Building Your Science Fiction Setting | The Way of Worldbuilding
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- Опубліковано 26 чер 2024
- So you've decided to start building your own original science fiction setting. The only question left, is how to begin. The Templin Institute has investigated this in depth, and is happy to help.
00:00 | Introduction
03:34 | Table of Contents
05:37 | Setting Subgenre
06:47 | Setting Tone
09:08 | Tangent #1 - The Tone of Battlefield 2042
11:17 | Setting Focus
13:09 | Tangent #2 - The Focus of Alien
15:57 | Geography - Earth & Humanity
19:12 | Tangent #3 - Words That Shouldn't Exist Without Earth
21:15 | Geography - Setting Extent
30:13 | Timeframe
38:56 | Technology
48:40 | Aliens
53:12 | Geopolitics
57:23 | Conflict
58:51 | Conclusion
🔸 This episode of the Way of Worldbuilding covers all the theories and ideas, to see them put into practice, as well as the next lore video from our science fiction universe, check out our secondary channel. @DawnofVictory2289
🔹 The Standard Sci Fi Setting
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Ending music "Battle Forever" used under license from Shutterstock.com. - Ігри
🔸 This episode of the Way of Worldbuilding covers all the theories and ideas, to see them put into practice, as well as the next lore video from our science fiction universe, check out our secondary channel. www.youtube.com/@DawnofVictory2289
Can i get an ooga booga?
How does Sol Aspera sound?
don't forget Eurasia from 1984
Things does fit pretty well, a Frontier colony would rely on the Wealthy for everything that they recieve. So technological issues would pop up quite rapidly. Example: The main population might get MRE's while the rich gets twinkies, and other fanfare.
How do i join?
Commenting in advance; today‘s my college move out day for the year, so I know what I’m listening to on the drive back home. Thanks to you!
Do not flee for the private sector, they expect results.
@@TemplinInstitute Immediate approval :)
G-d bless you.
Your passion for worldbuilding has intensified my passion for the same.
Congrats on finishing out the school year!
"Grim Dark being used to refer to settings like real life". Duuuuude 🤯
We are so Joever 😢
I realized that the only reason people find grimdark "realistic" is because they are insanely pessimistic and depressed. That is the only way their perception of humanity could be so warped from reality that they would find it anything else but entertaining fiction. Humanity, while certainly flawed, has followed a continuous upward trend for our entire history, with better technology, more understanding, more peace, and a better quality of life.
While temporary dips can be expected, a collapse as terrible as WH40K is simply impossible without a ton of hand-waving (40Ks collapse was caused and driven by eldritch evil all-powerful gods and magic, for example). People in general also aren't as evil as grimdark will claim. In grimdark, it seems like everybody has a secret agenda, nobody can be trusted, and your allies would kill you for $5 if they could. In reality, while there are some people like that, it's very far from the baseline.
The settings can certainly be fun, since they can serve as excellent contrast to highlight the good parts of humanity, but there's a reason why every grimdark setting needs all-powerful eldritch threats and arbitrary magical systems to justify their existence, because a grimdark setting is impossible to justify or sustain without these blatantly unrealistic elements.
@@MatthewSmith-sz1yq literally THIS. i love grimdark dont get me wrong, but i feel like it goes beyond what you said, its not people being so depressed they genuenly belive real life is grimdark. Its more become a social trend, like if i say ''arent rich people a bunch of dicks?'' anyone in front of me will agree, even if they themselves are rich, even if they have only met nice rich people... Its just the engrained automatic answer.
The same way, for some reason ''humanity sucks'' or ''we live in a very scary time'' has become the norm, even tho we are doing better than ever as far as we know
@@MatthewSmith-sz1yq Reading the last paragraph of that comment i remembered why i love grimdark so much. Its because the darker the setting, the more badass goodness is. I dont like grimdark because ''yeah bro i can relate to it, people are just so evil'' i like grimdark because it often is humanity vs unspeakable supernatural evil. And even with that all corrupting evil existing humanity is still mostly good and 100% unwilling to give up.
Im gonna catch shit for saying it but the Imperium of man, flawed as it is, is more inspiring than depressing to me. The fact that it can remain mostly good given the circumstances is very inspiring. And the more you delve int othe lore the more you see its rarely comically evil.
Usually, like in real life, truly evil people are the extreme minority, so are incompetent people, and while they catch the spotlight to make the setting feel darker, the underlying unspoken fact that 99% of imperials are fucking heros doing their thing the best they can is so uplifting to me.
I wouldn't agree that the upward trend was continuous. We have periods where civilizations regress. Certainly technology brings a better baseline for living standards as it progresses, but civilizations in general seem to be following a cyclical pattern that's relatively similar to that which existed thousands of years ago. It may look different, but it acts the same.
I'm quibbling here, I'll agree that grimdark isn't realistic. But don't fall for the "myth of progress" we've been telling ourselves for the last century. I'm sure Pax Romana felt the same.
Babe wake up, new Templin worldbuilding video
Remember, always make air combat and space battles look like a weird mix between the 1800s and the pacific front in WW2 despite technology already in the 21st century looking radically different then that.
I hear ya, but ships sniping each other with railguns across half a solar system after high g maneuvers is boring, even if it’s realistic.
@@domusavires19 Fair enough, but It does trigger the autistic reptillian part of my brain that hyper focuses over desert storm.
@@Randomusername998-ti3tnDepending on the tech, these antiquated things can become plausible though. Look at Ukraine, they are fighting in trenches but drones are fast becoming a deadly addition to both sides. Now if drone jammers become cheap and plentiful, then drones end up being useless. Maybe energy shields make artillery useless. You can pretty much do whatever you want. That’s what I love about sci-fi.
@@domusavires19 It is the opposite of boring! Have you seen The Expanse?
@jcanal0221 the expanse works because while you can shoot from vast distances the enemy can maneuver to intercept and the few rail guns in the setting aren't near instantaneous. Which means ships have minimum and maximum engagement ranges that are a few thousand kilometers, instead of hundreds of thousand kilometers.
