/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide I stand corrected, there's packages available for practically every system, including Windows.

How do I make a human-like race interesting in a unique setting? I want a race that people can look at and related to, in order to sort of ground themselves in the world, but I really don't like humans in most settings with other unique races. They always just end up being dull as fuck, or their gimmick is just like "they're royalty" or something. GW2 is a great example of this trope.

Wiki is a good idea. I was just going to use google spreadsheet or word files.

Ok thanks. I forgot to said I wanted pictures too. Anyway I'll look up plaintext

Does anybody have Grain into Gold. I have managed to misplace mine somewhere?

Human-like? If they're human-like, and pretty much just look like humans, you can do whatever you like with them. Give them a unique society, with different sexual and social norms; mix and match unique traits from other races, like the Argonian's complete resistance to poison and disease; or you could make them actual humans, but give the race an evolutionary start in a different climate than Earth, like mountaintops.

Do they get taller, shorter? Do they develop a resistance to the sun, in spite of the cold (eg in an ozone-lite part of the world)? Do they have rituals on bringing the sun back during a blizzard? Basically, humans can be varied, you just have to look at them differently.

just use classic captcha

If you want pictures, you just want to use something like Word or Pages. Unless you know how to use LaTeX, in which case, just use LaTeX and have all your images + source files in individual folders.

If installing an actual Wiki server seems like overkill, there's also Zim Desktop Wiki:

zim-wiki.org/

It's pretty convenient if all you need is basic markup, categories, tags and links between files.

You can choose? I thought you couldn't. I hate new captcha since when it does the "click on X until there are no more X" it never ends.

Top-right of the page, "settings," brah

Thanks buddy

No problem, pal!

I have a question about deities and gods.

Just to gather some opinions, What type of alignment would a God of Death be, Specifically the God of Death, the afterlife, and reincarnation. Naturally I feel like it would be some form of Evil, since that generally seems how it relates, though as I was thinking more into it, couldn't it also fall under some form of Neutral or maybe good even?

I say this because while death is normally seen as bad, I thought that it'd be "Is it truly evil if the God's job is to assist those who have died in crossing over into the afterlife without problems, and then offer them a chance at Reincarnating?" What are your takes on this?

If more context is needed, In my world, there are two deities who govern over death, a God and a Goddess. The God resides over Death, the Afterlife, and Reincarnation, while the Goddess resides over Death, Forgiveness, and Rebirth. When people die, they are either sent to the afterlife, where they work under the God of Death, and essentially work towards becoming reincarnated. The other path is they are forgiven of any sins they may have committed in their life by the Goddess of Death, and are re birthed into the world or as a servant to the Goddess (an angel essentially). The route people take would generally depend on how the person lived their life, they deeds they accomplished, etc.

So in terms of alignment, where would these two deities stand? Currently I have the God as Lawful Evil, and the Goddess as Lawful Neutral. Does that sound about right?

tl;dr What alignment would a God of Death, afterlife, and reincarnation be? What would a Goddess of Death, forgiveness, and rebirth be?

>God of Death
>Evil
The God of Death should be the chillest guy in existence. If he's the god of both an Afterlife and Reincarnation, he's probably willing to let whatever lost soul he meets decide on their fate. I'd put him solidly Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral.
I'd go full-on Reaper Man with him.

Could mold the Goddess of Death into a "Goddess of Execution", if one of her domains is forgiveness. She meets sinners, murderers, criminals, etc, and sends them back into the world to have another chance to live good lives.

Sounds most excellent, thanks for the feedback

What are some good current events for interstellar cold war scenario between republican revolutionaries and absolute monarchies? Proxy wars? Espionage? Some kind of Suez crisis analog?

How do you end up in a cold war with revolutionaries?

The whole point of a cold war is that each side is so powerful that the other fears to escalate into open war. If one side is just rebels, that doesn't seem likely.

I meant revolutionary in the sense of republican France - a big republican power surrounded by traditional feudal-ish nations.

Not him, but it wouldn't be hard to end up with a cold war between factions of wildly disparate power levels in a near-future space setting.

