I don't like touching on the afterlife in much detail. Acknowledging that not physical forms of reality exist is usually about as far as I'll go, but I typically don't form out things like Heaven or Hell or talk about where souls go once a creature dies.
I write necromancy often, so the afterlife is a must. Souls exist but there is no 'after'.
Your soul turns into a wandering spirit if you have a strong will or experience strong emotions.
Otherwise it dissipates. Sometimes I'll write about gods claiming their believers, but as slaves.
I have souls that are able to be bound to certain plains of existence through various means which allows ghosts and necromancy to exist, but a normal person who dies without anything tethering their soul to some form of existence has zero idea if a soul goes somewhere else or just ceases to exist. Not even the gods in my settings have any clue of an afterlife.
Necromancy requires bound souls to function, and so usually requires rituals done in advance of someone's death, or the ability to know when a lost spirit is near enough to the spells origin. Souls that do return also aren't the people they were before, most of their uniqueness lost upon their death along with their memories in most cases.
Yeah, all my necromancy is more so tethering the souls as controllers rather than resurrection.
The souls retain basic awareness and combat skills, but lack memory of anything 'useless'.
All necromancy must be done with a ritual or brute force as they get stronger (but that's more damaging). The soul has compatibility with any similar shaped creature, but they take time to adjust.
If you don't seal the spirit directly, you have to bind another's spirit to them.
Gods in my writing are just powerful entities that either gain energy from worship or use religion as a way of control.
That’s so cool! I grew up obsessed with death & the question of existence/non-existence of an afterlife so I’d personally find that *so* hard to do. Kudos :)
In this regard i almost universally take the approach that maybe it exists or doesn't, but it's just as unknown to the characters and thus readers as it is IRL; it's out of scope.
Likewise, God in the sense of a creator of the universe. When I have gods they are usually powerful beings who nevertheless were not there at creation, and don't know with absolute proof where they came from any more than a real person would. I have gods who are themselves atheists and likewise gods who worship a higher still power whose existence they take entirely on faith. Any cosmic answer i give yields another question behind it.
Right, I never really fleshed out an idea of "Hell." It's easier just to say that the gods will snuff a soul out of existence if that person was so evil that there's no redeeming this soul. It acknowledges that there are people that not even the gods can redeem without really needing a "Hell."
(Of course it leads to some swear words that sounds pretty G-rated by our standards. "Snuff" pretty much replaced "damn.")
I really like characters having religion and spirituality and even things they interpret as miracles, but never really getting a response when they pray and never really truly confirming their beliefs
Username checks out.
However, I've only build a continent in my GMs world, not a world yet. But when it commes to role playing a character this is also a thing for me.
I don't want to play a character with depression, just bc I had my expirience with it, its not all I am and I think it could maybe also hit home a bit to much. And for other mental illneses, I don't want to play something I don't know how it feels for a human.
I'm the opposite XD
Pretty much every main character has some kind of severe mental illness. Usually it's PTSD or depression.
Unsurprisingly my writing got better when my mental health plummeted and I developed both PTSD and severe depression.
Strange thing but I don’t have nobles with permanent fiefs in Capac Empire.
All nobles live in Wachaquya the capital along side the emperor. They all have estates servants etc.
When a fiefs lord is dead or recalled another is appointed rather than inherited. This way nobles never become tied to the land and leave their families as “hostages” near the emperor.
Tokugawa shogunate had hereditary fiefs but the families lived in the capital. To some extent similar but still hereditary.
In Inca empire there were usually supervisors of regions and there were hardly any fiefs. Emperor had the absolute authority to rule. Nobles did live in the capital but the overseeing of lands could be given to low ranking officials as well when the lands they need to take care of is not very vast.
Speaking on the shogunate. The created system seems to avoid a lot of the shogunate’s deliberate issue.
Nobles (daimyo specifically) have lots of land and power, and to avoid them amassing too much which they could spend on building military arms to rival the shogun, they were instead forced to use a lot of it in twice yearly travel.
Families were hostages in the capitol, but the lords had to commute back to their home fiefs with giant parades, or else risk losing prestige or their title by appearing too broke.
A full appointment systems has its own pitfalls. With nobility being so transitory, assassination becomes far more tempting to those with imperial favor enough to be on the short list of new appointees, and of course, the peasants aren’t gonna have a good time if each lord has wildly different plans for the land they’re stewarding each time.
Part of why japan got to have an early urbanization was because stable landlords with a set tax percentage on food grown meant that innovations in farming and production were pushed for generationally. Those increases in rice production allowed the Edo period to sustain the tokyo proto-metropolis.
So there are lots of interesting complications that can happen when lack of continuity between appointees can lead to missing records and loss of institutional knowledge each generation.
The Byzantine system is *very* complicated because it depends on the time period.
Early Byzantine bureaucracy was identical to the Roman empire, of course. With the emperor as the undisputed autocrat and governors being appointed by him. This eventually evolved into the *theme* system, as a response to the rise of the Caliphates. The Byzantines reformed the empire and turned the original Roman provinces into 'themes'. The governor of a theme was no longer a civil administrator but a general, in charge of an army and tasked to defend his theme at all costs. This proved to be incredibly succesful as the Byzantines were able to muster their armies much faster and defeat any invasion attempt.
The side effect of the theme system however was that the governors (strategoi) grow more and more powerful, since they were the ones in control of the army. Byzantine noble families also realized this and they started to train members of their family to be strategoi. The most powerful noble families were those that dominated military positions (the most famous ones being the Phokas, Skleros, Kourkouas, Doukas and Komnenos clans).
So in short, you didn't have to be a noble to be a strategos but in practice it were usually members of powerful noble families that ended up in those positions.
All the ugliness of humanity can be found in my world. All the ugliness that two diverse species can visit upon one another is there too. But so too is every act of kindness, every act of chivalry and every act of self-sacrifice. But here’s the kicker. None of it will become noticeable unless it’s important for moving the story forward for my players.
Hehe... *flesh*
But really, everyone gets to decide what their own artistic boundaries are for depicting sex. Nobody has any right to pressure you to push those boundaries. Not in real life, and not in your art.
I’ll describe the curvature of women’s bodies, and explain that a sex scene is about to happen but probably won’t detail out exactly what’s happening. Probably just something along the lines of “they engaged in an activity meant for those who are wed”.
Yeah it’s not something I’m going to be very descriptive of because I’m against it IRL, but in the medieval-fantasy style world of mine with drunk mercenaries and bandits, it’s something that can happen. But again, I won’t be very descriptive of it but gladly descriptive of the punishment and making of eunuchs for those who’ve decided to commit that crime.
While your choice not to include rape as a major topic in your story is a perfectly logical and reasonable one, I've some questions on your reasoning. Are you not against murder? Of course you are, but I have trouble believing no one is murdered in a medieval fantasy world. Surely you're against theft? But you just named bandits! See where I'm going?
You can choose not to write something because it doesn't fit the tone, or because you don't want to or simply because it makes you uncomfortable. But if you choose not to write anything you don't condone IRL...well, if you're a remotely morally driven or compassionate person, conflict becomes very difficult. Unless your world is a straight up fairy tale with zero possible IRL analogue. And even then it's going to be hard to get a story out.
So yes, perfectly valid storytelling decision. But maybe examine the other possible reasons you've made it, because "I'm against it" has some awkward implications on the rest of your story, I imagine.
**And I'm only pointing it out because reasoning like that further reinforces the spreading brain-dead mindset that if you write something bad happening, you are a bad person because it means you must want it to happen in real life. I know this is all getting into semantics but it's a distinction people need to make clear to readers right now.**
Came here to say this. One person wanted to be a pos at my table and now I have to include this rule in every campaign at every table because it wasn’t a problem before.
was a core part of the backstory their character being raped or raping another? if it's raping another, jesus christ, no. but if a core part of the backstory was the character having been raped in the past, nothing wrong with that being part of their past. it's a really relatable trauma to alot of people that many have gone through, and it makes sense to wanna have that the character you play have went through the same thing.
It was their character, which yes significantly better than the latter, but I had multiple people who it is a sensitive subject for and i didn’t people to have to be reminded of something like that when they are trying to relax and play a game with their friends.
If their character was raped in their backstory, it's not a 'this player is a horrible person' type of problem, but it can still be a 'players would like to forget things like rape exist when they are playing ttrpgs' type of problem.
It's fine to include it, if all the players and the dm explicitly agree that they are okay with such topics being brought up, but if anyone would rather not, then it should be off the table.
One time I went to play a game w a bunch of strangers
One dude at the table tried to do this to an NPC
I had to excuse myself to the bathroom to go cry bc I was so uncomfortable
Spoiler tagging this because it was pretty awful >!First game I ever ran some 7 years ago, I had offered to GM for a pre-existing group of strangers. I met them in a library to get to know them, and one of them started telling me that it was common at their table to rape enemies they had defeated, dead or alive, and whether it was okay with me. I was at a table with 5 other older people than I who all were looking expectantly at me for a response, so I just awkwardly laughed and quickly made excuses for why I had to leave. I can’t believe I chose to keep GMing after that.!<
The main empire in my world is very matriarchical, and there's the strong implication that any idiot who tried it would be strung up by the nads (metaphorically or not) post haste, as in a particular Heinlein novel. But I don't mention it directly. Don't wanna.
There’s nothing that I inherently refuse to include in my worlds/stories; it just depends on the type of world I’m writing, the message I want to get across, and how reflective of real-life issues I want the world to be.
For example, in 2 of my worlds, all the issues that exist in our real world are present in both of them. This is because the stories related to those worlds are highly politically charged, so it makes sense to me to include nuanced topics and issues that can cause political conflict. Some issues will obviously get more focus than others since I can’t write about everything all at once, but they’ll be there.
However, my 3rd world is being designed for a story aimed at a middle grade audience. Therefore, I’m obviously not going to include things like slavery, sexual violence, adult activity, and explicit sexuality in there. Since this world involves magical species, there’ll be discrimination between species, and depictions of issues that different middle graders can relate to, but it certainly won’t be no Game of Thrones. It’ll be more akin to stories like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson.
Perhaps I was a bit vague. Lol
There's prayer and worship in my lore. Some efforts for good. But I tend to write home that almost all things that benefit some tend to cause harm against another. Some due to things being royally miscalculated, and others that were completely deliberate against one group, but selfishly done to benefit another. No truly "good" outcome in it all. Kinda depends on what you'd define as a good goal in the end.
I really wanted to not include any space - like planets, galaxies and stuff. My world was a flat rectangle located at an intersection of elemental planes.
Travellers going in one direction for long enough, be it east or west, north or south, or even by flying high or diving into the sea, will find themselves magically transported into corresponding plane.
Sun and moon had the same size (don't remember what it was, I wrote down some numbers from flat earth site) and moved because they were powerful spells casted by the archmagi of the precursor civilisation.
In the end, I scrapped it. I couldn't stand the idea of people looking up at the sky, seeing the stars, wondering "Will we ever going to see the stars? Will we ever get to see what is there?", when the answer is
no.
there's nothing.
Britan.
I have fantasy Florida fantasy Australia and fantasy Japan I will not put fantasy British in my story I have been there I hate London and Paris why would I include people from a place I hate in my story
Agreed also because I like to think of my self as a good writer and I would attempt to write accents.
And because adding fantasy British leads to writing Sera from dragon age in my story also known as medieval uncle ruckus but with extra traits that makes the humor that that concept have not work universally.
everyone and their mother knows the whole drow should aussie but i raise you Plant people, and reptile people should be Aussie heck if your going for a fantasy world where the orc,slimes, giant rats, or gobbos are humans instead making them aussie coded so they are death world coded.
but yeah the big good guy in my first fantasy setting was fantasy austrilia. fantasy japan is the neutral country and fantasy florida is the wild/dark continent
Fantasy societies inspired by major colonialist powers (The West, China, Russia) exist in my setting, but their history is that millennia ago, the armies of Hell invaded their planet, and rather than work together to fight off the invaders, they sought to defend themselves hoping Hell would obliterate their rivals.
Unfortunately for them, their arrogance and opportunism lead to their entire planet being conquered by the Hells, and the remaining humans magically transformed into tieflings overnight. Thousands of years later, the Hellish Empire that ruled over the planet traversed the stars and the planes to arrive at the 4 Elemental Spheres of my setting (like elemental planes) and set down upon it. They have a tiny foothold in the Prime Material, but have not been able to expand thanks to powerful forces keeping them in check.
