/wbg/ - worldbuilding general

do you guys know any worlds or made any worlds where magic is a science? where different spells can be reverse engineered or taken apart to see the individual elements that make them up, then using those isolated elements to create your own spells and stuff? im pretty interested in this stuff

Star Trek :^)

Depends on how it's done, I guess. The elves in my setting generally live like this, but they also use magic for nearly everything.

>Where's the safest place to raise a family?
God I need to come up with names. Not!Europe or not!China, mostly. Really, you need to be around people. Living in the countryside by yourself with no one around for miles just can't be done.
>Does your setting have horrifying monsters, dire beasts, and/or roaming bands of demihumans? If so, where is there none of that?
Yeah, this is part of why living alone is pretty much impossible. Since the... fuck, I'll call it the "Warlock Uprising", resources have become scarce and plenty of their creations and servants still roam the countryside. Most are dead, and nearly all their legions of undead troops have either been destroyed or assimilated, but there are still plenty of other dangers out there, including the same natural predators that existed before.
>Where would you want to live? What kind of house would you want?
If I had to live in this setting? Not!Britain. It's always busy and someone's always hiring, but it's pretty crowded already, so good luck on getting an actual house to yourself.
>What's a good job to do for a living? Prioritize safety and long-term happiness.
That's... that's a tough one. I'm not actually sure. I have no real way to judge happiness, but most of the jobs that pay well are extremely dangerous, so yeah. I think entertainment would be getting popular in this setting though, so maybe that?

D&D. That's mainly why wizards are supposed to delve: to recover research and lost discoveries of previous wizards (or living, greedy wizards, which is almost all of them).

Gygac based magic on Jack Vance's dying earth novels because it had the most gameable system: a finite number of spells are known, and are named after teir discoverers or general use (such as Phandall's Excellent Gyrator) in the manner of mathematical theorems or physical effects, they can be discovered and improved through research and experimentation, and they are one use per rest (humans are still bad at magic compared to, say, demons or soace aliens, and the human brain rejects a spell as soon as possible).

how do you guys deal with dialects being influenced by trade and migration? or do you just simplify the linguistic histories of your worlds? i just think about this issue a lot

Calendars.

Weeks are arbitrary measurements of time, most likely developed to signify the time between market days.

How important are weeks? If you don't have them, is naming your months from one to thirty generic and hard to remember or interesting?

Common is a trade language, the more distant the two people speaking are from geographically, the more simple the word choice I use.

I'd like to get some help expanding on my world's races. I mentioned it last thread; it's a fantasy setting set several thousand years after humanity colonized a different world. Anyway.

Humans:
I think I'm going to split them into several different castes, each representing a different "type" of human genetically engineered to serve the colony. I could use help coming up with the types. Warrior, scout, leader, and scientist sound like a solid basis. There are also "normal" humans. The original colony broke apart, and many of the enhanced humans suffered backlash. The warriors now have an independent city and serve as mercs for the rest of humanity, but I'm not sure what the others are doing.

Wolves: super dogs, descended from dogs enhanced to serve the human colony. They're the size of large ponies or small dogs, and are intelligent. They can't make human sounds (and vice versa), but can communicate like Chewbacca if both parties take the time to learn the others' language. They're independently minded and territorial, but don't deal with other races much. They're basically a terrain hazard.

Apes: think Planet of the Apes, with the same origin as the Wolves. I like the idea of having them in the setting, but I'm not sure what to do with them.

Golems: robots. Designed to last forever, many are still around. However, while they can repair most of their bits, their positronic brains can't be repaired and new ones can't be made. Many golems have had to delete parts of their memory in order to stay operational. They're also incapable of hurting humans, but keep this a closely guarded secret.

Tieflings: (will get an original name eventually) magic in my setting is Lovecraftian in nature, and humans who used it too much... changed. These are their descendants. They're probably going to be the baddie species.

Thoughts?
Anyone have ideas on where to expand or what to add?

