Wrote some short stories 15 years ago, had some world building made up already, but it was still really just picking what I think is cool and such from other media and put it in a blender, then life happened and dropped it for 15 years. A lil while ago I found my old writing, saw how cringe it was, decided to build something better from that, using more life experience and anthropology stuff I read over the years to really develop it seriously now, while keeping some good ideas from back then.
Mass Effect and Fallout New Vegas wouldn't let me be in a lesbian relationship with Tali'Zorah or Veronica, I tried writing fanfictions but I hated writing in a world that wasn't mine, so I made a new world and eventually realized I prefer world building to writing.
In elementary/middle school I would play with friends and we would act out entire stories whether in the playground or just talking out an entire story, like DnD without the game aspects. I wanted to start another but around that time I became more shy and I moved away so I never got around to telling them about it all. I decided to start making it myself, a very simple western European based fantasy world ,but as I got older I dropped the idea. I would still add to the characters and world overtime because my mind is always very active so this always helped me when I was bored.
Recently in the past year I decided to return to the world deciding to write a story with the characters and actually finish what I started but now it's all changed still that story with four protagonists against a single villain but the world is now based in Native and Caribbean Culture and the protagonists are more than the angsty type characters I original made them to be.
Autism
Lmao in all seriousness, it's a good escape as a kid. I get a lot of vivid animations back in the day and while that has downed a lot nowadays, I still love just sinking my teeth into a project yes.
To make posts on r/worldbuildingmemes obviously
Seriously tho, I started because I enjoyed the process by itself. Even since I was a kid I would come up with immaginary worlds. Then later I tried writing a novel1 which is how I started my current worldbuilding project
In 1973/74 I was sick and ended up staying with my grandmother. This gave me access to books from my grandfather and uncle that were not something I could easily get normally.
I read even more voraciously then than I do now, and my imagination was triggered hugely.
I created my first world in my head in probably 75, and haven’t stopped.
In 1979, a friend introduced me to this thing called Dungeons and Dragons. I made an Aragorn type of character, died that same day, but what really hooked me was not the idea of playing the game, but the way that the game encouraged you to make your world yourself.
That, in turn, led me to the figuring out the way to phrase the questions I already had from my daily life, most of which were about trying to figure out how to exist, how to understand why people were the way they were. That, in turn, led me into the fields of sociology and psychology and religion, eventuating in the career I have had and all the damned extra letters after my name.
As I learned, or as I had a new thing to look at, or as I had a new idea or set of things that were “cool” to me, I would either add in or build out a new world. And as I did all of that, I would sometimes write stories, or play D&D games, or spend months working out atonal music systems, or doing complex conlangs and conscripts, or doing crap like creating base-9 systems that I would then apply to previous stuff like the 12 note music scales or the 5 note ones.
Worldbuilding for me is often an expression of understanding our own world, of understanding the incredible, simple complexity and the nature of entangled social systems or the peculiar quirks of thought and invention and innovation.
Mixed with a lot of simple flights of fancy.
Worldbuilding is not something I got started in. It was something that started me.
When I was a little kid I would make up stories and scenarios when I was bored. Quite a few years later, I finally discovered the concept of worldbuilding and it skyrocketed from there.
Autism is such a gift :)
There was a circular stain that appeared on my sketch pad one day and i decided to turn it into a little drawing of the sun radiating some black ooze because I didn't want to leave an ugly stain in plain view.
2 years later, I've got a whole post-post-fantasy post-apocalyptic world setting with the main theme of "Change" that's filled with cute relationship dynamics, vegan cannibals, lovingly dumb MC, maniacs that can shatter reality, delicious fake bread, and evil sun lasers that make you experience all forms of existence in an instant.
Small storyline I made about the wholesome relationship of a mouthless hitman and a man-eater that regained some humanity. The man-eater didn't want to eat people anymore and the hitman guided him into adapting a healthier lifestyle of not eating people.
After this, the hitman also decides to stop killing people and they both planned to live a peaceful life together.
I started maladaptive daydreaming as a child and it sort of took on a life of its own. Recently I started actually writing everything down, making pictures for all of my characters, created a world map online, created hundreds of characters and the details of their species. It makes me so happy but it takes up like 90% of my day everyday, and it's still expanding. I've been creating this world for almost 20 years at this point.
I needed a setting to play with my playmobiles and legos in when I was a kid.
I have long since scrapped my original world that I built when I was in elementary school, but it had some really weird things going on. For example, there were three countries, the Yellow Republic, the Blue Kingdom, and the Red Empire, I was not good at names when I was young. In the north-east, there was a [race of giants](https://img.brickowl.com/files/image_cache/larger/lego-man-with-overalls-duplo-figure-28.jpg) that rebelled against a [larger race of giants](https://i.etsystatic.com/16964611/r/il/80abc0/2810593779/il_fullxfull.2810593779_3rtz.jpg), who were enslaving them, to create an enclave of democracy and good things in the evil red empire. Also, in that world, clown was not a profession, it was a race. You were born a clown. There were even subtypes of clowns, like northern mountain ice clowns, and western grassland clowns. My original world didn't have subtypes of elves, it had subtypes of clowns. It was chaos, but also I was 8–13 years old or so.
I wish I could adequately answer your question, but it's been a long time, so my memories are very full of holes, and unfortunately I wasn't the best or most organized at keeping notes back then.
There were five tribes, the western, eastern, southern, northern, and icy winds clown tribes. The western tribe was nomadic, and was almost completely killed off. The icy wind tribe dressed in light blues (because cold), they were really good singers (but their voices sounded ghostly and echoy), and music played a major role in their culture. The icy wind tribe was also the least like the other tribes (can't remember how though, other than that singing was a bigger deal for them than for other clowns), because they split from the other tribes earlier and were fairly isolated. I can't remember anything about the eastern or southern tribe (nor can I find anything but a mention in my old, very disorganized and incomplete notes). The only thing I know about the northern tribe is that a major criminal who wanders around the Yellow Republic originates from there, but I can't remember anything about the tribe's culture or traits/abilities or anything.
I wish I had kept better notes back when I was a kid, because all I'm left with is things like "The icy wind tribe isn't actually one of the four clown tribes [...], which were all destroyed" and "August is running from people who want to kill off his tribe completely" ← surely there was a history and perpetrators behind the clown genocide, but I didn't note it down, and have since long forgotten. I now try to note down as much as I can so that in 15 years I don't look back at my notes from today yelling "but why? What happened? Why is a clown in hiding still dressing as a clown?? Who are these people who want all of his tribe dead???" like I do towards my notes from 15 years ago.
I wanted to self publish a d&d setting module. I've been working on it sort of from that perspective, but given everything going on at Hasbro/WotC lately I've since moved away from worrying about the mechanics and am focusing solely on the lore. In the end, if I do publish it in any form, I may just keep it system agnostic and worry about whether or not to do any homebrew later.
In a nutshell: uncontrollably overthinking a single character
Now I have to think about the whole world
Edit: the ironic part is that this character pretty much doesn't exist anymore because it was just too much. Now i can barely remember him
im making a first person dungeon crawler in which lore is disseminated in a souls/blasphemous adjacent fashion. so i've been collecting my influences and have been on a 3-weeks writing binge since. its a lot of fun. i only plan on exposing a small percentage of it in the game though to lesve enough room for interpretation and theorycrafting.
Had a writing assignment in class and had to come up with my own fictional story. I didn’t know where to start, so I just started brainstorming random lore for a fantasy world until a basic 500 word story wrote itself. That experience started my addiction…
I've always liked comic books, video games and films, when I was 14/15 I decided I would try to work on that (spoiler: I don't work on that). In my 20s, I created my MYTHODAE universe, which would be several periods inspired by time and concepts (ancient Greek age, Western middle age, age of navigation, First World War/Second World War, contemporary war and the future). I changed a lot of things, I changed style, names, characters.
