/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

I don't think you need to get that complicated with it. Remember, you do want it to be simple enough for your players to grasp.

How do I add complexity without going overboard then? Maybe just with the form the final product takes?

I don't just want an additive 1+1=2 healing system, I'd like it to be complex enough that a player can mix the same ingredients in different combinations and amounts to get different effects.

>Skyre

Consider giving each ingredient multiple attributes, possibly depending on how they're prepared. Say you boil the root for healing, but powder it for poison cures.

That might work, I'll see what I can work out.

I'd strongly suggest looking at Skyrim's alchemy. Each ingredient can have up to 4 effects which can be either positive or negative. With certain combinations, you can make both a potion and a poison.

Don't make the complexity yourself: have your players make it and take notes. They can bullshit all they want when it comes to making their potions... As long as they don't contradict themselves or a DM-confirmed fact that another player stated.
You can get a lot of good stuff out of this, like the use of magically infused silver nitrate to change the properties of a powdered mushroom that grows on holy ground and is normally used in healing potions.
Mix that with a clay and charcoal mixture to create a paste that will animate the dead!*
*Animated Dead created via this method are not automatically friendly towards creator. Command and Control (Undead) tokens sold separately. Additional Terms and Conditions Apply. This information was presented for educational purposes only, and use of it violates the Restful Dead Act of 1097AD. Any attempts to raise the dead are done at users own risk.

I'm still looking for ideas, by the way, if anybody has any further insights.

the most terrifying of pungee pits

>Should a fantasy world follow consistent physical laws or should it be as fantastical as magic allows it to be?
I prefer when it follows the laws of physics and evolution with somewhat realistic biological and technological systems. "Magic" should be limited to mundane things that don't exist in our world, such as fantasy plants, animals, monsters, substances, and races. Everything should have a somewhat logical scientific explanation. If you want to go full gods&magic, then you shouldn't try and make it look like Earth or copy historical societies because everything would be completely different. Go for Wizard of Oz or Dark Souls or something.

>Interspecies mating: does it result in babies?
Depends on the species. Dwarves, elves, orcs, halflings, why not? They're pretty much humans. The question is why they aren't just humans to begin with. A race with vastly different needs or physical traits shouldn't be breeding with others though.

Would any / which of these would work well as a flag for an american remnant government?

reposting from last thread, sloppy experiment in setting up the world's genetics

So my last few entries never amounted to much so I'm trying again with a new idea. Any thoughts are welcome

>Basic theme is "spaghetti sci-fi"
>Alien-tier chunky as fuck tech and a combination of beefed up projectile and energy weapons

>Setting is a enormous, stupidly huge planet
>mostly barren desert on a Jupiter scale
>discovered by accident by "The Company"
>thousands of networked probes are lost on the surface
>limited variance in terrain
>clouds don't happen, light pollution is a non issue
>Icanseeforever.exe
>sci-fi mumbo jumbo makes the planet a night world. No day, no change in light levels
>Civilisation consists of superheavy transports, some basic highways and small settlements clustered around spaceports
>Only export is rare minerals or salvaged tech.
>population is either settlers, drivers or guards tasked with watching the cargo
>danger comes from a few native species and other humans maddened by the perpetual night
>other dangers include breakdowns and madness. Something about a clear view into space, the endless night, mostly static environment and enormous distances (3-6 months for a short haul) fucks with folk

The game would be either survival horror during a long haul. Where players must manage themselves and their small crew against time, ambushes and the creeping threat of insanity.

Or your bog standard adventure. Where cargo hauling is swapped out for scouring the world looking for probes and technology left over from the planet's discovery. In both cases PC's would want to be your more pathetic and hopeless dregs. People looking to be forgotten or die rather then noble heroics or pure muderhobo

>ugly brown eyecolor still the dominant coloration, even in your fantasy world
Step it up, senpai.

You're likely already aware of this and just don't particularly care, but a Jupiter-sized rocky planet would be essentially impossible. It would sweep up so much hydrogen and other gasses that it would just wind up being a huge gas giant.

If you've simply opted to ignore that (which is your right), then it sounds pretty cool. Seems a bit odd for a desert world to have no daytime, but, I mean, it's not like deserts stop disappearing at night.

What do people/animals eat? On Earth almost (but not quite) all the energy in the ecosystem comes from sunlight, but it'd be hard for that to happen without day.

>other dangers include breakdowns and madness. Something about a clear view into space, the endless night, mostly static environment and enormous distances (3-6 months for a short haul) fucks with folk
This is the part that makes me say "really cool". An entire massive planet of people slowly going mad sorta gives me the vibe of an obscure Terry Gilliam movie.

Well, that depends. If within different groups of people, different eye pigmentations are more common (e.g. if there's a blue-eyed group, a red-eyed group, and a yellow-eyed group), then brown eyes would only be particularly prevalent in people with ancestry from all three groups.

