/WBG/ - Worldbuilding General

What would be the social implications of typing halfling and human reproduction together?

Basically halflings are a kind of human, and you won't know if a child of a human or a halfing is either or until they grow up or stop growing.

>>52596868
I mean, it depends on how Halflings and Humans get on. I'd imagine for some it's a lot like waiting to see if your kid inherited some sort of horrific genetic illness.

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Setting up something for a Hexcrawl, going for a Darkest Dungeon/Darklands kind of dark ages feel with a mostly unexplored, very dangerous wilderness where all the things your grandma warned you about are real.

I'm hoping for some feedback on geography, since realistic terrain isn't something I've studied a ton.

Map is 12 miles per hex, 7 miles on a side. Each hex will have one or two major features keyed to start and others will be filled in (It's not like there's only one thing worth doing every hundred+ square miles)

So the terrain here is basically a slowly descending valley into the floodplain the river system follows. The western coast is mostly rocky cliffs except where the river system lets out, which descends to sea level and forms a wetland that gets woodier as you head north. The town is at the edge of the wetland in a cultivated area, and a few miles up on the higher land is the lord's manor, where Darkest Dungeon things happened.

Most of the rest of the region is rocky, misty moorland, with dense forests in the north and south where the mountains and foothills rise. I'm imagining it being pretty gloomy and rainy, Witcher-esque. Should the trees be evergreen or deciduous you think?

So what about the geography here could I improve to make it more natural? How could I wrangle some more terrain diversity? Given the shape of the land is there anywhere I could realistically stick some dry terrain or badlands for the PCs to explore? I'm imagining most of this being ugly gray rainy from the ocean winds but if I can squeeze out more diversity that'd be nice.

Thanks, famalam.

>>52597142
I feel like the southern river is off. Is it flowing into the rest? Flowing away? It seems like it's hitting a bit too head on to be a natural confluence, and rivers don't really split like that, so I'm not sure which it is.

>>52597178

It's flowing in.

The head-on collision is an artifact of the hex thing, I'm trying to redo it to look more natural. Assume the hex-shape of the rivers and the road are all abstractions.

The two rivers are flowing down from the mountains further off the map and meeting in the valley where they flow to the sea.

>>52597266
In that case the river should come from more due South. As it is, there's no indication of higher ground that would turn the river aside at such an extreme angle.

Is Prussia and Rwanda the only times in history were the state was created to support the military? I have a military order that successfully fulfilled their crusade, and of course at the end there was power to be had and the soldiers and commanders didn't just disperse. So these knights take up residence at a cathedral in a land that was ravaged by war and mostly leaderless due to an ongoing civil war, the knight order brings the region law and any locals of what remained of leadership swore fealty to the grandmaster of the order. Half a century later the order is taking in recruits locally and from abroad as most people still believe they have a mission to fulfill (keeping heathens out of the civilized countries) so its a weird sort of military order running a state.

>>52596960
I imagine there would be a great deal of discrimination happening.

>>52597968
The other Crusader States seem, at least to me, to fit that criteria.

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Quick! I need ideas for an Old Empire in my setting.

My setting is an odd, Nautical-themed, tropical world based on Sinbad the Sailor, The Odyssey, Cthulhu, Darksun, and Pirates of Darkwater. I have the idea to add a British East India Trade Company type faction, but I liked the idea of having them be (secret or not) a continuation of an old Empire with a lot of reach, thus explaining their well-established trade monopoly.

Trouble is, I have no idea what to base this old Empire on. I really can't do Rome or Greece, and I feel like nothing else is coming to mind. The rest of the setting is Perisa-Greece-Mesoamerica, so I need something that looks distinct, but not too alien in comparison to those. Any suggestions? My brain is exhausted for the night.

>>52599555
Carthage or Phonecians.

bonus points if the top brass of the trade company are part of a secret cult that sacrifices babies to the bull god

>>52599684
>sacrifices babies to the bull god
That's played out. Make them have orphanages and central education for children but a very bad PR team.

>>52599684
>>52599703
Sounds interesting, but I don't think there's a lot on them, is there?

>>52599828
Not a lot on Carthage but there's plenty on the Phoenicians.

You could also go for the Minoans, if you wanna go older, or the Luvians or the Hittites (not much of a naval power, though).

There's plenty of flavor in that area to go around.

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>>52599856
Hm. I'll have to go wiki diving then. I'll probably go Phoenician, since I already DID Minoans once.

>>52599555
Why not Malays? There's plenty of unexploited history in there.

>>52599876
If you're not married to nautical empires, look into Elam and Medes.

>>52596673
How large is an organization to you guys?

>>52600403
Depends of the feel you are looking for your setting, I like a tribal age so anything about 100 people is large.

>>52600403
largest knight organization I have so far is 2000.

>>52599084
So I created a plausible scenario?

Guys, I'm making gods for my setting, and I need help coming up with names.

So far I've got a few, but I'm not sure I'm satisfied with them.

Tell me, what kind of feelings the following names evoke:

Efiril
Katra
Rutiannah
Lafitait
Sorlakoth
Bautir
Astrotex

>>52605755
>Efiril
Fire.
>Katra
Cute.
>Rutiannah
Nothing,
>Lafitait
>Sorlakoth
Evil, undead for some reason.
>Bautir
Nordic.
>Astrotex
Different setting.

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What are some ideas/examples of God(s) punishing a society for committing a sin? Like "God sends plague/earthquake/flood down on city of sinners", but the punishment matches a specific sin.

>>52607748
What are the sins? Also keep in mind that the punishment wasn't often directly related to the sin, probably a result of Biblical historians framing real tragedies as a result of the sins of the people.

>>52608059
I don't have any specific sins in mind, I'm just trying to think of divine punishments that sound cool. And in a high fantasy setting, you can be sure that these are actual punishments from the gods.

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Time to figure out bird-people.

>>52607748
Some interesting ones I think is Tower of Babel and such.

Well, biblical examples are pretty obvious, you could look into other religions. Perhaps hindu, or some more ancient ones ( ex. Greece/Roman/Scandinavian ) etc., perhaps apply apply individual punishments more broad strokes. Ex. turning people into monsters, ironic punishments...

Can't remember any more/specific ones from top of my head, though, sorry.

>>52605755
>Efiril
Lawful evil fire guy who really likes slavery
>Katra
Cats and other fluffy things
>Rutiannah
Tree hugger who lives in a bush
>Lafitait
Posh asshole who hates working class scum
>Sorlakoth
Ancient unkillable omnivorous worm
>Bautir
Autistic master builder
>Astrotex
Atomic robot from outer space

>>52605755
>Efiril
Fire
>Katra
Cats
>Rutiannah
Magic
>Lafitait
Light
>Sorlakoth
Death
>Bautir
War
>Astrotex
Don't mess with him

>>52605755
>Efiril
Maybe some kind of fire prince or powerful elemental
>Katra
Eskimoes
>Rutiannah
Some kind of Earth or fertility goddess
>Lafitait
Nobility
>Sorlakoth
Eldritch brainsucker
>Bautir
Some old Anglo-Saxon farmer tending to his memes
>Astrotex
The rootinest tootinest android cowboy this side of the Milky Way

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I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask, but I'm working on an armor design for a character.

This character is meant to be highly agile, with the armor being magical and mostly decorative, so it's meant to be minimalistic and inhibit movement as little as possible. Additionally, I'd like the armor to be entirely metal, as in, without leather/cloth/whatever straps needed to hold it in place. It's a bit silly, but I've been toying with the idea of the character being able to make the armor appear/disappear at will, so the armor strictly being above the clothes is important.

Mostly, this is really simple. Armor around the forearms, shin guards, and a chestplate that mostly just covers the ribs, so that the waist is still able to freely bend and twist. However, with how much hips move, putting any tight armor around there that doesn't inhibit movement is a difficult prospect. I don't want to leave the area bare, though.

My current design has a belt that's attached to a scale half-skirt, similar to pic related. However, this has the issue that, if the character goes up-side down, there's nothing really preventing the belt from sliding up or rotating or otherwise moving out of place. I'd like to have as few "It's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit." excuses for the armor design itself, so does anyone have better ideas for how to handle this kind of thing?

>>52599034
It's sad but my first thought when reading this was how easy it would be to paint this as a metaphor for homosexuality Xmen 2 style

>>52608167
You may want to check out Dante's Divine Comedy. Obviously you probably don't want to go to that extent if it's in the real world and not hell but he had different punishments for different sins. The less severe the sin, the less severe the punishment iirc

>>52605755
>Efiril
a benevolent wind godess

>Katra
Deep Sea and totally open ocean

>Rutiannah
Agriculture, autumn

>Lafitait
Nothing

>Sorlakoth
swamps, basically mtg black

>Bautir
Neutral death god, blacksmith

>Astrotex
My new rap name

>>52597968
This is no help to you but I'm now imagining a situation were a holy order stages a coup and forms a military junta.

So, the way I've written my setting is to write the entire history from the beginning to the end of time, from bronze age to space age, but left out the small details and let players fill those in. Any contradictions between player actions and the recorded history will either be a "legend" that as it turns out never happened, or a situation where the players' actions are what really happened but the truth has either been incorrectly recorded, lost to the ages, or deliberately altered by someone in-setting with an agenda.

Is that overly complicated/dumb?

>>52610727
Yes

One thing it's hard for beginning GMs to get is that you aren't making an ebin story and world for your players to look at

You AND YOUR PLAYERS are playing a game, for fun. What matters for your setting is what matters for your players.

Sure you can come up with some stuff but 'write the entire history from the beginning to the end of time, from bronze age to space age' shrieks of an enthusiastic newbie G< toiling in the basement writing shit the players won't care about and will only learn about via you getting excited and dumping tl;dr textblocks on them, after which they still won't care

Don't fall for the 'worldbuilding' meme. It's a scourge of amateur fantasy novelists who miss the point and has little to no place in game sessions. You should focus your efforts on the personal level of character and sessions. Not only is the GM the only one who sees these grandiose 'big picture' ideas, they're the only ones who even care about doing so.

>>52610855
>Don't fall for the 'worldbuilding' meme.

Oh shit, I just saw what the title of this thread was, I'm too late

Good luck all you anons

>>52610855
I actually don't know why I asked. Most of my games are ran in heavily abridged versions of the setting and basically exist as a sandbox for my friends to dick around in. The actual serious setting is more of just something I write for personal enjoyment.

>>52610855
>Don't fall for the 'worldbuilding' meme. It's a scourge of amateur fantasy novelists who miss the point
I kind of have to take issue with this. A good fantasy world is more than just a cool backdrop and framing device for a good story. If the worldbuilding is really good the world will stand on it's own and more. There's no "point", at least not necessarily.

>>52610727
I've done a similar thing in defining the history from beginning to end, but time and fucking about with it being are major themes in the lore of the world. I went the Elder Scrolls route of 'all possible outcomes of an event are equally true even when they contradict one another because time dragons or some shit.' Hyperbole aside, as long as there is a logic and you're consistent with its application, then you're fine. It's when you start giving each event its own rules you over complicate things and reduce your timeline to a bunch of nonsense.

Also >>52610855 is sorta full of shit. The more developed your world is the move believable it's going to be. Not all of it is knowledge that is going to be known by or pertinent to readers or players, and it's fine they don't need to be clued in on it, but that doesn't make it less important to the person writing it. World building is the difference between an epic story and just a string of events. Characters, places, and events become more real and more personal in the mind of the writer, and their understanding of those things will be reflected in the quality of their work. You can always tell when fantasy authors phone it in because they can describe the most grandiose settings and exciting events and seem bored while doing so.

It's somewhat different for GM'ing, but as long as you're not using your sessions to just advertise your independent writing and keep your focus on the characters you've been given, rather than the one's you've created, there's not necessarily a conflict of interest. I have given myself the flexibility to run games out of my setting, and I love seeing what other creative people can do with my ideas. I don't dictate to them how they should experience it, ultimately it's just any other fantasy setting.

