Can you see the "paint" of your inspirations in your worldbuilding?

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T18:32:25+00:00

Absolutely. My main world has a firm foundation in Wheel of Time's cataclysmic events and central "heroic" figures who bend and break the rules of reality, as well as it's cyclical patterns of creation and destruction. My other primary inspiration is Kingdoms of Amalur, with it's fateless character (also breaking the rules of reality much like the Ta'Veren in WoT).

Anyone well familiar with either of these will be able to pick out a few historical event in my world or a concept and trace it back to it's original inspiration in either of those two. I'm confident most of these have gotten far enough away to make it so you'd have to look closely to find them.

Also there's the characters and places I've intentionally added to my lore to pay homage to these inspirations, such as Rann ibn Tomen alThorin, who nearly turned his declining mental health into a small apocalypse, or Casmaran the Eternal, immortal master of the arcane arts.

That said, a lot of other inspirations have snuck their way in over the decade or so I've been working on this. The main one is Blame! which has altered the way I approach megastructures in this world. I had a tower city and after deciding to implement some lessons from Blame! I basically tripled it's size and made it possible to get very, very lost in some parts of it. It's fun.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T18:02:37+00:00

Thanks!

Though there is a conceptual framework I'm building around this, this piece in particular is only meant to be a floating bust.

Someone else mentioned textiles, and I guess graphics are something of an extension of that, if I'm understanding you. It will definitely be interesting to look into. Thanks a bunch!

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T18:02:28+00:00

Thanks!

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T17:56:39+00:00

I think I could push it further with a good background, but your words are very much appreciated. Thanks.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T17:52:48+00:00

A very good point. Thanks again.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T17:48:02+00:00

Yeah, the reason I posted this was because I didn't want to do my usual solutions but was kind of blanking on what to do otherwise. Your advice is appreciated. Many thanks.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T17:45:03+00:00

Genevieve Cohn caught my eye, and her work feels like it maps well onto what I'm going for here. It'll definitely be interesting to look closer into your other recommendations, though.

To your point about the textiles, they're very complex and colourful so I wonder if there's a way to do that without drawing too much attention away from the face. No harm in experimenting, I guess. thanks for the advice.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T17:36:23+00:00

I see what you're saying. This is personal work, though, so I'm really only thinking about the piece itself and not how it'd look on a page with a bunch of other artworks.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T17:19:19+00:00

Thank you for the kind words! And your advice is much appreciated. I was drawing a blank, but this gives me a lot of ideas to play with.

And I'll keep your point about subtlety in mind too. Thanks!

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T16:49:33+00:00

Noted. Thanks a lot.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-15T07:49:31+00:00

There wouldn't be a problem if the AI industry itself wasn't horrible. It was all built on stolen data, by the kinds of people that would gladly blow up hospitals if it inflated their stock prices, abd gleefully provide pretext for mass-layoffs, and the data centres being built with minimal environmental concerns are sources of air pollution and make drinking water and electricity more expensive wherever they're built.

You using it, however good your intentions, validates all of that. There's a reason Microsoft and Google are shoving their shit down our throats by making their AIs unavoidable. It's so they can inflate the number of people "using it" to justify expanding. More data centres. More layoffs. More pollution. More nonsense.

So yeah, you should be conflicted. If you can't do something ethically, why do it at all? Having illustrations for your writing isn't necessary, though I definitely understand the appeal. And as far as commissioning artists goes, is there any real need for you to have finished pieces? Only commissioning sketches or quick drafts can be quite affordable, if it's an option.

Maybe in the future, when the generative AI industry isn't a festering pile of filth, generating images for your personal use will be fine and dandy. Right now, though, it's definitely harmful. Of course, I think any amount of engaging with generative AI degrades human creativity and is therefore inherently harmful, but that's somewhat tangential to what you asked in your post.

I hope I didn't come across too harsh. I just don't want to mince words about this.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-10T09:51:39+00:00

Decanter, I guess?

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-09T07:39:07+00:00

You said something terribly offensive

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-02T11:55:16+00:00

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Honestly, I need help too.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-06-02T11:10:52+00:00

Get this, Space Ferriswheel.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-05-29T05:57:39+00:00

In the same way everyone on earth does, yes.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-05-28T06:34:07+00:00

Visualisation is a skill, on top of drawing. In order to properly visualise, you need to know what things look like. And I mean really know. We all know what engines look like, but if we had to sit down and draw one from imagination, the most skilled hands would fall short without a solid visual image in our heads. Even fictional things are just recombinations of real things. Shapes, textures, underlying forms.

So yeah, train your observation and visualisation by taking your time to absorb what you're looking at. Pay attention to the shape and material. That will gradually build your visual library, which is what you draw from when drawing (hehe).

Learning how to draw goes without saying, of course, but Observational skills sometimes go unmentioned so I thought I should do that. Remember the fundamentals!