And obviously players (if this is for a game) are gonna pick one of the fancy colors.

This might be adding a complication with which you don't want to deal, but remember the brown/green/blue alleles aren't the only thing that determines eye color. Brown eyes can range from golden brown to almost black. My eyes are nominally blue, but they're almost closer to gunmetal gray. Color in the strictest sense is just the most dramatic and easily-classified difference; like anything else, there are a lot of genes and even environmental effects at play.

Also, it might be a bit clearer if you construct these as a wheel rather than a list.

I'm thinking that societies that are separated from the yellow pigment would have a taboo against marrying people with brown eyes, any amount of yellow pigment restricts most of the obscure colors

I'll admit I'm running on pure rule of (personal) cool, but these are the types of things it'd be worth knowing. The major sticking point is how to justify perma-night plus the clear sky- both inspired by nightwalking.

I've had strange moments late some nights, particularly in winter when the sun sets earlier. Where it feels like time has stopped. This is the kind of thing I imagine the natives would feel. Made worse for convoy crews, who can stare out into infinite space, or across same-y terrain that might not change for weeks at a time. The question becomes, do you track time while on the road- so people have some idea, or is it easier, and kinder to let them disconnect and just function with no comprehension of time until you return to civilisation?

>what do the people/animals eat
A good question. Since we're working without sunlight perhaps geothermal energy takes its place. Tunnelling insects and crude reptiles that need to be dug up or who cluster around thermal vents. Native life would be limited and primitive, all of it adapted to either squat over natural sources of heat and survive in a similar fashion to lichen and fungus, or to hunt in short, violent bursts.

Apex predators are lean, built for explosive speed, tracking and accuracy. Killing and eating something gives a little more energy then it takes so they would need to be constantly moving or capable of doing into a form of stasis and ambushing prey

Humans..well the cop-out answer is "they survive on settler rations and imports" as the planet doesn't really give itself to raising meat heavy animals. Maybe as a bi-product of their mineral mining the population has discovered how to attract and kill the larger burrowing insects. Giant worm meat drawn up from creatures who periodically rise from the lowest levels of the crust to reproduce

>Should a fantasy world follow consistent physical laws or should it be as fantastical as magic allows it to be?
The rules are consistent, and magic is defined as breaking those rules. When physicists and inventors talk about the laws of the universe in my setting, they really mean "without accounting for magic", which is a bit like saying "without accounting for friction". So magic can create or destroy matter and energy, make gravity flow backwards, twist time and space, make two things exist in the same place at once, even travel faster than c without violating causality.

Magic is the act of pitting your will against the universe's. The universe wants things to play by the rules. You can impose your own rules onto an area, but gradually the universe's will (physics) collapses into the manipulated area, like a weak putty collapsing into a puddle under its own weight, which is the best analogy that comes to mind since I recently spent a shift at work playing around with a weak putty. Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty, if anyone's familiar with it. I'm sure there's a better comparison but I'm not thinking of it.

>Interspecies mating: does it result in babies?
Yes, as often as it happens in nature, though those babies are not always viable or fertile.

If you're specifically referring to homonid species, then it depends on the specific combination. Most homonid species that interbreed can at least get as far as forming a zygote, but some hybrids are prone to self-terminate soon afterwards. Even in species that can reliably produce viable offspring (like humans and elves), roughly one in four hybrid children are infertile.

I was thinking maybe it work better as a state of perpetual twilight rather than straight-up night. There are plants, but they're mostly limited to little mosses and lichens, maybe the occasional shrub. The downside is that you'd lose the starry night aspect, since only the brightest stars would be visible, BUT the entire sky just being a featureless pink-blue haze might be even more maddening. I dunno.

Also maybe the place is strewn with stopped clocks. Some smashed in rage, some just broken and never repaired. They used them when the planet was first settled, but gradually they seemed more and more useless. They mocked the people, with their tick-tock-tick-tock endlessly tracking something that didn't exist anymore, counting down the infinite seconds till sunrise, chiming at the meaningless hours, marking the mealtimes long after there was not enough food to go around, but the clocks didn't care, they didn't need food to keep on tick-tock-tick-tocking, they don't care about the families who died with loose skin draped over emaciated frames with bloated bellies, they don't care about the ones who went into the wilderness to look for scraps and never came back, they don't care about the ones who wandered off silently, mouths agape, not a thought left in their heads, they only care about that endless infuriating tick-tock-tick-tock.

Season 3 of Agents of Shield deals with a perpetually-dark, alien planet a little. Might be worth looking into for more inspiration.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4,722_Hours

Why is everyone trying to get me to watch Agents of SHIELD?

