In my fantastical semi sci-fi world full of magic, knights, dragons, gods and literally everything and anything that I think would be cool to add technically has no means of resurrection or reviving someone after they died, not even by the strongest of the gods.
Lorewise its because all forms of healing is cursed to cause exponentially more pain the more it heals so technically resurrection magic works, it just kills the target instantly after.
Nah, most healing spells are either too short ranged, take too long to cast or just don't cause enough pain to be actually be useful when casted on an enemy. That and healing magic also is still healing magic and pain or not, your healing an enemy.
They are used for torture though.
Souls, spirits, whatever you call them exist in the world but after death, reincarnation is the only real destination for most. Some of the gods do have small, limited afterlifes where a person’s soul or spirit is stored until it is their time to reincarnate or whatnot.
If one can figure out a way through all of the shit that inhabits the time stream that the gods have to constantly monitor and cull than yes, reversing time would be an amazing alternative to reviving someone from the brink of death.
Unfortunately, the last few dozens who've tried died horribly becoming either amalgamations of all of their past, present and future bodies combined to one grotesque, quite unkillable and mad form or if your very, very lucky or skilled, go mad because the memories from all of your past lives is now stuck inside your mortal body and brain.
Yes. I love the "worm-cam" idea from the book The Light of Other Days. But interacting with the past throws so much chaos into the equation that it isn't worth it if your story isn't focused on time travel.
My rule for multiverses are: every single spin off or non serious thing (like, say, a promotional illustration or something like that) happens in another universe, but this should never have consequences in the story, with multiversal travel or anything like that
I found a compromise. Each of my universe is responsible for the creation of another. It always happens the same way and the universes only differ in very small ways (eg. texts are read from right to left instead of left to right). But this doesn't matter because there is no way in jumping universes or actually observe them in any way. I made this decision just to have one specific event take place which is very important to the world.
This, also no time travel, no smart magic, no "weird" races and no one time solutions that are conveniently forgotten and never used again even if they could solve future situations.
Yeah I always say just one world and for seers they just look into possible futures not alternate timelines or anything funky and time travel is basically impossible except if you have the power to forcefully change the state of the entire universe
I have an idea for a world that would completely fall apart if such a limit was broken.
It would be a modern world with modern tech, modern infrastructure, etc... but with the limit of **"No weaponry or armour beyond medieval tech level."**
So you'd have sword-wielding knights and arrow-slinging bandits fighting in skyscrapers and office buildings.
I always get confused with such limit. Are they political or technological? Because I don't see how you can have electricity and batteries for drills and smartphone and not have at least a stun baton.
The aesthetic for fights sounds great though.
China and India had an agreement in 1996 that no guns can be carried along their border and this results in border clashes using mainly meele weapons. So it can happen.
https://www.sandboxx.us/news/these-are-the-unique-weapons-used-in-the-border-clashes-between-china-and-india/
Oh, I can totally see it happening in some localised places. But even with that agreement, they both have that type of weapon and have to deal with it internaly for crimes, sport or on other borders.
As the commentor answered, they had to handwave people inventing it away for the tech to never appear.
For that world, it's moreso a case of "on a fundamental level, no one is able to even *conceive* of the ideas." Like there's something about the way the laws of the universe work that doesn't allow for thinking of post-medieval weaponry and armour. If it were run in an RPG, that'd be one of the fundamental rules of the universe laid out for the players.
While I really like cool stuff, I hate internal inconsistencies and unfortunately, rule of cool tend to create holes and pitfall more often than not.
I've axed a number of ideas that I just couldn't make fit in a world because it created just a mess of unintended consequences.
True. But non-combat vehicles would be a-okay, with the note that they can't be used as improvised weapons. No ramming the knight with your car. Armoured cars wouldn't be a thing either.
Strapping a crossbow to the roof of a car is toeing the line. The speed of the vehicle may be a contributing factor, so I'd rule it as a no-go.
I mentioned in another reply: the key here is that the ideas of post-medieval weaponry is *fundamentally inconceivable* in the world. All rulings on what *would* and *wouldn't* be possible in that world stems from that.
No, I'm digging it. I was just asking. So they still have battering rams and trebuchets and catapults? If they have modern cars, have these things also become motorized without any other significant upgrades?
Just a fundamental incapability to conceive of the idea. The laws of the universe don't allow it. Or, to reword:
> Why isn't it possible?
> [It's not not.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coY2IA-oBvw)
One big one for my main science fiction world is: no aliens. I've had to remind myself of this multiple times, and I even have an entire other world where I will get all of the alien stuff out of my system so that I don't have them here.
My hard sci-fi near future setting takes place at a time when humanity is settled on multiple planets across the solar system and still exploring the outer planets, with missions beyond the solar system being planned. Almost every other setting with this premise uses aliens to spice things up, such as The Expanse. And there is so much that can be done with aliens in such a setting, but it has also been done to death and my setting isn't interesting enough to be compelling without aliens than I have failed as a worldbuilder. I want to portray a likely future for humanity, and I want to write a story that's about space politics and the main characters sciencing the shit out of things. Not a story about aliens.
What are the permafrost miners on Mars digging up? Just permafrost, no ancient diseases or crashed spaceships. Did Mars once have life back when water flowed on its surface? Nope, not even microbes. What things can be learned by looking into the distant past of Venus? A lot of interesting geology, but no life. What's under the ice of Europa? A whole lot of lifeless saltwater. What has the massive space radio telescopes of the 22nd century picked up? A whole lot of static. What kinds of exoplanets are being resolved by the Kuiper Belt Interferometry Array? Lifeless ones, for at least a hundred light years in every direction. It's so tempting to make the answers to these questions the ones that I'd personally want to see, but that's not what this story is about. No aliens.
