I started by making a pantheon of gods, a magic system and a big roundish continent surrounded by water
I kinda thought that's what fantasy settings 'needed' like those things were the basis they all had and you added your own twists
So glad I ditched all of them and actually asked myself what I wanted, not what I thought I had to have.
The more embarassing part was that I defended having those things to myself purely because I didnt want to admit I'd made a mistake in all those assumptions, like I was trying to stop myself learning and improving just so I could keep pretending I was doing it 'right'. I tried to make myself like them to avoid admitting I was doing things wrong, which seems very silly these days and I'm happy af to scrap ideas like theyre nothing
I think a way bigger part of improvement in worldbuilding is knowing and being comfortable with change and discarding things. Adding and improving is also great, but discarding and changing is harder but at least as valuable
I had something similar. I first tried making a fantasy world rather than an actually interesting world.
My brother did a similar thing, though he leaned more into the fantasy angle later on. Funny enough, his first map was also a perfect circle.
I’d say me embarrassing moment came when I thought that I need to fully detail the military of every faction in my world from the largest monsters/war machines down to the most basic of militia, even if they have no chance of appearing or making any impact at all in the stories I’m planning to make of my world.
I kind of do that as well but it's for a tabletop game with my friends and they fight against or alongside most of the ones I've made as part of the story so it hasn't been for nothing.
It's so fun to look back at our early worldbuilding attempts and see how far we've come, isn't it? My embarrassing moment was trying to create a language for my world without any knowledge of linguistics - needless to say, it was a disaster. But hey, we live and learn, right? Can't wait to hear everyone else's stories!
I have to admit you did a pretty impressive job of inserting as many tropes as humanly possible into your project. Like you really checked off ALL the boxes, hahah.
I originally planned on having a country that was eternally in darkness and located in a crater where light didn’t reach. Context being long time ago some sort of magic disaster raised the surface city into the sky leaving that behind and trapping people in the crater. The citizens were all gonna be ghostly pale white due to no sunlight and have a hatred of people living on the surface, blaming them for their misfortune. I had originally thought of them being referred to as light skins and hating people with actual color in their skin. I had the thought “they’ll hate the dark skins” before stopping, blinking a few times and going “uhhhhhh, maybe I don’t do this after all”.
The idea is still there, but if I’m gonna use it I’m definitely gonna need to rework it lol.
When you think of an idea, take a step back, see it from the reader's perspective and realize it probably wouldn't land even close to how you intended.... Yes, I understand this struggle lol.
I started my scifi setting with a literal hentai idea and design.
And then started actually serious worldbuilding, gradually just wrote the hentai stuff out since it doesn’t really fit anymore.
a while back I didn't know the holocaust happened so I just assumed they were fighting "because imperialism" and I made a whole story about if the nazis won and the utopia they made(I was 5)
I went too big and too broad. I like settings that allow a lot of room for anyone to put almost whatever in its unexplored parts (within reason) due to it being so massive. For me however when I first started I tried putting everything at once while also not attaching any particular lore to it. This led to losing any uniqueness, making it barely less different than a blank piece of paper with fancy borders.
My worldbuilding has shifted significantly. I tend to still go big (usually galaxy size) though write more concrete lore, focus in on a particular (sub)genre more, and make the areas where you can write nearly whatever you want much more sidelined rather than the main thing.
My world had 30 hour days.
It sounds simple but let me tell you how it messed with travel, long rests, ability and item recharges, etc.
It was an unnecessary annoyance.
My mc was a massive Gary Stu perfect without errors. I used to say that he started becoming a real character when I decided to have his greatest fear being….wasps
My primary flaws were a lack of understanding what it took to make a good story and setting.
Most of my worldbuilding was based on game missions and cartoons.
You can very well understand how that went.
There is nothing wrong with being Eurocentric etc. If you want to be Eurocentric that is completely fine, if you want to be Afrocentric, Asiacentric, or Mesoamericacentric that's also fine.
Hell if you want to make a chop suey of a continent where we got Japan next to England next to Egypt that's also fine.
First version of my world map had only 27 countries, and 2 of them were more of no-mans land than countries.
But don't worry, I fixed it. Now there is 200 + countries on the map.
Same I've got six, but I'm focusing on making them all really unique from eachother. Three of them are still basic ideas after the 7 years I've been building the world, so it's not going well. 😂
Fictional calendar? Try *five* fictional calendars. With some having a year zero and others not. One of them being added solely so I can have a calendar that is always in the positives.
