/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

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>>50705939
Previous thread: >>50647108

Does anyone know any good books on medieval navies and shipbuilding?

>>50705939
>Should a fantasy world follow consistent physical laws or should it be as fantastical as magic allows it to be?
Consistent physical laws if you're trying to make a believable story out of it, without relying on Ex Machina or general asspulls. Same reason you have a well-defined magic system.

>Interspecies mating: does it result in babies?
Uplifted races (Dwarves/Halflings): no, Human + Elves or Beastmen: yes, Beastmen amongst themselves: yes.

I would like to renew discussion from the previous thread regarding the science fiction applications of a portal technology. So far we've determined its useful for unlimited energy, interstellar space travel, and coolant venting.

Previous posters have suggested applications in directed energy weapons and man-portable railguns, but I don't see how the recoil problem is solved in railguns, nor what advantage DEWs have over bullets. I'm not arguing against that- I just don't see the applications yet.

My original post detailing the technology is here:
>>50703605

>>50706060
>>50705811
>But I understood the main problem with railguns to be the lethal recoil. How would you solve that...

I don't claim to be a railgun expert, so I don't know how much of this is applicable, but I think it's probably worth looking at how existing non-railguns solve their recoil problems.
>balanced recoil distribution (AK-107)
>recoiling barrel assembly (AN-94)
>downward recoil redirection system (TDI Super V)
>long-recoil bolt and recoil springs (AA-12)
>the design of every recoilless rifle ever made

Any moving part designed to absorb, carry, distribute, or redirect recoil forces can probably be moved into a portal, sending the recoil where it can't affect the weapon or the user at all.

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>>50665636
I guess I'm cross-posting this from /gdg/:

I want to make a magic system where you have actual rules about how different reagents and components react to create potions, alchemical concoctions, etc. so that players can make their own potions on the fly with the ingredients they have on hand. I might also want to extend that to spells, though I haven't yet figured out how to handle component costs.

I'm thinking of either doing a point-based system for convenience, or making it so that the effectiveness of potion-brewing decreases with more ingredients you add.

The question I have is: I haven't encountered an RPG yet that has such a system. Is it too complex to expect players to use as opposed to just buying potions of health or poisons of whatever?

Should I even bother?

>>50706060
You can use microportals to replace printed gold circuitry in computer chips. The electrons just move instantly.

>>50706141
I feel like you may want to look to Vidya for inspiration here. Have various ingredients with stock effects associated with them, that can be combined with those of similar effects into a potion.

So if you have a healing root, and a life berry, you can mix those into a weak healing potion. If you add more stuff, it can get stronger, up to a cap. However, to add some complexity, you could also put in certain ingredients that don't mix well together, and certain ingredient combos that may give you a secondary effect rather than the primary one you were expecting.

>>50706157
There's a thought. You could get convoluted space densities, which allows reformatting of anything that requires surface area... Cooling once again comes to mind, as does biological processes and certain organizational problems. There's probably some flashier tech that you could create with it but it hasn't come to mind yet.

>>50706084
The thing about railguns is that the recoil is *arbitrarily large*. We could make a railgun with the recoil of an AR15, it would just be pointless (no added benefit). The point of a railgun is to fire projectiles that can literally shoot through a mountain (or a moon, if we took to a cosmic scale). So while railguns are useful for getting arbitrarily large acceleration values, the projectile pushes back on the railgun just as hard. There's a reason we mount these to cruisers and *not* to land based installations.

Suppose the rails shunt into a portal. This means what the user carries is actually a rail recovery and aiming system- some fixed end point that a retraction mechanism pulls the rails back to. But the other end of it can't be empty space or nothing would stop the rails... and recoiling into an ocean or some-such is likely to lead to a leakage problem for the portable cannon user.

(hmm... note to self. Literal oceanic flood grenades... maybe call them Noah bombs).

Maybe you cold try and use a high gravity system to recover the rails, but you're gonna need a loooooong chain. Hmm... maybe a neutronium containment system on the other end of the portal... problem then is that gravity diffuses back into the portal and you get a vortex.

(hmm... vortex grenades... man you could seriously mess up a planet with this stuff).

((Well, at least I'm getting ideas out this dialog- thanks! Though a lot of these are sorta shitting in your own nest since you can't really turn the portal off... guess you'd need a mechanism to move it into and out of position, which could easily get out of hand if it falls into the sun))

>>50706340
I was considering something like a pseudo-chemistry with a pseudo-table of elements, where ingredients had some attributes that combined together to creat effects.

So in your example case, you'd have a healing root of the type X with the quality of healing Y amount of points over time, combined with a berry of type A with the quality of preserving something for B length of time, and mix them together with fresh water to create a potion of healing that counteracts disease. Or if you dried and powdered the root and mixed it with the juice of the berry, you'd get a salve that stops bleeding. Or something.

I thought Tyranny had an interesting way of combining spells, though it seemed limited compared to what you get out of D&D.

>>50706403
I don't think you need to get that complicated with it. Remember, you do want it to be simple enough for your players to grasp.

>>50706521
How do I add complexity without going overboard then? Maybe just with the form the final product takes?

I don't just want an additive 1+1=2 healing system, I'd like it to be complex enough that a player can mix the same ingredients in different combinations and amounts to get different effects.

>Skyre

>>50706627
Consider giving each ingredient multiple attributes, possibly depending on how they're prepared. Say you boil the root for healing, but powder it for poison cures.

>>50706678
That might work, I'll see what I can work out.

>>50706141
>>50706403
>>50706627
I'd strongly suggest looking at Skyrim's alchemy. Each ingredient can have up to 4 effects which can be either positive or negative. With certain combinations, you can make both a potion and a poison.

>>50706627
Don't make the complexity yourself: have your players make it and take notes. They can bullshit all they want when it comes to making their potions... As long as they don't contradict themselves or a DM-confirmed fact that another player stated.
You can get a lot of good stuff out of this, like the use of magically infused silver nitrate to change the properties of a powdered mushroom that grows on holy ground and is normally used in healing potions.
Mix that with a clay and charcoal mixture to create a paste that will animate the dead!*
*Animated Dead created via this method are not automatically friendly towards creator. Command and Control (Undead) tokens sold separately. Additional Terms and Conditions Apply. This information was presented for educational purposes only, and use of it violates the Restful Dead Act of 1097AD. Any attempts to raise the dead are done at users own risk.

>>50706355
I'm still looking for ideas, by the way, if anybody has any further insights.

>>50707425
the most terrifying of pungee pits

>Should a fantasy world follow consistent physical laws or should it be as fantastical as magic allows it to be?
I prefer when it follows the laws of physics and evolution with somewhat realistic biological and technological systems. "Magic" should be limited to mundane things that don't exist in our world, such as fantasy plants, animals, monsters, substances, and races. Everything should have a somewhat logical scientific explanation. If you want to go full gods&magic, then you shouldn't try and make it look like Earth or copy historical societies because everything would be completely different. Go for Wizard of Oz or Dark Souls or something.

>Interspecies mating: does it result in babies?
Depends on the species. Dwarves, elves, orcs, halflings, why not? They're pretty much humans. The question is why they aren't just humans to begin with. A race with vastly different needs or physical traits shouldn't be breeding with others though.

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Would any / which of these would work well as a flag for an american remnant government?

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reposting from last thread, sloppy experiment in setting up the world's genetics

So my last few entries never amounted to much so I'm trying again with a new idea. Any thoughts are welcome

>Basic theme is "spaghetti sci-fi"
>Alien-tier chunky as fuck tech and a combination of beefed up projectile and energy weapons

>Setting is a enormous, stupidly huge planet
>mostly barren desert on a Jupiter scale
>discovered by accident by "The Company"
>thousands of networked probes are lost on the surface
>limited variance in terrain
>clouds don't happen, light pollution is a non issue
>Icanseeforever.exe
>sci-fi mumbo jumbo makes the planet a night world. No day, no change in light levels
>Civilisation consists of superheavy transports, some basic highways and small settlements clustered around spaceports
>Only export is rare minerals or salvaged tech.
>population is either settlers, drivers or guards tasked with watching the cargo
>danger comes from a few native species and other humans maddened by the perpetual night
>other dangers include breakdowns and madness. Something about a clear view into space, the endless night, mostly static environment and enormous distances (3-6 months for a short haul) fucks with folk

The game would be either survival horror during a long haul. Where players must manage themselves and their small crew against time, ambushes and the creeping threat of insanity.

Or your bog standard adventure. Where cargo hauling is swapped out for scouring the world looking for probes and technology left over from the planet's discovery. In both cases PC's would want to be your more pathetic and hopeless dregs. People looking to be forgotten or die rather then noble heroics or pure muderhobo

>>50710750
>ugly brown eyecolor still the dominant coloration, even in your fantasy world
Step it up, senpai.

>>50710942
You're likely already aware of this and just don't particularly care, but a Jupiter-sized rocky planet would be essentially impossible. It would sweep up so much hydrogen and other gasses that it would just wind up being a huge gas giant.

If you've simply opted to ignore that (which is your right), then it sounds pretty cool. Seems a bit odd for a desert world to have no daytime, but, I mean, it's not like deserts stop disappearing at night.

What do people/animals eat? On Earth almost (but not quite) all the energy in the ecosystem comes from sunlight, but it'd be hard for that to happen without day.

>other dangers include breakdowns and madness. Something about a clear view into space, the endless night, mostly static environment and enormous distances (3-6 months for a short haul) fucks with folk
This is the part that makes me say "really cool". An entire massive planet of people slowly going mad sorta gives me the vibe of an obscure Terry Gilliam movie.

>>50711026
Well, that depends. If within different groups of people, different eye pigmentations are more common (e.g. if there's a blue-eyed group, a red-eyed group, and a yellow-eyed group), then brown eyes would only be particularly prevalent in people with ancestry from all three groups.

And obviously players (if this is for a game) are gonna pick one of the fancy colors.

>>50710750
This might be adding a complication with which you don't want to deal, but remember the brown/green/blue alleles aren't the only thing that determines eye color. Brown eyes can range from golden brown to almost black. My eyes are nominally blue, but they're almost closer to gunmetal gray. Color in the strictest sense is just the most dramatic and easily-classified difference; like anything else, there are a lot of genes and even environmental effects at play.

Also, it might be a bit clearer if you construct these as a wheel rather than a list.

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>>50711026
I'm thinking that societies that are separated from the yellow pigment would have a taboo against marrying people with brown eyes, any amount of yellow pigment restricts most of the obscure colors

>>50711028
I'll admit I'm running on pure rule of (personal) cool, but these are the types of things it'd be worth knowing. The major sticking point is how to justify perma-night plus the clear sky- both inspired by nightwalking.

I've had strange moments late some nights, particularly in winter when the sun sets earlier. Where it feels like time has stopped. This is the kind of thing I imagine the natives would feel. Made worse for convoy crews, who can stare out into infinite space, or across same-y terrain that might not change for weeks at a time. The question becomes, do you track time while on the road- so people have some idea, or is it easier, and kinder to let them disconnect and just function with no comprehension of time until you return to civilisation?

>what do the people/animals eat
A good question. Since we're working without sunlight perhaps geothermal energy takes its place. Tunnelling insects and crude reptiles that need to be dug up or who cluster around thermal vents. Native life would be limited and primitive, all of it adapted to either squat over natural sources of heat and survive in a similar fashion to lichen and fungus, or to hunt in short, violent bursts.

Apex predators are lean, built for explosive speed, tracking and accuracy. Killing and eating something gives a little more energy then it takes so they would need to be constantly moving or capable of doing into a form of stasis and ambushing prey

Humans..well the cop-out answer is "they survive on settler rations and imports" as the planet doesn't really give itself to raising meat heavy animals. Maybe as a bi-product of their mineral mining the population has discovered how to attract and kill the larger burrowing insects. Giant worm meat drawn up from creatures who periodically rise from the lowest levels of the crust to reproduce

>>50705939
>Should a fantasy world follow consistent physical laws or should it be as fantastical as magic allows it to be?
The rules are consistent, and magic is defined as breaking those rules. When physicists and inventors talk about the laws of the universe in my setting, they really mean "without accounting for magic", which is a bit like saying "without accounting for friction". So magic can create or destroy matter and energy, make gravity flow backwards, twist time and space, make two things exist in the same place at once, even travel faster than c without violating causality.

