/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

As far as the rain shadow goes, yes. Just remember that things tend to be slightly more complicated, so you should not follow it religiously. Wind does not blow in just one direction, and scale and size matters.

I'm less versed in the issues of medieval demographic and trade route routines, but it seems like more-or-less following the same pattern: it's a BIG generalization, but it should be ROUGHLY right.

Thx user

Would an ocean city be a cool enviroment? What material should i hand wave the city is made out of to avoid seawater erosion, 'plasteel'?

What the city is made of wouldn't be the big issue, your main problem would be mechanical devices and electronics. Prolonged exposure to ocean environments fucks them up.

Whys that? Moisture in the air?

I would not worry that much about materials. We have ships that have been afloat for many decades. Sure, repairs and maintenace is going to be a bitch, but it's not the biggest problem if the city keeps on suck up resources from various sources.
Otherwise, it's a cool-as-fuck environment. I have a soft spot for floating and under-water cities.

I have concept of very vague similarity. It's not a city, but a floating biome - an artificial buoyant island that was once concieved as an ecological experiment (and an attempt to dodge certain frustrating legal issues). It's a bit weird, because it's almost entirely organic: consisting mainly of beds of floating algae and sea-weed-like organisms, held together by "framework" of entangled roots of giant mangrove-like trees. Within that, insanely complex ecosystem of organisms - from bacteria past fungy to trees and bugs - all basically specifically created to help to keep the ecosystem alive. The surface is covered with forests and gardens that could provide potentially massive amount of food to those who could keep control of it.
It ows a lot to Miyazaki, namely his "Laputa: Castle in the Skies" and the Eastern land of Gods" from Shuna.

But it's a soft-science nightmare though, in a setting where magic does not really exist.

Salt and potential direct exposure to water would be my biggest bet for biggest problem.

Sea Spray, you get a mixture of salt and other compounds floating around in the air near oceans. It will get into everything and is hell on electronics and engines.

I love that eco-isle idea dude, i suppose i can handwave most of these issues with "its the future, and robots" since im tryig to make my settig a bit campy. I have guys who can manipulate hard light so i cant really go that hard sci fi

uh, thanks. My setting is trapped beween this weir need to feel archaic and "fantastic" without using too much of already used fantasy tropes. But along the archaic mythological feeling, the logic should actually be driven by some soft-science things that are hidden to the background mostly and most people aren't aware of them or what they do. I aim for that Miyazakian anachronisms he uses in his early works so god damn well. My aim is basically to create fantasy type of stories from soft-sci-fi and post apocaliptic elements: all of them woven toghether that the audience would never be quite sure which one of the many options it really is. So I'm trying to avoid the idea of "oh, it's genre X so now I know what to expect but meanwhile produce something that is genuinely interesting.

I think I would have been doing a better job if I did not start by ripping of one Miyazaki's story verbatim and used it at the core of the whole world. No I cant remove it, but, yet it betryes my black consciousness like crazy.

That'd be a fantastic environment. If I ever run a sci-fi game, I fully intend to include a world that's almost entirely ocean on which most people live on seasteads. These would range from full-blown cities to small floating independent communities.

As far as materials go, why not just have it be well-maintained?

Did you guys ever try creating worlds in universes where the laws of physics are completely different from ours? Like Unicorn Jelly did?

not really, no

Do any cultures in your setting have what would be considered a "pop culture"? Are there any songs that are currently popular? Books? Plays? Movies?

I like to defy the laws of physics as I please, but be realistic with the consequences. Like laying out rules which do not obey realism, but having the world and characters handle them in realistic and logical methods that can be taken seriously. Unrealistic science is fine as long as there's realistic utilization of it.

I suppose it can't hurt to ask you guys. A recent thing I did in a game really riled up one of my players, and I'm trying to figure out if they have a point and how to mollify them.

The premise of the campaign is that people living on a few small islands off the coast of a big old fantasy continent returning to the mainland a few centuries after an apocalyptic event which made returning impossible and seems to have wiped out all civilisation that was once there. I'm going for a mix of new frontiers and rediscovering what was lost.

As part of this I set up the hub town for the campaign, First Light. A town built around the base of a large, apparently magical lighthouse, the flame of which beckoned explorers from the islands to the old continent, basically a thematic representation of the campaign as a whole.

Initially it wasn't much, just a few driftwood huts inside a palisade, slowly shifting to stones and bricks, as well as better quality wooden constructions, based on the areas the players manage to clear of monsters and make available for resource gathering.

