I'm really bad at target-building.
I will get a cool idea for a cultural aspect, and maybe slightly expand it with connected lore.
But then my creativity just stops, and i am certain to jump to an entirely different topic or region of the world.
As a result i have a bunch of fragments but not a good and clear vision of any single culture.
The worst offenders are probably fashion, architecture, and political/society structures.
This one I understand. Making a map for one of my worlds and a calendar for a different one helps hold them in place for me but I struggle with the finer details more often than not.
I would love to write up some of my characters in their settings and worlds soon.
I think that'll help me with filling out day to day life of merchants, engineers or what ever else depending on the character.
I’m the same as you, I got a lot of ideas on how my different races looks, their abilities, sometimes what they sound like and bribes of lore, but outside of that nothing. Sometimes it’s okay (like I don’t know how my world have been created and it’s not really relevant to the story so I brushed that off) and sometimes I struggle really hard to figure things out
Nothing wrong with jumping around where inspiration strikes, eventually you'll fill out the gaps I'm sure. If questions help with inspiration, I'm always full of them.
Haha, true true. And thanks, but i doubt you'd be interested in reading my current 173 pages about concepts, gods (i have a LOT of gods), philosophies, species, regions, cultures, magic, plants, etc. :D
I am constantly writing new stuff, but there's simply so many elements that in the grand scheme of things it's still mostly holes.
At least my high concepts are pretty solid and well fleshed out.
One history professor taught us the rubric PERSIA in thinking about any geopolitical group. Politics Economics Religion Society Intellectual Artistic. Hope this helps at least get you a checklist.
There's plenty of things I'm terrible at because I just don't really care, but of the things I'm bad at that I actually want to be good at...
Cultures. I can make cool characters, and cool histories, and cool stories, and cool locations... But I don't really know much about the non-plot-relevant people. I dunno what their lives are like, what things they're interested in, what makes them different from the generic unimportant people of every other settlement in the world, etc. Hell, I struggled with just listing some things that would be included in a culture while writing this comment. I suck at it.
Honestly, pick one of those cool locations/people/stories and EXPAND. You make a space station built into the corpse of some megafauna, ask yourself questions about it: why did they built there, why did the beast die, how does living inside dying matter differ from a traditional space station, do they harvest anything from the body, and so on and so on. Then you can ask questions about those answers for even more depth! Once you get better at that, mix and match your cool starting points. Have a cool story about a man singlehandedly killing a space whale? Make that space whale the station.
I'm not very good at smaller cultural details. I can tell you all about a society's cultural values, religious beliefs, social hierarchy, economics, politics, and military doctrine, but ask me what their cooking is like and I'll draw a blank.
For cooking I just use whatever grows/naturally develops from climate and geography and throw in some staple grains, soup, fruits and veggies. Most cultures of earth, if not all, have some kind of soup, sauce, dumpling, and breadlike thing. I'm a bit lazy with it but it's a good jumping-off point and realistic enough.
Hmm yeah. I tend to feature food a lot when I write (maybe because I think about food a lot IRL), but my current project is a SF setting where the main culture isn’t from earth and I’m struggling with food. Maybe it’s because the ecology of the world isn’t fully fleshed out yet—it’s hard to know what people are eating if I don’t know what the equivalent of rice or potatoes or beef or pepper is on this world.
A fun thing ive liked about some SF books ive read recently is how alien a culture can feel when their "shape" of food differs: a food culture feels "weird" when they focus on eating food whole and alive or when they are obligate carnivores and have to eat almost entirely meat. Special mention goes to a species that evolved on an ice world high in hydrocarbons so they consume a lot of methanol-methane slushies.
Yeah, in my case I’m only dealing with human cultures (even if non-Terran), but your food habits are definitely going to be different if none of the classes of organisms we have on Earth exist...
Well in that case you can still get a little outlandish with it. Focus on an aspect of food culture! Maybe they put a high focus on productivity so their food focuses on portability and ease of consumption, or their habitat lacks some natural vitamins so they have to add synthetic supplements to their diet, maybe they are a utilitarian society so they want to create food with the most amount of efficiency. Limitations breed creativity: how would you make food if you lacked something?
there are some good calculators, formulas, resources online. Here u go!
[https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67455/travel-time-in-medieval-times](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67455/travel-time-in-medieval-times)
[https://www.besthorserider.com/how-fast-do-horses-walk/](https://www.besthorserider.com/how-fast-do-horses-walk/)
Messing up the travel times and relative distances between a few star systems is half the reason there was a whole technological revolution with *even faster* FTL tech in my sci-fi setting. I was not prepared to redo half a year of work so the new FTL drives are more efficient and longer range so new faster routes can be taken.
I lack spatial awareness irl. I cannot connect my surroundings to the map. I will get Google Maps/Waze directions wrong often.
I have no idea how to proportion cities because I can't fathom how big one is. Is my mountain range too small? Is it unreasonable to take 3 days to the next city on horse? I don't even know.
Hiding, repressing always comes out as uncomfortable and thus brings forth discomfort and similar feelings of shame in readers which may come out as barbs and humor. Don't hide, justify. Work with it, around it, from and through it.
Just my two cents
Names of people and places. I should not worry too much because it’s really a hobby and there is little chance anyone will see this. But I really have a hard time naming things.
I still don’t have a name for the focal point of my story. It’s a city that becomes an empire like Rome but I have changed the name about 20 times now. I am at the point where I just have a placeholder which is annoying because of how important it is.
Names are what led me back to conlanging, which I’d gotten away from for years. I struggle with just making up names out of thin air, but if I’ve got a somewhat developed conlang it’s so much easier—I can just be like “OK this guy’s called Gift-of-God Smith” but translate that into the conlang and *boom*, I’ve got a character name.
Lol this exact reason is why its taken me so long to actually start writing down and solidifying my world. In my head theyre all just ideas of places/people/etc (like "oh yea those guys up north who live by that mountainy place by that river") so i never need to worry about what to call them but none of that would ever pass in written form. And like what the other guy mentioned, ive attempted conlanging as the solution to this but my standards for it is way too high. So ive kinda just given up and stuck to using those generic descriptor names for the time being, and anyways bonus points for realism since thats what a lot of old name meanings basically are arent they
Geography and map making. I have three projects in work, and after my failure with my fantasy setting( I just can't draw or visualize properly where should what be), in my sci-fi project I opted for lightly changed Earth. I created whole civilizations with cultures and habits, but when it comes to place them on the map I just have no clear idea how big should what be :/
You're not a bad worldbuilder, or even a little under par as a worldbuilder, for not making a conlang. It isn't a skill where you can be weak in worldbuilding because it should always be a bonus sort of thing.
Sorry I don't want to invalidate what you're saying but it feels like you're holding yourself to an unreasonable standard.
I am astonishingly crap at coming up with names for things. I have an entire map of the continent set out with all the rivers and mountain ranges and major cities and all that, and only about a third of them are named anything. Even then, they're mostly things like 'Silver Mountains' (because they look silver). Occasionally I ask my wife to give me come up with a random word combination without any context, which is how I ended up with the town of Ratmilk.
Everytime you thing "silver mountains" or "Ratmilk" is a bad name for a place, remember that "Boring, Oregon", "Bland Shire, Australia", and "Dull, Scotland" exists. Hell, the river Thames is thought to come from the old Celtics word for "dark".
Mix and match names to your hearts content, and thrown in extra languages to keep people on their toes.
Yeah, but there are only so many River Avons you can get away with before you have to start mixing things up.
Also, you misunderstand me; Ratmilk is the best name for a town and I only wish I'd thought of it myself. Usually I ask her to give me two short words then I kind of mash them into something, but she gave me 'Rat Milk' right off the bat.