Magic is the act of pitting your will against the universe's. The universe wants things to play by the rules. You can impose your own rules onto an area, but gradually the universe's will (physics) collapses into the manipulated area, like a weak putty collapsing into a puddle under its own weight, which is the best analogy that comes to mind since I recently spent a shift at work playing around with a weak putty. Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty, if anyone's familiar with it. I'm sure there's a better comparison but I'm not thinking of it.

>Interspecies mating: does it result in babies?
Yes, as often as it happens in nature, though those babies are not always viable or fertile.

If you're specifically referring to homonid species, then it depends on the specific combination. Most homonid species that interbreed can at least get as far as forming a zygote, but some hybrids are prone to self-terminate soon afterwards. Even in species that can reliably produce viable offspring (like humans and elves), roughly one in four hybrid children are infertile.

>>50711456
I was thinking maybe it work better as a state of perpetual twilight rather than straight-up night. There are plants, but they're mostly limited to little mosses and lichens, maybe the occasional shrub. The downside is that you'd lose the starry night aspect, since only the brightest stars would be visible, BUT the entire sky just being a featureless pink-blue haze might be even more maddening. I dunno.

Also maybe the place is strewn with stopped clocks. Some smashed in rage, some just broken and never repaired. They used them when the planet was first settled, but gradually they seemed more and more useless. They mocked the people, with their tick-tock-tick-tock endlessly tracking something that didn't exist anymore, counting down the infinite seconds till sunrise, chiming at the meaningless hours, marking the mealtimes long after there was not enough food to go around, but the clocks didn't care, they didn't need food to keep on tick-tock-tick-tocking, they don't care about the families who died with loose skin draped over emaciated frames with bloated bellies, they don't care about the ones who went into the wilderness to look for scraps and never came back, they don't care about the ones who wandered off silently, mouths agape, not a thought left in their heads, they only care about that endless infuriating tick-tock-tick-tock.

>>50711456
>>50712018
Season 3 of Agents of Shield deals with a perpetually-dark, alien planet a little. Might be worth looking into for more inspiration.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4,722_Hours

>>50712297
Why is everyone trying to get me to watch Agents of SHIELD?

>>50712018
I am loving the clock notion. At first the settlers and scavengers thought it would help, having a semblance of normalcy in an otherwise static environment. But like how the disconnect between what the eyes see and the rest of the body feels can make a person sick, that gap between knowing that, technically time is passing, even if nothing you see or feel agrees is what drives people over the edge. ?

Today the madness is a given. Anybody living near the bare handful of starports can stave it off for a good while, since company vessels make port to load up and dispense their goods allows for a vague kind of schedule, but out in the roads and trackless wilds it takes a certain kind of willpower- or complete apathy to stay sane.

Twilight could work. I thought briefly about just a slow, slow orbit and rotation meaning no wind. But on the other hand if the wind is a constant, forever kicking up enough dust and shit into the air to create a constant haze.. It could also lend itself to the insanity, people grow irritable and agitated at first, thinking you've said something they didn't quite catch. From there one dissolves into screaming at the wind, talking to yourself and ultimately wandering off or going catatonic.

The whole thing is a result of major disruption to our circadian rhythm. The human body is fairly reliant on the environment giving it clues, and when those are missing our attempts to maintain said rhythm quickly start to break down, you can't sleep long enough, or too long, you struggle to fall asleep. Everyone is prone to it, even the rig drivers who, by necessity are secure in sealed cabins that crudely simulate a basic day/night cycle through lighting tricks and a VR headset that simulates weather and other minor distractions to keep drivers engaged

>>50712500
I'll take a look. I'd like to present as complete a setting as possible on the off chance anybody wants to use it

>>50712500
Did the other people recommend it because you brought up your dark planet? It's almost 1:1 for the alien planet from the AoS arc.

Do you use any drugs to enhance your worldbuilding?

>>50712996
I was just giving suggestions to the person who's making that setting.

>>50712998
You mean, like, do I use any?

Nah. I've got an addictive personality and I don't want to tempt fate.

>>50712996
I imagine so, that one poster pointed it out for possible inspiration. Plus being questioned helps

If the thread's still up when I wake up I'll reply to anything I may miss

>>50712998
I smoke catnip regularly and marijuana occasionally, also I take adderall sometimes to get work done which is really effective

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>>50713224
>catnip

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>>50713329
>hurr i never smoked catnip let me tell you all about it though

>>50709741
Flags are only as good as their symbolism. New-America's flag would be symbolic, assuming it wasn't just using the original flag to begin with. What changed in America that made them change the flag?

Second thing to think about: Contrast. The Blue/Red only flag has poor contrast. You can't see the stars from a distance. It ends up looking like a plain semaphore flag. Consider one big red star if you must go with that design. Symbolically, I assume it must be communist now?

The stars arranged in stars... use the second one if you must. The top right one's arrangement is just... shitty. Looks like its flipping me off.

Circle flag is pretty good, because it gets the third aspect of flag design down: does it look good flapping in the wind? Remember, flags will rarely if ever be viewed straight on like that. They'll be distorted and floppy. Circle flag does alright. Though I"m not sure what's up with the badge. Is that police state America? A symbol of law enforcement is kinda strange for a political entity.

>Third Reich Dixie
kek. But seriously, they'd just use the original Dixie flag if they're going that route. If nothing else just to prove the south did in fact rise again.

>>50709741
the top left and the middle left.
have them both be rival remnants

I'm looking to make a comprehensive list of fictional bionics/cybernetic augmentations. I've already mined Shadowrun and the Deus Ex series, as well as miscellaneous others. But I need moar. Any recommendations?

How do you guys map cities?

>>50705939
>Should a fantasy world follow consistent physical laws or should it be as fantastical as magic allows it to be?

I think both ways can work. My current setting is pretty physically rooted, but magic can have unpredictable effects (however, big magical effects are rare). I've played in and created settings where magic is much more pervasive, and the laws of physics are less reliable. People say that magic should be consistent: I strongly disagree. Making magic as reliable as physics makes it less, well, magical.

>Interspecies mating: does it result in babies?
In my current setting, there are two major human ethnicities which can obviously mate. As well, there are three elvic ethnicities that can reproduce. Humans and elves can reproduce, the race of the offspring is the same as the mother.

>>50714045
>People say that magic should be consistent: I strongly disagree
If you want your players (or characters, if you're writing something) to use magic to solve their problems, then it absolutely should be consistent (even if it's not clear in-universe) or else you're walking straight into ass-pull territory.

If you want magic to create problems for your characters, then it's fine with it being inconsistent, but if you want to use magic to create problems for your players and you don't keep it consistent, then your players are going to feel like you're railroading them or punishing them just because and they're going to call you a shit GM.

Basically, magic is fine being inconsistent as long as it doesn't interact with the players directory, but magic that interacts with players demands consistency to avoid feeling like bullshit.

>>50713408
>What changed in them?
The apocalypse.
Maybe for contrast, white, black and red?
Symbolically the shield one (didnt realize the shield was for law enforcement just thought it looked good) could be, the circle representing unity in strife and the center shield as law will prevail or something.

>>50705939
>Should a fantasy world follow consistent physical laws or should it be as fantastical as magic allows it to be?
I am of the strong opinion that fantastical worlds should obey the rules of physics and only act so far as the real world laws of the world allow. Flimsy rules for magic and other things within the world only serve to create easy answers to hard questions (i.e. lol magic dude idk lmao), which ultimately weakens the immersion of the setting.
>Interspecies mating: does it result in babies?
No. You can only mate within your own race.

Now for a couple questions of my own:
>Does your own political bias show in your worlds?
>Does your knowledge of things outside of worldbuilding/TRPGs show in your settings and/or worldbuilding process? (math, science, history, language, engineering, ect...)

>>50711372
>>50710750
red eyes a best, to be honest

>>50714268
A good comparison I like to use in describing my ideal magic is the ocean. It's wet, it's deep, it's generally cold: there are known constants. However, there are storms, and rogue waves, and other less predictable stuff. You can be a great sailor, but sometimes things are simply beyond your control.

It's definitely not for every GM as it can be easily used to railroad and fuck with people, but my players have responded well to it.

>>50714045
>How do you map cities
Step 1) Assess Metropolitan area's Resources. Is this a mining town? Shipping Port? Or just an ancient city of excess population in the middle of a bread basket?

Step 2) Draw major transporation lines. If there's a railway/highway/main road, start with that. Add a seaport if relevant.

Step 3) Draw Industrial and Merchant Districts based on these shipping lanes. Efficient cities will have more than one economic resource, so for instance many of my cities end up with a "meatpacking district" and a "steel processing district" on complete opposite sides of town (steel near the mountains/mines to reduce transit, meat near the agriculturally viable land on the other side of the city).

Step 4) Add Lower and MIddle class residential areas accordingly.

Step 5) Assess the highest value real estate. Post-automobile, this will be the highest elevation. Prior to that, it will be the shortest walk to the downtown area, typically upriver. Use this to place the upper class districts (Government buildings, Office Buildings, Universities, Theater Districts, etc). This generally provides you with a CBD.

Step 7) Finishing touches. Add military installations if any. If the city has political importance in the nation at large, add corporate/guild headquarters, government parks/monuments, etc. Assess its overall wealth and add fancy amenities accordingly (for instance, a metro system, a mage guild, etc).

>>50714444
>However, there are storms, and rogue waves, and other less predictable stuff
However, these still are consistent and obey certain laws, even if you don't know what those laws are as a user of the ocean.

It's fine if somebody inside the universe doesn't know why or how magic works, you don't have to explain everything. However, you as the creator of the world, must have that knowledge.

Suppose for a bit that in a particular instance, you want a spell to fail and fuck up the caster, ask yourself: "Why did it fail and why did it fuck up the caster" and if the answer is "lol magic," then you have failed. You don't have to tell the caster the reason why his magic fucked up, but you have to know yourself.

>>50714289
That's more a badge than a shield. Shields don't curve inwards on the sides so as to deflect blows *towards* the wielder. Hence why that's more emblematic as a badge than a shield.

>>50714293
>Political Bias
Maybe? Probably? In order to create dramatic tension, I made sure every faction has its opposite. I made my favored political faction the status quo dominant geopolitical power, and their opposition the scrappy underdog usually associated with protagonists.

>Does knowledge show?
Um, does your ignorance of these things show? That seems like the only alternative. I try to know enough of the basics about everything to keep it all coherent at the face of it, and then research each thing in depth more as needed to keep up with the campaign.

>>50714497
Wow, this was very helpful! How do you actually go about drawing them out, on paper, digitally, or some combination thereof?

>>50714521
Well obviously yes, they do have trackable causes and follow the laws of physics and such. It's not a perfect analogy.

I don't go "oh lol the spell failed just because," because obviously that would be bad GMing. Say, for example, that someone draws on the spirits of their ancestors to divine the future: if they've been blatantly disrespecting the spirits, it follows that the divination might not work. It makes more sense when you step outside of the Vancian magic system. Again, things don't happen for "lol no reason," but that doesn't mea they have to be predictable. My players like the way I handle magic, and that's enough for me.

>>50714293
>>50714268
>>50709622
Couldn't agree more. I actually have a magic system that needs troubleshooting to make it consistent in fact.

Objectives: Make magic that doesn't 1) cause a post scarcity economy or WMDs, 2) Ends caster supremacy 3) doesn't require an encyclopedia of rules or predefined spells (i.e. freeform magic) and 4) is genuinely information/intelligence based

Objective 1 is accomplished by the following rules.
1) Magic has a spherical radius centered on you, and spells target everything in that sphere unless explicitly indicated otherwise.
2) Transmutations aren't permanent. Spell effects have a duration (around 30 seconds but can be renewed), but most effects that occur in that duration are not reversed. For instance chemistry performed with the aid of magic remains stable.

Objective 2 is accomplished by:
1) Long casting time. Martial classes will always succeed in stabbing the mage before he casts unless the mage has a bodyguard.
2) All magic can be counterspelled by non-mages. Lethal spells almost never work. Damaging non-lethal spells are unlikely to work. If the counterspeller is affected by the spell at all he gets a bonus.

Objective 3 is accomplished by the core mechanic: To cast a spell, you literally just say what happens. "Mage ascends". "Incoming projectiles stop". "Quickening' (non-valanced verb doesn't translate well in English). But each word takes 3 seconds to translate into its magic equivalent. Hence long casting times.

Objective 4) Spells can only be cast if prewritten in a spell book as a sentence (proper grammar not necessary). This means getting words from libraries and experimentally deriving words in laboratories. Hence the "intelligence" and "information" theme. Upshot: you can't use a dude's name you just met on the battlefield, since you didn't prepare it- and likely can't unless he sits down with you in a lab.

