@gogglesaurus / gogglesaurus.tumblr.com
The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:
Oooooh! Saving this
That’s fun
Hey, but don’t fall asleep on this Medieval Fantasy City Generator
Reblogging for the last!
why did you spell 3D like that
@gogglesaurus thought this may be helpful for your campaign if you haven’t seen it yet!
I advised in a previous post that if you’re building a world from scratch, you should never waste your time. And I say this with all the love and affection in my body, but a lot of folks think they need to know their whole world’s entire political history back-to-front before they’re truly ready (before I sat down to plan for my current campaign, I thought this too!). We assume that knowing the history makes things feel real. And to some degree it does! But unless one of your players takes a special interest in history, you really don’t need all that; players don’t usually want to get bogged down in lore that is irrelevant to what they’re doing.
Furthermore, it’s just not realistic. You can share a document telling players everything about the world like they learned it out of a schoolbook, but even in places with mandatory schooling that simply isn’t how things happen. Whole histories and populations get omitted. Rumors get passed down as fact. Children learn from their elders and their storybooks and their friends as much as they do their teachers. And all this is culturally dependent.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed–don’t be! It’s very, very easy to write this kind of lore. You just have to listen to what your players are telling you.
For example, I have a PC who is from a big city, growing up fairly jaded and cynical. Given the kind of character and backstory I was working with, I came up with superstitions, legends, and folktales that he might have heard that feed into the way he is today. He won’t care about happy-ending fairy stories about rescuing princesses from towers, but a morality tale about the danger of trusting a stranger matches up perfectly with his worldview and suggests the culture he grew up in that taught him to be the way he is.
Conversely, another of my players has a bard character for whom I wrote a 17-page folktale that functions a lot like 1001 Nights, where the overarching story encapsulates many smaller stories like nesting dolls. Some of them have morals, some don’t. But they often have a theme of the wanderer, the traveler, the directionless adventurer–which fits in with the bard’s curious and rootless nature, and their affinity for traveling by sea.
I also have multiple versions of the same story; there are two myths surrounding the origins of a player character’s home, one which the PC in question would know and one that other PCs and NPCs might have heard instead.
The folklore approach is a great way to write your lore. First and foremost, it’s a sensationalized version of whatever may (or may not) have happened. That makes it more memorable to your players and their characters than the dry, realistic details of what probably happened for real. Secondly, it means you don’t have to be perfectly consistent; minor variations happen all the time in real folklore, so you can play your own faulty memory as the result of the oral tradition. Last but not least, it feels real. Children remember fairy stories and nursery rhymes, and we carry that with us through adulthood.
The same goes for gossip. Say your players visit a town and all their mirrors are gone. If everyone the party talks to knows and shares the truth, then that’s not very mysterious. But maybe they talk to the miller first, and she offhanded mentions that her mirror went missing a few days back, and then they come upon the mayor, who insists there’s nothing in that cave uphill, nothing dangerous to the town. And then they chat with the mayor’s gardener, who saw the mayor going up that self-same hill with a basketful of mirrors. They start to sense that something’s up, and then maybe they’ll go up to investigate and find the mirrors were stolen to appease a vain young dragon in the hills. The inconsistency and the unstraightforwardness lends an air of intrigue, suspicion, and interest.
Let your NPCs lie. Let yourself “lie,” insofar as you say “this is what you’ve heard” versus saying “these are the facts: {insert lie here}.” Let your NPCs not have all the answers, and let them turn to rumors and guesswork to fill in the blanks, because that’s what people do, and it’s fine if the NPCs are wrong as long as you, the DM, remember what’s true.
Small ways to make your world feel more real part 1
HELLO I JUST FOUND THE BEST FUCKING WEBSITE FOR WORKING ON CHARACTERS AND WORLD BUILDING YEET FUCKERS SEE YOU IN 8 YEARS
If you have been struggling with world building and finding a way to keep track of everything PLEASE GOD LOOK AT NOTEBOOK.AI
Notebook.ai has different categories for different things:
And then once you make something each category has different questions for you to answer about your world:
This website is literally a blessing
i just found this website that can randomly generate a continent for you!! this is great for fantasy writers
plus, you can look at it in 3d!
theres a lot of viewing options and other things! theres an option on-site to take a screenshot, so you don’t have to have a program for that!
Totally gonna use this for making my worlds
the link is broken
thank you!
“Have you always wanted to be Pixar animator? Now that process is a tiny bit easier. The animation studio recently made a number of courses available on the Khan Academy website to help you start your journey - and they’re free.”
The group of courses are called “Pixar in a Box” and include short lessons on everything from character modeling and animation to using virtual cameras. Today, it added a new course into the mix: The Art of Storytelling.
The free course is an exploration into the storytelling process at Pixar. From the course description:
“What makes someone a good storyteller? Storytelling is something we all do naturally, starting at a young age, but there’s a difference between good storytelling and great storytelling. In this lesson you’ll hear from Pixar directors and story artists about how they got their start, what stories inspire them, and you’ll begin to think about what kinds of stories you might want to tell.”
Read the full piece here
I was looking for an easy map creator that makes beautiful maps for a while now to make a visually stunning map to go along with my book. And now, after such a long search i have finally found one that suits my needs! Because i like it so much, i thought i’d share it with you guys! Just go to inkarnate.com and start creating! I have to warn you though, it is still in beta so a lot still needs to be added, but already it looks great and is easy to use!
I mean just look how beautiful some of these maps are!
And it is so much fun too! Someone even created a game of thrones map that is simply amazing!
So check it out and start creating your visual aid for your story. I promise you, it really is super easy and you will make one in no time!
You can find the site here: inkarnate
Reblogging for the lore folk
THIS IS REALLY GOOD
i cannot stress how important i find the last question.
i just found this website that can randomly generate a continent for you!! this is great for fantasy writers
plus, you can look at it in 3d!
theres a lot of viewing options and other things! theres an option on-site to take a screenshot, so you don’t have to have a program for that!
The way I build worlds is by collecting cool stuff from the history, myth and people around me. I blend these details with my own imagination, and create my own cultures.
Normally there are a few particular cultures that interest me at a given time. I read whatever I can find about them, their environment, their traditions and their myths. The interesting details filter into the new world I’m creating (example: at one time, Venetian widows could only remarry on the stroke of midnight).
In the long term, there is nothing more inspiring and challenging than visiting foreign cultures yourself (especially if you can get far beyond your comfort zone to do it). This is the truest way to experience culture, and I really believe it shows in your writing.
But reading (non-fiction, myth/legend/fairytales, as well as the classics like Dune and Lord of the Rings) and watching documentaries/films can get you a long way toward filling up on your inspiration tank.
It’s important to remember: Culture in fiction isn’t a rod to get a point across. At its best, it is something beautiful, otherworldly, amusing, and sobering. The more layers and contradicts your culture has, the more real it will be.
Some questions you might ask yourself are:
bc you can never have too much help worldbuilding
wow mine looks really cool
way to go you dicks