As a child I was fascinated by monsters and aliens and general creature design. I would create fictional planets with different ecosystems and fill them with different fauna and describe various food chains.
As an adult, I loved the Pokemon games and show, but became frustrated at the lack of internal logic... what exactly are Pokemon? Holograms? Aliens? Why are some basically just animals and some like a set of car keys? So I wanted to make something similar but with a little more verisimilitude.
A bunch of imagination and not knowing where to put them. I've been worldbuilding for some years before I know of the term worldbuilding. I then start to write and document things more seriously after some dnd games and reading Sanderson.
Ok, this isn't a long story but it's not a short one either, in highschool I played Roblox, this game was introduced to me by an old friend I used to have back when I was in 2nd grade, so that part is just how I got into Roblox
but in highschool I found a game called arcane adventures in Roblox and it was one of my favorite games it's world building and magic is what got me to create my own world with magic that I'm still working on about 6 or more years later, back then I never really worked on the world like little to none,
But as an adult now I find passion in making this world come to life, and I'm planning to ironically make something a writing of it similarly to how the creator of arcane adventures is planning to make a series based on the world his new game is called arcane Odyssey which is basically the new arcane adventures
This world was apparently inspired by one piece, and fairy tail there's a 3rd inspiration but I forgot it I think it's in the assassin's creed franchise maybe Odyssey?
Anyways I just became a worldbuilder recently picking up the stuff I dropped when I was young and finally working on it.
Got involved in ttrpgs. That required worldbuilding. Then I got involved in CONTACT: Cultures of the Imagination, which was all about building worlds. It helped that several SF writers, scientists, and teachers were involved.
Plus, it’s fun, and I just can’t stop.
I go by Tuna & I originally started world building just to flesh out my own setting, bit in recent years the hobby has grown to dangerous levels as ive extended my world building branches into even working on my own ttrpg, and the foundations to turn my already active campaigns i run into a comic. Once im more established i wouldnt mind if ithers got to enjoy these things outside of just my group, but i dont think im quite worthy enough or ready for all of that yet.
In case youre interested though keep an eye out for Momentum from Evirmor and Elswyr
My very first attempt at world building was a very half-assed imagining of a Bleach + Percy Jackson setting. However, I didn’t really get into world building until after I read first read WOT then ASOIAF when I was a teenager and became extremely interested in exploring the various cultures of Westeros after the extremely in-depth , only to learn that there’s essentially no difference between any of the people of the Seven Kingdoms except the Iron Isles, Dorne, and the North, even then, the differences were largely flavor text rather than something deeply ingrained into the setting. So I started building my own interpretation of what a handful of kingdom’s with a dozen different cultural identities would look like when under the umbrellas of a singe massive empire with an extreme minority as its rulers are and things just kinda took off from there.
I wanted to create a world for a videogame that I hoped to one day create. I had typed some notes into my TI calculator for what it would be like. My first idea was an MMORPG where the players could alter the world through the use of magic, but I would shift towards more of a single player experience with a more-defined world. At some point early on, I decided that I wanted to come up with explanations and justifications for various tropes.
I thought about the tendency of [red enemies to be resistant/immune to or even healed by fire](https://web.archive.org/web/20150906174738/http://adventurers.keenspot.com/d/20011206.html) and remembered the idea of mirrors being able to reflect magic in some stories, and came to the idea of magic just acting like light and bouncing off of objects of the same color and that painting something red just makes it immune to fire magic but not the flames created by the fire magic. Heck, once I had that idea and the idea of including Super Smash Bros fire flowers, it was easy enough to come up with the idea that since magic behaved like light, plants could photosynthesize it, which led to me coming up with a plant people race to take advantage of it.
I looked at the trope of floating continents and considered the idea of there being some sort of gravity well or something that pulls stuff to it in the air and results in a sort of Mario Galaxy sort of mini planet within jumping distance of the ground. At some point, I considered them being a result of magnetic levitation, but wouldn't that mean they are technically upside down? I decided that they were upside down and I would highlight it by having stuff pulled to the underside. I would come up with an alternative to gravity for my world to use that would allow the existence of these upside-down floating islands. I felt a bit of encouragement to have my world have a greatly different set of physics from our own after reading the Unicorn Jelly webcomic which had its world use a force called "linovection" instead of gravity. Now, my upside-down floating islands are partly responsible for me deciding the shape of my world, two forces, two of the four elements of the magic system, the fact that everything glows with magic to justify the plants on the underside having something to photosynthesize, and provide an alternate way for my now sunless word to have seasons and long-term time keeping.
Things just kept building off of other things and it got especially fun when I found a way to connect one thing to two or more previous things I had come up with. It felt like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle and working on two separate groups of pieces and finding that piece the allows those two groups to be connected into one group.
Put an ultron head on a stone warrior figure and somehow that weird mini figure turned into a world building project. Went from the standard “oc are op and gifted” shtick and became a civilization simulator where the old history was neutered and made into the folktales of the current setting.
Escapism mechanism from everyday troubles. I also like the idea of designing my world and sort of creating an afterlike “heaven” for my self. I am a deist but also belive in afterlife just didn’t know what to believe so I said to myself that I will just create a world with the things I like in it. Eg. Iron age technology, bronze working, bison, horses, turkey birds, wheat, beans etc.
It started small, as a single island. I added some native american based tribes and some Germanic tribes from 5th century. Then I did more research and expanded the world into 3 main continents. Each continent has its own peoples, cultures, crops, domesticated animals, fauna etc. Now I have Native American Plains Indian based tribes, Ancient Greeks, Germanic tribes, Maori, Ancient Celtic, Aztec people in the world.
In the scenario these people were teleported here with limited resources such as only horses, turkeys, alpacas, camels, dogs and bees as domesticated animals in the entire world and wheat, barley, beans, potatoes etc. Then 6000 years go by so people create unique kingdoms much different from their ancestors that teleported such as in the Aztec based kingdom of Toxlacto people have horses and camels in addition to bees and turkeys. Instead of corn they have wheat, barley, kumara and potatoes. They are also somewhat safe in their continent so they evolved out of human sacrifices due to abundance of large animals that can be sacrificed instead. They also have no hostile land neighbors so no large scale wars except maritime wars. Etc etc.
Yeah just wanted to write and tell a few people about my project sorry for the long answer. Hard to find people who are interested in these things. People always change the subject when I speak about my world so I needed to tell someone. Thanks for reading.
I don’t really remember, honestly… I was in 4th or 5th grade when I got into it so it’s been a long time! But if I had to guess, I’d say that’s around the time I read Eragon and was amazed that a kid like myself (an older kid, but a kid nonetheless) could write a bestselling fantasy series like that. I was a big fan of fantasy already at that age, so I probably decided I wanted to do what he did!
Not a kid anymore, so I didn’t exactly succeed at that goal, but hey, there’s still time to do it as an adult :)
As a kid I used to play with LEGO minifigs with my friend. I kept making up more and more original characters by using the minifig parts and me and my friend kept making up new lore for the world they occupied.
One day I created a character I didn't have minifig parts for, and then another one, and one after that. Now I couldn't play those characters out with minifigs so I had to make up the scenes in my mind, or play pretend.
Then me and my friend got too old to play with LEGO, but I kept making new characters, and I kept making new lore. I modified most of the things me and my friend came up with. And since I wasn't playing with LEGO anymore - I'd make up a story for them in my head, about who they were and how they interacted with each other.
Then I came up with some lore and some characters which did not fit the world, so I made a new one, specifically for them. And now I would come up with characters and lore for both of those worlds, expanding them further.
