/wbg/- Worldbuilding General

/wbg/ discord:
discord.gg/ArcSegv

On designing cultures:
frathwiki.com/Dr._Zahir's_Ethnographical_Questionnaire

Mapmaking tutorials:
cartographersguild.com/forumdisplay.php?f=48
www.inkarnate.com

Random Magic Resources/Possible Inspiration:
darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html
buddhas-online.com/mudras.html
sacred-texts.com/index.htm
mega.nz/#F!AE5yjIqB!y7Vdxdb5pbNsi2O3zyq9KQ

Conlanging:
zompist.com/resources/

Sci-fi related links:
futurewarstories.blogspot.ca/
projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
military-sf.com/

Fantasy world tools:
fantasynamegenerators.com/
donjon.bin.sh/

Historical diaries:
eyewitnesstohistory.com/index.html

A collection of worldbuilding resources:
kennethjorgensen.com/worldbuilding/resources

List of books for historians:
reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books/

Compilation of medieval bestiaries:
bestiary.ca/

Middle ages worldbuilding tools:
www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
qzil.com/kingdom/
lucidphoenix.com/dnd/demo/kingdom.asp
mathemagician.net/Town.html

Thread Question: What were the predecessor civilizations like in your setting? What do the current civilizations think of them?

Other urls found in this thread:

davidson16807.github.io/tectonics.js/
iranchamber.com/history/articles/sassanian_economy.php
twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?678519-PREVIEW-Sassanid-amp-Arab-Units-RELEASED!
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

>What were the predecessor civilizations like in your setting?
There was a race who built their civilisation like the great mounds of termites. Up and up they piled their knowledge, and art, and understanding. Over millennia their mounds reached the stars; they became all-powerful, and ascended.

Immediately they realised their mistake. Immediately they turned back from the horror, but this is an impossibility. Ascension is final. But they were powerful and they sacrificed everything. The universe rejected their retreat, and collapsed. A new universe was retroactively formed, and the race retroactively welded within it.
>What do the current civilizations think of them?
Here they are a race of slaves, with a quirk allowing them to hear their ancestors -- they don't listen too far back, because all they can hear is screaming.

Some, particularly followers of the Sun God (or their later atheist descendents) see them as firm allies against the repugnancy that is slavery. Others see them as cattle. Even the anti-slavers can be inclined to see them as slightly dull -- muted things, or childlike.

What are some good photoshop programs to use for mapmaking?

They do not exist.

Photoshop.

idk i just use gimp because it's free

> What were the predecessor civilizations like in your setting? What do the current civilizations think of them?

> Aliens come, beat the shit out of some elves, leave grand buildings and high technology, then disappear
> Pseudo-Egyptian cult driven by dwarves collects and retains technology, starts building massive empire
> 22nd century technology against iron age tech makes this an easy task
> But even 22nd century tech is a bare fraction of a fraction of what the aliens left behind
> Dwarves piece together where they think the aliens went, using clues the aliens left behind
> Using portal technology, put together a machine capable of opening a direct link to the destination the aliens pointed them to
> It's the Abyss

After around 98% of the world's sapient population gets killed off, the only things left capable of building a real civilization are the humans who found a patron god capable of resisting the Demon Lords of the Abyss. Now the iron age-mentality humans are running an art deco feudal empire in the bombed-out ruins of the bombed-out ruins of an alien civilization and oppress the shit out of anything that isn't human, on the halfway justifiable logic that demihumans were what put them in this mess to begin with.

And yes, this is all done so I can have a science fiction-fantasy setting like VARN from the Might & Magic series.

Can you have a AI/Robot rebellion in hard science fiction?

sorry about that god awful compression, I didn't want it to 1gb

Expanding on predecessor civs; Mega Structures.

Obelisks crackling with mysterious power, giant tomb complexes for long forgotten kings, arcologies, or just monumental architecture on a grand scale to shout "WE WERE HERE, AND WE WERE MIGHTY" and still impress folks 10,000 years later.

I have three small regions on my southern continent to place a civilization and develop. All of them have a northern coast on a central sea based off the Mediterranean. Which real-life cultures should I use as inspiration?

