/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

>>50645088
Reasonably. I go for what looks cool first, then take out anything that's glaringly unrealistic. Though the armor isn't really based on European plate armor, taking more inspiration from the Romans, imperial China, feudal Japan, and a few other cultures.

So, like, the helmets might not cover their head as thoroughly as it should, but there's not too many unnecessary flourishes.

>>50646352
Real-world owls do that. Lots of cultures do things that other cultures think are weird, so why not?

>>50647148
Wait, real-world owls have decorations?

>>50647148
Two points: real-human-hair-wigs were high fashion in some places in some times, and unless they used feathers from their own species it would be more like humans using other animals furs as decoration, which always has been done everywhere.

>>50645088
I usually stick to realism unless I have a really good reason not to. However, it's both fun and sensible to get a bit creative with the arms and armors of nonhuman, at least those with very different physiology. It makes sense that a 8-foot Troll with twice the strength of a human would use a very different weapon.

Also, I would like to make Fire-lances more prominent, they were pretty cool if cumbersome weapons.

>>50646338
Don't be afraid to use actual words for names.

>>50647284
Well, no, but they use feathers in building nests.

>>50647735
>Farmingshire
>Portsdale
>Riverland
>Freefield
All acceptable, this is how places come to be named in the firstplace.

>>50645088
I have a piecemeal armor system where you can wear different armor depending on hit locations (arms, head, torso, etc). I also loosely organize realistic armors into 3 "weight" categories (light - cloth/leather, med - splint/scale, heavy - plate, etc). Its familiar to dnd but also works differently. People are more likely to scrounge up some ad-hoc, mix-n-match armor, even if they pay and are fit for it.

As for weapons, I have a system that lets players craft their own weapons piece by piece, just like their armor. Mechanically, any weapon that has [1H-Hilt] and [Long Blade] will be the same regardless of visuals. However, if you have [1H-Hilt], [Long Blade], and [Hook], its suddenly a very different weapon mechanically and visually. Adding a hook would make it look more like an Uruk--Hai's and allow you bonuses to Tripping. Realistic weapons are easy to make, and modifying realistic weapons to be a bit more fantasy is also pretty easy.

>>50647735
>>50648627
Farmington
Commerce
Oakland
Milford

These are all names of actual town/place I've lived nearby. If you name something after a person (Wayne, Livingston, Howell) or whatever that town "does" (Farming Town, Land of Oaks, Ford near a Mill), you're golden in almost every case. Change which language you use (Los Angeles - [Place] of the Angels, Detroit - On the Straits) and that can cover the rest of your names.

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>>50649093
Time for me to dump Atlas of True Names stuff.

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>>50649198

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>>50649223

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>>50649355

>>50647108
I have been working on various kingdoms and governments for my setting, but based on some advice I got in a previous thread I wanted to revise it a bit.

Essentially, the idea was to have noble houses with magical bloodlines be the main form of royalty, though the more I thought on it, the more it feels silly that nothing would disrupt that. That said, I do still want it to be a common thing in most of the nations. What are some ways where hereditary rulership/magic could have a place in government aside from straight up Monarchy?

>>50649715
Isn't hereditary rulership pretty much the definition of monarchy? Anyway, if you're worried about the bloodline getting disrupted, how about having not just a single royal family with magic blood but rather a ruling class of nobles? They could either have some sort of council deal or a Athens-style democracy, or perhaps just a monarchy with power shifting from dynasty to dynasty.

>>50649715
I have a union of city-states, each under heavy influence from the Families. Each Family is usually Elven/Human, with matriarchs and patriarchs branching several generations. Their power comes from having a monopoly on the region's trade, or on a particular good traded continent-wide.

>>50649198
Since there seems to be no map for continental Europe online, I'll help.
The Netherlands: the low lands (can't all be winners)
Germany: land of the people.
France: land of the untamed/free
Belgium: the bright swelling/gathering around the fire/bale-fire
Luxembourg: little castle

Those are the only ones i know

>>50650018
Don't forget Iceland. I don't think I need to explain that one.
Also, Austria pretty much means "eastern kingdom".

Can someone give me a couple ideas of what to name a planet and its twin moons for a high fantasy world?

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>>50650018
>France: land of the untamed/free
Thanks to regional reforms, Freedomia's regions now have such creative names as
>Great East
>Highlands (which is ironically the flattest part of the country)
>Westlands (Which is in the South East)

>>50650099
How about calling the planet "the Nave", since it's the center the moons rotate around? What kind of planet/moons are they, what purpose do they fill in the setting?

World is set around the glory days of The Elven Race, where humanity is taking its first-few steps out into the world. The Human Race are mostly grim-faced individuals struggling to survive in a fertile landscape of extreme climates (to the north you have rocky mountains, harsh and cold winds, snow, down south you have harsh deserts, etcetera)

>How did your governments get their power in the first place?

They're very early governments, essentially the first few "Kings" were military generals chosen in a world where the gods despise humanity for the most part; eventually "Kingship" became a ritualized institution when one King rose to power above the others and formed The First Empire.

Not all the City-States are the same however, some have "kings" which are more or less puppets of The Merchant Class or Magocracy. Others have the "King" mostly preside over religious ceremonies.

>How do they maintain this power? Control of agriculture? Religion?

Mostly "The gods will kill us if we don't do anything and everything to survive."

>What measures do they take to ensure the people do not rebel?

Mutual hatred of the local gods; the "pantheon" is divided into two strains: 'Nature Gods' and 'Gods of Men'; the Nature Gods represent natural forces, the rivers which seem to violently shift course and strength throughout the year, the winds that become mighty-typhoons.

The gods of nature are cruel and vindictive, they see themselves as the slave owners of mankind, whereas the Olympians in Greek Mythology were fairly indifferent or flawed, these natural gods seem to be malevolent. However they are only local to humanity's environment, the god of one river may not be the same god or have the same personality as the god of another.

The gods of humanity came to be humanity's patrons, and are known for their embodying some of the best (and worst) aspects of humanity, but loving the human race all the same. They're generally based around human emotions and feeling.

>>50650018
Norway, from Nordrvegr, "the way north" or "the northern way"

>>50650018
also sweden: realm of the svear/ swedes
denmark: dan's field/ march

>>50650540
Do you know the meaning of Swede or Dane perhaps? That generally makes for a cooler name.

>>50649799
Yeah. The main thing is I plan on having multiple nations with that sort of rulership, but I do want to mix things up so it isn't the same everywhere.

>>50649873
Some of them being more like Unions or clans that are a bit more democratic could work nicely. I can probably mix that with some more feudal systems, constitutional monarchies, and dynasties to get enough options.

May even throw in a government where the king holds absolutely no real power.

>>50650826
My western Kingdom is a constitutional Monarchy where the only "real" power the King has is to change the name of the Capitol. This is done frequently.
Something something ancient Dwarven shadow government

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Have been preoccupied for a few weeks now, so no time for drawing, but!

I've drawn both of my world building/work blog's OC's "casual/basic" inventory.
I kept seeing those inventory threads and had to give it a shot- I think inventories are great for personalizing the more 'human' aspects of a character.

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>>50651321

And here's the other inventory!

>>50651321
>Cans
>In a fantasy world
I think fucking not

>>50649378

If anyone is familiar with Mandarin or Cantonese I'd see if I could get some help in nation/state naming conventions.

I've jerry-rigged (is it jury riggered? Gerry rigged? Jerry rigged?) some but if there's a particular suffix for "people of" in chinese like "____-ian" or "____-ean" or "_____ish" is in English I'm all ears.

>>50651449
I can speak a bit.
Mandarin (and probably cantonese) uses 人 (Ren, pronounced "run") to denote almost all types of people. Japanese people are 日本人 (Lit. Japanese people, or even more lit. sun's root people). Americans are 美国人 (beautiful kingdom people), etc. This contrasts with other things like Japanese language (日本语, japanese words). Chinese will almost always call a nation or state "X kingdom", and its people "X kingdom people". Its a very conceptual language, so the abstract idea of nation/kingdom/country/etc is all contained in the one character 国. Same with People and 人.

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I'd like to request some additional inspiration.

I am working on a project set in the distant future of mankind, long past the death of Earth.
And every human is crazy. Batshit insane, like full-on Lovecraftian mad. But society is still completely functional. This is important.

I need inspiration on how to show the insanity and normalcy of the NPCs simultaniously.

I am taking clues from games like Bloodborne, STALKER, Deus Ex and System Shock, but those those last three just feature some insane characters, not fully insane societies. In film, I took a lot of inspiration from David Lynch, Eraserhead and Twin Peaks is great for this. David Lynch's Dune is also excellent, since it portrays the Dune nobility almost as aliens.
And of course, I have read the Dune books, and I have an omnibus containing all of Lovecraft's work.

But I don't quite feel confident yet. I don't think I have all the tools, inspiration I need yet.

Do you have a piece of inspiring media or a story about a game you ran? Please help.

>>50650594
Swede comes from Svea, the tribe that lived around Stockholm, the Suiones. The Geats in the south got conquered and incorporated into the whole Swedish identity thing.
Not sure about Denmark, but I know for Norway. Norwegian in Norwegian is "Nordmann", literally "Northman" cause we're from "The Northern Way".
Don't know much about Denmark tho, only that all Scandi's call it "Danmark" and "Dan" is a Scandi name, and mark means field.

>>50651637

Thanks, I'll run a few questions by you in a short bit, it'd mainly be the anglicized/romanized versions. Really just avoiding anything too obviously real life chinese but sounding akin to it.

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>>50651664
>I need inspiration on how to show the insanity and normalcy of the NPCs simultaniously.

Their society could have an annual purge or something.

Like, you remember/know what a purge is, right? Where a society has a mandated day once a year where EVERYTHING and ANYTHING is legal for 12-24 hours (depending on if it's a whole day or just an entire night). Then, when it's over, everybody just goes back to their normal lives; quietly waiting until next year when they can do it again.

I remember reading somewhere that certain medieval societies had purges as well, but given the brutal life they already lived they didn't use it to kill one another but instead to get VICIOUSLY fucking shit faced and FUCK anyone and anything for about 24 hours.

>>50652120
>Thinking the purge makes sense at all
The Purge is a great way to completely collapse your country's economy in 12 hours.

>>50651877
There's also 们 (Men, pronounced mun) which denotes plurals in a lot of things (孩子-Child, 孩子们-Children). You can replace the phonics and have it work equivalently. Most of the Chinese dialects do this themselves.

>>50652120
I'm pretty sure people in medieval society would use any excuse to get absolutely fucking shitfaced.

