The world(building) is not enough
I've spent a huge chunk of the last two and a bit years - when I wasn't trying to finish Thalassa: Fire and Flood or working on other projects - fiddling around with worldbuilding. It's a huge topic, and one that more than anything else to do with writing can become the deepest darkest rabbit hole. It's also become clear to me from recent reads, especially by Guy Gavriel Kay, that worldbuilding does not need to... er... cost the earth. Most works are not built on Tolkien-esque foundations (even though Tolkien borrowed a lot more than is usually realised) or sitting upon the fiction-crafting equivalent of the mass of conquered metal in the Iron Throne. You can do a lot with not very much, and it's important [note to self] not to worry too much before you start - the gaps will inevitably show themselves as you go, and you'll need to rework stuff.
On Guy Gavriel Kay: he takes the expedient of using actual historical events, giving them and the characters involved a 'quarter turn to the fantastic' as his blurb has it, and setting them in a (very) thinly disguised setting, mostly the Renaissance Mediterranean, but also further north and east, and further back in time. This is an extreme form of what many fantasy writers seem to do anyway: the setting is Mediaeval European, with hardy rustic barbarians to the north, and louche or religiously zealous aesthetes to the south. (As an aside: Edward Said's criticisms of western Orientalism could also apply to the dim, rude, and heroic lands of the North: Nordicism, perhaps?) George R.R. Martin has plundered European inspirations too, so did J. R. R. Tolkien, Joe Abercrombie, Robert E. Howard, and Richard K. Morgan, to name but my favourites. Poul Anderson wrote a great rebuff 'On Thud and Blunder' of the errors present in much fantasy literature, and also called on authors to do more outside the cliched arena of pre-Industrial Europe. The problem is, Europe is an interesting area, and while it can't claim to have the exclusive rights to varied history as inspiration, it does have a number of geo-economic features that make it an inevitable zone of (at least) three-way conflict, and no single force ever achieving lasting supremacy.
As I said, this is a long topic, and so far all I've done is state the obvious, so I'll try to make some kind of point in a list of what I think of as absolute essentials.
1) Geography is key. It determines resource availabilty, which determines social structure and politics: horse-riding nomads do not inhabit jungles.
2) A triangle of geopolitical players works best. The triad or trinity, again. For example, knights and comely maidens vs. beardy barbarians vs. desert zealots.
3) Four major historical events. Why four? A number I picked off the top of my head, but there is probably a reason: it gives each of the triad a turn at the top, with one more twist to set things up for the present.
4) A few historical figures needed, usually heroic kings or queens, to personalise the four historical events.
And that's about it as the basic framework. Starting with that, you can go places. As you go, you can fill things in, add details. In real history, details are often vague and remembered much less clearly than their fictional equivalents: if you're aiming for a sense of realism and accuracy, inaccuracy is the key. Different sides tell different stories, and those stories need not point to some single solid ultimate Truth.
On Guy Gavriel Kay: he takes the expedient of using actual historical events, giving them and the characters involved a 'quarter turn to the fantastic' as his blurb has it, and setting them in a (very) thinly disguised setting, mostly the Renaissance Mediterranean, but also further north and east, and further back in time. This is an extreme form of what many fantasy writers seem to do anyway: the setting is Mediaeval European, with hardy rustic barbarians to the north, and louche or religiously zealous aesthetes to the south. (As an aside: Edward Said's criticisms of western Orientalism could also apply to the dim, rude, and heroic lands of the North: Nordicism, perhaps?) George R.R. Martin has plundered European inspirations too, so did J. R. R. Tolkien, Joe Abercrombie, Robert E. Howard, and Richard K. Morgan, to name but my favourites. Poul Anderson wrote a great rebuff 'On Thud and Blunder' of the errors present in much fantasy literature, and also called on authors to do more outside the cliched arena of pre-Industrial Europe. The problem is, Europe is an interesting area, and while it can't claim to have the exclusive rights to varied history as inspiration, it does have a number of geo-economic features that make it an inevitable zone of (at least) three-way conflict, and no single force ever achieving lasting supremacy.
As I said, this is a long topic, and so far all I've done is state the obvious, so I'll try to make some kind of point in a list of what I think of as absolute essentials.
1) Geography is key. It determines resource availabilty, which determines social structure and politics: horse-riding nomads do not inhabit jungles.
2) A triangle of geopolitical players works best. The triad or trinity, again. For example, knights and comely maidens vs. beardy barbarians vs. desert zealots.
3) Four major historical events. Why four? A number I picked off the top of my head, but there is probably a reason: it gives each of the triad a turn at the top, with one more twist to set things up for the present.
4) A few historical figures needed, usually heroic kings or queens, to personalise the four historical events.
And that's about it as the basic framework. Starting with that, you can go places. As you go, you can fill things in, add details. In real history, details are often vague and remembered much less clearly than their fictional equivalents: if you're aiming for a sense of realism and accuracy, inaccuracy is the key. Different sides tell different stories, and those stories need not point to some single solid ultimate Truth.
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Good parallel. Monotheistic doctrinal religions routinely try to impose order on a disparate set of myths to make everything neat and coherent, and it never really works; there are two versions of the parting of the R(e)ed Sea in the Biblical Book of Exodus, for example, one more Hollywood than the other. Sometimes the variation is even deliberate. I've been listening to Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones's Persians: The Age of The Great Kings, and after Cambyses II conquered Egypt, he added new 'origin myths' about his birth, saying that he had Egyptian as well as Persian blood to legitimise his rule. Sheer propaganda, but historians who fail to recognise that might be baffled as to which story is true. A very Orwellian "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past", and something to be borne in mind when writing fictional histories.
I like this.
This isn't quite what you were talking about, but it reminded me... In the Runequest RPG, most magic is divine, there are hundreds of gods, who appear in thousands of forms, and each has their own take on the creation myth and godtimes, but all of these are simultaneously true (and contradictory). It's messy, and fun, and still works.