I'm homebrewing a Pathfinder game that uses small woodland critters as the main races. It would essentially be played the same or very similar to PF which would mean I wouldn't need to drastically modify any rules. PCs would be Mice or Squirrels in armor or wearing robes slaying "giant" spiders using swords, arrows, and magic. They would travel to "huge" water kingdoms ruled by Frogs and earn favor from the King. I see it as a more familiar fantasy setting from a much smaller point of view.
The setting is an Earth where humans disappear right now and the world is left to the rest of animals that remain. A few of these animal species gained varying levels of intelligence and magical ability and over multiple new generations created their kingdoms and societies. It would translate as a traditional fantasy setting but the size of the world in general is much larger.
I've drawn parallels to existing base races from Pathfinder for each of my available player races. These aren't meant to be exact parallels, just based on their stat bonuses: PF Race -> Animal [Race Name] (Similarities)
>Human -> Mouse [Murin] (Generic, common)
>Elf -> Rabbit [Lepori] (Dexterous, fast, long ears)
>Half Elf -> Squirrel [Shurri] (Sort of halfway between Rabbits and Mice {not literally})
>Half-Orc -> Frog/Toad [An'Urai] (Shunned by more common folk {rodents})
>Dwarf -> Gopher [Gaiorin] (Stockier and live in the ground, not usually too social)
>Gnome -> Shrew [Sorserin] (Smaller, More similar to Dwarves/Gophers)
This is still open to more races.

My problem is this:
How do I say what species are intelligent and what aren't? It could be by size, but even if you excluded insects this gives trouble to the idea of riding animals. I could easily just say whatever magic made them intelligent only picked a select few and the rest are just beasts as they were. It's been giving me some trouble and I was wondering what you other fa/tg/uys thought.

Please berate me mercilessly if I am in the wrong thread

Well, even now we don't number weeks, they're just sorta there. I do think having a unit between months and days is a good idea though. It gives an idea of a unit of time somewhere between the two. And I think remembering a small number of weeks is much easier than remembering a large number of days. Do you think it's easier to remember 6 weeks or 42 days?

I'm trying to think about it from a practical standpoint.

Is it easier for you to remember the third day of the second week, or easier to remember the 13th of the month?

Is it easier to remember the 1st day of the third week, or let's say the 27th of the month?

At the same time, is it easier to remember the first of every week for the farmers market, or to remember it's on the first, the eleventh, and the twenty-first of each month.

I don't understand all the genetic modification going on. Why enhance wolves if you already have enhanced humans? I mean, frankly, I think it's going to be a lot easier to give an already sapient person some extra muscle mass and increased senses, than it will be to make a wolf intelligent.

If you can't find an idea for the apes, just drop them. It's better to save the idea for something else than jam them into the setting where they might not make a whole lot of sense, "just because".

>positronic brains
I kinda hate how all intelligent robots have anti-matter brains in fiction because science changed from Asimov's understanding of it.
>They're also incapable of hurting humans, but keep this a closely guarded secret.
What, did people forget or something? I also don't imagine it would stay a secret for very long.

>Tieflings
So... Destiny's Awoken, basically? I mean, not that that's bad, it's actually an interesting concept. But just how Lovecraftian are we talking here?

And how is any of this fantasy? Or are you talking space fantasy, like Destiny or Star Wars? Aside from the Tieflings, all I see is sci-fi.

Unless all your months have a number of days divisible by 7, what you say about days on weeks will be impractical to match up to number days. This is another reason weeks would be useful, is that they always start and end on the same day, and they will even run through when one month ends and another begins.

I'm going for an exactly symmetrical calendar, it doesn't have leap days or anything crazy and weeks don't bleed over into other months.

I don't really want to have weeks, I'd prefer people just refer to their days as Day Month: "Six Frostwane" or equivalent.

The coolest part about weeks, though, is you can give each a symbol and have illiterate people read store signs to figure out which weekday the store is open. This is unfeasibly complicated with a number calendar as there's a lot more numbers and symbols...

cont. And as a retard I just realized you can do exactly that by just having 10 different symbols and it being common knowledge that the 1 symbol is 1, 11, 21 and etc. You can even use the number one.

I'm not a fan. You've got to be realllllly high fantasy for that to make much sense as anything but the most savage tribal settlement.

>I don't really want to have weeks, I'd prefer people just refer to their days as Day Month: "Six Frostwane" or equivalent.
How does the existence of weeks prevent you from doing that?

