/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

>Honestly they aren't really expensive, but they are somewhat work intensive

This user beat me to it: , but it bares repeating.

Even if the material costs aren't expensive, artisan items will still rake up costs in terms of the craftsman's time and skill, so even if your wands are made out of pig bones and pine branches it isn't going to be cheap if it takes a gnome working 8 hours to make one wand.

How many types of magic in a setting are too many? How many different ways can you have for people to access magic before it gets to be too much?

Bump so the thread doesn't die before I read through everything.

Whoops, brain fart. I mistook the "replies" for the "page".

There's no fixed limit; you could even go for a "there's a hundred different ways" type thing. But if you need an answer, I'd say around six. I'm thinking about D&D 4e, with its arcane/divine/primal/psionic/shadow sources.

What exactly are you picturing with that? Like how rich people "hate" talking about how much money they make?

That really depends on the feeling you want your setting to have.

It's hard to think of perfectly comparable real-world examples; the best one that comes to mind is Europeans coming into contact with gunpowder.

I guess it first gets used by the wealthy and the ruling class; if it's useful to them, it'll proliferate to their subjects; and if it's REALLY useful, it'll spread even more as people need it to compete with the people who've already got it.

big expansion

planning on removing not-Europe completely and making a new one (bigger), right now it's far behind the rest of the map in development and I really don't like the structure of it

most of the map is far outdated and needs work

What's not-Europe? The continent to the far north?

This will all be removed and remade, most of it just removed, not much is worth salvaging

It's for the best. Better to have a smaller amount of strong material than to have that same amount of strong material plus a bunch of "meh".

I guess my trouble is getting all those schools of magic to feel distinct from one another while still having the world feel coherent. It's hard to strike a balance I like.

I've found the best way to have tons of schools of magic is to have them all be different ways to access/different methods to categorize the same phenomenon.
As long as your Clerics, your Druids, and your Wizards are all accessing the same fundamental powers, it doesn't matter if the Druid needs blood sacrifices or the Wizard needs to carve runes into an oak stick.

I guess that might be part of the trouble, as I sort of split them up between two major sources. For lack of a better term, they'd be body and soul.

Body covers the lifeblood of living things, Druids controlling that of mostly plants and animals, and psions controlling themselves and others.

Soul covers those who have magic innately, namely gods and sorcerers, and those who get it from others, priests & witches from prayer or bargains, and wizards from the complex rites of the kinda-dead god of magic.

My setting's magic system is basically The Force crossed with Jungian psychology. Everyone manifests magic through willpower, tricking themselves into doing so through some sense or connection with reality.

"Quintessece", the crystalline form of the "aether" that is the primordial energy that envelops the universe. Humans use it as fuel for sorcery.

It is generally mined though it is fairly uncommon

>What are the most valuable and useful substances in your setting?

There are no innately magical substances in-setting, as magic is derived from conscious manipulation of the universe's natural laws, but in terms of human-made enchants, Ghosi Heirloom Bronze is worth the most pound-for-pound.

>How are they harvested, processed, and applied?

The Ghosi are a highly collectivist culture, and their famed bronze is the ultimate symbol of that culture.

When a warrior falls in combat, his armor and body are salvaged and examined by war-oracles. They perform a highly-secretive ceremony which makes his armor impervious to whichever weapon defeated him. Then, they cremate the warrior and melt down the bronze, recasting the plate for a new user.

Over millennia, the bronze (and its user, by proxy) become nigh-indestructible by any force in battle, save for a heat high enough to melt it. This makes Ghosi cuirasses extremely valuable to mercenaries and other fighters across the known world.

In addition, Aelves can naturally channel this energy as they are what the gods intended to be the ideal race. Humans and other humanoid races are simply failures. So humans require rituals/incantations/sigils/runes to conduct what is reffered to as sorcery where as Aelves can simply preform what is called magic with a simple word and hand gesture.

Aelves fuel their magic using mana which is aether that has leaked into the world and permeates the air and soil. Once an area's mana is used up it takes a while for more to move in to the area. So aelves are limited by the mana in an area. Humans are limited by time, effort, and how much quintessence they have. They can preform sorcery without it but it requires much more time and more complicated rituals that can last hours to dats. So humans really need quintessence to be useful wirh magic.

