World Building

Too deep and I can't escape it. My shit been worked on since i was literally in elementary school.

I can't stop.

Yes already done with it too and for the language I have been learning about linguistics for expressly that purpose. Problem is linguistics is even more complicated then damn geography and culture put together. So its been slow going. On the plus side its not quite as complicated as sea winds and geography. Scientists are stilled puzzled about that shit and hence why even now weather forecasts is a rather unpredictable field.

I I was able to take care of that problem by using spirits and deities. Thank god too that shit was as bad or even worse then the linguistics so it was a fucking blessing to find a good excuse to take care of it.

Alas such an excuse doesn't work for language though goddamn it.

I am literal autism and the obsession for it manifested in worldbuilding. I fucking hate it but its practically compulsive for me at this point.

Copy British culture and paste it into the setting then adjust it to fit each other by letting them influence/adapt to one another. Your problem will be fixed and people will easily find it relate able which is key.

It also lets you keep a lot of words which is really fucking handy.

Also only use entirely new words if its unique to the setting. If its relate able or the same thing as irl its best to just keep the damn word instead of changing it for no good reason. Of course you can also use a thesaurus if your really that worried about it.

I've been thinking about giving Orcs and Elves a relationship akin to Morlocks and Eloi, but not quite so degenerate. The Elves once had a widespread, advanced, and flourishing empire, but they grew too proud and fell to decadence. The upperclass began seeing themselves as akin to gods, having achieved something approaching immortality, and developed a certain contempt for the "lesser" races of man and used various methods to alter and "improve"/distinguish their forms and bloodline from baseline humanity.

The Orcs were bred from their servants/slaves, their forms twisted to reflect their lowly position and to better serve in the roles to which they were assigned. The worst punishment an Elf could receive was to be cast down into the Orc pits to become one of them. They were the slave soldiers, laborers, and craftsmen, and one day they came to realize that the empire of the Elves was built upon their shoulders and that their masters had grown complacent. While the Elves still surpassed them in magical education, the Orcs came to understand and master the tools they were pressed to work with and make.

This revolt is why the Elves are on the decline, and the Orcs still loathe and hunt them to this day. Few enclaves of "High Elves", those who live in the more intact remnants of the empire, remain. The rest of them couldn't sustain that level of civilization without the labor and expertise of the Orcs, who they had grown far too reliant upon. These are the "Wood Elves", who were effectively sent back to the Stone Age.

Orcs are the new power in the land. They're still laborers, soldiers, and craftsmen, but now they work for themselves and their own nations and have grown to fit the role. They're regarded as a crafty and callous people, but their workmanship is largely unrivaled and often brilliant in design. The Orcish nation most open to trade with surfacers are a relatively stocky people known to wear large beards. They still hate elves.

I created multiple alien alphabets for a spacefaring game one, along with a few phonetic rules for how their speech and words would generally sound. Nothing so bold as a full language though.

I tend to end up focusing on details that don't matter when worldbuilding. I tell myself I just want a good foundation, but I often end up lacking in anything noteworthy in terms of adventure hooks or locations.

Oddly enough, one of my more successful settings was when I just said 'the world consists mostly of large underground caverns with magic crystals for light' and then circled the general area where most races lived and went from there. I had the broad swathes for each race, so I could make decisions about them on the fly, and since things were usually limited to a single cave, I didn't have to come up with a lot of content in any given moment. It also led to fun instances where the party just kept exploring because they'd been ordered to clear out some bandits, but the cave ended up being a tunnel that led them somewhere entirely different.

good stuff. Better than baseline jedi at least. Manages to deal with the consequences of muh eternally shining blade in a world, at least (with the unsteal-able technique)

Thanks for the comment. Here's an updated version. Only change is spelling "conscience," correctly at the end. It was bothering me.

My idea for a setting that I'm still fleshing out:

It's set on the moons of a gas giant. Almost all of the moons are habitable, and each one is linked to several others by portals. Some of the portals are easily accessable, but most aren't, and are known to only a few people. The gas giant that all of this is happening around used to be a refueling point for an interstellar empire, but it has been abandoned for a few millenia, and most of the automated defenses and docks are now unusable derelicts.

Each of the 36 moons has a different environment, and sentient life has evolved on about a third of them.