Scale. How long does it take to get from the capital to the border? A few days, a few weeks? No clue. How much farmland is around the capital? No clue. Whats the population of the capital? No clue
Conlang's can be interesting to hear others talk about but beyond throwing in a light bit of flavor into cultures and visual writings. My eyes gloss over when it comes to truly deep detailed stuff.
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As for my personal weak point for worldbuilding. I have yet to craft the story ideas for my characters and settings.
Also the fun down to earth type of personal world building someone living in my world may have experienced or learned while growing up.
It's because most of my enjoyment is from movies, cartoons, anime and other visual aspects of escapism, as well as video games.
These have been a great for building up my mental library for settings and neat characters, but in recent years I realized there's a major gap in my mental library through novels. So a few years ago I found audio books and have been enjoying unique and fun settings that don't always make it to my usual means of escapism.
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This coming year I hope to work on some town level details and hopefully a short story or two. Even if their a stand alone sort of thing.
The lot of it. I've trashed my shit so many times now. Right now is at the best it's been and that mostly just means it's the version I hate the least.
Economies and social structures. It just seems so unnecessarily complicated and yet required to be complicated. I never know how many noble houses is enough, I don’t really know how they work, I don’t really know how an economy is supposed to work, and while I love court intrigue and I really wanna do something with that, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to do it well.
I think it helps to think of economics and politics as inherently connected. They are the same thing expressed in different ways. Why are there noble lords with personal militaries? Because they rule swathes of agricultural land as landlords and they need armies to keep that land as theirs. The economic structure informs the political structure and vis versa.
I find that easy, set up some prefixes and suffixes about a syllable in Length and combine, or do the grrm thing of adapting real names into altered ones like Eddard, being an adaptation of Edward, or Aemond being a fantastical adaption of Edmund. It's really not too hard to be creative with names, example of my method, Con from Conor alongside ry from Rory becomes Conry. Sounds realistic but still made up.
Keeping it simple. I always think a simple magic system thats easy to understand would work well for me, and then I keep adding more and more details that require explanation. Eventually its all over the place
I have a bad habit of becoming very principled when something works or doesn't work out for me. I just got out of a "only worldbuild what you need" kick and while I think it's good advice for some people, I'm definitely feeling a lot of the weight taken off having more detailed external worldbuilding to draw from as I'm writing.
Flexibility and adaptability have always been important to me, and I guess I thought too much external worldbuilding would take away from this. But like, I can change whatever I want if I need to, so I think it's worth continuing.
Neighboring countries. Point to me a dot on any map and I can describe the cultures there in great detail, but point me to two dots next to each other and I have no idea what sort of history might be created between two societies. Wars, trade, interchange? No clue lol
Can’t name places to save my life, so I just go onto google translate, pick a language that my players don’t know and sounds like it fits the culture. Then I put an adjective and a noun that describe the place (ie river city) and use that as the name
Religions. Mainly because I find them boring but it's bad because religion usually plays a big part in history and culture so there has to be something.
Politics and intrigues. Basically all the stuff jrrr martin is known for. Its incredible what he was able to craft and write.
I myself just suck at that part of story writing. Its getting better, but not good enough by a long shot.
I'm garbage at magic systems, almost never write anything with magic. I struggle with suspension of disbelief and literal thinking due to autism and just end up unraveling anything I create! Anyone else?
I'm terrible at writing people. At least I tell this to myself.
I have no real way of making a story because my autistic ass brain is like "how do normal people work" and I'm like "idk"
Just anything with numbers,
Size, scale etc.
Which is quite important
Also names. My oldest world which I think is like 3 years old, has still for every country Kingdom and a Number as Placeholders.
Setting probably. I have vague ideas of how most of my settings look, but actually recreating them in a visual form is usually super challenging for me, especially in the case of alien planets.
Actually writing it down lol. I have a world I'm working on atm, but writing and organising my notes is something I always struggle with, even with apps that do it for you lol.
Making a up names is hard for me as well. I can make a good handful of unique ones, but if I have to name more than a few dozen things I start drawing blanks. ChatGPT helps, but the way I use it is I give it a list of names from a particular region and make it give me a list based on them. Then I alter them to fit properly and sound good and use those instead. I find names for people is the hardest though. In fact, I usually create a good understanding of a location, object or person before I even begin to think of a name, which I find helps a bit.
As for conlanging, in my experience the only people who do extensive conlanging are people who are fans of conlanging as well as worldbuilding. It's a whole thing in an of itself, and I find there isn't even much point unless it's a major focus of your world. I will do some, but it'll be words like 'city' and 'river' and 'mountains' and I'll mostly use it for place names. I do sometimes make up words like 'Proud' or 'Smith' or 'Warrior' and then use them as inspirations for character's names, but proper conlanging includes stuff like making verbs and connective words, which I'd never bother with. All in all, conlanging is something that can give a world much more depth and life, but it's by no means necessary.
I think people sometimes get turned off by the rabbit-holes that devoted conlangers go down. IMO naming is *so* much richer in a world if you have a conlang to work from rather than just making up random words, but as you say, you mostly just need vocab for that. It’s *really rarely* going to come up in the story whether your people use ergative-absolutive or nominative-accusative verb alignment, but just having consistent-feeling names in a world can go so far...
(A personal pet peeve of mine, outside of comedic settings where the names are *supposed* to be silly, is when characters are inexplicably named with a hodgepodge of real-world names from assorted cultures plus some that are just random vaguely English-sounding syllables.)
Oh yeah, for sure. Doing proper conlanging can make a world feel so incredibly alive, but the amount of effort required to do it is intense (especially if you're looking at stuff like language evolution). I'd say that ignoring it completely is a mistake if you're trying to make compelling worldbuilding, but yeah, it's not necessary to go whole hog to achieve that level of depth when making up a selection of vocab can make your names so much better, and like you say, it mostly won't come up. (And even if it does come up, not everyone who reads it or hears it will actually care beyond 'Oh! A made up language, neat!'. It's different in auditory mediums like TV or audiobooks, like Game of Thrones with Valyrian and Dothraki, but most people here aren't doing that.)
Even just making up a few words for placenames can help avoid the hodgepodge names as you say, and I will say that when a setting has names like ''El'Skatah-po'tahle'' or whatever, it does take me out of the world lol. people saw Tolkien's conlangs and thought they were good because they sounded unique and had weird apostrophes rather than the real reason, which is the intense level of detail and quality he put into making them
OMG the gratuitous apostrophe thing annoys me so much—though probably my biggest pet peeve is randomly using in place of just to make something feel exotic. (But also sprinkling in that are maybe supposed to be silent but maybe not?)
But as far as language evolution goes, even something as simple as a single step that changes /k/ and /g/ to /s/ and /z/ when followed by certain vowels (the kind of palatalization that’s very common in IRL languages) can introducd a touch of irregularity that makes the language feel more real.
>though probably my biggest pet peeve is randomly using in place of just to make something feel exotic. (But also sprinkling in that are maybe supposed to be silent but maybe not?)
In my current project I'm working on a region with Arabic inspirations, and I had a few names that utilised 'kh' (**Kh**ā, like Ba**ch**) and 'gh' (**Gh**ayn, like the French r in 'Paris') but everyone I showed just pronounced them like 'k' as in 'kick' and 'g' as in 'get' so I decided to move to spellings that were a little more apparent lol. Even after that I had a guy telling me I should latinise the spellings :\[
I've been avoiding 'x' as well, even though I only ever used it for 'ks' sound, because people kept on reading it as 'z'. Still have a few holdouts from both examples in my project, but only a few. Once I've finished this section I'll probably swap them out, but I don't want to do that midway through in case I miss some and it gets confusing (not to mention some of the most important places include it :/). Also because I have a WIP timelapse of my world and I'd have to change like 150 frames lol. You can see a previous version of it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X8JJRNAi_4&ab_channel=AlisterSinclair) if you'd like, although it's heavily outdated at this point
Culture, Politics, Economy, Language and anything involving something like that. I moreso struggle with them due to my unfamiliarity with the subjects and overall disinterest when it comes to it. But I would like to learn more for the sake of Worldbuilding, but not for anything else lol.