I could watch hours of Marc talking about science fiction and worldbuilding
Honestly same
Lets be honest, we have watched him for hours talking about Sci-Fi and Worldbuilding lol.
"He gave them what they asked, but sent a wasting disease among them."
46:23 I think the biggest example of that (at least aesthetically) is SWTOR given how heavily it leans into the idea of being recognisably Star Wars... which retroactively makes it seem like Palpatine was just trying to make his entire faction cosplay Vitiate's Sith Empire. To make issues like the technological stagnation make sense in Legends, my head canon is that parts of the New Sith Wars were so devastating that they caused technology to severely regress... by the time the battles of Ruusan had ended, the Old Republic had largely abandoned every major region of space beyond the Core with Jedi being the only defenders in many areas, and given how there were Sith capable of creating Supernovas and using planet wide Force Drain at earlier points in the timeline, it's possible entire systems or sectors worth of planets were destroyed over the 1000 years the Wars lasted for.
The technology regression is basically canon, both in Legends and in New Canon. Hell, the Army of Light was using spears, swords and shields as a mainstay of their forces.
SW TOR inherited the problem of KOTOR, which changed the Tales of the Jedi ancient aesthetics to make the videogame resemble the Prequel Era, despite it being set barely a generation after.
Personally, I kinda wish they had made the Republic and Sith Empire resemble Star Wars with a medieval aesthetic, while the Hyperspace War had it's ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia thing.
@@levongevorgyan6789 least KOTOR had some stuff to make it look older (apart from Sith ships resembling Star Destroyers), such as the Sith Troopers looking like sci-fi versions of medieval knights and factions having to regularly rely on the universe's version of swords in combat.
That was my biggest issue with the Old Republic, it just made the Star Wars Galaxy too stagnant. Fashion, architecture, technology and so on barely changed in the 4,000 years between KOTOR and the original trilogy. I hope in the new canon they fix this. With the upcoming dawn of the Jedi movie, the galaxy should be almost unrecognizable since it’s so far back in the timeline.
From a DC fan. You are correct.
"Superhero" is not a genre in itself, it is a modifier you add to other genres and the DCU is the best example of it.
From noir detective tale to star spanning space opera and not only are those stories happening at the same time, the participants know each other. Its what makes them so unique and why I love them so
I'd say that Phase 1-2 MCU was a good example of this too. Captain America 1 was a war movie in a superhero setting, Incredible Hulk was a suspense/horror movie in a superhero setting, Ant-Man was a heist movie in a superhero setting, etc...
@@Starsaber222 All of the MCU movies are good uses of this concept, its why they've persisted to this degree.
Indeed. Superhero is just something you add so you can tell your story. The genre depends. The same goes for 'fantasy' or 'sci-fi', as I feel the three are not real genres, but 'supergenres' of some kind.
50:25
The HFY stuff isn't actually AI slop, it is people taking other individuals' copyrighted works (posted freely on Reddit), feeding them through a drawing AI and a reading AI to pretend like they're releasing "original content", and trying to make a quick buck by uploading them to UA-cam for Adsense, often without any attribution to the original author. The actual "story" part of the HFY stuff is various authors' original creations.
(Which, yes, are highly derivative, but are actually works of human authorship.)
Was going to say something similar. Most I interact with are read out either by the uploader, which is neat and good, or are at least somewhat accidentally comedic at times with the AI pronounciations - but all of them have credited the writer with links. I can imagine how bad it is if you go deeper, though.
Looking forward to the geopolitics because it's just really fascinating and you can tell so many great stories because of it. From what the public is told, to how it's told, support for or against actions taken, pretext for or against conflict. And that's not even getting into the undersided espionage of geopolitics.
A danger with coming up with new names for things, is that the audience doesn't understand what you're trying to say. Using existing words means you can get your point across quicker and in a way that is less ambiguous, and without having to reinvent the wheel.
It’s the same issue that comes with naming ship classes and stuff. All space navies just use modern naval terms because you likely know what a “Destroyer” or “Cruiser” is and what their relative strengths are, you kinda need a “Silocraft” or “Gunstar” to be explained to you.
@Jaydee-wd7wr exactly! If the work is lore based or a tech manual, then that's cool. But if it's a narrative, then having to explain things that would be mundane in universe can really detract from the story.
I've been writing stories in my own setting where human culture is completely separate from the present day. I've found it difficult not to rely on existing terms for things without having to come up with new terms and then explain them. Space Navies being a case in point.
I was doing this with my second book, but I realized that you have to make things make sense to the culture you are creating. Let us say they are a mining colony, then you name things after mining terms. A more warlike race would have terms that make sense to them, like a "Conqueror Class Star Sailer". These are terms that make sense to us, but have a connotation entirely their own. The fact we have a group of mountains called "The Smoky Mountains" is pretty on the nose, as we have mist rising from them in the morning. Calling a place "Big Mountain" because it a large mountain is actually more realistic--people can become rather simplistic in their naming conventions.
Though, calling a ship "An Adjudicator Star Dreadnought" is simply fun.
Also, the words that are specific to Earth cultures are..... all of them. As long as it isn't directly derived from a proper noun it's usually fine. Or provide your own explanation. I am totally keeping the word Tesla coil and just making the backronym of Transformed Electro-Static Lightning Apparatus.
I would note that you're gripe about star wars using real world phrases contrasted with 'Lisan Al Gaib' falls a little flat when confronted with the fact that most of the 'foreign' sounds in Herbert's prose are just words in other languages "لسان الغيب," (lisaan al-ghaib) meaning "tongue of the unseen/missing," in arabic for instance. Which itself isn't actually an example of 'coming up with something' since the Fremen are explicitly descended from a sycretism of Zen Buddhism and Suni Islam.
I think he addressed that though by pointing out that the setting of Dune is explicitly in our far future while there are no historic connections between the world of Star Wars and our own histories. Also, that blending of the Zensunni is apart of the commentary on American exploitation of the Middle East.