I am loving the clock notion. At first the settlers and scavengers thought it would help, having a semblance of normalcy in an otherwise static environment. But like how the disconnect between what the eyes see and the rest of the body feels can make a person sick, that gap between knowing that, technically time is passing, even if nothing you see or feel agrees is what drives people over the edge. ?

Today the madness is a given. Anybody living near the bare handful of starports can stave it off for a good while, since company vessels make port to load up and dispense their goods allows for a vague kind of schedule, but out in the roads and trackless wilds it takes a certain kind of willpower- or complete apathy to stay sane.

Twilight could work. I thought briefly about just a slow, slow orbit and rotation meaning no wind. But on the other hand if the wind is a constant, forever kicking up enough dust and shit into the air to create a constant haze.. It could also lend itself to the insanity, people grow irritable and agitated at first, thinking you've said something they didn't quite catch. From there one dissolves into screaming at the wind, talking to yourself and ultimately wandering off or going catatonic.

The whole thing is a result of major disruption to our circadian rhythm. The human body is fairly reliant on the environment giving it clues, and when those are missing our attempts to maintain said rhythm quickly start to break down, you can't sleep long enough, or too long, you struggle to fall asleep. Everyone is prone to it, even the rig drivers who, by necessity are secure in sealed cabins that crudely simulate a basic day/night cycle through lighting tricks and a VR headset that simulates weather and other minor distractions to keep drivers engaged

I'll take a look. I'd like to present as complete a setting as possible on the off chance anybody wants to use it

Did the other people recommend it because you brought up your dark planet? It's almost 1:1 for the alien planet from the AoS arc.

Do you use any drugs to enhance your worldbuilding?

I was just giving suggestions to the person who's making that setting.

You mean, like, do I use any?

Nah. I've got an addictive personality and I don't want to tempt fate.

I imagine so, that one poster pointed it out for possible inspiration. Plus being questioned helps

If the thread's still up when I wake up I'll reply to anything I may miss

I smoke catnip regularly and marijuana occasionally, also I take adderall sometimes to get work done which is really effective

>catnip

>hurr i never smoked catnip let me tell you all about it though

Flags are only as good as their symbolism. New-America's flag would be symbolic, assuming it wasn't just using the original flag to begin with. What changed in America that made them change the flag?

Second thing to think about: Contrast. The Blue/Red only flag has poor contrast. You can't see the stars from a distance. It ends up looking like a plain semaphore flag. Consider one big red star if you must go with that design. Symbolically, I assume it must be communist now?

The stars arranged in stars... use the second one if you must. The top right one's arrangement is just... shitty. Looks like its flipping me off.

Circle flag is pretty good, because it gets the third aspect of flag design down: does it look good flapping in the wind? Remember, flags will rarely if ever be viewed straight on like that. They'll be distorted and floppy. Circle flag does alright. Though I"m not sure what's up with the badge. Is that police state America? A symbol of law enforcement is kinda strange for a political entity.

>Third Reich Dixie
kek. But seriously, they'd just use the original Dixie flag if they're going that route. If nothing else just to prove the south did in fact rise again.

the top left and the middle left.
have them both be rival remnants

I'm looking to make a comprehensive list of fictional bionics/cybernetic augmentations. I've already mined Shadowrun and the Deus Ex series, as well as miscellaneous others. But I need moar. Any recommendations?

How do you guys map cities?

>Should a fantasy world follow consistent physical laws or should it be as fantastical as magic allows it to be?

I think both ways can work. My current setting is pretty physically rooted, but magic can have unpredictable effects (however, big magical effects are rare). I've played in and created settings where magic is much more pervasive, and the laws of physics are less reliable. People say that magic should be consistent: I strongly disagree. Making magic as reliable as physics makes it less, well, magical.

>Interspecies mating: does it result in babies?
In my current setting, there are two major human ethnicities which can obviously mate. As well, there are three elvic ethnicities that can reproduce. Humans and elves can reproduce, the race of the offspring is the same as the mother.

>People say that magic should be consistent: I strongly disagree
If you want your players (or characters, if you're writing something) to use magic to solve their problems, then it absolutely should be consistent (even if it's not clear in-universe) or else you're walking straight into ass-pull territory.

If you want magic to create problems for your characters, then it's fine with it being inconsistent, but if you want to use magic to create problems for your players and you don't keep it consistent, then your players are going to feel like you're railroading them or punishing them just because and they're going to call you a shit GM.

Basically, magic is fine being inconsistent as long as it doesn't interact with the players directory, but magic that interacts with players demands consistency to avoid feeling like bullshit.

>What changed in them?
The apocalypse.
Maybe for contrast, white, black and red?
Symbolically the shield one (didnt realize the shield was for law enforcement just thought it looked good) could be, the circle representing unity in strife and the center shield as law will prevail or something.

