Worldbuilding General #177 - Book Edition

Don't you mean the big 3? I kept humans and elves, but I got rid of dwarves and replaced them with gnomes. And I made the gnomes sort of like chimapanzees, with stronger arms for their small stature, and thus more athleticism than being rocks.

big 5 IS big 3, plus orcs and gnomes/halflings, i just replaced the latter with fairies

Whats a good replacement symbol for stars on a flag?

What does the symbol represent?

It needs to go alongside a crown, so maybe something to represent willingness to fight, power, protection, justice etc.

swords sound like a good option, lions or towers too

Im looking almost for a counterpart to the stars and stripes thing. The idea is that kingdom really wants to push patriotism to rile people up for the coming battles. How about swords and swirls? (Swirl being the triskellion)

10/10 its shit. go for it champ

Whys it shit?

its an expression, its a good idea

Oh sweet thanks.

Arrangement of icons maybe could sue some adjustment. Only other thing i can think of would be 'crown and crystals'

>Humans
Europe

>Orcs
Africans and african-americans

>Elves
Islam

>Demons
United States

>Fae
China

>Beastmen and golems
Gypsies and jews, respectively.

Just make buckwheat-farming, vodka-drinking russian dwarves while you're at it.

You're an idiot.

My bad, russia is europe.

So, kangaroo-wrestling mad cunt 'strayan dorfs?

Taking current issues and racial stereotypes and assigning them to fantasy races is so overdone that it deserves to get called out. Anyone with the crappiest reading capability could see through that one. You're just a salty dork who needs to realize their writing is shit.

kek.
the thing is that i had races subdivided in subgroups, and each subgroup is then associated with a different faction, its not just a matter of pointing at a race and saying "europeans" beyond the paintjob the have

Now, if you tried classifying factions as historical superpowers, now that might be more accurate

answer me this, why did i call him an idiot?

>the thing is that i had races subdivided in subgroups, and each subgroup is then associated with a different faction, its not just a matter of pointing at a race and saying "europeans" beyond the paintjob the have

So, we should read your mind over the internet? :^)

No?
if you want i can go on about this to keep it on topic but my initial reaction was more in line with not understanding how elves could be islamic, why demons are the USA, or how beastmen and golems could be gypsies and jews.

When naming subraces for play, do you go with an easy label along with the race name, like the D&D standard, or do you try for unique names?

Yeah but Orcs and Halflings aren't really critical to the PCs. Most people don't pick Orcs.

both.
They call themselves a unique name. But everyone else calls them a simpler one when they arent looking.

I mean in the context of the metagame.

thats another matter, i make it simple so long as you can tell them appart.

So, I'm building a gothic setting for tabletop game and I'm having some problems with the iconic gothic monsters, vampires.
I've round up some ideas, like adding vampires based on leeches and mosquitos to the common bat vampires bit I can't find any good explanation for their differences.

Any ideas?

Dwarven sages have exposed an infiltration at the highest echelons by [demons, mind flayers, whatever] that goes so deep and so far back that many dwarves are starting to worry that the entire history of their race going back centuries is just one giant long con. What if they were *meant* to lose that war just so the Dark Power that's been controlling them could shift a pawn in the game it's playing? Where are the dwarven gods in all this? Are they, too, a lie dreamed up for the deception of dwarfkind? Do I even have free will? What if I mine this ore? Will that serve their dark plan? What if NOT mining this ore serves their dark plan? Can anything my clan leader says be trusted?

Different sources of vampirism, perhaps? Like, one got it from worshipping swamp gods, another got it through magic ritual, etc.

Or maybe it's just based on bloodlines.

So, so I got this idea. It's a bad idea.

Let's say that first of all you give everyone the power to create, not like build something, but visualize something and it become real. This comes from the soul and shit, and one's body is simply the soul creating a vessel for itself. Everyone can think and make things, like dolls/furniture/etc. Visualization is the key. Now, lets say that the ONLY things around are things people created like this. An endless void with little floating islands of communities of people making things.

No air our there, so you gotta have people create shits and air for themselves to travel between. navigation is hard because it is subjective spacing with no fixed reference points.

Now lets say people can't create life because their soul is already creating the life that is themselves, creating life kills the other life one has created. Creation of life and the economy of organics is what people really cling to.

Upon death what ever a person is current making sticks around. In sickness and old age people will create organic matter to commit ritual suicide and give back to their community.

So kid lives in a small community, many buildings attached together in the void, and dreams of travelings. So he wants to become one of the folks that make their own barges and travels around. Except it's more dangerous than just travel (also you gotta have multiple people because when you sleep everything but the soul's creation of its own body shuts off, so you need minimum 3 in 8 hour shifts). Material gods exist in the void. People who live alone, often madmen, who create their own words and mockeries of life. Puppets they control to mimmic the living.