Magic exists in this setting, but it requires being at least slightly schizophrenic, and the level of magical power the practitioner has is dependant on how disconnected they are from reality. Because all of the interstellar empires have eliminated mental illnesses, none of them have access to magic, while many primitive societies do.

At the current point, all of the civilisations on the moons are at medieval tech-level or lower.

The most commonly worshiped 'god' is the gas giant, though other planets and the sun of that system are also worshipped.

Most of the civilisations living on the moons are not aware of the portals and are only limited to one moon, but there is an empire currently trying to conquer as many moons as possible, and an order of monks dedicated to finding and hiding the portals in the name of peace, as well as a few bands of smugglers, who use them to move stolen and rare goods around.

Make the imperium-equivalent be failing for other reasons, like some cosmic event blocking the main form of interstellar communication meaning that co-ordination is impossible.

Scifi makes calenders an interesting project, since you have to account for varying cosmological positions and relativistic frame of reference for the passage of time. Currently working on a universal system (to be used alongside the numerous planetary systems) which works in neural tickrates of some kind, not something ive put more than that one idle thought into though.

I don't know man. I'm completely in love with my setting, and spend most of my idle moments daydreaming it up, but I can never hold onto the motivation to actually create anything for it. Ive been working on the "encyclopedia", RPG, and short stories for half a decade and have very little to show for it. Ideas inside your own head always seem perfect, and any attempt to flesh it from dream inevitably creates flaws. That is lazy, flawed logic of course, but its hardto break when you cant think of any good reason to devote all the time and energy necissary to accomplish something (and do it right) due to a lack of both pride and faith in your work. I have faith that they are meritorious ideas, but none that they will be recieved as auch by a significant number of people, so if I'm the only audience, leaving the world inside my own head doesnt seem unreasonable.

Of course, I still do enough to make the world sellable to my own group, with the aid of heavy spontaneous improve and inspiration, but even my players, great and fun friends as they are, wouldnt be interested in any more depth than is necissary for a action packed adventure.

Don't know if this is the relevant place to put it, but I've been working on this. What do people think? I realise that the vegetable section is the stuff of nightmares.

This is the relevant place.

Also this is neat. What's the difference between an ale and other alcohol?

Ales and beers are fermented from cereal, wines are from fruit. Fruit beers are fermented from cereal and flavoured with fruit.
One early difference is that ale is from a more Nordic/Baltic root (see öl/alus) whereas beer is more Central European/Germanic(see bier/beor).
Then you reach the high-late Middle Ages and the English distinction becomes that an ale is unhopped whereas a beer has hops.
And then you reach nowadays where beer is generic, ale is warm fermented, and lager is cold fermented.
And stout is made with toasted malts.

Hope that's helpful.

There was a guy that wrote like bible-style verses about his world, it was a very cool read and I want to read some more. On a related note, how do I stop sucking at writing about my setting?
How big are the moons, unless they are small I can't fathom a medieval level state with no magic controlling multiple moons.

I've got tons of ideas that I try to codify, but when I give them a once-over there's always some sort of serious flaw or fallacy that makes them fall apart at the seams.

For example, my "Concerned Citizens" sousveillance society concept (in which citizens form ad-hoc intelligence networks to keep eyes on those around them for the sake of personal protection and/or gain; intrigue ensues) assumes
>the government would actually allow that sort of thing
>citizens are paranoid enough to give up the right to privacy to snoop on their annoying neighbors and/or "potential threats"
>citizens are actually capable of forming the proper networks and systems without getting caught
In short, it assumes people are smarter, richer, and more paranoid than they actually are, and that the government is the opposite.

When actually I GM I usually give a basic outline of things and wing it from there.

>The only reason worth doing something is the opinion of others
What a sad little life you must be living
Anyway have your (you)

Humans desire judgement.
youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw

Mr Frank Zappa said to become a real country you really need an airline, a football team, and a beer. But you can get by on just a good beer.

dwarven ale, elven wine, gnomish fermented badger milk, etc.

Find Trollpak from Runequest. Trollish drinks are very detailed, and there's an adventure about them, too.

Ale is top-fermented and lager is bottom-fermented.