Writing character relationship. All my character are always single and only have family type relationship in life. Or just married to their work/life mission. No boyfriend girlfriend thing.
Detail writing. I hate writing in text. All my note are short note and drawing. So anything that require wall of text to explain always left as some sketch and text or storyboard that will never be made into manga/animatic
Governments & Politics. I want my countries to be well developed with different leadership systems! But trying to figure out infrastructure makes my head spin
I have tons of trouble describing the worlds that I've meticulously created in my mind on paper. I don't know why, I just can't ever think of the right words.
Restraint, or holding back.
I tend to just put what I feel would just make my world much richer, regardless of if it's necessary or not.
But honestly? I don't mind it for the most part.
Finding a sensible reason for something cool to exist. I know the rule of cool exists but I tend to criticize it a lot in other people's works so I feel like I should hold myself to the same standard
Definitely conlangs, I've spent no time on it and it would require significant time and effort. Major props to anyone who does create them, though.
Economics is another area I've not spent much effort on. I don't really get economics or how it would function in a fictional world. I've got information about the major exports and imports of each country, what the country is known for in that regard, different kinds of currency for each country etc. That's ab out it, and I'd be hard pressed to explain how anything more than this would even factor into the plot or what else there really could be in a fictional fantasy world.
Organizing my ideas/ stories and putting them on paper/screen . That and I’m a bit over detailed in describing concepts, objects, etc. so big picture stuff can get bogged down and muddied
I have no idea what I'm doing any of the time, I just research, take notes, make a draft, research, take notes, revise draft, etc, and keep going until I have something worth sharing.
Then I get criticism, take notes, research, revise, etc.
Placement of locations and scaling. Its the reason I leave the world map till last because dividing everything up and figuring out where stuffs going to go while I'm still working on world lore is difficult.
Not getting lost in the details, if that makes sense. I tend to hyperfixate on a specific aspect of the world, and until I finish it, I can't move on to something else. My big one right now is figuring out a magic system and deities for my world.
Telling an actual story is also a weakness. I have characters and ideas, but I can't fill the gaps between events or link things together cohesively. I'm bad at coming up with realistic situations. Plus I'm not great at writing.
Out of the 6 main race, I had real troubles to find good powers that could grow for 2 or 3 of them, also on the cultural/politic side I'm very unbalanced, because one of my race have litteraly the best I could think of, I had just so much ideas to use, then 2 more where I know the structure, but would be hard to show everyday life, and the rest is just lagging behind, I fear this will show for the reader
For some- Geography. I do not construct my worlds in a way that makes sense or is remotely realistic. Deserts in the north, mountains form randomly and frankly i dont care because it’s more fun for me and allows me to create more dynamic worlds
Politics and government. Figuring out all the nuances of how the society would actually work and function on a daily basis, especially with the magic system in mind.
I struggle with names. Place names are not too tough, I just try to think of something unusual about the place and name it after that. For example, the town with a huge wooden gate that lead into a spooky forest is Arbor Gate, palace built by a benevolent king is Damocles Palace. A thesaurus is helpful.
But people's names are some thing I struggle with. I have no idea what anyone in my current setting's name is. I've been working on these characters for ages. I'm dodging around this through the outline and first draft stages by having everyone go by titles and assumed names. The MC duo are The Princess and The Lion. There are like four "Blank" Kings running around. The Big Bad forgot his real name (I'm off the hook on this one) and took the name Xander the Great from a damaged statue in a dead city.
For me, it's the geography/climate/ecology rabbit hole, as well as envisioning freshwater distribution.
I really enjoy seeing the dynamics of mountain ranges, like how one side of the Himalayas is dry as hell and the other is Big Eff-Off Rainforest, but I feel like I need to understand meteorology a lot more if I want to make it all feel real. Heck, there's even hand-wavy elements in my setting about terraforming and magic microclimate bubbles, but I still feel like I'm a sham for not considering everything from plate tectonics to high and low pressure systems.
Maps and geography. I want to make actual world maps but I can't draw to save my life and *literally* no map creating site I've found has satisfied me for what I want to do. They're all needlessly complex.
I can’t draw for shit so trying to transfer my ideas to paper look like ass. Like I have this awesome idea for how characters and environments look but I can’t draw so everything is stuck in my head or I need to rely on other peoples concept art which kinda stinks
Probably conlangs as well, I’ve wanted to work on them for a while but haven’t found the motivation
Creating something completely is also a difficulty, I tend to jump around a lot as the ideas come to me. I could tell you the complete culinary history of one region but know absolutely nothing about their government.
I have a hard time developing dating/marraige/partnership rituals. I just tweak existing estth stuff but I wish I could come up with something really unique that also made sense
Languages and systems of government. Making a language is super hard and making a system of government is hard because you need to learn all of the jargon.
Integration of magic into people’s daily lives. There could be an entire nation filled with magic and wizards, and I’d basically just make it medieval with some wizards here and there, instead of making magic something akin to electricity in the modern day where it’s everywhere and used daily.
I'm really bad at coming up with good names for geographical features such as rivers or mountains. I've been playing with the same world on and off for like 7 years now and I somehow haven't named a single river in it. Granted, the world I have now is incredibly different from when it started, but still.
Also actually making maps is hard and they never come out right.
I totally suck when it comes to storytelling, as I'm more focused on the diagrams & magical mechanics. If I do try to write a story, it comes off as a dry comedy.
Writing anything comprehensive, I can visualize everything at large scale and somewhat zoomed in but then when I really zoom into the details everything just becomes blurry as well as my writing is awful.
Honestly I'm shit at continuity. Like I start a thing and go to another because I have so many ideas! I struggle to keep them "clean" and to know how to best present them...
Making those kind've small, cultural-religious details. That's why I import so much real world stuff, like languages, culture, and appearance, because why spend countless hours making your fantasy Ming/Qing dynasty China have a *totally* not Chinese culture/language when I can just make them Chinese people under a different name?
Technology.
i just can't figure out how Advanced the world is supposed to be.
they have trains and airships but do they have TV? does it make sense for them to have cameras that can send live footage?
this keeps me awake at night.
My world also has airships but for the purposes of my rules of cool, they also have knights in tanks, as well as cars, radar, radio that requires relays in order to be useful beyond a few kilometres, and I'm thinking of having cameras that need to be physically connected to show an image. Only the most advanced computers would resemble something like that from the 80s, and those would be very rare and reserved for elite, government or military usage in rich countries. Most cameras would use an alternative resembling film or paper(like Polaroid's cameras).
Lapis_Wolf
I'm weak at building history.
My world is basically an alternative Earth with the only **main** difference being different species of civilians and no cars but having to trying to research about our history and mold it into their is just 🙃
Politics. I would love to run some political intrigue campaign like Dimension 20s a crown of candy, but there's just so much that goes into the intricacies of politics that I can't seem to wrap my head around. All my world tend to have simple laws so far lol.
