/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

What's wrong, demon?

Wouldn't it be easier just to make a 3d version of this instead of a spreadsheet?

It's 5d, can't really render it in 3d

What kind of setting would feature cacodemons as a main race?

what

You're right, it's much easier to render it as a 2d spreadsheet.

How would one go about making a setting that mixes digital/cyber vibes and aesthetics with tribal/animistic culture?

Shadowrun?
Modern day Africa?

Sauce?

Tell me about a keystone species in your setting--a plant or animal with an outsize effect on maintaining its environment.

Or else just a made-up plant/animal that you think is cool.

reddit.com/r/DnDBehindTheScreen/comments/4516qj/the_penteract_dungeon_a_5d_hypercube_map_for/

I fucking love string and rope, and spiders by extension. I really wanted something that could make larger, more complex webs and structures. SO I've been working on these guys:

Mammalian silk maker. Tarsier-like. Start off as scent glands in the elbows, better for swinging. Long fingers except for the pinkies, which they hook the strands around to keep it close. They make homes, traps, clothes, use them for travel. Waiting in their traps, they look like they're praying/prostrating, laying with their arms splayed in front of them.

Hmm...I guess that isn't the best way to describe what I'm aiming for. Gonna stew on it a bit more, I suppose

And what impact does that have on the other plants and animals in their ecosystem?

I've seen Planet Earth and have a decent understanding of individual biomes. I know a bit about atmospheric circulation as well, and how it makes certain places drier or wetter based on where they are in relation to the poles, equator, and mountain ranges.

What I DON'T get are the specifics. E.g., I can determine that this area ought to be dry, but should it be a scrubland or a steppe or a rocky desert or should it have sand dunes? I can determine what areas would be wet, but how do I determine if they're rainforests or marshes?

2D is a lot closer to 5D than 3D is, it has to do with the dimensions being non linear. As there is a factor 3 difference rather than a factor 2 difference there's less infetterance in the conversion allowing the 5D image to be flattened and visible to the naked eye.

fuck if I know man, I just really like spiders and cute mammals, so I wanted something that was both.

If you want, they cover entire forests with this stuff, catching all kinds of bugs and smallish animals (It's gotta support their weight, so it could theoretically catch a squirrel). Without a good forest fire, they choke out a system

Well, that's all quite fickle and highly dependent, and it's why I like to bring up keystone species (i.e. as above).

As an example, a big part of why the African savanna is a savanna is that elephants tend to tear down trees, keeping it from turning into a wood.

Geology is also an important factor. An area with harder rock (especially which juts out of the ground) will lead to a rocky desert as it's less worn down by wind and rain; sandy deserts tend to occur in dried-out lake bed or river deltas.

Rainforests are rainforests because of the trees. They evaporate more moisture into the air than other trees, which leads to more rain.

Marshes tend to surround lakes or other bodies of freshwater, where the water has saturated the ground to some degree. (By the way, marshes are wetlands + grasslands, swamps are wetlands + woods. It's not a super important distinction, but hey, if you wanna get into the nitty gritty, that stuff becomes relevant).

The short answer is, there's a bunch of super complicated stuff, but you can usually work it out to justify whatever you wanna put somewhere.

Well that's kind of the opposite of a keystone species. If anything, a creatured that preyed on them to keep their numbers down would be the keystone species. (see: otters)

>keystone species
Ah, I see now. I didn't understand, so I skipped to the part about made up things I like. Which, you probably meant established things like griffons, right? Because of course you'd like something you made up.

What factors would make for an interesting setting featuring mercenary samurai?

The snapper lizard is critical to preserving the ecosystem of the Stormlands. It settles itself up in an oasis; it's even capable of digging down to the groundwater to ensure it stays open; but it also preys on the animals that come to those oases. It maintains the migratory patterns that define the Stormlands' ecosystem.

Slickvine is a slimy, unpalatable little shrub that grows in Reveste Gardens. Its roots, however, can contain a massive amount of water, allowing them to be used as a water source for countless animals during the brutal dry season.

HItchhiker bugs have a particular way of laying their eggs: they take a plant seed or two, and actually wrap their flexible eggs around it, before burying the seed in a small, shallow burrow to provide food for their young. Only about half of the hitchhiker's eggs hatch, however, and most of the seeds they bury grow better when planted than when just lying on the ground.

I forgot about the second part of the question I asked when I responded to your answer. Sorry about that, it was a pretty major space out.

I never said your spider-monkeys weren't cool, though. They certainly are that. Freak me the hell out (I don't mind spiders themselves, but I hate spiderwebs), but an intriguing addition to the world.