Even a small mining colony in the asteroid belt could easily redirect the orbit of enough rocks towards Earth to completely destroy the surface of the planet, and if Earth launched nukes at them, they would certainly see them coming far enough in advance to do so.

Anthropology MA student here. Willing to answer any questions I can in order to serve your worldbuilding needs. I mostly know about cultural anth, but I MAY also be able to help with questions relating to biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology.

Adopting a trip to use ONLY in these threads and ONLY when I'm making myself available to aid in the pursuit of more believable imaginary worlds, so as to avoid drawing undue attention to myself but still be identifiable when someone wants to ask a question.

How feasible is it for a region composed of numerous ethnically/linguistically/religiously distinct countries all being controlled by a unified trans-national noble class that have little or no cultural ties to the people of the particular nations they rule?

You're basically describing Europe from the end of the Middle Ages to the 19th century.

This is more of a question about history and what I gleaned from a class about the Ottoman Empire that ended like a year and a half ago, so take it with as much salt as you like.

I'd say it depends in large part about how the people in those different countries feel about it.

If they're far apart? Feasible in name but less so as far as having direct control over everyday practices. Maybe they pay fealty because it's a pain in the ass to fight, or too dangerous. Maybe they like knowing that they're contributing to the rulers such that the rulers will protect them if their enemies come knocking.

If they're closer together, it's probably easier to have more actual authority over the way they run their shit.

But still, you need people to either fear resisting you, actually believe you have some kind of moral legitimacy/right to rule, and/or just like the shit you're doing.

If you have none of those, then people aren't going to listen to you for long.

>What's the holy grail of PERSONAL transport in your world?
In my sci fi setting, a Class 4 starship. Experimental and highly expensive, but can jump from one end of the galaxy to the other in one FTL jump. Usually armed to the teeth with plasma cannons and kinetic weapons, as well as some stealth tech. Can hold hundreds of thousands personnel as well as a dozen or so squadrons of starfighters (as well as several hundred mechs). Science, medical, navigation, engineering, recreational, you name it it has it.

Alignments are shit senpai. Just ignore them.

Anybody want to help me invert Urban Fantasy?

I've got some half formed world concepts that would either make for a funny RPG setting or some mediocre novels.

Say all humans had magic, and existed alongside the typical urban fantasy slew of creatures. At some point in the past, a bloodline curse was put on humans that funnels all their innate magic into ignoring magic, constructing coverups for magic events, and if needed a hiveminded trance to then destroy repeat offender magic sources. Hence kitchen sink Urban Fantasy is possible, where humans literally ignore crazy shit like it isn't there and if pressed will trigger some to enter a trance and create a coverup. For example, if a magical creature was to shoot someone the nearest concealed carry normie would enter a trance run up and shoot the guy some more then get arrested and any cursed normies viewing recordings or investigating will "see" and remember the false event. The setting is a post-apocalypse for the world of magic. Minimal flaunting of magic is ignored, but continued magic presence will trigger a hivemind response in the cursed normie humans to destroy the source. Hence the kitchen sink urban fantasy elements are in hiding as per normal Urban Fantasy, since the cursed humans problem went full zombie apocalypse despite the normal modern world evolving and carrying on like nothing is wrong. Human wizards are actually people with no innate magic, freeing them from the curse.

So you've got a couple wizards dueling with fireballs in the street while normies commute to their 9-5. If it continues, some normies will go out of their way to do things like block or catch fireballs and other casual interference. Even further, then they'll start going village of the damned. Finally, it will go GTA chaos cheat mode on the wizards' asses if they keep it up. Magical creatures trying to make lairs will generally get hit by SWAT ('terrorists' on the news) or burned down in the night by people still in underwear.

>What's the holy grail of PERSONAL transport in your world?
A steamship is generally the fastest way to get from one place to another. If you're lucky enough to live in an area with paved roads, landship (imagine a cross between a yacht and a luxury car, about the length of a bus and 50% wider) can get your around even faster.