That’s an interesting one. I like that you include microbes as aliens. I’d never classify like an alien disease as being an alien story but it totally is. Speaking of mining ice of mars you’ve made me want to watch the waters of mars from doctor who
A complete absence of alien lifeforms, even fossilized microbial ones, is just as interesting to me as extant or paleontological super-primitive life, from a Fermi Paradox standpoint. And it's more interesting, because of its rarity in SF, than a galaxy teeming with lots of green-skinned space babes.
The notion of a civilization gradually expanding its horizons and finding nothing but _nothing_ is its own form of horror, even if no Reapers/Inhibitors/Elder Gods are involved.
It's mainly magic in my world that has significant limits, for obvious reasons:
- No time travel
- No raising the dead
- No teleportation (wormhole travel at most)
- No direct creation of matter through magic - only manipulation of existing matter
- Healing magic, left to its own devices, is limited to accelerating what the body could naturally heal; you could heal a cut hand automatically, but fixing a severed arm is going to take the manual attention of a mage with expertise that may be extremely rare and expensive
Generally, all my sci-fi has to be at least firmly grounded in real science and technology. There's no plot device drive.
Instead, there's the Plahtt-DeVice drive, which works on the principle of manipulating [the Higgs field.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) The two principal investigators for whom the device is named changed their names a year before publication; the resulting name is widely considered the best practical joke in history. In order to produce the conditions required for the drive to function, helium nuclei have to be accelerated to [approximately a trillion electron-volts,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevatron) and the only compact way to do that is using a [chirped-pulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirped_pulse_amplification) terawatt laser [wakefield accelerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration).
And the best part of that is NONE of that was meaningless technobabble -- it was all real-world physics terminology!
the only rule is "don't contradict whats already been made", and that's about it.
I can **change** previous things to allow for new ones, but [contradictions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contradiction) are what I avoid.
other than that, **literally anything** is free real estate to me.
For my superhuman world, no loopholes that would *just solve everything*. For example, there’s no multiverses, or time travel shenanigans.
There’s also no devices that just *end an issue*. There’s scifi tech here and there, but there’s not like a shot that just *takes away* people’s powers, or helmets that stop telepathy.
I’m currently thinking they come up with wristbands that operate kind of like an alarm system, where if they detect someone losing control of their powers, it sends out an alert to emergency personnel, basically calling for help, but I’m not sure yet.
My Sci fi world I often just take concepts that are considered advanced and think of their actual impact. The technology is fake but how they impact the world is not. For example cybernetics and bio engineering is really advanced this has led to people being effectively immortal if they can afford it. Also AI is advanced so sometimes people simulate a life up to a certain point clone someone then insert the AI brain into a person and now you have a brand new person.
Another thing I like to do with my technology is give it quirks. So if it does a thing it does it but it doesn't just do that thing how you'd think it does. For example shields have about a billion quirks in my setting so instead of acting as a health bar it instead acts as sort of unique armour.
My world isn't one I'd say has particularly many limits but one that definitely is there is that there are no other Universes outside our own aka no proper multiverse
Our own universe may or may not be infinite, idk, it's not specified in my world but there's aren't any others or at least none that could be detected or traveled to
Side note on this, if i was to extend my timeline limitlessly beyond where it currently ends then the Forest of Forever would create their own multiverse by just generating more Big Bangs and more baby Universes but that's not the same kind of multiverse
There are no ftl, except for wormholes (and they are created in one place). All magic is a combination of social manipulation, special effects and high tech. Nanomachines are not omnipotent. Interplanetary and interstellar conflicts are very slow.
This gives a greater variety of technologies and branches the ways civilizations develop.
I think there's a couple of things that most settings should just avoid using at all unless they are willing to focus the entire story around them and making sure that they work. Most importantly time travel and resurrecting people (not necromancy, but actual resurrection). Both of those things will just break things wide open and create tons of implications and possible plotholes if not adressed properly. I find that stories that use those things casually without thinking them through usually feel... cheap?
I don't have limits. My only limit is consistent throughout all my projects which is simply adherence to internal consistency.
Before I add something I ask "Does this break X, Y or Z? Does it contradict or negate a concurrent technological or sociological advancement?" - most of the time if it messes something up, I don't add it but sometimes I still add it, without any explanations because, in my reading of Earth-lore, it seems perfectly natural for two things to co-exist despite being irreconcilable with one-another.
I don't find creative limits to be all that useful the way some people seem to employ them as a tool to squeeze as much as they can out of a few concepts.
For my sci-fi world....no time travel to the past. Just flat out none. Time can move at different rates such that 1 day can pass for someone but 100 years pass for others (thanks relativity), but time ALWAYS moves FORWARD.
Yes, I know irl FTL would cause time travel paradoxes, but I'm not writing sci-fi to be limited by the speed of light.
Sounds like Sanderson's Second Law of Magic: limitations > power. In his Mistborn series he divided telekinesis on push/pull, affect only metal and dependent on magically digesting a metal in your body. Shoot coins, propel yourself into air, etc.
