/wbg/ World-building general

Would heavy cavalry be too expensive for city-states?

Basically, the cube if filled with rocks and soil and the people essential live in tunnels throughout the cube

Physics are believable as long as everything in everyday life works more or less as expected.
The rules or explanations governing it barely even matter.

Not if they're rich enough.

that or the goods necessary to produce heavy cavalry are abundant in the city states

Does your setting have a zodiac? How many signs are there? Tell us about one.

upwards in relation to what?
also why wouldn't it just spin to create pseudo centrifugal force?

No real pastures, have to buy horses from somewhere else.

There isn't a zodiac or at least no zodiac based off a persons birth date or the as there isn't an easy way to tell time because the world lacks a day-night cycle and stars don't exist

Interesting question, I had never thought of it.

I realize there is no upwards without gravity however for simplicity's sake I call the direction the cube accelerates as upwards, also the reason why the cube doesn't spin is because a magic flows through the cube on the x axis and if the cube was spinning the magic wouldn't have the same effect

* the stars

Mine is over 1000 times larger than earth but its not a serious setting, just some autistic shit. It is hollow and has asteroids floating around the middle, the people who "built" the planet were sealed in there because by the time they finished building it the new people had arrived (ten thousand years later). So much later on in the story they were released and were super badass with advanced tech like handheld gauss rifles and powerful aremor, they killed the good guys at a 2 to 1 ratio until the good guys finally adapted.

Gravity would still be many times that of earth but the setting also has psychic Jedi / dune type shit so it doesn't really matter.

last time I posted someone said the island chain I drew in the middle looked too straight (unlike his father(s), obviously) and looked like a big hunk of shit and I should kill myself for ever thinking it looked good, so after a few days of crying and a few days of saving up for a helium tank and a mask I had an epiphany and all on my own without anyone suggesting it at all I realized I could actually just redraw it a little more skewed, so I did.

Opinions?

fyi the guy who suggested it was actually really polite

It's fine, I guess? It makes me squint.

What kind of monsters would attack the lazy city state of the catgirls? DEUS VULT fellows?

Cynocephali, what else?

Do you memebuild for your worlds? Like create fictional memes that exist in your world?

Slavers maybe. There's gotta be a market out there for catgirl slaves

yeah I just realized puush was gay as shit with the compression, this should be better even though its still artifacted to all shit.

they're still unfinished, but the idea is there

somewhere around 74% the size, but i need to get around to actually working out density and shit and choose a final number

>worldbuilding without doing this

what the fuck

looks pretty good but I would add some islands off to the sides a bit too, a linear chain like that looks pretty unnatural

Fucking dog headed people ruin everything

Yeah, but have you ever tried to get a cat to be helpful or ever teach it a trick? Getting one to shit in a toilet takes a year or more of training

Dude, what software do you use?

photoshop and illustrator + wilbur for the heightmap

I do land outlines and heightmap shit in photoshop, then process heightmap in wilbur for erson and then import it back to photoshop and use the lighting effects to render it

then just copy everything into illustrator and do all the other map elements as vectors

for that pic i just take everything back to photoshop and use the 3d tools to map it to a sphere and render lighting

Depends on the city-state. If it's Ancient Greek style, then cavalry is unlikely thanks to terrain and culture (why would someone rich enough to fight as a full hoplite instead go to battle "sitting down"?). But it could still work.

Post-Roman-Italian-style city-states could work, as would Holy Roman Empire city-states.

You can keep it constant if you adjust density.

My current setting is pretty much Earth with names swapped because it's easier then to justify rubber-banding history.

The rest of my settings were never meant to be global and mostly cover area that is around Europe-sized.

Those Middle Ages worldbuilding tools are great, but does anyone know of ones geared more towards, say, Ancient China or the like? Or, failing that, how well those tools would work for representing non-European Middle Age nations?
I ask because populations in Medieval Europe and China around the same time period were rather different.

