Check out the old Lucasarts game Loom. It's an old-school graphical adventure where you interact with the world using music-based magic. It doesn't go too deep into the actual mechanics, but it's a great game.
“Low Fantasy” is kind of a broad job description but I’d say besides GBU_28’s “normal people be normal” and TheOakTree’s “upper bounds on magic”, there seems tb be the one thing highly relevant enough to LF that it’s used to “sell it”:
It’s about human glorification.
Sure, there can be elves and dragons and stuff but the setting presents them as worse or lower than humans. For example, dragons are basically cats and can be domesticated, or elves isolate themselves because they are chronic backstabbers who can’t form any lasting alliance, let alone a nation or country. Or even worse: the dragons are cats and the elves are just basically cosplayer humans!
But in the end whatever races and species you add, it all ends up somehow being in the service of humans having the primacy on the setting.
Other than that, I’d say an important thing for making a world feel low fantasy is that it has to be easy to pick a cause to join or fight for. It’s a world that has, dunno, artists, bards, poets, scholars, radio talks, whatever, that makes easy for people to broadcast and pick on immediate needs, be they refuge, food, or protection from the Hourglass Demons.
When I imagine Low Fantasy, there’s usually a House/Guild/Company that has one special person who bolsters their trade. Whether that special person has a magical affinity to trade, fight, vex, spy, or charm… even a single magical advantage, when applied consistently, could lead to market dominance.
For example:
A successful and renowned caravan company has a magic-attuned fighter who can fend off thieves and ambushers, even if that means being the last alive.
Local herbalist is suspiciously beating all of the competition. Upon further investigation, it turns out they hired a magic-attuned individual to charm their goods, evoking positive affect in customers.
You should implicitly define an upper boundary to how many people can have magic abilities, and to how often said people have powerful abilities. For example, say the nation that your story exists in has 100 million people, and each 100 million yields a handful of magical people. One special person is probably a baby, and two of them are probably quite old. A couple magical people might be quite powerful, another couple has quite mundane abilities, and perhaps one is somewhere in the middle. There may be more or less than a handful of magical people in the nation, since people may come to or leave from your nation.
Every magic item (even the more “common” ones) is valuable and treasured, even if it might not be used often
A +1 sword can split the hide of the toughest monsters and beasts, and is the heirloom of a powerful marquis
Three healing potions on the raised dias of the church, awaiting the arrival of the prophesied heroes, who will need them to vanquish the vampire
Or the duke with more money than sense, who has a small trove of magical items like the Stone of Gravity sensing or the Ring of Purple death detection. The twist is that in some forgotten corner of his room is a dagger that glows in the presence of demons (including the ones disguised as humans to overthrow the kingdom)
Imo core things normal folks do have to be: normal.
Shipping things takes a long time, and is done by caravan or ship. And it takes a long fucking time.
Taverns cost money. Long term places have rent or similar.
If people go on a journey they need supplies.
If people get wounded they take a while to heal, and might get sick.
People have generally (or consistently) normal lifespans, with younger years being fit and ready for anything, and older years slowing down, or not even being able to fight any more.
In my opinion acing those types of things means when you do introduce magic or other fantasy stuff, it is impactful and rare.
In a game a while ago there was a FtM prince turned hosteller. Left court and royal duties due to disillusioned and wanting to do actual good. But then they were a PC and quickly needed some help from granddaddy the king. I wondered what the king wanted in exchange. And it was clear - the royal line continued. In other words get an heir.
I checked with the player that this was an OK path comfort and safety wise. Afterall one way to solve it was for the prince to get pregnant, force upon themselves a gender they did not want etc. We talked about it and had regular checkins.
The moment that made this an awesome world building moment was when I realized magic impregnation wasn’t an impossibility. Nor pregnancies without the biological bits. Because Magic!