Shit mang, this might be a dumb idea.

Just like how Russia and china have their own, different HIV subtypes.

Just want to give a quick thanks to the dudes that actually critique and spend time to read peoples shit.

You guys make the world go round.

Sounds like the kind of setting you need to be incredibly high to be able to work on.

I dunno, I think it sounds pretty dope.

I've had super high-concept ideas before (few quite as high-concept as this) and I've wound up integrating them in bits and pieces into later projects. It's worth developing this even if that's all that becomes of it.

And if it does stick around, well, you'll have something really cool and unique to call your own.

So does anyone have any resources for designing human races and ethnic groups?

How often are you inspired by scenic pics?

Yo, some links you may like:

pastebin.com/0gG8Lwgy

>How to deliver a cavalry charge
>Eating corpses as medicine
>Draconic ghost-gods from Hawaii
>Medieval aerial ropeways
>Etc etc etc.

How do you make a kingdom tenacious fighters, but relative to their neighbors poorer equipment?

Germanic barbarians who are nominally ruled by an elected king?

Easy. Have conscription on country that is mostly compromised of farmers and very little wealth, with a history of wars and a culture that values tenacity over everything else. For real life example, Finland during the winter war.

They only have access to copper and some other metals like tin and zinc, but not iron. Or they have iron but don't have forges advanced enough to make steel for whatever reason. Or they can make steel but it's not very high quality. Something along those lines.

Fantasy example: Re-Estize in Overlord.

>shitty feudal kingdom vs glorious empire in an almost yearly war
>empire has a professional military
>kingdom conscripts cannon fodder peasants during the harvest
>Local Lich ruins everything, routes both armies

Do they ever explain why Re-Estize even exists as a kingdom and isn't just a bunch of feuding principalities or hasn't been conquered by literally anyone else?

I don't think the worldbuilding has established that yet. Ainz is well on his way to conquering it as-is, and it's only been around for ~400 years (presumably).

What's needed for a good Dying Earth fantasy setting? Kicking around the idea of a setting where the gods either died or up and left, and now the world is drying up on magic. I've got your survivor sanctuary, cannibal Dwarves, Elves trying to get the fuck out, and the barbarians hordes smashing everything they find to suck out the last of the magic.

Fucking liches, man.

My world is a realistic space setting where humanity is a type one civilization and has colonized the solar system. Interplanetary travel is possible, but only in ships that aren't capable of atmospheric flight. I'm trying to keep my space station designs as plausible as possible and I'm currently trying to figure out what a spacedock would look like - does anyone know of anyone who has put some serious thought into this before? right now I'm picturing a rotating wheel space station built around a space elevator with a few dozen individual docks on spokes coming off the wheel, but it seems like that would be impractical since that would mean that the docks would be rotating too.

How about just an extra large space station in orbit? And I think building the dock section at the end of the station, at the center of its axis if you're gonna rotate it, would be the best option. Zero gravity means you don't have to build cranes or walkways everywhere, the actual ship itself can be just held by clamps, it'd generally just be easier on everybody.

How about a cluster of stations rather than a single structure? You could have the central civilian ring built around the space elevator and many docking stations built separately around it. Crew and cargo could be transported to and from the space elevator via small, short range transport craft and each docking station could be run by a different private corporation.

Ian Mortimer's Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval Century England, probably one of the best non-fiction books I've read/listened to. Gave me a ton of ideas.

Get the audiobook if you can, the narrator is crazy good

Medieval England*, not Medieval Century England

reposting this from the Discord because I am in desperate need of attention

The Chikka are manifestations of "auras" of magic that tend to be much more ambitious than the other magical spirits. They used to be a bunch of douchey hedonistic pieces of shit that fucked some primates and created corporeal beings. The Zulo Heiri were a race directly descended from Zul, a Chikka spirit that is still alive at the time of the story that I'm focusing on for this setting. They are the ancestors of the Orcs, Goblins and Dwarves, which were formed from magical mutation after a series of cataclysmic magical events that wiped out the Zulo Heiri. The unknown hominids that are the ancestors of the Fae and the Humans are thought to be either the descendants of Mudjwim, a sagely Chikka spirit infamous in folklore for his harems formed of Zul and the other Chikka's daughters and his own primates, or the descendants of Rum id Illi, the Masked One in folk legend. He was mostly a mysterious figure, known mainly for his conflicts and blood feuds with the other Chikka spirits, and also for a series of mass pillaging and raping of primate colonies.They were nearly wiped out by a single cataclysmic magical event caused by a huge war between 2 Chikka factions. The details of this war are relatively unknown thanks to the fact that almost everybody involved in it died during it.

cont.

chikki* i'm fucking retarded

Anyways, Gnomes are the result of a slightly separated group of the Zulo Heiri being assimilated by a joint Dwarf-Fae melting pot.