I like this idea.
36 moons total
32 habitable
21 with native lifeforms
14 garden worlds, prime real estate
9 with a unique native sentient race

Ancient space opera ruins
Cthulhu Hypermath magic.
Fun portals to play tourist with.

The moons should be tiny but then we want normal gravity....hmm needs magic or alt physics. Earth-sized moons spoil the feel.

Sounds a lot like Endless space/Endless Legend
Also sounds really cool to play in
May steal the basic premsie for a new GURPS game.

>neat.jpeg

I am fond of using the lunar calendar with 13 months each 28 days long. You always know when the next full moon is.

Space Master uses Old Earth seconds, minutes, and hours but has an Imperial day set at 25 hours. Planetary days are however long they are.

I don't recall but it would make sense to make 250 hours a "week", 1000 hours a "month", and 10,000 a "year". It would be about 51 days longer than a Solar Year.

Okay guys, so I'm planning to do some kind of new setting, modern age tech but an entirely different world. The world is divided in four countries, all supposed to be a mockery of political stuff. Now, I've got the following three:

>Conservatives
Hate everything that is new and different, be it races, religions, technology, et cetera. Like warring and stuff
>Liberals
Self destructive tendencies. Everyone is special and needs a safe space, everyone is accepted, willing to refute facts to protect feelings et cetera
>Libertarians
Oliarchic minarchy. State only cares about itself, people only care about themselves. Pretty much like pic related.

Now, I was wondering what to make the 4th faction? I need four factions, since I'm going to have 4 players and I want them to be from different factions and work together and shit, but what should I make the fourth? Fascists? Communists? Theocrats? Or something else entirely?

>pic
>Nobody takes the time needed to read how the anarchist actually concieved society

It's a very useful read for worldbuilding. Anarchy is just the government of cooperatives and direct democracy with out a state opresing people.

>The world is divided in four countries, all supposed to be a mockery of political stuff
>Nobody takes the time needed to read what I actually wrote
It's ought to be stereotypes, I'm not here for political discussion on this level of edginess tb.h

I've tried to make a time system and such, but realized all it did was confuse players.
"Okay so we have a week to test our defensive wall, rest up, and prepare for the undead army"
Yes, but a week is only 5 days!
And each day is only 20 hours!

The players do math to determine what they have time for and don't, but it's slightly more complicated because time scale is different. While this can make the world more complete, sure, it's something that shouldn't require that much thought.

>libertarians not believing in law enforcement, public education, and public infrastructure, and even a negative income tax to compensate for the finite amount of land and natural resources available
You're a real faggot.

(Cont.)
Ancients build ships and a giant space laser ship launcher and fly off.
14 worlds are colonized with experimental races created from the Ancients' genetic material.
9 races develop.

Maybe the gravity is maintained by Portals which is why every moon has them. Huge Crystal Obelisks using Hypermath Gravity Bending.

Gravalisks don't work on any thing bigger than 1,000 miles in diameter. The larger moons are airless with low gravity.

Titania is a good example of the largest of the 36 moons.

Make it Fascists. State control of everything, "For the Greater Good of the Country!", gratuitous German/Latin.

Kingdoms of Kalamar does a good job with languages. They do just enough to make the names of people and places have a strong cultural theme.

Beauticians. Only the most gorgeous and best dressed are fit to rule the world.

Bump

Can this thread also be a Worldbuilding-Questions-That-Don't-Deserve-Their-Own-Threads thread?

Because I need to know how long after the total destruction of the moon it would take for the Earth to begin wobbling uncontrollably on its axis to such a degree that the planet can no longer support live

That's basically the purpose of most of the worldbuilding threads. It's a collection of "rate my stuff," and questions/answers.

Wouldn't the loss of the Moon immediately cause huge changes in weather/the tides?

Not sure about weather, but the tide would be much, much weaker since the only thing really pulling on the oceans anymore would be the sun.

That's not what would doom the earth first. First you get massive tidal shifts that would probably cause severe tidal waves of flooding.

It also depends how exactly the moon is 'destroyed' if it's flung into space or teleported away, Earth can still support life, but it just has a really big climate shakeup and mass extinction events from animals that rely on the moon for their behavior patterns.

If it's blown up, enjoy a bunch of meteoric debris crashing into earth, which would spell bad news for the obvious reasons.

