/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

Depends on the setting. List some things from your setting that are economically exploitable.

>Long and funny-sounding.
Look into Kojiki and the names of the dieties in the early parts of it.
sacred-texts.com/shi/kj/index.htm

Man, I can relate to a lot of that. Especially the Mononoke part, that movie got me hard when I was a kid. As time went on, Miyazaki's older works, like Naushicaa and Shuna really got me into world-building.

>>Why do you like to worldbuild?
Personally, I am trying to capture certain specific images, icons, moments and moods, then trying to create a world that could accommodate them. A lot of it I do intuitively, and only retroactively realize why and how I did it.

I am quite fascinated with the subject matter of "becoming at peace with" the world. A lot (I dare to say majority) of Fantasy is about CHANGING the world, overcoming a major obstacle.
I however aim at the feeling of a world that is not a nice place (in fact it's very ruthless), but that is just how things are - and how they will be - and if you can find peace with it, you can find a lot of beauty in it.

I have these visions, mostly inspired by Shuna's Journey and FUCKTON of research I did mostly on central Asia as a region - these great magnificent mountains and endless steppes, faded, moss covered ruins of statues that combine barbaric and primitive images with modern elements, the small, poor nomadic tribes letting their cattle graze among ruins of once amazing cities.

I like anachronism and paradoxes, elements that pit contradictory sentiments against each other. Gods that are essentially the embodiment of beauty of nature - angel-like creatures covered in moss accompanied by flock of animals in a Cinderella like image, who are at the same time almost Cthulian monstrosities: it's not a "surprise" twist reveal, it's just two complimentary sides of one thing.

I like my anachronisms - medieval or ancient lifestyle but relatively modern weaponry - I like my central asian and middle east like landscapes and cities, I like my feeling that the world is very old and very worn out, a world where dozen great civilizations have came and gone. I love masks.
That is why I world build.

Well, the world I'm trying to make has different important elements. Salt is very important in the economy, it's used for a lot of different things.
Magic is present, but it's been forgotten and there's only urban legends of creatures who still can use it.
There's two different sentient races that are present in the world. The corporation is supposed to be controlled by the shorter gray kind. I won't go into too much detail about them unless you want me to. The corporation though is leading a large expedition into a new found continent in hope of finding salt.

Feel free to ask any questions. I just don't want to do the whole "Oh no they're tearing up the trees and being mean to nature DDD:". It feels like what someone typically would immediately go to.

>>How pages of lore/backstory do you have?
I've lost count. I have notes and scribing everywhere, poorly organized and synchronized. But most of it is still in my head, and has been for almost a decade now.

>>What's a trivial, random fact about your world?
The creatures called Karaf's, my worlds most common mounts, a sort of a cross between Cattle and Dogs are thought to be a species native to the great steppes of the central part of the region, where they have been domesticated.
In reality, they are not a natural species, and have been designed artificially as part of a small genetical experiment roughly 3000 years ago.

Also, compasses don't work very well in my world. Which makes navigation, especially at sea, quite difficult.
The reason for this is a remnant of an ambitious world-wide "wireless energy distribution" project relying on electromagnetic heat induction that left a number of gargantuan magnets running under ground and at the bottom of the sea, though the civilization that had build them has been gone for several thousand years. They are strong enough to mess with compasses.

>>What's something you need feedback on?
Everything, anything - I don't think I ever got feedback on anything I've ever posted in world building threads in the last couple of months... I'm really writing this for myself and not expecting anyone to bother reading it.

>Hard Mode and Dante Must Die questions available upon request.
I am curious about those, though.

>Or, maybe you need an expert's opinion on a random subject?
Did ancient oxcarts use metal axles?

>Corporation finds a new continent
>Continent has magical creatures
>Corporation captures said magical creatures on the down-lo to fuel

That's actually pretty good. I can expand off of that and it feels original so it doesn't make me feel like and idiot.

Anyways, thanks user. It may not come out exactly like that, but considering some of the important people I wanted to in the world it fits well.

Also gives an excuse for there to be an old scientist/researcher/hermit type who knows about ancient magicks.
Always an excellent trope to invoke.

FUCK. This is exactly me. Who sold you my skin, shapewalker? WHO? GIVE ME A NAME!!!

