Also, like, “vibes” can absolutely be a well thought out system? My magic system is 1) the universe can hear you but 2) nobody knows how to speak its language and 3) contagion and similarity.

I mean one of the most common historical ones is "sympathetic magic" where you do stuff *based on how it vibes with the thing you want done*

Brandon Sanderson

It’s funny you mention this, because I was interested in reading Brandon Sanderson until someone started talking about the “magic system” and not the characters and what they want.

Yeah, it's how people tried selling it to me too "They eat the metal, and different metals give different powers, and everyone can only eat one kind of metal except for-" "I don't care! What's the actual story about?"

I’m curious what impact Pokemon had on this aspect of the Fantasy genre. Lore/worldbuilding gets subbed out in favor of a list of what your lil guys do.

This is a large part of why I have no interest in reading his works.

The characters and story could be really cool! But I’ll never find out, if the best loved aspect of his books is the “magic system”.

If you’ve spent any more than 15% of your total creative energy on “worldbuilding”, I’m out.

All right, I feel personally attacked by this one.

Look, I get it. Worldbuilding is *fun*. But it’s not actual writing, and doesn’t have much positive impact on how enjoyable the thing will be to read, and can LOTS of NEGATIVE impact, and 9 times out of 10 just keeps people from ever finishing the damn thing.

Okay yeah but what if I want to get sidetracked on the specifics of the unicorn trade between fantasy China and fantasy Vietnam and spend the next 3 days on that only to realize that I have lost all motivation to write original thing

You should write a story about unicorn smugglers 100% serious that would be awesome

Then you retvrn to tradition and build a janky early 2000s website about unicorn trade. As The Ancestors intended.

almost all of my worldbuilding starts with me envisioning a gay ass scene and going “okay cool cool how do I make this happen”

My current writing project is like "ok I want this specific type of person and I have a story for her to be in but I do need to make sure I understand the stuff around her enough that the things she does make sense"

literally engineering the world to maximize the yuri payoff

my ability to run a ttrpg improved 100% the moment i stopped focusing on "worldbuilding" and instead focused on what elements are important for the Story that the players and myself are creating

i do not need to know that this township primarily harvest magi-grain and has 25 named npcs with rich backstories - i need the guy related to the plot the players are engaging with to have a name and i need to know what the statblock of werepigs are bc there's a basement full of them in town

i'm gonna start asking for every npc's name and what grain they harvest

Players like Katie are the reason I have a spinny Wheel of Names.

im going to give kyrtae another wraith disease

i'm literally unkillable i have Time and Demons on my side

oh yeah i saw that denzel washington movie!

I love that movie!

fuck her up

same thing i guess with just Broad writing. like if a detail doesnt interact with your book/movie's central Story, idk why it matters at all. the exact science of how Tattooine functions with seasons and weather patterns doesn't matter what matters is that its a shitty planet Luke wants to leave

I mean, I can get a fan enjoying reading a book all about facts about Tattoine. We do love our Tlöns and Uqbars. But you either need to FIRST have a story or game or something that gets people invested, OR set out with “facts about a fake place” as the specific goal of the project. What you DON’T…

…do is set out to write a story, and then instead of actually doing any of the story stuff, spend all your time working on the fake place facts. It’s like wanting to be a NASCAR driver and spending all your time planning livery and sponsors before actually learning to drive.

As a Heavy Worldbuilding Guy (TM), I actually agree with you a lot here. Frontloading all your worldbuilding can absolutely kill writing momentum, and worldbuilding done organically during writing often just feels better. Frontloaded worldbuilding is best in moderation, hah.

Also I genuinely love that you turned "don't put the cart before the horse" into a NASCAR metaphor, that's awesome.

don’t put the livery before the heavily retuned generation 6 engine in a camaro body

Don't put the... something something... before the extractive global petrochemical industry? ... I don't know enough about cars to play this game, I bow before your skill and wisdom.

People think they want to be Tolkien, but they forget he did all the linguistics and mythology for it's own sake as a fun exercise, and then totally separately to that wrote some stories set in that world. You literally don't need to know any of that stuff to enjoy the Hobbit or LotR

I’d like to put in a good word here for worldbuilding as a hobby! I’ve done it for years and it’s quite fun when your end goal is just to figure out the history/geology/politics/society/languages/culture/maps of the world. I’ve built some huge spreadsheets and obsidian vaults doing this

Oh, as a hobby it’s perfectly fine! There’s nothing wrong with worldbuilding in and of itself. It’s lots of fun! It’s just not the same thing as writing a story, and often gets in the way of doing so.

I admittedly do more sandboxy stuff so it's a bit different but I get ya

yeah if you run it more sandboxy i can see why you'd need to have more fleshed out. ngl the tables i run tend to prefer more focused narratives and if i were to put my table into a sandbox rn katie would cry and scream at me begging for narrative direction

shes just like me fr

i for one would play within the sandbox and not break any toys

Well you give them hooks!

...maybe I want my story to be setting focused

oh dear

Its been done before (the xeelee sequence comes to mind)

worldbuilding is only good if it's a minimal part of it or it's 100% of it. either make a story or make a ttrpg book and shut up. too many people think they will make the best story because it's "deep" nah nobody needs to know what typical meal structure is. just put the world in the book girl

sure a girl can put the world in the book but what if,,, what if someone put girls in the book,,, and made them kiss and,,,

I DO THIS! I AM DOING SO AS WE SPEAK

worldbuilding is for ttrpgs and rock n roll concept albums

Or wargames and certain specific kinds of videogames. Or one of those encyclopedias of fictional creatures / spaceships / whatever books.

yeag i was about to say reading rpg settings like anthro/ecology books is rad as hell when its done right

Yeah but that’s a case of it either being the intended purpose of the project OR a supplement for people who are already fans. Which is different from people ostensibly writing novels forgetting that novels are STORIES, not settings.

Since I'm currently having to write the setting intro and explanation territory for my book (curse you @umlauthuth.bsky.social) I'm starting to realize maybe I don't like reading that stuff as much as I like just reading big lists of monsters I can put in a thing

The only magic system that's really stuck with me recently is the one from the nothing mage by J.P. Valentine has the classic different colours correspond to different types of magic red fire blue water etc. But posits what if a mage is born with magic in the Xray/gamma ray end of the spectrum

Oh and Mage errant by John Bierce which has a really interesting magic system which all of the main characters are completely broken outliers in and making their screwed up magic work for them rather than the conventional techniques is the whole point.

@johnbierce.bsky.social mentioned!

Lol I literally spent my afternoon today writing an essay on the hard/soft magic system discourse www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/co...