Either way, you're not really dealing with Earth's rotation being majorly affected, at least not for several thousand years. Even if it was, it's still in the habitable zone. Seasons might get fucked up, days might get screwy, but that's the sort of change that's gradual enough that life can adapt to it.

I have notebooks filled with ideas for different settings, some as long as single page, others taking up multiple notebooks.

And I'd say that not even 5% of all of that has ever been used for a game.

My big thing is creating calendars. I love calendar systems. I sometimes get too deep and put in little mistakes into my systems so I have to make other systems to correct the mistakes (i.e. The Drety Calendar has 230 days, but the solar year for the world its in is actually 230.1 days, so in the year 710 Dret, the Roarian Decree added a leap year every ten days, and bumped the calandar forward by some days and creating the Drety-Roarian Calendar)

>added a leap year every ten days

Meant leap day every 10 years

But now I'm intrigued by the idea of a 10 day year...

Any have good, scholarly alternative history books to recommend? I don't mean books of stories set in alternative histories, but studies on what history might have been like had things gone differently?

Trying to create a 19th century setting in a world where the French won the 7 Years War

wiki.alternatehistory.com/doku.php?id=timelines:timelines_and_scenarios

I never go as far as making my own languages or calendar systems. I make pretty extensive histories and cultures but that's about it. Currently, I have a couple settings that I am using and several more I am making.
Made:
-DnD based world with not!Rome, not!Greek islands, not!Asian jungles, not!Finland, and not!Western Europe.
-Sci-fi setting with AIs and humans, no aliens, and no Earth-type planets (every planet was terraformed)
-magitech soft sci-fi very loosely based off of Nanoha
Currently creating
-Alternate history with Japanese and German Empires as well as isolationist UK and USA. Mainly a mecha setting.
-Fictional WWII era setting where two nations are fighting over the not!Panama Canal
As for tips, these are my major ones for people creating a world:
1. Start from where you are most comfortable, be it a plot hook, country, or even the mythology of the world.
2. What is the daily life of the average Joe in a part of your setting like? Map that out to find out what a person's day is like.
3. List out what is different or exciting about your world. What sets it apart from other settings like it.

I'm trying to work on a setting that focuses around a not!China and not!Korea Jade Empire wuxia-land, with a not!Japan acting as a sort of Eastern buffer.

To the VERY far West is basically Arabian Niiiiigghts, with no European or American-based factions to speak of. The further South you go is basically not!Africa and India. North is the stereotypical steppes. And East is a ton of archipelagos, with fantasy Polynesians the further out you travel.

I wanted a setting that focused on stuff outside of the stereotypical vague European-based fantasy. Only humans as "PC races," so while there are supernatural elements we aren't dealing with typical orc/dwarf/elf bullshit. Lots of wuxia and other Eastern-style myth on larger-than-life figures and characters.

No idea on a map yet.

So is it more not!China than not!Japan or Arabian Niiighhttts?

The "not!" is a terrible modifier that I hate Veeky Forums has adopted.

It should be "X but..."

It allows clear distinctions to be made on the spot, rather than claiming some hazy foundation and not building upon it,

I understand what you mean, it's the same reason why I hate the term "weeb". It has become a meme and shorthand for something rather than an actual descriptor. Regardless "not!" is shorthand for something longer that gives the reader a general idea of what the area/setting is, which is a side effect of being on the internet.

The not!China/Korea and Japan are the "focus," of the world. Characters can spend a TON of their time in the AN area (I plan on fluffing everywhere just as equally, so players don't feel hemmed in) if they want to. I plan on starting anyone in wuxia land or samurai land, and having them explore outwards if they want to.

Meh. Don't really think it's that big a deal. I'm planning on there being more nuance, but it's the kind of thing I need to work on because this world concept is fresh in my mind.

I've recently come to appreciate Eastern mythology and "world design/aesthetic," so to speak. My time growing up in Hawai'i has always given me an appreciation for studying Japan and China, but I've recently been expanding that to the PNG, Australian aboriginee, the Middle East, and Northen Asia. I'm sick of vague Medieval Europe fantasy, and want a world based around--effectively--almost everything East and South of it.

