Worldbuilding reminder: the definition of "too impractical" is a matter of cultural momentum, not one of tangible objective boundaries.

"Yeah this hypothetical weapon looks cool, but it would take like 20 years of practice and training to use in any marginally efficient way" isn't a reason to not have it in your setting. Fuckers would start training kids to use it at the age of seven just to have 27-year-old warriors going "I have trained my whole life and mastered the art of Impossibly Cool Thundecock Blade, you should feel privileged that this is how you get to meet your end", about three minutes before getting their shit decked by a peasant farmer with a quarterstaff.

If you're worldbuilding and someone gives you criticism on something, remember that most of the shit that humans do isn't perfectly logical, just mostly functional. If someone points at a vehicle you've designed and says "it may be super fast, but this part would catch on fire immediately if a single particle of dust floated close enough, exploding the whole vehicle", that doesn't mean you scrap the vehicle, it means that it's common knowledge that they burst into fire sometines. But not "randomly", humans don't do well with exploding randomly.

Dying in unexpected and unpredictable ways in high risk high reward situations will always have some superstition in them, make it personal. Rituals that people do in hopes of avoiding that 1-in-10 chance they'll explode while starting the ship. Not wearing clothes of a certain colour because the last guy who exploded had a red scarf. Not eating meat the day before because someone ate a ham sandwich. One pilot who has done countless of successful flights who is convinced that the engine only combusts upon starting if you're thinking about heterosexual thoughts.

Hey, as a worldbuilding thing:

If you're going to write in a people whose history's defining trait - in one way or another - is grief, misfortune and suffering, you absolutely can and probably should illustrate this by giving them a dark, fucked-up sense of humour.

Whether they're living in The Borderlands fighting demons, constantly enduring Dark And Horrible Climate, or facing constant and ongoing persecution, if your people are human, they need some kind of joy to keep going. One single traumatic incident can take the laughter out of one single individual, but when it comes to an entire people, the ones who can't laugh when they don't know whether to laugh or cry aren't going to make it. Humour is a powerful coping tool, and doesn't take additional resources even you have absolutely nothing else going for you.

Bleak environments and hopeless fates don't breed bleak and joyless people - being severe and taking everything seriously at all times is a luxury to people whose life is already severe and serious enough. I'm definitely not saying you should make your Hardy Survivor People sadistic, callous or cruel, have them laugh at their own misfortunes rather than the suffering of others, but you can definitely illustrate just what kind of environment these people were born and raised in by having them find humour in situations where - as far as anyone else is concerned - there's nothing at all to laugh about.

When you've seen one neighbour get eaten by a demon, that's a harrowing experience that you'll never joke about again. But when the neighbour that got eaten wasn't the first and won't be the last, your people do kind of learn to see that there are some situations where someone getting eaten by a demon because of their own stupidity is kind of funny.

Every time I'm around mosquitoes I start thinking about how people made the entirely correct connection between places with a lot of temperate stagnant water and the spread of malaria, but didn't quite connect all the dots - this place has stagnant water, this place has people getting sick with this same illness. Clearly it's the stinky water causing this, maybe it smells bad and the bad air is causing this. It's unhealthy to breathe the outdoor air at night, people who are out at night or don't shutter their windows tightly when the sun goes down are more likely to get sick because the bad air gets in.

The missing middle part was mosquitoes. Mosquitoes breed in standing water, and mosquitoes spread malaria.

I think this kind of thing would make a fun worldbuilding exercise. Have something in your world that does function the way people think it does, but they're completely wrong about why that happens. Or they've gotten the right connection, but backwards.

Holy rites that ward off evil but the Pure Substance is actually just antibacterial. Birds whose call is an omen of an approaching dragon, but these birds actually just have some symbiotic relationship with them. Half-elves that seem predestined to turn to dabbling with dark and lethal magic, but actually they just have a stronger tolerance of The Thing That Kills You due to hybrid vigour. Everyone knows that tigers never attack holy women because of a pact between their gods, but actually it's because a tiger is an ambush predator and the priestesses' headwear vaguely resembles a human face from the back, and the tigers can't quite tell whether she's facing away or towards them.