The trouble is, one player just cannot stomach that the town exists, arguing that it should be further inland, that it shouldn't exist at all, that the structure doesn't make sense, and I just... From what I've gathered from basic research, what I'm doing isn't inconsistent with a lot of coastal frontier/colonial towns, but even without that I was more thinking of it as a thematic thing than a realistic one.

This is the first time I've really had a worldbuilding aspect like this strongly called into question, so I'm not sure how to deal with it.

Tell him to fuck off and come up with setting and campaign his own damn self, if he's so god-damn smart.

If he's getting that tushy-troubled about one little town in your setting, he needs to either leave, or stop complaining.

In fact, give him that ultimatum if he does it anymore.

Please rate this, /wbg/. I know I am a twat for dumping a PDF but it's fairly short and I would appreciate some feedback. I made it as this sort of ... just, weird world, but not too weird. I used to play a lot of Garry's Mod while listening to BvDub and other really ethereal mystical sounding ambient music. See video below for a lot of what I would do. It was comfy as hell for some reason.

streamable.com/lb8cs

But anyway, a couple years ago I started running a post-apocalyptic campaign, pretty basic generic world, but without any fallout influence because I've never played fallout. I've been told it's a bit similar to Stalker or Metro 2033 but I've barely played those games so I couldn't say for sure. I just want to convey this feeling of unease, like some just plain freaky or unsettling monsters, effects (like a bus randomly sprouting legs and coming to life, or a rift to nowhere opening suddenly). I don't know, I have this strong feeling for the world I want to create but I don't know how to put it on paper without droning on endlessly. I also plan to make one of these for Maine rather than Russia, with cozy lighthouse fortresses watching the sea, monsters hiding in the alpine forests, haunted acadia, that kind of shit.

But yeah, just give me your thoughts. It's meant to be a "soft" document that outlines some factions and creatures but doesn't really give specifics on locations or anything.

Honestly dude I really like that setting. The light house, the post-apocalyptic shit, for some reason it reminds me of that h2o Rust-type survival game that was on steam early access where you ran around rocky islands and swam and shit. i don't know why. There really doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it and it sounds like a fantasy setting so you can make up magic bullshit to protect it from storms or reinforce the ground. I mean if it was realistic setting I could see the complaints. but otherwise not really. Did he have any specific complaints?

Well, I have mentioned storms messing with the town, destroying some of the early driftwood shacks and killing some people, but better building materials has basically solved that problem. The lighthouse does provide a degree of protection, although this isn't something anyone explicitly knows yet.

They were things like... There's a forest about an hour away so why not just move everything over to the forest instead, I mentioned fields nearby and he went on a short rant about soil quality near the coast, I mentioned clay and he started complaining that I'd described the wrong type of river for that. Just... Lots of stuff I didn't really care about but I'm wondering if I fucked it up.

The guy is our usual GM, which makes the situation a bit more complicated. I think it's just that his usual style is a lot more details and realism focused, whereas I'm more happy working with themes and concepts rather than fretting over the nitty gritty.

He probably feel jelly of your skillz and is trying to make you look stupid, no joke.

Just make up some kind of fantasy crop that loves high salt content in the soil. Call them salt turnips or sand potatoes or some gay shit, I don't care, it will give the setting character. Tell him to fuck off, you didn't fuck up anything.

> I think it's just that his usual style is a lot more details and realism focused

Well if he's helping you flesh it out that's fine, but if he's trying to point out plotholes...well.

>why not move everything to the forest?
>well... that's a good question. you know the forest is full of dangerous beasts and it's safer near the coast

Then fill the forest with monsters at least 4 levels higher than him so when he goes out there to fight them he gets his ass rekt.

Okay maybe don't do that, that's a bit passive aggressive, but the point is, you are in control. Hell, I have let MUCH worse bullshit slide from a DM because I have respect for him trying to make the world a certain way. Your idea is cool, probably way better than his gay-ass setting.

And I'll be honest, as a forever DM myself, it's hard to stop from criticizing everything. You've been running the game for years, you end up lie a grumpy old man who always knows the better way to do things and it's certainly not the way you're doing it. But at least I keep my mouth shut about it, god damn.

>What material should i hand wave the city is made out of to avoid seawater erosion, 'plasteel'?

Coral.
Erosion is not an issue, because it just grows back at a faster rate than it dissappears.

What are your place naming preferences /wbg/, real life names, names in English or names in a made up language?

