Is this an example of great worldbuilding?

Not really.

>>53346341
it's pretty good - it serves as effective backdrop for the kind of stories GRRM wants to tell

>let's make the map a vertical rectangle and a horizontal one right next to each other

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Here's a more accurate map.

I take worldbuilding contextually, and like >>53346384 said GRRM had a goal in mind and he built an effective world for it.

There are things I dislike about the world or think they could have been done better, but that is because of me projecting the story that I want, not what he wants. So I wouldn't criticize his world simply because he accomplished what he was going for. If I wanted something different I would make my own.

Personally I think the setting of Essos has a lot more potential than it lived up to. Some of the vague and limited information we get about it in ASOIAF and AWOIAF is a great example of establishing "far away foreign land you will never see".

>>53346341
Your leaving out the Summer Isles and Sothoryos in that map.

Honestly though it's only okay. You hardly see any interaction or history with anywhere other than Westeros. It's be cool to see an outside context problem other than the the Others for Westeros, like beasts from Sothoryos raiding or the asians in eastern Essos bringing sea dragons or something.

>>53346341
Is that Loss?

ASOIAFd world is very well developed and logical. 4chan contrarians just hate it because. Or it's like GoT

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>>53346718
Everything is if you try enough.

>>53346475
Does GRRM even tectonic plates?

>>53346341

Well, it's decent. I like GRRM, even if it's cool to hate him now, but geographically and tecnologically he dun goofed many times - it doesn't mean the world is shit, but it's far from perfect.

>aluminium mined in the Iron Islands
>the neck is a hugeass peninsula swamp with a river running in it
>nation-cities apparently having dominion on lands greater than most european nations
>and overall GIVE US A FUCKING SCALE GEORGE GODDAMN

That being said even if it's not his forte I think somethings were really inspired. I adored his new "races" ideas like the Ibbenese for example, or Asshai and the far east as Mordor+Lovecraft. Westeros is kinda meh tough, landscapes are pretty boring (tough I guess that was his idea all along).

>>53346973
There is a scale, anon. Just seach for it, but I remember one being there in atleast the first book.

>>53346477

>we'll never know what the bloodless men are

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>>53347036
>implying
The cities of the bloodless men were discovered and named by Marwyn the Mage. Qyburn studied under Marwyn before being expelled for his occult curiosities. Then, Qyburn drained Gregor's blood and did unknown things to the body to make it an obedient slave. I feel like GRRM intended for this connection as a bit of intrigue.

>>53346477

Yeah I think the GRRM made a good setting with familiar fantasy tropes, but all of it in the history/myth of Westeros.

I do wish there was more on Essos. I love what little tidbits of the Free Cities we get, and all sellsword companies being born out of their strife and trade wars. Reminds me of a mix of Renaissance Italy and the east. Sadly it's really not enough to make a campaign out of and the SIFRP game is focused almost solely on Westeros. I wish Green Ronin would come out with an Essos campaign guide.

All in all, I really like it.

It's basically a larger Britain that boarders turkey going into to middle east. I think the worlds a lot bigger and they have simoly yet to discover it.

Also via the intro, the world is actually set in a Dysons sphere.

>>53347084

The big book of lore is more or less what you'd use for that.

>>53346973

I hate how all of his Lovecraft references are in the "Far East" or other corners of the world not really well known.

I'd love to see GRRM try his hand at a Lovecraft-inspired story set within ASOIAF.

>>53347073
>The cities of the bloodless men were discovered and named by Marwyn the Mage
Replying to my own post here, I'm pretty sure this is incorrect unless it was in AWOIAF. However I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in the Sam chapters that Marwyn did indeed go beyond the Mountains of the Morn.

>>53347134
>I'd love to see GRRM try his hand at a Lovecraft-inspired story set within ASOIAF.
Have you read the Aeron chapter from TWOW that was released? It looks like Euron is going to cause eldritch destruction in TWOW and ADOS. He's the one who has been sailing all over those lovecrafty locations procuring artifacts while we focused on the rest of the story.

>>53346477
Can anyone make out the name of the island in the Saffron Straits?
>LTO
>UTO

>>53347177
It's Ulos, I have the png version of the image where it isn't blurred

>>53347197
Thanks man.

>>53347134

Eh, you can't really put a Kadath in the middle of the Vale.

I guess you could put an Innsmouth in the Iron Islands (even the Abyssal Priests need to be afraid of something, right?). Or even that damn labyrinth in Oldtown. But I wouldn't do in the Westeros of todays. HPL stories are all about the protagonists that like a moth to a flame are attracted to the mistery; in nowdays Westeros it's all about survival, can't really see that mechanic of "what the hell is that?".

The fantasy cartography in A Song of Ice & Fire is a good example of form following function - in this case, the form is a rectangle because the function is fitting all of Westeros onto two pages of a hardcover novel.

The individual locations are really cool, but the geography is crappy

>>53346341
The geography and sense of scale is pretty bad. The culture and history is very good. This all works out great for a story about armies and intrigue (and more of the latter). It'd be a bad place to run a hexcrawl, though.

>>53346475
You mean
>Let's take British Isles, turn them upside down and connect in the middle
>Oh, and some horizontal rectangle, too

>>53346341
Shit-tier geo
Over-the-top politics
Cultural uniformity over areas so vast it's just not funny.

It's literally screaming "GENERIC" and "random generator"

>>53346973
It's utter garbage. The continent is so large that in reality the north would have their own dozen or so kingdoms fighting each other and wouldn't care what was happening further down south.

>>53346962

What's so infeasible about grrm's map?

Historically, Earth's map has had all kinds of crazy shapes. There's no law of nature that says a lopsided two-continent world isn't possible.

>>53347848

I dunno. China and Russia seemed (most of time) pretty unified to me.

>>53347871
China had a vast and effective administration based entirely on merit.
Russia didn't became unified or truly large until early 18th century

>>53347897
*on merit in times when everyone was busy with feudalism or nepotism or both

>>53347864
Do you even basic tectonics?
Yes, it's pretty unfeasible to have world in a shape of massive, pretty regular rectangle. Two, to be precise. Shit just doesn't work that way, because you need those plates to connect somewhere, giving mountains somewhere. By the way shit is put, it doesn't make any sense with the bigger rectangle, while the smaller one is literally oversized Britain and Ireland put together, but without taking any accomodation for new geological processes. I mean how the fuck you expect to have glacial processes affecting in the same fucking way something this fucking huge?
Especially when you have right next to it another continent, obviously unaffected by the same glacial periods, since it's just a random rectangle.

And that goes without mentioning the fucked up climate

>>53347864
Literally Civ 2 random map generator gives results more grounded in tectonics, based almost entirely on world size, size of landmasses and erosion.

>>53347962
>And that goes without mentioning the fucked up climate
Pretty sure GRRM has admitted that that's all due to magic so he doesn't have to explain shit.

>>53347871
What are you on? China's only been ultra-homogenous in the years since the Cultural Revolution, and even then Communism and standardized Mandarin still haven't completely stamp out regional differences, languages, cuisine, and dialects. Fujian/Min Nan, Cantonese, and Mandarin all share the same written language but sound completely different.

As for Russia, much of it's landmass is incredibly thinly populated and even then Kazaks are completely different from Russian Inuit who are different from Western Russians.

>>53346341
It's good enough, plus GRRM does a good job of making the more far away lands seem really exotic and mysterious. There's too many fantasy books and media where the characters go everywhere on the map and solve everything, sucking the sense of mystery right out of the story.

plus the map isn't supposed to be entirely accurate, it's supposed to mimic medieval maps somewhat, most of which look wonky as fuck for obvious reasons. so all these super high res maps of the known world are kind of missing the point.

>>53347962
Pretty sure Winter does affect Essos. Could have sworn I remember an Arya chapter while she's in Braavos talking about snow appearing.

>>53347871
None of those two countries got anything to do with Westeros. Don't just say random shit. Try to understand your "example" first and if it applies.

>>53348032
There's too many fantasy books and media where the characters go everywhere on the map and solve everything, sucking the sense of mystery right out of the story.

This. The faggots saying they want to know more of the east don't fucking get what's the point of having a mysterious east.

>>53347848
The North(i.e., the purview of Winterfell) is sparsely populated with most people swearing fealty to the Starks just because that's what they've always known for thousands of years. There aren't enough resources for them to really fight wars over or form their own kingdom over. The whole area is just like Scotland and the current Stark is the guy in charge, but lets the lesser lords have a fair degree of independence so long as they honor their oaths to show up to battle when called.
And it's a big point in the book that the North has little care for the realpolitik bullshit of the Southern Kingdoms. There are far, far more people and resources down South. Far more to fight over, far less subsistence living. Much easier for them to get enough of their shit together and want someone else's shit.