>>52611341
>It's when you start giving each event its own rules you over complicate things and reduce your timeline to a bunch of nonsense
So, exactly like TES?

>>52611341
>g your sessions to just advertise your independent writing and
That's really not an issue for me. Aside from really important people historically like monarchs and other faction leaders, basically all the NPCs are made custom for the campaign based on the party and how serious the game is. Obviously their traits are consistent in the world, the idea is that they complement what we're setting out to do in the campaign while also being someone who could've actually filled the role they do in whatever event or period the game takes place in.

Plus I like to focus campaigns on smaller scale things, which might sound odd considering I bothered to write out the entire world history. My favorite: for about a year, we'd been doing shorter campaigns all around the same period of time but in different locations, and the whole time I'd been hyping up this battle that took place ~50 years prior between the Goblins and not!Russians that altered the entire political landscape and was in some way connected to many of the situations they'd fond themselves in, think D-Day level importance but followed immediately by the Yalta Conference. Well, the players actually got to take part in the battle. Not as commanders or generals or elite troops or any of that stuff, just a squad of normal soldiers trying to carry out orders and stay alive in a battle so large they couldn't really tell exactly what was going on or if what they did had any effect.

I guess the reason I want to make worlds that big and detailed is because I want to approach the capabilities of historical fiction. If you wanted to write fiction taking place in WW2, there are so many details and "backstory" you can draw from without having to explain any of it isn't even funny. Obviously the limiting factor is that players can't be expected to know the same amount of information as real life, but I think having it there that you can use selectively as important details ultimately just makes the stories better.

Anyone know the levels of social interaction would be? Like individualistic, peers, village?, town?, city? Etc. I've been noticing there's certain identities that build within each part and other people can identify each other through what part of a region you came from or a household and such. I was thinking these things could help incorporate into character behavior and flesh them out and separate them from say a village down the south a few kilometers.

>>52611364
Elder Scrolls does have a logic though. While I was oversimplifying it drastically, there are rules about how time and its relation to the interpretation of events goes.

There is a natural linear timeline, which progresses from A to B. But there are periods of 'un-time' where there is a break between A and B where multiple things COULD have happened. This is the difference between playthroughs of the story in a game. For example, my Nerevarine was a female Khajiit, yours might have been a male Dunmer. Neither one of these is 'wrong' nor is either of them explicitly 'canon'. Each one of these possibilities is as equally true as the other. They contradict but do not override each other.

Eventually the event that causes the split from the natural timeline concludes and the various possible timelines converge back to its natural state and progress forward again in a linear fashion.

It's not hard to understand. It's like a small scale 'multiverse' hinged around key points in history. It does not effect the A and B of the story line though, only the sections in which it is relevant.

>>52610541
To me for some reason it brings to mind the mistreatment of children in Victorian England. Like child labour, except it's halflings

>>52611533
>Not as commanders or generals or elite troops or any of that stuff, just a squad of normal soldiers trying to carry out orders and stay alive in a battle so large they couldn't really tell exactly what was going on or if what they did had any effect.
Wow, how do you pull that off? That sounds really cool actually.

What about a world that's built from the bottom up, rather than the top down?

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>>52596673
I made a big list of groups and important organizations a while ago for my setting, I don't expect to keep all of them for a final draft, or I might, but I will likely change some of them.

>>52608241
I appreciate your recent bird drawings, I wanna see more

>>52611584
Well some backstory first:
The entire continent had sort of been in an intellectual dark age for about 150 years, but in the past 10 or so they started to come out of this. Specifically, it had the affect that for a relatively brief period the mass stigma about trusting and making use of the average magic user was greatly diminished, and the various factions of the time had all started using mages heavily in a military capacity. Basically, conventional clashes of armies was made temporarily obsolete. This is basically my excuse to have Vietnam-esque command structures in a world that hadn't even really began to make use of gunpowder weaponry yet. All this to facilitate that a "squad" would even be plausible to play in, and also why they wouldn't be in open terrain much at all.

Basically, the battle was in the foothills of a mountain range (which I'd be saying for a year had been renamed the "Mountains of Blood" because of this battle), caves and volcanic stone everywhere, geothermally active, occasional lava flows, you get the idea. Place was hell on Earth. Add in the fireballs streaming overhead in both directions and Goblins (or god forbid Orc and Troll mercenaries) around every corner, they were constantly on edge.

I'm not sure exactly how I pulled it off at the time in terms of literally how I GM'ed it, but I think I did it well enough

>>52612478
It's always better to bottom-up.

>>52612478
>>52613152
I usually do bottom -> top -> back to bottom. Essentially, figure out how you want the world, work all the way up until you have the cosmology you want, and then go back and alter the bottom in a way that's still cool but better fits the new top. New additions to the setting can always inform previous ones, retcon a little frequently so you don't have to do a lot ever. Major retcons are a pain in the ass.

>>52610727
eh... Honestly, probably better to write out the history of the world up-to when the PCs enter it and leave the rest blank, as it, from here-on-out there is no telling what will happen, because that's life. it also gives the players the choice to affect world events on a grander scale, or choose to let history play itself out and focus on a smaller story. How their actions affect history is going to be unknown is far better than having their impact on world events be largely nil save for a few minor moments. as for >>52610855 he's just as ass, good world building doesn't just make for a pretty backdrop, it can inform on what kinds of adventures the PC's will go on, how they will be treated, and it makes the difference between getting the players immersed in the setting and interested in what is happening around them, or a bunch of disinterested murderhobos who go around causing death, destruction, and mayhem wherever they go just for the lulz, and to show off their character sheet's big numbers.

>>52613336
>there is no telling what will happen, because that's life
I mean, I never let a party read any history that isn't relevant to the campaign, they can't just go to the wiki and see how the world ends.

>>52613375
but at the same time YOU the GM should be prepared for the possibility that maybe the PC's do something that actually alters the course of history, and rather than hand-wave that away, let it happen, let their actions change the course of history accordingly.

>>52613401
>and rather than hand-wave that away
I had an entire campaign investigating why the deeds of a previous campaign had been covered up. And obviously the setting history isn't set in stone, it's more just for the ability to hold a campaign in many time periods in the same setting. I don't just want to see the Lunar cult begin in the Bronze age, or get persecuted in the gunpowder age, or build a new holy city on the actual Moon, I want to be able to show all of them.

That's the main purpose of this type of worldbuilding. You can show any event at any time and it's as if you're using the Historical Present.

>>52603696

Probably.

Zulus were war(rior) centered too, from what I recall.

Mounted nomads might be seen in a similar light, in that they did not have much in the way of civil administration out on the steppe.
Which brings Cossacks to mind, though they generally had a patron/ruler from outside the local area.

Also look at modern Egypt and 20th century Turkey for a less extreme version of this.

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I've been really into the style of OSR books lately, and have also been really frustrated at the blandness of my current overland travel system for my campaign I'm running (5e). After a bit of research and inspiration, I made this map and I love how clean it turned out.

Here's a guide I wrote for a fellow DM on what I did exactly to make the map and the proposed mechanics behind what a modern hex crawl looks like in the 5e system, borrowing heavily from older systems.

https://medium.com/@davidwoyke/d-d-creating-a-hex-crawl-cf33d42e35f9

>>52613277
What if you're worldbuilding for a game, and bottom-up means the world is developed gradually through play?

>>52613759
Well that's a different scenario. In terms of pure worldbuilding, that isn't necessarily the best thing to do. But I've done that with friends before, as well as seen the let's make a setting threads here, it's certainly fun.

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>>52596673
>/WBG/ - Worldbuilding General

Just in time to bump the thread!

I've decided that April will be
>Animal People April
And that means I'm gonna make an effort to try and draw & detail all the varied beastmen races within my big ol' fancy setting I've been cooking up.

I put the huge list of animal persons I've got into a "random choice" generator and today I got OCTOPUS... So here they are!
They are neither kids, nor squids, and quite honestly they're kind of PRICKS.

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>>52612580
Thanks. I might do more later on. Threw in some color to figure out the scheme etc.

>>52608601
Fixed to cloth/padding underneath?

>>52605755
I also would mind if you told me what the following names evoke:

Kleaneg
Tydor
Lanfax
Vellarth
Gildir Trelin
Phuzlugla
Cyddon
Vridra
Blemba
Avald Kvartan
Fhargus Kostello
Klareggond
Ransallar

Sorry to bother you guys, but I need a specific space settign that could reasonably come after Steampunk>Dieselpunk>Cyberpunk in a timeline. Just can´t think of anything myself.

Do you guys maybe have an idea?

>>52615576

>Fixed to cloth/padding underneath?

That's probably the smartest way to go about it, as no amount of brainstorming on my part has resulted in a way for the armor to secure itself to the pelvis without either limiting hip/leg movement or being awkwardly baggy.

I'm not coming up with a good way of fixing the belt to the clothing, though, since this character doesn't wear belts and wouldn't have a reason to have anything with belt loops. I guess I'll just possibly go with a materials explanation? All of the other armor is worn over clothing made out of the same material as the 'pants', and while it would make sense for the armor on the limbs and the chestplate to be able to hold themselves in place due to their shape, arbitrarily deciding that the armor simply can't slide over that clothing material, or saying that the armor has a way of attaching itself to that material (since the armor is magical and not a real physical earth metal) would at least be consistent.

>>52615763
Nanopunk?

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>>52615763
Sci-fi.

>>52615606
>Fhargus Kostello
Faggotry.

These are the names of the sovereign nations in this continental setting
>Kazimir Empire
>Kingdom of Harman
>Free City of Iuwine
>Freimut Order
>Tarasa
>Cillian Kingdom
>Kingdom of Rowena
>Tapio Khanate
>Kingdom of Oriane
>Kingdom of Brecht
>Vencel Principality
>Kingdom of Loick
>Duchy of Thale

Any of these sound like comfy places?

>>52617159
>Kazimir Empire
Poland
>Kingdom of Harman
Arabs
>Free City of Iuwine
Drunks
>Freimut Order
Teutonic Order
>Tarasa
Ukraine
>Cillian Kingdom
Chile
>Kingdom of Rowena
Ravenclaw?
>Tapio Khanate
Finrand
>Kingdom of Oriane
Knifears
>Kingdom of Brecht
Bertolt? Bavaria.
>Vencel Principality
Venice
>Kingdom of Loick
West Country
>Duchy of Thale
Iceland

>>52617256
2/13, guess I need to think this through some more.

>>52617510
What, you ain't even gonna tell what's what?

>>52617159
>Kazimir Empire
Sticks up their asses

>Kingdom of Harman
slippery traders

>Free City of Iuwine
come here if you want to get mugged

>Freimut Order
constant schemers

>Tarasa
a city of high stakes and high opportunity

>Cillian Kingdom
very friendly until you cross them

>Kingdom of Rowena
godless savages, you know they eat people right?

>Tapio Khanate
no-nonsense, extremely loyal if they know you

>Kingdom of Oriane
those damned astrologers practically run that place, who knows what they're up to?

>Kingdom of Brecht
they're all sort of assholes but who isn't really?

>Vencel Principality
think they're the hottest shit, if they show you their painting say you like it or the little bitches might start crying

>Kingdom of Loick
humorless inbred fucks

>Duchy of Thale
down to earth people with little ambition, busty barmaids who'll basically believe anything

Sorry if this wasn't what you were looking for, I just like adding a layer of stereotypes to worlds. Yeah most people have them, but they always seem to be tacked on after the "actual" building.

