"For as long as your arse will polish the throne."

"What?"

"Oh, just a little saying my people have. That birthright has nothing to do with it, the rightful ruler is whoever will leave the kingdom better than they got it. If the throne shines brighter after you've sat your time on it, it was your arse that polished the throne."

"With all due respect, when it comes to the sayings and expressions of your people, every single one of them has been impressively crude."

"With all due respect, my liege, you have not heard the ones that are impressively crude. Would you like to hear one of those?"

"I would rather not."

"Not even the one about missing opportunities because you didn't want to look to the lowly places where they came from?"

"Especially not that one."

"Ah. I thought so. Worth a try nonetheless."

Fantasy setting where the calendar has exactly twelve months of thirty days, but the year is still 365 days long; the remaining five days are nameless, numberless, considered to be part of no month or year, and may strike at any time, being impossible for mortals to predict in advance – you just wake up in the morning and see the Signs. Sometimes they're widely scattered throughout the year, sometimes you get two or three in a row; all five in one go is either a very good omen, or a very bad one. Some years have six nameless days rather than five and nobody knows why.

This post: *repeatedly emphasies that it's talking about randomly distributed intercalary days*

The notes: "This is just [calendar system in which the intercalary days are not, in fact, randomly distributed]."

"I have all this cool, complicated wordbuilding I want to use, but I don't want to slow the narrative to a crawl by constantly stopping to explain stuff" so just don't. Use made-up words without defining them. Let things pass without comment. Have the narrative voice remark on exceptions to the setting's norms without ever explicitly establishing what those norms are. Treat it like you're writing the fourth book in a series and the reader already knows all this shit, and if they can't figure it out from context, fuck 'em.

Fuck ‘em (phrase) - Commonly used shorthand for, “I am the author of my own universe, quite literally, and do not need to preoccupy myself with reader accessibility while guiding characters through the machinations of my universe. Readers may deduce a surprising amount of information from my factual statements and, even if they do not, the gaps will be addressed by a universal translator (an editor) at a later date.”

Help someone got me ranting on how Westeros’s economy and agriculture make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER before bedtime

how am I supposed to go to sleep now

Okay basically:

You get the European High Middle Ages by achieving agricultural surplus.

NOT having agricultural surplus means: You just barely have enough food to make it through the winter. Producing food is the highest agricultural priority. Everyone who CAN make food DOES make food. Major agricultural events like harvest, planting, fishing, roundup, and butchering are all-hands-on-deck events where the entire community has to work together to make sure you last the winter.

These are Earth winters in Northern Europe. Winters that last a couple of months.

The High Middle Ages in Europe were made possible because agriculture got good enough that some places could produce WAY more food than was necessary, which allowed others to specialize. You need a LOT of agricultural surplus to get:

The last one is the especial kicker. That kind of economic and agricultural devastation is very characteristic of the Hundred Years War, which ASOIAF is mostly based on. It arose when you got so much agricultural surplus that you could literally set fire to crops and mills and kill peasants and still make it through the winter.

So Westeros is, essentially, an incredibly food-secure society.

And then

You tell me

THAT WINTER LASTS ANYWHERE FROM A FEW YEARS TO ALMOST A CENTURY???

And all the Starks do to prepare for it is sound ominous and put glass greenhouses in a stone castle?????????????

Man so much this.

I never got involved with GoT because I’d been warned it was grim in a way I find unfun, but I heard it was about a bunch of people competing to be ruler of a region defined by periodic multi-year winters, of which the first in a while was coming up soon. And that the writer had described his goal as ‘like Tolkien but with more realism.’

And I assumed for actual years that a core element of the entire drama was the different would-be leaders and factions having different logistical plans to prepare for the Ice Zombie Climate Change Decade (including presumably at least one ‘That’s Fake Haha’) and how much of what kinds of supplies are to be stored in what ways, for whose benefit, and the constant loss of precious time as everyone backstabs each other, while the constant shifting of power means that no one’s infrastructure plans get fully realized, so Westeros has about 20% of the necessary granaries and Winter Is Coming.

Until I casually asked a fan who’d been explaining the ice zombies and the Crazy Big Wall to me what the culture’s norms for caching food for the long winters had been, traditionally, only to find that nothing of the kind had ever come up.

For admittedly neither the first time nor the last, I was so bitterly disillusioned in a cultural phenomenon in which I had steadfastly declined to participate.