>>53348016
Right, because rather than creating a world that at least has some semblance of sense, it's better to further deprive it out of it with 'wizard did this' bullshit.
In a setting with barely no magic in it.

>>53346973
>aluminium
>mining aluminum in the middle ages

>>53348119
>don't fucking get what's the point of having a mysterious east.
Having an exotic location for no purpose other than having exotic location is part of shit-tier world building. If you don't want people to go to exotic place, you simply don't create one for your setting. Because the moment you mention something, it creates curiosity to learn something about it. By not using this "mysterious far away land" you yourself as a creator are missing the point of putting such locations. Things either play a role in the story, or can be ommited for the better of the story.

tl;dr - it's shit world building

>>53348211
The entire fucking point of the world is that the weather serves as an indicator of how shitty the times are.
It exists blatantly as a plot construct; this is one of the very few times that I *wouldn't* bitch about 'a wizard did it'.

>>53348244
>Everything has to be absolutely related to this one plotline or it shouldn't be in there!

Jesus fuck, you missed the entire point of world building.

>>53348234
Aluminum is generally smelted from alumina and not mined straight out of the ground...

>>53348244
You confused story telling with worldbuilding there man.

>>53348085

So, yeah, I stand correct.

>>53348234

That's why I pointed to that, anon.

We don't actually mine "aluminium" now, even.

>>53348244

So, like Conan never went to Khitai in REH stories?

>>53348367
Maybe the same folks that get angry in the worldbuilding thread when other people don't worldbuild according to their guidelines.

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Geographically it looks like shit because of the 90 degree angle.

He has a terrible grasp of numbers and scale.

He's a good storyteller and it illustrates the setting needs to serve the story. I say that as someone who has setting before story, but a mistake a lot of worldbuilders do is try to focus too much on the world and not on the story.

>>53347171

I shope hope Euron does that. I have a real concern that the ending will be some fairytale Jon and Dany get together and hooray the winter is dispelled and it's an eternal summer again. I hate about-face thematic shifts. There was another book that was gritty in setting but bright in cast and then all of a sudden book 4 has a death-count like the red fucking wedding

>>53348244

You ought to have parts of the world which are not well known or traversed because otherwise it presents a world far smaller and more interconnected than we have ever been prior to the 18th-19th century. That would be like suggesting that the trojan war should exist on a world that is nothing but Greece, Anatolia, Egypt and Thrace because the rest of the world doesn't matter. And old stories abound in such exotic far off locales - Palamedes being son of the King or some noble of Babylon yet serving in Arthur's court, Herodotus remarking about Xerxes' vast levies the world over even though they play basically no part in the story (and Herodotus is as much a storyteller as a historian).

An example of a world that you're espousing is the shithole that is sanctuary in Diablo. It looks like a shithole you could road trip through in a few days not an entire planet.

>>53348367
No, I didn't. You see, if you are doing world-building for the sake of world-building, you would describe such place IN DEPTH. Their culture, politics, history, language and so on and forth. That would be world-building for itself.
Then comes the part about competent writing, when you create things within the scope of the story, so you don't introduce half-baked elements into the world, as it leaves fuck-huge areas of said world unknown or pointless for the story. In this case, Essos could be half its size and it would worked exactly the same, without all those "but what's over there" questions.
But that assumes the world is not created by a hack that doesn't give two squats about own setting and literally made most of it using map of Britain, because hey, who needs world-building, right?

>>53346475
Well, it has to fit in an endpaper.

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>>53348244
are you new to speculative fiction or something?

>>53346341
It's literally one of the worst, poorly-made and created without any planning or insight, "mainstream" setting. It's so bad it makes shit from Witcher look good by comparison, but that at least had a writer who outright said he doesn't care about the setting at all, so as far as everyone is concerned, the world ends with Blue Mountains and there is nothing beyond

>>53346341
Upside down UK with a War of the Roses with the serial numbers filed off?

>>53348428
So now he should have filled pages and pages with information about these places not relevant to the plot? Make up your damn mind.

>>53346973
The Neck was magic n' shit though.

>>53348561
You don't get it, do you? Unless you are creating encyclopedia exposita, you don't throw such stuff at all into your book. Does it affect in the slightest the plot? No? Then you drop it. Do you need it for any reason at all aside "Map Filling Empire #97"? No? Then you drop it. And so on and forth. And if you are adding it for flavour, then give it some flavour, rather than an offhand remark in tune of "here be lions".

>>53348655
it's literally just throwaway shit to give your world a little more depth, why are you getting so triggered about this? no one's saying that background characters should just randomly come up to the protags and be like, "Yo did you know that there's a goddess with like ten titties and thirty vaginas in the east, k thanks bye".

most people will have some conception of the world outside of where they live, because contrary to what you may believe, people (even medieval people) do not live in a giant vacuum where they never hear anything about the outside world or wonder what's out there.

you're not spending such a huge amount of time on it that you're derailing your own plot. it's a small quick thing that's makes your world seem more real, because hearing fantastical things and then filling in the blanks in your own mind is a very natural thing to do.

>>53346341
Absolutely not.

>>53346341
It's not perfect, but I like it. Especially the pulpier stuff that got added in the lore book.

>>53348852
>Throw-away shit
>Gives depth
Because it's precisely how you spot shit-tier worldbuilding. Rather than actually creating something coherent, it relies on throw-away shit to add "depth". Depth that serves no real point or purpose and the introduced elements often don't even fit in any explainable way, but since the author made it on spot, he/she don't care.

>>53346901
holy shit tho

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>reading genre fiction

>>53346477
I like the world he's built, except for Dorne
Its like a fucking utopia

>>53348905
look, I understand that you're like some robot with no imagination, but you do realize that hearing a weird rumor and then extrapolating things based off it is something that most people just naturally do (and by extension writers and the characters they write because they're usually based on normal humans), right?

it adds depth because it brings your world closer to a real world, because real actual human beings do this thing and they can relate to it. literally no one besides you looks at one quick line about a foreign culture, and immediately decides that it's bad worldbuilding, because 1) they don't care that much, and 2) they probably know little to nothing to about it and have no basis to decide whether its coherent or not.

>>53349153
It doesn't add depth you fucking moron, it just expands the universe. What good is an ocean if it's only an inch deep

>>53349147
This.

Fuck Dorne.

>>53349203
whelp, I tried. i'll be on the lookout for your book where there's no world outside of where the main characters go, it'll be a pretty odd shape I imagine.

It's an iconic example of shit worldbuilding, and I don't understand why plebs think its good.

>shallow characters
>shit war
>no economy
>little to no culture
>dumb stereotypes though, got those

I'll grant him detailed food descriptions, but that's not something to be enthusiastic about. Ed Greenwood owned that shtick since 2e D&D.

>>53349263
>no world outside of where the main characters go
Where the fuck did I say that? If you're going to mention a location or whatever it needs to be part of the plot. Otherwise it's bullshit.

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>>53349297
>detailed food descriptions
I will never understand.

I've literally used "smoked fish with carrots" to describe a meal in writing.

>>53349333
You probably have that common disorder where you're incapable of imagining the tastes of described food or lack the normal mirror neurons for getting hungry by watching someone eat, or getting joy out of seeing others enjoying food.

Usually this is caused by childhood malnutrition or prolonged starvation, or alternatively one of the several empathy emotional disorders.
Basically if you're the kind of person that doesn't get food television where people eat things.

Could also be too much masturbation or sex without recovery times, which for some can deaden the ability of the brain to care about tasting food, which is chemically akin to starvation's effects on sexual desire.

Or like me you just don't give a fuck about writer's wanking their food lore and skip it because you don't want to read the mental break they took between shit actually happening.

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I'm not entirely sure why people are so dead-set on assuming the shapes of the continents are the exact square rectangles we're presented with. Other than because that's what we're presented with. As far as I know (this isn't a subject I've delved into at all really) we don't have any information on what projection the map uses or even what map making technology is available in the setting. I think they mention a sextant once but I don't remember magnetic compasses. I could totally be wrong on that though.

http://imgur.com/gallery/VXADz

There's a lot of things I don't like about this theory and I think it's fairly obvious that it isn't the correct answer. But it's the type of answer that I personally like.