I have someone like that I plan on being in the world. He's going to be a refugee from a civil war that has been living on the new-found continent. I didn't really have any way to interject him into the conflict until now though.

>The corporation though is leading a large expedition into a new found continent in hope of finding salt.
Quick question: A) how do you have corporations before knowing basic geography like "where are all the continents" and B) if you have continents, that kinda assumes seas and oceans between them, right? Is the water in them not salty?

>A) how do you have corporations before knowing basic geography like "where are all the continents"
Not him, but my setting has oceans that are neigh-unnavigable. No one will be able to set foot on several of the continents until trans-oceanic exploratory air travel is invented and financed.

>Not him, but my setting has oceans that are neigh-unnavigable.
Interestingly enough, (I'm the and guy) I have a very similar feature - oceans are extremely difficult to navigate (and dangerous, as within my world, spermwhales are a prey animal to some of the ocean predators, especially a class of giant sea worms which have difficulty telling the difference between a silhouette of a whale and a ship...) and transoceanic travels are incredibly difficult without air travel.

Yet still: corporation is a very specific type of economical and political organization, and it's really difficult to imagine it existing in a organization that does not have REALLY efficient infrastructure: and that implies extremely efficient transportations. Plus, the pressure towards inventing air travel will be increased with the lack of having other means of trans-oceanic travel.

Maybe this is a terminological thing, but... I'm just wandering it would not be better to invent your own term or seek inspiration in similar but less industry-and-globalization-dependant model.
Look into guilds, into the earliest Japanese Zaibatsu or into the "clan-companies" that predated them.
It might even be more interesting.

At one point of my world, there was a fairly advanced society where each part of industry was monopolized by a single gargantuan socio-economical body - nicknamed "kiith" (until I can figure out a less plagiary name).
Each kiith had characteristics of guild (equalizing prices and regulating competition within the domain of production), but also those of a clan (generally hereditary membership and genealogy-like hierarchy), a corporation (had political ambitions and own economic agenda) and even a cult (many of them had their own internal religion and culture).

Corporations outside of the cultural context of modern, globalized, super-connected world make little sense, but it might be fun seeing what equivalents and similar bodies can be invented.

Is it too confusing if the rules for slavery in my kingdom are a backwards mess of arbitrary and fickle rules filled with exemptions and designed so the ruling class can do whatever they want and have little internal consistency since they were written by comittee over the span of a few hundred years?

Can I just point my players at the american tax code for comparison?

No that's good, it leads to lots of cool plots, like a character becoming a slave by accident or technicality or getting freed the same way.

Post as much as you've written about your slavery rules and the kinds of exemptions and loopholes you've come up with.

It's not that crazy

So, it's a human kingdom, and only non-humans can be enslaved. Humans can become indentured servants but because they're not slaves they still have rights and if those rights are violated, all their debt is cleared.

Elves are the largest group of slaves, dating back from the war six hundred years ago, the population never got repatriated (so they're not a distinct subrace). By any rational observation, elves and humans are the same race, just one is fey touched. But fuck elves, they're invading shits trying to take over the world. Half-elves can also be enslaved even though they're half human, because there was too much social turmoil with the children of slaves being free, and then what do you do with this enslaved woman raising a free baby? So they adopted the one-drop policy.

Which also fucked over half-orcs. Orcs are demonspawn, very different from humans. Not many orcs though, because the caliphate gets them back by force.

Tieflings can be enslaved, but the punishment for being a tiefling is death by immolation, so that's irrelevant. Assimar are the property of the gods and thus are already enslaved, and you can't take someone else's slave.

Gnomes and Halflings in this setting are what happens when an elf or a human respectively gives birth and the soul doesn't make it to the child, it's treated like a disfiguring birth defect, and since they don't have human souls, they can be enslaved. This way the little monster can't inherit what should go to their normal brother or sister.

The tricky one is dragonborn (half-dragons), because their soul is half human half dragon, but dragon's don't really have souls, and they can do everything a human can, so it's really a human soul in entirity (think of the philosophical definition of an army) and thus they CANT be enslaved

No one fucks with dwarves.

I'm pretty sure they used wooden axles. I could be wrong though.