Quintessence is formed when aether in the air, mana, sepps into the ground and eventually crystalizes due to pressure and being in a higher concentration than when in the air. This happens because the soil and rock becomes saturated.

One of the most important purposes for the practice of magic in our own world's folklore was fertility-related purposes:

Getting a mate, guaranteeing a child, determining whether it would be a boy or a girl

What magic traditions exist for these in your world?

>One of the most important purposes for the practice of magic in our own world's folklore was fertility-related purposes
Huh. That's an interesting point. I haven't given it much thought until now.

Doctors frequently incorporate magic into their practice. Certainly this could include fertility treatments.

I don't know how well my setting's magic would work for the "getting the mate" part, though, beyond the use of glamors and such to make yourself seem more attractive. What with the world lacking push-up bras and shapewear.

Warlocks are a particular kind of theurge in that they're betrayers of the pact. They have stolen the power of a spirit and taken it for their own, binding it into their soul. While powerful, they are also cursed as spirits don't take kindly to having their power taken from them.

Simple people need simple magic. Nothing's more important than a healthy child or a good harvest.

Even at the highest level of power, kingdoms have been made and unmade by the birth or death of an heir.

>Nothing's more important than a healthy child
Don't I know it.

Thanks for bringing up fertility spells. I think I can integrate this into my setting in some neat ways.

>tfw female Sorcerers, Druids, Clerics and Wizards on both sides of the Good/Evil spectrum summoning Angels/Demons/Outsiders in order to get children with a powerful bloodline
>not magical realm, somehow a legitimate process in some cultures
There's a witch coven on the Amber Isle that keeps their bloodline pure by siring daughters with an incubus and sacrificing any male infants. There's technically no way for a summoned succubus to remain tethered to the world long enough to bring a child to term.

>trying to make a cyberpunk setting
>Love infinities setting alot
>want to pay homage to it
>come out on the otherside practically stealing it

FUCK. All I want to do is make a setting for my fucking cyber punk story.

Well, what are the things you like most about infinity as a setting, and cyberpunk in general?

Tell me a bit about Infinities.

I always pondered about how to get something roughly the climate of Europe without making a carbon copy

Well, it's not the only part of the world with a Mediterranean climate, if that's what you mean. Much of coastal California has one, for instance.

Here's what I like most
>aesthetic of most the armor and the setting
>really like the story behind yujing and panO
>think that the nomads are cool with them being essentially a living Internet
>like the idea of galactic Internet

Those are my favourite things to be honest.

Ah, in fact, here we go, from Wikipedia.
>Mediterranean climate zones are associated with the five large subtropical high pressure cells of the oceans... These climatological high pressure cells shift towards the poles in the summer and towards the equator in the winter, playing a major role in the formation of the world's subtropical and tropical deserts as well as the Mediterranean Basin's climate.

So it's about distance from the equator, mostly. And I imagine ocean currents have some say in it.

I wish I could help more, but I can't say I'm too familiar with Infinity or the specific factions. Aethetics should be easy to get, and galactic internet isn't overly unique.

Still, perhaps there are some ways you can get it to work. Maybe introduce some althistory to give yourself a different starting point and go from there, or go with some of the story they gave for those factions but tweak the end results.

I'm not familiar with it either, but one thing I noticed:
>yujing and panO
That makes me think that it's inspired by Chinese cities/culture, yeah? You could try making a cyberpunk city with another culture at its base, like India or Brazil.

I'm just getting started doing some worldbuilding; and I honestly have no idea where to start.

I have a few ideas for races, the magic system, cosmology... and that's it. What should I be working on next? Nations? Landmasses? It feels like a huge step from just a few scattered ideas and trying to make it work out.

Any advice?

There are two common ways to start.

1. Start big.
Start with the feel you want the world to have. The stories you want to evoke or the conventions you want to deny. Build the world to reinforce that feeling.

