Creative Prompts

I have been working on a hard sci-fi setting for about eight months now and I managed to back myself into a corner that completely breaks the narrative before the main timeline even begins. I wanted to design a species that evolved on a planet with zero natural predators. The environment was supposed to be completely cooperative, minimal evolutionary pressure, plenty of resources. They developed a complex society based on mutualism and shared neural empathy. No concept of war, no concept of weapons, not even a word for murder in their vocabulary.

The problem started when I sat down to map out their first contact with the rest of the galaxy. I am aiming for a high level of realism, so no space magic or convenient plot armor. I introduced a standard expansionist corporate faction from a neighboring system. Nothing cartoonishly evil, just a typical resource extraction empire that needs the rare minerals under the utopian species home world.

As soon as the corporate scout ships landed, my entire worldbuilding structure collapsed under its own weight. Since the natives literally cannot comprehend the idea of institutionalized violence, they did not hide, they did not build defenses, and they did not negotiate with any leverage. When the corporations started setting up mining rigs and displacing local populations, the natives just tried to communicate their distress through empathy networks. The corporate suits obviously did not care because they do not have the neural receptors to even perceive it.

I tried to write a scenario where they survive through passive resistance but it makes no logical sense. They do not have the concept of holding territory or denying access. Within three decades of contact, their entire ecosystem is strip-mined, their social structure is ruined, and the population drops by ninety percent due to industrial pollution and habitat loss. They did not even fight back because the neural architecture of their brains physically prevents them from generating malicious intent. They just sat there and faded away while trying to share feelings with bulldozers.

So now I have a dead planet and a completely blank spot where a major faction was supposed to be for the actual story. I refused to use the magical savior trope where some advanced alien race swoops in to protect them because that ruins the gritty tone of the universe. But letting them just get quietly wiped out by a mid level corporate mining company feels incredibly anticlimactic and depressing.

I guess this is what happens when you spend too much time building an ideology and completely ignore the basic thermodynamic reality of invasive species. Now I am stuck deciding whether to rewrite their entire evolutionary history to give them some teeth, or just accept that my favorite faction is nothing but a bunch of fossils by the time the actual main characters show up to buy fuel.

● Reality has been catching up to me in ways I don't want it to. I have a job where I have a lot of free time on my hands due to being the only one in the building, but more than ever, I spend that time watching YouTube and doom-scrolling rather than working on the worlds I have built, like I used to. I feel like this has to do with me feeling like I'm wasting my time building out worlds that nobody else will ever really see or care about outside of social media, such as this sub. That's on top of the fact that I'm now a father and have just been taking on more responsibility than ever in my life. The feeling that I'm wasting my time with this is a thought that I don't want to have, but it's growing stronger every week despite how much fun it used to give me.

● I take my world-building seriously, despite the fact that I'm the only one who will ever know about what I'm building. There's nothing that's ever going to change this; it's just the way I am. Being able to make sure my concepts are airtight and have competent continuity is something that I used to take pride in because it made my effort that I would put into world-building feel more validated. But now it's feeling like a chore, especially with how much I have to struggle with organizing my notes when making outlines of my worlds. Making proper outlines is a real pain in the ass because I've used Samsung Notes as my primary app to line things out, but recently the app has become so much more user-unfriendly and tedious. Trying to fight with the formats and default settings, I feel like I'm focused more on getting the ideas to be readable in the first place instead of brainstorming like I want to.

● I'm trying to convince myself that I'm not outgrowing this because that is an absurd statement, as there are people in their 60s and older creating amazing concepts, whether as a career or in their free time. But above all else, I'm just exhausted with my ideas. I know that might not make sense or that it's contradictory, but I am honestly just so exhausted trying to filter through these 15-plus ideas I have in my head to pick the ones that are most worthy of actually going through the painstaking, tedious effort of making outlines and design documents for them.

● I'm just too tired, I have to spend more energy than ever on the most basic physical tasks due to raising my daughter and being the one that watches her mostly while also working graveyard shifts. There are a thousand plus things that I need to do rather it's fixing the house or cooking for my wife or keeping up with my work quality at my job, Etc. World-building doesn't feel like an escape from all of that anymore, and I can't figure out why. Of course, it seems like I've figured it out because I'm listing my thoughts right now to you all, but there's a feeling inside of me that says these reasons are not good enough for you to abandon six years of hard thinking and organizing on ideas that you used to take pride in. But the apathy, if that's the right word to use, has overwhelmed any excitement that I used to feel for world-building, that exciting feeling that creates a tingling sensation whenever I would get a brand-new idea. That pretty much never happens anymore, despite the fact that I come up with new ideas. That feeling never arrives anymore, and I'm starting to realize my ideas are getting more and more generic. They're branched off of some sort of other idea from a TV show or a song or a game or whatever I may have been directly or passively exposed to, and it makes any of the newer ideas feel so much less original and personal to me.

● I have thought of one solution to fix this, and that would be to actually learn how to draw and start visualizing my worlds , but knowing me , I'm going to fall into the same problems of being too tired and exhausted with too many things already on my plate in the real world to spend time even if it's free time at work where I'm stuck at, to learn how to draw. And I know what some of you might be thinking while reading this if you even made it this far in the post which would be astounding and if so thank you, but you're probably thinking "oh you're just being lazy with it you have to commit to and it's going to be hard but that's the process" and I wouldn't even be offended if that's what you thought, I even believe that myself but how can I spend effort and energy into my World building and try to double down on that, well I'm failing to maintain my house or my job or doing anything more with my baby than just sitting watching cartoons together cuz I don't have the energy to run around the house with her. All of that obviously takes priority over writing down fantasies.

● But it still hurts not to get that exciting tingling feeling anymore when I have a new idea. It's a shame that I rot my brain scrolling while listening to YouTube instead of pushing my imagination. But no matter how much I've tried this past week after taking a long break from world-building, I still can't get back into it. Imagination is like a fire; perhaps my fire has faded.

My world has multiple continents completely seperated by the ocean. The distances are great enough that over centuries, people assumed they were the only ones.

Eventually one state (A) discovered the existence of another continent (B). This led to conflict and the different groups of people that exist on the two continents aren't actively exchanging knowledge. Now I want a third continent (C) to be discovered by A.

How long would it likely take until B finds out about C's existence? The technology level is similar to the 13th century. Generall, how did internal news about A and B likely reach the other continent? (I am aware that this depends on a multitude of factors, but would appreciate a rough time frame anyways!)

So to put it as simple as possible, this idea I have is a twist on / mix of christian and catholic theology. Lucifer exists in the story and is canonically the root of most of the world’s evil including rape, genocide, bigotry, etc. My question is if this would be considered offensive as I would be essentially saying that everything bad that happens only happens because of a single guy, that guy being an actual religious figure. I myself am not religious and am just using Lucifer as a basis for my own characterization and story.

Edit: I should clarify that my concern is offending non-religious people

https://i.redd.it/74grbhmypf2h1.gif

I have reached a point in a few of my projects where keeping track of the lore is not the hard part anymore.

The hard part is remembering how all the different parts of the lore connect, to each other.

I started trying out ways to explore these connections because I was getting tired of jumping back and forth between pages of notes all the time.

I am curious to know how other people handle this problem when their settings become large enough that the lore starts to get really complicated and everything affects everything in the lore.