It's ancient Mediterranean themed, tech level circa 200 BC. Cultures I've already used / drawn influence from:
>Romans
>Phoenicians / Carthage
>Greeks
>Ancient Egypt
>Mesopotamian city-states
>Celtics (Gauls and Irish)
>Anglo-Saxons
>Vikings
>Native Americans / Mesoamerica
>Caribbean
>Aboriginals / Pacific Islanders

I figure I should have one not!Persian, but aside from that I don't know much about Central Asia during antiquity, and China / Japan / India seem way too far away to realistically introduce.

I use Autorealm, I feel like it does its job well enough.

Also,

>What were the predecessor civs like in your setting?

>a few tribes diddling around
>a race called the Forefathers comes through a mountain pass with iron weapons, never looks back
>everyone is either conquered, assimilated, or flees
>Forefathers make short work conquering everything, make some interesting technological advances
>suddenly wiped out in a cataclysm, everything goes back to stone age / bronze age for a while
>that was nearly 1500 years ago or so, roughly
>all current civilizations, even separated ones, have similar myths describing an angry sea god destroying everything, like flood myths of earth
>some depict it as a man, some as a monster, some as just a wave, etc etc

Some present nations believe themselves to be the ancestors of these Forefathers and believe they are meant to carry the mantle, with the most zealous being all about racial superiority. Others (usually descended from the people they conquered) think they were dumb as fuck and brought the cataclysm on themselves, even going so far as to worship the sea god who reset everything as their main deity. The ideological and religious conflict is fuel for the fire that is a massive cold war between the two dominant naval powers.

I use paint.net because I suck at everything art related, my map is nowhere near as good as others but it gets the job done.
This sounds really interesting, I would explore the shit out of those ruins.

haha, good job, I always liked M&M's setting.

This is pretty cool desu

What are the Jews of Your world?

I'll report a bit of info for central asia and Iran in antiquity in a little bit.

You added Native Americans in the setting and they are farther than China or India

Wow Jews completely went over my head, I guess I don't have any. Good call
Thank you in advance

Found a plate tectonics simulator. Might be cool for those of you who care about minutia.

davidson16807.github.io/tectonics.js/

So i'm making a calendar for my world, the primary one at least. I'm somewhat at a loss of inspiration for names of days and months, anywhere I can go to get some?

-The turks do not arrive in the Near East or Central Asia until at least the 500s or so. There's some debate or question as to a few of the ostensibly non-Iranian invaders who arrive thereabouts with the migration of the Huns: Kidarites, Chionites, and a group I forget preceding the Kidarites. Some consider them Iranian speaking, some an Iranian populace led by a Turkic elite.

-Instead, the linguistic majority for the Iranian Platea & Central Asia area are Iranian-speaking tribes. Traditionally a distinction being made between (in more classical to 0AD history) the Saka Iranian nomads concentrated beyond the Oxus (along with the Sarmatians who dwelt north and west of the caspian, more so west) and the more sedentary Iranians below - Bactrians, Sughdians, Arachosians, and so on. It's important to remember that nomadism did exist and would continue to exist (I think upwards of 25% of the Iranian population before the first Pahlavi emperor in the 20th century was still nomadic) beneath the "saka" lands. It's more the idea that in saka lands you would have little to no urbanization or settlement whatsoever, while in Chorasmia/Margiana/Sughdia/Bactria/Iran/Media/Media Atropatene you would have urbanization and nomadism.

-As time goes on the Saka would start to migrate southward and settle, which is where you get the Indo-saka of India, the Kushans, Sistan of Iran/Afghanistan originates from Sakastan.

-Iran was always greatly decentralized, and even the supposed centralization efforts of the Sassanids is a bit of a overinflation. Compared to the Parthains yes, but as this dry read illustrates the Sassanids continued to rely on the major Parthian houses (clans) for political and military support.

-Mesopotamia is the most populated, most lucrative, and also least Iranian province for the Sassanids. It is almost entirely populated by Aramaean speakers (and then probably a slim minority of Arabs on the fringes) who are Jews, Christians, and Sabeans.

-Sughdian culture has been discovered to have been a vibrant entity all its own and not just an echo of the Sassanids. It was Sughdian (and Gandharan, who would be Indo-Iranian in essence) merchants who largely brought Mahayana Buddhism to China and without them it's dubious if China would have ever become Buddhist. Similarly, it was largely Greeks and Indo-Iranians who formulated and codified Buddhism Or you could say perverted it from Siddhartha's original vision and created Mahayana buddhism.