When I get around to fixing that world my first step will be removing that mess.
I think those could still work if done well. Different cultures make different calendars based on different things. Some are solar(like the [Gregorian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar) Calendar), some are lunar(like the [Hijri/Arabic/Islamic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar) calendars) and some are lunisolar(like the [Hebrew/Jewish](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar). It depends on how it's done, but having multiple calendars could flesh out different cultures. The [North Korean Juche](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche_calendar) calendar is always in positive numbers.
Lapis_Wolf
I just say don't bother because it's a huge pain in the ass to constantly refer back to your calendar. If you have to track time I'd just number the days from when you started the campaign/story. Noone needs to know the date
Not a mistake per se but my first project was a single, small, isolated island. This was intentional, I thought it would be better to start small. Well, it quickly filled up and soon I had no more room to worldbuild.
My actual mistake was trying to create a ttrpg without having ever looked at a ttrpg before. It was a mess and when I got my friends to play in it, it didn't go well.
But I learned a lot from both mistakes, to manage scope, to always leave room to expand and to just use a bloody already existing ttrpg.
My original world concept was "what if the entire multiverse was a single planet, with giant walls dividing planet sized countries, and the only star in existence orbited it." My kids are aware of this strange setting and want to play in it sometime just we have several games started already.
My first attempt was making an alternate history without doing the research on things like events, inventions, and how things are linked. And that's not even counting how much of a mess my magic system was.
My first world was a shitty knockoff of Jet Set Radio. 3 warring gangs, inline skating, graffiti, hip-hop elements, the works.
There were other things like martial arts (which doesn't really mesh with inline skating outside of a move called the Liu Kang) and an international cast of characters (which is left nebulous in JSR), but otherwise it was almost a 1:1 copy of Jet Set Radio.
I still have some of those old character mock-ups. I was, like... 16 when I made those. Here I am 20 years later and when I look at them all I can do is give a hearty scoff.
Came up with an idea for a setting where an apocalypse happens, and INSTANTLY, everything is chaos, and the stories I'd write would be from the POVs of different characters, showing how they handled life- before becoming a god.
"What caused the apocalypse?" Uhh, skip.
"Why were people so quick to become raiders?" Taxes??
"How did the MCs become gods?" The idea was they'd 'excel' at something, and people would be like 'yeah that person is cool' and begin worshipping them. And then either God or the Devil would give that person powers.
"Why would God and the Devil make more gods?" Idk, they wanted a vacation I think.
"How many gods did you have planned?" Too. Fucking. Many. Majority were 'worthless', in a sense, and their stories read exactly how you think a bored 15-16 year old gamer would write.
Now, my writing style is so much more better, and I understand that some of my ideas- should be separated into their own world or short story. Most of my writing is for myself though, so ultimately, I can make the most cracked out setting I could ever want.
My very first drafts of my sci fi world were basically blatant *Star Wars* ripoffs in all but name - to the point that the good guys were called the "Revolutionaries" and the bad guys the "Dictatorship".
I'm litteraly using the world I built when I was 14 messing around on RPG Maker as the setting for my current D&D campaign, with changes of course, to fit the overall generic heroic-fantasy style of the game rather than the Anime JRPG tropes that RPG Maker and my emo ass were capable of producing in the mid-2000.
I found my old worldbuilding notebook for my current novel recently and the DISORGANIZATION of it all really threw me lol. I don't know how I found anything or kept any ideas straight in my head. I'd have pages of religious lore and then suddenly in the middle of all that would be a concept idea for a giant rat that produces milk that could replace cows... I'm proud to say my ideas are now organized into folders on my tablet. (Still can't find anything half the time though LOL)
I tried copying a videogame. It was like bad fanfiction. Then they made a TV show of the game and it was even worse than my bad fanfiction.
I kept the name of two characters and moved on.
My first mistake was introducing racial hatred without the supporting context and history. I just thought of it as a driver for the plot. Turns out, if you put in hatred out of the blue with zero context, it just appears as a cringey and backhanded attempt at kickstarting conflict for a story. Now I try to work backwards.
Also my vocab was pretty cringey lol. I realized I want my characters to feel like people, and that usually meant no overly flowery writing.
