Worldbuilding Thread - Under Construction Edition

>magic portal ships
Okay, that´s something I didn´t consider at all. Gonna look it up for inspiration. Thanks, user.

>Why do you like to worldbuild?
I can't GM games and I can't get into any games that aren't complete shit. So I try and worldbuild.
>How pages of lore/backstory do you have?
Less than half of a page of bullet points. I can't worldbuild either. No motivation.

I'm not sure whether those mountains look right.
And I'd rather have interesting shapes than play with tectonics autism.
Just fuck my shit up.

Pick a culture in your setting
>What is their food like?
>Their art
>Their music
>What do they consider virtues ? What do they consider taboo or vice?
>What is their architecture like?
>Their clothing?
>What is the common stereotype of them to outsiders?

I can't say mountains on the edge of the ocean are any interesting.
If you lived near the mountains, there'd be no point crossing them, since there's just water on the other side.

Try putting them inside the land, that will help shape your nations and stuff.

>>Why do you like to worldbuild?
Because I want to run a game or write a fic, and it gives me something to do when bored.

>>How pages of lore/backstory do you have?
Probably about 6, if I wrote it all down.

>>What's a trivial, random fact about your world?
Extended exposure to a harmonic drive will turn your bones blue.

>>What's something you need feedback on? Or, maybe you need an expert's opinion on a random subject?
How do I into pantheons?

>So basically you tried to throw inflammatory shit around just so you can soapbox about how your setting is going to miraculously set new standards and become the next Tolkien. Wouldn't your time have been better served actually writing and publishing things?
No, because, again, I do not feel that I have an original, groundbreaking idea to contribute, and I don't want to settle on stale emulation or combination. That is the very reason I made these posts in the first place.

>Why do you like to worldbuild?
I have way too many ideas for my own good and so far I have not gotten into actually writing stories/novels. At first I just wanted to be a player, but when i kept getting more ideas, i found joy in making my own settings.

>How pages of lore/backstory do you have?
Well I wrote an official lore guide for players written in the style of Deckard Cain, but otherwise i have mostly notes on stuff that makes me remember it.

>What's a trivial, random fact about your world?
Up north is the City of Man - a city where women have forbidden entry and thus family houses are actually outside the city itself.
>What's something you need feedback on? Or, maybe you need an expert's opinion on a random subject?
I guess id want feedback on the map, while i like inkarnate, the trees seem iffy. Also the general geography of the world, I suppose.

>inkarnate
>empire of apostrophe
>"tribal lands"
>desert both coastal and on the same latitude as temperate zones, nearly same latitude as ice area
>extremely egg like geography
>that red text

NO

>Well I wrote an official lore guide for players written in the style of Deckard Cain, but otherwise i have mostly notes on stuff that makes me remember it.

NICE. Would you mind posting it?

I thought the Sirnaan/Cernaan thing was a nice touch.

Is this a tiny island?

>Sirnaan
>Cernaan
>Kaerran
>arth
>areth
>ahryn

Help me Veeky Forums.

I want my setting to be three different things at once. I want it to be a gritty fantasy realpolitik simulator, and a mysterious Dark Souls-a-like, and a pulpy science fantasy cyberpunk/post-apoc.

How do I deal with these totally different atmospheres? Do I just give up, and make separate times have separate feels? I tried doing that but I keep wanting to bring in foreign elements.

My setting has elements of all of these save science fiction, which can always be added subtly, it can be done as long as you excise the pulpy part.

You just make it what dark souls was 50 years before the game started and everything went to TOTAL shit.

Why drag up shit from the last thread? This general isn't life support yet, doesn't need shitposting to stay alive.

>He can literally only make stale emulations or combinations
You're not very good at this, are you?

No.

You could increase the scope of your setting in terms of size, or mesh it together through different frames in terms of time and locale, emphasizing certain elements in one area, other elements in another.

