/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

So I'm in the process of building my first setting, nothing too fancy so far just a Demi-HRE with an Empress Elect running the show and smaller kingdoms that contribute a tithe to the whole.

To explain the relative flavor each little mini-nation I've come up with a tithe system based on the concept of "Blood, Sweat and Tears" If a nation chooses blood they supply troops. If they choose Sweat they produce arms and other goods but I'm stuck on what to choose for Tears.

It needs to be something traumatic enough that most nations would avoid it but those that do as a result see neither their manpower nor economy drained to feed the greater empire. Any ideas?

You fucked up the "Serpent's Tounge". Also that right rectangular landmass looks weird as shit, whether or not it's realistic.

>not writing a study bible for your world's mythology
No but seriously, it's very rewarding to write this. Especially since I can put notes into the text itself I can make some more subtle movements in the prose easier to explain. I'm honestly surprised how good it's turning out, with interesting characters blending the human characteristics of Greek mythology and the more all-powerful qualities of the Abrahamic God, and adding in even more "new-agey" stuff as well. After a certain point it almost writes itself. It's really fun writing mythological explanations for things, like fire being destructive, the existence of different peoples, the movement of the sun, existence of the stars, and the existence of matter itself. An interesting addition that I did not mention is that because of the way I set it up, the entire world is literally made of the God himself.

A couple of things I don't (explicitly) mention in the text is how I mirror a lot of stuff from real mythology. Like the creation and subsequent rebellion of helpers of Gods.

It probably helps that I've studied Greek Mythology and read the Bible though.

Thanks. I just enjoy world-building for the joy of it. I want to create an expansive and interesting world. Creating a religious document is pretty important to that, if we look at our own history. This means I can reference it in other works.

Posting a colour image of the coat of arms used in the map just to have this not just be a wall of text.

That shield looks like the kind of panties traps are always wearing.

It's rectangular because cartographers from the past usually just extrapolated how the shoreline would look, instead leaving the interior blank, like in this old map of America.

And yes, I hadn't noticed that misspelling. But hey, let's chalk it up to one of those cartographer "copyright" marks.

Stop going through with things it's making me feel bad.

Worldbuilding is more rewarding when you actually put pen to paper instead of just exploring it in your head, I promise.

>imperial republic
Do you have the political knowledge of a 5 year old?

I hope not, explain to me how that is stupid.

republic:
noun
a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.
empire
empire
an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy, or a sovereign state.
Two vastly incompatible forms of government, there is a reason the Romans didn't have Republican Emperors.

Oh don't be a pedantic cock. Rome reffered to itself as an Imperial republic both during and after the rise of the Caesars

Well first off there's this:
But then there's the issue of definition. "Empire" has had different definitions through history, the one I'm using here is a collection of nations and ethnic groups ruled as one, in this instance in the form of a republic.

In short, I'm using the word "empire" not to denote political system, but ethnic diversity, like a lot of nations through history has done. I was considering using federation instead, but that word has a more "modern" feel to it, since it implies democracy.

My republic could be an elitist one, thus a form of oligarchy, which would fit your narrow definitions. Furthermore, even within your definitions you can probably see that you could construct sovereign states that would fit that moniker.

In short, part two, empires need not be ruled by monarchs, thus a republic can be an empire.

A pedantic cock would be someone investigating mountain ridges for realism; I have but acknowledged the abysmal error made.
And no, the Romans never referred to themselves as Imperial republicans, being the people to have invented and experienced both of these forms of government.
An autocrat is required to rule an empire; he becomes the emperor, and democratic conduct is rare in an empire. An oligarchy is just as autocratic and tyrannical, implying that the reigns of power are held in the few hands of the elite, and not the masses.

>An autocrat is required to rule an empire
I wholeheartedly disagree.

>democratic conduct is rare in an empire
Again I disagree

>An oligarchy is just as autocratic and tyrannical, implying that the reigns of power are held in the few hands of the elite, and not the masses.
Republics can be oligarchical to an extent. It's more of a sliding spectrum.

To be frank with you I don't think your definitions are too narrow to be accurate over any significant period of time. I appreciate your input though, but I'm sticking with the name, and I'm sticking with my (in my opinion) better, more widely-held, and more accurate definitions of these things.

>To be frank with you I don't think your definitions are too narrow to be accurate over any significant period of time.
And that should be DO think, sorry.

>the romans invented empires

Fucking what.

>the romans invented the oligarchic republic

What x 2

>republics are democracies, like rome

So you're trolling, then. Nicely done, my man.

1. In what way are those two incompatible?

2. Are you going to tell me that "National Socialism" is impossible, too?

To be fair, the idea of an 'empire' and a 'republic' are fairly different. Generally the type of leadership determines the term. The conquering or ruling of disparate areas/identities is only tangentially related.