>Is there a mass-transport version, like a caravan, a Carrier ship, or just a very large hoverbus?
Not really. Sociological factors mean there isn't much of a market for large scale passenger ships. Public land transport is even less developed, with local trains just beginning to becoming a thing in a couple of the larger cities.

>questions relating to biological anthropology
How long would populations have to be isolate before speciation would occur?

That depends a lot on things like rate of breeding as well as how strong the imperative to adapt is (for instance, skin color change happened quickly because of how important it is to get enough Vitamin D without reducing folate too much if you want healthy offspring). If too complex of changes are needed too quickly, then the species just doesn't do well and possibly doesn't even survive there.

The first humans left Africa closer to 100,000 years ago, but there has been intermingling pretty much the whole time since then, so that's not a great way to tell.

But consider Australia. The first people arrived there 50,000 years ago, and this was almost certainly the part of the world that was the most isolated from the rest for the longest. Yet speciation did not occur.

So the best I can say is "probably way longer than 50,000 years."

Part of this may be due to the fact that we've evolved in a way that lets us produce tools and manipulate our environment to be more conducive to our survival, meaning that evolutionary pressure is lighter.

That said, even intentional eugenics probably wouldn't produce speciation as quickly as you might think, given that traits are linked together in very complex ways such that some things which produce intelligence, for instance, may also produce traits that you want to breed out.

Neanderthal could interbreed with modern humans but were distinct in the way that various humanoid species might be, and are believed to have diverged about 500,000-600,000 years ago. So I'd go with that, or maybe even more if you want to be on the safe side.

Different guy here; let's alter the environment a little. Say you have a population high enough for self-sustaining reproduction, they've got all the food and water they need, but they live somewhere with thin air and lighter gravity than Earth. How long would it take for them to become noticeably different from us, if at all? Or is this more of a biology question?

I mean, this isn't even just bioanth. It's entirely speculative.

But much lower gravity would probably start to affect us quickly. Hell, astronauts have trouble with that. Muscles would be much thinner and weaker, so that's something. Thinner air would mean a need to either breathe more efficiently or take in more oxygen. Or maybe since they'd have less muscle, it'd cancel out. I'm not a biologist.

I have no idea how long it would take.

Most of the changes you'd see (a generally thinner, more spindly build) would be due to different conditions during growth, not heritable genetic changes.

If a space girl and a space boy settled back on Earth and fugged, their kid would be a normal human.

I'm not sure this is true. Do we know if there would be heritable epigenetic effects if the parents grew up in an environment with thin air and low gravity?

Long-term malnutrition, for instance, can change one's DNA in a way that can be passed on.

Do you have an opinion regarding the origination of Sacrifice in cultures i.e. do you believe it occurs before or after pastoralism?

I'm not sure. I know that ritual destruction was a part of life prior to pastoralism. For example, there are ancient clay objects that appear to have been thrown into a fire, where they would heat up and explode, almost like fireworks without the flash of light. Some of them were shaped like a woman with exaggerated sexual characteristics, suggesting possibly a deity.

No doubt that has some connection to the practice of sacrifice.

At the same time, pastoralism and agriculture make more formalized hierarchy possible, and it's certainly the case that shows of piety (such as sacrifice) often grant status. Richer people can afford to sacrifice more, so it makes sense that sacrifice of animals and such would be encouraged in a society in which the wealthy want to reinforce the idea that they DESERVE to be the powerful.

Plus, pastoralism makes an animal one's property to be sacrificed in the first place.

If I had to guess, I would say it probably does not occur without pastoralism, just because I think the way animals are perceived by people who encounter those kinds of animals at the place where those animals live, which is not seen as land owned by the hunter, is unlikely to produce the kind of conception of the animal as property that can be sacrificed which is necessary for sacrifice to occur. I have no specific data to back that up, though.

That doesn't mean ritual doesn't happen, of course. Rituals surrounding hunting are common in societies with pastoralism as well as those without it.

It's also worth considering whether, if non-pastoral societies are unlikely to innovate animal sacrifice, interaction between pastoral and non-pastoral societies can lead to the latter understanding animals in a way which IS conducive to them coming up with animal sacrifice.