-Greek influences on Iranian culture were most acute during the Parthian period and probably the late Achaemenid given basically any Greek with money and influence could run to some Achaemenid court to hang out if he got into trouble back home or wanted to fly with the big money. The Sassanians pursued a much more aggressive Iranification to purge greek influences and the presence of the clerical Magi had no predecessor during the parthians or achaemenids. Similarly, the fighting of heresies (Zurvanism, Manichaeanism) was a new and irritating phenomenon.

-Iranian courtly custom and the behavior of aristocracy in play is the single defining element that classical golden age Arab (and subsequent golden age Turkic) monarchies and courts imitated. If you can imagine the life of a 1,001 nights Sultan barring perhaps the excessive emphasis on harem purdah seclusion it's a dead ringer for Iranian (sassanian) court ritual, which in turn descended from Parthian and Achaemenid (which in turn was imitations of the earlier Babylonian court ritual and custom which in turn was imitation of the Assyrian which was imitation of the akkadian).

-"Emperor is the Shadow of God on Earth", feasting, drinking, hunting, the emperor is the arbiter and bringer of justice, law and order. Honestly you know the 40k emperor? That is largely derived from the Byzantine or late Roman notion of the Emperor which is derived/influenced/shaped by the Sassanian notion and so on and so on. It's not a Charlemagne kind of emperor with limits and handicaps on power or a holy roman emperor. Now this is all in theory, in practice a Shahenshah would have the same troubles and problems of factionalism, practical limitations on power.

-Achaemenid (famous cyrus cylinder) and Parthians were thoroughly tolerant and didn't really give two shits about foreign religions. Sassanids had more issues with this because of the symbiotic relationship of the Magi clergy's validation of the Shahnehshah's power and authority. Jews were persecuted the least compared to their treatment by the post-Christian Romans, Christians had a mixed record but by the late empire princesses or queens or wives of the Shahenshah could be Christian, Zoroastrian heresies were treated very badly and Manichaeans got the shit kicked out of them.

-Outside of certain outliers living in mountainous territories (south of the caspian or daylam/Mazandaran/Gilan/Elburz, Caucasus, ect.) the Iranian love and association of equestrianism is highly evident. In those aforementioned areas infantry could be more abundant to the point that Strabo writes of the Caucasus folk fighting as adept on foot as on horseback and in wooded mountainous terrain, and the Daylami..well just look them up because they were from 500s to 1000s the premiere indigenous infantry of the Near East.

iranchamber.com/history/articles/sassanian_economy.php

Does anyone else have Satyrs in their settings? I find dexterous, hedonistic goatmen to be a far more compelling barbarian race than orcs or primal elves.

Lots of Buddhism in the far eastern reaches of Iran. Sughdia and especially Penjikent and modern day Xinjiang region. That aformentioned Tarim basin had been Iranian inhabited (with yes, even "We wuz Aryans" blue eyed and light skinned folk) before the arrival and replacement by Turkic speakers.

-Bactria had lots of cities, Balkh itself being called by arabs "The mother of all cities".

I'm a bit under the weather and kind of aimlessly wandering here so I will try and find good sources for you rather than continue.

Yeah and I agree with you. I've got a race called Hwagari who dwell in a mountainous woodland to the north-west who I see in some shape or form being satyr. I'm still getting a feel for them and they will probably be less warhammer beastmen and more human satyr but maintain the hedonistic, feisty spirit that I felt inspired by in Herodotus' Thracian comment that "if they could stop fighting eachother they would probably conquer the world because they are the 2nd most numerous people".

Thracians are Orks, I just realized it

I did an old preview of Sassanian units for a Rome 2 mod back in the day twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?678519-PREVIEW-Sassanid-amp-Arab-Units-RELEASED! and you can get a feel for some martial things there with citations from period authors about various Sassanian soldiery.