Scrubland and steppe are basically the same thing. Rocky deserts are just deserts with no real soil, due to wind erosion being high and rain being lower than in scrubland and steppe, so nutrients don't remain much. Sand dunes aren't exactly because of dryness, they come from the ocean and wind. If your dry area is up against a depositional coast, then it gets dunes.

>As an example, a big part of why the African savanna is a savanna is that elephants tend to tear down trees, keeping it from turning into a wood.
Holy shit, really? That's oddly funny to me for some reason. Why do they do that?

I was aware of the bit about how rainforests work with evaporation, but does this mean that rainforests have special trees in them? As far as I'm aware, the Pacific Northwest just has regular pine trees, and is a rainforest because of the Rocky Mountains making a rain curtain (I think it's called that.)

I've actually been really worried about the whole marshes/swamp problem, so I'm a bit relieved to find that it's simpler than I thought. What makes a "swamp" turn out unlike a rainforest, though, and where do "fens" and "moors" come into it?

>The short answer is, there's a bunch of super complicated stuff, but you can usually work it out to justify whatever you wanna put somewhere.
This is heartening to hear. I'm always just really worried about putting a biome somewhere it somehow wouldn't be able to go, and I'm trying to minimize the amount of explicit divine intervention in the creation of this world so I want it to be realistic.

Sorry if these questions seem asinine but your answers so far have been very helpful.

If they're mercenaries, wouldn't that make them ronin?

This user might know more about some of this stuff than me; I'm more an expert on the biological end of ecology. Honestly I'm just popping open a tab of Wikipedia for some of this. I'd tell you "just go look on Wikipedia!" except that learning is fun. (MinuteEarth is also helpful.)

Elephants do it to get to the leaves and foliage at the top. Giraffes evolved long legs and necks, elephants just thought "let's tear this shit down!"

>does this mean that rainforests have special trees in them?
Basically. Evaporating more water is a high-risk, high-reward metabolic strategy. At some point, some trees randomly evolved to produce more water; in the places where this strategy paid off, we got rainforests.

Rainforests get most of their water from rain, swamps/marshes get most of their water from rivers/lakes/basins. I think. Again, a liiittle outside my realm. Moors is mostly just the Scottish word for a swamp, but when used in a technical sense, it refers to an area with low vegetation (often a wetland) with highly acidic soil. Mires are wetlands with a high concentration of peat, and fens are a subset of mire (located on a slope or depression, as contrasted with a bog, which is elevated relative to the land around it.) I did not know that until now. Terminology is weird.

>your answers so far have been very helpful.
Well thank you. I try. I don't always succeed, but I try.

feudal japan. or a cyberpunk setting. or an alternate history setting.

To my knowledge, ronin are to samurai as knight-errants are to knights. A "knight errant" is a knight with no lord, and a "ronin samurai" is a samurai with no daimyo.

>Scrubland and steppe are basically the same thing.
Well, that clears it up. The map program I've been using has them as two different tiles, so I was uncertain as to if there was a difference or not.
You seem to know a thing or two about geology, do you know anything about volcanic plains? I'd like to build a civilization around a large cinder-cone volcano, but I'm a bit stuck on how this would effect the surrounding geography of the area. I have a vague impression that the ash and lava deposits can sometimes positively effect the nutritional quality of the soil, but when I think about it it sounds kind of counter-intuitive and I have no idea how it works in the first place. Do you have any input on that?

>does this mean that rainforests have special trees in them?
"Special" is relative. Rainforest trees tend to be very productive, meaning that they have a high photosynthetic rate, and they also don't have a lot of adaptions for retaining water during transpiration. It's actually more a matter of how much living plant biomass is there.

Swamps, marshes, and wetlands are different mostly in that they're very flat and tend to have a lot of water just lying around. There are not that many plants that can germinate in water and then poke out of the water and grow that way, and the most successful tend to be in Poales (which includes grasses, rushes, cattails, etc). There's a good handful of herbaceous taxa outside of it which can do fine, but for trees, there's cypress, assorted mangroves (not monophyletic), and that's pretty much it off the top of my head. And even those can't do it if the water is very deep at all, proportionate to their adult size. Fens are sort of in between grassland and marshes, they tend to have grazers. A moor is not related, that's high elevation scrub with acidic soil. Don't even bother thinking about soil concentrations in your worldbuilding though, that's a rabbit hole that'll take a graduate degree to do justice.