Most of these are fucking awful. That said, the "JIN DYNASTY FOREVER" one is fucking brilliant

This sounds interesting. What else do you have on it? Or is it merely in its early development stages right now?

Early development stages right now. I've been reading up on the history of the Imjin war, re-reading Shogun, and watching a lot of Kurosawa and good wuxia films (Hero, House of Flying Daggers, etc.) to inspire myself. I've done some reading on the Zande, Zulu, and Massai tribes to give myself something in the south, and have been watching documentaries on the natives of the PNG and Austrailans. Marco Polo is helping me as far as inspiration for the North goes, and I've been thinking on what kind of seemingly supernatural creatures I'm going to have added that are just normal for the inhabitants of the world.

I prefer the character dramas, and a lot of Eastern cinema allows for that. The Polynesians I'm very familiar with in regards of how I'm planning on doing them, but I'm also going to add a serious bend of conquest to their motivations--mirroring the way King Kamehameha I took the islands.

I'm still debating on whether or not I want the not!China to be focused around warring states or a singular and peaceful Empire. I'm thinking an Empire with its own good, peaceful territory surrounded by warring states that want to force their own influence on the others.

The Nippon will be focused more around its warlords than its Emperor/Shogunate combo. At the moment I'm planning on having their central government be about useless, and I'm thinking the unified Imperial state in the not!China will act as a good contrast.

But yeah, early development hell. I don't even have names yet, or a map.

Anyhow, this isn't some twist where the Elves are evil and the Orcs were the good guys all along.

Modern Elves are by and large a humbled people, many of whom only survived due to the hospitality of humans they once saw as beneath them. They do retain a good deal of their pride, especially those who survived unassisted or managed to hold out against the Orcish rebellion, but most have lost the delusions of divinity they once had.

Most Wild Elves actually have significant human ancestry and aren't too afraid to admit this. While they retain some of the magic of their ancestors, mostly in regard to manipulating plant and animal life in various ways, they really aren't anything like the empire of old though they do differ from tribe to tribe. It's not unknown for some to seek out remaining High Elf holdings, drawn in by stories of their past glories and possible sanctuary from the Orcs, but they're received with mixed reactions.

High Elves aren't universally pricks, but many actually lived during the decline and fall of the empire. Most are pretty focused on preserving what they have left and don't want shit to do with anyone else. They would rather keep pretending everything is fine, though this also varies from group to group.

The Orcs basically took over the remains of the Elven Empire. Their pride and values are different from their predecessors', but they tend to have a strong pragmatic streak and value duty and diligence above all else. They don't really have any sense of honor beyond that, nor much concern for people to which they have no ties. To them, a non-Orc has only as much value as they can provide them and they lack the courtesy or social graces to hide this too well. It's only a bit better for Orcs of other nations, who they war with at times. They're regarded as bastards for a reason, especially since they occasionally launch crusades to conquer the surface world in the name of their underworld deities or whatnot.

I'm all for political satire but could you make it a little less, pedestrian?

Bumperino

Speaking of changing the geopolitical axis, is it really going to be jarring for the "West" to have orientals and the "East" to have Europeans in a setting? I don't like how the map looks flipped and it's too late for me to move the continent around

I can't be bothered to write about each moon and civilisation and whatnot, but the idea was that the refueling points and docks were all in orbit, and there wasn't much on the moons to begin with, let alone after millenia. One of the more stable moons has an abandoned orbital elevator that's still intact, but the surrounding infrastructure is buried under kilometres of sand and defended by giant robots disguised as sandworms.

Anyone who wants to write about any of the moons/civilisations/whatever is welcome to.

Not sure what you mean there. The closest thing I'm having to Europeans in the setting is Polynesians to the East, or Indians to the South-West. Maybe you misread it? I'm not planning on putting European-based cultures in at all, so it shouldn't be one of those things where it's only jarring because the compass got reversed.

Don't like grammar, so I use real ones.

And because following a made-up calendar is a pain for most, I used the positivist one, which is simpler. Each month named for a god.

It can be regular physics if they are hollow, with black holes inside.