2. Start small.
Start with a single character. What is she like? What made her that way? How does she reflect the place she was raised? Now build a city around that. Now build a country around that. Then think of another character.

You can try either of these, or you can switch between the two: come up with a country, then come up with a city within the country, then tweak the country to better fit the city, then tweak the city to better fit the country.

Something to consider is not starting with the whole world. Try just a continent or a region or a small mining town, and fill it up with details that make it feel like real people live there with a culture all their own.

This all may sound a bit vague, I just don't want to push you towards a particular type of world or story or whatever.

So what's a good way for Wizards to enchant magical items?

Like what actual process does it take? I haven't been able to get a good grip on how it differs from normal daily spellcasting.

Does anyone have any ideas for how to make magic dangerous? So far the magic in my personal setting is being fleshed out sort of like Warhammer style magica, but not AS bad. Like, there are side effects, possible mutations and changes to your body for having it flow through you, etc. What sort of ideas do you have for having it be dangerous enough that it's not an everyday thing that anyone would practice?

Depends somewhat on how common you want them to be. Generally, my preference (to use magic weapons as an example) is for the mage to seek out a skilled blacksmith, commission a blade specially designed for the enchantment they plan on using, and seeking out rare gems and materials necessary for the particular enchantment, before putting it all together in a day-long ritual.

Generaly, I'd imagine that ritual would involve numerous small, but permanent enchantments requiring rarer reagents, gradually layering up to the full effect of a permanent magic weapon. To make a stronger one, you simply add more and more layers, but obviously it gets rather costly and difficult to hunt down that many rare materials.

Well, outside of magic just corrupting you or giving you a chance to explode, there's the possibility of something more external.

Perhaps casting spells attracts the presence of 'mana hounds', creatures that eat magical energy directly and can sense it from a great distance, meaning any mage will almost always have a few tracking him, depending on how active he is.

Thus, it's hard to practice and learn Wizardry, as these things are heavily resistant to common defensive magics and can easily kill an unprepared mage. It makes staying in one place for a long time less feasible, as the more magic you cast the more you'll attract.

It then becomes the sort of thing that leads to traveling mages who try and use magic sparingly, as using their most powerful spells runs the risk of becoming a very large dinner bell.

In my current setting, my "magic" is a technological remnant from a long-dead civilization. Innumerable little nanobots that respond to the right stimulus/input, and output energy. Originally they were used to gather and transport energy, but in the ages since, people have discovered rituals and acts that can provoke an action. People don't know *why* it works, but they understand there's a system at work and magic remains mysterious.

The little bots are semisentient as a group, but networked in such a way that the more casting that is done by an individual, the more will tend to congregate around them. This is how I explain a more experienced wizard doing more damage than a novice one with the same spell. More energy to draw on.

Now, getting to the question, I also have these little buggers as the basis for what "fuels" monster creation and growth. Monsters feed on this untapped energy....somehow. I'm thinking of trying to get my players to investigate this shit and let the system work itself out that way. But the divide is that powerful wizards working within civilization bring power to that civlilization. Magic is stronger for commoners, crops grow better, people are healthier, crude electric device analogues are capable of creating a steampunkish setting, all from the stronger concentration of bots/magic, but the powerful wizards individually have less magic to call on.

Rogue wizards out in the wilds can call on greater individual magic power, but there's there's lots of stagnant dark corners for bots to accumulate and cause monsters to spawn and grow in power and threaten the wizard who doesn't take precautions, like redirecting them at civilian villages.

So there I have a ideological split that can easily be reframed by both sides. One sees it as good v. evil, the other as Individualism v. Collectivism. Technology v. Magic. Personally, I only feel I succeed when my players fight amongst themselves over moral choices.

>"Magic" is the technological remnant from a long-dead civilization

In my current setting, magic comes from the Elder Gods, so using it too much runs a risk of the Cthulhu monsters from beyond space and time noticing you and deciding to fhtagn your shit up

Tell me more user? sounds pretty interesting

The most valued substance in my setting is a fluid known as "biogel", "ichor" or "nectar". The setting itself is set in a dystopian organic city inhabited by mutated and broken beings known as "freaks".