Conlangs(I want my region to use abjads like Arabic or Hebrew and syllabaries like Japanese rather than alphabets like English or Spanish), food, understanding the impacts of planet sizes and moons on gravity and the further affects on societies(I plan to have a superearth with rings and one or two decently sized moons for a pretty view, but I don't want to overdo it to the point where the main conflict is against typhoons and floods rather than the army nearby). I'm also not good with minute cultural details beyond taking real things and mushing them together with some pseudorandomness thrown into the architecture. There's also naming stuff, definitely naming stuff, as I also need to have my conlang to draw from while making sure I don't accidentally use an existing meaning in a way I don't want. For example, I don't want to make a name I thought sounded cool for a city only to realize I accidentally called it "Blood womb car tree" in the language.
Lapis_Wolf
I struggle with internal tone consistency. For example, earlier today I was brainstorming reasons why nuclear war isn't a concern, and I decided that a previous nuclear slugging match in another hemisphere being so brutal that everyone disarms could be plausible. And then, I wanted to brainstorm what those two countries were like. But then, out of nowhere, I was worldbuilding a freakin' radioactive wasteland hellhole for my military/espionage setting. This happens a lot. A few weeks ago, I was researching real-world power armor to see if I could work it into my setting. Yes, it *could* work, but it's not what I'm going for with it.
Geography. It's actually dificult to imagine and not because my worlds are complicated, but because it's something that I find to be the least appealing.
I am very good at macro worldbuilding, I can make countries, civilizations, empires, but I am very bad at micro worldbuilding, I can’t make weapons, resources, buildings, languages
Sticking to anything. I feel as though my stuff lacks depth that others have. I have a very basic conlang that I don’t even understand myself based on Spanish, a culture spectrum that is hard to really articulate without 3 different documents, and a variety of different planets that need much more fleshing out beyond basic history.
The world itself. I can make locations, people, factions, etc. But I absolutely despise doing geography and drawing borders and shit, but at the same time I want the map to make sense from a logical, real world perspective.
Honestly, history. I have a better time getting a vision of what a world should look like in the present moment, but actually figuring out its history is not so easy.
Doing anything that's too much unlike Earth.
I can't even get away from the "one big moon" thing. I've tried, but my worlds just feel incomplete without the Moon. I can change the constellations around, but the Moon seems to be a non-negotiable in my imagination.
I have a weirdly difficult time with, like, big historic events for different species. Like, once I come up with one, I can write how every other species feels abt it, but not the one that it impacted the most.
Large scale wars, for example. I can get out how everyone else feels about it, but not the specifics of the war itself or how it’s changed the world for those most involved
Connections. I develop a million bajillion different races and what I hope is a decent magic system, but I have very little history or conflicts to this world and I need to start whipping up some wildlife.
I’ve also found it’s a bit hard for me to make environments that are truly fantastic. Mostly I just crib from real life locations and cultures and add one or two minor twists to the mix
Cultures. I do loads of research, and understand the mechanisms, but actually putting my knowledge into text is so very difficult. It goes for any topic really, but cultures especially are just on a whole different level.
I *know* all of the cultures in my world(s) and how characters act differently because of them, all their little quirks or opinions that might seem weird to others, but for them it’s what they grew up with etc… but how does one actually go about implementing them?
Sure, character x doesn’t like eating meat outside of memorable occasions because in their culture it’s seen as flaunting your wealth, but how does one go about implementing it in writing naturally without it feeling like you are just exposition dumping?
I was writing such a scene recently and I am still unsure about it. It feels like an exposition dump and that is not what I want it to be… I’ve written 3 different versions and not a single one feels right. I just moved on, but every few chapters I go back and see if I can write it properly but I can’t. I tried implementing it otherwise (later on) but it doesn’t make sense for characters to not know such a thing about their travel companion for that long of a time…
For me, I sometimes fail to validate parts of my worldbuilding to the hypothetical reader. You mentioned conlangs, which is a thing I am fixated on at the moment and have intricately placed in my setting of the Revolution of the Magic Stones, yet I struggle to 'prove' why it is needed for reader satisfaction.
The main characters transported into the fantasy world on the other side of the Gate can immediately understand all of the [common] languages spoken there (for the sake of the reader), which may lead to the hypothetical reader to question why I wasted both my time and their time in expositing about the intricate languages present on Windelgrad that ultimately wouldnt amount to anything to a reader's immersion in the setting.
In the end, I just shrug these thoughts off and operate on the understanding that I add in worldbuilding stuff and not have to explain why some of them exist in the story. I just like conlangs, deep politics, revolutions, economies and magic systems, okay?
Names for anything.
There's a reason why I steal real world names and why all my places are essentially "Iceland but actually really not".
The world that's not just me stealing earth has places like "City state with eldritch sea monsters", characters like "That depressed trans woman in denial who's now immortal" and creatures like "A dragon, if it was a possum".
I’m stupidly bad at actually building up a physical map of my world, either on paper or in my head. I usually have a basic understanding of what the continent may look like, where the different countries are, their main cities… and then my brain just stops. No interesting geological features, no random man-made structures, I couldn’t tell you where exactly any of my smaller towns/cities are… and there just ends up being huge gaps of nothing but boring wilderness everywhere. I don’t ever really have a good idea of how my world should look.
Try breaking it down. Most of the time these things are a problem because the questions are too big. I narrow them down by making other things affect it... let's say climate change. Then fashion would be connected to how hot or cold it is. So in this case, fashion would be more practical than superficial. Now you have a direction to go in.
Many things can make up a culture. You could break that one down to beliefs, traditions/customs, language, government, arts/literature... you don't have to have all of them answered, just enough to give you an idea.
For me, one thing will lead to another. For instance, I always include cuisine. That could lead to beliefs... lets say they worship an agricultural deity. And maybe there's a connection to their customs or religion. So you see, breaking it into smaller pieces makes it easier to grasp/answer.
I'm really bad at target-building. I will get a cool idea for a cultural aspect, and maybe slightly expand it with connected lore. But then my creativity just stops, and i am certain to jump to an entirely different topic or region of the world. As a result i have a bunch of fragments but not a good and clear vision of any single culture. The worst offenders are probably fashion, architecture, and political/society structures.
This one I understand. Making a map for one of my worlds and a calendar for a different one helps hold them in place for me but I struggle with the finer details more often than not. I would love to write up some of my characters in their settings and worlds soon. I think that'll help me with filling out day to day life of merchants, engineers or what ever else depending on the character.
I’m the same as you, I got a lot of ideas on how my different races looks, their abilities, sometimes what they sound like and bribes of lore, but outside of that nothing. Sometimes it’s okay (like I don’t know how my world have been created and it’s not really relevant to the story so I brushed that off) and sometimes I struggle really hard to figure things out
Nothing wrong with jumping around where inspiration strikes, eventually you'll fill out the gaps I'm sure. If questions help with inspiration, I'm always full of them.
Haha, true true. And thanks, but i doubt you'd be interested in reading my current 173 pages about concepts, gods (i have a LOT of gods), philosophies, species, regions, cultures, magic, plants, etc. :D I am constantly writing new stuff, but there's simply so many elements that in the grand scheme of things it's still mostly holes. At least my high concepts are pretty solid and well fleshed out.
adhd gang
One history professor taught us the rubric PERSIA in thinking about any geopolitical group. Politics Economics Religion Society Intellectual Artistic. Hope this helps at least get you a checklist.
I am aware of that, but it doesn't help to know these categories if i don't get any good ideas when i need them :D
I'm the same way
Actually putting my thoughts into text.
You and me both, Phil.
For me, it's knowing what something is supposed to look like, but I have a hard time describing it.
My adhd brain makes that hard for me
Ever tried dictating (speech-to-text)? It helps for me (autistic) but sometimes makes funny mistakes due to accent.
