TL;DR: Post your abandoned or shameful magical-realmy concepts here, and I as an experienced sperg herder will try to see if I can get it to work in civilized company.
As a perma-GM of six years, the magical realm threads here piss me off in two ways - there are the shitters who have to call everything "magical realm" if someone in the world has gotten a stiffy to it, and then there are those who like to seem "subtle" while writing "gentle domination ladyknight" settings that sound alarms from miles away.
I've brushed with a lot of players over the years, and there have been a lot of spergs. I have witnessed just about all degrees of magical realm (in real life, at that) save for the "rainbow dragonwolf Sonic OC with smelly feet" tier, and I like to think that I know how it works by now. More importantly, I have wrangled a lot of funky concepts into playable characters, and I like doing it.
If you have any dubious or spergy concepts lying around, I'd be happy to try to see if I can get them to work - it's a hobby of mine to salvage good ideas from funky concepts. Come at me.
Magical Realm Classroom
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Barefoot, parkouring, white(as in actually white) skinned almost elves with a tail and black sclera.
Their martial arts, if any, is Muay Tay or
Capoeira
If you're homebrewing, it's fine as long as you don't make them the main characters of the setting or really rub in how fantastic they are. Approach their culture and traditions from a neutral and even scientific viewpoint, writing things that have nothing to do with their feet.
Try not to give them magical powers or make them "divinely blessed" - people let a lot of their positive and protective emotions spill over in their magical realms, and that sets off warning lights.
You can always give a reason for their being barefoot just so you have it in case someone asks (but please don't push it to the forefront) - for example, the tendons and muscles in their feet are made to distribute pressure better and are very flexible at the cost of being frail, so wearing shoes for a longer time results in muscle aches, inflammation and even microfractures.
The tail is no problem - it's still technically in the human genome somewhere, and using it for balance has hundreds of precedents in almost all animal families.
For God's sakes, though, the "miracle elf" is getting old. Make them something else than distant, wise and slightly dominant, because that's a warning signal as well. Instead of making them seem superior compared to other races, just make them different and don't get too hung up on the "better ways" they have to do things or their magical philosophy.
To be fair, my definition of elf is mostly "knife eared with lean body and not ugly"
They were not meant to actually be elves
There's just really a tendency to call elf-like races something else while keeping the annoying author-enforced feeling of superiority and the tendency to be slow-breeding and long-lived scholars who know "the ancient ways" better than anyone else.
Instead of saying they're all pretty (a red flag), you could say that their average appearance is appealing to humans as a whole, but that the ones who're really good-looking according to their standards come off as a bit freaky to humans. Making a whole race good-looking because of your tastes is a red flag so big your players won't be able to see anything else.
You might think of taking typical elven traits out, too, since they've been done an uncountable number of times - for example, make them relatively short-lived and fast-breeding, make them distinctly anti-intellectual and to the point, or have them be a surprisingly social and non-isolationist people.
The "scholarly, pretty, aloof knife-ears with access to the Ancient Ways who keep themselves hidden because their race is dying and they think everyone else is a bunch of assholes" has gotten old, and it has so because it lends itself very well to fetish-crammed cultures and otherkin sperging.
My players have accused me of magical realming some, mostly because how Goblinoid reproduction works in my world.
-Eusocial species
-Goblins: immature females, working caste
-Hobgoblins: immature males, soldier caste
-Bigbears: mature males, "drone" caste
-Then there's a Queen.
When there's no Queen in a hive, a Goblin will go through "puberty" and develop sexually, then she instinctively flees the warren. Her maturation process triggers the same in the oldest Hobgoblins, who become Bugbears, and chase after her. The Bugbears compete against each other and against the Queen's own reluctance to mate in order to pass on their genes.
My players (well, not all of them) think this is "rapey" and obviously it is. But for many (even most) of the animal kingdom males are tested for fitness by the females simply because the females don't want to mate with them, and try to run, which means a male who can't outrun and overpower a female doesn't get to pass on his genes. It's nature, and it's terribly cruel, but it wouldn't be realistic to assume that a very alien species would have the same courtship norms that we do.
They still haven't figured out how the dwarves reproduce. I wonder how they'll feel about it when they do.
I think you've already solved the problem yourself.
There's nothing inherently creepy about your setting, it's just that your players are being too sensitive about worldbuilding. They're expecting goblins to be short humans with different skin colors, as they are in a lot of other media, and instinctively come with buzzwords when this is not the case.
I really don't get the feeling that you have a fetish for it from your post, not in the slightest. If you're as calm, factual and academic about it in-game as you are here, it's just your players who're used to generic fantasy worldbuilding in which you recolor humans and their traditions instead of constructing a proper race from the bottom up.