That doesn't mean you can't use the term 'imperial republic', though. It just implies a weird merger of the two systems of government, which you're implied is what you were aiming for.

Well, 'national socialism' is a codeword for 'racist military dictatorship' in the modern sense. Like how communism is a codeword for 'oligarchic centrally-controlled dictatorship from a revolutionary origin, as seen through the lens of terrified capitalist propaganda'.

lol yeah wtf is up with all this "British Empire" thing I mean the British were a democracy???
So are you saying it's impossible?

>Especially since I can put notes into the text itself I can make some more subtle movements in the prose easier to explain.
Yeah, perspective and historical ambiguity are my personal favorite aspect of worldbuilding as well. I guess I'm really inspired by Borges and his stories like the Tlon, I generally like to write pseudo-historical documents where I pretend the "historical text" itself was then translated and noted by some future historian or scholar, adding notations that comment on it from a historian perspective, which allows me to add additional levels of depth or exposition to the problem.
I have to translate some of my writings one day...

Yeah look at all the democracy their colonies had

I wanted to write a story which appeared to be a fairly standard heroic legend, but which told the REAL story in the editing/reinterpretation/censorship that had gone into it, but I was too lazy.
Well done user, you get a sweet for being so clever.

>Do you have the political knowledge of a 5 year old?
Dude, do you not know the fact that Rome had a senate alongside of it's emperor? Or that the British Empire had the house of commons and parliament?
You never heard of Estate monrarchy and constitutional monarchies?
Is this a troll?

>I wanted to write a story which appeared to be a fairly standard heroic legend, but which told the REAL story in the editing/reinterpretation/censorship that had gone into it, but I was too lazy.
Yep, that is probably the best way to approach world-building.
This, and telling real stories through the "distorted" lense of mythology are my two favorite aspects of the exercise. My two personal "masterworks" (e.g. the only works I'm somewhat proud off) is a sort of a rather standard mythological schlock about how humans were elevated to be equals with gods, only to eventually anger them and be casted back on earth to live shitty lives: a fairly common "fall of man" type of myth, but I'm pretty proud of it because if you actually read between the lines, you can find out it's a mythological retelling of the actual (a semi-plausbile sci-fi style) events that took place in very early history of my world and resulted in an actual fall of a highly advanced civilization. I also wrote like five different versions of the myth, two of them rather radically different from the rest, to represent how the mythology changes, diffuses into different cultures, how mythology lives it's own life through oral culture.

The second is a sort of a heroic epic capturing story that was originally intended to be the root of the originally planned RPG campaign (which I eventually abandoned since it would require too much handholding and railroading and I found out sandbox-style adventures are more suited for my players and world style) I started world-building for. In that case, the intention is pretty much what you said: the real story being in the notes and comments and notes, which both expand on the world and tell their own history of cultural influences shaping the tale, rather than in the epic itself, which is rather intentionally very schematic and traditional.

>So are you saying it's impossible?

Depends which 'version' of the term you're talking about. There's a lot, most of them meaningless.

I'm currently deciding whether I want any patriarchal figures in my text. Sort of like Abraham, Moses, etc. or if I should skip that to avoid making the parallels to the Bible too obvious?

Well, there are two different types of patriarchal characters though they do tend to overlap in some way).
One is a masculine archetype. These tend to be gods and some types of heroes (hero here in the rather traditional sense): these are characters that simply represent the masculine principles in the world: examples could be Herculies, but also Zeus, Raa, Usirev (Osiris, if you want), Thor, Suza-no-ó.
The other type is a cultural hero. Unlike the characters above, cultural heroes exist for the purpose of giving culture (which is associated with order, and hence masculinity) legitimacy. They usually tend to be associated with some (fictional) "founding of a culture/nation/other type of identity) act. Often at the expense of angering someone or something - usually gods.
Example of these patriarchal figures would be Prometheus, Hór (Horus), Romulus, Gilgamesh or The Yellow Emperor. One could argue that religious prophets, especially in the Abrahamic tradition (Moses, Christ, Mohammed) fall into that cathegory as well, as they found and give legitimacies to certain state-establishing religion (here, I consider even the original catholic Church as essentially a state).

You might want to consider which one (or if both) you want to go and what is their specific purpose within the narrative. It's very difficult to imagine a plausible religous system that does not feature at least ONE such character (from either categories, but mostly from both), so I would definitely not avoid it entirely. But it's a question of the specificity of their role. A clear messiah (AKA Moses, Christ, Mohammed) might be a bit on the nose. But again, it's a question if your religion is based on messianism or not. Is your religion based around an idea of a "definitive" salvation idea? If yes, you are going to need a prophet of some sort one, so you won't be able to avoid it.
If not, you can partially avoid the idea by say, employing only the masculine hero type, not the cultural one.

