Worldbuilding Workshop - Otter Space Edition

'Sup Veeky Forums. You're working on something. You've got an idea that you might want to put in front of a group, or you've always wanted to but haven't found the right table for it.

You've got a world in your head, and it needs some fleshing out. You've got a thing you want to try, but have never been able to.

Share it, here. What makes it unique? What problems are you having, putting it together? What questions do you have?

I've never been able to completely focus on one thing. One idea is made to the point where I think it's not good enough, and I scrap it, or several ideas that aren't developed

That's pretty much the same problem I have. I get a neat tagline or concept for a setting or an aspect of one, but I can't extrapolate from it to make a full world, or fill in enough gaps that I can run a game with it.

What ideas has it been most recently for you guys?

For me, it's a...

- Space Fantasy based on every HFY trope and story that isn't shit (surprisingly few) and a couple of good space superstition threads.

- Heroic Fantasy based on American history and folklore, as opposed to European.

- Superhero game - something street level, like Daredevil/Jessica Jones, where they finally build up to the big bad, for him to be just a guy with powers like theirs actually trying to change things for the better, and giving them the rundown on why beating up on street level crime is just getting their vigilante jollies off.

Let's see

-A world consisting mostly of underground caves and caverns, lit by openings to the surface and bright glowing crystals

-A setting where all the nobility has magical bloodlines and spellcasting abilities, being the dominant forces in the setting because of them

Those are the two biggest ones.

>-A setting where all the nobility has magical bloodlines and spellcasting abilities, being the dominant forces in the setting because of them

Ever read the Codex Alera series?

>Heroic Fantasy based on American history and folklore, as opposed to European.

Westerns are already a thing.

You are aware of /wbg/, right? My bad if you actually meant for this thread to be different in some way.

I actually didn't see it when I searched the catalogue, which is bad on me - if I had seen it, I would have asked the question there.

Broadly, though, the direction I wanted this to be was "Shit you've wanted to try but haven't been able to," as opposed to "Ongoing projects." More a workshop on how to make it possible.

Still, if that's too close, I can let this fall off the catalogue.

Never heard of it. Does it do something similar?

My pet project at the moment is a D&D 5th Edition core with elements of 3.5, Homebrewed classes, Spelljammer and Planescape.
BBEG Mind Flayer; Ulitharid born with the curse of sorcery turned full Alhoon to reap a mighty vengeance on the city that he was cast from. In pursuit of this, he manages to find the ruined remains of a Nautiloid in what was the Underdark on this world. Slowly uncovering the origins of the Mind Flayers on this world, creating thralls, a gang of slaves, a cohort, an army for various creatures. Sets forth and conquers his old home. Now with the resources of his conquered realm he willed forth his army to retrieve the eggs of dragons that he would turn into Brainstealer Dragons to rule as his lieutenants and vanguard, courtesy of a helpless Elder Brain that was being corrupted and twisted into service under the alhoon (Because of McGuffins on the ruined ship), He will break the world of free will and make them rebuild this vessel so that he may rule rightfully over all the stars.

Takes his forces to the surface, war ensues. All PCs will be created on the fly in form of fighting retreat from the final standing defending forces on this continent. The word has spread of this war to all corners of the world, borders being prepared, kingdoms and empires girding themselves.

It was written on a dare to combine two shitty elements and make something good from them - the elements Butcher was given were "The Lost Roman Legion" and "Pokemon."

He ended up with a pretty bitching fantasy world, with something a bit like Bending - the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Metal, and Wood, each having abilities which buff and change the "Crafter" of the relevant element. Everyone has a craft of some sort, except the main character, and many have more than one.

The noble houses tend to be made of the absolute strongest, and when you finally see them employed in a war, each of them is like a nuclear sub in terms of individual power.

I made a Cthulu styled sea adventure.

Am I original?

Hmm...sounds interesting, but not quite what I was going for.

I wanted more minor magical talents. Still useful, and occasionally you get stronger ones that could qualify as a warmage, but it's still just normal people they're ruling over.

