/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

Time for me to dump Atlas of True Names stuff.

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I have been working on various kingdoms and governments for my setting, but based on some advice I got in a previous thread I wanted to revise it a bit.

Essentially, the idea was to have noble houses with magical bloodlines be the main form of royalty, though the more I thought on it, the more it feels silly that nothing would disrupt that. That said, I do still want it to be a common thing in most of the nations. What are some ways where hereditary rulership/magic could have a place in government aside from straight up Monarchy?

Isn't hereditary rulership pretty much the definition of monarchy? Anyway, if you're worried about the bloodline getting disrupted, how about having not just a single royal family with magic blood but rather a ruling class of nobles? They could either have some sort of council deal or a Athens-style democracy, or perhaps just a monarchy with power shifting from dynasty to dynasty.

I have a union of city-states, each under heavy influence from the Families. Each Family is usually Elven/Human, with matriarchs and patriarchs branching several generations. Their power comes from having a monopoly on the region's trade, or on a particular good traded continent-wide.

Since there seems to be no map for continental Europe online, I'll help.
The Netherlands: the low lands (can't all be winners)
Germany: land of the people.
France: land of the untamed/free
Belgium: the bright swelling/gathering around the fire/bale-fire
Luxembourg: little castle

Those are the only ones i know

Don't forget Iceland. I don't think I need to explain that one.
Also, Austria pretty much means "eastern kingdom".

Can someone give me a couple ideas of what to name a planet and its twin moons for a high fantasy world?

>France: land of the untamed/free
Thanks to regional reforms, Freedomia's regions now have such creative names as
>Great East
>Highlands (which is ironically the flattest part of the country)
>Westlands (Which is in the South East)

How about calling the planet "the Nave", since it's the center the moons rotate around? What kind of planet/moons are they, what purpose do they fill in the setting?

World is set around the glory days of The Elven Race, where humanity is taking its first-few steps out into the world. The Human Race are mostly grim-faced individuals struggling to survive in a fertile landscape of extreme climates (to the north you have rocky mountains, harsh and cold winds, snow, down south you have harsh deserts, etcetera)

>How did your governments get their power in the first place?

They're very early governments, essentially the first few "Kings" were military generals chosen in a world where the gods despise humanity for the most part; eventually "Kingship" became a ritualized institution when one King rose to power above the others and formed The First Empire.

Not all the City-States are the same however, some have "kings" which are more or less puppets of The Merchant Class or Magocracy. Others have the "King" mostly preside over religious ceremonies.

>How do they maintain this power? Control of agriculture? Religion?

Mostly "The gods will kill us if we don't do anything and everything to survive."

>What measures do they take to ensure the people do not rebel?

Mutual hatred of the local gods; the "pantheon" is divided into two strains: 'Nature Gods' and 'Gods of Men'; the Nature Gods represent natural forces, the rivers which seem to violently shift course and strength throughout the year, the winds that become mighty-typhoons.

The gods of nature are cruel and vindictive, they see themselves as the slave owners of mankind, whereas the Olympians in Greek Mythology were fairly indifferent or flawed, these natural gods seem to be malevolent. However they are only local to humanity's environment, the god of one river may not be the same god or have the same personality as the god of another.

The gods of humanity came to be humanity's patrons, and are known for their embodying some of the best (and worst) aspects of humanity, but loving the human race all the same. They're generally based around human emotions and feeling.

Norway, from Nordrvegr, "the way north" or "the northern way"

also sweden: realm of the svear/ swedes
denmark: dan's field/ march

Do you know the meaning of Swede or Dane perhaps? That generally makes for a cooler name.

Yeah. The main thing is I plan on having multiple nations with that sort of rulership, but I do want to mix things up so it isn't the same everywhere.

Some of them being more like Unions or clans that are a bit more democratic could work nicely. I can probably mix that with some more feudal systems, constitutional monarchies, and dynasties to get enough options.

May even throw in a government where the king holds absolutely no real power.

My western Kingdom is a constitutional Monarchy where the only "real" power the King has is to change the name of the Capitol. This is done frequently.
Something something ancient Dwarven shadow government

Have been preoccupied for a few weeks now, so no time for drawing, but!

I've drawn both of my world building/work blog's OC's "casual/basic" inventory.
I kept seeing those inventory threads and had to give it a shot- I think inventories are great for personalizing the more 'human' aspects of a character.

