Quote Originally Posted by Lvl 2 Expert View Post
My tip would be: don't be too structured.

It's tempting when world building to create nice patterns. The continent consists of 7 kingdoms, roughly equal in size and power. This religion has 3 gods, each symbolized by one of the primary colors and each the patron of one of the three main groups of adventurers. Every 6 years for as long as we can remember the dragon of awe has awoken and eaten a village.

Taken all together it ends up feeling fake. A real world has lots of elements that don't make sense, continental maps with no clear balanced power blocks, with small regions nobody can agree on who they belong to and ethnicity maps that are even worse. Religions that you think you have figured out, but then there's a bunch of supernatural beings that don't really have a category or even a story people agree upon. City maps where one of the five districts is as big as the rest combined yet the city center still lies between the five rather than shifted towards the large one, or the other way around when that option doesn't make sense. The world wasn't build from a plan, countries were not designed as a whole, but build one house at a time. Unless your world was build from a plan, someone put those cities there for a reason, try to add some chaos. It will feel more real.
It is interesting advice and has many good points, but as a lawful being in general (and not a chaotic one) I would be against the above advice. The world HAS TO have structure for 2 main reasons:

- Chaotic details are minor and do not matter. For example, a coast has a chaotic shape but you are not going to draw it on a map with every detail; you will rather draw a line or a curve. A city is a mixed chaos of humans, orcs, elves etc. but you are not going to create the character sheet of each one of them (except if you are really want to do such an extraordinary and impossible thing that no one has ever done before) but you are going to flesh out the details of only the major characters of the region.

- The world needs balance and law serves that much better than chaos. Sure, there are powerful nations, there are weak nations, but their alliances (if hostile) are equally strong, that is why there is any signs of civilization in your world in the first place. The other way is to have permanent warfare that, in my opinion, would have had reduce the technology and civilization back to the stone age.

Because of these two reasons, I think a more lawful approach serves more than a chaotic one, but chaos is awesome when adding minor details.