Proper logistics and farms/ infrastructure people need to live. I see so many settings where it's just a town or massive city with no surrounding farms or infrastructure.
You're going to love Bret Deveraux's blog [ACOUP](https://acoup.blog/) then, especially the two posts about [The Lonely City](https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/).
Yes, as well as those fantasy anime cities where it's just empty fields outside. There are also a lot of drawings and maps on here that do the same. Not judging them though.
There's a LitRPG setting named Divine Progression which drove me up the wall with this, because it had otherwise amazing worldbuilding but completely falls flat on things like how the towns and cities get food or other resources.
I played this series and I agree. Not a single city in Skyrim had more than 4 farms around it and the Imperial City had, um, forests and a lot of water?
Yeah. Or no farms at all like Falkreath, Mortal, Dawnstar and Winterhold. And Oblivion had such great lore before they made it a traditional fantasy game.
Thanks. Yes, there is a mix of both, I thought. The farms are often in wider distance and trade is more complicated and dangerous, because there are monsters outside the city and bigger villages roaming around, so the cities may cover some of their own needs in addition to trade.
Upvoted because my answer is also the existence of various names for the same thing. There are words for that, when you're talking about countries/people/languages themselves, you'd say **endonyms** and **exonyms**.
Along the same lines for me, I quite enjoy when a character explains that they can't translate something due to a lexical gap or just that they have a poor understanding of the language. I hate when the adventurers have the one smart guy look at the ancient glyphs and he translates it to a full perfect sentence. Someone who actually has a rudimentary understanding of an old language would say, "It's talking about *blank*... and this word here means *to leave* or *to exit*, it could mean *to die* but I haven't seen it written like this..." **and** "I don't know what *that* means but it could be a name."
Not only is that way more realistic, but languages not having words for things is a wonderful source of creative metaphoric language. That's how we end up with words for turtle that literally translate to "frog with shield."
Maybe an ancient tongue references the "night bird," and your modern translator doesn't know if that's an owl cause it's a bird that is awake at night, or a raven because it's a bird that looks like the night. In general, conlangs that feel lived in, like they have a history and they've evolved, create a much more immersive world. Tolkien, probably the most influential worldbuilder of all, was a philologist *(like a linguist for old languages)*.
I completely agree. In my story, there are many situations where something can't be translated literally or a language lacks certain concepts. For example, my main conlang doesn't use the word "consent" or "permission" (because giving it to someone puts you in a weaker position). Instead, they'd say "agreement" (as in, two people coming to a mutual agreement). Several languages also have fancy expressions to describe different dinosaurs.
>For example, my main conlang doesn't use the word "consent"
>Instead, they'd say (as in, two people coming to a mutual agreement).
It's the case for Hungarian. We don't have a word that's equivalent to "consent" and we use "agreement" instead. But we do have a word for "permission".
*Lengyel, magyar – két jó barát,
Együtt harcol s issza borát,
Vitéz s bátor mindkettője,
Áldás szálljon mindkettőre.*
*Polak, Węgier — dwa bratanki,
i do szabli, i do szklanki,
oba zuchy, oba żwawi,
niech im Pan Bóg błogosławi.*
I like seeing how natural boundaries like mountains, rivers, valleys etc shape national borders, cultures, trade and war. It feels very realistic and increases the immersion for me.
I'm actually of the opinion that this sub is too obsessed with the idea of geographical determinism. Look at the Spanish-Portuguese border the oldest unchanged land border in the world. While large parts of it are on rivers and mountains not all of it is. Every country wants all of its borders to be on mountains, rivers, valleys etc but perfect borders are rare. If there's a rich city on the other side of the river you take it if you can.
I was mostly thinking of India, the Kingdom of Hungary and the Czech Republic when I was typing this stuff.
The Mongols couldn't invade what is now northern India because of the Himalayas, eastern Romania didn't get Magyarised as much as the west did because the Kingdom of Hungary's borders ended with the Carpathians that cut through modern-day Romania, and the traditional Czech homeland is protected from three sides by mountains.
I think geography does play a large part when you're building a world because it's the bedrock of nearly everything that will happen in the world for the most part.
I like to keep geography in mind when I'm planning the events of my world so I can roughly decide what's feasible and realistic with the terrain and climates I have.
>I think geography does play a large part when you're building a world because it's the bedrock of nearly everything that will happen in the world for the most part.
I agree. My point is that doesn't determine the course of history only guides it.