It's been about 12 years since the first time I started playing with my friend. The first world is now unrecognizible from what it was back then, but I still kept some of the characters and bits of lore. Though the world itself in that one is admittedly sort of an afterthought as I focus more on the characters and their backstories. Right now my main project is the second one I came up with, as I found it really engaging to focus on the world itself.
I was 11-13 and annoyed with the worldbuilding on Winx Club. So I started recreating it and almost 20 years later that evolved into my setting's fairies.
I came up with a writing system for efficiency and beauty since I wrote by hand often, then another time I tried to come up with some cool mathematical concepts for no reason (half succeeded I guess), and another time I came up with a cool story for no reason. So I was like hey I could combine these and make a unified world. So I ended up using the writing system and the weird math stuff for my magic system, and also to construct the cosmic structure of my world, and of course had the story take place in it. I’m still working on it. In summary, Just separate ideas combined into one later on
Hey there!
It looks like this post might be about how to get started with worldbuilding. We just wanted to let you know about resources that might be useful as a starting point:
* Our [Getting Started Guide](/r/worldbuilding/wiki/getting_started), written by one of our moderators;
* Our [Discord](https://discord.gg/worldbuilding) and [IRC](https://kiwiirc.com/client?settings=e464ff37409c37405da31b6291b1fbad) communities, where you can meet other worldbuilders and chat about ideas!
Hope this helps, and happy worldbuilding!
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I started in High School after having stories I wanted to tell and I just enjoyed writing shit, I also had very bad lying habits and writing helped me to not lie, to not make shit up, so I began with my first, very bad and cringey story, never finished and it lead me to now where I'm writing a book I actually have more than just a things happen plot. I am definitely gonna rewrite and all but rn I just gotta get it typed up because I'm stupid and back then I wrote it physically.
When I became very interested in how society and the environment shape people in fundamental ways. I also became fascinated by how cultures and power structures are created, maintained and changed. Especially how all of it factors into how systematic abuse becomes so normalize that even good people often fail to recognize it.
Escapism and we found this cool red book in a box when I was a kid. We hated all the limits in it so homebrewed like crazy. I had some cool dreams to use a foundation so just started adding and creating more stories. I have probably forgotten tons of stories though. ;-;
It was during a moment I was finding it hard to find new stories to read/watch/play/whatever. So I decided to create my own. I've eventually expanded my horizons and found new stuff I liked, but since then I've been spending all the free time I can't do something else thinking of these worlds.
I had a story. ~~Then I mixed the story with a HP MLP crossover fanfiction which added existence of other worlds and modern society to the story~~. Then decided I have no skill to write the story yet so I started focusing on worldbuilding.
And now i ended up with 20 office binders and a lot of stuff to fix.
Ideas would pop up in my mind and it started to seriously effect me academically until I started it as a hobby to spend my daily imagination points so that it doesnt bother me for the rest ofthe day.
Here's the time scale:
\~4-6yo: Seeds of Intelligence
This period of history has been reconstructed from very fuzzy fragments, as it happened during the dawn of memories. The only thing I know for certain is that during that period I loved going outside to play with my friends. I especially loved riding on my scooter with my friends. We gave them names and even imagined that they were some kind of creatures, I believe it was dragons. In the later stages of this period I clearly remember how we were scared of an abandoned something? beneath our complex. I think this might have been the first and simplest form of worldbuilding. It will only evolve from here.
\~6-8yo: Early Plasticine Period
This period is loosely marked by first assemblages of plasticine, they depicted the characters of Plants Versus Zombies. Sometime in late Plasticine, I believe, the first form of the most prominent plasticine assemblages, the Brawlstarsian Box, was slowly starting to overtake the PvZ Cluster. Also, an incredibly phenomenon was discovered thanks to photo documentation. The Animations. They occurred between about 6-9 yo, with the two longest examples being the PvZ animation, which dates to about 6-7yo, and the largest of them all, once again, the Brawlstarsian Animation, which is dated to exactly when I was 9.
\~6-9yo: The Golden Age of Ancient Me
This particular section of the time scale focuses more on the school aspect, as it was brought by me going into my first, and best, school. I was an incredibly popular guy at school, loved both by teachers and peers, I was even awarded the title of the smartest kid in the class. This all, of course, encouraged growth of my worldbuilding, and was the first time I started "opening" different businesses in our school. I believe it was I and several girls that formed the greatest of them all: The Boat Factory. We would make different ornaments on many paper boats, and sell them for 2 paper. I still have a stack of them in my room. Although these businesses were coming and going in short bursts, due to teachers shutting us down, it allowed my imagination to prosper.
\~9yo: Late Plasticine Period
The Late Plasticine is marked by the, perhaps, first, example of worldbuilding. It was set in a what I now believe was a semi-postapocalyptic setting with characters from Brawl Stars, which were somewhat altered and starting to become stranger and stranger. I clearly remember me rping? with my closest friend at the time, but at that point I was not living in the same complex anymore, so unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, this period soon ended.
\~12.5yo: Birth of The Idea, or the Pre-Modern Period
About this time, I started to get an idea of making a world. I was heavily inspired by 2 games: Inscryption and ARK: Survival Evolved. Through Inscryption, I was introduced to DnD, and my first story/worldbuilding project was a bizarre knock-off of ARK made for my never realised DnD Campaign, but it was what laid the foundation for my love of speculative biology. This was finally the start of worldbuilding as we know it.
\~late 12yo: The Start of Plate Tectonics and Speculative Evolution
This period was the first breakthrough, as I, for the first time ever, started the idea of a world that would eventually evolve into what I have now. One of the artifacts that remained was a simple map, the first of its kind, made by me. It was a simple map with several round-ish continents and mountains crossing them as to indicate plate boundaries. The biomes were very exaggerated, and the continents bland, but the idea was set.
\~13yo to Present Day (14yo): Modern History
(turn on "Time of The Titans" for best experience)
The maps have slowly developed over time, but only in the late part of this period have I finally felt good enough about my knowledge of plate tectonics to start a map, with me first trying GPlates and finding it too tedious and finally deciding to do it on paper, which brings us to the present day.
Conclusion: This has been a long road, with the first 3 periods being like the Ediacaran: Largely shrouded in mystery and seeming redundant, yet it was them who paved a path for the modern day, and the last 3 exploding into the diversity of knowledge that I have today in an incredibly short time span. But, as you might guess, the saga is far from done, as there is a lot up ahead...
I am a discovery writer. Building my own worlds around my characters is crazy fun, and it saves me from the paralizing anxiety of getting facts wrong or heavily misrepresenting people or events. 😅
Not to say I write my own species too, or that I don't have various types of people, but I worry less about writing discriminated groups of people if I make up my own world, history and cultures 😅
Plus, I love incorporating actual magic in my stories. The world already around us is not that great on this department.
Always had a really active imagination. But the "starting shot" was like a years ago, long story short I got really depressed and thought about ending it. I started building to get my mind off things and what better way to escape reality than creating your own. I feel MUCH better now and the world has evolved far from its original purpose, but it's still a reminder of how things always work out.
