Any tips on how to write a serviceable story for a fantasy game?

Any tips on how to write a serviceable story for a fantasy game?

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Oh, as well as lore.

play other, good fantasy games

try to merge gameplay and story, ie think about how the MC traverses the world and how it would effect them instead of relegating the brunt of storytelling to exposition dumps (cutscenes, text boxes, audio tapes etc)

>WHAT DO THEY EAT?

Okay, first off, think theme.

How fantasy are we talking?Tech magic, ye old Tolkien shite, good old Dystopian bullshit of Magic Vs Tech in old/new/future world? If you don't even have this shit sorted out, what the fuck are you doing.

After that, beats me, I kind of suck at writing anything worth reading.

Don't do Tolkien tropes. That shit's played out.

Don't do elves, dwarves or any of that generic shit, make your own races

do what everyone else do, steal from cool different sources and change names

Like a blend of Tolkein and Magic vs Tech.

What kind of tropes are we talking here?

Don't do the following
>generic dark lord
>chosen one
>best weapon is a katana
>over the top armor
>generic magic
>two legged "dragons"
>lotr elf rip offs
>lotr dwarf rip offs
>lotr orc rip offs
>niggers

>Mag-Tech Tolkien

Okay, the premisse does not seem like total garbage yet. Legend of Korra styled or what?

Oh, do not do elves and dwarves for fucks sake. Do not. Think for 7 seconds on ideas for races if you anything but human, but please don't do that. Don't copy tolkien for fucks sake

Keep it simple.

read lord of the rings
Even if it's not that type of fantasy the way he wrote worked well

Should I throw orcs and trolls out, too?

>Legend of Korra styled or what?
Maybe a little less of a "modernised" setting, if that makes sense.

don't be shit

>mag-tech tolkien

>not instant garbage

Tolkien isn't low fantasy. It doesn't blend because the technology cannot keep par with the "magic". You might be better off saying D&D or some other misaligned derivative of Tolkien works that aren't so high fantasy to have it more comparable with tech

Create a setting first before you start on any story.

Reinvent world Laws.

Like Ar Tonelico writer, that guy sure dedicated.

Do a medieval setting in the far future of a post apocalyptical earth

Dont try too hard Like game of Thrones in being realistic and randomly killing people

Remember that it's fucking fantasy, it's meant to be unrealistic

also don't be a cluster fuck and have so much backstory you bore people to death

Big titties.

Yes, in whatever way they are shaped. Just a bunch of evil "All I want is a gud fightin" kind of shit needs to fuck off from any story unless you are doing Orkz, and Mag-Tach Tolkien cannot do Orkz

Don't keep gameplay and story separate. Having gameplay moments that get interrupted by cutscenes is dumb.

No forced walking scenes with forced exposition

Good writing is never an easy task, nor one that can be done through a few basic rules or pointers. My advice would be to avoid getting too bogged down in the world building (the most common and frequent fantasy writing mistake) and instead focus on developing decent characters and individual images or icons.
Any moron can write hundred pages of extensive complex fantasy structures, histories, magic-techno babble, his own justification for why he ended up with the same old worn out elf and dwarf tropes.
Few people can write an actual character driven story that does not overload reader with bullshit.

My second advice would be to make it clear what kind of fiction are you doing. A classic faux mythology? A faux history? A more causal, structured world? Are you going more speculative, or more iconic route? It's a good idea to clear those out before you even start writing.

Finally, I would advice you to draw inspiration from lesser known fiction and aesthetical sources. Look up older Miyazaki's work (I mean the Japanese animator) like Naushicaa (the manga), Shuna or Laputa. Watch More's Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea. Read Calvino's Invisible Cities, or Borges'es Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Read Thousand and One Night in an unabridged and uncensored version.

Finally, think of your own culture and folklore and history, and think if you could draw inspiration from there. Nothing more sad than the kind of brain-dead, PCV-esque fantasy written by people who have fantastic imagery, great fairytales and myths, distinct forms of imagination at their finger tips.