>a "ronin samurai"
No such thing. You're a ronin or a samurai. Japan isn't like medieval Europe, where if you've got a title it's yours. The authority of these positions is related to the authority of the daimyo which stems from the authority of the emperor. Service to a lord is part of what makes a samurai a samurai, and a ronin used to be a samurai but is in a disgraced position after losing that relationship.

>ronin samurai
You just made me barf. You are a ronin if you have no lord. You cannot be a ronin and a samurai. You are one or the other.

How would Veeky Forums improve my shitty map?

I'd start by using some kind of visible ink. Like, I love the invisible thing, I think it's very atmospheric, but it doesn't make for a great map.

Well, how do you define samurai here? Just "dudes with swords and armor who are Japanese" with the optional honor code, or "people who belong to the historical social caste known as samurai"

If it's the former, those already existed for a long time up until the Edo period (1600-mid 1800s). That's kind of how the chaos of the Muromachi period (1300s-1500s) came about, people would just join up with warlords and essentially act as mercenaries because the prospects were better than being a farmer. If the latter, then really any reason for mercenaries to exist would work; though in the Edo period many "samurai" had become scholars or bureaucrats or others like that because of the overarching peace of the time, they were the only people allowed to carry serious weapons (swords, as opposed to daggers or short swords).

Could have a massive, world-spanning war for light or some shit, and now that its won there's an entire older generation of warriors who never really "got theirs". For them justice would be an ideal that was already achieved, and they would feel owed more and more of the world. Think "Greatest Generation" to the nth degree.

Many would be hired on as town guards, or even local lords or other symbolic positions, but the vast majority would turn to being wandering warriors. They would probably also know far more dire and devastating techniques due to the circumstances of their training and the wars they fought in.

Ive actually run a setting with something similar, where there was a massive and desperate war fought by one of the older empires in the setting, and they turned to necromancy creating legions of undead soldiers from their fallen who were more than willing to fight. However, they lost anyway, and so now there's a fair number of undead soldiers who just want to be either left alone or find meaning, and are viewed with a HUGE degree of suspicion on account of being the minions of a ostensibly evil empire and created using black magic. They tend to wander, and hang out with eachother in ruins and caves where nobody will bother them. When they start to fall apart they burn eachother, for fear of crumbling and being left immobile and unable to die in some ditch somewhere.

Woops, fucked that up royally. Here. Before you ask about the stupid place-names and choice of locations, thats part of the mechanics of the system Im using, so it'd be a real pain to change it. Also a few aspects of relative position needed to be preserved for similar reasons.

You could go the Ruroni Kenshin route and have a new modern culture sweep in, instantly making the old traditions obsolete. Former Samurai would be left without a place in the world and either hire themselves to the biggest corporations or form their own bandit clans.

>Noblebright, High Fantasy setting
>Victorian-era tech level with low magitech
>prevalent hero worship, adventurer teams exist on the same tier as Olympic teams
>Monster Hunter-tier monsters in the wilds, civilized areas are well defended
How cozy is this? Pic somewhat related.

eeeeh, this is dangerously close to all the things I hate about Golarion or whatever the PF standard setting is called. I really never understood the whole "heroes as celebrities" thing.

How can I emphasize a sort of Grimm fairytale tone in my game/campaign?

kill the children

>What would you change about my map?
>Except that everything needs to stay the same.
Anyway.

I'm a bit confused about the source of wind. If it's coming from the west, then the forest makes sense, but since the mountains don't continue further south, it seems like the "desert" area would get plenty of precipitation.

That could maaaaybe be justified if you're going for outright fantasy-world physics by saying there's supernaturally powerful winds in that area, so the clouds pile up next to the mountains but just get blown right over the desert. But that might raise some eyebrows.

The hero worship just amounts to "Superheroes". The Adventurer's Guild is big on personal branding and iconography.

That's not quite enough for me to tell how cozy it is. "Noblebright", "civilized areas are well defended", and "Victorian-era tech" tell me that it IS cozy, but they don't tell me HOW cozy.

That pic does look pretty cozy.

I already have that with Goblins abducting children to make more of themselves, and Bugbears eating children because they taste better.

Now make it so they only eat children who disobey their parents or don't eat their vegetables or something.

>most magic is utility magic; heaters/AC exist in a limited fashion, perishables can be stored for long periods of time
>the wilds are dangerous, but population centers are hubs for culture; theater and musical performances are in the early stages, restaurants exist beyond simple taverns
>kitchen sink of waifus, if you're into that
>world is barely explored, the age of exploration has been postponed till the invention of the airship in the next century
Etc.