It is an organic substance that can be used to rapidly heal and shape flesh, fuel augments and maintain the broken bodies of the freaks along with other, more esoteric uses. It is both a raw resource, a basic necessity, and an unit of commerce, as it is used almost like currency.
It is treated with near reverence by the denizens of the setting, and without it, their society would quickly break down.

It's raw form is pumped from the depths of the city, trough relatively rare "wells" that are the subject of fierce conflict between the Noble houses that rule the city. It's diluted form can also be extracted from the various fluids and even the flesh of the city itself, along with the new born freaks that the city has spawned.

Refining the substance depends on what purpose it is being prepared for.
Raw Biogel is used as a simple resource for organic manufacturing in the bio forges of the city, where it is used to boost the growth of flesh and bone into desired shapes.
More refined forms are used for medication, nutrients, fuel, and other, wide range of functions in the society of the freaks.
The purest form of it, is something the nobles keep to themselves and use to prolong their existence, and enter a trance like state where they have a total mastery over their bodies and can change them to their whim.

So I have an urban fantasy/light sci-fi setting I got going on. Essentially, it's set in a city where many different worlds meet and once you are there you can't come back; so the city is full of lost souls and other beings from around the universe, having a great amount of diversity and basically being forced to just try and live together in relative peace and harmony. However the city can be a dark place a times and has wild animals, gangs, crazy magic psychos and monsters roaming about in some of the darker places, especially within the old service tunnels and in ruined and abandoned factories and buildings.

Basically; I want ideas for what kind of monsters to put here. They can basically be anything from any world, but I need them to be at least somewhat original. What's a non-fantasy creature you can put in some old urban shopping malls and laundromat dungeons instead of the usual crypts and caves?

Big picture, the world is huge because it's set on the outer side of a giant ring in space. At the center of the ring is a controlled singularity (which the ring controls), which was part of a binary star system. Part of that ancient civ, they intentionally collapsed one of the stars for deeper lore reasons. The ring is harvesting the singularity's gravity, resulting in a steady 1G but the inhabitants are subject to slightly irregular day-night cycles with minor seasonal variations.

On the ring itself, though, the wind only blows west to east, and it does this constantly, and every X (I haven't finished the math, likely several hundred) kilometers there are giant white elliptical towers several kilometers high that serve to dampen the wind, but also causing climactic variations along the ring. So immediately east of the towers, the wind is calmer, but colder and precipitation is more likely. A permanent winter with light snowfall. Immediately to the west of the towers, however, are windy steppes. Further west might be a breezy breadbasket, then a london-esque weather, more towers, then a windy desert. The wind also serves as a way for a land-based sailing ship+railroad to be powered, except it can only really efficiently go one direction, so that influences trade and population centers.

"Dungeons" are where the ring infrastructure comes close enough to the surface that people can dig down to it and tap into it, creating a reason why humans could live in permanent winter, they can power heaters or other "magic" devices to run greenhouses. However, because of the "magic" concentration and they've tunneled into the subsurface labyrinths (maintenance tunnels) where there's lots of baddies, they have to send down regular armed forces patrols to keep the region clear, or in the case of smaller towns, hire adventurers to do it. Larger cities need multiple smaller satellite "breaches" to supply their demand, keeping adventurers in demand there too.

The nanobots are intended to be an autonomous maintenance system, repairing the ring and keeping it functioning. The current humanoid inhabitants aren't really authorized to be there, but at the same time they're not really doing a lot of harm, so the immune response is minimal. However, wizards are unauthorized users and they're misusing resources, so the more they misuse them (cast magic) the bigger and nastier the immune system response is (monster spawning).

Also serves as a regulator for population density, as civilizations that pass a certain energy consumption threshold provoke a monster response that, if it doesn't destroy them, will damage or displace enough people to mitigate the response. This is how I square having magic healing and such amazing advances like sanitation while still keeping average city size below 25k-ish but still allowing for huge set-piece capitals with fancy militaries and elite guards. One thread hook leading the players into this deeper lore is the steampunk people's city provoking a nasty response. They'd go down into the depths, fighting nasties, and eventually come across a terminal that would put them in contact with the ring's central control/consciousness. Past that, IDK what the hell they'll do. Maybe I'll send them into space, hunting down what happened to the lost civ, and why they built the ring. Maybe they'll go crazy and kill the ring consciousness and the whole thing'll get sucked into the singularity.