Fast forward to le ebin current year, a decade ago, a prophecy was etched onto sacred stone that Zul, who is still worshipped by most of the Zulo Heiri successor races, will wipe out his descendants in a fit of paranoia, while leaving a select few alive for their special skills. Their families would not survive his rampage, however. One of them would slay him with a special bone that I will describe later when I feel like elaborating on this shit. Nobody knows who inscribed this, but since they had been able to inscribe it onto sacred stone, it was now destined to happen. Zul could never know of this prophecy, and if anybody did try to communicate it to him in any way, they just couldn't. This resulted in him getting more paranoid, which fucking freaked out his descendants, which in turn made him even more paranoid, which made his descendants even more fucking freaked out. Repeat this again and again, with cults formed to either be the elite few that survived or to desperately defend themselves against Zul.

cont.

HOWEVER, there is one lone hero that will rise during these harrowing times. One that will embark on a journey to achieve the possible. One that will gather like minded heroes in order to destroy the prophecy, and destroy Zul with the special bone. He will save his people from their own ancestor.

That's it so far. Ask me if you're confused about any shit. I'm sure this reads like rambling anyways.

FUCK, forgot about the Chikki experimenting on and killing a quarter million corporeals in order to splice and create mutants for their own interests. They then got nearly wiped out by a chimp out by the corporeals. Zul nearly died in this uprising, and temporarily even changed his identity in between hiding from roaming bands of corporeals rooting out Chikki spirits to destroy. This can be considered the root of his paranoia. It also forever changed the Chikki, who had been seemingly powerful and arrogant before the uprising. It's also why they're listed as endangered in the races chart

FTL travel produces a natural gravitational force which, when properly controlled, creates comfortable artificial gravity inside a starship. This gravity will exist as long as the ship is moving FTL, but must be carefully monitored to prevent it from crushing the ship and the crew into a fine paste. Since ships can't go FTL in most gravity wells, artificial gravity disappears in a planets orbit.

What are the implications?

Been a while since I've posted any progress. Never use pencil to colour a map Veeky Forums. Everytime I look at this is just see faded colours and disappointment. Think I'm gonna stick to black and white next time

Planet Gethsemane
>What happened?
A bunch of colonists met with a series of unfortunate events that resulted in only the colonists, their environmental hardsuits and a bare minimum of supplies being dropped on a planet that wasn't that great in the first place. They took what they had and ran with it but became isolated and paranoid despots living in city states that greedily eye each other for their resources and territories.

>What's the planet like?
Gethsemane is deemed 'inhospitable' due to its atmospheric pressure, unsuitable atmosphere and geological features viewed as unstable. Despite this, the planet has a diverse range of unmarred environments that to the naive would be considered picturesque. Additionally Gethsemane is rich in surface level chemical elements and ores found in abundance. The weather of Gethsemane is turbulent and very difficult to predict but along the relatively stable equator, muggy and stifling heat is met with drizzly intermittent rains with coastal regions suffering caustic showers periodically as the oceans boil from underground chemical vents. Some areas of Gethsemane are too environmentally unsound to navigate and all attempts to even map these areas is an impossibility due to electromagnetic interference. Most signs point to these areas having been caused by a malfunctioning Terraforming project initiated by the colonists ship prior to their planetfall.

I'm having trouble deciding what is imported and what is exported out of the countries of my medieval fantasy setting. What sort of trade went on in the middle ages internationally?

Herbs and spices.

Antiquities, relics and literature from religious circles

Turkish delights.

Slaves.

Just found this:
monastic.org/orth/

It's a dictionary/grammar guide to the fictional language of Orth from Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

>Herbs and spices
Yeah, but those are traded in small quantities at the market and they're perishible so they don't last long and you can't order them in huge quantities. Plus, they're rare, which means there's never that much of it.

>Antiquities and religious relics
Was this a thing in the Middle Ages? Seems more like a Renaissance thing.

>Turkish Delights
Like what? Metal jewelry and dinnerware?

>Slaves
I guess, but there aren't many slaves in my setting.

Turkish Delights are a Narnia meme.

You mean white pussy?

>Turkish Delights
>Like what? Metal jewelry and dinnerware?
Niggah it's a sweet treat. Rosewater candy basically.