Now again, I don't know enough about ASoIaF to make any sort of complete theory but I have a small inkling that the the far north of the map connects to the far north east. This is just based off of the far-east legends of the Long Night matching those told in Westeros and my own assumption that the Five Forts are the easter equivalent of the Wall. If these barriers are holding back the same threat, and if that threat was once defeated by the same hero, then it would make sense for the two places to be connected. This is all just speculation off of this video: https://youtu.be/Ih_ZAGCfMY0?t=449

Honestly that's a lot of words that could be read as saying "No guys, GRRM totally knew what he was setting up when he drew the map!" That's not what I'm trying to say. It's a dumb map. But I also don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that we have been mislead and that there's stuff going on we don't know about.

>>53349973
>see this
>the far south of the world in my setting is darker than the central/north because it has a different sun (these suns are tiny and move in circles/ovals above a flat plane)
>the south is also hot and jungly despite the dimmer sun
>no equator or N/S pole, only one single pole
Am I fucked? Or is the stuff about the darkstar and the south of planetos being darker just speculation?

>>53350116
Pure speculation, also every idea you've ever had has already been implemented better than you're capable of many times before. Don't worry about it.

>>53350138

Even the idea that love can bloom?

>>53350193
Nah actually I think that one's new.

>>53350249

I was only joking since to an extent that's romeo and juliet.

>>53346962
>muh realism
yeah, realistic tectonic plates is key to a good setting

>>53347812
that is the fantasy genre and people like it

>>53347848
>>53347962
>>53347993
it's funny how, when questioned about the quality of world-building, the assholes in here start to rant about geography which is utterly unimportant when it comes to the former. i guess they need to show off their assumed geographical knowledge. well, one thing is for sure: they have to clue about what it takes to make good stories.

>>53348244
>it creates curiosity to learn something about it.
intended effect realized. end of story.

>is part of shit-tier world building
as if you know anything about that subject.

>>53351697
Geography shapes cultures like it shapes the land and sea, anon. Egypt only ever became more than a few villages because of the Nile river and its flood-basin. Greece spent so long as a splintered collection of city-states because the mountains and sea made travel so damn difficult and left no room for rulers to extend their reach on land. The United States of America only survived to become the culture(s) and superpower it is because had two fuck-huge oceans protecting its flanks and no real threats on its land-borders.

>>53348182
But Scotland did have multiple kingdoms competing with each other.

>>53352508
But they were eventually united under Robert the Bruce, aka, the real Braveheart.
Incidentally, against a Southern asshole who claimed to own them all.

>>53349305
I've never been to Russia.

I must not mention Russia

>>53347117
>I think the worlds a lot bigger and they have simply yet to discover it.
The World of Ice and Fire, a big lore book that GRRM and some people from the wiki released, featured Sothoryos, a southern continent full of jungles, orcs, diseases, megafauna, dinosaurs, elder gods and various other reasons not to go there, as well as the Lands of Always Winter to the north of Westeros, which are pretty much the North Pole but with possible giants and ice dragons.

>>53347714

Look at westeros.
Look at the map of the UK. cut in half, rotate and turn upside down, join together.

Tada, england and scotland. Geography of westeros isnt crappy, its real.

Well, if you count only westeros and pretend nothing exists, otherwise it does become "what, did you ever looked at a map or too geography?"

>>53352715
Better not. That'll learn ya.

>>53352715
fucking this

>>53352272
since RPG settings are only a backdrop for games and early RPGs prove that you can run good scenarios without much of setting information, all of that is just intellectual posturing

>>53347134
What about the Iron isles and their "drowned god"?

>>53347796
Actually, Westeros sans North and Dorne is specificallly upside down Ireland.

Not making this up. It's a detailed map of Ireland turned upside down, with the Reach being Ulster, Westerlands - Leinster, Stormlands + Crownlands - Connaught, the Vale - Munster.

>>53352272
Not every setting has to be a simulation. I have a setting where everything happens on an archipelago that floats in a literal bowl held by literal gods. It also has close to no D&D-style magic. And I don't believe I have to worry about geography all that much there

>>53349147
>>53349226

Fucking kerning. I was searching for 'DoMe' for ages

>>53353011
>>53353094
There's something to what you say, but you're assuming the players won't start making noise about "immersion" and "verisimilitude" and "proper backstory and RP hooks". A lot of OSR games might be able to get away with that kind of bare-bones worldbuilding, because most players know it goes with the territory and buy into it as an inherent part of playing OSR, but other games? Book-series like ASOIAF?

>>53353176
Thing is, world building goes beyond tectonics and geography. A world can be well built even if it is entirely unrealistic. Take a look at the Creation from Exalted. It's ludicrously detailed but nothing about it's geography is realistic (its land floats in unformed reality held up by 5 elemental poles; it has a Russia-sized island in the middle) or meant to be

>>53349147
Dorne is running out of water, this is mentioned in the books.

>>53353176
Book-series and other games are safe, because the number of geographic autists is very limited.
Seriously, I see people sperging out about it ONLY on /tg/
Geography matters in worldbuilding to have something that makes kind of sense, in a beginner view, because that's all you're gonna need.

And I can assure you that most of the worldbuilding done by people is fucked up in some way, it can be geography, but it can be politics, it can be law, it can be economy, it can be science, and so on.

Nobody is an expert in all the fields needed to make a world real. There's just too much.

>>53353176
>other games? Book-series like ASOIAF?
No genres are more at fault for ignoring the realities of geographical influence on their cultures, nations, and empires than fiction and especially fantasy literature.

Strange, no?

It's more surprising to see an author properly representing the effects of drought or medieval economies or the limitations of societies where they are related to basic geography.

One mountain range and one sea is all it takes to separate a culture using iron armor and sabers from another using wooden spears and clubs for centuries without any evidenced intermingling. Same with jungles, hilly forests, large rivers, and deserts with each their own various tech limitations and encouragements for specific forms of warfare, agriculture or lack thereof, and building development. The Celtic Gauls being within a small driving distance of the Romans for one, and many other examples too.

Many fantasy authors pick and choose what they want for their worlds without comparing it against what's likely or possible, because why? Because when someone knows what kind of story they intend to tell or what sort of game they'll run you only have to pick those things. That's where actual storytelling skills are involved. Choosing the most important pieces to focus on for the world, connecting them together with characters, plots, and an environment that makes sense in reference to the former. This includes ambiguity, with no perfect knowledge or absolutely true perspectives on the world. Many truly suck at this essential skill for worldbuilding, because they're either not capable or too tunnel visioned to build, break, and redo something enough for it to fit their basic intentions. Or they go in the other direction and try to be professorial on everything, and fail, because no one person knows every little interaction aspect it takes to create a living breathing world even if they've devoted entire decades to it.

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Which idiot designed this world. No real world would be constructed that way.

>>53348852

Just enjoy the richness of getting writing lessons from a guy who hasn't discovered capitalization yet.

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>>53346341
Example of great world building ruined by retarded characters.

>>53353176
>>53353486
Conveniently, this applies to top-down and bottom-up worldbuilding equally.

It's the same for games pnp and otherwise. Can your world tell its story in silence? Can the characters live and act independently enough to take you out of "now" and start thinking about their world and lives? That's sufficient.

But perhaps your world is so overfocused that it's difficult to get a proper perspective on things, which is fine if that's the feeling you want to convey. But if it isn't? Do a little more work. Be ambiguous. Understand the meaning of a rumor made from equal parts truth and lie and it's little brother equation called information quality disintegration multiplied by the amount of people to the power of time.

You can have all the accurate geography in the world but it can only help you tell a better story if you want to build a world whose story is told or enhanced in that specific way. For most people and casual readers, tectonic plates and rain shadows are the background information they don't pay attention to or give a damn about.

Not to say geographical isolation is a bad storytelling mechanic, but it's just one among many and for all of them it matters more how it's used and how accurate and true it feels to the world one's being immersed in than how accurate and true it is to the reality we know.

This is an integral part of using fantastic elements to make a fiction a believable story, and putting these pieces together in a function that is fun or enjoyable is usually the goal. Accuracy for fantasy is better used to test the questions "Does this make sense for the world?" and "Does this get across the feeling I want?" than the real correspondent elements they would be in our world. IE, people talking plate tectonics in a world with zombification, alchemy, and dragons. It's just because they know about that specific thing and can challenge it because they've learned basic geo interactions.

>>53349973
>Calling the Summer Sea the Sunset Sea
Other than that, that theory is a pretty good one.

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>>53353514
actually he kinda looks like map of westeros

>>53353176
Dude are you new?
GRRM is a total hack.