Does your setting have any republics? Elective monarchies? How did these systems form?

This, Europe would probably be colder if not for warm Gulf current.

It does have a republic. It was a colony of a powerful empire that has already autocratic rule eroded and all but replaced by plutocracy. The empire had fallen to a magical zombie apocalypse, but the colony remained, and having somewhat rose-tinted view of their homeland they had replaced previously appointed from the capitol autocracy with assembly of top land and ship owners. They also happened to control the primary trade hub which further increased influence of merchant class.

Looking for inspiration for 'travel journals". A bit like in the Martian but someone setting off in an unknown fantasy land instead of Mars.
Similarly, examples of letters a traveler in a strange and distant land would send to his family

scp-wiki.net/random:random-scp

>Looking for inspiration for 'travel journals".
"Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino
"Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges
"Italian Journey" by Goete
"Record of Stone Bell Mountain" by Su Shi
"The Travels of Marco Polo" by Rustichello da Pisa.
"Gulliver's Travels" by Swift
Also, there is a pretty interesting anime on this subject matter called "Kino's Journey".

Or give me a year or two till I've finished my own fictional traveler journal. I'm actually writing two of them, one as a mere part of world-building exercises, which I don't really value as "literary" work, the other I hope to perhaps get published one day.

How are the roman numerals following a noble's name typically derived?

For example, if someone is named King James IV, does that mean that he is the fourth King James, or just the fourth James in the family?

Fourth James in this country, most likely.

He is the fourth king going by the name of "James" in the history of that country or that particular dynasty. Had he not reached the title of king, he would James of - family/or place".

I want to make a setting where wizards are all chain smokers. I'm thinking there's a plant that replenishes mana when smoked/chewed. Setting would be right around the time that people have discovered a way to refine it into a potion that doesn't give you cancer.

Anything I should add to this idea to amp up the fantasy-noir feel?

I meant to post this is the last thread but it died before I could:

>Magic, is your setting low magic, high magic or no magic at all?
Technically none but "thaumaturges" do exist that use a form of advanced technology to simulate magical effects. There's been attempts in the past to create actual mages but all of those have ended in failure. There's also psychics that also can play the role as mages but they're incredibly rare and the gene for psyonics is very recessive so I won't talk about them much.
>If you have magic, how do you power it? Where is the source of the power?
An ancient nuclear battery called 'Gears' that last a long ass time and that power various different gadgets that can do almost anything if time is put into studying and understanding how their systems work. Most wear 'gears' on their back, and given that these 'gears' are almost always malfunctioning or leaking in some way, usage of them is hazardous and requires extensive training and understanding of the specific systems quirks and mannerisms. Just please make sure you don't fuck too much with the advanced wiring that no one really understands all that much.
>What makes you mage? Is it born power only given to few chosen or can everybody use it?
If you're psychic you're born with it, otherwise it varies by culture. The most common practice is for a Master Thaumaturge to have a trial by wits, with the most skilled participants being taken up as apprentices, of which all are ordained into the secrets of Thaumatergy that if revealed to outsiders is usually a capital offense (Thaumatergical Guilds have their own jurisprudence separate to that of most nations). Once the Master becomes too old, crippled or otherwise unable to perform their duties, he designates a successor of his choosing to, the rest of his students serve the Guild in other ways. Scheming to become successor is not uncommon.