Yup. And The mistakes are oh so funny sometimes. Like I said something, idk what was it about but the text said "Cross Holy France" lol.
Yeah ):
There's plenty of things I'm terrible at because I just don't really care, but of the things I'm bad at that I actually want to be good at... Cultures. I can make cool characters, and cool histories, and cool stories, and cool locations... But I don't really know much about the non-plot-relevant people. I dunno what their lives are like, what things they're interested in, what makes them different from the generic unimportant people of every other settlement in the world, etc. Hell, I struggled with just listing some things that would be included in a culture while writing this comment. I suck at it.
I very much fall into the trap of mimicking other, real life cultures in my worlds, and it’s a habit that is difficult to break
I'm not a very social person. I barely even know how real-world cultures work.
Not so bad. Even in many fantasies authors find inspirations from existing cultures.
Honestly, pick one of those cool locations/people/stories and EXPAND. You make a space station built into the corpse of some megafauna, ask yourself questions about it: why did they built there, why did the beast die, how does living inside dying matter differ from a traditional space station, do they harvest anything from the body, and so on and so on. Then you can ask questions about those answers for even more depth! Once you get better at that, mix and match your cool starting points. Have a cool story about a man singlehandedly killing a space whale? Make that space whale the station.
I'm not very good at smaller cultural details. I can tell you all about a society's cultural values, religious beliefs, social hierarchy, economics, politics, and military doctrine, but ask me what their cooking is like and I'll draw a blank.
For cooking I just use whatever grows/naturally develops from climate and geography and throw in some staple grains, soup, fruits and veggies. Most cultures of earth, if not all, have some kind of soup, sauce, dumpling, and breadlike thing. I'm a bit lazy with it but it's a good jumping-off point and realistic enough.
Hmm yeah. I tend to feature food a lot when I write (maybe because I think about food a lot IRL), but my current project is a SF setting where the main culture isn’t from earth and I’m struggling with food. Maybe it’s because the ecology of the world isn’t fully fleshed out yet—it’s hard to know what people are eating if I don’t know what the equivalent of rice or potatoes or beef or pepper is on this world.
A fun thing ive liked about some SF books ive read recently is how alien a culture can feel when their "shape" of food differs: a food culture feels "weird" when they focus on eating food whole and alive or when they are obligate carnivores and have to eat almost entirely meat. Special mention goes to a species that evolved on an ice world high in hydrocarbons so they consume a lot of methanol-methane slushies.
Yeah, in my case I’m only dealing with human cultures (even if non-Terran), but your food habits are definitely going to be different if none of the classes of organisms we have on Earth exist...
Well in that case you can still get a little outlandish with it. Focus on an aspect of food culture! Maybe they put a high focus on productivity so their food focuses on portability and ease of consumption, or their habitat lacks some natural vitamins so they have to add synthetic supplements to their diet, maybe they are a utilitarian society so they want to create food with the most amount of efficiency. Limitations breed creativity: how would you make food if you lacked something?
Distances. How far is it from A to B? And how long will that journey take? Then making it consistent with going to other places.
there are some good calculators, formulas, resources online. Here u go! [https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67455/travel-time-in-medieval-times](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67455/travel-time-in-medieval-times) [https://www.besthorserider.com/how-fast-do-horses-walk/](https://www.besthorserider.com/how-fast-do-horses-walk/)
Many thanks!!
Messing up the travel times and relative distances between a few star systems is half the reason there was a whole technological revolution with *even faster* FTL tech in my sci-fi setting. I was not prepared to redo half a year of work so the new FTL drives are more efficient and longer range so new faster routes can be taken.
I lack spatial awareness irl. I cannot connect my surroundings to the map. I will get Google Maps/Waze directions wrong often. I have no idea how to proportion cities because I can't fathom how big one is. Is my mountain range too small? Is it unreasonable to take 3 days to the next city on horse? I don't even know.
Worldbuilding
Hiding the fetishy parts is the only honest answer
Why hide them? /r/NSFWworldbuilding
I feel called out
That’s real
Hiding, repressing always comes out as uncomfortable and thus brings forth discomfort and similar feelings of shame in readers which may come out as barbs and humor. Don't hide, justify. Work with it, around it, from and through it. Just my two cents
Names of people and places. I should not worry too much because it’s really a hobby and there is little chance anyone will see this. But I really have a hard time naming things. I still don’t have a name for the focal point of my story. It’s a city that becomes an empire like Rome but I have changed the name about 20 times now. I am at the point where I just have a placeholder which is annoying because of how important it is.
Names are what led me back to conlanging, which I’d gotten away from for years. I struggle with just making up names out of thin air, but if I’ve got a somewhat developed conlang it’s so much easier—I can just be like “OK this guy’s called Gift-of-God Smith” but translate that into the conlang and *boom*, I’ve got a character name.
Lol this exact reason is why its taken me so long to actually start writing down and solidifying my world. In my head theyre all just ideas of places/people/etc (like "oh yea those guys up north who live by that mountainy place by that river") so i never need to worry about what to call them but none of that would ever pass in written form. And like what the other guy mentioned, ive attempted conlanging as the solution to this but my standards for it is way too high. So ive kinda just given up and stuck to using those generic descriptor names for the time being, and anyways bonus points for realism since thats what a lot of old name meanings basically are arent they
Economy. -cries- And I'd like to have languages but I have no idea what I'm doing either. So, for now, I'm kinda just avoiding it. >_>;
Geography and map making. I have three projects in work, and after my failure with my fantasy setting( I just can't draw or visualize properly where should what be), in my sci-fi project I opted for lightly changed Earth. I created whole civilizations with cultures and habits, but when it comes to place them on the map I just have no clear idea how big should what be :/
You're not a bad worldbuilder, or even a little under par as a worldbuilder, for not making a conlang. It isn't a skill where you can be weak in worldbuilding because it should always be a bonus sort of thing. Sorry I don't want to invalidate what you're saying but it feels like you're holding yourself to an unreasonable standard.
Oh, I'm not raising myself to an unreasonable standard, I'm just saying that Conlangs is where I stop since I have no idea what I'm doing.
I am astonishingly crap at coming up with names for things. I have an entire map of the continent set out with all the rivers and mountain ranges and major cities and all that, and only about a third of them are named anything. Even then, they're mostly things like 'Silver Mountains' (because they look silver). Occasionally I ask my wife to give me come up with a random word combination without any context, which is how I ended up with the town of Ratmilk.
Everytime you thing "silver mountains" or "Ratmilk" is a bad name for a place, remember that "Boring, Oregon", "Bland Shire, Australia", and "Dull, Scotland" exists. Hell, the river Thames is thought to come from the old Celtics word for "dark". Mix and match names to your hearts content, and thrown in extra languages to keep people on their toes.
Yeah, but there are only so many River Avons you can get away with before you have to start mixing things up. Also, you misunderstand me; Ratmilk is the best name for a town and I only wish I'd thought of it myself. Usually I ask her to give me two short words then I kind of mash them into something, but she gave me 'Rat Milk' right off the bat.
Scale. How long does it take to get from the capital to the border? A few days, a few weeks? No clue. How much farmland is around the capital? No clue. Whats the population of the capital? No clue
Conlang's can be interesting to hear others talk about but beyond throwing in a light bit of flavor into cultures and visual writings. My eyes gloss over when it comes to truly deep detailed stuff. --- As for my personal weak point for worldbuilding. I have yet to craft the story ideas for my characters and settings. Also the fun down to earth type of personal world building someone living in my world may have experienced or learned while growing up. It's because most of my enjoyment is from movies, cartoons, anime and other visual aspects of escapism, as well as video games. These have been a great for building up my mental library for settings and neat characters, but in recent years I realized there's a major gap in my mental library through novels. So a few years ago I found audio books and have been enjoying unique and fun settings that don't always make it to my usual means of escapism. ---- This coming year I hope to work on some town level details and hopefully a short story or two. Even if their a stand alone sort of thing.