That guy already said that he thinks there's nothing original, and refuses to worldbuild as long as he can't come up with something that no one has ever thought up of before.

Delicious thread, thanks.

Then that guy is wrong.

He just came in to let everyone in the worldbuilding general know he doesn't worldbuild

What a swell fella

So, Im making a setting where all the gods are gods from Earth, exiled to another dimension by the god calling himself YHWH. This happened a little over two thousand years ago, which was long enough for some of them to become established but not all. Also, most of them are dead from the war preceding their exile.

Here's the problem, under this explanation, a lot of really obscure gods would be the survivors, the famous gods going down in the war. Which has its advantages, but the disadvantage is the players wont recognize the gods and thus wont get it.

Suggestions? On which gods I should include?

On that topic when is it okay to have the same ending to a nation? Way that we have -stan, 'ia/' (Bulgaria, Romania, Wallachia, Arachosia/Gedrosia/Media/ect).

I liked having the common ending of -an for a group of my common culture states (Khasahan, Ashragan, Sanukharan, Asvaryan) as their version of the -stan ending and the suffix for land of. They spoke the same language, belonged to the same general polity, ect.

But does that become a problem for keeping track of names?

And how would you go about defining an area that has no single dominant political entity but is rather a patchwork of various clans, tribes and so on? "Tribes of the ______", "_______ tribes"? I could go into the trouble of outlining the major confederacies or macro-tribal blocs but then that really bogs down the map in evn more details.

What happens to all the other really big religions?

What do you mean?

It's fine within that context. Don't overdo it, and mix up spellings/pronunciations if you want to get into it, but it's a cool way of tying the world together.
Well, what happened to the Aztec gods? They survived, presumably, being relatively new.

I'm working on a small system to suit my world as a hobby. What I want to know is, how much about the world do you want to know from the core book?

A lot of the setting deals with exploring a forgotten, ruined land shrouded in mist and full of secrets. I thought I would include a brief intro chapter with everything the players need to know and say, "From here on out, feel free to make things up. Fill in the map with what you and your players want to see. Make this your own. What follows is my vision and ideas." Then I'd go into more detail about what lays in the mist and why this pervasive mist persists.

What do you think?

>all the gods are gods from Earth
>under this explanation, a lot of really obscure gods would be the survivors

Plenty of solutions to this.
a) Plenty of pantheons exist, not all Gods are war gods, there's no reason why there wouldn't be any that fled from the get go, unless you're trying to emphasize that your YHWH is omnipotent and killed them all before they had a chance. But this creates a different hole in itself.

b) Consider what you define as a God, and see what available Gods you have in the pool. Pick the ones most likely to survive or the ones most well known. Or let the players have a say on what Gods are there, though that part would really depend on your players.

c) Is the setting on Earth or the exiled realm? If it's the exiled realm and the gods have set up base, then there's no reason you can't just do intros in the beginning if the players are natives to that realm.

I dunno, there's other stuff you could do, but immortals in general are delicate to work with when you're dealing with a player base. Might not even factor that much in the end

Well sure, Its fairly simple though, dont expect Blizzard levels of writing: pastebin.com/mPdVuBkA

Yes Inkarnate because I wanted a easy presentable map to show to others. Coastal deserts are a thing, you know? Plus latitude does not mean evrything. Though geography, might have to put some fjords in...

Nah its the main continent.

Won't work. Players want to be entertained, not vice versa. You are only going to look lazy.

I'd agree with , you're putting yourself in a very precarious situation, especially dependent on what your players are like. Give them too much information to begin with, and they might not know what to fill in the map with. Give them too little, and you risk them messing with whatever your vision/ideas are. It'd be tricky enough with a single player, but with a group of players then there's no way of knowing how things will turn out.

You want to keep going with it? Explain to them whatever this mist thing is beforehand, and lay down ground rules. If people are going to see "What follows is my vision and ideas." as railroading anyways, you might as well be upfront with it beforehand.