A quick search gave me this article:

iansa.eu/papers/IANSA-2012-01-svobodova.pdf

I have no idea how good it is or what it says, as I haven't read it.

I believe I've read bits of that paper before. Still, thanks for your perspective. It's roughly what I had been thinking, but I wanted to be sure I wasn't crazy.

Do you have any tidbits or thoughts on the functional origin of slavery?

>functional origin of slavery
I'm not sure. I mean, to some extent it's just a more intense form of the kind of hierarchy I mentioned in . Are we talking about slaves in the broadest sense or the kind of chattel slavery that ended up being a big thing in America?

I need to crash. Good night, /wbg/.

Well, specifically my mind was lingering on the differences between Roman and Frankic, Celtic and other 'barbarian groups' ' treatment of captives after large battles - namely, that Romans would most often enslave them while the other tribes would sometimes conduct mass sacrifice. The last time I was reading papers actively, there was still substantial debate over whether the activity preceded the need to deal with large numbers of extra people, or came about as a way to handle the excess. In other words, did human sacrifice, at least for Indo-European groups, begin from a point of functional need (lack of food, potables, space, etc.) or was it always a purely spiritual endeavor?

There was an user in a past thread that was mentioning about a cyberpunk setting that he made on a Veeky Forums thread? Does anyone know what that was about/the details of it?

It sounds cool

Is there such a thing as too many peninsulas? Could it backfire?

No, but how the peninsulas have formed has a good explanation it is viable. Of course if every single one is made by volcanic hotspot, it is bit too much.

bump

Slavery arises when you have the intersection of stable permanent settlements practicing agriculture, along with a relatively strong concept of property rights. And not necessarily property rights in the sense of the slaves being property, but property rights in the sense of ownership of land being separate from tenancy of land.

Basically, societies start taking slaves when they have a labor-intensive economy and sufficient rule of law for a landowner to hang out in his villa while slaves work the fields.

Will see if thinking about it and hearing it in my head/saying it aloud lets me figure out which ethnic denonym I like but if someone wants to halp me:

Got the city of Nakkar (Think Babylon or Assur or Ur and the like), rules over their other culturally/ethnically similar neighbors. Nakkar is in the South and the babylon to their conquered rival Saharat, who dwell in the north and are comparable then to the Assyrians. Nakkarum is the title of their empire. For the ethnic demonym I can either:

1) Go with what I think was the early iron age/1st millenium thing of Babylonia being such a preeminent and dominant power that it seems to have conferred the title of Babylonian as a sort of ethnic identifier (At least among outsiders) to the entirety of the southern Mesopotamia. And the same applying in the north with the Assyrians. So cities of the north all identify as Saharatumi even if they aren't from Saharat, and all those in the south identify as Nakkarumi even if they aren't from Nakkar.

2) Come up with a separate ethnic demonym that encompasses all the cities ruled by Nakkar, which isn't partisan to a specific city. So Nakkari might identify by their city but to outsiders the whole lot of them are _______. In that case the names I liked, mostly borrowed from Ugaritic words, are:

Uhrayum/Uhrayom
Nasumat
Aharat
Iratu(m) or Irati or Irathu

Go fractal, man, push it to the limit.

Elaborate

This is relevant to my interests

>tfw worldbuilding

Back for a bit if y'all need anything.

How would the culture/religion of a "young" world differ from an "old" world?
For instance, my world was created 6-8 thousand years before the "current age". There aren't thousands of years of deity worship and ancient pantheons for current cultures to build upon, so I figure they'd just use hero worship. The current "Gods" are the equivalent of a Julius Caesar or Plato, a pretty swell dude who lived ~500 years ago.

Hard to say. Honestly, people are complicated as shit. Consider how complicated the lore is for something like Marvel or DC Comics, and those are each less than 100 years ago and not intended to be religious (Grant Morrison's work being an arguable exception).

So if we're assuming that agriculture and such can start to exist in that short amount of time (which it must, otherwise you probably wouldn't have a Julius Caesar), then I wouldn't assume the religion would be any less complicated than it is now.

