/wbg/ Worldbuilding General

Worldbuilding for a variety of reasons. No specific games, systems or genre.

Some worldbuilding resources:

On designing cultures:
frathwiki.com/Dr._Zahir's_Ethnographical_Questionnaire

Random generators:
donjon.bin.sh/

Mapmaking tutorials:
cartographersguild.com/forumdisplay.php?f=48

Free mapmaking toolset:
www.inkarnate.com

Random Magic Resources/Possible Inspiration:
darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html
buddhas-online.com/mudras.html
sacred-texts.com/index.htm

Conlanging:
zompist.com/resources/

Random (but useful) Links:
futurewarstories.blogspot.ca/
projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
military-sf.com/
fantasynamegenerators.com/
donjon.bin.sh/
eyewitnesstohistory.com/index.html
kennethjorgensen.com/worldbuilding/resources
reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/europe#wiki_middle_ages
reddit.com/r/worldbuilding

Now with a remembered subject line.

Other urls found in this thread:

batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-make-fantasy-sandbox.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

How much attention do you pay to shipping, trade routes, ports, etc?

How's my geology/plate tectonics/topography?

I guess I should actually include that layer if I'm asking for feedback.

Pretty good.

>dat nightmarishly vast northern sea
10/10, would drown in.

How'd you do it? Been messing with plate tectonics for my world and having issues with it.

This is why my world is a plane, not a planet.
No earthquakes means underground strongholds and ancient dungeons are everywhere.

If you dig down far enough, do you reach space or the underworld?

The material plane is a bubble.
The deeper you dig, the hotter it gets. You eventually reach an area of pure Primal Fire and Earth, aka magma.

Explaining further; it's a sphere of Primal Fire, surrounded by a shell of Primal Earth, covered with Primal Water, with Primal Air sealing it off from the Void.

I've run into some trouble coming to terms with the origins of my various races in setting. I set a challenge for myself that I absolutely must have every playable race within the core Player's Handbook for D&D 5e, and it's only now coming to bite me in the ass. The tl;dr is as follows:

>Humans evolved on the planet as evolution dictates.
>The fey saw humans in their late tribal days, got jealous, and created the elves to surpass them.
>The gnomes are a type of fairy, and a number of them crossed over to the mortal world years ago, telling the courts to fuck off.
>Aasimar, tieflings, and genasi are all varieties of planetouched, and are literally transplants from the Planescape verse, their bloodlines getting all mixed in with this world. They're pretty rare, but standard fare. (Distant spawn of fiends/celestials/certain elementals.)
>Nobody knows where the orcs came from, but that's sort of part of their deal. (Probably used to be humans. They can mate with elves because elves were made in humans' image.)
>Dragonborn happen when a humanoid male knocks up a female dragon, then she reverts to dragon form and lays a clutch of eggs. Half-dragons are when a polymorphed male dragon knocks up a humanoid female. They're rarer, but identical.
>Not playable, but giants existed long, long ago. They're all gone now, since something happened to them and then they invaded the Land of Fairy, which promptly hunted them to annihilation. It's been so long nobody even knows what they originally looked like.

The problem comes up when I try to figure out origins for Halflings and Dwarves. I feel like I could figure out one if I figure out the other, since I've tied multiple races origins together, but I haven't found anything that I like. I'm hoping for something that isn't "the gods created them", because the nature of the setting is far removed from normal D&D gods.

Could just make them Human subspecies.
I'd give references, but it'd just sound like /pol/.

I'm such a stickler, that there's a very specific problem with that. You may hate me for this pure autism.

There's no half-human-half-dwarf, and therefor they cannot interbreed, thus not a subspecies. (If orcs and humans can and dwarves can't, I have to draw a line.)

I'm tempted to have Stout Halflings Half-Halfling, Half-Dwarf, though.

