A freezing planet equivalent to Arrakis referred to as "Snow", the only source of a valuable mineral...

A freezing planet equivalent to Arrakis referred to as "Snow", the only source of a valuable mineral. Freeman equivalents instead based on Inuits

Bad idea, good idea, kinda meh?

Calling it snow is little bit generic imho. How about translating snow in another language.

Otherwise good for what ? Character background ? Adventure setting ? Bait ?

Change name to Drift.

Has potential. Not sure I like Snow or Drift. No good name springs to mind though.

>Snow
it was spice, not sand

use something else, like salt

Dune has lack of water as a theme. You can do that with heat. Natural heat sourced - volcanoes etc. Become native people holy sites. There is no nature fuel so travel on foot depends on knowing this sites and going from one to another in one day very fast. Lighting a fire in the cold,cold night summon dangerous wildlife.

Sandworm equivalent: kilometers long "leviathan" whales swimming beneath the ice plains, enormous shadows producing an eerie song. At any moment they can break through and kill everyone. Settlements must be built away from the ice.

What are the reverse houses?

You could probably combine heat with a lack of water theme. The arctic is a desert by definition.

You require heat/energy to make water because nobody is dumb enough to simply eat snow.

House Sedierta and House Nennokrah, obviously.

My advice - educate yourself on Inuits even a bit. Especially their myths

Then you will realise yourself how fucking god-awful idea this shit is.

What's so bad about it compared to any other kind?

i'm guessing it's just
>snow/ice
>blubber

>educate yourself on Inuits even a bit

Inuit is already plural, you smug cunt.
The singular is inuk.

>the hero needs wisdom, and casts a deep line to catch a wise old blind greenland shark, who was repeatedly fished up from the depths by his ancestors for sage advice

oldest one we've found so far is about 4 centuries, making it the oldest living vertebrate

Research is always a good idea, but why would it be obviously shit? It's not like the Fremen were 100% Arabs In Space.

I don't want to like it, but I do. What would be the resource that makes this shit hole so valuable to the rest of the galaxy that it got colonised in the first place?

He doesn't have an answer, beyond 'they're not 100% compatible'. He's probably going to start spouting some social justice bullshit soon. You see the same guy in any 'culture swap/setting swap' thread.

The difference between the arctic and a real desert is that the water that does fall freezes when it hits the ground. You can melt it to drink. Additionally, in the summer, if you're far enough south, there's generally a lot of water on the surface because the water table is so high due to permafrost.

Oh, also, no snow-worms because of permafrost. Sorry guys.

Wow, it's literally Lost Planet

Congratulations OP what a groundbreaking idea

I lived in Inuvik, Canada, NWT for 25 years. Ask me anything.

same as Dune.
Spice.

Something with high mass/value ratio.
Eating and aquiring magic powers (you can change magic powers type) seems a good bet.

It must to do something nothing else in the setting can.

How do we know it's 400 years old

You count the rings in the trunk

It's not even an idea, it's a reskin of Dune.

It's Dune without durkas, which is an improvement already.

>Researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of 28 of the animals, and estimated that one female was about 400 years old.
>The team found that the sharks grow at just 1cm a year, and reach sexual maturity at about the age of 150.

You insolent faggot, Inuit mythology is amazing.

Tell us about Inuit mythology. I'm not OP, but I'm also working on a setting somewhat inspired by Native American mythology.

A lot of animism, some ancestor worship, generally what you would expect or imagine from a native American/First Nation belief system. "Trickster", "Great Spirit", etc all have their appearances, but their culture has been unquestionably tainted by white culture over the years. The vast majority of inuit, especially older ones, are Anglican or Catholic at this point and their mythology has well and truly become nothing but stories.

To be fair, Canada had these amazing things called Residential Schools in the first half of the 20th century that were essentially "schools where you learn how to be a white person", so a lot of these beliefs were ridiculed away from the older generation and then never passed on.

I kind of think that was his point.

you could make the Spice equivelent Spermaceti-esque oil from the whale's head-junks

they can only take smaller young whales because old centuried bull whales are too big and aggressive

What's next? An African Westeros anxious that a great summer drought is going to come and kill everyone? A French boy taken to a school of mad scientists? Girl falls in love with a zombie and a ghost?

You can't "invent" setting just by reversing the shallowest aesthetic elements of a popular fiction book. Shame on you, shithead. Learn to be original.