Remember, good and believable walk hand in hand.

If your world has magic, fucking incorporate it into the daily lives of people. Think Gandalf in Fellowship, showing up in the shire using his magic to entertain the common hobbits, giving them a few jollies in exchange for some coinage and food. This makes your magic system more believable.

Write about people, not figures. Write the King as a human being before you write him as a King.

And most importantly, you are not Michael Kirkbride, do not be weird for the sake of weird, be weird because it enhances the world you're building.

Write it backwards.

Not even kidding, start with how it ends and what the big tweets will be, then work your way to where you want it to start. Honestly always felt like that's how xenografts was written.

You don't, because all of you are worthless losers with no talent.

You mean like Arcanum?

Ancient evil has awoken
Every NPC lore dumps for 5 hours and tells you about their wonderful unique culture
Characters should be stereotypes that do things for no reason
Massage the player's ego at every opportunity

Make up a world based on certain truths no one can defy.
Like World being made of magic from a stone, or shit like this where the world is affected by it's existence.
I like how Oda does one piece. He has a set a rules that every one has to follow.
Do that and start world building around it, make churches that worship such "magical" thing or oppose, same with government and towns. Have countries have less of "it" where others have abundance. Don't have some one have an ability to break the rules, could be hackish and makes things too easy for your characters. Also it would show you didn't do a good job making these rules if you need some one to break them.

Tolkien tropes to avoid
>elves are sad and old and ethereal and shit
>orcs and goblins are pure evil
>Attempting to capture his pentameter/syle of writing

Also avoid the whole Chapter 1 is something interesting then Chapter 2 explains the whole world cliche.

Actually, if you want to avoid those tropes, avoid elves, goblins and dwarves entirely.

use this world

Save the princess is probably enough as long as the gameplay is good

Im and a lot of other peoples o world-building is more important and gives that atmosphere of a breathing world thats a staple for good fantasy games

don't overdramatize it
have good dialogue
and if you make a side-story, make sure it fits in with the main one
avoid useless exposition

Nah fuck that, exploring the physiological differences between races can be interesting but they just cant be as one dimensional as Tolkeins.

You an make orcs love to fight I guess but dont make them servants of a singular dark master unless you really got a good story point for it.

For example I like portraying Elves as lovers of debauchery and leisure rather than old dudes who live in trees and do nothing. Youd think that after living awhile you would get bored of pedestrian things and go after the finer things in life.

Jesus fucking Christ no. There is a reason why elves, dwarves and goblins were portrayed the way they were in Tolkien's works, same reason why they became so incredibly popular. Any attempt to "deconstruct" them and make alternation to them ends up in a fucking disaster, and you are a lot better off avoiding them entirely. "look my elves are totally unique because I changed one idea for a considerably more pedestrian one" is the most pathetic way of going around fantasy, it screams "I can't think of anything original but I never understood why the established trope was popular either."

Please, please OP don't make that kind of mistake.

>Don't keep gameplay and story separate. Having gameplay moments that get interrupted by cutscenes is dumb.
There's only so much you can do plot-wise within the confines of gameplay mechanics. Sooner or later you're going to need cutscenes or dialogue to tell a story with any depth.

Here's what I'd do.
>consider gameplay above all else, think about what mechanics you'll want the player to have access to
>picture how you want the game to start and what sort of finale you're going for, try to keep the player entertained and invested at these two critical points
>write a basic overview of how to get from the start to the ending, be sure to include moments you want to happen and decide how mechanics should be introduced in the plot
>go over the plot again a few more times, filling out a bit more details each time you do so
>it can help to sprinkle in some foreshadowing details or other little things during later go-overs
>keep this up until you've got a solid plot

This doesn't even need to be for a fantasy plot really, it's just the plan I'm working with for something I'm trying.

Start by having actual ideas yourself.

You'll never write a good story.