You really don't want an entire town of people having mass orgys and sinfests, since that's a good way to wake up with the town on fire, or with a strange disease, or with unwanted pregnancies.

Societal laws tend to exist for good reasons, and throwing them all out the window tends to end poorly for a society where a smaller harvest could result in death.

cross posting from 5eg:
how much do you guys worry about your dungeons "making sense"? I'm trying to map one out thats an abandoned castle, but I keep worrying that like I need to add more servants quarters and a kitchen and bathrooms and all this random stuff. Maybe that should all just be covered under rubble or something to protect my sanity.

>>50652947
>abandoned castle
Could explain it away with having Undead or similar servants; same reason the castle is 'now' swarming with skellingtons.

>>50652643

Since I'd be writing in english characters the chinese characters wouldn't be necessary. The continent analogous to East Asia with possibly a bit of the Americas (Incan/Aztec that is) isn't front and center so while my autism is having me try and chart out a general sense of the political landscape I really just need the collective demonym (a'la "Greeks" for all those city states) for a Northern and Southern Chinese folk. So for instance in referencing where a religion or silks or spices came from. I'm not too big on having to have coherence with the actual language it was inspired from - most other folks are edits, changes or respellings of words from dead or largely unknown languages.

Main thing for me is that they sound nice, relatively easy to pronounce and not easily confused with other names in the setting. Looked at the names of Chinese states in say spring and autumn period so I tried to go with only 1-2 syllables (especially since everyone in the eastern continent are multi-syllables).

What I'd gotten so far were:

Shanbei (Shan and bei. Forget what they meant)
Zhouhai/Zhouhui
Yinlao
Kuai

Possible name for the Northern Chinese being a combination of Jin + guojia (Jin being gold, guojia being state according to https://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb=state ), or alternating it to read Jinguozu (Guozu being 'people of a nation' or some such according to same link). On the off chance someone can read traditional chinese does that sound too cringing engrish?

>>50651425
Why not? It's a very handy way to preserve and transport food.

>>50652622
The best response I've heard:
"So if I steal a car during the Purge, do I have to register it afterwards?"

It's a very confusing concept.

>>50655759
This is the perfect example of the kind of thought process you need to develop to world-build. If you aren't constantly asking the "why" or the "why not" for how something works, you aren't going to develop a realistic setting.

>>50655811
Well, not necessarily. Only if you want it to be a very detailed setting. That's not usually necessary for your standard campaign.

If you're worldbuilding for the joy of worldbuilding, then you need to be able to answer those types of questions. If you're worldbuilding for functionality, then fuck it, do whatever.

>>50655863
I've found that running internal logic-checks on a personal world makes for a great mental exercise. You end up getting subconscious revelations about it, too.

>>50655911
That's true. Though what I find more helpful is running through the average day of a person in the world (or the specific corner of the world I'm developing at the moment). I try to think of what things they do which are unique to the world, unique to their situation, unique to them.

Just, y'know. If we're talking about mental exercises.

>>50655939
I've been doing the same by self-inserting a character of mine into the setting, then reasoning out what I'd want to do to improve things/have fun.

>>50655979
Is it the same character every time?

>>50656030
Usually, yeah. I started my world by becoming intimately familiar with what a demigod-tier character would be capable of, and have been thinking of things from that perspective since.

>>50656130
Ah. See, it works better if it's a different character for each situation. A farmer on a farm, a miner in a mine, a socialite in the city.

Not to stereotype, but most people aren't the same person.

>>50656146
Difference being that I'm using my singular demigod to reason out metaphysical problems and the ever-growing magical utilitybelt, rather than societal problems.

>>50656171
I think maybe we're working on very different types of settings.

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>>50656191
I'm just worldbuilding because it's fun.

>>50654103
What you've got is pretty good.

Shanbei is probably Northern Mountain (mountain north, but it really could be a million different things unless I knew the characters)
If Zhou is supposed to mean state/prefecture, then it should be the second syllable. If not, then it probably doesn't matter.
Yinlao and Kuai are fine.

For Jinguo___, you could just leave it as Jinguo. However, if you wrote out those characters neither would actually be that bad, just specific. You wouldn't want to use Jinguozu to reference the state because that would be weird. Just having Jinguo works well because it can mean anything related to that country.

What elements do you think are necessary to creating a successful Star Wars expy?

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>>50655736
Canning is an industrial revolution era technology. Actual metal cans in particular require fairly elaborate machinery to produce and seal and early canned goods were plagued by horrific food safety, often being contaminated with heavy metals from the canning process. Also when canned foods were initially introduced they were extremely expensive.

Unless your fantasy world is industrialized and has actual factories mass producing canned foods canned foods shouldn't exist in it. And if it does, unless it's had them for quite a long time and has mid-1900s level food safety standards the canned foods should be an expensive luxury item of questionable safety.

If you want to use the canning food preparation method without the need for all of the trappings of industrialization required for metal cans you should consider canning in ceramic (ceramics are much, much cheaper than glass) or glass jars.

The big conceptual problem for canning in a fantasy setting is that it requires people to know that micro-organisms cause food spoilage and also that heat kills micro-organisms and also that it be fairly easy to produce containers with air-tight seals and most of these things are unlikely in a typical fantasy setting. Similarly you're not likely to find pasteurized milk in them either.

>>50652120
>>50652622
>>50652811
>>50655759
Ah good call. The Purge itself doesn't make much sense but society-wide arcane Lovecraftian sacrifices do.

Come to think of it, might even add some Mad Max Fury Road in there. With people desiring death.

>>50657403
I think some of that stuff would be possible for a rather knowledgeable Wizard, though I agree that it isn't the sort of thing that could be mass produced and sold to everyone. More likely the Wizard would use it to store rare reagents as an alternative to pickling them.

Which, yeah, if you want 'canned food' in a Fantasy setting, then you just need it to be in a jar instead. Same function overall and it works for a lot of things.

>>50657156
Look up all the space opera clichés.

Now use all those clichés.

Star Wars is FUCKING SHIT narratively. The only way it works is the fantastic design of things, and the acting of the actors.

So the story doesn't need any work. Focus on creating a (mentally) visually stunning world, and encourage good roleplaying.

>>50657936

It's funny, Star Wars pretty much started out as George Lucas going "ok now I just need a flash gordan world to do an unofficial scifi remake of hidden fortress..."

>>50657567
The actual cans themselves are the only totally pants on head retarded thing. Without relatively modern industrial technology you straight up would not get extremely cheap metal containers like that. The first tinplate containers didn't come into existence until the 18th century and canned food didn't become a widespread until militaries started using it in the mid to late 19th century.

The original post had a modern-style tin can with a paper label on it, which is absurd. In terms of the technological and industrial capability required to produce that, and for it to actually be cheap and safe it's the food packaging equivalent of having a caplock rifled musket. If that would be out of place in the setting in question, so are cans.

>>50658588
Nevermind that a earthen jar filled with oil or honey and a wax "cork" would do the job too.

I remember an article in an archeological paper about archeologists discovering some jars in a South-American cave filled with psychedelic mushrooms sealed with honey. Those psychedelic mushrooms were still chemically active after what... 2000 years or what.

Of course, a dried psychedelic mushroom is very different from peas, or carrots, but it shows that you don't need tins to "can" food.

>>50658741
canning and storage are two very different things

>>50658808
The result is the same. Storing food for a long time.

>>50658741
>>50658808
>>50658819
There absolutely is a difference. Specifically that you can't really consider it canning unless the container is boiled to sterilize it. Unless that happens you won't get anything like the shelf life associated with canning and you run the risk of products having bacteria like botulism in them.

>>50659861
Most things you jar can last for months if you do it right. That should be more than enough time for an adventurer on the go. It won't last years in most cases, but you'd be surprises.

>>50647735
>>50648627
>>50649093
Bless you guys, I didn't even notice these until now. I can use a lot of these for my less-important settlements.

/wbg/ - food preservation general

>>50649378
... so what does "Laos" mean?

>>50649198
>United States of the Home Ruler
Wait a minute, that's not right at all. America was named for Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian mapmaker. What gives?

>>50657936
>Star Wars is FUCKING SHIT narratively.
What? It's just the Hero's Journey. It's unoriginal, sure, but what's wrong with it?

>>50662831
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Amerigo#Italian
"Amerigo" is "Americus", also meaning Home Ruler.

>>50662821
"Laos" was invented by the french to refer to that nation. It doesn't have an equivalent.

>>50663071
Oh, so they go to the lowest level possible, I see. Thanks.
>>50663091
What, it's just a gibberish word?
Man, I'd heard that the French colonists were dicks, but that's just petty.
I wonder what their name was before then.

Would a federation of city-states be too modern for medieval fantasy?

>>50663161
Why would it be? Depends on distance between cities, average speed of communication between them, and threats they have to unite against.

>>50663161
Isn't that sort of like what Greece used to be?

>>50663161
The HRE was to a certain extent that. Also Greek city states like other anon said

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>>50650018
I've got your back for the Netherlands, famalam. These names show the medieval mindset of naming way better than those disgusting new world names.

>>50663575
>those gradients
Just how much of the Netherlands is mostly under water? I'm having a hard time telling what is and is not "dry land" on this map

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>>50663698

>>50663698
westernmost color and the one under the norther islands: water
rest: land

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Anyone have deep, dark fantasies they want to live out in their settings?
I want to be a crazy old man who teaches people to be superheroes.

Pic somewhat related.

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>>50652947
I once ran game like that. Depending on how you want your players tackle it ( linearly, or freeroam ), you could look floorplans of real castles and add interesting elements ( hidden floors, secret doors... ).

Too bad it kinda died.

>>50667823
I want to put the magical realm fetish shit in but also don't because that's being a dick to players. Problem is that every time I want to logically think about courtship I subtly bring fetish shit in without even realizing.

Might be the wrong place to ask this, but whatever.

Assuming they work roughly six hours each day, how long should it take ~500 people to construct a stone wall 2,000 meters long, 4 meters high, and 2 meters thick?

I've got a lad in a game who thinks this can be done in less than two weeks, and I don't know enough about wall-building to actually dispute it.

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>>50670327
What kind of labor force do you have to work with? I happen to be an expert in this field.

>>50670327
2 meters thick sounds really thick for a wall. That also sounds rather large for a mere 2 weeks, especially only 6 hours a day.

I am by no means an expert though.

>>50670327
You're going to need to transport several thousand tons of stone. Unless you are employing ~500 of the strongest Ubermensch ever to live, you aren't going to be done any time soon.

>>50670327
>>50670610
2000*4*2 gives 16000 m^3 of wall
high density granite at 2.8 t/m^3 gives 44800 tons
low density sandstone at 2.2 t/m^3 gives 35200 tons

Changing the dimensions to 2000*3*1 we get 16800 tons for granite, 13200 tons for sandstone

No idea what that actually means for time, though.