>A clear messiah (AKA Moses, Christ, Mohammed)

Only Jesus claimed to be a Messiah
Mohammed was a prophet and never claimed to be anything else. Same with Moses

Messiah is one that brings the option of salvation to people. It does not if you are of divine substance (as Jesus is generally assumed to be) or merely a man blessed with the option to interpret divine guide to salvation through prophetic powers (as Moses and Mohammed did). All three of them are proper messianic figures.

>>Would it be more reasonable for humans in a space opera setting to have mixed together into one race?
People naturally form distinct tribes based on countless factors, but with culture, race and religion being the strongest ones. Strong ethno-racial and religious groups would naturally form tight-knit bonds in space, where trust is even more important than on the relatively-more-friendlier environment of a Terran planet.

There would be Chinese, Hindus, Nigerians, Russians, Christians, Muslims, Japanese and other strong-knit groups in space. Whether American and European whites survive their current multiculturalism craze to develop their own space societies remains to be seen.

Meant Messiah as per this definition:
>the promised deliverer of the Jewish nation prophesied in the Hebrew Bible.

Would have to say you're misguided.

Large scale space exploration and colonization would require infrastructure and cooperation of a unified planet.
We'd be seeing something akin to Trek before we ever got beyond our solar system.

I've been watching a lot of Britbong nature documentaries lately and honestly every video I've come away with a few bits and pieces I add into my world. David Attenborough ones are probably some of the better ones

>the promised deliverer of the Jewish nation prophesied in the Hebrew Bible.
Actually, that is precisely who Moses WAS to the Jewish people. But if we want to get to the nitty-gritty of the matter, the word Messiah is derived from Hebrew hamashiach, which means "the chosen one", implied "the one chosen by god". Within the context of Jewish sacred texts it refers both to the highest priest of the Jewish sacred hierarchy, or a king (one that is identified as appointed to his rule by - jewish - God, so not every king is recognized as Hamashiach - for an example, David and his successors were recognized as Melekh Hamasshiah - "King appointed by God", while say, king Nebuchadnezzar (or his son) famous from Isaiah's prophecy, were recognized as Melekh (king), but since their actions were not aligned to Jewish interests, they were not recognized as Hamashiah).

The modern spelling and modern understanding of the word comes Christian adoption of the word (in the greek Christian traditions, the word "khristos" is used as a literal translation of the word "Hamashiah"), and while derived from the original meaning of "chosen one" it gained the more specific meaning of "chosen (by god or divine provenience) to lead to salvation". It's in this meaning that we use it today in modern religionistics and psychology.

From a Christian perspective, of course Christ is the only "true" messiah, but others, including Prophet Muhammad, or say, Prophet Mani are still recognized as fake messiahs, as they do actually still promise salvation, just not a true one. So they do respect the word "Messiah" as an identificator of someone promising salvation, and not necessarily Christian.

Though from a theological perspective, you could make an argument that Christ is the only of the lot that offered salvation through his ACTIONS, while others, like Muhammad or Mani only offered salvation through their words, frequent and cute little Christian argument in favor of their own religion.

Wouldn't a cyberpunk society have pure and traditional families with third wave feminism a dying and demonized philosophy? We're sorta cyberpunk already but going further Earth is about to become more traditional than it was decades ago.

Third wave was destined to die from the very beginning simply by natural selection, except by philosophy rather than genes. You have generations of women who are abused and told to be sex objects by feminists, but a major part of that is because of modern technology and communication. The sexually liberated do not develop any meaningful skills or personality, and in the rare case that they do, men would rather marry and reproduce with someone who hasn't slept around. This will lead to mass suffering when millions of feminist women grow old and lose their primary skill, sex, and they might not even have to grow old before they effectively become useless due to robots and mtf transgenders being better sex objects than women, with the latter being a largely traditionalist demographic that isn't limited to objectification like robots. Even now we see men becoming gay or dropping out of the mating pool because they can't get a traditional wife and they don't want to marry a libertine. So, the people that reproduce and inherit society are the traditional families. They won't be wholly traditional, they will have far more utilitarian and post-modern beliefs than the old traditionalists, but they will operate on a traditional family system nonetheless.

I guess it's something controversial to touch on when it's not the focus of a universe but I always thought it was weird that cyberpunk often depicts men and women having equal roles.

Cyberpunk was an awful word choice here, more of just near-future with high technological advancement

Righto, you make your point.

I really shouldn't debate theology, it's not my area of expertise. Thanks for bein' patient with me.