Also the perishing of spices is highly dependent on the spice, you'd see things with longer shelf lifes thrown about more. Also don't forget that after a certain point (though I honestly forget if this was still medieval or the end of it), spices began to be looked down upon by the aristocracy as they became more and more available to poor people, and it became all the craze to eat food naturally plain (at least in the British isles, which is why so much of their food is boring to this day).

Dude goes full Judas for it, so probably.

>Herbs and spices
One of the side-effects of having my not!ImperialRome, not!CatholicRome, and not!Aachen all connected by wormholes is that imported spices from the Beastman regions and the South Shore are incredibly valuable.

>conscripts peasents DURING the harvest
>not before or after
>during
>workers missing at busiest time of year, country starves
sounds like that lich did everyone a favor.

That's the in-setting reason it's a yearly war.

>did everyone a favor
You have no idea.

What else aside from spices though? What kinds of fabrics other than silk? Did metals get traded internationally, or did they rely on their national mines?

I'd imagine that ore wouldn't be all that popular to trade internationally. That's a lot of weight, and before proper capitalism kicked off countries tried not to just ship raw materials to other countries (you wanted to keep all of your gold/silver and acquire more, not send others raw materials so that they can refine and up the price on completed goods).

However if you had a metal, or the capacity to produce an alloy that another nation could not, the good produced from these materials would be primo.

I know wool was a big fabric to trade, obviously never got the prestige that silk got (which it got because china had a complete monopoly on it until people managed to smuggle live silkworms out of the country). But not everyone keeps sheep.

Cotton, linen, flax were traded around, and papyrus and parchment too.

I know some historians say that the Bronze Age was built on the international trade of copper and tin to forge bronze, but I don't know if that's really realistic.

>How was it Colonised?
Initial colonisation was an absolute disaster. The ship, after throwing malfunctioning terraforming probes onto Gethsemane's surface, saw the planet as 'hospitable' and ejected its frozen human cargo immediately in a band across the equator. While in the process of queuing up additional colony equipment to send, the ships AI was caught in a solar flare that locked it in a perpetual state of preparation. As the sole link with the rest of civilisation and having never sent the necessary communication devices to the surface, the colonists were on their own. The colonists found life on Gethsemane very difficult but found a small grace in the hardsuits they had been provided. The hardsuits became an essential go-to vehicle for exploration and construction, their enhanced servos and computers providing the raw strength and technological advantage required to survive in such a harsh world along with the modular diversity required to fulfil any role. For a while things were good. Sealed cities (known as Habitats) were constructed and the land around them carved into some semblance of civilisation.

>How is it now?
The natural isolationism the planet demanded of its population fostered paranoia between Habitats. Having already spiralled away into entirely unique customs and practices, belief systems and even languages, the Habitats could no longer be considered unified and instead became a number of individual city states. Currently the major Habitats are eager to expand their territories, choked for land as their populations swell and demand for resources increase. Jostles and minor skirmishes with neighbours has raised tension and with it mercenary pilots have become ever more present in the field of battle as those states without formalised military are forced to defend their sovereignty and independence.

Thoughts, ideas?

I need a vader for my post-apocalyptic Emperor. A badass enforcer whose name spreads terror through the wastes, Any ideas anyone?

My setting ( ) has bio-luminescent silk, cotton, tobacco, and certain metals native to volcanic regions as other major import items.
There's national mines for the cheap stuff, and Gold/Mythril/Deep Metals are all found in the highly efficient Dwarven trade network.

Do pic related with some fancy armor.

pic related is a pretty good book, fwiw

Whats a British animal that would be good as a big horrid mutant thing? Mutant Badgers, Foxes?

>jungle life overtakes the Earth
>Surviving numbers of the U.S military all have a Vietnam theme
>They struggle to hold onto to what little land they have
>Another faction pops of and is basically a matriarchal society of amazons who worship the jungle
>Jungle just fucks over anything and even if they do cut it down more just comes back
>U.S. faction started using a version of pesticide that made Agent orange look like Weed Be gone
>Instead of birth defects it mutated soldiers into beastmen or orcs
>Looking for an advantage instead of shunning the new soldiers these mutants are put into a special unit
>Official name is the United States Military Genetic Warfare battalion or the "78th"
>Essentially the modern version of MACV SOG
>The amazons also have a few tricks of their sleeves like special honor guard who are "one" with nature and their goddess Gaia
>Basically have control over the planet itself and some weird voodoo magic
>Even some of their soldiers receive mutations but this is seen as blessings from the goddess
>and compared to the U.S. mutants the amazon mutations are more majestic mostly turning into elves or dryads
>Both have shaky relations with eachother with the amazons trying to take civilians to join their religion or the soldiers chopping down some scared worshiping area

I just watched some Vietnam movie and suddenly got this idea.