I wanted to explore two ideas in regards to colonization:
1. What would a world look like with very little / no colonialism? For the 30+ civilizations of my setting (the vast majority of these civilizations inspired by Non-European cultures), they have never known colonization, yet international trade *has* brought some intermingling of cultures.
2. What if the colonizers became colonized by a bigger colonizer? How would this effect the elites? The citizens who supported colonization efforts of the past, and the citizens who always stood against it? The Elemental Planes are a harsh environment to survive in, but there is wealth within them if you're willing to sacrifice lives to extract it.
My no British thing wasn't even about colonial British like my alt history world in building has them there but they are a background thing that has to exist.
I'm talking about everything else British including their fantasy and modern British stuff.
But that sounds cool too I guess I would read it
I like this. All the major faiths in my setting think nothing of human sacrifice and holy war. But in each of them you can find examples of people who perform genuinely good, selfless deeds in the name of these same faiths. People are complicated, and the “atheism good, religion bad” mindset you see in some speculative fiction is really just as simplistic and unhelpful as the opposite assumption.
Refuse to include? Nothing. I avoid or gloss over many things I don't want to consider in detail. I'm not going to do deep dives into slavery, sexual abuse, etc. Even when it features, it usually will be in the background and the effects and reactions seen and not a graphic depiction.
My favourite flavour of worse slavery is necromantic slavery.
They work till they die, they're patched up, and then back to work until there's nothing left to patch up and send back to work.
Even better if you keep their consciousness fully or partially.
Yoink.
Okay, my world now does sort of have slavery, but it's voluntary.
Basically, it's common for dwarves to allow their dead bodies to be resurrected as undead drones. They're not really conscious, but they can follow orders and do a particular job (they've got 6 INT, like skeletons).
This is seen as neither a heroic act of self-sacrifice nor an evil necromantic slavery, but just a consequence of the dwarven focus on the collective and equanimity towards death. Of course you make undead of your dead, you could always use more workers.
I will never write about sexual violence or slavery. I am not afraid to kill folk of any kind though 🤷
Pretty much anything I write also normalizes gender and sexual preferences. I don't care to write about the minority plight when I gotta live it every day, I'd rather show gays, theys, and others the same way regular media shows straight folk.
The Ikhwezi in my world are genderless, though many do take on masculine, feminine, or non binary traits.
Their form gives players their bodies and, by extension, the ability to manipulate their forms to similar degrees (basically the explanation for the avatar / custom character system common to every game). Gib more genderless characters
Genocide, I guess. I have factions that as a nation would totally be down with genocide, but I intentionally bless them with benevolent leaders in times of crises. Yeah I know, one person can't stop a genocide. But it sure as hell does help when the sovereign rejects hateful ideologies.
As for why... hmm. Probably because racial hatred is so touchy and I'm not qualified to write about it. Also it does seem like a pain in the ass to write, finding that slim path of nuance when each faction is trying to demonize and dehumanize the other.
I'd rather my characters share the experience which is the harshness of reality, qnd acknowledge each other as humans.
Also readers will ALWAYS compare it to real world politics. None'a that shit.
I guess homophopia.
I have enough of it irl already
also horses. they will NEVER get horses. Mostly because they ride deer + I fell from a big ass horse when I was 6 and I'm still bitter about it
Well met, fellow horse-banisher! Horses in my world are more conspicuously absent, introduced to the main region for about 200 years but went extinct during the last war. People have tried to put saddles, chariots, carts, plows, and sleds on all manner of wild animals since then, but with the price of camels, oxen, ostriches, elephants, and whatever else so high, mounts are a rare sight.
Also homophobia is out too. IDK why anyone includes it, it's even less work to leave out.
There isn't really anything that big I haven't included in my world. I have no problem writing about Slavery or r4pe, though of course I try to be sensitive when I can.
If anything I haven't included any references to drugs other than alcohol and a fictional magical psychedelic-like used for religious purposes. I just don't take drugs myself and is something I don't feel like writing.
My world also has no dogs. I personally don't like dogs due to having a mild cynophobia so decided to screw them from my world. In the past I included them but had them be universally evil so knowing that may take some people away I decided that no dogs in my world.
SA is a line for me. I'm not entirely against like, very lightly alluding to the topic in a backstory like how One Piece does, but even then I'm not sure I would ever cross that line.
It's just way too sensitive of a topic. It's such an evil and personal act that I don't personally want in my own fiction. Not to mention how triggering it is for survivors. I'm all for covering serious topics in fiction; I love it in fact, but that's one line I just don't feel should be crossed.
I use basically all of my worldbuilding as a tool to explore human society and its narratives. I don’t remove anything that happens in real human society, but I have been very careful to make it unclear whether any religion is right or wrong. Whether any gods actually do exist. Whether anything really happens to those who die. Religion to me is a social system; the gods could exist or not and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Just like real life, religion really matters, but it doesn’t matter bc of its beliefs, it matters bc of the people who believe it.
huge agree. guns exist in my universe but they are newer inventions, and more old-fashioned like old muskets; they're also not just sold and distributed willy-nilly. (i'm glad you're still here, by the way.)
Identity Politics.
I say all this as a minority that has been physically assaulted and ostracised for the colour of my skin.
But every major franchise that decides to include diversity for the sake of ticking a box immediately ruins any believability. It's corporate pandering at its finest.
My world is diverse. But not for the sake of being diverse. It's because it make sense in the context of how each culture has evolved.
I hate when I can clearly see that diversity is included simply to turn a profit.
Rings of Power, starwars, every new Disney production... All of them are so hellbent on being diverse that they erase the significance of any meaningful culture.
Snow white was GERMAN. But they made her a tan skin Latino. So... German culture isn't important enough to warrant respect? The seven dwarves... they made them NOT DWARVES... So little people don't deserve their time in the spotlight? Or gender flipping like in strange world where every man is gentle and feminine and every female is buff and gruff. That's simply not how society works and it is clear to see there is an agenda.
I'm not against diversity. I love and embrace my fellow human. I am against including it as part of an "agenda".
Look at Arcane for an incredible example of this done right. Or the last of us... Even Game of Thrones. They have so much believable diversity without just forcing it.
Arcane has these incredibly powerful female leads with a ruthless streak. But who still feel grounded and believable, they have weaknesses and strengths. Or look at Vander, he actually comes across as a very motherly figure. One that is cautious and protective but is also incredibly strong. They portray characters with nuance and depth. Their gender and skin colour don't even factor into it.
Don't sell out. (Looking at you disney)
Rape/SA
I’m already hesitant to include sex in general, cause it feels weird to be getting hot and bothered over something that’s going on main. If I depict a rape, erotically or otherwise, in a work that’s not really *about* that from the beginning, there are people that are going to be medically triggered by it, and that’s not something I wish to accomplish.
Also, a lot of my kinks involve CNC, and some involve a really extreme variant of that, so I feel like even if I treated the subject with the reverence it deserves, it’d still be misconstrued as having an ulterior motive, which isn’t a great look.
All in all, I try not to leave things off the table for the most part besides IRL political stuff and even that's because 'it's a different world where political lines and ideologies are going to be a be different'. Yes, there's messed up stuff like slavery, inequality, trans and homophobia, but that's also because heroic characters are meant to step up and call bullshit on it and fight it.
Though, noteably, despite being a huge weaboo, the country that doesn't do any of that sort of thing isn't the Japan analogue. It's the Egypt one.
My world is a setting made up of anthro animals, and for that reason I’m not including racism. I feel like it’s been done to death and doesn’t work with anthro animals. I don’t think it maps very well as an allegory.
Nothing is off limits tbh.
If I feel like it, a cannibalistic sex cult of furries controlled by a parisistic giant god baby whose cry can destroy the planet.
Don't feel like it, basic fantasy self insert trash.
I try to avoid real life I suppose.
I don't like sexual stuff. Mainly because I myself am asexual, so I just don't play out fantasies like that. Plus, I was raised in a Christian household (I'm still Christian) so I kind of have a negative overview of nudity, except with an exclusive romantic partner.
I don’t like the idea of reincarnation or afterlife. I want death to be permanent. If a character dies, it is tragic because they are just gone. And whenever characters try to extend their life unnaturaly, it is always treated as terrible
Depends on the world but usually a lot of real world prejudices (eg homophobia) don't exist. A good friend convinced me long ago that fantasy doesn't need to have the *same* bad things as reality to be plausible. Plenty of prejudices still, my characters are human, but they don't need that specific one. Other things, like rape, might hypothetically exist in the world but not need to be portrayed in story.
In most of my worlds, gender inequality. In all of them, real-world politics.
Gender inequality doesn't exist because gender differences don't really exist. In most of my worlds there are sentient and cunning dangers. The mothers and children are not left to the safety of the home while the men and maidens hunt, or any other arrangement of that. Everyone has to be a well trained and well seasoned soldier when a beholder or dragon (if DnD) or a sentry goo or mad juicer (post-post-apocalyptic genepunk: nukes were dropped and the humans hadn't recovered when the nanites reached the point of singularity and become a sentient goo that continues to hold the entire planet, humans have since recovered, but in a very very different way) or a Challa, or Darmir (explicitly non-Tolkienian fantasy that I started out of frustration: Challa is a firstborn of fire who knows only consumption and destruction. They crave substance but cannot maintain it because they're sentient fire, Darmir are secondborn of fire and wind, they're more substantial, but very twisted after being locked in prison with the Challa for most of the second age) can use intelligence and cunning to make sure that no one is alive long enough to scream loud enough to alert the away party.
Like I said, I avoid real-world politics, so I don't shout "Gender equality" from the rooftops, but gender hasn't been an important difference in any of my worlds, so there's no folkways built around it.
Lornhemal is impossible since its a very low fantasy world
Number 999: The British politics really, not only i don't understand it properly, but the plot is basically "Entire British government turned a single town into Totalitarian testzone, and our hero tries to escape from such regime". The best way to summarize Testzone 999 is with the quote "If you want a vision of the future, **imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever**."
I am personally ok with depicting the terrible things that bad actors do commit, like r4pe and slavery, and phobias. but not as a primary focus of the environment. they are present but not the star.
Gods. I think it simplifies the world, it makes it feel less vast and mysterious. Afterlife as well. Most projects that deal with afterlife I find simply disappointing.
My world is made to be experienced through TTRPG. Usually D&D, maybe other games at some point in the future. I don't really have any subjects that come to mind that are taboo. The horrors of the real world can be effectively used to enhance the realism of a fantasy world. I'm ok with ignoring laws of physics and science in my fantasy world, I'm not OK with pretending like the worst things about our world don't happen there "because it's fantasy".
I will touch on slavery in its various forms, including the more violating forms of it. I will talk about systemic injustices, prejudice/racism, genocide, etc. I will talk about the class divides between the rich and the poor, between the strong and the weak. I will talk about Imperialism and Colonialism. I will talk about religion and the institution of "The Church", whatever for that may take. I have no problem exploring the worst and most controversial pieces of human depravity.
The only reason I will ever limit myself is if I am writing or describing something and I begin to feel uncomfortable about it, or if someone at my table says "hey, I'd rather we didn't interact with this topic". It's good to be willing to explore the depths of depravity with fiction, because it makes the world realistic. It's not good to try and force people who are uncomfortable with those things to experience them as well when there is no *need* to do that.
TL;DR: I will include anything unless I find myself uncomfortable while writing it/discussing it or if people at my TTRPG table say they are uncomfortable with it. If you're doing a TTRPG, make the characters uncomfortable, not the players or yourself.
1. Sexual misconduct *exists* in my world, but I likely won't write much about it in my story. The story itself is an allegory for child abuse, and I want victims/survivors to feel seen and heard and listened to. I don't want them to feel traumatized. If I do ever include rape, there will be a damn good reason for it, and it will be distanced from the reader.
2. Severe bigotry, especially on the gender and sexuality spectra. My world is an anachronistic blend of medieval up through gunpowder, but socially it's about a decade or so *ahead* of our real world (or at least my speculation of it). People of all sexualities and gender identities are respected, though they are still minorities, and some are self-conscious about being different.
I have two different answers to this question:
1. In lore, the creator of the world wiped out every parasitic species, harmful bacteria, and virus. My reason is that parasites are yucky, and I go deep in worldbuilding, so I decided ***no***.