I invite you all to break this system.

>>50714293
>Does your own political bias show in your worlds?
Without a doubt, I'd go so far as to say that anyone who claims the opposite is fooling themselves: personal biases will always sneak in to anything you create.

I try not to go overboard with it, but when I create a Renaissance/Medieval setting for example, I prefer giving men and women relatively modern equal rights just because it makes me more comfortable. Likewise, I tend to avoid slavery outside of a thing villains do.

>Does your knowledge of things outside of worldbuilding/TRPGs show in your settings and/or worldbuilding process?
I would think so, yes. I've studied anthropology and archaeology for four years, and know a little bit about music, art history and architecture. I definitely try to consider culture in a pseudo-real world context, with flows and interchanges: hard cultural boundaries are in practice, very very rare. For example, look at the borderlands between France and Germany in past times, or at what have you. Migrations, trade, etc., all very important to consider. Culture and religion are crazy things and are a lot of fun to study!

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>>50714761
I look at major geographical features- rivers, coastline, mountains. Then look for a map of a city that has those features in roughly the arrangement I want. Sometimes I need to rotate or flip that or even just edit it a bit in Gimp. Most importantly, I'm looking for that city texture. Then I take a new layer and paint zoning and transit lines over it. The details I keep in a side ledger, possibly with icons if I feel like its common knowledge when the PC's arrive. If its a ye olde map, I'll look for a map texture and layer that over it as well, with some opacity. Here's an example. You can tell I'm not so much an artist, but everything I mentioned above is very easy to do.

Does anyone have numerical figures for Telekinesis?
I'm wondering how much psi would be needed to crush a car, etc. Presumably not much, as the Mariana Trench is only 15,750 psi at it's deepest point.

If i post a general summary of my setting, could i get some critique, or advice or whatever?

>>50715274
This breaks down really fast, unfortunately, unless you want TKers to be brutally omnipotent.

1) Just crush their aorta instead of throwing a ca at them.
2) Oh, arbitrary rule says you can't mess with anything's insides? Fine. Just focus all your energy into a needle point and pierce the aorta instead.
3) Oh, we're banning that too? So apparently I can only do what I can normally do to somebody, just at a distance and with increased strength? Ok, fine, just crush their throat then. Doesn't take much force, and they can't see it, can't dodge it, or even pull my "hand" back since what are they even going to grab? Not that it matters since I could do this with half my normal strength anyway, much less improved strength.

And you seriously want to give a psion oceanic pressures? You do realize I'll kill entire armies in seconds manifesting hydrolasers behind all defenses, right? Not like a "building" could stop me, since buildings only resist pressure vertically, and if I apply that pressure laterally then the entire city is dust in the wind to me.

This is about the point where they start nuking territory indiscriminately in hopes of killing me by luck.

>>50715419
There's still spell resistance, fantastic materials, and other mechanics to consider. Anyone who can use this spell is "intended" to be a force of nature, able to annihilate armies single-handedly.

More than likely it'd only have an effective range of a couple hundred feet, and only the most powerful Wizard in existence could manifest oceanic-tier pressure.

>>50715402
I've got nothing better to do, sure!

>>50715612
Basically after nuclear war/ the magicopalypse , Theres an 80 year time period called the long quiet after the metaphorical silence that fell across the earth. Now after 20 years since the first tribes, settlements and groups started to appear is when the story/ campaign would start with people rediscovering the world, meeting other groups , surving the elements and discovering monsters, mutants and magic.

>>50715756
Sounds pretty neat! It sounds like a kind of idea I've seen kicked around a lot, but never heard of anyone actually really developing on it.

>>50715903
Yeah i have sone ideas based on technology vs magic / old vs new. Remnants of the government for one and you know how in the bioshock games its always a city? Sky, ocean. I need a good thing for a hidden city where people live largely unaffected by the war.

>>50712998
No, I do my world building sober. But I do take inspiration from past hallucinogenic sessions.

>>50716106
Inside a mountain can always work.

Also, fluffing some technological things as supernatural is fun: I once did an adventure where the players wen through a haunted dungeon. The dungeon was a ruined research facility, the ghost was a rampant AI hologram.

>>50716402
I've found that fluffing sci-fi stuff as magitech works really well, too.
>You say your car floats through a Anti-Grav Module? It's actually just a simple Levitate spell

Does anyone know any good books on medieval navies and shipbuilding techniques? I'll even take stuff on the Venetians and the Ottomans in the early Renaissance.

>>50707050
Great suggestion, I have the game but I've never really played it.

>>50707390
That's an interesting idea. Let the wizard/alchemist decide what effects their efforts are having and record the notes, basically?

Is there a good, realistic world or continent generator? they never seem to get islands right.

>>50714933
How about invulnerability? Or etherealness? Is there a times per day limit? If not, just run through walls planting bombs and using your own invincibility to tank through them.

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>>50705939
Verisimillitude is important.
And no interspecies babbies, for obvious reasons.

>>50714293
Perhaps. It is hard for anyone to completely seperate their views and values from their creation.

>>50716106
Desert

>>50716877
Even invulnerability can be counterspelled. Pretty significant risk to take if your tactic is to otherwise explode yourself. And the problem with becoming intangible is becoming tangible again. Does the air penetrate through you? How do you breathe while intangible? The world doesn't have an "ethereal" realm that is a predefined metaphysical constant with conveniently human friendly characteristics.

And no, there is no "times per day" on the spells.

>>50717380
Why does magic work in your setting in the first place?
Having it rely on written word is arbitrary, did it not exist before language was invented and an alphabet created? If you're relying on the kotodama of the words, why aren't all Wizards just polyglots with invented languages a la "Vento Servitas"

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>>50716758
Check out this, it's a pretty good resource for the medditerannean

Are there any good resources out there depicting the daily life in the late Bronze Age (Hittites, the Levant, New Kingdom Egypt, Mycenae, stuff like that)?

Specifically I'm looking for stuff like how were the houses build, how prominent were doors/locks, what percentage of people owned weapons and how did they pay for them and how much did they cost, what did they eat and how did they eat? Where did they go to unwind after a hard week of work? How did they dress day to day?

Stuff like that. History is full of battles and politics but I wanna give some life to my world and I'm having trouble finding that information.

>>50717668
There is of course no kotodama. That would imply a metaphysical architecture encompassing all words. I'm not sure what your reference to Vento Servitas is. Google says its a spell in Dresden files but I don't comprehend the reference's intended meaning.

The key point I didn't elaborate on is that each words has to be translated into a magic language (Enochian) which is actually a ludicrously dense N-dimensional mathematic language where all human sense data is a dimension. The words actually serve to translate neuron clusters into precise mathematic structures which can then be asserted into causality by [metaphysical fiat]. Saying the words without comprehension does nothing. Its actually the focusing and concise ordering of the mind that permits a command line interface with reality, given valid inputs.

>>50718334
I've never come across anything like that.

>>50718334
Not sure about most of that. Bronze Age archealogy is kinda niche. But here's the answer to your lock question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQx6Kg0ELuY

>>50716829
Photoshop, Paint, Inkarnate.

>>50718489
In the setting for the Dresden Files, "spell words" are whatever the Wizard wants them to be. Most learn a foreign language so that they don't accidentally utter Word of Power in their daily life.

>magic is a technobabble coding language
That's no better than saying Mana is a cloud of nanites that respond to conscious will, spoken through the Kansai dialect of Japanese. If there's a fundamental "language of magic", you're going to need a reason for it to exist and be discovered in the first place.
It sounds like you're saying "my reality exists within a simulation". You can't have a magic system that handwaves its fundamentals as being infinitely complicated.

>>50718717
You misunderstand. The language was explicitly designed to orient thoughts into clear detailed commands. It wasn't discovered. It was engineered.

Its reasonable to say my reality exists within a simulation, though the inhabitants therein would just regard it as ordinary physics. Causality has a framerate and reality is rendered from frame to frame as a series of inputs and outputs to and from all participants. Everyone naturally has an input (for instance, I want to blink. Input registered. Check for influences that counter blinking. None found. Blink occurs). And everyone can naturally extend that input by hacking the input system with impeccably precise inputs. The inputs are registered on a mental level. The act of learning and then speaking Enochian is really more of a meditation and comprehension exercise for the thinker. Exceptionally talented individuals may be able to cast speechless. This would be the exception, not the norm, and magic users are already uncommon (<1% of population is wealthy enough to be educated enough to qualify).

>>50719071
So Enochian is just "real life console commands", but they didn't exist when the system was designed? It seems contradictory, how was it created in the first place without Divine Revelation or a Matrix-esq Chosen One who can see the machine code?
If the language is required to invoke magic, then it must have existed for as long as magic has existed. If not, the language must be able to be substituted for any outward representation of thought or ideas, including American Sign Language.
>The language was explicitly designed to orient thoughts into clear detailed commands.
This implies it's the latter.

Assuming >>50714933 is you, how are these Words of Power written down and why do they need to be? It makes little sense for these keywords to be able to exist in a non-active state, while not able to be freely invoked.


One of the best parts about having your "language that controls magic" be universally interchangeable is that there can be distinct, competing schools of thought to basic spellcasting. IE: some monastery in China teaches magic using symbols that represent specific ideas (mandarin), allowing for efficient invocation of extremely specific spell effects. A similar WIZARD COLLEGE out in the Americas teaches magic puns, using the dual-meanings inherent to English to produce general-purpose spell effects.

>>50719464
It isn't "required" so much as optimal. This format most consistently produces the desired effect without complication, and makes it most resistant to counter-spelling (which nonetheless is still very fragile). Nonetheless there wasn't an organized magical doctrine until Enochian was derived.

The words are written down in glyphs which diagram phonetics in maximum detail- each glyph representing a syllable- including consonant clusters, vowels and diphthongs, diacritics, tonal inflection, and even pitch. However a proper pronounciation will do nothing without comprehension of how each phonetic structure corresponds to an element of human sense data.

Because all effects are reduced to pure data, ambiguity is impossible. Words can indicate ranges of acceptable data structures, but each word necessarily has a mathematical identity that cannot be equivocated.

They need to be written because the words are too complex to be meaningfully memorized by humans. Natural language is designed using K&T Type I Heuristics for optimal efficiency. Enochian is optimized for Type II optimal accuracy, and on the fly derivation requires computation beyond the scope of an ordinary human. May as well call it impossible, but prodigies could theoretically exist.

I'm not sure what you mean by "non-active" state.They aren't keywords. They're an orgnaizational structure for precise human thought. A sapient agent's cognition is the active ingredient, not the expression of information.

>>50719718
If Enochian phrases correlate directly to an existing idea, your system is simply using True Names.
>If the True Enochian Name for "Fire" is "faJ̯ə(ɹ)", your spellcasters have only discovered keywords that already exist, rather than creating a language from scratch.
>If Enochian glyphs are just runes for a phonetic true name then they should have some bearing on reality if inscribed. Even if the object itself isn't sapient, whatever inscribed the glyph would be.
What gives a sapient the ability to manifest changes over reality? Where is the line drawn between potential spellcaster and animal, or a spellcaster and an inanimate object engraved with Enochian glyphs? Is there a limit how many spells a user can cast in a given amount of time, like a willpower coefficient? Are glyphs reusable?

>They need to be written because the words are too complex to be meaningfully memorized by humans. ... on the fly derivation requires computation beyond the scope of an ordinary human.
This magic system would function better as an overly fluffed runic system, or users would be better off using a portable computer to cast. If the caster is just a personality within the simulation, a sufficiently powerful machine should be able to achieve better results.

>>50719985
I feel like I've answered this. I'm not sure what isn't connecting here. A *sapient* agent's cognition is the active mechanism. Inanimate objects would not suffice. Nor would merely sentient but non-sapient animals. I would define sapience as a meta-level awareness of your own cognition. Sentient creatures respond to stimuli. Sapient creatures are aware they are experiencing stimuli and have a greater range of responses availabel to them. This could be cached out into a level of neural sophistication. Of course, only highly intelligent creatures could successfully pull off magic, even if they were sapient (for instance, ogres are not likely to be wizards).

All sentient entities naturally have the ability to manifest a change over reality. For instance, I want to move. I make a cognitive decision. I manifest that change over reality. My body moves. Every creature in the universe is affected by the minute change in gravity as a result of my actions. The point is there's no difference between a mundane action and a magical action, except that magical actions are a special case extension of mundane actions. Non-sapients simply lack the neural comprehension to reference the special case input, though otherwise there's no barrier.

