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I am not even new to world building .... I haven't started yet, but I found it fun to read posts here. I have also had experience that I enjoy reading novels that have poor story but creative settings. For example, to me, Harry Porter is one of these novels. The story plot is boring but I continuous reading just to explore more on the magical world behind the story.

At the same time, I found that there are books like the World War Z, just describing the world but is really fun to read.

However, for the question I read here, and some guilds on world building I found on Google, all of them are related to role playing or writing a story. I am curious if there are other people like me who just solely enjoy creating / imagine a new world?

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    $\begingroup$ Creating worlds, without creating stories is actually quite common. But naturally, such activity does not create a lot of publishable stuff. $\endgroup$
    – SE - stop firing the good guys
    May 13, 2016 at 11:05
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    $\begingroup$ Closest thing I can think of would be the setting books for tabletop roleplaying games. They describe worlds, locations, the people living there and the conflicts in the areas. Rough outlines of stories and their dramatis personae can be given in pre-written adventures, but the meat and potatoes of what make a story a story are not there. Still, I'm going to vote to close this because this is more of a question for a forum "Are there other people like me who just solely enjoy creating / imagine a new world?" than one for either Worldbuilding or Worldbuilding Meta. $\endgroup$
    – Thomas Jacobs
    May 13, 2016 at 11:14
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    $\begingroup$ I once created a small piece of Java software that created totally random solar systems... well, some moons did orbit their planets below surface, and there was the brown dwarf with a density of less than 0.5 kg/m³ which had a radius of 500 million km... but hey, the sole purpose was watching what may come out for the sake of enjoyment, so you are not alone, yet everyone who is like this may be like this in his very own way. $\endgroup$
    – Confused Merlin
    May 13, 2016 at 12:04
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    $\begingroup$ Related: meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2101/… $\endgroup$
    – DaaaahWhoosh
    May 13, 2016 at 20:14
  • $\begingroup$ Oops, what the heck? I flagged this because it should be on meta, then the site refreshed and I realized it was on meta. Oops. $\endgroup$
    – Xandar The Zenon
    May 15, 2016 at 5:00
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for pointing that his is a repeated question. I did search before I posted, but seems the question in meta is separated from the world-building site itself? $\endgroup$
    – cytsunny
    May 16, 2016 at 2:44
  • $\begingroup$ I would suggest to read the interviews of a few of our members, you'll see that more than one are actually building some worlds for the sake of it. $\endgroup$
    – clem steredenn
    May 17, 2016 at 9:01

2 Answers 2

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No!

You do not have to be developing a world for a story. I agree that creating a world and its history and physics/magic can be fun, which is why I spend so much of my free time on this site. You can optionally post your world (or rather all relevant information) on a forum (but not here; this is a Q&A site!) and make it a shared world so that others can use your world in a story. Gods know we have many otherwise good writers who lack the creativity to build their own worlds. The actual writing is, after all, only about half the work in creating a good story IMO.

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    $\begingroup$ I'm a web developer, and I just like making up universe/worlds without ever writing a story or drawing it (damn I'm so bad at this). When I ask questions in here, it is mostly because I'm ---not alone in my head--- very creative :) $\endgroup$
    – Strannch
    May 18, 2016 at 9:22
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    $\begingroup$ @Strannch I'm in the exact same boat as you are. +1 $\endgroup$
    – user11426
    May 19, 2016 at 19:44
  • $\begingroup$ Is thre an official associated StackExchange-endoresed WorldBuilding forum? $\endgroup$
    – Vi.
    May 22, 2016 at 0:45
  • $\begingroup$ @Vi. Well, we have the chatroom, which is about as close as Stack Exchange has gotten to that. We also have an unofficial blog, and I believe some of our members may have set up something unofficial on Reddit. $\endgroup$
    – Jax
    May 22, 2016 at 18:10
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Although most of the questions posted here seem to be motivated by a desire to tell stories or play games, I can assure you that this is not exclusively the case.

I am retired at the moment but if I should ever go back to work I expect to find the ideas in this stack to be of enormous practical value.

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