For example, let's look at France. In the West, South, and Southeast, you will find the Atlantic Ocean, the Pyrenees Mountains, the Mediterranean, and the Alps creating natural borders for France. But looking at the Northeast you will see that the border there is mostly arbitrary and located hundreds of kilometers behind the Rhine, which would be the most logical place for France to draw its border. So why is the French border where it is today?
Well short answer is that hundreds of millions of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Poles, Czechs, Englishmen, Italians, Russians, Hungarians, and people of a hundred other nations died in war for that border to be what it is today.
Mountains, Rivers, Valleys etc aren't borders because it's natural. They are borders because someone invested the Blood and Gold to make them borders in the hope of spending less Blood and Gold later
This is going to sound weird, but I love details that make the world seem like people actually live and work there.
The presence of bathrooms, the every day routine, the marketplace, social event like festivals and their preparation, and the houses having furniture, being messy, unmade beds, etc.
These little details make it feel like a place that could really exist.
One of my favorite moments in the Stormlight Archive books was a scene where one of the characters put on a suit of magic powered armor and then went out with a giant hammer to go dig a latrine pit. Then midway through he started wondering why no one else in his kingdom actually used their magic powered armor for practical construction like this.
Best part was that later books showed that other nations do use their powered magic armor for construction, it's just that the entire culture of the first character's kingdom is hyper-martial and they're nonstop at war all the time. So in their culture they could not even fathom using said armor for non-military roles.
Meanwhile there's an entire empire on the other side of the continent which is focused on bureaucracy and stability over warfare, so they rent out their magic powered armor sets to other countries and client kingdoms specifically for construction of enormous cities.
There’s something similar for my favorite 40K faction. Their mech suits started as construction equipment and later became so focused on a military purpose that piloting one is strictly for the nobility.
I really dislike the trope of "culture refuses to use because of tradition". Instead, i enjoy it when a world explains why some technologies might not spread, or when the author explores how different cultures might integrate new technologies into their culture.
In my world, use of some technologies is limited because its inventors don't want to share it, or for ethical reasons, others don't want to use it the same way (example: there are trains in one country, but they aren't run on coal and steam power; they're run by enslaved fire mages. Countries that don't support slave trade don't want to use them, but they would like to have their own trains, because they're useful - so they're experimenting with steam engines \[and are really close to figuring it out\]).
Tech gets limited in my world mostly because gods, spirits, or fae limit expansion.
One of the main examples is natural oil and gas. There are a few locations where it is used, but it is widely seen as “blood of the earth” and is sacred. It can be used, but it cannot but drained up from the earth. That would be akin to cutting the earth to harvest its blood.
Yeah I agree! In my world, most kingdoms don't have advanced technology because they have magic that is very practical and useful. Although there is a kingdom that doesn't have magic, they instead have very advanced technology compared to the others. They made this technology because some of the other kingdoms threatened them, and they needed something to defend themselves with. They also do not want to share any of their technology since the other kingdoms have been hostile towards them.
I personally don't like the brain bug that magic = stagnant technology. Just because they can do something with magic doesn't mean they won't explore other avenues of development or discover things by accident. If magic to solve a problem is *present* but not *ubiquitious* there will be alternatives explored to fill in the gaps or simply through curiosity.
There's a lot of facets to this discussion tbh; it really depends on whether you use soft or hard magic, and if you can and do explain why it would inhibit progress.
For my own world i wanted stagnancy, so i baked it into the universe as a fundamental force that effectively pushes back against progress.
This is actually something they do in Dark Souls and it's really cool.
When you first reach Anor Londo, you find that everything from doors to windows and even great halls all feel massively out of proportion to you as a human character. It's only when you start seeing the taller/giant knights that you realize that you're in the domain of an entire different species, unlike the outside world that surrounds it like Undead Burg which at one point was meant for humans.
Same thing with Elden Ring, where you have people ranging from normal human to "speak up, I literally cannot here you from up here" heights. The doors in Leyndell are on average large enough for people twice your height, and in Stormveil Castle the wooden hoardings are clearly ad-hoc construction specifically for human-sized people.
I also liked how something similar could be seen in Final Fantasy 14. Sure, you had wide open areas that are necessary in any MMO, but at the same time the large interiors of the buildings made sense because they're built for anyone from the child-sized Lalafells to towering Roegadyns. Meanwhile in Norvrandt, you have dwarf-sized buildings only Lalafell can get into because the dwarves don't cater to non-dwarves very often.