As long as you're not forcing the players to participate in the sex in any way, it's your players who're being thin-skinned. If you however cram the sexualization in everywhere, describing how the goblins have lots of sex and do it everywhere, that's where it gets a bit funky.
If your players come to you again with that, that's where you tell them that you looked to the animal kingdom for inspiration and this is what you got. A player who can't take their GM thinking like this doesn't have the fundamental trait needed for good roleplaying - that is, realizing that the things that people imagine and write don't jump fully formed out of the GM screen to rape people.
I just want to take slaves and fuck them I guess.
>They still haven't figured out how the dwarves reproduce.
How, pray tell, do the dwarves reproduce?
The fact that German dungeon porn exists has made that magical realm impossible to conceal.
If you want to create a society around it, there are countless ways to do so (the main way being to draw inspiration from actual slave trade, giving it some moral weight and roleplaying possibility instead of coming up with Gor 2.0), but it's never going to be completely hidden. The sexual parts are so utterly obvious that you would have to disconnect the sex from the slavery - that is, slaves are usually not used for sex and you got laid with this one not because they're a slave but because of your relationship.
Sex slaves are the archetypal loser's fantasy in our society, because being able to enter a relationship (even if it's getting more and more complex and fraught with the danger of stepping on somebody's feefees) is considered a major part of being a functional member of society. This is one of the main reasons that mind control and sex slavery sound so many alarms - they bring up stereotypes of people who can't interact constructively with society and need to force their sex out of people.
Dwarves release large sperm-like gametes in their urine, along with spoors of a yeast with which they share a symbiotic relationship. The waste from the holdfast pools up in the caverns below, and the yeast forms fungal cysts, fed by that waste. The dwarf gametes meet and join in these pools, and implant into the womb-like cyst. The infant dwarf gestates for around a year, then tears its way out of the cyst and climbs up to the holdfast.
dmsguild.com
...
How did they evolve this in the first place?
Please tell me that your dwarves don't engage in Jewish stereotypes, because I could see that being the second part of this to make it an ugly /pol/ related campaign
Ok i m hooked how do other race reproduce?
are they an all human party?
Oh hey, it's you, the guy with the pissbaby Dwarves!
>sickened but curious.jpg
I don't think this idea needs a lot of work, but:
Monstertown. A collection of the species usually relegated to being enemies for the heroes band together and build a large, Africa-esque city where they co-exist. Orcs, various beastfolk, vampires, goblinoids, assorted monsters, even a dragon, it's all there, right down to a location in a bay for the all-important trade and a place for our tentacle-friends to hang out. The entire thing is run by a matriarchal council under the typical "men are too violent" excuse, and one practice they perform to ensure (some) impartiality is that they buy slaves from the market to train and use as an internal force of arbiters, rather than using their own tribes and followers, which would run the risk of sparking a civil war. In Magical Realm terms, this means the player can occupy a nice switch position between the dominant council and their cronies, and the populace they police as well as the outsiders they deal with (I mean, have you never wanted to defile a devout Paladin, come on...). And, of course, all the monster people cater to all your typical Veeky Forums fetishes. Up to and including dragonfucking.
But take away the fetishism, and I'd still want to play it. The biggest give-away would be the matriarchal council, but it's not exactly a stretch.
...
I am into inflation and pregnancy. Bellies in general.
My magical realm can never come to be.
>tfw I don't play with people who are so tragic that they have to sexualize a friendly night of gaming with friends.
Feels completely normal, man.
>completely missing the point of the thread
>virtue signalling this hard
Yup. You're stupid.
Twinky healslut
lizard people breed with other species and take advantageous traits to breed hybrids that then breed back into the tribe, all in order to create a stronger, smarter race.
You keep it to the basics, and you don't start talking about "gentle domination" or searching out party members to dominate you. In fact, preferably drop the whole servile healer aspect, since it's been done so many times that it's obvious by now, as well as making for annoying characters who don't contribute enough. Not to mention that one of the most painfully awkward things in the world is to watch a grown man act like a "cute young boy". It's even more awkward than watching them pretend to be a little girl, and believe me.
The whole concept is so overdone and fundamentally grating that the only elements which are still salvageable are the basics - that is, your character is a boy who looks like a girl, they're a healer, and they also happen to like having sex. Remove the typical blushing awkwardness, and don't get too obvious either - like everything about characters and sex, it should be unnoticeable until it becomes explicitly relevant. Everything else outside an ERP game is in the original territory of "magical realm".