First of all, that seems like a thinly veiled political and moral rant and I'm not sure if it suits a world-building threads in the first place.
Second of all, generally speaking, cyberpunk actually does not concern itself so much with direct speculative socio-political commentary (within the community where the term emerged, feminism is not yet very internalized and as such has not been viewed with much critical regard, mostly just as a general "women of the future probably won't be taking shit and will kick ass as much as men will" sentiment), and is more of an aesthetic or broadly philosophical notion.
Third, you are using the wave datation wrong: the vehement and drastic attack on traditional notions of family happened in the SECOND wave feminism, in the radical left wing intellectual circles of the 60's and 70's and third wave actually had to tone it down a lot. And since this shit has been around for half a century now, according to your logic it should be dying out already (two generations have passed, actually): yet we see it as strong, if not stronger than ever. It's pretty naive to assume that the sexually liberated anti-traditional-family people lack basic social skills or avoid reproducing what so ever. As much as I wish that was happening, reality seems to beg to differ. It leads to general weakening of social bonds and integrity, and breeds and fuels conflict, true, but the effect seems to be much more subtle and is also compensated by the increased safety and social viability that comes with dramatic increase of wealth and power in western societies, which is actually necessary for such ideological trend to remain viable in the first place.

Cyberpunk generally does not give two shits about such things in the first place. Again, it's not a political commentary: it's an aesthetic category based on essentially on the feelings and impressions about future people had in eighties, driven ad absurdum.

>Large scale space exploration and colonization would require infrastructure and cooperation of a unified planet.
That's what people said about any kind of space exploration, including low orbit. In practice those turned out to be ethno-national efforts, with only a tiny bit of cooperation on things like the ISS. China is 20% of the human population and India 16%; they could, if they chose, develop space exploration entirely on their own. It's what China is doing right now, actually, building their own space station and moon/mars effort. Parochial self-interest generally overcomes any lovey-dovey feelings of cooperation.

please don't sperg your tradishunul fumulies shit over the worldbuilding thread

sci fi has so many problems in that regard already

lots of very intelligent, imaginative people tell me they 'don't read sci fi' 'because of all the political shit'

>lots of very intelligent, imaginative people tell me they 'don't read sci fi' 'because of all the political shit'
Those people are definitely not intelligent, and probably not imaginative either. Those people are fucking morons.

Mhm. Heavy-handed political propaganda is considered some of the classics in sci-fi. If i'd read those first instead of Stross and Hamilton, i'd consider the genre suspect, too.

Yo Veeky Forums, homebrewing a campaign, and one of the components is mysterious and magical potions. I have a d100 pool of thrown and ingested potions. Some are good, some are bad, and some are just funny/fluff. Any ideas for some of these potions?

>Heavy-handed political propaganda is considered some of the classics in sci-fi.
Really? Because where I live, sci-fi is definitely not associated with anything like it, in fact it used to be a very popular genre mostly because it was one of the few forms of western media that slipped through the cracks of the old regime and was generally free of bullshit politics that littered most of the regime-controlled media.

I used to read a fuckton of classic sci-fi and I can't really think of any particularly strongly political work. Maybe Starship Troopers, but that book is so deeply steeped in irony and the author was such a weird fucking bastard that it's basically impossible to say if he serious, satirical, or just contrarian and controversial for the sake of it.

>Does your setting have undead
Yes

>What kinds are present
Liches and their servants appearing as various forms of undead depending on the whims and taste of the lich in question.

Ghosts are their own class.

>How do you kill each type
The only type which can be killed fully are liches, and that is through destruction of the head, heart, and how ever many phylacteries they have stashed away.

The others require severing their connection with their lich.

Ghosts can only be exorcised.

>How are different types created?
Liches are the remnants of the Elven race. To become a lich, one must enter into an apprenticeship with an Elven patron as a necromancer helper. It generally requires hundreds of years of dedicated study and work, requiring the necromancer to artificially extend their life. While extremely rare for an Elf to take on an apprentice, it's not unheard of. A few operate on a system which makes them more akin to vampires.

The other undead are created mostly through the uwilling collection of specimens through raids on the warmer Northern shores. Necromancer apprentices are often planted in port towns to pave the way for these raids.

There's no surefire way to create a ghost, but it's generally agreed that someone must have suffered a great deal in life. They escape even the liches' understanding.

In universe, the elves used to be protectors of the cycles of life. Some became obsessed the notion of death and of ghosts who spat in the face of this natural order. This was the beginning of necromancy. As more and more were pulled in, the two factions split. The normal elves began to die out, and the liches went South to study in solitude. Now, they're all islands in of themselves. No two elves have any feeling of racial connection with the other, and they jealously guard their secrets from one another. With an endless supply of undead minions and willing apprentices, they don't need each other.