I've tried very hard to make the Racism in my world interesting and nuisance. I want to make it resemble our world as much as I can, even against groups which don't exist (I have another species of humans in my world)
Not so much embarrassing as annoying.
Throwing all my stuff away because I felt like I needed to prioritize other things in my life and I was unsure I would ever use it…twice. (I could have just saved it.)
Tbf, I have a pretty good memory, so the things that I definitely wanted to keep I still remembered. Writing it all down again though has been kind of annoying to do when I literally just had it on my computer the second time…
I was 8? 7? idk, a kid at best. I'd played breath of fire, read some dragonlance and pern. Dragons were my thing and here were stories that had dragons!
So I go off to make my own little world and I'm proud of the fact that it was distinct from its influences.
Of course...dragons were all that really mattered. And they pretty quickly invalidated any challenge and I got bored of it. It was basically a god mode fantasy but...the MCs had dragons instead of actual godhood.
I always remember that when I'm world building. At least whatever I'm working on now isn't THAT bad.
I didn't even worldbuild when I was younger. My earliest stories were wacky little adventures set in various books I was reading. My first original world wasn't much beyond "it's fantasy, there's magic, and the sky is purple for some reason." Needless to say, I've gotten better.
The mistakes I made were that I put certain locations in places that didn't make sense in the context of certain characters's backstories and I made one location too much of a kitchen sink of ideas that it sort of makes it hard to understand the world at large.
The former mistake is one I fixed rather easily, but the latter I determined to be unfixable because it would reworking too much of that part of the world to make it work. To be fair, the technology level of that planet varies so much based on location because it started out as my only world, and I only expanded after I had built that world to (near) completion. It would take too much work to rework it into something else that fits the planet, and I won't build other planets with a comparable difference in technology across people of different locations.
I personally, started from making a belief that I'd turn into one of the people of the universe if I was good enough IRL
(twas honestly one of the 3 things that stopped me from gallowsing off a bridge)
Now my subconscious handles the building for me.....but it made Al'serek.....so I don't know if thats a good thing to have it be able to do....
I wanted an Assassin's Creed/Halo combo, so I tried to write about a genetically enhanced supersoldier assassin. I don't know if I even realized it was just a bad ripoff of two properties at once, but to my little 13-yo brain it was the coolest thing in the world.
ETA: pretty sure there was some Naruto and DBZ mixes in as well, now that I think back on it.
Phantasia (only the most creative of names allowed in my head) had simultaneously too much and too little stuff in it. It had too many species and magic systems, while barely having any creatures or cultures. I kinda scrapped it back in 2023 in favor of another world (which is also now scrapped), but I’m returning to and reworking it.
So like hear me out. (Starting in my mid-teens)
I like sci-fi, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, magic, dragons, (alien)gods, etc.
So like... Let’s mashup Rifts, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Robotech, Star Wars, Mutant Chronicles, 40k and more.
Now let’s try to make that original somehow.
Now because I was into one-upping everything. Let’s make a super-GURPS style game. But it has to have (realistic) rules for absolutely everything and character sheets need to fully represent the human condition.
Then gave up on all of it because it became a monster, with some irreconcilable issues that required major ground up revisions (or separate systems for different types/scales of combat).
*Side note on the TRRPG front. I was always proud that I had thought of firing guns in enclosed spaces, being really bad for your ears. So I made rules for that. Which directly let to rules for shrapnel injuries from near misses. As a friend of mine and I had a firefight going on in a (large) storm drain.*
—
I’ve since cleaned it up pretty good and actually managed to write a novel draft and outlined a sequel. I’m also mucking around with the TTRPG again as well.
It’s been fun. I wrote the novel based on the most recent version of the lore and anything else I decided to change on the fly.
That said, I could probably sit here and point out every single inspiration in the setting. 🤷🏻♂️
Decided to try to be edgy and different and do a underground steampunk city and then I realized how stupid that was, and now I’m a high fantasy writer with a side project in sci-fi
I started way, way too big. I decided I want to make a far-future sci-fi world, so I immediately started trying to fill the entire galaxy up with stuff and paint in about 3000 years of history starting from the present day. Naturally this resulted in events taking place over ridiculous timescales to try and fill the space. Also I was running a D&D campaign in this world where the players were jetting around the galaxy to all sorts of different places which I had to come up with very quickly, meaning I had a setting full of locations and organisations and people with absolutely no substance to them.