It's even better if you don't have to resort to them being a shota - I don't usually use existing characters as examples, but a good one is Lucius from Fire Emblem 7. Looks like a chick, acts like a healer, there's gay subtext if you want to look for it, but all in all there's no warning flags because there's no explicit sexualization or implied fetishes in his character.
For example, the cliché healslut is in his early teens, has blond hair, blue eyes and wears white robes. He's submissive, shy and overly kind, and he's naïve to the point of being retarded.
Now imagine a young priest in his twenties, with black hair and brown eyes, who still very much looks like a girl if you don't look too closely at his chin. He's not particularly naïve, and maybe even too serious and uptight, but he can't refuse someone if they ask him honestly for a favor he can do them (including sex).
Both are healsluts, one is playable.
Oh boy oh boy, I get to pull out my vajazzled demi dragon sex slave worldbuild
if any one is interested that is
Game Commentary: There is a magocratic city in the far south ruled by a gynosphinx witch-queen, who has reigned over the place for a couple of centuries. The people there seem to be quite happy with her rule, even if she does demand a "symbolic sacrifice" of one handsome male youth from the nobles every generation - he just becomes her attendant and her mouthpiece. Said city also has a large population of maftets who serve the witch-queen exclusively, save for those who leave her service.
Magical Realmism: The sphinx takes the "sacrifices" as her husbands, having hit on that human men make far better lovers and baby-daddies than androsphinxes do. She loves each one until he dies of old age, mourns him, then falls in love with the next sacrifice and starts over again. The maftets are a side-effect of sphinx reproduction; sphinxes have very large litters (to counteract how rarely the gynos & andros actually hook up), but human/sphinx pairings produce a majority of maftet cubs with only a small percentage of offspring being new gynosphinxes.
That's kinda cool. Just make it less about the sex itself and more about getting traits
Has any tried running a game with these?
Those are shitty supplements and make ERPs unfun, would not play
Got links to those?
>and then there are those who like to seem "subtle" while writing "gentle domination ladyknight" settings that sound alarms from miles away.
But gentle domination ladyknights are my magical realm! How do I make this work without sounding alarms from miles away?
Seconded.
"Monster claims sacrifice as its spouse" isn't exactly a niche fetishy thing. I would say go for it, just don't make it ABOUT the interspecies sex. Hell, have her be celibate and adopt children or something. Maybe have her looking for a secret to eternal youth for her paramour that she's never been able to find?
My setting's awkward because I don't have the fetishes but it's STILL gonna come across as realmy.
>setting inhabited by shapeshifting parasites
>eat people alive
>tentacles
>reproduce by crawling inside someone
Well, they reproduce by crawling into someone's skull via the eyes and basically merging with that person. There's a few months of gestation (where the host gains parasite traits) and then the children each pick a segment of the host body and wander off with it.
Working on an alliance of four demon princes as long-term BBEGs in my 40k campain.
I'm a bit hesitant about the slaaneshi one, and not only because of the sort-of magical realmy parts.
Basically, he's an arch magos who got stuck in a space hulk during an exploration, and then managed to conquer the entire building through willpower, demonic pacts and an abandoned Selenar gene-lab. He promptly decided to use said lab to create his own horde of grotesque monsters.
Now that he has taken the whole ship and somewhat fused with it, he uses his degenerated and mind-controlled mutant underlings to do about everything you can expect from a crazy-ass slaanesh worshipper whose only way to have fun is through other people's bodies.
So basically 24/7 hardcore /d/-tier orgy on a space hulk.
>each pick a segment of the host body and wander off with it
What happens to the child parasite that picks the D?
It starves to death within a day or so since it doesn't have enough biomass to move, attack, and metabolize. It has to pick two and that shit isn't sustainable.
That's kind of canon Slaaneshi though. If your players didn't want daemonette orgies they should have gone and fought Orks or something.
"Slaaneshi" is now in my phone's autocorrect library. I don't even play 40K.
I don't remember where I got them. Try Google.
I wouldn't even try to say anything about foot tendons in it. Their way of life is dependent on their agility and it makes sense that they would go shoeless the same way gymnasts and old-school sailors work barefoot.
Eh, I think your players are just being over-sensitive to it. That's pretty much just ants/bees with an "immature male" added on.
Fine as written if you ask me. Some people like monstrous humanoids and gelatinous cube is one of the most requested but least usable. Slythe hits a nice balance of "feels cube-like" while still being a medium adventurer that speaks common. I wouldn't worry about it.
Is having a city run by a crazy sorceress whose infamous for transforming people who piss her off into things too obvious? Like if a maid didn't do her job right she might turn her into a broom, or someone without manners into a pig. She's literally based off Circe, so it's not like classic myths lack don't have this kind of thing in them...