Let's start small. The impossible architecture with most of GRRM's described construction methods being blatantly incorrect or outright misinterpretations of the real things, he doesn't know how a pulley works(!), the fact that when describing sailing ships he mixed up the PORT and STARBOARD equivalents (left and right) multiple times before someone told him and he fixed it in a later book, he doesn't know how BOOKS are physically made so when writing it he wrote only the setting and binding (start/finish) without all the inbetween work and having the character put it on a shelf without a laying or weighting period, Westeros' described military support systems wouldn't be able to allow their armies to function as armies, his concept of supply trains are a joke, the properties of the alembic elude him, and shit man that's just the beginning.

It's a good thing he focused on characters and fake politics because that's all he can write half decently above shit-tier garbage.

>>53353657
And his map looks like naruto. Take fucking that GRRM.

>>53351697
>geography which is utterly unimportant when it comes to the former
>Being this tier retarded
Seriously? So you are saying geography and thus climate have no influence on cultures and civilisation? I mean even if we ignore the extreme geographical determinism, there are still such "minor" things like access to farmland, water, natural resources and so on.
By your definition, we can have a thriving agrarian empire in the middle of boreal forest or develop strong nomadic tradition in loess plains or heavy personal armoring in warfare right next to equator, because hey, geography is unimportant.

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>>53353719
>GRRM is a hack
>oh okay, were his stories lacking in some essential aspect that I'd missed?
>HE MIXES UP PORT AND STARBOARD ON HIS BOATS

For real this thread is the worst kind of autistic contrarian whining.

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>>53353735
>I will defend a man who can't tell left from right

>>53353735
>muh autism
You don't know anything about writing as a profession. If you mention these things, get them right.

>>53353730
Not that anon, but I would say yes so long as there is a fantastic element that allows it to happen which is also consistent with other fantastic elements in the setting, but also is not conveyed in a way that is just for the purpose of plugging up the author's silliness. But that doesn't change your point ofc, since it's replacing the basic real elements with workarounds and it can get pretty cheap and boring if someone's just throwing out 1:1 perfect substitutions with no flavor.

Freshwater springs on mountainless flying islands, boreal forests with hundreds of species of tasty tree fungi, for example. They're too simple. It's bad if it's too specific, obviously, since it's boring to instantly point out how an author or DM is plugging holes in easy, dumb ways.

Substitution has its places and can work, just not everywhere for every thing.

>>53353735
>>53353756
Exactly. It's called "write what you know" not write what you heard someone mention in one sentence a few years ago.

He even has less excuse because he takes decades to write one fucking book without doing basic research, apparently.

I still read the books though.

Is there a difference between world building and setting building? Most of the critiques in this thread are about plate tectonics and weather, or GRRM's writing style or quality. The setting critiques seem to be not enough of this, or "unrealistic" culture.

What's an example of a very well built world that I could contrast it with?

I wanted to include trade in my world as an important part of the setting because I want to give my group a campaign where all the big players (and them) are basically mage mercenary kings with lots of capital fighting over magical and mundane resources in a new world.

So I researched trade and the bullet points of economics.

And cried.

So I decided to try doing introductory research on how economies worked in roman, medieval, and renaissance time periods, because I figured that would be good enough.

I'm still crying.

Maybe I'll just keep my players away from their money, that will work, right?

>>53353894
I would also like an answer to this very good question.

It'd make a good final panel for a loss comic. But apart from that it's pretty generic

>>53353894
I would guess that world-building encompasses the whole world, while a setting can focus on a smaller scale, like a city or region.

>>53353926
I would suggest combining the basic videogame system of trade from any that has basic trading. (Roll charisma, you hear rumors that this province is in need of this resources, its produced cheaply in this province, more roleplaying obviously), with random events (farmer revolts, such and such territory legalized slavery creating a new market, gold rush etc.) and player influenced events like GTA (Are rival just made a big contract with minor faction, it would be a shame if that minor faction was destroyed, or if their leader was replaced by someone who opposed the trade deal).

Throw in insurance companies and a basic stock market and you should be alright unless your gming econ students

>>53353926
Instead of researching historical economies I would research historical centers of trade (venice at it's height, the dutch golden age etc) and people who were important in these societies.
After all you're putting your players in the position of people who would be seeing how the economies effects on them and their surroundings, not analyzing it like modern economists try to do.

>>53353852
So you are basically saying "Wizard did this solves all problems, because it's a fantasy world"? There are two stances I've got toward such reaction:
>old & oldschool games
Setting is literally an unimportant backdrop, so you can put anything you want into it and megadungeon games pretty much require from you to go full retarded. That's part of a "genre", so it gets a free pass
>Anything else
Shit-tier worldbuilding, when things make zero sense and someone took money for creating a world, but then instead delivered pile of crap and said "Hey, it's a game! Who cares!". I do.

>>53353994
I don't know why it's taken someone else to tell me to steal from systems that already work this way to get me to think of doing that. Usually that's what I do.
Shit. I'm devolving or something.

Thanks anon.

>>53354031
That makes much more sense than what I was trying to do.
Thanks!

>>53354031
Not him, but why not both?
I've recently played an anime spoof campaign and we were handled a pre-made characters by our GM (we draw them from a literal hat). My characters picked from a hat was modern day accountant. That left the character with both vast knowledge of how economy works (unlike everyone else in the verse) AND understanding of what and how went in history, to adjust said knowledge and get some serious dough running pretty fast. And it was part of the adventures prepared by our GM.

>>53354039
No problem. My life's work seems to be stealing other peoples ideas and doing them in a worse way, so I guess I'm pretty good at it

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His tax policy was pretty good.

>>53346341
>Late middle ages England
>Spain
>THE WILD NORTHMEN OF THE WILD NORTH
>Mongols
>The republics of money and mercenary land but WITH AN EASTERN TOUCH

No

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>>53346341
Other than the fact that GRRM got his sense of scale wrong (he's openly admitted that if he's given you numbers, he probably fucked it up) it's fucking fantastic worldbuilding m8. A World of Ice and Fire gave us so much interesting history and the most obscure parts of the setting are excellent.

>>53346962
No, he doesn't. The map looks kind of silly, and I chalk it up to the fact that the maps we see are in-canon drawn by maesters, who aren't really that much better at geography than any random medieval monk-expys. For example, pic attached is what Europeans used to think the world looked like - my headcanon is that the maps are wrong.

>>53347848
>Realism in a world where people are agriculturalists despite there being decades-long periods where nothing can grow

The fact that the north is inhabited by anything other than tiny bands of hunter-gatherers doesn't make sense, anon. Roll with it.

>>53348018
China and Russia are actually some of the most diverse nations around, and they used to be more diverse before they pioneered ethnic cleansing. Imperial autocracy isn't as hard as people seem to think it is, literally all you have to do is get people to swear fealty and not go against your decrees where you can see it (i.e. Russian republics are basically autonomous states unless they're infringing on what the Kremlin wants) and be ready to kill anyone who steps out of line. The North runs similar to that - the Starks have a long, proud history of murdering the fuck out of rival kings, forcing them to bend the knee and taking their daughters as wives, if not simply exterminating rival tribes of the First Men to make examples. The North was pretty balkanized once, but the books don't talk about it much.

>>53349147
Dorne is cool, in that they have river gypsies worshipping pagan gods, are borderline heretics and their internal politics is great (but irrelevant to the main storyline, and at its most boring during the books). Show ruined 'em.

>>53347962
You're under the false impression that that's the entire world, and not just a small portion of the world. It's also a map made by humans with very limited technology and thus not entirely accurate (similar to how maps in the real world weren't 100% accurate ages ago).

>>53354077
Primarily because they haven't enjoyed learning about it so I was suggesting an alternative path.

>>53353756
You mean left

>>53354036
Not quite. I'm saying it's only as allowable as the "magic" could solve the problem relatively to what that world is like and only so long as it doesn't exist as a stand-in for the creator's ignorance, apathy, or laziness and has significance with the setting and characters as an actual, whole element. This goes across mediums.
Things that are as foundational as geography and genetics, but are fantastic and cohesive.

A minor example would be magic in a specific place altering the people who live there, having become malign over time and having more pronounced effects on travelers but not so much on the people who've been there for generations. These people have a lot of infighting, they don't get invaded by outside forces much if at all, they're often rejected by other cultures, and they've got a host of unique problems due to what's actually happening in their little part of the world. This is all a basket of reasons for how this area of the world functions and carries over into the aspects of their culture and people, including the effects thereof on surrounding kingdoms. And so on.

All the good examples take a while to find, but they're usually similar. They're integrated in so many things it won't or at least shouldn't instantly key the reader or player in on the complete intent of what the author will use these people, their characters, or their situation for.