Suppose I have a town called Zmeygrad or something, which in the language of the people there means Dragon Town, and suppose the player characters speak that language natively. Would you introduce that town as Dragon Town to your players, since that's what the name means or use the foreign sounding name and explain the meaning of the name?

i always figured proper nouns should be conlang'd as they provide flavor without taking away from the story

some of them can be translated if it's not too jarring, i.e. you can have zmeygrad but also "Tsar's Hill" or something

Ainu culture?

How common should magic be?

On the one hand, I would want my players to be able to heal their injuries without resting for weeks, to keep the game flowing.

On the other hand, if healing is that accessible, how do convincingly present a feudal fantasy world without having the peasantry population-boom out of control?

Can magic even be considered supernatural if it's that common?

>Erosion is not an issue, because it just grows back at a faster rate than it dissappears.
...So every wall gets more and more misshapen as time goes on?

Those clothes are clearly inspired by Ainu (Emishi) people of Japan.
That similar tradition of tattoo's existing among many societies: Henna has been used across the entire Middle East and India for temporary ones. I think it was Tupi-Kawahiwa tribes in South America who had some really interesting facial female tattoos too.

The picture is annoying though: the Joker-like tattooed smile looks just stupid.

>misshapen

Unique user, unique

Working out the answers to 'Why hasn't this been invented' for X punk settings is difficult desu

What reason does a secretive group of assassins who only perform a hit every few hundred years, and each hit has changed the course of history, have for killing a reasonably small time gang boss who's only really dealing in drugs and extorting people but has only got control of one medium-large city.

My first instinct is that it's not about what he was, but what he would become. Some degree of foresight or awareness that, due to bloodline or aptitude or simply being in the right place at the right time, he would be able to rise further than anyone expected and bring crime and misery to huge numbers of people, perhaps even becoming powerful enough to affect politics, with disastrous consequences.

The question of why aside, my first thought about a group of assassins who only perform a hit every few hundred years is that they must be really incompetent because they lack practice. There's only so much training can accomplish.

Hmm, this is an interesting idea. The players have killed this guy's second in command, but have to lie low as he's bought off the city guard. I want them to find his hideout, and fight his way to him and then meet an assassin standing over his freshly killed corpse who leaps out of the nearest window before they can react.

My first idea was that the assassins wanted to get the attention of the players because of what the players could do to the game world, but maybe it really is about this gang boss himself...

They are part of a really long-lived species of Elves. Each of the assassins is several thousand years old, and to them a few hundred years is not very long.

Why not both? Assassins of fate rarely take an action for a single reason.

So I read my character notes about him.

"Where Hjorr came from is unknown, though it is whispered that he is an escaped dwarf criminal from Blackholde where he would surely be hanged for crimes against Dwarfdom if he were ever to return , though he never discusses his past.
He 'doesn't trust' ponies, prefers hard liquor to ale, and gets unreasonably angry about the number 235. No one knows why."

Maybe his past caught up with him. Perhaps this crime is not just some vague atrocity. Maybe it was his crime that is so terrible, no one must ever hear about it.

Say they live 5000 years and make an assassination every 200 years, that's 25 assassinations split over who knows how many members, those are rookie numbers.

Honestly, you can do whatever you want since it's your world, but if I were doing that I would either turn them into a cult that does ritualistic murder as a group through meticulous planning and/or hiring competent people (something like the classic Illuminati, a group of rich people with a purpose), or a secretive group of assassins who hire their services out at considerable prices and never work for free, but there's a rumor going around that sometimes they will make a hit for free, and sometimes they might refuse to do a hit for reasons known only to them.

Seems more plausible that way to me, but in the end it's up to you, not trying to tell you how to run your game, just offering a suggestion.

>or a secretive group of assassins who hire their services out at considerable prices and never work for free, but there's a rumor going around that sometimes they will make a hit for free, and sometimes they might refuse to do a hit for reasons known only to them.

Yes, good point user. I suppose if they're really good assassins, they only get linked to the murders they want people to know about (for whatever reason), that makes more sense too.

Assassins' seer reveal the local boss to play an important part on the demise of their home country if not stopped in time

Gang boss puts etheric substance on his drugs thanks to his alchemist right hand man that makes them prone to violence and threatens to throw kingdom into anarchy

Gang boss is in reality an extra-planar entity trying to get the funding necessary to build his own paramilitary order that will end the line of the grand master of the assassins for good, avenging one of his brothers who fell by his hand

Boss is controlled by a hidden figure who is planning to get enough gold to fund the wars of the king and bankrupt him and then bail him out of debt, aquiring his indebted kingdom who will only nominally be the king's.
He already did this in the past and succeeded.