>What's next? An African Westeros anxious that a great summer drought is going to come and kill everyone? A French boy taken to a school of mad scientists? Girl falls in love with a zombie and a ghost?
fund it

Actually, you just gave me a cool idea. I think I'm gonna open a thread for it.

>African westeros afraid the next drought will fuck shit up
If you do the appropriate cultural changes necessary to make the change feel natural, this could be really neat.

I understand you're trying to be a sarcastic bitch, but good ideas for settings can be had taking the basic premise of a thing and trying to mess with it enough that you could get something quite different.

>tainted

>
Feel free to join

>Residential Schools in the first half of the 20th century that were essentially "schools where you learn how to be a white person"

I mean, they didn't completely shut down until 1996.
They were also murderous rape dungeons, but that's neither here nor there.

Point is nobody wrote down any Inuit mythology until after they had been Christianized, to the point where you had ex-shamans saying things like "We didn't 'believe', we feared."

Weirdly, I actually think more people know about Aztec mythology (and Mayan, and Incan, and Tupi, and Navajo, and most anything you could have appear in a Mesoamerican themed setting) than about anything in Africa south of Egypt.

i'm all for learning about those cultures and making them better known if it means less Kangz

Yes. Tainted.

It allows the metabolism to slow to torpor-like levels, allowing for long-term survival in the harsh environment with a reduced calorie need and a measure of resistance to cold-weather injuries like frostbite or hypothermia.

In its refined form, the drug can put the user in a trance-like state, which offers a short-term enhancement of analytical thinking skills. Higher doses provide a greater degree of benefit, but can leave even experienced users in a vulnerable state for a period of time.

Withdrawal causes the metabolism to speed up above baseline levels, resulting in improved metabolic recovery rates along with an increased caloric need and a dramatic increase in sleep deprivation symptoms. Withdrawal symptoms from long-term abuse include renal failure, cirrhosis, and congestive heart failure, and is fatal more often than not in the absence of careful medical treatment.

Call the planet Iceberg instead.

>How about translating snow in another language.
I heard those crazy Inuits got two thousand words for it.

Shouldn't the spice equivalent just facilitate FTL travel, as in Dune? I mean, you got to explain that shit somehow, humanity clearly didn't evolve on Icecube or whatever you call it.

>I heard those crazy Inuits got two thousand words for it.
It's a myth, they barely have four or five. What they do have is grammar that allows you to create new words by pretty much stringing them together (kinda sorta like German) so you can end up with an original word for snow that's fifteen syllables long because it's really an entire description.

Combine this with . For FTL travel, humans must make calculations that are only possible for a brain in a state of superconductivity, achieved by freezing the pilots and keeping them frozen throughout the flight (keeping with the ice theme). The spice or whatever keeps them alive throughout the process.

I never really read the books, so one thing that's bothered me: computers are illegal to make in the Duniverse, right? Then how come in the Dune RTS games everyone uses missiles which are clearly homing so willy nilly? Doesn't a homing missile contain a small computer basically by definition?

Actually, believe it or not, but very primitive air-to-air missiles tracked their target by a process that could probably be replicated using a very good clockwork (assuming you were allowed to integrate an electronic sensor into the system, which Dune would).

Then you got late WWII Nazi attempts at making homing torpedoes for their U-boats. They never worked historically but there was no real reason for them not to and they could've probably made them work if they'd had a couple more months to work.

user, I'm interested in that kind of stuff, too, but let's not kid ourselves. They weren't tainted, they were improved.

Would it really be relevant if they could use heatseeking missiles on a planet whose shtick is being covered in ice?

Read the books.

The specific tenant is "thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"
Whether that means "no AI" or "no computers whatsoever" is somewhat inconsistent.

Some planets managed to ignore that and make advanced technology anyway, through political manipulation and the unstoppable demand for their products.

So, for this magical spermaceti oil substance, what would be the physical symptom of constant exposure, much like how Fremen and other people in Dune had those bright blue eyes.

Also, what would be the conflict of this setting?

I liked Lost Planet too, op

>space Inuit kill shielded House soldiers using lances and harpoons carved from leviathan bones
>use special drysuits to descend beneath the ice clinging onto a diving leviathan
>nobody's ever explored the oceans of Snow, deep down are things that EAT leviathans

I'd say "blue skin", but you gonna get that in the Arctic soon enough anyway.

It does something to the blood which flows to the extremities (maybe it actually mixes in your blood but by the time it gets to the extremities the chemical reaction has slowed down, etc.) resulting in blackened fingers and toes, then black hands and feet.