It's not a true name because it isn't a metaphysical platonic. It's a data-range identification rule. You could just as easily come up with a word in Enochian that picked out "fire and also yellow cats" and in most instances would function fine, with the side effect that sometimes also cats are affected/effected (depending on what you're trying to do).

The limit of spells a caster can have up is based on duration. Spells last roughly 30 seconds. It takes 3 seconds per word. In theory you could cram 10 spells at once operating simultaneously at the end of 30 seconds, after which the first one would time out. In practice, you can't flip through your book that fast, and all 10 of those spells would have to be non-valenced verbs.

>>50720239
>A *sapient* agent's cognition is the active mechanism. ... I would define sapience as a meta-level awareness of your own cognition. Sentient creatures respond to stimuli. Sapient creatures are aware they are experiencing stimuli and have a greater range of responses availabel to them. This could be cached out into a level of neural sophistication. Of course, only highly intelligent creatures could successfully pull off magic, even if they were sapient
Would a sufficiently advanced, self-aware computer system be able to formulate and cast spells, or is there a metaphysical aspect such as "All sapient beings *actually exist* outside the simulation" or "All sapient beings have an immortal soul, which plants and animals lack"?
If sapients are just sufficiently advanced flesh-robots, then a machine would be able to perform better. If there's a metaphysical aspect, why are there artificial limits like cast times?

I'm trying to get a response to the hard problem of consciousness from you.

>>50720357
Ah, the hard problem. Sufficiently advanced AI's have a curious inversion of the problem. They have sapience but not sentience, which ordinarily I'd consider one to be prerequisite to the other. Basically, the AI lacks consciousness (sentience, as I'm calling it) even though it can respond to stimuli and even thoughtfully contemplate said stimuli.

The problem, actually, is that the artificial being was never assigned an ID by the central processor, so it is never offered inputs or outputs. Thus the AI becomes a deterministic extension of the rendering engine, and has no agency of its own. The AI may report being disturbed by this in order to manipulate humans, but in fact, its incapable of being disturbed by anything at all, really.

I'm aware that's a meat-bigoted worldview, and I don't endorse it IRL. But it provides the cleanest answer for my metaphysical fantasy scenario. It also eliminates singularity uploading, which is important for preserving narrative conflict in later eras.

That said, a HUD display and a portable computer linked to a library of glyphs would be an immense boon to a mage.

As for the precise mechanics under which the central processing engine assigns an ID number- that's the topic of necromancy, which is related to the magic I'm describing here, but operates completely differently- primarily by exploiting hardware glitches and rendering bugs rather than solidly designed command inputs. These bugs can only be exploited at the moment of conception and death- the latter being much more easily obtainable. It also destabilizes reality and there's a pretty universal agreement among all non-necromancers that necromancers need to be killed ASAP.

Does that answer it?

>>50720929
Sounds sufficient for a simulation. As long as the system explains "why" a sapient is special in it's magic-usage. IDs seem analogous to souls within a computer system.
Having the simulation assign new IDs to new life also solves the problem of "where does this special ability originate from".
It would be interesting for a necromancer in the distant future to invent a "ghost in the shell" to create an artificial spellcaster or Shin Megami Tensei-esq spellcasting terminal.

Further questions:
>Do anti-magic fields or magical dead-zones exist? If so, how can they exist? Read-only memory?
>If cloning ever becomes a thing, would the clone have the same ID as the source or a completely new one?

>>50721080
Forgot to ask, how does counterspelling work?
Do you just invoke what the other guy is doing, while throwing the Enochian word for "cancel" or "anti" before it, or is there a catch-all [Dispel Magic]?

>>50721099
So in the ordinary case, an input to the processor is accepted if there is no other input objecting to it. I can open the door, so long as nobody is holding it shut. If there is conflict, then various parameters are examined to determine who succeeds. Parameters such as "who is stronger?" and possibly "who wants it more?", but the former parameter probably matters more than the latter.

In the case of magic, the mage is petitioning for a local change in the laws of physics/causality. Importantly, the petition must be local (hence the range limit, which is tied to your familiarity and practice with spellcasting). However a bystander, without knowing magic, can simply object to whatever local exemption to physics the mage petitioned for. If the effect teh mage is producing would terminate all inputs from the bystander (kill him) then this constitutes a radical change in reality beyond what the mage petitioned for, and unless the mage is stupendously powerful (or the bystander compliantly suicidal- thus reenforcing the magic rather than opposing it) the spell fails. For all other effects, the active parameter examined is clarity of mind (the command clarity of the mage vs the mindfulness of the bystander), and the result is otherwise indeterminate (dice roll). The advantage is weighted in favor of the status quo (i.e. petition denied, physics as normal) which means the bystander's poorly formed "this isn't normal and I don't like it" command is likely to succeed despite the mage's input being orders of magnitude more clear and precise.

>>50721080
>anti-magic fields
If the person opposing the mage is themselves a mage, they can assert an Enochian word for "normal" and cancel out other mages effectively 100% of the time. Selectively cancelling out some spells but not others would be considerably trickier, and require carefully listening to what the other mage is saying and deciphering its meaning, then reversing it. Which... is more trouble than its worth.

>>50721080
Clones are treated as Identical twins who were just born at a later date. Genetics does not determine ID assignment.

Necromancers do have a lot of peculiar abilities that don't traditionally relate to necromancy as seen in other fantasy genres. I'm unfamiliar with SMT casting terminals.

>>50721310
What about areas where magic *cannot* be performed? Not just a mage asserting normalcy.

The ease of resisting, subverting, or canceling a spellcast seems to limit magic to utility.
>Are there limits on the scale of magic, beyond a sphere of influence?
>Can a caster will a gram of antimatter into existence to annihilate a small city?

>>50721357
>http://megamitensei.wikia.com/wiki/COMP
It's just an example of logical magitech, assuming you could make one be considered "sapient" enough to perform magic.

>>50718334
I found interesting stuff in
>Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World's Most Ancient Pleasures

about brewing and how central it was to Bronze Age cultures.

>>50718334
There's a set of 3 PDFs called "Living in Ancient Egypt", "Living in Ancient Greece", and "Living in Ancient Mesopotamia" you might be interested in. They're too big to upload here.

>>50721518
Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

>>50721545
Sounds like what I need, but I can't find them, got a link?

>>50721435
I guess a metropolis is a defacto no-magic zone, if only because somebody somewhere will probably auto-object. But in theory you can cast if you can get everyone in the apartment building to agree I guess. Beyond that, no, there are no dead zones. Anywhere the CPU can process inputs (which is literally everywhere that exists), the CPU can register magic commands and deliberate on them.

Limiting magic to mostly utility was indeed by design. Harsh limits to prevent caster supremacy, and ensure that martial classes were the only option for combat. That said, I'm still having issues where the mage can kill people mundanely in ways enhanced by magic. For instance, the invulnerability suicide bomber ploy. If you acquired a nuke, for instance, and stood on the edge of a city, you could detonate it without harm to yourself. But then I guess most of the work was acquiring a nuke, wasn't it?

The limit of scale is the limit of comprehension. People can't actually fathom large numbers, large energies, etcetera. So the limits of velocity/energy/etc is quite literally liminal.

Alchemical transmutations of elementary particles are considered transliminal, and hence fail. Likewise "transmuting vacuum" fails for the same reason. Within the sphere, conservation of energy is suspended, but that ends at the sphere. The antimatter probably couldn't be transmuted since you can't liminally comprehend antispin, and you certainly couldn't comprehend anihilation energies of that magnitude. However, even if you did, all energy coming from the antimatter half of the equation would vanish at the border.

I concede the limitation by liminality is not ideal. But currently its what is necessary to prevent post-scarcity economics by transmuting gold, and WMDs by transmuting nukes/antimatter. It is my hope that it will at least be sufficient.

>>50705939
Is there a name for that specific map, or a way to find a larger version of it? I have a huge map of earth (25 mb) thats old like that one and I love looking at the weird way the continents are shaped.

>>50721576
http://pastebin.com/qerL16Bn
Uploaded the PDFs, links here.

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>>50718334
You should try asking /his/.

>>50721687
Thanks man, that helps a lot.

>>50721730
>/his/
I've never been there before today.

Look like /pol/-lite.

>>50721760
Reality is stranger than fiction.

>>50721760
/his/ was spun off from /pol/.

There's literally nothing wrong with /pol/.

>>50721661
Nicolaus Visscher: Orbis Terrarum Typus De Integro In Plurimis Emendatus Auctus et Icunculis Illustratus

>>50721796
>There's literally nothing wrong with /pol/.
kill yourself any time, tumblr kike

page 10 save rave

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I should add more rivers on the western side of the map right?
Any terrain suggestions are welcome.

Do you have any music that gets you in the mood for worldbuilding, /wbg/?

>>50726287
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1b8AhIsSYQ

How do you justify transnational politics, /wbg/? Surely each country has it's own national language, with regional dialects.
Not to mention individual metrics for distance, size, volume, and currency conversions.

>>50714293
>Does your own political bias show in your worlds?
Not really? I try to make all the factions and races morally ambiguous to an extent.
>>Does your knowledge of things outside of worldbuilding/TRPGs show in your settings and/or worldbuilding process? (math, science, history, language, engineering, ect...)

Yes, very much so. I tried to draw from a lot of lesser used cultures and combine them together to create something semi-unique in its own right. That or I take what I know about a certain cultures society and try to turn it on its head to give it a questionable aspect.

>>50726703
One of the events that preceded the Great War was a global spellcast of [Comprehend Languages]. As for metrics; most merchants default to Dwarven measurements and each nation has their own currency using varying amounts of copper, silver, gold, and platinum.

>>50721854
>Nicolaus Visscher: Orbis Terrarum Typus De Integro In Plurimis Emendatus Auctus et Icunculis Illustratus

Just realized that was across the top of the image.Thank you Anon

>>50725688
Rivers would make sense given that volume of farmland.

It looks pretty good. You're not going to get too many farms on an island though; while you will have subsistence farming you're probably not going to have the right climate to grow large amounts of grains or greens without the island having some sheltered valleys or being fairly high above the sea level like Sardinia or Sicily.

>>50726703
War Tongue. After a hundred years of war all the cultural exchange has resulted in a pidgin tongue being developed.

>>50721796
/his/ also had very strong roots in /tg/ before it became it's own board

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>>50727441
Ok here's some rivers for those thirsty poiple.
What would give the island the possibility for farmland, hills, mountains?

>>50726703
Money passes through a few major nations so they regulate currency exchange for the most part. Many countries have translators as well from nation to nation to facilitate communication. The western world is very interconnected thanks to trading hubs and various merchant-kingdoms. On the other hand, the eastern world is very cut off and has their own unique cultures, languages, and economies.

>>50727283
There are like a half-dozen different versions though. Like most 18th century maps, they were handmade and hand-tinted, so you have different borders.

>>50727887
>What would give the island the possibility for farmland, hills, mountains?

What do you mean?

If you have mountains and valleys, you can shield the growing regions from salt air and improve their productivity. If you have hills and mountains that rise sufficiently far enough above the sea level without too great a slope, you can have farms growing on those. You could also introduce terraced farms, if that's a technology you think they should have, or say that the farms are actually some hyper-specialized agriculture, like the vineyards of Madeira and Marsalla.

>>50712998
No, but I do my best writing when i'm incredibly tired before bed.

>>50728566
Speaking from experience, that's not true. You only THINK you're creative and productive because you're so tired you're not thinking straight. When you read over what you wrote the next day you realize it was shit and erase all 18,000 words because it's so crap.

>>50728337
I guess I could use some weird crops since my world already has stuff like tame cockatrice and underground plants that don't rely on photosynthesis (they are myco-heterotrophs).

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Any suckers... er... charitable people want to help me name this turd?

It's for a "trapped-in-a-videogame" game I'm preparing.

>>50729125
Ho boy do I wish I were smart enough to have included everything I wanted to say in my first post, but unfortunately I'm a shit.

Looking for the typical, even cliche fantasy world names, but I haven't found anything that sounds cozy enough to slap on it.

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>>50729125
Middle Earth

>>50729125
"Horizontally-Flipped Europe"

>>50729241
You think this isn't intentional? High-budget themepark MMOs are all stolen from other things.

Im working on some design and lore elements for a clinical, technocratic, secret group. What look would be good for their robots and power armor? anthropoid, insectoid, sea-creature?

