a lifestyle well adapted to hot wet tropics with dense rainforest like the Amazon or Choco. There are plenty of disease ridden, hot lowlands with high populations (West Africa, Southeast Asia, or southern India are good examples of this) and a high population density in the mountains is mostly a weird quirk of colonialism. I think the one major counterexample I can think of is in New Guinea, where the highlands are more populated since they were easy to subsistence farm and relatively disease free so the high mountain farming cultures flourished, but this is a very unique situation. Basically, even this video really oversimplifies the situation, turns out history and geography are complicated.
@@StuffandThings_ Most of the disses came with the Spanish. On the other hand the Americas weren't riddled by disease, as here weren't high populated areas, nor livestock. And, yes, sure there are some endemic diseases now, but if you track them, they came from Africa. I suppose I don't need to tell you how.
@@Theraot Yes, the Spanish definitely helped create the problem, but they still didn't have immunity when things _became_ disease riddled. There were also some truly endemic diseases to the tropical Americas, like Chagas. Of course those new diseases were also notorious for devastating the natives, but the Spanish didn't have any cultural precedent for staying in the lowlands so they settled the mountains.
this is why i love the worldbuilding in the dragon age games/franchise. it has a real sense of history & cultural evolution/transfer i have yet to see replicated to the same extent
0:02 Colombia mentioned in a non negative connotation lets gooo
Yeah, bro
Last time I was this early the Fire Nation hadn't even attacked yet
As a fire nation General I must clarify that we are scheduled to attack in 10 minutes.
Cringe
@@balabanasireti Saying cringe is cringe. I'm now cringe.
@@balabanasireti
Cringe is in the heart of the beholder
Oh as a mosquito tech who works for Orange County in Florida, it was a little exciting hearing you talk about why Colombians tend to live at higher elevation to avoid the mosquitoes. Yeah, before mosquito control was present here Florida was described as “uninhabitable.”
I'm doing a master's degree on environment and development and I love the concept of environment we have there: environment is not just ecosystems, but the synergy between ecosystems and culture, and how they affect each other. That's what I'd call this topic “ecosystemic determinism”, rather than “environmental”. But anyway, I think this is a very nice way to explain one of the most common traps of worldbuilding, since environment is not just landscape and biomes, but also the culture and people.
Oh, and I'm Colombian, you got me from the start. And as a Colombian worldbuilder, it has always bothered me that flatland bias, since I've lived my whole life among mountains, my beloved homeland is the Andes (though obviously there are people from gorgeous flatlands here too). Mountains in most Colombians have united us as much as they have divided us, so Thank you for pointing that out!
🇨🇴
Great video. I like the idea of environmental determinism as a starting point, then using all the factors you listed to move further and further away from environmental determinism as is appropriate for that society's level of technology or colonial influences or whatever.
I live in Bogotá Colombia and yes, here we're far away from the heat and the "dangers" of the Amazon rainforest or the huge savannas on the east (it's also freezing cold up here). We also benefit from the access to multiple natural resources, almost all out electrical supply comes from big rives that flow down the mountains, our cities and tows are built almost exclusively with bricks and concrete, a lot of our agriculture is better suited for high altitudes. There sure are more reasons that I don't know of but understanding all of them, can really bring realism to a fantastic world. Amazing video!!!
This whole video reminds me so much of my cultural and physical anthropology classes in college. They were highly detailed. I learned so much about worldbuilding that I tried to apply to my writing. You made me feel like I'm back in class.
Curses! I came into this video after long weeks of working out the extensive and detailed history of cultural evolution in my world to better understand how things are in the present, and with the title I was expecting you to say something like "don't worry too much about worldbuilding every single hard detail, you'll fall into an endless rabbit hole" and free me from the grave I'm digging myself into. But instead, you come out telling me to do exactly what I've been doing!
In all seriousness, thanks for the great advice and the reassurance that I'm on the right track.
I built my world with the main races in Malaysia as influences (Malay, Chinese, and Indian). And when you mentioned that the fantasy races are too static for what they believe in the mainstream setting, that got me thinking about changing more of my world-building.
I will implement each fantasy race with the specific influences unique to Malaysia. It's not that I dislike the default Western approach, but I've noticed it's quite prevalent in much of the writing I've encountered.