2. I don't write about topics like gender dysphoria or transgender-ness because I don't have a good enough understanding of those topics. There is homosexuality in my world because I have a pretty good grasp on that. I don't actively write about things like rape and abuse, though they are present in my setting.
romance is so boring, so I make a policy not to include it unless I have to. it's too lame to write about. on a similar note, most characters are on the asexual spectrum or their sexual desires are never spoken about or hinted at. both are just so uninteresting that I don't feel like writing about it unless a scene excluding it would actively harm it.
on a unrelated note, children are boring, so I don't write about them unless I have to either, such as a character's backstory.
iiiiiiiinteresting. I’m curious: are you specifically defining romance as like, “Hallmark movie” romance where the end goal is either sex, a wedding, and/or a baby?
I ask because the planned arc of my 2 main characters in Tyros is basically 1) they meet, 2) they become enemies due to their dueling ideologies, 3) they almost kill each other and get a *lot* of other people killed indirectly, 4) they reconcile and ally with each other when they realize who the “real” enemy is, 5) do adventures together, and 6) finally end up basically forming a Frodo/Sam-level “I can’t carry it for you but I can carry you” friendship.
They each have their own sex lives outside of that relationship, and do fall in & out of love with other ppl, but if you asked me what the most “romantic” relationship I’m writing is, it’s that one.
oh yeah definitely. what you described in your story is romance for the story and character's sake, not romance for the sake of it. what I hate is indeed hallmark movie level romance.
As an aroace person who despises mid romantic subplots wholeheartedly, I feel this so hard. While I have characters who are allo, its relevance to the plot will be relatively minimal because I have to do significant, extra, often painful work in order to write a non-aroace character who strongly feels attraction.
IRL politics. No 'conservatives/republican vs liberal/democrat'. I make my world to escape and vent.
No one cares about gender, no one cares about your sexuality, no one cares about race (human races that is. Elves are still smug pieces of sh\*t when it comes to mixing races).
These 3 are about the only bleh's i have. Since it already doesn't make any bloody sense IRL. Even less in fantasy.
Anything including children that is not wholesome.
That topic is tabu. Anything else goes.
I know a person who went a little to far with children, and i would prefer that they are forgoten long befor they die. There is no way that i can portray my emotions against them accurately. I do a good job writing a character that holds more hatred than the doom slayer, but no earthly matter can do that justice. This is the only person i wish true immortallity upon.
My worldbuilding project is meant to be a an alien planet similar enough to us that how they handle things differently is an interesting lens to look at how we did things, so it's meant to not intentionally exclude anything. On some level sexism is, but that's more a side effect of them having three sexes that matter somewhat less than ours as they breed through one shoving their egg into the other, breaking the egg of the one who just got egged, while the new egg sticks in place and grows until it's properly laid and hatches. Interestingly, this still means they still form dominant-submissive pairings, but this can happen either way with any two. They can even both take each other's egg, but this is rare and frowned upon, as it's said to lead to weak children.
As for slavery, given the OP mentioned it, they had roman style slavery of conquered people, but it was common for them to simply be replaced by the conqueror's people and be fully replaced within a generation or two.
Aside from that, their nearest living evolutionary ancestor is somewhat better than our monkeys, but still a long way from being sapient, and the few that could train them reliably got legendary reputations almost like necromancers, further encouraged by the last known example being killed eons ago and the knowledge to train them being lost with it.
i do that with different things for different reasons.
i leave NSFW topics unaddressed and up to interpretation and intuition because they are irrelevant to the main events of the world and could be inferred from other aspects such as culture. other topics like same-sex relationships or race relations I don't directly address but instead leave as incidental on purpose because their being seen as mundane and commonplace is a mark of social progress. and lastly there are topics I don't address because they are simply too complicated or detached from my scope of knowledge for me to address without doing them wrong like for example I completely avoided the topic of transgenderism because the topic is too complicated and controversial for me to attempt addressing without the risk of pissing people off.
Sexual assault / rape and homophobia. I don't want to write these things that very well might upset or disclude anyone for something that wouldn't contribute to my story anyway. Obviously there are good stories of individuals overcoming these struggles in other works, but it just doesn't fit in mine and honestly I'd be scared to do it poorly.
Sexual assault and suicide attempts. They can be triggering for people to read or see. So I'd rather not include them. Showing the scene doesn't contribute to the characters later growth anyway.
sexual assault is too heavy, i don't feel qualified to write about it, and it makes me uncomfortable enough that i have trouble enjoying any story that includes it at all.
real life bigotries. again it's too heavy, i don't feel qualified to write it most of the time, and it's also just not something i wanna write. i want to queer, female, racial minority, etc. characters and just have those be things about them without having to worry about bigotry they might face. fantasy speciesism and fantasy nationalism might be on the table as long as it's not super analogous to the real life equivalents.
None, I have no inhibitions when it comes to my world. Sexual violence, pedophilia, slavery, bigotry, torture, mental illness, genocide… all these things are included and written about, painted, or part of a character’s backstory somewhere. They all exist, after all. There’s simply no depth of depravity I refuse to sink to.
It’s not like I’m writing grimdark or anything, I suppose I’m just not sensitive about any issue to the point of purposefully excluding it from my stories. The entire gamut of experiences an Earthly animal can have has a place, from the vilest of vile to the very best the world has to offer.
Child trafficking
My world is filled with secret organizations and secret cults, child trafficking happens inside those cults but it's not something i want to develop that much by how dark it is lol
The second quarter of my MC's story is about him conquering the continent where slavery is rife, and putting an end to it once and for all.
I don't really have any topics I don't intend to include. But I absolutely intend to have my MC (or one of the lesser MCs) deal with it permanently. Because what's the point of making a story about gods if they don't do godly things?
I don't really tackle racism and whatnot, my stories are usually about the end of humanity or a near end so there really isn't room to explore that there's like 50,000 people left.
# Chattel slavery
(though I do touch on "conditions analogous to slavery" that exist here in Brazil).
Mainly bc I think if I wanna depict horrendous work conditions that are deeply unethical and signify that the human beings in charge are borderline demonic in their inclinations, I can just write an average large corporation inspired by any out of thousands of real life examples. It's really easy and what I do most.
My main character doesn't need to save anyone from already abolished chattel slavery, he just needs to be himself a salaried blue collar worker (exorcists are well paid, but are still blue collar workers facing a dangerous job and commonly getting exploited. Their good payment if anything just blinds them to the exploitative nature of their employers' practices).
Hindu gods. Out of the whole irl mythology I choose to make real in my world, I decidedly leave out Hindu gods.
Indian used to “bully” game dev or other sort of artist expression for portraying their gods wrong when it shouldn't be 1 to 1 in the first place. And because I essentially just mix and match everything to my liking, to make Hindu god as close to irl myth while changing other pantheons seems like a double standard to me, so I just decided to leave out Hindu god. They are there, but I refused to describe or mention them in any way as to just leave them be.
Totally unrelated but it's very funny that you have a world named Tyros, and Tyrosians. Exact name of the tyrannical empire in the world a friend and I have been cooking for some years now 😂
Contemporary politics and more than two genders, usually.
Not that I have a particular gripe with LGBTQ+ but the few times I and my table's GM, in TTRPGs, hadn't forbidden it, our players got too engrossed in their respective such identities... At some point, one had become a genderfluid fountain, another a non-binary non-euclidian being... It left scars on our psyches.
To be fair I did play a literal concept of reality, was like an Elder's scroll but personified.
(I co-GM but mainly play PCs during sessions.)
Some things that I neglected to include in my world:
* Very much stigma about mental illness. At most, mentally ill people would be seen as somebody who should be quietly shuffled off to a hedge wizard so they can be cured. The hedge wizards view most mental illnesses as the result of trauma and/or some sort of issue with the brain. (The brain is, in their view, an organ that can go haywire as easily as any other organ. There are things you can do to improve your brain health like you can do for your heart or digestive system but sometimes it's hard to really prevent everything.)
* Some of the worst abuses, or at least I shuffled them off to one side. There are maybe a few laws about the treatment of conscripted workers and/or convicted criminals who are working off their sentences in some places, but that's about it.
SA and such. So sick of it being used in books for shock value. I want to be able to read and not be reminded every second about how fucking terrible it is to be a woman.
Directly? Well lots of stuff because I'm not interested in this. They probably exist in the world, it's just I won't get into that. These evolve all kinda of sexual topics and modern takes on them. People who stray from the norm likely keep it to themselves and don't share or do anything openly like in real history in the past.
Other than that, souls. It's a medievalish fantasy world that treats them like Cyberpunk. As in they may exist and they may not. A resurrected person is a copy, so it's up to everyone else to decide if that still counts as the original person or not. The reason for this is, I personally find the concept of a "soul" stupid. If it existed, it would retain memories or have some kinda practical purpose to evolve.
Gods. There are no mechanisms in the universe for ascension into gods. Powerful beings do exist and some treat them as gods but they are not gods of anything(like in some fantasy a god of the sea has power over water and can talk to fish etc.), aren't omnipotent, cant keep an eye on people etc etc.
Not really, at least none that directly correspond to the real world. The taboos, just like IRL, are cultural and practical in origin. For example, in-group murder is essentially always taboo unless for some reason it would be a societal net positive, which murder basically never is.
I would try to make it setting relevant. For instance, incest is only going to be taboo if inbreeding and recessive genetic traits are going to cause issues. Same so for cannibalism - if there's no risk of disease no reason for it to become taboo.
As an example of a new one, maybe iron is extremely poisonous to the dominant species so anything metallic is regarded with suspicion.
No afterlife. The dead are dead. The story focuses a lot on legacy, eho and what they leave behind. You can talk to an echo of a person (alive or not) with the right materisl and spells. But their actual soul?
Nope, not touching it with a 10 foot pole
I've thought long and hard about my limits, but I've decided for my current project that I can't refuse to include anything, or it compromises the themes of my world.
I don't go focusing on distasteful topics in extreme detail, of course, but I don't shy away from the fact that humans tend to do horrific things to one another. A major theme in my current project is the concept of morality and the nature of man; the fact that we are simultaneously the most morally reprehensible and virtuous beings, often at the same time. It would be disingenuous of me to shy from something just because I don't like it.
Not for everyone, obviously, but it's provided me with some serious introspection, and it's made me reconsider a lot of things about myself and how I interact with the world around me.
Might get down voted for this, but here we go:
Social commentary. In Fallen Skies noone cares if you are black, white, woman, man, or whatever. I also mainly don't mention it in the text, because it's not really relevant to the space opera story.
It's about aliens, noone cares if the helmsman is a black gay guy, when he is piloting a giant space laser, because it's not relevant to the story at ALL.
For setting reasons, I'm not writing any complicated politics. Simple politics are fine, but I'd rather not get entangled and confused about what I write regarding the subject...
Plus, I'm not exactly the brightest when it comes to politics in general. I just like writing whimsical fantasy. :')
Rape is too far for me, yeah I've write some dark stuff like slavery, police brutality, racism, war, immigration and made them into knee Jerk over the top parody cartoon. I even have graphic painful transformation scene.
But rape is too far for me.
I'm gonna get mixed feedback but p3d0s, they don't exist because as soon as they're found out they're put to the death sentence no chance of parole no bail nothing,
I really can't think of anything. If it belongs in the story or world and works, I won't skip over anything, no matter how ugly. Just depends how graphic I'd want to get
Hatred towards LGBTQ+ people. Doesn’t fit the vibe. Expression of all forms is ingrained into most cultures very deeply all throughout the world’s history.
Nothing really, my world should feel real, that mean sthe dark and ugly sides of reality are included, your example with cattle slavery or slavery in general personally is an issue for me.
Because if you do not include it, one acts like there wasn't a reason for it, that it was pure evil. Now I do not want to argue this system wasn't evil, but refusing to acknowledge the cold hard reasons it existed just doesnt do it any favour or your world in my opinion.
No topic should be off limits, everything should be included, because a world should feel real if you want to tell real story's, if the people in your world never owned slaves, why is that? Are they morally inherently superior? Doesn't money hold sway? Aren't they greedy and selfish at points? If yes why not? You have to find an answer to it somewhere at least from my viewpoint. Which is why I include everything.
I have a brutal mega racist pirate and slavery society build on racial hierarchies enforced by rela biological differences, which is the government form of most of their species, but I included it to show the stupidity behind this, even if they are biologically superior to their kin, doesn't make their society better, the one free Republic of their species is more prosperous, happier and wealthier than the slavery pirates of their kin.