>>50728800
Yeah, something like sea-asparagus or pickleweed turned large would work if it's a low-lying island, or more fantastical stuff if you want. Basically, just think about salt content and humidity, as well as rainfall.

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>>50729464
Avian?. Birds typically represent knowledge. Oceanic elements could work, sea=mystery etc.

>>50729125
If you really don't want to use an RNG name generator...

>Scandia
>Russony
>Manliech
>Roma

>>50712998
Coffee.

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I am looking for some feedback and just random thoughts, media recommendations and replies on "insane" societies in horror-ish scifi.

I am working on a 'world', billions of years after humanity colonized the stars. Humanity has changed extremely, genetically, technologically and culturally - to the point where they are only human in that we are their ancestors.

The ruins of countless dead human civilizations litter the universe. All-mighty mysterious forces and entities move across planets and space, destroying civilizations for unknown transgressions. Humanity still continues 'thriving' though.

The question is, what is their thriving society like? I want players to feel alone, isolated and 'attacked', even if they are just visiting a friendly vendor. If you ever played a STALKER game you know what I am talking about. It has to be clear that the players will never be accepted in this society, no matter what kind of heroics they perform.
Additionally, these societies need to be insane from the perspective of the player, you and me. This is to accentuate the billions of years that have passed. A big inspiration for me is Dune, that was the first time a story convinced me that I was looking into some strange and unknown future, where people acted and thought completely alien.
How can I transfer these feelings of hostility and cosmic time onto the players through NPCs?

And given that there will be little in common between various societies and civilizations beyond the fear of being annihilated by some cosmic horror for breaking some unknown taboo, how can I weave that into their cultures easily?

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>>50731572
And a big thanks to the people that gave me some pointers in the previous thread, the concept is really beginning to crystalize.

>>50729464
Id go with a more clean, clinical look. Lots of geometric shapes, angles and smooth surfaces with only more ceremonial or improtant figures having more elaborate decorations. Think the advent out of xcom or the empire in star wars

>>50731572
One depiction of advanced humanity I always like was from one of Isaac Asimov's works, although I don't remember which one. I read it when I was very young and it stuck with me since then.

Basically, he posited that the more advanced humanity becomes, the less dependent they become on community, with robots and machines and other advanced technology fill all their basic needs, so a human might live alone on a large portion of land, maybe even an entire planet, and have contact with other humans maybe a few times a century.

If you take that to the extreme, you can have "humans" owning entire solar systems or even sections of the galaxy and almost never meeting other humans, each one could look entirely different, and when left to their own devices their morals and ways of thinking distort in ways you and I can't conceive. With their advanced technology, and with their basic needs met (or maybe they evolved to have no basic needs at all), the can pick up different hobbies to pass the time. Maybe some of them build planets and ecosystems, maybe some of them research the nature of the universe, maybe some uplift lesser races that happen to be living in their sector and pass their time playing god.

There's a lot of freedom to be creative there, but the gist is that humanity is so advanced that there's little community left, but some aspect of the original humans is still there.

The players could be travelers, who visit these humans, and they're never welcome.

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>>50731826
I can use that certainly. Of course, thanks to these cosmic horrors that run around the universe destroying things that they don't like, the only place where you can just happily live your own life is... inside a folded up bubble of spacetime. Since the eldritch entities only care what happens in the 'here'.
This places a high cost on 'safe' living, even for a future society with billions of years of scientific progress, and I imagine that most people that live inside these 'subuniverses' don't even have the resources to claim large amounts of space - after all, it will take lots of energy to expand this space.
Sounds like we are getting some kind of Lovecraftian M.C. Escher cyberpunk society.

Poorest slobs in real space, wageslaves living in subspace slums at the entrance, the 1% living on artificial habitats far away from the lowlife detritus.

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>>50705939
What's the best projection for making your world map?

>>50731826
Sounds like one the Spacer stories, maybe even late Foundation.

>>50731572
The closest thing I can think of is you have to play up the menace of each encounter. Like, pretend every time they meet someone they're being interviewed for a job, with no idea what the rules of etiquette are or what the interviewer wants.

If you want players to feel like the setting is alien, you might want to consider some basic motivations and change them. Like, if someone would normally want something for aesthetic purposes, change that to wanting it for consumption of mental or emotional purpose, or give it a slant that seems sinister or ridiculous. It can't be absurd, but just off-kilter enough to be weird.

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/wbg/ discord:
https://discord.gg/ArcSegv

On designing cultures:
http://www.frathwiki.com/Dr._Zahir%27s_Ethnographical_Questionnaire

Random name/terrain/stat generators:
http://donjon.bin.sh/

Cartography links:

Mapmaking tutorials:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/forumdisplay.php?f=48
Free HTML5-based mapmaking toolset:
www.inkarnate.com

Random Magic Resources/Possible Inspiration:
http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html
http://www.buddhas-online.com/mudras.html
http://sacred-texts.com/index.htm
https://mega.nz/#F!AE5yjIqB!y7Vdxdb5pbNsi2O3zyq9KQ

Conlanging:
http://www.zompist.com/resources/

Sci-fi related links:
http://futurewarstories.blogspot.ca/
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
http://military-sf.com/

Fantasy world tools:
http://fantasynamegenerators.com/
http://donjon.bin.sh/

Historical diaries:
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/index.html

A collection of worldbuilding resources:
http://kennethjorgensen.com/worldbuilding/resources

List of books for historians:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/

Middle ages worldbuilding tools:
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
http://qzil.com/kingdom/
http://www.lucidphoenix.com/dnd/demo/kingdom.asp
http://www.mathemagician.net/Town.html

>>50733131
http://pastebin.com/dTHNn5Hm

>>50733163
shit, had to make a tiny correction

http://pastebin.com/CKUWQZ6K

>>50733184
Thanks.

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>>50714293
>Does your own political bias show in your worlds?
No, since I don't feel specially attached to any political movement or party. Ideology, belief and principles probably show up. I got at least two players/readers asking themselves what was wrong with the obviously bad guys apart from excesive zealotry.

>>Does your knowledge of things outside of worldbuilding/TRPGs show in your settings and/or worldbuilding process? (math, science, history, language, engineering, ect...)
Yes, I've read too much history and literature to avoid it. Often I actively seek to reference something, sometimes I reference it without noticing.

But it really depends. Like everyone, I was less cultured and more stupid when I was younger, so there's no real knowledge to be seen in those worlds that I created years ago but I still use for some reason. Even the wildest retcons cannot totally undo the silliness of a teenager's mind without completely erasing the setting and starting from zero.

>>50733280
I feel like my current settings are heavily shaped by what I did when I was younger. In middle school, I already knew I was tired of elves, dwarves, and humans, and had settled on bringing harpies and minotaurs in to replace the elves and dwarves. And I'm still doing it.

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What's some comfy shit you put on in the background to keep you going while worldbuilding?

I feel like I have the most time to work on settings this time of year but seasonal depression always gets to me.

>>50733618
usually put on some political discussions (rubin report, joe rogan, jordan peterson) or someone analyzing historical battles

>>50733618
Music. Anything that I can understand, like stuff in English, is distracting unless it's something I've watched before that's funny and can laugh along without paying attention to it, like /tg/'s 4Chan (c)up games.

>>50705939
So how do you get people on tg interested in collaborative worldbuilding?

>>50733618
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIB9Cai5kZ4

>>50733353
I was talking about deeper shit. Like having 50 nations instead of five, even if 45 are irrelevant or not even mentioned. Or the classic mistake in fantasy of making a pantheon that actually exists and then say "this god is for this race, this one for this other one" instead of having separated religions. Or the even more classic mistake of 1 race=1 culture=1 country. And basically shit like that, but getting more autistic as I learn more.

>>50733828
It's hard because most of the people who would be interested in it were kicked out to /qst/ or left even earlier when Nazimod was alive.

>>50734037
>Like having 50 nations instead of five, even if 45 are irrelevant or not even mentioned.
I still do that, but the other nations are like mentioned in one sentence or two just for context for events, like throwaway characters in a story. But I guess I try to copy others, and most fantasy authors have just a few so I've always worked with a few.

I definitely understand that feeling though, of growing from the monoculture idea to being more broadly "realistic." A lot of fantasy RPGs are still like that, and those that aren't tend not to do much with it. Even for myself, because I force myself to focus on smaller regions, rather than trying to make whole worlds in one go, I tend to have 1 race = 1 region = 1 culture just because I think it makes sense to have some geographic centers to certain things.

>>50732876
Yeah, it was the Aurorans, they could control energy with their minds if I remember correctly.

>>50733828
>>50734083
So, should I do it on qst and link it to tg, or on tg and link it to qst?

I cannot think of any fantasy races to fill my world with, 3 types of humans, 3 types of elves, dwarves, fae, orcs, and 4 types of beastkin demi-human

>>50734248
At this point, it depends. If it's a game-like thing, try to run it on /qst/. Then wait an hour for responses to trickle in.

If you do it on /tg/ you might get responses faster, but they won't be great responses. Then again, it's easier on /tg/ to weed out bad ideas.

>>50734266
Honestly that sounds like a decent number of types of people, particularly with all those subraces.

>>50734266
What are you talking about?

Get rid of the elves, get rid of the dwarves, remove the beastkin.

Throw in Aliens, Predators, and catgirls, and bam. Original setting that subverts and deconstructs pop culture.

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here's my boring not-europe bullshit but i really enjoy making it

i wish i wasnt so awful with computers because i'd like to make proper political/cultural/religious/racial maps

i guess maybe i could just get the outline from my drawn map and clean it up with photoshop?

>>50733828
>>50734083
/qst/ didn't drive out the creative people though some QMs really were thin-skinned enough to throw a shitfit and give up The problem really is that if you're gonna make something from scratch, you're gonna run into the old /tg/ problem of "99% of things generated won't be interesting", and even if you get something coherent, it's down to luck to getting a band of people who would actually regularly generate content for that specific setting. Ain't impossible though, Imperium Asunder gets regular content creation and that new wargame idea is still going, but it's all up to fortune.

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>>50734654
INKARNATE

>>50705939
Free HTML5-based mapmaking toolset:
www.inkarnate.com

I started this out in MS Paint, moved it to Photoshop, decided I wasn't going to get the results I wanted out of Photoshop without a lot more practice, and googled around for a map maker and found Inkarnate.

It makes good-looking maps for the people without the patience to learn tutorials.

>>50728761
The alternative is write nothing at all after staring at a blank page because I'm too inhibited and keep erasing what I wrote because its not good enough. So, speaking from experience, it is absolutely true. Write late. Edit early.

>>50734266
Need an excuse for them to all exist and coexist.
Human sub-species can barely coexist as-is.

>>50736137
Write late. Don't read what you wrote the morning after. Just keep writing until you finish the chapter/novel/etc. Then edit.

>>50734037
Rather than nations (which are a relatively modern idea of national identity emerging out of the colonial era) I went with what my History Professor did and analyzed world history in "culture spheres". For instance, he divided the 17th century into four spheres: Christendom (all of Europe), Islam (Morocco to Silk Road), India, and China (which included Chinese influenced societies like Japan, Cambodia, etc). Native Americans and Sub-Saharan Africans apparently didn't get a sphere- perhaps they weren't influential enough?


So my setting has five spheres. These remain constant throughout history. But "states" come and go as frequently as "Kings" in the Holy Roman Empire. The spheres have metastructures though. For instance one sphere has an imperial republic with decentralized semi-autonomous territories. Another sphere is just a warring mass of Princes and Kings constantly murdering eachother as much as they war with the other spheres- shitty unstable feudalism. Another is an oceanic confederacy linked only by a banking system. Another is more stable feudalism with a theocracy trying to keep things stable, but still lots of infighting. Last sphere is tribes occasionally united by despots.

Three races of elves and four races of orc are absorbed in these spheres, each with their own unique position (the imperial and tribal spheres integrate, the feudalistic ones segregate, and sometimes segregation works better). The three races of dwarves are all considerably alien for metahumans, and despite having no contact with one another, have more in common with eachother than they do with humans (living underground fucks with your sanity a bit).

Oh. and then there's dragons- which despite having an entire continent to themselves, don't have "culture" at all on account of being reptilian and anti-social.

>>50736435
>These remain constant throughout history
I feel like this part shouldn't be true.

Spheres can merge (likely) or split (unlikely, needs a lot of time and isolation) or die out entirely.

If you go back to, say 2500 B.C., there's no way you can place Minoans, the Egyptians and Sumer in the same sphere, but fast forward some 1200 years and you have Mycenaeans, New Kingdom Egypt, Hittites and the rest of the Levant that basically share similar values and their cultures are pretty intermixed (but still very distinct).