Random worldbuilding:

You're walking through an otherwise completely ordinary modern city, but there are countless varying flags hung on the walls of the buildings - on peoples' balconies, windows, rows of little tilted flagpoles on the walls of apartment buildings, one per apartment apparently - each one having a flag. No two flags appear to be the same. You hear yelling from the window of one apartment somewhere above, and turn around just in time to see a couple unfurl yet another flag, hanging it from their own respective pole.

Your local guide remarks that they must have just moved in. Most people lay claim to the apartment as soon as they get the keys and the contract has been signed, and only throw a housewarming party and celebrate moving in a month later, once the apartment has been successfully "claimed". By the look on your face, your host concludes that you have no idea what they're talking about, or what it has to do with the flags.

Your host begins explaining: several centuries ago the land was devastated by a deadly plague - many houses, homesteads, even whole villages were wiped out, the buildings left standing empty. And survivors with nothing to stay for in the places where they were born were roaming about, trying to find a new place to live. To solve both problems, a decree was made: If a wandering party finds an abandoned homestead and raises their own flag on top of the building and manages to stay there for a whole month without the house's original owner showing up to protest, the one who hoisted the flag is now the lawful resident.

So historically this decree made countless of people who were formerly serfs into not only free citizens but landowners with family names and their own flags. Many had a wry sense of humour about theirs, and some of the now oldest and proudest family flags depict things like a broken plough or a pig in a crown - one of them is abstract and seemingly modern, famously born as the ancestors of that particular family had nothing else to use for a flag than one foremother's patterned scarf.

And while these days there's far more laws and regulations on the old traditions of claiming a house, the tradition of flag-raising and keeping an official housewarming party only a month after the move have remained. Many young couples moving in together don't just choose which one's family flag to use, but getting your own, unique mutual flag commissioned for you is a fairly common wedding gift. Immigrants coming from somewhere else who have adopted the house flag traditions have made their own designs, using elements of their own old homeland like historical symbols, colours, and birds that are not native here.

You pass by a flag with a figure that looks conspicuously like Garfield, and your host confirms that yeah, while there is a registry of flags and you can't make a flag that's exactly the same as that of someone else, the flags are explicitly excempt of regular copyright law. This decree was set after someone jokingly included a Mickey on theirs, the government sided with them, and Disney came to the conclusion that going into actual, literal war with a small nation with a trained army would be bad for PR.

Another random worldbuilding linguistic thing: What about a language with a bizarrely massive vocabulary for relatives?

The finnish language has a separate word for "uncle" whether that's your mother's brother or your father's brother - and the latter one is used for General Unrelated Uncles like for the old-fashioned custom of teaching small children to refer to unfamiliar adults as "aunts" and "uncles". The Donald Duck -comics actually use the wrong one when referring to Donald in relation to his nephews, as they are his sister's children, though the otherwise spectacular finnish translation can get a pass since the first comics were translated and published before such background lore reached Finland, or was written at all.

Swedish has separate words for paternal and maternal grandparents, your mother's mother is "mormor" and father's mother is "farmor", and "farmor" and "farfar" for your father's parents. While finnish isn't as efficient with these, both languages have specific words for whether a grandchild is your son's or your daughter's offspring, or simply "child's child" (barnbarn) if you don't know the genders of either or - I presume - to remain gender-neutral.

So what about a people whose language has different and exact names for any kind of relatives, or can-be-regarded-as such people? Like there's a separate word for "aunt" if that's your mother's sister, one for your father's sister, and a specific "auntie" preserved for your mom's best friend who's not actually related to you in any way but they've been best friends ever since they were your age so that's your auntie now. And there's a specific word for your mother's sister's bestie, and so on.

So people who speak the language can go "yeah I've got fuck-all to do with this specific person but he's my father's sister's best friend's son", while trying to explain the relation in a language that doesn't have the same terminology. And someone else goes "damn, how the hell do you people always seem to manage to keep track of this kind of shit, I barely remember my second cousins' names."

And the person explaining just shrugs and goes "nah no I don't actually even know him, I've just heard someone refer to him as my paternal-honorary-cousin-once-removed in a sentence one time. I literally don't even know his name."