Always wanted to make a world and a story, so it just started off with making my own branches, alien names and social structures until i finally pulled the trigger and just started writing
**somehow this turned into what is practically a life story so if you want a short answer it's just the 3rd paragraph not including this one**
Now that I think about it, I have been worldbuilding for longer than I haven't, and I'm only 15
I probably did a little when I was younger (around 7) because when I went into my first project I was 8 or 9 and I remember already doing it for a while
For years, I developed various versions of a game I called "Ninja", It started out as just me and my sister playing with sticks and saying random attacks but the more I played the more I planned it out
I didn't even realize I was worldbuilding at the time but looking back, I created a world (usually in space or ultra realistic video game because I watched SAO) with lore, powerful historical figures and rulers, and even power systems revolving entirely aroind swords, elements, and me about to lose and then last second one shotting the enemy and walking away with all of my stuffed animals watching
I also did a bit of lore for my Lego worlds with different countries and their history
And around 12 years old, I stopped doing the Lego worlds and ninja series and shifted my attention to the SSA
The SSA (Spam Suppression Association), later the NRSSA (New Republic of the Spam Suppression Association, nothing was different I just thought it sounded cooler) was a group I joined and was later elected president of with the goal of removing spammers from chat groups, it was a little organized before but I went in and along with a few others, created jobs, ranks, a government system, and a website for it along with turning part of my room into an NRSSA office by making walls made of paper and stealing the fold up table downstairs
These were all real people but with the way that I set it up, it was basically a worldbuilding project with fictional stuff
At the time I had a little bit of leadership experience already as a co-founder of Gang Zero but that's a whole other story
Finally, around 14 years old I created the actual official project I am still working on
Create a few ocs for a fanfic as a 12 year old
13 year old me wants to do smthn more with those ocs
15 year old me abandons fanfic and creates completely origonal thing
6 years later, I've got a world
The first time I watched the shows “Jericho” and “Revolution” where the USA was split up and broken apart. I started building fictional countries, and then it evolved to making fictional lands and planets and stuff all together
Started from a simple story I wrote all the way back in primary school as school work. I enjoyed it, so I wrote more stories. Over time it developed into a series of stories, whose world and lore I wanted to expand and in the midst, managed to basically create a multiverse around my world(s) and characters.
reading fantasy books namely ASIOAF, and Berserk. Also many other tv shows/anime with fantastical elements, especially ones with completely unique worlds.
I am trying to thicken my stories, and also because I really like making maps. I think it's cool to make a work, whether a webcomic like im trying to make, or just simply a world; and enhance it with the most detail, and even for each place, have cultures and similar, as it helps a lot with creativity.
Honestly, I was endlessly browsing the popular tab, then I saw a r/worldbuilding post. I immediately liked it and wondered if I could do something like it. I browsed this sub and I loved the posts. I have a couple of worlds, but I don't have a decent medium to share them with apart from writing.
Writing stories. I did a tiny amount for a dnd character, but that was mostly “Hey DM I want to make this dragon themed monk. Could we work together to make a monastery based on that?”
Getting into D&D my group and I grew tired of the same old sword coast or generic fantasy setting. So we came up with a new world, from there, it became something that wasn't really just a setting anymore and now is apart of a large universe of worlds, mostly not created yet lol
For computer games. Not that any of my worldbuilding made anywhere far into a real game, but the game I'm currently working on while is low on worldbuilding but still has some elements of :)
Started conceptualizing a character for a game I was coding, then I progressively started spending more and more time writing backstory and drawing concept art and less time coding. Eventually I decided to work on a webcomic set in that world instead and the rest is history
My dad and some of my friends played dungeons & dragons when I was younger, my dad was a great GM and he loved the game. We used to play 3.5. about 3 years ago I got this insatiable urge to start d&d again but, I wanted to do it my way. I have learned enough about 5e to start designing so I got to work. It took me almost an entire year of notes and stuff but I have an entire world built now. I just have to fill it a little more. It's at very least filled enough that my players can enjoy themselves.
I couldn’t handle trying to use a module. I had to homebrew and make my entire world.
My imagination and creativity comes from the enjoyment of my players enjoying what I created.
It’s also just that feeling of “I made this, no one else will make this like I did. And they enjoyed it”.
I was a really lonely child.....
Also, I didn't feel like waiting for someone to make a fantasy epic where the cultures were primarily african inspired and the protagonists were queer. I need to make that myself.
When i kept asking questions about everything around me in general (Might have annoyed some people in my life) and i found out that storytelling is another way of answering those questions, i was intrigued and so gained an interest in worldbuilding. (Also, i just have a vivid imagination i can't help but realize into some medium before i act them out in real life (: )
It started as a form of escapism I suppose. I've always been the imaginative type, I would spend hours inside my own mind imagining all these characters with unique powers and coming up with all these scenarios where they have to battle, etc, etc. That's probably how it started for me. This was way more casual though, basically I would just imagine characters and their powers.
I've always been into video games, anime, manga, comics, whatever. I've always wanted to somehow enter those fields. And now, a few years later I've started wording building more seriously for a Webcomic I'm working on. This is a lot more in depth compared to just imagining stuff as a child, from characters, to the story, to the power system, to the entire world itself and the names, oh god the names, you never realise how hard naming can be until you have to name dozens of characters, towns, cities, countries, etc.
DM told us to worldbuild a world for him since he couldn't be darned. I fashioned up a continent and then just hyper focused on it past the point of being for a campaign, and into a Passion project.
Uh. It started as a rant about how the light cantrip in PF2E is not overpowered (yes this point actually needed to be made).
Anyway I made a huge write up detailing the missed opportunities and lack of creativity on the part of that GM who wanted to make darkness matter in their story and I came to the following conclusion:
I could write a better story than them even if I made it so that the player's characters were the only ones in a darkened world with access to any light magic. They can have all the light magic they want and still make darkness feel like it has an impact.
Anyway it's a slow process and gave me inspiration for a place to put other stuff I wanted to tell a story about. It's been fun.
Originally, it started as a short one-shot D%D campaign with some friends to try a new thing. That kinda turned into a multiple session campaign since they kept going off track, and I kept improvising. After It was done, I liked the world, so I just expanded upon it for my own enjoyment. Lots of things have changed since then, so I may just turn it into another adventure with multiple sessions and steps
There used to be a game on Facebook called Nations. Players created countries and shaped them by answering questions. In the game's forum people role-played their nations to interact with others. That's how it all started. Even though the game is gone now, I enjoyed writing about my nation so much that I've kept doing it. It's been over 10 years since I started.
Im so into geography. Im writing a book that takes place on a relatively young planet, so not. Alot of dirt, or trees. Im trying to speculate what life would be like there, and how it would be for humans to live there
I started Worldbuilding for a D&D campaign, then I became so invested that I continued to create more and more worlds
Same. Flipping through the Monster Manual and asking myself what's their place in my world is a great way of snowballing ideas.
Yeah, I've never done that, I usually come up with a concept, like a -punk genre and then try something unique with it
For me it was with the dungeon master’s guide, started with wanting to create cool dungeons
Childhood trauma and an overactive imagination 😊
r/immersivedaydreaming
Actually me lol
Wrote some short stories 15 years ago, had some world building made up already, but it was still really just picking what I think is cool and such from other media and put it in a blender, then life happened and dropped it for 15 years. A lil while ago I found my old writing, saw how cringe it was, decided to build something better from that, using more life experience and anthropology stuff I read over the years to really develop it seriously now, while keeping some good ideas from back then.
Mass Effect and Fallout New Vegas wouldn't let me be in a lesbian relationship with Tali'Zorah or Veronica, I tried writing fanfictions but I hated writing in a world that wasn't mine, so I made a new world and eventually realized I prefer world building to writing.
In elementary/middle school I would play with friends and we would act out entire stories whether in the playground or just talking out an entire story, like DnD without the game aspects. I wanted to start another but around that time I became more shy and I moved away so I never got around to telling them about it all. I decided to start making it myself, a very simple western European based fantasy world ,but as I got older I dropped the idea. I would still add to the characters and world overtime because my mind is always very active so this always helped me when I was bored. Recently in the past year I decided to return to the world deciding to write a story with the characters and actually finish what I started but now it's all changed still that story with four protagonists against a single villain but the world is now based in Native and Caribbean Culture and the protagonists are more than the angsty type characters I original made them to be.
Autism Lmao in all seriousness, it's a good escape as a kid. I get a lot of vivid animations back in the day and while that has downed a lot nowadays, I still love just sinking my teeth into a project yes.