>>52617603
>Kazimir Empire
Grand Duchy of Moscow, Kievan Rus
>Kingdom of Harman
England
>Free City of Iuwine
Switzerland and Italian City-States
>Freimut Order
Teutonic Order
>Tarasa
Amazons that are pale Welsh girls
>Cillian Kingdom
Gaelic Kingdoms and Kingdom of Scotland
>Kingdom of Rowena
Kingdom of Norway and Denmark
>Tapio Khanate
Fingolians
>Kingdom of Oriane
France
>Kingdom of Brecht
Low Countries, Bordeaux France
>Vencel Principality
Poland and Bohemia
>Kingdom of Loick
Holy Roman Empire
>Duchy of Thale
Baltic states

>>52617952
>Grand Duchy of Moscow, Kievan Rus
Kazimir is not a typical Russian name
>England
Fucked up Anglo-Saxon letters could help
>Switzerland and Italian City-States
If it ends in -li it automatically sounds Swiss as fuck. Also should start with a J.
>Amazons that are pale Welsh girls
Subtract vowels, add more gw, ll and dd
>Gaelic Kingdoms and Kingdom of Scotland
Church Kingdom?
>Kingdom of Norway and Denmark
Should be ending in -ska
>France
Doesn't sound gay enough
>Low Countries, Bordeaux France
What the hell? They aren't anywhere near each other. Add more double vowels and zw's for a Dutch effect.
>Poland and Bohemia
Add more szczrz for a Polish effect. Should at the very least start with a W.
>Holy Roman Empire
Loick doesn't even sound like a German word, and it would be spelled Leuck or Läuck. Come on, it's not that difficult to create fake German names.
>Baltic states
Baltic languages literally sound like random gibberish, keep that in mind

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>>52618202
I'm definitely thinking of changing Loick though I guess it could be Loïck instead, the rest don't necessarily follow the naming conventions of the cultures they're based off of.

>>52618276
But then don't complain when people can't draw the parallels.

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>millennia in the past
>elves emerge and quickly begin to dominate the Bronze Age world
>their divinities are worshipped and given tribute at temples around springs, rivers, and wells
>they establish an empire and an unshakeable hegemon
>until, one day, the portents and stars reveal a waning of magic and their Gods become silent
>human powers begin to rise, mass migrations from the steppe lead to new kingdoms
>they pick at the Elven Empire until it's in pieces, then, eventually, nothing but holdouts
>the age of men lasts for almost 500 years
>human kingdoms rise and carve out their own realms
>cont.

>>52618358
No complaints, I'm taking and considering changing some of the names just not all of them.

>>52618822
>cont.

>the Shemsherha, in the vast central plains and low country, an urban culture led by satrapies
>the Mathura, chivalric and determined warfighters controlling a vast helot class
>the Gadals, an urban confederation clinging to the rocky shores of the great sea
>the Atskaran, desert rulers, controlling the oases and the trade-routes that travel them
>the Matar, a people led by kings and cults, torn between knightly orders and upstart factions
>picture related: retainers of a Shemsherhan lord, typical heavily armed warriors of their culture

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>>52618997
>forgot pic

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>>52618997
>the Elven holdouts bide their time.
>suddenly, they heap precious stones on the idols of their gods and slaughtered probably a million bulls
>proceed with magical apocalypse
>storms on land and sea tear apart the land, human kingdoms suffer famine and anarchy
>vast tracts of land are turned into ashy wastelands of lightning and dust storms
>elven spirit guardians with the heads of deer emerge from tombs and terrorize the countryside
>setting takes place as both human and elf are too crippled to win yet regaining their strength

>pic related: human mercenaries

>>52596868
Abomination.
Thinner bone structure or smaller body parts than usual resulting in bad quality of life. It would be like a shorter human but some things will be so fucked up it could not live a quality life.

>>52619362
I imagine many halflings are discriminated against by humans, and I imagine it's the reverse as well.

On one side I see a human kingdom with halfling labour laws and treatment resembling the treatment of children in Victorian England.

One the other side I see a militant Munchkinland with a Napoleon complex that ostracizes the tall folk

>>52597142
I'd say draw the rivers across hexes, not just on the sides. It looks a bit off like that.

>>52619116
So did the magic come back or ?

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>>52608601

Pteruges. Means feathers I think, they are the little thongs of leather or linen that hang from Greek armor. They can vary in length, if they are one layer or two (or more). Have each one feature a 50-75% smaller metal ribbon inlaid into the pteruge and you have flexibility, the leather/linen foundation keeping it from going CLANG CLANG CLANG WENT TROLLY RING RING RING WENT THE BELL every time they move or jostle about.

It might clang a little still when one pteruge on top layer bends and hits the other pteruge but you could always have the metal woven beneath the linen pteruges (but sandwhiched between a top and bottom layer)

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>>52628479

Bear in mind they can go as short as you want or as long as you want (within reason). I've seen them go knee length. The odd fellow dead center is accurate, it's based off a Macedonian I think relief/relic.

>>52627297
yes.

>>52628479
>>52628500
God I love Osprey.

>>52612558

I think that's some real good art, anon and that you should feel good about it.

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Bit of a bumparoo.

On extraplanar entities, how do you like to describe them? Lovecraftian abominations, angels, common folk, demons...?

>>52615576

If you want the animal bird people to look animalistic then they should not have a waist, just mass at center mass

>>52632121
You know what, maybe you shouldn't describe them. You shouldn't unveil this mystery. If they have to interact with someone, give them a human form, so their true form doesn't blow a mortals mind. You can hint at, though.

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Anon who was making a fantasy setting based off of Earth's geography here. I've settled for a sort of early 1800s feel, and have started thinking about how to draw the national borders on Earth's surface. I feel like I'm maybe too much relying on real-life borders to do that. I'm going along a lot of geographical lines as well (Rivers, deserts, etc). How does this appear, without any context, as areas that geographically would make sense to be grouped together?

>>52635227
Can you post the borders in a terrain map? I think it might help to visualise borders better.
Anyway, I don't think I'm feeling the pink country spanning korea-outer manchuria-sakhalin-hokkaido. I'm thinking, if it's capital is in korea, it would make more sense to try to nab any of the other japanese islands before hokkaido, and likewise if the capital is in hokkaido. Now if it's in sakhalin or outer manchuria, I think it would make sense expanding a bit more inland into manchuria before going down all the way to korea.

>>52635621
Give me a second and I will toss it all on to a terrain map to the best of my ability.
The capital of the pink country is somewhere near real-world Vladivostok, on the real world Korean-Russian border. I was also thinking that the area would have been a former Not!Siberia colony, having just recently gained independence through a war.

>>52632121
I think that planes are a shitty D&D trope and you shouldn't use them.

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What are the core concepts, creations and differences between 80's retrofuture and 90's retrofuture?

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Hey lads.
I'm trying to simplify the great wheel a tad because having gorillions of planes irks me to no end. I've come up with this so far:
There's really only two "planes" or dimensions, if you will, the material and immaterial, provisory names until I come up with something better.
The material plane has what usually are the elemental planes condensed into it, like a more literal version of pic related. So, when you're treking south through the Great Desert and it only gets hotter and hotter and you start to see fire elementals and efreeti, it's not that the location is closely linked to the elemental plane of fire, but it IS the "plane" of fire itself.
Then there's the immaterial plane, which is mostly like the usual astral plane with a Warp-like vibe, with regions inhabited by gods and other powerful beings who shape the space around them according to their will, thus creating their dominions.
So the immaterial is where pretty much everything else would be, like feywild, shadowfell, as well as mount celestia, nine hells and warrior's rest, for instance, but with great distances between each, filled with bursts of energy, wandering thoughts and the occasional nothingness as well.
I think this cuts the clutter without accidently 93mb of anything.
What's you guys opinion? Does it breaks anything?

>>52635798
Yeah, now that's what I'm talking about

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>>52635621
>>52635725
Okay, here's the map of what I have so far (Or, at least some of it). It's a bit ugly but whatever.

>>52636472
I don't see the point in simplifying it to such a degree when you can simply not use it at all.

>>52636701
That's true, I completely scraped the wheel. I should've put it like that:
I'm trying to take the good stuff, like places, lore and their inhabitants, but putting it in another structure, fuck the wheel. and I'm wondering if it fucks up anything, because I'm not all that familiar with the workings.

>>52636484
Oh, that's clearer for me.
Does not!China has to go all the way to the south? I'm thinking splitting it up in two, with a highly contested border along the Red River could spice things up, settling the dispute one way or another could be a nice story arc.

>>52636925
That could be interesting, for sure. I think I'll do that in my next revision of the map (I still need to add in a bunch of stuff, obviously. I don't see any need for it to be united, at the moment. The only thing I'm really certain on is the Not!Siberian empire and the Not!Tibet mountain republic/empire/commune/whatever.

>>52632121
I like all of the above really, and I like it weird. I really want to just combine the lot so that there are angels and demons and abominations are they're all very Lovecraft in design, some as agents of higher powers. I also maintain that the idols of worship of these powers don't necessarily correspond with the actual appearance of the entity.

>>52636788
Why are you at all concerned with the mechanics of D&D if you're making your own setting?

If you are conlanging, how do you handle handle words that have a very specific origin? The word "narcissistic" that comes from Greek myth for example; do you use it, trash it, replace it or make a new point of origin?

>>52636472
I have a similar concept for my own world, except it's all in an Otherworld that bleeds into this one, and it's very Lovecraft inspired.

First thing it breaks is spells and abilties like Plane Shift which literally shifts you into another plane. Does that spell still exist, or is it now a glorified teleport? What about spells who require you to be on the same plane as your target? Are you mechanically considered on the same plane despite you being on the slops of Mount Celestia and your target in the middle of the Desert of Elemental Fire? What about transitive planes like Ethereal and Astral? How do powers that interact with them function?

>>52639374
I'm not that creative and my group is very used to FR, so I'm taking some of my ideas, mixing with bits and pieces of well-established stuff to make something that's mine but is still familiar.


>>52639640
Good questions.
Teleport has a chance of going awry, and can't take you across planes, while Plane Shift is more reliable and takes you from material to immaterial and vice versa. So I think both spells would remain useful and maintain their niches.
For the spells, I'd make the divide in material and immaterial. Then since in this example Mount Celestia would be in the immaterial while the Desert would be in the material, they're considered in different planes. And also have Gods being able to veto spells being cast or affecting someone or something in their dominion, to represent the control they exert over it.
The Astral plane would be the main component of the immaterial, like vacuum between star systems, while the Ethereal would be pretty much scraped since there's no more inner planes. I think I could just change things that interact with the Ethereal to interact with the Astral instead.

How did you manage it in your world?

>>52640586
Since in my world it's an Otherworld that overlaps in places, there are corresponding locations in the Otherworld that represent different planar places.

The Elemental Planes however i've done away with. The Elements are the substance of the world, and so they emerge from the world. Elementals are usually conjured forth or emerge naturally. The Ethereal Plane is the Space Between. You travel between matter, and extra dimensional places and pocket dimensions are found here. It's still technically in a material realm, just fit into the Space Between.

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Could some anon look over these plate tectonics and the resulting continents? I know a few things are out of place, but if there are any glaring errors, I'd appreciate help figuring them out.

Red - Divergent
Blue - Subduction (Side with dots is being subducted)
Green - Transform
Purple - Convergent

>>52641281
Looks mostly fine to me.

Maybe add a few hot spots to get some volcanic chains like Hawaii.

A couple of things, though. The convergent boundary on the south west continent looks more like it should be a transform fault wit that bend being the only part that converges forming a couple of mountains. So maybe make that boundary a bit straighter. Also in that same continent where the purple line meets the blue line there's that peninsula which doesn't look natural for some reason. Maybe because it's too close to the divergent fault so that land would have to be pretty young unless that plate changed directions not long ago. Personally I'd move the plate boundary so that that piece of land is on the plate to the west, would also mesh well with changing that convergent boundary to a transform fault.