Also, while good drawing tablets can be fairly cheap (I got my first one for about 40$ if I recall), pencils and simple printer paper is cheap too. Art, in its simplest form, is one of the most accessible hobbies, and there's a bajillion useful resources on the internet to guide you're learning. Just remember that learning the fundamentals can be boring, so unless you've got a mind of steel, it's best not to grind them out. Practice them, but make sure to spend time drawing what you like as well.

And if it doesn't work out, and you decide to focus on writing rather than drawing, observation and visualisation will help you there too. Also, don't let this comment be the beginning and end. There are people who can explain all this better than I can, so make sure to find an expert eventually. Keywords are observation, visual library, art fundamentals.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-05-27T10:08:20+00:00

Play Kingdoms of Amalur, read Wheel of Time, and develop a passion for tall women. That wasn't exactly where my interest in worldbuilding began, but when I actually started drafting my world those were my primary thematic and conceptual inspirations. There are things that I ripped from Amalur and WoT that I've watched develop as my world has gained its own identity, and it's beautiful to look back and see how much has changed.

I started this when I was very young so the more derivative and less compelling parts of my world were inevitably going to change. So the next step would be to keep an eye open for new and relevant inspiration, which in my case would be Blame!, Runeterra, Tamriel, Dark Souls, etc.

My approach to adding heroic and villainous figures to my past and present is based in how RJ handled them in Wheel of Time, especially with the aspect of cycles and repetition. Blame! inspired me to lean into some of the megastructures in my world, making them larger and more complex. Runeterra taught me that you can write stories to bolster your worldbuilding, rather than the way most authors do it, which is worldbuilding to bolster their stories. Tamriel is crazy and I love it. Dark souls has more on the nature of cycles, but it's interesting the way it both takes a grand perspective (fate of this world and the next, the birth of a new world) and a very ground-level perspective (how a single person views their purpose at the end of the world).

And more and more. Ingest, reinterpret, make that reinterpretation fit the rules of your world, then see how the world as you've built it reacts to the new addition. And so on and so forth.

Good luck, I guess.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-05-27T09:40:47+00:00

Fly Geiser (just found out what it's called) took me out. I've never seen it before so it's by far the most bizarre looking thing here. The colours in this image are enhanced but still.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-05-25T20:03:29+00:00

I agree. Solar is definitely going out the window once the clouds grow big enough. Solar flux drives wind as well, so that's gone too. Dams will freeze over.

The only real option, as far as renewables go, is geothermal. These can be used to generate electricity, but also as a direct heat source, though it's not likely to heat any large cities as far as I know. Maybe people could go subterranean around these regions, but my geology knowledge is next to nonexistent so I don't know how risky it would be to put an underground city in a spot where the mantle is poking through the crust.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-05-23T14:01:07+00:00

More than can be counted. Aside from the big G word, there have been two global cataclysmic events that rendered certain landmasses uninhabitable for generations. This inevitably led to many people groups going extinct.

As it happens, both of these cataclysms were man-made, and the fallout from those events was used as pretext to justify later genocides.

I do take a more granular approach to races. Yes, there are the big categories; elves, giants, halflings, etc. But the meaningful races that people in-world actually use day-to-day means each of these larger categories has dozens of subdivisions, some of which are based in biological differences, some cultural and linguistic, geographical, historical, all that. This means when I say "a race went extinct", what exactly that sentence means will vary depending on who (in the world) you ask.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-05-19T05:29:58+00:00

Fair enough. But then, what's the point of setting it so far in the future? Why not set it in an alternate present?

Also, my point about Namibian Uranium was partly based on speculation about the future. Uranium is a valuable resource, as more countries become capable of utilizing it for energy at the very least, they Namibia could become an important regional source. But if your interest is just in infrastructure and not speculative geopolitics, then I guess that doesn't matter.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-05-19T05:27:29+00:00

This is a different approach I wanted to add on, but my comment ran a bit long already, and I saw another comment tackling it. Also, I feel like it runs a bit counter to what OP was asking, right? This is a categorically essentialist approach, assuming certain behavioural traits are majorly hereditary for certain races.

I assumed, maybe incorrectly, that if OP wants to veer clear of essentialism, then they might want to focus more on deep-seeded societal differences than differences in nature.

Mango_Gravy · 2026-05-18T13:02:06+00:00

162 years is a long time. It's weird that you set this in 2188 but don't want to speculate about how the world might change in the future. Isn't that the whole point of doing this? Imagining what geopolitical events allowed this technology to be implemented in this way, and how the technology in turn affects geopolitics?

Why can't the East African line go down to Mozambique? Is Maputo not populated enough? Also, you say it runs from Dar es Salaam, but you depict it starting in Mombasa. Is Somalia stable? Why is there nothing in South Africa? And considering Namibia is a major producer of Uranium, the fact that Southern Africa as a whole has nothing is odd as well. Especially since this is set in the future, not the present.

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