/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

>>54998129
We already have a thread up >>54991938

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>>54998665
That's a specific setting building thread (and kind of a dead one at that). These generals are meant for general setting discussion.

For example: I'm planning on a new setting where a semi-traditional fantasy world discovers a cheap and potent energy/magical source in Ectoplasm. Considering how spooky ectoplasm is, my setting will naturally gravitate toward gothic horror themes, but also industrial themes a la Iron Kingdoms.

Because Ghost-Powered-Mechs. I also imagine the races and landscape will be altered by proximity to ghost-pollution. Is it more interesting to make the typical monstrous humanoids/goblinoids even more monstrous due to this, or have them seem to succeed and adapt in the new world?

>>54998817
Seeing them succeed and adapt, especially culture-wise, would be more interesting, I think.

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>>54999179
Alright, cool. I've been toying with the idea of naturally occurring undead as a playable race, but I'm not sure if I prefer Ghost-people or Dhampirs as a starting point.

Ghost folk I actually worked on a stat-block for once, and I like the spooky glowing style of ghosts. But solid undead also have a lot going for them, especially in how they decay and hold themselves together. Sort of like Unsounded, the webcomic where a main zombie character actually spends a lot of time rigging up replacement parts for himself in his downtime.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is pretty much 75% worldbuilding of a species' rise to sentience and advanced civilization, focusing over the millennia on an abandoned terraforming project gone hilariously wrong.

Basically, a virus intended to uplift and quickly evolve monkeys, upon not actually finding any primates (they all died en route), instead starts its work on
insects, with the protagonists being spiders.

It leads to some great situations: their battle against giant metalworking hivemind ants,
their rapid development of biotechnology, and their struggle to not murder and messily devour their mates. The differences in their tech compared to anything we know is great, especially when it leads to things like EMP not working on them, because they use radio, bioengineered mosses, algae, plants, and flesh in goddamn near everything. And miniaturized specialized ants, lots and lots of ants.

I want to have some weird cosmology in my game world and see what those changes would cause.

I currently have the planet's axis ~15 degrees from the orbital radial line. In addition, the planet has no moon and there are no other stars in the night sky.

As far as effects this has on the planet, what I've got so far is:
Nights are terrifyingly dark, necessitating that some species have evolved heightened hearing/scent/early thermal senses to hunt.

Tides are much lower than ours, meaning that sailing is mostly governed by the winds.

Areas roughly the size of the arctic originating from the poles face a "long night" and "long day" each year, a couple weeks to a month long.

Ideas for how to expand on this or notices that I'm full of astrophysical and meteorological shit are welcome.

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>>54998817
lmao I was shitposting in there and I didn't even realize it was supposed to be themed

oh well it died anyway

>>55000728
Such is the fate of all fluff-writing threads.

>>54998129
Should I make a "created" world with created/uplifted humans and stuff, or have normal evolution, though this raises a whole lot of questions about how the heck did monkeys evolve and conquer half the planet when there are older and badder races

>>55001271
You could run with the normal evolution route, it's just that instead of humans conquering half the planet, they might be limited an isolated island or continent before making first contact with the older and badder races.

So elves who have just discovered seafaring could be in for a nasty surprise when they sail to Bumfuck Nowhere, to conquer it in the glorious name of Elflandia, only to find it overrun by nasty grunting ape-things with too much body hair and bad manners.

Do youknows of any alternatives to pinterest? That site is somewhat better than goggle images but some of its functions are just cancer

>/wbg/ finally starts doing something productive for once
>it falls apart not even after one thread
im disappointed in you guys

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Have you guys ever had your PCs start off as nobles? How did it go? Were they all from the same family or different ones? Why did they come together? How did you quantify them being nobles in game terms?

>>55002262
in my setting, nobles have an actual gap of power separating them from the peasants, so it was facing a few lesser monster than preventing a eclipse tier shit.

>>54998129
>>54998129
So, Ive wrote myself into a corner. Ive got a nation of persio-arabs who came across the sea from a dying land and carved out a slice for themselves using their alliances with Djinn from their homeland. However, at some point they turned on the Djinn and banished them along with any Djinn-touched people they could find, sending them away to a blasted desert to the south.