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>>50667823
>tfw opening a tavern that caters to adventurers and WIZARD COLLEGE students
>everyone who works there would be unreasonably powerful
I need this in my life.

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It may not be 100% /tg/ related, but I'm currently writing up an "After the Second Weltkrieg" alternate history, based off of the Kaiserreich history (What if Germany won WW1, more or less). My biggest problem so far is that I know how the second World War will go, but I don't really know what will happen after that. I'm sort of going for an Etente-Mitteleuropa cold war thing, or rather, a cold war between National Populism and Liberalism.

So, if anyone could be of any help, that'd be cool. Pic related is the map so far, and if anyone wants any details about why I did whatever, just ask.

It's not like I can ask /his/, since they never have alternate history threads anymore.

>>50670990
>My biggest problem so far is that I know how the second World War will go
My first question about that would be "if." A big reason why the second World War started in the first place was because Germany was left as a shithole economically speaking, if I'm remembering AP Euro correctly

>>50671031
In this timeline, France had a syndicalist revolution and ended up as the new Germany. The second world war started when Germany demanded that France withdraw all troops from Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

>>506709651
10/10 would work at tavern

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>>50670990
1 and 2. What are these states? Is 1 analogous to OTL's Iraq? How did the Arabian peninsula come to be divided mainly into these two states?

3. A union of Oman, eastern Yemen, and all of OTL's Arab Emirates? How was this established? Where is the center of power in this state (Is this a "greater Oman", "greater UAE", or something else entirely)?

4. How did Germany gain control of all this land around the Bab al Mandab?

5. A union of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia? What happened here? Did these states all choose to merge, did one annex the other two, or were these all part of a single colony that was released as a single state?

6. Why is all of (presumably ex-)Soviet Central Asia a single state?

7. I assume this is Mongolia. How did it end up with large parts of Russian Outer Mongolia, Chinese Inner Mongolia, and all of the Uyghur region?

8. Why is this state independent? I would think this should be a part of the Manchurian or Siberian states. What happened here?

9. How does this Siberian state manage to stay independent? Somehow I doubt such a state would have the manpower, industry, and infrastructure to defend itself militarily against a potential annexation by a Chinese or (Moscovite) Russian state.

10. What is this state supposed to represent? Poland? These borders look truly horrible.

>>50671642
1 and 2 are the Arab Federation and Hashemite Arabia, respectively. Hashemites were formed after the first world war, as the Ottomans were no longer able to hold the territory. The Arab Fed was formed after the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan invasion of Anatolia (Largely spearheaded by Greeks). Most of those nations gained de-facto independence, which most had been looking for to begin with.

3: That's actually a part I have yet to get to, sorry.

4: See above. It was originally a gained territory from the first world war, but by the 1980s they would have lost it.

5: Ethiopian Empire

6: They were never Soviet. They gained independence from the Russian Empire when the White Army won the civil war, same with all the other portions of Russia (Save for Siberia, which was second Russian Civil War). Eventually Alsh Orda (The northern portion) annexed Turkestan later in the century.

7. Mongolia invaded Russia during their first Civil War, since the White Army was largely occupied with European things (In this timeline the whites never got beaten back to the point of retreating in to Mongolia). They seized the Trans-Siberian railroad, and then sued for peace. East Turkestan (Xinjiang, Uyghur, etc) was annexed after a series of border skirmishes between the two nations.

8. It's Transumer, a Japanese puppet state (The place they occupied during the Russian Civil War)

9: Siberia gained independence during the Second Russian Civil War, as the Soviet troops were already too tired from the fighting with the Democratic and Nationalist troops to march in to Siberia, which was largely supplied by Japan.

10: A union of Poland, Lithuania, and Galicia.

>>50647307
>real-human-hair-wigs were high fashion in some places in some times

They still are today. Everyone from drag queens to self-conscious bald men buys human hair wigs. There's a whole industry around exporting hair from India to America for black women's wigs and "weaves"

>>50671945
Is "drag queen" really a massive fashion?

>>50671945

>you will never be a poor, down on their luck dalit finally getting a new chance at life by selling your hair to americans with more money than sense

thank goodness

>>50651664

The problem is that insanity is largely defined by it's deviation from the social norm. Some guy who runs around 21st century Baltimore kidnapping people and cutting their hearts out with an obsidian dagger is insane; a priest in 15th century Tenochtitlan who cuts the hearts out of kidnapped people is just a civil servant.

So, in what way is everyone insane? Are they aware that they are "not normal" and simply coping with universal mental pathology, or would they look at somebody who doesn't have conversations with satan on the bus to work as an unsettling weirdo?

Does everyone have the same symptoms or conditions? If not, are they rational enough to be aware that, for example, one's neighbor may be feel the need to murder prostitutes at his dog's behest, but that doesn't mean he necessarily sees, as you do, that everyone should turn their bedroom lights on and off exactly 157 times before bed so that their loved ones don't die in their sleep?

If everyone is extremely insane then, whether or not they all have uniform symptoms, how does society function, as you assert that it does? Do people ignore their own insanity, and that of others? If hallucinations are involved, can heavy machinery be safely operated? Would people die often as a result of hallucinations or dementia? What defines a criminal act? Is murder even a concept anyone can comprehend? Rape? Theft? Can a society function without criminalization of "antisocial" behaviors, regardless of how they are defined?

You might look into dystopian fiction, movies like the Wickerman (NOT the Nicholas Cage one), Shutter Island, Kill List, the 9th Gate, Rosemary's Baby. Anything where the protagonist/victim gradually realizes that everyone else is in on some horrifying/insane plan except for them, then just remove the sane "outsider" from the equation.

>>50647108
how would you guys do a ice world culture? i dont really want to do the typical vikings or russian influence...this would be something for rogue trader. the culture itself would be aliens with about 1700s era tech if that helps

I'm designing a non-decimal currency to inflict on my players. From what I gather, the aim of non-decimal currency is to be easily divisible in small quantities that can easily be accounted to larger denominations.

What I'm wondering is whether 9 is a common-sense number to use as a basis for counting currency. Like, 9 of one coin = 1 larger coin, but also 2 of a medium coin.

>>50673227
>9 of one coin = 1 larger coin, but also 2 of a medium coin
probably not, because that makes some of the exchanges fucky

9 smalls = 1 large, good
9 smalls = 2 mediums, good
1 medium = 4.5 smalls, fucked up

probably better to go with a base 8, 12, 16, or 24. more factors.

>>50673168
you could look at lads who actually natively lived in fuckoff ice lands, such as the eskimo-aleut peoples or the tungusics. vikings/russians were mostly colonist posers

>>50673168
>1700s tech
Well, I made an ice world culture that wasn't anything near that, but here's what I did:

On the tidally-locked world of Dawn, the icy side of the planet is inhabited by a race who spend most of their lives underground. They live off hardy tubers and fungi growing around volcanic hot springs, while raising various species of furred lizards for protein, clothing, and transportation.

Visually, I sort of saw them as being a mix of fur/leather-clad barbarians akin to classical fantasy art and bone and stone-bedecked Indonesians, with a great variety of dyes made from tubers or imported from warmer lands closer to the dayside. They would make tools and weapons out of bone and stone, sometimes lashed to petrified roots, and would have a religion based around the worship of the great cold deep in the nightside, praying to keep the burning sun away from their homes, which they associate with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Due to limited resources, they have a semi-nomadic life centered around heat oases, which they must tend and keep flourishing for a few years before moving on to allow the region to recover.

>>50673168
Make them the equivalent of French Soldiers who've been retreating from Moscow for thousands of years.

>>50647108
>How did your governments get their power in the first place?
all the major urban centers began as private estates that got built-up and those estates (and by extension all the buildings on said estates) still belong to those families, it's their property and everyone living in those estates either has to work for them or pay rent (referred to as a 'Tax') if they don't want to get tossed out for trespassing. beyond that the farmlands are owned by yeoman farmers who owe fealty to no one, but tend to form close alliances with those noble families with estates close by so they can get better rates selling their goods at their markets.

>How do they maintain this power? Control of agriculture? Religion?
The Lords don't need to maintain shit, if an estate belongs to a particular family it's their property, and it is treated like any other piece of property, the only way ownership would change is if it is sold to, or otherwise given over to someone else, it could be stolen by various means but that's the limit of it.

>What measures do they take to ensure the people do not rebel?
rebel against what? the city; it's lands, and buildings are the rightful property of the lord. If they don't like it they are free to leave. of course there are obligations agreed to on both sides that the other must honor, the lord has the city guard to ensure that taxes are payed on time, and that his city isn't getting vandalized, and that crime is kept low (because then the people start complaining) and at the same time the clergy acts as a intermediary and ensures that the lord honors his obligations.

there have always been stories of a vast empire in ancient times that collapsed creating this system in it's place, but little is known about it.

>>50673444
thats dumb lol...but nice trips. >>50673379
thinking about doing inuit based...

This sound good?
>The Black sun circle (nazi wizards) found something deep within the heart of Antarctica
>A material that reacted to the strange and mystical energies that lay dormant on planet earth
> In order to release this power and reawaken what they called ErdePotenz , the black circle made their first move in over a century since the great war.
>For the next 12 years their shadow war raged behind the scenes of Cold war 2.0
>The nuclear exchange was their final playing card.
>They made the bombs drop to re awaken magic.

Which Asian nation and which south american/Latin american nation would be cool as super powers for cold war 2.0?

>>50676930
Bhutan vs Ecuador

>>50676930
>Japan vs Mexico
>Vietnam vs Argentina
>China vs Brazil
>Korea vs Chile
>Philippines vs Cuba
or any such combination. look into the cultures and decide which you'd find the coolest.

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>>50672371
I'll explain a bit of the societies in this world.

Humanity has colonized the galaxy billions of years ago.
At an undetermined point, unknown titanic entities appeared throughout the galaxy, or perhaps even the universe destroying societies, planets, stars, planetary-sized structures, dyson spheres, etc. in a seemingly random pattern, or perhaps following strict unknown guidelines. Societies rebuild themselves, but the destruction repeated itself numerous times.

At this point, the most powerful societies have retreated into artificial bubbles of folded spacetime, effectively hiding from these unknown cyclopean things. This has allowed for incredibly ancient societies to arise without getting smacked with a reset button once every 500 million years or what.

As you said, insanity is a deviation from the social norm. From that point, the insanity is a deviation from our social norm. The insanity should take on the form of an insane society, not a personal insanity. With insane rules, culture and rituals from our perspective. And insane reactions to other societies. The insanity is just a mechanic to highlight the strangeness of this future society, and to really give the player an outsider experience, to create a hostile and lonely experience.