Suggestions:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala_(Southeast_Asian_political_model)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens_of_Langkasuka

hariragat.blogspot.com.br/2015/08/sinbad-horse-wrangler.html

hariragat.blogspot.com.br/2014/03/building-southeast-asian-settings-part-i.html

hariragat.blogspot.com.br/2014/04/on-southeast-asian-settings-part-ii.html

hariragat.blogspot.com.br/2014/05/highland-southeast-asia-for-your.html

>suggestions
Thanks. That will be very helpful.

>Suggestions
Not the guy you're responding to, but thanks, it's useful for my own setting.

Bumperinos

Try these

amazon.com/What-If-Foremost-Military-Historians/dp/0425176428

HOW DOES I MAP-MAKE?

I have most of an entire campaign setting here(document related)

the 2 things I need are a system to run it in, and maps of the setting country.

also, I need eastern European horror ideas
and eldritch horror tie-ins

how do you guys pantheon?
i want to make my own pantheon for my next game, but i'm having a hard time deciding how many gods and what they all run. i don't want to make too many because hopefully they will be a big focus of the campaign, so i want to be able to focus on their characteristics to an okay depth.
another thing i'm tossing around is that i would like the gods of this setting to be literally real and on earth, but dead and or sleeping, depending on your definition for a god. so the fire religion is literally centered on a huge humanoid god who is now ashes in a huge cremation pyre, but will never stop burning, if only the coals at the center. another idea i have is the forest god being a huge serpent/dragon ouroboros which sleeps in a huge forest, circling a really crazy magical forest, perhaps some kind of feywild.
i feel like, based off of other non monotheistic religions, there has to be a storm/sky god, a fire god, an ocean god, a death/underworld that could be a god, and then after that its kind of like whatever values a culture has.
but heres what actually has me caught up: in a setting with multiple intelligent/sapient species/races, and in a setting in which holy places actually literally exist and are marked by the bodies of gods, how do you... have races share the same gods. should each holy site be so holy that members of all races can always go? i don't want to just associate x god with y race or whatever, like all humans are made by the fire god, all elves by the forest god. so i'm not sure how to reconcile all of this...
another thought i had was to make the literal existent gods on !earth be the children of gods, reborn every so often, or who fall asleep and wake up every so often, or whatever, who are worshiped as gods, yet the actual gods are more abstract and unknowable.
idk i'm a bit confused. brainstorming on any of this shit is much appreciated as well, if you don't necessarily have any answers but have ideas.

I have an entire language down to the grammar (admittedly simple, no prepositions, etc.) and a full calendar system with fourteen 25-day months with named based on the climate of the locale. It really goes along with the religions of the area, etc., and I love making pantheons.

You can make whatever kind of pantheons you want, dude. It doesn't have to be sky/fire/water and etc.

I have a pantheon with one 'mother goddess' and her six children that are named after the holy books they wrote. I have another with bizarre, dickish/insane personifications of human emotions and concepts.

You can also, if you really want to go balls deep on this, make multiple/conflicting denominations of those religions like real life. The possibilities are endless.

>You can also, if you really want to go balls deep on this, make multiple/conflicting denominations of those religions like real life. The possibilities are endless.
this actually could partially solve my problems...

what do you think about bodies of dead/sleeping gods existing and reconciling that with conflicting nations/species? just keep them holy neutral ground? i guess it could just depend on the religion.
>You can make whatever kind of pantheons you want, dude. It doesn't have to be sky/fire/water and etc.
i kind of like elemental gods though, they're kind of nice. but i will strive to keep this in mind. i have some other (imagery mostly) ideas that don't follow traditional elemental pantheons so maybe i'll have a bit of a and a bit of b.

>what do you think about bodies of dead/sleeping gods existing and reconciling that with conflicting nations/species?

sounds cool on paper, but you just need to develop the idea more. maybe look into some lovecraft and similar works or something if that's the way you want to go.

I'm *this* close to scrapping my fantasy setting again.

Every time I do it absorbs a few elements from the last incarnation but it seems like I can't stick with anything or find it in a place I really like it. What gives?

When you say scrap, do you mean literally destroy?

I keep everything I create, no matter how shitty I might think it is. Trust me, as bad as you might think it now, there'll come a day when you remember it and want to look it over again and will kick yourself in the head if you've deleted it.