It make sense for peninsula in circle to be more desertified? Bearing in mind the 30° desert bonanza business. I need to move my Inebket Egyptian inspired folks to the other continent as the river-valley they are currently on (the desert one with big delta plains) is going to go to an India inspired relatives for various raisins. I would remove the plateau's river from the west of the circle so that the snowmelt and such from the mountains in the north goes down into the circle peninsula.

Georgia/Florida being so verdant despite being in the 30° latitude area has really thrown me a curveball to figure out exactly why that is the case. What I read says if there is a body of water with wind then a 30° area will be more likely to be subtropical (like Florida). Florida gets the wet winds of the trade winds blowing on it - but so does the horn of africa and it's drier despite being closer to the equator and thus more rainfall.

I guess the peninsula circled could be like baja california? Yes there's a sea in front of it but it is a small one and next to that sea is a much larger deserty region (Not just the north of Mexico for baja but something akin to half of North africa in girth)

I don't believe I've heard of any chariots in the past using a metal axle. Granted they would have been built with speed and not durability in mind, books.google.com/books?id=5mKefpEufkgC&pg=PA159&dq=ancient metal axle&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjCtLr12rnNAhWKNSYKHQJDA-QQ6AEIPTAF#v=onepage&q=ancient metal axle&f=false but I don't think you'd have a full metal axle.

How the fuck could you make a wooden axle? You can't smelt wood!

>Carve out a long cynindrical pole for an axle.

wat

I really like this idea of writing down the themes.

Is there somewhere I can see the themes of some worlds and universes made by other authors?

scifiwright.com/2014/12/pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain/
Here's some of John C. Wright's notes for Count to the Eschaton.

scifiwright.com/2013/03/a-peak-behind-the-hermetic-millennia/
A few more here.

>I don't think I ever got feedback on anything
Judging from what I could gather from these two posts, your world is pretty awesome and you're really doing it the right way. Central Asia is very interesting and far from overrepresented in fiction and fantasy. I saw Nausicaa and Mononoke rather recently, but those movies really enchanted me in a way only Star Wars has done before.
Do you just do your worldbuilding for fun or are you hoping to use it in a game or story of some sort?

Working on the Pantheon and magic system for my setting.

Here's what I have so far for the god of Force, and 'pure' magic (think Magic Missiles kind of magic. Not elemental, just pure energy.)

>Wex is the god who inhabits the planet fourth from the sun, next to the 'main' planet of the setting

>He's basically the center of the planet, surrounded by a deep ocean that stays with him due to the immense gravity he gives off

>Wex is the god of Water, Air, Force, Gravity, and Giants

>He does not interact with mortals directly, unlike the other gods who are very active, and choose to philander and sometimes appear at rituals in person

>You earn his favor, and by proxy, his magic, by surviving. Deep personal strength is required to earn the favor of Wex, and surviving traumatic events, facing your fears, and fighting against impossible odds and winning causes him to unconsciously provide you with his force

>Unlike the other gods, who require both a material cost (components for spells), and a magic cost (MP, basically), all of Wex's magic requires only a Magic Cost

>Wex's magic ranges from bolts of force, to slowing and speeding up time on specific people and things, Telekinesis, and gravity fields that crush and compress anything around you

>However, as his magic is only provided to those who constantly test their boundaries, face their fears, and go on suicide missions regularly, very rarely does anyone reach the point of becoming a gravity master

>In case anybody does manage to become an adept user of Wex's magic, eventually, they will change and shift in form as Wex blesses them with more gifts

>Eventually, they become one of his eldritch Titans, forces of nature that wipe the surrounding area clean of life, until, of course, someone challenges them and slays them, upon which the cycle begins anew, as slaying something as massive as a Titan will bestow the gifts of Wex upon the slayer

So, yeah, anything about this bit of lore too clunky or janky?