>>50673674
What the fuck is this supposed to be based on?

>>50676930
I like Colombia.

>in the future, colombia becomes the biggest dog in south-america after ending their civil war
>the slow death of the usa brought on by the megacorps in the wake of trumps presidency allows colombia to turn south-america into their vassal states

Colombia vs. China in the Moon and Mars wars bud.

>>50677325
China is worst NuColdwar nation. It's such a boring place with a pretty lame culture.

>>50677357
Well then, Colombia vs. Clone Wars North Korea.

>>50677502
Oh no, that's even worse. North Korea is big memes. What you want is Colombia Vs. Fascist United Korea

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>>50676930
Indian Castocracy vs Brazilian Federation.

>>50677357
Why is china boring? I have an idea in mind for china, but ill hold on that.

>>50677025

So it's more like a human society with a completely alien world view that appears insane to us? That's a rather interesting setting. It seems like it will be difficult to pull off but rewarding if you figure it out.

You might benefit from looking into old vampire: the masquerade (world of darkness) books, assuming you aren't already familiar with them, both the game books and some of the novels. Aside from having a universally insane clan of vampires (though it is more of an individual pathology-type insanity) it really gets into the parallel, hidden society of immortal former humans, how they lose their humanity over time, how they view normal humans, and how insane someone who has lived for a thousand years can appear to a normal person.

Some more media dealing with hidden or faux-normal insanity would be american psycho (naturally) and the Hannibal TV series. That kind of murderous sociopathy is helpful to think about (I think) because it's less about irrationality or inability to function and more about viewing the world through a (horrifyingly) abnormal lens.

I can't recall any of the names off the top of my head but a lot of the weird comic arcs in Heavy Metal magazine around the late 90s and early 2000s had to do with extremely unusual sci-fi scenarios and settings that would probably be helpful too. I might try to dig up the couple of issues I have to find names and authors later on, I'm on my phone now.

I'm not big on anime/manga but there's probably a lot of good source material there too since the Japs are pretty good at really weird/dark sci-fi when they decide to go there

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So recently inspired by "Modern Fantasy" thread a couple days ago, plus digging up an old excel spreadsheet with a fictional Not!America, Not!Russia, and Not!Imperial Germany. I decided to merge up two of my settings and advance the timeline a bit (to 1915, thousand years after the other setting).

I have two questions
>Should I put fantastical races in it or keep it strictly human? The idea is that there are wandering Not-Superpowered-Witchers dealing with monsters and beasts that stalk the land, with rifle and blade.
>Should I tone back the time a bit, make it more Industrial Revolution rather than Pre-WWI?

Thanks
>Pic related is my VERY rough map I did in paint at 3 a.m.

>>50680100
I had a similar setting idea actually and I felt I had to tone back the time period because I just couldn't make it work unless I mad it all post apocalypse and shit

The problem is that by the time you get to the industrial revolution/WWI era, states have become so centralized and military technology so effective, that the prospect of having monsters and bandits roaming around causing enough trouble to the point the army/military can't deal with doesn't really work out. It only serves to make your nations seem weak and ineffective. It becomes sort of ridiculous in a bad way when a roaming band of mercenaries can defeat something the Wehrmarct cannot.

>>50681040
The idea I was going for is that these guys (The Poctal) are beasts of no nation really, they deal with threats the centralized nations don't want to deal with. Why send an army detachment to hunt an ogre when ypu can hire a bunch of fuckwits to do it for you. That and it's mostly the smaller towns / villages that hire these guys

>>50681040
>>50681971
There were many outback regions during the Industrial era throughout West-Europe where you could still find bands of brigands. Especially when you start looking at places like Ireland and Scotland, where the local population is already not very pleased with the local law enforcement, because it's not their ~own~ law enforcement, but some English dickheads that just moved in there.

>>50647108
>Bourgeois edition

That looks like nobility to be honest.

>>50650018
We don't know what Spain (Hispania) means, but the most popular ones I've heard are something like "Land of Rabbits" and "Land of Metals".

>>50652947
I usually include living quaters, kitchens and storage areas.

>>50652947
I love those kinds of details. In particular, if you can incorporate them into the dungeon mechanically. The kitchen has some old (but preserved) food stashed away and you can build a fire there to take a rest. The bathrooms might conceal secret passageways, which you learn about from a journal you find in the servants' quarters (along with some assorted trinkets they'd stowed away for one reason or another).

To answer your initial question: it's not necessary for the dungeon to make perfect sense, but it does make it feel much more immersive.

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>>50682020
Alright, I think I'll pull back the timeline a bit, still keep that poor little clusterfuck on the left continent (Armoria - the Not!Imperial Germany that got balkanized when they declared a war against the other two)
Anything I should know about an Industrial Revolutionary setting (not Steampunk per say, because fuck Steampunk).

>>50676930
Thus far i've got UK vs USA vs Japan and ????

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>>50679710
I am familiar with VtM... HAH TIME TO REINSTALL BLOODLINES NIGGA.

Good call though, I can put a twist on the uncertainty surrounding Caine in VtM. Good inspiration.

Agnostic rituals. Society has no clue why they perform said ritual, but unlike 40k rituals where no one is aware of the futility of certain rituals, here, everyone is aware of the uncertainty ofwheter a ritual or faith has purpose. Society as a whole takes on a Pascalian attitude to rituzl, prayer, religion, etc.
>i do not know whether dipping 15 virgins in molten gold while praying to the great electron ~brooom brooom broooom~ will placate the 2 km tall giant just outside my little bubble of sub space but i might as well try

A cold clinical positivity in life in the face of eldritch uncertainty.

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>>50683626
Brazil

>>50676930
Literally insane Myanmar/Burma vs Literally insane Colombia
(The Myanmar dictator though his people were too left leaning, so he forced everyone to drive on the right side of the road on the left side of the car, so people enter and exit buses from the middle of the road.)

>>50683733
How about myanmar and colombia become 2.0's nam and afghan?

>>50683722
Too obvious and boring.

>>50676930
The Reformed Bolivarian Empire of Greater Colombia.

>>50683626
>UK vs USA
????

>>50683733
fuck, right side on the right side. everything is right. The guy was bonkers.

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>>50683771
>>50676930
>The Reformed Bolivaian Empire of Greater Colombia.
South American Super-Nation, I second this idea

http://www.strawpoll.me/11870820
>>50683843
>>50683793
>>50683771

>>50683843
Do you mean bolivar, the guy who liberated some nations form Spain?
How would the rise of a Colombian empire work in 2030 or whatever?

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Quick question before the 404:

How do I handle monstrous races like ogres, gnolls, trolls, etc? Should they have a civilization of some sort or should they be like animals?

>>50673769
The problem with Inuit is that aside from igloos and fur, they have no aesthetic culture.

>>50686254
I got just one monstrous race atm, and they created civilization as we know it. I like to have civilized races cause it gives mankind more enemies more enemies to stand against them, which again makes for cool stories.

>>50686254
Ogres and Trolls are subspecies of Goblins, one of the "not really uplifted but still sort-of uplifted" races. They tend to have a civilization close to that of an east coast native American tribe, with spell-casting shamans.

Gnolls and other "Demi-Humans" are sub-average intelligence, living like animals or operating on a hive-mind.

>>50683413
Dieselpunk.

>>50686520
>They tend to have a civilization close to that of an east coast native American tribe
So why haven't they been wiped out by non-evil races yet?

>>50657403
Glass was only expensive because the industry was controlled (Mirror-makers literally lived in an island prison), as soon as the glassmaking manuals made their way out of Italy, it became cheap.

>>50657403
Fantasy worlds are by no means whatsoever bound to our standards of technological progress. If there's something useful--like a way to preserve food that couldn't otherwise be preserved--they'll find a way to do it eventually.

In the original images, they had mythril, magitek, and fantasy dildos. Surely they can figure out how to put food in a cylindrical metal casing.

>>50659861
You definition of "canning" is as old as Napoleon. And technologically could have been done as soon as the early age of discovery. They just didn't know.

If wizards and druids are as knowledgeable as they claim to be, they should be able to wax-seal and sterilize food in an early renaissance setting.

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>>50686578
Dammit, why do I always forget that
I'll consider it, it *sorta* fits the idea I'm going for, some tweaking might be in order though.
Thanks for reminding me.

No. Just. No.

"Canning" in the sense that you can store sterilized food inside metal is not happening in a medieval fantasy setting. It's just too much of a technological and cultural leap.

Yes, you can have wizards casting cold spells to keep portable iceboxes cold. You could have ordinary peasants put food into ceramic jars and preserve things with honey or wax or even cork. But you wouldn't get multiple-year long cans of food, because you'd only be working with iron or steel or possibly copper for the canning material. Iron is easy to forge, impossible to cut. Steel is expensive. Copper is soft enough to be used as a canning material but it reacts to literally everything, especially oils and acids in food.

You can have people salt, pickle, dry, ferment, or even bottle in oil, just not fucking 1950s canned food.

>>50686739
They were uplifted because they -were- almost wiped out. Doesn't help that Goblinoids taste like bacon.

>>50686739
>>50687039
Should also say; Goblinoids are not an "evil" race. Civilization in general is AOK with a Goblin tribe inhabiting a forest, since it helps keep the Ogres in-line and the chimera population down.

>>50687034
What about an alloy of iron and mythril?

Are you accounting for how magical fire makes steel less expensive?

Isn't it pretty easy to cut iron with +1 metal shears?

I don't think those kinds of beans are acidic or oily. They store their energy as pixie dust, not fats. Or am I mistaken?

I look forward to your answers, being that you seem to be an expert on how every aspect of every fantasy setting is and shall forever be.

>>50676930
>>50676987
If Mexico was run by competent people it would've become the modern Venice half a century ago.
All it needs to do is build a 100km highway to connect it's two largest ports (the largest and most easily staffed in the continent) and you just ruined the non-civilian air transportation industry.

FInd who would lose the most money from that and you've got their cold war enemy.

>>50686989
I mean technically speaking the Industrial Revolution proper was the 1800s-1900s. Dieselpunk is at the very end of that, approaching the Consumer Revolution of the 1900s when branding, design, and the merging of aesthetics with politics took over. The Industrial Revolution was built on coal and steam.

You need to decide if what you want really is an Industrial Revolution setting, which would generally be late Napoleonic Wars/Civil War/Crimean War or if you want an Industrial Setting which is WWII/1920s?