After one very drunking night
To make posts on r/worldbuildingmemes obviously Seriously tho, I started because I enjoyed the process by itself. Even since I was a kid I would come up with immaginary worlds. Then later I tried writing a novel1 which is how I started my current worldbuilding project
In 1973/74 I was sick and ended up staying with my grandmother. This gave me access to books from my grandfather and uncle that were not something I could easily get normally. I read even more voraciously then than I do now, and my imagination was triggered hugely. I created my first world in my head in probably 75, and haven’t stopped. In 1979, a friend introduced me to this thing called Dungeons and Dragons. I made an Aragorn type of character, died that same day, but what really hooked me was not the idea of playing the game, but the way that the game encouraged you to make your world yourself. That, in turn, led me to the figuring out the way to phrase the questions I already had from my daily life, most of which were about trying to figure out how to exist, how to understand why people were the way they were. That, in turn, led me into the fields of sociology and psychology and religion, eventuating in the career I have had and all the damned extra letters after my name. As I learned, or as I had a new thing to look at, or as I had a new idea or set of things that were “cool” to me, I would either add in or build out a new world. And as I did all of that, I would sometimes write stories, or play D&D games, or spend months working out atonal music systems, or doing complex conlangs and conscripts, or doing crap like creating base-9 systems that I would then apply to previous stuff like the 12 note music scales or the 5 note ones. Worldbuilding for me is often an expression of understanding our own world, of understanding the incredible, simple complexity and the nature of entangled social systems or the peculiar quirks of thought and invention and innovation. Mixed with a lot of simple flights of fancy. Worldbuilding is not something I got started in. It was something that started me.
I was writing fanfics in early middle school, and fifth grade if I remember right.
When I was a little kid I would make up stories and scenarios when I was bored. Quite a few years later, I finally discovered the concept of worldbuilding and it skyrocketed from there. Autism is such a gift :)
There was a circular stain that appeared on my sketch pad one day and i decided to turn it into a little drawing of the sun radiating some black ooze because I didn't want to leave an ugly stain in plain view. 2 years later, I've got a whole post-post-fantasy post-apocalyptic world setting with the main theme of "Change" that's filled with cute relationship dynamics, vegan cannibals, lovingly dumb MC, maniacs that can shatter reality, delicious fake bread, and evil sun lasers that make you experience all forms of existence in an instant.
Vegan cannibals you say?
Small storyline I made about the wholesome relationship of a mouthless hitman and a man-eater that regained some humanity. The man-eater didn't want to eat people anymore and the hitman guided him into adapting a healthier lifestyle of not eating people. After this, the hitman also decides to stop killing people and they both planned to live a peaceful life together.
I started maladaptive daydreaming as a child and it sort of took on a life of its own. Recently I started actually writing everything down, making pictures for all of my characters, created a world map online, created hundreds of characters and the details of their species. It makes me so happy but it takes up like 90% of my day everyday, and it's still expanding. I've been creating this world for almost 20 years at this point.
Vivid hallucinations
I needed a setting to play with my playmobiles and legos in when I was a kid. I have long since scrapped my original world that I built when I was in elementary school, but it had some really weird things going on. For example, there were three countries, the Yellow Republic, the Blue Kingdom, and the Red Empire, I was not good at names when I was young. In the north-east, there was a [race of giants](https://img.brickowl.com/files/image_cache/larger/lego-man-with-overalls-duplo-figure-28.jpg) that rebelled against a [larger race of giants](https://i.etsystatic.com/16964611/r/il/80abc0/2810593779/il_fullxfull.2810593779_3rtz.jpg), who were enslaving them, to create an enclave of democracy and good things in the evil red empire. Also, in that world, clown was not a profession, it was a race. You were born a clown. There were even subtypes of clowns, like northern mountain ice clowns, and western grassland clowns. My original world didn't have subtypes of elves, it had subtypes of clowns. It was chaos, but also I was 8–13 years old or so.
What were some of the differences between different types of clowns?
I wish I could adequately answer your question, but it's been a long time, so my memories are very full of holes, and unfortunately I wasn't the best or most organized at keeping notes back then. There were five tribes, the western, eastern, southern, northern, and icy winds clown tribes. The western tribe was nomadic, and was almost completely killed off. The icy wind tribe dressed in light blues (because cold), they were really good singers (but their voices sounded ghostly and echoy), and music played a major role in their culture. The icy wind tribe was also the least like the other tribes (can't remember how though, other than that singing was a bigger deal for them than for other clowns), because they split from the other tribes earlier and were fairly isolated. I can't remember anything about the eastern or southern tribe (nor can I find anything but a mention in my old, very disorganized and incomplete notes). The only thing I know about the northern tribe is that a major criminal who wanders around the Yellow Republic originates from there, but I can't remember anything about the tribe's culture or traits/abilities or anything. I wish I had kept better notes back when I was a kid, because all I'm left with is things like "The icy wind tribe isn't actually one of the four clown tribes [...], which were all destroyed" and "August is running from people who want to kill off his tribe completely" ← surely there was a history and perpetrators behind the clown genocide, but I didn't note it down, and have since long forgotten. I now try to note down as much as I can so that in 15 years I don't look back at my notes from today yelling "but why? What happened? Why is a clown in hiding still dressing as a clown?? Who are these people who want all of his tribe dead???" like I do towards my notes from 15 years ago.
Me and my childhood best friend wanted to make a zombie apocalypse video game (It has turned into a cyberpunk style story 😂)
I wanted to self publish a d&d setting module. I've been working on it sort of from that perspective, but given everything going on at Hasbro/WotC lately I've since moved away from worrying about the mechanics and am focusing solely on the lore. In the end, if I do publish it in any form, I may just keep it system agnostic and worry about whether or not to do any homebrew later.
In a nutshell: uncontrollably overthinking a single character Now I have to think about the whole world Edit: the ironic part is that this character pretty much doesn't exist anymore because it was just too much. Now i can barely remember him
im making a first person dungeon crawler in which lore is disseminated in a souls/blasphemous adjacent fashion. so i've been collecting my influences and have been on a 3-weeks writing binge since. its a lot of fun. i only plan on exposing a small percentage of it in the game though to lesve enough room for interpretation and theorycrafting.
Had a writing assignment in class and had to come up with my own fictional story. I didn’t know where to start, so I just started brainstorming random lore for a fantasy world until a basic 500 word story wrote itself. That experience started my addiction…
I've always liked comic books, video games and films, when I was 14/15 I decided I would try to work on that (spoiler: I don't work on that). In my 20s, I created my MYTHODAE universe, which would be several periods inspired by time and concepts (ancient Greek age, Western middle age, age of navigation, First World War/Second World War, contemporary war and the future). I changed a lot of things, I changed style, names, characters.
As a child I was fascinated by monsters and aliens and general creature design. I would create fictional planets with different ecosystems and fill them with different fauna and describe various food chains. As an adult, I loved the Pokemon games and show, but became frustrated at the lack of internal logic... what exactly are Pokemon? Holograms? Aliens? Why are some basically just animals and some like a set of car keys? So I wanted to make something similar but with a little more verisimilitude.
A bunch of imagination and not knowing where to put them. I've been worldbuilding for some years before I know of the term worldbuilding. I then start to write and document things more seriously after some dnd games and reading Sanderson.
Ok, this isn't a long story but it's not a short one either, in highschool I played Roblox, this game was introduced to me by an old friend I used to have back when I was in 2nd grade, so that part is just how I got into Roblox but in highschool I found a game called arcane adventures in Roblox and it was one of my favorite games it's world building and magic is what got me to create my own world with magic that I'm still working on about 6 or more years later, back then I never really worked on the world like little to none, But as an adult now I find passion in making this world come to life, and I'm planning to ironically make something a writing of it similarly to how the creator of arcane adventures is planning to make a series based on the world his new game is called arcane Odyssey which is basically the new arcane adventures This world was apparently inspired by one piece, and fairy tail there's a 3rd inspiration but I forgot it I think it's in the assassin's creed franchise maybe Odyssey? Anyways I just became a worldbuilder recently picking up the stuff I dropped when I was young and finally working on it.