I assumed making the transformation be literally a puff of smoke and the person being replaced by an animal or object would be enough to keep it tasteful, but am I wrong?
>virtue signalling anonymously
Traps, corruption, castes, infection, monstergrills
The axiomatically matriarchal council is your big red flag. Outcastvilles happen, they attract tourist dollars from people who want to see the freaky stuff, and part of sampling the freaky stuff is usually getting their rocks off in freaky ways.
If you wanted to gloss the matriarchy just make it a non-gender specific role that tends to feature that trends matriarchal for the same reason that most leadership in minority communities trend matriarchal: menfolk tend to die young or go missing.
Change Sorceress to witch and hide behind the Disney fairy-tale angle.
Please go outside. You'll like it out there, there are lots of bellies and some of them are pregnant.
Meh, there's always room for one Dragonborn Dragon-blooded Sorc nympho with submissive tendencies and *spectacular* personal grooming. Just don't make it formal slavery and don't make it every single NPC and you're fine.
It's not apparent unless she starts changing people to panties or something in front of the party
If she does though I'd love to play that game
It really baffles me when people don't just set up Roll20 rooms for games like this. I've done it before on impulse, and it ended up being one of the best groups I've been in (though the magical realm is mainly in the character concepts and not the plot).
It's not a problem to find players, and most people in hard-to-find groups act nicer because they can't just switch groups right away.
Then again, I'm a perma-GM, so I might have the hardest part over with already.
Hypothetial mecha game, every unit from a particular region is piloted by pale, frail, sleepy-looking lolis. Genetic engineering heaviy involved.
>inflation
DM brushed on this as when one of the pc's got hit with a spell in the middle of a dungeon, i've been to 20 of her games and this has never come up
but she went into great detail about the effects slowing them down and getting stuck in the doorways
A centaur cleric of Ilmater that would allow party members to bully her by treating her like a horse, ride her, make her act as the pack mule, and generally demean her like a dumb animal.
probably trying to hit that weird willy wonka kinda angle and coming off as too weird since you're versed in freak shit, in my professional observation
Multi-generational fantasy eugenics experiment, like out of Fire Emblem.
Female half-drow woman obsessed with defeating everyone in her bloodline- let's just say sadistic and incestuous don't mesh well.
Female wasteland cannibal searching for a strong mate, her self-restraint gone in the hell that is the apocolypse.
Tiefling Rance.
I actually think I remember this idea from another thread long ago. Weren't they associated with being messengers for the Drow? And had little tails or something to help with their maneuvering?
Based race, magical realm or not.
All I want is an excuse to have all the women in skintight latex suits with high heels built in.
Space military?
That's one way to do it.
The slutty queen who doesn't know who the bastard heirs father ia, and the dumpy old man king who is too dumb to realize its not his.
This actually happened in an Exalted campaign I was in. Not my fault the queen wanted that barbarian Anathema D so bad. Though in the epilogue, questions were raised years later about why the Prince was so much taller than both his parents and why he looked like an Icewalker...
Elves without sexual dimorphism, both sexes have flat chests and birthing hips
Sounds nice to me!
>Then again, I'm a perma-GM, so I might have the hardest part over with already.
Yes yes you do. Finding GMs is always the hard part.
The mechas are piloted by direct-to-brain interface, so brain is all they focus on.
Neoteny is engineered in to stop body wasting effort on building the body up past the necessary minimums.
They also don't go to gyms or anything, just sims all day every day.
Some end up as pale lolis. Some end up as looking like basically the greys.
I just want a way for catgirls/foxgirls to be a thing.
And by that I mean humans with animal ears and tails but nothing more.
its not like I'm a furfag
This has literally been a thing in all of my campaigns since I started DMing a decade ago. Never had a single complaint.
Probably helps that all my friends are lolicons.
>but a good one is Lucius from Fire Emblem 7.
This right here.
I played a demure and womanly cleric like that once, in a final fantasy-style campaign: no one in the party ever suspected anything, except for the party fighter/tank. During the mandatory hot spring scene of the game.
The rest of the party never suspected anything and I'm still gaming with fighterbro to this day.
>spoiler
I have never once had that happen in any campaign I've ever been in. People talk about that happening in campaigns, but I've never seen it.
>tfw you have already inserted your magical realm into your setting
>shamelessly
>players know it's your magical realm
>they still love the campaign
Yes. Please.
You have to gently nudge the GM.