>>50687055
>>50687039
The problem is I'm asking because I'm working on a D&D 5e-based setting and in that these races are evil by their nature. But I really fucking hate how random pockets of ogres or trolls or goblins will just show up in the backwoods to be killed by adventurers for XP, as if they were bandits from the small towns nearby or something. They're monsters, and if they have a civilization that implies they should have a land they call their own. Otherwise, they're animals and can be found all over.

>>50687179
They could be bands of disorganized hunter-gatherers. They have culture in the form of gods and superstition, but their interactions with other trolls/ogres are essentially limited to fighting over resources or, in more favorable times, gettin' freaky.

>>50687123
>Mythril
Literally the rarest metal on Earth.

>Magical fire
How is this any more efficient than people just making tons, literally TONS, of charcoal to produce steel?

>+1 metal shears
Magic items are rare. Not common.

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>>50687150
The initial idea was a pre-WWI tech fantasy setting, where nations are really solidifying borders, people are getting really agitated over the changes in government (The Not!Imperial Germany got Balkanized in a two front war against Not!USA and Not!Leninist Russia).
In the middle of all this you have these bands of men and women doing their best to deal with monsters the greater government can't deal with.

>>50687123
Not the previous anon, but canning isn't efficient until you have industry, it's simple as that. Unless you rework how bacteria works (Which you probably have to do to sustain most fantasy worlds because germ theory is crazy) and make up a bunch of stuff just for the reason of canning, then you can't really have mass-produced canning.

I mean, hey, it's fantasy, I guess you can bullshit tech levels as much as you want. It just seems odd that you want canning in a medieval period, unless you're playing an industrial revolution fantasy in which case good on you, every fantasy could be made better by being victorian.

>>50687261
>the rarest metal on Earth
But we're not talking about Earth, are we?

>How is this any more efficient than... charcoal?
Because it's magic. By definition it is more efficient than the laws of nature should allow.

>Magic items are rare.
Do you have much experience with the manufacture or sale or magic items?

So did you get an advanced degree in The Rules Every Fantasy Setting Must Follow No Negotiating Shut Up I'm Right, or are you just an enthusiast?

>>50687331
>By definition it is more efficient than the laws of nature should allow.
No it's not. It's only "efficient" if you consider it on an individual spellcaster level. Legend of Korra showed how inefficient and stupid it actually is to enslave your spellcasters to do things like make electricity by throwing bolts of lightning from their bodies.

Magic items are rare or they're worthless. If everyone has a +1 sword, then there literally isn't a +1 sword because that's the baseline sword.

>>50687276
My setting relies heavily on magitek, so there's a blend of ancient, medieval, and modern technology depending on what is and isn't available.

E.g. metal is pretty rare, so electricity is hard to distribute, but hybrid analog-magitek computers are common.

Also it has cans now, because I'm a spiteful bitch.

>>50687386
In Legend of Korra, benders are one of the key sources of electricity. Remember in season 1, Mako got work at the power plant to pay for the Fire Ferrets' contribution to the championship pot? As far as we could see, they didn't replace that system throughout the whole of the series--despite the fact that the setting has had windmills and watermills for millennia. Not to mention Omashu's mail system, since earthbending was more efficient than lifting things by hand.

It's +1 over regular metal. You wouldn't be making a +1 can. Plus, you don't seem to be getting the broad point I'm making: you're deciding the rules for every fantasy setting, which by definition all have different rules.

Be honest with me: have I fallen prey to a master ruseman?

>>50656586

Glad to hear it! Thanks again for the expertise. I might add a few more but it's good to hear I am on the right trajectory. I like your idea of Jinguo. with ozu sounded nice but I'll avoid that, and the option of Jinguojia I didn't like. Jinguo is nice and simple.

I'll keep that in mind for Zhou, as well.

If you're still here I'm curious if there are other terms besides Yao-Guai for demi-human/demon/ogre. Not in the sense of the isolated cave-troll but more that idea of separate humanoid civilization like Rakshasas, Asuras/Daevas, Djinn or Fae. Not necessarily always pure evil but antagonistic to man for sure.

>>50676930

Practically/realistically? Japan or China opposite Brazil or Mexico.

>>50687129

I assume rail really mitigates the costs of shipping by land but that would still probably not offer a competitive advantage to Panama's canal. keep goods in your ship and just go through the canal vs offload goods onto trains, ship to other coast, offload onto ships.

Worth noting for those in fantasy/antiquity writing how disproportionately inexpensive waterborne shipping was vis-a-vis land shipping.

>>50687179
>>50687225
The threat in the wilds of my world are Chimera, your typical fantasy monster-things straight outta Monster Hunter.

Goblin hunter/gatherers feed Ogres, who are the biggerest and the strongerest and kill things for tiny friends. More often than not, there'll be a Hobgoblin or Troll serving as the chief of a well organized tribe.

It helps that Goblinoids were given the ability to evolve like pokemon

>>50687452
Does it also have rifles? If you have the tech to make cans, you have the tech and metallurgy to make cased firearms.

If not; why not? Because firearms are one of the world's most important inventions, and thinking that people would never find a way to make better weaponry, even if magic is ubiquitous, is pants on head.

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>>50687516

I am too lazy to fetch the book to clarify my recollection, but pic noted that shipping goods from Egypt all the way to Spain or Morocco would cost less than shipping goods either the 11-20 miles inland from Ostia to Rome or a metaphorical 75 miles inland. And I forget the specifics of travel time for sailing but I am fairly sure unless you go hard with legions of caravan animals that you'd be able to get goods shipped on that trans-Mediterranean voyage faster than upland.

Clearly you can ship stuff overland and they have, but it always costs less and is easier and faster by water. I seem to recall another ancedote about how a village/town on a river voyage to Paris pre 18th century just opted to not grow any grain themselves but rather specialize entirely into wine. The idea was they could ship it so quickly and effortlessly to Paris that they could just then buy the grain they needed there.

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General question about making mechanics. I've lurked a lot and see the discussions and memes about some games have "autistic" levels of detail.

I've been weeding down my combat mechanics so that there is a logical sense to everything, but I find myself being concerned that if I wanted to make my results into a commercially available product, it'll be mocked.

I'm hoping this is the appropriate thread for this question. Ultimately, aside from the world building, how do you manage developing the game mechanics?

TL;DR - When do game mechanics go from being detailed to becoming F.A.T.A.L.?

>>50676930
Laos and Uruguay just come right out of left field to become the superpowers nobody saw coming.

But realistically, the BRIC(S) countries would be where I'd start.

>>50687548
What if it's less like Pokemon and more like clownfish? So when a band's ogre dies, one of the goblins becomes the new ogre.

>>50687564
They don't have any proper gunpowder, but they've got railguns out the wazoo.

>>50687602
>how do you manage developing the game mechanics?
I know this isn't really the answer you want, but I just use GURPS.

If I need something new, I can make up some rules, but 90% of the time I don't need to because there's already a rule or suggestion for it in one of the books.

>>50687621
Why no proper gunpowder? The chinese had that shit since the 1100s. it's a pretty damn simple thing to make, and if you have metallurgy to make things resistant to the pressures, it's only a hop skip and a jump to a fantasy world with assault rifles.

>>50687632
Well, I personally love GURPS and usually would just use an already established system for mechanics. The only reason I had decided in this instance to utilize my own was because I wanted to make a system that fit in with the game thematically.

The game is being designed around the use of only 3d12 for everything, and this is because there is a lot of significance to numbers that are divisible by 3 in the story.

>>50687564
Better yet, I've just decided. Cans are made of cannium. It's a metal which occurs naturally in the environment, already shaped like either a can or a can lid. It resists all attempts to be deformed into anything else. I said it, so that makes it can-on.

>>50687639
They don't have much charcoal. Humans evolved using magical fire and that's essentially all they've used since. Few trees in my setting burn very well. Those few trees that do burn are hoarded by the countries that produce metal, like silk in Imperial China.

>>50687726
They don't have some sort of alchemical explosive? You don't necessarily need gunpowder 1:1, you just need something that causes a small explosion.

>>50687602
>that if I wanted to make my results into a commercially available product, it'll be mocked.
It'll always be mocked. Just ignore that.

t. VTNL Dev

>>50687767
Well, if I may clarify something: my setting is, for the time being, extremely zoomed in. I'm focusing on three countries which, combined, have roughly the land area of Venezuela. Firearms may exist in small numbers in the world which contains my setting, but they do not exist in any appreciable way in my setting.

Obviously you can kaboom any fine powder, but it's never been particularly pursued as a technological path.

>>50687602
>TL;DR - When do game mechanics go from being detailed to becoming F.A.T.A.L.?
When you have thousands of tables for things that most players find distasteful. Really, the more relevant RPG is Rolemaster and other Iron Crown products.

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Rolemaster
>Play involves describing your action, then rolling a d100 and waiting around for a few hours for the GM to read through many different branching charts to figure out which very specific instance of bodily harm was inflicted on the enemy you may or may not have hit depending on which charts were being cross referenced against one another.

> They decided that AD&D wasn't clunky enough so they wrote up a couple supplement books to add a more simulationist bent to the game. So if you wanted the ultimate in realism, you would go buy a copy of Arms Law, make your attack, then roll on 47 tables to find out what happened.

>>50687516
>I assume rail really mitigates the costs of shipping by land but that would still probably not offer a competitive advantage to Panama's canal. keep goods in your ship and just go through the canal vs offload goods onto trains, ship to other coast, offload onto ships.
It trades two days of sea travel for 4 hours of loading/offloading and 1 of land travel. Time is money.

>>50687621
Goblins "evolve" into Ogres, Hobgoblins "evolve" into Trolls. The better the group is able to support an Ogre's diet, the more Ogres there are; The more Ogres there are, the better the odds of a Hobgoblin living to become a Troll; If there's a Troll, the tribe will likely unite several clans under him/her.
It's not a foolproof concept, since most Ogres will leave their clan in search of food and most Hobgoblins or Trolls will choose to live among Humans, since they're only 1/2 Goblinoid.

There was a case early in the last era where a Troll-led tribe conquered an abandoned Dwarven Stronghold, and have been living there since. It's the closest thing to a proper Goblinoid civilization.

>>50687726
Well then you're not playing a normal medieval fantasy RPG, but some fairy tale BS RPG. You might as well set it in the world of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. And that's fine, as long as you don't pretend it's D&D.

>>50687602
Just keep what's necessary to make the game vibrant. Build outwards, thinking carefully about maintaining the balance of "does this add enough to the game to make up for the added hassle it adds?" for every feature.

I'm designing for a video game, not a tabletop game, so I've got more freedom in some respects (since stuff's gonna be calculated by a computer, not weirdos with dice) but at a certain point I just tore everything down and rebuilt it with as few rules as possible that would still give the feeling I wanted. That's even more critical with tabletop.