That isn't to say that hero and ancestor worship haven't happened, or even that they don't happen now., of course. But it seems that in many cases, polytheism emerges from animism. Also, ancestor and hero worship/reverence can exist alongside monotheism or polytheism.

Please keep in mind that anything I tell you in response to a hypothetical question is going to be speculation, since I don't have a mirror that can see into other worlds.

I'd like to see how you think a race I've developed would go with civilization, both among themselves and with outsiders. The reason I'm asking at all is because they are quite radically different from most.

Vensi are made of flexible volcanic rock, with a magical core that keeps them alive. While they do need to sleep (for the core to recover from daily activity) and do die of old age (at between 120 and 180 years old), they don't eat, drink, breathe, or become sick. Their main population limit is that Vensi can only be born in two ways: Forming a new body for an dead vensi's core (who don't have any of the deceased's memories), or naturally produced during a volcanic eruption. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how (or even if) they'd form their own civilizations, and how they'd fit into your more typical society. Assume they have very small populations relative to everyone else (5% or less or total pop)

Did they evolve or were they artificially produced?

I'm asking this because if they were produced by a higher power, they can be made to have any characteristics that entity or society wanted them to have.

If they evolved, then not needing to eat, drink, or breathe eliminates most things that cause death and most evolutionary pressure that might lead to becoming social animals. Maybe you could introduce some kind of predator which hunts them that they can't handle alone but can handle much more easily as a group.

It could be that they have some kind of overwhelming desire to be present for the birth of their kind, so they stick together around volcanoes in case someone dies or there's an eruption.

Lots of interesting ways to go with this, but they're way too different from humans for me to say.

Produced by magic, though of the "random outgrowth of a god in a coma" type, without any planning in their design. They're blank slates when they're formed (which is at their full adult size), though they learn really rapidly for the first 4 years before ending up at about the level of a human teenager. So not much in the way of preexisting instincts (pretty much limited to "find shelter" and "pain bad").

And yeah, how weird they are compared to humans is why I'm having so much trouble figuring out how they'd (not) fit in.

...

Just gonna post random stuff from my environments folder when this gets close to death.

You've got it a bit backwards, user. Young cultures tend to have much weirder, more flamboyant religions that are more varied from one culture to another. The older a world gets, the more religions tend to syncretize into a homogeneous blur.

Just look at our setting: go back 3000 years and there were hundreds of thriving religions each with is own exotic ritual tradition and pantheon of gods. Now, 60% of the world's population believes in one of several different Jewish heresies, and the Indians are the only major group still holding onto their original faith from antiquity. It seems reasonable to imagine that a few thousand years from now, we'll have something like the religion from Dune, where all of the beliefs of all the great cultures have been reconciled and formed into a single quasi-religious philosophy that's more symbolic than theological.

I figured the spread of Christianity and other Jewish-inspired monotheism was due to most notable empires adopting them. British, French, Russian, American, etc are all mostly Christian.

That said, I could see there being flamboyantly weird religions in my setting. Probably those damned Elves and their new-age hippy religions.

Don't forget Roman, Byzantine/Ottoman, Islamic, and Malian.

Perhaps even more noteworthy is the spread of Islam into south Asia and Indonesia. Or that Buddhism was founded in India but mainly practiced in east Asia.

The fact that almost all of these religions find their greatest concentration of believers outside of the countries they originated in suggests that religious drift is inevitable in the long run.

I just meant that if you can think good reason why peninsulas have formed then you are good to go. But if you handwave that most peninsulas were formed by some fancy way, like hotspots, then it is bit too much.

Look into real life peninsulas and how they have formed.

...

Bump with a fledgling setting

>What's the holy grail of PERSONAL transport in your world?

Airships. They subvert a lot of the dangers of the sea while still being able to fly low enough to, in theory, harvest from it for food and use basic magic to desalinate.

Unfortunately, the reality is that airships are pretty unreliable, slower than normal sailing ships, and highly experimental. This is slowly changing since magi-tech's the big and growing craze but it's going to be a good while and require the (re)discovery of Cavorite before airships can be functional. In the meantime, the super-elite like to keep them as sort of wealth symbols.