>My advice would be to avoid getting too bogged down in the world building (the most common and frequent fantasy writing mistake) and instead focus on developing decent characters and individual images or icons.
>Any moron can write hundred pages of extensive complex fantasy structures, histories, magic-techno babble, his own justification for why he ended up with the same old worn out elf and dwarf tropes.
>Few people can write an actual character driven story that does not overload reader with bullshit.
This is good advice. A meticulously crafted fantasy world is pointless if I don't have good plots or characters to get me emotionally invested, and the most generic setting possible can still be very enjoyable if the story and characters are good.

use existing stories, tropes, cliches and ideas as inspiration, but don't just copy them.

for a story to be really good, you have to come up with your own thing. nobody can really give you advice on how to do that. spend a lot of time thinking about it and developing your own ideas and concepts.

some advice:

build the world and lore, THEN start creating a story set in this world. make the story fit the world, not the other way round.

a story lives and dies with its characters. make sure that your characters are fleshed out well. establish their origins, motivations, habits and flaws.

avoid overdone things.
>dark lord ruling over evil orcs from his dark tower atop mount death
>dwarves are angry craftsmen who live in mountains, drink beer and swing hammers/axes
>elves are lanky snobs who live in woods and shoot bows

do your own thing and do it well.
focus on primarily creating a story YOU would enjoy, not a story you think others might enjoy.

Just do what everything does and base your story on some book, real history or whatever

By base I mean copy with some changes to make it OC donut steel

>>generic dark lord
>>chosen one
Those can be good though. I'll give you the rest

>It doesn't blend because the technology cannot keep par with the "magic"
Tolkien's magic isn't exactly high fantasy levels of ridiculous though. Especially during LotR, magic takes the backseat most of the time

That is not the point. The point is that Tolkien's world is mythological, not speculative.

If anything, there should be more stories where mages throw a bunch of flashy magic around, like in this scene: youtube.com/watch?v=6Tbffj_04cI

I figure I'll ask it here since we're somewhat on topic.

How would someone go about properly writing a story for a video game, as in, in what ways should a story be incorporated into the game that's not simply just restricted to cutscenes or audio logs/journals, etc.? I often see people mention a story in a game being bad, but rarely hear of examples of any done correctly, so I'm curious to know what's missing or what's not being done for stories in games to at least be decent.

I think the gist of it is that writing a story for interactivity is much different than for other mediums, but I'm not sure that's the sole reason for it.

>acquire large folder of neat looking art
>acquire pair of headphones, nicer over the ear types are preferred
>acquire phone
>acquire apps that play white noise, pzizz, etc
>look at folder of art for 5-10 minutes
>lay down with phone and headphones and listen to white noise app while just relaxing like you're trying to nap for 20 minutes or so
>jot down whatever you come up with
It doesn't have to be white noise either, bird sounds, blizzard recording, something like this youtube.com/watch?v=XeksMTcUP_Q

That entirely depends on what kind of game you are making. There are some games were entirely passive narrative, provided by voice-overs and cutscenes is appropriate way to story telling (see Homeworld, Silent Hill). In other cases, it's more beneficial to tell story through complex and branching dialogues (see most RPG's).
Then you have experimental titles where a completely different approach is necessary (see The Void).
There is no one "right" way to tell stories in video games. Some games can actually benefit from placing the player into a hapless, bystander role. Some games can use lack of player agency into their own virtue. Vietcong would not be such a great war themed game if the played did not feel like "just a single soldier" and the story did not feel like taking it's track entirely over his head.

In RPG games, for an example, I think the most important thing in writing is to account for multiplicity of possible problem solutions. Rather than inventing a story ark for individual stories (quests), you need to think in manner of problems and possible solutions: questions, and then possible answers. Horror games however generally may present you with entirely different outlook.

Am I the only one who doesn't really mind cutscenes?

A story is a story, make sure your characters are properly motivated and conflict is immediate and tangible.

Story haters don't like it when a story gets in the way. So don't get in the way.