#i know#this is not the first time i have ranted about this on this blog#but!#but!!!#i just cannot get over#he ripped off Pern and bragged about his realism and couldn’t be arsed to care about the agricultural economy in any meaningful way#and he wants to talk his worldbuilding up contra TOLKIEN?#man that guy may have stylized his politics#but at least i understand how people in middle earth#are alive#anyway

I love it when people are Mad About Worldbuilding. Those are my kinda people.

I would 1000% be there for a North where they look grim and dour to Southerners because they think the Southerners are fucking morons who are way too frivolous and are not preparing enough while the North has been busting ass to actually, really, seriously prepare for the next who-knows-how-long winter since the end of the previous one bc Winter Is Coming you fucking grasshoppers and the idea of the South being able to order them to part with even one single grain of their stores or one salted sardines when the going will inevitably get tough is galling and makes every true Northener want to just put a sword through their hearts and spare the North from them and their feasts.

I want the entire North to have figured how to survive on, like, mushrooms they grow in dark rooms that they just need to keep heated up and have no actual need for sun, and like drinking a little bit of your horse’s blood every day and then carefully tending to the wound, and thus storing dried and dehydrated grain that would be somewhat inedible for humans but can keep their cattle going a long time. I want them to specialize in long term storage of foods like salting and drying. I want them to have invented glass jars sealing, and be mildly off put by even the though of food that goes bad in only a couple of days. (They see someone just leave a tomato on their counter without doing anything to cook/prepare/conserve it and get twitchy.) I want them to have an agriculture based on lichen and to be professionnal ice-fishers.

I want the North to have a food culture that is so wildly different from all the other groups that they’re constantly told their food is weird and bad.

This was created by someone who takes jabs at Tolkien during interviews for not spending more time on “Aragorn’s tax policy”…

I wonder if the long winter idea seemed like a good idea at the start, then all the politics and war and stabnation and rapeicity took over and seasonal stuff got sidelined or even forgotten.

The next books are called “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring”, so those seasons may be getting a bit more attention.

Let me know if it happens.

“this worldbuilding/story point you created is so cool and I’d love to see you do more with it” me too, mate. me too.

Two universal constants of high fantasy living:

I’m sorry, sir, if you don’t renovate your summer keep and live in it at least one month out of the year, we’ll have to charge you with Negligent Dungeonization of Property. The old cellar laboratory might have belonged to your uncle, but if you aren’t going to use it, something will.

The players are a squad of government investigators, trying to prevent monsters from claiming new habitat. It’s mainly negotiation but sometimes people have an interest in attracting dangerous entities for their own purposes.

I love this so much!! GIVE 👏 ME 👏 DUNGEONS 👏 WITH 👏 BACKSTORIES

Heck but I’d play that idea though

Reverse embezzlement.

Evil accountants, hired by people who hate you surreptitiously adding gold to your treasure rooms, increasing your wealth incrementally, until the day the Dragon Event Horizon is passed and you’re ruined.

The group hired to stop the evil accountants are called Robin Hoods. They’re oftentimes nearly too late and end up having to pull some elaborate heist to distribute the gold over a wide enough geographical area that the dragon looses the scent

“Gods damn thee, Hardison!”

Let a building fall into ruin, but every year, go back there and add a bunch of gold

If you get it just right, the Dragon Event Horizon will be reached at the same time as the necromancer moves in, and then you get to sit back, eat popcorn, and take notes on what happens so you can write an article and get published in Mad Artificer Weekly

People understandably question the worldbuilding behind the minor covens besides the nine main ones despite mostly being mentioned as jokes and I personally like to think they’re like job-specific sub-covens to the main ones where the person would still get the related sigil to the main coven. Cat and Tiny Cat Coven? Those are Beast Keeping sub-covens. Baking Coven? Potions sub-coven (because you mix ingredients together). Flower Coven is a sub-coven to the Plant Coven. I know Therapy Coven is a fandom joke but I‘m sure the Healing Coven could have a sub-coven specializing in mental health.

i honestly think that worldbuilding as a concept was done a great disservice by the kind of overly literal "criticism" that demands to know where blue dye comes from if it's mentioned at all - the Clothing-Dyers' Guild and its supply chain issues can be a fun thing to explore but unless you want to and it contributes to the main goals (plot, feel of world, theme) of your book, you can just say that they had blue dye.

That can be is really important for me - I love fantasy financial drama. I'm planning on writing some fantasy financial drama. It's very fun for me to go into all the gory details of running a realm. But if that's not a big part of the book, that's fine.