>Should a fantasy world follow consistent physical laws or should it be as fantastical as magic allows it to be?
I am of the strong opinion that fantastical worlds should obey the rules of physics and only act so far as the real world laws of the world allow. Flimsy rules for magic and other things within the world only serve to create easy answers to hard questions (i.e. lol magic dude idk lmao), which ultimately weakens the immersion of the setting.
>Interspecies mating: does it result in babies?
No. You can only mate within your own race.

Now for a couple questions of my own:
>Does your own political bias show in your worlds?
>Does your knowledge of things outside of worldbuilding/TRPGs show in your settings and/or worldbuilding process? (math, science, history, language, engineering, ect...)

red eyes a best, to be honest

A good comparison I like to use in describing my ideal magic is the ocean. It's wet, it's deep, it's generally cold: there are known constants. However, there are storms, and rogue waves, and other less predictable stuff. You can be a great sailor, but sometimes things are simply beyond your control.

It's definitely not for every GM as it can be easily used to railroad and fuck with people, but my players have responded well to it.

>How do you map cities
Step 1) Assess Metropolitan area's Resources. Is this a mining town? Shipping Port? Or just an ancient city of excess population in the middle of a bread basket?

Step 2) Draw major transporation lines. If there's a railway/highway/main road, start with that. Add a seaport if relevant.

Step 3) Draw Industrial and Merchant Districts based on these shipping lanes. Efficient cities will have more than one economic resource, so for instance many of my cities end up with a "meatpacking district" and a "steel processing district" on complete opposite sides of town (steel near the mountains/mines to reduce transit, meat near the agriculturally viable land on the other side of the city).

Step 4) Add Lower and MIddle class residential areas accordingly.

Step 5) Assess the highest value real estate. Post-automobile, this will be the highest elevation. Prior to that, it will be the shortest walk to the downtown area, typically upriver. Use this to place the upper class districts (Government buildings, Office Buildings, Universities, Theater Districts, etc). This generally provides you with a CBD.

Step 7) Finishing touches. Add military installations if any. If the city has political importance in the nation at large, add corporate/guild headquarters, government parks/monuments, etc. Assess its overall wealth and add fancy amenities accordingly (for instance, a metro system, a mage guild, etc).

>However, there are storms, and rogue waves, and other less predictable stuff
However, these still are consistent and obey certain laws, even if you don't know what those laws are as a user of the ocean.

It's fine if somebody inside the universe doesn't know why or how magic works, you don't have to explain everything. However, you as the creator of the world, must have that knowledge.

Suppose for a bit that in a particular instance, you want a spell to fail and fuck up the caster, ask yourself: "Why did it fail and why did it fuck up the caster" and if the answer is "lol magic," then you have failed. You don't have to tell the caster the reason why his magic fucked up, but you have to know yourself.

That's more a badge than a shield. Shields don't curve inwards on the sides so as to deflect blows *towards* the wielder. Hence why that's more emblematic as a badge than a shield.

>Political Bias
Maybe? Probably? In order to create dramatic tension, I made sure every faction has its opposite. I made my favored political faction the status quo dominant geopolitical power, and their opposition the scrappy underdog usually associated with protagonists.

>Does knowledge show?
Um, does your ignorance of these things show? That seems like the only alternative. I try to know enough of the basics about everything to keep it all coherent at the face of it, and then research each thing in depth more as needed to keep up with the campaign.

Wow, this was very helpful! How do you actually go about drawing them out, on paper, digitally, or some combination thereof?

Well obviously yes, they do have trackable causes and follow the laws of physics and such. It's not a perfect analogy.

I don't go "oh lol the spell failed just because," because obviously that would be bad GMing. Say, for example, that someone draws on the spirits of their ancestors to divine the future: if they've been blatantly disrespecting the spirits, it follows that the divination might not work. It makes more sense when you step outside of the Vancian magic system. Again, things don't happen for "lol no reason," but that doesn't mea they have to be predictable. My players like the way I handle magic, and that's enough for me.

Couldn't agree more. I actually have a magic system that needs troubleshooting to make it consistent in fact.

Objectives: Make magic that doesn't 1) cause a post scarcity economy or WMDs, 2) Ends caster supremacy 3) doesn't require an encyclopedia of rules or predefined spells (i.e. freeform magic) and 4) is genuinely information/intelligence based

Objective 1 is accomplished by the following rules.
1) Magic has a spherical radius centered on you, and spells target everything in that sphere unless explicitly indicated otherwise.
2) Transmutations aren't permanent. Spell effects have a duration (around 30 seconds but can be renewed), but most effects that occur in that duration are not reversed. For instance chemistry performed with the aid of magic remains stable.

Objective 2 is accomplished by:
1) Long casting time. Martial classes will always succeed in stabbing the mage before he casts unless the mage has a bodyguard.
2) All magic can be counterspelled by non-mages. Lethal spells almost never work. Damaging non-lethal spells are unlikely to work. If the counterspeller is affected by the spell at all he gets a bonus.