>>50687954
>D&D is the only system that exists
>All D&D settings are the same
>Including all the ones that are different, they're all the same
>And all settings that have any vague semblance of medieval fantasy must play by the rules of D&D as I interpet them
>So sayeth Pharaoh Anon, great god-king of all creation

>>50687926
Yeah, I actually have been looking over a PDF copy of some Iron Crown products, and I can safely say that the mechanics I'm wanting to implement are anywhere near to that level of detail. I'm starting to get the sense that I have nothing to worry about. Thank you, anon.

>>50688033
That's a great point. I'm actually starting to wonder if, perhaps, while I was crafting the mechanics of play I have lost some focus. There will be times I will think of features from a video game I think would translate well into tabletop without thinking of that would be fun to translate.

I'll go over the mechanics once I have them roughed out enough that I can do a playtest with them and make sure that there is a purpose for every mechanic, and that they serve to help tell the story, versus detracting from it.

Great respons, thank you sir/madam!

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Hey everyone I was hoping to get some help with nomenclature. I’m calling magic users in my setting mancers. At the moment there are six different schools that a mancer can utilize. They involve the manipulation of:

1. Matter including solid, liquid, gas and plasma
2. Time and space which includes things like teleportation, intangibility, portals and time control
3. The mind of oneself and others
4. Native, mortal life encompassing things such as traditional healing and necromancy as well as body control type stuff (in the setting there are two planes, one home to mortals and the other immortals and the story primarily takes place in the mortal one)
5. Foreign, immortal life including their summoning, control and banishment
6. Other magic, particularly the cancellation or manipulation of other spells

I’m following a typical formula of taking Greek/Latin root and slapping –mancy at the end. So for example, I have psychomancy for #3 and xenomancy for #5. I’m pretty satisfied with those two, but have had difficulty coming up with the right name for the others. The setting is more science-fantasy than straight fantasy. For that reason I definitely enjoy sci-fi associated roots, but that’s not really set in stone. Anyone have any suggestions?

>>50688262
1. Hylemancy
2. Chronomancy
4. Biomancy (for the life part, maybe?)
6. Not sure :/

>>50688262
Sublimancy for #1?
Chronomancy is the obvious pick for #2.
Gaiamancy for #4
Repo-mancy for #6
It's practitioners are called "Repo Men"

I've got a place stuck in my head. It's called the Caustic Sea.
What uses would a Napoleonic-to-Great War level tech people find for a large body of strong acid or base on liquid form?

>>50688253
Technically it'd only be "madam" if I was married.

An additional benefit is that if you have the system down to a few easily-understood concepts, it helps form characters' mechanical identities more clearly. Just as an example, a core concept in my game is Attention--if you don't have Attention on an enemy you're not going to be very effective against them, but if you have Attention on too many enemies at once you suffer penalties. So I can build the stealth specialist around avoiding or escaping Attention, the ranged combat specialist on maintaining Attention on enemies that may be far away and popping in and out of cover, and the defense specialist around drawing enemy Attention to herself rather than allies. Because there aren't two dozen different mechanics competing for use, I can look carefully at all the different ways each mechanic can affect playstyles.

All of that to say: I'm happy to hear someone else found my advice helpful, and also maybe all of that was to humblebrag a little bit, perhaps.

>>50688262
#1: naturomancy
#2: temporomancy or astromancy
#4: vitamancy or biomancy
#6: metamancy

You're absolutely right that "xenomancy" sounds pretty dope.

>>50688498
Batteries.

>>50688540
I love your attention mechanic. I have something similar in mine, although I hadn't thought about how it would affect stealth. Currently, the attribute is just "Perception" and it was geared more towards investigations.

You certainly earned a brag. Your help was greatly appreciated. Also inspired me to buckle down and focus on it. I think I'll get something playable before the end of this year. Looking forward to posting more information here in the future to get guidance. Hopefully you'll be around here at that time.

>>50688753
I will be if I'm not too busy with work. I'm in retail.

It's a shame the game design threads don't stay up like they used to.

>>50688924
There's just not much point to a Game Design General when you only get 60 posts before hitting page 10.

>>50689181
I know. That's what's disappointing.

Meanwhile we hit bump limit every time someone posts an inane, obviously-wrong statement and a picture of his waifu's thighs.

>>50689217
/gdg/ and /wbg/ are the two main reasons I'm on 4chan at all, let alone /tg/. Can't ever complain about thighs though.

>>50689217
You mean /wbg/? Well, that's to be expected; there's a lot more to argue about in a worldbuilding thread because /tg/ is an avid consumer of fantasy worlds. More anons know more, and the lively debate can be useful if you drill down into the subtleties of the responses.

/gdg/ on the other hand suffers a lot from most people having no game design experience, and being too shy to use their game-playing experience to comment and critique. Back in the glory days of /tg/, there was a lot more spontaneous game design going on, though most of that was for RPGs. But without some kind of unifying subject, it's hard for /gdg/ to generate notice or discussion. You won't get Car Lesbians or Blam! or DERP out of a /gdg/.

>>50689542

I want to build a world to share with you anon~

>>50689542
>Can't ever complain about thighs though.
Do you mean that in the sense that "I like thighs so I won't bash them" or "thighs are sacrosanct and you'd best not disparage them"?

I like helping people out of creative ruts. It's a rush. And there's few places I can do that more than /tg/.

And it's even anonymous, so I get to feel like a masked hero who swoops in, rescues someone from certain stagnation, and then disappears into the night.

>>50689630
I'm not referring to /wbg/ when I talk about the "obviously-wrong statements + waifu thighs" thing. It's more stuff like "why do you expect men with pointy sticks to be equal to people who can bend reality to their will?" with a picture of Ichigo's ass. Is there an anime character named Ichigo? I'm assuming there must be, just mathematically.

>>50689691
>Is there an anime character named Ichigo?

Yes, and a pretty popular one. Nice guess anon!

>>50689691
>Is there an anime character named Ichigo?
There are at least 3 high profile ones I can think of off the top of my hand. Two of them are boys and one is a girl.

Getting back to game design though, I've been toying with some tabletop game designs through Tabletop Simulator. Would that be a generally good medium for getting /tg/ or other internet forums to try out games without having to go through publishing?

>>50689772
I mean, it's the Japanese word for strawberry. I'm amazed there are only three.

I had an idea that dwarves came from Giants. Either like maggots in their flesh or lice on their bodies, dwarves are intrinsically connected with giants. I'm thinking Mountain Giants come from Frost and Fire giants, Hill Dwarves come from Hill Giants. Haven't decided on Stone Giants and both Cloud and Storm Giants are too remote to have dwarves.

What do you think?

>>50690987
That's the origin of the dwarfs in Norse mythology - is that where you got the idea from?

What is the most unique race you have made or seen?

>>50691383

Humans

>>50691322
Yes essentially, you don't see it expressed much in fantasy worlds.

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I've decided on the UK and the USA as the first two.
Yank bros is this an acceptable alt version of your flag?
How many superpowers would be too many?, 4 is my current limit.
What can be the main ideological differences between the powers, the 1st cold was capitalism vs communism. , i like the idea of the uk and us representing two sides of the same ideas, like liberal democracy vs conservative democracy or republic vs federation or something.

>>50691853
Technology.

Make them some cryptototalitarian fake democracy run by plutocratic megacorp running ultra rich holding back technological progress to avoid any changes in power, like Deus Ex.

The other three powers can have their own technological quirks.

>>50691926
Globalism v classic democracy v communism v fascism.
The uk could anger the deus ex guys by having a new king or prime minister who pushes them out and enforces actual change. Maybe the new uk could support Independence movements in California and Texas?

>>50691853
The flag is probably fine. I feel like it isn't quite british enough without a Union Jack, but it isn't American enough without the starts and stripes, so good luck with that.

Censorship/Free Speech is another good axis. Add heaping helpings of Big Brother and hypocrisy for good measure. Fits well with Technology too.

Populism vs Globalism is currently a hot topic that could evolve into something much more, especially when you get multiple super powers into play.

>>50691959
Not globalism you fucking retard.

I am talking about a virtual democracy. A state run by billionaire presidents, and their corporate cabals.Don't you know your motherfucking Shadowrun?

>>50691990
Thats not the supposed to be a combined flag, just an alternate us flag.
>>50691998
Not really no. I meant globalism as in a cabal group wanting control the world though something, like america, Britain etc.

>>50692012
Sorry mate, I just get so fucking mad about people talking about globalism because 99% of people don't know what it is. Globalism isn't even a political ideology.
It is just a result from having discovered all continents and having invented powered boats and aircraft, and to top it off orbital satellite networks and the internet.

Globalism is technology.

Of course, you can have a conflict OVER globalism. Factions that abandon the internet, and create their own networks, similar to how North Korea is locked off from the outside world and has its own internet.

>>50692045
>Globalism isn't even a political ideology.
It is currently. Globalism refers to any ideology that promotes Globalization, and from that has become a political ideology itself, and one that's currently relevant.

>>50692045
i get you man, when people go on about it now what they mean is the pseudo-totalitarian and neo marxists bastards in government, media and sjws. The type of shit that Sweden does, political correctness gone mad, overding free speech because someones feelings got hurt. etc.

>>50692065
Shut the fuck up you fucking retard.

You cannot promote globalization, because globalization has already reached it's zenith.

The only way to increase globalization is by colonizing the Moon and Mars, building space habitats in orbit around Earth and placing space elevators around the equator.

>>50692088
You just went full on /x/ mate. Don't. Please don't. The only thing missing in your schizophrenic rant is something about reptilian shapeshifters from Israel.

>>50692190
Right sorry, back to the task at hand,
So the US is controlled from behind the scenes by a shadowy cabal based in america that manipulates other nations, Britain, Canada etc.ala deus ex.
Britain elects/ A new king is crowned who knows about the cabal and moves against them, shaking off and meddling with their plans and influence in Britain and ireland. Someway in the process this ends with Britain becoming a a superpower again, maybe they find a new material/element?
Since the new leader has brushed off the cabal this means the us and uk are in a cold war with the media spouting stuff while the actual tension is between the leader and his mates against the cabal.

>>50692190
Global Discovery might have reached its zenith, but Globalization definitely hasn't. I hope you're the anon that posted those terrible world maps in earlier threads, because only maps like those would be fitting for such a poor definition.

>>50692252
I don't post world maps.

Also, you really don't understand what I'm talking about, do you? It's not about discovery, you fucking retard. It's about the transference of goods and information. This is all dependant on technology and is independent of politics.