Hey, fun culture-worldbuilding tip: If you aren't sure about what the people of a specific place think about some specific element of the world they live in, make them disagree about it! Not only does it save you a lot of time, it adds realism and depth to the setting. If something isn't simple and obvious from looking at it, and there are different possibilities of what it could be, not everyone is going to agree on what the truth is. I mean hell, sometimes people in real life are just blatantly wrong about things that can be deducted from context clues, and make up their own theories that don't even make any sense. You can add those people into your world, too.

So if you've got something that could have multiple interpretations or explanations, you don't have to pick one. Like let's say you've got a city where the people worship a specific statue of a giant squid on the city square. Do the people rever to the statue itself as a symbol of a higher divine entity? Do they believe that the squid symbol itself is a symbol of this god which cannot be depicted in a tangible form? Or do they literally think that the god looks like a squid, or that the statue itself is literally a god?

You absolutely can, and as a matter of fact, probably should, just answer it with "yes." Some people do think it's the first option, some think it's the last, some think that all interpretations of the matter are equally valid because we can't know for sure, and there's two people who believe that the squid statue should not be worshipped at all, but one of them thinks that it's because there is no squid god at all, and the other one thinks that there absolutely is one but the squid god is evil.

They all meet at the pub in the evenings and fist fight about it.

Random worldbuilding from the Unfinished Book:

The nomad peoples of the plains and mountaineous regions have a traditional protocol for making peace between long-warring peoples - the exchange of orphans. Though the various tribes and peoples all have their own languages, cultures and ways, they all know of the tradition. It's not considered something that came from any specific people, but something as natural, obvious, and universal as knowing where the sun rises, and that you ride a horse by sitting on its back. It's simply What People Obviously Do.

If and when two clans who have been enemies manage to negotiate peace between them, both sides choose a child - or several, if we're talking about entire tribes with a history of war with each other - and exchange them as emissaries. The chosen children aren't necessarily required to be orphans, but generally tend to be, as no parent would willingly volunteer to part with a child they want to raise. There's a specific ideal age window for the chosen children, old enough to know their own peoples' customs, but still young and malleable to adapt to a different culture and learn to speak their language as fluently as a native.

From there on, standing awkwardly between the two cultures, with one foot in their own old tribe's ways and customs and one foot firmly within the new one's culture, isn't just their fate but their duty in life. Their task is to learn of the new clan and teach them something of their own old clan's ways, and generally showing them that these Others whom they were taught to regard as an enemy are truly just people, too. While becoming a translator and a diplomat is a heavy burden to put on a kid who's usually somewhere between the ages of seven and twelve at the time of the exchange, they do enjoy a rise in standing in life - going from a child in their old clan whom nobody really wanted, into someone of a revered status.

From there on, these Exchanged Children are brought along to every negotiation between the clan leaders - not only to work as literal translators of the languages spoken, but the cultural ones as well. If one clan leader says something that offends the other one, there are two youths in the room who can negotiate from somewhat-mutual ground to determine whether the insult was intended, and work together to explain both leaders where the cultural difference is between them in this. If both of them can agree that one of the cultures considers dogs to be revered and dignified creatures, and the other one doesn't think as highly of them, they can explain to both chiefs how saying that someone has "the heart of a dog" could be intended as a compliment and read as an insult.

In the Empire, the nomad custom has been appropriated into a legal way for feuding noble families (and later, remarkably wealthy merchant houses who have not yet bought their way into nobility but want to copy their customs anyhow) to make peace with each other. However, their way of seeing the custom has turned it into "give up your least-favourite child to be your enemy's assigned punching bag, but in return you get one of theirs as a consolation prize", essentially making them court-mandated hostages. Everyone agrees that the idea of ensuring that both sides have a child as a hostage is brutal and savage, and even a baroness who would happily yeet her unwanted son into the hands of a woman she absolutely hates, and would happily brutalise whatever kid she's traded in return, will act disgusted of how savage this custom must be in The Plains, where no court of law will supervise what the nomads do with them.

Meanwhile, the nomad peoples themselves would be absolutely horrified to learn how badly these imperialist, invading barbarians have perverted a sacred custom.