Hedgehog

b-bump

peacock

chicken

lynx

darkling/rhino/stag beetle

slow worm

/wbg/, how can I make a turn-of-the-20th-century setting interesting without making it basically "our world but with stuff flipped around"?

same tech level, completely different world.
the tech doesn't need to work the same way functionally, it just needs to work the same way on a societal level.

the world is advancing at a rate quicker than politics can keep up.
sweat the minor details and keep the themes.

"Listen to the wisdom of the Old Ones:

The red world and the blue are brothers. They were born together in the seething maelstrom of dust and gas spinning out from the heart of the vast cloud that was to become Father Sun.

For uncountable time each world was engulfed in endless violence. Monsters roared down out of the sky, pounding the worlds mercilessly in a holocaust of terrible explosions. Under such awesome bombardment there could be no solid ground; the rocks themselves were liquid bubbling magma as the fiery rain from the sky went on and on, blotting out the radiance of the newly bright Father Sun with steaming clouds that covered each world from pole to pole.

Slowly, with the godlike patience of the stars themselves, slowly their surfaces cooled. Solid land took form, bare rock, hard and harsh and lifeless. Worse than the desert where The People live; much worse. There was no tree, no blade of grass, not even a drop of water.

"Deep below their crusts both worlds were still liquid-hot with the energy of their violent creation. Water trapped beneath the ground boiled up, sweated from the depths like droplets beading a gourd in the heat of summer. The water evaporated into the thin film of atmosphere swaddling each newborn world. Cooling rain began to spatter onto the naked rocks, running into rivulets, streams, raging torrents that gouged rocks out of their paths and tore huge gashes in the land.

On the bigger of the two worlds might oceans grew, filling deep rocky basins with water. The smaller world formed broad shallow lakes, but gradually they faded away into the thin, cold atmosphere or sank out of sight below the surface of the land.

Because of its glistening wide oceans the larger of the two worlds took on a deep blue tint. The smaller world slowly turned into a dusty, windblown desert as its waters sank into its ground. It turned rust-red.

"Life arose on the blue world, first in the seas and later on the dry land. Gigantic beasts roamed forests and marshes, only to disappear forever. At last The People came to the blue world-First Man and First Woman emerged, standing tall and proud in the bright sunlight. Their children multiplied. Some of them wondered about the world in which they lived and about the stars that dotted the night.

They turned their intelligent eyes to the red gleam in the sky that marked their brother world and wondered what it was. They watched it carefully, and the other stars, too, and tried to understand the workings of the heavens.

To The People, the stars spoke of the endless cycles of the seasons, the time to plant, the time of the rains. The red world held no special fascination for them. They called it merely 'Big Star.'

But to the Anglos, steeped in conquest and killing, whenever their pale eyes turned to the red gleam in the sky that marked their brother world they trembled with thoughts of blood and death. They named the red world after their god of war.

Mars."

- Ben Bova, Mars (1992)

How can I employ western (i.e. wild west) aesthetics in a high fantasy world?

It seems like Western themes rely heavily on guns being powerful and accessible as they're tied to individualism and the ability of a single person to affect the world, but I might just not be creative enough.

Did any of you guys ever get any art commissioned for your world or your campaign?

If so, how'd you go about the process and were you satisfied with the results? Would you do it again?

I suck at drawing, so I was thinking of commissioning drawing of some important locations and historical events for my world, but I'm not sure how to go about it and whether it's a good idea.

To me, the wild west is about that feeling of being on the frontier, away from civilization but that civilization still impacts every aspect of your life.

As for the role of guns, the quote "God created men, but Sam Colt made them all equal" is what springs to mind first and foremost. Guns made every man, regardless of size, potentially dangerous, and enabled small groups to do a lot of damage, as well as to effectively protected themselves, both from the wilderness and from their fellow man, in ways that had never really been possible before. It's not so much about guns being able to affect the world, but guns giving the individual some form of independence from the community.

Also keep in mind another inventions that's arguably more important for the wild west than the gun, and that is the railroad. Fast transport and fast communication is a very, very important advancement.

With that in mind, in a high fantasy world, you could have magic take the place of guns (usually that's the case anyway). You just need to work on the feeling of a lawless frontier still in constant communication with civilization and working mostly for the prosperity of said civilization, or more correctly, the metropolis exploiting the frontier for it's own gains, while providing technology (and people looking to get rich quick) to the frontier.