There we go. That's pretty dang cozy.

Although, concerning the airship thing, lemme paraphrase the old writing adage.
>Is this the most interesting part of your world's timeline? And if not, why aren't we hearing about that?

It's not, it's just something in the plans of a main character in the present. I've been trying to consider future technologies and the overall progress of the world, to keep it internally consistent.

Like they're rather friendly to children, but find disobedient children delicious?

Something like that.

Ah, okay. So like technology in Avatar: TLA as compared with LoK.

I've decided that airships will *probably* be the logical conclusion.
>seas are nearly unnavigable due to leviathans and related shit
>most undiscovered islands and continents require a lengthy journey over the seas
>high level teleportation magic can't travel to somewhere you've never been before
>magic can defy the laws of physics
Thus, retrofitting ships with anti-grav magitech things.

Very neat.

Seems odd they have ships to retrofit if they're unusable, though.

How do I justify a setting where things from one's ancestors and ancient cultures are implemented for use as modern weapons and technology?

That is to say, I want to have a setting where being the descendant of a Knight from a knightly order with dragon heraldry will let you use some dragon-themed power armor and a laser sword. Or being from a tribe known for clairvoyance might net you some modded genes and psychic powers.

I'm not sure if there's really a term for this sort of thing, but I do think that is the theme I'm after. People getting power from the past.

Sorta-spoilers, there 'is' a group who's able to sail the high seas. They're skeletons, and they're total bros.
They're not the best shipwrights, though. Most boats are built to navigate the shallows or along lakes/rivers.

I don't know much about your setting so far, but I like what I'm hearing.

I've been giving distances to my players in terms of travel time recently, but now that I'm making a map, I need to convert that to distances.

It's pretty easy to find distance-travel time relationships for ships, armies and adventurer parties, but here's a question I'm having trouble with.

How far could a group of around 40 families walk in a week? Consider bronze age extended families, not nomads used to travel, not feeling from anything, over reasonably flat terrain but without roads.

I'm coming up with a figure of around 70 to 100 miles, does that sound right?

What offices and positions should I have in a Ministry of Defense for an modern nation in a setting that isn't Earth (basically a world that is modern but has nation names and geography that isn't Earth or Earth-like)

Any criticism people want to give?

Well, they could probably walk 3 km/h for 10 hours or 4 km/h for 8 hours. It's roughly the same either way.

So over a week, that'd be about 210 km.

I'm not sure a family with kids and elderly could walk for 10 hours a day. They would also need time to set up camp each night and take it down in the morning.

Depends on what threats there are, and the available responses to those threats.

>Beta Jew Africa

why

What do you mean by that? Or are you just answering with a non-answer?

The Russians fight a series of wars in the near east, forcing the Jews out of Israel. In response, they settle in a new location in East Africa. Don't know what you mean by "beta" though.

That's why 8-10 rather than 12-16.

I suppose it depends on urgency, though. I'm imagining a group of refugees desperately trying to get to a new home. If comfort during the journey is a concern, then it becomes something like 6 hours at 4 km/h or 8 hours at 3 km/h, so closer to 168 km total.

>Don't know what you mean by "beta" though.

u wot m8

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Israel

>I'm imagining a group of refugees desperately trying to get to a new home
Workers being relocated to mining villages around a relatively new colony, actually.

But fair enough, I'll stick to 90-120 miles a week or so, to account for terrain and weather conditions.

Say my Ministry of Defense has to deal with eco-terrorists, Cold War-esq espionage, and the occasional kaiju. It'd probably have an office that scrutinizes other employees, one that deals with rapid-response to biohazards and the like, and a group that manages the kaiju early warning system. There'd be at least one Minister acting as an overseer, and department heads for the individual groups.

>also known as Ethiopian Jews
well why didn't you say so in the first place?

I mean the setting that I'm making is more so WWII or a little bit afterwards-era. Very low fantasy too. No magic or other races. No monsters either. Just regular humans.

How many department heads within the ministry does a ministry usually have though?

Depends how much you subdivide your bureaucracy. If your government has a lot of nepotism, there's bound to be useless or redundant positions.
There is no "average", it's based on the circumstances in your setting.

youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs

I'm working on a sci-fi setting where both melee combat and firearms are totally viable.

How I think is a good way to do this is to have personal shielding devices to temporarily deflect the high damaging firearms while melee weapons, dealing less damage but ignoring the shield altogether. Reason being that the shields do not react to something with less velocity than a bullet or laser.