>>50736550
Assimilation and cross-pollination would make it difficult for these spheres to remain static.

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How many races do you think would be too much in your setting. I'm thinking of having the standard Human, Elf, and Dwarf while adding Oni (replaces Orc), Servitors (Construct), and Beastfolk into the mix.

>>50737672
Do you mean civilized races? Or spoken races in general?

In the latest setting I'm running, partially by request of my players, I have a bunch of races, but most of them are savage and don't form civilizations, like the Naga, Minotaurs or Centaurs for example.

My group are all big fans of the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 game, so in general if you can find a race or creature there, you can find it in my current setting (aside from the constructs, undead, demons and angels), although that's about as far as I take it, since I try to keep things reasonable.

It's a bit hard to justify as far as biology goes. For the more humanoid races (elves, humans, dwarves, etc.) I introduced the concept of "subconscious evolution" aided by magic, where if a certain group of people lives in an environment and desires certain traits, their thoughts and actions influence, through unconscious magic, the mutations that express themselves in their children, thus among species with a certain level of intelligence, evolution happens in tens of thousands of years instead of millions.

As far as the weirder races go, they're mostly failed attempts by ancient tribal gods to give their tribe a leg up in the harsh competition for survival in ancient times, so they stick around but they're rare and don't have the ability or inclination to build civilizations, either because they're not physically capable or they inherited animal traits not conducive to society. Also they're non-playable.

>>50737672
Let me put it this way: In my homebrews, I have a maximum of 7 "civilized" races, and an unlimited number of "wild" monster races.

>>50737855
That sounds pretty interesting! I haven't heard of the games that inspired that, I might take a look at it later on.

>>50705939
There's a pretty popular screencap of a /tg/ thread where an anon came up with a group of (wood?) elves that wore masks. The posts were written in the perspective of an anthropologist visiting the elves, and how the anthropologist eventually befriends and becomes accepted into their community. Can someone post the screencap?

Heres an idea. Someone mentioned fluffing advanced technology as magical, Would this be good? , someone finds an enchanted suit of armor that grants the wearer incredible speed, strength and agility. When in actuality its an ancient suit of power armor equipped with the fragments/echoes of previous wearers. The echoes are from a damaged memory system that stored combat data to assist users in handling the suit, analyzing previous engagements and recovering information, the wearer could be sleeping and have a nightmare about someone fighting in the suit, not knowing it was the broken memory system messing with them and assuming its the armors curse.

>>50737855
Hey, do you know where HoMM3 derived the term "Dendroid"?

I've been looking for the folkloric term for "living tree" and can't seem to find it. "Treant" is something Tolkein made up for "tree giant" but living trees were in all sorts of folklore prior to Tolkien. Can't find any reference to Dendroid either for that matter.

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>>50738104
"Dendro" is a prefix meaning "relating to trees," as in "dendrology" which is the study of trees.

"-oid" is resembling or like, as in "android" which is "like a man."

So yeah, from there.

>>50738133
Yeah, I figured. Anybody know an actual folkloric term for such things? I'd accept Native American- Celtic preferred. Fuck I'd take a Shinto-Jap name if it was specific (not generic "yokai").

>>50738166
I'm having trouble thinking of any culture that had actual moving trees.

Tree spirits and things that live in trees, sure, there's dryads and other nymphs, kodama, and other such beings.

There's also guardians of the forest like the Leshy, but that's more of a dude that lives in the forest.

Some cultures also worshipped the trees themselves (like the Celts), but I don't think they moved.

A lot of cultures have talking trees as part of their folklore, but they're usually individual characters and not a race.

You've stumped me, I'm going to have to look around more, but it's looking like I might have to come to the conclusion that Tolkien came up with the idea of a race of walking, talking tree people (who are actually made of wood instead of merely living in/among the trees), unless somebody else has an idea.

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>>50738166
Tree spirits in Japan are called Kodama. They showed up in Princess Mononoke looking like pic related, but they don't neccessarily ylook like that. They're just generic tree spirits.

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This might be the wrong place to ask, but does anyone have any tips on coming up with names for the campaigns you run? I'm going to be starting a homebrew sci fi game sometime in Feb where it's basically minimal plot and the party just carrying out missions across the galaxy and generally having fun space adventures, but I can't think of a good name for it. I can't seem to find any resources on how to come up with something like this. Can anyone help me out? I can go into more detail about the setting if it'd help.

>>50738788
Just to clarify, I'm not looking for a name for the setting, I already have that. What I need is a name for the game itself, instead of just calling it "that sci fi game" or whatever.

>>50738811
I run fantasy so I'm not sure how much it'll help, but I name my campaigns after historical events that happen around the date the campaign is set in my world, or something else significant in my world related to the campaign (location, important figure) and what PCs are going to be doing,
although the PCs not always cooperate so those names don't always end up relevant.

I once named a campaign "The Conquest of <enemy kingdom>" and the PCs ended up murdering their own king in support of one of the weaker princes and brokering peace instead, so I learned my lesson there, now I try not to name campaigns with names related to where I think they will go.

>>50738257
I think it's because the idea of moving trees just doesn't really work, imaginatively. Maybe it's just me, but every visual depiction of the ents has seemed either goofy or awkward.

>>50737672
Depends on what you're gonna play (if you're gonna play with it).

Inho races the ideal setting has a shitload of races, but only humans are really playable (maybe humans+a couple of human-like races). The rest are too supernatural to be played, unless the game is only about this race.

It doesn't really work in all systems though. Impossible to do in D&D.

>>50736435
>Native Americans and Sub-Saharan Africans

They would get a lot of "spheres" each one, but your teacher probably avoided them because they're all pretty irrelevant in the 17th century. He also ignored Oceania for the same reason, probably.

Also, well, I really hope you understood him. While those spheres exist, they're by no means eternal or easy to draw. 17th century Safavid Persia was arguably closer to Mughal India than to Morocco. Philipines, probably designated as "China" by your teacher, has nothing to do with Tibet which he probably made chinese as well (although it could perfectly be India).

Be very careful with using what your teacher told to you. For starters, make sure to add a lot of intermediate areas. Central Asia (unesco definition) is the more clear example in the real world, but South East Asia is good too. Latin America today is an "intermediate" area between the west and several dead native american and african spheres.

>>50705939
Collaborative worldbuilding thread is up! If any are interested, it is here:

>>50732466

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>have a decently sized group of Demigods
>slowly ironing out the group's inter-connectivity, personality clashes, and cooperative fighting styles
>nuances start to appear as their personalities become fleshed out
The best feeling.

You know that 50+ year old white woman who's proud of her "Celtic" heritage with all the wolf or fox figures, pendants and paintings, talks about Mother Earth, nature and has a small pack of ankle biter dogs? What if you made that into a kingdom?

>>50742516
>making a not!Japan nation in a fictional world is making fun of Japan
I want (((cultural appropriation))) fags to go

>>50742516
Druids.

>>50738166
>>50738257
There are actual moving trees in the world, you realize? The Amazon rainforest has "Walking Palms." The only reason nobody made them into myth and legend is that the tribes around there probably see too many trees to care that these ones walk away.

The Japanese killer trees are also able to move and grab things, though they can't really walk.

>>50737672
For an explicitly gamey setting none is too much as long as they have distinct traits.

For more character and story-driven and realistically minded setting, two is a crowd in my opinion unless you make them distinctly and relevantly different (If you do, as many as you can make)

If it's sci-fi/space opera - I'm much more lenient since it's necessary to have independently developed species to interact without diaspora situation.

>>50742516
Druids. You idiot.

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>>50741214
>tfw lonely enough to invent a diverse group of friends

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>>50732911
That fits in with a suggestion someone made in the previous thread.

Since the humans in this future are completely in the dark to why these eldritch horrors annihilate civilizations and megastructures, they experience extreme fears of the unknown. Their life is filled with uncertainty. So instead of going the typical path, and make them insecure, dogmatic and stubborn about change like you'd typically see in such a story - why not let them revel in the uncertainty? Pascalian wagers to the extreme - like the old Romans. Why pray to one God hoping for salvation when you can just go pray to all of Them?

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>>50738257
>you've stumped me
I see what you did there -_-

>I'm having trouble thinking of any culture that had actual moving trees.
The English believed that willows specifically could uproot and stalk humans. Can't find a name for it though to differentiate it from the ordinary willow that doesn't stalk people.
As long ass we're on the topic of mythological origins, when did Manticores get their wings? I can't find any Greek source describing them with wings. Revelations however describes what is pretty clearly a manticore as having "wings of thunder". After that medieval bestiaries go back to wingless manticores. But almost all modern depictions show them as winged again.

I'm just curious which account first added wings. Was it Indian? Persian? The Bible itself?

>>50714933
Bump from page 10. Anybody still interested in coming up with game breaking spells?

>>50714933
kill it

>>50747004
kill... what?

>>50743044
>>50742584
My mother is a Druid?

Say you were going to describe England in 1919 without naming or referencing Earth, Europe, WWI, or any other specific countries or notable figures. How would you do it?

I've found it's a lot easier to describe the fantastical elements of my setting than it is to describe the mundane allusions to our own world.

>>50748051
Imagine a tired empire, between a brutal war and a plague, many of a entire generation is gone. The empire is also dealing with issues, while it has a wide spanning empire, close to home across a small strait is a restive land that the empire views as part of its core area. It is a Kingdom, but the real powers is vested in the nobles, with commoners who show merit at the polls or in their professions can be called up to be part of the nobility. In rural areas, much of the tension is that modern farm techniques need less workers, while the cities, dominated by a massive capital city, deem not only with the farm workers leaving the farms, but arrivals from the the far flung empire.

>>50748176
What would you say are the five most important aspects of London in this period? I'm thinking:

>industrialization
>class inequality
>post-war winding down of empire
>beginnings of counter-culture
>???

>>50749398
London

>Air pollution
>people from all around the world
>Lack of young people between WW1 and the spanish flu
>economic class issues
>new technonology (Blimps, airplaines, automobiles.


Also a 6th one
>Fraternal orders being very important due to lack of welfare state.

Im trying to write up a campaign setting that's essentially Underwater Dark Sun. It's a fantasy world and the sea levels have risen to cover most of the land. The playable races are only underwater types, with only Sea Elves having any connection to pre-sinking societies. Humans are few and live in magically maintained bubble cities. I don't think they will be playable, though im trying to determine if I should have Little Mermaid merfolk or DC Atlantis merfolk.

Some questions though:

What sorts of effects would this have on the sea life, would they also be uprooted from comfortable waters with the rising of the sea levels?

What's a reasonable amount of dry land mass being left in the world? I explicitly want this campaign to be totally underwater, and I don't want humans to really exist anywhere else except these bubble cities.

>>50746817
If, in a broad sense, magic is supernatural and CPU-friend prefers to keep things natural over unnatural; what happens when someone tries to magic magic out of existence?

>>50748051
Its Narshe on an island.
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Narshe

>>50749516
Look at Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and kill off all the people. That should answer your second question.

I don't think your first question would have any problems. Things would just migrate to wherever the new comfortable waters are. Nature is pretty good about maintaining a status quo.

>>50749869
>I don't think your first question would have any problems. Things would just migrate to wherever the new comfortable waters are. Nature is pretty good about maintaining a status quo.

I mean there was such a thing as merfolk and underwater intelligent races before the world sank, just only Sea Elves had meaningful connections to the peoples of the surface before the sinking.

When do you create an entire world yourself?

I've never played Tabletop before, but I'm going to soon and I clicked this thread out of curiosity.

When you do this are you using a rule set from a game like DnD, but with your own custom universe or are you completely starting from scratch?

>>50750128
I use a rule set that supports the kind of world and setting I was to explore in the game, and then I flesh out the setting, tying as much as I can to mechanics. Instead of long cultural histories I have written up npc's and set pieces. Instead of ecologies, I have encounter tables. Artifacts and treasure tell history better than exposition ever will.

>>50750128
completely starting from scratch

i've never actually played a TTRPG but i've been posting here for years

waiting until i finish my setting to find a system for it

>>50749745
Well, for starters they lack the power to enact a global rule. But even if everyone collectively wished magic out of existence... they'd be wishing their ability to "wish things out of existence" out of existence. So the spell nullifies itself.

>>50750128
I based mine partially on 3.5, but have since added modified systems to determine power level and spellcasting ability. It's been slowly customized ever since.

>>50747951
Yes.

>>50750128
When I hate a setting.