And here's the other inventory!

>Cans
>In a fantasy world
I think fucking not

If anyone is familiar with Mandarin or Cantonese I'd see if I could get some help in nation/state naming conventions.

I've jerry-rigged (is it jury riggered? Gerry rigged? Jerry rigged?) some but if there's a particular suffix for "people of" in chinese like "____-ian" or "____-ean" or "_____ish" is in English I'm all ears.

I can speak a bit.
Mandarin (and probably cantonese) uses 人 (Ren, pronounced "run") to denote almost all types of people. Japanese people are 日本人 (Lit. Japanese people, or even more lit. sun's root people). Americans are 美国人 (beautiful kingdom people), etc. This contrasts with other things like Japanese language (日本语, japanese words). Chinese will almost always call a nation or state "X kingdom", and its people "X kingdom people". Its a very conceptual language, so the abstract idea of nation/kingdom/country/etc is all contained in the one character 国. Same with People and 人.

I'd like to request some additional inspiration.

I am working on a project set in the distant future of mankind, long past the death of Earth.
And every human is crazy. Batshit insane, like full-on Lovecraftian mad. But society is still completely functional. This is important.

I need inspiration on how to show the insanity and normalcy of the NPCs simultaniously.

I am taking clues from games like Bloodborne, STALKER, Deus Ex and System Shock, but those those last three just feature some insane characters, not fully insane societies. In film, I took a lot of inspiration from David Lynch, Eraserhead and Twin Peaks is great for this. David Lynch's Dune is also excellent, since it portrays the Dune nobility almost as aliens.
And of course, I have read the Dune books, and I have an omnibus containing all of Lovecraft's work.

But I don't quite feel confident yet. I don't think I have all the tools, inspiration I need yet.

Do you have a piece of inspiring media or a story about a game you ran? Please help.

Swede comes from Svea, the tribe that lived around Stockholm, the Suiones. The Geats in the south got conquered and incorporated into the whole Swedish identity thing.
Not sure about Denmark, but I know for Norway. Norwegian in Norwegian is "Nordmann", literally "Northman" cause we're from "The Northern Way".
Don't know much about Denmark tho, only that all Scandi's call it "Danmark" and "Dan" is a Scandi name, and mark means field.

Thanks, I'll run a few questions by you in a short bit, it'd mainly be the anglicized/romanized versions. Really just avoiding anything too obviously real life chinese but sounding akin to it.

>I need inspiration on how to show the insanity and normalcy of the NPCs simultaniously.

Their society could have an annual purge or something.

Like, you remember/know what a purge is, right? Where a society has a mandated day once a year where EVERYTHING and ANYTHING is legal for 12-24 hours (depending on if it's a whole day or just an entire night). Then, when it's over, everybody just goes back to their normal lives; quietly waiting until next year when they can do it again.

I remember reading somewhere that certain medieval societies had purges as well, but given the brutal life they already lived they didn't use it to kill one another but instead to get VICIOUSLY fucking shit faced and FUCK anyone and anything for about 24 hours.

>Thinking the purge makes sense at all
The Purge is a great way to completely collapse your country's economy in 12 hours.

There's also 们 (Men, pronounced mun) which denotes plurals in a lot of things (孩子-Child, 孩子们-Children). You can replace the phonics and have it work equivalently. Most of the Chinese dialects do this themselves.

I'm pretty sure people in medieval society would use any excuse to get absolutely fucking shitfaced.

You really don't want an entire town of people having mass orgys and sinfests, since that's a good way to wake up with the town on fire, or with a strange disease, or with unwanted pregnancies.

Societal laws tend to exist for good reasons, and throwing them all out the window tends to end poorly for a society where a smaller harvest could result in death.

cross posting from 5eg:
how much do you guys worry about your dungeons "making sense"? I'm trying to map one out thats an abandoned castle, but I keep worrying that like I need to add more servants quarters and a kitchen and bathrooms and all this random stuff. Maybe that should all just be covered under rubble or something to protect my sanity.

>abandoned castle
Could explain it away with having Undead or similar servants; same reason the castle is 'now' swarming with skellingtons.