>Why do you like to worldbuild?
I like constructing histories and cultures as well as creating settings to write stories in. I'm a big setting/premise guy for my own stories so that appeals to me a lot. Started with writing a high fantasy setting back in elementary/middle school and eventually created a couple worlds with my best friend in high school (one a sci fi and another a high fantasy D&D world). With a bunch more being made in my later years in high school and most recently in college. I just love the scale of worldbuilding.
>How pages of lore/backstory do you have?
Depends. On my high fantasy D&D world, I have about 10 pages all together. On my sci fi setting all together I would say 35-50 pages (possibly even more spread across multiple documents, its a lot of stuff). On my low fantasy story for a novel I want to write its about 5 pages. On my mecha/AltHist setting its about 36 pages. For my magitech/Nanoha-inspired one it's around 15 pages. And for my most recent one, a WWI-era fictional setting for a book I want to write, it's 10 pages.
>What's a trivial, random fact about your world?
For my most expansive one (the sci fi one), it's that there are three classifications for robots in the Interdimensional Era. These ACCSs(Automated Cybernetic Control Systems) or service bots, IRLUs (Intelligent Recursive Logic Units) or supercomputers, and SAHCs (Self-Aware Human Constructs) or androids.
>What's something you need feedback on? Or, maybe you need an expert's opinion on a random subject?
I need some help on one of two things. One how religion would work in a secluded fedual enviorment that is still close to larger empires (aka a large maritime empire or a consortium of powerful trading city-states). Another is what sort of technology/weaponry was avaliable to the normal infantryman in WWI. Some help on how to portray the WWI military in writing would help as well.

Most of those are just elongated names. For example, Hakama no Kumonosu is actually two words, just put together with the "no" particle. Same for Kihora Koujou Toshi

>4
The Crackerjacks

Yeah, I made those ones up. Hakamanokumonosu is "pants made of cobwebs." Seems an appropriate name for the Fair Folk. I didn't know if someone might know IRL ridiculously long Japanese names.

I know someone else recommended this, but I would HIGHLY suggest reading old Shinto texts like the Kojiki and the Nihon Shiki. Those have some great inspiration for long Japanese names. Make sure they make sense in Japanese first though. Also, make sure to read the translated version of the texts that have the original Japanese names and not the translated names for the kami.

I’m having trouble defining the sort of alignment a character is, or at least what they could be considered. The character in question is a god of a realm known as the void. Before I go any further, let me put this stuff up to help clarify on some things.
>In this setting, the alternate universes are just a thing, multiverse, etc
>Space between these universes is what the Void is
>The Void is incredibly volatile towards all life, anything not “of the void” is pretty much guaranteed death.
>Gods in this are also tied to something
>I.E. There is only one god of fire, he/she/it is tied to all fire in the universe, and has influence wherever it is. However the limit to their power is what they’re tied to.
>God of ice cream cupcakes would be amazingly powerful if the whole universe was filled with them, but if the recipe fell out of the known and nobody made them anymore, the god would basically die out.
>Main point of this is that there’s a degree of power struggle amongst the gods, mainly because no matter how vast the Universe is, it’s -limited- eventually.
>They can only affect their own Universe, if they were to go to another one (not possible but we’re talking theory here) they wouldn’t have power there, someone else would already be the god of something.
>God in question is tied to the Void, which is infinite, so they have infinite power (Disclaimer: there is no “god of universes”)

(Going to continue this in the next post)

The God in question doesn’t have any sort of agenda or plan. Really for the most part they just sort of sit in the Void and do their own thing. Existing longer than anything else ever has pretty much made them apathetic, so they don’t really care about what’s going on.
The main difficulty I’m having when it comes to defining them, is that the Void can and has been responsible for a lot of bad shit. Its influence on things can fuck reality up and corrupt people beyond repair.
So far what I’m thinking is that they can be considered neutral/generally just a decent person, and while the Void can be responsible for some terrible shit on horrible scales, when it comes to the grand scheme of things, it’s just not big enough for them to really care. Though if the common everyday man knew about said god/what they were responsible for, they’d probably consider them a villain/generally an asshole.

I'm having the same issue with my god, Wex, posted up here.