The constraints can be obvious and the problem can be made magical without taking away from everybody else's good sense. The reason behind all of it doesn't have to be made clear to the audience, and at least for players I feel this is up to personal taste but I wouldn't let mine in on the hows or whys of things unless they specifically sought them out. Usually they do. Understandably it would be applied differently in literature.

>>53354133
Fuck me. What part of the world is that even supposed to be? Is it upside down?

>>53354261
Looks like the Eurasia upside down.

>>53348234
>mining aluminium

>>53354329
>making saltpeter from corpses and shit and piss

>>53354329
>aluminium
>not aluminum

>>53348381
In that case, we don't really mine some of our most common metals, but since the distinction is ridiculous, people still call it mining and aren't autists.

>>53349147
This, I bought the World of Ice and Fire book and it made me go from, "the books are okay" to "holy shit I want a series in Braavos."

>>53352720
The Ibbenese are Dwarves and Neanderthals mixed together, and the Dothraki have gone from "dumb Mongols" to "Scourge of God, kill these guys holy shit."

>>53354329
Why the fuck would anyone want to use aluminum as an iron-substitute in the Middle Ages, does anyone here take metallurgy? Aluminum is great because it is incredibly light and reasonably tough, this does not mean it's as tough as steel. We make planes out of aluminum because we know even a steel plane wouldn't survive Cannon fire or a missile, so why not go for speed over meaningless armor?

You want the best metal for a weapon, outside of blatant fantasy? 1060 Steel.

I mean, as much as I love aspects of the world and the writing, in terms of world-building, no, it's not that great.

Also, that map is all kinds of fucked up, and just looks completely fucking off compared to what you'd expect it to look like. It doesn't look natural at all and I can just imagine how extra-fucked-up it would look if you actually used it to make a globe.

>>53346477
That one is even worse. More accurate. But worse.

>>53354487
>You want the best metal for a weapon, outside of blatant fantasy? 1060 Steel.
>Not using steer forded mirrion times
you done fucked up

>>53354487
GRRM doesn't even know about carbon differences for different iron grades and their impacts on steel quality so it's all fucking whatever.

He's probably in the same camp of people that think katanas are good weapons because they've been folded thousands of times instead of the real reason being that Japan's overall ore quality may as well be the worst in the world.

>>53346341
No.

>>53348211
>In a setting with barely no magic in it.
There's a plot reason for that though. The entire world is actually fairly fucking magical. It's just that it's mostly low-key and subtle, nevermind the fact that it's implied that magic used to be a lot more common.

It's the fucking dragons, and their return heralds the return of magic, which is why spells and alchemy suddenly works a lot better than it's done in the entirety of the lives of any of the main characters.

I personally believe that Valyria was a lot more "high fantasy", and that whatever happened to it had part in magic being fucked in the world.

>>53354487
>Why the fuck would anyone want to use aluminum as an iron-substitute in the Middle Ages
Why would you think that it's being used as an iron-substitute for weapons?

Aluminium has a lot of interesting attributes, and combined with magic, who knows what can be done?

>>53354582
Incorrect anon.

It's not "may as well be."

Japan's iron is the most shit out of all societies of humanity that have had iron and related forging techniques as a thing.

To put it into perspective, all the places where that got a worse roll of the dice on iron than Japan never conceived of using to make tools.

Japan is the actual, factual, WORST.

>>53354582
See, that surprises me since GRRM talked about enameling armor or even bluing it, which not a whole lot of people know about since Bluing is fairly esoteric, at least for a layman delving into metallurgy.

But then he points out how Valryian Steel looks like Damascus or Woortz and I just get frustrated. I don't think many people realize Steel you find in a scrapyard is probably better quality than Damascus or Woortz, the stuff we make in the modern age would be the stuff of WONDERS to a medieval blacksmith.

Why? We're making the same Steel, better conditions. The bane of any smith is impurities during the smelting and forging process, and with stuff like EMFs and oxygen furnaces we can control even the tiniest percentage of carbon or nickel going into the product.

>>53354662
It's a mix, but that one I can pin on most other modern fantasy writers too.

They know lots of esoteric things because they read lots of esoteric stuff, but lack a lot of context because they're caught up in the fantasyness of the esotericness if that makes sense.

>>53354651
Aluminum is worthless for medieval society because aluminum's interesting qualities only become apparent in the construction of large buildings, aircraft and lightweight vehicles. It's not a good armor, it's an even worse weapon, and for the longest time before we found out Bauxite's stuffed with the shiny stuff we used it as a luxury metal.

>>53354684
Fun fact: it was once considered more valuable than gold, and so that's why it was used to cap the Washington Monument. This fact is correct and you shouldn't double check it.

>>53348244
>t. never read William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land

>>53354662
I don't see the issue, though. Valyrian Steel was literally forged with magic. The fact that its damascus steel is pretty irrelevant to that.

Also, it might still be better than most other steel in the rest of the world.

>>53349973
It doesn't line up with the in-universe evidence really any better than the dyson sphere theory, but shit is this theory so much more fun.
If only GRRM cared as much about fleshing out his setting as we do.

>>53354753
>Also, it might still be better than most other steel in the rest of the world.
Yeah, there that. It should probably mean something that in Westeros they use "castle-forged steel" as a sign of quality. Basically, it's the same as saying "this smith looks like he actually knows what he's doing as opposed to the majority of them"

>>53354753
Qohorik Steel is almost as good as Valyrian.

Baby blood makes for a good alloying material.

>>53354783
>If only GRRM cared as much about fleshing out his setting as we do.
He does as long as it comes to backstabbery.
Also, the seasons aren't supposed to make sense. That's the point

>>53348427
>I have a real concern that the ending will be some fairytale Jon and Dany get together and hooray the winter is dispelled and it's an eternal summer again
never gonna happen

>>53352508
remember that all of the "7 kindoms" where once a just minor self proclaim kings that beat the shit out of all the other self proclaimed kings in the region to become the only king in the area.

>>53354789
I actually never thought of it as anything else, like, it's "Castle-forged", rather than forged by some hobbyist plow-maker out in the boonies.

>>53354793
>Qohorik
Never heard of her.

Seriously though, looking it up, I can't find anything on it, just that they're the only ones that can rework Valyrian steel, and that it possibly requires blood sacrifices. Are you sure that "Qohorik Steel" isn't just Valyrian Steel that they've reworked?

I've always seen it as implied that Valyrian Steel isn't so much that the weapon is made magic, as much as magic is infused into the steel itself, since you can rework it (whatwith Tywin Lannister reforging Ned's ancestral greatsword, Ice, into two longswords, Widow's Wail and Oathkeeper).

>>53354783
I think GRRM has probably thought about this shit a lot, he just doesn't have any reason to tell us the real situation

it would ruin the story

>>53354783
>the dyson sphere theory

W- what..? How the fuck would that even work? There wouldn't be any horizons, since everything would curve inward/upward.

>>53349973
I mean, yeah, sure, we can come up with post-hoc rationalizations, but at the end of the day, the map still looks like wrong and shit, and it's that impression that is relevant, honestly.

>>53355053
It's really only based on the fact that in the opening to the show, the world map seems curved inwards, and the dyson sphere wandering in relation to the star would provide weird seasons of variable length.
It's epileptic trees all over again. Inb4 retard tropes

>>53355011
>Are you sure that "Qohorik Steel" isn't just Valyrian Steel that they've reworked?
It is, Tobho Mott (Qohorik guy in KL) reforges Valyrian steel

>>53353730
>Seriously? So you are saying geography and thus climate have no influence on cultures and civilisation?
no, I am saying you can drop cultures into your fantasy setting and make it all work out fairly nicely without realistic consistency. because, in the end, all of that are just trapping, just context, for the struggles of the protagonists of your scenarios

case in point: forgotten realm or warhammer 40K. both are retarded in their own right but hugely popular in spite of making not much sense.

>By your definition, we can have
just don't make it too obviously nonsensical and you're good to go. or, if you're Games Workshop, DO make it nonsensical and still rake in the cash.

>>53354036
GRRM doesn't make money for creating a world, he makes money from writing fiction. Those who care about logical geography (or good world-building) in his books are an irrelevant minority.

So I assume you guys don't really like Tolkien's Middle-Earth?

>>53346477
>K'Dath
>Carcosa
>Leng
Is that map official?

>>53355013
I'm not sure if he's thought about it - some writers are meticulous, and others just sorta wing it as they go along - and maybe it will be relevant to the story, maybe it won't.

