this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Worldbuilding

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Rules of !Worldbuilding:

See here for a longer, more explanatory version.

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Kind of a weird question I know, but let me explain. I'm not talking about your themes or messages, but the general feeling someone looking into your world or imagining themselves in it might get about the situation, when the world is not in conflict. Basically, you know how when you watch a franchise like Star Trek, it has certain recurrent moods and feelings, like the tranquility of flying through space, the bittersweet isolation of being on a ship in deep space, where you are close to your crewmates but far from everything else you know, and the general professional but still sufficiently jovial atmosphere that they seem to go for? Or with Pokemon when it's very adventure driven and based around meeting everyone you come across and making friends both with other humans and also with these magical creatures! I'm sure you can think of descriptions like these for your favourite franchises. We've all imagined ourselves in these worlds or imagined ourselves as characters in these worlds right? What were some of the vibes or feelings you imagined when you imagined your world? Or I guess another way of putting it is what would a slice of life exploration of your world be like?

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[–] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

(For the setting of 'UNHA')

From an out-of-universe point of view, one of my golden rules has long been 'internal consistency' - delivering a sense that there is some larger process or flow which drives from one element to another. (Since the setting is largely an excuse to design sci-fi military equipment, in this case this is reflected as the doctrine which governs all equipment, and the evolution technology and its limitations impact how they are designed.

In terms of in-universe... I'd suggest it's something similar. I'd almost say the biggest idea is that "this is a universe of moving parts" - lots of things going on everywhere. Every person you walk past, every piece of machinery humming and clanking away, every place or starship or whatever has some small piece of a larger whole that it is playing.

Moving through it should give you a sense that there's no one central story. This is a setting built of innumerable small stories, mounded up together.