Looks cool! Your rivers though, at least I assume that’s what the white squiggles are, a few have unrealistic shapes. Rivers start at high altitudes in mountains and plateaus and flow downhill to a sea, ocean, or lake. They’ll have many tributaries that converge but almost never does a river diverge except at a delta, and if they do it’s almost always for very short distances and erosion will very quickly cause one channel or the other to become the new main channel and the other will dry up.
Water is hugely economically important, so when I’m building a world for an RPG I like to establish my topography first (bonus step: decide on climates and latitudes and rain shadows and stuff), determine my drainage basins based on that, add big rivers and other bodies of water, and then figure out where the cities would be as a result (flood plains, estuaries, and major confluences are prime real estate). It’s super helpful to do those steps first too, because then whole histories of conflict over access to resources and arable land and trade routes almost write themselves.
Oh damn, rivers don’t start from the ocean sometimes?
That’s a lot of info I didn’t know, thanks!! I’ll definitely have to go back and revise, I’m not a diehard realism type (just because I don’t want to get too lost in rabbitholes of unnecessary details) but I do want it to be passably realistic. I’ll look into that stuff before I do!
I definitely love how writing often does that, write itself, after you set up the initial pieces. It’s really beautiful. I’m sure understanding dialectics and having a proper understanding of historu helps us a bunch in that.
What sort of stuff do you like to write?
Just want to jump in to say that “environmental determinism” can make a world seem kinda flat. So like you said, don’t get bogged down by the nitty gritty details too much. However, it’s good to learn the rules and norms of worldbuilding to gauge which one actually matter to your story. And more importantly which rules you want to break.
So yeah, rivers always flow into the ocean. But maybe there’s a reason why some of your rivers work the opposite way.
Edit: By the way I really like your flag designs!
I usually like just enough detail to hint at a larger world. But, to quote my friend, “we don’t need to know every side character’s grandma’s sexual kink” 😂😂😂 it’s hard for me to stop sometimes, I really could label every rock if I didn’t stop myself.
Always ‘Rule of Cool’ above all else 😎 whenever it feels to flat I try and think of some weird wrench to throw into it. I figure real life ain’t so different! Still I should probably learn the basics of how rivers work…
And thank you so much!!
Yes it’s important not to get too bogged down unless you’re making a hardcore sim of some sort, but having a realistic backdrop helps a lot when you want to highlight something unique to your world. A river that flows up from the ocean and ends in the sky is completely unrealistic but could be one of the greatest magical wonders of your world. Or a peculiar large river that diverges to form two more could become the center of a conflict between two downstream cities who want to divert it in different ways.
Nope, water (at least, normal water) flows downhill under the force of gravity and an ocean/sea/big lake is usually as low as it gets. It doesn’t necessarily end up taking the shortest path, but it will inevitably carve a channel to the lowest point it can reach. Water is pretty unstoppable, most of the varied topography of the earth is just the long-term results of tectonic forces pushing rocks up, and then water that falls on those rocks trying to get back to the ocean.
You can also work backwards too, and that’s very handy. Say you want an important town on a certain place. Why was it built there? Add a river! Do you want it to be the center of a conflict? Maybe it’s at a strategically important mountain pass, or maybe there’s gold in them there hills!
Personally I really like post-apocalyptic fantasy and settings that take slightly more complex politics into account. Eberron is one of my favorite D&D settings, it frequently dispatches with a lot of the “good vs. evil” stuff in favor of having characters and races with more complex material motivations, and the Mournland is a lovely wasteland wracked with wild magical phenomena and dangerous people.
I think most of the flags are great, but I’m not so sure about the United Papacies one. The top left part is quite good, but the rest feels way to modern imo, and doesn’t feel like it captures any appropriate symbolism.
Also, you said this all is for a game. Could you give more details on that please ?
I just realized I totally didn’t mention, it is a modern setting! The United Papacies is meant to be an on-the-nose stand in for the USA with some elements of Europe. What sort of appropriate symbolism do you mean?
And as for game details, sure!