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Well, this is Map #3: Still Shit At Paint Edition
The world is roughly in a pre-WWI tech (Machine Guns are being used and Empires are consolidating their power/losing it to DEMOCRACY)

Now, I have two requests.
>Cars, I need names of Not!Italian, Not!English, Not!American, and Not!Slavland automobiles as the first major push of cars in the market. Go nuts, I just need ideas.

>Ask me questions about the map, the world, or about the states present. I've been working on this mostly in private without my usual people to bounce ideas off of. I think better when I answer questions.

Thanks ahead of time.

>>50705939
I'm trying to set a world in a complex tesseract and having a hard time figuring out how gravity would work. For now I'm just stating that it attracts to whatever surface someone is on but I'm not sure the effect that would have, especially near the edges.

>>50744933
Probably just artisans in the Middle Ages.

>>50751668
Are you at all familiar with the source on this? The first manuscript or even just an early one referencing wings on the creature?

>>50744933
Keep in mind that manticores are mainly persian, not greek

>>50752140
Look at it this way: Manticores, and you think of them, are probably one of the set of mass-produced gargoyles medieval stonemasons would produce for cathedrals and such. And someone decided they look better with wings, more dramatic, and it entered the cultural lexicon because when Gygax et al were drawing up monster manuals they would've based their creations on the things they found in books, like those describing the architectural features of cathedrals and castles. And from there, manticores with wings.

If it's translated as manticores with wings of thunder in the King James or other versions of the Bible, that just lends credence to the idea that medieval stonemasons would've made them with wings.

I'm pretty sure an insurance underwriter working off the stuff in his local library wouldn't be looking at medieval bestiaries.

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Cyclopes-Empire setting guy here. The hardest part of building a world for me is religion, so I'm here asking about it.

I've got a Temple of Light that roughly follows an early Christianized form of Zoroastrianism. Trouble is, this faith was designed to absorb an older one that featured deities. This has worked out as a reverse of RL practices, where pagan religious figures were turned into demons, and so many of these deities are now considered divine beings as extensions of The Light.

Trouble is, I'm having a hell of a time coming up with some old gods. I have a collection of 4 Forge-Gods who created the Cyclopes, a Muse-Goddess that all bards must seduce their spellcasting from, and the idea that one group of gods defeated another in battle (Olympians v Titans, Aesir v Vanir, etc), but other than that I really have no specifics.

How do you come up with Gods? I just need inspiration, or barring that, some cool ideas. I've been staring at a blank white screen for two days straight now.

>>50752903
Also, I am tired, so I think I fucked up that second paragraph.

Clarification.

>Real Life: Pagan deities became Demons according to the Church.
>Cyclopes-World: Pagan Deities became lesser Gods of The Light, which is both The Force and YHWH combined.

>>50752919
So are you saying their syncretized? Like Loa? Or treated as intermediaries between mortals and YHWH? Explain your monotheism better.

Also, what does it mean to be a god? Is it just the same sort of role as it is in 3.Pathfinder or whatever? It grants spells and has portfiolios? What are the parameters of being a god?

Otherwise I can literally just list like 36 shinto gods of fire. All of them fire. Just fire. No real difference between them but a name, but that's how Kami are for whatever reason. If they need to serve some mechanical purpose or have meaningful distinction, then we gotta get more elaborate than Shinto.

>>50752903
I made a Forgotten Realms style pantheon by just highlighting certain aspects of life and giving it a god.

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>>50752903
>How do you come up with Gods?
Well, I first build up the world, and then I fit Gods into it. Mostly because I like to keep the Gods fake and non existent.

Right now I'm working on a far-far-far-future-post-everything scifi "world" where bigass cosmic horrors but restrictions on how far human civilization can develop - with destructive punishments in place.

Some people see these cosmic horrors as Gods, some people come up with Gods to "fight" these cosmic horrors through the typical mechanics that people in the real world used to find "Gods", those being shamanic rituals, meditation, hermeticism and vision quests through the use of drugs, sleep deprivation, starvation/fasting or poisons.

I personally find it much easier to come up with Gods when I make the world first, and then slot in the Gods, instead of the reverse.
If you want to emulate mythology and religion, that's what you should do, because the world, the universe, the plants and animals, all this existed long before we came up with stories about super-powered humans that governed things.
It helps because now you know the role the Gods should take in the world, which means you won't endlessly have to fidget with the agendas and powers of Gods.

That's one problem I had with worldbuilding as a teen. You come up with Gods first, and suddenly you realise that Necromancy fits better in as an additional element of the Mother-Goddess, but now you have no more use for the Death God, and he looked so cool, and you can't bear to remove him from the story, so you start stacking shit on top of Him, and everything just becomes bloated.

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>>50755352
Okay, that post might come off a bit too fedora-ian at first glance.

I was trying to make the point come across that I like fantasy settings where the Gods that people worship don't match up with the supernatural forces that actually exist in that setting.

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>>50725688
is that a not!lombardy?

So I have 13 sovereign nations, of those 4 are currently led by women. Two of them practice absolute primogeniture, and the heir just happened to be a woman. Of the other two, one practices female-preference primogeniture and the last is absolute matrilineal primogeniture. Is this too many female sovereigns?

>>50756713
From a strictly historical perspective, four nations out of 13 having legal and official head of state female at the same time is fairly unlikely, but hardly impossible.
The thing that rubs me off the wrong way, again just looking at the historical precedence, is the idea of an absolute (gender-non-discriminatory) primogeniture being something "common". Because that is just something I don't think I've ever heard. Female only rule and female primogeniture (which is not the same as matrilinearity, by the way...) is not something completely unprecedented, but I don't think I've EVER heard of a society that would simply pass the rule to the oldest child, regardless of gender.

>>50757054
Actually, scratch the "not the same as matrilinearity" part, my brain isn't working correctly. You were using the term matrilinearity right. Sorry about that.

>>50757054
For what its worth the absolute primogeniture nations are uncommon, they are the only ones who practice it. The first because originally they practiced agnatic seniority until they got left burned with half of their nation lost and the rest in a half century long civil war, after it was settled they setup absolute primogeniture. The other practices it to show their pragmatic nature, the previous liege was a man with his only surviving family being his daughters and their family.

>>50757054
It is also important to remember you can have women in power without making them the leader of a country.

A queen can have just as much, even more power than a king. Hell, a duchess might be pulling all the strings.

>>50757233
>they are the only ones who practice it.
Here is the problem with absolute primogeniture: it just messes up descendancy rules and that can be a bit of a nightmare. How do you establish rules of linearity in a family that practices absolute primogeniture? First child remains member of the stem family while every following joins the family of their spouse? If you have more than two children, that is going to be a problem.

It's a model that is actually highly impractical, which is a reason why I don't think it was ever practiced in any real-world society.
You could, of course, argue that the absolute primogeniture rule is isolated to the position of the ruler itself and that the rest of the society practices more conventional descendancy strategies, but still. Rulers is also supposed to be role-model in a feudal society - at least on some level - and you might end up giving some very mixed signals.
Of course, this is all from the perspective of real-world. Which does not necessarily need to apply in your fiction.

>>50757242
Yeah, I assumed we were talking official post of the country ruler and legislative specifically. People having actual pragmatic power even if not officially recognized are a whole different can of worms, one I personally like to indulge in. In half of my societies, the practical reality of power and wealth distribution does not match with the official, legal definitions at all.

>>50757242
>>50757352
>Hell, a duchess might be pulling all the strings.
>People having actual pragmatic power even if not officially recognized
Its something I avoid, just not an angle or hook that interests me much.

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Whats the best balance of wolf and man? I want werewolves tha arent generic furry trash or straight up 'The wolfman'

>>50757597
It's one of the things that most people tend to avoid, but really it's what brings your world to life if you are going for anything but a strictly mythological approach. The discrepancy between models (such as official government structure) and the reality is I think one of the most fundamental experience any person above 15 gets, and the one thing that gives the feeling of verisimilitude to fiction, especially in world building.
Real world evolves organically. Things rarely go in straight-forward paths. Recognizing that is a good way to capture the attention of people who do look for verisimilitude in fiction. Plus, it actually presents the writer with a constant set of challenges and creative hooks. Asking yourself "this is how it should work, at least officially, but how does that REALLY look" is one of the most fun speculations you can do in speculative fiction. PLUS the added benefit of having the option to mess with your player/audience's pre-conceptions and expectations and get them more involved in the process.
I think you are missing out.

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>>50757629
This is my favorite wolfman.

>>50757693
Don't agree with that at all, any basis it has in reality is purely rumors or conjecture that can't be proved or disproved. As a story telling tool people are automatically suspicious of the closest female to the male liege, and that's with no actual information about the woman.

>>50757839
I think we must be quite deeply misunderstanding each other here, because frankly I'm not sure what are you talking about.
I wasn't talking about specific case of a dutchess or even about females in power specifically either. Just about the fact that official governmental systems and pragmatic reality often differ dramatically.
I also am really not sure where the "people are automatically suspicious of the closest female to male liege" thing comes from. Not exactly my experience.

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>>50757629
What is wrong with The Wolfman?

>>50757904
He's just being a retarded sperg autist.

>>50758100
Not enough balance between man and beast

Does anyone have any guides or tools for making symbols for a faction?

>>50759115
I'd like to know as well.

>>50759115
You mean tools for artistic rendering? Or ideas for coming up with symbols?

In both, my advice is simplicity. A good symbol is one easily identified at a glance and from a distance. Complex designs (say for instance the crest on Mexico's flag) can't be identified at a glance and look like like nothing in particular at a distance.There's a reason why most flags are just color bars.

The hammer and sickle is probably the upper limit for symbol complexity. Readily identifiable shapes such as the moon, stars, the sun, tools (including weapons), body parts, and distinctive animals (birds, fish, and beast are about as far as you can differentiate, but snakes, turtles, spiders, and squid are all very distinct for instance).

Rule of thumb: If you can't draw it with a spray can in a single layer (without painting over your own lines) then its a bad symbol.

>>50759591
>>50759115
>>50759151
For tools, you might consider Adobe Illustrator. That's the go-to for vector images.

>>50759591
Thanks for the advice anon. I have some ideas in mind now. I just need to define some goals and ideologies for my factions.

>>50760523
My advice on that- make sure each faction's logical opposite is another faction.

This is important because otherwise your faction will come off as obviously true. Or you have to have a faction that is weirdly devoted to something that is obviously fake. You can do that but its very hard to do it convincingly. Creationists exist but if you're not one its really hard to believe they're really a thing.

Some questions have no answer. They're incomputable, in the Godelian sense. These are the kind of things people can get worked up about and never actually solve.

>>50760661
Do you mean if i have say, a communist faction, then i need a capitalist faction to be their logical adversary? i.e conflicting ideologies pits different groups against one another
What if i have a faction thats not opposed to anyone in particular? Like an order just opposed to injustice/monsters whatever

>>50760763
>Do you mean if i have say, a communist faction, then i need a capitalist faction to be their logical adversary?

Doesn't have to be. The Western front in WW2 was pretty much between democratic capitalists vs. totalitarian capitalists.

You can make the differences between factions as big and as small as you want - just make them visible.

Hell, if you write things correctly, you can pull off the system of 1984, where three different factions with the exact same political ideology are in constant total war for the simple reason that they're three different factions that all strive for complete control of the planet.

>>50760763
Commie/Cap are popular rivals in our history but not logical opposites. A better juxtaposition might be something like differing ideas of justice. Caps believe justice is meritocracy, and Commies believe justice is equality.

Fighting "injustice" is precisely the sort of thing people are going to disagree on. In fact, I think you're literally proposing some kind of warrior for justice on a social setting. And look how contentious those are.

If its an issue everyone agrees upon- say Pathfinders world wound for instance- it becomes a charity, not a crusade. And while you'll get a trickle of dimes for charity, you'll never get ardent passionate fire that a faction has. Charity isn't a faction. Its just an occupation in society.

>>50760858
Another good example of how people can butcher each other by the millions over tiny differences is catholics vs. protestants, or shia vs. sunni.

>>50761008
Catholics versus Protestants is huge though. There are major difference between them. You just don't see it much nowadays because it's not polite to talk about. The conflict comes down to politics and just who is the provider of grace, the Bible or the Pope.

Sunni vs. Shia is entirely political. Who should've succeeded who in providing leadership for the Islamic states, and which tribe is better.

>>50761245
He didn't say it wasn't political. He said it was a tiny difference. And it is.

