/WBG/ - Worldbuilding General

Quick! I need ideas for an Old Empire in my setting.

My setting is an odd, Nautical-themed, tropical world based on Sinbad the Sailor, The Odyssey, Cthulhu, Darksun, and Pirates of Darkwater. I have the idea to add a British East India Trade Company type faction, but I liked the idea of having them be (secret or not) a continuation of an old Empire with a lot of reach, thus explaining their well-established trade monopoly.

Trouble is, I have no idea what to base this old Empire on. I really can't do Rome or Greece, and I feel like nothing else is coming to mind. The rest of the setting is Perisa-Greece-Mesoamerica, so I need something that looks distinct, but not too alien in comparison to those. Any suggestions? My brain is exhausted for the night.

Carthage or Phonecians.

bonus points if the top brass of the trade company are part of a secret cult that sacrifices babies to the bull god

>sacrifices babies to the bull god
That's played out. Make them have orphanages and central education for children but a very bad PR team.

Sounds interesting, but I don't think there's a lot on them, is there?

Not a lot on Carthage but there's plenty on the Phoenicians.

You could also go for the Minoans, if you wanna go older, or the Luvians or the Hittites (not much of a naval power, though).

There's plenty of flavor in that area to go around.

Hm. I'll have to go wiki diving then. I'll probably go Phoenician, since I already DID Minoans once.

Why not Malays? There's plenty of unexploited history in there.

If you're not married to nautical empires, look into Elam and Medes.

How large is an organization to you guys?

Depends of the feel you are looking for your setting, I like a tribal age so anything about 100 people is large.

largest knight organization I have so far is 2000.

So I created a plausible scenario?

Guys, I'm making gods for my setting, and I need help coming up with names.

So far I've got a few, but I'm not sure I'm satisfied with them.

Tell me, what kind of feelings the following names evoke:

Efiril
Katra
Rutiannah
Lafitait
Sorlakoth
Bautir
Astrotex

>Efiril
Fire.
>Katra
Cute.
>Rutiannah
Nothing,
>Lafitait
>Sorlakoth
Evil, undead for some reason.
>Bautir
Nordic.
>Astrotex
Different setting.

What are some ideas/examples of God(s) punishing a society for committing a sin? Like "God sends plague/earthquake/flood down on city of sinners", but the punishment matches a specific sin.

What are the sins? Also keep in mind that the punishment wasn't often directly related to the sin, probably a result of Biblical historians framing real tragedies as a result of the sins of the people.

I don't have any specific sins in mind, I'm just trying to think of divine punishments that sound cool. And in a high fantasy setting, you can be sure that these are actual punishments from the gods.

Time to figure out bird-people.

Some interesting ones I think is Tower of Babel and such.

Well, biblical examples are pretty obvious, you could look into other religions. Perhaps hindu, or some more ancient ones ( ex. Greece/Roman/Scandinavian ) etc., perhaps apply apply individual punishments more broad strokes. Ex. turning people into monsters, ironic punishments...

Can't remember any more/specific ones from top of my head, though, sorry.

>Efiril
Lawful evil fire guy who really likes slavery
>Katra
Cats and other fluffy things
>Rutiannah
Tree hugger who lives in a bush
>Lafitait
Posh asshole who hates working class scum
>Sorlakoth
Ancient unkillable omnivorous worm
>Bautir
Autistic master builder
>Astrotex
Atomic robot from outer space

>Efiril
Fire
>Katra
Cats
>Rutiannah
Magic
>Lafitait
Light
>Sorlakoth
Death
>Bautir
War
>Astrotex
Don't mess with him

>Efiril
Maybe some kind of fire prince or powerful elemental
>Katra
Eskimoes
>Rutiannah
Some kind of Earth or fertility goddess
>Lafitait
Nobility
>Sorlakoth
Eldritch brainsucker
>Bautir
Some old Anglo-Saxon farmer tending to his memes
>Astrotex
The rootinest tootinest android cowboy this side of the Milky Way

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask, but I'm working on an armor design for a character.

This character is meant to be highly agile, with the armor being magical and mostly decorative, so it's meant to be minimalistic and inhibit movement as little as possible. Additionally, I'd like the armor to be entirely metal, as in, without leather/cloth/whatever straps needed to hold it in place. It's a bit silly, but I've been toying with the idea of the character being able to make the armor appear/disappear at will, so the armor strictly being above the clothes is important.