Objective 3 is accomplished by the core mechanic: To cast a spell, you literally just say what happens. "Mage ascends". "Incoming projectiles stop". "Quickening' (non-valanced verb doesn't translate well in English). But each word takes 3 seconds to translate into its magic equivalent. Hence long casting times.

Objective 4) Spells can only be cast if prewritten in a spell book as a sentence (proper grammar not necessary). This means getting words from libraries and experimentally deriving words in laboratories. Hence the "intelligence" and "information" theme. Upshot: you can't use a dude's name you just met on the battlefield, since you didn't prepare it- and likely can't unless he sits down with you in a lab.

I invite you all to break this system.

>Does your own political bias show in your worlds?
Without a doubt, I'd go so far as to say that anyone who claims the opposite is fooling themselves: personal biases will always sneak in to anything you create.

I try not to go overboard with it, but when I create a Renaissance/Medieval setting for example, I prefer giving men and women relatively modern equal rights just because it makes me more comfortable. Likewise, I tend to avoid slavery outside of a thing villains do.

>Does your knowledge of things outside of worldbuilding/TRPGs show in your settings and/or worldbuilding process?
I would think so, yes. I've studied anthropology and archaeology for four years, and know a little bit about music, art history and architecture. I definitely try to consider culture in a pseudo-real world context, with flows and interchanges: hard cultural boundaries are in practice, very very rare. For example, look at the borderlands between France and Germany in past times, or at what have you. Migrations, trade, etc., all very important to consider. Culture and religion are crazy things and are a lot of fun to study!

I look at major geographical features- rivers, coastline, mountains. Then look for a map of a city that has those features in roughly the arrangement I want. Sometimes I need to rotate or flip that or even just edit it a bit in Gimp. Most importantly, I'm looking for that city texture. Then I take a new layer and paint zoning and transit lines over it. The details I keep in a side ledger, possibly with icons if I feel like its common knowledge when the PC's arrive. If its a ye olde map, I'll look for a map texture and layer that over it as well, with some opacity. Here's an example. You can tell I'm not so much an artist, but everything I mentioned above is very easy to do.

Does anyone have numerical figures for Telekinesis?
I'm wondering how much psi would be needed to crush a car, etc. Presumably not much, as the Mariana Trench is only 15,750 psi at it's deepest point.

If i post a general summary of my setting, could i get some critique, or advice or whatever?

This breaks down really fast, unfortunately, unless you want TKers to be brutally omnipotent.

1) Just crush their aorta instead of throwing a ca at them.
2) Oh, arbitrary rule says you can't mess with anything's insides? Fine. Just focus all your energy into a needle point and pierce the aorta instead.
3) Oh, we're banning that too? So apparently I can only do what I can normally do to somebody, just at a distance and with increased strength? Ok, fine, just crush their throat then. Doesn't take much force, and they can't see it, can't dodge it, or even pull my "hand" back since what are they even going to grab? Not that it matters since I could do this with half my normal strength anyway, much less improved strength.

And you seriously want to give a psion oceanic pressures? You do realize I'll kill entire armies in seconds manifesting hydrolasers behind all defenses, right? Not like a "building" could stop me, since buildings only resist pressure vertically, and if I apply that pressure laterally then the entire city is dust in the wind to me.

This is about the point where they start nuking territory indiscriminately in hopes of killing me by luck.

There's still spell resistance, fantastic materials, and other mechanics to consider. Anyone who can use this spell is "intended" to be a force of nature, able to annihilate armies single-handedly.

More than likely it'd only have an effective range of a couple hundred feet, and only the most powerful Wizard in existence could manifest oceanic-tier pressure.

I've got nothing better to do, sure!

Basically after nuclear war/ the magicopalypse , Theres an 80 year time period called the long quiet after the metaphorical silence that fell across the earth. Now after 20 years since the first tribes, settlements and groups started to appear is when the story/ campaign would start with people rediscovering the world, meeting other groups , surving the elements and discovering monsters, mutants and magic.

Sounds pretty neat! It sounds like a kind of idea I've seen kicked around a lot, but never heard of anyone actually really developing on it.

Yeah i have sone ideas based on technology vs magic / old vs new. Remnants of the government for one and you know how in the bioshock games its always a city? Sky, ocean. I need a good thing for a hidden city where people live largely unaffected by the war.

No, I do my world building sober. But I do take inspiration from past hallucinogenic sessions.

Inside a mountain can always work.

Also, fluffing some technological things as supernatural is fun: I once did an adventure where the players wen through a haunted dungeon. The dungeon was a ruined research facility, the ghost was a rampant AI hologram.