I could probably nit-pick some more things that jump out but they're minor enough that it doesn't matter.

>>52641503
Thanks anon.

Yeah, I'll add some hotspots and change the shapes of the continents into something less rough. I think I probably didn't take plate age into account nearly enough in general.

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>>52641281
Oh yeah, one more thing. Divergent boundaries are usually formed of straight lines and 90-degree angles, visually, like a series of steps. Think of a bunch of divergent boundaries with transform faults instead of a a single unbroken line.

Like the "transform plate boundary" in this picture.

You can see it well on google maps if you go the oceanic ridge in the Atlantic, particularly between Africa and South America.

>>52641649
Thanks again anon. Do you have any advice for mapping out topography, aside from making land higher wherever plates are colliding? I'm always at a little bit of a loss once I get a fair way away from mountains and aren't quite sure what an area's geologic past has been.

>>52641865
I always struggle with areas away from mountains myself.

Generally I start with new mountains, on plate collision boundaries, then older mountains from previous collisions that are eroding away already (like the Appalachians and Atlas mountains).

Since in general, the older piece of land is, the flatter it's going to be, I usually try to label areas by rock age. Erosion and gravity tends to flatten things out. The higher something is, the more aggressive is erosion there. So oldest places are more regular in height while middle aged places look very eroded, in places like white noise (again, Appalachia) or in places like trees (fjords, new zealand, etc), and new places are jagged and high. That's the rule of thumb I go by, then I sprinkle some hot spots and volcanic activity, and then I leave it at that.

Don't go into too much detail at the start, fill it out as you need it for your players so you can be flexible.

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>>52596673


Hey guys, I made my worldbulding sheet FORM FILLABLE... hopefully it works ok, figured I'd post it in case anyone finds it useful. If you want anything changed/added let me know, it's just something I did because I wanted to mess around in inDesign. I've also got the pdf split up if anyone wants like... just the 'government' page or anything.

This is pretty fucking cool anon! I'd nominate it for the next OP.

How do you decide on names and basic info for Gods? I can't seem to get past the most broad strokes. I mean, like, name of pantheon broad.

I need a safe home base for the players that's near a bunch of interesting stuff. I also need that home base to be an emphatically boring place with no adventure to be found.

I'm considering putting their home tavern in the middle of a squabbling feudal clusterfuck, in a tiny fiefdom ruled by an overpowered lord, who married a spirit of pacifism (spirits are solid and roughly human, this is still a weird thing to do) and settled down. He used to be an adventuring druid, she saps the desire to fight from anyone she can see. Nobody is simultaneously spirit-wise enough to resist that and stupid enough to face a druid on his home turf, and nobody who is powerful enough to overcome both of them gives a shit about this tiny fiefdom.

I'm always a bit nervous about powerful NPCs though. Is this going to warp the campaign in some way I don't expect?

How can I make my gods more Lovecraft in design?

>>52645570
Make them less Anglo-Saxon.

>>52645608
Explain?

I don't understand what makes a god anglo-saxon or not.

>>52645614
Lovecraft was a huge racist and basically anything that wasn't English/Anglo-Saxon in origin fueled his nightmares.

Advice?

I am making a fairly generic fantasy world, and will ask my players to make fairly mundane medieval types of characters.

The idea is that the world is relatively "normal" as you'd expect of a standard fantasy world.

The plot begins with otherworldly brings interfering with the status quo. Beings nobody in the world knew even existed.

How much information should I make sure they have before the game starts? I have a few changes, like a small pantheon and their (assumed) effect on the world, as well as a rough and brief overview of the country they are in. But should I just make short work of the majority of the explanation by saying "generic fantasy world"?

I am kind of hoping to spend most of my time coming up with the new threat, and leaving most of the background as a "You should know this already" kind of thing.

>>52643265
Thanks a bunch, I find this is a very nice way to organise your notes and present them to new players.

>>52643265
Great effort, but I'm afraid it's only useful to describe the standard fantasy monocultures.

>>52646897
>should I just make short work of the majority of the explanation by saying "generic fantasy world"?
Why not? I instantly know what to expect when I hear "generic fantasy world", and I'm usually right. The problem is that this description doesn't sound very inviting.

What's a good "fantasy"-sounding name for a magical force field-like thing?

The main conflict in the world I'm building is a war between two supernatural races, an abstinent, orderly one, and a decadent, chaotic one. Both use their own forms of magical energy that is somewhat distinct from "neutral" or "natural" magic, usually to conjure a protective field that can either block or partially absorb (usually the latter, to conserve magical energy) the energy/impact of most attacks.

Said magic fields are somewhat inspired by AT fields from Evangelion, so I currently refer to them as "ASC (Ascetic) fields" for the orderly race and "SYB (Sybaritic) fields" for the chaotic race, respectively, as placeholder names, but I would like to have more fantasy-sounding names for them, as the world/setting I'm building is mainly a medieval/renaissance fantasy setting.

>>52647437
Arcaegis

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>>52646897
>>52647426
>Build ranger for "generic fantasy world"
>Expect to fight goblins, orcs, etc in forests and shit so make them favored enemies
>Fight nothing but aberrations in non-euclidean space
Sometimes it's good to let them know

>>52647576
That's the point...

>>52647437
Ascetic and Sybaritic sound fine, if not a little alchemical. I'd suggest you replace field with something like hex or the likes.

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If anyone uses the file related saderan tutorial I figured out a neat trick for better mountains. I'll post it in a second with a link to a relevant file.

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>>52648565

Firstly as always, ignore the river guide in Saderan and follow this one:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwYUexL0zGS_MGFQNlk0dktNR2s and http://imgur.com/a/7mwR8 for the abridged version.

Secondly, what you do in short is:

-Create a second PSD. I'm not sure if the resolution matters save being large enough to let the filter-render-cloud generate enough cloudiness. For reference my world map is 4200x3800ish. My workshop psd is 2000x2000.

-Open your main map of the saderan tutorial. Move the window to the side, drag the mountains layer (both the mask and the texture/pattern) over to the workshop PSD.
-Add a terrain base that is just a normal layer with the color of the dirt/land in saderan.
-From the mountain layer's mask, render cloud and then render difference cloud.
-Control + L gets you to levels. White are peaks, black is no mountain. More you move black input the more sharp the mountains get as the land is eroded from the outside in (since white causes the peaks)

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>>52648660

-Find mountains in the workshop you like.
-Lasso tool, set feather to 5-10.
-Circle the mountain you like, giving it a fair bit of berth. The general mountain chain in the template is what matters, doesn't have to be perfect. See pic.
-Make sure you have the cloudy black/white layer mask selected when you copy, not the pattern one.
-Copy, go to the saderan tutorial map you have.
-Click the layer mask of the mountains tab then alt click it so the screen is now a black/white cloudy layer. Paste

Now I don't like how this chain looks because it's not narrow enough, but you get the idea. It gives you the irregularity of the cloud generation rather than having you paint it meticulously by hand. You still should paint by hand, especially around the edges but the feather lasso helped avoid the issue of a sharp divide between the copied mountain and the non-mountain (or even other mountains you painted by hand or pasted).

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwYUexL0zGS_WG9lNHktb0JWUlk the workshop file.

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What does your screen look like when you're worldbuilding?

Pic related is mine

>>52596673
>>What Organizations exist in your setting?
You have the Unions and the Guilds of which include prominently:
The Bloodbound
Union of Imperial Steelworkers
GreatToro Charter Company
International Magicians Guild
International Mechanics Guild
Dragons of Labor

As well as the Church of the Palatinate

To name the ones I fleshed out
>>How exclusive are they?
Depends, but usually pretty exclusive
>>What tenets do they hold?
Generally?
Unions: Advocate for Workers rights and promot Fantasy not!Socialism

Guilds: Preserve the traditional system in which their members have exclusive rights and privileges in an increasingly modernizing society.

The Palatinate: Advance the teachings of the Church as written by their founder, Jangradar the Herald; who believed that all of the various Gods and beliefs of the world are all just different expressions of The One Being.

>>What are the consequences of leaving/Betraying the organization?

Unions: You can leave, but betrayal usually results in bad things happening to you to varying degrees.

Guilds: You can technically leave, but the paperwork involved makes it not worth it. Also, they will usually attempt to mindwipe you so their secrets don't get out. Betrayal results either in Death or Imprisonment, depending on the degree of the crime.

The Palatinate: You can't leave, you are considered part of the Church forever. Betrayal usually results in execution by law or by assassin.

>>52643265

Cool man, saved

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>>52648803

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>>52649454
>calling someone autistic in /wbg/
I'm probably one of the least autistic people in here, and that isn't even meant offensively to the others.

>>52647124

I definitely had fantasy in mind when creating it, but I tried to have 'race/culture' etc so that it could be used for less fantasy/magic settings, and a lot of it could be used for SF or something. Is there a specific thing you'd rather see that might apply to your genre more? I'd be happy to change/add to it, or make it more 'generic.'

>>52650966


and while I'm hanging out, here are some map resources-
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzS5fqP5rugESzk0T0tBUEdsVHM
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzS5fqP5rugEWVdqcWM0MWFYeUE


and uh..
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzS5fqP5rugEcnVpVGJyRUp3b3M
yea!

>>52648803
It seems that a lower decimal number is a better combat outcome and their difference describes how lopsided the war was, but what's the formula? I'd assume it takes both the number of troops and a random roll into account, but what about technology levels, different tactics and army compositions?

>>52648803
What program is this? How are you simulating all this shit?

>>52652319

Top left: Gimp
Top right: Notepad
Bottom left: Chrome or Firefox or something
Bottom right: Spreadsheet.

Also dude while that's commendable I would urge you to not get caught in the weeds with too much details if you're trying to take it somewhere to a story or Pnp. If it'st just worldbuild to worldbuild, feel free to continue.

I like those political map layouts. Makes me feel like I need to decentralize mine more.

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>>52653402
>Top left: Gimp
>Top right: Notepad
>Bottom left: Chrome or Firefox or something
>Bottom right: Spreadsheet.
What this anon said.

>Also dude while that's commendable I would urge you to not get caught in the weeds with too much details if you're trying to take it somewhere to a story or Pnp. If it'st just worldbuild to worldbuild, feel free to continue.
I do the worldbuilding just for my own enjoyment, but I might one day use this world for some campaign or something.

>I like those political map layouts.
Thanks :). Here's a (pretty outdated) gif of the first part of the history I generated.

>>52652276
It's not a very realistic or optimal system. First I roll for how much manpower each country is able to muster. Then bonuses, such as tech, culture, religion etc. are added to the manpower. The percentage of the troops of the attacker is calculated, and rounded to two decimals. Then I roll 1d100 to get a random number. if it's lower than the percentage, the attacker wins. If it's higher, the defender wins.

I understand this might be confusing as fuck when I explain it like this, but I don't know how else to say it.

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>>52634849
Thanks for the note, I'll be considering it a bit.

>>52635798
Mostly it was shorthand, and I kinda agree with you, at least how D&D settings usually represent them.

>>52645570
Do you mean in how they behave or how they look? Behavior and attitude to mortals is more important, I think, but as for visual looks, I'd probably go for the short of interpreted. It's more about how living creatures interpret them, while their physical true form is more strange and exotic. Perhaps vestigial, if there are other levels of existence in the setting.

>>52646897
If it is mostly generic, perhaps just mislead them by doing sort of generic FR/Greyhawk shit with somewhat spooky undercurrent?

>>52649576
>I'm probably one of the least autistic people in here
Allow me to disagree.

>>52655825
>Do you mean in how they behave or how they look?

Behaviour wise I have the simplest motivation is that they want to sleep. Appearance-wise i'm not sure what makes the distinction, blatantly inhuman shapes and forms?