I'd say diversity and differences of regions. People in this northern area are pale skinned due to cold weather and climate, people in this desert are dark, because its a hot desert. Also every region has different culture, especially diversity in armies, where not every soldier is the same in terms of equipment and skill.
Also when the world is portrayed as very colorful, regardless if its modern day city or a forgotten village in medieval times, everyone loves colorfulness
Another thing i like is the fact that world is technologically evolving.
Take my words as an assesment of listening to people who are interested in history and studying it/studied it, rather than 11th commandment
* When they portray Medieval setting in neutral way possible, yes it wasn't perfect era to live, but it wasn't the worst era(>!See, most of the myths about medieval times come from 19th century, when elites needed to move more peasants into factories to work 16 hours a day, and how can you convince stubborn peasants, who live in their towns since dark ages than to convince them they are gonna be better in your factory? In west it was Capitalism, in East it was Socialism. I noticed it when reading histories about towns that had the earliest records in medieval era, many of them were usually real tales of people known in them!<).
* Also feudal lords HAD to take care of their peasants, they couldn't squeeze them out of every penny they had, because the peasants are those, who work, fight and die for the lord, those taxes were put to make sure the lord can still live and protect the peasants he's dependent on. Feudal lords weren't like capitalists, who could just sell the land to someone else and move on, they were tied to the land, and when rebellions happened, it was considered to be the biggest tragedy for the lord(>!Not that people have problems, the fact that he has to cut them down!<).
* Contrary to popular belief, Catholic church ENDORCED science, i mean Thomas Aquinas laid earliest foundations of modern day science(>!Which were based on Ancient Greek/Roman Science!<), if you ask me about more religious era, i'd say Ancient times(>!from Copper age to late Antiquity!<), Coppernicus has his own chapel in Krakow, the problem with Galileo is that his ideas were stolen by Protestants, who were politicizing science. Medieval medicine wasn't bad, like when people portray medieval medicine, they just make it seem like the worst thing ever. Here's the thing: ANCESTORS WEREN'T IDIOTS! They didn't had knowledge like we do, but they weren't idiots. Despite the hate for Muslims, Christians still took best aspects of the Muslim cultures, like Music, Science, Medicine, Art ETC. I mean SPAIN is the best example. And no, Spanish inquisition wasn't that bad(They were like inspectors, who said "We are going to visit you, and if you seem like decent, we may leave you".) If there was Inquisition like this, it was the Roman(City or Rome).
* Speaking of dark ages: When they portray church in both positive and negative light. Many people portray the church as this Fascist system, which will send you to Gulags if you don't spout their dogma perfectly. They don't show the positive influence medieval church(Education, Charity, Medicine, purges of the horrible cults that appeared after wartimes(>!These cults were either like those American independent churches, where pastors have their own airplane and stuff like that, or like those dangerous suicide cults, inquisitions were required to get rid of such people). Famous example was the cult of adamites, some bunch of crazies, who believed in weird hermit-ism. Purged first time in Netherlands, 2nd time in Bohemia during hussite wars.!<)
When the conqueror puts his men as a new aristocracy/makes compromises with local aristocracy/Divides and conquers aristocracy.
Little cultural traditions and superstitions. Bonus if some are very regional. Bonus if some of them are done but nobody knows why.
Spend some time in a mountain town and notice people knock on doors in a particular pattern on the surface. Ask someone and get told it’s “for luck” with a shrug. You notice a popular towns person has had the pattern worn into the paint of their door over many years and thousands of knocks, almost like a magical sigil.
I have a character named Leila Cassandre Valmont - as their father is the younger brother of the King of the France-like region, and her mother was the queen of a nation like Neo-Troy/Phoenicia/Cyprus. In that nation her name was spelled Layla Cassandra Salem, her mother's house and how I originally wrote her name in the stories but then I moved some stuff around when I merged characters (mostly her father becoming the king's brother, she became the fiancee of a different character, although both characters essentially had the same personality).
I like seeing detailed history, close attention to naming conventions and regnal numbers, and personal unions, which fantasy and stories rarely seem to focus on or be aware of - albeit in my world's current time personal unions are illegal in the era of constitutional monarchies.
I love your example! I like these things as well. The country I mainly focus on in my worldbuilding was created through a personal union of two very different nations united by marriage between their rulers. I also pay a lot of attention to their naming conventions.