The gang is in reality a cult devoted to some unspecified deity (in reality a major demon) who gave to the gang's boss the magical recipe of the drugs he's selling in a vision and that will make everybody who takes it into one of the demon's thralls until the demon himself will be able to cross the planes from his prison when enough of his thralls will sacrifice themselves in the Night of the Last Light.

He could make them into retired heroes that secretly join everytime some catastrophic event is unfolding and form what would basically be an elite deathsquad to take out some very dangerous fellow.

Are most RPGs just strategy games with a thin, pretentious veneer of 'storytelling r a art' overlaid on top?

In all the groups I've ever played with, everyone has nearly always focused on overcoming the challenges the DM presents as efficiently as possible. Sure, their characters had some individual quirks (most of which could be described as 'psychotic'), but they never let a character's established personality get in the way of gaining the maximum benefit out of any given situation.

Rough, wrong-side-of-the-tracks scoundrels turned into polite, cultured aristocrats as soon as the party engages in any sort of conversation with an authority figure.

Should I just take this into account when selecting and/or tweaking a system, or planning for an adventure? Should I simply assume every character is a manipulative social chameleon as a legitimate part of their personality?

I could always try a stricter DMing routine to try and make players really get into the spirit of roleplaying a character, but that would just annoy everyone involved. I would feel like I'm herding cats, and the players would feel like they're being told how to have fun.

I'm better off setting up a campaign as a strategy game and keeping the RP aspects fluffy, right?

Pic unrelated, I've barely even looked at what I selected.

maybe your groups are shit.

Shit for narrative-driven games. Whatever. Different strokes for different folks.

I might as well set the games up as mostly strategy and develop an overarching narrative for my own enjoyment.

Just shit mate.

see

I fail to see how this is related to worldbuilding.

it's not, it's b8

Setting up the narrative for your campaign isn't worldbuilding?

Relatively mundane. Automobiles, trains, boats, aeroplanes and blimps. I haven't decided if horses are gonma be around or replaced with something.

Not unless they serve setting in way. I mean, square cube law mostly doesn't get enforced.

It really depends on what sort of feel and game you want from your setting. Grittiness, etc.
You can make magic commonplace but supernatural, I suppose. For example mortals/player races get really rarely into magic, and when they do, it is more subdued kind. However, there are ton of magical fauna/flore (ex. fey).

Time travelers, surgical history manipulation.

Not really, no. The narrative is the story, not the world. The game and the player characters are irrelevant when building the world and the setting.

roast me faggots

Font name?

Dungeon.

Needs a north arrow.

not so bad desu

have five

>probably Florida
Truly a fate worse than death

I need help imagining a viable species that don't look like a modification of earthly stuff.

Anything I can imagine is either exoskeletal/endoskeletal, with "head" housing most perceptory and cognitive functions, as well as a mouth, and a body with a number of appendages, below it. Or a squid.
When I try to invent something else, I can't think of anything other than mixing those around ("let's have mouths on appendages. and cognitive centre in the butt for protection.") which is
1) not really original
2) obviously just a mix of an earthly creature's traits, which is even more glaring than a regular earthly creature
3) I have serious trouble imagining how the fuck did it evolve to end up like this

can anyone point me at some really original creatures or give me some guidelines to make my own?

Thanks, I like it. I use AVQuest usually but that fits too.

Now with rudimentary civilization outlines.

82228947 days on MSpaint

radial symmetry that evolves into asymmetrical body types
nothing is truly original, mathematics are universal, even if we meet aliens one day they'll probably resemble /something/ on earth
try to make your traits make at least a half-assed amount of sense (evolution is like a low INT high WIS character playing a foreign videogame, it understands the goal and the philosophy of the game but doesn't know what half the dials do and everything's written in moonrunes).

also, talking of biology, is it plausible for a living being to derive energy out of radiation instead of oxygen? say, living in radon-heavy atmosphere?

Pretty sure it is. See that mold in Chernobyl that feeds on radiation

oh great! that solves a lot of problems.
i'm so tired of "all inhabited planets and worlds have water and oxygen" cliche

society advanced a few centuries and we get this horseshit, final verdict?