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I made a map for the campain that am DMing for the first time using Hexographer. In my setting, almost all of the dnd races are joined in a united kingdom, where the ruler has a final word, but is helped by a council that consists of 5 "senators" that represent each race.
I have usual guilds for the classes, like Warriors or Thieves Guild. There are also some special places, like eastern dragonborn city that is built on a volcano, or an island with a magical city on it, where spellcasters have to be registered.
It is all still fresh, and may be changed.
Pic related.

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>>52648803
Mostly just this, but lately I have started using a phone to keep notes since there's too much stuff to reliably remember

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>>52657112
Formally human, casually inhuman (to varying degree)?
That's what I'd go with.

>>52655825
>if there are other levels of existence in the setting.

This works well with the thing i'm stealing straight from the Rules Cyclopedia where everything in downgraded a dimension in the Astral Plane.

Mortals perceive themselves in 2 dimensions, and movement is 2-dimensional. Something like teleport instead acts as flight. Outer Planes and their inhabitants appear 3-dimensional, including the gods.

>>52657153
I carry a notepad and a pen with me, since it is a lot faster than typing on my phone, but I agree, there can be too much to remember.

>>52657153
Looks nice, the text sizing reminds be of mount and blade.

>>52657281
funny enough this started as a mount&blade mod 3 years ago, but it's far too big and decentralized for that now

I'll throw in the names of my setting's nations, how do these sound?
>Sirasean Empire
>Valoroth Republic
>Neshan
>Penmarth
>The Badlands
>Aviran Confederacy
>Allenfel Kingdom
>Nuskovo Empire
>Balkosan Empire
>Tirithil Kingdom
>Emusan
>Horiskal
>Dunova
>Sirata
>Belumar

If Dwarfs play games like Tafl what do Elves play? Cards?

It's strange how I want to focus on my settings board games rather than their economics.

>>52657398
>Sirasean Empire
Nice

>Valoroth Republic
Nice

>Neshan
Nice

>Penmarth
a weird sort of nice

>The Badlands
doesn't fit in, I see Australia when I think of this

>Aviran Confederacy
bad

>Allenfel Kingdom
alan fell

>Nuskovo Empire
nice

>Balkosan Empire
nice

>Tirithil Kingdom
meh

>Emusan
emu-san please be gentle~ (bad)

>Horiskal
not good for a nation, but good for a person/region/people/etc

>Dunova
see above

>Sirata
meh

>Belumar
nice

>>52658389
on second thought I like Dunova

>>52657398
>>52658389
While he's at it, I'd like to put mine out there as well.

>HARTHEN EMPIRE
>>Motherland:
>>>Harthlon

>>Provinces:
>>>Lower Vauln
>>>Liffen
>>>Nyrel
>>>Variel
>>>Knobrim
>>>Estharia
>>>Navos
>>>Gavonia
>>>Iphross

>OTHER NATIONS
>>Skaaras
>>Vauln
>>Cass-Duhr
>>Stoncemir
>>Dwen
>>Brecia
>>Zelkland
>>Aulkoris
>>Espius

Hey anons,

What are some ways to have Imperialist rulers seem like the good guys? Or at least morally ambiavalent

>>52657763
For some reason I actually see them playing tabletop RPGs. Not exactly as we have them in modern times, but at least loosely ruled games with shared/cooperative storytelling at work.

>>52658848
Don't make them assholes. At least not all of them. Let there be a few assholes but make a point of it that there are competent and good people in charge that keep these types down.

Create a big threat that pretty much requires a large, unified empire to deal with it. Ends justify the means basically.

Make sure to show that the empire does good apart from being the obvious counter to the big threat. Less comical version of the resistance discussion in Life of Brian essentially. The Empire brings security, wealth, infrastructure, education, ....

>>52657398
>Sirasean
Might be good but it reminds me of sriracha sauce

>Valoroth
Its ok. It just makes me think of "Azeroth" and "Valor" slapped together

>Neshan
Cool, sounds like an South Asian style country

>Penmarth
Not bad

>The Badlands
Not too creative. You can do better

>Aviran
Avian with an r

>Allenfel
Meh, kinda generic. I don't mind it but it might work better for a region of a country, like a county/barony/province. Even then I just think of a guy named Allen though

>Nuskovo
Cool, brings to my imagination some cold, Russian-like place

>Balkosan
Its ok, but a bit close to the real-world "Balkans"

>Tirithil
Very generic Tolkienesque-fantasy style name

>Emusan
Respectable Japanese bird of great size

>Horiskal
I don't mind it, seems better for a town than a nation to me though

>Dunova
Its good, but I think again it would work better for a town though, maybe one in Nuskovo

>Sirata
Sriracha again.

>Belumar
Pretty good.

>>52658848
>>52658969
also idealism...have the rulers be in it because they believe in the Empire and what it stands for, the good, the bad, everything. Have them acknowledge the bad, but in their eyes it is far outweighed by the good and a necessary evil. This is of course provided that the Empire itself is at least somewhat good, or at least not a total fuckup.

>>52615763
space cowboy

>>52615763
That style of retro futuristic that was popular in the 70's and 80's, where everything is futuristic and high tech by the current standards, but old and used by the settings. Like how Alien did it.

>>52645219
Sounds like a good idea, roll with whatever punches your PCs give you.

I need something to expand on my giants. Right now, I have the big stupid kind that used to work with ogre tribes to rule the primitive humans, until the humans worked together and overthrew the ogres and giants, enslaving them. They'd been enslaved until about 200 years ago, when a new religious cult took over, which forbid slavery. Many of the newly freed giants became devout followers.

And that's about it.

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Put together a rough partial draft of a world map for a campaign I'm gonna run soon, was hoping to get some starting feedback on geography and such and some advice on filling the gap in the middle.

Hexes are 24 miles across, I was going for roughly spain-to-germany length for a decent variety of cultures and kingdoms without being massive and spaced out.

So there's the western mountain range that goes all the way up the spine of the continent. The southern half of the western area is the continent's breadbowl, a low grassy region that's heavily farmed and populated by the Low Humans in my setting, the grubby medieval dudes.

East of that the continent is rifting, with broken rocky land and volcanoes, and the tan area northwest of that is roughly yellowstone-ish, some forests and lots of hot springy volcanic territory where this whole hot spot is splitting the continent. That's where my not-elves live, who are just gonna be a subrace of humans who've been altered by the magic boiling up in the springs all over the region.

The little gray spot is where a volcano went up krakatoa-style and killed a giant section of land, along with most of the setting's not-dwarves.

East of that, no idea. I might move the rift valley east or the eastern section west. The eastern section is colliding with the west, pushing up the mountain range.

I haven't added in rivers or drainage or civilization borders or anything yet, just hashing out basic geography. Any suggestions where I'm fucking things up? Or suggestions on what to put there in the middle green section?

How is day-to-day business conducted by the citizens of an empire in the terminal stages of its decline but still probably has at least a decade or two before total collapse?

>>52660597
Why is it declining?

If it's going the way of Rome, probably business as usual, just probably with alternate currencies, and increasingly out of the cities.

Rome's urban population declined as birth rates collapsed and gold fled the empire, leading the population to steadily leave the city where there was no work and no money and become self-sufficient farmers. As the troops were pulled out of distant territories and Rome lost control of them the people living there just went back to what they did before Rome was around, which was mostly the same shit but without paying tributes.

>>52660304
Are they otherwise culturally integrated? Could they work jobs where being 8-20ft tall is an advantage, like in security, construction or resource-gathering industries?

>>52660726
Okay, so we have a WRE-style decline, but what about

>A Bronze-Age collapse
>An Eastern Roman Empire-style decline
>A Ming Dynasty-style decline
>A Mughal-style decline
>A Qing Dynasty-style decline
>An HRE-style decline
>An Ottoman-style decline

>>52660597
Almost nobody in a collapsing empire will really know that it's collapsing. Even among the political class, many will be deluded about their future.

>>52660810
More or less. There's still bias, but the take-over be the current religious movement wasn't subtle. The previous empire was destroyed by giant flaming death when the goddess, Pyrisia, arrived. So less social reform, and more "The goddess is pissed and took out a 4th of the continent, let's try not to do that again."

>>52661144
Maybe some sort of Giant/Ogre sharecropping? like human nobles own the land, but lease out parcels for giants to mine or log, but biases keep them in poverty.

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>>52615006

Back again for some more Animal People/Beast Folk

This time we got Pterodactyl People.
They're annoying as hell, they can fucking FLY so they're EVERYWHERE, and they have an outspoken affinity for using wyvern and dragon bones in all of their arts and crafts.

If they weren't skinny and dumb they might pose a threat to civilized society- mostly they're just air-borne thieves.

I'm torn between two forms of cosmology for my fantasy campaign. One is having to travel through the Ethereal Plane also known as the Space Between to get to any other plane, and the Astral Plane and beyond exists in a higher dimension that ours, so 3d is 2d there and 4d is 3d.

The other is the world is not a sphere or globe, but a many faced shape in which all other planes intersect at their sides. One could said to the edge of their world and perilously sail into another, or travel far beneath the ground and come out on another planar face. This way they're literally planes. The Astral Plane is now the Sea of Night, which the world floats in, and you can sail on it by boat if you reach the horizon at dusk.

>>52596673
What's some good spooky stuff to put in a jungle?

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Artfag here, I have an arid world with only one large ocean and several lakes being its primary water-sources, where should i put the majority of plant life? i want only minimal green to sand and rock ratio.

>>52665386
the viet-cong

Lads, if the civilization in my setting was started by one group of gods giving mortals fire, how many different cultures can I realistically introduce? And when I say different cultures I mean Aztec to China different, not Spain to Germany.

>>52665720
BTW, I meant "giving fire" metaphorically not literally.

>>52665720
You could convolute it with collapses and disasters so that the ancient civilizations fracture and split into different cultures that have different interpretations of the origin. One thing I can think of in the real world is how we perceive Satan to have horns. I haven't seen much information on this topic, but I would guess that the reason Satan has horns is because Bael and Moloch, ancient god who received human sacrifice, were depicted as having horns. The Romans were not fond of it and IIRC used this as propaganda against Carthage. Memories of Bael could have easily been twisted into the mythology of Satan.

My setting has many different cultures isolated from one another but the larger ones have a somewhat unified sense of mythology because a physically and reproductively inferior race populated Earth long before the humans, and humans take that race's art and historical records very seriously. Everything has been destroyed, abandoned, and rebuilt enough that no one really knows how old civilization is or how much of recorded history can even be believed.

>>52665386

Look up African myths. Off the top of my head, these are not african myths per se but spooky stuff could be were_____s, nagas, demons, I find the kinds of missing link gorilla apes you often saw in Conan/Hyboria stuff to be pretty spooky. Think Demon gorilla

There's another conan story on a coastal jungle with a "Black man". Not black as in negroid per se but more an unnaturally black humanoid thing that tends to represent the devil or a demon or something. Scarlet letter had it as the devil. So think an unnaturally smooth, like a walking statue of obsidian that stalks the player/reader/characters.

>>52660870

It would help to contextualize just what you mean with those examples. While they convey a visual theme, think about a bite-sized few sentences to a paragraph or two at most synopsis. Will give you example in a post

>>52666551

A bronze Age collapse involves the steady and unrelenting destruction of an existing political and world order. The world becomes smaller, poorer and more provincial, brutish in many cases. Less cosmopolitan and certain and sure. Egyptian writing shortly afterwards I recall has some older guy or priest lecturing about how it's footloose and bad for you to go dating outside of the village.. The destruction is economic, social, military, environmental.