However, it would be horrible storytelling to flat-out state the real circumstances of shit like this. It's fan-fic-level writing to go on exposés about minutae and details of the world outside of how it relates to the situation and characters.

Lore-dumps are awful.

>>53354570

Folding steel just removes impurities. Its a clever solution to Japan's problem of only having access to pretty low quality metals.

If you have better metal to work with, you don't need to fold it. Indeed, with high quality metal at the start folding it is more likely to fuck things up than make it better.

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>>53351627

>>53355437
He's confirmed a few times now he's making up the backstory as he goes along. In fact, everything but the broadest strokes is being made up as it goes along. It was originally going to be 1 book, then a trilogy.

>>53355432
Yes

>>53352537
Edward I did nothing wrong.

>>53353492
Wow, what a relevant and insightful comment to make on this Chinese cartoon board. You're right, the entire validity of someone's argument rests in whether they capitalize their sentences or not.

Pedantic retard.

>>53347871
>>53347871

>china
>unified

China has more regional dialects and cultural differences than England and their entire history can be summed up with "civil war, one generation of peace, civil war"

>>53356535
Just like how the validity of an author's skill lies in tying the entire universe to his main characters, amirite lads?

>>53356668
>China has more regional dialects and cultural differences than England
It's almost like it's 70+ times bigger or something.

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>>53350116

>magnetic monopoles exist in my fantasy setting

Truly a world of wonder and mystery

>>53354487

Incredibly light and reasonably durable armor with a thick enough gauge.

>>53348244
Go away Chekhov.

>>53349742
>describes the neurological basis for a phenomenom
>"not me tho dudes i just don't give a shit hehe :^)"

>>53350762
If you think Romeo and Juliet is about love you need to take a few steps backwards. Romeo and Juliet is about dumbass horny teenagers.

>>53357473
Romeo and Juliet is a commentary on the war of the Roses, and it's message is that the inter-familial feuds that were common during the period accomplish nothing but pointless death and destruction.

>>53353894
>a very well built world that I could contrast it with
You'll never get an answer here, because no matter what world gets brought up someone will complain about it.
You could fucking bring up Middle Earth in a thread about linguistics and some fa/tg/uy will complain about it not being realistic.

>>53357709
Never heard about this before, but I can sorta see it.
Doesn't change what I said, though - "love" is really not part of the play in any important sense. The main characters are in lust.

>>53347073
More rape?

>>53354651
>Magic
Bigga, anything + magic can be powerful as fuck.
Hello, Magic shit that burns fornecer, heating the house of anyone that shits in a Magic bucket with Magic Seals to Prevent backfires

>>53354653
Someones been reading the "katanas are underpower in d20" 1d4chan's page

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>>53346341
>fuckhuge continent the size of europe
>barely any cities
>barely civilization for miles and miles
>fucking wilderness
>childishly simplistic political map

It's complete and utter dogshit. Plus Kings somehow are able to just snap their fingers and make shit happen most of the time despite Kings only possessing as much power as their vassals believe they have.

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>>53358411

>>53358352
Or a history book, take your pick

>>53346341
No, not at all.
It's horrid.

>>53358411
That last one is a plot point and core theme of the series, but yeah it does annoy me from time to time just how badly it's dealt with. At this stage at least one disenfranchised guard would have just stabbed ceresi, or somebody would have poisoned her or something. Literally every other abuser of power has had people get annoyed at them and kill them, except for the one who abuses and misuses power the most?
Make up your mind GRRM. Do you want to write a gritty political tale or snow white and the evil witch? If it went straight from full low fantasy to full high fantasy then fine, but at this point it's really just mixing the worst of both worlds.

>>53358477
>A history book
>A
1d4chan, pleb

>>53348905
Tolkeinn literally does shit like that. Aragon tosses out weird. old references that mean nothing to the readers, some it isn't even explained in the extended lore. It's fine, it adds to the feeling that there's a world beyond what we see. It DOESN'T have a point or purpose, it's pure tone.

>>53358712
He doesn't even get "hard fantasy" either. I laughed my ass off through the series reading about how often armies would be raised and marched and go to war despite this being a monumentous event in history that took months of funding and planning for a short expedition. It's not a "hey lets go invade X" type of question but rather "Let's prepare for military action in X within a couple years, start collecting the funds to raise an army and I'll work on the casus belli so we don't get called out for the invasion".

>>53358914
I'm glad you pointed that out. I realized armies in my story do spend years preparing, but that was just a plot device, I didn't know it was normal because I was used to things like GoT. Now to make it MORE years since we're talking a big army.

>>53355401
i like it but it's not required to write a compelling fantasy novel

>>53359085
For example Edward the Third had to jump through a shitload of hoops to get the money to finance his multiple campaigns in France during the Hundred Years War, and part of the reason why his part of the war cooled off and ceased was because he really had trouble paying the army. Kings typically have to court their own vassals to finance shit when their own coffers run dry. And they dry out fast because Kings typically live in constant debt thanks to their lifestyle.

>>53359085
>>53359575
However on the other hand this is for purely feudal entities. Romans or the Chinese didn't require this kind of hoop jumping because their logistics weren't shot to hell with feudalization and sub-fuedalization destroying any idea of centralized power a king ideally would wield. That's how you have the Republic practically shitting out Legions by mitsos whenever one got destroyed.

>>53349297
>>53349297
>shallow characters
Oh come off it.

>Lannister siblings, Tyrion, Cersei, and Jaime, universally complex and a pleasure to read

>Theon, caught between two worlds, deluded, and goes on a massive character arc

>Mance Rayder and co, the lords of the libertarians

>Sam pulling his zero to hero routine

>fukin Varys

>cool old king's guard knight whose name escapes me

Like, the only noticeably bad characters that are agressively and dully Suey or one dimensional are Daenaerys and Jon.

>>53355432
Not really. Leng is an official land, asian-influenced, but there isn't any information about the other areas out that way.

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>>53347962
>Do you even basic tectonics?

No man.

>>53358712
Let me guess, you only watched the tv show.
>>53358914
That's not universally true. It really depends on the society and how big a army we're talking about. A military superpower like Ancient Rome, for example, could pull an army virtually
any time they wanted. Hell, Caesar went as far as winning 3 big battles in Gaul in one summer.

>>53346477
I'm really interested in the lands past the Five Forts, but I doubt George has anything written about them.

>>53360148
Anything eastern of Qarth is just names and references, there's nothing to know about them.

>>53353514
There are actually some pretty great characters. It's just the main ones suck, and they're the focus. Also there's like 5 final bad guys.

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Stop ignoring tax policies

>>53360148
From what I know most of the far east (excluding Asshai) was created by his two assistants who made AWOIAF, not him. They probably have a lot planned out that they couldn't include in the book.

>>53354261
Greece maybe?

>>53346341
>There's a 200 reply ASOIAF thread that I somehow missed
Reeeee

>>53354487
>does anyone here take metallurgy?

Nobody here does fucking anything.

>>53346341
Certainly not. But It's an example of effective worldbuilding.

>>53346341
If you like garbage War of the Roses fanfiction then I guess.

>>53361077
I do. It certainly beats most of the stuff out there.

>>53361207
then ur a PLEB!!! why don't you read some REAL fantasy like Book of the New Sun or GORMENGHAST instead of this baby SHIT?

>>53346341
Geography - hell no.
Culture and historic content - very much so.

>>53354133
The "this may or may not be entirely accurate as it's an account from a maester compiling many different accounts from older maesters who may or may not have gotten their info from accounts of older maesters" is explicitly the canon of TWOIAF book, which is the source of most of the better quality maps. GRRM and the other writers also have said many times the further you get not only from Westeros but just from the Citadel in the current year the less reliable the author is. So many things in that book especially the maps of far off regions should be taken with an enormous grain of salt.

>>53361252
RPGs were conceived to relive vanilla settings like LOTR, Conan, etc. If you need a fancy setting to tell a good story, your stories are probably not all that good to begin with.

>>53361429
Yeah people should stop making stuff up to be fancy or fancy sake unless they're doing it for humor. Even my DM and some in here seem to go too far with the details and uniqueness of their world and it's really unnecessary for everything to be unique and named and drifted from normal stuff.

If it takes the creation of ten new words and names to get your story across, plus six individual "cultures" with traits, some obscure magic system made by combining eastern faiths with western alchemy, dumb politics that couldn't actually exist in their forms, your world is probably shit and the story is just being propped up by vagina prepwork. I'm talking about ASOIAF in this, too. Tolkien too.