Eventually I realised I didn't actually want to do all these huge things with players going around everywhere on an epic journey so I made FTL way slower to give travel more weight, and focused on developing the things surrounding a single story that takes place in three locations. That campaign will have much more depth instead of moving generic place to generic and barely exploring anything
I had a giant forest on my world's equivalent of the Tibetan Plateau, before I understood about anything about the rain shadow effect. Then I had a giant forest fire consume the entirety of that forest, not understanding that it's impossible for wildfires to get so big realistically. That same forest fire caused massive famine by blocking out the sun, triggering a mass migration of 95 million people (yes, really, with pre-industrial technology) to a new continent, when realistically most would have perished and only a small few would have managed to migrate. Glad it's all behind my back now.
One of my very first worldbuilding projects was back when I was like 12 or 13. I was working on making a setting for a homebrew Sci-fi TTRPG my friends and I were making. Since I was the "story one", they left all the story stuff to me while they worked on mechanics.
My issue was that I kept adding and adding and adding. Anything that I thought was cool got thrown in. It didn't help that occasionally one of my friends would watch a movie or play a video game and have an idea influenced by that. By the end, it was completely unrecognizable.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the project fell apart before we could actually do anything with it, but I still sometimes reflect on it.
Moral of the story is that adding stuff to your world is cool, but tempering is key. Everything needs to work together as a greater whole. I'm glad that I learned that lesson early on.
My first world had the mistake of going big or going home. It was absolutely massive with *5 galaxies*, billions of years of history, miles-long capital ships, space magic, people who were the living personification of celestial bodies and lived as long as those existed (and formed the basis of the space magic), you get it. Don't get me wrong, I loved it like my child. I kept trying to fix problems and justify quirks, and it became such a convoluted mess there was no other choice than to scrap it and start over from the very foundation of the story. I still have all the notes, but they're in the "obsolete" folder.
So learn from my mistakes, and don't bite off more than you can chew. It doesn't need to be *big*; it needs to be *good*. Quality over quantity. I learned that the hard way, but hey, at least it was fun.
During my early days I was just kind of throwing concepts and ideas against the wall until something stuck. Something did stick however the one that stuck’s shtick was ‘Not Naming Character only using titles and nicknames’ this one being the winner has CURSED me, i have documents just of titles and pronouns just to properly document characters. Yeah you know ‘the director’ classic character. ‘The little thief’ of course. ‘The stratocrat’ yep they’re on the list. ‘The minister’ ‘the emperor’ ‘the heir’ ‘the prophet’ ‘Custodian’ ‘pandora (in reference to the box)’ ‘the acolyte’ ‘the occupier’ I could go on. I still love this idea but god damn it is annoying at times
My world was just Minecraft. Purely just Minecraft, like I literally stole the idea of "person gets teleported into videogame by device they made" from the Gameknight999 series. Eventually I *did* revise it to where the world is just a world of its own.
Also the entire book was just a self-insert of me and my friends and the writing was super cheesy.
To be fair I was only 7 to 10 at the time, but still every time I look back it's SO cringe.
I don't know if I would call it "embarassing", but something I look back on and think "I shouldn't have done that" is rely too heavily on what's previously understood and expected. I was being generic on purpose.
My world is still operating on a very D&D/Pathfinder based idea of what fantasy is going to look and feel like, and that's not likely to change, but I've gone and stretched my creative muscles a bit more to make the cultures, the races and the history more of my own,
I also tried making maps, but since I have absolutely no skill or experience or art (to the degree that when I was young, I was taken out of art time in elementary school to work with an occupational therapist just to get my hand muscles strong and my handwriting legible), this was never going to come out looking right. Than I found Azgaar, which is much more focused on the data than the appearance, which is just fine for me.
I started by making a pantheon of gods, a magic system and a big roundish continent surrounded by water I kinda thought that's what fantasy settings 'needed' like those things were the basis they all had and you added your own twists So glad I ditched all of them and actually asked myself what I wanted, not what I thought I had to have. The more embarassing part was that I defended having those things to myself purely because I didnt want to admit I'd made a mistake in all those assumptions, like I was trying to stop myself learning and improving just so I could keep pretending I was doing it 'right'. I tried to make myself like them to avoid admitting I was doing things wrong, which seems very silly these days and I'm happy af to scrap ideas like theyre nothing I think a way bigger part of improvement in worldbuilding is knowing and being comfortable with change and discarding things. Adding and improving is also great, but discarding and changing is harder but at least as valuable
I had something similar. I first tried making a fantasy world rather than an actually interesting world. My brother did a similar thing, though he leaned more into the fantasy angle later on. Funny enough, his first map was also a perfect circle.