There is no reason for the usage of the word Praetorian in Star Wars because Praetorian is derived from Latin. Those were his examples...
You could amend my original point by saying that words and phrases don't necessarily need to be wholly unique, just distinct enough to rise above the usual generic titles.
@@TemplinInstitute agreed, that could be a demerit for Star Wars as well, especially with all of the warrior cultures in the galaxy. It could even be a commentary on cultural appropriation if the Empire used an old Mandalorian word as a f^○/< you to them.
Great video as always. On the subject of sci-fi technology, I think a lot of worlds would benefit from making a distinction when technology makes something "technically possible" vs "easily achievable "
For example, you can say teleportation technology exists but it's expensive and often inaccurate, or maybe universal translators exists, but it takes a variable amount of time for the software to analyze and learn a new language. In-universe, that sort of thing can add a sense of realism and plausiblity to miraculous technology. In a meta sense, doing that lets writers introduce and utilize elements while still being able to restrict its presence when needed. A good way of having your cake and eating too.
Another long one. Overall, a fascinating overview of sci-fi & more specifically space opera. I do think there are certain aspects & loopholes in the latter half that weren't given their full due, but they might be explored in future videos, so I'll hold off on that for now.
Sci-fi is an immense field of ideas, and it will be interesting to see how future developments play out.
I look forward to further elucidation of DoV astropolitics in the following video parts.
Been loving this series so far, keep it up
0:23 Zack Snyder felt that
Hearing that your working on a Geopolitics video has me hyped, I like to make factions in my worldbuilding projects and see how relationships form or how different cultures or groups react to each others way of life. Love the videos, they always help me on worldbuilding and give me ideas on how to view my own stories.
Ahhh I miss these types of videos. One hour or hour plus and just talking about science stuff.
I've never been able to track down the quote, by apparently Gene Roddenberry once said that he knew that any realistic attempt to imagine 23rd century society would seem incredibly strange to a 20th century audience. So he was deliberately making his characters unrealistically familiar.
This series is a testament to the best of this channel; keep it up Marc!
As someone deep into my own YT based scifi world building project this is an incredible resource and has a number of amazing insights I hope the bring to my world building. Thanks you
hope it helps!
@@TemplinInstitute it does! I’m through my core concept phase and am now exploring key settings and factions as part of Phase 2 so this is timely
On "social media": It seems most SF think the interstellar equivalent of Internet is like sending snail mail, having a video chat, visiting the library or watching the news.
Even non-SF fiction sometimes try to ignore the existence of social media or even cell phones.
Here is something that I learned in my Mayor Journalist degree and of course by reading many books, when you would create a science fiction setting or a fantasy setting, ask the why, the who, the where, the how, always be concerned that it should be history prior the events of your story, can be vague or can be detailed, always show your factions, what their motivations, what are their goals, what are their leaders, and of course the consequences of the actions of the characters in your story.
What about a way of coming up with cool Megacorp or faction names? I’ve been playing around with a sci-fi setting, with alot of different corps/manufacturers, but I always find the names one of the hardest things something that sounds unique but not generic or like it’s trying to force itself to sound cool.
i use word search puzzles for my inspiration for sci-fi or fantasy names. just looking around for things that seem like names for things
I like to try acronyms or blended titles for megacorps and factions. EG: Energy, Generators, Solar, Action, (EGSA Corp), they blended with the Johns Accounting and Territorial Claims Office (JATCO), they formed into the Jegsat-Co megacorp (or: JATSA, or EGSCO). Combos can come quickly enough and it kind of blends how real corps gets their titles (other than through founders last names)
i love the pause at 24:00. what a stylistic choice. your videos are already entertaining and this series very informative. but getting this. i dont even know what i felt, but it just made such a big impact on the sentance and the ideas you presented. biggest respect to whoever made the decision to make a pause there, crazy creative vision!!!!!
I started on my own woldbyilding during NaNoWriMo last year, it has been really interesting to listen to these videos and watch your livestreams as I am world on my own things. Because as you say everyone does this differently. I started with a character and came up with a backstory, then started explaining the characters, factions, planets, governments, ext. Then once I am satisfied with that, I create another character that may or may not have some cross over.
I am hadn't really thought about looking at subgenres, so I appreciate that. I have a few trops large imperial-esce faction, but I also have non-standard sci-fi stuff like demons and magic. There is a whole group of engineers that are dedicated to building non-magical items to compete with magic items, the reasoning is because most people don't have magic so they can't repair or recharge magical items. This these non-magical items might be more expensive, but the up-keep is a lot cheaper or easier for your average pilot or engineer. I am trying to seriously look at the whys of things.
But I don't have a map, I don't know where the planets or factions or animals actually reside in the galaxy. I also don't have a lot of planets or history, so much as explainers on factions and how they interact. If that makes sense. Really looking forward to the next episode tomorrow!
This is really well done. All those years of breaking down lore have paid off haha, I'm writing science fiction myself--off and on for a while now. This video will definitely help me refine things. Much appreciated Templin!
The societal and cultural transformation aspect of scifi is what I live for, so bring on the distant future!
22:11 / 22:32 Would the Mass Effect Trilogy fit into Interstellar or Galactic? This might be an obvious answer given how events span across the Galaxy but - as a result of the Mass Relay Network among other aspects of the setting - it's stated in the Codex that only 1% of the overall Galaxy had been explored by the end of the current cycle.
IMO the scale of the setting you explore is interstellar due to the smaller number of systems, but the consequences are galactic due to the scale of the Reaper Harvest being stopped
Galactic. Yes the setting has a reason why comparably unadvanced civilisations span the galaxy, that doesn’t change the fact that the span the galaxy.
The important thing here is tone and what it feels like, not the numbers of stars inhabited. Mass Effect wants to be a story of galactic import.
This is such a cool channel. Keep it up! Love your work
The thing about Destiny is that while the solar system is the main setting, a lot of the things threatening it are from much, much further away. The solar system ends up feeling like 'home', even though there is still a lot of it we don't fully understand. Lots of the mystery within the solar system tends to come from 'the golden age' in a more post-apocalypse kind of way. Mileage varies on how successful it is at that. Destiny's lore is neat either way, though.