>>53361326
Not to mention the historical timelines are explicitly wrong and almost certainly overblown. For example, the Andals supposedly arrived 6,000 years ago but it's probably closer to 2,000.

>>53361429
I was just making fun of hipster fantasy fans who rag on people for liking stuff like ASoIaF.

>>53361429
This.

Fantasy is just writers making up shit in place of actually knowing anything.

The fact that people point this out like it's something special is its own special form of retardation. Fiction writers are almost all the same this way. "I'm a dumb shit that doesn't know anything about anything! I'll write a book! I can just make stuff up!"

And they do. Fuck'n 'tards.

>>53361663
I just wrote a short story about faeries and I wouldn't have deigned to do it with less than five hours of period-tech and martial-arts research.
Writers who think they can make shit up are pleb-tier.

>>53348427
>I have a real concern that the ending will be some fairytale Jon and Dany get together and hooray the winter is dispelled and it's an eternal summer again.
You really don't have to worry about that. GRRM has never written a story with a happy ending. The closest he comes is something like Guardians, where there are hints that maybe the problems could have solutions in the future. Most of the time his stories end either with everyone dying or most people dying. Hell, he's flat out stated "the only thing worth writing about it the human heart in conflict with itself".

>>53361968
>Hell, he's flat out stated "the only thing worth writing about it the human heart in conflict with itself".
This dumb line of reasoning seems to be prevalent in his generation of writers.
I'll just pick the option "I'm too much of a fucking nerd to write about happiness".

>>53346477
why is dorne a desert but the rest of westeros is normal Britain geography/ topography.

>>53362012
To be fair, the Reach is meant to be hot, southern france-ish.

I always pictured Dorne being like Morocco and the Stormlands being like the Balkans. Maybe because the KL scenes were filmed in Croatia.

>>53361588
first of all, we play fantasy for mysticism, not realism. secondly, uniqueness is fine but it often gets used as a gimmick, similar to cgi in movies, to cover over the weak plot.

>>53348427
>>53361968
GRRM has said that he liked the bittersweet ending of LOTR and that you can expect no less of him or sth to that effect.

>>53362181
GRRM regularly lies to mislead the expectations of his readers.

>>53346475

It probably looked less overtly retangular when it was spread between two bits of paper in the back of a book.

The bearded faggot didn't realise that if he filled in the entire page evenly it'd end up really square.

>>53362009
He's very much a child of the 70's.

>dude what if moral ambiguity lmao
>dude what if life wasn't like the stories lmao
>dude Vietnam lmao

Yes I know he was born in the fourties, but he started writing in the seventies and it was the Vietnam war and the culture of the late sixties and seventies that most influenced his work.

>>53361780
if you write anything detailed about hand to hand combat without actually being a fighter yourself I'll guarantee that your 5 hours of research amounts up to nothing

>>53362164
A good setting supports the kinds of stories you want to tell in it rather than steals attention away from them.

>>53362667
The problem is that he's taken so long to write the series that even the original things he did are now considered cliched.

>>53362681
I have years of martial arts experience, I just needed to make sure I was describing the particular style correctly.
Generally speaking, I agree with you.

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>>53362012
The wind comes from the North because magic, making a rainshadow happen to the south of the Red Mountains.

>>53362009

You can't really write about happiness. >>53363040

Actually I THINK the idea is that Dorne is southern mediterrenean/california and Stormlands is like Normand/England. The usual hot zone shit that happens on western coasts.

Yes, I know it doesn't make sense as in Westeros the globe turns from west to east as IRL, but still.

I don't get why people enjoy Martin's work so much.

>>53363294
It's f-fun

>>53361663
I can't tell if you're being serious.

>>53347962
Dude, that map literally shows you a cut of the world equivalent of going from just north of stockholm (and that too only if we assume that the world of ASOIAF is not just a lot cooler and has the arctic cycle begin way more south, which is possible considering all we know of the lands north of the wildlings lands is that they too are potentially fuckhuge) down to the northern reaches of the amazon rain forest. It doesn't even cover half the world in height alone. You can't even see the eastern half of Essos and we know that there is something like America because the iron men of Last Light discovered it and, instead of following Euron, fucked off on their boats to the new world.

Also, Have you LOOKED at how fucking fucked up the geography of Europe is compared the the rest of the world? If I showed you a map of Europe drawn by very advanced medival scribes you would shit all over it for how muh thats not how tectonics work.

And all that going by a purposefully bad and missrepresentative version of the actual map that is posted here all the time to trigger retards like you.

And all that is even before we consider that much of this geography that makes the continents look as blocky as it is is literally due to magic. The shipbreaker bay, the stepstones, the neck, all of that is because of successive use of ancient magic trying to stop humans from going there.

>>53346341
No, it's an example of mediocre cartography.

This is a good video about this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVGonAUUQ8c

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>>53363941
>REEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>>53358900
Tolkien also happen to create one of THE most extensive fictional worlds, period. And you are seriously trying to use it as an example of cheap tricks.

>>53363941
Westeros is the size of south america

>>53360110
>Being this tier retarded
Caesar brought army already trained and prepared by someone else with himself, based on centuries of Republic's development into the field of military. There was already everything prepared. And he had to do with almost no resupply and reinforcements when in Gaul. So it's more a case of tactical genius (the guy was wickedly smart at handling battles) than anything else.
And doesn't compare at all with raising levies day and day out and marching them to get everyone killed in single battle. Because that's probably the most annoying part of GRRM writing - every army exists to be either victorious or wiped out to last man. And that's also what makes his "SNAP! Suddenly wild army appears!" so annoying - there is just no way you can wage constant wars with casualties off the roof and with barely any infrastructure at all to equip a small band, not to mention an army.
I mean it doesn't take a genius to realise that if you are going to raise a levy, you need to arm those people with something. And when you have 10 cities and handful of village in entire fucking continent, it begs a question from where the fuck you take both people and material for those armies.

>>53348234
>>53348381
>>53348408
>>53354329
>>53354487
>>53354684
To me the unrealistic thing about the Iron Islanders mining aluminum isn't that aluminum doesn't naturally occur in its metallic form, or that it is a substandard choice when durability is the top concern. Lead, tin, iron, copper, and silver all were refined from ore in antiquity. Only gold was often found in its native form.

No, the unrealistic parts are its discovery and refinement. Humans have used aluminum salts (alum) since antiquity but we didn't discover metallic aluminum until the 1800s and didn't discover an economically feasible way to refine aluminum from ore until the 1880s.

Lead, tin, iron, copper, silver, and gold all date back to antiquity, most of them used in refined forms since before the invention of writing. But aluminum is a distinctly late-modern product.

>>53364401
Don't post if this is all you have to say.

>>53364429
Nobody said the tricks were cheap! Except that one angry anon. That anon needs to chill.

>>53365118
It's almost like GRRM didn't bother to do any research. :/

>>53364383
Wow, I sped through that at speed x1.5, but this was really really dissapointing. This is the most basic shit I have ever heard. She only ever scratches the very surface of any interesting point.

If you think this is actual advice and didn't think of this already the very first moment you ever thought about worldbuilding, you are probably so stupid that noone should give you this advice lest you actually go through and build a shit world with you below average uncreative intelect.

From the title of the talk I would have assumed that she would talk about how geography influences culture, how the toplology of terrain and cultures influences a world, how to do basic geography so that peoples eyes don't bleed the moment they look at one of your shit maps, stuff like that. The only thing she does is state the plain fact that all of this exists, period. Well no shit sherlock, I thought it was YOUR job to convey to me HOW it does.

>>53365450
Thanks for calling it out. Was gonna watch but if it's less than the basics it's not worth it.

>>53348244

my god I haven't seen someone miss the point of worldbuilding this dramatically in ages

>Because the moment you mention something, it creates curiosity to learn something about it.

this is something every sci-fi/fantasy author dreams of having in their worlds

>>53365596
It isn't even the basics. Its just "this exists. if you care about money, you need to know or you will have a bad time"

>>53349114

do you realize what sub youre in

>>53365635

>sub

oops

>>53365635
>sub

>>53349147

>free love
>everyone is beautiful
>only nation to successfully defend themselves from Targaryens

seems like we found Gurm's author insert land

>>53365118
It's almost like fictional settings can have technological advancements at a different rate then the real world.

>>53365714
Sure they can. It can even be done well. That's also not even the heart of the subject of criticism in this case. They have it without any reason stated as to how that knowledge came about or the necessity that mothered it.
Even without the story ever making any use of it beyond dropping the name.