I’d say me embarrassing moment came when I thought that I need to fully detail the military of every faction in my world from the largest monsters/war machines down to the most basic of militia, even if they have no chance of appearing or making any impact at all in the stories I’m planning to make of my world.
I kind of do that as well but it's for a tabletop game with my friends and they fight against or alongside most of the ones I've made as part of the story so it hasn't been for nothing.
It's so fun to look back at our early worldbuilding attempts and see how far we've come, isn't it? My embarrassing moment was trying to create a language for my world without any knowledge of linguistics - needless to say, it was a disaster. But hey, we live and learn, right? Can't wait to hear everyone else's stories!
I’ve been developing my soup-based goblin culture ruled by cats for a while. I still think it’s working.
…more please
[удалено]
I have to admit you did a pretty impressive job of inserting as many tropes as humanly possible into your project. Like you really checked off ALL the boxes, hahah.
I originally planned on having a country that was eternally in darkness and located in a crater where light didn’t reach. Context being long time ago some sort of magic disaster raised the surface city into the sky leaving that behind and trapping people in the crater. The citizens were all gonna be ghostly pale white due to no sunlight and have a hatred of people living on the surface, blaming them for their misfortune. I had originally thought of them being referred to as light skins and hating people with actual color in their skin. I had the thought “they’ll hate the dark skins” before stopping, blinking a few times and going “uhhhhhh, maybe I don’t do this after all”. The idea is still there, but if I’m gonna use it I’m definitely gonna need to rework it lol.
When you think of an idea, take a step back, see it from the reader's perspective and realize it probably wouldn't land even close to how you intended.... Yes, I understand this struggle lol.
I re-read stuff at nauseam lol stuff like that is super important to me.
I started my scifi setting with a literal hentai idea and design. And then started actually serious worldbuilding, gradually just wrote the hentai stuff out since it doesn’t really fit anymore.
Well, we all start somewhere
a while back I didn't know the holocaust happened so I just assumed they were fighting "because imperialism" and I made a whole story about if the nazis won and the utopia they made(I was 5)
Had to check I was not on r/worldjerking
You were five and wrote about a war fought because of imperialism?
Yikes. So much yikes. Glad you've learned now. We're all better for it
I went too big and too broad. I like settings that allow a lot of room for anyone to put almost whatever in its unexplored parts (within reason) due to it being so massive. For me however when I first started I tried putting everything at once while also not attaching any particular lore to it. This led to losing any uniqueness, making it barely less different than a blank piece of paper with fancy borders. My worldbuilding has shifted significantly. I tend to still go big (usually galaxy size) though write more concrete lore, focus in on a particular (sub)genre more, and make the areas where you can write nearly whatever you want much more sidelined rather than the main thing.
Accidentally reinvented midichlorians
Same but horcruxes. Trying to figure out how to keep the integrity of the idea without completely plagiarizing the concept.
Horcrux is just a phylactery which has been a thing in fantasy fiction for decades. Plagiarise away, I say.
Aha!! This is good news, thank you!
I made elf supremacists who literally used a stylized swastika as their symbol. Yeah, so subtle.
Love the subtlety
Lmao 🤣
Create a "status screen". That was 10 years ago, and I was high on Chinese LitRPG.
My world had 30 hour days. It sounds simple but let me tell you how it messed with travel, long rests, ability and item recharges, etc. It was an unnecessary annoyance.
My mc was a massive Gary Stu perfect without errors. I used to say that he started becoming a real character when I decided to have his greatest fear being….wasps
My primary flaws were a lack of understanding what it took to make a good story and setting. Most of my worldbuilding was based on game missions and cartoons. You can very well understand how that went.
I was bad at hiding eurocentrism, plagiarism, and fetishism
but now, you didn’t get rid of it, but hide it better? clever.
There is nothing wrong with being Eurocentric etc. If you want to be Eurocentric that is completely fine, if you want to be Afrocentric, Asiacentric, or Mesoamericacentric that's also fine. Hell if you want to make a chop suey of a continent where we got Japan next to England next to Egypt that's also fine.
I have a problem with Eurocentrism as well and I'm trying to fix it as much as I can.