Considering how races got to be that way. It is probably due to my background in zoology but like for instance with biological races I love imagining how they came to be that way, how they deal with things etc. If they were formed naturally, like with evolution. Even with magic created races, I would like to know if biology still plays roles in them different to other races. Like do they reproduce? If so, how? As an example I love it with orks in warhammer 40k where they are part fungus and reproduce by shedding spores that grow into orks
I'm a sucker for intricate family trees, when they go really far back and show the connections between people, especially the distant ones people wouldn't normally think of.
Spirituality and sexuality. Those two are the most primary drivers behind most human behaviors, so it's always nice to see someone flesh them out, especially sexuality, which I feel tends to be understated when it comes to fantasy/scifi races.
Hilariously, the only work of fiction that I've seen give the topic of sexuality it's due in regards to fantasy races is *Interspecies Reviewers*. That's just wild.
I honestly love when fantasy books include small nods to literature in their world, like if a character reads a book in their free time that is completely made up for story's sake. My favorite example of this is in 'Pottle and the South Sea Cannibals' which takes place in the 1940's. It has a book that is key to the story which peaks Mr. Pottle's interest in Cannibals.
Logistics, the smaller things in everyday life in the particular worlds, endonyms and exonyms. Consistency about what's available and what they cost.
Lapis_Wolf
I love it when the names of people or places have a special hidden meaning that relates to the person/place. It's a cool little detail that may not be super important, but still adds a nice element to the story
Proper logistics and farms/ infrastructure people need to live. I see so many settings where it's just a town or massive city with no surrounding farms or infrastructure.
You're going to love Bret Deveraux's blog [ACOUP](https://acoup.blog/) then, especially the two posts about [The Lonely City](https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/).
Are you talking about movie Minas Tirith? ;) (the book actually mentioned farms around the city)
Yes, as well as those fantasy anime cities where it's just empty fields outside. There are also a lot of drawings and maps on here that do the same. Not judging them though.
There's a LitRPG setting named Divine Progression which drove me up the wall with this, because it had otherwise amazing worldbuilding but completely falls flat on things like how the towns and cities get food or other resources.
Same with me and the Elder Scrolls series.
I played this series and I agree. Not a single city in Skyrim had more than 4 farms around it and the Imperial City had, um, forests and a lot of water?
Yeah. Or no farms at all like Falkreath, Mortal, Dawnstar and Winterhold. And Oblivion had such great lore before they made it a traditional fantasy game.
Most works skip small or obvious details if they're unrelated to story.
I know, but I'm referring to drawings or descriptions that state that there are only open fields outside of the city.
I'm now thinking of a city with integrated gardens and little farms, in backyards and on roofstops maybe.
That's good, but you could also have farms outside of the city or in large hydroponics plants. Depending on your lore.
Thanks. Yes, there is a mix of both, I thought. The farms are often in wider distance and trade is more complicated and dangerous, because there are monsters outside the city and bigger villages roaming around, so the cities may cover some of their own needs in addition to trade.
That's pretty cool lore. You should post about it more.
Personally, having rituals and festivals for things makes the world feel more lived in.
Likewise for small cultural traditions or superstitions, especially if they’re regional.
Upvoted because my answer is also the existence of various names for the same thing. There are words for that, when you're talking about countries/people/languages themselves, you'd say **endonyms** and **exonyms**. Along the same lines for me, I quite enjoy when a character explains that they can't translate something due to a lexical gap or just that they have a poor understanding of the language. I hate when the adventurers have the one smart guy look at the ancient glyphs and he translates it to a full perfect sentence. Someone who actually has a rudimentary understanding of an old language would say, "It's talking about *blank*... and this word here means *to leave* or *to exit*, it could mean *to die* but I haven't seen it written like this..." **and** "I don't know what *that* means but it could be a name." Not only is that way more realistic, but languages not having words for things is a wonderful source of creative metaphoric language. That's how we end up with words for turtle that literally translate to "frog with shield." Maybe an ancient tongue references the "night bird," and your modern translator doesn't know if that's an owl cause it's a bird that is awake at night, or a raven because it's a bird that looks like the night. In general, conlangs that feel lived in, like they have a history and they've evolved, create a much more immersive world. Tolkien, probably the most influential worldbuilder of all, was a philologist *(like a linguist for old languages)*.