>Does your setting have undead?
They feature frequently in myths and stories and folk beliefs, but they don't really exist in my world. Not in the traditional sense at least. The closest to undead (and presumably the source of many undead-related beliefs in my world) are the Old Ones, formerly humans who went through a process that made them nearly immortal, but did not prevent aging processes entirely. After few thousand years, they look very much how you would imagine an "undead": dried up husks reminding one of a mummy or a zombie (though without the festering or exposed internal organs), often deformed, with visible bones under thin, gray parchment-like skin, dull grey eyes deeply sunk into the skull, no or little hair.
Most of them are immobile, many blind, and generally entirely oblivious to the world that surrounds them. Those that had not gone flat out mad, or withdrew entirely into the depths of their own mind, still tend to care little about regular mortals and frequently show little signs of intelligence or consciousness.
But still, they are technically alive. Their hearts beat, their blood, though often thick as a jam still circulates. They still breathe, eat or drink, even though it may be only a few gulps of condensed water licked off a wet stone, few bites of raw meat of a poor critter they managed to grasp as it was running past them every couple of months.

>How do you kill them?
By smashing their skull or piercing their heart or lungs, by drowning them or burning them. They can recover from serious injuries, their immunity can deal with almost any infection and they can regenerate well beyond normal humans, although the process can take centuries and the regeneration is never "perfect" (they don't grow back lost limbs or anything like that, though they can recover from say, damaged liver).
But major damage to any vital organ is just as fatal to them as it is to humans.

Why the fuck is naming countries so hard? I'm trying to make a fairly huge world for a quest I'm planning on running in a few months, and having trouble coming up names for all the countries, duchies and cities

Would you happen to be arbitrarily naming them instead of using a basic language type and drawing up from there?

Thinking of an alt-hist setting to run a GURPS campaign in, does anyone have an idea for a world in which the Americans never invaded Japan and instead commenced Operation Downfall?

Mm. I'll believe it when I see it. And I said out of the solar system, not within it.

I try to use wiki pages like this one
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_forms_in_place_names_in_the_United_Kingdom_and_Ireland
But it's still quite hard to think of places that don't sound either dumb or already exist as a famous place.
This is obviously just an example for the not!England country

Maybe a brutally destructive war resembling the Korean war where Japan ends up divided?

Like as in southern Japan/Kyuushu gets taken by the Americans and the Kyoto area or so gets locked in a stalemate between the Americans and the Japanese?

Yes.

Zombies obviously exist but I don't like the terror they've become. I like that they're the embodiment of the fear of mortality, and I like the shambling sort, so my zombies aren't ravenous but pitiful and sad. Their moans are wails, and faces full of grief. Their arms are outstretched not to grasp, but to embrace. They reach out, begging for you who life, they want life again, they have not accepted death.

Skeletons on the other hand, are cruel things, always grinning as if there is some great joke that the dead are privy to at the expense of the living. They chatter in their hollow laughter as they butcher the living. They have eschewed all mortal needs, and are animated by foul power, and they relish it.

Ghosts are a plot hook all on their own. An untimely death, an omen, a spirit unable to be freed of this world by some foul deed or power. You don't fight ghosts, you help them rest. Ghosts you fight are wicked spirits like Specters and Wraiths.

Lichdom is a wicked rite gleaned from the Necromantic arts, or the Arts of the Dead for it was the dead that taught it to the first practitioners. By trapping your immortal soul, once gleans immortal power as the sacrifice of the withering of their physical body, unless they preserve themselves with a spell of Gentle Repose. This rite is a desperate one, for to do it is to damn oneself to oblivion.

It would probably end up akin to Germany as the Soviets were already gettin their own invasion ready. The Soviets might not have been as successful as with Germany though, as the US had a massive lead and was better positioned to take the more important parts of Japan.

It might have ended with the Soviets using their gains in Japan as leverage for more concessions in Germany. Something like, we give you our holdings in Japan in exchange for Bavaria.

That makes sense. What about the causalities it would inflict upon the American forces and the resulting Japanese guerrilla cells/resistance?

Yeah you're full of shit.

Brave New World? Foundation? Stranger in a Strange Land? Fucking Handmaid's Tale?

Hell, one of the big "movements" in sci-fi politics is based around the idea that awards -- and fame -- are given based on political leaning

Wow. You named three books. Whole three! One of which is not actually a sci-fi but motherfucking distopia, but still. Great.

Now let's think of authors (because list of works would be too long) that are NOT political and considered classics of the genre:
Stevenson, Wells, Chapek, Asimov, Kuttner, Clarke, Bradbury, Lem, Adams, Simons, Crichton, Herbert, Chiang, Dick, Aldiss, Egan, Gibson, Forward, Mieville. Those are just from the top of my head. And unless you are an idiot (which you apparently are), being anti-ideological does not necessarily mean being political, so add Strugatsky Brothers, actually also Huxley and even Orwell to the list.

So yeah. Who is full of shit again?

page 10 save rave

>Does your setting have undead?

