What media has your favorite worldbuilding?
What media has your favorite worldbuilding?
Personally I'm really obsessed with the lore in Fire Emblem: Three Houses
It was a short story, but I really like Faun by Joe Hill. The way the two worlds interact was really fun, and I'd love to hear more about it.
The Expanse.
I love the idea of sovereign nations Earth and Mars, and the political conflicts of not just diferent people, but different people living in different atmospheres, unlike different nations on earth, the difference between a Earther's and Martian's live is so different: Gravity, Breathable Atmosphere, the Ocean.
Also there are people that live outside of the planets in space stations that have never experienced a planet's gravity and their bodies and unable to survive on planets. The story expands to other star systems.
Its originally a book series but it has been adapted into TV, although they canceled the TV series before it was finished :(
But still worth a watch tho, the politics is more fun than irl politics.
Most recently, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, had great world building and character development.
You know, I've always liked the Avatar:TLA's worldbuilding
Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi by Ryouko Kui.
It has wonderful world building introducing it slowly over time without info dumping, or better said, there is a nerd in the world info dumping on his friends, who don't always appreciate it =D
serious answer: Discworld. every storyline starts out completely separate but through the years they wove together into a world rushing headlong into a new age.
shitpost answer: ace attorney. eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
I've enjoyed the world building of the Warhammer 40k setting.i started out with the models in high school and moved into the books to not have to deal with sweaty, agro nerds wanting to rules lawyer the game into no fun. So many interesting stories set in the grimdark universe, and a ton of great characters to follow.
Peter F Hamilton is another good one, though his world building is rather dense. Hell tell you all about how the roads on some alien world are enzyme bonded concrete or how the magic paths traverse entire worlds and systems. Definitely not for everyone, but the audiobooks are great (John Lee has such a soothing voice) and I've heard them so many times they make a great media to fall asleep to when I'm traveling.
The original StarCraft and Brood War. I’ve always hoped a movie would be made about the story/lore but hollywood doesn’t exactly have a good track record with turning games into movies.
I still remember the first time I played StarCraft and watched the intro movie, when the battle cruisers left it blew my child mind.
BattleTech/mechwarrior. I think it started as a tabletop game? Lots of media came from it, and video games pop up every few years starting in 1989.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech
The series began with FASA's debut of the board game BattleTech (originally named Battledroids) by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock III and has since grown to include numerous expansions to the original game, several board games, role playing games, video games, a collectible card game, a series of more than 100 novels, and an animated television series.[3]
The main wiki: https://www.sarna.net/wiki/
There was a so bad it's good cartoon in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLJM4vjMdhc
Tons of novels, two modern TTRPG systems, two current tabletop miniature wargame rule sets.
A new action game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2000890/MechWarrior_5_Clans/
A very good turn based game very closely following the tabletop rules: https://store.steampowered.com/app/637090/BATTLETECH/
A multiplayer online action game: https://mwomercs.com/
The Expanse or First Law
I've never heard of First Law, but it being mentioned alongside the Expanse is reason enough for me to check it out
10/10 recommend. I'm 6/9 through the expanse and on 7/10 with Joe Abercrombie. (these are number of books, not ratings)
Joe's books are great. After the first trilogy, it's 3 stand-alone and a compilation of short stories. So if you don't love his stuff (if you liked the expanse you will) you can be done after the First Law Trilogy
My lemmy username is directly related to the First Law Trilogy
Dune is incredibly unique. Scifi without computers and genetic magic. All politics. The books are outstanding.
Caves of Qud was my first contact with post post-apocalypse. Can't even begin to convey how strange and magical everything feels in that universe.
The latter books are just weird with all the sexual imprinting and other weirdness which sounds more like written by a horny teenager than an adult.
I really loved Magnamund, the world setting for Joe Denver's Lone Wolf adventure books and their later novelizations.
LotR - it's really fucking hard to top especially when Tolkien was pioneering the field.
Chinese xianxia and wuxia shows. I’m a brown person from the American southwest who grew up with mostly European mythology and fantasy stories. Learning about a very different world of myth and lore has been endlessly fascinating and exciting for me. I even homebrewed a ttrpg around it so I can share some of the cool concepts and stories I have learned.
In your opinion what are this genres masterpieces or best introductions?
His Dark Materials is worldbuilt very well, I also like ATLA for its worldbuilding, even if it's a bit simplistic at times.
HDM for sure.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is really solid, if limited. Not sure how similar it is to the non-advance version.
DrakeNier series: Starting by red dragon falling from sky in 2000s. Through guy in medieval, postapocalyptic 3400s trying to save his sister. Ending on androids in maid suits fighting a war against machine lifeforms and preparing Earth for return of humanity, in 11945.
Also I didn't tell about origins of the dragon, because I haven't played Drakengard series yet.
The Elder Scrolls is probably the one I've had the most fun theory-crafting about, but I will admit that you have to pick and choose what to care about.
Also the old Wipeout racing games had a remarkable amount of background plot going on that was really pretty fun. The self-awareness to poke fun at Fusion's poorly-received changes as being the in-universe result of megacorp meddling for mass market appeal gave me a good laugh, but you can piece together a surprising amount of the world from random references in team flavour text
What's lovely about Elder Scrolls lore is it very much feels like you have to investigate or draw your own conclusions about things. Things can rarely be taken at face value since people and things in the world will contradict each other. At a surface level it sounds like there is no cohesion but even the bias itself can be revealing.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series.
Just a breathtaking setting that begins with the first hundred settlers and traces the intrigue, terraforming, conflicts, and dreams of the colonists. It's a sweeping epic written on a human scale.
Magic: the Gathering.
It churns out a ton of unique settings and ideas for worlds.
Right now I'm way down a Brandon Sanderson rabbit hole, so I guess the Cosmere? I'd say Stormlight Archive, but Mistborn is really cool because they're set at the inflection points in the planet's history. The first arc is excellent, and it changes the world. The second arc is set in the future, with mythologies based on the first arc and scientific progress based on secrets uncovered in the first. The changes in the use of magic are really cool. There's a third arc planned to be set in the future from there.
But the Cosmere as a whole shares some core concepts and characters can move across it, and that comes into other standalone works like (3 of 4) secret projects and a bunch of other stuff.
Agreed - Brandon may not be the best at certain facets of writing, but he's nothing short of virtuosic when it comes to worldbuilding. The cosmere is a masterwork in this regard.
I love his work and bought physical copies of all of Stormlight, Mistborn, and just a couple days ago the pretty "premium" hardcovers for the secret projects, just to have on my shelves.
My one thing is that his introductions are almost always slower than I'd like. Though ironically he did better in the Wax and Wayne Mistborn arc and I like the Vin arc more.
I really love Jack Vance’s world building. His Gaean Reach setting gives an endless variety of cultures, customs and beliefs. And the Dying Earth novels formed the basis for magic system of DnD.
But the real treasure is in how he can let these worlds come alive with his descriptions. Often he would spend a whole paragraph describing something that will never be part of the story but manages to perfectly set the tone of the local atmosphere.
I grew with these books (thanks to my dad’s impressive personal SF library) and they’ve always managed to spark my imagination like no other book.
Call me boring but Randland (The Wheel of Time).
I read those books over and over again just to spend more time there. I still remember more details about the cultures, cities, and fashion in those books better than I could ever remember the plot. The magic and higher moral themes were very simplistic in comparison to other books but RJ really excelled at fleshing out a continent with diverse and unique peoples that made sense in that world.
Dragon Age, I really love the lore. Hopefully the new one won't disappoint.
Also Wheel of Time has a really nice worldbuilding.