Inkarnate produces clipart tier shit that is inferior to even hand drawn maps.

Just take the 2 days it takes to learn Photoshop and make something that doesn't just look like babies first forgotten realms rip off.

Don't explain mysteries if you want your world to be mysterious, mongoose.
>dont expect Blizzard levels of writing
Blizzard is not exactly top-tier writing.

How the fuck do you make something on PS without a pad?

>Players want to be entertained, not vice versa.
>Entertainers don't want to be played

To clarify, I would have all the typical explanation of a normal RPG corebook, including a completed map and explanations of various settlements, ruins, etc.

But that would all be after the break, with a note saying "feel free to change it." It's less about them having the experience I want and more about helping them be inspired to have fun.

>Don't explain mysteries if you want your world to be mysterious, mongoose.
Would you rather have a GM's section that explains the mysteries or just leaving it up to the imagination altogether?

If you're going to go at it like a normal RPG corebook then why don't you just look at RPG corebooks and emulate that? They evidently have a working formula, the more successful ones at least.

>Would you rather have a GM's section that explains the mysteries or just leaving it up to the imagination altogether?

This depends on how often the setting is used. If it's a one shot deal, there's no sense in ruining the surprise, especially if that's your only card to play. If you intend to have your group revisit this over and over again, and the "mystery" is just there for the first session, it doesn't matter as much.

And I ain't trying to give you vague answers on purpose. It's just that when your group is your audience, this is the sort of thing that you should be asking them, not us. You know your group better than we know your group (hopefully). For all I know if I tell you I want to know the major countries, factions, and NPCs, there'll be two of your players that don't give a shit about that and will think it's boring fluff.

Tailor to your audience.

Aztec gods weren't exiled until a few hundred years ago, and they can take the place of the evil new cults demanding blood sacrifices. YHWH went around ahead of the spread of Christianity and slaughtered their enemy's Gods, that's why Europe (Christianity) took over the world, they were the only ones getting miracles.

I figure that at about 0 AD YHWH was shifting over from the small time god of a few sand people into what would become the supreme ruler of Earth, and he wasn't hot shit at the beginning so he cut deals and played diplomatic with the Greek, Norse, and Egyptian pantheons (Nah, he's totally always been my agent. His name's not Thor, it's uh... Michael) and that worked out okay until the war with the Hindu Gods that got most everyone killed and forced YHWH to go "EVERYBODY GET OUT REEEEEE" and exiled them to the other world.

The question, if I stick with all this, is what I want to do with zorastrianism.

Also, the setting is isekai, so the player awareness of the gods does matter.

pic related isn't something you're gonna be able to make with 2 days of PS tutorials though.

Do a Morgoth/Sauron thing between Zoroastrianism/Abrahamic. YHWH idolises his inspiration.

If it's isekai, then how important is this backstory really? Do you intend the campaign to revolve around it, or is it more freeform? Right now it sounds like YHWH is really just some sort of background character at best here.

I mean frankly, if they are still gods, and they have worshippers, there's no reason why your isekai party can't just come across them one by one, and learn about the lesser known ones through NPC interaction and other such measures. Unless you intend to have divine intervention right away, I don't really the awareness factor hitting hard right in the beginning.

YHWH is why the gods are still there instead of back on Earth, and why 80% of them are dead and consumed. The backstory is the determinant of what gods survived to be exiled, and thus impact the story.

I suppose I could have a few well known ones running about (Loki brought them over) and then kind of go Supernatural on the lesser gods, make them try to reverse engineer who the god is and then use Earth myths to find their weaknesses and subjugate them.

You can make really fine maps just with cutting and pasting and layer effects and the sort
Maybe not the town, but the regional maps? They are not overly complex to do with Photoshop.