Well i think its static in american media too, im from México and the population of this country its totally mixed, in the colonization at some parts like Veracruz, black people came but it was a very little fraction compare to USA or Colombia, and here the mixed fast with mexicans, spanish and french colonges, and people with all looks and colors came from that part.
In other parts of the country european mixing with natives (like Michoacan) make that part of the country really, REALLY white even in indigenous communities.
And chinese have a big flow of inmigration last century so they came to Puebla, and they have a lot of chinese ancestors in there; even now there its a big flow of Korean and Japanese, specially in the city.
I dont know why, but in México these comunities rarely are close for long, these people marry or just have kids with mexicans and everything get in the mix.
@@devilinred3319 You know, if Mexican come to Malaysia, I myself can never differentiate you all from the locals.
Yeah, even Japanese media often has Western European countries as a base for fantasy world building, it gets tiresome.
@@KasumiRINAFinal Fantasy X is all about Pacific cultures. It's pretty rad. A lot of the game's plot deals with exploring the history and traditions.
@@SNN95understandable Mexicans like me are diverse in facial features and some of us may have some facial features like yours while having different elsewhere.
I'm hairy light brown, have no almond shaped eyes but another Mexican is less hairy, has light light skin more native American features facial and eyes (almond shaped) and another is like them but dark and another like me but dark light. So many dif features tbf
4:06 Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I'm very sure yellow was the color of Chinese emperors, not red. Red probably held great significance for them or the imperial court, but a bright golden yellow was the emperor's
He is a ccp supporter, so anything that Mao deemed unnecessary for the Chinese, such as pre socialist Chinese history, is unnecessary in his mind.
The real world examples you provided aren't really helping.
The Colombian example *IS* a case of an environmental effect shaping the culture, just not the one effect you thought. 😅
The Romanian example *IS* a case of the environment shaping the borders of countries and *HAS BEEN FOR CENTURIES.* Wallachia and Moldavia were to the south and north-east of the mountain range, while Transylvania (the part inside of the mountain curve) was a part of Hungary for most of its history.
The formation of the larger nation of Romania was only possible in modern times and it was meant to be a (partial) unification of different peoples inside a common group... but it was exactly because of those mountains that they were different in the first place. 😉
Yeah, dude doesn't really know what's he's talking about... Lists all time great series with great world building as a cautionary example... Feels like cope
The Colombia thing reminded me of Spore adventures (custom missions) by a guy called Parkaboy, who made a lot of worldbuilding showcase adventures. One of the first was about a race of insectoids who lived in the high cliffs of their world bc the lowlands were full of sweltering hot fog and murderous wildlife. He might've been inspired by Colombian population map too
Oh I'm so excited for your 3rd book !! The two first ones are a gold mine for my work ^^ I'm writing a video game world with my partner and he's a hard worldbuilder and I'm a soft. We fight a lot about it but that's what makes the world we're creating a bit more nuanced I believe :D
Ahh thank you and it's awesome your two styles can work together! I promise volume III will be the best yet.
~ Tim
My favourite part in my world is how some of the parts were "cut out" and placed elsewhere, one of them being a town. That town used to have a river but well, that obviously originated elsewhere, so now there are two useless bridges and a pond lake at one of the bends--
Great video. I do think the biggest trap people get into, especially a lot of young writers is TOO much world building and not enough writing of the dang story.
This, for sure, I can spend hours having fun playing with world building without ever making an actual story. While it is very fun to do this, it does not help when it comes to making an actual story, at least from my experience. of course, your millage may varry
Don’t at me bro…
GRRM describes this as being an architect vs. a gardener. He obviously built the world but he is more of a gardener in the sense that he lets the story go where it wants to, rather than constructing every piece of it
I feel called out
@@bushraptor Never heard this one before, but I'm totally stealing it now. :D
Listening to this reassures me that I’m doing the right thing with my own story. I feel like in think of things so minute that it could be a detriment ( it probably still is) but I feel like I’m on the right track. Thank you for the confidence and information!
8:10 But England's geography could be considered to be a factor as to why it started to colonize. Being an island nation naturally lead it to form a strong naval tradition to defend said island. Naval tradition lead to naval exploration and expansion overseas.
