Worldbuilding general thread - /wbg/

Are you the anon who wanted to make a setting about Judas priest in the writing thread a few days ago?

>>49653196
Yes

Judas Priest are a very mediocre heavy metal band.

>>49653550
perhaps, but I like it and that's the only thing that matters

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Worldbuilding threads not really working right now...

What are some good resources for laying out the logistics of armies and navies?

What is some fitting synonym for Pope, but not copyrighted by Catholic Church?

>>49657692
pontifex

>>49655438
What do you call this sort of formation?

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>>49658106
Travertine/limestone/carbonite terraces, natural terrace pools, mineral/travertine pools.
"Travertine terraces" are the most common term though.

>>49652313
>Speed metal
You mean power metal?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c9JdQW45RI

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I'm looking for a couple of pdfs about fantasy worldbuilding and having a little trouble. Anyone have these?
The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy (3 book collection, link to 1st) - Park and Dullemond
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Writing-Fantasy-Vol/dp/1896944094/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_z

Guide to Writing Fantasy - Philip Athan
https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Writing-Fantasy-Science-Fiction/dp/1440501459/ref=pd_cp_b_3

In return, a favourite of mine: A Magical Society's Guide to Ecology and Culture

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I'm working on this setting where it is World War I but basically due to a weird disease something like 80% of all births are women. So the result is a society where each man impregnates multiple women but the result is even more women. They are very vulnerable to genetic disease but that hasn't mattered yet. Basically it is World War I so with mostly female soldiers, but the same weapos and tech, and better machine guns and less good artillery. So basically a lot of the war involves hordes of young women aged 18 to 25 rushing into machine gun fire and something like 95% percent of them get cut down by the barrage. Also most of these guns are basically MG42s with like a 1300 RPM fire rate and ammo production is easy so the belts of like 500 rounds are pretty common. But other than that it is mostly like World War I. I am planning to run a campaign in this setting this Friday night with some friends I am introducing to RPGs, they don't know anything about the setting so it should be a nice surprise for them.

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>tfw need drugs to come up with the really cool stuff

>>49659002
Seconding complete guide to writing fantasy request.

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>>49659002

>>49659523
I found it. Can't find the other one by Philip Athan and R.A. Salvatore though.
It's 481MB though so I can't upload it. Anyone have any suggestions?

>>49659824
Upload it to mega and share the link?

>>49653550
Well, they also happen to have some good stuff.
It's like power metal before it was even a thing, kinda like Manowar but more artsy in a way

>>49659123
so fetish bait ?

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>>49659402
iktf

Do the rest of you have something similar to writer's block, as in, having countless cool ideas but when it comes to putting them down on paper, they suddenly don't seem as interesting and attractive anymore?

I'm not sure because it is that I want my fantasy setting to be perfect, but I find myself constantly editing and changing things I previously thought to be set in stone, and it's annoying me, as I can't focus and settle down. I feel like I worry/think too much when it comes to putting in work, which in turn makes me procrastinate.

How do you guys go down about it? How do you pump up your creative juices?

>>49660071
I've taken the adding and removing part to extremes, building over things and cutting away until the original is barely visible. The setting has become a lot more distinct and unique because of it, and generally better ideas always overwrite old stuff.

>>49659824
Or at least tell us where you found it!

>>49659895

https://mega.nz/#F!18lgzbzL!mwlqyP2fZIz1qWZmk-p2LA

>>49660139
>>49659895

Posted, took a million years to upload.

>>49660143

>>49660143
Noice, thanks!

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Just add water to an existing map

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>>49659123

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>>49656353
Ask in /hwg/ one of the Napoleonics guys had a resource a while back.

So I want my setting to have a weird anachronism in its cosmology or 'science' as to how the actual world works.

As in- the Bureaucracy of heaven run by gods and spirits and passed souls run the entire world. When the seasons change it is not a change in temperature that make the leaves orange and fall off, no. It's a little underpaid overworked spirit that paints the leaves orange and later comes around and pulls them off. The only reason why fall doesn't happen in one day is because the spirit is too tired to paint all the leaves orange and pull them off in the same day, so he does them all incrementally.

This is basically how the entire world works, but this isn't just a mythological belief. This is the ACTUAL mechanism for how things happen.

Is this interesting worldbuilding? What conflicts could arise from such a method?

>>49659123
>I'm going to write an alt-history that does absolutely nothing clever or new, but just genderswap things to fuel my magical realm.

The most autistic thing I've seen all day, thanks for reminding me why I don't go on these threads

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I have been slowly working on this world/setting for the past year off and on. Pic included is the rough world map that I have been slowly working on / redrawing / restarting.

Here is a "player" document for the setting as well, but it focuses more heavily of a single region of the world rather then the whole. Its unfinished mainly because I'm not sure how much of the secrets of each area I want to make public to my players.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RqntL4AkukicccsW71BC7pxa_h7B3v9WLojwRo92kZU/edit?usp=sharing

>>49661060
What are you using to make the map?

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>>49661232
Photshop, used the attached tutorial and then changed some things to suit my tastes a little better.

>>49658253
Dragonforce are to Rhapsody of Fire what Bulbaaur is to Venusaur

Requesting a tutorial for making cities

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>>49660071
Take walks, listen to music, think about it in bed.