I pretty much got the idea from seeing so many threads about how any random mage could turn a noble court into his personal puppetshow, and figured that giving nobles magical tools at their disposal as a default rule would help avoid those situations. It also makes randomly attacking the king when he's offering you a quest a much scarier prospect.

Well, give it a read anyway, it's a cool concept, and a great example of how inspiration can come from the weirdest places.

That being said, in your setting - does spellcasting ability follow sallic law, then, and come down through the blood? If so, that gives even more of a reason for Noble houses and a feudal society to develop - there actually is a quantifiable advantage the Nobles have, which in turn gives them their responsibility to the people.

Have the magic itself be a demonstration of Noble blood, and have any peasant child that shows talent be married into the Nobility, because obviously he must have nobility somewhere in his bloodline, otherwise where would his magic come from?

That's why I like it, it ties in a good reason for nobility and feudalism to get started and stay in place, since they all have that advantage over the average people.

Peasants showing that sort of talent would be really rare, or a clear sign of a bastard. Whether they'd be forced into the house or simply gotten rid of would vary from family to family.

Now the fun part about all of this: I have multiple ways to get them ashore and the entire continent that they're escaping to written out. But I have no NPCs. I can not flesh out shop keeps, fish mongers, bar tenders, mayors, lawyers, nobles, any of that.

I have the state of the world and all the physical and plot points covered, but zero for interactions. Please Veeky Forums, how to NPCs during world war?

I make tables. List out 100 male names, 100 female names, 100 last names (broken up into five chunks of twenty, for the different cultures you have in your setting), 100 virtues, 100 vices, and 100 strong physical characteristics. Put them side by side. Print. Roll 5d100, and presto, you've got a character. You can throw other shit in their you like to, like titles or nicknames.

For example, off of my tables (done for a broad swath of Europe):

Mikel Azarola, "Mikel the Lion," Humble but Selfish. His face is covered with severe scars from a pox.

Maja Durant, "Durant of the Crushing Maul," Innocent... but violent. Her hair is a brilliant shade of white, cut short.

Fatima Allard, "Fatima Fell-hand," Candid and Cruel. Her left leg is missing below the knee, and she walks on a wooden replacement.

My charts are mostly made for creating adventurer type characters, but gear it however you want. Through 100 professions on there, have farmer show up 20 times to represent how common it is, roll for those too.

The added value of that is that you can roll with things (no pun intended) that seem right. Fatima there, for instance - I make it her hand, not her leg, that's missing, and have her prosthetic be her weapon of choice, and it helps explain her Sobriquet. If I just really like a goddamn name on my list (any of the O', Mac', Mc', Ap', or 'ssen or 'daater names come to mind) you just pick them from there and go for it.

And let's say you're not in a place where french names are common - you roll a second Allard, and all of a sudden, Fatima has a baby brother who's studying to be a priest.

Actually, let me roll him up real quick, cause now I'm interested.

Lorenzo Allard, of the Loyal Nine. He's a thorough man, but arrogant, and he has a gorgeous speaking voice.

>Westerns are already a thing.

Yeah, a thing that references a period of (about) twenty years of American history, and ignores most of the biggest factors in it.

Broadly speaking, I'm imagining two worlds colliding - one, suffering from mysterious plagues and strange new omens, has a connection to the land and the other beings on it; the other is a stranger to this world, and where they settle, they bring order to what once was chaos.

I don't know the best way to do it, but I like it better than the infinitely repeated medieval post-roman-empire Europe we see in any other fantasy setting.

GOD FUCKING DAMN IT OP FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU GODDAMNIT RAAAAAAASASGHHHHH FUCK FUUUUUUUUUCK DAMN YOU I HOPE YOU DIE YOU BURN IN HELL FUCK YOU GODFUCKING DAMN IT

wat

I wanted to do a water world situation with TWIST floating islands and archipelagos powered by antigravity magma where TWIST a race of Samoan-Romans were aggressively raging war using antigravity magma powered devices where TWIST the protagonists were from a roughly Japanese-Greek culture that used magical glass.