Not strictly speaking. Skeletons and zombies are possible via direct animation (not "re-animation") just taking individual bones and magically compiling them into the shape of a skeleton, like a puppeteer. Because there are so many moving pieces to account for, it takes a top-tier magic user to use one even at a rudimentary level (just holding a sword in one hand requires fine controls of hand bones/arm bones/shoulder bones, that's not even getting into bipedal movement).

If you think of real-world juggling as a parallel, 10 items at once is professional-level. Similar idea carries over for the 100+ bones required for a basic skeleton.

I want to create some fluff and reason for why my game world is the way it is. What method/s do you personally use to create an interesting timeline and history for your game world? As a new DM, I want to avoid 'because a wizard did it' as much as possible. Blah

I think you may be making too hard on yourself regarding dumb sounding names. It's perfectly fine for a place to have a dumb sounding name especially if it's a descriptive or ironic one like Hogs Hamlet for a village known for raising pigs or Perfumed Quarter for the part of the city that smells like shit.

The most important part to me is that there is a reason behind the name(or change in name) that reflects the places' nature, history or inhabitants. I have an elven colony village rename itself into something mundane like Southern Pass because it was afraid of imperial persecution following an elven rebellion it had no part in.

If the place isn't liable to be well known or come across by a reader then you should be fine.

I realized too late that Arazala is very close to Arzawa in bronze age Anatolia.

Considering it's a mark of distinction if people even know of the Hittites, let alone Mycenaean Greece, I'm fairly safe.

a) that guy isn't me

b) I wasn't asserting that every single fucking sci fi book is political propaganda, just that a lot of the older ones and many considered classics because the 'all freedom from US conservative values is a momentary aberration' hardcore conservative sci fi was super edgy and cool back in the 80s or whatever

c) that you think sci fi was used as a means to communicate free of censorship has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not some books are better than others

d) most of those authors wrote books that posited highly controlled societies where rebellion against tradition was scawy and stwange, meaning you're using some incredibly narrow definition of political in order to support your argument

e) that you think that people being turned off something by being given a bad example of it that someone deep into the genre is fanboying over is a sign of 'stupidity' means you are exactly one of those shitters who does that, and are doing your level best to ensure sci-fi stays a weird little niche populated by the socially awkward and the unwashed

Use the Dwarf Fortress history viewer and refluff. My world was entirely built off of refluffed random generation.

>>Does your setting have undead?

I am seriously waffling about it. The main reason for this is the nature of magic in the setting has no connection whatsoever on any morality or ideology and the economic and military potential of the necromantic arts.

If I do include it, it would boil down to 2 kinds: The first type would just be golem like constructs which use dead body parts as materials and second type being "true" undead by using the mind/soul of the deceased as part of the process and binding that to the construct. The second type should be way more expensive and difficult to do than the first but much more powerful and intelligent. I'd also put an additional penalty on actual undead eventually going crazy and uncontrollable after some time as their memories fade and they devolve into true monstrosities.

Yeah after a few names I just zoomed in tons on Google Maps and picked names from little villages that I liked.
You'd have to live close to them to know them, so it's fine.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. For countries and historical lordships that's not really viable though, you can hardly call a country "Treeland" because there's a lot of trees

>It would probably end up akin to Germany as the Soviets were already gettin their own invasion ready. The Soviets might not have been as successful as with Germany though, as the US had a massive lead and was better positioned to take the more important parts of Japan.

I also wonder what capacity for amphibious invasion the Soviets had. That was something the US had a lot of experience with in WW2 (not to mention equipment).

>you can hardly call a country "Treeland" because there's a lot of trees

I bet you can:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-land

>mfw I didn't realise Iceland and Greenland (which both indicate that vikings had a sense of humour) were a thing
>NEWFOUNDLAND
jesus
>Zeeland
I'm Dutch I shoulda remembered this one at least

>Now let's think of authors that are NOT political and considered classics of the genre:
>fucking Wells
>fucking Bradbury
>"anti-ideological isn't political because it agrees with my political views so it can't be propaganda!"
Yeah, you're full of shit.

How do you think the real world works

random things happen, people refluff it. 'history makes sense' is something no-one with a history degree thinks

Can someone help decorate / populate a dungeon for me?

What should it look like, what features / traps should it have, and who should inhabit it (if any creatures).

Basically the idea is it's a grotto that a sea hag lives in by herself, and the idea is that it's full on reverse wizard tower and she's going to pay the adventurers to kick her deadbeat neckbeard son out (who lives at the very bottom).

No clue on how to detail it otherwise though. Any help?

Everyone should beware lest they touch the bewitched mountain dews, which entrance those it touches and lead them down a winding path of reclusion and eventual insanity.

Seahag right?