Also, as for Romania. For a large portion of that country's history it was divided at the Carpathian mountains. Transylvania was to the west of the mountains and to the east were the states of Moldavia and Wallachia.
I'd say that even Colombia is shaped by it's environment because like you said the reason they live in the mountains is because the lowlands are far less hospitable.
And yet the Japanese, despite also being an island nation, wasn't nearly as expansionist and colonialist as the English were, and at one point they even became isolationist. There's also European nations like Portugal and Spain which are land-bound, and yet also engaged in colonialism.
@@StrikeNoir105E Japan is thin and mostly mountains and didn’t unify until after colonialism was in full swing. Japan was also influenced by the isolationist culture of China, who was the great power of Japan at the time
@@StrikeNoir105E Nonsense. Japan tried to be as expansionist and colonialist as English. The difference is they failed. Also, being not unified mess for a lot of their history didn't help.
You also need to look up what land bound means. Portugal and Spain is the opposite of landbound. Water on three sides, and mountains on fourth., Might as well be an Island.
I don’t know if it’s relevant but the town I grew up in only exists where it is because people travelling on their way to somewhere else needed to stop before they crossed the river. Before there was a bridge the river was dangerous to cross, and people often needed to wait for the water level to drop a bit before attempting it.
Those people were just passing through but they influenced the placement of the town.
The evolution part is so true, I'm from Thailand, we have water festival in April.
It start as our old New year day, just like April fool origin.
We pure water on the hand of higher-ups and elders as a sign of respect and submission.
Our culture use water a lot, even drinking a holy one together for swearing an oath.
Then January become new year. Instead of making April an April fool like the west, *conservatives* separate old calendar for festivals.
Then the young's sarcasticly pouring a lot of water to each other. Play pretend or something IDK, but it's fun because it's hot so let's continue doing it.
Boom, now everybody throwing water at each other for fun everywhere for three days a year with party music's and stuffs.
I love your first 2 world building books. When I get stuck, both in worldbuilding and plot, I go to the relevant topic and read them. I'm absolutely excited for the 3rd. More info at my fingertips! Yay!
Ok I just wanna say that in the game of thrones the Iron born may seems statics compared to real Vikings but in the books it is told that iron borne used to be conquerors and they tried to escape the isles and live in the Westeros mainland but the were beaten back by the Aegon Targaryen.
I really needed that video. Lately, I've been trying to rewrite or 'upgrade' my fantasy setting and so, of course, I started with the map XD I ended up studying different climates and how they are spread out on Earth, where exactly some species of animals and plants can be found etc. And then I took a break and realised: 'wait... why am I even doing this?'. I was so focused on 'things making sense' in my worldbuilding that it pretty much became just me copying Earth-rules to my fantasy world. This is where I understood that it limited me more than it actually helped me. Now I try to keep in mind that things in that world do not need to make sense to me, as a human from Earth but to my characters that live in this world and know its rules, not the other way around.
I'm quite proud of the world I've designed for my short stories. Over the years I managed to make a pretty realistic world because I started early in the timeline and iterated on it. The setting of one or two stories became the lore of the new setting, and so on, and now I have 4000 year timeline where each period functions pretty well on its own.
This is an amazing lesson. I feel like I partially do this right but without ever actually finishing anything ("world-builder's disease"), still I fully get the temptation to be bogged in land, and its always where I do start myself. Still I do 'soft' enough world building to make sure things really click with the needs. Start off from one point, fill out some info, some basics, figure out the culture, do some writing, and come back later to fill in the blanks. Often after some rough writing and figuring out organically what your character and world is missing, you can then figure out "Hey, there's this country over here that actually hangs its magic users." And then as you start that, you realize you can do something real fun if they set out to seas, land, fight, and then rebel against their own home. Nothing to do with the land other than where they docked, but it sure means trouble and culture were stirred and rearranged, and helps me fill a huge gap in the map. There's only but so many ideas you can do with a coastal line society, given there's going to be a lot surrounding the entire land masses anyway, so might as well start thinking about what happens when things skewer and change them. Same with mountains, grassy fields, deserts, etc. What's more fun to you, a desert place where they just really intensely have for some reason lived in this terrible land for hundreds of years, or they were sent there and broke free of an old banishing ritual from another land they have mystified onto their new generations?