What if a planet was kinda like Earth but somewhat closer to its sun? I imagine it would make the athmosphere warmer and capable of holding more water vapor. That in turn would make weather more extreme with regular rainstorms, crazy clouds and powerful thunders which in turn would make aviation much trickier.
Am I wrong?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus
Yeah, just dial it back a bit if the planet is in the habitable zone for human life.

Venus is crazy with what its athmosphere is made of. I was going for similar air to the one we breathe

>Yeah, just dial it back a bit if the planet is in the habitable zone for human life.
Already covered that.

I've seen that. That's a ton to dial back

How could you run a nation like a mafia boss?

I'm participating in a Nation RP as an island roughly the size of Ireland that is a haven for pirates and criminals. The nation recieves taxes as "tithes" from criminal enterprises, as well as regular citizenry, and governing is mostly handled by a pretty standard feudal system. The island's ruler exerts his power through a syndicate under his control, a network of spies and other agents loyal to him. They infiltrate criminal enterprises based out of the island or ones that at least make port there, and act as both comissar (reporting acts against the ruler and ensuring tithes are paid) and union representative (using clout and resources from the syndicate to bibe, make bail, etc).

This is the simplified version of the concept, avoiding going into explaining magic bullshit and such. Thoughts?

Pretty much the only thing you have to dial back is the CO2 content of the atmosphere, then you'd have a world pretty much exactly what you described. The other shit's only in the atmosphere because all the water boiled out and Venus got so hot that the rules went out the fucking window.

Look up what Italy was doing in the 14th-16th centuries.

From what I can tell, the best takeaway from this would to have control over banks, and/or have the island be a financial hub.

Bingo.

Add merchant princes with privateer forces and mercenaries to complement defensive militia armies to preserve order, guard infrastructure and keep the taxes paid.

Hmm, my less than adequate knowledge of economics will have to suffice for working this out, but I can probably manage.

I'm mostly trying to reconcile how to blend Florence with Tortuga (which my island most currently resembles), and the banking families with the syndicate I mentioned, which is in equal spades a cult made up of the ruler's descendants.

>I'm mostly trying to reconcile how to blend Florence with Tortuga (which my island most currently resembles)
Easy, poor folks are kept in line by being given lax laws so long as the taxman comes home with full pockets and people don't damage the larger structures of society. Murder is common enough but kept in line (well, in line enough to stop a civil riot) because everyone has swords and you can hire militamen and freelance adventurers to just wipe out the Mong Torell Gang who keeps murdering your business partners because you can just absorb their brewery into your business empire.

>and the banking families with the syndicate I mentioned, which is in equal spades a cult made up of the ruler's descendants.
Spice trade dominated by syndicate organization, one or more spices are of Melange-quality importance to those with the cash, eventual syndicate absorption.

The cult is because they have people eating a fuckton of hallucinogenic spices and manipulate them into worshiping figures and philosophies that benefit them.

Could be worse.

Now, don't be a total faggot and push it forward for another 500 years and show the Napoleonic Era.

Then push another 200 or so and show how industrial revolution looks like.

>The narrative is the story, not the world.
Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot these don't affect each other in any way.

Mountains look fucked up.

Hey /wbg/, how do I make huge and fancy settings the norm in my world? I want every city/town to have something that makes them high fantasty tier as far as their design goes, does anyone have ideas or recommendations on how to achieve this?

Like other guy said 80s-90s sci fi anime. There's a bit of a Japanese look with their armor sans the helmet.

AVOID APOSTROPHES. AVOID APOSTROPHES. AVOID! Even though I've come across them in some real languages transliterated (Tuareg tongue off the top of my head), they are danger-zone for fictional languages as they seem try-hard, cliche and hokey as fuck. They do serve to give you a sense of rhythm or spacing, "Kaldorei" vs "Kal'Dorei" has a pause, but I'd rather have no apostrophe and just leave it up to the reader than an apostrophe and it look stupid.

For your example, if they speak the language I guess it could be Dragon-Town but I don't see harm in Zmeygrad.

You do not need to answer it. "Because it wasn't invented yet". A fictional setting does not follow the same trajectory of development or the same tempo as our world. There's no reason gunpowder had to be discovered when it was. Likewise we could have figured out steam with Hero of Alexandria but it took us almost 2000 years (1800?) to do so instead.

page 10 save rave

what's the average penis size in your world? feel free to break it down by race.

No.

BIG
HUMAN
COCK

3d6 cm.

Rolled 2, 6, 1 = 9 (3d6)

Rolled 3, 4, 2, 4, 5, 3 = 21 (6d6)

should be 6d6 t b h