However, I have spoken with my players and many of them deem this idea too unrealistic as they believe it would be easy enough to adjust the shield to deflect slower objects.
But allowing that would cause the weapons to be vastly imbalanced.
What does tg suggest?

Why have soviets? Are you doing an alternate history setting or Russia wanted to go commie because last time was so much fun. Also who owns the lavendar coloured land? Really the map is fine as long as the setting info attached to it makes sense. Map reminds me of the UFO:AI geoscape with alot of countries forming superstates after a global crisis or war.

Why put that into a fantasy setting?

You could point out that adjusting the shield to deflect slower objects would effectively trap the person if they say, try to walk through a bit of underbrush and the shield 'deflects' every single branch.

The entire reason for letting slow moving objects pass through the shield is so that things like that won't happen. Also cases where if you do get knocked out despite the shield, your allies can pick you up, rather than the shield still blocking their arms from touching you.

And then you factor in that blocking everything slow is going to be a lot less power efficient. You want to save your shields for bullets, rather than particles of dust or insects.

Shields only working on fast stuff is a safety feature.

I mean that's a hard question to answer since I tend to get a bit autistic in the creation of branches of government and organization of power, so my own tendencies overrule what is logical in the setting sometimes. The government doesn't have a lot of nepotism but it is somewhat disorganized due to a lack of capable leaders. I don't know if that would lean them towards more branches or less though.

I'm imagining someone accidentally leaving their energy shield on super-slow mode in storage and it runs up their power bill and when they finally go into their storage and see it it's an energy shield covered in dust.

Thanks for the help, I will bring this to the table and see how it plays out.

Because superheroes in a fantasy setting is something of interest to me that I haven't seen done extensively.

The USSR restructured in the late 60s, causing it to live longer. And yes it is a AltHist setting that leads to a near future/sci-fi setting that I recycled from an old cyberpunk setting idea I had. And what area do you mean by lavender? Because the US/US corps control the independent countries in South America.
>with alot of countries forming superstates after a global crisis or war.
Thanks, this was exactly what I was going for. Basically, Russia expands and other countries form superstates in response, especially after the western economy collapses, which leaves East Asia (especially Japan) one of the better off countries in the world.

You could also just say that whatever technology the shield uses doesn't have a "slow mode" at all.

If you think of dilatant materials for example, that change viscosity depending on the shear force applied. It's possible to image that whatever technology makes the shield work also has similar properties.

You can also do away with energy shields and use metamaterials for armor, there are already experiments with using materials that become harder under impact. You can say that the armor that they wear gets hard if you hit it hard enough, but with a melee weapon you can get in close and around all the armor plates and attack the joints or simply deliver more energy than a bullet could (with a mace, for example) to try to produce trauma that way.

Alright here is the idea, normal melee weapons either don't work or have a reduced effect on those with personal shields. The solution is vibro-weapons that are tuned to ignore the personal shields. The device used to make vibro weapons work is too large to fit into bullets and doesn't scale up well to fit in shells so it doesn't really work on ship shielding. There could even be an expensive energy rifle that works on the same principle as vibro-weapons but it is either finicky, shortranged, power hungery, or all of the above.

How do you guys do shielding/FTL in sci-fi? Do you just hand wave it or do you try to incorperate psudo-science into it?

My shielding is based off of small-area gravity manipulation based off of calculated innertia. The personal shields have to be recharged with hand-held batteries though. My FTL travel uses transportation through the 11th dimension by making a temporary black hole and preserving the passenger's concept of their own time via an Einstein-Rosen bridge.

Could make the expensive energy rifle a technobabble gauss rifle that vibrates the bolt fired, to give the same shield-penetrating power as a vibrating melee weapon.

Another possibility in addition to what others suggested is simply having a fictional supermetal that works amazingly for armor (possibly also amazing for blades, or have a different material for them) but doesn't work well for bullets.

That isn't too farfetched, as already you want different materials for armor and bullets in modern day.

I'm talking about Greenland, Labrador, and some chunks of the artic being coloured lavendar and not having the map isn't listing who they belong to.

Those are neutral states. I believe they are the same color as the other grey colored states on the map.

Mostly just wave it, but we've kinda come to an agreement that most shields operate off of a strong energy field that deflects material somehow.
In game mechanics it's basically a separate pool of hit points that melee weapons ignore.
And another thing is that shields are vulnerable to electrical damage or otherwise high heat damage.

I like the idea, but i want the players to be able to suffer from simple things like a tribal species spear or other simpler weapons.