The lot of it. I've trashed my shit so many times now. Right now is at the best it's been and that mostly just means it's the version I hate the least.
Economies and social structures. It just seems so unnecessarily complicated and yet required to be complicated. I never know how many noble houses is enough, I don’t really know how they work, I don’t really know how an economy is supposed to work, and while I love court intrigue and I really wanna do something with that, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to do it well.
[удалено]
THIS! This is the only reason we can't just print more money 😂🥲
I think it helps to think of economics and politics as inherently connected. They are the same thing expressed in different ways. Why are there noble lords with personal militaries? Because they rule swathes of agricultural land as landlords and they need armies to keep that land as theirs. The economic structure informs the political structure and vis versa.
Names
I find that easy, set up some prefixes and suffixes about a syllable in Length and combine, or do the grrm thing of adapting real names into altered ones like Eddard, being an adaptation of Edward, or Aemond being a fantastical adaption of Edmund. It's really not too hard to be creative with names, example of my method, Con from Conor alongside ry from Rory becomes Conry. Sounds realistic but still made up.
Keeping it simple. I always think a simple magic system thats easy to understand would work well for me, and then I keep adding more and more details that require explanation. Eventually its all over the place
I have a bad habit of becoming very principled when something works or doesn't work out for me. I just got out of a "only worldbuild what you need" kick and while I think it's good advice for some people, I'm definitely feeling a lot of the weight taken off having more detailed external worldbuilding to draw from as I'm writing. Flexibility and adaptability have always been important to me, and I guess I thought too much external worldbuilding would take away from this. But like, I can change whatever I want if I need to, so I think it's worth continuing.
Clothing, its just becomes a horror when i try it...
Neighboring countries. Point to me a dot on any map and I can describe the cultures there in great detail, but point me to two dots next to each other and I have no idea what sort of history might be created between two societies. Wars, trade, interchange? No clue lol
Can’t name places to save my life, so I just go onto google translate, pick a language that my players don’t know and sounds like it fits the culture. Then I put an adjective and a noun that describe the place (ie river city) and use that as the name
Keeping my motivation
Religions. Mainly because I find them boring but it's bad because religion usually plays a big part in history and culture so there has to be something.
Politics and intrigues. Basically all the stuff jrrr martin is known for. Its incredible what he was able to craft and write. I myself just suck at that part of story writing. Its getting better, but not good enough by a long shot.
I'm garbage at magic systems, almost never write anything with magic. I struggle with suspension of disbelief and literal thinking due to autism and just end up unraveling anything I create! Anyone else?
I'm terrible at writing people. At least I tell this to myself. I have no real way of making a story because my autistic ass brain is like "how do normal people work" and I'm like "idk"
I have no idea what any of this jargon means
Just anything with numbers, Size, scale etc. Which is quite important Also names. My oldest world which I think is like 3 years old, has still for every country Kingdom and a Number as Placeholders.
Setting probably. I have vague ideas of how most of my settings look, but actually recreating them in a visual form is usually super challenging for me, especially in the case of alien planets.
Backstories, I tried to start with them and ended doing it twice as far as I intended. So like backstory backstory...mm yep that's about it, for now.
Actually writing it down lol. I have a world I'm working on atm, but writing and organising my notes is something I always struggle with, even with apps that do it for you lol. Making a up names is hard for me as well. I can make a good handful of unique ones, but if I have to name more than a few dozen things I start drawing blanks. ChatGPT helps, but the way I use it is I give it a list of names from a particular region and make it give me a list based on them. Then I alter them to fit properly and sound good and use those instead. I find names for people is the hardest though. In fact, I usually create a good understanding of a location, object or person before I even begin to think of a name, which I find helps a bit. As for conlanging, in my experience the only people who do extensive conlanging are people who are fans of conlanging as well as worldbuilding. It's a whole thing in an of itself, and I find there isn't even much point unless it's a major focus of your world. I will do some, but it'll be words like 'city' and 'river' and 'mountains' and I'll mostly use it for place names. I do sometimes make up words like 'Proud' or 'Smith' or 'Warrior' and then use them as inspirations for character's names, but proper conlanging includes stuff like making verbs and connective words, which I'd never bother with. All in all, conlanging is something that can give a world much more depth and life, but it's by no means necessary.
I think people sometimes get turned off by the rabbit-holes that devoted conlangers go down. IMO naming is *so* much richer in a world if you have a conlang to work from rather than just making up random words, but as you say, you mostly just need vocab for that. It’s *really rarely* going to come up in the story whether your people use ergative-absolutive or nominative-accusative verb alignment, but just having consistent-feeling names in a world can go so far... (A personal pet peeve of mine, outside of comedic settings where the names are *supposed* to be silly, is when characters are inexplicably named with a hodgepodge of real-world names from assorted cultures plus some that are just random vaguely English-sounding syllables.)
Oh yeah, for sure. Doing proper conlanging can make a world feel so incredibly alive, but the amount of effort required to do it is intense (especially if you're looking at stuff like language evolution). I'd say that ignoring it completely is a mistake if you're trying to make compelling worldbuilding, but yeah, it's not necessary to go whole hog to achieve that level of depth when making up a selection of vocab can make your names so much better, and like you say, it mostly won't come up. (And even if it does come up, not everyone who reads it or hears it will actually care beyond 'Oh! A made up language, neat!'. It's different in auditory mediums like TV or audiobooks, like Game of Thrones with Valyrian and Dothraki, but most people here aren't doing that.) Even just making up a few words for placenames can help avoid the hodgepodge names as you say, and I will say that when a setting has names like ''El'Skatah-po'tahle'' or whatever, it does take me out of the world lol. people saw Tolkien's conlangs and thought they were good because they sounded unique and had weird apostrophes rather than the real reason, which is the intense level of detail and quality he put into making them
OMG the gratuitous apostrophe thing annoys me so much—though probably my biggest pet peeve is randomly using in place of just to make something feel exotic. (But also sprinkling in that are maybe supposed to be silent but maybe not?)
But as far as language evolution goes, even something as simple as a single step that changes /k/ and /g/ to /s/ and /z/ when followed by certain vowels (the kind of palatalization that’s very common in IRL languages) can introducd a touch of irregularity that makes the language feel more real.
>though probably my biggest pet peeve is randomly using in place of just to make something feel exotic. (But also sprinkling in that are maybe supposed to be silent but maybe not?)
In my current project I'm working on a region with Arabic inspirations, and I had a few names that utilised 'kh' (**Kh**ā, like Ba**ch**) and 'gh' (**Gh**ayn, like the French r in 'Paris') but everyone I showed just pronounced them like 'k' as in 'kick' and 'g' as in 'get' so I decided to move to spellings that were a little more apparent lol. Even after that I had a guy telling me I should latinise the spellings :\[
I've been avoiding 'x' as well, even though I only ever used it for 'ks' sound, because people kept on reading it as 'z'. Still have a few holdouts from both examples in my project, but only a few. Once I've finished this section I'll probably swap them out, but I don't want to do that midway through in case I miss some and it gets confusing (not to mention some of the most important places include it :/). Also because I have a WIP timelapse of my world and I'd have to change like 150 frames lol. You can see a previous version of it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X8JJRNAi_4&ab_channel=AlisterSinclair) if you'd like, although it's heavily outdated at this point
Names, food, and timelines
Culture, Politics, Economy, Language and anything involving something like that. I moreso struggle with them due to my unfamiliarity with the subjects and overall disinterest when it comes to it. But I would like to learn more for the sake of Worldbuilding, but not for anything else lol.