>I often see people mention a story in a game being bad, but rarely hear of examples of any done correctly, so I'm curious to know what's missing or what's not being done for stories in games to at least be decent.
In my experience, people who talk like that are often people who think stories have no place in games to begin with. They won't give suggestions on doing it right because they don't think it should be done at all, so I wouldn't worry too much about what they say.

I think is right, although I do think you should invent story arcs for quests along with trying to account for various different methods of solving problems.

God tier advice except for the setting part. Building a good setting and writing good characters and plot are not mutually exclusive

Story haters think a story is getting in the way just by existing in the game.

Sure, but if you have to choose one, it's better to have well-written plots and characters in a generic setting instead of a highly detailed setting with nothing interesting going on.

>Building a good setting and writing good characters and plot are not mutually exclusive
No, but it's a common problem that people sacrifice one in favor of the other. To be honest though, I think the problem does go deeper.

There are essentially two different ways of creating fantasy worlds: mythological, and speculative. Hard core world building usually falls into the category of the second, but in my experience, best fantasy falls in the first one. Where the fantastic elements don't exist as a plain speculations, but rather exist to convey some form of symbolic or archetypal concepts, that unlike simple speculation, resonate much more profoundly with people. Mythological fantasy can be, in it's own odd way, mimetic in a way that speculative fantasy rarely can be.

My point is: when you use fantastic elements in fantasy writing, you should ask what they mean, rather than what part of the extensive backstory structure they elude to, if that makes any sense.

>everyone saying to avoid elves and dwarves completely because Tolkien did it
You guys realize that Tolkien's elves and dwarves were literally ripped straight from mythology, right? He fleshed them out and personalized them to his liking, but the basic concepts he used are older than the language he used to write about them. He did not invent the concept, he does not own the concept, and he's not the best iteration of the concept.
He even said all this himself.

If you ban yourself from using a concept because someone else already did something similar, you're never going to be able to write anything, because everything has already been done before. Unique does not necessarily imply good, and your personal setting does not need to be the best or the most unique. If you like it and it allows you to write good stories, then it's a good setting. Who gives a fuck how many overused tropes show up?

Thank you for your input. It has helped me out a little bit. For the most part, I've been thinking about character interaction with each other more than anything else.

You're not. I wasn't trying to imply cutscenes are inherently bad. I was mostly looking for other options that could be applied as well alongside it.

I was mostly thinking how story and gameplay could work together rather than them being two separate entities where one overlaps over another. Of course, that depends how much "in the way" means. Even with a "skip" option, some people would find it it to be intrusive.

Fair enough. I still hold the stance that game mechanics are important, but I feel like it can benefit from being complemented with proper structure from writing.

There's a lot of tips, but the most useful one I can think of is "consistency".

Don't try to juggle too many balls and make everything feel like it belongs to the same world and feel real, even if it's a world completely unlike ours. Also, try not to have favorite characters because they'll almost never be the ones the reader/player likes. Other than that, you should just read a lot of good stories, plays and stuff and try to reverse engineer what made them work then apply it.

Write the most generic shit you can think of and plagiarise from as many sources as you can, then leave it alone for a week.

Return to your first draft and rewrite the whole thing this time expanding the areas you find most interesting, and fleshing out the characters and their dialogue. Steal famous lines from movies/books. When finished take another week off.

Return to your second draft, but this time rewrite the whole thing from another character's perspective along with their own interpretation of the events. Make your first attempt to break the story into ten self contained sections. When finished take another week long break.

Return to your second draft again and choose a new character to rewrite the whole story again from their perspective and interpretation. Again break it into ten parts. Again take another week break.

Now rewrite everything, taking the best parts of all your previous rewrites, with ten self contained sections, then write alternative scenarios for at least five of the sections. Take another week off.

By this time you should have the core of your story and characters sorted out, but your story likely massive so the rewrites this time will attempt to write out everything exactly as it is already written, but with the goal shortening it by half, without cutting anything. When done rest for a week.

Make a second attempt at what you did last week. Rest another week.

Make a third attempt, but now start storyboarding your story with the game. Make rewrites to fit within the constraints of your game. Rest for another week.