Mostly, this is really simple. Armor around the forearms, shin guards, and a chestplate that mostly just covers the ribs, so that the waist is still able to freely bend and twist. However, with how much hips move, putting any tight armor around there that doesn't inhibit movement is a difficult prospect. I don't want to leave the area bare, though.

My current design has a belt that's attached to a scale half-skirt, similar to pic related. However, this has the issue that, if the character goes up-side down, there's nothing really preventing the belt from sliding up or rotating or otherwise moving out of place. I'd like to have as few "It's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit." excuses for the armor design itself, so does anyone have better ideas for how to handle this kind of thing?

It's sad but my first thought when reading this was how easy it would be to paint this as a metaphor for homosexuality Xmen 2 style

You may want to check out Dante's Divine Comedy. Obviously you probably don't want to go to that extent if it's in the real world and not hell but he had different punishments for different sins. The less severe the sin, the less severe the punishment iirc

>Efiril
a benevolent wind godess

>Katra
Deep Sea and totally open ocean

>Rutiannah
Agriculture, autumn

>Lafitait
Nothing

>Sorlakoth
swamps, basically mtg black

>Bautir
Neutral death god, blacksmith

>Astrotex
My new rap name

This is no help to you but I'm now imagining a situation were a holy order stages a coup and forms a military junta.

So, the way I've written my setting is to write the entire history from the beginning to the end of time, from bronze age to space age, but left out the small details and let players fill those in. Any contradictions between player actions and the recorded history will either be a "legend" that as it turns out never happened, or a situation where the players' actions are what really happened but the truth has either been incorrectly recorded, lost to the ages, or deliberately altered by someone in-setting with an agenda.

Is that overly complicated/dumb?

Yes

One thing it's hard for beginning GMs to get is that you aren't making an ebin story and world for your players to look at

You AND YOUR PLAYERS are playing a game, for fun. What matters for your setting is what matters for your players.

Sure you can come up with some stuff but 'write the entire history from the beginning to the end of time, from bronze age to space age' shrieks of an enthusiastic newbie G< toiling in the basement writing shit the players won't care about and will only learn about via you getting excited and dumping tl;dr textblocks on them, after which they still won't care

Don't fall for the 'worldbuilding' meme. It's a scourge of amateur fantasy novelists who miss the point and has little to no place in game sessions. You should focus your efforts on the personal level of character and sessions. Not only is the GM the only one who sees these grandiose 'big picture' ideas, they're the only ones who even care about doing so.

>Don't fall for the 'worldbuilding' meme.

Oh shit, I just saw what the title of this thread was, I'm too late

Good luck all you anons

I actually don't know why I asked. Most of my games are ran in heavily abridged versions of the setting and basically exist as a sandbox for my friends to dick around in. The actual serious setting is more of just something I write for personal enjoyment.

>Don't fall for the 'worldbuilding' meme. It's a scourge of amateur fantasy novelists who miss the point
I kind of have to take issue with this. A good fantasy world is more than just a cool backdrop and framing device for a good story. If the worldbuilding is really good the world will stand on it's own and more. There's no "point", at least not necessarily.

I've done a similar thing in defining the history from beginning to end, but time and fucking about with it being are major themes in the lore of the world. I went the Elder Scrolls route of 'all possible outcomes of an event are equally true even when they contradict one another because time dragons or some shit.' Hyperbole aside, as long as there is a logic and you're consistent with its application, then you're fine. It's when you start giving each event its own rules you over complicate things and reduce your timeline to a bunch of nonsense.

Also is sorta full of shit. The more developed your world is the move believable it's going to be. Not all of it is knowledge that is going to be known by or pertinent to readers or players, and it's fine they don't need to be clued in on it, but that doesn't make it less important to the person writing it. World building is the difference between an epic story and just a string of events. Characters, places, and events become more real and more personal in the mind of the writer, and their understanding of those things will be reflected in the quality of their work. You can always tell when fantasy authors phone it in because they can describe the most grandiose settings and exciting events and seem bored while doing so.

It's somewhat different for GM'ing, but as long as you're not using your sessions to just advertise your independent writing and keep your focus on the characters you've been given, rather than the one's you've created, there's not necessarily a conflict of interest. I have given myself the flexibility to run games out of my setting, and I love seeing what other creative people can do with my ideas. I don't dictate to them how they should experience it, ultimately it's just any other fantasy setting.