An ERE/Ottoman collapse is internalized, a last gasp of a long delayed terminal illness. Peripheries and subject nations fall off like gangrenous limbs. The world is not shattered like in the bronze age collapse, the world is actually conspiring to speed up and take advantage of the collapse. Not barbarians at the gate in the sense of primitive foes I guess 1204 would have more of that though but rather foes of equal parity or even superior quality. The house is rotten from within, suffering a listless and impotent populace and court-intrigue greedy aristocracy and entrenched factionalism. There is likely an ideological struggle between innovators who believe emulation of the outsiders is key (Young Turks, Tanzimat) and those who are puritanical and believe a return to the old ways will solve it.

I dunno Ming.

I assume Qing is much the same as ERE/Ottoman. World is conspiring against you, decadent and rotten aristocracy, subject nations and peripheries are falling off, there is the added bonus of a highly motivated and restive populace adding to the chorus of innovation vs reactionary (Taiping and Boxer rebellion).

Mughal I am not as familiar with except a possible theme is too-many-enemies and overextension. Aurangzeb presided over the height of the empire in territory but also was the last emperor before the whole pie fell apart.

>>52660870
>HRE-style decline
I'm not sure you can pick any period and say that this was the decline of HRE. It existed in a terminal stage of decline for centuries and managed to be somewhat successful and efficient at that.

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Rate my WIP elf abugida.

Also any preferences towards the last part?

>>52667868
>custom alphabet
>con lang
Anon, I love you.

I like the 'killer' stroke idea. It seems a logical extension of the rest.

>>52668100
Whenever I post my languages and writing systems I get ignored.
Fucking 4chan.

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>>52668486
Well, /wbg/ is different. You get ignored for lots of reasons here!

Pray, tell us about your lang(s)? I might respond intermittently, but I keep an eye out on here.

What do ((you)) like when it comes to spaceships? Visually i mean, im trying to establish a visual language for some stuff.

>>52669807
I tend to vacillate between Star Wars Star Destroyers, Halo Gun Ships, and Stargate Tau-ri Capital Ships.

>>52669885
I like the simplicity of the imperial ships, iot comes down to blocky, angular or curved with spessships if you ask me

>>52658918
Might work. I was thinking maybe a Yu-Gi-oh clone, but maybe I could mix it with Settlers Of Catan.

Related question what kind of sport could you play in a Dwarfish settlement? Just wrestling?

>>52669807
Depends on their function
an intergalactic empire fighting a losing war will have blocky, modular and monotone ships. An enterpreneur could have some luxury yaht all aerodynamic and shit. Some other might have some crazy 40k-like design (shape-wise, not in size), as vacuum is more forgiving on flimsy parts than atmo.

For human civillian vessels I go with a standard rocket-like main block in the middle, helm at front, as it's compact and simple to manufacture, with the added benefit of limited atmosphere capability.

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>>52670043
I think i have something in mind for humans, variation in design based on what sector the ship is from but ill try to unify some of the visuals. The alien ships will be blocky or sleek im not really focused on them. I think quarian ships are cool looking, ill use them and some of the stuff from no mans lies as inspiration.

Ok so... an organization that is adamantly against mages, wizards, warlocks, witches, all those magic societies. They're not exactly against magic, but rather the shady, and often lawbreaking groups that arise to "train" or "teach" others in the use of magic. So they're not against magic, the usage of magic for personal gain, and have no qualms with using it to augment your strength as long as it is to defend the realm. They take children uniquely gifted in magic and train them as knights, and masters oversee their training with spells with the product being magic knights who fight the enemies of the organization like an augmented knight. That's not hypocritical is it?

>>52671718
Sounds fine. Of course, there could be tinge in hypocrisy if you want to keep it more interesting, and different reasons for whatever they do withing the organization itself.

>>52657398
>>52658818
Since we're doing this now; I'll list their full names as they're known in setting and list them by the continents they're located on (also any interesting details about specific polities):

>>Uleria: The Northern Continent
>The Mo'Rum Potentate
>Dorok Horde
>Gothmaren Imperium
>High Kingdom of Skael
>The Clockwork Cities (a collection of city-states)
>Necropolis of Dundur
>Kingdom of Illuvan
>Realm of the Bandit King
>Iniluk Federation
>The Golden Empire
>High Clanlands

>>Dremerg: Snaking peninsula
>Gothmaren Imperium (Formally claims the entire peninsula)
>The Raider states (various pirate covens and villages)

>>Mashalle: Land of Great Toro
>Ungani Desert Nomads
>The Elder Chiefs of Great Toro
>Protectorate of Kostruma (Colony of Mo'Rum)
>Kingdom of the Great Apes (Intelligent Apemen)

>>Akko: Land of the Exiles
>Akkan Mageocracy
>

>>Zunbil: Shah's Domain
>Zunbilid Shahdom
>Free-city of Gomer

>>Zithraki: The Southern Continent
>The Golden Empire ( controls the Northern coast)
>The Palatinate (Theocracy)
>Dun Dun Confederacy
>The Dead Kingdom of the Half-men
>Principality of Zithrak (Lizardmen)
>Tribes of Mannerlyn
>Nassuan Republic (Controls the southern coast)

>>The Darkness (Underground)
>Great Xuun (city state)
>Agar-Than Empire

>>The New World: Unexplored land
>Nassuan Republic (Capital is located here).
>Various Skirati (bugmen) Tribes
>Keriti (Flymen) of Orshun'di (Theocratic Democracy)
>Thousand Goblin Isles (Nomadic Goblin tribes live here)

>plain ol' western European feudal kingdom based on France and England
>rich chivalry culture
>plottwist: the knights are all female
What do you think?

>>52669807
I like the designs from Star Wars and Homeworld: far from hard sci fi, but still looking like actual working machines, with bits and pieces sticking out.
Speratate design themes for separate factions are a bonus.

>>52672836
>plottwist: the knights are all female
For what purpose?

>>52672873
Subversion of gender stereotypes

>>52672903
Yeah, but why are they subverted? What can a woman bring to knighthood that a man cannot?

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>>52669807
Slow hulking chunks of metal with antennae and wires everywhere. No sense of symmetry or aerodynamics.

>>52672923
Nothing. That's just how things evolved in the setting. Like in many other high fantasy settings, all genders have exactly the same capabilities. Just the social norms differ from one society to another.

>>52673024
Well, not to offend, but that just seems lazy. If I were you, I'd give a lore reason why women were chosen over men, like having a Goddess of Love gift powers to her female worshipers to make them Knight-paladins of compassion.

Otherwise, it comes across as gimmicky

>>52673077
The setting is still in its infancy, so of course I'm going to come up with a good explanation. Thanks for your input.

>>52663862
Any thoughts on this?

>>52673024
>Like in many other high fantasy settings, all genders have exactly the same capabilities
then where do babies come from?

Males don't get pregnant, women do. A man can get a woman pregnant and then die the next day but the baby will live on. The woman needs to survive 9 months. She isn't expendable. It's why the human brain evolved so that men are more reckless and violent than women, who are naturally more cautious and submissive, which assists the survival of the species. It doesn't make sense evolutionary for females to be equally suited for violence when they have to put in more effort to reproduce, pregnancy is long and physically taxing.

>>52673133
Sorry, not trying to be an asshole here, I just hate when people choose to break convention without giving a very good reason why they choose to do so.

>>52673155
To expand on this, it obviously isn't the same for all species. Humans are very gender dimorphic because they are bipedal, which is a double-edged sword. It allows us much more physical freedom, exposed us to stimulation to further develop intelligence, and allowed us to live in pretty much any habitat and build incredible tools. On the downside, it's terrible for giving birth. Birth is extremely painful and dangerous for humans, but not so much for quadrupedal animals. We only carry one embryo at a time, while a lion can have around 4, and they only have a 3 month pregnancy, along with their quadrupedal form making it much easier to survive while pregnant. So, the lions don't experience as much gender dimorphism when it comes to strength.

>>52663862
>>52673138
Depends on what you're going for. It sounds like the second option actually allows for people to just stumble into another plane on accident, just by sailing to far. In the first one, you have to get to the Ethereal Plane first, which would be like space and the planes like planets.

>>52673155
There are animals where the females are much larger and stronger than the man, because they have to protect the young and carry them around.
How about this: There was a cataclysmic war in the past of the kingdom which killed off 90% of all men and effectively ended patriarchy and male-only military. Men were much, much more valuable than women in that time period, but a military was still needed. Thus the female knights were born.
Maybe they would swear a vow of chastity for 10 or 20 years and then, after serving the country as knights, settle down to raise offspring and pass their knowledge on to the next generation.
>>52673171
I actually legitimately appreciate the responses.

How cliche would it be to introduce an antediluvian civilisation that left nothing but remnants of their technology amongst ruins reclaimed by nature?

>>52673323
>How about this: There was a cataclysmic war in the past of the kingdom which killed off 90% of all men and effectively ended patriarchy and male-only military. Men were much, much more valuable than women in that time period, but a military was still needed. Thus the female knights were born.
That works. If there's that severe of an unbalanced gender distribution then there would definitely be many female soldiers, and it could carry on as a tradition however the amount of female soldiers would decrease over time.

>Maybe they would swear a vow of chastity for 10 or 20 years and then, after serving the country as knights, settle down to raise offspring and pass their knowledge on to the next generation.
Not the best choice biologically, if we say a female soldier starts at 18 then you're looking at births happening in their 30s. That significantly increases the risk of numerous mental and physical health issues in their children and can be overall detrimental to the child's health. It is much healthier to have children in the early-mid 20s.

>>52673417
Forgot to mention on the last point: a female knightly tradition could definitely become ingrained into the culture permanently but as the M/F ratio balanced out there would be fewer female knights. If it goes down far enough, then it wouldn't be necessary for retired femknights to reproduce, so you don't have to worry about age-related birth problems.

>>52673323
>Depends on what you're going for. It sounds like the second option actually allows for people to just stumble into another plane on accident, just by sailing to far. In the first one, you have to get to the Ethereal Plane first, which would be like space and the planes like planets.

I'm going for a more weird Lovecraft vibe. The closest would be Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and the Dreamlands, except that's the world.

>>52672836
Waifu shit.

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>>52669807
A giant dwarf head with a huge moustache and a castle on top, from which a hand clutching a war axe grows.

>>52667868
>Schwa
Good taste.

>>52673077
Or, alternately, all or most of the men were killed in a great war. The enemy wasn't defeated...

>mama grizzly mode activated...

Enemy is pushed back, ladies get the credit, knightly order ensues...

>>52615006

Nice Splatoon 2 promo art you got there!

Does anyone know what the average rate of movement was for sailing ships? Say, ancient to early medieval?

>>52675529
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/TAPA/82/Speed_under_Sail_of_Ancient_Ships*.html

No idea about medieval, though.

>>52672702
>Uleria
Good

>Mo'Rum Potentate
What's a potenate? Also sounds like someone asking for 'more rum' to me

>Dorok Horde
Dothraki Horde

>Gothmaren
Seems like its close to being good, but I'd replace the 'goth' prefix with something else

>Skael
Its alright

>Clockwork Cities
Not my cup of tea. Seems more like a colloquial name like "The Big Apple" is to New York, or "Hogtown" to Toronto. Too literal and not sounding like it emerged from cultural etymology, to me.

>Necropolis of Dundur
Dundur is ok. Necropolis could work but it is a little bit on the nose (I'm assuming this is some sort of undeady/necromantic type place)

>Illuvan
Feel I've heard it before. Kind of generic but I don't hate it

>Iniluk
Its ok. I'm assuming a northern !not-Inuit people live here?

>Golden Empire
See comment on Clockwork Cities

>High Clanlands
Works ok for a geographical region. But I wouldn't use it for any actual political state

>Dremerg
Not bad

>Raider States
Could use a name (Kilvare Raider States, for example)

>Marshalle
Sounds like "Marshall" or "martial" Francisized 20%

>Ungani
Like it

>Toro
Makes me think of Spanish bulls and bullfighting

>Akko and Akkan
Both are good on their own, but I wouldn't use both since they sound so similar. Then again our world has Iraq and Iran, so its not unrealistic.