I had a rough idea of the shapes of the continents that I wanted before I began tectonics, they were the first things that I did. I did those through almost random combinations of the products of random shape generators then parallels with the real world, alternate worlds, country borders, etc. Once I had this out I started dividing the world up with lines into plates that I think would work. This took a LOT of fiddling and consulting of real tectonic maps and others. When coming up with the plates what I focused on was

1. Having a mix of continental and oceanic plates (ended up 3 oceanic, 8 continental).
2. Having the boundaries where the plates met up be able to form coherent plate relations, so no janky interlocking, etc.
3. Get a rough idea of what I at least wanted as far as major tectonics went with relation to the topography. Here it was having a long multi-plate spanning mountain range caused by a convergence zone (along with some other things). I stole that outright from the Americas-Pacific and stuck it between the polar continent and the 3 along the middle there. As you might be able to tell, I tried to draw parallels with the real world as often as I could. Like all fiction, it helps with realism and works out well if it's not stupidly obvious.
4. Then there was a refinement of the land shapes with this in mind (e.g. making that whole southerly coast much flatter like the western Americas.)
5. Then refining the plate directional movement defining magnitude and direction. Plate movement actually works with axes of rotation and complicated geometry that I'm not smart enough so I tried to focus on doing this in a way that created realistic (or at least with the appearance of realism) plate boundaries (convergent, divergent, transform), noting what each one is.
6.From here the tectonics is done but I did one more land refinement and went on to topography. It's based around tectonics as well as a few other things tucked away in my head.

To incorporate Halflings and Dwarves into my setting, I had to make them evolve from the other Beastman races in seclusion.
It worked out to have only pure-blood Halflings and Dwarves, with Humans being able to breed with everything.

Nice, and thank you for the explanation. What did you use to draw all of this?

How should my seasons work if I want to keep the standard summer/fall/winter/spring but don't have a world that is a sphere without resorting to it's magic?

If you don't want to tie it to the emotional state of a weather goddess like the Greeks did, it'll probably be due to the big glowing light/heat source in the sky.
What is your setting's sun?

It's a literal big glowing orb that replaced a deity that got btfo

If it's actively heating the world, have it slowly travel away from and closer to the world.
Obviously; winter is when it's farthest, and summer is when it's closest. Spring and Fall are mirrors of eachother, getting progressively warmer or progressively colder.

Alternatively, the sun could slowly dim and brighten with time, staying at the same distance.

Wouldn't both of these appear relatively the same to observers on the ground?

Can anyone rate my map?

It grows, slowly.

Tell me about the lands

I'm no expert, I think you've got too many mountains that have weird circular shape. I don't think this is how mountains usually are.

Also, Enlightened Land is would be dry as hell with all this mountains between it and water.

>A detailed account of adventures of Rolan the Plunderer, his travels across sea and land seeking treasure and slaying beasts, as well as of men and women he met and their strange customs, by his loyal man-at-arms Invar

Does this sound like a medieval book?

Thanks I'll probably do something like these

The sun dimming sounds pretty noticeable

What advantages and disadvantages do regular bowmen have versus crossbowmen?

It really depends on what bows and crossbows we are talking about. I think longbows would out range crossbows as well as having a higher rate of fire, with the mayor downside being the time it takes the train the archers compared to just arming peasants with crossbows

Bows have high strenght requirement. Probably would burn through stamina if such is a thing in your system.

Crosbows are slow to fire, but not as tasking.

Name a bow that isn't a longbow, really do it not every bow in existence was made by an Englishman or that matter a Welshman either.

Threadly request for someone with programming and geography skills to develop a random hex map generator. Computer games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress do it, and it would be nice to have something similar for role-playing games.

Perhaps an automated version of this:
batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-make-fantasy-sandbox.html

I'd pay money for it.