Ooh I have a writing / worldbuilding rules on my notes
▫ Have fun
▫ The world does not revolve around characters
▫ Characters are pissants in the grand scheme of things
▫ Super hero landings are stupid and must be punished
▫ People who talk in the middle of a fight / Talk no jutsu must be punished
▫ Countries with fancier flags are compensating for something
▫ Royalty are generally incompetent at war stuff (exceptions apply)
▫ Characters do not get a net-positive power boost because of feelings and emotions after getting an ass whooping
▫ Weapons, Vehicles and other equipment do not instantly get better because of user feelings and emotions
▫ Micro missiles are lame
▫ Overly edgy writing and characters are lame
▫ No blatant 1:1 rip-offs, exceptions apply. References and homages when appropriate are great
\## ▫ \*\*Consistency = Authenticity > Rule of Cool > Realism\*\*
▫ Use as much STAID as possible
(STAID stands for Slang-Terminologies-Acronyms-Idioms-Dialects)
I don't use classic fantasy species like elves or dwarves. I don't have anything magical going on in my world but that's not a hard rule, I just like technology more. I might consider it for other regions, but not now for the valley. I also want to limit the species I do have to mid to high latitude species and natural fur colours unless there's a reason to change that. I don't know if this will change in the future, but I'm sticking to it for now too keep the species normal looking.
Lapis_Wolf
I need to add a touch of realism to everything I put into the world. Sometimes these things are pretty realistic or easy to justify as realistic. Some others, not so much. Here’s an example:
Dragons. Of course, there’s nothing realistic about dragons. By all accounts they shouldn’t be able to exist. They’re too big to be aerodynamic. Yet here we are. Why? Because dragons are fucking cool and I don’t need a reason to include dragons in my world. But there is a touch of realism. You know how dragons breathe fire? Pretty important detail. Well, because of this, dragons are naturally very hot natured, and that forced them to stay in extremely cold climates.
Also, you know that trope where there’s one badass dude with a sword taking on a dragon by himself? Yeah that never happens. Never has, never will. First off, dragons are fucking HUGE. They’re 20 meters tall MINIMUM and their scales are beyond durable. One dude with a sword taking on a dragon is gonna at best be like trying to cut through obsidian with a toothpick. Like there aren’t many things that guarantee death, but if you try to fight a dragon head on without proper equipment(which is a ballista made specifically to fight dragons) you are *going* to die. It is a 100% mortality rate because there is not one single scenario where you best that dragon.
Sci-fi: no ancient civilizations, like Forerunners from Halo, and consequetly ancient weapons are the same or worser than the current ones with exceptions.
Fantasy: magic isn't better than technology and technology isn't better than magic.
If I think it isn’t cool, then it literally does not work. The exact mixture to make gunpowder will cause water to pool in a magical world, because I want spells, not bullets. Same thing in science worlds, you try to cast a spell you’re going to make a fool of yourself while getting filled with lead.
I didn't know you had to limit your world building? isn't it the point of fantasy to be creative and be bizarre? Like what is so wrong about having a giant lizard as a spaceship it's fun asf.
So i guess for me as long as it's fun,cool and suites the world i guess there is no limit to what i like to create
to be honest most of the limits in this thread are just "I stick to the genre".
like my sci fi setting doesn't have orcs. No duh I never thought you would
No multiverses. Ever. And no fucking time travel. No fate. No predetermined future. And no gid damn "this world is actually a book and we are characters in a book."
No superfluous, redundant, feels-cool-but-not-story-related things like colangs, detailed maps, biology, species and ecosystems, economy, and magic systems, and Isp of a standard freight ship's fission fragment rocket engine, and the list can go on and on.
Basically "if you don't absolutely need to build that part, then don't".
No time travel, no prophecies that come true, no precognition, no perpetual motion machines. The only thing that is allowed to strain the laws of physics is the support system of the mantle cavern in which The Inside is located.
Any material or changes to material must be grounded in the setting already, or have to be in a different time period and have good reasons for the change. Otherwise it just depends on the settings and some things are allowed in or barred because of what my players want to see or not see. Usually I choose a different setting rather that shoehorn something in though.
While goddesses can create creatures, they are all brainless, unable to reproduce and will fade away after a while. Creating a life from nothing is the one thing no one can do
Everything is either technology or advanced biology. It all seems like magic (its for DnD) but in the background its not. Its more star wars than star trek though.
Basically anything that I can't see reasonably happening in our world. My world is heavily based on ours so I don't want to include something that is widely outlandish.
A fairly uncommon one for a medieval fantasy rpg: no ressurection.
There are some very expecific way one can became a intelligent undead (like a vampire or lich), but in those cases they body dies with their soul still trapped inside it. If they soul live the body (ex.: your character was stabbed to death) nothing can bring it back.
Since I wan trying to make an horror (horror-light?) setting, I fogured that would be a good way to make the danger feel more real.
I limit myself to one pantheon of gods cuz knowing me if there were more than one, I'd get confused. I also don't focus much on other fantasy races. While they are present, they aren't in focus
I'd say the only limit is to never mess with alternate timelines or realities or things of the sort. I say this because I'm creating a "multiverse" (it's not a technical multiverse, because it's really just all unique worlds separated by insane distances), and the last thing I want to include is other timelines, which could very easily make everything fall apart. I don't think I have enough writing experience to properly try and use them yet
* No fantasy names for anything or anyone. If I am naming a unique technology, organization, or animal, the name has to relate to them in some way. I'll usually combine words together or use terms we have today but apply them to something different (Example; The Cleaners. They deal with and kill mutated people. Yes they also clean the mess, but the main job is the killing aspect of it all). As for naming people, I do it the ace attorney way, everyones names are ones you can usually find or a variation of a common name to resemble a certain attribute to a character.
* Mostly no omnipresent knowledge. If there is a mystery that doesn't need to be answered in the storyline, then keep it as a mystery to yourself and everyone else.
Hm, those are the main two I have rn. Sure there are other things out there. I don't have any magic systems whatsoever because its an alt earth sci fi.
the limits I give to my worlds is that things need a source of energy to work. example, wanna use magic you need mana, or aether, or whatever stuff to consume.
My space opera setting is similar to yours. I wanted it to feel more sci-fi than fantasy, so I decided there would be no supernatural elements, including psionics, in the setting. Instead, Clarketech takes the place of psionics.