Go through your three compression drafts and use the best parts for a fourth rewrite while also continuing with your storyboarding. Rest another week.

By this point your story is finished and just a matter of fitting it into your game. Rewrite as needed.

>You guys realize that Tolkien's elves and dwarves were literally ripped straight from mythology, right?
Except A) that does not make them any less overused and worn out, and B) his elves and dwarves are NOTHING like their mythological and folklore counterparts. His elves have more in common with fairies in anglo-saxon and celtic tradition, while his dwarves are more in common with german gnomes.
The main problem, however, is that it has been done, and usually a lot less competently than Tolkien had done it. Tolkien created his own unique, special synthesis of certain mythological concepts - and yes, those were great, which is one of the reasons why they resonated with the audience so well that everybody internalized and eventually reused them. Ever since then, the already somewhat simplified icon has been washed out over and over and over until they became meaningless, boring, worn out husks, tropes existing for the sake of genre conventions. The problem is not just that they have been done, the problem is that nobody is going to do them better than he did.

If you want to take inspiration from great authors like Tolkien, do what he did. Read real mythology and take inspiration there. Look for different archetypes, try to understand WHAT MADE elves appealing, rather than transplanting their superficial qualities and name.

The problem with elves and dwarves is that they have been rendered predictable and meaningless.

read story engeneering.

Most people I see put more effort into their universe, not their plots.

My wife who is apeshit for fantasy books mostly cares about the rules you create for the universe and how well you follow them. Things cant be too convenient but use the tools you give the universe to create your ups and downs.

Make half the cast die

this

I don't know about the story but you have to make the world really cozy. Like, you'd want the players want to live in that world. If you're going for the lighthearted adventure fantasy game anyway.

Yes, I guess you're right. I'll take your advices into account too. I'm trying to write something and at the moment I'm stuck in the building setting part.

I wish I had friends that know as much as you seem to know about his topic.

Wow. So many good advices I found here. What kind of Sup Forums is this?

>Look for different archetypes, try to understand WHAT MADE elves appealing, rather than transplanting their superficial qualities and name.
Ok good, you're about halfway there. Now, take those core qualities that make the archetype appealing, and go flesh them out into a fully fledged idea. You might notice that at some point of another, you wind up running into those overused superficial qualities you were complaining about. But that's alright, you can just try a different take on the concept! Except that's been done before too. In fact, every single possible variation or twist on the concept has been done before somewhere, probably more times than you can count, almost as though people have been creating fiction for as long as we've had the means to remember and communicate ideas.

Just because an idea is used frequently does not mean it's bad. Things do not need to be new to be good. These ideas show up so often because people like them and want to see more of them. It doesn't matter that every fantasy setting ever has muh treehugging druid elves, because people like treehugging druid elves and want to play as them and read about them and see more of them. I know for a fact that at some point in your life you've finished playing the last game/reading the last book in a series and found yourself desperately wishing there was someone else making something like that. Even the most generic and overused tropes still aren't even that prevalent, especially not in the eyes of people who enjoy them.

Plus, I don't really see how taking inspiration from mythology is different than taking inspiration from modern fiction. If anything, using mythology as inspiration is what's been done before :^)

I'm gonna share a little unpopular secret with you. The best fantastic literature is not fantasy to begin with. The best fantasy literature is magical realism or many of it's close siblings. Look at stories by Cortazar, or Borges, or Calvino, or Bulgakov, or Schulz, or Kafka. The thing that differentiates those authors from average fantasy fiction is the fact they use magical motives to tell meaningful stories about things in the real world. No amount of extensive and complex world building can ever rival a good human story, a good tale of a good character. Even the damn original mythology is usually a form of symbolic para-psychological tale, a tale of meaningful and relatable concepts told through language of symbols and associations.

I had tried world building for five years, crafting an expansive, complex, extremely detailed world - spend months devising histories, mythologies, cosmologies, cultures, traditions, races.
Wrote hundreds of pages of materials. Not a single page of decent literature has ever came out of it.