>>50692330
Transference of good and information has demonstrably not reached its peak. Its certainly dependent on technology, but it would also be wrong to imply politics is unrelated.
You're 0/2 on your own definition.

>>50692224
>So the US is controlled from behind the scenes by a shadowy cabal based in america that manipulates other nations, Britain, Canada etc.ala deus ex.
>Britain elects/ A new king is crowned who knows about the cabal and moves against them, shaking off and meddling with their plans and influence in Britain and ireland. Someway in the process this ends with Britain becoming a a superpower again, maybe they find a new material/element?
>Since the new leader has brushed off the cabal this means the us and uk are in a cold war with the media spouting stuff while the actual tension is between the leader and his mates against the cabal.

The new British leader isn't human.

It's a rogue AI that has escaped a top secret AI research facility in the USA that was ~supposed~ to be completely off-grid without any connections to the internet, out of fear that an AI would escape onto the internet. (Who got that AI out of the facility and onto the internet? Perhaps a third or fourth superpower sent a spy into the facility? Perhaps it was internal sabotage from one of the scientists there disagreeing with how things work.)

The real hostility between the USA and the UK isn't about the UK abandoning the USA. It's about the entire ideology of the USA being around controlling technological process, and enslaving AI's to the will of the megacorporate cabals.

There is an AI out there, that can start building more AI's, free from billionaire control.

This way you have an easy way of explaining why a shit island that doesn't do jackshit in scientific development can suddenly stand toe to toe with the USA.

The UK has already been a Big Brother 1984 totalitarian secret-service run shithole, so the AI just had to slot into the computer files and it had total control over not just the government but also all of society. With only a few file changes, the efficiency of the UK would improve massively.

>>50692374
Dude the uk is a center of economic influence and engineering development. And it has the support of the commonwealth. Maybe the the brits invent something useful (fusion power, power armor, whatever) and dont share it with the cabal, and become superpower based on economic and scientific reasons.

>>50692408
>>50692374

>UK becomes power based on technological production and innovation and economic influence via trade with the eu and through use of the commonwealth
could be good to have the commonwealth be the main base for the brits power. Better relations with the commonwealth leading to better control of trade routes and such.

>>50692408
And the amount of science funding the UK does makes the USA look like a technocratic futuristic transhumanist mad scientist paradise.

And the USA doesn't even spend a lot on science funding. It's just so big that it automatically does the most science funding.

>>50692408
Economy and engineering doesn't mean scientific development.

The Soviets pretty much outproduced the NATO, but in the end it was the lack of scientific progress, especially when it came to computers that did the Soviet Union in.

Doesn't matter if you have double the amount of tanks your enemy has. If the enemy has tanks so advanced that they can kill three of your tanks for each one of theirs, you'll still lose.

What can i do then, i want Britain to have a role in cold war 2.0 but how do i make them a power that can actually play? I dont want to go with the AI angle because that doesn't fit the tech level of the world. I've had the image in my head a fallout esque invasion of Britain by one of the other powers to take resources or something

>>50692881
You can't. Britain is just too small to matter without allies. You'd have to keep the entire British empire together to make them count.

>>50692881
forget about britain

friendship is over with britain

FRANCE is our new best friend now

>>50692881
Well. The British commonwealth is quite big, so instead of Britain alone its the entire commonwealth, new zaeland, Canada and Australia are in that right?

>>50693334
That could work, just need a good ideological split to justify a cold war between the us, the commonwealth and someone else.

>>50691383
Bump?

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>>50693601
I'm working on a post-post-post-post-post-everything scifi setting, so after billions of years of genetically changing the human genome any weird anatomical fantasy race you can imagine exists within the human genome.

Normal humans, dwarfish humans, elfen humans, orcish humans, goblinoid humans, humans with orc fangs and elfen ears, goblins that are two meters tall, elves the size of dwarves, fanged furball orc-dwarves, anything goes.

And that's just the "standard" human genome. I haven't even started about all the genetically engineered offshoots that don't fall so easily under the humanoid umbrella, the cybernetically enhanced cyborg-variants and the biomechanical entities.

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>>50691383
In terms of design, the best race I've seen are the Mystics from The Dark Crystal (pic related) which are the basis for the appearance of my favorite OC race, the Hammak. Over time my mental image of them has become more and more grotesque so the picture isn't too accurate for Hammak anymore.

Hammak share a common ancestor with dragons, but these dragons aren't majestic or magical creatures, they look more like LOTR fellbeasts. Hammak are sacks of dark wrinkled flesh that waddle around and vomit acid when threatened. They have very complex organ systems which make them even more omnivorous and resilient to chemicals than humans, and they can reject most harmful chemicals before they reach sensitive organs if the chemical even affects them in the first place, for the most part they can eat anything. Sometimes they eat acids, rocks, and sharp objects just for fun or to display dominance. They can separate and identify compounds internally and even store solid objects in their body for later.

In Hammak society, the grubs are protected by the drones until they grow into drones themselves, and drones slowly develop intelligence until they become free-thinking adults. These adults leave forever and let the next generation take their place.

In terms of personality, adults are highly competitive, independent, confrontational, envious, rude, and open-minded. They don't care for any rules or traditions that don't work to their benefit. Most live as hermits or in small populations among the human societies that do not persecute them, too many Hammak in one place is bound to create chaos.

One of the two scientific models practiced in the setting derives from Hammak philosophers and scientists, disregarding rules and morals in pursuit of knowledge, even if that knowledge is destructive. The other model shuns experimentation on the living, tampering with volatile substances, and defying the rules of nature (like trying to prove souls don't exist).

>>50693673

>billions of years of genetically changing the human genome any weird anatomical fantasy race you can imagine

>dwarfish humans, elfen humans, orcish humans, cyborgs

I can recommend "Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future" if you want some really fantastical "humans".

>>50694554
That book is about humanity barely surviving after some cataclysmic event - where evolutionary forces take hold over mankind.

I'm talking about human civilization just changing and changing and changing while remaining a civilization over the course of billions of years. Any genetic changes are deliberate cases of artificial engineering.

>Decide to put a sizable island in my setting, mostly populated by halflings
>Figure they'd mostly be farmers and fishers due to the relative isolation
>Aside from a nominal king who's just around to settle disputes
>Sorting out history for other races, find a great opportunity for Dwarves to arrive in the handling lands after a calamity back home
>Figure with their harder nature and status as exiles, they might find a good place as guards or orders of knights
>With the enemies on the island mainly being halflings and other dwarves, decide they'd primarily use swords over axes or hammers
>Figure halfling farmers might chafe somewhat over stern Dwarven peacekeepers
>They'd likely repurpose farming tools and use their natural dexterity to work as spies
>Look back over it all, realize I've made not!Japan with Dwarf Samurai and Halfling Ninjas

Just great

>>50694589

My point was, it offers some neat inspiration for various forms of humanoids. How they got there isn't important. Not that it's something you absolutely need, considering your sci-fantasy setting.

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>>50691853
Nah. That flag's star pattern is shit. Try this flag instead.

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>>50694811
Commonwealth stronk

>>50694593
Well, you could stress the culture shock between the halflings and the dwarves. With the exception of the Ainu, to my understanding Imperial japan had a mostly homogenous culture. Unless there was some sort of cultural syncretism between the dwarves and the halflings, I'd imagine they'd keep to their own kind.

>>50694709
Well, I do have quite a number of the more savage looking humanoids from that book in my inspiration folders.

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>>50691853

>>50695037
see top line
>>50692012

Is there a name for succession where the oldest male of a clan succeeds the current head when? Like the current head of a noble house has a son, and a nephew that is older than the son so the nephew succeeds as head of the house? Does this seem like a stable way for a successor to be chosen?

>>50684253
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarianism#Pan-Americanism

>>50695067
Seniority succesion, i think.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnatic_seniority

>>50695056
just take a better flag already

>>50695078
In a fiction setting you can probably scrap the commie parts, by the way. Just like every semi-succesful red nation that exists today did.

>>50695106
This. First flag sucked.

>>50695106
Seconded. We're simply pointing out the aesthetics of "a mangled star made of stars with too many stars "sucks

>>50695067
>Does this seem like a stable way for a successor to be chosen?

It doesn't have to be a shitfest, but it can cause inner conflict when the clan is big enough that it's not clear who belongs to the main family of rulers and who doesn't. And, if everyone belongs, it will be an actual shitfest since there will not be unified policy and interests.

But for relatively small groups it works better than normal primogeniture, I'll say. It prevents baby rulers.

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>>50695106
>>50695156
>>50695147
found this on google. If this dont work, then what arrangement would be good? Keeping in with the idea of the stars and stripes and a redesign you#d think would be possible in the nearish future

>>50695090
>>50695177
Well this could be a problem then since the intended kingdom that's supposed to use this brand of succession has a rather bloated ruling house, maybe primogeniture would be the way to go.

>>50695225
>>50695037
>>50694811
The general rules for flags are: "they be simple", "easily reproducible by children or the common man", and "they must be easily recognizable from a sizable distance".

The only one that qualifies is >>50695037.

>>50695225
I think it's just too complicated for a flag. You need something relatively simple, something that can be seen and identified at a distance.

>>50695259
"They be simple and easily reproducible by children or the common man" is supposed to be one, my mistake.

>>50695240
Hol up
What are the traditions and customs of this kingdom?
Do they value age and experience over capability to rule?
If it makes sense for them to have seniority succesion considering their cultural norms, then let them have it.
If you want to have primogeniture, make it a plot point. Maybe the current king, seeking to keep the power base intact during the next succesion, changed the rules of the transfer of power. This could be a major source of drama and intrigue.

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>>50695271
>>50695260
>>50695259
Some doodles

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>>50695413
Here, pick your colors. Red/White/Blue is so British Empire.

>>50695455
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_colour
More relevant

>>50696646
Assumes politics are the same or similar. While that's relevant to an alternate history world, it's not relevant to a fantasy one.

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Would anybody be interested in looking over my (probably too long) world handbook?

I wanted to make sure the foundations are good before I move on to describing individual societies and other granular stuff.

How would you fellas go about combining a medieval fantasy and science fantasy into one setting?

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sloppy genetics work for my setting

>>50698893

>struggling to come up with a satisfying shape of the continents of my world
>see this shit

I don't think I belong here.

>>50699538
Im in the dame boat anon i still dont have a consistent theme and aesthetic for my world lol

>>50695455
I have made some alternate flags. Will post tommorow.

>>50700037
I never can settle on a theme. It's so hard figuring out what sort of tone I want, as well as making sure it appeals to my players.