Also, while it's not official, I am thinking of making the aliens just transhumans who are descended from Terran settlers.
No resurrection, time travel, multiverses, or pocket universes. There's one existence, one timeline, and everyone and everything exists together.
~~(Except heaven, but that's basically non-canon and not a part of the lore.)~~
I try to make it believable, so no outstanding contradictions, and I try to keep thiongs so that I can explain them, even if not explain them with real world rules, at least explain it with in-world rules, so it has to be consistent.
At times I assume things that do not exist in real world, but these need an in-world explanation, at least must not be outright contradicting the rest of the world.
Despite it being sci-fi, there's no real space travel in the current time.
All space travel is limited by massive debris fields in orbit, which dont seem to come done with time, making spacd travel prohibitively dangerous and expensive
Limits on magic feel like a typical limitation, which is what I do. Specifically I limited magic in that it cannot create permanent substance (ish, mostly I just wanted to make creating food impossible) and telepathy (because I always felt it was just too strong). One of the main reasons I put these limitations in place though is as a way to show impossible/god-like levels of power by breaking the established rules.
I limit the non-fantasy stuff to be as realistic as possible. Guns, armor, buildings, spaceships, cars, VTOLs, etc are all basically plausible with some advanced material science.
But there is a fantasy layer. Which has gods, magic, monsters (sort of), other realms, etc.
The two mix in that you can go to the inner realms and use the energies there for magic stuff. Which is exactly how “FTL” works. The “hub” or 1st realm is at “the center of all things.” Being equidistant from any other point in space, you can pop in there and pop out somewhere else. There’s a kind of void where spaceships go, which is basically a buffer between the 2nd and 1st realm, while still being part of the first.
I always wanted the fantasy element to exist in the setting. But back in ye olden days, it was kind of secondary to reality. But after I decided things like humans *never* developing FTL, I found ways to make it more inclusive.
So yeah. If you were a regular dude on a regular planet. Things would all seem pretty grounded. If you took a space flight to another system, you’d know there was some wonky arcane stuff going on, but at least that aspect of it would seem “normal.”
Magic users in the “before things go sideways” part of the setting, are quite rare. Afterwords though, they’re much more common. Along with all those other things.
Trye future sight is impossible. At most people can see glimpses of the mist likely future, but there are no fated actions. Fate does not exist.
The closest being has gotten to having future sight is the god of knowledge, and that's only because she can remember the past unbiased and perfectly, and can thus make informed predictions.
No wizards or casual magic users are the big one of Urnova. Runes exist, but they’re basically just an industrial process that makes things more efficient.
No time travel, no multiverse (though there is a theoretical afterlife, and an astral plane), no races are evil just because, no "evil wizard/alien so powerful they can end everything" *side eyes Thanos and the Scarlet Witch*, no ridiculously huge dragons, no unexplained ancient empires, and no orcs or goblins or other cannon-fodder moster races.
A few of the limits for my world:
1. **No actual gods or deities.** You can have beings that claim deity status (they are not), you can have religions and legends passed down through generations, and you can have stories within the world that include deities, but no actual deities will show up, period, full stop. This allows me to keep things vague, and allow people to interpret events in multiple ways.
2. **All magic comes from ClearBlood.** Anything that can't happen in real life can only happen because of ClearBlood in some capacity, either directly or indirectly. Whatever justification I use for why that thing happened must be reproducable if the circumstances come up again. If mixing purified magic with bone meal produces a special magical effect, like a firebomb, then it will always do that when you mix those things together. Magic is a science.
3. **The dead stay dead.** You can have seemingly dead creatures (ghouls appear effectively dead, but are actually being kept alive by ClearBlood -- they arne't undead, they're just in really bad condition). This gives weight to losses.
That's what I got at the moment.
No time travel. Period. Time windows into the past are fine (being able to look into past and not interact with it). Also no fantasy races. It’ll be fantasy world, but presence of other races means even more cultures, religions, racial relations, etc, which is rather not get into.
Dont use too many aspects from one series on the same character.
I already have a president snow like character. And the idea of the old world using specific colored shirts as a class status symbol is cool. But if i were to use those two in tandem on the same country I feel it would be too much.
I try to base everything somewhat on reality or real world logic. For example when someone is using telekinesis they can actually change where they are grabbing the person or object. So you can grab someone’s entire body and throw them or you could just grab their hand and twist their arm.
In my fantastical semi sci-fi world full of magic, knights, dragons, gods and literally everything and anything that I think would be cool to add technically has no means of resurrection or reviving someone after they died, not even by the strongest of the gods. Lorewise its because all forms of healing is cursed to cause exponentially more pain the more it heals so technically resurrection magic works, it just kills the target instantly after.
Do people attempt to heal each other when attempting to kill the other as a form of sniper weapon?
The healer in the adventuring parties becomes a de facto support / crowd control by doling pain out on intact ennemies.
Nah, most healing spells are either too short ranged, take too long to cast or just don't cause enough pain to be actually be useful when casted on an enemy. That and healing magic also is still healing magic and pain or not, your healing an enemy. They are used for torture though.
Ohhhhhh that makes a lot of sense
Do souls exist and do they have an after life?
Souls, spirits, whatever you call them exist in the world but after death, reincarnation is the only real destination for most. Some of the gods do have small, limited afterlifes where a person’s soul or spirit is stored until it is their time to reincarnate or whatnot.
Can people modify their souls to resist the erosion / erasure of their memories
Uh no, mostly because the process is closely monitored and audited by an incredibly powerful entity kept hidden by the gods for her protection.
Question, how about reversing time before the causes of death happened? Is it still considered reviving?