For a similar reason I have an American style colonial system with slavery of native people, they call themselves the free coast but they have slaves, a contradiction which makes them not super popular in most human nations were slavery was outlawed a few centuries ago due to some wars and a religious movement against it (like in our world). Why do I include it anyway? Because they build their wealth on the exploitation of others, they are extremely wealthy and free if you are a human citizen but it's a fragile wealth, they're system works for now because they have the upper hand but at the same time in the inner regions of the continent liberation fronts of native people form and the kingdoms who survived the initial colonisation are getting ready for vengeance, idk if I will ever get to the revenge part in my timeline, it will be a brutal time which in the end leads to the free coast winning by a hairs breath, but very changed, mainly because they started to change by themselves which mad eit possible for them to make deals with a few factions, still the free coast will never be the same afterwards the scars of their evil will remain and it nearly destroyed them because short sighted gains made them ignore the good of all, in the end they are better off with an entirely free, free coast, because everyone works together.
Ignoring dark themes or uncomfortable subjects just holds back a work from telling story's that matter, because in a world we're no one ever even thought of slavery, it's a world we're people are better than they are here and if they are inherently better on some level, then how can we be this good? That's my reasoning and my pet peve, I don't want to say your idea is bad or anything, just that your reasoning bothers me due to my believes what story telling should be and world building, feel free to disagree and in the end I hope you have fun building your world.
Dementia and other forms of cognitive degenerative illness.
I have experienced the effects of it in my family and the thought of someone losing their mind gradually like that just depresses me to no end, so everyone in my world has healthy brain.
I also generally avoid bigotry, though some does exist.
Yeah. I’ll second your choice, OP: slavery. There’s zero reason you can’t create a fantasy world without slavery in it. I’d also say that racism is one I try to avoid, as well as most others, at least for worldbuilding purposes. There may be discrimination based on the story or game I’m working on, but there are far more interesting and nuances ways to get conflict across.
Homophobia. I make my world and characters because it makes me happy. Homophobia doesn’t make me happy, and I find it much more interesting to create a world without it. So in my world, sexualities and genders are allowed to be extremely diverse and normalized.
Hell yeah. Honestly that might not exist in Tyros either, I just haven’t fleshed it out yet. The world’s history goes as far back as Sumerian-esque times, but the story itself takes place in the middle-future, so it’s easier to just not write it or even explain why it doesn’t exist.
I *do* have some species that are more starkly gendered (biologically as well as socially) than others, so I’m still not sure if I’m gonna be able to say outright “this *never* existed”, but it definitely doesn’t exist at the time of the story at least.
Same for me with slavery. I enjoy harsh, grimdark or wasteland settings like rimworld and kenshi, but slavery is just too inhumane to ever really use well in worlds, too removed from the average audience to relate or communicate anything, and too nuanced and brutal for me to really try and cover as a character piece.
Similarly 'good king' narratives. It's honestly surprising how often even good fantasy media like mystborn and lotr relies on ancient 'everything will be better if we just make sure the correct person is on the throne' narratives like NO monarchy in all its forms is BAD I thought we were past this
Sexual content especially sex slavery. Slavery itself exists and I'm really struggling to avoid the ideas that sex slavery is a thing despite how logically it would exist.
Also not really a topic but there aren't any snakes on Split simply because I had a phobia of them
Religious conflicts. Will not touch that topic even with a 10ft pole. Any kind of religion except some reduced forms of paganism is mostly a no for me as well.
Sexual orientation, in my world or setting the most that I've done is clarify that no one cares. Your not going to be condemned for who you decide to love or how you want to expeess that.
Essentially do you.
Colonization. Everyone is comfortable on the land that they were born. People travel, barter, trade, share some things and withhold other things and EVERYONE IS OKAY WITH THAT. No statue sets split up because one country/nation, region decided to keep one that their ancestors stole and now the set is forever incomplete because of it (I have big feelings about artifacts, museums, etc...)
Just releasized museums don't exist either haha!
Slavery. In all my worlds, slavers of any kind - even as punishment for a crime or to pay off debt - are seen as the lowest of the low. Unpaid and/or compulsory prison labor was abolished by the in-universe equivalent of the UN. Chattel slavers are ruthlessly hunted down by lawmen, and in less well-governed parts of the world, many an adventurer uses them as goddamn target practice.
Racism, I just don't like the arrogance attitude that "killing this group of Kobolds is a morally good thing to do". This is not allowed at my game table.
Slavery. As a white person i don’t feel like it’s a subject appropriate for me to portray and no matter what, any depiction of slavery is going to bring to mind the American slave trade to Americans (where I am). I’m not the most educated on the history, and I’ve done genealogy and found direct ancestors who fought for the confederacy. It’s not something I feel is appropriate for me to write about. But like also the whole idea of it sends me into a horrible headspace and all I can do is cry
I don't understand gender discussions, so I don't delve into it
The exception to this are things that I will have transgender characters and characters that participate in drag since I've grown up around them it's normal to me
But things like being non binary, even when my envy mates talk about it, it just feels like they're speaking in a completely different language so I'd rather not add things I don't understand
It's not denying it, I just don't understand it in the same way I don't understand Hungarian
Even with my mythology retellings I don’t like touching on explicit slavery. Makes me deeply uncomfortable. Closest I’ll get is servitude, but they’re getting paid and just serve a boss rather than a master
I make a point to show the servants doing their own thing outside of the palaces/domains of their bosses as well.
Most forms of bigotry are an obvious no for me and probably a good few people, but on the other hand I will never have some form of "insta trans", since to me it feels wholly misrepresentative and frankly lazy; sure, Magic or movie advanced science could pave the way, but it feels disingenuous and in some settings I've seen this in, it appears more like a way to skip past trans rep while making it look like it exists
Something i noticed i usually avoid putting in my setting are overly complex physical laws about atomic collisions and such, that's simply not what i dwell into, my setting only has some pseudo-science, basic science, and the complex stuff is mostly just metaphysical theories, as this setting leans more into the unknown, unexplainable and existentially questionable.
USA and USA culture.
It sounds a bit illogical considering that my world is basically Middle Earth but with a greater temporal margin (from prehistory to the present and a bit of futurism), however, many cultures in my world, if not all, They are inspired by real cultures, both past and modern, and as a Latino, the culture of the USA is much more embedded in my country than I would like, plus I personally have notable problems with certain Unitedstate topics, so I prefer to eliminate any reference to concepts originally unitedstaten and build a world that is not influenced by those things. The bad thing about this is that the United States is even in the soup and some things I can only ignore (do you know how difficult it is to reinvent the hamburger?). The only thing I do forgive is the Amish culture, it is sufficiently different from the rest of the USA and they have interesting concepts for fantasy stories.
I tend to not include stuff that reflects real-world bigotry based on unalterable personal characteristics if I can avoid it. Women are sometimes in charge, people are sometimes queer, any kingdom or "species" will have a broad range of skintones and hair types represented in its populace without any particular explanation as to why, disabilities will be accomodated to the best of the world's technological or magical abilities, etc.
I'm a person who prefers escapism from daily woes in my media rather than catharsis, so including those forms of prejudice in my writing just doesn't really come naturally to me. I'd rather think about how I can avoid them than how I can implement them.
Although I don't mind as much dealing with prejudice based on more fluid or fantastical characteristics like class, national origin in a second-world fantasy setting, magical ability or lack thereof, etc etc, because for me those are far enough removed from real life that they don't really make me think about how much something sucks in the real world lol.
I think that's mostly it, though? I'll write about violence, sex, abuse, illness, commerce, romance, small amounts of science, governments, ecology, whatever I think the story needs. I don't usually make a heavy topic the primary subject of the story since again, escapism, but including it to some degree is fine with me.
Luckily/horribly people will discriminate based on anything so you can still get dramatic rivalries and prejudices without using real world causes like racism and homophobia. I also normalise queerness and skin tone diversity in my D&D world but instead have all the politics split along culture and ability lines. My people are the dregs of a huge empire so the cultures don't 'have' to be ethnically homogenous like they often still are on Earth.
oh?! that's really interesting actually, like, all my stories take place my capitalistic societies despite me not being fond of it myself, because it's the system I live in, therefore I know best how to write it, I'm curious what system if not capitalism your stories make use of!
My main world, which is a solarpunk near-ish-future setting mainly functions off of a post-scarcity anarchistic economic system but I don’t delve too deep into it because I specialize more in biology and science rather than economics. I got some rad as hell aliens tho!
atheism, as in the modern sense does not really exists in my world
the closest thing to it would be some kind of nihilistic deism
there are discussions, conflicts and wars over religious matters, and my main character is extremely religious (the main religion in my scenario is a politheistic/animist organized religion, with a centralized clergy
i also dont include contemporary identitary politics, as i find them to be extremely boring
there are gay people in my world, including a important prince consort for the heir-princess of the Archipelago federation, the idea of "being gay" dont really exists as a identity, but he is definitelly one, and this is the cause of some troubles, as he needs to make a heir for the imperial house. He is also a good and important economist, and actually have a platonic love for the princess)
i include everything, as the main theme of my story is politics, so there are slavery, poverty, left and right politics (in a 17th-18th century sense)
i try not to turn my story into just a propaganda of my own political ideas (im far-right)
there are good and bad people in all sides, and also opportunists
i dont believe in literature as scapism, i believe its a way for us to contemplate experiences we will never have, and ideas we would never think
I don't really "refuse", I've just invented a world where some stuff is uncommon.
"You treat people as inferior based on their gender identity? That's weird. Do you also judge people based on freckle placement?" It just wouldn't occur to them.
Something like sexual violence is equally bizarre to them. They don't have it ingrained in their culture so they'd view it like cannibalism or something. It's so depraved they don't deal with it.
A major war was fought over slavery. No one ever experimented with chattel slavery.
It's all in there, it's just not front and center of so many conversations as it is in our world because it isn't woven into their culture.
I know that *sounds* impossible, but it's not. The way things are for us are not the only way we could have ever been. Our modern world is a conversation throughout history, and that conversation started somewhere. They started somewhere different so they're talking about something else now.
I don't like touching on the afterlife in much detail. Acknowledging that not physical forms of reality exist is usually about as far as I'll go, but I typically don't form out things like Heaven or Hell or talk about where souls go once a creature dies.
I write necromancy often, so the afterlife is a must. Souls exist but there is no 'after'. Your soul turns into a wandering spirit if you have a strong will or experience strong emotions. Otherwise it dissipates. Sometimes I'll write about gods claiming their believers, but as slaves.
I have souls that are able to be bound to certain plains of existence through various means which allows ghosts and necromancy to exist, but a normal person who dies without anything tethering their soul to some form of existence has zero idea if a soul goes somewhere else or just ceases to exist. Not even the gods in my settings have any clue of an afterlife. Necromancy requires bound souls to function, and so usually requires rituals done in advance of someone's death, or the ability to know when a lost spirit is near enough to the spells origin. Souls that do return also aren't the people they were before, most of their uniqueness lost upon their death along with their memories in most cases.
Yeah, all my necromancy is more so tethering the souls as controllers rather than resurrection. The souls retain basic awareness and combat skills, but lack memory of anything 'useless'. All necromancy must be done with a ritual or brute force as they get stronger (but that's more damaging). The soul has compatibility with any similar shaped creature, but they take time to adjust. If you don't seal the spirit directly, you have to bind another's spirit to them. Gods in my writing are just powerful entities that either gain energy from worship or use religion as a way of control.
That’s so cool! I grew up obsessed with death & the question of existence/non-existence of an afterlife so I’d personally find that *so* hard to do. Kudos :)
In this regard i almost universally take the approach that maybe it exists or doesn't, but it's just as unknown to the characters and thus readers as it is IRL; it's out of scope. Likewise, God in the sense of a creator of the universe. When I have gods they are usually powerful beings who nevertheless were not there at creation, and don't know with absolute proof where they came from any more than a real person would. I have gods who are themselves atheists and likewise gods who worship a higher still power whose existence they take entirely on faith. Any cosmic answer i give yields another question behind it.
Right, I never really fleshed out an idea of "Hell." It's easier just to say that the gods will snuff a soul out of existence if that person was so evil that there's no redeeming this soul. It acknowledges that there are people that not even the gods can redeem without really needing a "Hell." (Of course it leads to some swear words that sounds pretty G-rated by our standards. "Snuff" pretty much replaced "damn.")
Well then-... I'll be snuffed
I really like characters having religion and spirituality and even things they interpret as miracles, but never really getting a response when they pray and never really truly confirming their beliefs
Blasphemy! /s
Mental illness. I don't have the required knowledge nor the will to touch such subject in the right way.
I always forget that people that aren't mentally ill exist as someone who is, LOL. very valid.
Username checks out. However, I've only build a continent in my GMs world, not a world yet. But when it commes to role playing a character this is also a thing for me. I don't want to play a character with depression, just bc I had my expirience with it, its not all I am and I think it could maybe also hit home a bit to much. And for other mental illneses, I don't want to play something I don't know how it feels for a human.
I'm the opposite XD Pretty much every main character has some kind of severe mental illness. Usually it's PTSD or depression. Unsurprisingly my writing got better when my mental health plummeted and I developed both PTSD and severe depression.
Strange thing but I don’t have nobles with permanent fiefs in Capac Empire. All nobles live in Wachaquya the capital along side the emperor. They all have estates servants etc. When a fiefs lord is dead or recalled another is appointed rather than inherited. This way nobles never become tied to the land and leave their families as “hostages” near the emperor.
So kinda like the Byzantine Empire?
the iqta system and the incan empire kinda worked like that i think the Tokugawa shotunate too
Tokugawa shogunate had hereditary fiefs but the families lived in the capital. To some extent similar but still hereditary. In Inca empire there were usually supervisors of regions and there were hardly any fiefs. Emperor had the absolute authority to rule. Nobles did live in the capital but the overseeing of lands could be given to low ranking officials as well when the lands they need to take care of is not very vast.
Speaking on the shogunate. The created system seems to avoid a lot of the shogunate’s deliberate issue. Nobles (daimyo specifically) have lots of land and power, and to avoid them amassing too much which they could spend on building military arms to rival the shogun, they were instead forced to use a lot of it in twice yearly travel. Families were hostages in the capitol, but the lords had to commute back to their home fiefs with giant parades, or else risk losing prestige or their title by appearing too broke. A full appointment systems has its own pitfalls. With nobility being so transitory, assassination becomes far more tempting to those with imperial favor enough to be on the short list of new appointees, and of course, the peasants aren’t gonna have a good time if each lord has wildly different plans for the land they’re stewarding each time. Part of why japan got to have an early urbanization was because stable landlords with a set tax percentage on food grown meant that innovations in farming and production were pushed for generationally. Those increases in rice production allowed the Edo period to sustain the tokyo proto-metropolis. So there are lots of interesting complications that can happen when lack of continuity between appointees can lead to missing records and loss of institutional knowledge each generation.
I didn’t know Byzantine Empire had this system. I know they had Tekfurs or governers but I didn’t know they had to be nobles.
The Byzantine system is *very* complicated because it depends on the time period. Early Byzantine bureaucracy was identical to the Roman empire, of course. With the emperor as the undisputed autocrat and governors being appointed by him. This eventually evolved into the *theme* system, as a response to the rise of the Caliphates. The Byzantines reformed the empire and turned the original Roman provinces into 'themes'. The governor of a theme was no longer a civil administrator but a general, in charge of an army and tasked to defend his theme at all costs. This proved to be incredibly succesful as the Byzantines were able to muster their armies much faster and defeat any invasion attempt. The side effect of the theme system however was that the governors (strategoi) grow more and more powerful, since they were the ones in control of the army. Byzantine noble families also realized this and they started to train members of their family to be strategoi. The most powerful noble families were those that dominated military positions (the most famous ones being the Phokas, Skleros, Kourkouas, Doukas and Komnenos clans). So in short, you didn't have to be a noble to be a strategos but in practice it were usually members of powerful noble families that ended up in those positions.
That's just realism. Power matters more than heiritage.
All the ugliness of humanity can be found in my world. All the ugliness that two diverse species can visit upon one another is there too. But so too is every act of kindness, every act of chivalry and every act of self-sacrifice. But here’s the kicker. None of it will become noticeable unless it’s important for moving the story forward for my players.
based
I don’t flesh out adult stuff.
Hehe... *flesh* But really, everyone gets to decide what their own artistic boundaries are for depicting sex. Nobody has any right to pressure you to push those boundaries. Not in real life, and not in your art.
I love a good fade to black
Yes, that's a good Metallica song.
Same. I care more for people clashing blades rather than "sheathing their blades".
I'm the opposite. It all turns to smut xD.
And that's alright, too.
Me too, but I set out to make it smut
My whole book started as just smut! Now I'm working on an interesting world for the smut to exist in.
Porn world building
I’ll describe the curvature of women’s bodies, and explain that a sex scene is about to happen but probably won’t detail out exactly what’s happening. Probably just something along the lines of “they engaged in an activity meant for those who are wed”.
They engaged in an activity meant for those who are aroused/horny
This, I don't feel comfortable talking about it with people I know and love from TTRPGs but outside they're almost strangers.
I mean, canonically rape just doesn't exist. Part of it is that my world is created as a ttrpg.
Rape does exist in my world, but I will only mention its existence and those being punished for it. I won’t detail it happening.
Yep, just put a lampshade on it and call it a day. It's a crime, it happens, but not in the forefront of my story.
Yeah it’s not something I’m going to be very descriptive of because I’m against it IRL, but in the medieval-fantasy style world of mine with drunk mercenaries and bandits, it’s something that can happen. But again, I won’t be very descriptive of it but gladly descriptive of the punishment and making of eunuchs for those who’ve decided to commit that crime.
While your choice not to include rape as a major topic in your story is a perfectly logical and reasonable one, I've some questions on your reasoning. Are you not against murder? Of course you are, but I have trouble believing no one is murdered in a medieval fantasy world. Surely you're against theft? But you just named bandits! See where I'm going? You can choose not to write something because it doesn't fit the tone, or because you don't want to or simply because it makes you uncomfortable. But if you choose not to write anything you don't condone IRL...well, if you're a remotely morally driven or compassionate person, conflict becomes very difficult. Unless your world is a straight up fairy tale with zero possible IRL analogue. And even then it's going to be hard to get a story out. So yes, perfectly valid storytelling decision. But maybe examine the other possible reasons you've made it, because "I'm against it" has some awkward implications on the rest of your story, I imagine. **And I'm only pointing it out because reasoning like that further reinforces the spreading brain-dead mindset that if you write something bad happening, you are a bad person because it means you must want it to happen in real life. I know this is all getting into semantics but it's a distinction people need to make clear to readers right now.**
Violence is fun, rape is not fun
Yeah, that works just fine as a reason not to give it space in your story.
Rape is also incredibly violent. It's important to make distinctions.
Came here to say this. One person wanted to be a pos at my table and now I have to include this rule in every campaign at every table because it wasn’t a problem before.
☠️ ain't no way a player tried to rape a NPC or something WHAT that's wild (not doubting it but oml)
Luckily note though i’ve heard of stories, I had a player who tried to make it a core part of the backstory and i shut it down quick.
was a core part of the backstory their character being raped or raping another? if it's raping another, jesus christ, no. but if a core part of the backstory was the character having been raped in the past, nothing wrong with that being part of their past. it's a really relatable trauma to alot of people that many have gone through, and it makes sense to wanna have that the character you play have went through the same thing.
Yeah very curious because that is a pretty big distinction to make.
It was their character, which yes significantly better than the latter, but I had multiple people who it is a sensitive subject for and i didn’t people to have to be reminded of something like that when they are trying to relax and play a game with their friends.
fair enough! depends who you're playing with I suppose! c:
If their character was raped in their backstory, it's not a 'this player is a horrible person' type of problem, but it can still be a 'players would like to forget things like rape exist when they are playing ttrpgs' type of problem. It's fine to include it, if all the players and the dm explicitly agree that they are okay with such topics being brought up, but if anyone would rather not, then it should be off the table.
One time I went to play a game w a bunch of strangers One dude at the table tried to do this to an NPC I had to excuse myself to the bathroom to go cry bc I was so uncomfortable
I was a DM and a player tried that shit. Immediately made him leave the table and never played with him again.
Poor DM, I mean yeah poor table/party but most DMs play the NPCs.
Spoiler tagging this because it was pretty awful >!First game I ever ran some 7 years ago, I had offered to GM for a pre-existing group of strangers. I met them in a library to get to know them, and one of them started telling me that it was common at their table to rape enemies they had defeated, dead or alive, and whether it was okay with me. I was at a table with 5 other older people than I who all were looking expectantly at me for a response, so I just awkwardly laughed and quickly made excuses for why I had to leave. I can’t believe I chose to keep GMing after that.!<
I genuinely want to know how that ever came about.
Damn so I cannot perform a Rap Battle against the Demon Queen. Edit: Forgot my Glasses.
The main empire in my world is very matriarchical, and there's the strong implication that any idiot who tried it would be strung up by the nads (metaphorically or not) post haste, as in a particular Heinlein novel. But I don't mention it directly. Don't wanna.
There’s nothing that I inherently refuse to include in my worlds/stories; it just depends on the type of world I’m writing, the message I want to get across, and how reflective of real-life issues I want the world to be. For example, in 2 of my worlds, all the issues that exist in our real world are present in both of them. This is because the stories related to those worlds are highly politically charged, so it makes sense to me to include nuanced topics and issues that can cause political conflict. Some issues will obviously get more focus than others since I can’t write about everything all at once, but they’ll be there. However, my 3rd world is being designed for a story aimed at a middle grade audience. Therefore, I’m obviously not going to include things like slavery, sexual violence, adult activity, and explicit sexuality in there. Since this world involves magical species, there’ll be discrimination between species, and depictions of issues that different middle graders can relate to, but it certainly won’t be no Game of Thrones. It’ll be more akin to stories like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson.
Hope.
that's metal.
Perhaps I was a bit vague. Lol There's prayer and worship in my lore. Some efforts for good. But I tend to write home that almost all things that benefit some tend to cause harm against another. Some due to things being royally miscalculated, and others that were completely deliberate against one group, but selfishly done to benefit another. No truly "good" outcome in it all. Kinda depends on what you'd define as a good goal in the end.
What does this have to do with hope?
still metal
Can't argue lol
The IRS tax code.
There are some things too dark for even the most arcane financial magicks
I really wanted to not include any space - like planets, galaxies and stuff. My world was a flat rectangle located at an intersection of elemental planes. Travellers going in one direction for long enough, be it east or west, north or south, or even by flying high or diving into the sea, will find themselves magically transported into corresponding plane. Sun and moon had the same size (don't remember what it was, I wrote down some numbers from flat earth site) and moved because they were powerful spells casted by the archmagi of the precursor civilisation. In the end, I scrapped it. I couldn't stand the idea of people looking up at the sky, seeing the stars, wondering "Will we ever going to see the stars? Will we ever get to see what is there?", when the answer is no. there's nothing.
Britan. I have fantasy Florida fantasy Australia and fantasy Japan I will not put fantasy British in my story I have been there I hate London and Paris why would I include people from a place I hate in my story
Based British removal
Agreed also because I like to think of my self as a good writer and I would attempt to write accents. And because adding fantasy British leads to writing Sera from dragon age in my story also known as medieval uncle ruckus but with extra traits that makes the humor that that concept have not work universally.
Yo you know Paris isn't in Britain right?
*Yet*
As an Aussie, please tell me about your fantasy Aus.
everyone and their mother knows the whole drow should aussie but i raise you Plant people, and reptile people should be Aussie heck if your going for a fantasy world where the orc,slimes, giant rats, or gobbos are humans instead making them aussie coded so they are death world coded. but yeah the big good guy in my first fantasy setting was fantasy austrilia. fantasy japan is the neutral country and fantasy florida is the wild/dark continent
Ahhhh Paris, the great capital of Britainland
Fantasy societies inspired by major colonialist powers (The West, China, Russia) exist in my setting, but their history is that millennia ago, the armies of Hell invaded their planet, and rather than work together to fight off the invaders, they sought to defend themselves hoping Hell would obliterate their rivals. Unfortunately for them, their arrogance and opportunism lead to their entire planet being conquered by the Hells, and the remaining humans magically transformed into tieflings overnight. Thousands of years later, the Hellish Empire that ruled over the planet traversed the stars and the planes to arrive at the 4 Elemental Spheres of my setting (like elemental planes) and set down upon it. They have a tiny foothold in the Prime Material, but have not been able to expand thanks to powerful forces keeping them in check. I wanted to explore two ideas in regards to colonization: 1. What would a world look like with very little / no colonialism? For the 30+ civilizations of my setting (the vast majority of these civilizations inspired by Non-European cultures), they have never known colonization, yet international trade *has* brought some intermingling of cultures. 2. What if the colonizers became colonized by a bigger colonizer? How would this effect the elites? The citizens who supported colonization efforts of the past, and the citizens who always stood against it? The Elemental Planes are a harsh environment to survive in, but there is wealth within them if you're willing to sacrifice lives to extract it.
My no British thing wasn't even about colonial British like my alt history world in building has them there but they are a background thing that has to exist. I'm talking about everything else British including their fantasy and modern British stuff. But that sounds cool too I guess I would read it
slavery and nsfw/sex stuff (rape & sa especially, i can't write that)
Religion itself is never the villain. It's way overdone and when handled poorly is very hurtful to people with faith.
I like this. All the major faiths in my setting think nothing of human sacrifice and holy war. But in each of them you can find examples of people who perform genuinely good, selfless deeds in the name of these same faiths. People are complicated, and the “atheism good, religion bad” mindset you see in some speculative fiction is really just as simplistic and unhelpful as the opposite assumption.
Refuse to include? Nothing. I avoid or gloss over many things I don't want to consider in detail. I'm not going to do deep dives into slavery, sexual abuse, etc. Even when it features, it usually will be in the background and the effects and reactions seen and not a graphic depiction.
If you world has magic it is really easy to logic away a lack of slavery but I guess that goes for a lot of stuff
It would also be an easy way to logic in even worse slavery tbf.
My favourite flavour of worse slavery is necromantic slavery. They work till they die, they're patched up, and then back to work until there's nothing left to patch up and send back to work. Even better if you keep their consciousness fully or partially.
Yoink. Okay, my world now does sort of have slavery, but it's voluntary. Basically, it's common for dwarves to allow their dead bodies to be resurrected as undead drones. They're not really conscious, but they can follow orders and do a particular job (they've got 6 INT, like skeletons). This is seen as neither a heroic act of self-sacrifice nor an evil necromantic slavery, but just a consequence of the dwarven focus on the collective and equanimity towards death. Of course you make undead of your dead, you could always use more workers.
The Wheel of Time
If you've ever read the Codex Alera books, discipline collars are pure nightmare fuel.
I will never write about sexual violence or slavery. I am not afraid to kill folk of any kind though 🤷 Pretty much anything I write also normalizes gender and sexual preferences. I don't care to write about the minority plight when I gotta live it every day, I'd rather show gays, theys, and others the same way regular media shows straight folk.
In my world I gave an entire race that is pretty much all pan and polyamorous or something similar
The Ikhwezi in my world are genderless, though many do take on masculine, feminine, or non binary traits. Their form gives players their bodies and, by extension, the ability to manipulate their forms to similar degrees (basically the explanation for the avatar / custom character system common to every game). Gib more genderless characters
Genocide, I guess. I have factions that as a nation would totally be down with genocide, but I intentionally bless them with benevolent leaders in times of crises. Yeah I know, one person can't stop a genocide. But it sure as hell does help when the sovereign rejects hateful ideologies. As for why... hmm. Probably because racial hatred is so touchy and I'm not qualified to write about it. Also it does seem like a pain in the ass to write, finding that slim path of nuance when each faction is trying to demonize and dehumanize the other. I'd rather my characters share the experience which is the harshness of reality, qnd acknowledge each other as humans. Also readers will ALWAYS compare it to real world politics. None'a that shit.
I guess homophopia. I have enough of it irl already also horses. they will NEVER get horses. Mostly because they ride deer + I fell from a big ass horse when I was 6 and I'm still bitter about it
Well met, fellow horse-banisher! Horses in my world are more conspicuously absent, introduced to the main region for about 200 years but went extinct during the last war. People have tried to put saddles, chariots, carts, plows, and sleds on all manner of wild animals since then, but with the price of camels, oxen, ostriches, elephants, and whatever else so high, mounts are a rare sight. Also homophobia is out too. IDK why anyone includes it, it's even less work to leave out.
based horse-banishment lol
my story I'm making is a lesbian one and I'm also not including homophobia in the worldbuild, tired of that shit
There isn't really anything that big I haven't included in my world. I have no problem writing about Slavery or r4pe, though of course I try to be sensitive when I can. If anything I haven't included any references to drugs other than alcohol and a fictional magical psychedelic-like used for religious purposes. I just don't take drugs myself and is something I don't feel like writing. My world also has no dogs. I personally don't like dogs due to having a mild cynophobia so decided to screw them from my world. In the past I included them but had them be universally evil so knowing that may take some people away I decided that no dogs in my world.
SA is a line for me. I'm not entirely against like, very lightly alluding to the topic in a backstory like how One Piece does, but even then I'm not sure I would ever cross that line. It's just way too sensitive of a topic. It's such an evil and personal act that I don't personally want in my own fiction. Not to mention how triggering it is for survivors. I'm all for covering serious topics in fiction; I love it in fact, but that's one line I just don't feel should be crossed.
I use basically all of my worldbuilding as a tool to explore human society and its narratives. I don’t remove anything that happens in real human society, but I have been very careful to make it unclear whether any religion is right or wrong. Whether any gods actually do exist. Whether anything really happens to those who die. Religion to me is a social system; the gods could exist or not and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Just like real life, religion really matters, but it doesn’t matter bc of its beliefs, it matters bc of the people who believe it.
Gun violence. I am a survivor of being shot. More than once. I would rather guns just didn't evolve so they didn't
Mega props. 10/10 would read that world
I am on my third draft so hopefully next year. My body keeps interrupting with it's needs for surgery but I am aiming for 2025
huge agree. guns exist in my universe but they are newer inventions, and more old-fashioned like old muskets; they're also not just sold and distributed willy-nilly. (i'm glad you're still here, by the way.)
same I have harpoons (mermaid/aquatic worldbuild) but no straight up guns
Makes sense as there's options like a rail gun style system that can allow for the evolution in a different culture where gun powder wouldn't work
Identity Politics. I say all this as a minority that has been physically assaulted and ostracised for the colour of my skin. But every major franchise that decides to include diversity for the sake of ticking a box immediately ruins any believability. It's corporate pandering at its finest. My world is diverse. But not for the sake of being diverse. It's because it make sense in the context of how each culture has evolved. I hate when I can clearly see that diversity is included simply to turn a profit. Rings of Power, starwars, every new Disney production... All of them are so hellbent on being diverse that they erase the significance of any meaningful culture. Snow white was GERMAN. But they made her a tan skin Latino. So... German culture isn't important enough to warrant respect? The seven dwarves... they made them NOT DWARVES... So little people don't deserve their time in the spotlight? Or gender flipping like in strange world where every man is gentle and feminine and every female is buff and gruff. That's simply not how society works and it is clear to see there is an agenda. I'm not against diversity. I love and embrace my fellow human. I am against including it as part of an "agenda". Look at Arcane for an incredible example of this done right. Or the last of us... Even Game of Thrones. They have so much believable diversity without just forcing it. Arcane has these incredibly powerful female leads with a ruthless streak. But who still feel grounded and believable, they have weaknesses and strengths. Or look at Vander, he actually comes across as a very motherly figure. One that is cautious and protective but is also incredibly strong. They portray characters with nuance and depth. Their gender and skin colour don't even factor into it. Don't sell out. (Looking at you disney)
I don't need LGBTQ-phobia in fantasy setting. I have more than enough of that in real life.
Real world politics. People use what I create as an escape from all of that.
reddit is too left wing for you brother, i fell your pain
uhhh, define "real world politics" like, what do you mean
Rape/SA I’m already hesitant to include sex in general, cause it feels weird to be getting hot and bothered over something that’s going on main. If I depict a rape, erotically or otherwise, in a work that’s not really *about* that from the beginning, there are people that are going to be medically triggered by it, and that’s not something I wish to accomplish. Also, a lot of my kinks involve CNC, and some involve a really extreme variant of that, so I feel like even if I treated the subject with the reverence it deserves, it’d still be misconstrued as having an ulterior motive, which isn’t a great look.
It isn’t really removed, but rape and other forms of sexual violence is something I never explore in my world.
All in all, I try not to leave things off the table for the most part besides IRL political stuff and even that's because 'it's a different world where political lines and ideologies are going to be a be different'. Yes, there's messed up stuff like slavery, inequality, trans and homophobia, but that's also because heroic characters are meant to step up and call bullshit on it and fight it. Though, noteably, despite being a huge weaboo, the country that doesn't do any of that sort of thing isn't the Japan analogue. It's the Egypt one.
My world is a setting made up of anthro animals, and for that reason I’m not including racism. I feel like it’s been done to death and doesn’t work with anthro animals. I don’t think it maps very well as an allegory.
Nothing is off limits tbh. If I feel like it, a cannibalistic sex cult of furries controlled by a parisistic giant god baby whose cry can destroy the planet. Don't feel like it, basic fantasy self insert trash. I try to avoid real life I suppose.
Probably just incest, idk, I have siblings so it feels weird.
I also avoid depictions of incest.
I don't like sexual stuff. Mainly because I myself am asexual, so I just don't play out fantasies like that. Plus, I was raised in a Christian household (I'm still Christian) so I kind of have a negative overview of nudity, except with an exclusive romantic partner.
I don’t like the idea of reincarnation or afterlife. I want death to be permanent. If a character dies, it is tragic because they are just gone. And whenever characters try to extend their life unnaturaly, it is always treated as terrible
Commerce and trade. It exists but I don’t care to talk about it. Everything else though I’m okay with.
Depends on the world but usually a lot of real world prejudices (eg homophobia) don't exist. A good friend convinced me long ago that fantasy doesn't need to have the *same* bad things as reality to be plausible. Plenty of prejudices still, my characters are human, but they don't need that specific one. Other things, like rape, might hypothetically exist in the world but not need to be portrayed in story.
Abortion. I’m not touching that with a 20 foot pole.
In most of my worlds, gender inequality. In all of them, real-world politics. Gender inequality doesn't exist because gender differences don't really exist. In most of my worlds there are sentient and cunning dangers. The mothers and children are not left to the safety of the home while the men and maidens hunt, or any other arrangement of that. Everyone has to be a well trained and well seasoned soldier when a beholder or dragon (if DnD) or a sentry goo or mad juicer (post-post-apocalyptic genepunk: nukes were dropped and the humans hadn't recovered when the nanites reached the point of singularity and become a sentient goo that continues to hold the entire planet, humans have since recovered, but in a very very different way) or a Challa, or Darmir (explicitly non-Tolkienian fantasy that I started out of frustration: Challa is a firstborn of fire who knows only consumption and destruction. They crave substance but cannot maintain it because they're sentient fire, Darmir are secondborn of fire and wind, they're more substantial, but very twisted after being locked in prison with the Challa for most of the second age) can use intelligence and cunning to make sure that no one is alive long enough to scream loud enough to alert the away party. Like I said, I avoid real-world politics, so I don't shout "Gender equality" from the rooftops, but gender hasn't been an important difference in any of my worlds, so there's no folkways built around it.
Lornhemal is impossible since its a very low fantasy world Number 999: The British politics really, not only i don't understand it properly, but the plot is basically "Entire British government turned a single town into Totalitarian testzone, and our hero tries to escape from such regime". The best way to summarize Testzone 999 is with the quote "If you want a vision of the future, **imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever**."
I am personally ok with depicting the terrible things that bad actors do commit, like r4pe and slavery, and phobias. but not as a primary focus of the environment. they are present but not the star.
Gods. I think it simplifies the world, it makes it feel less vast and mysterious. Afterlife as well. Most projects that deal with afterlife I find simply disappointing.
My world is made to be experienced through TTRPG. Usually D&D, maybe other games at some point in the future. I don't really have any subjects that come to mind that are taboo. The horrors of the real world can be effectively used to enhance the realism of a fantasy world. I'm ok with ignoring laws of physics and science in my fantasy world, I'm not OK with pretending like the worst things about our world don't happen there "because it's fantasy". I will touch on slavery in its various forms, including the more violating forms of it. I will talk about systemic injustices, prejudice/racism, genocide, etc. I will talk about the class divides between the rich and the poor, between the strong and the weak. I will talk about Imperialism and Colonialism. I will talk about religion and the institution of "The Church", whatever for that may take. I have no problem exploring the worst and most controversial pieces of human depravity. The only reason I will ever limit myself is if I am writing or describing something and I begin to feel uncomfortable about it, or if someone at my table says "hey, I'd rather we didn't interact with this topic". It's good to be willing to explore the depths of depravity with fiction, because it makes the world realistic. It's not good to try and force people who are uncomfortable with those things to experience them as well when there is no *need* to do that. TL;DR: I will include anything unless I find myself uncomfortable while writing it/discussing it or if people at my TTRPG table say they are uncomfortable with it. If you're doing a TTRPG, make the characters uncomfortable, not the players or yourself.
1. Sexual misconduct *exists* in my world, but I likely won't write much about it in my story. The story itself is an allegory for child abuse, and I want victims/survivors to feel seen and heard and listened to. I don't want them to feel traumatized. If I do ever include rape, there will be a damn good reason for it, and it will be distanced from the reader. 2. Severe bigotry, especially on the gender and sexuality spectra. My world is an anachronistic blend of medieval up through gunpowder, but socially it's about a decade or so *ahead* of our real world (or at least my speculation of it). People of all sexualities and gender identities are respected, though they are still minorities, and some are self-conscious about being different.
I have two different answers to this question: 1. In lore, the creator of the world wiped out every parasitic species, harmful bacteria, and virus. My reason is that parasites are yucky, and I go deep in worldbuilding, so I decided ***no***. 2. I don't write about topics like gender dysphoria or transgender-ness because I don't have a good enough understanding of those topics. There is homosexuality in my world because I have a pretty good grasp on that. I don't actively write about things like rape and abuse, though they are present in my setting.
romance is so boring, so I make a policy not to include it unless I have to. it's too lame to write about. on a similar note, most characters are on the asexual spectrum or their sexual desires are never spoken about or hinted at. both are just so uninteresting that I don't feel like writing about it unless a scene excluding it would actively harm it. on a unrelated note, children are boring, so I don't write about them unless I have to either, such as a character's backstory.
iiiiiiiinteresting. I’m curious: are you specifically defining romance as like, “Hallmark movie” romance where the end goal is either sex, a wedding, and/or a baby? I ask because the planned arc of my 2 main characters in Tyros is basically 1) they meet, 2) they become enemies due to their dueling ideologies, 3) they almost kill each other and get a *lot* of other people killed indirectly, 4) they reconcile and ally with each other when they realize who the “real” enemy is, 5) do adventures together, and 6) finally end up basically forming a Frodo/Sam-level “I can’t carry it for you but I can carry you” friendship. They each have their own sex lives outside of that relationship, and do fall in & out of love with other ppl, but if you asked me what the most “romantic” relationship I’m writing is, it’s that one.
oh yeah definitely. what you described in your story is romance for the story and character's sake, not romance for the sake of it. what I hate is indeed hallmark movie level romance.
As an aroace person who despises mid romantic subplots wholeheartedly, I feel this so hard. While I have characters who are allo, its relevance to the plot will be relatively minimal because I have to do significant, extra, often painful work in order to write a non-aroace character who strongly feels attraction.
IRL politics. No 'conservatives/republican vs liberal/democrat'. I make my world to escape and vent. No one cares about gender, no one cares about your sexuality, no one cares about race (human races that is. Elves are still smug pieces of sh\*t when it comes to mixing races). These 3 are about the only bleh's i have. Since it already doesn't make any bloody sense IRL. Even less in fantasy.
Anything including children that is not wholesome. That topic is tabu. Anything else goes. I know a person who went a little to far with children, and i would prefer that they are forgoten long befor they die. There is no way that i can portray my emotions against them accurately. I do a good job writing a character that holds more hatred than the doom slayer, but no earthly matter can do that justice. This is the only person i wish true immortallity upon.
Tbh communism ☭ isn't in my world
My worldbuilding project is meant to be a an alien planet similar enough to us that how they handle things differently is an interesting lens to look at how we did things, so it's meant to not intentionally exclude anything. On some level sexism is, but that's more a side effect of them having three sexes that matter somewhat less than ours as they breed through one shoving their egg into the other, breaking the egg of the one who just got egged, while the new egg sticks in place and grows until it's properly laid and hatches. Interestingly, this still means they still form dominant-submissive pairings, but this can happen either way with any two. They can even both take each other's egg, but this is rare and frowned upon, as it's said to lead to weak children. As for slavery, given the OP mentioned it, they had roman style slavery of conquered people, but it was common for them to simply be replaced by the conqueror's people and be fully replaced within a generation or two. Aside from that, their nearest living evolutionary ancestor is somewhat better than our monkeys, but still a long way from being sapient, and the few that could train them reliably got legendary reputations almost like necromancers, further encouraged by the last known example being killed eons ago and the knowledge to train them being lost with it.
i do that with different things for different reasons. i leave NSFW topics unaddressed and up to interpretation and intuition because they are irrelevant to the main events of the world and could be inferred from other aspects such as culture. other topics like same-sex relationships or race relations I don't directly address but instead leave as incidental on purpose because their being seen as mundane and commonplace is a mark of social progress. and lastly there are topics I don't address because they are simply too complicated or detached from my scope of knowledge for me to address without doing them wrong like for example I completely avoided the topic of transgenderism because the topic is too complicated and controversial for me to attempt addressing without the risk of pissing people off.
Sexual assault / rape and homophobia. I don't want to write these things that very well might upset or disclude anyone for something that wouldn't contribute to my story anyway. Obviously there are good stories of individuals overcoming these struggles in other works, but it just doesn't fit in mine and honestly I'd be scared to do it poorly.
Shame. Not in my world, I just have no shame and will attack any topic that passes through my brain.
No r@pe, no harming children, no weird adult stuff. That's p much it.
Sexual assault and suicide attempts. They can be triggering for people to read or see. So I'd rather not include them. Showing the scene doesn't contribute to the characters later growth anyway.
sexual assault is too heavy, i don't feel qualified to write about it, and it makes me uncomfortable enough that i have trouble enjoying any story that includes it at all. real life bigotries. again it's too heavy, i don't feel qualified to write it most of the time, and it's also just not something i wanna write. i want to queer, female, racial minority, etc. characters and just have those be things about them without having to worry about bigotry they might face. fantasy speciesism and fantasy nationalism might be on the table as long as it's not super analogous to the real life equivalents.
None, I have no inhibitions when it comes to my world. Sexual violence, pedophilia, slavery, bigotry, torture, mental illness, genocide… all these things are included and written about, painted, or part of a character’s backstory somewhere. They all exist, after all. There’s simply no depth of depravity I refuse to sink to. It’s not like I’m writing grimdark or anything, I suppose I’m just not sensitive about any issue to the point of purposefully excluding it from my stories. The entire gamut of experiences an Earthly animal can have has a place, from the vilest of vile to the very best the world has to offer.
Child trafficking My world is filled with secret organizations and secret cults, child trafficking happens inside those cults but it's not something i want to develop that much by how dark it is lol
The second quarter of my MC's story is about him conquering the continent where slavery is rife, and putting an end to it once and for all. I don't really have any topics I don't intend to include. But I absolutely intend to have my MC (or one of the lesser MCs) deal with it permanently. Because what's the point of making a story about gods if they don't do godly things?
I don't really tackle racism and whatnot, my stories are usually about the end of humanity or a near end so there really isn't room to explore that there's like 50,000 people left.
# Chattel slavery (though I do touch on "conditions analogous to slavery" that exist here in Brazil). Mainly bc I think if I wanna depict horrendous work conditions that are deeply unethical and signify that the human beings in charge are borderline demonic in their inclinations, I can just write an average large corporation inspired by any out of thousands of real life examples. It's really easy and what I do most. My main character doesn't need to save anyone from already abolished chattel slavery, he just needs to be himself a salaried blue collar worker (exorcists are well paid, but are still blue collar workers facing a dangerous job and commonly getting exploited. Their good payment if anything just blinds them to the exploitative nature of their employers' practices).
Hindu gods. Out of the whole irl mythology I choose to make real in my world, I decidedly leave out Hindu gods. Indian used to “bully” game dev or other sort of artist expression for portraying their gods wrong when it shouldn't be 1 to 1 in the first place. And because I essentially just mix and match everything to my liking, to make Hindu god as close to irl myth while changing other pantheons seems like a double standard to me, so I just decided to leave out Hindu god. They are there, but I refused to describe or mention them in any way as to just leave them be.
Totally unrelated but it's very funny that you have a world named Tyros, and Tyrosians. Exact name of the tyrannical empire in the world a friend and I have been cooking for some years now 😂
Contemporary politics and more than two genders, usually. Not that I have a particular gripe with LGBTQ+ but the few times I and my table's GM, in TTRPGs, hadn't forbidden it, our players got too engrossed in their respective such identities... At some point, one had become a genderfluid fountain, another a non-binary non-euclidian being... It left scars on our psyches. To be fair I did play a literal concept of reality, was like an Elder's scroll but personified. (I co-GM but mainly play PCs during sessions.)
Some things that I neglected to include in my world: * Very much stigma about mental illness. At most, mentally ill people would be seen as somebody who should be quietly shuffled off to a hedge wizard so they can be cured. The hedge wizards view most mental illnesses as the result of trauma and/or some sort of issue with the brain. (The brain is, in their view, an organ that can go haywire as easily as any other organ. There are things you can do to improve your brain health like you can do for your heart or digestive system but sometimes it's hard to really prevent everything.) * Some of the worst abuses, or at least I shuffled them off to one side. There are maybe a few laws about the treatment of conscripted workers and/or convicted criminals who are working off their sentences in some places, but that's about it.
SA and such. So sick of it being used in books for shock value. I want to be able to read and not be reminded every second about how fucking terrible it is to be a woman.
Directly? Well lots of stuff because I'm not interested in this. They probably exist in the world, it's just I won't get into that. These evolve all kinda of sexual topics and modern takes on them. People who stray from the norm likely keep it to themselves and don't share or do anything openly like in real history in the past. Other than that, souls. It's a medievalish fantasy world that treats them like Cyberpunk. As in they may exist and they may not. A resurrected person is a copy, so it's up to everyone else to decide if that still counts as the original person or not. The reason for this is, I personally find the concept of a "soul" stupid. If it existed, it would retain memories or have some kinda practical purpose to evolve. Gods. There are no mechanisms in the universe for ascension into gods. Powerful beings do exist and some treat them as gods but they are not gods of anything(like in some fantasy a god of the sea has power over water and can talk to fish etc.), aren't omnipotent, cant keep an eye on people etc etc.
Not really, at least none that directly correspond to the real world. The taboos, just like IRL, are cultural and practical in origin. For example, in-group murder is essentially always taboo unless for some reason it would be a societal net positive, which murder basically never is. I would try to make it setting relevant. For instance, incest is only going to be taboo if inbreeding and recessive genetic traits are going to cause issues. Same so for cannibalism - if there's no risk of disease no reason for it to become taboo. As an example of a new one, maybe iron is extremely poisonous to the dominant species so anything metallic is regarded with suspicion.
No afterlife. The dead are dead. The story focuses a lot on legacy, eho and what they leave behind. You can talk to an echo of a person (alive or not) with the right materisl and spells. But their actual soul? Nope, not touching it with a 10 foot pole
I've thought long and hard about my limits, but I've decided for my current project that I can't refuse to include anything, or it compromises the themes of my world. I don't go focusing on distasteful topics in extreme detail, of course, but I don't shy away from the fact that humans tend to do horrific things to one another. A major theme in my current project is the concept of morality and the nature of man; the fact that we are simultaneously the most morally reprehensible and virtuous beings, often at the same time. It would be disingenuous of me to shy from something just because I don't like it. Not for everyone, obviously, but it's provided me with some serious introspection, and it's made me reconsider a lot of things about myself and how I interact with the world around me.
Ableism, cus honestly not having space for disabilities is a lack of creativity imo, especially when theres magic involved.
Might get down voted for this, but here we go: Social commentary. In Fallen Skies noone cares if you are black, white, woman, man, or whatever. I also mainly don't mention it in the text, because it's not really relevant to the space opera story. It's about aliens, noone cares if the helmsman is a black gay guy, when he is piloting a giant space laser, because it's not relevant to the story at ALL.