It doesn't prevent it, it just encourages using the shorter time metric.

Either way, you can use basic numbers for a ten-day week that is easy to remember and relate too.

Not him, but how savage? "We don't know what metal is" savage?

>It doesn't prevent it, it just encourages using the shorter time metric.
How? In America at least, we don't really number or mark weeks at all. Again, usually people use weeks to either mark the start/end of a work cycle, or when referring about a relative date in the past or future.

Forgot one race
>Halfling -> Chipmunk [Tamian] (Small, quick, agile)

Pretty much. We're talking un-contacted cannibal headhunter tribes in the Amazon rainforest tier savagery.

So people never tell you they are going to have their work finished by Monday? They always say they'll have it done by the 15th? and so on.

Oh, you're talking about the names of the actual days now? You just kept talking about weeks.

These are the real origins of the races, in-setting it appears like a medieval society in an arid climate (not a desert, though). People think the golems are magically animated metal, for example.
The colony wasn't supposed to go to this planet, but several of the higher ups were part of a cult that believed real magic could be found on the less habitable planet. They were right, but things went badly and a civil war destroyed the colony before it could disperse it's tech in a comprehensive way, leading to an eventual decline.

The dog/ape thing helped speed the fall. Some people thought enhancing humanity was best for survival, but others argued that such changes were counter productive: saving humanity by stopping it from being human. These people also had different ideas, some creating the super dogs and othets the apes.

How do I into climates & biomes?

Here's how the major winds work on an earth-like planet.

Overlay this pattern of arrows onto your world. Below the arrows going from land towards water, there's dry biomes like desert and steppe. Below the arrows going from water towards land, there's wet biomes like jungles and swamps. In areas kinda between the two, you get more normal forests and grasslands.

Read, a lot.

Then use all your knowledge of how awesome nature is to make up a bunch of insane shit.

...and my fucking phone fucks up the image of course.

>People think the golems are magically animated metal, for example.
Why? I'm having a hard time understanding how all the people currently living have no explanation for anything they're seeing other than "must be magic." I mean, it would make far more sense if all these things were separated from humanity, humans go through a downfall where records are lost and knowledge is warped. And then, after many years, finding the robots, and since none of them have the knowledge of what they are, then they think they're golems. Really, I think that the humans should understand at least on the surface level what these things are, just not how exactly they work, why they were made, how they were made, or who made them.

youtube.com/watch?v=r2pt2-F2j2g

Fuck you, user.

It's not unfeasible, it's just not entirely plausible without knowing more about user's world history. All we know from his descriptions is that several thousand years have passed, genetic engineering is a go, caste society has been implemented. There's very little that we know about their education system and their culture. We also know relatively little about the humans' perception of technology as a whole - if they internally define technology as magic then it fits in a notch completely.

Furthermore if the design of the technology is alien enough, it's theoretically plausible to disassociate shape with function, and shape with intention. Again this goes into specifics which would need user's clarifications moreso than anything.

>Deadman Wonderland
Read the end of that recently. Fucking tragic story, but it looks like a mostly happy ending.

Actually, yeah, how do you guys handle prisons in your settings? Do they even exist? Is there even a change the inmates can get out by serving their time? What do you do with the paranormal ones? Like, how do you jail a lich, a genie, or a dragon? Or do you just kill them all because you're tired of all those pussies in the past who couldn't kill the villain and just sealed it away so it could wreak havoc on the world long after they were all dead? (Seriously, that last one's always bugged me.)

discord link expired, heres the new one: discord.gg/ZGStJ

>Actually, yeah, how do you guys handle prisons in your settings? Do they even exist?
Yes and no. Prisons exist in areas that value life and have a strong military, so they commonly found in Dwarven holds and the Empire. Other countries use criminals as slaves, rather than just locking them up to atrophy.
>What do you do with the paranormal ones? Like, how do you jail a lich, a genie, or a dragon? Or do you just kill them all because you're tired of (ancient evil plotpoint)?
Paranormal prisoners hasn't been an issue yet. Most actual prisons have lead-lined cells to keep warlocks and other "evil" spellcasters in, while genies and dragons don't exist in the setting.
There's a secret society that has a proper prison for demi-gods, but it hasn't had much use.