Just a note to say I'm really enjoying your world building book, Tim. It's great!
Geography is destiny. In my world building geography creates a baseline that local cultures will shift back too without outside pressure. Few cultures are an island. And so geography and history often interact to create unique stuff.
I think this needs to be talked about more, just general culture worldbuilding and everything that goes along with it. Your magic system is neat, that hole in the world where gods once fought is fantastic, those countries in a three-way tie for getting the important trade city is intriguing and all. But what's your holidays? Whats your festivals and remembrances? Your birthdays, baptisms, coming-of-ages, weddings, and funerals? What do the kids get excited for? What's the brightest point in a young man's(or woman's) life? What little things do the elders get all catty and backstabbing over? I've seen too many things that answer just one of these and call it good and get back to 'the real meat of the story' by stabbing a dragon.
Another amazing video, sir! Finding that balance between hard and soft worldbuilding is difficult but once you do, the ideas, themes, and stories begin to write themselves!
I’m so glad I caught this, I just bought your book and I’m super excited to learn more. Love your channel
It's pretty common for hot tropical environments to have most of the population living in the mountains, which is not only true for Colombia but also for Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, in addition to a bunch of other tropical countries. This rule of thumb may be useful for writers who are worldbuilding in the tropics.
I think we’re moving into periods in Sanderson’s writing where it will have more of that soft worldbuilding flair. The Stormlight Archive is filled with enormous amounts of holdovers from past cultural mingling, and lost reasons for things.
Brandon has said in a q&a that he has absolutely no idea why alethi women cover their left hand… it’s just culture, and he doesn’t have a deeper reason in mind
I have the first two books... I lent volume one to a friend's kiddo who is loving how easy it is to dive into... Thank you... I am waiting for volume three... and getting it, because your work is awesome!
All great advice, except for the environmental determinism part. At the start of the video you talk about how 50% of the world's population lives near the coast, then say DON'T use the environment in a broad way like that. If you don't have a standard, exceptions aren't interesting, and if you don't use the environment, you're missing out on a lot of character for a place. And especially in a fantasy where cities aren't as old as they are now, triumph over environmental conditions won't be as common.
Columbia is a fun example because it defies the norm. Cities that thrive despite changing conditions are special and important. Starting with the question of "what will the environment support and why" is important. At least in my opinion.
I think theres also something to be said for simplistic cultures based entirely on their environment. Simplistic cultures can be poetic, or symbolize something. Theres also something fun about trying to worldbuild with these limits
Fascinating. Just the other day I was thinking about a world I've been toying with off and on. The dwarves in this world live in the mountains, and are very good at diverting rivers to suit their purposes. I was considering adding an abandoned elven city at the base of the mountains, where a river that the dwarves had diverted long ago used to flow. Perhaps I should have the city not be abandoned, just that the people adapted when the water stopped but retain some traits one might expect from a city on a river.
Ooh! Maybe they worked out how to efficiently collect rainwater and distill water from humidity. If you look at real life, mountain ranges near coasts can keep a lot of that water on the side near the coast, making a desert on the other side. Or there could be a large body of water like the great lakes or something that provide moisture to drive the weather. Also, how plant life adapts can be an interesting avenue to explore as well.
If I can make a suggestion, perhaps having this be the start of a conflict where the elves and dwarves go to war for this reason and making it part of how they relate to each other or having traces of this conflict change the area, such as having fortified cities or seeing ruins of settlements abandoned due to the conflict or seeing the impact it had on the lives of the people in the area, it could help make the area more interesting and add another layer to their culture
You could turn it into a rustbelt-esque city where when the primary resource is shut off, only poor people remain and there's a lot of crime.
I am Colombian and it was amazing to see a worldbuilding video with our map!
I think one of the reasons writers are drawn to stories that take place in the past is that we subconsciously miss the connection we used to have to the natural environment.
I had assumed that the largest and most important factor in the cultural and technological differences between different human societies was the geography in which they reside. Including climate, diseases present, the minerals and ores in the ground, the terrain, presence of nearby water bodies and fertile land, the wildlife including domesticable animals…
Thank you for challenging my perspective with this video!
