Hey /tg/. I've never been here before but other boards

We have a wordbuilding general but is not up atm, look on the archives for their resources.

File: worldbuilding.png (294KB, 2560x2500px) Image search: [Google]

294KB, 2560x2500px

>>51148194
Think about everything in the world. From religion to what food eat the pigs every friday night.

Well, it's a impossible question. Unlike other hobbies, like writing, programming, or drawing, there's no process, software, or technique that's standard. It's all just made up and unique to the person doing it!

My personal process is to create 1-2 little ideas every day. Over the past 6-8 years I've got hundreds of them, and I combine them into a cohesive world. It's slow, and plotting, but what I do.

I would suggest these resources:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLduA6tsl3gygXJbq_iQ_5h2yri4WL6zsS

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/

And here, /tg/. Ask specific questions, run ideas off people, and mind the autistism.

>>51148194
>How do you start laying down the grounds for a solid believable world?

You could start almost anywhere. With a culture, a city, a continent, even a single person, and simply go from there. I usually start with geography and cosmology though.

>How do you lay out a story?

This is a question people devote their entire lives to answering. There's so many nuances to storytelling that it's hard to know where to begin. The most solid advice I ever got was to write a beginning and an ending, and then figure out what happened between them. Really depends on the type of story you want to tell though. The most important part is to include characters that the readers can understand and relate to. Whether this is a villain or a hero, they should seem like real people with thoughts, feelings, and motivations of their own. Then they cease to be characters on a page or a screen and become real.

What storytellers, game designers, artists, poets, and writers all have in common is that we're all really magicians pulling tricks. We're making magic happen before people's eyes, and there's not quite as much science to it as you might think. The most important thing, friend, is to dream.

>>51148194
>every area except storytelling and world building.

World building relies on setting out just enough detail to excite a reader's imagination without bogging them down with minutiae. It's a fine line. Some people people think that Monte Cook has way too much detail in his books, others find that RPGs like Unknown Armies doesn't have enough.

You have to tantalize the reader, and then present the rules in support of exploring your world.

Storytelling as such really doesn't need to be part of game design. You're not telling a story, you're presenting a world and tools for the GM and his players to build their own story.

>>51148194
>Im nearly at the level where I am competent enough to begin work on my first game
What specifically have you done to make you feel this is true?

>>51148194
I generally establish just a bare bones outline of the big picture, other than stuff that will immediately impact the PCs (like if the world has extreme seasons, or if metal is scarce, or if humanoid tribes have just overrun the totally-not-Roman-Empire, etc.). Other than that, I just have some ideas bouncing around my head, which may or may not end up being the way things are, depending on how things naturally develop.

I start play focusing on the small-scale and local. If the PCs are searching ruins for lost treasure or are tracking down bandits that kidnapped a noble's daughter, they probably don't need to know the intricacies of the geopolitics of the various empires that are vying for dominance on the continent... except when it directly relates to the mission at hand (maybe the bandits have ties to a hostile neighbor kingdom). So I don't need to establish everything right away. And as the campaign continues, the world expands as needed, with the details needed to make sense of specific encounters and situations informing the structure of the wider world.

To try to nail down every facet of the world before you even begin is madness. It's an endless task, and you'll end up designing things in ways that turn out not to work as well in play.

thanks guys, this is all great!