'Cause I'm a big ol' fuckin' fag.

When i actually read up on it, i was amazed and how short a period cowboys were around in.

Simplified, basic premise:

-sci-fantasy, planetary romance world based mostly on magitech. Almost all tech beyond a modern level is powered by mana

-magitech is always organic/bio-mechanical, as living/carbon based structures are the only thing capable of conducting souls and mana. Magitech is everywhere and tends to make places look a bit H.R Giger-ish.

-Sentient ("ensouled) beings can be "fleshcrafted" into *extremely* powerful mana generators and devices. The process is cheap and easily reversible, so it sometimes forms a community service.

-Individuals can also learn to harness mana in their own bodies. This mana is weak, but is infinitely renewable since its source is the users soul. One can also enhance their mana by killing other sentient beings and absorbing their mana, or augmenting oneself with magitech.

-Galactic civilzation has become very wild west, since nearly anyone can become a killing machine by learning to use mana, augmenting themselves, and devouring others to grow stronger. Picture a world in which a serial killer or terrorist grows exponentially stronger with each life they take, and you have an idea of why its hard to keep under control

-There are, however, special regions called "sanctuaries", enormous multiplexes with artificial skies and ecosystems, where mana is banned and a relatively "safe" life is possible. They are protected and ruled by *incredibly* powerful augmented individuals (Guardians) according to their own ideologies. Some sanctuaries hide the existence of mana and the outside world, creating the illusion of an ordinary modern society. Others do not hide the truth, but are ruled in a very Orwellian fashion. Those who use mana or awaken to it (intentionally or not) are either exiled to the harsh outside world, or abducted to be transformed into mana generators.
My problem right now is that "fleshcrafting" makes everyone functionally immortal. Not sure if want. Haven't found a good way to justify otherwise yet either.

I had some cool ideas for a bronze age low fantasy setting, and then I ended up just running a historical bronze age game with my players as Phoenician traders.

Whats the line between wanting to design a setting like something historical, and just playing in that setting? I always seem to just go for the actual historical setting. How would you capture that near east, multicultural, ocean focused feel in a fantasy setting?

It might not vary from family to family but from culture to culture. Some cultures would go "he's clearly destined for higher things than mere peasantry, have an arranged marriage to a minor noble and we'll keep our eyes on you" while others would go "he's clearly a bastard of some noble, kill him to cover up that noble's shame".

> My problem right now is that "fleshcrafting" makes everyone functionally immortal. Not sure if want. Haven't found a good way to justify otherwise yet either.

A few thoughts that come to mind.

- Cell Senescence is something we haven't been able to overcome, and the procedures to fix it start getting prohibitively expensive with diminishing returns. Lifespan maxes out at an arbitrary date you pick (couple hundred years) and everyone gets to be elves.

- Something like that Justin Timberlake movie where time was a currency. People have an artificial expiration date, which they can push back by producing more value than they consume.

- People ARE functionally immortal, but death from trauma or disease replaces death from old age as the primary means of shuffling off this mortal coil. Maybe some kind of felshcrafting plague, something engineered, hell maybe even something sentient. Likewise, it's way more common to die from violence, especially if you're strong (and draw the attention of others) or weak (and get caught in the crossfire).

- Fleshcrafting and Augmenting only work on sentient beings, right? Well, at one point, the actual meat of the brain is going to fall apart, no matter how well you're holding it together, and at that point, no further augments work on the person - if they've backed up part of their consciousness, great, a part of them survives, but they are diminished. They're understood as a wraith or specter by the rest of mankind, and no longer count as people.

Or hell, all of the above. Go wild.

The line is, at least for me, whether you want to do the work and have something be totally historically accurate. If you play in a historically inspired one, as opposed to a historical one, you get to play with the "What-if" part of the brain. "What if Not!Phoenicia discovered Not!India, because the Suez Canal was a natural formation?" "What if Not!Shtetls found a crashed alien ship and used what was in it to stop a pogrom by the Not!Poles?"