For using Earth words, I think they can be used to help the audience keep up with the story but you should avoid using Primary names. So I do agree you should avoid using terms like the Byzantine empire or the Enterprise as a ships name if you are not writing with Earth in mind but I think its fine to use idioms or terms like Capitalism and Communism instead of trying to make up new words for these complex terms.
A few solutions to the weird problems I’ve seen be used in sci-fi.
Just don’t give a real date, have some event in your setting reset the calendar, let’s say first contact, and have time be relative to it, like happened with BC and AD. That way it’s up to the audience when exactly it’s set but you can still have a relatively continuous timeline.
If going galactic scale, limit how exactly people get between stars like with the Gate Network, Hyperlane Network or Mass Relays. That way you are theoretically on a galactic scale, but still only have to deal with around a hundred or fewer stars. If that network or FTL drive was built by some precursor it creates a fun mystery of why they chose those systems and often justifies why all those systems have aliens or interesting things in them, they were connected for some greater purpose.
I think it’s useful to pick a specific technology and try to make it solve multiple problems, like the Mass Effect or Drift, those things do FTL, artificial gravity, thrust, weapons and more despite being a single discovery/material/invention.
Are we gonna get a video on Battletech? That's such an underrated and underrepresented franchise
Really loving this series, especially the map building. I noticed @2:17 Rule of Cool is listed twice as a Worldbuilding pillar, I agree that you guys really are double cool but thought I'd mention in case it was a typo. Keep up the great work!
Really looking forward to the rest of this series! This series is fascinating for me since I’m currently working on pretty much creating a sci-fi galaxy. As of now, I have the Background written up for the galaxy, which details the history of the galaxy up until the start of the conflict that I’m referring to as the Thousand Year War (which ironically actually lasts closer to 1200 years). This war is essentially being fought between three different factions (I find multisided wars an interesting concept). The motivations of each faction can be broken down to essentially one faction wanting to maintain the thousands of years old status quo, while the other two factions want to change it (just because the two want to change it, how they want it to be changed brings them into conflict with one another, hence the three-sided war).
The reason why I want to write about this war is because it provides the catalyst for the creation of a bunch of new states and factions in the galaxy to be created. Like I’ve actually already written a story about a post war state that was founded after the war already.
All in all, really excited for the rest of this series, and watching the world building series too! Maybe it’ll inspire me to share my story.
I enjoyed this video a lot but I think it neglected a key concern that a lot of these sorts of discussions omit - focalisation, the method by which the details of the world are communicated to the reader/viewer/player. There's a surprisingly short list of different ways this can be done and the different characteristic effects they can have can be crucial to the direction and ambience of the world they created. This factor is, for example, the fundamental reason the Star Wars prequels are so contentious, how Alien works, why a generation of kids grew up waiting for their Hogwarts letter and what gets people so excited about 40K. I wrote a whole book once on how George R.R. Martin's varying approaches to different parts of his world (and how he braids them together) accounts for the fluidity and impact of his story. How the observer finds out about the world is possibly the most important decision a world-builder can make, and while I think there's a lot of good points made in this video - as in most Templin vids - I think it behoves a guide to world-building to give the matter due consideration.
Regarding the point about picking a timeframe, I think you could argue that the culture of future humanity will be more familiar than you'd expect. We've only recently reached the point in our history where our entertainment media: 1) captures how we communicate in real-time audio and video in high fidelity, 2) is saturated enough to occupy a significant portion of an individual's time investment, and 3) can reasonably be preserved in its original quality indefinitely. As humanity's media library continues to build, so too will the average age of the media humanity consumes. Much like the cultural dominance of English news, movies, TV shows, and music spreads the language worldwide, I believe our growing media pool will slow language drift to an extent we've never seen before.
Question for the geopolitics video is how do you express geopolitics and the intricacies of that in an internal way? Factions within the same nation and how they affect the decisions of a whole. I think it's easy to say "oh this is the x country and make these basic decisions because of the archetype I've assigned to them." Is there a good way to express the actual complexity of the people and politicians and their goals on higher level without getting too deep into things and bogged down in it?
I want an Alien movie that’s just a colonial marines war movie. No aliens (except maybe some bugs to hunt) but just We Were Soldiers or Band Of Brothers but with ultra macho Colonial Marines.
But that would involve space communists.
I am not joking. The only other faction the Marines have to deal with other than Xenomorphs, Xeno cults, and Weyland Yutani mercs is some kind of Communist Star Nation mentioned in the comics and Colonial Marines Technical Manual causing proxy wars and funding separatists in developing colonies.
In defense of Battlefield 2042, just because the world is glum doesn't mean all the people are. Look around you! There's a lot of shit going on in the world, but we all keep our heads up and keep on going as we are.
In the universe I am building, which is just for myself the idea of traditionalism is a key theme. I run with the concept of civilization state vs nation state. In the setting it is discovered humans have been seeded across the stars and for untold centuries various civilizations have been rising and falling. The revelation of this caused many of Earth’s nations to form multi-state civilization superstates which are obsessed with preserving their identity. As humans from Earth settle various star systems the opportunity for new nations/civilizations based on a myriad of ideas open up, then you have the descendants of Earth encountering other human civilizations that are both familiar and alien. I try to highlight the positives and negatives of both. I think there is something said for a culture trying to retain their identity as the world changes, like China or India for example.
Needed this for real 💪🏿
There's an error regarding Halo. It should stay in the "Galactic" spot.
I mean not only it take action over multiple places of the galaxy (all the Halo installations are located at equal distances between themselves and the galactic core) but it ends up also on the Ark... in an extragalactic place. The Lesser Ark is in fact placed outside the Milky Way.
I agree, but putting it in interstellar is fair. The vast majority of Halo is in just a single region of the galaxy, even if we occasionally leave that region and know about some stuff outside of it.
