I've noticed a fair few people on HikiCulture are fans of sci-fi and fantasy so I'm curious how many people have tried (or want to try) their hand at world building, i.e. creating a fantasy or sci-fi world from scratch using their own imagination.

I do have a world I'm currently working on (and in which I'll hopefully set some works of fiction) though I've got a long way to go before it's detailed enough to use. It can be good fun to try and come up a variety of cultures and giving each one its own history, kingdoms, cities, technology, economy, religion, mythology, ethics, language, literary culture, characters, temperament and also deciding how that culture then interacts with its neighbouring cultures. You can end up with a map full of different peoples who have warred, traded, intermixed, held and lost territory, etc over many centuries or millennia. Also because it's a fantasy world, you can throw in magic, monsters, and the supernatural without fear of sounding like a complete nutcase.

So, is anyone else into (or interested in) world building?

Would anyone be interested into taking part in a group fantasy world building project? I'm not sure quite how it would work, but I've always wanted to try one.

I always liked brain storming, but I would like it more if it was based around some interactive platform used individually to create for example a nation/culture/race. These would later be combined into a continent/world. Like a fantasy Nationstates meets Spore.

I enjoy it, but my problem is that I tend to just suck off whatever fantasy series I'm obsessed with.

So, essentially, it ends up being Westeros, with more lesbians. Of course, a Westeros-ripoff is an improvement over the eight trillion LOTR-ripoffs there are out there.

But yeah. I definitely want to develop a very in-depth world, both for writing and for my own personal delusional escapist fantasies. I've been planning on/trying to read medieval history to give me more of an idea of how things worked, as I've completely forgotten whatever we learned in the minimal period of 9th grade global history where we covered it, and a major in computer information systems doesn't do much to teach me about it. I really prefer more realistic fantasy worlds with small amounts of magic and stuff, as opposed to "The great he-witch loomed over the field of shambling orcs and great bursts of manic blue microwaves shot from his fingers, casting upon the heathens a fate most grim and melty" stuff like in some (*cough*Erikson*cough*) series. As for group world-builing, I think it could be fun, but would probably give me anxiety because of the social aspect of it.

This is one of those things that i've always wanted to do, but never quite got round to...

I'll get the ball rolling...

1. LordTricky is Emperor of The Universe

2. He is a cybernetic ninja

3. He lives in a flying space mansion with a harem 137 seksy arian women.

I'm working on mine. It's radically different from this world, the only real similarity is that humans look human and people speak english.

I've been doing that for my whole life, but I didn't know there was a term for it until I saw this thread today.

I'm a fan of maps to accompany works of fiction. When I'm working on a book, I always set it in an imaginary place and draw a detailed map to go with it. I've also drawn maps of more fantastical places without actually writing down stories to accompany them. My brother and I used to draw a lot of detailed maps of imaginary cities and topographical maps of imaginary places when we were growing up, with detailed drawings of scenes within these places. I always complete the design of a story's setting before I flesh out the story itself.

I like making up worlds more than actually writing anything.
But everything always seems ripped off. "That's from Stargate, that's from Star Trek, that's from some book I read 20 years ago..."

Yeah I've often thought up ideas for online world games like nation states, but more complicated and interesting. One ideas was along the lines of a town (perhaps medieval in setting) with all the players taking on roles in that town but then you have problems of who gets to be the aristocracy and who gets stuck as the peasants etc. Intereating to ponder but difficult to design. A game like that would also mean interacting with lots of people online which is nerve-wracking. I'd prefer world building with a small group of people I liked initially, though I do see the appeal of the interactivity.



lol sounds like a Westeros I'd visit.

I agree about the magic...my world does contain magic, but its quite limited. There's far more superstition and mythical magic than actual magic. Magic's power is in the fear it creates and power it instills through that fear, not in its actual strength.

I suppose in a group world building project everyone would need to agree on magic and its limitations and I'd probably suggest for any initial world that magic is excluded altogether so people can focus on the cultures and people.


LordTricky's "137 seksy arian women" are a distinct possibility in any made-up world

Ivory, I love the map side of it too. Sadly I have next to no artistic ability so anything I draw looks crap. I'm a frequent lurker on the forum called Cartographer's Guild which is a great place for getting fantasy map inspiration. As for terms, I think a lot of people also refer to World Building as World Construction (or 'World Con' for short).

I'll have a think about how a group world building project could work given the response to this thread has been good.

WTF I skimmed Cartographer's Guild for like 10 minutes and now I am downloading Photoshop and planning to wile away the weekend creating an elaborate map of my own little world.

I get sucked into new hobbies so easily.

A related thing that interests me is constructed languages. http://www.zompist.com/kit.html
But no way do I have the attention span for that.

haha, yeah I've tried to create maps in Painter, but I don't have any artistic talent so they look crap. Let me know if yours are any good. I'd recommend using Painter rather than Photoshop for map making, although maybe that's cos I suck at using Photoshop for anything more than tweaking images. lol



The more I study other languages the more I think trying to create something to flesh out a fantasy world would be worthwhile. Even if the grammar is farily basic with a small number of inflections and none of the horrible complexities of say Latin, it'll still look good to the average reader whose probably not gonna try and learn it.

As that guy in your link points out on one of the pages, people with no linguistic experience beyond english tend to stick random punctuation marks in English sounding words which kind of follow English grammatical rules and they end up with a rather fake looking language. Its better not to try at all than to try and end up with that. lol

As for the world building project, I'm playing around with some Wiki software which might do the job well. I'm adding all my story notes into a Wiki to better organise them and if that works well, then the Wiki model could be applied to some kind of group world.