And it takes up this HUGE part of the American cultural mythos. You see it everywhere. It's one of those things like the Chicago or New York mobster of the first third of the 1900s - but everybody knows those had a limited timeframe.

The main thing I want to do with this is challenge the central rules of the world of fantasy. Almost all fantasy that I've read is inspired by the world of Europe after the fall of Rome. That's why the Aeylids are there in Oblivion - they're the precurser civilization with the advanced technology and architecture, which left their ruins across the world and had lost troves of knowledge.

The Romans.

The central premise of most western fantasy is that of a world that was, and has passed, with remnants of the old world abutting the growing new one. They often get the time scale wrong - artificial medieval stasis is a trope, after all - but you're just playing in the lawless or semi-lawless wilderness between pockets of independent civilization after the fall of some greater, older culture that you may or may not consider yourself a part of / the descendant of.

So I've been fiddling around with a setting, making shit maps in mspaint and stuff, and I'm starting to see that knowledge of climatology is everything. Lets say I wanted a nomadic people who primarily rode on horses. Now I have to create a great plain suitable for them. Let's say I wanted my nomads to live near hardy mountain folk. Now I'm mapping out continental plates to explain why the mountains are there then I have to calculate factors that make sure a large flat piece of land next to a mountain actually becomes a lush plain and not a fucking desert or swamp or whatever. Even the cultures of every civilization seems to be dictated by geography. I feel like it is easy to create the land first, than sprinkles people with attributes that make sense, not the other way around.

Of course plan B is to just copy the real world and design Noteurope and Notafrica ect.

The more interesting interaction for me would be between cultures that treated it differently - one run by a mad god-king, who demands all children of talent be delivered over to him, in order to train them in their art, when in actuality he breaks their minds to his will while they're children and personally controls them as an army of talent; something like communism, where those with talent are understood to bear a direct burden of responsibility for society, and serve is public positions best suited to their abilities; maybe even a place where the specific KIND of power you demonstrate determines your social rank, with people who have certain sets of powers (speaking with spirits, maybe) making up an "untouchable" caste at the bottom tier of society.

If there's magic, you can get away with more.

"The world revolves, literally, around the Spire of the Archmage in Duc Shova, from whence all water flows"

"The maelstrom sends forth the seasons, so long as we appease it with blood willingly given on the appointed day."

I'm not a lazy cunt.

Yes you are, just about the things that matter less to you. It's important to you that the maps make sense, so you put time into them - but I guarantee you don't have an accurate biosphere, or you don't get the diet of the region right, or handwave away cultural inaccuracies, just because those things are less important to you.

Don't get on your high horse, I'm just talking about a different approach, not murdering your grandmother.

Well I am, but my favorite way to be lazy is to screw with people's sense of direction. Have Not!Europe laid out in reverse, north to south, east to west, or both. When people hear about the "Great Northern Desert" that seems to stretch forever, and the "Fields of Southern Ice" with their hardy mountain folk, it makes it seem distinct.

That, or use parts of the world they're not crazy familiar with. The Andes. The Alps. The Mongolian Steppes.

My favorite way to be lazy about maps is to keep the scale limited. For the most part, my players aren't doing things on a nation scale. They're in one city and the surrounding Countryside. They're adventuring in one massive archipelagos, hopping from Island to island with mostly the same climate.

If the scale does have to increase, it's not .hard

Stupid phone. It's not hard to come up with transitional spaces that makes sense next to the client you're in. If you're in a mountainous region, slap a cool desert on one side, and a moist forests on the other.

So what other sites/forums do you guys go to get your worldbuilding discussions?

/r/worldbuilding 's okay sometimes, most of its nonsense but occasional they have some interesting discussions

Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse are your friends.

I think using the geography of south america would make for a fun world. There's a lot of variety in the terrain there.