Mention of the cheese rolling took me by surprise… living down the road from it I take for granted how weird it is for everyone else 😅
This is legit a thing I've been hammering at in my setting for years. I'm also a history nerd, so the ebb and flow of cultures in an area is something that has driven me mad as I've built it.
9:41 This is less environmental determinism and more divine determinism. Aule the Smith made the dwarves and hid them under the mountains, and when illuvatar gave them life, their natural inclinations were to work with stone to honor Aule. Dwarves didn't like stone because they lived in the mountains, they chose to live in mountains because they loved stone, and that's where they could get the most.
Love this topic! I have a hard time with balance. Sometimes I get really bogged down in obsessing over every little detail, then can’t write. Often I have to just write and hope that details will emerge as I gain steam.
I dunno, I think this has just added to my anxiety provoked perfectionism. More and more layers of hard world building, mixed and matched, redefined and half forgotten with additional layers if soft world building, subtext and metaphors. And after all of that I'd still have to create compelling characters, plots, dialogue, scenes and themes. Hopefully with an interesting enough twist or combination of features that it's somewhat interesting 🤞
If it helps any, I've taken inspiration from how Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games work. If you look at what all GMs have to do you can see it's possible to create a compelling story even when you don't know ever detail or your meticulously planned encounter is subverted by the players in a way you didn't expect, and the ad-libbing that comes out of that can make for really fun and creative events and solutions.
I know you're aware that it's perfectionism, but you only really have to nail a few of those things and the rest should come naturally. The characters being compelling will come in part from the plot and the dialogue, as well as well-written scenes. Not everyone cares about plot. Not everyone cares about characters. Not everyone cares about worldbuilding. So you can choose one or two of those things to work the story around and not everything even gets to make it into the story.
You could do all the stuff that HFM mentions in the video and most of it may never be explicit on the page because it doesn't come up.
And you can also do each thing over time. So start with a plot you feel good about and the basic outlines of interesting characters. Once you have the story written out once, you can find places to expand on the worldbuilding, you can think of character traits that would make the story more interesting. Then write a new draft that builds on that. Maybe after that draft, you realize one part of the plot is weaker and some of your worldbuilding and character ideas actually take the story in a different direction. Then you can change it.
tl;dr you don't actually have to nail everything and you don't have to nail it all at once.
Personally I've found it easier when I'm writing drafts to get the skeleton down. Then it's easier for me to see what gaps to fill.
Just remember your story is your own and only do what you WANT to. A lot of people don't care about this stuff and that's okay, and most of the time people will never notice! I love soft worldbuilding that cares less for this stuff. If it's giving you anxiety, just know you don't need this ❤
~ Tim
Good characters are the most important thing. Then plots, dialogue, and scenes, and then themes. These things will save a story with weak worldbuilding more than immaculate worldbuilding can save a story with bland characters or a boring plot. Then, what worldbuilding does exist becomes very interesting, because it’s attached to a story and characters that people like and connect with.
Star Wars really doesn’t have that great of worldbuilding, but people love the Star Wars universe and delve deep into the lore because they want to learn more about the world that produced such memorable characters and exciting adventures.
I start with cool ideas before the map. Then find a way for them to be viable on the map, and hold space for things to be unique and stem from lore.
Kaliningrads and pre-1990ms Hong Kongs have an outsized and interesting impact on the world.
“English is the language of power in the world less because England had a favorable geography…”
I would push back against this somewhat. England was an island nation with large amounts of farmland and large deposits of coal and iron. The climate and soils gave them a large population, the resources allowed them to industrialize early on, plenty of access to wood for ship building, being an island meant they were somewhat isolated from the effects of the wars on the continent and it also made them heavily reliant on sea power which made it easier to spread their power over the globe. All of these are environmental factors that shaped the course of history and gave England a boost in the colonial age, making their dominance slightly more likely. It certainly wasn’t inevitable that they would emerge as the global super power, but it was more likely for them to do so than a landlocked country like Switzerland for example.
Exactly.