The question I cant answer is why would they turn on Djinn so wholeheartedly. At some point they became a client-state to some sorcerer-kings a world away, but they've long since fallen from power, and yet they still keep to hunting and banishing the Djinn touched. Anybody have any ideas?

>>55002262
Yes, on accident. They were all from different noble houses, and things worked out really well. They all goaded eachother into doing things and basically treadmilled their way to victory through constant rivalry

>>55002344
hmm
they found evidence that Djinn are claiming their souls after they die and horribly consuming them for personal power
so they are basically cattle to the Djinn and get no afterlife

whether that is true or the evidence was forged by someone (agents of sorcerer-kings?) is up to you

>>55002344
You could've made that the Djinns were drawing their power from a source and said source is the seal of a bad thing that was sealed.

>>55002041
where?

>>55002300
Its sorta similar in my setting. While the church has more or less taken control of all the magical relics that the nobles used to control, some smaller noble families still have theirs. The 13 major houses of the kingdom are allowed by the church to each carry one of the 13 divine relics though.

>>55002389
the previous thread

>>55002372
Thats a cool idea, but god, how would you go about proving that? Its
definitely given me something to think about.

>>55002373
That would be cool, but I still want them to be a credible threat in exile.

>>55002372
>>55002373
What if a Djinn just knocked up the crown princess and birthed a Djinn-blooded messiah who the Djinn aligned themselves with to usurp the throne because it was foretold or some shit?

>>55002438
>That would be cool, but I still want them to be a credible threat in exile.

They can still be, trying to revive their dark master or something. Perhaps their soon-to-be enemies found scriptures showing that they acting in a selfless way as a ruse to release their master or something.

How do you feel about alternate universes closely intertwined with a world?

For instance, all forests large and old enough are basically where regular world and a huge forestworld meld together, and while domain of Wood Elf lords are located more or less in earthly worlds, an elf can walk from one Elfhold to another without ever leaving the forest... despite Elfholds lying on different continents in real world.
Without elven guides, humans and other mortals can only get there either by luck, strong magic, iron resolve or just getting very-very lost in a regular forest and taking a wrong path.

This solves a bunch of problems, but feels like a cop-out.

>>55002480
The way to make it seem like less of a copout is to have the worlds not be 1:1, and have the other world just be totally different and alien, and hence uninvadable. Have anyone who comes out of it talk about totally different shit, name tons of kingdoms and kings, make every specific interaction complex but ultimatly meaningless so players dont seek out the aid of the denizens of the wood. Any interactions with the woodworld should be through an intermediary. They should be utterly unable to find their way without a guide, negotiate without an envoy, and fight without a mercenary. They should be out of their depth at all times should they enter. Similarly, wood elves should not be omnicompetent outside of their realm, but should be overcautious, over courteous, and bewildered by the simplicity of things.

>>54998129
The recent eclipse has got me thinking: what conditions would cause a planet to experience solar or lunar eclipses often?

>>55002673
Buncha moons. Too few suns.

>>55002682
Could you do it with just one moon?

>>55002673
simple, moon's orbit must be in same plane as the planet's orbit
then sun, planet and moon will often end up in one line, causing eclipses

>>55002480
Nah, this seems like a pretty "natural" idea to me. The concept that you might enter a forest or even a fucking wardrobe and accidently find yourself in an entire different world is REALLY old and pretty mythologically intuitive. I don't see it as a cop-out if you can just sell it right.
There is actually something really charming about this notion to me. The good old "you can take the wrong turn on your way to the bakers and find yourself surrounded by fairies in a kingdom on the Moon" fairytale feel.
Classical mythology and folklore does not see world a simple topological plane as we see it today. Worlds could be hiding with other worlds, travelling forward could make you end up above or bellow, there could be holes into strange places all over the world.
I don't see why fantasy setting should shy away from similar sentiments.

I'd just recommend not trying to explain or speculate on how it works too much. That is actually pointless. Let it be a magical, unexplained fact of the world rather than some kind of pseudo-scientific phenomena.

>>55003649
>I'd just recommend not trying to explain or speculate on how it works too much.
oh, don't worry, I hate that. there gonna be rational way to predict how to get there from normal world or how to affect it