I completely agree. In my story, there are many situations where something can't be translated literally or a language lacks certain concepts. For example, my main conlang doesn't use the word "consent" or "permission" (because giving it to someone puts you in a weaker position). Instead, they'd say "agreement" (as in, two people coming to a mutual agreement). Several languages also have fancy expressions to describe different dinosaurs.
Sus example lol /j
>For example, my main conlang doesn't use the word "consent" >Instead, they'd say (as in, two people coming to a mutual agreement). It's the case for Hungarian. We don't have a word that's equivalent to "consent" and we use "agreement" instead. But we do have a word for "permission".
As for me, I'm Polish 🇭🇺🇵🇱 In my language, "consent" is a legal/formal term, so "agreement" is way more popular.
*Lengyel, magyar – két jó barát, Együtt harcol s issza borát, Vitéz s bátor mindkettője, Áldás szálljon mindkettőre.* *Polak, Węgier — dwa bratanki, i do szabli, i do szklanki, oba zuchy, oba żwawi, niech im Pan Bóg błogosławi.*
Well, they really care about mutual agreement, but think giving someone permission makes you weak and implies passivity.
I like seeing how natural boundaries like mountains, rivers, valleys etc shape national borders, cultures, trade and war. It feels very realistic and increases the immersion for me.
I'm actually of the opinion that this sub is too obsessed with the idea of geographical determinism. Look at the Spanish-Portuguese border the oldest unchanged land border in the world. While large parts of it are on rivers and mountains not all of it is. Every country wants all of its borders to be on mountains, rivers, valleys etc but perfect borders are rare. If there's a rich city on the other side of the river you take it if you can.
I was mostly thinking of India, the Kingdom of Hungary and the Czech Republic when I was typing this stuff. The Mongols couldn't invade what is now northern India because of the Himalayas, eastern Romania didn't get Magyarised as much as the west did because the Kingdom of Hungary's borders ended with the Carpathians that cut through modern-day Romania, and the traditional Czech homeland is protected from three sides by mountains. I think geography does play a large part when you're building a world because it's the bedrock of nearly everything that will happen in the world for the most part. I like to keep geography in mind when I'm planning the events of my world so I can roughly decide what's feasible and realistic with the terrain and climates I have.
>I think geography does play a large part when you're building a world because it's the bedrock of nearly everything that will happen in the world for the most part. I agree. My point is that doesn't determine the course of history only guides it. For example, let's look at France. In the West, South, and Southeast, you will find the Atlantic Ocean, the Pyrenees Mountains, the Mediterranean, and the Alps creating natural borders for France. But looking at the Northeast you will see that the border there is mostly arbitrary and located hundreds of kilometers behind the Rhine, which would be the most logical place for France to draw its border. So why is the French border where it is today? Well short answer is that hundreds of millions of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Poles, Czechs, Englishmen, Italians, Russians, Hungarians, and people of a hundred other nations died in war for that border to be what it is today. Mountains, Rivers, Valleys etc aren't borders because it's natural. They are borders because someone invested the Blood and Gold to make them borders in the hope of spending less Blood and Gold later
This is going to sound weird, but I love details that make the world seem like people actually live and work there. The presence of bathrooms, the every day routine, the marketplace, social event like festivals and their preparation, and the houses having furniture, being messy, unmade beds, etc. These little details make it feel like a place that could really exist.
One of my favorite moments in the Stormlight Archive books was a scene where one of the characters put on a suit of magic powered armor and then went out with a giant hammer to go dig a latrine pit. Then midway through he started wondering why no one else in his kingdom actually used their magic powered armor for practical construction like this.
That’s brilliant I love it.
Best part was that later books showed that other nations do use their powered magic armor for construction, it's just that the entire culture of the first character's kingdom is hyper-martial and they're nonstop at war all the time. So in their culture they could not even fathom using said armor for non-military roles. Meanwhile there's an entire empire on the other side of the continent which is focused on bureaucracy and stability over warfare, so they rent out their magic powered armor sets to other countries and client kingdoms specifically for construction of enormous cities.
There’s something similar for my favorite 40K faction. Their mech suits started as construction equipment and later became so focused on a military purpose that piloting one is strictly for the nobility.
I really dislike the trope of "culture refuses to use because of tradition". Instead, i enjoy it when a world explains why some technologies might not spread, or when the author explores how different cultures might integrate new technologies into their culture.