So for instance

"....and the forms of human faces were so skilfully fitted to their heads, that, since their entire bodies were plated with metal, arrows that fell upon them could lodge only where they could see a little through tiny openings fitted to the circle of the eye, or where through the tips of their noses they were able to get a little breath. Of these some, who were armed with pikes, stood so motionless that you would think them held fast by clamps of bronze." - [Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum, 25.12 - 25.13]

"Hard by [the cataphracts], the archers (for that nation has especially trusted in this art from the very cradle) were bending their flexible bows with such wide-stretched arms that the strings touched their right breasts, while the arrow-points were close to their left hands; and by a highly skilful stroke of the fingers the arrows flew hissing forth and brought with them deadly wounds." - [Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum, 25.12 - 25.13]

"All regions of this country are fertile except the part towards the north, which is mountainous and rugged and cold, the abode of the mountaineers called Cadusii, Amardi, Tapyri, Cyrtii and other such peoples, who are migrants and predatory; for the Zagrus and Niphates fountains keep these tribes scattered; and the Cyrtii in Persis, and the Mardi (for the Amardi are also thus called), and those in Armenia who to this day are called by the same name, are of the same character. The Cadusii, however, are but little short of the Ariani in the number of their foot-soldiers; and their javelin-throwers are excellent; and in rugged places foot-soldiers instead of horsemen do the fighting." - [Strabo, Geography, 11.13.3 - 11.13.4]

"The walls [Pirisabora] were surrounded by a triple line of armed men, and from dawn until nightfall they fought with missiles. Then the defenders, who were strong and full of courage, spread over the ramparts everywhere loose strips of haircloth to check the force of the missiles, and themselves protected by shields firmly woven of osier and covered with thick layers of rawhide, resisted most resolutely. They looked as if they were entirely of iron; for the plates exactly fitted the various parts of their bodies and fully protecting them, covered them from head to foot." - [Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum, 24.2.9 - 24.2.10]

One of my alien races ended up as not!Protoss. What other reasons would an advanced race of psionic beings have to fight in melee combat aside from "MUH RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE"?

This is true, but my "Native Americans" are still a branch of southerners who managed to cross over to a densely forested area on the northern continent (unclear if they made it across the sea or there was a land bridge that is no longer there).

Introducing an entirely new old empire / nation with as much history as somewhere like India or China does, and a new distinct race of people with it, seems like too large a task for a world of this size. I might make it larger though.

Man this is overwhelming but extremely helpful. It's too bad Iran and the rest of Central Asia just gets glossed over sometimes as a "bridge place" between Europe and the Far East.

I've got all sorts of ideas for peoples based on the Bactrians, Scythians, and the Sassanids running from north to south rather than west to east, as you travel further away from the known world / not!Mesopotamia.

The goatmen in one of my settings are called Kith. They're fire worshipers and have invented the gun to the horror of pretty much everyone else.

Deities (January, Janus), occasions (Feburary, Februa), numbers (October, eight), things like that. Pathfinder had the months on their calendar named solely after the settings' deities, so that's a good idea.

Keeping the temple of the mind at the best it can be is only natural.
Woe to those who let it fall into decay, for it is the link needed to act while in the material plane!

as an advance race that relies on psionics, the ability to send bolts of psionic energy at opponents at range may be a less valuable ability, as perhaps this race is more secluded, only dealing with itself, and as such, defense against ranged psionic attack is an elementary part of teachings, making it such that the use of psionics in close quarters yields stronger results/ more favorable outcomes/ less energy spent. could also be a limiting thing regarding psionics for this race, they can only extend their abilities so far before it loses power/cohesion, and throwing projectiles take too much energy/effort/ training to be effective.

So I'm making a calendar and with 12 gods, it fits quite well with a month for each. However, there is a 13th fictional god and I think having a year-end day or similar in their name would be fitting. But, I don't know how to do it, it's pretty standard D&D fantasy, magic is sentient and one day regained a lot of its power, making everything kind of fucked up. That is the day it would probably be, but while I can see time stopping or something to that effect when it happened, I can't make sense of it doing the same every year. I don't really want to fuck with the moon or weeks as they're neat, so it can't just be that it got knocked a bit outside its normal rotation.

Is this a cool place to post my maps i've been building for feedback?

Holy fucking shit thats amazing.

...

...

these towns look a bit too small to be on a map don't you think?

>Splitting rivers
Oh boy. Memes aside, I like the first two a lot but the landmass shapes on this makes it look very fake. Inkarnate is hard to make good landmasses with I think, but that is what it is.

> Bretonnia
> Estalia
> White Orchard

I really hope these are placeholder names.

Of course

I hadn't really thought about it but yeah, I might wipe them from the world map.

Any tips on how to make it look more believable?

Also, here is the world map, obvious use of Europe and the Mediterranean aside, thoughts? The idea behind the whole campaign is to keep it relative to IRL for simplicity sake. Running it for a bunch of new guys who are just really getting into DnD

I'd look at maps that aren't too detailed but have nice looking coastlines, you can give them a ton of detail but that only works on some types and Inkarnate's art style does not fit that imo. Smoothing it out is probably the best way to go, now the coastlines just look kind of cut out.