Since I'd be writing in english characters the chinese characters wouldn't be necessary. The continent analogous to East Asia with possibly a bit of the Americas (Incan/Aztec that is) isn't front and center so while my autism is having me try and chart out a general sense of the political landscape I really just need the collective demonym (a'la "Greeks" for all those city states) for a Northern and Southern Chinese folk. So for instance in referencing where a religion or silks or spices came from. I'm not too big on having to have coherence with the actual language it was inspired from - most other folks are edits, changes or respellings of words from dead or largely unknown languages.

Main thing for me is that they sound nice, relatively easy to pronounce and not easily confused with other names in the setting. Looked at the names of Chinese states in say spring and autumn period so I tried to go with only 1-2 syllables (especially since everyone in the eastern continent are multi-syllables).

What I'd gotten so far were:

Shanbei (Shan and bei. Forget what they meant)
Zhouhai/Zhouhui
Yinlao
Kuai

Possible name for the Northern Chinese being a combination of Jin + guojia (Jin being gold, guojia being state according to mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=1&wdqb=state ), or alternating it to read Jinguozu (Guozu being 'people of a nation' or some such according to same link). On the off chance someone can read traditional chinese does that sound too cringing engrish?

Why not? It's a very handy way to preserve and transport food.

The best response I've heard:
"So if I steal a car during the Purge, do I have to register it afterwards?"

It's a very confusing concept.

This is the perfect example of the kind of thought process you need to develop to world-build. If you aren't constantly asking the "why" or the "why not" for how something works, you aren't going to develop a realistic setting.

Well, not necessarily. Only if you want it to be a very detailed setting. That's not usually necessary for your standard campaign.

If you're worldbuilding for the joy of worldbuilding, then you need to be able to answer those types of questions. If you're worldbuilding for functionality, then fuck it, do whatever.

I've found that running internal logic-checks on a personal world makes for a great mental exercise. You end up getting subconscious revelations about it, too.

That's true. Though what I find more helpful is running through the average day of a person in the world (or the specific corner of the world I'm developing at the moment). I try to think of what things they do which are unique to the world, unique to their situation, unique to them.

Just, y'know. If we're talking about mental exercises.

I've been doing the same by self-inserting a character of mine into the setting, then reasoning out what I'd want to do to improve things/have fun.

Is it the same character every time?

Usually, yeah. I started my world by becoming intimately familiar with what a demigod-tier character would be capable of, and have been thinking of things from that perspective since.

Ah. See, it works better if it's a different character for each situation. A farmer on a farm, a miner in a mine, a socialite in the city.

Not to stereotype, but most people aren't the same person.

Difference being that I'm using my singular demigod to reason out metaphysical problems and the ever-growing magical utilitybelt, rather than societal problems.

I think maybe we're working on very different types of settings.

I'm just worldbuilding because it's fun.

What you've got is pretty good.

Shanbei is probably Northern Mountain (mountain north, but it really could be a million different things unless I knew the characters)
If Zhou is supposed to mean state/prefecture, then it should be the second syllable. If not, then it probably doesn't matter.
Yinlao and Kuai are fine.

For Jinguo___, you could just leave it as Jinguo. However, if you wrote out those characters neither would actually be that bad, just specific. You wouldn't want to use Jinguozu to reference the state because that would be weird. Just having Jinguo works well because it can mean anything related to that country.

What elements do you think are necessary to creating a successful Star Wars expy?

Canning is an industrial revolution era technology. Actual metal cans in particular require fairly elaborate machinery to produce and seal and early canned goods were plagued by horrific food safety, often being contaminated with heavy metals from the canning process. Also when canned foods were initially introduced they were extremely expensive.

Unless your fantasy world is industrialized and has actual factories mass producing canned foods canned foods shouldn't exist in it. And if it does, unless it's had them for quite a long time and has mid-1900s level food safety standards the canned foods should be an expensive luxury item of questionable safety.

If you want to use the canning food preparation method without the need for all of the trappings of industrialization required for metal cans you should consider canning in ceramic (ceramics are much, much cheaper than glass) or glass jars.

The big conceptual problem for canning in a fantasy setting is that it requires people to know that micro-organisms cause food spoilage and also that heat kills micro-organisms and also that it be fairly easy to produce containers with air-tight seals and most of these things are unlikely in a typical fantasy setting. Similarly you're not likely to find pasteurized milk in them either.

Ah good call. The Purge itself doesn't make much sense but society-wide arcane Lovecraftian sacrifices do.