Well, if that's the case, and your intended plot line revolves around this exile backstory, then you should probably just pick gods based off of themes that you want to be prevalent or ones that you have a possible plot line in mind for. Grab a small assortment more from various mythologies so that you present a bit of "variety". Don't really need to care in this case whether your players are immediately familiar with all of these gods, can play both sides to your advantage as long as you can follow the situation.

If you were writing a novel or something, the choice of characters would be much more important, but with a campaign generally it's the PCs that matter more so than the NPCs.

You weren't going to have the players choose to be the exiled gods, were you?

>You weren't going to have the players choose to be the exiled gods, were you?
Noooo no no no no except kind of because human souls have a non-zero amount of god in them, and the elves and majin in the other world don't.

What advice would you have if this were a novel? Or like, a series of shlock bullshit self-published on amazon for $1 per 100 pages.

Well if you're writing it out as fiction, generally you don't need a massive array of Gods, and you're afforded flexibility in ways that a gaming session wouldn't permit. You have your POV character depending on your writing style, and you can control how you introduce your gods, as well as the backstory.

If you're writing out something relatively simple for instance, you might just need one deity, and you can work a plot around them pretty easily. Like the Loki plotline you mentioned in itself could form the basis of a fic. You'd have a lot more freedom also in terms of how things go since as the author, you drive the story forward. The pace and such are all dictated by you. Furthermore because the prospective audience is bigger than just a gaming group, your initial concern about people not knowing the gods is significantly reduced. They can just look things up if they get hooked onto the character, and you can introduce obscure gods via more well known gods.

But a gaming session can be a bit more volatile. Only showing one deity might be seen as railroading (if deities are everything), and because your audience is immediately there, the implications of not knowing who a deity is might be more significant. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I mean for instance players who don't know who Sedna is and accidentally club a seal in front of her might trip a plotline and you can set up things like that (not the best move though I suppose). But it does have a lot more pitfalls than a story where you can plan out sequences and not have as many potential deviations.

People more experienced than me in both fields probably has better advice though. Isekai and immortals in general are a finicky topic to work with, even though I like them both a fair bit.

Cool, thanks. The -an ending are limited to those I named (and their collective ethnic group of Raoxshan), elsewhere any other culture with a lot of various states will use a different suffix - I was thinking for the steppe dwellers the macro grouping of: Akahiysa (southern steppe) and Dasyahisa (northern steppe). I pronounce it as Ak-ah-ee-sah and Das-yah-ee-sah).

I'm making sure to have no damn apostrophe names. And some that just have that 'cheap fantasy feel' I'll avoid, but that goes on gut.

Follow this guide but do not use its river method. I will post a PDF another user suggested using the rivers of and it works a lot better. I'll also do a few recommendations with this PDF, but I do not have a pad and I've been able to make satisfactory maps.

River guide: Start from his tutorial at 1.5/1.6. (However go to page 5/8 for the specifics of the river stuff)

You create a new file, make a filter-render-difference clouds, image-adjustment-threshold (aim to have the same white/black territory as you see in his picture), then do magic wand tool, select the black space anywhere on the map. Then go to select - similar.

Once you've done that then you go to edit > Stroke. My map is 2800x2309, his stroke for my scale is too high so I went with a stroke of 5 for main rivers, a stroke of 3 for smaller rivers/tributaries.

After you've done the stroke, press control+I. That will invert all but the stroke into the 'land' white color, leaving you a very thin bunch of squiggly black lines.

Lasso a bunch of squigglies you want. It doesn't have to be a big part, you can go with a small selection and then build up the river.

Copy and paste it onto your map (following the tutorial make sure you are pasting it at the top of the photoshop order. beyond ice/land/ect.) Magic wand the white parts, delete it. Then Control + L, drag INPUT LEVEL black triangle all the way to the right. Then usually I will control+T (Free transform) and turn the river to the left or right and then press enter. This'll make it a bit blurrier and not so crisp. You may have to control L again to make it all pure black.