>It's when you start giving each event its own rules you over complicate things and reduce your timeline to a bunch of nonsense
So, exactly like TES?

>g your sessions to just advertise your independent writing and
That's really not an issue for me. Aside from really important people historically like monarchs and other faction leaders, basically all the NPCs are made custom for the campaign based on the party and how serious the game is. Obviously their traits are consistent in the world, the idea is that they complement what we're setting out to do in the campaign while also being someone who could've actually filled the role they do in whatever event or period the game takes place in.

Plus I like to focus campaigns on smaller scale things, which might sound odd considering I bothered to write out the entire world history. My favorite: for about a year, we'd been doing shorter campaigns all around the same period of time but in different locations, and the whole time I'd been hyping up this battle that took place ~50 years prior between the Goblins and not!Russians that altered the entire political landscape and was in some way connected to many of the situations they'd fond themselves in, think D-Day level importance but followed immediately by the Yalta Conference. Well, the players actually got to take part in the battle. Not as commanders or generals or elite troops or any of that stuff, just a squad of normal soldiers trying to carry out orders and stay alive in a battle so large they couldn't really tell exactly what was going on or if what they did had any effect.

I guess the reason I want to make worlds that big and detailed is because I want to approach the capabilities of historical fiction. If you wanted to write fiction taking place in WW2, there are so many details and "backstory" you can draw from without having to explain any of it isn't even funny. Obviously the limiting factor is that players can't be expected to know the same amount of information as real life, but I think having it there that you can use selectively as important details ultimately just makes the stories better.

Anyone know the levels of social interaction would be? Like individualistic, peers, village?, town?, city? Etc. I've been noticing there's certain identities that build within each part and other people can identify each other through what part of a region you came from or a household and such. I was thinking these things could help incorporate into character behavior and flesh them out and separate them from say a village down the south a few kilometers.

Elder Scrolls does have a logic though. While I was oversimplifying it drastically, there are rules about how time and its relation to the interpretation of events goes.

There is a natural linear timeline, which progresses from A to B. But there are periods of 'un-time' where there is a break between A and B where multiple things COULD have happened. This is the difference between playthroughs of the story in a game. For example, my Nerevarine was a female Khajiit, yours might have been a male Dunmer. Neither one of these is 'wrong' nor is either of them explicitly 'canon'. Each one of these possibilities is as equally true as the other. They contradict but do not override each other.

Eventually the event that causes the split from the natural timeline concludes and the various possible timelines converge back to its natural state and progress forward again in a linear fashion.

It's not hard to understand. It's like a small scale 'multiverse' hinged around key points in history. It does not effect the A and B of the story line though, only the sections in which it is relevant.

To me for some reason it brings to mind the mistreatment of children in Victorian England. Like child labour, except it's halflings

>Not as commanders or generals or elite troops or any of that stuff, just a squad of normal soldiers trying to carry out orders and stay alive in a battle so large they couldn't really tell exactly what was going on or if what they did had any effect.
Wow, how do you pull that off? That sounds really cool actually.

What about a world that's built from the bottom up, rather than the top down?

I made a big list of groups and important organizations a while ago for my setting, I don't expect to keep all of them for a final draft, or I might, but I will likely change some of them.

I appreciate your recent bird drawings, I wanna see more

Well some backstory first:
The entire continent had sort of been in an intellectual dark age for about 150 years, but in the past 10 or so they started to come out of this. Specifically, it had the affect that for a relatively brief period the mass stigma about trusting and making use of the average magic user was greatly diminished, and the various factions of the time had all started using mages heavily in a military capacity. Basically, conventional clashes of armies was made temporarily obsolete. This is basically my excuse to have Vietnam-esque command structures in a world that hadn't even really began to make use of gunpowder weaponry yet. All this to facilitate that a "squad" would even be plausible to play in, and also why they wouldn't be in open terrain much at all.

Basically, the battle was in the foothills of a mountain range (which I'd be saying for a year had been renamed the "Mountains of Blood" because of this battle), caves and volcanic stone everywhere, geothermally active, occasional lava flows, you get the idea. Place was hell on Earth. Add in the fireballs streaming overhead in both directions and Goblins (or god forbid Orc and Troll mercenaries) around every corner, they were constantly on edge.

I'm not sure exactly how I pulled it off at the time in terms of literally how I GM'ed it, but I think I did it well enough

It's always better to bottom-up.