>Zunbil and Zunbilid
Same thoughts as Akko and Akkan

>Gomer
Sounds more like a character but its not terrible

>Zithraki
Dothraki

>Palatinate
Would make "Palatinate" the type of governance rather than name of land

>Dun Dun Confederacy
I don't know a single group of players that wouldn't jokingly refer to this as "Dum-dum Confederacy" every session

>Dead Kingdom of Half-men
More of a descriptor/title or colloquial name again

>Zithrak
Its ok, sounds reptilian enough

>Mannerlyn
Mind your manners, Lynne!

>Nassuan
Good

>The Darkness
I'd go with "The Shadows" or something else, but that's just me

>Skirati
Good

>Keriti
Good

>Thousand Goblin Isles
Its ok

>>52675814
>>52672702
>Kostruma
Good
>Kingdom of the Great Apes
As a general rule, long descriptor names like this would be placeholder names that would quickly be shortened as time passes (ie. "Apeland"). Especially the longer its known of and the more foreigners speak about it. More likely, the ape natives would have their own name for it that foreigners would roughly adapt to their own pronunciation.

>Great Xuun
Good and sounds intriguing

>Agar-Than
Sounds a bit like The Agatean Empire from the Discworld series

What are some good ways to make familiar but non-human races such as dwarves, elves, and halflings seem less human without making them too creepy, weird or alien?

I've been thinking about what would unite humans of any race and ethnicity in similarity moreso than dwarves or elves to a race or ethnicity of human that lives in close proximity to them. Not including physical similarities of humans.

>>52657398
Throwing mine out there as well
>Successor States (Formally the Second Haesiatic Empire)
>Ulmite States
>Hasenplaatz States
>Novograde Republic
>City-State of Cordia
>City-State of Nikophae
>City-State of Basilia
>City-State of Noloteas
>The Ancient City of Kamyra
>The Red Hoard (They call themselves the Kasali Empire)

>>52675688
Hm. Well thanks for the link! It's already helping a great deal.

Response delayed by Sudden Life.

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Which style of hills and mountains looks better?

>>52677406
Left.

>>52677406
Left easily looks better anon, but part of the reason I think that is the difference in arrangement. Its hard to tell if the mountain and hill "brushes" are worse or not on the right since the left's composition looks way more natural and aesthetically compelling.

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>>52677551
How about this one? I tried to clip a piece of landscape for the right that looks more natural.

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>>52676644
Another ship question!

How large were the Chinese Treasure Ships? How large were their crews?

Pic unrelated.

>>52605755
>Guys, I'm making gods for my setting, and I need help coming up with names.
Stop what you're doing.

Do not make 'gods'.

Make religions. Maybe these religions have deities, but do not think much about the deities themselves. Think about the theology, the dogma, the church, all of that. That's what matters, that's what's interesting.

Absolutely no one is interested in a boring 'pantheon' where faith is just membership in some dumbass divine fanclub.

>>52677406
Disgusting naming sense. Go and look up actual town/village names for the appropriate culture and use those.

>>52678514
That's boring.

>>52665590
Majority of your vegetation would probably be in and around the coastal regions, and particularly dense around the lakes if they're freshwater.

>>52678580
It's not boring, it's good. What you're doing now comes off as the worst of genre fiction schlock, with absolutely no element of believability or immersion.

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R8 my roll20 setting for Godbound.

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>>52678692
clusterfuck/10

size your fonts you degenerate.

>>52678723
Only got a few fonts and sizes to pick from since this was made with roll20 tools.

>>52608601
Thigh plates, encorporate how the person fights into keeping their hips back. That or codpiece, maybe even have just a belt with chains dangling down to prevent damage.

I really think strapping metal to your thighs is the best bet and a chain belt would be best though to preserve movement.

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Added hex grid to current map. Unless I fucked my numbers of course I did, the Castian Island Belt or Castian Seas should stretch about 6,000 miles from East to West, and 3,300 miles from North to South. So the whole thing can fit between the far West coast of Africa and almost to Sri Lanka, as well as between the middle of the Sahara to Namibia.

It's meant to be just one part of the world, but it's effectively all that is currently Known by the belt's inhabitants.

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>>52679332
And for comparison.

>>52678601
Okay. Would there be less or more veg beneath the equator? If it helps to visualize this is supposed to be the planet they found around proxima

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>>52669807
An efficient design to complete all tasks it may face. Functional designs are always the most beautiful, after all.
>>52672928
I loved the Torus, but the Kestrel shall always remain first in my heart. Mostly because it was much easier to repair.

>>52678514
>not only using the most cancerous convention in all of worldbuilding, but actually trying to poison others with your sensibilities
Kill yourself, I really mean it.

>>52678692
>fantasy humans using broken European languages
Into the trash

>>52681122
>>52681142
>fantasy humans speaking some variant of George Lucasian garbled nonsense
The languages that exist sound like they do for a reason.

No matter what you say, "Yhlth", "Hryx", "Pava Nojis" and all the rest of this trash will never sound good. There is absolutely no linguistic consistency, nor any possibility of immersion when you have such literally juvenile naming sense mucking up your world.

>>52681158
And you have the imagination of a boulder and cry like a little bitch whenever dragged out of your frame of reference.

>>52681158

You know absolutely nothing, besides it has some mountaions, about his setting, buddy. Look up some cultures outside of Europe and NA and you'll find some trash names for cities and places too.

>>52681168
>>52681190
I use non-European cultures for civilizations all the time, but I /actually use/ those cultures and their linguistic heritage. Most places in the world aren't terribly creative in naming cities or countries, but it doesn't stand out as obnoxious or trite because those names are rooted in actual linguistic tradition.

What you're suggesting, that it's merely a 'frame of reference' problem, ignores the fundamental flaw here: that all these trash bin names came straight out of this faggot's ass, and can't have consistency since he's just vomiting meaningless syllables onto a page. It is the method of a complete amateur, novice, juvenile creator.

>>52681227
>Most places in the world aren't terribly creative in naming cities or countries
In countries with a real history, most place names aren't translatable at all, except from some ancient and dead language, and sound like meaningless gibberish.

>>52681306
Actually, in almost every country except those so uncivilized to not have adequate histories available, place names are entirely translatable, they're just highly simplistic. By modern linguistic standards, sure, they are distantly understood at best in most cases, but you don't have to go back that far to find the meaning.

>>52681158
Hryx sounds fantasy Slav as hell

Hr- exists in Eastern European place names and there's fucking towns called Krk, Crnac, Zrin and Trgovi in Croatia

Pava Nojis sounds cod-Hungarian given Hungary has Pápa, Baja and so on.

Yhlth is indefensible though

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I want to run an episode of my relatively well established scifi setting on the setting's Earth.

Now, how life on Earth is right now is not something I've given much thought. Its the birthplace of mankind, so it will always have some relevance I think, as a symbol if nothing else. Things that have happened up to the 'modern' day in the setting:
- Earth suffered mass flooding, catastrophes, and attendant wars etc. and nations rebuilt.
- Earth suffered a second round of this. Nations rebuilt but prioritised getting space infrastructure in place, leveraging soft sci-fi technologies that were clumsily developed. The first extraterrestrial colonisation took place immediately, using what was effectively a salvaged and repaired alien space craft on a one way trip to Aldebaran 65 light years away, and subsequently both Sol and Ald very slowly expanded within their own systems, and subsequently over the next few hundred years began using rather slow FTL drives (about 10c) to colonise and establish stellar states in surrounding systems, with basically no contact with each other.
- The two culturally divergent states come to blows in a 35 year long interstellar war, that eventually leads to a superweapon fatally damaging the capital world of Ald's state and a political reunification.
- The economic capital of EarthFed wasn't even Sol by this time, instead being Centauri. The unified Solar Dominion shifts capital to an unknown site and obfuscates everything, to prevent decapitation strikes against the new government.
- Another 80 years after, the Solar Dominion fights a relatively non-devastating contact war against AYY LMAOs that lasts 20 years. FTL drives are getting much, MUCH faster, to the point that anyone anywhere could go on a roadtrip to or from Sol if they wanted. The new FTL drives have a range limit, but its huge so there is still a diaspora.
- Another 10 years, and then the present.

Players have visited war museums, but I'm wondering what Earth would be like.

>>52681306
Actually, that's bullshit. Out of 7 towns in my region, only one has a meaningful name in modern German.

>>52681361
>Yhlth
Sounds Breton as fuck

>>52681361
>>52681390
Although I'd disagree that any of these names sound good even if you tether them to a particular language, the actual issue is that there's absolutely no believable circumstance whereby they are found so singularly and so compacted. A town with a Slavic name should be surrounded by a culture that is part of the Slavic linguistic tradition, and it should not be near such an alien linguistic tradition as whatever produces "Yhlth" in any case.

In truth, the author has no basis for these names, except maybe that he thinks they sound cool. That's why they're so unbelievable and so badly mismatched.

>>52681364
Sounds like Traveller. I'd expect Earth to either be like it is there, as a site of pilgrimage, or for it to be a well-kept 'garden' planet.

Not that space opera ever makes much sense.

>>52681364
With the nigh unlimited resources from asteroid and gas giant mining and all that reverse engineered alien tech earth would be doing quite well really. Think, all the stuff we do irl to learn about mars, venus and how to terraform them helps us understand and develop tech to aid the earth itself. If a botanist can successfully grow a potato in martian soil, imagine how much land could be turned to breadbaskets for entire continents. So after decades/centuries of space travel and exploration on top of having a war with another species who we would end up stealing/reverse engineering tech from we'd be fine, earth would look like something out of 70s/50s sci fi.

>>52681451
Always boggles my mind that space opera people can go:
>With the nigh unlimited resources from asteroid and gas giant mining

and conclude:

>earth would look like something out of 70s/50s sci fi.

Actually, with the nigh-unlimited resources of gas giant and asteroid mining, we'd just build orbital habitats where we can fully control the climate, gravity, and distribution of energy and resources in the most efficient ways possible, and have robots and nanomachines do everything for us.

The notion of colonizing other planets for resources is just so baffling to me. Even worse is this virus-like mentality that we should just continue breeding and producing for breeders endlessly, when we can achieve utopian, post-scarcity living conditions without so much as leaving our own solar system.

>>52681328
>>52681227

AUCKSCHUALLY, you sound elitist as fuck. You still know nothing of his setting, the history behind the names, anything. For example, Yhlth might for all we know be an alien city built next to a slav-inspired kingdom. Get it together, man, there is no reason for this kind of shitflinging.

>>52681496
In the case of my setting, a core conceit I had to lay down to justify planetary habitation was "a lot of things we think we know are wrong, human beings fucking lose it if they stay in space for too long due to real or imagined supernatural/mental problems".

I guess my questions about Earth are, while obviously Sol's space resources are substantive enough to provide for the local population for the centuries this is set after, what's its... feel I guess.

Like, the majority of everything that goes on is not happening anywhere near Earth, which means that they'd presumably have a good economic incentive to provide some kind of service or tourism economy for other planets, and I'm not sure what precisely that would be.

A verdant garden world is certainly option given the rich, human compatible biodiversity available there. But alternatively, I dunno whether some kind of goofy Las Vegas / Waxworks museum feel where everyone rebuilt all the old landmarks and wonders of the world would be appropriate. Another angle I was considering was an Earth that is still under reconstruction centuries later as people dredge the old world from the depths, so you have a sort of Indiana Jones planet.

The actual reason that Earth is likely to make an appearance is that it's the physical locale of every oldest book in human history, which is particularly relevant for topics like occultism where people value the book itself as much as the text it has written in it, and a digital version is unlikely to be available.