Navigators which have to take the thing all the time eventually end up losing their limbs completely and looking like freakish seal people, in a callout to the myth of Sedna.

While this is a cool idea, from a dramatic point of view it misses out on the fact that the eyes are e very visible, very presentable part of the body, allowing everyone to recognize a Spice user. On a planet that's so cold, everyone's hands and feet would be covered pretty much at all times anyway.

The blue was great because it contrasted the red sands.

So how about instead, due to the effects it has in the mind, it causes black branch/crack-like growths around the eyes and temple?

That also works

>black branch/crack-like growths around the eyes and temple?
I like this. Maybe does something to the iris until the black swallows the whole eye.

The eyes are also covered in Snow Hell, lest one gets snow blindness.

>are you a bad enough dude to fulfill the prophecy of being "He who traverses the depths without sinking"

Make it the Schelera. Black where your whites should be is freaky and cool as hell

Isn't heat a lot easier to generate than water, assuming access to moderately advanced technology? I mean, they have nuclear reactors. It's not like running out of gasoline for the heaters is much of an issue.

>guy on the right
"What the fuck am I seeing"

You need a computer to make a heat seeking missile. You can put the IR sensor on the missiles, and put in a set of controls, but without the computer, there is no real way to get the controls to actuate to aim the missile at the output of the IR sensor. I suppose you could make some kind of wire based Infrared TV guidence system, but it would imposed drastic limits on speed and maximum range.

Technically, they were tainted. "Improved" is subjective, and many of their legends and myths were translated through english or french eyes with english or french biases and ideas about the world. It's fair to say they were tainted and changed from their source material in translation.

Don't get me wrong, the Inuit, Gwitch'en and other tribes have higher standards of living because of white culture, but it's completely true that we essentially rewrote and transcribed their myths with our own "twists" and ideas about how they should be understood.

t. some white guy who lived among the inuit for decades

>Then you got late WWII Nazi attempts at making homing torpedoes for their U-boats. They never worked historically

I thought the german passive homing torpedos were better than the american ones because of their higher speed?

the US Mark 24 and 27 certainly worked well(especially paired late war with the ERSB Expendable Radio Sonar Buoy) considering the air dropped Mk 24 alone killed 31 U-boats and 6 IJN submarines

Weren't the earliest attempts based on an almost mechanical system by which a blind rotates over the heat sensor, and a yes/no system thrusts the missile in the correct direction based on whether the heat source is within or outside the iris at the end of every rotation? You could do that with extremely basic electricity and no computer to speak of. It wouldn't exactly be a genius of a missile but it would "track the target".

I just think that tainted has too many negative connotations. It makes you seem like the kind of person who thinks that white culture is bad.
I feel bad about erasing interesting cultures, too, but I definitely don't think that they were replaced by a bad one.

You're talking about the Hamburg system. IIRC it never saw (or never saw much) real usage and if it did it certainly wasn't a stellar success, but it was a passive IR homing missile that didn't need a computer.

>children stolen and raped to death in brainwashing internment camps
>communities uprooted and relocated from traditional hunting grounds to barren wastelands where they'll starve to death on the off-chance that they'll phone in about a commie sighting some day
>sole means of locomotion, the sled dog, eradicated by federal police
>missionaries erasing culture with preaching and murdering villages with exotic diseases

Not a bad culture at all, no.

How about you come up with something yourself?

That's just Canadians.
Anyway, white culture means stuff like Christianity, business suits, English, all our inventions, Etc.
Even Veeky Forums.
But being treated poorly by corrupt Canucks isn't white culture.

>all the bad stuff white people do isn't white culture

Nazis need to get back into their containment board. Seriously.

How is that Nazism? Most whites don't do. Is ever little thing a group of corrupt jackasses do a people's culture? Is eating humans the culture of all native Americans because a few did it down south?
You're the reason that people dislike the Left, nowadays, even centrists like myself. Everything is Nazism, nowadays.