I've found that fluffing sci-fi stuff as magitech works really well, too.
>You say your car floats through a Anti-Grav Module? It's actually just a simple Levitate spell

Does anyone know any good books on medieval navies and shipbuilding techniques? I'll even take stuff on the Venetians and the Ottomans in the early Renaissance.

Great suggestion, I have the game but I've never really played it.

That's an interesting idea. Let the wizard/alchemist decide what effects their efforts are having and record the notes, basically?

Is there a good, realistic world or continent generator? they never seem to get islands right.

How about invulnerability? Or etherealness? Is there a times per day limit? If not, just run through walls planting bombs and using your own invincibility to tank through them.

Verisimillitude is important.
And no interspecies babbies, for obvious reasons.

Perhaps. It is hard for anyone to completely seperate their views and values from their creation.

Desert

Even invulnerability can be counterspelled. Pretty significant risk to take if your tactic is to otherwise explode yourself. And the problem with becoming intangible is becoming tangible again. Does the air penetrate through you? How do you breathe while intangible? The world doesn't have an "ethereal" realm that is a predefined metaphysical constant with conveniently human friendly characteristics.

And no, there is no "times per day" on the spells.

Why does magic work in your setting in the first place?
Having it rely on written word is arbitrary, did it not exist before language was invented and an alphabet created? If you're relying on the kotodama of the words, why aren't all Wizards just polyglots with invented languages a la "Vento Servitas"

Check out this, it's a pretty good resource for the medditerannean

Are there any good resources out there depicting the daily life in the late Bronze Age (Hittites, the Levant, New Kingdom Egypt, Mycenae, stuff like that)?

Specifically I'm looking for stuff like how were the houses build, how prominent were doors/locks, what percentage of people owned weapons and how did they pay for them and how much did they cost, what did they eat and how did they eat? Where did they go to unwind after a hard week of work? How did they dress day to day?

Stuff like that. History is full of battles and politics but I wanna give some life to my world and I'm having trouble finding that information.

There is of course no kotodama. That would imply a metaphysical architecture encompassing all words. I'm not sure what your reference to Vento Servitas is. Google says its a spell in Dresden files but I don't comprehend the reference's intended meaning.

The key point I didn't elaborate on is that each words has to be translated into a magic language (Enochian) which is actually a ludicrously dense N-dimensional mathematic language where all human sense data is a dimension. The words actually serve to translate neuron clusters into precise mathematic structures which can then be asserted into causality by [metaphysical fiat]. Saying the words without comprehension does nothing. Its actually the focusing and concise ordering of the mind that permits a command line interface with reality, given valid inputs.

I've never come across anything like that.

Not sure about most of that. Bronze Age archealogy is kinda niche. But here's the answer to your lock question:
youtube.com/watch?v=kQx6Kg0ELuY

Photoshop, Paint, Inkarnate.

In the setting for the Dresden Files, "spell words" are whatever the Wizard wants them to be. Most learn a foreign language so that they don't accidentally utter Word of Power in their daily life.

>magic is a technobabble coding language
That's no better than saying Mana is a cloud of nanites that respond to conscious will, spoken through the Kansai dialect of Japanese. If there's a fundamental "language of magic", you're going to need a reason for it to exist and be discovered in the first place.
It sounds like you're saying "my reality exists within a simulation". You can't have a magic system that handwaves its fundamentals as being infinitely complicated.

You misunderstand. The language was explicitly designed to orient thoughts into clear detailed commands. It wasn't discovered. It was engineered.

Its reasonable to say my reality exists within a simulation, though the inhabitants therein would just regard it as ordinary physics. Causality has a framerate and reality is rendered from frame to frame as a series of inputs and outputs to and from all participants. Everyone naturally has an input (for instance, I want to blink. Input registered. Check for influences that counter blinking. None found. Blink occurs). And everyone can naturally extend that input by hacking the input system with impeccably precise inputs. The inputs are registered on a mental level. The act of learning and then speaking Enochian is really more of a meditation and comprehension exercise for the thinker. Exceptionally talented individuals may be able to cast speechless. This would be the exception, not the norm, and magic users are already uncommon (

So Enochian is just "real life console commands", but they didn't exist when the system was designed? It seems contradictory, how was it created in the first place without Divine Revelation or a Matrix-esq Chosen One who can see the machine code?
If the language is required to invoke magic, then it must have existed for as long as magic has existed. If not, the language must be able to be substituted for any outward representation of thought or ideas, including American Sign Language.
>The language was explicitly designed to orient thoughts into clear detailed commands.
This implies it's the latter.

Assuming is you, how are these Words of Power written down and why do they need to be? It makes little sense for these keywords to be able to exist in a non-active state, while not able to be freely invoked.

