Thread "How do you go about World building?" in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 6:07PM, Jul. 29, 2015

My current comic is the first sci fi project I've done, so it's my first attempt at 'extreme' speculative world-building. I do have a pretty good grasp of how my future world works behind the scenes – I even downloaded Celestia, a solar system simulator, so I could keep track of where all the planets are supposed to be. But for the most part, I'd prefer to keep all of that in the background and focus on the characters. I usually find it a distraction when a story focuses too much on explaining its fictional universe and not enough on telling the story… though with some sci fi the world-building largely is the story, so I guess it depends.

Posted at 2:07AM, Jul. 30, 2015

fallopiancrusader wrote:
In science-fiction, the vernacular for what is a "Futuristic" look hasn't changed since "Star Wars," and that movie came out 38 years ago! Many actual buildings being built today are more "Futuristic" looking than what we see in science fiction movies. Just look at Zaha Hadid's architecture for one example among many. Many producers of sci-fi movies and games seem to be caught in the past, not the future.

The last point is too true as many of "Star Wars" designs were taken from 1920-1930's movies especially Fritz Lang's Metropolis and ALexander Korda's Things to Come. Along with healthy doses of Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers serials. The whole lived in look was supposedly inspired by westerns. Many original concepts for Star Wars was very much inspired by westerns. You could add a cowboy hat and a duster to Han Solo's outfit and he'd fit right in a John Ford or Sergio Leone movie.

So motion picture design is very much what is old is new again. Many films and TV series like Firefly owe their inspriatin more to the look of Alien than Star Wars. What I can't stand is the generic "living" spaceship. They all end up looking like something out of a 1970's Dr. Who series.

If you're going to design a fanasy or SF race, one way to make them more interesting is to add in the "whys" Why are they like that? I did elves as evolved Neanderthals who were excellent Ice Age hunters. They had fantastic hearing and long distance sight but with down-sides. They were mostly vegetarian as their heritage of hunting had made the eating of meat a highly reverred religious experience to be savored. And their unevolved Neanderthal cousins (orcish brute race types) were a constant source of embarrassment. Cultures like animal species evolve and there's usually a reason as opposed to someone's whim. And if it was someone's whim they'd be remembered. Or what if they were forgotten or their memory so twisted as to be unrecognizable? Fun stuff like that.

Posted at 10:07AM, Jul. 30, 2015

And just to be a complete industrial design geek, it should be noted that much of the visual design seen in science fiction movies and games since the 70's owes a lot to the work of Syd Mead. Though I admire Mead's work a lot, I still wish that other styles would be explored more often within the Sci-Fi genre.

Posted at 9:07PM, Jul. 30, 2015

LEXX and Existenz are good examples and Scifi that had unique designs: Very organic, gooey, living tissue based technology.

In Existenz it was just because of Cronenburg's own little kink, but LEXX had a good rationale for it.
You see glimpses of earlier periods in the world's history over the course of the series when things were a little more mechanical and what we're used to. But some time in the past the massive insect civilisation because dominant and all tech was somehow based on things salvaged and devoloped from it- even hundreds of years later.

Warhammer 40k, the gaming world, has an interesting idea… In that the domonant human forces are controlled by the ultra religious monastic forces of the space marines. All their tech, weapons, armour, ships etc shows heavy gothic Catholic influence in the aesthetics- they're basing their empire on the Vatican culture (their focus is "the cult of the Emperor").

It reminds me of how The Nazis and Mussolini's Facists created their little worlds- basing them on the aesthetics from history they most admired and wanted to emulate. And that went further than juniforms, music, parades and banners. It showed in their rituals, ceremonial weapons, even massive industrial creations like their battleships echoed their national aesthetic: German battleships had very gothic, Tuetonic, angular shapes (even the fighter planes did), while Italian battleships (of the '30s) have the sleek, smooth lines and aesthetics of Italian 1920s modernist art decco.

Posted at 9:07PM, Jul. 30, 2015

Adding to the "barbarian" thing, I DO see that unimaginative use of tropes as problematic.

The biggest developers of the whole "Barbarian" concept were Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E Howard, and Fritz Leiber.
Each of them had their own rationals as to WHY those people were "Barbarians"- they were outsiders to civilisation, primitive people who you can contrast against the corruption and softness of civilised man. Their origins and histories are part of their stories, they're not JUST "Barbarians".