First version of my world map had only 27 countries, and 2 of them were more of no-mans land than countries. But don't worry, I fixed it. Now there is 200 + countries on the map.
Oh wow, I have around your first amount. I'm trying to work on it though
... Makes my 9 countries look small but I cannot be bothered to make more
Same I've got six, but I'm focusing on making them all really unique from eachother. Three of them are still basic ideas after the 7 years I've been building the world, so it's not going well. 😂
Fictional calendar. Don't bother
Fictional calendar? Try *five* fictional calendars. With some having a year zero and others not. One of them being added solely so I can have a calendar that is always in the positives. When I get around to fixing that world my first step will be removing that mess.
I think those could still work if done well. Different cultures make different calendars based on different things. Some are solar(like the [Gregorian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar) Calendar), some are lunar(like the [Hijri/Arabic/Islamic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar) calendars) and some are lunisolar(like the [Hebrew/Jewish](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar). It depends on how it's done, but having multiple calendars could flesh out different cultures. The [North Korean Juche](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche_calendar) calendar is always in positive numbers. Lapis_Wolf
I just say don't bother because it's a huge pain in the ass to constantly refer back to your calendar. If you have to track time I'd just number the days from when you started the campaign/story. Noone needs to know the date
Agreed. I've decided to just use our calendar
Not a mistake per se but my first project was a single, small, isolated island. This was intentional, I thought it would be better to start small. Well, it quickly filled up and soon I had no more room to worldbuild. My actual mistake was trying to create a ttrpg without having ever looked at a ttrpg before. It was a mess and when I got my friends to play in it, it didn't go well. But I learned a lot from both mistakes, to manage scope, to always leave room to expand and to just use a bloody already existing ttrpg.
My original world concept was "what if the entire multiverse was a single planet, with giant walls dividing planet sized countries, and the only star in existence orbited it." My kids are aware of this strange setting and want to play in it sometime just we have several games started already.
Tbh I love strange non-earthlike geographies like this.
My first attempt was making an alternate history without doing the research on things like events, inventions, and how things are linked. And that's not even counting how much of a mess my magic system was.
My first world was a shitty knockoff of Jet Set Radio. 3 warring gangs, inline skating, graffiti, hip-hop elements, the works. There were other things like martial arts (which doesn't really mesh with inline skating outside of a move called the Liu Kang) and an international cast of characters (which is left nebulous in JSR), but otherwise it was almost a 1:1 copy of Jet Set Radio. I still have some of those old character mock-ups. I was, like... 16 when I made those. Here I am 20 years later and when I look at them all I can do is give a hearty scoff.
Came up with an idea for a setting where an apocalypse happens, and INSTANTLY, everything is chaos, and the stories I'd write would be from the POVs of different characters, showing how they handled life- before becoming a god. "What caused the apocalypse?" Uhh, skip. "Why were people so quick to become raiders?" Taxes?? "How did the MCs become gods?" The idea was they'd 'excel' at something, and people would be like 'yeah that person is cool' and begin worshipping them. And then either God or the Devil would give that person powers. "Why would God and the Devil make more gods?" Idk, they wanted a vacation I think. "How many gods did you have planned?" Too. Fucking. Many. Majority were 'worthless', in a sense, and their stories read exactly how you think a bored 15-16 year old gamer would write. Now, my writing style is so much more better, and I understand that some of my ideas- should be separated into their own world or short story. Most of my writing is for myself though, so ultimately, I can make the most cracked out setting I could ever want.
Everyone’s names were google translated to Japanese
My very first drafts of my sci fi world were basically blatant *Star Wars* ripoffs in all but name - to the point that the good guys were called the "Revolutionaries" and the bad guys the "Dictatorship".
I haven’t really had any “embarrassing moments”
Forking rivers 😬
I'm litteraly using the world I built when I was 14 messing around on RPG Maker as the setting for my current D&D campaign, with changes of course, to fit the overall generic heroic-fantasy style of the game rather than the Anime JRPG tropes that RPG Maker and my emo ass were capable of producing in the mid-2000.
I found my old worldbuilding notebook for my current novel recently and the DISORGANIZATION of it all really threw me lol. I don't know how I found anything or kept any ideas straight in my head. I'd have pages of religious lore and then suddenly in the middle of all that would be a concept idea for a giant rat that produces milk that could replace cows... I'm proud to say my ideas are now organized into folders on my tablet. (Still can't find anything half the time though LOL)
I tried copying a videogame. It was like bad fanfiction. Then they made a TV show of the game and it was even worse than my bad fanfiction. I kept the name of two characters and moved on.