1/2 response
>Where's the safest place to raise a family?
The as of yet unnamed floating city made of crystalline magic. It is physically separated from the rest of the world by a massive desert, so very few (read as none) attacks have ever been tried. It is still connected with the rest of the world via a vast transportation/teleportation system that is subsidized by the various magical guilds that call the city home (as in the main office of the magic guilds is there). There is also a large oasis/sea in the shadow of the city that supports the crystal city with water and fish. There are a couple smaller towns around the sea where mostly the fisherman live
>Does your setting have horrifying monsters, dire beasts, and/or roaming bands of demihumans? If so, where is there none of that?
Yes to all. Everything from eldritch monsters to dragons to roaming packs of feral wolves.
If you stay near the cities and away from the Sea of Death, you should be fine.
>Where would you want to live? What kind of house would you want?
My self insert character lives in a small tower in the crystalline magic city.

It's a long story. Ending up on the wrong planet really screwed up the planned harmony and such the colony was supposed to have. Robots were supposed to be the only helpers they needed, but there just weren't enough of them. This lead to the rampant genetic tampering, with dozens of different groups trying their different methods. Add to this the introduction of functional "magic" and shit got weird.

In short, apes rebelled, wolves fucked off to do their own thing, the few people capable of maintaining robots left to start their own society (with few complaints, since many people saw robots as having failed them, causing the strife in the first place), and the cultists tried to take active control.
And it's been a long, long time since all this happened.

Honestly this is mostly just for my benefit. I intend the setting itself to come across as fantasy, but with a few anachronistic bits and pieces showing up to make things interesting.

2/2
>What's a good job to do for a living? Prioritize safety and long-term happiness.
Well, my self insert is one of the council members of the crystal city. He basically is paid to do research most of the time, and occasionally vote on matters of state for the city. He represents one of the larger mage guilds (1 of 4 main mage guilds) in the council, and also speaks on behalf of some of the lesser guilds that don't have enough members to obtain a council seat.

Other than positions of authority, the mercantile business is booming, and it is relatively easy to gain a sponsor for loan for an airship (magically powered). Air transportation is still very profitable even with teleportation services existing because of large/bulk goods (perishable goods don't always agree with teleportation) and service to smaller towns and the wilds. It is quite often cheaper to charter an airship to go to a area in the wilds than to hire one of the mage guilds to offer teleportation service to the same location.

Other than that, trade goods almost always turn a profit. Owning a shop or baking or such are also /mostly/ stable jobs.

Still don't get it, especially "No more robots? OK, let's make mutants." I think you should throw in a lot more magic so it makes more sense, at least from a narrative standpoint.

>>Where's the safest place to raise a family?
Oh fuck, I hope you're rich, because most countries unironically have forced conscription.
>>Does your setting have horrifying monsters, dire beasts, and/or roaming bands of demihumans? If so, where is there none of that?
Yes, and most of the subcontinent of Umbrin is decently civilized due to it being a highly urbanized region. They still get pirate raids along the coasts however.
>>Where would you want to live? What kind of house would you want?
Probably along the Northern frontier of Ulnuu where people are just colonizing and building settlements, medieval Russian style. You'd be the most isolated from the outside world, but at the same time you'd be living in a semi-radioactive wasteland.
>>What's a good job to do for a living? Prioritize safety and long-term happiness.
Town Watch during peace time. Otherwise you'd want to be a higher up, preferably a buerocrat or merchant placed somewhere in a capital city

More like, "Robots aren't cutting it, we need to do something drastic or we're all going to die." But I think I see you point.

>the Sea of Death
Sounds like a lovely place for a vacation home.

>He represents one of the larger mage guilds (1 of 4 main mage guilds) in the council, and also speaks on behalf of some of the lesser guilds
Why would they pick him to represent their interests? Why not pick someone else who is far less likely to have a conflict of interest?>most countries unironically have forced conscription.
You don't need to say "forced", conscription implies force. Also, "unironically"? What does ironic conscription look like? An army made entirely of ultra-pacifists? ...That sounds like a comedy sketch.