And a place to host yacht parties if you happen to somehow live in a landlocked region. (or are too lazy to go to the harbors)

Side question for folks: What kind of holidays do they have in your worlds? How do they celebrate? And more important: how do you figure out a name for them?

>Side question for folks: What kind of holidays do they have in your worlds? How do they celebrate? And more important: how do you figure out a name for them?
Pagans have special local spirit festivals where they offer sacrifices and entertainment to spirits they are bonded with. Monotheists have various celebrations commemorating deeds of historical figures. Feudal kingdoms usually have celebration for local duke's and king's birthdays. Successor Principality has Nikoliad on each anniversary of making peace with nomads by exarch Nikolai. People of Hammer Isle insist of celebrating many old imperial festivities not really remembering what they were all about. They usually do it by ritually humiliating, publically torturing and executing their slaves to feed their delusions on how much a master race they are.

I haven't yet decided on how calendar looks like so it's too early to go into specific on when and what exactly do they all celebrate.

>Look into real life peninsulas
Where would I do that? Wikipedia doesn't say how they form when you look then up and I'm not sure where else to look.

What can you tell us about your setting? What makes it unique or interesting? What inspired you to make it?

Here is a brief cover. ehow.com/how-does_5266908_peninsulas-formed.html

>Side question for folks: What kind of holidays do they have in your worlds? How do they celebrate? And more important: how do you figure out a name for them?
Well, two basic kinds of holidays come to mind: those based on the seasons and natural world (Christmas, Straw Hat Day, Easter), and those based on great people or events (Presidents' Day, Bastille Day, feast days). Obviously, religion can also play a huge part.

All this to say that naming is the easy part. Just name it after the person or event. Holidays tend not to have super creative names.
>Hey, we're having a mass for Christ. What should we call it?
>Remember that time God passed over the houses of the Israelites?
>Let's appoint a day that will tragically be lost to history when people switch from felt hats to straw hats that marks the unofficial start of summer, before goddamn JFK makes hats go out of fashion forever in the Western world.

Merci.

As for my setting specifically, there's days celebrating at the beginning of the dry season and the beginning of the rainy reason; those are the big ones. Beyond that, almost every day is some kind of holiday--the threshold for a day becoming a holiday is pretty low, and every time something significant happens, it's weighed whether or not it's more significant than the holiday currently filling that date. If it is (decided by the Royal Council, in one of their few remaining duties) then it replaces the old holiday.

Which ones people actually celebrate depends on their personal beliefs. For example, after one dynasty replaced another, they declared holidays in the names of various traitors, insurgents, rebels, and uprisings experienced by the previous dynasty as an act of spite. Today, those who support the concept of small government are more likely to observe these holidays. Those a bit more loyal to the crown or more in favor of large government will tend to observe the celebrations of great rulers, military victories, or significant laws and treaties.

The government uses these as a tool to keep its people more or less placated--inasmuch that they know that if they were to get rid of the Tyrant-Slayer holidays, it'd make the people who observe them very unhappy. For this reason, the official holidays maintain a rough but precarious balance in political ideologies.

How badly can treatment of enslaved local population by settled conquerers get before it gets ridiculous?

"Master race" are all crazy and conditioned to accept cruelty as a way of life and prevention of terror and are getting shorthanded in the field because they kill slaves for fun. Throwing rocks at tied up slaves or poking them with red hot iron is considered acceptable entertainment for children on fairs and an initiation of a sort. To combat this they run slave farms where women are kept captive and forced to get pregnant as often as possible and because of skewered mating scheme inbreeding among slaves becomes a problem.

Would you find it way too ridiculous and only fit for something comically grimdark?

>because of skewered mating scheme inbreeding among slaves becomes a problem
This is the part that breaks my suspension of disbelief. It just seems unlikely that, if you're breeding slaves, that such a bureaucratic fuckup could happen across several generations and remain unsolved.