Cont

>How does the magic users do magic? Do they need staffs, long rituals or just by flick of a finger?
The gadgets are usually rigged in such a way that makes them concealable, but still effective; and are activated via the use of a keyword spoken into a voice recognition engine. However, the language required to activate these systems has complicated grammar that's often difficult to pronounce by humans due to its guttural nature.
>How effective is the magic?
Pretty powerful when the systems work perfectly. However most systems are jury rigged and are more often than not just as dangerous to the user. Thaumaturges will spend their entire lives trying to fine tune their gears to put out more energy, more reliably, more often, in order to fuel the requirements needed to power a gadget that might allow them to pause time for just a single second.
>Is there taboos or forbidden things in magic?
If you're not an ordained Thaumaturge and you're trying to use a 'gear', don't. It's not only considered a major crime that could get you executed or worse in 99% of the world (which even in those places, a Thaumaturgical Guild would just send an assassin to deal with you and recover the gear), but it's dangerous as fuck without proper training with the side effects ranging from radiation poisoning, hair loss, and (in the case of an explosive incident) atomic devastation.
>How does new mages learn their craft? Schools, apprentices or something else?
See above
>Pointy hats Yes or No?
Sure, just don't forget the battery or you'll look like a fool.

>Setting would be right around the time that people have discovered a way to refine it into a potion that doesn't give you cancer.
I don't see how vaping is noir. You probably should drop that part.

>potion
>vaping
Okay user

That's a mental image your premise gave me.

>fantasy setting
>cancer
Why use the same biology and metaphysics if you're including magic?

If it's an important potion that needs to be inhaled, create the fantasy equivalent of a humidifier.

I fucking love their aesthetic and the Nomads living internet and blatantly want to steal it for a Science Fantasy game.

Are their any guides like the designing cultures for races? I'm having trouble coming up with the aspects of different races

Godsflesh.

Taken from the corpses of the gods.

Highly illegal in many systems, traded dominantly by the Githyanki pirates. Can be refined into a drug that effects all races, or can be used in the construction of weapons/armor to imbue them with a shard of divinity. Such things appear weirdly biomechanical in nature and fuse to the body to the user.

Treat them like musical instruments, which are treated in all the different ways you mentioned.

You'd probably see those advanced items treated in almost religious ways, if the people finding them have no idea what the prinxiples behind electricity, radio, etc are, and there's nothing written to teach them or dwarves to instruct them, then the only way to get more phones and radios is to mimic then perfectly.

Anyways, the big thing about phones radios and railroads is that they connect disparate areas, expect to see big empires rapidly become more efficient, which may make then more expansionist. Fortifications, on the other hand, may make everyone harder to kill and conquer if there isn't new weaponry to go with it. Siege warfare may become even bigger.

>What are the most valuable or useful magical substances in your setting?
Nepenthite. Crystallized magical energy, it is is generally found beneath the earth in places of particular magical or spiritual significance. The Unification Crisis little more than an excuse for Carska to seize the King's Mountain in Lorne. Said to be the dwelling place of the nature god, there must clearly be some truth to it given the ridiculous amount of nepenthite present. In the West, sites of power among the native people are often filled with nepenthite deposits, particularly where Fabled chieftains are said to have been active.

>How are they harvested, processed, and applied?
The modern applications of nepenthite were almost unimaginable before 79 years ago, when the first nepenthite catalyst was constructed. Previously, any attempt at harnessing the power of nepenthite was unstable at best and explosive at worst. Now, however, the incredibly arcane energy stored within just a small shard of nepenthite can be utilized completely. These catalysts drive much of Carska's magitech, from the automated Peacemaker soldiers and experimental airships to the arcane lights casting a soft glow upon the gilded spires of the Carskan magisters while the rest of the population live out their daily struggles in a muck and smog beneath them.

You just need to be in the temperate zone and not be dry.

Hot damn, much better than my Google Draw or Paint maps.

Take a look through the Numenera bestiary.

The root discolors teeth, meaning you can judge a mages power by how gnarly their smile looks.

>What are the most valuable or useful magical substances in your setting?
The one setting that I frequently find myself returning to doesn't have magic in the mystical sense. there's some fantastical technology at work but even that behaves, like technology, with grounded rules and limitations, like a mash-up of Star Trek and Firefly as such there is no specific magical substance to be harvested, at least none that has any real value.

I'm trying to think of a good way for vampire damage immunity and combat to work.