I could fucking say it's not actually aluminum and probably be correct because GRRM never describes the use or necessity of it in any way shape or form. It's... a useless nagging detail. Literally fucking nothing.

If that's your standard for good go fuck yourself with a stalagmite.

>>53365622
When someone finishes reading my story and says "I want to know more!" I tend to take it as a compliment instead of as a personal failing. :^)

>>53365635
inb4 everyone else here pretends not to go on Reddit

>>53365714
Well, gee, it sure is impressive of the Iron Islanders to develop large-scale electricity production solely for the purpose of refining aluminum. But you'd think they would have found other uses for electricity.

You do know that's why aluminum has one of the highest values for recycling, right? Because it takes a lot of electricity to refine bauxite ore into aluminum, while you can just melt down existing metallic aluminum.

>>53365797
I didn't know any of this but it makes sense with the Civ 5 tech tree, so I assume it's true.

>>53346962
Ah yes, the Autism Measurement of a good setting.

>>53366870
It's a mite more complex than that, but anon is mostly right.

You don't actually need to master the secrets of electricity and open a 4000 volt can of worms in order to refine bauxite aluminum metal. It can infact be done at great cost and difficulty chemically which as the reason it was so expensive. Perfect,a nice ultra-luxury metal to add to the world that is just about within reach of medieval/renaissance/magic alchemist hand-wavery?

So our ASOIAF aluminum only actually need a early/mid19thC knowledge of chemistry, the lab infrastructure, chemicals that themselves have to be gathered or synthised and the ability to pay for all that. So marginally more plausible than electro wizards but still completely outhere and that knowledge of chemistry is going to earth-shattering impact beyond a few lords eating will ally forks instead of silver.

>>53346973
>aluminium mined in the Iron Islands
What the fuck are you talking about? There isn't a single mention of aluminium in the series.

>>53354261
It's Eurasia and Northern Africa with south facing upwards.

>>53361623
>but it's probably closer to 2,000
That's still far enough back that the people of the setting have no business knowing anything about what happened back then.

>>53347871
>China
Built on rivers.

>Russia
Like the previous anon said; Russia didn't conquer most of its colonies till the 18th century.

>>53370342
And indeed they know very little beyond "people came from (((somewhere else))) and they knew how to use bronze so they won."
80% of the stuff that happened back then is considered myth or is very highly misunderstood. It's not unlike the medieval understanding of Hebrews' migrations based on the Bible.

>>53365794
the only time i go to plebbit is when i am researching something and a search engine hit directs me to that site, you mong

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>>53370688
>People who use more than 1 hobby-related web site have down's syndrome

>>53365635
Sub, like a submarine?

>>53355432
Holy fuck how can they all keep getting away with ripping him off?

>>53365714
Processing aluminium in any real quantity requires electrolysis, and is hideously expensive even by today's standards. Aluminium would be worth several times its weight in gold if they could refine it, as it would be an order of magnitude more difficult to produce than now. People really underestimate how difficult aluminium is to refine.

>>53371108
No, a sandwich.
>>53371170
It's all "references", same way the entire culture of the iron islanders is shadow over innsmouth + call of cthulhu
Carcosa is one thing but naming half your continent after another man's works is a bit fucking extreme.

>>53363294
It's a soap opera for people who believe themselves to be above enjoying soap operas while clearly not being being above enjoying soap operas.

>>53367134
And the Iron Islands are specifically stated to not bear precious metals (like exclusively chemically-refined aluminum would be).

>>53371170
By "ripping him off," I assume you mean Lovecraft? If so, there are three things to consider:
>Anything published before 1923 is in the public domain in the U.S. That includes a significant portion of Lovecraft's works.
>The copyright status of the remainder of Lovecraft's works is a matter of dispute. It is unclear whether copyrights were renewed as required by U.S. I.P. law at the time.
>Lovecraft encouraged other writers to reference his works (and borrowed heavily from others), as a way of making his stories feel like more of a part of real mythology/folklore.

>>53371108
Short for "subreddit," reddit's equivalent of boards.

It's relatively well-known that a good portion of fa/tg/uys also frequent reddit, but because of memes and 4chan culture in general it's something to be mocked.

>>53349203
This is so retarded it makes me head hurt.

>>53349305
You fucking moron, you just said it, AGAIN.

>>53354916
Yeah, Georgie would have to actually get there first.

>>53372657
>>53372717
Nice argument

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>>53372535
>it's something to be mocked

Because Reddit is fucking shit. It's fucking shit.

>>53346477
I kinda hope there will be more stuff revealed about Asshai, since what the fuck is that place?

>>53373963
Reddit is pretty much the same as 4chan. The only real difference being that their vote system makes it so that unpopular opinions are silenced while the anonymity here makes it so that retarded opinions are brought up constantly no matter how many times they are debunked.

Depending on the board you visit you will find everything from redditors who sound as if they belong here to ones that sound like 4chan's straw man of tumblr.

>>53374089
Martin has specifically said he will never show Asshai personally. Which may just be a bald faced lie.

>>53346901
I don't get what the image is trying to show.

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>>53374141
>reddit is pretty much the same as 4chan

>>53374141
Can I say "nigger" on reddit?

>>53374196
No you will be downboated into oblivion. r*ddit is fucking terrible about wrongthink. The difference between a dumb shitpost on 4chan and r*ddit:
>Mob rule and autism can silence you to everyone else by default
>I have to write a regex statement to hide your shitposts; it is viewable to everyone by default
Also it encourages strawmanning and ad hom because people can look through your post history and see you said "nigger" 2 years ago. Many boards even have spam filters that block you from posting if your upboat meter is not high enough.

>>53374182
I guess that's your loss then.

>>53372535
Is that the place with retarded attention whores, upboat beggers and conformists?

>>53358411
This map has several mistakes. Like the Riverlands are under the control of Baelish who is the Lord Paramount there, not the Freys who merely got Riverrun for their troubles.

Also lots of random grey areas...

>>53354682
This is one of the fundamental issues I have with fantasy as a whole. Most authors get the little details right but lack understanding of the greater whole or more fundamental aspects which makes even the more reasonable things stand out as unrealistic and poorly thought out.

>>53374196
Depends on the board and the context.

>>53353749
The Port side is called that, because that's the side of the ship that faces the Port historically.
The Starboard side comes from Middle English terms, roughly translating to "Steer side", because the steering oar used to be by convention on that side. (This is also why the Port side was always the opposite, so the steering oar doesn't get in the way of the port.)

Are you telling me that in this land of magic and alchemy there's no way that he first time someone established a convention for which side the steering oar should be, it was the opposite of how we did it?

>>53348427
I wish the map mattered fucking at all in Diablo

>>53346341
No.

>>53354103
What are Westeros' tax policies?

So related to the OP, and to >>53346384 and >>53346477
What stories best work for ASOIAF RP? I mean plot hooks as well as themes. Pre-written adventures have already used "Wedding (Feat. Deception)" and "Tournament (Feat. Conspiracy)" plus you have the plotlines through the series. So what's left to do in Westeros for a small house other than scaled down versions of problems facing the great houses?

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>>53374196
1. On some subreddits, yes.
2. If that's your litmus test for the quality of a website, you might be an asshole.

>>53374253
You act like Reddit is a single community. Many subs, especially the hobby-related ones, suffer very little from this. You know, kind of like how /tg/ is a less shitty place than /pol/.

>>53374459
As opposed to the place with the edgy memesters and "no fun allowed" grognards?
See, I can make caricatures too.

>>53381489
Still didn't manage to paint them bettee than us.

>>53374459
>He seriously just called people conformists

You must be at least 18 years old to post here anon.

>>53381717
>bettee than us
You're still ignoring the large overlap. There's no "us" and "them" except to those people who are on one site only, but there's no reason to think they represent the overwhelming majority. Subs like /r/lfg come up regularly on /tg/.

>>53374141
However, the downvotes also create a symptom of an echo chamber too, not just prune idiots and retards from being the forefront of discussion. Even if they're plain wrong or unpopular, a bad post can still create discussion and beneficial ideas coming forth to anons who read past the first few posts, and there is also the simple idea that we're all equal without anyone's voice being more weighted with any sense of authority by virtue of anonymity.

>>53382175
That's definitely a bit of a downside, and Reddit is somewhat more prone to echochamberism than 4chan. But again, that's mostly a problem in opinion-based subs, not hobby-based ones.

Does anyone have any experience using Dwarf Fortress to generate and export maps?

>>53382878
Pretty sure a Game of Thrones thread already in autosage about to die is not the best place to ask this, but good luck

>>53382913
Thought this was a worldbuilding general, oops.