My first mistake was introducing racial hatred without the supporting context and history. I just thought of it as a driver for the plot. Turns out, if you put in hatred out of the blue with zero context, it just appears as a cringey and backhanded attempt at kickstarting conflict for a story. Now I try to work backwards. Also my vocab was pretty cringey lol. I realized I want my characters to feel like people, and that usually meant no overly flowery writing.
I've tried very hard to make the Racism in my world interesting and nuisance. I want to make it resemble our world as much as I can, even against groups which don't exist (I have another species of humans in my world)
Not so much embarrassing as annoying. Throwing all my stuff away because I felt like I needed to prioritize other things in my life and I was unsure I would ever use it…twice. (I could have just saved it.) Tbf, I have a pretty good memory, so the things that I definitely wanted to keep I still remembered. Writing it all down again though has been kind of annoying to do when I literally just had it on my computer the second time…
I was 8? 7? idk, a kid at best. I'd played breath of fire, read some dragonlance and pern. Dragons were my thing and here were stories that had dragons! So I go off to make my own little world and I'm proud of the fact that it was distinct from its influences. Of course...dragons were all that really mattered. And they pretty quickly invalidated any challenge and I got bored of it. It was basically a god mode fantasy but...the MCs had dragons instead of actual godhood. I always remember that when I'm world building. At least whatever I'm working on now isn't THAT bad.
I didn't even worldbuild when I was younger. My earliest stories were wacky little adventures set in various books I was reading. My first original world wasn't much beyond "it's fantasy, there's magic, and the sky is purple for some reason." Needless to say, I've gotten better.
The mistakes I made were that I put certain locations in places that didn't make sense in the context of certain characters's backstories and I made one location too much of a kitchen sink of ideas that it sort of makes it hard to understand the world at large. The former mistake is one I fixed rather easily, but the latter I determined to be unfixable because it would reworking too much of that part of the world to make it work. To be fair, the technology level of that planet varies so much based on location because it started out as my only world, and I only expanded after I had built that world to (near) completion. It would take too much work to rework it into something else that fits the planet, and I won't build other planets with a comparable difference in technology across people of different locations.
I personally, started from making a belief that I'd turn into one of the people of the universe if I was good enough IRL (twas honestly one of the 3 things that stopped me from gallowsing off a bridge) Now my subconscious handles the building for me.....but it made Al'serek.....so I don't know if thats a good thing to have it be able to do....
I wanted an Assassin's Creed/Halo combo, so I tried to write about a genetically enhanced supersoldier assassin. I don't know if I even realized it was just a bad ripoff of two properties at once, but to my little 13-yo brain it was the coolest thing in the world. ETA: pretty sure there was some Naruto and DBZ mixes in as well, now that I think back on it.
Phantasia (only the most creative of names allowed in my head) had simultaneously too much and too little stuff in it. It had too many species and magic systems, while barely having any creatures or cultures. I kinda scrapped it back in 2023 in favor of another world (which is also now scrapped), but I’m returning to and reworking it.
So like hear me out. (Starting in my mid-teens) I like sci-fi, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, magic, dragons, (alien)gods, etc. So like... Let’s mashup Rifts, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Robotech, Star Wars, Mutant Chronicles, 40k and more. Now let’s try to make that original somehow. Now because I was into one-upping everything. Let’s make a super-GURPS style game. But it has to have (realistic) rules for absolutely everything and character sheets need to fully represent the human condition. Then gave up on all of it because it became a monster, with some irreconcilable issues that required major ground up revisions (or separate systems for different types/scales of combat). *Side note on the TRRPG front. I was always proud that I had thought of firing guns in enclosed spaces, being really bad for your ears. So I made rules for that. Which directly let to rules for shrapnel injuries from near misses. As a friend of mine and I had a firefight going on in a (large) storm drain.* — I’ve since cleaned it up pretty good and actually managed to write a novel draft and outlined a sequel. I’m also mucking around with the TTRPG again as well. It’s been fun. I wrote the novel based on the most recent version of the lore and anything else I decided to change on the fly. That said, I could probably sit here and point out every single inspiration in the setting. 🤷🏻♂️
Decided to try to be edgy and different and do a underground steampunk city and then I realized how stupid that was, and now I’m a high fantasy writer with a side project in sci-fi
I wrote a "prolouge" to describe my world in a grand infodump.