Come to think of it, might even add some Mad Max Fury Road in there. With people desiring death.

I think some of that stuff would be possible for a rather knowledgeable Wizard, though I agree that it isn't the sort of thing that could be mass produced and sold to everyone. More likely the Wizard would use it to store rare reagents as an alternative to pickling them.

Which, yeah, if you want 'canned food' in a Fantasy setting, then you just need it to be in a jar instead. Same function overall and it works for a lot of things.

Look up all the space opera clichés.

Now use all those clichés.

Star Wars is FUCKING SHIT narratively. The only way it works is the fantastic design of things, and the acting of the actors.

So the story doesn't need any work. Focus on creating a (mentally) visually stunning world, and encourage good roleplaying.

It's funny, Star Wars pretty much started out as George Lucas going "ok now I just need a flash gordan world to do an unofficial scifi remake of hidden fortress..."

The actual cans themselves are the only totally pants on head retarded thing. Without relatively modern industrial technology you straight up would not get extremely cheap metal containers like that. The first tinplate containers didn't come into existence until the 18th century and canned food didn't become a widespread until militaries started using it in the mid to late 19th century.

The original post had a modern-style tin can with a paper label on it, which is absurd. In terms of the technological and industrial capability required to produce that, and for it to actually be cheap and safe it's the food packaging equivalent of having a caplock rifled musket. If that would be out of place in the setting in question, so are cans.

Nevermind that a earthen jar filled with oil or honey and a wax "cork" would do the job too.

I remember an article in an archeological paper about archeologists discovering some jars in a South-American cave filled with psychedelic mushrooms sealed with honey. Those psychedelic mushrooms were still chemically active after what... 2000 years or what.

Of course, a dried psychedelic mushroom is very different from peas, or carrots, but it shows that you don't need tins to "can" food.

canning and storage are two very different things

The result is the same. Storing food for a long time.

There absolutely is a difference. Specifically that you can't really consider it canning unless the container is boiled to sterilize it. Unless that happens you won't get anything like the shelf life associated with canning and you run the risk of products having bacteria like botulism in them.

Most things you jar can last for months if you do it right. That should be more than enough time for an adventurer on the go. It won't last years in most cases, but you'd be surprises.

Bless you guys, I didn't even notice these until now. I can use a lot of these for my less-important settlements.

/wbg/ - food preservation general

... so what does "Laos" mean?

>United States of the Home Ruler
Wait a minute, that's not right at all. America was named for Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian mapmaker. What gives?

>Star Wars is FUCKING SHIT narratively.
What? It's just the Hero's Journey. It's unoriginal, sure, but what's wrong with it?

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Amerigo#Italian
"Amerigo" is "Americus", also meaning Home Ruler.

"Laos" was invented by the french to refer to that nation. It doesn't have an equivalent.

Oh, so they go to the lowest level possible, I see. Thanks.
What, it's just a gibberish word?
Man, I'd heard that the French colonists were dicks, but that's just petty.
I wonder what their name was before then.

Would a federation of city-states be too modern for medieval fantasy?

Why would it be? Depends on distance between cities, average speed of communication between them, and threats they have to unite against.

Isn't that sort of like what Greece used to be?

The HRE was to a certain extent that. Also Greek city states like other user said

I've got your back for the Netherlands, famalam. These names show the medieval mindset of naming way better than those disgusting new world names.

>those gradients
Just how much of the Netherlands is mostly under water? I'm having a hard time telling what is and is not "dry land" on this map

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westernmost color and the one under the norther islands: water
rest: land

Anyone have deep, dark fantasies they want to live out in their settings?
I want to be a crazy old man who teaches people to be superheroes.

Pic somewhat related.

I once ran game like that. Depending on how you want your players tackle it ( linearly, or freeroam ), you could look floorplans of real castles and add interesting elements ( hidden floors, secret doors... ).

Too bad it kinda died.

I want to put the magical realm fetish shit in but also don't because that's being a dick to players. Problem is that every time I want to logically think about courtship I subtly bring fetish shit in without even realizing.

Might be the wrong place to ask this, but whatever.

Assuming they work roughly six hours each day, how long should it take ~500 people to construct a stone wall 2,000 meters long, 4 meters high, and 2 meters thick?

I've got a lad in a game who thinks this can be done in less than two weeks, and I don't know enough about wall-building to actually dispute it.