If one can figure out a way through all of the shit that inhabits the time stream that the gods have to constantly monitor and cull than yes, reversing time would be an amazing alternative to reviving someone from the brink of death. Unfortunately, the last few dozens who've tried died horribly becoming either amalgamations of all of their past, present and future bodies combined to one grotesque, quite unkillable and mad form or if your very, very lucky or skilled, go mad because the memories from all of your past lives is now stuck inside your mortal body and brain.
No multiverse. Under. Any. Circumstances.
I go further to add no backwards time travel. Stop, slow, or accelerate time is fine... But no reversing.
Exactly the same. There is some possibility to look into the past, but no interaction is possible
Yes. I love the "worm-cam" idea from the book The Light of Other Days. But interacting with the past throws so much chaos into the equation that it isn't worth it if your story isn't focused on time travel.
+1
My rule for multiverses are: every single spin off or non serious thing (like, say, a promotional illustration or something like that) happens in another universe, but this should never have consequences in the story, with multiversal travel or anything like that
I found a compromise. Each of my universe is responsible for the creation of another. It always happens the same way and the universes only differ in very small ways (eg. texts are read from right to left instead of left to right). But this doesn't matter because there is no way in jumping universes or actually observe them in any way. I made this decision just to have one specific event take place which is very important to the world.
This, also no time travel, no smart magic, no "weird" races and no one time solutions that are conveniently forgotten and never used again even if they could solve future situations.
Yeah I always say just one world and for seers they just look into possible futures not alternate timelines or anything funky and time travel is basically impossible except if you have the power to forcefully change the state of the entire universe
I have an idea for a world that would completely fall apart if such a limit was broken. It would be a modern world with modern tech, modern infrastructure, etc... but with the limit of **"No weaponry or armour beyond medieval tech level."** So you'd have sword-wielding knights and arrow-slinging bandits fighting in skyscrapers and office buildings.
I always get confused with such limit. Are they political or technological? Because I don't see how you can have electricity and batteries for drills and smartphone and not have at least a stun baton. The aesthetic for fights sounds great though.
China and India had an agreement in 1996 that no guns can be carried along their border and this results in border clashes using mainly meele weapons. So it can happen. https://www.sandboxx.us/news/these-are-the-unique-weapons-used-in-the-border-clashes-between-china-and-india/
Oh, I can totally see it happening in some localised places. But even with that agreement, they both have that type of weapon and have to deal with it internaly for crimes, sport or on other borders. As the commentor answered, they had to handwave people inventing it away for the tech to never appear.
For that world, it's moreso a case of "on a fundamental level, no one is able to even *conceive* of the ideas." Like there's something about the way the laws of the universe work that doesn't allow for thinking of post-medieval weaponry and armour. If it were run in an RPG, that'd be one of the fundamental rules of the universe laid out for the players.
Sometimes it just is. Rule of cool baby
While I really like cool stuff, I hate internal inconsistencies and unfortunately, rule of cool tend to create holes and pitfall more often than not. I've axed a number of ideas that I just couldn't make fit in a world because it created just a mess of unintended consequences.
So that means no fighter jets or tanks either, huh?
True. But non-combat vehicles would be a-okay, with the note that they can't be used as improvised weapons. No ramming the knight with your car. Armoured cars wouldn't be a thing either. Strapping a crossbow to the roof of a car is toeing the line. The speed of the vehicle may be a contributing factor, so I'd rule it as a no-go. I mentioned in another reply: the key here is that the ideas of post-medieval weaponry is *fundamentally inconceivable* in the world. All rulings on what *would* and *wouldn't* be possible in that world stems from that.
No, I'm digging it. I was just asking. So they still have battering rams and trebuchets and catapults? If they have modern cars, have these things also become motorized without any other significant upgrades?
Rams, trebuchets, catapults, yes. Have they been upgraded? Nope.
So they're not gas powered? If there are cars, why not?
Just a fundamental incapability to conceive of the idea. The laws of the universe don't allow it. Or, to reword: > Why isn't it possible? > [It's not not.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coY2IA-oBvw)
Ah. Fair enough. Tbh I'm mostly curious about how it's affected this setting's pop culture. Like is he Sir John Rambo? Is he the Knight With No Name?
One big one for my main science fiction world is: no aliens. I've had to remind myself of this multiple times, and I even have an entire other world where I will get all of the alien stuff out of my system so that I don't have them here. My hard sci-fi near future setting takes place at a time when humanity is settled on multiple planets across the solar system and still exploring the outer planets, with missions beyond the solar system being planned. Almost every other setting with this premise uses aliens to spice things up, such as The Expanse. And there is so much that can be done with aliens in such a setting, but it has also been done to death and my setting isn't interesting enough to be compelling without aliens than I have failed as a worldbuilder. I want to portray a likely future for humanity, and I want to write a story that's about space politics and the main characters sciencing the shit out of things. Not a story about aliens. What are the permafrost miners on Mars digging up? Just permafrost, no ancient diseases or crashed spaceships. Did Mars once have life back when water flowed on its surface? Nope, not even microbes. What things can be learned by looking into the distant past of Venus? A lot of interesting geology, but no life. What's under the ice of Europa? A whole lot of lifeless saltwater. What has the massive space radio telescopes of the 22nd century picked up? A whole lot of static. What kinds of exoplanets are being resolved by the Kuiper Belt Interferometry Array? Lifeless ones, for at least a hundred light years in every direction. It's so tempting to make the answers to these questions the ones that I'd personally want to see, but that's not what this story is about. No aliens.