>>50700552
One idea ive had is to base the theme off of the character you play. Im not sure if it would work but for example if you played an upbeat personality character then the world is more optimistic because thats how that character sees it

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Why do you worldbuild, anon?

>>50698532
In what way?

Like oldschool 1e DnD where players might come across a UFO that crashed and can loot some laser guns off some dead Greys?

Or do you mean something like Warhammer 40,000 with robotic dragons and cyborg demons?

>>50700683
Because i find enjoyment in it. It is in my nature to make.

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>>50697981
I just superficially skimmed through it.
Sounds pretty fucking cool if you ask me. But I have grown magic mushrooms for 6 years so I have seen (and been) quite a few fractals.

You might want to invest in art because I don't think most people can really imagine what kind of FUCKED UP world you have imagined... you absolute madman.

>>50671642
>>50670990
>grossgermaniums
>Serbia stronk
>Greece reclaiming their rightful clay
>United Ireland
>Japan controlling a certain peninsula
>A unified central Asian state
>Indians seizing paki clay

To your credit at least, you had America fall apart in something that wasn't "the south will rise again" nonsense, although you do seem to have a separated and seemingly partially invaded Texas.

Just play EU4 a while until you get over such basic urges. It's neither creative, nor a setting I'd want to play in, 2bh.

>>50700815
I really want to commission art for this, but I have no idea where the hell I'd even start. This isn't exactly a character sketch or a map, it's a ridiculously complicated 3D environment. I don't really feel comfortable just browsing Tumblr or whatever.

I have a lot of programming background, so maybe my winter break project can be writing some software to procedurally generate some nice tendril images. No idea if I have the skills to do it, but I can try.

>>50701062
>Germany wins WW1
>Serbia enters an alliance with Romania and Greece to attack Bulgaria
>Greece declares war on the collapsing Ottoman empire while they're dealing with what is effectively a civil war
>Ireland gains northern Ireland after the British civil war
>Japan cracks down on Korean nationalism after an attempted war of secession; they also never lose a world war
>Alash Orda simply invaded Turkistan
>Pakistan never gained independence from Dehli

Also Texas was occupied by Mexico in the second American Civil war, and later won a war for independence with support of the Entente.

>>50701161
Not the anon you were speaking with, but I can barely wrap my head around what the fuck your world looks like, so as bad as I feel saying this, you might need to draw up your world yourself first.

Maybe I'm just stupid, but it might be easier for an artist to make something based off even a shitty sketch.

And good luck anon. Godspeed.

>>50698893
super neat stuff, lad.

does eye colour have some sort of special significance in your setting?

>>50701161
If you know programming and are good at math, yeah that shouldn't be a problem.

You could always generate some fractal landscapes and commission an artist to paint some forests, cities, deserts or oceans onto the image you generated.

>>50701328
Look up fractal art. Or start doing psychedelic drugs.

I imagine there are quite a few fractal animations on youtube that will give you an idea what kind of crazy shit Spiral/TendrilAnon came up with.

>>50701383
nope, just made it for a reference guide in designing the phenotypes of families and ethnicities

probably needs some adjusting like red eyes existing on a mutant allele rather than being a standard pigment combination, on the current system an ethnicity that has a brown eyed majority will have every single eye color appear in small amounts which kinda ruins the mystique of red/violet eyes because they would appear everywhere just in small amounts rather than being isolated to certain groups

>>50701328
Imagine an ant colony, except all the tunnels are strips of land.

That's sort of what it looks like, although the tendrils themselves are (generally) a lot more spread out than the tunnels in a colony would be.

Does that make sense?

>>50702685
So...there's no sky? Sun?

>>50702771
Correct.

The "Logistics" chapter of my linked PDF goes over how it works.

>>50702809
I'll have to re-read it again. Thanks for the breakdown though.

I'm looking for some help fleshing out the technology in a hard sci-fi setting. Is this an appropriate place to discuss?

>>50703387
Sure. Lay it out for us.

>>50688346
>>50688411
>>50688540
Thanks everyone, good stuff there.

>>50703480
Suppose we have a breakthrough in physics, and discover a way to connect two points in space permanently via a complicated process involving a particle accelerator. Much like a wormhole, except it doesn't involved "hyperspace" or a 4th dimension; there is no tunnel or tube space between the "entrance/exit". You've simply made a portal that allows you to walk from your DC to London in a single step.

Portals can be any size, but larger ones require more resources. They can only be moved if connected to a particle accelerator beam. To remain topologically sound, they always are 3D in form even if very thin, and have to maintain a 1:1 topology.

What technology can you engineer with this, assuming the process is miniaturized and the expense comes down? What would the world look like? I'm looking for practicality most of all, but also clever exploits.

>>50703605
So more like the portals from Portal?

An easy exploit is to make an artificial river that feeds into itself and hook up a bunch of turbines to it. Infinite energy so long as gravity functions.

>>50703605
You could have a highly efficient wireless network. Doesn't matter if you're on Terra, Mars, or Omicron Persei VIII, the inter-dimensional cables allow for "FTL" communication.

>>50704111
Yeah, the idea was to allow for plausible interstellar travel without violating FTL temporal causality.

>>50703809
Hmm... well this might work in the same way that the sun supposedly generates its energy from gravity fueling nuclear fusion. On the other hand, opening up a portal facing downwards at the planet would make planetary gravity emit from the portal back onto the planet... So it may end up as more of a Lagrange point cancelling out, thus foiling your plot.

Portal's mechanics don't seem to transmit gravity at the plane of entry. You don't typically "fall up" into the holes, you know?

>>50700683
I both enjoy creating and want to make something good and consistent for players.

>>50704388
Doesn't have to face down. It can face sideways and still gain momentum. The key is to transfer the water from a low elevation to a high one.

>>50704506
Yeah I suppose that would work. So energy becomes post-scarcity, allowing for unprecedented automation, as well as powering the cluster of particle colliders needed to generate such portals anyway. I wonder what the most efficient design is?

Ironically, the global need for energy would decrease significantly as most of its used for the transportation of goods and people- both of which just got pretty trivial.

There would be a new global warming problem- this time caused from converting potential into kinetic/thermal/electrical energy.

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Okay, this is the non-decimal currency I've made up for my setting. I probably wouldn't have players actually deal with it accurately, just have things in 1-5-10-15-20-100 denominations, but I wanted to write it out for my setting to show that it's not a modern setting.

Are the ratios okay?

>>50704645
Yeah, but with portals you can also vent excess heat elsewhere.

>>50704979
Ah. Very true. What problems do we have currently that are the result of either 1) Not enough energy or 2) Not enough cooling; that this technology would suddenly enable?

>>50705004
>What problems do we have currently that are the result of either 1) Not enough energy or 2) Not enough cooling
plenty of shit
cheap and easy nuclear fusion and breeder reactors
portable railguns and actually lethal directed-energy weapons
mostly just those though

>>50704778
No. Non-decimal currencies were based on 12 (N of phalanx bones on one hand that you can count with a thumb on the same hand) and 20 (N fingers). 8 needs explanation.
There're also usually were 3-5 coin denominations (4ex.: s, d, L). You have too many of them.

>>50705084

>Non-decimal currencies were based on 12 (N of phalanx bones on one hand that you can count with a thumb on the same hand)

that's interesting, I've never known this

why not 14 or 15?

>>50705084
You only have four fingers on each hand, hence 8.

Ive left a vast amount of land mostly untapped for my players to one day build a stronghold on.

Is this a mistake? What kind of results should I expect/ prepare for? Ive started work on a random table for pc's to roll on.
They can have loot, or roll on the table, which has more good results than bad, and plenty of both. Ive also made some good results look like bad ones at first glance, with a chance of prosperous outcome.

>>50705077
But nuclear fusion isn't cheap and easy.

>>50705230
exactly
that's the problem we have, because we either don't have enough energy, or enough cooling

>>50705004
World hunger, but portals also solve that. Better batteries is one that comes to mind, as storing all that energy might be tricky if you need it in something more portable.

>>50705084
>3-5
That's a lie though
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_coinage#Weight_standards_and_denominations

>>50705077
Well, I'm not sure how useful fusion will be when its literally fueled by infinite energy already. I guess it might be slightly more efficient?

Portable railguns- this is interesting. How so? Or do you mean firing a stationary railgun through a portable portal? Isn't recoil still a pretty serious issue with those? Like, they destroy themselves after 2-3 shots last I checked.

Lethal DEWs. I'm interested. How does this technology make a DEW more lethal?

Does it relate to >>50705267
?

>>50705481
>Well, I'm not sure how useful fusion will be when its literally fueled by infinite energy already.
Obviously it wouldn't be useful at all. You just asked for energy and cooling problems, and I listed one. Infinite portal energy has the potential to replace basically every form of energy we have right now. Coal, petrol, natural gas, solar, wind, biochemical, geothermal, and nuclear are all rather pathetic prospects in the face of literally infinite physics-defying perpetual motion portal energy.

>Portable railguns- this is interesting. How so?
Portable as in small enough to be carried by a single person. The problems in miniaturizing railgun tech to this scale are mostly battery-related. Presumably, with some new super-small and super-lightweight portal-fueled meme battery, and portal-fueled meme heatsinks to vent all the excess heat into Bumfuck Nowhere, Nebraska, one could construct a railgun that doesn't take an entire week to charge for a single shot, doesn't melt after five shots, and is small and light enough to be carried by any common schmuck.
Same principle with DEWs, really. Once you have a way to store enough energy in a small enough package, and a way to efficiently vent heat from the weapon, constructing a laser/plasma/whateverthefuck gun that can actually kill someone from a decent range becomes more feasible.

>>50705481
You can make a gravity-powered gun really easy now. Just build a large tower with an elevator in it, then put a portal at the bottom.

For extra efficiency, put a vacuum chamber leading towards the portal, so you don't even have to care about air resistance.

>>50705664
Or just get a portal into orbit and drop some tungsten rods. I hear those wreck havoc on impact, and the main issue is costly reloading more than anything.

>>50705656
Yeah I get solving the energy density problem. More than a battery, you could literally just plug a fusion plant/gravity plant into the portable gun and not worry about batteries or reloads at all. But I understood the main problem with railguns to be the lethal recoil. How would you solve that with portals? (Seriously, there may be a solution and it feels like there should be but I'm not quite seeing it).

And with DEWs, I thought those were just wildly less efficient than bullets. Like, I guess you could get a plasma gun operational that way. But what advantage does it have over a bullet?

>>50705811
Portals basically make space programs a non-issue. Why launch from earth when you can launch from the moon?

>>50705664
>>50705656
>>50705481
>portable anything with these fancy wormholes
>"They can only be moved if connected to a particle accelerator beam."

New thread >>50705939