Anyways, settings are very involved works. I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me they worked years on one and they still didn't have down perfect. You just gotta keep working on it and not starting over from scratch.

Make a self-insert character and turn it into a setting you'd want to live in. Will make you feel a lot more connected with your creation.

No, I meant scrap as in not working on it but I like to keep my notes. I already kicked myself a bit because I deleted/didn't write down a bunch of stuff from the fantasy setting I was working on last year about this time.

Won't that just lead to an Eden of a setting with no problems and all pleasures?

It could, if that's all you wanted.
Putting a self-insert dude in my setting gave me an excuse to expand on my setting's Magitech.

Bump

I'm trying to think of a semi-generic fantasy setting, but I just keep failing and coming up short with interesting stuff.

All I know is I don't want elves and dwarves.

Anyone have some good sources for Magitech? Trying to find ideas.

dwelves and orves

I went too deep, realized I wasn't writing the story, and pulled back. Now the War Tongue is the common language, and the original language is the Old Tongue from before the War.

The reason to worldbuild is so your players have fun. Making your own calendar doesn't make the game more fun or interesting, it's just pointless work.

Or because you enjoy doing it

Basically whether it's hard for the reader to overcome the natural impressions between cardinal directions and human cultures/civilizations - for pretty much anyone besides East Asians "East" is the orient/far east, "West" is Europe and America, "North" is norsemen and vikings and cold lands and so on and "South" is tropics and equatorial and darker people.

Not as if it is an insurmountable obstacle (Thedas in Dragon Age was south of the equator so north = warm, south = cold) but I was curious for my own sake. Sorry, since it wasn't clear when I said 'the map'.

Rather than try and think too far out of the box (like with sci-fi that tries to come up with wholly alien and far from the baseline humanoid physique - not saying that is bad but it can be hard to do and hard to get into for reader/viewer) just try and think to the edges of the box.

Beastfolk can work instead of Orcs or instead of elves - the former would be more culturally Greek satyr (live to drink, to fuck, to fight) the latter would be a bit more subdued and dryad-y (potentially, could go with the former culturally and just make them long lived like elves). "Beastfolk" could run the gamut from just satyr style with digitigrade legs and horns to straight up warham beastmen.

Look to Sci-fi. I liked how, using a plebbie example, mass effect's turians were avian based without just being bird-headed.

Catfolk.

Werewolves.

Centaurs.

Look up other myths. Instead of demon or ogre or orc have ________ looking like the Persian/Mughal/Chinese miniatures demons.

Novelist here. Working on a sort of cyberpunk desert city. Idea is that in about 2020, a new battery is developed that finally makes electric vehichles cheaper than gasoline. World at large doesnt change much, but theres a boom town in Nevada that springs up for two reasons, first, the enigmatic owner of the land put up enough solar arrays that electricity is free in the city, and second, the desert allows you to go FAST once you break out of the sprawling concrete jungle of a boomtown thats grown around and above the race tracks.

I'm not sure how much of a presence I want megacorps to play. And if I should make my own or twist real ones. I cant decide because its kind of secondary to the dirty mechanic girls and bloody gang hitmen and the racers caught in between.

The map thing I said there had me wondering about possibly switching up the geography of mine. Doing so will really drastically adjust the dynamics of geopolitics which has a major hand in my plans. I'm talking myself through this, so apologies for wall of text. Welcome oponions too but I've found talking myself through it on WBG topics has really helped in the past.

This is the old map, though if I stick with it I will move Continent B up a tiny bit and eastward a little bit. Maybe tilt it angled so the northern part is close to Nakkarum but the south is further from the 'blacklands' (next to Sahel is going to be an Abyssinian/Sudan style state).

The main conflict themes I'm after are:

-Raoxshanids & vassals vs Inebket and allies/vassals over the semi-nomads of the interior and the Nakkarum city states. Think Hittite/Egyptian conflict over Syria or Saudi-Iranian conflict over middle east influence.

-Arazala needs a distraction that would justify why they aren't an immediate threat to the Raoxshanids and vice versa. Arazala was meant to visually be late roman and perhaps the Kingdoms 2/3 & "Anatolian kingdom" were territories it lost to migrants from the uncivilized north and north-west.