That's very interesting. Rules can change all the time and that's why worldbuilding is flexible yet hard to execute. Truly fasinating
what? The dwarves were literarily FORCED out of their mountains, and had to adapt to a new diasphoric world, just like the Jews that were Tolkien's isnpiration for them. They migrated far and wide, and while some would colonize other parts of the world, others ended up as the local blacksmiths where they made their living by becoming the best craftsmen wherever they ended up setting up shop. Thorin Oakenshield spent the majority of his life as a blacksmith in the west, before deciding to gamble it on retaking Lonenly mountian.
I just started the beginnings of a story, i’m starting with the map, i chose to start with the map because i learned a lot about maps from my AP human geography class. HOW DID I ALMOST FALL INTO THIS TRAP?!? That same class that made me decide to start with a map talks about environmental determinism, migration, sequent occupancy, colonialism, post colonialism border drawing, cultural effects of the germans migrating to part X of america during Y, possibilism, and other stuff along these lines. I like the class a lot too! By all means i should have caught myself, thank you for happening to appear in my recommended with this, you’re setting me on the coarse i somehow didn’t chart.
I finde the evolution of Christmas a very good example of how customs evolve.
Originally, it most likely came from the tradition of mid-european and northern european tribes where people would gather on/around winter solstice. The christmas decoration such as a christmas tree or a mistle toe probably started very simply because winter were cold, dark and without colour, so people used still green branches to decorate their huts. Additionally, coming to gather to celebrate in winter provides the advantage of more warmth and you can share the scarce food with each other.
Nowadays we don't celebrate solstice anymore, but christmas a few days later. The colour red got its boom due to the coca cola commercials while santa clause is inspired by Saint Nicholas, a christian bishop.
In Germany we also have the custom of Saint Martin's day. De customs differ, but much of it stems from what the germanic tribes used to do to celebrate the end of harvest season/beginning of winter. In some regions people gather in a large group and walk through the streets with lanterns and sing songs. In others children play games. In most regions you have a fire around which people gather. In some they play the story of Saint Martin, which is the christian story the church made up because people wouldn't stop with their "pagan" traditions. In others children jump over the fire as a game. Traditionally, you eat goose on Saint Martin's day, which stems from the middle ages where peasants had to pay their feudal lords with geese before the winter. The church somehow incorporated them into the story of Saint Martin to give a christian-appropriate explanation for it.
This is an extremely common myth, but none of it is true. Christmas was first performed by Roman christians, and was passed onto the rest of Europe as it christianised. Some of the features of these local traditions got mixed in. The christmas tree was invented in the 16th century, and has as much to do with paganism as the Japanese christmas tradition of KFC. We don't know how, if at all, trees were important to ancient European cultures. The only culture that has evidence of this are the celtic peoples.
Red as a Christmas color and did not come from cocacola, it’s been around for centuries
Jol wasn't on the solstice either until Hakon moved it there. For untold centuries it was the first full moon after winter began -- a seasonal AND lunar system that barely had any bearing on timekeeping. All those handy landscape features were the lunar calendar the ancestors used to keep time and set dates for events. Christianity did everything in its power to erase the old ways, just as they did to all the native Americans and Australians and on and on... including trying to use integration. Just as the Romans before them.
Bust Christmas as we know it is largely a modern invention, basically dated to the 20s-50s ad campaigns. The traditions before that were pretty germane. It wasn't stolen from the heathens. Instead it paved them over with small local adaptations lter granted greater significance.
It's also not true at all we don't know how important trees are to the old norse, Ask and Embla, Donnar's Oak... the Germanic people's believed humanity was made from trees, and trees, literally a world tree, tied the cosmos together. That bishops targeted those trees and groves and hofs, to destroy them, should tell you all you need to know. To destroy the heart of a community in the north, you kill their sacred trees.
While a good point, I would put this argument the other way around.
When trying to design interesting worlds, you have a lot more options than you might think you have, because you can also invent history and culture to explain what would otherwise be contradictions.
Even further: just like a good story, an interesting world has inbuilt tension, things that are under pressure to change, which in turn are natural sources of conflict.
A world that doesn’t make sense when looking at the map probably has constant pressure to change, which is often good for stories.