I would argue that they are True Neutral, but DnD alignments are pretty lame. True Neutral works for them in that they just aren't motivated to do anything. If it was actively plotting to use the Void to control the whole universe, it would be Lawful Evil, if it wanted to destroy the universe so that nothing can exist for shits and giggles, it'd be Chaotic Evil, I guess. (CE is the most poorly thought-out alignment, in my opinion. ) But, since he has no intention of doing anything with his power, and operates on a morality that mortals can't really understand, I'd call him True Neutral.

where would you put him on a chart of Selfish/Selfless and Utilitarian/Epicurean

Incredibly Selfish, really Utilitarian.

much better alignment system, isn't it?

hey I'd like to as for a bit of help, do you guys know of any event in recent history (lets say post ww2) that seem like a near apocalyptic battle could have happened in?
the idea is that angels and demons got into a fight that nearly triggered the apocalypse early, it was thankfully stopped but a lot of angels and demons were killed and now both sides have to recruit humans to build their numbers back up.

US race riots in the summer of '68. It works because there was a huge cultural shift afterwards. OK, maybe you can include the protests too but those were boring.

On the other hand, maybe the apocalyptic battle was why the Chinese invasion of Vietnam stopped. Maybe Belarussian mercs were dogfighting angels and demons over ancient ruins in Ethiopia. Maybe a lot more French troops went to that scuffle on the Ivory Coast than records show came back.

The numerous secret wars and conflicts with nuclear weapons in balance, that are all part of the Cold War?

is there some kind of guide to making medieval heraldry (like the actual process in Photoshop or something)?

eh I was think more towards stuff where things blew up and no one knows why, like the Tunguska Event for example. sorry for not being clearer.

I been doing it for years and its practically second nature.

Depends on what we are talking about exactly. As i have multiple settings that are actually just part of a bigger overlapping mega setting and all have their own histories.

The setting is incredibly ancient but most of the history is forgotten or lost. Humans are considered 'new' despite being around for 'not even a mere hundred thousand years' according to the dragons one of the longest lived species who actually remember when the universe wasn't very old and the worlds still young. They have seen countless species rise and fall. Gods arise and mass extinctions occur over the countless long eons. This makes it so the dragons have a very odd view of things and despite being ancient they aren't remotely disconnected from the world or waiting to die.

Only help i could use is some stuff on geography, oceanography, and linguistics.

Holy shit why the hell does your stuff sound so similar to my own?

You primed it with WWII as an example event, now I know you meant it as a time frame.

There was a flash in the South Atlantic in the 80s that most people think was an Israeli/South African nuke test. Mt. St. Helens blew... around that time frame?

How close to the equator? How is the currents like(which is why Florida is like that)?

If you want to a pull an Egypt consider how the geography made that possible for especially given they are sitting right next to the fucking Sarah Desert.

Egypt got to be dry as fuck because its squashed right in the middle of several continents. Makes it a bitch for rain to make it all the way there. A coastal desert meanwhile is likely to have virtually no rains or seasonal monsoons. Consider how the wind flies and how the ocean currents move.

Worse comes to worse use the weather deity or magic excuse.

Ancient Greece is a good place to look for the city state one. As for the secluded larger empire's look at historic China. Secluded maritime empire...there never was one. Ships were such a better way to get around, move people, ship goods, and explore for the longest time hell to a degree it still is. Maybe Rome might work but not really.

WW 1 is a very interesting point in military history. You had fucking zeppelins, automatic machine guns mowing people down, trenches, people on horseback, tanks, and planes. You had chemical weapons and was such an awful war that afterwards people agreed to never use certain weapons(like the previous mentioned chemical weapons).

>Ancient Greece
The city-states were more Italian than Greek I think in terms of inspiration. China might be a good place to look although the overall feel of the larger empire I was looking at has more of an emphasis on regional control rather than heavily centralized government. And when I said maritime empire, I meant an empire that had little strong land trade routes and thus had to rely on sea routes. Not that secluded but still mostly limited to sea routes. Immensely rich though. Flavor inspiration came from the Islamic Empire.

>zeppelins
Wasn't really planning on zepplins. Maybe airships though.
>MGs
Actually this leads me to a question: what sort of rifles did most infantry have in WWI? I'm an idiot on military tech in that era.
>Trenches
Was planning for a lot of this.
>horseback
Wasn't really planning for this since the cast was mainly gonna fight in the mountains, trenches, or hills
>tanks
Lot's of this. The tanks in WWI were very bulky and slower than WWII tanks yes?
>planes
MC is gonna be in the army so that might play a minor role. Besides bombing runs haven't thought of that much.
>chemical weapons
Haven't given much thought to this. What sort of effects did chemical weapons have?