Bloated corpses that have washed up on the shores, a decaying carcass of some great leviathan that crawled inside to die and now is home to numerous scavenging crabs and birds, bits and pieces of shipwrecks that the Hag has fashioned into crude but serviceable furniture, piles of rotting fish that the hag periodically samples from both for potions and her supper, etc.

Basically, gross waterlogged stuff.

A nest of pirate goblins/kobolds/tiny race that capsized and got stuck, and were slowly dying out of starvation untill they see the players.

>Arr, ye brave men! Dare ye take on the mighty Tattersail crew? No? Then, tribute! We, the mighty tattersail crew, and I, captain nobeard, request the mage. We are very hungry and havn't eaten in weeks. Harr!

I love it. Just the sort of funny little easter egg that doesn't detract from the rest of the campaign.

His Majesty's First Ship of the Line of the Royal Gob Navy; a race of (slighty) more intelligent Goblins from across the seas who have periodically tried to land and conquer whatever landmass the party is on, but always end up failing miserably due to their diminutive stature.

>"Avast ye scallywags! Fire a warnin' shot ta scare the 'lubbers white!"
>An undersized cannonball lands with a tiny sploosh a few feet from the enemy ship

>Thinks Mieville isn't political
>when he's a self-identified flaming communist
>and puts it in all his work

Most of those authors were political, you're just blind to your own political prejudices.

Okay lads, I've been designing a religion/mythology for quite a while now. Need advice on everything except formatting.

First of all. The entire universe is very similar to a nut or a fruit. It has a shell, that is, bedrock, it has flesh, that is, water, soil, sand, and everything else that is built upon bedrock. And it has seeds; The sky.

Sins exist. The greatest sin is fear, which manifests itself in submission and cowardice.

When a person dies, they ascend upwards. Keep the fact that the earth is "inside out" and the sky is the centre of the globe. THe sky is a big dark nothing, made up out of pure magic. The only things in it are heavenly bodies. Now, the sun is clearly the biggest of these. The sun is, in this mythology, a tunnel to the other side of the world, the path to the afterlife. It is where believers go to get cleansed of their sins, in heavenly fire. The less bad stuff they have done, the faster they go barelling through the tube that is the sun, and soon land on the other side, the afterlife, a place that has always existed, but not been inhabited untill the founder of the religion figured out how the world works.

Said founder was a warrior poet, a totally-not-Muhammad named Raz'az

>Which roughly translates to Godlike, or almost god, or more specifically, 'az means "As close as you can get without being it" and Raz meaning immortal, omnipotent, all of that shit.

Raz'az united the vast lands of the peninsula as one, and wrote the truth on the world as he went about conquering city state after city state, settling what rocky highlands and plains that was uninhabited before his soldiers marched over it. The religion in question is extremely rare outside of the peninsula, and its' worshippers are seen as barbarians at best, and are satirized as cannibal beasts at worst.

Said founders texts has all been written down, his philosophical musings and pseudoscientific investigations leading to be the holiest book in all of that religion. Cont

These are all perfect! Any ideas for an underwater kelp forest?

Do they also dine exclusively on Tuna Tenders?

Labyrinths are the order of the day. Have you seen kelp forests? You can't see shit.

The kelp could trap air between its boughs to make a path for the players. But it shifts to the wizards command, and the paths shift too.
You could have some terrible beast hunt the players from the waterlogged "walls", and the constant rush of water behind them should force the players onwards with every step. Bubbles of water could come roaring in when certain traps are triggered, bringing the lurking beast to hunt the players for a short while before returning to the kelp.

Make allusions to Predator and 'nam. Obviously you should have some Rambo-esque goblin-gone-native be the players' partially-deranged """guide""", giving advice in the form of frustratingly stupid riddles.

The second holiest book is what most scholars think of as the greatest fiction ever to have been written, and is the journal of an anonymous author (Naming himself Sinner) that, according to himself, sailed across the great ocean in a dingy, circumnavigating the sky, and reaching the afterlife all alone. He describes it as a perfect place devoid of any suffering; For all whom inhabit it are good people. He also notes that there are innumerable statues, carved out of solid bedrock, dominating the skybox. He recognises the largest of them, a statue of Raz'az, and at the foot of this great statue, in the near end of the book, he meets Raz'az himself, and talks to him. Sadly, he is not allowed to stay in the afterlife (as he is as corrupted by life as all mortals) and is sent back, where he publishes his own edited journal, complete with dates and very livid descriptions of dozens of people he met, all saintly believers of the religion, purified by their voyage through the sun.