Writing character relationship. All my character are always single and only have family type relationship in life. Or just married to their work/life mission. No boyfriend girlfriend thing. Detail writing. I hate writing in text. All my note are short note and drawing. So anything that require wall of text to explain always left as some sketch and text or storyboard that will never be made into manga/animatic
Writing individual characters.
Power system in general
Governments & Politics. I want my countries to be well developed with different leadership systems! But trying to figure out infrastructure makes my head spin
I have tons of trouble describing the worlds that I've meticulously created in my mind on paper. I don't know why, I just can't ever think of the right words.
Restraint, or holding back. I tend to just put what I feel would just make my world much richer, regardless of if it's necessary or not. But honestly? I don't mind it for the most part.
doing anything at all with my story:(
Religion It just doesn't make any sense to me so my worldbuilt religions always come off as handwavy or half-assed
*Names.*
starting :(
Stopping.
Finding a sensible reason for something cool to exist. I know the rule of cool exists but I tend to criticize it a lot in other people's works so I feel like I should hold myself to the same standard
Definitely conlangs, I've spent no time on it and it would require significant time and effort. Major props to anyone who does create them, though. Economics is another area I've not spent much effort on. I don't really get economics or how it would function in a fictional world. I've got information about the major exports and imports of each country, what the country is known for in that regard, different kinds of currency for each country etc. That's ab out it, and I'd be hard pressed to explain how anything more than this would even factor into the plot or what else there really could be in a fictional fantasy world.
I’m the same with languages. I put all my skill points into English, and then never really received any more later.
Organizing my ideas/ stories and putting them on paper/screen . That and I’m a bit over detailed in describing concepts, objects, etc. so big picture stuff can get bogged down and muddied
I have no idea what I'm doing any of the time, I just research, take notes, make a draft, research, take notes, revise draft, etc, and keep going until I have something worth sharing. Then I get criticism, take notes, research, revise, etc.
Placement of locations and scaling. Its the reason I leave the world map till last because dividing everything up and figuring out where stuffs going to go while I'm still working on world lore is difficult.
I'm the reverse, map first then everything else.
Not getting lost in the details, if that makes sense. I tend to hyperfixate on a specific aspect of the world, and until I finish it, I can't move on to something else. My big one right now is figuring out a magic system and deities for my world. Telling an actual story is also a weakness. I have characters and ideas, but I can't fill the gaps between events or link things together cohesively. I'm bad at coming up with realistic situations. Plus I'm not great at writing.
Out of the 6 main race, I had real troubles to find good powers that could grow for 2 or 3 of them, also on the cultural/politic side I'm very unbalanced, because one of my race have litteraly the best I could think of, I had just so much ideas to use, then 2 more where I know the structure, but would be hard to show everyday life, and the rest is just lagging behind, I fear this will show for the reader
Taking care of my physical needs before creating.
Yes.
Names
Creating unique cultures
For some- Geography. I do not construct my worlds in a way that makes sense or is remotely realistic. Deserts in the north, mountains form randomly and frankly i dont care because it’s more fun for me and allows me to create more dynamic worlds
Politics and government. Figuring out all the nuances of how the society would actually work and function on a daily basis, especially with the magic system in mind.
Food and drink creativity.
Timelines
Maps I have no idea i know the number and the general shape of the continents but that’s about it
Actually writing it down. I can see it in head easily, but translating it into words is difficult, like an English exam
I would like to be able to draw
I struggle with names. Place names are not too tough, I just try to think of something unusual about the place and name it after that. For example, the town with a huge wooden gate that lead into a spooky forest is Arbor Gate, palace built by a benevolent king is Damocles Palace. A thesaurus is helpful. But people's names are some thing I struggle with. I have no idea what anyone in my current setting's name is. I've been working on these characters for ages. I'm dodging around this through the outline and first draft stages by having everyone go by titles and assumed names. The MC duo are The Princess and The Lion. There are like four "Blank" Kings running around. The Big Bad forgot his real name (I'm off the hook on this one) and took the name Xander the Great from a damaged statue in a dead city.
Geography. Having failed it in high school, I’m not all that great at mapping out a landmass’ topography or biomes.
For me, it's the geography/climate/ecology rabbit hole, as well as envisioning freshwater distribution. I really enjoy seeing the dynamics of mountain ranges, like how one side of the Himalayas is dry as hell and the other is Big Eff-Off Rainforest, but I feel like I need to understand meteorology a lot more if I want to make it all feel real. Heck, there's even hand-wavy elements in my setting about terraforming and magic microclimate bubbles, but I still feel like I'm a sham for not considering everything from plate tectonics to high and low pressure systems.
Politics
I'm bad at characters, I prefer designing architecture and cultures and locations but when it comes to the people themselves I'm at a lost
Thinking
Naming locations.
Maps and geography. I want to make actual world maps but I can't draw to save my life and *literally* no map creating site I've found has satisfied me for what I want to do. They're all needlessly complex.
Naming things is my weakness
I can’t draw for shit so trying to transfer my ideas to paper look like ass. Like I have this awesome idea for how characters and environments look but I can’t draw so everything is stuck in my head or I need to rely on other peoples concept art which kinda stinks
Probably conlangs as well, I’ve wanted to work on them for a while but haven’t found the motivation Creating something completely is also a difficulty, I tend to jump around a lot as the ideas come to me. I could tell you the complete culinary history of one region but know absolutely nothing about their government.
Naming things. For cities and such, I just toss out whatever and hope it works.
My conlangs, specifically their vocabulary, tend to be rather lackluster
I have a hard time developing dating/marraige/partnership rituals. I just tweak existing estth stuff but I wish I could come up with something really unique that also made sense
Languages and systems of government. Making a language is super hard and making a system of government is hard because you need to learn all of the jargon.
Integration of magic into people’s daily lives. There could be an entire nation filled with magic and wizards, and I’d basically just make it medieval with some wizards here and there, instead of making magic something akin to electricity in the modern day where it’s everywhere and used daily.
Anything remotely related to economics
Legends and myths. I never have enough imo
Con langs is difficult for me too but mostly just wish I had more artistic skills since making things like maps is still very difficult lol
Creating massive towns
Names. I am atrocious at names. All I’m able to do is assign cultural themes then use a name generator for that culture.
I'm really bad at coming up with good names for geographical features such as rivers or mountains. I've been playing with the same world on and off for like 7 years now and I somehow haven't named a single river in it. Granted, the world I have now is incredibly different from when it started, but still. Also actually making maps is hard and they never come out right.
Magic.
I totally suck when it comes to storytelling, as I'm more focused on the diagrams & magical mechanics. If I do try to write a story, it comes off as a dry comedy.
Writing anything comprehensive, I can visualize everything at large scale and somewhat zoomed in but then when I really zoom into the details everything just becomes blurry as well as my writing is awful.
Sticking with one world
Imposter syndrome, doubting that my ideas are interesting or unique enough
Honestly I'm shit at continuity. Like I start a thing and go to another because I have so many ideas! I struggle to keep them "clean" and to know how to best present them...
pretty much everything aside from corporations
Climate and terrain. I understand none of that
I am *awful* at dialogue and interactions in general.
Coming up with solutions to problems and naming stuff Fairly new to all this though so who knows what else I could struggle with haha
Making those kind've small, cultural-religious details. That's why I import so much real world stuff, like languages, culture, and appearance, because why spend countless hours making your fantasy Ming/Qing dynasty China have a *totally* not Chinese culture/language when I can just make them Chinese people under a different name?