Make the reason for the downfall into humanity was fighting the Lovecraftian forces. Explains races as a result of desperation. Could also explain lack of knowledge through reality warping and mind rape.
>"Sir, our forces can't push them back!"
>"Not even with the robots?! Then we'll make super soldiers! We'll even turn the apes and dogs into soldiers! Anything that might help!"

Sorry, my English isn't too great and I think I picked up bad habits from Veeky Forums

I was already planning on making the "tieflings" the bad guy species, so it's not much different.

Oh no, "Sea of Death"? Don't worry about it. Certainly not the worst, and humans as a whole aren't always stellar with names. We do have a Dead Sea, after all. It was just some light ribbing. Fucking hell, I don't name most of my stuff because I'm shit at coming up with names.

Aw, don't tell me ALL the corrupted humans are bad guys, that's no fun.

>Aw, don't tell me ALL the corrupted humans are bad guys, that's no fun.
I'm a big fan of having disparity between what is "known" in-setting and what I, as the setting creator, know. The Not-tieflings are thought to be universally evil, but that doesn't mean they actually are.

>tfw my setting's creator
>tfw favoritism for certain fantasy races actually affected the setting's history, and said races know it
>tfw I don't hate any of my creations, even if they hate eachother

Why would you let them know what you did to them? They might break through the Source Wall and find you!

That's the thing, they think they got "uplifted" from moles and monkeys because they were good little children. They have no idea it's because of magical realm.

>They have no idea it's because of magical realm.
If you ever want to make them suffer, tell them that. I'm suffering right now.

But by that metric, the Congo shouldn't exist since the air currents that feed it are rolling off the Sahara and the grassland down south. Monsoon climates in general also kind of cheat the system.

Rodent guy here

The question has been answered so now I'm looking for general things to possibly expand on.

Answering questions helps me a lot.

>How do I say what species are intelligent and what aren't?
This is really a question of narrative convenience. Since you're not going to think of every animal possible right off the bat, I say just work under the assumption that all other animals than the ones you're developing are unintelligent, but don't be afraid to make any intelligent if you think it would add to the story by perhaps introducing an interesting new race or something else along those lines. Also, remember that animals don't need intelligence to contribute to the plot. It's easy to make an antagonist intelligent or not.

I'm curious. How many people are working on games and how many are working on books?

>I think even with Rome it was a dole just in Rome itself, not in every city.
Well, I've got the only city. It's supposed to be a very shitty country and one of social ills I want to give them is compulsive racism and racially segregated slavery pushing people of non-enslavable race out of the jobs forcing them to flock capital and mooch of the wealthy land and slaveowners.

That's pretty racist buddy

You should probably make a survey if you want any meaningful idea. Oh, it could be part of the next op, get some longer term metrics.

Game by the way

Books need characters, plots. I just like making settings

Book.

Book. Veeky Forums a shit

...

Never been to Veeky Forums. What're they like?

there's nobody there for the most part; some people also talk about philosophy in a pretentious uneducated way

Games, but I only just got here.

>Family

The Red City; the only city in the setting that has the avatar of a god looking after it. Home to the Legions, too. Even the poorest families can send their sons to join the army, and their daughters to join the priesthood.

>Monsters, dire beasts, demihumans

Same story. The First of the House of Fire, Du'an'uil, keeps the region pretty safe. Unless you're one of said demihumans, not all of whom are raving lunatics.

There is a reason I never set games in the Red City.

>Where would you want to live? Type of house?

... Red City. I would join the priesthood because a purpose in life is great.

>What's a good job?

Don't join the Legion, that's for sure. Even being a tenant farmer's pretty good when corruption is constantly being checked and monitored by the servants of a god who know their deity is -right over there-.

Ive had a look at it from time to time (not very often) and didnt really like it, but maybe i was there at the wrong time or i just dont get into it, but i have seen other anons on /wbg/ share my opinion.