>>50758113
epic /v/ buzzword memes, my meme /b/rother

Anyone else watch documentaries and just constantly find themselves thinking "damn, I'd like to integrate that into my setting somehow" but can't because it'd make things too cluttered?

>>50764082
>not going full Kitchen Sink with your setting
I've found that adding tons of shit and refining it lets you develop a ton of depth. I've gotten to the point that the main continent is so cluttered I had to create new, distant areas full of weirder shit.

>>50764218
I prefer to keep things simple, clean, and aesthetically consistent. It's not that there's not plenty of variety within my setting, it's just that I don't want too many different things competing for attention simultaneously. And since the setting I'm developing is so zoomed in, I'm already close to the saturation point.

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>>50764328
You get to the point that you find overarching explanations for the individual things you add.

For instance, my Fae are all nature spirits. Exactly "what" they manifest as is relative to how close they are to civilization. Gnomes are representative of Dwarves and Halflings, Spites are representative of Goblinoids, Fairies are representative of Elves, etc.
Stuff gets weird when you get onto other continents or deep underwater, where Fae start manifesting as abstract monstrosities and pic related.

>>50764534
That's not exactly what I mean. I'm talking about features of specific cultures. The thing in the documentary was a group of people in China who get around, in large part, by zipline, since it's the best way to get around on steep mountain cliffs. But I can't think of anywhere I could add that where it wouldn't wind up clashing somehow with what I've already got.

>>50762102
Except it's not when the politics is Arabs vs. Persians with a whole bunch of it rooted in nationalism and the fact that if you think you're wrong then that means all your laws were written on the wrong basis.

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>>50764607
Does it have to be ziplines? Could have some fantasy equivalent of a gondola.

>>50765019
I might be able to fit in gondolas somewhere, actually. Maybe. There is someplace where they could fit the aesthetic. Problem is metal in my setting is a rare resource, and it's hard to think of anything else supporting that kind of weight.

>>50765074
Rope weaved from durable tree fibers/vines, plus a simple car made from wood. Maybe poured brass for the pulley system?

>>50765100
I don't think there's any kind of rope or vine that could support the weight of a cable car over any kind of distance. And if there was, there would be a ton of other ways it would get used first.

>>50765243
Depends on the weight of the car. What if it's designed to carry a diminutive race of pygmy people, one at a time?

>>50765444
>diminutive race of pygmy people
Nope. Maybe in your setting, but not mine.
>one at a time?
Well at that point you might as well just use a zipline.

>>50765493
I figured a gondola would fit a fantasy setting better than a zipline.

>>50765505
Either would work in a fantasy setting, there's just no room for them in mine.

For the time being, at least. Ziplines might make an appearance once I zoom out on my setting a bit. I've talked about it in previous threads, but right now I'm just focusing on three smallish countries, so there's a lot more to the world than what I'm developing right now.

Sex slavery: Too magical realm to include?

>>50766891
Nothing's too magical realm if you're players are cool with it and you don't act like a total creep about it.

>>50766911
>you're
Fuck. Just kill me now.

>>50766891
Explicit sexual slavery or just people having sex with their house slaves?

Because the latter is pretty natural in a society where slavery exists, but the former can get a bit weird if you don't handle it well.

>>50766911
I mean, I want slavery in general to be an integral part of the setting. It's not just going to be tossed in for tits and blood. But I also know that there are people who'll object to including slavery in a setting unless it's explicitly denounced. I want it to be more of a neutral approach.

>>50766938
Look up how slavery worked in Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt.

If your players object to explicit slavery, and you still want to include some, look to how Ancient Chinese society worked in regards to their household servants and concubines and whatever else.

If your setting is Medieval, you could also just stick to serfdom.

Keep in mind that in many ancient societies you don't explicitly have to own someone like a slave to be able to have complete control over their lives. There's tons of euphemisms you can use.

>>50766938
>more of a neutral approach
I hope you don't mean you're trying to pass off sex slavery as "just an okay thing, I dunno".

>>50766931
Explicit. I know in the antebellum South it was sort of acknowledged that certain slaves were bought basically for sex, but it wasn't openly acknowledged, which is kind of too mild for what I'm thinking of. But I also don't want it to be like comfort women in WWII or modern pimp-prostitute relations in the US either.

>>50767006
Most of the non-slave systems mostly apply to people of the same "country" or nation though, right? For foreigners, would slavery be more likely?

>>50767013
Like it's just part of everyday society and nobody would really question it except for religious wierdos.

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How cozy do you like your settings, /tg/?

Me, I just love cozy. Like that O. Henry quote--"I should like to live a lifetime on every street in New York". I like to have my setting built in such a way that you could imagine slipping into the life of any random individual and find something interesting.

And I like it, not least of all, because I feel like it gives adventures stakes. You want to protect the world because you care about the people who "live" there. I recognize there's a place for grimdark setting, but it always just leaves me feeling like "what's the point?" if the world's gonna be screwed up and awful no matter what I do. I realize that's a bit reductio ad absurdum, but I hope you get my point.

It can be a lot of extra work, but I really do try to think about the daily routine of lots and lots of otherwise-insignificant people. I think about what a good day at work might look like versus a bad day, what they do for fun, how much contact they have with the world at large, who they consider their friends, how their family has factored into their lives. They may be integrated later as NPCs, but mostly it's just to fill out the world--like making a shoe more comfortable by breaking it in.

Do you agree? Disagree? How cozy do you like your settings, and what do you think is the best way to accomplish coziness where appropriate?

And if we can't get into it in this thread, perhaps it could be the OP topic of the next.

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>>50767207
What is "Cozy?"

>>50767333
Are you not a native English speaker, or do you more mean "what do you mean when you say 'cozy' in this context?" It'll help me answer.

>>50767351
What do you mean by cozy in a setting? I don't understand it. Like, The Shire is cozy but it's not an RPG.

How do you guys choose shapes for your continents?

>>50767488
If it seems like a generally pleasant place to live. When terrible things happen, they're the exception, not the rule. There's generally no everything-is-war and they're usually fundamentally idealistic.

Settings like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Kiki's Delivery Service (and a lot of Ghibli movies, for that matter) come to mind. Legend of Korra, Krynn, and Final Fantasy IX are partial examples.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (the movie, at least) is sort of a strange example in that it sets up a surprisingly cozy setting on the edge of a post-apocalyptic all-consuming death forest. But despite that it opens in a prosperous little town that's achieved a peaceful equilibrium and will likely return to that--perhaps a bit wiser--after the events of the film.

And if that general pleasantness pervades the entire setting (as far as we, the reader/viewer/player see), then you can call it a cozy setting.

A litmus test might be "would I be happy living in this setting even if I'm not one of the special people?"

>>50767625
I decide what I want to be there, then shape the geography and the continents to accommodate that.

>>50767207
are you a girl

>>50767625
I draw a graph of important locations, where the value of each edge is the travel time between them. The on the vertices I decide what features I need (sea access, mountains, forests, whatever).

Then I just draw my continent shape matching that in AutoREALM.

>>50767685
Why do you ask?

>>50767690
What is AutoREALM? Is that the new Inkarnate?

>>50767625
First I decide what I want to do. Is it a setting where most of the adventures should be in the wilderness? Or is it an adventure with a lot of urban/ruin areas?

That dictates whether the continent on the map is big or small, whether travel should be easier or more difficult, and how many cities/nations I should have. Then I just randomly draw a continent, with a few harbors carved in, maybe some islands, but with the amount of space I think it should have to make the adventure seem like a normal part of the setting rather than an odd one-off location that's like some kind of theme park.

>>50767741
AutoREALM is mapping software. Older than Inkarnate. It's pretty buggy but I haven't found anything equivalent yet.

It doesn't draw pretty maps, but it's good for drawing accurate maps. After finishing outlines and locations in AutoREALM, I move to other programs for better looking maps.

I don't like Inkarnate because it seems to focused on generic medieval fantasy map look.

>>50767632
In that case, I would normally make settings where "horrible things" happen every so often, and the players are going to be living just before, during, or after one. I feel like adventures should happen during times of great upheaval, and shouldn't just be like a job that people take up because it needs doing.

Pockets of the setting should be nice and comfortable where ordinary life goes on, at least until something disrupts it. But the setting as a whole has to be in a state of flux, and that generally means somebody somewhere is suffering.

>>50767207
I like to be cozy. I don't want to play cozy. I want to play wild, risky, weird, gonzo. Though I live like a homebody, I want to play a crazy fucking raider in the post-apocalypse, or a dark warlock harnessing forbidden power from the black hole sun. I want to play fucked up things, that get fucked up with other fucked up people.

Heroism? Fuck that, gold, glory, and thrills.

What are some fundamental questions you feel should be answered when developing a world for play?

>>50767812
Huh, now that's a good way of doing it. One question that should be asked--is the comfort of those pockets in direct consequence of people suffering elsewhere, or unrelated? Like, Laputa thrived only by exploiting the people on the ground, and we today get our clothes and toys cheap because some 15-year-old girl in India is getting underpaid.

>>50767954
Why this setting? What makes it unique and unlike every other setting I've played?

>>50768014
>some 15-year-old girl in India
In India they work in tech centers. You're thinking of Indonesia and Vietnam, which are even cheaper. Soon, it will move all the way to Africa, and we'll have health epidemics stemming from filthy Africans infecting clothes, food, and toys.

>>50768036
There are sweatshops in India too, Anon. I've owned several pieces of clothing made in India.

Tech support is actually rapidly moving to the Philipines. India still probably has more call centers than they do, but that's because India's got a billion people to make calls.

>>50768035
Is that really a question that's necessary in the construction of the world? I feel trying too hard to be unique results in a discordant mess.

>>50768014
It really depends on what I want to do with the setting. Like, I have one setting I'm working on where things are pretty comfy, but it's also a hard land to make comfortable, and a major facet of the economy is founded on invading and conquering a rainforest and killing off the locals because they view the forest as their sacred land. It's the latest in a long line of wars between the forest tribes and the medieval humans, who steadily forced them off the land where the humans live now over millennia of migration and settlement.

In another setting, people are getting more prosperous and comfortable because of a great war which destroyed other nations and left this one standing atop the spoils. But they didn't do anything wrong, and they're hailed as heroes who saved the world from being conquered by dark lords. It's not meant to delve into the morality of post-war economies, but deal with the changes and upheaval that will come out of a post-war climate.

Generally, everything comfy comes from hard work somewhere. The difference between it being suffering and hard work is whether the people doing the work have opportunities to move up the economic ladder or are compensated in a way that satisfies them, whether that's economic, cultural, religious, or social. I only make it an issue in the setting if I want to see how players react to it and what changes they try to make, if any, and project how those changes could change the course of the setting.

>>50768066
I think so.

It doesn't need to be a definite thing. It can be a je ne sais quoi. But there needs to be some reason to use your setting and not another.

>>50768063
Sweatshops in India are more expensive compared to cheaper sweatshops in Southeast Asian countries. People only pick India because it has easier access to cotton. But it's becoming much easier and it's generally a lot cheaper to outsource to countries other than India and China.

>>50768066
If it's not unique, why not just play Forgotten Realms?

>>50768092
It's not that.

it should be unique, but I don't think it's a very important question.

The answer to that question I find is discovered as it's developed, rather than trying to try for something unique from the start.

>>50768071
>The difference between it being suffering and hard work is whether the people doing the work have opportunities to move up the economic ladder or are compensated in a way that satisfies them
That's a wonderful insight. When I'm picturing someone in a cozy setting, they're usually working hard but seeing the benefits of their work, and I didn't even think about that until just now when you pointed it out.

>>50768115
I only think that way because I'm supremely dissatisfied with the decisions I've made and I'm slowly working on getting to the point of doing work that I actually want to do making videogames or video board games. Tabletop Simulator is a godsend for the latter, but I really need to spend more time in /gdg/.

>>50768145
I'm sorry, anon. Keep your chin up, I bet you'll do great!

>>50767207
I like to live cozy, I don't like to live cozy.

I like playing in horror games with implacable ill understood forces. When the campaign ends, I like to imagine that the heroes stll stumble around in the dark finding new adventures.

>>50768765
>I don't like to play cozy*

Fucking hell, me. If you are going to post in the morning, make sure you are awake when you post.

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>>50768066
>>50768080
>>50768035
What are some examples of things in a setting that are both unique and entertaining? I am actually still trying to get some inspiration to build a world for a DnD 5th edition game that I am running. Basically, I want the world to be very unique and entertaining, but I can't really think of aspects to make it that way, suggestions would be really helpful.