However, there are great people that do not worship the religion. They may not be cleansed of their sins, as the sin of being a heretic is too great. So, no matter what they did, they can not journey through the sun and be cleansed. Instead, they are usually flung into the windy abyss of the night, blue at day and black at night. However, the greatest heroes that did not follow the religion are martyred as stars in the night sky, burning in their own private purgatory, acting as a symbol of sacrifice and also hope. Most stars have names within the religion, with Sinner himself taking the role of the north star; The greatest pagan ever to have lived and ever to live. People tend not to attack warriors of the religion untill daybreak, due to a belief held by the warriors themselves that they are practically immortal untill the sun shines and they are able to ascend upwards.

r8/10

Why are the PCs there? What kind of kelp? Tropical, arctic, temperate waters? How did the PCs get there? What's the tone of the campaign like that takes them there? (horror, exploration, politics, war, grand prophecy, etc)

the water bubbles bring the beast to fight the players directly*, not hunt (which is what it does otherwise).

You people are dribbling spastic retards. It's actually terrifying to see this shit.
Can't tell the difference between AUTHOR having beliefs and HIS WORKS reflecting or not reflecting those beliefs (especially in, as the original post of this discussion suggested, "heavy handed" political agenda), can't tell the difference between political agenda and anti-totalitarianism, think that literally any story that talks about people is political - Jesus CHRIST you people are fucking cretins. If you think works of MOTHERFUCKING Bradbury are political, you are deluded to a point of being a fucking social menace.
If you think this is a genre heavily saturated with political beliefs, you must be driven MAD by any classical fiction in the world. You have absolutely no frame of reference here: god-fucking-dammit. And there is an entire fucking swarm of you fucking cocksuckers, god.

You people are idiots. Beyond any fucking measure. Now fuck off.

Protip; If the entire world disagrees with your definition, someone talking about what general normal people consider to be political might not be talking about what you consider to be political.

Not entire fucking word: three cretins who are talking out of their assess because we are after all on a site saturated with idiots.

You people think fucking Orwell is heavy handed political agenda. For fuck sake: the guy was a radical left fucking winger. NOW TELL ME, WHERE IN 1984 DOES HIS RADICALLY SOCIALIST BELIEFS GET HAMFISTED INTO THE READERS FUCKING HEAD. TELL ME.

TELL ME WHAT POLITICAL AGENDA DOES FUCKING BRADBURY HAVE.
Tell me where in fucking Perdido Street Station does Mieville's alleged communism surface.
You shitstains are so fucking sheltered, so fucking disconnected from any reality it's just fucking sad. Have you actually read a single ACTUALLY politically fucking charged fucking book in your fucking lives?
No, you fucking haven't.

I'm the original complainant about this. I said people didn't like it because it felt like political propaganda rather than a storyline. Not that they didn't like it because the googled the author and read about the author's political beliefs and then saw that in the fictional book.

It's great that you've classified 'political' with all these speshul modifiers that don't apply to the actual dictionary definition of the word, but where exactly is that relevant to anything i'm talking about? Some writers and sub-genres of sci-fi are less concerned with an extreme view of reality that has political ramifications, notably space opera, some of the 'alien exploration' styled ones too. Those are notably different in tone and content and _structure_ to many of the books i'm calling political, and what others have described as political.

Get out of your fucking ivory tower of autism and accept that people don't have to use your fucking definitions to describe things they are seeing and preferences they have.

I understand the difference. I still disagree with you.

The key point here is the difference between "contains politics"/"reflective of politics" and "saturated with politics". Ezra Pound, despite being a fascist, usually doesn't saturate anything with his politics. Don Quixote reflects some political views, but is largely unconcerned with it. The Iliad more strongly deals with the political, but even then sidelines it a great deal.

But sci-fi (being a popular genre with various shit writers) often has people saturating their works with politics. Some people find this distasteful, I personally think it's a bit pointless.

So here you are, trying to tell me 1984 isn't reflective of Orwell's political beliefs, and Fahrenheit 451 isn't reflective of Bradbury's. I would call them saturated, too.

Do you understand why I think you're full of shit?

Also stop getting made just because everyone disagrees with you.
>You people think fucking Orwell is heavy handed political agenda. For fuck sake: the guy was a radical left fucking winger. NOW TELL ME, WHERE IN 1984 DOES HIS RADICALLY SOCIALIST BELIEFS GET HAMFISTED INTO THE READERS FUCKING HEAD. TELL ME.
Literally the entirety of the novel. Have you read it?

Being anti-totalitarianism WAS his political beliefs. It's pretty core to democratic socialism. Honestly I think your confusion with this stems from political illiteracy.

>TELL ME WHAT POLITICAL AGENDA DOES FUCKING BRADBURY HAVE.
Suppression of information, power of the government, flaws in the idea of duty to your nation &c.; I'm not going to claim 451 was meant to be simply about censorship -- he himself said it wasn't -- but it is about the importance of ideological discussion. This is political.

I'm beginning to think you would call "What is to be Done" unpolitical.