What kind of labor force do you have to work with? I happen to be an expert in this field.

2 meters thick sounds really thick for a wall. That also sounds rather large for a mere 2 weeks, especially only 6 hours a day.

I am by no means an expert though.

You're going to need to transport several thousand tons of stone. Unless you are employing ~500 of the strongest Ubermensch ever to live, you aren't going to be done any time soon.

2000*4*2 gives 16000 m^3 of wall
high density granite at 2.8 t/m^3 gives 44800 tons
low density sandstone at 2.2 t/m^3 gives 35200 tons

Changing the dimensions to 2000*3*1 we get 16800 tons for granite, 13200 tons for sandstone

No idea what that actually means for time, though.

>tfw opening a tavern that caters to adventurers and WIZARD COLLEGE students
>everyone who works there would be unreasonably powerful
I need this in my life.

It may not be 100% Veeky Forums related, but I'm currently writing up an "After the Second Weltkrieg" alternate history, based off of the Kaiserreich history (What if Germany won WW1, more or less). My biggest problem so far is that I know how the second World War will go, but I don't really know what will happen after that. I'm sort of going for an Etente-Mitteleuropa cold war thing, or rather, a cold war between National Populism and Liberalism.

So, if anyone could be of any help, that'd be cool. Pic related is the map so far, and if anyone wants any details about why I did whatever, just ask.

It's not like I can ask Veeky Forums, since they never have alternate history threads anymore.

>My biggest problem so far is that I know how the second World War will go
My first question about that would be "if." A big reason why the second World War started in the first place was because Germany was left as a shithole economically speaking, if I'm remembering AP Euro correctly

In this timeline, France had a syndicalist revolution and ended up as the new Germany. The second world war started when Germany demanded that France withdraw all troops from Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

10/10 would work at tavern

1 and 2. What are these states? Is 1 analogous to OTL's Iraq? How did the Arabian peninsula come to be divided mainly into these two states?

3. A union of Oman, eastern Yemen, and all of OTL's Arab Emirates? How was this established? Where is the center of power in this state (Is this a "greater Oman", "greater UAE", or something else entirely)?

4. How did Germany gain control of all this land around the Bab al Mandab?

5. A union of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia? What happened here? Did these states all choose to merge, did one annex the other two, or were these all part of a single colony that was released as a single state?

6. Why is all of (presumably ex-)Soviet Central Asia a single state?

7. I assume this is Mongolia. How did it end up with large parts of Russian Outer Mongolia, Chinese Inner Mongolia, and all of the Uyghur region?

8. Why is this state independent? I would think this should be a part of the Manchurian or Siberian states. What happened here?

9. How does this Siberian state manage to stay independent? Somehow I doubt such a state would have the manpower, industry, and infrastructure to defend itself militarily against a potential annexation by a Chinese or (Moscovite) Russian state.

10. What is this state supposed to represent? Poland? These borders look truly horrible.

1 and 2 are the Arab Federation and Hashemite Arabia, respectively. Hashemites were formed after the first world war, as the Ottomans were no longer able to hold the territory. The Arab Fed was formed after the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan invasion of Anatolia (Largely spearheaded by Greeks). Most of those nations gained de-facto independence, which most had been looking for to begin with.

3: That's actually a part I have yet to get to, sorry.

4: See above. It was originally a gained territory from the first world war, but by the 1980s they would have lost it.

5: Ethiopian Empire

6: They were never Soviet. They gained independence from the Russian Empire when the White Army won the civil war, same with all the other portions of Russia (Save for Siberia, which was second Russian Civil War). Eventually Alsh Orda (The northern portion) annexed Turkestan later in the century.

7. Mongolia invaded Russia during their first Civil War, since the White Army was largely occupied with European things (In this timeline the whites never got beaten back to the point of retreating in to Mongolia). They seized the Trans-Siberian railroad, and then sued for peace. East Turkestan (Xinjiang, Uyghur, etc) was annexed after a series of border skirmishes between the two nations.

8. It's Transumer, a Japanese puppet state (The place they occupied during the Russian Civil War)

9: Siberia gained independence during the Second Russian Civil War, as the Soviet troops were already too tired from the fighting with the Democratic and Nationalist troops to march in to Siberia, which was largely supplied by Japan.

10: A union of Poland, Lithuania, and Galicia.