One of the best parts about having your "language that controls magic" be universally interchangeable is that there can be distinct, competing schools of thought to basic spellcasting. IE: some monastery in China teaches magic using symbols that represent specific ideas (mandarin), allowing for efficient invocation of extremely specific spell effects. A similar WIZARD COLLEGE out in the Americas teaches magic puns, using the dual-meanings inherent to English to produce general-purpose spell effects.

It isn't "required" so much as optimal. This format most consistently produces the desired effect without complication, and makes it most resistant to counter-spelling (which nonetheless is still very fragile). Nonetheless there wasn't an organized magical doctrine until Enochian was derived.

The words are written down in glyphs which diagram phonetics in maximum detail- each glyph representing a syllable- including consonant clusters, vowels and diphthongs, diacritics, tonal inflection, and even pitch. However a proper pronounciation will do nothing without comprehension of how each phonetic structure corresponds to an element of human sense data.

Because all effects are reduced to pure data, ambiguity is impossible. Words can indicate ranges of acceptable data structures, but each word necessarily has a mathematical identity that cannot be equivocated.

They need to be written because the words are too complex to be meaningfully memorized by humans. Natural language is designed using K&T Type I Heuristics for optimal efficiency. Enochian is optimized for Type II optimal accuracy, and on the fly derivation requires computation beyond the scope of an ordinary human. May as well call it impossible, but prodigies could theoretically exist.

I'm not sure what you mean by "non-active" state.They aren't keywords. They're an orgnaizational structure for precise human thought. A sapient agent's cognition is the active ingredient, not the expression of information.

If Enochian phrases correlate directly to an existing idea, your system is simply using True Names.
>If the True Enochian Name for "Fire" is "faJ̯ə(ɹ)", your spellcasters have only discovered keywords that already exist, rather than creating a language from scratch.
>If Enochian glyphs are just runes for a phonetic true name then they should have some bearing on reality if inscribed. Even if the object itself isn't sapient, whatever inscribed the glyph would be.
What gives a sapient the ability to manifest changes over reality? Where is the line drawn between potential spellcaster and animal, or a spellcaster and an inanimate object engraved with Enochian glyphs? Is there a limit how many spells a user can cast in a given amount of time, like a willpower coefficient? Are glyphs reusable?

>They need to be written because the words are too complex to be meaningfully memorized by humans. ... on the fly derivation requires computation beyond the scope of an ordinary human.
This magic system would function better as an overly fluffed runic system, or users would be better off using a portable computer to cast. If the caster is just a personality within the simulation, a sufficiently powerful machine should be able to achieve better results.

I feel like I've answered this. I'm not sure what isn't connecting here. A *sapient* agent's cognition is the active mechanism. Inanimate objects would not suffice. Nor would merely sentient but non-sapient animals. I would define sapience as a meta-level awareness of your own cognition. Sentient creatures respond to stimuli. Sapient creatures are aware they are experiencing stimuli and have a greater range of responses availabel to them. This could be cached out into a level of neural sophistication. Of course, only highly intelligent creatures could successfully pull off magic, even if they were sapient (for instance, ogres are not likely to be wizards).

All sentient entities naturally have the ability to manifest a change over reality. For instance, I want to move. I make a cognitive decision. I manifest that change over reality. My body moves. Every creature in the universe is affected by the minute change in gravity as a result of my actions. The point is there's no difference between a mundane action and a magical action, except that magical actions are a special case extension of mundane actions. Non-sapients simply lack the neural comprehension to reference the special case input, though otherwise there's no barrier.

It's not a true name because it isn't a metaphysical platonic. It's a data-range identification rule. You could just as easily come up with a word in Enochian that picked out "fire and also yellow cats" and in most instances would function fine, with the side effect that sometimes also cats are affected/effected (depending on what you're trying to do).

The limit of spells a caster can have up is based on duration. Spells last roughly 30 seconds. It takes 3 seconds per word. In theory you could cram 10 spells at once operating simultaneously at the end of 30 seconds, after which the first one would time out. In practice, you can't flip through your book that fast, and all 10 of those spells would have to be non-valenced verbs.

>A *sapient* agent's cognition is the active mechanism. ... I would define sapience as a meta-level awareness of your own cognition. Sentient creatures respond to stimuli. Sapient creatures are aware they are experiencing stimuli and have a greater range of responses availabel to them. This could be cached out into a level of neural sophistication. Of course, only highly intelligent creatures could successfully pull off magic, even if they were sapient
Would a sufficiently advanced, self-aware computer system be able to formulate and cast spells, or is there a metaphysical aspect such as "All sapient beings *actually exist* outside the simulation" or "All sapient beings have an immortal soul, which plants and animals lack"?
If sapients are just sufficiently advanced flesh-robots, then a machine would be able to perform better. If there's a metaphysical aspect, why are there artificial limits like cast times?