Then one day I sat down to just write myself out of depression. I started making up non-sense tales about cigarette butts coming to life and running away from my heels, about talking vipers living in desk drawers, stories about my friends or memories of long summer evenings. No complex systems, no rich lore, no system to them.
Those were the first good things I ever wrote.

That is the sad reality of fantasy. Imagination is a fantastic tool, but it must serve a relevant story.

should i read this thread?

you could read it, but i offer a better choice

suck my cock, dude

You are mixing together archetypes and tropes. Elves were a personification of a certain archetype in Tolkien's world. Take them out of that world, use the because that is what you expect out of fantasy, and you end up with a meaningless, worn out trope. There is no reason to use elves - creatures fitting that particular story, and transplanting them into a different fiction just because. Their story has been told already. All you end up with is regurgitation of the same story, the same idea, in a setting that, let's not kid ourselves, won't be as good as Tolkien's one.

Elves and dwarves are reused because they have became a cliché. People use them because that is what people expect fantasy to feature. It loses purpose. You can tell a new story about the same idea, the same archetype, but not about the same fucking elves.

When you use elves and dwarves again, ALL you do is to make your work more predictable, more genre conforming. People like that, because it makes for easily accessible fiction: people don't like to challenge themselves. But that does not make for good fiction.

Using elves and dwarves today is a cheap, shitty trick that shows you don't have anything of substance to tell. If you want to talk about the archetype that elves represent, talk about that archetype, not about the superficial traits loosely associated with it in a much better work of a much better author. Elves were a part of Tolkien's work: they made perfect sense there. That does not mean they make sense in other fiction. Using elves means alluding to a better book, instead of saying something that can stand up on it's own merits.

i mean, are there good ideas here, or it's standard Sup Forums rambling

>focus on primarily creating a story YOU would enjoy, not a story you think others might enjoy.
This is the best advice I've read in a long time. There's a lot of good advice in this thread but this is too overlooked for how important it is.

both

now get to suckin'

No, because fiction is a dull, generic and overused trope that Tolkien already did better.
I'd say nonfiction is better, except Tolkien existed in real life and therefore has invalidated all forms of literature by being better than you.

im blocking you faggot, suck yourself off

Make the gameplay first. Build the story around it.

Your end-point is true but whats also true is that you didnt know how to use the material you created...you implied so yourself btw

Magical realism is a genre like any other, can be good or shit. Good and human stories can very much be found in works with extensive worldbuilding like Dune or LOTR, its just a matter of how well you know your shit.

Just avoid painting anyone in black or white. Every faction should have understandable motives for what they do.

>all these people taking the time to give genuine advice

come on guys, if OP doesn't even know how to start his story he's too far gone. his generic fantasy story #2131214 will never see the light of day, let alone get to the first draft stage, like most people who come here with their great game ideas.

Except Tolkien didn't invent elves, his elves aren't the best elves and most of Tolkien's work is actually pretty shit based on your own classifications.
Get over yourself and go actually read LoTR. It's really not as flawless and wonderful as everyone told you.

It's actually a terrible piece of advice, exactly the kind of logic that leads to fan fiction wank, magical realm, or the kind of autistic world-building overload that nobody ever wants to read.

Storytelling is a craft, not a self-indulgence. You should tell stories that people need or want to hear, you should think of it as a way to communicate messages across. You should tell stories because they are truly worth telling.

You are pathetic.

I'll give you the bullet points:
Read good writers.
Avoid stereotypes and tropes.
Interesting characters doing interesting things is much more important than an interesting world.
maintain an internal logic (doesn't have to be realistic).
Subverting stereotypes isn't the same as having an original idea.
Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

Think of new ways to use old concepts.

Magic doesn't have to be throwing fireballs and green healing auras.
Your races don't need to be the common ones, and you don't really even need to have different races at all.
Weapons don't have to be conventional either. Maybe your world has no workable metal. What kind of weapons would be forged with wood being the only viable resource to create weapons?

Be different.

