Mostly logistics. I'd like to have a city that gives the illusion of functioning to my players. The trouble with mega-cities is that the shear size makes running such a game a case of juggling chainsaws.
Related: Factions. Throne has a ton of colorful factions, and I have trouble imagining what they actually DO besides fight the protagonist.
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Well what are we working with? How much do you know about city planning in general? How large of a campaign do you intend this to be? Are you considering a city the size of 6Bill demons, or something beyond that (ecumenopolis class) or something smaller?
Generally when people talk about verisimilitude as far as citybuilding goes, you find the sort of folks who are looking at nitty gritty details like sewage, manpower, RCI distributions (to borrow from SC), and so forth. Then you'll also find the sort of folks that are looking for an immersive atmosphere, and can accept that you'll have large cultural clashes (not necessarily violent) within the city itself, which in turn leads to some very peculiar results in city design. So you might not necessarily have a massive city that ends up being uniform, and you might find that having a well developed culture is more important than numerical logistics.
Where do you stand in terms of that?
As far as factions goes, most organizations are established with an objective in mind. A church is developed to spread worship and faith, a business is developed to make profit and garner reputation, a NPO might have a goal that's a bit more vague. You don't necessarily need to have guilds like in traditional fantasy - even just a large group of NPOs or like minded individuals who chipped in to rent a place could be the start of a faction. If you work out their origins from the beginning, it becomes easier to figure out their later motivations as you go along.
>>whats the biggest problem bothering you about your worldbuilding/setting in this very moment?
Putting things into paragraphs instead of bullet points.
>is there something in your setting that you would like to have advice and/or opinions on?
How much detail is too much for a general setting guide? What aspects of a nation's culture would you say is important?
>Are you considering a city the size of 6Bill demons
I'm basically running K6BD without the PLOT being relevant.
I definitely think culture is the more pressing need at the moment. I want the setting to feel like there's 100,000 cultures mingling in the streets. If there's a basic logic structure to explain away how 800 million people shit together without everyone everywhere dying of cholera, I'll gladly take it. But making the city feel alive is more important to me.
>factions
Only trouble with that is that K6BD has factions (like the Polishers or the Wax Candle Confederacy) whose jobs appear to be the same as the assassins and thieves guilds or the mercenary guilds, but they still identify as candlemakers and bankers. There's just a disconnect that I worry I won't be able to imitate in play, which would be a blow against the verisimilitude I really, really want to get across. I really want this city to feel real, even if demon samurai are fighting gun-witches in it.
>I'm basically running K6BD without the PLOT being relevant
Just realized that sounded bad. I'm running K6BD, but I'm assuming Zoss is gone but Allison hasn't entered the picture (and might never due to not wanting the game to revolve around a DMPC).
>How much detail is too much for a general setting guide? What aspects of a nation's culture would you say is important?
This kind of changes from person to person. But why don't you consider it like this - if you were a foreigner looking for somewhere to go on vacation, what is it about a country that you'd want to know before you go there?
Details like "major historic events" or "public holidays", culturally distinctive points like food or mannerisms, things that would be socially taboo - would all be nice to know in my opinion.
What would you guys say are the coolest parts of Naruto? And don't just say 'the setting,' give me details.
What would you guys say are the coolest parts of Pokemon?
I'm dusting off a setting I came up with a while back that combined the two and tried to keep the best of both. Wanna get your guys' opinions on this before I work too much more on it.
If you're using the exact same universe, then it's all pretty easy to explain since you can basically handwave it the same way K6BD handwaves it - the demons have a functional society based on their own systems, so society doesn't just implode on itself.
K6BD gets away with it as long as there's action going on, so people don't necessarily question how demons, angels, and humans have lasted this long, they're basically hitched to the ride.
But let's say we put aside the K6BD foundation for example and just look at population logistics for a bit. In a standard city, waste is either diverted away from the city, or destroyed at a cost. Naturally for things like water and such there's details like filtration and recycling and settling ponds and so forth, but the idea of "what do we do with waste" remains the same - if you can't recycle it, remove it, if there's nowhere to remove it to, destroy it.
In a very dense city like Hong Kong for example, landfilling in the outer territories is a pretty standard go to. Having the sea nearby makes water wastes relatively easy to handle, provided the treatment facilities are functional and the factories don't just end up dumping waste into the sea again.
But there's eventually a threshold you hit where either your population produces waste at a rate that your facilities can't handle, or you run out of space to handle that waste - essentially a breaking point.
Sci-fi solutions generally tend to lean towards technological advancements to handle this, fantasy has magic to fall back on or just relatively small populations, it's plausible in K6BD that Throne simply diverts waste into somewhere else in the multiverse.
The "duality" of factions in K6BD is something that, since this is a setting with beings that aren't wholly human (and plenty of immortals), makes sense in setting. On the other hand, dual occupations aren't too uncommon either. In most cases it's a matter of mindset.
I'd say being 12 again.