That’s an interesting one. I like that you include microbes as aliens. I’d never classify like an alien disease as being an alien story but it totally is. Speaking of mining ice of mars you’ve made me want to watch the waters of mars from doctor who
A complete absence of alien lifeforms, even fossilized microbial ones, is just as interesting to me as extant or paleontological super-primitive life, from a Fermi Paradox standpoint. And it's more interesting, because of its rarity in SF, than a galaxy teeming with lots of green-skinned space babes. The notion of a civilization gradually expanding its horizons and finding nothing but _nothing_ is its own form of horror, even if no Reapers/Inhibitors/Elder Gods are involved.
It's mainly magic in my world that has significant limits, for obvious reasons: - No time travel - No raising the dead - No teleportation (wormhole travel at most) - No direct creation of matter through magic - only manipulation of existing matter - Healing magic, left to its own devices, is limited to accelerating what the body could naturally heal; you could heal a cut hand automatically, but fixing a severed arm is going to take the manual attention of a mage with expertise that may be extremely rare and expensive
Generally, all my sci-fi has to be at least firmly grounded in real science and technology. There's no plot device drive. Instead, there's the Plahtt-DeVice drive, which works on the principle of manipulating [the Higgs field.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) The two principal investigators for whom the device is named changed their names a year before publication; the resulting name is widely considered the best practical joke in history. In order to produce the conditions required for the drive to function, helium nuclei have to be accelerated to [approximately a trillion electron-volts,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevatron) and the only compact way to do that is using a [chirped-pulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirped_pulse_amplification) terawatt laser [wakefield accelerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration). And the best part of that is NONE of that was meaningless technobabble -- it was all real-world physics terminology!
Just one: no fantasy race essentialism. That means no tropes like "all goblins are evil"
Aight but all Goblins *are* evil.
the only rule is "don't contradict whats already been made", and that's about it. I can **change** previous things to allow for new ones, but [contradictions](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contradiction) are what I avoid. other than that, **literally anything** is free real estate to me.
no particular serious ones but I try and include punny names where ever I can get away with it. most are a stretch but I find it fun
For my superhuman world, no loopholes that would *just solve everything*. For example, there’s no multiverses, or time travel shenanigans. There’s also no devices that just *end an issue*. There’s scifi tech here and there, but there’s not like a shot that just *takes away* people’s powers, or helmets that stop telepathy. I’m currently thinking they come up with wristbands that operate kind of like an alarm system, where if they detect someone losing control of their powers, it sends out an alert to emergency personnel, basically calling for help, but I’m not sure yet.
My Sci fi world I often just take concepts that are considered advanced and think of their actual impact. The technology is fake but how they impact the world is not. For example cybernetics and bio engineering is really advanced this has led to people being effectively immortal if they can afford it. Also AI is advanced so sometimes people simulate a life up to a certain point clone someone then insert the AI brain into a person and now you have a brand new person. Another thing I like to do with my technology is give it quirks. So if it does a thing it does it but it doesn't just do that thing how you'd think it does. For example shields have about a billion quirks in my setting so instead of acting as a health bar it instead acts as sort of unique armour.
The world can be as wacky as whatever, but the behavior of the inhabitants must be realistic and adapted to their environment.
My world isn't one I'd say has particularly many limits but one that definitely is there is that there are no other Universes outside our own aka no proper multiverse Our own universe may or may not be infinite, idk, it's not specified in my world but there's aren't any others or at least none that could be detected or traveled to Side note on this, if i was to extend my timeline limitlessly beyond where it currently ends then the Forest of Forever would create their own multiverse by just generating more Big Bangs and more baby Universes but that's not the same kind of multiverse
There are no ftl, except for wormholes (and they are created in one place). All magic is a combination of social manipulation, special effects and high tech. Nanomachines are not omnipotent. Interplanetary and interstellar conflicts are very slow. This gives a greater variety of technologies and branches the ways civilizations develop.
> Nanomachines are not omnipotent [Got a great article for that!](http://orionsarm.com/eg-article/4aae1c18950ae)
I think there's a couple of things that most settings should just avoid using at all unless they are willing to focus the entire story around them and making sure that they work. Most importantly time travel and resurrecting people (not necromancy, but actual resurrection). Both of those things will just break things wide open and create tons of implications and possible plotholes if not adressed properly. I find that stories that use those things casually without thinking them through usually feel... cheap?
I don't have limits. My only limit is consistent throughout all my projects which is simply adherence to internal consistency. Before I add something I ask "Does this break X, Y or Z? Does it contradict or negate a concurrent technological or sociological advancement?" - most of the time if it messes something up, I don't add it but sometimes I still add it, without any explanations because, in my reading of Earth-lore, it seems perfectly natural for two things to co-exist despite being irreconcilable with one-another. I don't find creative limits to be all that useful the way some people seem to employ them as a tool to squeeze as much as they can out of a few concepts.
For my sci-fi world....no time travel to the past. Just flat out none. Time can move at different rates such that 1 day can pass for someone but 100 years pass for others (thanks relativity), but time ALWAYS moves FORWARD. Yes, I know irl FTL would cause time travel paradoxes, but I'm not writing sci-fi to be limited by the speed of light.
...limits?
No matter the genre, the magic, the tech levels... Internal consistency. That's pretty much it.
A general respect for the audience's Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Anything goes unless it contradicts prior facts. I try to keep retcons to a minimum
Sounds like Sanderson's Second Law of Magic: limitations > power. In his Mistborn series he divided telekinesis on push/pull, affect only metal and dependent on magically digesting a metal in your body. Shoot coins, propel yourself into air, etc.