If you let other people decide for you whats "truly worth telling" then you probably arent writing anything worth reading.

What's the point of a thread if it's just for the OP alone?

I think it goes without saying that you shouldn't autistically self-indulge. However if you're writing a story only because it's something you think others will enjoy and not because it's a story you want to tell then that advice is important to remember.

God damn you're so pretentious you made my vegan, organic, free range tofu roll its eyes.
Maybe if you shill Tolkien harder some of his talent will rub off on you.

I would argue that the first step is tell the story you want, then through many rewrites have it evolve into a story everyone will like.
Most of the shit you listed happens because a story doesn't get past the first couple rewrites.

>Your end-point is true but whats also true is that you didnt know how to use the material you created...you implied so yourself btw
I did know how to use it, I just realized it's not really worth telling t begin with. You are right that magical realism is "just a genre", though you are wrong to compare it to genre fiction like Dune. And Dune, much like Tolkien's work, is great at the points where it (knowingly or unknowingly) draws from great, ancient mythological archetypes and motives. The world building is actually accidental to that. In Dune this becomes painfully apparent as the quality of the books drops distinctly with each next title, as the original themes recede in favor of more world building that ultimately means jack shit.

>Except Tolkien didn't invent elves, his elves aren't the best elves and most of Tolkien's work is actually pretty shit based on your own classifications.
You are a complete fucking idiot and you need to stop posting. Tolkien did invent elves in the form that we know them - their mythological counterparts were very different (just look up elves in german folklore or mythology for fuck sake) - the rest is literal nonsense and absolute bullshit.

And yes, I had read LOTR. The fact that you can't appreciate what it is and what it did is not my problem.

build a strong foundation. figure out the most mundane details.

>How does town X get food?
>Why is this character afraid of water? How did that happen?
>How does magic react to this material? This one? This one?

harness that autism. make it useful

I'm happy Stellaris pics are n ow making an appearance.

Well, that's what I'm trying to accomplish. I want to build a complex setting/lore that serves an equally impressive plot. I know I'm being too ambitious but I can't imagine doing it in a different way.

>Tolkien did invent elves in the form that we know them
>LoTRfags are THIS clueless
God damn I bet you would argue with the man himself if Tolkien came here right now and called you out on your bullshit. He already did pre-emptively but obviously you have not fucking read his books or you would know that.

Not op, but I'm also getting some good advices. And even if I don't finish any project, I find this thread really interesting.

I'm not wrong in referring to Dune because for starters I'm referring to the first book (otherwise I would have specified the series) and secondly it very much does have human stories being told within it, fulfilling the parameters you laid down. And every bit of its world-building in the story serves to help the greater themes of strength, endurance, hope, etc.

Whether he "borrowed" from mythological concepts or whathaveyou is irrelevant, the fact remains its all still there.

I honestly dont even give a fuck about genre distinctions and conventions, to me fiction is fiction.

>If you let other people decide for you whats "truly worth telling" then you probably arent writing anything worth reading.
That is a nice apologetic bullshit for why you can't be arsed to actually work hard on your fiction and improve yourself as a writer. The reality is, a single individual nearly never has the capacity to understand and figure out as complex task as good storytelling. Especially not one arrogant enough to dismiss the thousand years of experience and knowledge accumulated by thousands of people smarter than him.

Humility is the first step towards being a decent person, being a decent person is the first step to writing good stuff.

Again: you are pathetic.

>I would argue that the first step is tell the story you want, then through many rewrites have it evolve into a story everyone will like.
I would argue the first step is telling a story that you have instead of wandering if it's the kind of story you want. If you think you are going to create a story by your own criteria of enjoyment, the odds are you don't really have a story to tell, and the outcome will be always weak: it's not going to be a story, just a product of biases and fancies. This is exactly the problem, mind you, that resulted in the kind of absolute wank like Twilight or whatever the new "youth novel" shit you see in your average bookstore.
"Finding" a good story is almost never a question of what you like or dislike, it's a matter of what you had seen or experienced.