Snapbuilders, how did you start worldbuilding?
Hello fellow builders!
I'm rather curious regarding why your "world" came into existence and what were your influences? Was it Role-Play game with friends? Are you writing a novel? Were you influenced by Lovecraft or Tolkien? Cook or Gaiman?
Tell us the story, not of your created world, but of how it came to be.
8 years ago by RoMS
with
7 comments
Join the Discussion
It was a warm summer day in the middle of exams... you know, too warm to actually study. I remembered my dreams from that night (I'm a lucid dreamer, btw) and as I had been staring at the wall for the past 10 minutes anyway I started to draw a map of what I imagined the world to look like. It was actually quite different from what it is now (biggest difference being that the planet used to be tidally locked) and I've been changing and adding things ever since. I only started seriously worldbuilding about 7-8 months ago when I dicovered /r/worldbuilding and realized I was not actually alone in my weird way of passing time!
About a couple of months ago I was writing some lore and I realized what I was writing was actually a rather interesting plot to what could someday become a book/game. I started characterbuilding then and I like to think I've got quite a decent plot by now. I still haven't decided on whether I want to make a book or a game out of it but for the first I'd have to learn to write and since I'm going to study game design next year the latter option is probably more realistic.
I'd say my biggest influence is the ASOIAF series... they are really some of my favorite books and I love GRRM's writing style. I liked the political focus in the plot so my story is also filled with murder, coups, kings and emperors... and a lot of war.
What are you biggest IRL influences for your states and kingdom?
I like to think I'm quite original if it comes to my nations :D Of course there's some elements of certain IRL cultures in my world. The language of Thalas for instance, is based on Ancient Greek. I also took the whole "city state system that the Greeks had going and gave it a bit of an overhaul for how the Empire of Thalas works. The language and some cultural aspects of Naviton and the Esya are from the Inca with some Maya/Aztec elements in there. Other than that I can't think of something else really, other than Atura being the "Europe" of my setting (they have more advanced weaponry: steel when the rest still uses iron or even bronze).
I have quite a bit more nations but I'm quite proud that I can't immediately think of some obvious real world inspirations for them! :)
I started by wanting to write a book about a revolution in a fantasy land and having to create the country. I then decided to map the entire planet because I wanted to visualise the world. The book gradually fainted from my mind as I naturally started coming up with new things for other countries and all of a sudden I was worldbuilding.
Why did you stop wanting to write that book?
I suppose it was because everything was too clichéd and I had other things I wanted to focus on.
I had always been the kind to doodle snd jot down ideas when they popped into my head, but I can actually credit my jump into proper worldbuilding to DND. More specifically, our DM was extremely uncreative with worldbuilding (Ex: Town names like Stonewood, or unimaginative plots). It got to the point where we ended up on a campaign that was literally "Guardians of Ga'hoole", same names but just with dragonkin instead of owls. So I got to work on making my own, since if im going to criticize something I better have my own idea of what to do. After that it just rolled from there :)