From what I remember

Regular bowmen advantages
>higher rate of fire
>better range
>better accuracy over distance

Regular bowmen disadvantages
>Years of training
>Bow and string suffer in wet weather
>Years of training
>Most can't fire prone
>Years of training
>Powerful bows need powerful arms and specialized materials
>Years of training

Crossbowmen advantages
>easy to train
>metal bows stand up to weather
>good enough punching power in close range
>can shoot prone
>repeating crossbows
>kinda like a medieval ak47

Crossbowmen disadvantages
>can cost more per unit
>some need both hands and 1 foot to draw
>shorter range
>lower firing rate in general
>may need metal components
>bulkier and heavier
>shorter range

Weren't crossbows of possessing superior range?

>How much attention do you pay to shipping, trade routes, ports, etc?

Just about to start, really. I needed to make a rough map first then fill in climate, geography, fauna and flora and the factions therein.

Now I'm planning to map out the trade routes. I've already decided to have 2 major port cities for trade(one neutral) with one empire essentially blockaded by another through a gulf to the eastern ocean. This forces the empire to hire neutral ships or disguise their ships for carrying goods and passengers.

Since I want economy to be a major thing in the setting I've spent a lot of time pondering how trade would occur between 2 competing and warring empires and those stuck in between them. I settled on a saber rattling fencewar with occasional flareups in their neutral zone. Neutral region are essentially free trade areas where their merchants compete. Lots of maneuvering, manipulation and power struggles can be set up.

I've tagged the eastern empire as going full bore on economics and basically tries to cock block the middle empire's trade whenever it can. It also tries to make its own merchants more influential in its territory by imposing high taxes on foreign merchants and goods but regular taxes on consignments to citizens. Roads are built for faster travel and transport. They conquered a major port city for easier access to salt and its premier trade port. They also have a banking system with foreign affiliates/branches to facilitate large scale transactions across borders. Merchants also need a license and such to operate within it's borders. Actually, almost everything needs some sort of license and certification. I should probably make a list of that.

>metal bows stand up to weather
Maybe firing into the wind, but as a weapon they're more complex which makes them more intolerant to adverse conditions. Like Agincourt, the Genoese Crossbowmen of France couldn't make any impact because the weather ruined their crossbows versus the English archers who simply unstrung and covered their bows during the weather, and strung them for battle.

>this is what longbowfags actually believe

Why not, they also believe the French mutilated the hands of archers

Can't say I ever remember reading anything like that. As far as I can remember it was the ease of use that made crossbows standout more as a weapon than anything else.

What about orographic rain? Shouldn't that keep them nice and moist?

I think orographic rain is on the sea side, no?

Talking about trade, do you think it would make more sense to move Reesa-Basadae to West bank of the river? This is the sort of thing that will bug me until I make sense of it.

Pink lines are trade routes.

Oh, right. I completely forgot. My bad.

Water needs to come from somewhere to become rain, that's just simple logic.

Also, the hell is with your rivers in the Enlightened Land? Where are they flowing from where, I can't make sense out of it.

A regiment of all female light cavalry, numbering less than 1,000 women. Seen by the men as more or less as a joke, formed by the queen as a way for orphaned girls to not have to live a life of prostitution or thievery and a way to meet a future husband. Believable, or no?

Aye, probably. But what's the population and time period?

One thousand is a lot in medieval times. A sizable fraction of an entire realm's army, in fact.

Sinecure is a thing. I imagine there'd be a better way to employ orphaned girls if empress can afford to pay their salary, but sure, why not.

Its less than a thousand, more than 500. The country's current population is relatively average compared to it's neighbor's with a population of roughly 4 million.

Alright then, it sounds reasonable. Provided you have the resources to sustain these fighting women.

What do they do when not at war? What comforts and necessities are they entitled to?

Who will provide these necessities?

What is a good name to invasive ecosystem that follows bad guys everywhere and makes land uninhabitable for good guys? Since Blight is already taken.

What kind of ecosystem is it? Are we talking fire and brimstone or like creeping fungus or something else?

So, in stead of prostitution and slavery they're out getting raped and killed by the enemy? That Queen must be loaded too. Imagine the cost of horses and materiel a 1,000 omen would need. Why not just set them up with a business?