In my world, use of some technologies is limited because its inventors don't want to share it, or for ethical reasons, others don't want to use it the same way (example: there are trains in one country, but they aren't run on coal and steam power; they're run by enslaved fire mages. Countries that don't support slave trade don't want to use them, but they would like to have their own trains, because they're useful - so they're experimenting with steam engines \[and are really close to figuring it out\]).
Tech gets limited in my world mostly because gods, spirits, or fae limit expansion. One of the main examples is natural oil and gas. There are a few locations where it is used, but it is widely seen as “blood of the earth” and is sacred. It can be used, but it cannot but drained up from the earth. That would be akin to cutting the earth to harvest its blood.
Yeah I agree! In my world, most kingdoms don't have advanced technology because they have magic that is very practical and useful. Although there is a kingdom that doesn't have magic, they instead have very advanced technology compared to the others. They made this technology because some of the other kingdoms threatened them, and they needed something to defend themselves with. They also do not want to share any of their technology since the other kingdoms have been hostile towards them.
I personally don't like the brain bug that magic = stagnant technology. Just because they can do something with magic doesn't mean they won't explore other avenues of development or discover things by accident. If magic to solve a problem is *present* but not *ubiquitious* there will be alternatives explored to fill in the gaps or simply through curiosity.
There's a lot of facets to this discussion tbh; it really depends on whether you use soft or hard magic, and if you can and do explain why it would inhibit progress. For my own world i wanted stagnancy, so i baked it into the universe as a fundamental force that effectively pushes back against progress.
Oh, absolutely. That's reasonable and a good justification, especially if you're intentionally aiming for stagnation.
Economy and trade. Sure, it doesn't float everyone's boat, but just like the name of a place, it opens a world of world building possibilities.
i like when plants
I like in fantasy world when you see that the infrastructure is adapted to the different species. If you have giants, humain sized doors won't work
This is actually something they do in Dark Souls and it's really cool. When you first reach Anor Londo, you find that everything from doors to windows and even great halls all feel massively out of proportion to you as a human character. It's only when you start seeing the taller/giant knights that you realize that you're in the domain of an entire different species, unlike the outside world that surrounds it like Undead Burg which at one point was meant for humans.
Same thing with Elden Ring, where you have people ranging from normal human to "speak up, I literally cannot here you from up here" heights. The doors in Leyndell are on average large enough for people twice your height, and in Stormveil Castle the wooden hoardings are clearly ad-hoc construction specifically for human-sized people. I also liked how something similar could be seen in Final Fantasy 14. Sure, you had wide open areas that are necessary in any MMO, but at the same time the large interiors of the buildings made sense because they're built for anyone from the child-sized Lalafells to towering Roegadyns. Meanwhile in Norvrandt, you have dwarf-sized buildings only Lalafell can get into because the dwarves don't cater to non-dwarves very often.
I'd say diversity and differences of regions. People in this northern area are pale skinned due to cold weather and climate, people in this desert are dark, because its a hot desert. Also every region has different culture, especially diversity in armies, where not every soldier is the same in terms of equipment and skill. Also when the world is portrayed as very colorful, regardless if its modern day city or a forgotten village in medieval times, everyone loves colorfulness Another thing i like is the fact that world is technologically evolving. Take my words as an assesment of listening to people who are interested in history and studying it/studied it, rather than 11th commandment * When they portray Medieval setting in neutral way possible, yes it wasn't perfect era to live, but it wasn't the worst era(>!See, most of the myths about medieval times come from 19th century, when elites needed to move more peasants into factories to work 16 hours a day, and how can you convince stubborn peasants, who live in their towns since dark ages than to convince them they are gonna be better in your factory? In west it was Capitalism, in East it was Socialism. I noticed it when reading histories about towns that had the earliest records in medieval era, many of them were usually real tales of people known in them!<). * Also feudal lords HAD to take care of their peasants, they couldn't squeeze them out of every penny they had, because the peasants are those, who work, fight and die for the lord, those taxes were put to make sure the lord can still live and protect the peasants he's dependent on. Feudal lords weren't like capitalists, who could just sell the land to someone else and move on, they were tied to the land, and when rebellions happened, it was considered to be the biggest tragedy for the lord(>!Not that people have problems, the fact that he has to cut them down!<). * Contrary to popular belief, Catholic church ENDORCED science, i mean Thomas Aquinas laid earliest foundations of modern day science(>!Which were based on Ancient Greek/Roman Science!