>considered acceptable entertainment for children on fairs
Unless your children are drow or mongolian, also breaks my SoD

>getting shorthanded in the field because they kill slaves for fun
Unless they are comically cruel, it seems unlikely that slaveowners would allow too many slaves to be killed. After all, this is their property and income source that's getting killed

The idea behind all this is that they were really afraid of slave rebellion after they lost their homeland and thus most of support for their colonial effort.

The nation is supposed to be North Korea tier, laughing stock of the world with delusion of grandeur, partially borrowing from and exagerrating Spartan Helot antics and apartheid.

But I clearly went too far and I'm currently trying to figure out how to downscale this all without losing the retarded flavour.

As for killing slaves - it's part sadism inherent in their racist culture, part conspicuous consumption. Showing that they figuratively (and sometimes literally) have slaves to burn.

To me, your description is kind of contradictory. They're supposed to be "be North Korea tier, laughing stock of the world with delusion of grandeur", but the way you describe their sheer cruelty and number of slaves to throw away makes them look like they have power, less 'glorious in their own heads' and more legitimately glorious, like they have the power and wealth to waste human lives so easily and uselessly.

It reminds me of Domination of the Draka actually. Maybe you can look at that for inspiration.

>currently trying to figure out how to downscale this all without losing the retarded flavour
Maybe describe the consequences of their retardation? I assume their practices make them practically nobody's friends, and their country is rife with civil strife and rebellion.

I think there's a pretty fine line there, honestly, and it's to the point where the best guideline is probably real history. To examine the circumstances where people are willing to be utterly awful to one another, basically. It's like:

>Throwing rocks at tied up slaves or poking them with red hot iron
As punishments/executions these could be spectacle, but it's hard to really imagine the attitude around these things wouldn't be pretty morbid, much like any other hanging or beheading. Yeah, everyone's going to watch, and it serves a pretty obvious media-message value-- but "entertainment" is a strong word.

>entertainment for children
Honestly, exposing children to death in general is probably you can't do light-heartedly. It doesn't really matter how superior you feel to another race, if there's a human empathy issue with telling a little girl her goldfish died, you probably can't expect kids to react well to anything MORE sociologically trying.

>Slave farms
It was done in Mistborn and it worked. Brandon Sanderson treaded very carefully around it, though.

Basically, as it's written, yeah, that's strictly comedy-grimderp. Which is fine, but if you want it to be immediately taken seriously, I would say your best bet is to make it so that people's treatment of the "lower" race mostly comes out under stress. The worst acts of human cruelty: Slave punishments, things like the Rape of Nanking, death marches, they did underline a distinct disregard for the value of people's lives, but there was also some kind of circumstance that brought that out of people.

Amount of human resource they can waste vs replacement rate is something that is hard to calculate for me since I'm pretty bad with such things.

I already said they are shorthanded and their casually throwing away population leads for lowering of genetic diversity as well as creating business for mandatory breeding.

Obviously, nobody wants to be friends with them, and they don't want to be friends with anyone either, since their ideology is heavily racist - they fancy themselves to be true successors to my fantasy!Romans - other successor states exist, but not racially pure enough. In fact another my concern is to explain how exactly are they not invaded and conquered yet.

Honestly, if they're a laughingstock, the easiest way to drive the point home would just be food shortages and economic ruin. It gives them a reason to be panicked and tightening the clamps on their slave trade, it's inherently a condition brought about by their shitty attitude and incompetence, and in general it just mirrors how things have always gone down. Plus, it gives a reason why they wouldn't have been squashed by a revolution or foreign intervention-- A rich nation with a shitty attitude is just them giving you an excuse to invade them. A poor nation with a shitty attitude is a problem nobody can solve.

>explain how exactly are they not invaded and conquered yet
They just aren't economically worth it, and people have bigger problems than that one angry nation that makes loud noises every once in a while.

I mean the North Korea comparison is the answer there-- Nobody invades them because, more or less, nobody would be able to deal with the economic consequences of the thousands upon thousands of refugees that they haven't been dealing with in a sustainable way. Just unfucking them would be such an undertaking that nobody's willing to make plans to do it.

That's not actually all that far from what's happened in real life, I'm sad to say. Bear in mind that Brazil, up until the end of the slave trade, never hit a point where its slave population was stable, despite the fact that they got about five times as many slaves as the US, because conditions were so horrible.