I like making up evironments and cities and imagining how a world would develop.

Im currently thinking about a gas giant with a couple of small moons in the same orbit as the rings. Different planetoids have different races ans trade ,war and explore this ring system

ok

I touched on the towns, does this look like it belongs on the big map?

Yeah that looks a bit better

This website, Inkarnate, is just kick ass. I love this thing. What a valuable tool for DM's.

Fuck me I made a big mistake.
I'm using real languages as fill ins for the fantasy languages so that I can actually name shit well for them and players won't tell the difference. Finally writing up the list after making a dwarfish fort and two elven cities and I completely forgot what real languages I based em on.
I know the dwarfish is eastern, something slavic I think but i'm clueless on the elvish. Should I just say the rest of the elven world works on a different dialect for their shit?

Why not just paste whatever you have written down into google translate?

And if nothing is written then it doesn't even matter, just change the language.

I already tried. I combined the words together into a form of shorthand (because fuck their native grammar) to make the names sound better. Nothing's coming up for either. Elf is
>Amar Paltyalda
Which I know translates something to the effect of
>Fort of Palm Trees
And dorf fort is called
>Baighkhotyc
which I forgot the translation.
Players have already seen these cities (on map at least). Its a coin toss if they'll actually remember the name, I know, but still I don't want to just change shit on them if they do actually remember cause that sets a bad precedent.

I've found that using a super small brush-sized eraser and going around the edge in a circular motion helps to make landmasses look more realistic.

Here's an old old map I made on it, I kind of did it here but this was a rough draft so it's not great.

These look fucking great, I stopped using inkarnate once they changed, because I can't do world maps like I could before. This was the best I could do with something smaller scale.

Yeah, i'm slowly working my way down from world scale and its definitely easier the smaller you go.
And >super small brush-sized eraser and going around the edge in a circular motion
This. Its better to paint more then erase some because it'll create a rougher, less purely rounded look just due to the natural unsteadiness of your hands.

Both of those are me.

I've never been any good at small scale. That second map I posted was probably the best I've come up with.
Since Inkarnate changed things around I've moved over to photoshop for my mapping. Realistic edges are so much easier to come up with using this.

This was the last map I created, I spent time on it but now that it's done I really don't know that I care for it all that much. It seems too mountainous for my liking, not enough space for movement. Idk how cities would form or how trade would work Maybe by sea? Idk

And of course I always like to make a player map, something that would look more like a map that their character could come across. I almost like this one more than the original.

>"It doesn't look /that/ impressive..?"
>*Zooms in*
>Pic related

Does it ever demotivate you that everything seems to have already been done? Every time I think I have a original idea, I later realize it was in fact something I got from something else I read/watched/played. It seems I find it impossible to start from scratch

Long story short, I'm planning a big, campaign-kickstarting event which is the siege of a major city.
>The city must have an inner city which is more defensible than the outer city
>It will be on the edge of a large border crossing, which the enemy will cross in a Siege of Tyre-esque attack
>I want the outer city to be lost relatively quickly, but the inner city to hold out for at least months, if not years
Supplies aren't a problem because it has a port and the enemy has no real naval presence, so the city is unlikely to starve (in fact, I'm planning to make securing trade relations with another nation that has abundent grain part of the PC mission). But what can I do about this city's design to ensure that the inner city is practically impossible to take, even though the outer city will fall as soon as the enemy manages to cross the river?

And before you mention bridges, I plan to have the good guys burn/break them all down beforehand as a defensive measure.

Originality doesn't come from whatever ideas you have. It comes from how you use them. For example, Shakespeare and Homer just rewrote other people's stories -- but they were extremely original.

This If you want to write an entirely original story that has never been told before you will have to abandon a lot of concepts. For example, it already starts with the fact that your story can't have a protagonist and can't have a coherent plot. But guess what, absurdist writers have already told protagonist-less, plot-less stories. There's this Dutch novel called "Breekwater" which exists purely to break with established norms. It includes, among others, the protagonist randomly switching names because the storyteller decides that he now has a different name, and walking up a wall to get to his office because the elevator is too slow or something.

Focus on being good and memorable rather than being original. You cannot do something new, but you can add your personal twist to something that exists already.