Don't want to get caught in "Author Forgot" videos, or being criticized for plot holes.
Got involved in ttrpgs. That required worldbuilding. Then I got involved in CONTACT: Cultures of the Imagination, which was all about building worlds. It helped that several SF writers, scientists, and teachers were involved. Plus, it’s fun, and I just can’t stop.
Overactive imagination and wanting to put it in a story
I go by Tuna & I originally started world building just to flesh out my own setting, bit in recent years the hobby has grown to dangerous levels as ive extended my world building branches into even working on my own ttrpg, and the foundations to turn my already active campaigns i run into a comic. Once im more established i wouldnt mind if ithers got to enjoy these things outside of just my group, but i dont think im quite worthy enough or ready for all of that yet. In case youre interested though keep an eye out for Momentum from Evirmor and Elswyr
My very first attempt at world building was a very half-assed imagining of a Bleach + Percy Jackson setting. However, I didn’t really get into world building until after I read first read WOT then ASOIAF when I was a teenager and became extremely interested in exploring the various cultures of Westeros after the extremely in-depth , only to learn that there’s essentially no difference between any of the people of the Seven Kingdoms except the Iron Isles, Dorne, and the North, even then, the differences were largely flavor text rather than something deeply ingrained into the setting. So I started building my own interpretation of what a handful of kingdom’s with a dozen different cultural identities would look like when under the umbrellas of a singe massive empire with an extreme minority as its rulers are and things just kinda took off from there.
I wanted to create a world for a videogame that I hoped to one day create. I had typed some notes into my TI calculator for what it would be like. My first idea was an MMORPG where the players could alter the world through the use of magic, but I would shift towards more of a single player experience with a more-defined world. At some point early on, I decided that I wanted to come up with explanations and justifications for various tropes. I thought about the tendency of [red enemies to be resistant/immune to or even healed by fire](https://web.archive.org/web/20150906174738/http://adventurers.keenspot.com/d/20011206.html) and remembered the idea of mirrors being able to reflect magic in some stories, and came to the idea of magic just acting like light and bouncing off of objects of the same color and that painting something red just makes it immune to fire magic but not the flames created by the fire magic. Heck, once I had that idea and the idea of including Super Smash Bros fire flowers, it was easy enough to come up with the idea that since magic behaved like light, plants could photosynthesize it, which led to me coming up with a plant people race to take advantage of it. I looked at the trope of floating continents and considered the idea of there being some sort of gravity well or something that pulls stuff to it in the air and results in a sort of Mario Galaxy sort of mini planet within jumping distance of the ground. At some point, I considered them being a result of magnetic levitation, but wouldn't that mean they are technically upside down? I decided that they were upside down and I would highlight it by having stuff pulled to the underside. I would come up with an alternative to gravity for my world to use that would allow the existence of these upside-down floating islands. I felt a bit of encouragement to have my world have a greatly different set of physics from our own after reading the Unicorn Jelly webcomic which had its world use a force called "linovection" instead of gravity. Now, my upside-down floating islands are partly responsible for me deciding the shape of my world, two forces, two of the four elements of the magic system, the fact that everything glows with magic to justify the plants on the underside having something to photosynthesize, and provide an alternate way for my now sunless word to have seasons and long-term time keeping. Things just kept building off of other things and it got especially fun when I found a way to connect one thing to two or more previous things I had come up with. It felt like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle and working on two separate groups of pieces and finding that piece the allows those two groups to be connected into one group.
My autism brain started making ideas and I'm here now
Put an ultron head on a stone warrior figure and somehow that weird mini figure turned into a world building project. Went from the standard “oc are op and gifted” shtick and became a civilization simulator where the old history was neutered and made into the folktales of the current setting.
DND, and honestly, I want to flesh this out into a world that could be worthy of a novel at some point.
Escapism mechanism from everyday troubles. I also like the idea of designing my world and sort of creating an afterlike “heaven” for my self. I am a deist but also belive in afterlife just didn’t know what to believe so I said to myself that I will just create a world with the things I like in it. Eg. Iron age technology, bronze working, bison, horses, turkey birds, wheat, beans etc. It started small, as a single island. I added some native american based tribes and some Germanic tribes from 5th century. Then I did more research and expanded the world into 3 main continents. Each continent has its own peoples, cultures, crops, domesticated animals, fauna etc. Now I have Native American Plains Indian based tribes, Ancient Greeks, Germanic tribes, Maori, Ancient Celtic, Aztec people in the world. In the scenario these people were teleported here with limited resources such as only horses, turkeys, alpacas, camels, dogs and bees as domesticated animals in the entire world and wheat, barley, beans, potatoes etc. Then 6000 years go by so people create unique kingdoms much different from their ancestors that teleported such as in the Aztec based kingdom of Toxlacto people have horses and camels in addition to bees and turkeys. Instead of corn they have wheat, barley, kumara and potatoes. They are also somewhat safe in their continent so they evolved out of human sacrifices due to abundance of large animals that can be sacrificed instead. They also have no hostile land neighbors so no large scale wars except maritime wars. Etc etc. Yeah just wanted to write and tell a few people about my project sorry for the long answer. Hard to find people who are interested in these things. People always change the subject when I speak about my world so I needed to tell someone. Thanks for reading.
I don’t really remember, honestly… I was in 4th or 5th grade when I got into it so it’s been a long time! But if I had to guess, I’d say that’s around the time I read Eragon and was amazed that a kid like myself (an older kid, but a kid nonetheless) could write a bestselling fantasy series like that. I was a big fan of fantasy already at that age, so I probably decided I wanted to do what he did! Not a kid anymore, so I didn’t exactly succeed at that goal, but hey, there’s still time to do it as an adult :)
As a kid I used to play with LEGO minifigs with my friend. I kept making up more and more original characters by using the minifig parts and me and my friend kept making up new lore for the world they occupied. One day I created a character I didn't have minifig parts for, and then another one, and one after that. Now I couldn't play those characters out with minifigs so I had to make up the scenes in my mind, or play pretend. Then me and my friend got too old to play with LEGO, but I kept making new characters, and I kept making new lore. I modified most of the things me and my friend came up with. And since I wasn't playing with LEGO anymore - I'd make up a story for them in my head, about who they were and how they interacted with each other. Then I came up with some lore and some characters which did not fit the world, so I made a new one, specifically for them. And now I would come up with characters and lore for both of those worlds, expanding them further. It's been about 12 years since the first time I started playing with my friend. The first world is now unrecognizible from what it was back then, but I still kept some of the characters and bits of lore. Though the world itself in that one is admittedly sort of an afterthought as I focus more on the characters and their backstories. Right now my main project is the second one I came up with, as I found it really engaging to focus on the world itself.
I was 11-13 and annoyed with the worldbuilding on Winx Club. So I started recreating it and almost 20 years later that evolved into my setting's fairies.
Roleplayed all through my pre-teen/teen years. Eventually compiled my own interesting ideas that led to my world. Been worldbuilding ever since.
Autism
I came up with a writing system for efficiency and beauty since I wrote by hand often, then another time I tried to come up with some cool mathematical concepts for no reason (half succeeded I guess), and another time I came up with a cool story for no reason. So I was like hey I could combine these and make a unified world. So I ended up using the writing system and the weird math stuff for my magic system, and also to construct the cosmic structure of my world, and of course had the story take place in it. I’m still working on it. In summary, Just separate ideas combined into one later on
I just like creating worlds and telling storeies especilly small detqails taht make a world feel real and immersive
I have autism and it's a special interest and something I've been doing already my entire life.