Position a bunch of those squiggly rivers where you want them on your map (continuing next post)

Map has since adjusted and changed locations so you have some ghost rivers that are since moved or removed, but you can get an idea. You'll want to do some nice touches at the template stage - use a small opacity (11-15 maybe) irregular kind of eraser brush (Spatter or soft round, just make sure you jack up the spacing, and the shape dynamics and scatter so it looks like a jackson pollock painting in the brush preview) and dab the eraser on the further inland ends of the river.

When you are satisfied with your rivers (I recommend doing a backup of your land-mass, as you will be editing it with these rivers. Maybe a quick temp save copy of your PSD) - I forget the exact thing I did, but it was something like lower the river template layer to 75% opacity/fill, possibly down to even 50%.

Magic wand the picture (not on the rivers, outside of it), then invert selection (Control+shift+I, I think). This selects your river templates.

Go down to your land layer from the tutorial . Alt + left click on the black and white thumbnail, not the pure white thumbnail. With the river templates selected from before, press delete.

Leave the land thumbnail, click anywhere else to bring the map back to its colored normal self. Disable the river template layer.

You should see land now removed where the river template was, which introduces the look you see on the right.

In following I recommend skipping the ocean part of the tutorial beyond that initial cloud layer & blue overlay. Worrying about the continental shelf and shallow/deep is not necessary until you are 100% set on your map's land mass.

Anybody know how to make the fantasy maps on donjon not be connected to the top or bottom or the map?

Would a 15th-16th century European society have had a census? If so would they be accurate to a point? For example if I wanted to say that it is known that the free city of such and such has a population of 16,074 people, would that make sense? Or would it be more accurate to say that the local duke says that there are about 15,000 people and that is generally the number people go with?

I figure there would be a decent motivation for a lord to know how many serfs he has to a man, but in a city the number of illegal inhabitants, migrants, traders and such make it more of an estimate at best

That makes sense, thanks for the reply!

How else would you tax them

Romans had a pretty accurate census, mostly for tax purposes. That said, it's the sort of thing that's costly and not easy to do frequently, so you'd end up with a rough estimate, even accounting for births and deaths. You could get it to maybe within 100 accurately.

Of course, if you're that worried, you could come up with some sort of 'census spell' that can just tally up how many people live somewhere, or at least how many are in an area.

The Domesday book was a survey taken of England and Wales after William the Conquerer took over. That was in 1086, so I'd say you have good reason for it to happen. Its purpose was more to work out who owned how much of what land so that it could be taxed.

>City is using an ancient artifact to count how many people are in the city and where
>They use it just for the census
>It was actually designed as a super weapon
>The interns are allowed to use it

Don't forget, Halflings only count as half a person.

>15th-16th century European society.

Actually, yeah, they usually had. But it's not what you would expect. They didn't count individuals, but families. They wanted to know how many families inhabited certain places, because the families paid the taxes. So you can see censuses were there are like 1000 families, but the members of said families aren't know.

Cities were a bit complicated. There were territories associated to cities that weren't part of the city itself. Then you had the fact that beggars and huge parts of the lower classes weren't usually considered when making a census.

That said, they're usually accurate, and you can guess that each family has about five members (the father, the mother, two children and a grandparent) and go from there.

more children than that due to mortality and replacement

Yeah, I was just giving a small frame to work with. There are tons of exceptions and special cases that don't conform to the family I mentioned, but that's the decision of the interested party.

bump

This song has inspired me lately.

youtube.com/watch?v=LGczmeOnKNQ

I see a cluster of isles in the far north of a world. The main island houses a number of disunited celtic-type kingdoms. A warmer, southern isle is the seat of a romanized celtic vestigial kingdom, and a colder land far off serves as the home of a norse-people. And just over the western horizon the mythical land of the Fey has returned from the Otherworld. The Old Gods return, with blood and fire. Magic returns to the world where once there was none for a thousand years or more. The numbers 3, 7, and 9 become cursed and blessed both by the gods. Shedding ones blood and making an oath will actually, truthfully call down divine power to seal it. Gods, demihumans, wizards, heroes, all walk the earth again.