I guess the question is I want some ideas for entertaining culture for Earth to have, where even though there's no particular reason to expect life to be *bad* there per se, it doesn't have any concrete reason to be relevant in a modern context, but at the same time it could never be a backwater planet, because it's Earth.

>>52681926
>economic incentive
That being... what, exactly?

>>52681496
People want to go to other planets because exploration and discovery etc.

>robots and nanos do everything

I hate this meme. So you want to be be fat and lazy mooching off someone elses civilization? When machines do everything its not human society anymore, look at everyone in benefits and in 'tha hood' there all stupid cunts who dont work, letting machines do everything and expecting people to wake up and become master poets and artisians because they dont have to work anymore is a baffling and frankly childish concept.

>>52681979
Even assuming that the bulk, unprocessed resources scarcity is resolved by virtue of access to space (Which I admittedly do lean on the side of in this setting, mining is a job for robots), there can still be a scarcity on processed resources, and odds are there's several important resources that the Sol system has a glaring lack of that would become more obvious once other systems are explored.

All of those aforementioned reverse engineered and stolen alien technologies come from elsewhere in the local cluster, and simply by virtue of its small place in the diaspora, even human invented technologies probably come from elsewhere. These would demand some kind of exchange in goods and services from Earth to access. Unless Earthlings live like space-amish (entirely possible, they don't need heavy industrial infrastructure to maintain a livable habitat), they're going to need to export goods, or put forward a service economy of some kind.

>>52682148
>implying becoming a hedonistic idiot isn't the endgame for mankind
Achievement is overrated

>>52682148
>not consigning yourself to senseless toil
>wanting to become fat and lazy
The best option is the best option. You can whine about work ethic and 'honest labor' or whatever idiot Boomer bullshit you like, but it takes a damned fool to put humans on the job when you can do it with automation.

>>52682270
>processing
Automation.
>resources lacking in the solar system
Nope, not really. Even for weird exotics not present in our system, we don't send people and pickaxes, we send robots.

Going places for nonmaterial purposes is all well and good, but don't pretend as if 'interstellar trade/economics' makes a damn lick of sense.

>>52682347
You did avoid answering the issue of service and IP trading as an interstellar economy though. Particularly given a high degree of automation leading to devaluation of bulk resources, it seems like the sort of thing you wouldn't give away easily. Why tell everyone about this weird trick you figured out about alien holograms for free when you could demand a vacation on a coral reef in exchange? An economy would still exist, just that the "resources" being traded at anything beyond local scale would be a little unusual by the standards of a modern economy.

As far as economic bread and butter, robots have, and for the foreseeable future will have, minimal problem solving ability, so even in a fully automated industry your foremen and overseers are still human, unless you are running a factory that deals entirely in outputs from other factories to minimise the odds of any surprises.

It isn't enough to support a good number of working individuals, but if you spread human industry over a wide enough distance (Literally interstellar distances), you end up with at least a few dozen people whose employment is an absolute necessity even for run of the mill, small scale operations on a remote world.

>>52682713
Even if I grant you everything here, and I wouldn't, it still doesn't excuse the no doubt archaic and bloated SPACE CAPITALISM which you're actually using in setting.

A handful of programmers and engineers, and that's a maybe, per automated resource collection/processing vehicle does not an interstellar economy make. Nor can arbitrary hypercapitalist frivolities like 'intellectual property' and 'the service economy' in any way support the existence of BIG SPACE OPERA EMPIRE.

Realistically, these people fracture into communistic habs and fleets, and fuck off to their own corners of, in all likelihood, local space, to engage in post-scarcity hedonism in peace. There's no good reason to work for some coercive, exploitative enterprise like a corp or government when everyone has access to essentially limitless energy, matter, and space.

Any of you guys ever run a campaign that was essentially monster hunter?
I have a group now that I think would enjoy a string of side quests hunting some more challenging monsters but I'm not sure how to go about it.
They don't play monster hunter so I think I could lift large chunks of the setup from the games outright, not sure about the monster selection though.

>>52682839
The reasoning for that in setting was that there is no stealth in space, and the government will hunt you down and fucking explode you if they find you engaging in post-scarcity hedonism. Or indeed, transhumanism. The reasoning being that since the only way for a government to exist is if shit like that can be considered an option, it needs to be constantly and actively erased from the social vocabulary. People don't even consider going off and being space commies because the idea never occurs to them, on account of noone having ever heard of anyone doing this. It isn't even so much about taxation as keeping people actively invested in the society and economy around them, at gunpoint if necessary.

The reason its easy to track down escapees is in turn because noone can survive in deep space, even in a hab, people and most animals go insane and die if they spend more than a few weeks outside the immediate orbit of a planetary body (for unknown reasons), so there's a pretty finite number of places to check.

>>52675814
>>52676056
Thanks, I'll be sure to change them and give them more unique names.

>>52675814
>What's a potentate?
It's basically a non-hereditary dictatorship with absolute power.

>>52675814

>Seems like its close to being good, but I'd replace the 'goth' prefix with something else
True, I don't like it much myself, but "Gothma" sounded too gutteral and brutish for what's supposed to be a civilized empire.
>Dothraki Horde
Yeah, I noticed that too when I was thinking of the name. It's supposed to be pronounced "Do Rock" thought.

>Too literal and not sounding like it emerged from cultural etymology, to me.

True, though I stuck with it because it's not really a unified region. I'll think of something more fitting in time.

>Necropolis could work but it is a little bit on the nose (I'm assuming this is some sort of undeady/necromantic type place)

It actually isn't, they're simply very reverent of their dead to the point that they wear the bones of their ancestors on their armor (thus it's a "necropolis" in that the dead "live on" through their ancestors".

>Kind of generic but I don't hate it
It's actually short for Illuvaritanita (Elvish fuckery), but I shortened it because that's a bit of a mouthful

>I'm assuming a northern !not-Inuit people live here?
You'd be correct. It's more like a Inuit-Siberia hybrid state though.

>See comment on Clockwork Cities
Tbh, I choose the name because it's basically the not!Golden Horde, and I couldn't just straight up copy the name.

>Works ok for a geographical region. But I wouldn't use it for any actual political state

Yeah, it's kind of the same thing as the Clockwork cities where the region isn't technically unified, so there's not one polity that dominates.

>Could use a name (Kilvare Raider States, for example)

Technically, the region is so sparsely populated and isolated that no real unified cultural identity exists. It's also formally controlled by the Gothmarens. I love the name though, I think I'll keep it.

>>52684869
>>52675814
>Sounds like "Marshall" or "martial" Francisized 20%

Lol, that's probably because the continent was named by the Illuvians, who are not!Gaulish-French Elves. It's just "Great Toro" to the natives.

>Both are good on their own, but I wouldn't use both since they sound so similar. Then again our world has Iraq and Iran, so its not unrealistic.

Well, the Akkans are kind of the only people to settle on the island-continent, so it made sense to name it that. Same with the Zunbilids.

>Sounds more like a character but its not terrible

That's intentional, it's named after one of the Zunbilid Shahs before it became a free city.

>>Zithraki
>Dothraki

Dammit, I'm just realizing how much I need to change now.

>Would make "Palatinate" the type of governance rather than name of land

I'll admit, it's pretty shamelessly ripped from the historic Palatinate region. The system of governance is actually similar though.

>I don't know a single group of players that wouldn't jokingly refer to this as "Dum-dum Confederacy" every session

Lmao, well it's technically pronounced "Dune-Dune" but I see your point.

Welp, I should probably get working on the names again before I forget to do so.

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>>52596673
I'm home brewing a setting based on of my love of history and philosophy and I decided to incorporate characters leveling up into it. This opened up a lot of questions on how a world with supermen would work, especially in regards to religion. I'm not sure if people would believe in a higher divine power when there's already powerful people on earth. Could a collectivist movement like communism occur in such a world? Would it intensify and lead to witch-hunts to find and strike down the ubermensch or or they become the center of religions?

>>52685103
Well first off, the Ubermensch be more of an ideal than an actual person. There can be people who approach that ideal, but they're still burdened by human limitations that prevent them from obtaining such a state. Id have the very idea of an Ubermensch differ greatly depending on the kind of person, but in general it represents a goal that a person sets for themself that encourages them to improve themselves for their own sake.

A collectivist movement could result out of resentment of the status that these Ubermensch have in society. It would be a textbook case of Society vs. Individual, with society seeking to subvert the individual towards their own ends, while the individual seeks to rise above society.

>>52612558
dont forget the fey-blooded
nor the fiend blooded

Im trying to craft a species of brutish alien/reptilian aliens for humanity to fight as our intro to the galactic community. I have a 'prototype' but i cant seem to make them look intimidating enough, what makes aliens like the krogan for example look tough or intimidating?

Also avian or reptile?

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My players generally aren't interested in an information dump or setting homework before the first session of an adventure.

I've been thinking of accomodating them by building adventures around the core concept of the characters waking up in an unknown world with no memories. They will all be the same race or species, and capable of recognizing each other as 'one of my kind' despite their lack of memories. They'll have to set out into the world in order to find food and shelter, and eventually find a raison d'être beyond that.

By that point, I hope to have been able to throw enough varying hooks at them to find out what they're interested in playing.


I've also thought about a possible variation on their character origin. The characters will be built as everyday people from our world in the year of our lord Yahweh 201X. I'll briefly describe a snippet of their boring, everyday life before moving on to a world-ending nuclear apocalypse that ends all life on earth. I hope to be able to paint a vivid enough picture of the sensation of dying in a world-encompassing fiery holocaust.

After that, they wake in an unknown world with no recollection of how they got there. The last thing they can recall is having the flesh blasted off of their bones, but they seem to be completely uninjured, if a bit tired and hungry. And what were supposed to be the charred ruins of civilisation are an inexplicable verdant forest, lush field or sunny beach.

Is there anything about this that sounds either appealing or unappealing to you? How would you change that, if necessary?

>>52673417
>>52673442
All fair points. There would definitely be a decrease in numbers over time as necessity fades and more duties could be taken up by men again.
The birth thing is also true. The world I'm working on is gonna have more widespread knowledge about medicine and hygiene, and no rivers of diarrhea flowing through market streets. But the issue is still there.
I keep comparing this order of female knights to the Jedi Order in my mind. They are recruited from random children all around the galaxy and don't reproduce themselves which is an awful idea if you get down to it, considering strength in the force can be inherited.
Maybe I should limit this idea down to a tiny circle of paladins or a royal guard or something.

>>52687852
>By that point, I hope to have been able to throw enough varying hooks at them to find out what they're interested in playing
You could just ask

>>52688167
I could. I have. I usually end up with blank faces and some references to other adventures or even video games.

Might as well turn that 'interviewing' stage into a part of the game.

The underlying goal of making 21st-century characters is to do away with the back-and-forth between the DM and player that would usually be necessary to build a bit of backstory for a character. They won't need to study the world to determine their character's origins and motovations in it. They can just make characters they can directly identify with, and I'll be the one worrying about presenting a fantasy world to them on a platter.

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>>52681158
>No matter what you say, "Chappaquiddick", "Mashpee", "Truro", "Tuckernuck" and all the rest of this trash will never sound good. There is absolutely no linguistic consistency, nor any possibility of immersion when you have such literally juvenile naming sense mucking up your world.

>>52681419
>A town with a English name should be surrounded by a culture that is part of the English linguistic tradition, and it should not be near such an alien linguistic tradition as whatever produces "Chappaquiddick" in any case.

>>52688362
>Its not a map of New York State
You can't beat us in keeping Native American names.

Ever find yourself falling into the "progenitor civilization = Roman Republic civilization"?

>>52689325

No, never, you are alone with that you fucking weirdo.


Just kidding. Honestly though, no. How'd you end up with that?

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>>52688362
DELET THIS

IT IS COUNTER TO MY KNOWLEDGE AND THE PERFECT ORDER OF A NARRATIVE!