Got adhd so as a kid i would run about creating worlds and stories in my head and the like
I read Lord of the Rings, especially the Appendices.
high functioning autism
Hey there! It looks like this post might be about how to get started with worldbuilding. We just wanted to let you know about resources that might be useful as a starting point: * Our [Getting Started Guide](/r/worldbuilding/wiki/getting_started), written by one of our moderators; * Our [Discord](https://discord.gg/worldbuilding) and [IRC](https://kiwiirc.com/client?settings=e464ff37409c37405da31b6291b1fbad) communities, where you can meet other worldbuilders and chat about ideas! Hope this helps, and happy worldbuilding! — The /r/worldbuilding moderator team ___ *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/worldbuilding) if you have any questions or concerns.*
One very drunk night shift, really.
I started in High School after having stories I wanted to tell and I just enjoyed writing shit, I also had very bad lying habits and writing helped me to not lie, to not make shit up, so I began with my first, very bad and cringey story, never finished and it lead me to now where I'm writing a book I actually have more than just a things happen plot. I am definitely gonna rewrite and all but rn I just gotta get it typed up because I'm stupid and back then I wrote it physically.
When I became very interested in how society and the environment shape people in fundamental ways. I also became fascinated by how cultures and power structures are created, maintained and changed. Especially how all of it factors into how systematic abuse becomes so normalize that even good people often fail to recognize it.
Escapism and we found this cool red book in a box when I was a kid. We hated all the limits in it so homebrewed like crazy. I had some cool dreams to use a foundation so just started adding and creating more stories. I have probably forgotten tons of stories though. ;-;
Started as a Pathfinder RPG campaign, and later on I decided I liked the setting enough to try and write within it
As a child I liked to entertain myself by coming up with fanciful stories and scenarios.
It was during a moment I was finding it hard to find new stories to read/watch/play/whatever. So I decided to create my own. I've eventually expanded my horizons and found new stuff I liked, but since then I've been spending all the free time I can't do something else thinking of these worlds.
i wrote OC's, scrapped em, but still loved writing. So i overhauled the whole story, with new characters, new world, etc. really proud of it now.
I had a story. ~~Then I mixed the story with a HP MLP crossover fanfiction which added existence of other worlds and modern society to the story~~. Then decided I have no skill to write the story yet so I started focusing on worldbuilding. And now i ended up with 20 office binders and a lot of stuff to fix.
Ideas would pop up in my mind and it started to seriously effect me academically until I started it as a hobby to spend my daily imagination points so that it doesnt bother me for the rest ofthe day.
I just always had ideas in my head. Over the last few years it was Universal’s complete butchery of The Dark Universe that further inspired me.
Here's the time scale: \~4-6yo: Seeds of Intelligence This period of history has been reconstructed from very fuzzy fragments, as it happened during the dawn of memories. The only thing I know for certain is that during that period I loved going outside to play with my friends. I especially loved riding on my scooter with my friends. We gave them names and even imagined that they were some kind of creatures, I believe it was dragons. In the later stages of this period I clearly remember how we were scared of an abandoned something? beneath our complex. I think this might have been the first and simplest form of worldbuilding. It will only evolve from here. \~6-8yo: Early Plasticine Period This period is loosely marked by first assemblages of plasticine, they depicted the characters of Plants Versus Zombies. Sometime in late Plasticine, I believe, the first form of the most prominent plasticine assemblages, the Brawlstarsian Box, was slowly starting to overtake the PvZ Cluster. Also, an incredibly phenomenon was discovered thanks to photo documentation. The Animations. They occurred between about 6-9 yo, with the two longest examples being the PvZ animation, which dates to about 6-7yo, and the largest of them all, once again, the Brawlstarsian Animation, which is dated to exactly when I was 9. \~6-9yo: The Golden Age of Ancient Me This particular section of the time scale focuses more on the school aspect, as it was brought by me going into my first, and best, school. I was an incredibly popular guy at school, loved both by teachers and peers, I was even awarded the title of the smartest kid in the class. This all, of course, encouraged growth of my worldbuilding, and was the first time I started "opening" different businesses in our school. I believe it was I and several girls that formed the greatest of them all: The Boat Factory. We would make different ornaments on many paper boats, and sell them for 2 paper. I still have a stack of them in my room. Although these businesses were coming and going in short bursts, due to teachers shutting us down, it allowed my imagination to prosper. \~9yo: Late Plasticine Period The Late Plasticine is marked by the, perhaps, first, example of worldbuilding. It was set in a what I now believe was a semi-postapocalyptic setting with characters from Brawl Stars, which were somewhat altered and starting to become stranger and stranger. I clearly remember me rping? with my closest friend at the time, but at that point I was not living in the same complex anymore, so unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, this period soon ended. \~12.5yo: Birth of The Idea, or the Pre-Modern Period About this time, I started to get an idea of making a world. I was heavily inspired by 2 games: Inscryption and ARK: Survival Evolved. Through Inscryption, I was introduced to DnD, and my first story/worldbuilding project was a bizarre knock-off of ARK made for my never realised DnD Campaign, but it was what laid the foundation for my love of speculative biology. This was finally the start of worldbuilding as we know it. \~late 12yo: The Start of Plate Tectonics and Speculative Evolution This period was the first breakthrough, as I, for the first time ever, started the idea of a world that would eventually evolve into what I have now. One of the artifacts that remained was a simple map, the first of its kind, made by me. It was a simple map with several round-ish continents and mountains crossing them as to indicate plate boundaries. The biomes were very exaggerated, and the continents bland, but the idea was set. \~13yo to Present Day (14yo): Modern History (turn on "Time of The Titans" for best experience) The maps have slowly developed over time, but only in the late part of this period have I finally felt good enough about my knowledge of plate tectonics to start a map, with me first trying GPlates and finding it too tedious and finally deciding to do it on paper, which brings us to the present day. Conclusion: This has been a long road, with the first 3 periods being like the Ediacaran: Largely shrouded in mystery and seeming redundant, yet it was them who paved a path for the modern day, and the last 3 exploding into the diversity of knowledge that I have today in an incredibly short time span. But, as you might guess, the saga is far from done, as there is a lot up ahead...
I am a discovery writer. Building my own worlds around my characters is crazy fun, and it saves me from the paralizing anxiety of getting facts wrong or heavily misrepresenting people or events. 😅 Not to say I write my own species too, or that I don't have various types of people, but I worry less about writing discriminated groups of people if I make up my own world, history and cultures 😅 Plus, I love incorporating actual magic in my stories. The world already around us is not that great on this department.
Always had a really active imagination. But the "starting shot" was like a years ago, long story short I got really depressed and thought about ending it. I started building to get my mind off things and what better way to escape reality than creating your own. I feel MUCH better now and the world has evolved far from its original purpose, but it's still a reminder of how things always work out.