Listen warriors of the Old Gods,
As the Wild Hunt’s horn does sound.
All their works shall fall before us,
And the evil ones be bound.
Raise the shield of bright Athena,
Swing the hammer of great Thor.
Avalon is risen, is risen, is risen.
Avalon is risen, to fall no more.

Also, bumping with Celtic and Dark Age stuff, or close to it.

...

that bridge district is inspired by the Krämerbrücke in Erfurt, Thüringen in case anyone was wondering
Really nice place to visit, and it's not that big either so you could easily cop it for a campaign

Actually, now thinking about this again,:

>What music do you listen to to get inspired to create a setting?

But that tutorial generates a random landform. There doesn't seem to be a way to decently draw a premade map in PS.

>youtube.com/watch?v=MtyBBoOUgho

Sounds pretty chill, in a way. What sort of settings does this song conjure in your mind?

>youtube.com/watch?v=NyC5RKzQm9I

For some reason, always conjures up the feeling of technological incomprehensibility I need.

A hopeful struggle, fearsome monstrosities that are very much kill-able, whispers of eventual glory.

Basically just cozy.

Cozy is nice.

>the objectively "good" side triumphs
>the story is one big overdose of hope for a better future
I can't bring myself to put victorious evil in my settings.

Ey, that's okay. Although I fear to ask what you think is "objectively good". Not that it matters. It's your setting, not mine.

How would Shaka's Bull's Horn turn out when exercised by Ancient Greek troops? What kinds of units would needed for this?

I need this for world building reasons. My elves are pretty much ancient Greeks and I need some "revolutionary" new strategy that focuses on offense over (phalanx) defense without requiring a lot of high quality troops.

>How would Shaka's Bull's Horn turn out when exercised by Ancient Greek troops? What kinds of units would needed for this?

I guess it could turn out alright. Going by Classical Greek armies, you would need a core of hoplites, preferably with previous combat experience, who would compose the "Chest" of the formation, the portion holding the line and keeping the enemy busy. Then you would need two wings of peltasts and/or cavalry to be the "Horns", to quickly flank the enemy phalanx and take it by surprise.

However, you would still need high quality troops. Arguably, you need even more high quality troops than before. If you used the Bull's Horn against a phalanx without highly trained warriors, you would lose pretty quickly. I mean, you're sending light infantry to take on heavily armoured enemies. Unless your guys are prepared for such a fight, defeat is certain.

How can the WW1 era world exist with the technology of 1400s?

I want to tell a story in a world connected with the period of WW1 and the subsequent wars and revolutions but I don't want technology or steampunk in my setting.

Guys, general question: how do you catalog all your fluff? Just random word files, actual maps, some kind of program, a wiki?

>An era so intimately linked to technological advances.
>Without said technological advances.

You can't.

I am thinking of substituting it with magic as the Renaissance was the rediscovery and relearning of the Art.

Unless magic is both widely available to everyone and easy to learn, you still can't get anything like WWI with it. And that is without getting into demographics.

Is there anything unique to RPG vs. JRPG world design? I saw this map on /a/ and I immediately thought "yeah, a Japanese person came up with that," but I'm not really sure why. Maybe something about discrete geographic regions separated by mountain passes?

Why not? Some wizards can replace the canons and tear down the feudal lords by destroying their walls with magic.

Some magical form of communication can accelerate the forming of big societies and nations instead of electricity based communications.

I think it's the fact that it's a big island that makes me think it's a JRPG

You literally can, assuming user means "utter fucking shitshow of a war" rather than "war with the exact kind of trenchlines the western front had".

Thirty Years War + Three Kingdoms happened without industrial tech.

fun fact: centuries old ottoman medieval canons were used in gallipolli front because of the lack of modern artillery.