I usually do bottom -> top -> back to bottom. Essentially, figure out how you want the world, work all the way up until you have the cosmology you want, and then go back and alter the bottom in a way that's still cool but better fits the new top. New additions to the setting can always inform previous ones, retcon a little frequently so you don't have to do a lot ever. Major retcons are a pain in the ass.

eh... Honestly, probably better to write out the history of the world up-to when the PCs enter it and leave the rest blank, as it, from here-on-out there is no telling what will happen, because that's life. it also gives the players the choice to affect world events on a grander scale, or choose to let history play itself out and focus on a smaller story. How their actions affect history is going to be unknown is far better than having their impact on world events be largely nil save for a few minor moments. as for he's just as ass, good world building doesn't just make for a pretty backdrop, it can inform on what kinds of adventures the PC's will go on, how they will be treated, and it makes the difference between getting the players immersed in the setting and interested in what is happening around them, or a bunch of disinterested murderhobos who go around causing death, destruction, and mayhem wherever they go just for the lulz, and to show off their character sheet's big numbers.

>there is no telling what will happen, because that's life
I mean, I never let a party read any history that isn't relevant to the campaign, they can't just go to the wiki and see how the world ends.

but at the same time YOU the GM should be prepared for the possibility that maybe the PC's do something that actually alters the course of history, and rather than hand-wave that away, let it happen, let their actions change the course of history accordingly.

>and rather than hand-wave that away
I had an entire campaign investigating why the deeds of a previous campaign had been covered up. And obviously the setting history isn't set in stone, it's more just for the ability to hold a campaign in many time periods in the same setting. I don't just want to see the Lunar cult begin in the Bronze age, or get persecuted in the gunpowder age, or build a new holy city on the actual Moon, I want to be able to show all of them.

That's the main purpose of this type of worldbuilding. You can show any event at any time and it's as if you're using the Historical Present.

Probably.

Zulus were war(rior) centered too, from what I recall.

Mounted nomads might be seen in a similar light, in that they did not have much in the way of civil administration out on the steppe.
Which brings Cossacks to mind, though they generally had a patron/ruler from outside the local area.

Also look at modern Egypt and 20th century Turkey for a less extreme version of this.

I've been really into the style of OSR books lately, and have also been really frustrated at the blandness of my current overland travel system for my campaign I'm running (5e). After a bit of research and inspiration, I made this map and I love how clean it turned out.

Here's a guide I wrote for a fellow DM on what I did exactly to make the map and the proposed mechanics behind what a modern hex crawl looks like in the 5e system, borrowing heavily from older systems.

medium.com/@davidwoyke/d-d-creating-a-hex-crawl-cf33d42e35f9

What if you're worldbuilding for a game, and bottom-up means the world is developed gradually through play?

Well that's a different scenario. In terms of pure worldbuilding, that isn't necessarily the best thing to do. But I've done that with friends before, as well as seen the let's make a setting threads here, it's certainly fun.

>/WBG/ - Worldbuilding General

Just in time to bump the thread!

I've decided that April will be
>Animal People April
And that means I'm gonna make an effort to try and draw & detail all the varied beastmen races within my big ol' fancy setting I've been cooking up.

I put the huge list of animal persons I've got into a "random choice" generator and today I got OCTOPUS... So here they are!
They are neither kids, nor squids, and quite honestly they're kind of PRICKS.

Thanks. I might do more later on. Threw in some color to figure out the scheme etc.

Fixed to cloth/padding underneath?

I also would mind if you told me what the following names evoke:

Kleaneg
Tydor
Lanfax
Vellarth
Gildir Trelin
Phuzlugla
Cyddon
Vridra
Blemba
Avald Kvartan
Fhargus Kostello
Klareggond
Ransallar

Sorry to bother you guys, but I need a specific space settign that could reasonably come after Steampunk>Dieselpunk>Cyberpunk in a timeline. Just can´t think of anything myself.

Do you guys maybe have an idea?

>Fixed to cloth/padding underneath?

That's probably the smartest way to go about it, as no amount of brainstorming on my part has resulted in a way for the armor to secure itself to the pelvis without either limiting hip/leg movement or being awkwardly baggy.

I'm not coming up with a good way of fixing the belt to the clothing, though, since this character doesn't wear belts and wouldn't have a reason to have anything with belt loops. I guess I'll just possibly go with a materials explanation? All of the other armor is worn over clothing made out of the same material as the 'pants', and while it would make sense for the armor on the limbs and the chestplate to be able to hold themselves in place due to their shape, arbitrarily deciding that the armor simply can't slide over that clothing material, or saying that the armor has a way of attaching itself to that material (since the armor is magical and not a real physical earth metal) would at least be consistent.