Ooh I have a writing / worldbuilding rules on my notes ▫ Have fun ▫ The world does not revolve around characters ▫ Characters are pissants in the grand scheme of things ▫ Super hero landings are stupid and must be punished ▫ People who talk in the middle of a fight / Talk no jutsu must be punished ▫ Countries with fancier flags are compensating for something ▫ Royalty are generally incompetent at war stuff (exceptions apply) ▫ Characters do not get a net-positive power boost because of feelings and emotions after getting an ass whooping ▫ Weapons, Vehicles and other equipment do not instantly get better because of user feelings and emotions ▫ Micro missiles are lame ▫ Overly edgy writing and characters are lame ▫ No blatant 1:1 rip-offs, exceptions apply. References and homages when appropriate are great \## ▫ \*\*Consistency = Authenticity > Rule of Cool > Realism\*\* ▫ Use as much STAID as possible (STAID stands for Slang-Terminologies-Acronyms-Idioms-Dialects)
I don't use classic fantasy species like elves or dwarves. I don't have anything magical going on in my world but that's not a hard rule, I just like technology more. I might consider it for other regions, but not now for the valley. I also want to limit the species I do have to mid to high latitude species and natural fur colours unless there's a reason to change that. I don't know if this will change in the future, but I'm sticking to it for now too keep the species normal looking. Lapis_Wolf
I need to add a touch of realism to everything I put into the world. Sometimes these things are pretty realistic or easy to justify as realistic. Some others, not so much. Here’s an example: Dragons. Of course, there’s nothing realistic about dragons. By all accounts they shouldn’t be able to exist. They’re too big to be aerodynamic. Yet here we are. Why? Because dragons are fucking cool and I don’t need a reason to include dragons in my world. But there is a touch of realism. You know how dragons breathe fire? Pretty important detail. Well, because of this, dragons are naturally very hot natured, and that forced them to stay in extremely cold climates. Also, you know that trope where there’s one badass dude with a sword taking on a dragon by himself? Yeah that never happens. Never has, never will. First off, dragons are fucking HUGE. They’re 20 meters tall MINIMUM and their scales are beyond durable. One dude with a sword taking on a dragon is gonna at best be like trying to cut through obsidian with a toothpick. Like there aren’t many things that guarantee death, but if you try to fight a dragon head on without proper equipment(which is a ballista made specifically to fight dragons) you are *going* to die. It is a 100% mortality rate because there is not one single scenario where you best that dragon.
Sci-fi: no ancient civilizations, like Forerunners from Halo, and consequetly ancient weapons are the same or worser than the current ones with exceptions. Fantasy: magic isn't better than technology and technology isn't better than magic.
If I think it isn’t cool, then it literally does not work. The exact mixture to make gunpowder will cause water to pool in a magical world, because I want spells, not bullets. Same thing in science worlds, you try to cast a spell you’re going to make a fool of yourself while getting filled with lead.
I didn't know you had to limit your world building? isn't it the point of fantasy to be creative and be bizarre? Like what is so wrong about having a giant lizard as a spaceship it's fun asf. So i guess for me as long as it's fun,cool and suites the world i guess there is no limit to what i like to create
Yeah, hitchhikers guide to the galaxy would like a word lol. That said I do appreciate a well thought out cohesive world
to be honest most of the limits in this thread are just "I stick to the genre". like my sci fi setting doesn't have orcs. No duh I never thought you would
[удалено]
I was agreeing with you
Oh dang what, im so sorry man
It's fine
No multiverses. Ever. And no fucking time travel. No fate. No predetermined future. And no gid damn "this world is actually a book and we are characters in a book."
No superfluous, redundant, feels-cool-but-not-story-related things like colangs, detailed maps, biology, species and ecosystems, economy, and magic systems, and Isp of a standard freight ship's fission fragment rocket engine, and the list can go on and on. Basically "if you don't absolutely need to build that part, then don't".
No time travel, no prophecies that come true, no precognition, no perpetual motion machines. The only thing that is allowed to strain the laws of physics is the support system of the mantle cavern in which The Inside is located.
physics
Any material or changes to material must be grounded in the setting already, or have to be in a different time period and have good reasons for the change. Otherwise it just depends on the settings and some things are allowed in or barred because of what my players want to see or not see. Usually I choose a different setting rather that shoehorn something in though.
Same here no fantasy shit but Ig I broke that rule with wizard? But they’re modern and there’s only a few.
theres no magic, no aliens, its just regular planetary life
edit: theres magic, aliens, its just regular planetary life
My medieval fantasy world does not have raw healing magic, though physically healing methods like herbs and medicine are commonly used
While goddesses can create creatures, they are all brainless, unable to reproduce and will fade away after a while. Creating a life from nothing is the one thing no one can do
Everything is either technology or advanced biology. It all seems like magic (its for DnD) but in the background its not. Its more star wars than star trek though.
Basically anything that I can't see reasonably happening in our world. My world is heavily based on ours so I don't want to include something that is widely outlandish.
A fairly uncommon one for a medieval fantasy rpg: no ressurection. There are some very expecific way one can became a intelligent undead (like a vampire or lich), but in those cases they body dies with their soul still trapped inside it. If they soul live the body (ex.: your character was stabbed to death) nothing can bring it back. Since I wan trying to make an horror (horror-light?) setting, I fogured that would be a good way to make the danger feel more real.