>white people doing something bad means it's white culture
>Someone argues against what I'm saying, thus he/she is a nazi
That's not Nazism and you're crying fucking wolf. This is why people dislike the left leaning ideologies right now, because people like you are doing stupid shit like this. Every culture has done both good and bad, no exceptions to the rule. If you blame all black people for the acts of some, that's racist. If you blame all white people for the acts of some, that's also racist. I'm a white Canadian and yes what my government did to the natives was wrong, but that was in the fucking past and we're trying to move forward, by being better. I was threaten with murder and rape by a group of black men, and yet I don't go around saying all black people need to fucking die and think that their culture is just rape and murder. Fucking cunts like you are the reason I don't tell others I'm a liberal, since they would think I'm some racist alt-left piece of shit like yourself. You fucking people make me sick. When actually Nazism comes, no ones going to fucking listen because of you and your other alt-left buddies calling everything you dislike Nazism or Fascism.

No, no user. You aren't being progressive enough. If even one whitey does something bad then all are dirtied by that sin.

But if anyone else does something bad then the crime is their own and taring a group with the same brush is racist as fuck no matter how common or not the incidents were.

Can you all fuck off to some other thread? We were trying to invent a setting.

On that note, how about the wider universe? Equivalents of the Houses of the Landsraad, Bene Geserit, the Spacing Guild? Most of that doesn't NEED to be changed just because the Arrakis expy is now ice but, you know, change for its own sake is a tenet of lazy reskins.

Have various competitive colonial powers trying to settle the planet, resisted by the natives.

The natives huff gasoline and drink a lot, right? It's not realistic otherwise.

If Dune managed without having the Fremen all be drug smugglers, this gets a pass as well.

Natives in this case being the descendants of the original colonists who came over in a cryo on an old sub-light ship way back in prehistory.

Or at least what passes for prehistory in a nobody can be bothered looking that far back.

Also I suggest changing the Spice to Salt because we are dealing with Leviathans rather than Worms.

No user, the *planet* is called Snow not the mineral.

Like how the planet was called Dune in, uh, Dune.

Going to be honest, I was going to help with your setting, but I got pissy because of crying wolf. Now, an idea would be about the hostile animal life that lives in your setting. Haven't read Dune, but I'm going to take the assumption that there was other wildlife then just worms. How about some kind of semi-intelligent polar bear species. They can't use tools, but they do have a proto-language they speak to each other and are smarter then the average bearpun intended. You can make them highly aggressive and predatory, and they're attracted to flame.

>fucking bears hunting in PACKS
>speaking to each other in slav

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

There was other shit on Dune but mostly the only dangerous stuff was I think a few scorpions.

That and the mile long belligerent sand worms.

What did the sand worms eat? Sand trout. Which were an early stage of the Sand Worms.

Leviathans should be something like this pic but with the same unhurried attitude of a Greenland Shark, at least the older ones.

Older ones are filter feeders that predominantly live off of plankton and krill but sometimes eat larger things by accident, given their size it isn't efficient for them to actually hunt. Young ones are capable of hunting actual fish efficiently and are the most dangerous as humans are fucking tasty.

They are the only organism so far discovered that has no evident Terrestrial origin. Everything else alive in the known universe is an adapted version of something that was brought from Earth. Where did they come from? It's unknown.

What's a suzumou?

Seconding this, google reveals nothing but other Veeky Forums threads.

I took the pic from an old Veeky Forums thread.

Sorry.

But that culture is boring as shit.

I like the concept that it lets you control the temperature of a ships interior and protects the exterior so well that you can nearly land on a sun. They bottle solar flares in flasks treated with the stuff, it's like nitro for a starship

It needs to allow for FTL, though.

Would be neat if it could somehow cool ships into stealth in space or something

Unless something is keeping it frozen like the Sandtrout on Arrakis were keeping Arrakis dry it's not going to make much sense.

Could just be kinda distant-ish from the sun. They say if Mars had a been a tad little bit closer it would've been basically livable, just hellishly cold.

Yeah, but the premise of Arrakis is that it should be more-or-less ideal for life but isn't. That's a really important part of the books.

So many variables are needed for life it's not inconceivable for a planet to just narrowly miss out on one. Plus, you could always make up some kind of alien magic like the sandtrouts. Dunno why the leviathans would be freezing the planet but meh

It doesn't have to be exactly like Dune.

>Equivalent to Arrakis

I had this idea that in the vastness of space some peculiar things happen that can't be explained one such being Crystalized Suns. Basically it's like a resource that can be mined, hot to the touch and able to be used for powering anything that shouldn't be physically possible to power through any other way. Companies find them in space and terraform solar systems in order to mine them, it's crazy dangerous though and if you hit the wrong place while chipping away at the Sun you can cause a solar flare to erupt from the crystal.

That sounds like a neat idea, but not really in the style of Dune.

What about the Guild?