Nanopunk?

Sci-fi.

>Fhargus Kostello
Faggotry.

These are the names of the sovereign nations in this continental setting
>Kazimir Empire
>Kingdom of Harman
>Free City of Iuwine
>Freimut Order
>Tarasa
>Cillian Kingdom
>Kingdom of Rowena
>Tapio Khanate
>Kingdom of Oriane
>Kingdom of Brecht
>Vencel Principality
>Kingdom of Loick
>Duchy of Thale

Any of these sound like comfy places?

>Kazimir Empire
Poland
>Kingdom of Harman
Arabs
>Free City of Iuwine
Drunks
>Freimut Order
Teutonic Order
>Tarasa
Ukraine
>Cillian Kingdom
Chile
>Kingdom of Rowena
Ravenclaw?
>Tapio Khanate
Finrand
>Kingdom of Oriane
Knifears
>Kingdom of Brecht
Bertolt? Bavaria.
>Vencel Principality
Venice
>Kingdom of Loick
West Country
>Duchy of Thale
Iceland

2/13, guess I need to think this through some more.

What, you ain't even gonna tell what's what?

>Kazimir Empire
Sticks up their asses

>Kingdom of Harman
slippery traders

>Free City of Iuwine
come here if you want to get mugged

>Freimut Order
constant schemers

>Tarasa
a city of high stakes and high opportunity

>Cillian Kingdom
very friendly until you cross them

>Kingdom of Rowena
godless savages, you know they eat people right?

>Tapio Khanate
no-nonsense, extremely loyal if they know you

>Kingdom of Oriane
those damned astrologers practically run that place, who knows what they're up to?

>Kingdom of Brecht
they're all sort of assholes but who isn't really?

>Vencel Principality
think they're the hottest shit, if they show you their painting say you like it or the little bitches might start crying

>Kingdom of Loick
humorless inbred fucks

>Duchy of Thale
down to earth people with little ambition, busty barmaids who'll basically believe anything

Sorry if this wasn't what you were looking for, I just like adding a layer of stereotypes to worlds. Yeah most people have them, but they always seem to be tacked on after the "actual" building.

>Kazimir Empire
Grand Duchy of Moscow, Kievan Rus
>Kingdom of Harman
England
>Free City of Iuwine
Switzerland and Italian City-States
>Freimut Order
Teutonic Order
>Tarasa
Amazons that are pale Welsh girls
>Cillian Kingdom
Gaelic Kingdoms and Kingdom of Scotland
>Kingdom of Rowena
Kingdom of Norway and Denmark
>Tapio Khanate
Fingolians
>Kingdom of Oriane
France
>Kingdom of Brecht
Low Countries, Bordeaux France
>Vencel Principality
Poland and Bohemia
>Kingdom of Loick
Holy Roman Empire
>Duchy of Thale
Baltic states

>Grand Duchy of Moscow, Kievan Rus
Kazimir is not a typical Russian name
>England
Fucked up Anglo-Saxon letters could help
>Switzerland and Italian City-States
If it ends in -li it automatically sounds Swiss as fuck. Also should start with a J.
>Amazons that are pale Welsh girls
Subtract vowels, add more gw, ll and dd
>Gaelic Kingdoms and Kingdom of Scotland
Church Kingdom?
>Kingdom of Norway and Denmark
Should be ending in -ska
>France
Doesn't sound gay enough
>Low Countries, Bordeaux France
What the hell? They aren't anywhere near each other. Add more double vowels and zw's for a Dutch effect.
>Poland and Bohemia
Add more szczrz for a Polish effect. Should at the very least start with a W.
>Holy Roman Empire
Loick doesn't even sound like a German word, and it would be spelled Leuck or Läuck. Come on, it's not that difficult to create fake German names.
>Baltic states
Baltic languages literally sound like random gibberish, keep that in mind

I'm definitely thinking of changing Loick though I guess it could be Loïck instead, the rest don't necessarily follow the naming conventions of the cultures they're based off of.

But then don't complain when people can't draw the parallels.