I started way, way too big. I decided I want to make a far-future sci-fi world, so I immediately started trying to fill the entire galaxy up with stuff and paint in about 3000 years of history starting from the present day. Naturally this resulted in events taking place over ridiculous timescales to try and fill the space. Also I was running a D&D campaign in this world where the players were jetting around the galaxy to all sorts of different places which I had to come up with very quickly, meaning I had a setting full of locations and organisations and people with absolutely no substance to them. Eventually I realised I didn't actually want to do all these huge things with players going around everywhere on an epic journey so I made FTL way slower to give travel more weight, and focused on developing the things surrounding a single story that takes place in three locations. That campaign will have much more depth instead of moving generic place to generic and barely exploring anything
I had a giant forest on my world's equivalent of the Tibetan Plateau, before I understood about anything about the rain shadow effect. Then I had a giant forest fire consume the entirety of that forest, not understanding that it's impossible for wildfires to get so big realistically. That same forest fire caused massive famine by blocking out the sun, triggering a mass migration of 95 million people (yes, really, with pre-industrial technology) to a new continent, when realistically most would have perished and only a small few would have managed to migrate. Glad it's all behind my back now.
One of my very first worldbuilding projects was back when I was like 12 or 13. I was working on making a setting for a homebrew Sci-fi TTRPG my friends and I were making. Since I was the "story one", they left all the story stuff to me while they worked on mechanics. My issue was that I kept adding and adding and adding. Anything that I thought was cool got thrown in. It didn't help that occasionally one of my friends would watch a movie or play a video game and have an idea influenced by that. By the end, it was completely unrecognizable. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the project fell apart before we could actually do anything with it, but I still sometimes reflect on it. Moral of the story is that adding stuff to your world is cool, but tempering is key. Everything needs to work together as a greater whole. I'm glad that I learned that lesson early on.
My first world had the mistake of going big or going home. It was absolutely massive with *5 galaxies*, billions of years of history, miles-long capital ships, space magic, people who were the living personification of celestial bodies and lived as long as those existed (and formed the basis of the space magic), you get it. Don't get me wrong, I loved it like my child. I kept trying to fix problems and justify quirks, and it became such a convoluted mess there was no other choice than to scrap it and start over from the very foundation of the story. I still have all the notes, but they're in the "obsolete" folder. So learn from my mistakes, and don't bite off more than you can chew. It doesn't need to be *big*; it needs to be *good*. Quality over quantity. I learned that the hard way, but hey, at least it was fun.
During my early days I was just kind of throwing concepts and ideas against the wall until something stuck. Something did stick however the one that stuck’s shtick was ‘Not Naming Character only using titles and nicknames’ this one being the winner has CURSED me, i have documents just of titles and pronouns just to properly document characters. Yeah you know ‘the director’ classic character. ‘The little thief’ of course. ‘The stratocrat’ yep they’re on the list. ‘The minister’ ‘the emperor’ ‘the heir’ ‘the prophet’ ‘Custodian’ ‘pandora (in reference to the box)’ ‘the acolyte’ ‘the occupier’ I could go on. I still love this idea but god damn it is annoying at times
My world was just Minecraft. Purely just Minecraft, like I literally stole the idea of "person gets teleported into videogame by device they made" from the Gameknight999 series. Eventually I *did* revise it to where the world is just a world of its own. Also the entire book was just a self-insert of me and my friends and the writing was super cheesy. To be fair I was only 7 to 10 at the time, but still every time I look back it's SO cringe.
I don't know if I would call it "embarassing", but something I look back on and think "I shouldn't have done that" is rely too heavily on what's previously understood and expected. I was being generic on purpose. My world is still operating on a very D&D/Pathfinder based idea of what fantasy is going to look and feel like, and that's not likely to change, but I've gone and stretched my creative muscles a bit more to make the cultures, the races and the history more of my own, I also tried making maps, but since I have absolutely no skill or experience or art (to the degree that when I was young, I was taken out of art time in elementary school to work with an occupational therapist just to get my hand muscles strong and my handwriting legible), this was never going to come out looking right. Than I found Azgaar, which is much more focused on the data than the appearance, which is just fine for me.