@@ALLMINDmercenarysupportsystem the majority of Halo 2 is set well outside of the UNSC and even Covenant space. Namely on Delta Halo/Installation 05 that is equidistant from Alpha Halo/Installation 04. Plus on the Covenant capital (mobile capitol) of High Charity.
Halo 3 is almost entirely set on the Ark. Outside the galaxy.
Halo Wars 2 too is set on the Ark.
Halo Combat Evolved is set on Alpha Halo/Installation 04, again an unknown location even if they say it's "close to Reach" from an hyperspace point of view.
Halo 3 ODST is set entirely on Earth while Halo Reach is set on Reach, Epsilon Eridani, that is located in the local cluster of stars close to Earth.
Halo 4 is located on Requiem, an artificial Dyson structure that is somehow located between the Lesser Ark (outside the galaxy) and the galaxy itself. So in the Galactic Fringe.
Plus other locations such Gamma Halo/Installation 03 that is equi-distant to Alpha Halo in the galaxy.
Halo 5 Guardians is located mostly on locations such Meridian, a former UNSC colony, Sanghelios, the homeworld of the Sangheili (orbiting the star of Urs, location unknown but not nearby the UNSC) and Genesis, again, location unknown but inside the galaxy.
Halo Infinite is located on Zeta Halo, Khaphrae system, supposedly close to the Oth Sonin system and the now-destroyed homeworld of the Jiralhanae of Doisac.
Yeah, "just a single region of space".
Like Star Wars was mostly set on Coruscant and that's it. I don't remember other locations, right?
😮💨 ...
@danielefabbro822 It's almost like the vast majority of HALO is in the region, regardless of the games. The games are most important, naturally, but they make up a tiny part of the lore. And the majority of the locations you give are in the region of space I was referring to anyway.
Yeah the whole Star Wars technology thing is weird. I'd have expected the Old Republic to not have Blasters, for example, and instead primarily use Lightsabers- the whole elegant weapon from a more civilized age thing. Also meaning that space combat would be very different, mostly involving boarding actions and ramming.
These videos are extremely helpful.
I was recently inspired to peruse an idea involving far future humanity, and also a great reset to the entire species. This video couldn’t have come at a better time!
Thank you I had started working on one recently and have been a bit stuck. I hope this will help!
I'm already making my own universe but your videos always give me inspiration
Regarding geopolitics you can also combine unipolar and multipolar.
In that there's a civilisation or entitiy that has de jure hegemony over everything and all the conflict comes from the various subfactions and subdivisions within that civilisation.
One of my favourite sci fi examples is the five galaxies civilisation in the uplift universe.
The excitement with which I saw this in my feed is surely unhealthy.
Since you're reviving Dawn Of Victory, I'm thinking we'll finally get to learn about The Templin Institute's namesake: Templin-Keppe.
Hi! so I'm starting to develop a story using this, and this is what i've got so far:
Subgenre→ military science fiction
Tone→space vietnam, dark explains what the soldiers suffer characters from both sides, the elites control and fight for resources and politics, as the story progresses we get more heroic(characters from both sides, suffering join together to try to *politically, not directly* undermine the corrupt goverments and show the people the truth )
Focus→ kitchen sink, not totally (many options to expand, original is just one war, but *BIG BUT* same kind of message)
NO:
-country 1: good/country 2: evil
-important motives/reasons to fight
-Aliens (for now)
-desintegrations, pew pew (impersonal killing)
Technology:
-”future”: railguns, missiles, nukes (stuff that hurts, is cruel)
-WARP: for storytelling is sehr gut
GEOGRAPHY:
-2, 3 star systems
-important resources/political influence in the place that the story takes part in
-2 superpowers (democratic but fake democracy. Ej: russia, china in real life)
-Earth included, nation based there, other nation is a splinter group from the lost times
-Early, experimental FTL that helps with going places (still takes about a week to go from places to places)
-already implanted “jump points” for fast travel
TIMEFRAME:
-
CONFLICT:
-A war between two powers, to obtain resources, territory and economic power, supported by an old rivalry between both sides.
-heavy use of infantry and close combat(vehicles support troops in combat with enemies within visual range)
-stagnation, no one really wins, pyrrhic victories
- Because of poverty, the only way for the families to survive is by sending their young to fight to get money.
GEOPOLITICS:
-Bipolar, power is divided in between two main factions, each has own “puppet states” controlled by them and that respond to their military calls
SIDES OF THE CONFLICT
The Republic of Sol: Some kind of government run by politicians who focus on efficiency and economic gain without remorse, overlooking social and ethical concerns that make the people angry, but a combination of propaganda and a limitation of technology makes them stick to their work.
The true Sovereingty/ The Imperium of Rëft: Rule by religious leaders enforcing strict interpretations of faith, often limiting individual freedom and promoting rigid social rules. The people follow because of lack of other opinion
Any ideas/opinions?
thanks in advance
I hope that there will be another episode in the future that focuses on these types of questions as relevant to fantasy settings. I’ve got a general idea for one myself, and I’d like to hear some ideas on how to expand it past the core pillars.
For me, the first step in any sort of world-building is to figure out the story you want to tell, *first* , and then build a world that lets you tell that story.
So, I build worlds for table-top role-playing games and, regardless of genre, *the most important things* are the world has understandable conflicts and *players* make meaningful choices.
The world is the background setting and defines the *type* of story told, but the *player choices* define the plot.
(This video references this in the section on selection of "Subgenres", "Tone" and "Focus.")
For player choices to matter, the *characters* require the ability to act with autonomy -- free from the oversight of authorities breathing down their necks and second-guessing everything they do.
So, for autonomy to exist, the setting needs either no authority figures who can project enough power to impact player choices (any standard D&D setting exemplifies this), or the "information-analysis-decision-feedback" loop requires so much delay that characters have no choice *but* to exercise self-reliance.
It's easy to find space sci-fi television series that do exactly this, which indicates the writers and producers of those shows recognize the dramatic importance of character empowerment.
1. "Firefly" and "Farscape" feature protagonists who try to remain away from authority figures by keeping enough distance between themselves and those in power.