I think George R. R. Martin brushed past something similar in concept in ASoIaF, with a few characters referring to themselves in ways like saying "a man has no name" to say "I have no name", and later on in some interview saying that's actually a thing somewhere in the setting, but I think it would be fun to have a worldbuilding thing of a people whose language straight-up doesn't have personal pronouns, or where the line between pronouns and simply nouns is so blurred that technically speaking you could say that the amount of words you could use as pronouns is infinite.

Like in finnish, lacking gendered pronouns, people occasionally refer to someone who isn't present as "the/that girl/boy/man/woman" for clarity. There's a specific word ("tytötellä/tytöttely") for the thing where adult women are referred to as "girls", and if I recall right, the varying Japanese first person pronouns depend on one's gender and status in whatever situation they are in, so you can draw a lot of conclusions about a character by whether they say "I am" as watashi wa or boku wa in the same external context.

But what if you took this kind of a thing and wrote a language where there are no pronouns? A language that does not have words for "I", "you", "he/she/they", or even "it", but where whatever word you choose to use to refer to yourself or other people, and whom you are addressing is only distinguished by a prefix or suffix. So there is no "neutral" way of saying "I want to see you", but sapphic poetry is full of sentences like "a woman(myself) wants to see a woman(you, whom I address now)". And you cannot say a thing without showing how you see yourself and others.

It's an observable part of growing up to notice when a kid stops referring to himself as "a boy" and starts using "a man", someone raising into a new status takes a moment of adjustment to learn how to refer to themselves at work as "the supervisor", or someone revealing their past by slipping into an old form of address by saying "a soldier" when they should have said "a passenger" on a train.

Many people go through their whole lives not really thinking about it, going from referring to themselves as "a child" (there is no common use of "baby" as first person, as babies naturally don't know how to talk yet, so as soon as a child starts talking in sentences, they'll just use their name or the word for "child"), and move on through age, gender, and social role words through their life arc, but some people do get creative with it, such as making a pregnancy announcement by unexpectedly referring to themselves as "a mother", or someone who royally screwed up sending a text

"A disaster(1st person) is coming home, hoping that a wife(2nd person) can forgive."

More on linguistic worldbuilding - you ever noticed how languages with a lot of Oddly Specific Untranslatable Words, and prefixes and suffixes that imply more context and tone to specific words, are probably a nightmare to learn as a second language, but are probably really damn efficient at communicating things in the smallest amount of words possible?

Like some languages have very distinct grammatical cases, various verbs for actions that one would think are identical but there's a tonal difference in the variation, linguistic indicators of the speaker's own opinion on the matter, and then there's the whole cultural-context-clue game of things like verbs that refer to a specific poem or folk tale that everyone roughly knows, even if they've never personally heard the original story.

So grabbing this concept and running with it, you could possibly come up with a language where you can put together a 15-syllable word, a prefix- and suffix-laden monstrosity of one, that sums up an entire paragraph. Which broken down would translate to something like "[person spoken of], whom I have no respect for, attempted to do the first action of [folk hero], and failed in doing so in a way that I personally think was entirely his own fault."

And then you need a native speaker to translate the translation, explaining that even in the original story, the folk hero's first quest failed miserably, but nonetheless earned the hero the local peoples' respect, so put together with the "failed" tonal indication of the word used, it translates to "this dipshit tried to play big hero and pull a cool stunt, and not only did he fail at it completely, he looked fucking stupid doing it and simultaneously shit himself."

An additional word would have been needed to clarify whether he literally shit himself. But there was no space for it.

Imagine a fantasy/sci-fi book that's written like the narrator is pre-emptively bracing for the hostile tumblr kid Bad Faith Reading by defensively explaining worldbuilding details to an audience who supposedly already knows half of the world's lore and history and is very overconfident about it. Like all the infodumping is made in the framework of "okay before you grab your pitchforks" style argumentation.

Like a character picks up a book bound in elvenskin, and the narrator pauses to clarify that no, "elvenskin" is not made out of the skin of elves, it has historically never been made out of the skin of elves, the oldest etymology of the word claims that this specific method of treating goat skins for book covers was invented by the elves, who taught it to humans, and that's why most human tongues' word for this specific kind of leather is some variation of "elvenskin". Also the claim that the word refers to the leather's colour being similar to the natural skin tone of elves is bizarrely racist and unfounded, since elves also have a number of different ethnicities with a broad range of skin tones - as you all know.