But that has become a catagory of fantasy races. Now I'll blaim Dungeons and Dragons there again too. It's great as a gaming system for people but should have NO influence on the fantasy genre because it codfies things too much.
Too many OTHER fantasy games and books are based on the second and third hand sausage -mix fantasy tropes that D&D pumped out.
You have Tolkien's elves and not just that but all his elf cultures that HE alone developed became stratafied and codified into drak elves, high elves, wood elves… Also his Orcs and goblins and trolls, and dwarves… etc.
-some of these things sort of existed before Tolkien obviously (not orcs), but the version that D&D took was purely Tolkien's.
They took their barbarians from Howard's Conan and the rest of their things from everywhere else…

But the trouble is that now popular gaming (and soon to be a movie) series World of Warcraft traces it's lore from that 3rd hand source, The same with Warhammer fantasy AND 40k and a million other book series, games and movies.

I do not decry the copying and devopling of ideas, that's how culture evolves afterall, but when you do it you should do it with a higer level of understanding of what those ideas really mean and where they came from.
And just maybe you shouldn't have elves, drwarves, and orcs in your story.

Posted at 4:07AM, Jul. 31, 2015

Actually across cultures elves, dwarves and orcs are mytholgical archetypes. Most cultures have mythical beings that are refined nature spirits (elves), short workers of the earth (dwarves) and nasty brutes (orcs).

It is as you said that D&D codified these races and everyone is so accustomed that they glom unto them without thinking. You third generation of the use of the idea as opposed to going and finding another interptation of the same archetypes and using it. That's why anime can be so refreshing to see the Japanese/Asian mythologies or their twist on the common Tolkien archetypes. Some do it badly as if it's a game system as a TV show and others fly away with it.

Unfortunately it takes a little searching to find fantasy even based on the older traditions of faerie. I know one series set in Elizabethan times that has Oberon as a player in English politics and extrapolates faeire culture based on traditional sources and Midsummer's Night Dream. There was the wonderful mini-series Merlin which added traditonal English folklore to the legend of Merlin with Queen Mab and gnomes and nothing Tolkienesque in sight so it can be done. But it just takes work on the part of the creators.

As a former Dungeon master (I rarely ever got to play always you're so imaginative you run stuff!) I often did change-ups because everyone had read the Monster Manual. I worked over the world and made orcs into a primitive human and a dying speices, elves into evolved orcs and dwarves as short guys who worked in tight places. All branches of humanity with their own quirks but still part of the same evolutionary path. Me and evolutionary biology. Helped so much to put it all together. A little research goes a long way in world building.

Posted at 4:07AM, Jul. 31, 2015

That sounds like a Robert E Howard way of doing things. He did a similar thing with the Aesir and Vaniar of Norse myth- reimagining them as tribes… back when he was still on the 19th century style racialist kink and imagining Conan as part of a racial continum of supermen decended from Aryan heroes in the distant past (along with Krull and Cormac Mac Art, and Solomon Kane, and all the rest…)

I'm rambling now, but part of Morcock's rationale for Elric was that he was an anti-Conan: skinny, sickly, albino, royalty, a sorcerer with a demon sword, a member of a non-human dying hyper civilised race…
But in reality he was exactly the same.as Conan intrinsically: an avatar of an eternal hero as well as the author's idea of a fantasy fulfilment kick-arse warior god who triumphs in spite of awesome odds. The differences were just superficial.

To tie it together:
Michael Morcock is not a great story writer, he's just not very good at character interation or development, but he is a brilliant idea man, fantastic at concepts, scenes and world development. In his stories he's come up with dozens of different and exciting new fantasy worlds that don't need elves or trolls, dwarves, or Orcs… Though technically Elric is some sort of high elf thing I suppose.

Posted at 5:08AM, Aug. 1, 2015

ozoneocean wrote:
That sounds like a Robert E Howard way of doing things. He did a similar thing with the Aesir and Vaniar of Norse myth- reimagining them as tribes… back when he was still on the 19th century style racialist kink and imagining Conan as part of a racial continum of supermen decended from Aryan heroes in the distant past

That's where the deep background of Mask of the Aryans came from that wonderful race based mythology that stood in for archeology in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The same genius that brought us the white race originating in the Caucasus (hence whites are caucasians) and the Aryans originating in Atlantis via Thule and living on Vril enegy defeating the brutal Neaderthals in hand-to-hand combat. Guess that was the only chapter in the Blavatsky books he could get through.
Now that was a world builder. Look up the stuff Madame Blavatsky came up with as the history of life on earth. Look up Ignatious Donnelly's ruminations on Atlantis. Fantasy world building pretending to be archeology. Then there is Zecharia Stitchin and his reinterpretation of Sumarian myth. One of his last works was the Lost Book of Enki which if anything is a novel purporting to be a lost history of the Annunaki.