The later. Less fungus and more like red, slimy poisonous plants, that grow through everything, chock normal green plants, poison water sources.

creep
bloodweed
red rot
stranglers
plagueleaf

I dunno, just spitballing

That's an interesting pick. What's this?

War of the worlds has a creeping red weed that comes with the martians
it was literally like the 3rd pic on google images

Yeah, right, it had this. I don't remember war of the world. Alien capsule unscrewed itself and then everyone died from common cold. This is how I remember it.

Also Tom Cruise was there

The movie didn't have unscrewing scene, I think.

I wouldn't be surprised, it's been a minute since ive been through any version of wotw

I want to do a bad guy faction of space vampires/pic related/war boys that have prolonged their lives unnaturally by living near black holes so that time passes slower for them than other races.

They believe their purpose is to outlast all other life in the galaxy and to become the crows picking at the corpse of civilization. They recycle the dead into a food source and are trying to construct an infinite entropy engine to essentially heat-death localized parts of space.

Any critiques? I feel like it might be too much rolled into one faction, but I really like the idea of apocalyptic death cults on a huge scale.

>and are trying to construct an infinite entropy engine to essentially heat-death localized parts of space.
I don't get it. What exactly are they hoping to achieve by it?

R8 and H8 folks

The closest thing my setting has to a deity is more of a beyond-your-comprehension-lovecraftian-yada-yada-yada being then a god. Those few who know of her existence call her the Hungering Mother. She exists as a body that lies intertwined with our world, cradling the ancient places lost or forgotten by humans. The ruins of deceased civilizations, disused maintenance tunnels in an otherwise thriving city's sewer system, and ghost towns are all her domain. Anywhere forgotten long enough she will eventually swallow whole, leaving nothing but a bricked up doorway where a room used to be, or a barren plain where once was an abandoned settlement. She envelops these places, and they begin to glue together in her metaphorical stomach, forming impossible architecture and unsettling landscapes. Although they are no longer of our world, these places maintain a connection to it. Certain people can see where one used to be, and travel to and from the hungering mothers body itself, ofttimes using the cobbled landscape as a sort of transportation. Walk through a place where an abandoned storage unit once was, end up where that storage unit got glued to a mayan temple, and walk back out a door through the temple into the jungle it came from. She will eventually eat the whole world, the land within her becoming a better and better mimicry of reality until she has consumed everything and will give birth to a whole new world. Hence the name the Hungering Mother.

So, they're shunting energy out of a localized area and putting it where?

Their whole thing is they want to end all life in the galaxy so they can feed off the dead and rebuild the galaxy in their image. Essentially they see themselves as vultures just waiting for everyone else to die, and are building the entropy engine to give them a little push.

Honestly I hadn't thought that far ahead, I just needed a doomsday weapon that would work on such a large scale.

also I think Infinite Entropy Engine sounds really cool

>Evil space race
>Where does the energy go
Death rays of course.

10/10, can visualize and get spooked by

From the point of view of hard science, how exactly are you going to induce heat death on a localized area. Not only work doesn't work like this, but unless you cut it off from the rest of the universe, it's not a closed system and it will replenish its energy eventually.

>also I think Infinite Entropy Engine sounds really cool

It's catchy but it's descriptive of what the universe already does.

>Death rays of course.

But that's like a giant neon sign for similar tech level civs to fuck their shit up.

Who will fuck your shit up if you have a death ray powered by the heat death of the universe?

it doesn't have to be true 100% heat death, It just has to suck out energy faster than it gets replaced, generating a spike in entropy locally. All the energy coming in would be low level radiation that would be difficult to harness for any useful purpose anyways.

Anthony Fremont.

Fair enough.It seems like sizing it down might be the best option. Just turn it into a giant energy vacuum and call it a sun eater?

the name is the most important part of any superweapon

Goddamn, those rivers are gigantic. Making them smaller would make sense. Towns often grow at river crossings or bridges, and they may expand to both sides of the river.

The known world was supposed to be pretty small, but I lost all sense of scale. And my hands keep shaking.