To start they only have one general for SF/Fantasy and are generally against the discussion of it somewhere else. Not many "discuss your own stuff" like threads as well.
The SF/Fantasy general is mostly memespouting about american autors X,Y and Z and why theyre shit/ the best thing ever written. Very, very few discussions about literature by anons as well.
Ive also found them to be very snobbish. The board is for discussion of literature so basically different interpretations/preferrences are bound to collide and it happens in the usual Veeky Forums way. I can cope with that when its about politics, religion, culture or even engineering/crafting stuff and i dont mind insulting and shitflinging on /pol/, /int/, /diy/ and the likes, but i cant stand it when its on boards that relate to hobbies that are meant to be fun and i wouldnt want my work posted there. The community of /wbg/ seems just way nicer than there.Thats just me though.

Mostly people who masturbate to classical literature and shit on fantasy/sci-fi. Trying to find any useful discussions on world building there is like trawling Veeky Forums for useful dating advice.

They have a fantasy/sci-fi general but I've never seen anything interesting come out of it.

I'm fine if magic or superscience is involved, in fact, I dream of the future in which we would all live in the genetically engineered forests. But I don't want author to berate me for not embracing his fantastic solutions (Like in Avatar, for example).

>>Where's the safest place to raise a family?
Different places offer different kind of bestness. In the woods civilians are safe from human agression for the most parts but woods are full of bears, trickster spirits and witches. In the plains you will probably get war every few years and feudal lords are cunts. In the valley is peaceful and safe, unless someone tries to raid you. Further East there are steppes full of nomads and city state full of greedy merchants and ex-nomads both are somewhat unsafe. Just don't go to southern islands, people there are crazy.
>>Does your setting have horrifying monsters, dire beasts, and/or roaming bands of demihumans? If so, where is there none of that?
There are some titanic beasts and cataclysmic magic spawns and there are humans who lost their god causing them to mutate into deformed freaks, with burning desire to kill everyone and spread corruption. They destroyed a mighty empire but lost their minds and now they are mindless beasts who never die naturally and roam their habitat aimlessly for the most parts

Not impressive. They mostly hate fantasy/sci-fi over there so I never found much interesting discussion. They've got some highly articulate posters, though.

Had one guy claim that including multiple races in a story was always bad because they would be stuck acting either in line with their racial stereotype or against it. When I posed the question about how this was at all different if it was just another human culture he never responded (never mind that any race can have as many distinct cultures as their living space allows).

Mostly dropped out of the board after that.

Oh god. They're probably populated by the type of people who think that the only good books are at least a hundred years old.

I definitely got that kind of vibe.

Credit where credit is due, they had some of the most educated and articulate posters I've seen on the internet, but more often than not their discussions got bogged down in minutiae and irrelevant shit. Like Veeky Forums but without the humor.

Wow. That's really weird. And yeah, applying the same logic to human races has some uncomfortable implications. It's like the guy's unaware that stereotypes are generally true about a group, but you can't just go around and start applying the stereotype to everyone in that group, you'll just look like an idiot.

Eww, why? Trees tends to be filled with bugs.

Cuddly genetically engineered bugs.

As long as they don't crawl on me, I'd probably be fine with them.

Actually, now I'm curious. Do you have a setting where this happens?

i wouldnt drop it completely off though. Their essential reading lists have the one or other jewel i would never have found or read otherwise, although the term "essential" or "classic" is really subjective and sometimes it seems they just put the hardest, longest and oldest books in there just to boast with it.

>essential christian reading
>the fucking Philokalia
yeah no, there are easier ways to get orthodox christianity.

So, I'm trying to draw a map for a setting. I got a few landmasses with shapes I like, but I'm having a scale problem.

I don't want the region the adventures takes place (upper right) to be too big. I'm thinking the landmass for this region to be something in-between the UK (240.000km2) and Japan (360.000km2). Which would make the bigger landmass to be around 1-1.5 mil km2 (About the same area as Bolivia or South Africa).

Problem is, that would either force the planet to be tiny compared to Earth or have a way too much water and/or unexplored space which I would have to fill later on. After doing some research, I found that the Moon would have a decent size for what I'm thinking, and still have plenty of space for new continents later on: spudart.org/blog/images/2007/earth-moon-size-comparison-559.jpg

My question: could a Moon sized planet have a similar gravity and overall astronomical behavior to our Earth? Would there be any weird implications I should be aware of?