In particular, look at how they were treated on slave ships. They were chained down so they couldn't move for the entirety of the trip across the Atlantic, which could take weeks.

After a slave was whipped, the only treatment they'd receive was a bunch of salt poured in their wounds, if they received treatment at all.

If someone doesn't view a group of people as people, and has the firepower to keep them down, there's no limit to how cruel they can be.

>What kind of holidays do they have in your worlds? How do they celebrate? And more important: how do you figure out a name for them?

Only one I set up for now is a summer celebration of a young general beating back a necromancers invasion.

It's a giant orgy. It makes sense in context, trust me.

So, necromancer had taken over some islands, young noble beat him, lots of people died. The islands needed to be repopulated, which the church took care of. The lands thrived and soon the church would send people there as a reward, not a necessity.

Now comes the orgy into play. The people of the islands celebrated their savior in summer ever since, but as the region became more and more religious the event was conflated with another tradition. This far off region is rather lax on sexual norms and so it's no surprise that there was a lot of fucking during the festivites. So a lot of unwanted babies.

It's tradition for the children of priests to become so called saints: Each kid learns a single spell to mastery. Then, they are put into a magic koma and buried at holy places. People can then use talismans to channel these spells.

The region became known for it's affinity for holy magic. Many people pilgered there specifially wanted to create saints as a service to the people and god. Leave that running for a few generations and now you have a culture based on both piousness and pleasure. There are temples surrounded by brothels and ritualistic gladiator battles.

Then, once a year the peopel gather to celebrate the beginning of summer. Priests and nuns gather to strengthen the churches ever dwindling holy batteries, prisoners refight the current rulers favourite battle to win their freedom and nobles send expensive prostitutes and sometimes even daughters to bring new saints to their region.

And of course the scoundrel in the streets descend upon the tourists like a swarm of mosquitoes.

Sure, but there's a difference between "gives so little a damn that they don't even view them as human" and "actively torturously cruel", which is what user described that country like

Suppose they view slaves like beasts of burden. Overt cruelty to animals has appeared in many cultures around the world, often for the sake of entertainment.

Even today, we still have cockfighting, dog fighting, and cow-tipping.

I'm not sure we have children throwing rocks at cows or branding them with hot iron in fairs.

I can see this kind of shit happening in the Ancient world (Roman times, Ancient Greece, etc.) but at least they had a distinctly more egalitarian view of slavery back then, and punishment was to lord your power over slaves, not because they were thought of as distinctly subhuman

We had stockades and public floggings and public executions.

Original poster her.

My slavery was egalitarian originally, but it was different in this particular place - empire and the sole beacon of civilization in its own eyes decided to finally expand North and invaded the island where it all happens. Those people were some of the least advanced and got enslaved to work preparing for expansion to mainland further to the North.

After empire got eaten by zombies however, the colony had to control its slaves somehow and national pride and belief that they are the ones to carry the torch consumed their politics driving them to both extreme racism and massive terror campaign to keep slaves in control. And it kinda snowballed from here.

Is there any good place to make medieval coats of arms? I've considered opening Crusader Kings 2 just to make some.

Now with all slave talk. How do you go with thralls? What kind of position/jobs do they have? What about slave children, are they free or slaves? Are metahumans or beastmen slaves for humans or vice versa? Let's open the question more, slavery do you have it?

Delete that picture, user, this is a blue board.

Damn OP, that takes me back.

Not sure what's the difference between thralls and slaves.

I've got a culture that is partially Norse (but mostly Slavik). Certain menial jobs are considered unsuitable for free people and given to captured enemies, criminals and debtors to do. Or at least supposed to. If your clan or tribe can't get any thralls, everyone would point at you, laugh and call you a loser. They have no rights, but nobody really does have rights while it's considered cowardly and disgraceful to mistreat unarmed people.

Children of thralls are supposed to be free, but their position makes them dependent on their parents' masters and thus open for exploitation too. Major celebrations are often accompanied by granting thralls freedom.