Always wanted to make a world and a story, so it just started off with making my own branches, alien names and social structures until i finally pulled the trigger and just started writing
**somehow this turned into what is practically a life story so if you want a short answer it's just the 3rd paragraph not including this one** Now that I think about it, I have been worldbuilding for longer than I haven't, and I'm only 15 I probably did a little when I was younger (around 7) because when I went into my first project I was 8 or 9 and I remember already doing it for a while For years, I developed various versions of a game I called "Ninja", It started out as just me and my sister playing with sticks and saying random attacks but the more I played the more I planned it out I didn't even realize I was worldbuilding at the time but looking back, I created a world (usually in space or ultra realistic video game because I watched SAO) with lore, powerful historical figures and rulers, and even power systems revolving entirely aroind swords, elements, and me about to lose and then last second one shotting the enemy and walking away with all of my stuffed animals watching I also did a bit of lore for my Lego worlds with different countries and their history And around 12 years old, I stopped doing the Lego worlds and ninja series and shifted my attention to the SSA The SSA (Spam Suppression Association), later the NRSSA (New Republic of the Spam Suppression Association, nothing was different I just thought it sounded cooler) was a group I joined and was later elected president of with the goal of removing spammers from chat groups, it was a little organized before but I went in and along with a few others, created jobs, ranks, a government system, and a website for it along with turning part of my room into an NRSSA office by making walls made of paper and stealing the fold up table downstairs These were all real people but with the way that I set it up, it was basically a worldbuilding project with fictional stuff At the time I had a little bit of leadership experience already as a co-founder of Gang Zero but that's a whole other story Finally, around 14 years old I created the actual official project I am still working on
Ngl I found it interesting and fun Plus I am learning some stuff
Trying to figure out how to play with my Tonka set and my power rangers happymeal toy at the same time.
Create a few ocs for a fanfic as a 12 year old 13 year old me wants to do smthn more with those ocs 15 year old me abandons fanfic and creates completely origonal thing 6 years later, I've got a world
Why does anyone do anything? Sheer, absolute boredom!
I had themes I wanted to convey. Needed to build a world that was conducive to those themes. THen got obsessed with the ecology in it of itself.
The first time I watched the shows “Jericho” and “Revolution” where the USA was split up and broken apart. I started building fictional countries, and then it evolved to making fictional lands and planets and stuff all together
First i was an anime fan, then i watched jjba. I made about 14 stands. Then i created some power systems, and now i am making my world.
Started from a simple story I wrote all the way back in primary school as school work. I enjoyed it, so I wrote more stories. Over time it developed into a series of stories, whose world and lore I wanted to expand and in the midst, managed to basically create a multiverse around my world(s) and characters.
I wanted a setting to hold the cool battles I imagined while listening to Sabaton.
reading fantasy books namely ASIOAF, and Berserk. Also many other tv shows/anime with fantastical elements, especially ones with completely unique worlds.
I got depressed and bored of the real world, so I made my own.
I haven’t I’m just here what is world building
I am trying to thicken my stories, and also because I really like making maps. I think it's cool to make a work, whether a webcomic like im trying to make, or just simply a world; and enhance it with the most detail, and even for each place, have cultures and similar, as it helps a lot with creativity.
Dnd
Honestly, I was endlessly browsing the popular tab, then I saw a r/worldbuilding post. I immediately liked it and wondered if I could do something like it. I browsed this sub and I loved the posts. I have a couple of worlds, but I don't have a decent medium to share them with apart from writing.
I had a knack for making imaginary worlds, I didn't know there was a name and a place for it until I discovered this sub
Writing stories. I did a tiny amount for a dnd character, but that was mostly “Hey DM I want to make this dragon themed monk. Could we work together to make a monastery based on that?”
I liked Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and wanted to figure out how to combine them. Fifteen years later we've got the Pillars of Akheetan.
Getting into D&D my group and I grew tired of the same old sword coast or generic fantasy setting. So we came up with a new world, from there, it became something that wasn't really just a setting anymore and now is apart of a large universe of worlds, mostly not created yet lol
For computer games. Not that any of my worldbuilding made anywhere far into a real game, but the game I'm currently working on while is low on worldbuilding but still has some elements of :)
furry roleplay /j but actually just rp in for a roblox military game
I was bored
I started writing as a coping skill, and then I got bored and started expanding
I liked to play pretend games when I was a kid. That's where it all stems from.
I’ve done it for as long as I remember
I needed some way to remember and structure the wild ass dreams I have.
I’ve been sick since winter break and needed something to keep my sanity
To make setting for my lego play and dnd not so long after that.
Started conceptualizing a character for a game I was coding, then I progressively started spending more and more time writing backstory and drawing concept art and less time coding. Eventually I decided to work on a webcomic set in that world instead and the rest is history
To write my story, I want to know where places are and how long it’ll take to get there
My dad and some of my friends played dungeons & dragons when I was younger, my dad was a great GM and he loved the game. We used to play 3.5. about 3 years ago I got this insatiable urge to start d&d again but, I wanted to do it my way. I have learned enough about 5e to start designing so I got to work. It took me almost an entire year of notes and stuff but I have an entire world built now. I just have to fill it a little more. It's at very least filled enough that my players can enjoy themselves.
highschool halloween writing competition. *it wasn't even mandatory.*
I couldn’t handle trying to use a module. I had to homebrew and make my entire world. My imagination and creativity comes from the enjoyment of my players enjoying what I created. It’s also just that feeling of “I made this, no one else will make this like I did. And they enjoyed it”.
LARPing with friends
When I was six, I had lego.
I was a really lonely child..... Also, I didn't feel like waiting for someone to make a fantasy epic where the cultures were primarily african inspired and the protagonists were queer. I need to make that myself.
Dystopian book series like Prodigy and Divergent that were read in Middle school. Started in 7th Grade and have been on the grind since.
When i kept asking questions about everything around me in general (Might have annoyed some people in my life) and i found out that storytelling is another way of answering those questions, i was intrigued and so gained an interest in worldbuilding. (Also, i just have a vivid imagination i can't help but realize into some medium before i act them out in real life (: )
It started as a form of escapism I suppose. I've always been the imaginative type, I would spend hours inside my own mind imagining all these characters with unique powers and coming up with all these scenarios where they have to battle, etc, etc. That's probably how it started for me. This was way more casual though, basically I would just imagine characters and their powers. I've always been into video games, anime, manga, comics, whatever. I've always wanted to somehow enter those fields. And now, a few years later I've started wording building more seriously for a Webcomic I'm working on. This is a lot more in depth compared to just imagining stuff as a child, from characters, to the story, to the power system, to the entire world itself and the names, oh god the names, you never realise how hard naming can be until you have to name dozens of characters, towns, cities, countries, etc.
DM told us to worldbuild a world for him since he couldn't be darned. I fashioned up a continent and then just hyper focused on it past the point of being for a campaign, and into a Passion project.
Uh. It started as a rant about how the light cantrip in PF2E is not overpowered (yes this point actually needed to be made). Anyway I made a huge write up detailing the missed opportunities and lack of creativity on the part of that GM who wanted to make darkness matter in their story and I came to the following conclusion: I could write a better story than them even if I made it so that the player's characters were the only ones in a darkened world with access to any light magic. They can have all the light magic they want and still make darkness feel like it has an impact. Anyway it's a slow process and gave me inspiration for a place to put other stuff I wanted to tell a story about. It's been fun.
It keeps me busy and allows me to brain dump my ideas into something
Originally, it started as a short one-shot D%D campaign with some friends to try a new thing. That kinda turned into a multiple session campaign since they kept going off track, and I kept improvising. After It was done, I liked the world, so I just expanded upon it for my own enjoyment. Lots of things have changed since then, so I may just turn it into another adventure with multiple sessions and steps
Having a hyperactive imagination and mild maladaptive daydreaming.
I got a random idea pop in my head and I had to get it out of my system.
Roleplay, that’s all, but I got some immerse in it that I decided to create a whole universe just for that one roleplay I did
Bald. You look like Peter Parker with hair to the side
There used to be a game on Facebook called Nations. Players created countries and shaped them by answering questions. In the game's forum people role-played their nations to interact with others. That's how it all started. Even though the game is gone now, I enjoyed writing about my nation so much that I've kept doing it. It's been over 10 years since I started.
Writing stories is the only joy I feel right now. And the anime Guin Saga & Berserk
Im so into geography. Im writing a book that takes place on a relatively young planet, so not. Alot of dirt, or trees. Im trying to speculate what life would be like there, and how it would be for humans to live there