Redesigning a world

[Lezales]

Hey Cartographer's Guild !

It's been awhile since I came here (probably several month) but I've been very busy with university and writing my novel and had little time for worldbuilding aside from taking an absurd amount of notes. Anyway, late July I've left for a five weeks backpack travel through Turkey, the balkans and Easter Europe all the way to Kiev. It was a great deal of fun, inspiration and ideas. Now, I have been thinking about it for awhile and travelling just made me want to do it more.

I've been worldbuilding on this universe for a long time (around 12 to 14 years I'd say). The thing was that I was very young when I started it and always stayed with it. But as it was **** at the start, everytime I'd grow a little (every 2 years I'd say), my newly found maturity and knowledge would make me realize how bad was my world. So I'd keep the essential of it, what was salvageable and then rework it all. Every time, I was very happy with it and the new result was immensily better tahn the previous. Now, I've been on this "version" of my world for a good while, four to five years I'd say. I did change a lot of little things, tweaks, developped cultures, languages, economy, resources. But...

Here's the problem. As I've done all those change over time. Whether changes from 10, 8, 6 years old or all new tweaks I've made recently; I've got different "aspects" of my world that are very coherent in themselves. My cultures and sub-cultures are well defined, coherent among themselves, migration patterns, etc. The same with economy, geography (although I do not care much for realism), linguistics, etc.

But AMONG themselves, the systems are not all that coherent. They are to some extent. But I've felt the need for a while to just take step back and checking the bigger picture and like to link these aspects, culture, economy, geography, more tightly together. But it is very hard. Normally I was just attacking one of the aspects and doing an overhaul. But now that I would have to manage several domains at the same time, it seems hard to do. To me it looks like a big 500 pieces puzzle that needs to all drop at once and fit and not something that you can built slowly piece by piece.

I've got my names, races, big rivers, migration patterns and everything. And now I will be changing geography a bit to make things more interesting (and following inspiration from my travel) and I think this is the right opportunity to overhaul things and make them fit. But as I am not building my world from bottom to top; how to you make these pieces fit when you got all top and want them to fit at the bottom ? I don't know if I am being clear.

Thank you for your help !
Lezales

[Chick]

Make a brand new bottom. Draw your map with the geography you know for sure you want to keep. Then start fitting in the human parts (races, cities, kingdoms, etc). Grow the map up from a new start, using what you have as filler material. Then add more geography as needed to glue it all together.

I suspect the biggest problem you will have is letting go of some older things that simply don't fit well any more. If you start out this rebuild with the mindset that some of the top stuff might not make it in, I'll bet you can build a really excellent world!

[Diamond]

Chick has a good point about being willing to let stuff go. One of the hardest things I had to do in my own conworld was scrapping something that (I thought) was interesting and cool, that I'd worked on since my late teens, because it Just. Didn't. Work. No matter how hard I tried to shoehorn it in to the rest of the world, it didn't work. Finally I let it go and I've made real progress in my writing and world design. And I didn't forget about that other idea; it just didn't belong where it was originally. Doesn't mean I can't use it for something else!

[Ilanthar]

You're far from being the only one in this case, believe me ! I think it's a good thing to establish priorities. What's the most important things, the "core concept(s)" that you will rely on. I tend to need to have this "backbone", then, I tend to add all the pieces of the puzzle based on this new perspective(s). Some fits perfectly, some need a change (small or big), some are to be deleted or completely reworked.
Hope that helps!

[Pixie]

Lezales, it seems we've all been there. And the general answer, which I will stress as well, is to be able to let go. It's almost like that when we go back to our past conworlds we find a new (adulthood induced...?) urgency for coherence. You can go in any direction you go, obviously, but the overall tendency here is for people to scrap what doesn't fit anymore. In fact, I can tell you from my personal experience, scrapping some stuff that isn't "really fitting" allows you some space to invent again and add more (and better!) layers of creativity.

Basically put, you can't keep your top as is when you start fixing the bottom. But the good news is, you get to keep parts of the top and whatever rises from the new bottom will be even better.

[Saigonnus]

New here to the group, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

Having hand-drawn my own maps for years, and worldbuilt for just as many years, I can offer at least a smidge of advice.

It sounds like the interactions between your various cultures is in need of minor tweaking.

The first thing I would ask myself is: "if a citizen from civ A meets someone from civ B, how do they react to each other?" And "Is that a commonly shared reaction?"
Other questions I might add would be: "What do the countries trade with each other for?" "Do they have similar religious beliefs?"

If you look at the real world, certain geographic areas; ones that all stem from the same ancient cultures, tend to have similar belief systems. A shared/similar language is another concept to be explored as well. Taking Spain and Portugal into account, the languages are both latin root, and while some words are the same, others are not, giving it a different flavor even though they are right next door.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk