Edgar Ironpelt
Adventurer
I tend to do more and more-exotic world-building for the settings of my read-only fiction than for the settings I run games in.
In my game worlds, for example, there will usually be a single moon that's Luna-like in apparent size, brightness, and periodicity, and calendars will be either the standard modern Gregorian one or a lightly modified variant. In my read-only worlds, I might have a different moon, or two moons, or something else, and so there are no months and the calendar is otherwise different.
My Etan game is the oldest and therefore most well-developed. In it, adventurers typically have weird names because adventurers choose to adopt weird names as their adventuring names. Because it's cooler to be known as "Boronor Moonblade" that as "Jeffery Drunkard's-son." Most people use 'ordinary' names, with what counts as 'ordinary' varying with location and culture.
I try to avoid high tech or (especially) magic that's bolted on, in favor of magic that's an integral and organic part of the world. So mundane things will often have a magical or supernatural component. Not a wizardly spell-casting type magic, but more subtle and sometimes deep and important. To reference Etan again, the different cultures are all multi-racial because it is very important to have at least one friend who is not of your race when it comes to marriage and having kids. You need at least one such friend to help you make a fertility charm, and fertility charms are important for certain magical reasons.
And speaking of fertility charms, there is no such thing as a true love charm or love potion in Etan. There is lots of junk that purports to be "love charms," but they're mostly low-grade fertility charms combined with a lot of wishful thinking. They're also the reason why unexpected and out-of-wedlock births happen in the world.
Being an unchurched free-thinking sort myself, I tend to ignore religion in my worldbuilding - unless there are (or were) actual gods in the setting, in which case religion and holidays will be built around them. There's also my alt-history setting for read-only fiction, with a subtle twist to religion, and with holidays the same as our timeline but with certain holidays having either greater or lesser importance.
My settings will often have a few exotic and fantastical creatures that are not at all exotic and fantastical in-setting, but rather are ordinary domestic animals.
Something I commonly use in my magical settings is alchemy to make a bimetallic gold/silver standard stable. Yes you can transform lead into gold, but it's expensive to do so (and mass is not conserved in the process). It's easier and in fact routine to transform silver into gold and vice versa. The amount of gold you get from a given weight of silver (or vice versa) sets a (super)natural, stable gold/silver exchange rate.
Patricia Wrede has a big set of worldbuilding questions
She also has a number of posts in her blog about worldbuilding in fiction. It's intended for writers of read-only fiction, but still useful for worldbuilding gamemasters.
And there was a "loretober" thread here on ENworld.
In my game worlds, for example, there will usually be a single moon that's Luna-like in apparent size, brightness, and periodicity, and calendars will be either the standard modern Gregorian one or a lightly modified variant. In my read-only worlds, I might have a different moon, or two moons, or something else, and so there are no months and the calendar is otherwise different.
My Etan game is the oldest and therefore most well-developed. In it, adventurers typically have weird names because adventurers choose to adopt weird names as their adventuring names. Because it's cooler to be known as "Boronor Moonblade" that as "Jeffery Drunkard's-son." Most people use 'ordinary' names, with what counts as 'ordinary' varying with location and culture.
I try to avoid high tech or (especially) magic that's bolted on, in favor of magic that's an integral and organic part of the world. So mundane things will often have a magical or supernatural component. Not a wizardly spell-casting type magic, but more subtle and sometimes deep and important. To reference Etan again, the different cultures are all multi-racial because it is very important to have at least one friend who is not of your race when it comes to marriage and having kids. You need at least one such friend to help you make a fertility charm, and fertility charms are important for certain magical reasons.
And speaking of fertility charms, there is no such thing as a true love charm or love potion in Etan. There is lots of junk that purports to be "love charms," but they're mostly low-grade fertility charms combined with a lot of wishful thinking. They're also the reason why unexpected and out-of-wedlock births happen in the world.
Being an unchurched free-thinking sort myself, I tend to ignore religion in my worldbuilding - unless there are (or were) actual gods in the setting, in which case religion and holidays will be built around them. There's also my alt-history setting for read-only fiction, with a subtle twist to religion, and with holidays the same as our timeline but with certain holidays having either greater or lesser importance.
My settings will often have a few exotic and fantastical creatures that are not at all exotic and fantastical in-setting, but rather are ordinary domestic animals.
Something I commonly use in my magical settings is alchemy to make a bimetallic gold/silver standard stable. Yes you can transform lead into gold, but it's expensive to do so (and mass is not conserved in the process). It's easier and in fact routine to transform silver into gold and vice versa. The amount of gold you get from a given weight of silver (or vice versa) sets a (super)natural, stable gold/silver exchange rate.
Patricia Wrede has a big set of worldbuilding questions
She also has a number of posts in her blog about worldbuilding in fiction. It's intended for writers of read-only fiction, but still useful for worldbuilding gamemasters.
And there was a "loretober" thread here on ENworld.
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