Ectober 2015 Day 1: Ghost Lights

looks welcoming 

dont it

i mean come on ghost zone businesses would be hella rad

idk how consistent or effective they are but

this month, I am am trying to start and complete “the compendium” - a catalogue of thirty outfits for thirty different characters from original worldbuilds.

be sure to follow me on twitter @ sabattons to catch them as they go up

for all of you guys that are writing fantasy and getting into fantasy cartography, i highly, highly recommend that you sit through artifexian’s youtube series on building realistic fantasy maps

he basically breaks down stuff like how to realistically place climate zones on a map, what they look like, how ocean currents work, how they affect things (like where your world’s fishing hubs and climates are going to be placed), where mountain ranges should go and how they affect climate, where your world’s metals (i.e. resource wealth) are going to be found, and on and on and on. it’s SUPER incredibly fucking helpful and really fleshes your world out in a whole new way

Random mansion generator

The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/random-mansion-generator.html

Oooooh! Saving this

That’s fun

Hey, but don’t fall asleep on this Medieval Fantasy City Generator   

If you want the next step up from cities, check out this world map generator!

A random example:

It can also show you the heights of regions of the maps, what kind of biomes you might expect, generate border shifting, upload base maps from images, assign areas where specific cultures or religions are practiced, you can add, move and name every single town in a country, add provinces within the country, generate place names from language databases, shift rivers, change the direction of global wind patterns and see how that effects the climate… There’s a bunch of stuff you can do with it!

@ourorobotic

Major population centres in and around the Arctic circle

Experiment with political systems

Sure, having a king/queen is simple, but have you ever tried:

There are thousands of possibilities, be creative!

Older post, but I highly encourage it! Try out the weirdest stuff! Try things you think would never work in the real world because this is your world and if you say (insert political system believed to not work) works then it does

Here’s a list of Society and Government types I’ve stolen directly from the worldbuilding section of some rulebooks:

Anarchy: the social conscience maintains order, but there are no laws

Athenian Democracy: Every citizen can vote on every new law

Representative Democracy: Elected representatives form a congress or government

Clan: Pretty much whoever is older is in charge, traditions are strongly adhered to, and society as a whole is split cross many tribes that are generally similar (and usually allied) but with their own quirks and traditions

Caste: A lot like a Clan structure, but each clan has a set role in society that usually renders them co-dependent. These Castes usually follow a social heirarchy

Dictatorship: One person controls everything, and they will later pass the right to rule to someone else, whether by inheritance, election, duelling, or some other method. Not all dictatorships are bad, especially if they are formed in times of crisis or rebellion, but even those started with the best intentions may quickly corrupt.

Plutocracy: Whoever has money is in charge.

Technocracy: A group of scientists and engineers have complete control and do everything they can to run the country at maximum efficiency. The more competent they are, the more likely this is to be viewed as a good thing.

Thaumocracy: Like a technocracy, but run by a science-like form of magic (like wizards and arcanists rather than shamans and witches)

Theocracy: The Church controls everything, and their religious law is civil law. Whether this religion is real, is fake but knows it, or believes its own lies is up to you.

Corporate State: Powerful mercantile organisations have taken control of entire regions. This is a lot like a Technocracy, but with a corporate structure and a focus on maximum profitability (and no-one else is going to set them a minimum wage)

Feudal: A lot like a dictatorship, but subsidiary lords are assigned their own local power and can enforce their own law without notifying the larger state.

***VARIATIONS***

Bureaucracy: Government runs very slowly and the public has effectively no control. There is a lot of red tape and taxation is high.

Colony: Government is dependent on a mother society

Cybercracy: A computer system is the state administrator. Hopefully the programmers did a good job…

Matriarchy: Positions of authority are female-exclusive.

Meritocracy: Positions of authority require rigorous testing to qualify for.

Military Government: The Military control everything, usually but not always totalitarian

Monarchy: The person in charge may call themselves king or queen, but fundamentally this is either a dictatorship or a feudal society.

Oligarchy: A small organisation is in control, and it elects its own members.

Patriarchy: like a matriarchy, but for guys. what a novel idea

Sanctuary: A society that protects the people other societies hunt (that may be considered criminals or terrorists by other nations)

Socialist: The government directly manages the economy, education is easy to get, the government intervenes to get everyone possible a job. This is likely to collapse quickly without good technology or magic to assist it.

Subjugated: The society as a whole is completely controlled by an outside force.

Utopia: A perfect society where everyone is satisfied and nothing sinister is happening behind the scenes we swear.

Ooooh this is a freaking great post :)

Day 6- Worldbuilding

Day 9: World Building I like to imagine that a certain wandering ghost eventually makes a home for himself.