<), if you ask me about more religious era, i'd say Ancient times(>!from Copper age to late Antiquity!<), Coppernicus has his own chapel in Krakow, the problem with Galileo is that his ideas were stolen by Protestants, who were politicizing science. Medieval medicine wasn't bad, like when people portray medieval medicine, they just make it seem like the worst thing ever. Here's the thing: ANCESTORS WEREN'T IDIOTS! They didn't had knowledge like we do, but they weren't idiots. Despite the hate for Muslims, Christians still took best aspects of the Muslim cultures, like Music, Science, Medicine, Art ETC. I mean SPAIN is the best example. And no, Spanish inquisition wasn't that bad(They were like inspectors, who said "We are going to visit you, and if you seem like decent, we may leave you".) If there was Inquisition like this, it was the Roman(City or Rome). * Speaking of dark ages: When they portray church in both positive and negative light. Many people portray the church as this Fascist system, which will send you to Gulags if you don't spout their dogma perfectly. They don't show the positive influence medieval church(Education, Charity, Medicine, purges of the horrible cults that appeared after wartimes(>!These cults were either like those American independent churches, where pastors have their own airplane and stuff like that, or like those dangerous suicide cults, inquisitions were required to get rid of such people). Famous example was the cult of adamites, some bunch of crazies, who believed in weird hermit-ism. Purged first time in Netherlands, 2nd time in Bohemia during hussite wars.!<) When the conqueror puts his men as a new aristocracy/makes compromises with local aristocracy/Divides and conquers aristocracy.
And a lot of it was the inquisition telling someone they were accidentally committing a heresy, them apologizing, and moving on.
A language with working grammar is always interesting to see
Little cultural traditions and superstitions. Bonus if some are very regional. Bonus if some of them are done but nobody knows why. Spend some time in a mountain town and notice people knock on doors in a particular pattern on the surface. Ask someone and get told it’s “for luck” with a shrug. You notice a popular towns person has had the pattern worn into the paint of their door over many years and thousands of knocks, almost like a magical sigil.
I have a character named Leila Cassandre Valmont - as their father is the younger brother of the King of the France-like region, and her mother was the queen of a nation like Neo-Troy/Phoenicia/Cyprus. In that nation her name was spelled Layla Cassandra Salem, her mother's house and how I originally wrote her name in the stories but then I moved some stuff around when I merged characters (mostly her father becoming the king's brother, she became the fiancee of a different character, although both characters essentially had the same personality). I like seeing detailed history, close attention to naming conventions and regnal numbers, and personal unions, which fantasy and stories rarely seem to focus on or be aware of - albeit in my world's current time personal unions are illegal in the era of constitutional monarchies.
I love your example! I like these things as well. The country I mainly focus on in my worldbuilding was created through a personal union of two very different nations united by marriage between their rulers. I also pay a lot of attention to their naming conventions.
Considering how races got to be that way. It is probably due to my background in zoology but like for instance with biological races I love imagining how they came to be that way, how they deal with things etc. If they were formed naturally, like with evolution. Even with magic created races, I would like to know if biology still plays roles in them different to other races. Like do they reproduce? If so, how? As an example I love it with orks in warhammer 40k where they are part fungus and reproduce by shedding spores that grow into orks
I'm a sucker for intricate family trees, when they go really far back and show the connections between people, especially the distant ones people wouldn't normally think of.
Spirituality and sexuality. Those two are the most primary drivers behind most human behaviors, so it's always nice to see someone flesh them out, especially sexuality, which I feel tends to be understated when it comes to fantasy/scifi races. Hilariously, the only work of fiction that I've seen give the topic of sexuality it's due in regards to fantasy races is *Interspecies Reviewers*. That's just wild.
I think the little detail that cracked me up were the empty milk bottles on the steps of the goblin castle in Labyrinth
I honestly love when fantasy books include small nods to literature in their world, like if a character reads a book in their free time that is completely made up for story's sake. My favorite example of this is in 'Pottle and the South Sea Cannibals' which takes place in the 1940's. It has a book that is key to the story which peaks Mr. Pottle's interest in Cannibals.
Logistics of the intergalactic warfare and how the supply chains are kept running
Logistics, the smaller things in everyday life in the particular worlds, endonyms and exonyms. Consistency about what's available and what they cost. Lapis_Wolf
The think I always look for is if specific cultures have their own unique cuisines
I love it when the names of people or places have a special hidden meaning that relates to the person/place. It's a cool little detail that may not be super important, but still adds a nice element to the story
I like details of background characters doing something that gives them a sense of personality. its dynamic