2. "Star Trek" features military-style hierarchies, but the power of the United Federation of Planets is *so far away* starship crews can't just hunker down and wait for the cavalry.
3. "Battlestar Galactica" (both shows) also qualifies as "military sci-fi," but in that case the powers-that-be have been *eradicated* and there's nobody left *but* the Galactica and the largely-unarmed fleet that depends on her commanders and crew.
4. "The Expanse" provides a cleverly self-referential ("meta") example, since it started out as a setting for a CRPG, and then a TTRPG, but that means it also provides a nigh-perfect case-study.
While authorities in "The Expanse" can frequently see that *something* is happening within minutes or hours, light-lag makes instantaneous communication impossible and the vast distances delay support by days or weeks (or months).
That forces the Roci crew into self-reliance and autonomous decision-making, and that's made explicitly clear in Episode 2 of Season 2, when Fred Johnson gets angry at their lack of communication with him.
So, for my TTRPG setting, I need a combination of vast distances (that's easy -- space is called "space" for a reason...) and slow(ish) transportation and communication times relative to those distances (whether interplanetary or interstellar).
With that established, I need plenty of conflicts -- and, fortunately, time-lags in transportation and communication also help with that.
This can happen in two different types of settings -- those with a static "base" where things happen to which the characters must respond, and those in which the characters travel around and stumble into situations they must then learn about and deal with.
Those two settings have existed since the days of TV Westerns.
The series, "Gunsmoke" (and its sci-fi counterparts, "Babylon 5" and "Deep Space Nine") exemplifies the first setting; while "Rawhide" and "Wagon Train" (and the sci-fi series already mentioned) fall into the second.
(People like to treat with disdain the notion of "space cowboys," but it works *incredibly well* as a dramatic story-telling sci-fi framework....)
Now then, in my experience, the players prefer settings where the characters exercise initiative and travel around and do stuff they find interesting, so "Rawhide" and "Wagon Train" make the best models.
In those shows (and in "Farscape" and "Firefly" and "Star Trek") the protagonists arrive at locations about which they know little or nothing; must somehow get sucked into local events that drive conflict; must unravel the mystery of what's happening; and then make decisions about how to deal with the conflict.
For that to work well, communications must travel at the speed of the fastest ship to depart a location most recently, so any information is always at least somewhat outdated.
Also, ships need a limited range, and require refueling/recharging/resupply that takes a significant amount of time and forces the crew to interact with the locals.
The shorter the range and the longer the recharging/resupply takes, the spatially smaller the setting can be but the more communities it needs within that region.
Additionally, while the most advanced vessels can (and should) perform *better* , the superiority must be a matter of degree, and not an exponential improvement.
For instance, a cruiser in a 21st Century navy can do a lot of things faster and better than a bulk container cargo ship, and can do any number of things the freighter can't do *at all* .
However, the cruiser still takes weeks to travel across the Pacific, days to cross the Atlantic, and must resupply more often because it has less storage space and more crew.
So, with those things in mind, create your setting with the *limitations* that let you tell the story you want to tell.
Those limitations -- as so brilliantly defined and used in "The Expanse" -- can actually act as a source of dramatic conflict and suggest story seeds.
Once you've figured out the limitations to supply, transportation and communications that let you tell your story, select the sci-fi technology that *creates those conditions* .
Don't pick the tech first; pick the *stories and themes* first, and *then* build the setting and select the suitable technologies and features.
For instance, one of my favorite TTRPG Sci-Fi settings was GDW's "2300 AD."
That one features a "future history" timeline created during initial game design in the late 1970s, that extended out more than 300 years to the eponymous date.
The designers very much wanted a setting that evoked "19th Century Colonial Empires in Spaaaaace," and they built the game with that in mind.
It includes a WWIII with a limited nuclear exchange that took place in the year 2000 (The “Twilight War” setting of GDW’s “Twilight: 2000” game) that forced a retrenchment of human civilization followed by a slow recovery that lasted until the discovery of FTL technology.
The FTL selected had a fairly hard maximum range of 7.3 light-years (although a *really good* engineer could extend that by a few more tenths), and that meant everybody could (and did) make it out Alpha Centauri soon after the technology appeared.
In that setting, Alpha Centauri had a habitable world, which the polities on Earth (broadly separated into the United States and its allies; China and its allies; and Europe and its allies) carved into exclusive regions and promptly began to fight about.
That conflict resulted in and America emerging more or less equally strong at the expense of Europe, but the brutality of the violence (which sparked wars on Earth, as well), meant that each headed off in different directions.
That meant America and China created their own "Arms" of stars that could be reached with the limited FTL range, so each was able to settle its own sections of space (The "American Arm" and the "Chinese Arm") fairly autonomously, and choose those client nations/cultures they'd permit to live in the area (the "fingers" that led to planets open to colonization by allies).
For their part, the Europeans figured out how to "double-up" FTL engines and keep one isolated from the forces created by another in use, and that gave them access to Wolf-359, 7.86 light years away, and thence out to other systems within normal range.
Thus, the "French Arm" mostly featured conflicts between different European nationalities/ethnicities (similar to 19th Century politics) that took place in isolation from the Americans and Chinese.
It *also* meant the discovery of implacably hostile aliens with approximately equivalent technology out at the end of the European Arm sent a terrifying shock through every colony, there, all the way back to Earth, 40 light-years from that frontier.
On the subject of tone, I think it’s worth mentioning that a serious/grounded tone is not necessarily superior to a lighter one, so long as there is consistency, I mention this because all of your examples of tone done well have a more serious tone, even LOTR I wouldn’t say has a light tone
I believe they mentioned the tone was decided from the elements they wanted to include.
In Halo, the Covenant don't speak English. It was the incredible capabilities of the Unggoy to learn languages that granted them such option at the start of the war, but it took 30 years of conflict for the Sangheili, Jiralhanae and other species to learn English.
Of course Forerunners had no problems at all since most of what remained of them was machines, able of superior calculation and processing processes.