Worldbuilding: A culture whose funeral practices involve ritualistically beating the shit out of the corpse while yelling at the deceased, scolding the dead for dying. "If only you had not [___], if only you would have [___], then you would still be with me, then I would not beat you now."

It's culturally understood that blaming the dead isn't blaming them, as much as the anguished structure of the poem is accusatory and clearly in rage. Even if the loved ones of the dead could not see it at the time - as grief wins over reason every time - it's understood that the more absurd the demands of what the dead should have done to avoid dying are, the more obviously it was nobody's fault. Such as accusing the elderly for failing to stop the passage of time, or an infant for not being strong enough to swallow.

"Fine, but I wll beat your corpse if you do", is a common go-to line of guilt-tripping mothers who do not want their children to do something that they've decided is dangerous. The mental image of one's own grieving mother beating the shit out of your corpse after you die of something stupid has a varying success rate in deterring teenagers from doing inadvisable things, but the most important thing is that it's not a threat, it's a promise.

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

Worldbuilding idea: Different cultures with climate overlap should have different cultural associations to the same animals. Like one culture looks at a specific kind of a migratory bird like "these birds are the divine messengers of the Gods, they are more intelligent than humans, as they have souls like we do but they are free of sin. They only visit us in the summer because they spend the winter in Heaven :)"

And on the other end of the birds' range the people are like "these feathered little bastards are too smart for their own good, can and will eat your trash. Some say they taste great when fried with scallions, but I wouldn't eat them after seeing what they eat. They always disappear for rainy season - nobody knows where they go but at least they are gone."

I love the subtle worldbuilding details in Dungeon Meshi. Like baby orcs having those camo patterns on their backs. Like the way baby ostriches and wild boars do.

That's nature's way of saying "my little shit is free to roam however they please because I noticed you before you noticed us, I can and will run you down, and it will be very fun and easy to stomp/gore you to death. If you saw my baby, no you fucking didn't."

Random worldbuilding from the Book I'm Not Working On: noble families' family stones

Every single noble family in the Empire has a specific stone type as their representing symbol, much like a coat of arms - the stone itself is somewhat irrelevant to the particular family's origins, but you can roughly estimate how old and/or powerful a house is by how valuable their House Stone is, as naturally gemstones were taken up first, and newer and lesser families adopt whatever fancy stones are still available, in declining order.

As there is a limited amount of types of stone out there, one may naturally also adopt the stone of another noble house that has passed from existence. It is considered natural that if an ursurper family is powerful and crafty enough to wipe out a specific house that is in decline, they have the rightful claim for that family's former stone. Representing the ruling class of a brutal imperialist empire that values power above all else, the noble houses see nothing wrong in this - ones with power don't just have the right to take down those who are declining and weak, but it is downright their duty to do so.

The higher up you go, the more precious the family stones become. Someone with the right to wear jewellery with sapphires or emeralds is most certainly someone who is entitled to eat at the same table with the Empress - if not downright from the same plate. The exception to the rule is the Empress herself.

Regicide is considered an acceptable way of changing rulers - an empress whose position is weak enough to simply be killed off just like that deserves to go - but the stone of the Empress stays the same, no matter what house the current ruler is from. The representing stone of the House on the Throne is granite. Common grey granite, polished like a precious gemstone, and set in silver and white gold.

Though nobody knows the exact historical accuracy of the tale, legend has it that this custom has been in use ever since the Empire became an empire. The warlord houses of the region had decimated each others' rulers and commanders for so long that once they came together to form a truce and make peace, none of them could agree on anyone from any family to rule over them all. A commoner (who, exactly, depends on who is telling the story) was chosen to become the Empress, and when it came time for her to choose a stone to represent the new royal line, she picked up a chunk of grey granite that had chipped off the foundation of the royal palace in the recent battles over the throne, stating that if this grey granite is noble enough to form the foundations of the palace, then surely it is noble enough to be the foundation of the Empire itself.

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

@witchofanguish it is also used in poetry and plays, ghosts talk like that. Imagine being in a folk story, staying overnight in an abandoned cabin and in the middle of the night there's a knock on the door and a bellowing voice going

and from the "me" alone you know that whoever is out there is not one among the living.