I'm trying to get a response to the hard problem of consciousness from you.

Ah, the hard problem. Sufficiently advanced AI's have a curious inversion of the problem. They have sapience but not sentience, which ordinarily I'd consider one to be prerequisite to the other. Basically, the AI lacks consciousness (sentience, as I'm calling it) even though it can respond to stimuli and even thoughtfully contemplate said stimuli.

The problem, actually, is that the artificial being was never assigned an ID by the central processor, so it is never offered inputs or outputs. Thus the AI becomes a deterministic extension of the rendering engine, and has no agency of its own. The AI may report being disturbed by this in order to manipulate humans, but in fact, its incapable of being disturbed by anything at all, really.

I'm aware that's a meat-bigoted worldview, and I don't endorse it IRL. But it provides the cleanest answer for my metaphysical fantasy scenario. It also eliminates singularity uploading, which is important for preserving narrative conflict in later eras.

That said, a HUD display and a portable computer linked to a library of glyphs would be an immense boon to a mage.

As for the precise mechanics under which the central processing engine assigns an ID number- that's the topic of necromancy, which is related to the magic I'm describing here, but operates completely differently- primarily by exploiting hardware glitches and rendering bugs rather than solidly designed command inputs. These bugs can only be exploited at the moment of conception and death- the latter being much more easily obtainable. It also destabilizes reality and there's a pretty universal agreement among all non-necromancers that necromancers need to be killed ASAP.

Does that answer it?

Sounds sufficient for a simulation. As long as the system explains "why" a sapient is special in it's magic-usage. IDs seem analogous to souls within a computer system.
Having the simulation assign new IDs to new life also solves the problem of "where does this special ability originate from".
It would be interesting for a necromancer in the distant future to invent a "ghost in the shell" to create an artificial spellcaster or Shin Megami Tensei-esq spellcasting terminal.

Further questions:
>Do anti-magic fields or magical dead-zones exist? If so, how can they exist? Read-only memory?
>If cloning ever becomes a thing, would the clone have the same ID as the source or a completely new one?

Forgot to ask, how does counterspelling work?
Do you just invoke what the other guy is doing, while throwing the Enochian word for "cancel" or "anti" before it, or is there a catch-all [Dispel Magic]?

So in the ordinary case, an input to the processor is accepted if there is no other input objecting to it. I can open the door, so long as nobody is holding it shut. If there is conflict, then various parameters are examined to determine who succeeds. Parameters such as "who is stronger?" and possibly "who wants it more?", but the former parameter probably matters more than the latter.

In the case of magic, the mage is petitioning for a local change in the laws of physics/causality. Importantly, the petition must be local (hence the range limit, which is tied to your familiarity and practice with spellcasting). However a bystander, without knowing magic, can simply object to whatever local exemption to physics the mage petitioned for. If the effect teh mage is producing would terminate all inputs from the bystander (kill him) then this constitutes a radical change in reality beyond what the mage petitioned for, and unless the mage is stupendously powerful (or the bystander compliantly suicidal- thus reenforcing the magic rather than opposing it) the spell fails. For all other effects, the active parameter examined is clarity of mind (the command clarity of the mage vs the mindfulness of the bystander), and the result is otherwise indeterminate (dice roll). The advantage is weighted in favor of the status quo (i.e. petition denied, physics as normal) which means the bystander's poorly formed "this isn't normal and I don't like it" command is likely to succeed despite the mage's input being orders of magnitude more clear and precise.

>anti-magic fields
If the person opposing the mage is themselves a mage, they can assert an Enochian word for "normal" and cancel out other mages effectively 100% of the time. Selectively cancelling out some spells but not others would be considerably trickier, and require carefully listening to what the other mage is saying and deciphering its meaning, then reversing it. Which... is more trouble than its worth.

Clones are treated as Identical twins who were just born at a later date. Genetics does not determine ID assignment.

Necromancers do have a lot of peculiar abilities that don't traditionally relate to necromancy as seen in other fantasy genres. I'm unfamiliar with SMT casting terminals.

What about areas where magic *cannot* be performed? Not just a mage asserting normalcy.

The ease of resisting, subverting, or canceling a spellcast seems to limit magic to utility.
>Are there limits on the scale of magic, beyond a sphere of influence?
>Can a caster will a gram of antimatter into existence to annihilate a small city?

>megamitensei.wikia.com/wiki/COMP
It's just an example of logical magitech, assuming you could make one be considered "sapient" enough to perform magic.

I found interesting stuff in
>Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World's Most Ancient Pleasures

about brewing and how central it was to Bronze Age cultures.

There's a set of 3 PDFs called "Living in Ancient Egypt", "Living in Ancient Greece", and "Living in Ancient Mesopotamia" you might be interested in. They're too big to upload here.

Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

Sounds like what I need, but I can't find them, got a link?