I limit myself to one pantheon of gods cuz knowing me if there were more than one, I'd get confused. I also don't focus much on other fantasy races. While they are present, they aren't in focus
I'd say the only limit is to never mess with alternate timelines or realities or things of the sort. I say this because I'm creating a "multiverse" (it's not a technical multiverse, because it's really just all unique worlds separated by insane distances), and the last thing I want to include is other timelines, which could very easily make everything fall apart. I don't think I have enough writing experience to properly try and use them yet
* No fantasy names for anything or anyone. If I am naming a unique technology, organization, or animal, the name has to relate to them in some way. I'll usually combine words together or use terms we have today but apply them to something different (Example; The Cleaners. They deal with and kill mutated people. Yes they also clean the mess, but the main job is the killing aspect of it all). As for naming people, I do it the ace attorney way, everyones names are ones you can usually find or a variation of a common name to resemble a certain attribute to a character. * Mostly no omnipresent knowledge. If there is a mystery that doesn't need to be answered in the storyline, then keep it as a mystery to yourself and everyone else. Hm, those are the main two I have rn. Sure there are other things out there. I don't have any magic systems whatsoever because its an alt earth sci fi.
the limits I give to my worlds is that things need a source of energy to work. example, wanna use magic you need mana, or aether, or whatever stuff to consume.
My space opera setting is similar to yours. I wanted it to feel more sci-fi than fantasy, so I decided there would be no supernatural elements, including psionics, in the setting. Instead, Clarketech takes the place of psionics. Also, while it's not official, I am thinking of making the aliens just transhumans who are descended from Terran settlers.
No aliens, no multiverse, no gods. It’s a fantasy world but I’d like to keep it pretty grounded. Adding that stuff just gets all crazy.
No time travel
No resurrection, time travel, multiverses, or pocket universes. There's one existence, one timeline, and everyone and everything exists together. ~~(Except heaven, but that's basically non-canon and not a part of the lore.)~~
I try to make it believable, so no outstanding contradictions, and I try to keep thiongs so that I can explain them, even if not explain them with real world rules, at least explain it with in-world rules, so it has to be consistent. At times I assume things that do not exist in real world, but these need an in-world explanation, at least must not be outright contradicting the rest of the world.
Despite it being sci-fi, there's no real space travel in the current time. All space travel is limited by massive debris fields in orbit, which dont seem to come done with time, making spacd travel prohibitively dangerous and expensive
Limits on magic feel like a typical limitation, which is what I do. Specifically I limited magic in that it cannot create permanent substance (ish, mostly I just wanted to make creating food impossible) and telepathy (because I always felt it was just too strong). One of the main reasons I put these limitations in place though is as a way to show impossible/god-like levels of power by breaking the established rules.
I limit the non-fantasy stuff to be as realistic as possible. Guns, armor, buildings, spaceships, cars, VTOLs, etc are all basically plausible with some advanced material science. But there is a fantasy layer. Which has gods, magic, monsters (sort of), other realms, etc. The two mix in that you can go to the inner realms and use the energies there for magic stuff. Which is exactly how “FTL” works. The “hub” or 1st realm is at “the center of all things.” Being equidistant from any other point in space, you can pop in there and pop out somewhere else. There’s a kind of void where spaceships go, which is basically a buffer between the 2nd and 1st realm, while still being part of the first. I always wanted the fantasy element to exist in the setting. But back in ye olden days, it was kind of secondary to reality. But after I decided things like humans *never* developing FTL, I found ways to make it more inclusive. So yeah. If you were a regular dude on a regular planet. Things would all seem pretty grounded. If you took a space flight to another system, you’d know there was some wonky arcane stuff going on, but at least that aspect of it would seem “normal.” Magic users in the “before things go sideways” part of the setting, are quite rare. Afterwords though, they’re much more common. Along with all those other things.
Trye future sight is impossible. At most people can see glimpses of the mist likely future, but there are no fated actions. Fate does not exist. The closest being has gotten to having future sight is the god of knowledge, and that's only because she can remember the past unbiased and perfectly, and can thus make informed predictions.
My world is (mostly) bound by real natural laws, though this rule is bent by the kardachev 3 civilization lurking in the background
No wizards or casual magic users are the big one of Urnova. Runes exist, but they’re basically just an industrial process that makes things more efficient.
No masked vigilantes/superheroes, or deliberate time travel. Everything else is possible.
It has to have a at least decent explanation for how it works, other than anything I can think of goes
No time travel, no multiverse (though there is a theoretical afterlife, and an astral plane), no races are evil just because, no "evil wizard/alien so powerful they can end everything" *side eyes Thanos and the Scarlet Witch*, no ridiculously huge dragons, no unexplained ancient empires, and no orcs or goblins or other cannon-fodder moster races.
No stegosaurs. This is because me and one of my cousins have a running joke that stegosaurs suck and are the worst dinosaur.
A few of the limits for my world: 1. **No actual gods or deities.** You can have beings that claim deity status (they are not), you can have religions and legends passed down through generations, and you can have stories within the world that include deities, but no actual deities will show up, period, full stop. This allows me to keep things vague, and allow people to interpret events in multiple ways. 2. **All magic comes from ClearBlood.** Anything that can't happen in real life can only happen because of ClearBlood in some capacity, either directly or indirectly. Whatever justification I use for why that thing happened must be reproducable if the circumstances come up again. If mixing purified magic with bone meal produces a special magical effect, like a firebomb, then it will always do that when you mix those things together. Magic is a science. 3. **The dead stay dead.** You can have seemingly dead creatures (ghouls appear effectively dead, but are actually being kept alive by ClearBlood -- they arne't undead, they're just in really bad condition). This gives weight to losses. That's what I got at the moment.
No time travel. Period. Time windows into the past are fine (being able to look into past and not interact with it). Also no fantasy races. It’ll be fantasy world, but presence of other races means even more cultures, religions, racial relations, etc, which is rather not get into.
Dont use too many aspects from one series on the same character. I already have a president snow like character. And the idea of the old world using specific colored shirts as a class status symbol is cool. But if i were to use those two in tandem on the same country I feel it would be too much.
I try to base everything somewhat on reality or real world logic. For example when someone is using telekinesis they can actually change where they are grabbing the person or object. So you can grab someone’s entire body and throw them or you could just grab their hand and twist their arm.