So even the Didact and the Librarian was able to speak it thanks to their super advanced technology.
In Alien, the only example of first contact between Humans and the Engineers was made through David-8, an advanced synthetic, who had learn a combination of ancient languages of Earth during the voyage to Zeta 2 Reticuli.
And it didn't ended well despite the preparations...
OH HELL YEAH HERE WE GO!!!!!!!!!
One of the best sides of my own sci-fi universe is that there's a lot of time between major events before the story is set.
And in the middle of that there's countless of situations all different.
A civilization rise to power in a corner of the galaxy while another is tore apart in another corner. There could be a forgot colony of humans that experience the events of 2042 just outside the borders of a almost timeless alien empire that is experiencing a major threat.
I can eventually put everything I want in that span of time. And of course 7500 years are a lot of time. If we count the total lenght of the events, 1 million of years are even more. And that's the total lenght of the events in my personal sci-fi universe. 1.117.500 years.
I've got a setting I'm working on with a similar length of timeline, but most of it is going to be filled by a very long dark age, where just about every civilization near earth has been wiped out, and the ones that survived were sent back to the stone age.
@@henryfleischer404 interesting. It gives you a lot of options.
Damnnn i was searching for this 2 weeks ago, i see i got lucky.
A take i like is the Lancer rpg. A mech focused rpg. The only form of ftl availabes are mostly slip gate but they can only lead to another gate who have to be build beforehand. Building gates is also extremply expensive which means very few worlds have one in their system. All other forms of travels are done with near light-speed ships with all the caveat that implies, like time dilatation. There are resorts specifically built for people who are culturally displaced because the took a ten years long trip that lasted a century for everyone else, so they can adapt to the new culture
One approach that could have been mentioned in the timeline section is the "keep it vague" approach. An example of this I can think of are the various Gundam series, which aside from 00, all take place in some year of their own calendar, with no mention of where their year 1 sits relative to the present day.
I'd love to see you guys break down The Society of Man from Pierce Brown's Red Rising saga. I think you'd have a lot of things to talk about, from the interplay of the neo-feudal fascism and the social engineering of the different castes.
'Or grim dark for real life' OUCH. XDXD
I've found the Stellaris schema to be an excellent template for 4D galactic world building. The 'Early Game' is "low tech" exploration and discovery with severe power disparities, e.g. The Expanse, Aliens, HALO, Avatar. The 'Mid-Game' is more equally balanced with a handful of minor players and a couple of hegemonic poles as well as a shit ton of primitives to uplift and fight over ; e.g. MCU, DCU, Star Trek. The 'Late Game' is a tech diffused multipolarity with a galactic menace, e.g. Star Wars as the GOAT. Dune may qualify as a post-menace "Overtime Game". I'm not sure about that one though, lol.
My setting is technically interstellar scale but the two full-length novels I’ve managed to write are more focused on single star systems. The first one on Sol in the near future, the second in a fictional system two thousand years later with multiple inhabited planets.
The first novel, The Pride of Parahumans, ended with the foundation of a polity that eventually became a galactic hegemony, creating a unipolar setting. But I had trouble writing stories longer than a short story in that setting, so the empire fell.
Horizon: Salvaged Heroes takes place after the fall and follows a salvage crew who stumbled upon some very advanced technology and negotiating the balance of power between the multiple factions in their system.
I will say this, on the topic of conflict, it is much more interesting (And easy) to have multiple factions and not just 2, this makes it so their is some balancing force that prevents group A from going all in and eliminating group B without them having to be equal powers.
Yeah I agree about concepts and terms included.
I had developed one "alien empire" for my Sci-fi universe and I had to develop also its society, its economy, its military, its own terms.
I came out with vaguely remembering terms to our languages. Such "Prion" for example. In our world it have a specific meaning, in my world its a sort of rank and social class.
Sure, it's an hell of a job try to elaborate something authentically new from zero...
Right off the bat, the cosmos and a fleet of spaceships.
Our new TTRPG world setting has, sci-fi physics, i.e. Quantum foam/flux concepts to build a system for middle ages style magic. Magic users use the Quantum foam streams to manipulate energy. That allows a medieval setting to link with a modern sci-fi setting and we have crossovers between those worlds. Khor The World of Many Portals will be fresh, different and thought provoking.
Tangent 3: don’t use well known colloquialisms. Well even Frank Herbert did this with names like Lisan Al Ghaib. It isn’t recognisable to most English speakers but its pretty straight forward Arabic. It means something like the “absent tongue” which makes sense because using the Voice doesn’t require physical speech. In Arabic the GH would a gargled G. Imagine Chewbaca’s gargles
I once have a scifi universe idea base sole on an MRE. Basically they are disposable replicator the size off playing cards. To activate it just bend them in half. It even comes with size dial for your species size!. Then it just stop there.
In the same universe is a missile launcher that can allowed you to dial a yield from a regular grenade size explosion to about one megaton. Thought the latter require authorization from a higher rank. The missile contains a minirature anti-matter nanofactory that also requires two or three parts together in order to work.
Well the sense of the scale of the galaxy is actually a good concept about play to build something.
Once again I recall from my own work saying that the way I decided to put the thing offers multiple choices.
There are tiers of scales between those I can choose. Galactic civilizations so advanced to have no problems in visit or even colonize other galaxies while other civilizations still struggle to achieve interstellar travel. Depending on the era, on the political/economic/social/military situation, depending on the degree of technological development in a different meaning that just that of discovering the FTL tech. Indeed it doesn't stops right there. FTL ensures to travel faster than light but still light travel across distances in millions of years.
Even inside our galaxy. So there's a tier more in my galaxy. there's the "Faster Than Thought" speed. Or simply the "Hyperjump"...
So, at this point one can have the super-advanced civilization that rules over the galaxy or most of it, while others tiny and less advanced civilizations are still struggling for survival etc.
It is indeed how things should technically and realistically go on in our universe...