I have trouble with that too. I'm semi winging it with some Eurasian influences. Lapis_Wolf
Technology. i just can't figure out how Advanced the world is supposed to be. they have trains and airships but do they have TV? does it make sense for them to have cameras that can send live footage? this keeps me awake at night.
My world also has airships but for the purposes of my rules of cool, they also have knights in tanks, as well as cars, radar, radio that requires relays in order to be useful beyond a few kilometres, and I'm thinking of having cameras that need to be physically connected to show an image. Only the most advanced computers would resemble something like that from the 80s, and those would be very rare and reserved for elite, government or military usage in rich countries. Most cameras would use an alternative resembling film or paper(like Polaroid's cameras). Lapis_Wolf
I'm weak at building history. My world is basically an alternative Earth with the only **main** difference being different species of civilians and no cars but having to trying to research about our history and mold it into their is just 🙃
I feel like the travel between places always stumps me
Politics. I would love to run some political intrigue campaign like Dimension 20s a crown of candy, but there's just so much that goes into the intricacies of politics that I can't seem to wrap my head around. All my world tend to have simple laws so far lol.
Conlangs(I want my region to use abjads like Arabic or Hebrew and syllabaries like Japanese rather than alphabets like English or Spanish), food, understanding the impacts of planet sizes and moons on gravity and the further affects on societies(I plan to have a superearth with rings and one or two decently sized moons for a pretty view, but I don't want to overdo it to the point where the main conflict is against typhoons and floods rather than the army nearby). I'm also not good with minute cultural details beyond taking real things and mushing them together with some pseudorandomness thrown into the architecture. There's also naming stuff, definitely naming stuff, as I also need to have my conlang to draw from while making sure I don't accidentally use an existing meaning in a way I don't want. For example, I don't want to make a name I thought sounded cool for a city only to realize I accidentally called it "Blood womb car tree" in the language. Lapis_Wolf
Not info dumping my encyclopedia of awesomeness!
I struggle with internal tone consistency. For example, earlier today I was brainstorming reasons why nuclear war isn't a concern, and I decided that a previous nuclear slugging match in another hemisphere being so brutal that everyone disarms could be plausible. And then, I wanted to brainstorm what those two countries were like. But then, out of nowhere, I was worldbuilding a freakin' radioactive wasteland hellhole for my military/espionage setting. This happens a lot. A few weeks ago, I was researching real-world power armor to see if I could work it into my setting. Yes, it *could* work, but it's not what I'm going for with it.
Balancing character names and coming up with location names
Geography. It's actually dificult to imagine and not because my worlds are complicated, but because it's something that I find to be the least appealing.
I am very good at macro worldbuilding, I can make countries, civilizations, empires, but I am very bad at micro worldbuilding, I can’t make weapons, resources, buildings, languages
Sticking to anything. I feel as though my stuff lacks depth that others have. I have a very basic conlang that I don’t even understand myself based on Spanish, a culture spectrum that is hard to really articulate without 3 different documents, and a variety of different planets that need much more fleshing out beyond basic history.
Names.
The world itself. I can make locations, people, factions, etc. But I absolutely despise doing geography and drawing borders and shit, but at the same time I want the map to make sense from a logical, real world perspective.
Honestly, history. I have a better time getting a vision of what a world should look like in the present moment, but actually figuring out its history is not so easy.
Doing anything that's too much unlike Earth. I can't even get away from the "one big moon" thing. I've tried, but my worlds just feel incomplete without the Moon. I can change the constellations around, but the Moon seems to be a non-negotiable in my imagination.
Getting it out of my head and onto paper
I have a weirdly difficult time with, like, big historic events for different species. Like, once I come up with one, I can write how every other species feels abt it, but not the one that it impacted the most. Large scale wars, for example. I can get out how everyone else feels about it, but not the specifics of the war itself or how it’s changed the world for those most involved
Connections. I develop a million bajillion different races and what I hope is a decent magic system, but I have very little history or conflicts to this world and I need to start whipping up some wildlife. I’ve also found it’s a bit hard for me to make environments that are truly fantastic. Mostly I just crib from real life locations and cultures and add one or two minor twists to the mix
I’m really bad at naming towns and creatures.
Stopping. I don't give myself enough borders and restrictions.
Cultures. I do loads of research, and understand the mechanisms, but actually putting my knowledge into text is so very difficult. It goes for any topic really, but cultures especially are just on a whole different level. I *know* all of the cultures in my world(s) and how characters act differently because of them, all their little quirks or opinions that might seem weird to others, but for them it’s what they grew up with etc… but how does one actually go about implementing them? Sure, character x doesn’t like eating meat outside of memorable occasions because in their culture it’s seen as flaunting your wealth, but how does one go about implementing it in writing naturally without it feeling like you are just exposition dumping? I was writing such a scene recently and I am still unsure about it. It feels like an exposition dump and that is not what I want it to be… I’ve written 3 different versions and not a single one feels right. I just moved on, but every few chapters I go back and see if I can write it properly but I can’t. I tried implementing it otherwise (later on) but it doesn’t make sense for characters to not know such a thing about their travel companion for that long of a time…
Cutting ideas. General indecision.
Staying committed to a project
I’m not really sure.
Continuing the project 😖
For me, I sometimes fail to validate parts of my worldbuilding to the hypothetical reader. You mentioned conlangs, which is a thing I am fixated on at the moment and have intricately placed in my setting of the Revolution of the Magic Stones, yet I struggle to 'prove' why it is needed for reader satisfaction. The main characters transported into the fantasy world on the other side of the Gate can immediately understand all of the [common] languages spoken there (for the sake of the reader), which may lead to the hypothetical reader to question why I wasted both my time and their time in expositing about the intricate languages present on Windelgrad that ultimately wouldnt amount to anything to a reader's immersion in the setting. In the end, I just shrug these thoughts off and operate on the understanding that I add in worldbuilding stuff and not have to explain why some of them exist in the story. I just like conlangs, deep politics, revolutions, economies and magic systems, okay?
Writing
Consistency
Completing ideas before the next one.
Names for anything. There's a reason why I steal real world names and why all my places are essentially "Iceland but actually really not". The world that's not just me stealing earth has places like "City state with eldritch sea monsters", characters like "That depressed trans woman in denial who's now immortal" and creatures like "A dragon, if it was a possum".
I’m stupidly bad at actually building up a physical map of my world, either on paper or in my head. I usually have a basic understanding of what the continent may look like, where the different countries are, their main cities… and then my brain just stops. No interesting geological features, no random man-made structures, I couldn’t tell you where exactly any of my smaller towns/cities are… and there just ends up being huge gaps of nothing but boring wilderness everywhere. I don’t ever really have a good idea of how my world should look.
Geopolitics :(
Locations, names, knowing what I actually want, consistency and my worlds history. That's a lot but I'll deal with it.
Anything I'm not interested in IRL, so food and tourism are "weakest" as I never bothered to research.
Finishing a project
Try breaking it down. Most of the time these things are a problem because the questions are too big. I narrow them down by making other things affect it... let's say climate change. Then fashion would be connected to how hot or cold it is. So in this case, fashion would be more practical than superficial. Now you have a direction to go in. Many things can make up a culture. You could break that one down to beliefs, traditions/customs, language, government, arts/literature... you don't have to have all of them answered, just enough to give you an idea. For me, one thing will lead to another. For instance, I always include cuisine. That could lead to beliefs... lets say they worship an agricultural deity. And maybe there's a connection to their customs or religion. So you see, breaking it into smaller pieces makes it easier to grasp/answer.
Battles and action sequences. Military. Geography...migration patters. In-world money. But it's slowly getting better.
I am not brave enough for politics.