Unfortunately we never to to that part before scheduling did its thing.
horny content insideMost worldbuilding has some erotic parts, but I did one where the erotic was front-and-center. A silly world that runs on porn logic and every fantasy comes true. Fantasies like: cheerleaders, sexy cops abuse their power, nurses take really good care of you, you rub a lamp and a genie comes, you get kidnapped by aliens, enthralled by a vampire… Because it’s a whimsical leisure world, everything should be on easy-mode. Agriculture should be free of pests and produces massive yields. There’s little disease. It’s a Utopia of sorts. It’s hard to justify that. Then I realised if I justify the 2nd-last fantasy listed in the first paragraph, I can justify everything else. What sort of world is it where you might get kidnapped by sexy aliens? If alien abduction happens, there must certainly be far more advanced aliens watching over the planet, using it as a playground. It’s an extraterrestrial creationism situation: the aliens built the world for their amusement. It was satisfying to justify one specific plotline that tends to happen (alien abduction), and in the same stroke justify all sorts of things: why is the world filled with beauty and exoticism, why is work on easymode, why is there no disease. Extraterrestrial creationism is an idea with some canon. It’s actually a plausible prediction that if technology develops enough in 100,000 years our horny descendants will create an erotic planet populated by beautiful porn stars who think they evolved there naturally and sometimes get abducted. Wouldn’t you if you had the technology? With one stroke, it goes from ‘ridiculous fantasy’ to ‘plausible’. Almost anything else I need to justify now is just: “the makers made it that way”. Santa Claus can exist if his magic sleigh is alien tech: he’s an alien who flies around spanking naughty girls. I can justify vampires existing (the makers engineered some sort of virus or something that creates blood-lust). Go through the list at tags.literotica.com and it’s easy to imagine pervy aliens setting any of them up.
Designing a solarpunk world. I wanted people living within the ecological limits in every biome: arctic, tundra, jungle, sailing the sea, sailing the sky in airships, under the sea in submarines. This last one posed a massive problem because submarines are extremely power-hungry, and that’s incompatible with the low-energy-use theme of the world. But I didn’t want to give up the Zissou vibes by erasing the submarine-tribe.
The existing ones are small drones. But a paper with (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-16649-0_12) has a section titled ‘Size effects’ and bigger would be better. And the paper already linked has a whole chapter discussing scaling effects.
That was a great breakthrough because I went from “Submarines are poewr-hungry nuclear behemoths” to “Submarines use basically zero energy” and did it with proven tech. The tradeoff is that you have to glide up and down, and the floor will be at a 4° tilt a lot of the time, which could be annoying.
The value of art is in the choices you’ve made and why. It’s important to keep this in mind with AI; how you choose to use it should mesh with your vision. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses is hard enough, but now we must also know the AI’s, if it can truly help us.
For a criminal organization operating a towpath racket, an LLM once proved interesting in generating a rudimentary business plan for it and speculating various knock on effects of the racket. I had to give it a great deal of context and carefully choose which ideas to use, but if you make its outputs your own thoroughly enough, it can be a useful tool.
I pretty much only world build in TTRPG’s. As a result I use AI a lot in world building, for everything from landmasses, to city layouts, to individual NPC’s. Because by the time I get down to the details of the story, the players choices have shaped the story being told, and I no longer have to world build, I just react as the NPC’s.
Grammar checking my properly written-up Wiki entries from notes of my Obsidian vault. Or finding names and acronyms, but I prefer to do that myself if possible.
To get a scale like that, I would just leave it up to extrapolation of the fundamental traits of your world. If my world was scorched, but I only write about a couple cities, you can imagine everything inbetween is a fiery hellscape too.
It’s your universe, not AI’s nor a professional’s. Try to do as much as you can by yourself, if the world your building fits with you as a person, this should be easier than it sounds.
P.S - Proc-gen is not necesserily AI, but an algorithm. A set of rules to follow with given aguments for variation. This is why games such as No Man’s Sky, that heavily use proc-gen, end up with repeating landscapes or planets. The algorithm was given similar arguments. AI is far more complex however, closer to how a biological brain determines something.
I think I’ll use AI to keep track of the lore accurately, if I were to ever write a story. By the way, procedural generation isn’t related to AI. It is more and less related to functions like the Perlin noise generator, and it’s different variants.
Transformers have the potential to recall context. Pair it with a knowledge base software modified for writing stories and world-building, and it would boost productivity. Index-based search engine is inferior, because although the search works, users have no idea about what type of technique is being used behind - is it pattern-matching? Is it text-distance? Or vector-based?
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.”
I’ve never watched Blade Runner, only this scene, but this scene is incredible. And this quote gives a really strong impression of a much larger world.
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