>>Where's the safest place to raise a family?
At home? Every culture is made mostly of safe places to raise families, that's how life works.
>>Does your setting have horrifying monsters, dire beasts, and/or roaming bands of demihumans? If so, where is there none of that?
That stuff is only on the shitty continents. And the roaming bands are just nomads, and the monsters generally don't hurt you if you don't do anything to them.
>>Where would you want to live? What kind of house would you want?
Human country because I am human. A nice cottage.
>>What's a good job to do for a living? Prioritize safety and long-term happiness.
Standard farmer's life, I suppose. An academic or a knight in a peaceful kingdom isn't far behind.

>Where's the safest place to raise a family?
In one of the major cities. Most are welcome in any of the cities that are part of the Republic as they are all-inclusive and usually don't discriminate based on race (species).
>Does your setting have horrifying monsters, dire beasts, and/or roaming bands of demihumans? If so, where is there none of that?
The beasts of the wild roam constantly as they did before the awakening just looking for a meal. They usually tend to stay away from population centers as they are driven away by the sheer "man" power. Villages are not spared from this but they are usually safe in their houses.
>Where would you want to live? What kind of house would you want?
I'd live in the Murin (mouse) capital city. Those guys really know how to build a cozy city with great infrastructure. If I was a Lepori (rabbit) I would prefer to live out on my own with my mate on a farm making little clanlings.
>What's a good job to do for a living? Prioritize safety and long-term happiness.
If you're a Gaiorin (gopher) then you are guaranteed a job in the Sorisin (shrew,mole) mines. Easy money doing something you love and were built for. If I was any other race then having a farm close to one of the major cities promises a lot of business along with protection from the vigilant guards that patrol on watch.

Did the Discord chat help you in developing your setting? Did you decide on which animals to make intelligent and which not to?

Yeah it really did, especially the fact that I don't have to specify which species is or isn't sentient. I can just make it up as I go. Whatever feels better.

Wrote Bios for all the races I had and came up with a few more.

Gravity is dependent on the mass of the objects involved, so for any body smaller than the Earth to have similar gravity, it would have to be similarly massive. That said, mass is a property independent from volume, so it could still work if the planet were many times more dense than Earth. Perhaps the crust contains a much higher percentage of iron or some other heavy metals--you could play around with that by making magnetic navigation on this planet highly difficult (or impossible).

>the Sea of Death
>Sounds like a lovely place for a vacation home.
If you want your morning to start by an eldritch abomination attacking specifically your house, sure.. Although the equivalent of Atlantis is rumored to be in the center of that sea...
>He represents one of the larger mage guilds (1 of 4 main mage guilds) in the council, and also speaks on behalf of some of the lesser guilds
>Why would they pick him to represent their interests? Why not pick someone else who is far less likely to have a conflict of interest?
Who exactly would they pick? If the lesser guilds want any voice, they have only so many options. If they are under having their own council member, they have to choose either to ask patronage by one of the already council members, or there is one council member appointed by a guild of guilds, that always votes a specific way that rubs some people. They get a more direct input by patronizing a council member their selves.

Do you think our present day world would be much different if our world had magic and all the other fantasy stuff from the start? Like, would we still have World of Warcraft and a Warcraft movie, except they get genuine orks for the rolls instead of using CGI? Or do you think society would be radically different?

Tech would never evolve the same way. Entertainment media would either involve magitech, if it exists at all.

Can't they vote? They would likely pick someone whom they believe best represents their interests as a whole. I'm pretty sure there was a Greek or Roman type of politician who was rich and well off, but would speak in favor of the poor. I imagine it would be something like that. Trying to find more info now.

What are some great examples of locations for grand libraries hosting over 1000+ books?

Oh, I think this is it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_of_the_Plebs

It would be radically different. The only reason stories like Harry Potter or the Dresden Files work is because the supernatural stuff is kept secret. Human interaction and society would be changed on a fundamental level if that sort of stuff was both real and common knowledge.
You cannot underestimate how huge the social, economical, and technological implications would be.

Trying to have the world be exactly the same but with magic is just bad writing, and the further back you start the change the more pronounced the effects will be.

Hung by huge chains over the mouth of an active volcano.