I'm curious if you've read The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker because it has the most developed version of Hell in fiction. It feels like an actual society throughout.
ok you just got me an idea for my world, i was stuck at step -5 because i didn't know if i should make a "globe" or a "something else" and i think i got an idea.
thanks, man OwO
Loved it on Nebula, loved seeing it here :)
I'm a big sucker for getting deep into the science of worldbuilding. It's a great way for me to keep my knowledge sharp while being creative with it. So maybe it's a matter of philosophy, but I don't actually mind leaning into environmental determinism a little bit. It also allows me to think for a moment of what kinds of possible ways cultures could develop. If tribe A conquered tribe B in a region, or vice versa, how would that shape culture, religion, and possibly even their attitude towards knowledge and exploration. All fun things to play with.
Also, I think if you're going to go the hard worldbuilding route, REALLY do your research. Study some geoscience and anthropology, or ask a friend with solid understandings of those subjects for advice. Because poor research can result in a "planet of the hats" problem, which can result in some pretty nasty stereotypes.
For those curious about the map software he used, it's called Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator. If you ever want a really fun way to make a map, do the following;
- Get Space Engine
- Find a random planet and export its heightmap
- Import the heightmap to Azgaar's and define heights by colors
Thank you for this interesting video. I think I've fallen into this "trap" a time or two, if I've even thought that hard about it to begin with.
God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)
Of the many things I expect to pop up in my yt feed, between my political interests (all left -leaning) and my pop culture interests (mainly nerdy stuff), to find a nerd creator speaking about writing and fantasy with a really nuanced perspective on how human beings use spaces and not taking geography for granted by detatching ir from history, was one that I least expected. That was a really nice surprise, by the way.
Oda (creator of One Piece) created a world that justifies whatever new setting he wants to drop in, and masterfully makes it so they never feel out of place. You've got the Lost World, Atlantis, islands in the clouds, island chains made of food, and literally Japan coexisting!
I love the worldbuilding in one piece, it’s so clear that Oda is just having fun and he’s basing his world around what he enjoys drawing. That sense of fun really translates to the reader and it adds to the themes of freedom and adventure!
In my DnD world, the home territory of most of the fantasy races were severely impacted by natual disaster 5000 years ago. The human continent was least affected, and also the strongest bent towards exploration trade and colonization. Hence humans are now the most common and widespread ancestry. This video has really helped my work this more into the cultures of my setting.
Saying England """chose""" to colonize the world makes it sound like it was just an idea someone happened upon and everyone was like, "okay." The development of capitalism inn England --- and hence colonialism --- was the product of historical factors that ran away from human choice, and environment played no small part.
Umm humans were evil epsically white ones we know that capitalism is fuled by people..yk
A part of me thinks that a better approach to worldbuilding is to actually work our way backwards - start out with what we want and need, and to fill in the blanks after-the-fact or even allow others to fill that in for themselves. For the parts that are expected (e.g. subterranean folk who are miners), it fits and comes naturally, and for the unexpected (e.g. subterranean folk who are miners but worship a sky god), it draws people to wonder and/or speculate how that arose.
England was able to colonize the world because of their favorable geography. It was not bound to the endless wars of the continent and thus was able to concentrate on itself and overseas expansion.
nah, nepal and lesotho had the same chance of colonizing the world, its not just enviroment!!1
You do know France, Portugal and Spain also had multiple colonies (which is why their languages spread around the world too) and were part of the continent and its "endless wars"?
Britain geographical situation certainly had an effect, but the political decisions at the time and especially Britain's head start in the Industrial Revolution were much bigger factors.
@@dr.antonius8350 Iberia was practically and island because of the Pyrenees separating them from the rest of Europe. France got colonies because they couldn't let the English one up them an because France was the richest and most populous country in Europe up until the 19th century. Britains geostrategic situation was the defining factor as to why it was able to colonize most of the world. Britain had already colonized most of the world before the industrial revolution. Furthermore, the industrial revolution was made possible by Britains favourable geography. From the coal necessary, to stability fostering economic growth and innovation to the ideal water ways to construct canals. In addition to that, Britain, being an island, naturally makes it have lots of sea faring experience and sailors to draw from.
i feel like its always fun just running a trial version of the world and thinking about what people would get up to and then building the actualy world ontop of those "ruins" or ideas thinking how that trial run evolves into something practical