Discord link don't work

>>49660071
>Do the rest of you have something similar to writer's block, as in, having countless cool ideas but when it comes to putting them down on paper, they suddenly don't seem as interesting and attractive anymore?
Everybody has that. Or at least absolute majority of us do.
It's partially a normal, unavoidable part of any creative process, writing in particular (writing takes practice and skills, the ability to properly communicate between the images and ideas in your brain, the words of your language and your fingers is complicated and not straight-forward), partially a problem more specific to world-building, which usually involves a lot of synchronic ideas, visual notions etc... making it even more difficult to properly properly transcribe into "diachronic" and purely language-based form of writing.

It just takes experience, practice, and figuring out some kind of more novel workflow.

>>49657692
Patriarch
>>49657742
Fuck off Jimmy.

hey i might be dming a game soon and im thinking of finally taking the plunge and making my own world. do you think i should start with fleshing out just a town and the surrounding area? or go whole hog and get a world map and shit rolling?

>>49665235
Depends on how much effort you want to put into it, how much you want to improvise on the fly, whenever you prefer a top-down or bottom-up approach to world building.

Most people who enjoy worldbuilding as a stand-alone hobby will tell you to get a world map and to the whole thing largely top-down, because creating a deeply interconnected world (which is what people generally refer to as "depth") is what most people tend most appealing on the activity. And you can't really create "deep" settings where all kinds of elements are connected to each other when you start by fleshing out an isolated and small location.

That said, world-building is a very dangerous road to go to, and contrary to what most people believe, is not always conductive to good storytelling - or even good DM'ing. So you might want to think twice before you go down that route.

>>49665235
Start with a town and the elements your players might be initially interacting with. e.g the towns, the farmsteads, a city, surrounding forests etc

While interesting to a game world, players might not find a four page description of a far flung space mountain and its inhabitants that they're unlikely to visit all too relevant in their first session.

>>49662697
Bumping this request
>>49663244
and this one as well

>>49660071
I tend to daydream all the goddamn time. Half the time, it's about my setting. How I imagine things play out, or how characters think or react. Eventually, something makes sense.

I'm leaning more and more towards having the process of learning to pilot a hardsuit akin to a squire becoming a knight - were there any kind of odd practices for that or any other similar formalized job progressions that I might lift and convert for hardsuit training?

>Have world built up enough that players can move about in it and have a general idea of what they will encounter
>Planning to have a new faction enter the scene because of their actions
>Decide that it will be a faction that existed in the past but vanished because of plot reasons that I need to figure out

I have made a mistake. I should have thought of them BEFORE the world was built and put in hooks for them to latch onto when they became relevant.

Any of you made a similar mistake? Were you able to rectify it?

>>49672223
Have the "new" faction be mimicking an "old" faction. They're not actually the old faction, they're just masquerading as them to build credibility.

>>49672223
I'm pretty sure anyone EVER who improvised his world-building has made a mistake like that at some point. Yeah, that is why world-building should be done in advance and with some broader strokes, so that you have all the foundations already laid out for yourself.

This >>49672246
However, is a damn good advice. History is FULL of faux-successors, and the whole tension between the new and the old actually can make for some really interesting dynamics, red herrings for your party even.

>>49672223
Besides what anon said earlier, they could also be a relatively new faction that aren't up to strength yet, so to say. Or they might be a foreign faction making excursions into wherever the players are.

>>49672288
>party eventually tracks down an old Wizard/Lich dude, who was one of the organizers of the <Plot> Faction
>He's senile/crazy, hasn't left his tower/crypt in decades
>had nothing to do with the Neo-<Plot> Faction's rise, all of that investigative work was a waste

So I'm doing a new take on world building. I'm running a party through a campaign set in Greyhawk, and having them collect various "curios" along the way. These curios are always non-magical items, and the choices the players make on how to retrieve them will influence what the curios represent in the world I'm building.

For example: the party has to acquire an old Dwarven statue. If they prove to the Dwarves that hold it that they are worthy of it, Dwarves in the new world will be noble and true. If they barter for it, Dwarves will be master tradesmen, but less noble. If they steal it, Dwarves will gain a reputation for using any means necessary to achieve their goals. If they kill for it, Dwarves will be rightly-feared, violent berserkers.

>>49672693
So your campaign is acting as a creation myth for a new world?

>>49672246
That's actually perfect and could create an entire storyline as the party tries to figure out
>What happened to the original faction
>Who the impostors are
>Why the impostors are pretending to be the original faction at all

Thanks, anon!

>>49672288
Yeah, I definitely made a mistake, but I sure won't be making it again.

>>49660768
Weather spirits go on a work strike, leading to countrywide droughts for extended periods.

Some paperwork gets misfiled in the Heavens, so until they can sanction somebody to go find it, it's looking like winter's staying around for a while. Which in bureaucracy terms usually means indefinitely.

Clerics can't contact any of their gods, causing a global drop in divine magic... The god of law has begun the filibuster to end all filibusters, holding the rest of the gods captive until he stops.

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Don't have anything exciting to post/share, beyond the "Castanet Bird" I drew today.

They're a combination between Spoonbills, Flamingos, and the stymphalian birds of greek myth.

They hang out in swamps, rivers, ponds, etc with other aquatic birds eating shrimp n' crayfish and water bugs. They get their name from the loud, iconic, "clapping" noise their beaks make as they open and close them.

They're considered a "Monstrous Beast", but they aren't particularly dangerous.