Lisan al Gaib means "tongue from the unseen realms" in Arabic, superficially it is exactly the same as Praetorian Guard as a historical term used in a fictional setting. Personally I like both because they are fun Easter eggs for history nuts and also are little threads to pull a person into the deeper meaning and influences on the work. The major difference is that Arabic and Islamic History is less familiar to the target audience which suggests more research and creativity was used in selecting that term.
32:51
Using the historic context and my country of Origin, I could only travel back to era between 18th and 19th century where I would encounter these mentioned problems.
Well now I want videos like this for Grim Dark and maybe a fantasy setting one
Hell it's about time
What did you use to make you map
I'm thinking of how to apply these tips to my non-sci-fi world. I've decided to replace Earth with a different planet. Some concepts and ideologies haven't appeared in mine. No glass skyscrapers or Western suits and modern clothing, even though they are nearing or already could build them, but they prefer traditional clothing and architecture. This even goes for those with modern machinery like trains. I've decided to replace words related to specific real people, places or particular situations (gasoline is named after a person; Diesel is named after German inventor and engineer Rudolf Diesel; I use landship instead of tank because the latter came from the British hiding landships from the Germans as water carriers, which didn't happen in my world; no sandwich because that's named after a location, Sandwich; Jet Ski is a trademarked term of a company that doesn't exist in my world). I may still have things translated to a generic term in English for simplicity, but I want native words in languages native to my world. I also decided to make the region a multipolar system. This is just a small region of one continent.
I just had an interesting idea.
A small scale Galactic universe (think just the area around Earth) where a few hundred years before, Humanity managed to get people off of earth (using some sort of basic Near FTL system) and onto planets that they began to terraform. Then from there the many planets began to grow into their own groups and Unions separate from earth.
And then you can have the FTL drives work differently based on what group developed them.
Example. One of the FTL drives is ludicrously risky to use, but it can be extremely quick and can get to most star systems nearby without having to go around specific areas of FTL disruption. And that one could be mostly used by expendable ships or drones because they are so dangerous.
And there could be another one that Is quick and safe but can only follow specific routes.
I've got something like that in a setting I'm working on for an FPS. Humanity settled a few systems before achieving FTL travel, then developed Warp Cannons, lightsecond long devices that can launch ships at superluminal speeds. The problem I found is that, even with this, the knowledge to build it spreads so fast that nobody else would have a good chance at making a different FTL drive before getting this one.
54:30 Interesting choice
lets go i finally got here on time.
I feel like not mentioning battletech in the timeline section is a bit of a crime. I think it’s a great hybrid of the familiarity of something like mass effect or star trek and the alien warping of 40k. It’s a big theme of the setting how humanity can change over time, the Claners are descendants of the SLDF, two groups that couldn’t be more different.
One of the big problems in the new Netflix movie Atlas is its tone and scale. Its supposed to be near-future and AI is still experimental but they go all the way to the ANDROMEDA GALAXY to fight the evil AI.
I’m trying to come up with my own starships, but I absolutely suck at drawing, so I’m stuck at just writing down specs.
38:40, is it a subtle mention of Traveller 2300AD ? Where WW3 caused society to collapse except for Space France on steroids ? I love how they designed the timeline with a wargame simulation xD
Could you do a video on starfighters or aircraft in a similar way to your videos on tanks and ships?
I have a doubt about creating communication systems.
I am talking about a simple level of planet to distant solar system, comparing dune and the Foundation work is possible to see different designs and would like to imagine, comparing the current technology, would the message communication be very different in the future?
49:36 What is this from? It looks absolute bonkers.
Can you explore the taiidan empire?
Hey I was thinking you could review the themes of narnia and the message of that hideous strength
Regarding the Geopolitics chapter: You can have a unipolar, or bipolar world, but from the perspective of the main cast it can appear multipolar. As an example from the real world, imagine the leader of a small town, who has to balance the needs of the school, the church, the business owners, the people living there, and so much more, and "compete" against other similar towns right next door. But if you then zoom out, why does that one little town matter in the scale of the country? Or for the UN? It probably doesn't.
As a made up example from Sci-fi: Imagine a galaxy-spanning, elder civilisation, who has no reason to interact with the "younger" races, so they go around "conquering" planets, fighting wars, but if either side displeases the elder civilisation too much, by trying to attack one of their planets, or any other number of reasons, they will just get wiped out.
Besides "The Expanse" franchise, could the "Gundam" franchise setting also be considered a solar/planetary system setting despite most of the story set around the Earth and Moon and having massive space station colonies?
In multiple "Gundam" titles, Jupiter and Mars were hinted to have space colonies or permanent space infrastructure/installations as well for mining and colonisation.
7:53 "or grim dark being used to refer settings like..."
he is going to say 40k right ?
"real life"
oh :(
1min ago havent watched it yet but i know it's good
Ya know.... I have an idea of how to have the alien cake and eat the corporate plots too
Corps, Wey in particular, in the alien(s) universe has tried multiple times to get Aliens for study, as well as the actual military.
They gotta get them eventually, sooner or later they'll find a way to secure a xenomorph.
What if we explore a corporate war/hostile take over, and the xenomorphs are deployed as (not really controlled) weapons (very foolishly)
We get to follow around the corpo suits and those fighting them, as well as have the heroes (and villains) ducking xenomorphs....
.......................crap I just came up with Alien Isolation didn't I?
❤❤❤❤
22:45 does DUNE fit there tho? Sort of like the Firefly example. I feel like DUNE spans the ''known universe'' but it really just spans a handfull of individual planets
I'm mainly referring to the setting as a whole rather than any individual story. The RPG for example goes a lot more in depth into the Imperium and its houses.
@@TemplinInstitute interesting. ill try to research more into it, id love to know more about the Dune universe's ''geography'' so to speak besides the famous 3 or 4 planets like Arrakis, Caladan and such
Depending on which era of Dune you are talking about, Dune is either Interstellar or Galactic. However, for the parts of Dune that the vast majority of fans will experience, it is very much only Interstellar. The Imperium is less than 1000 lightyears across.
Damn it, I *just* finished going over my notes...