So, I guess the TLDR would be, me and my friend have a very ambitious game project, but we want to tackle it piece by piece, so we’re doing a few smaller games as demos to work out concepts. For example, this game is, at least as of now, planned to have little to no gameplay, it is entirely story–I guess the best example that comes to mind is something like Disco Elysium. I put a few details in my comment at the bottom, but basically you are an old man who grew up as a young boy in imperialized Albion and rose to great prominence in the realm of international organized crime. You are becoming senile and your life is fading and you are trying to piece together your memories of the most pivotal summer in your life, trying to figure out “where it all went wrong” and what kind of person you were as a child, deep down. The intention is for your memories to be foggy, distorted, sometimes missing pieces or flat out wrong, but as you remember more and more the new context helps you revisit memories with greater clarity.
I would certainly like to make something with gameplay elements but that will likely not be in the cards until later demos, my friend handles the bulk of the technical side and he’s still learning to code, although I have great faith in him. Forgive the use of the imperfect left/right brain understanding but all I can say is he has absolutely maxed out his left brain. We want future demos to hammer out “choices matter,” RTS/TTS/management, action RPG, and other less critical genres/concepts before we work on the aforementioned ambtious project, which would require elements of all the previous games. So, if you just want a good story, this might interest you, but if you want actual gameplay, it might take a few years to a decade 😅😉
The other flags look really medieval I guess, so I assumed the world was in that era. As for the Papacy flag, what’s the meaning behind the four stripes ? Is it another reference to the four leaf clover ? In addition, black doesn’t really feel holy. Maybe that’s the intent, but I think gold and white would fit better while keeping the US parallel. Maybe something firey too, to reference the holy fire of the inquisition.
I’ve read your description for the clover and eyes, but I find the idea that their Jesus got crucified on a clover way too funny.
Your description of the game reminds me a lot of Suzerain. Will all your games take place in this world ?
Not sure where to post but I figured ya’all might dig it. It has obvious inspiration from real life, I’m sure anyone here can see.
The game is set in Albion, a country with a nasty comprador government puppeted by the United Papacies of Italieu’s very own Committee of Internal Affairs. They recently had a brutal civil war and the country is in total disrepair as the new compradors move in to loot and removed off what little is left. The story is seen through the eyes of a young boy who slowly finds himself mixed into an international crime organization as he tries desperately to help and protect his family.
It deals with themes of poverty, ecocide, racism, imperialism, cultural genocide, religious fanaticism, violence, substance abuse, corruption, hardening one’s self, secrecy, betrayal, innocence, family, perseverance, pragmatism, hope, acceptance, and joy despite anything and everything.
There are elements of the geopolitics, culture, and history inspired by Scotland, the Middle East, Central America, the Pacific islands, the Baltics, and many others.
I think my favorite map detail I want to share the most is the United Papacies of Italieu’s flag. The four-leaf clover represents “Luck,” a virtue the UPI believes their God bestows to the worthy; their bounty (their ill gotten loot) is holy by virtue of its existence. You might also see if zoomed in it has 5 eye shapes (wink) made from the clover which also make a cross; it was also chosen because the four-leaf clover is also a white supremacist prison gang symbol. I chose black instead of red because I feel the color combination captures the true dread feeling, the cold and sterile evil, that people across the world feel when the self-proclaimed “hero”, the “world police”, comes knocking on their door; people don’t normally associate blue with evil but I wanted to capture how the USA can turn anything benign or even positive into something sinister. I particularly wanted to capture the feeling of the world during the “End of History” when it seemed the USA was the final, indomitable force…so that in sequels, well…maybe this thesis can be disproven (wink)
Everything is still a work in progress, very beginning stages, still writing an outline.
Skara Brae seems out of place to me, at least as an old Ultima player, amid all the otherwise whole-cloth seemingly new nations all around it.
Then again Albion’s there too so don’t mind me.
Wait, do you mean like, the position of the country itself, or its flag? I’m not sure what you mean by Albion either but would like to hear!
I assume most of those nations were created by you or your friend, but Skara Brae is a major town in the Ultima series, and Albion is an old term for England used in a lot of prior fantasy IPs.
I like the judicious use of both natural and arbitrary borders. The ones north and south of Albion seem like they have interesting histories.