The problem I guess I have with the concept is that you have what seems to be a Level 2 civilization going to Level 3. The power available to these civs is so high that your initial premise seems too trivial for a race that advanced. Maybe if they were creating their own universe to escape this one or created a pocket universe and are preying on that it'd be more interesting,

Another problem is that if you're referring to time dilation then they aren't living longer near a black hole but living slower. Everyone else is advancing their tech in real time and likely already have solutions prepared.

I approve of this. Be careful to aVOID spunky adventurers though.

What is there to say? Each land is not necessarily a full nation but is sort of grouped together based on racial and cultural lines. This setting contains mostly humans but they have deeply differing cultures and some mystical or unusual racial traits. A single land may be made up of one empire, or it may be made up of many tribes and bushman, or it may be made up of collectivist city states and so on. It's a bit like TES provinces in a way.

Maybe, for the most part I did that because I wanted to show Salvation as a very mountainous landscape. It's supposed to be a bit like the Himalayas, inhabited mainly by enlightened spiritual monkey men. But obviously I'm not very good at art so it came out looking a little weird.

lifesaving bump

How can I make in-settings politics feel both interesting, realistic, and fitting for the game/setting?

Things like succession wars for medieval fantasy, struggles of dynasties for empires, the coalitions and land disputes of tribes and bronze age people, etc?

Make their conflicts as petty and disgusting as possible. None of the participants should be the "good" choice, though one might be a "lesser evil".

That seems needlessly edgy and misanthropic.

Real life is needlessly edgy and misanthropic, particularly medieval politics.

There's essentially two ways to handle fictional politics. You can either be Game of Thrones or you can be Episode I. Guess which one you WANT to be.

If you're doing it like Episode I, you'll have a lot of established political figures and, well, establishments who deal with big things in the setting, but which lack any real connection to the overall story or its outcomes. The politics are there, and inform certain parts of the story, maybe affect a key plot point or two, but in terms of their impact on the characters, they serve more as something that's just... there.

If you're going the Game of Thrones route, then the characters and politics are intimately entwined. The characters are actually the ones affecting the political landscape. Not all the characters have to be, say, senators or other officials or the like, but those that are ought to have a say in who gets what, when, and why. And, most importantly, all the other characters must actually be affected by the political shifts. If the king is assassinated, the realm ought to suffer the consequences; if one tribe steals another's goats, they ought to strike back with some revenge raids; if a new tax is levied on dragon dildos, there ought to be riots.

TL;DR: If you want to make fictional politics interesting, give your audience interesting characters to engage in them.

>if a new tax is levied on dragon dildos, there ought to be riots.

kek

Dwarves
Rock/earth constructs made to do the dangerous work of mining magical regents by ??? (crazy wizards in general, elves would work well if you want the animosity there, giants if they had the mojo, Dragons could explain any dwarven gold lust and they would definitely be conceited enough to for the next bit of my explanation)

Either due to over design or finding a "spark" of life deep down, they develop independence and a need to improve themselves, with each new model trying to be made closer to their creators form (or surpassing them depending on what faction your listening to). Who in their logical mind just being a very advanced carbon construct.

By the time their creators took action it was to late, the constructs had grown far too numerous in their endless creation on new and better forms. There is great debate on who did it, but the final solution was to completely collapse the upper sections of the mines.

Que thousands of years later, and it turns out they were perfectly happy continuing their mining and self improvement, Many generations of such having resulted in the eating, drinking, breathing, and fucking dwarves that dug their way to the surface just x00 years ago.

I think it could be a little more jumbled, like:

>A most detailed account of the adventures of Rolan the Plunderer, his travels across known and foreign seas and lands for treasure and challenge, as well as of men and women he met and their strange customs, by his loyal man-at-arms Invar.

hunnic bow

Considering how odd a monarch could be and enforce, it sounds believable.

I think they would be extinguished the second she lost her power, or even transformed into some kind of concubinage by the future ruler.