-I wanted a role for the Indo-Chinese in the Raoxshanid/Inebket conflict as it may have a religious holy war trapping (a dividing line of faith roughly across Nakkarum and the deserts though I'm not crazy about such a clear cut north-south religious division). Where the Indo-Chinese (who might be the big empire of continent B) sat in those template borders I'm not sure. The little city is a reminder of hong kong's latitude, and I liked the idea of a more tropical kind of China. Some sort of nemesis (possibly a Khmer/Siam competing state in the southernmost river valley, or hillfolk of not-Himalayas) distracting them so they aren't competing for Nakkarum themselves. Or I could throw that out and make the conflict Raoxshanid vs Indo-China.

But then I get to continent C and I have no fucking idea whatsoever. Also so with the western edge of continent B and even the highland interior (which I should make less desert and more gravely grassy - I don't need a second big fat desert and if it is more Himalayan steppe then I can put Turkic folk there.)

I haven't put norse anywhere and the temptation to have good ol norsemen is mitigated by the cliche of good ol norsemen. Given my predilection for more offroad choices of civ inspirations I like the idea of the dreaded mediterranean style sea people vikings, but not sure where to place it.

Putting European types there feels odd because the route is so indirect - the "Europeans" are all in the North and North-east of A with the Hwagari/Beastfolk a bulwark against travel or settlement from that side. Continent B is likely inhabited by Indian and East Asians and SE asians,

I dug the idea of Japanese without the samurai (I had vague notions of a kind of Sohei Monk Jihadist/templar order, and that works with the climate and ethnically (B is Asiatic/Indian). Put in the lowland region and they are close enough to play a role in the center apex of world-politics (the Nakkarum/tongue of B region). But I don't know who would inhabit the highlands.

Bringing C and B closer to A and twisting C - it's close enough to Nakkarum that I could imagine some prehistoric migration of white-people from North-East A moved into continent C. If I ran out of space for anything European (Kingdom 2/3 and Anatolia were going to be dark ages style Germanic equestrian warrior-aristocracies but could have that more extensively in C). Gives me more northernly latitudes (dead center of map is 30° North, very bottom of map is equatorial and very top is 60°) to work with. Further intensifies the apex of the map being their 'middle east' (where everybody comes to p̶l̶a̶y̶ kill and butcher and trade and kill). River valley of lowlands C offers the spot

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Whoops sorry Hiroyuki.

Beastfolk still offer a bulwark to funnel any naval affairs of C down towards the apex. At least to me geologically it looks sound - C could be a breakaway plate from Nakkarum, or on the same plate as the north of continent A but recent melting ice caused lowlands between them to flood (So it's just a gigantic continental sized british isles). Or the same deal but having broken from B.

Trying C off to the east of A didn't look right and further pushed the isolation of its periphery. At best it could offer a continental version of the germanic migrations with hordes of tawny haired barbars rolling from the highlands pushing Arazala to the shore and off it. So they could be trying to rally their suspicious neighbors to unite against that eastern push. But it leaves a gaping wide gap in the North-West (whereas on that previous map I can just crop away the endless ocean).

Am leaning towards A but will mull over it, welcome any oponions.

Maybe put it as far as possible away from the other 2 and give it an isolationist culture based on a historically isolationist country?

Could work. I did want to have fantasy Mesoamericans/Incans but ran out of space in the sub-tropic region. If I tilt it at an angle so the semi-arid region is northward and remove the ice from the mountains it could work there. Although being so isolated would also mitigate it from any circumstances of participation in the story. Doing this for writing (eventually) rather than just PnP and while it's interesting the whole arrival to a new world a'la conquistadors isn't my Jam.

I'm coming at this from a strong historical and historical wargame modding (M&B/Total war) background, and one thing I always liked was getting to research and contextualize varied and off the reservation nations militarily (and by extension learning in brief on their culture and such). While I can't visually depict such, I can textually and thematically.

One other complication is that while I'm one for low fantasy I like the notion of the slightly hard to describe atm Eastern Rakashkas/ogres/monsters in those Eastern miniatures - While the beastfolk in the north I figured as celtic named satyrs, I might fill in empty spaces of the wastes in the world with beastfolk like that. Was the option of an entire continent of demi-humans but I don't want to have a mordor invasion nor an invasion of mordor.