30 degrees north of equator, the top tip being maybe 32-33 and the bottom of the circle being around 25-26. I'm going to go with the desert there regardless (low/no magic but I don't think anyone is going to throw a fit since I'm not even sure Westeros or Middle Earth have latitude longitude lines) as it's not like the desert is equatorial.

Also to back up your comment of
>Ships were such a better way to get around, move people, ship goods, and explore for the longest time hell to a degree it still is.

books.google.com/books?id=40AjSfdJXaAC&pg=PA198&dq=cost of shipping grain to rome&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjj7dTvzrrNAhVHSSYKHSqGCD8Q6AEINjAA#v=onepage&q=cost of shipping grain to rome&f=false

>Scholars have estimated that the cost of shipping grain from one end of the Mediterranean to the other was cheaper than hauling the same amount of grain 75 miles overland. It was perhaps 40 times more expensive to transport goods by land rather than by sea. And while it was somewhat more costly to move goods along a river than over the open ocean it was still many times more efficient than land transport.

Also books.google.com/books?id=sDpMh0gK2OUC&pg=PA283&dq=Alexandria to ostia distance&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwieromezrrNAhXCRiYKHYgdAT4Q6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=Alexandria to ostia distance&f=false

Notes the length in days to travel from Alexandria to Messina as 7 days, 9 days from Alexandria to Puteoli in Naples.

books.google.com/books?id=26VwGWEd2vsC&pg=PA315&dq=ancient land travel length of time&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitxvypz7rNAhVMOSYKHUn6C3IQ6AEINDAE#v=onepage&q=ancient land travel length of time&f=false

Bordeaux Pilgrim reckons he took about 3400 miles from Bordeaux to Jeruslaem, it sounds like overland only (excluding the Bosphorus) and it took him 170 days and 20 miles on average daily. By comparison Alexandria to Puteoli averages 111 miles a day, Ostia (Rome) to Africa (carthage?) 135 miles a day. And Melania the Younger took 44 days overland from Constantinople to Jerusalem but the author says a sea voyage in winter would have taken 10 days.

>47881646
>Why do you like to worldbuild?
because its interesting coming up with all the little things, that and it occupies me, the constant research takes hours upon hours.

>How pages of lore/backstory do you have?
70 or so now ( I've been busy )
most of the worldbuilding is about the main civs and their history/biology/society/tech(40 pages) and the general plotline of the whole thing ( 10 pages) the rest is common technobable and types of ships each civ use.

also this is an attempt at a hard science type story.

>What's something you need feedback on? Or, maybe you need an expert's opinion on a random subject?

the stuff im having issues with is character building ( ive got one kind of fleshed out, but he's based on someone i know )

any tips on character creation?

>any tips on character creation?
Steal, steal, steal. Grab attributes from people you know and fictional characters and mix them up. Interview the characters, write up questionnaires for them, to really get into their heads.

Most infantry used bolt action rifles while tankers and pilots would usually be issued a handgun, usually a revolver but sometimes semi-automatics. However, there were a few occurrences where battalions were fielded with muskets. Most of those were either Ottoman or colonial troops in the early years.

As for tanks there were usually two kinds. Tanks and tankets. Tanks had cannons while tankets had heavy machine guns. Tanks were originally called landships because they were meant to act like battleships on land and, for the most part, they did. They were big, clunky, and (usually) had large crews. The Fiat 2000, an Italian tank that entered service a month or so after the war, was 20 ft tall and moved about three or four mph. Other, earlier tanks would have crews of seven or eight men operating various positions and guns. These earlier tanks were also prone to poor ventilation and the crews would have to exit their vehicles or suffer hallucinations and asphyxiation from the poisonous gases that were produced from the engines. This occasionally would happen in the heat of battle where the tanks would be surrounded on all sides by the enemy.

Also, tanks varied widely in their designs and uses. Many tanks were designed to be able to drive right over the trenches that the infantry considered the safest place on the front. I imagine the first people to see tanks used on a large scale would have been shaken to their core from such an image.