Things like
>Oh, they have a volcano there? Maybe the magma heats the water too and in some places, instead of geysers they have hot springs?
or
>My character will look for a nice place to relax, like a beach or some hot springs. Since we're in X place, maybe they have it.
Don't worry about it too much: GMs are generally grateful when players put some input in the world aswell, things that they had not thought about before.
>players know it's your magical realm
>they still love the campaign
>magical realm
It upsets me quite a bit when I see specific terms being used wrong.
That's just the autism talking.
I can't help but disagree with you. I feel like today's society should put an emphasis on how we communicate with each other, to avoid miscommunications and misinterpretations.
In our current example: magical realm means a situation where a player (usually the GM -yes, GMs are also players) puts their fetish into the game and makes the other players uncomfortable with it.
clearly did not magical realm, because even if he did inject his fetish into the game, the group was still okay with it and not grossed out.
Some people who haven't been on Veeky Forums longer than a few days or weeks, might start using the term like him, thinking that they are using it correctly, before someone rebukes them for using it incorrectly and starting a nasty argument.
An argument that could've been avoided if the words were used correctly in the first place.
What argument?
Any argument about what is and isn't Magical Realm, devolving into name-calling and flame wars about what is considered right, wrong, sexual or not.
And so what we have here is not really an argument.
Just a sad lone REEEEE unto the night of an uncaring world.
No, it's not an argument, it's just me expressing my thoughts on the matter peacefully and rationally
Uncaring world.
Night.
REEE.
>Uncaring world
It's not really uncaring if you reply to me though
That's just me.
And even I don't care about your opinion specifically.
Literally the Mord Sith from Legend of the Seeker
>I am into inflation and pregnancy. Bellies in general.
>My magical realm can never come to be.
Well pregnancy could happen, but it's going to be a background thing that isn't very noticeable...
>lizard people breed with other species and take advantageous traits to breed hybrids that then breed back into the tribe, all in order to create a stronger, smarter race.
>That's kinda cool. Just make it less about the sex itself and more about getting traits
So reverse-Nazi Lizardfolk?
I can dig it!
>Working on an alliance of four demon princes as long-term BBEGs in my 40k campain.
>I'm a bit hesitant about the slaaneshi one
>That's kind of canon Slaaneshi though. If your players didn't want daemonette orgies they should have gone and fought Orks or something.
Even then, play it up more like SHODAN or A.M., dude has a GOD complex and they just stepped into his rat maze.
>Traps, corruption, castes, infection, monstergrills
You have a setting where people get corrupted/infected into Monstergirls, then pressed into their caste system?!?!
>I just want a way for catgirls/foxgirls to be a thing.
>And by that I mean humans with animal ears and tails but nothing more.
Easy enough to to pull off, mythology is full of animal spirits in human form and nekomimi is pretty mainstream nowadays anyways.
O hey ND, somehow I haven't seen you in a while.
>O hey ND, somehow I haven't seen you in a while.
Yes, there were reasons for that...
Hopefully I can avoid them.
ding dong bannu, eh?
Um. A twink doesn't look like a girl, a twink is generally well-muscled and hairless. Think surfer dudes.
I instinctually went with the most common "healslut" definition I could find, and I remember a lot of people using "twink" in a lot of different ways in some of these threads.
For example, the muscle part isn't always considered part of it at all (your post is the first time I've seen it mentioned as an important part), and sometimes people use it like "trap". I just went with the intent that I thought the poster used, because it's not like he gave me much to work with.
Very hard to pull off. This is explicit maso behavior
I get rock hard when I turn my players down. I always do it as a viable love interest who gets disgusted when the PC makes an advance on her. Oh, she'll lead him on, but she'll shut him down or go "Hey, have you met my boyfriend?"
This is how I make my world and relationships mature and nuanced. Also, because I - on some level - hate my players.
have you ever GMed Monsterhearts because it seems like you might enjoy it
I don't really play indie games.
A race that only captures its victims, and then goes them to elaborate death traps, then takes their place to kill and rob others. How well could this work?
So doppelgangers that are just big fans of bond films?
*puts them in death traps,
fucking phone
fair enough I just figured that a game about people who have screwed up relationships might appeal to someone who enjoys messing his players about relationship wise
Something like that but more bondage involved I guess
Player cucking is no fun when they expect it.
Exactly. NTR only hurts when you don't see it coming. I want to kick my players in the fucking soul.
My kinks are Traps and Hatefucking
not necessarily together, though
>mfw my players think it's just a "running joke" of mine that Elves are all Androgynous
>Mfw they think it's hilarious when the big burly Paladin is forced to share a room/tent with the Elf rogue
I force a smile, I "laugh" with them, they will never know just how hard this shit gets me.