The general premise is that their bodies constantly repair themselves semi-magically (AKA semi-illogically) by transmuting blood into anything their body needs. Silver, however, causes terrible genetic damage when in contact with the vampire's own blood, leaving permanent damage in necrotic wounds that can spread throughout the body. Mundane weapons can still kill a vampire by destroying the brain or heart, or by leaving a weapon pierced through a vampire's body, but most other wounds will be rapidly sealed after some rest.

All vampires are constantly fighting cancer due to their age, and the gradual slowing of their metabolism leads to cancer killing them of old age. This metabolism is highly linked to their generation, with the closest vampires to the source living the longest while a 9th-generation vampire will live shorter than a human. Aged vampires enter a process called mortification based on their generation, where their body begins to mutate, shifting them towards a nosferatu-like appearance and sometimes causing extremities to become grotesque and vestigial. At this age they slow down, hibernating for long periods of time and producing little of value, until the cancer finally kills them. A concoction called Mortifex, (subject to retconning and revising) containing healthy blood from younger vampires among a cocktail of rare alchemical ingredients, can be used to prolong a vampire's lifespan and prevent the cancer from causing mortification, but there are obvious risks to using the foul elixir.

Most vampires die of tainted blood, followed by being murdered, blood starvation, burning in sunlight, and finally by old age.

The big thing I'm wondering about is the consequences of vampires being so hard to kill in combat. I already reasoned that vampires would be everywhere and tend to dominate politics and science, but war vampires are something I'm trying to figure out now. A small group of vampires in full plate armor attacking at sunset could ruin a much larger force and levies would be useless against vampiric soldiers. How might warfare change to counter this? I'm thinking less field combat, more longbows, and more fortifications.

>Vampire soldiers
>can't cross a stream or river unless they bring their coffin with them
>can't invade a castle, have to siege until they're invited in
>holy water
Vampires a shit.

Seems like the only country to Vampires would be the threat of silver weapons. So your see vampires that destiny regular armies, and then elite human units wielding silver. If you cant field enough silver units to keep the vampires from running rough shod over your army, then you might as well not have an army.

Fucking autocorrect making me look retarded up there.

You don't need to be invited in if the castle isn't standing anymore

What's the tech level? I doubt some medieval vampires could flatten a castle with artillery.

I dunno, I'm not that guy, was just positing the idea

>vampires decide to lay siege to a castle
>camp out in dark tents during sunlight
>defenders charge out at sunrise and break the siege and the vampires can't defend themselves
I guess I overestimated war vampires, they're better off fighting unprofessionally.

>vampires decide to lay siege to a castle
>>camp out in dark tents during sunlight
>>defenders charge out at sunrise and break the siege and the vampires can't defend themselves
reminds me of this funny little stunt in one of my old campaigns, our airship was boarded by vampires, we all run below deck and bar the door, Vampires can't get in and have to be invited. of course we refuse to let them in but they are relentless, so I ask what Time it is, about midnight, so I say that if they wait patiently for about nine hours we'll open the door and let them in. come 9:00 A.M. and we open the hatches to find half-a-dozen ash piles on the deck. That's my story of how we defeated Eberron's dumbest vampires.

They can still be useful as axillary forces.

I'm a stickler when it comes to chemistry, silver weapons in my setting are relatively realistic. Silver is a pretty crappy material for weapons and in the setting it is mostly used in arrowtips, small extra spikes on maces or hammers, decorative emergency knives, and rapier tips, the latter being a ceremonial concept for posh vampires more than a common application.

Does it need to be pure silver, or would silver alloys work?

Additionally there is Mithril which is an alloy of silver protected by a magical grease. While extremely expensive, mithril weaponry the best method against vampires while still being practical in general combat that doesn't involve vampires.

Iron armor splitter with a silver spike on the back to dig into a vampire whose armor you've sundered.

Only fantasy, no sci-fi?

Everything

Hi Veeky Forums! I'm setting up a section of my world which is a blend of ancient Greece (city states, thousands of scattered islands, climate) and Celts (specifically the Welsh)

I've got nearly everything stuck down, but I'm having trouble with creating fictional foodstuff and animals. Any suggestions on how to get over this creative block?

They'd probably learn to exploit them as soon as possible and jumpstart their society. People are selfish and want to make money.