>millennia in the past
>elves emerge and quickly begin to dominate the Bronze Age world
>their divinities are worshipped and given tribute at temples around springs, rivers, and wells
>they establish an empire and an unshakeable hegemon
>until, one day, the portents and stars reveal a waning of magic and their Gods become silent
>human powers begin to rise, mass migrations from the steppe lead to new kingdoms
>they pick at the Elven Empire until it's in pieces, then, eventually, nothing but holdouts
>the age of men lasts for almost 500 years
>human kingdoms rise and carve out their own realms
>cont.

No complaints, I'm taking and considering changing some of the names just not all of them.

>cont.

>the Shemsherha, in the vast central plains and low country, an urban culture led by satrapies
>the Mathura, chivalric and determined warfighters controlling a vast helot class
>the Gadals, an urban confederation clinging to the rocky shores of the great sea
>the Atskaran, desert rulers, controlling the oases and the trade-routes that travel them
>the Matar, a people led by kings and cults, torn between knightly orders and upstart factions
>picture related: retainers of a Shemsherhan lord, typical heavily armed warriors of their culture

>forgot pic

>the Elven holdouts bide their time.
>suddenly, they heap precious stones on the idols of their gods and slaughtered probably a million bulls
>proceed with magical apocalypse
>storms on land and sea tear apart the land, human kingdoms suffer famine and anarchy
>vast tracts of land are turned into ashy wastelands of lightning and dust storms
>elven spirit guardians with the heads of deer emerge from tombs and terrorize the countryside
>setting takes place as both human and elf are too crippled to win yet regaining their strength

>pic related: human mercenaries

Abomination.
Thinner bone structure or smaller body parts than usual resulting in bad quality of life. It would be like a shorter human but some things will be so fucked up it could not live a quality life.

I imagine many halflings are discriminated against by humans, and I imagine it's the reverse as well.

On one side I see a human kingdom with halfling labour laws and treatment resembling the treatment of children in Victorian England.

One the other side I see a militant Munchkinland with a Napoleon complex that ostracizes the tall folk

I'd say draw the rivers across hexes, not just on the sides. It looks a bit off like that.

So did the magic come back or ?

Pteruges. Means feathers I think, they are the little thongs of leather or linen that hang from Greek armor. They can vary in length, if they are one layer or two (or more). Have each one feature a 50-75% smaller metal ribbon inlaid into the pteruge and you have flexibility, the leather/linen foundation keeping it from going CLANG CLANG CLANG WENT TROLLY RING RING RING WENT THE BELL every time they move or jostle about.

It might clang a little still when one pteruge on top layer bends and hits the other pteruge but you could always have the metal woven beneath the linen pteruges (but sandwhiched between a top and bottom layer)

Bear in mind they can go as short as you want or as long as you want (within reason). I've seen them go knee length. The odd fellow dead center is accurate, it's based off a Macedonian I think relief/relic.

yes.

God I love Osprey.

I think that's some real good art, user and that you should feel good about it.

Bit of a bumparoo.

On extraplanar entities, how do you like to describe them? Lovecraftian abominations, angels, common folk, demons...?

If you want the animal bird people to look animalistic then they should not have a waist, just mass at center mass

You know what, maybe you shouldn't describe them. You shouldn't unveil this mystery. If they have to interact with someone, give them a human form, so their true form doesn't blow a mortals mind. You can hint at, though.

user who was making a fantasy setting based off of Earth's geography here. I've settled for a sort of early 1800s feel, and have started thinking about how to draw the national borders on Earth's surface. I feel like I'm maybe too much relying on real-life borders to do that. I'm going along a lot of geographical lines as well (Rivers, deserts, etc). How does this appear, without any context, as areas that geographically would make sense to be grouped together?

Can you post the borders in a terrain map? I think it might help to visualise borders better.
Anyway, I don't think I'm feeling the pink country spanning korea-outer manchuria-sakhalin-hokkaido. I'm thinking, if it's capital is in korea, it would make more sense to try to nab any of the other japanese islands before hokkaido, and likewise if the capital is in hokkaido. Now if it's in sakhalin or outer manchuria, I think it would make sense expanding a bit more inland into manchuria before going down all the way to korea.

Give me a second and I will toss it all on to a terrain map to the best of my ability.
The capital of the pink country is somewhere near real-world Vladivostok, on the real world Korean-Russian border. I was also thinking that the area would have been a former Not!Siberia colony, having just recently gained independence through a war.

I think that planes are a shitty D&D trope and you shouldn't use them.

What are the core concepts, creations and differences between 80's retrofuture and 90's retrofuture?