The trenches were muddy, wet, and disease ridden structures that had a surprising complexity to them. It would be easy to get lost if you didn't know your way around. The trenches also had a physiological effect on the soldiers who lived day after day in the same small track of land, never advancing and never retreating.

Chemical weapons were in many ways viewed the same as tactical nukes are viewed today. The moment you start using tgem is the moment your enemy starts hitting you with slightly larger and deadlier weapons. Because of this many experts at the time feared such weapons would eventually be used on population centers. Many chemical weapons, such as chlorine gas, were less a gas and more a powder that settled over the battlefield. Some eye witness accounts claimed that a man could walk faster than the gas would blow. The first victims were too confused and frightened to save themselves and just watched as the gas slowly overtook their positions. The British suffered the worse because the artillery crews didn't adjust for wind so when they shelled enemy positions some of the gases would be carried back to friendly lines.

The phsycological effect of this was tremendous and, along with artillery bombardment, contributed to the first major cases of PTSD, know at the time as shell shock. Stories of friends fighting over a gas mask or of doctors tearing the mask off of a wounded soldier's face are widely circulated.

Any tips for naming a campaign? I need something to call my campaign on Roll20.

Steal from people you know and steal from people you don't know. Give them some goals, quirks, fears, history, and then let em loose.

Characters are just people remember that.

How do I worldbuild for a single, all campaign compassing city?

For more information; it's a city set in another dimension where 'lost' people and objects end up, and not just from our human world either. There are other alien worlds with refuges there too.

Basically I should wonder if I should try to encapsulate everything in the worldbuilding or try a more floaty type where I just list a few districts, important locales, a few important people and let other people fill in the blanks.

Are there any good tools for playing with real-world maps?

Find a poem that deals with the same themes as your quest and just tweak the name a bit.

>The God in question doesn’t have any sort of agenda or plan.
>apathetic, so they don’t really care about what’s going on.
Unaligned or True Neutral. They don't do the scary bad void shit on purpose or because it's fun, right? It just happens.

>linguistics
What do you need to know?
Sixth semester linguistics student here

Just a small addendum, In the last one or two years of the war, Beretta, Bergmann and Thompson were developing submachine guns. That means fully automatic handheld weapons that used pistol ammunition. They were very useful in trench assaults.
Self-loading rifles weren't really a thing and only saw some use during WWII, along with the first assault rifles.

>Utilitarian/Epicurean

how are these two on opposite sides of a spectrum? Epikuros was way into moderate hedonism

>Do you just do your worldbuilding for fun or are you hoping to use it in a game or story of some sort?
Probably waaaaay too late to reply (got bogged up in work), but: I recently started doing some serious writing and I plan on using the world as a background for some fantastic stories. Aside from that, we have occasionally short campaigns that I DM set in the setting, and a friend, a programer and an aspiring game developer, proposed a single board-game/simplictic strategy game based on a particular era of my fiction, something akin to the old Shogun board game, if you ever heard of it.

Requesting hard mode.
>Why do you like to worldbuild?
Lots of reasons.

I tend to see a lot of elements get repeated in other fictional worlds over and over, and I want to try to make something different, like if I notice that most fictional worlds tend to be based on medieval Europe. Or I might see one I don't like but think "well if you did X this way, it'd be a lot more interesting." Or I'll be watching a documentary or something that'll be talking about a particular culture and think "huh, that's interesting. What if I combined that with Y?"

It's a way to stretch my creative muscles. Unlike, say, historical fiction, where all there is to make is the story, worldbuilding gives you essentially unlimited space to create. You can create a world, then create countries for that world, then create cultures for those countries, histories for those cultures, and on and on in a fractal of detail and texture. Were you so inclined, you could work on it your whole life and never be 100% finished. So since I enjoy writing and creating in my free time, worldbuilding lets me do that without limits.

Those are the big ones, at least.
>How pages of lore/backstory do you have?
If you just wanna count the stuff I've got typed up and stored in an easily-accessible format, just a couple pages. Outlines of all the key locations and some of the world's rules and important history. I've got a lot more on looseleaf that's not super well organized.
>What's a trivial, random fact about your world?
The most populous city in the world is home to about 6 million people.
>What's something you need feedback on? Or, maybe you need an expert's opinion on a random subject?
Nothing comes to mind at the moment.