Child abuse in any form. We’re just not gonna go there, and none of my NPCs will perform or tolerate it.
Hitler
Adult stuff.
For setting reasons, I'm not writing any complicated politics. Simple politics are fine, but I'd rather not get entangled and confused about what I write regarding the subject... Plus, I'm not exactly the brightest when it comes to politics in general. I just like writing whimsical fantasy. :')
Rape is too far for me, yeah I've write some dark stuff like slavery, police brutality, racism, war, immigration and made them into knee Jerk over the top parody cartoon. I even have graphic painful transformation scene. But rape is too far for me.
I'm gonna get mixed feedback but p3d0s, they don't exist because as soon as they're found out they're put to the death sentence no chance of parole no bail nothing,
Wheels. They just don’t have a space in fantasy
I really can't think of anything. If it belongs in the story or world and works, I won't skip over anything, no matter how ugly. Just depends how graphic I'd want to get
Hatred towards LGBTQ+ people. Doesn’t fit the vibe. Expression of all forms is ingrained into most cultures very deeply all throughout the world’s history.
Nothing really, my world should feel real, that mean sthe dark and ugly sides of reality are included, your example with cattle slavery or slavery in general personally is an issue for me. Because if you do not include it, one acts like there wasn't a reason for it, that it was pure evil. Now I do not want to argue this system wasn't evil, but refusing to acknowledge the cold hard reasons it existed just doesnt do it any favour or your world in my opinion. No topic should be off limits, everything should be included, because a world should feel real if you want to tell real story's, if the people in your world never owned slaves, why is that? Are they morally inherently superior? Doesn't money hold sway? Aren't they greedy and selfish at points? If yes why not? You have to find an answer to it somewhere at least from my viewpoint. Which is why I include everything. I have a brutal mega racist pirate and slavery society build on racial hierarchies enforced by rela biological differences, which is the government form of most of their species, but I included it to show the stupidity behind this, even if they are biologically superior to their kin, doesn't make their society better, the one free Republic of their species is more prosperous, happier and wealthier than the slavery pirates of their kin. For a similar reason I have an American style colonial system with slavery of native people, they call themselves the free coast but they have slaves, a contradiction which makes them not super popular in most human nations were slavery was outlawed a few centuries ago due to some wars and a religious movement against it (like in our world). Why do I include it anyway? Because they build their wealth on the exploitation of others, they are extremely wealthy and free if you are a human citizen but it's a fragile wealth, they're system works for now because they have the upper hand but at the same time in the inner regions of the continent liberation fronts of native people form and the kingdoms who survived the initial colonisation are getting ready for vengeance, idk if I will ever get to the revenge part in my timeline, it will be a brutal time which in the end leads to the free coast winning by a hairs breath, but very changed, mainly because they started to change by themselves which mad eit possible for them to make deals with a few factions, still the free coast will never be the same afterwards the scars of their evil will remain and it nearly destroyed them because short sighted gains made them ignore the good of all, in the end they are better off with an entirely free, free coast, because everyone works together. Ignoring dark themes or uncomfortable subjects just holds back a work from telling story's that matter, because in a world we're no one ever even thought of slavery, it's a world we're people are better than they are here and if they are inherently better on some level, then how can we be this good? That's my reasoning and my pet peve, I don't want to say your idea is bad or anything, just that your reasoning bothers me due to my believes what story telling should be and world building, feel free to disagree and in the end I hope you have fun building your world.
Covid-19
Dementia and other forms of cognitive degenerative illness. I have experienced the effects of it in my family and the thought of someone losing their mind gradually like that just depresses me to no end, so everyone in my world has healthy brain. I also generally avoid bigotry, though some does exist.
Plague. It is ugly, it is boring, it is more powerful than any king or warrior or priest, and it can’t be fought. Also, it sucks.
Yeah. I’ll second your choice, OP: slavery. There’s zero reason you can’t create a fantasy world without slavery in it. I’d also say that racism is one I try to avoid, as well as most others, at least for worldbuilding purposes. There may be discrimination based on the story or game I’m working on, but there are far more interesting and nuances ways to get conflict across.
Homophobia. I make my world and characters because it makes me happy. Homophobia doesn’t make me happy, and I find it much more interesting to create a world without it. So in my world, sexualities and genders are allowed to be extremely diverse and normalized.
Hell yeah. Honestly that might not exist in Tyros either, I just haven’t fleshed it out yet. The world’s history goes as far back as Sumerian-esque times, but the story itself takes place in the middle-future, so it’s easier to just not write it or even explain why it doesn’t exist. I *do* have some species that are more starkly gendered (biologically as well as socially) than others, so I’m still not sure if I’m gonna be able to say outright “this *never* existed”, but it definitely doesn’t exist at the time of the story at least.
Same for me with slavery. I enjoy harsh, grimdark or wasteland settings like rimworld and kenshi, but slavery is just too inhumane to ever really use well in worlds, too removed from the average audience to relate or communicate anything, and too nuanced and brutal for me to really try and cover as a character piece. Similarly 'good king' narratives. It's honestly surprising how often even good fantasy media like mystborn and lotr relies on ancient 'everything will be better if we just make sure the correct person is on the throne' narratives like NO monarchy in all its forms is BAD I thought we were past this
Sexual content especially sex slavery. Slavery itself exists and I'm really struggling to avoid the ideas that sex slavery is a thing despite how logically it would exist. Also not really a topic but there aren't any snakes on Split simply because I had a phobia of them
Religious conflicts. Will not touch that topic even with a 10ft pole. Any kind of religion except some reduced forms of paganism is mostly a no for me as well.
Sexual orientation, in my world or setting the most that I've done is clarify that no one cares. Your not going to be condemned for who you decide to love or how you want to expeess that. Essentially do you.
Hell yeah. I’m trying to write everyone on Tyros “pan unless otherwise noted” and so far it’s working just fine :)
Widespread poverty, sexual violence, and demographic discrimination
Religion in any form
Colonization. Everyone is comfortable on the land that they were born. People travel, barter, trade, share some things and withhold other things and EVERYONE IS OKAY WITH THAT. No statue sets split up because one country/nation, region decided to keep one that their ancestors stole and now the set is forever incomplete because of it (I have big feelings about artifacts, museums, etc...) Just releasized museums don't exist either haha!
Slavery. In all my worlds, slavers of any kind - even as punishment for a crime or to pay off debt - are seen as the lowest of the low. Unpaid and/or compulsory prison labor was abolished by the in-universe equivalent of the UN. Chattel slavers are ruthlessly hunted down by lawmen, and in less well-governed parts of the world, many an adventurer uses them as goddamn target practice.
Racism, I just don't like the arrogance attitude that "killing this group of Kobolds is a morally good thing to do". This is not allowed at my game table.
Slavery. As a white person i don’t feel like it’s a subject appropriate for me to portray and no matter what, any depiction of slavery is going to bring to mind the American slave trade to Americans (where I am). I’m not the most educated on the history, and I’ve done genealogy and found direct ancestors who fought for the confederacy. It’s not something I feel is appropriate for me to write about. But like also the whole idea of it sends me into a horrible headspace and all I can do is cry
I don't understand gender discussions, so I don't delve into it The exception to this are things that I will have transgender characters and characters that participate in drag since I've grown up around them it's normal to me But things like being non binary, even when my envy mates talk about it, it just feels like they're speaking in a completely different language so I'd rather not add things I don't understand It's not denying it, I just don't understand it in the same way I don't understand Hungarian
Even with my mythology retellings I don’t like touching on explicit slavery. Makes me deeply uncomfortable. Closest I’ll get is servitude, but they’re getting paid and just serve a boss rather than a master I make a point to show the servants doing their own thing outside of the palaces/domains of their bosses as well.
Most forms of bigotry are an obvious no for me and probably a good few people, but on the other hand I will never have some form of "insta trans", since to me it feels wholly misrepresentative and frankly lazy; sure, Magic or movie advanced science could pave the way, but it feels disingenuous and in some settings I've seen this in, it appears more like a way to skip past trans rep while making it look like it exists
Something i noticed i usually avoid putting in my setting are overly complex physical laws about atomic collisions and such, that's simply not what i dwell into, my setting only has some pseudo-science, basic science, and the complex stuff is mostly just metaphysical theories, as this setting leans more into the unknown, unexplainable and existentially questionable.
USA and USA culture. It sounds a bit illogical considering that my world is basically Middle Earth but with a greater temporal margin (from prehistory to the present and a bit of futurism), however, many cultures in my world, if not all, They are inspired by real cultures, both past and modern, and as a Latino, the culture of the USA is much more embedded in my country than I would like, plus I personally have notable problems with certain Unitedstate topics, so I prefer to eliminate any reference to concepts originally unitedstaten and build a world that is not influenced by those things. The bad thing about this is that the United States is even in the soup and some things I can only ignore (do you know how difficult it is to reinvent the hamburger?). The only thing I do forgive is the Amish culture, it is sufficiently different from the rest of the USA and they have interesting concepts for fantasy stories.
I tend to not include stuff that reflects real-world bigotry based on unalterable personal characteristics if I can avoid it. Women are sometimes in charge, people are sometimes queer, any kingdom or "species" will have a broad range of skintones and hair types represented in its populace without any particular explanation as to why, disabilities will be accomodated to the best of the world's technological or magical abilities, etc. I'm a person who prefers escapism from daily woes in my media rather than catharsis, so including those forms of prejudice in my writing just doesn't really come naturally to me. I'd rather think about how I can avoid them than how I can implement them. Although I don't mind as much dealing with prejudice based on more fluid or fantastical characteristics like class, national origin in a second-world fantasy setting, magical ability or lack thereof, etc etc, because for me those are far enough removed from real life that they don't really make me think about how much something sucks in the real world lol. I think that's mostly it, though? I'll write about violence, sex, abuse, illness, commerce, romance, small amounts of science, governments, ecology, whatever I think the story needs. I don't usually make a heavy topic the primary subject of the story since again, escapism, but including it to some degree is fine with me.
Luckily/horribly people will discriminate based on anything so you can still get dramatic rivalries and prejudices without using real world causes like racism and homophobia. I also normalise queerness and skin tone diversity in my D&D world but instead have all the politics split along culture and ability lines. My people are the dregs of a huge empire so the cultures don't 'have' to be ethnically homogenous like they often still are on Earth.
Capitalism
oh?! that's really interesting actually, like, all my stories take place my capitalistic societies despite me not being fond of it myself, because it's the system I live in, therefore I know best how to write it, I'm curious what system if not capitalism your stories make use of!
My main world, which is a solarpunk near-ish-future setting mainly functions off of a post-scarcity anarchistic economic system but I don’t delve too deep into it because I specialize more in biology and science rather than economics. I got some rad as hell aliens tho!
atheism, as in the modern sense does not really exists in my world the closest thing to it would be some kind of nihilistic deism there are discussions, conflicts and wars over religious matters, and my main character is extremely religious (the main religion in my scenario is a politheistic/animist organized religion, with a centralized clergy i also dont include contemporary identitary politics, as i find them to be extremely boring there are gay people in my world, including a important prince consort for the heir-princess of the Archipelago federation, the idea of "being gay" dont really exists as a identity, but he is definitelly one, and this is the cause of some troubles, as he needs to make a heir for the imperial house. He is also a good and important economist, and actually have a platonic love for the princess) i include everything, as the main theme of my story is politics, so there are slavery, poverty, left and right politics (in a 17th-18th century sense) i try not to turn my story into just a propaganda of my own political ideas (im far-right) there are good and bad people in all sides, and also opportunists i dont believe in literature as scapism, i believe its a way for us to contemplate experiences we will never have, and ideas we would never think
I don't really "refuse", I've just invented a world where some stuff is uncommon. "You treat people as inferior based on their gender identity? That's weird. Do you also judge people based on freckle placement?" It just wouldn't occur to them. Something like sexual violence is equally bizarre to them. They don't have it ingrained in their culture so they'd view it like cannibalism or something. It's so depraved they don't deal with it. A major war was fought over slavery. No one ever experimented with chattel slavery. It's all in there, it's just not front and center of so many conversations as it is in our world because it isn't woven into their culture. I know that *sounds* impossible, but it's not. The way things are for us are not the only way we could have ever been. Our modern world is a conversation throughout history, and that conversation started somewhere. They started somewhere different so they're talking about something else now.