I once came up with an in-universe game of chance called "greedy merchants".

Players would write down 3 numbers in secret and then roll a die. Whoever has greater sum of numbers wins, but the numbers that are higher than the die don't count.

However, after some calculations I concluded that the game pretty much has the best combination of 1-2-3 and perhaps 2-3-4 to counter it, so the entire game now feels lame.

How could I improve it? I was thinking about randomizing the initial pick (By means of cards or rolling more dice) and play it like poker, but probability feels too confusing for common rabble.

Is there any reason to have actual ground soldiers when a society has robots built for war?

Being a ground soldier is punishment
captured enemies are forced to be soldiers via bomb collars
Robots are to expensive to comprise the entire army

Maybe ground soldiers with a company of robots at his command

Let's put it this way: ED-209 would have a really hard time going in to a building to arrest someone.

As others pointed out, robots as we currently experiencing them are not very smart and not very agile. Also expensive.

But fragile meatbags inside is a huge limiter on performance. Even stupid robots that are agile enough to navigate the battlefield would make humans obsolete.

What about calling a single number instead of a set, but playing more than one round. Calling 1 is a guaranteed point, calling 4 gives 4 points half the time and 0 points half the time, giving an expected average of 2 points, six is 1 point on average, but has huge variation, etc.

Let the players call, or raise, bets between rolls and alternate who calls numbers first. This will create situations where a player might be good with calling a safer, but smaller, number, or situations where a 6 is the only way to get back in the game. Each single situation might still be solvable, but at least it's not always 1,2,3.

You can also insert bluffing/reading, of sorts, by having one player call a number, roll the die and see the result without showing his opponent and *then* the opponent calls his number. (Hide rolls e.g. by rolling with a dice cup and peeking under it)

>the island chain I drew in the middle looked too straight
It is, if you erased some of them it would make the chain less cluttered which would help. Make a few bigger islands and place very few small ones around.

That mountain chain on the right was made by an meteor impact?

>why would someone rich enough to fight as a full hoplite instead go to battle "sitting down"?

Except in ancient Greece it was precisely the richest the ones who formed the small cavalry element, faggot.

Wouldn't it be better to say that china was rather different from the rest of the world? Even today it works on a completely different scale.

No, not at all, specially if you're gonna use the archetype of the rich trade city-state. Even if you don't the elites of the city are most certainly the heaviest cavalry allowed by their culture, since elites will always have the better armor and fight as cavalry (or mounted infantry( as long as those things exist in your setting.

>Veeky Forums general linking to a subreddit

I. What? What reality have I stumbled into?

Weren't chariots super popular in ancient Greek warfare?

One where elegan/tg/entlemen know that reddit's toxic qualities are stronger in bigger subreddits and inconsequential in specialized subreddits?

The "other side" are people who think Veeky Forums is identical to /b/ and /pol/, they are just as wrong as the people who think every subreddit is /r/funny.

Yes, but there was a stigma to doing so. Warfare between city-states in Ancient Greece was semi-ritualized with a huge emphasis on being a hoplite and winning decisive engagements. Hoplite warfare was seen as a microcosm of the city: citizens working together to push back and defeat other cities. Until the Spartans and Athenians really started going at it, most Greek v Greek wars were rather short since long, attrition-based warfare or cat-and-mouse tactics would hurt you as much as your enemy since the skilled labor force of your city would have to be on the battlefield for so long. Fighting one major battle was preferable to this, and cities often just chose a mutually agreeable location to throw down so they could get it over with and go home. Hoplite warfare existed in a mostly static form for centuries due to this belief, which is why any change up could be so devastating (Thebes beating Sparta by overloading their best troops on the "wrong" flank, Philip of Macedon's pike-phalanx, thermonuclear warheads, etc).
Cavalry did exist, but it was seen as queer to fight on a horse when all the honour and glory went to the hoplites.

I wasn't making that up, it actually happened.

You're complaining about something inconsequential which has pretty much always been there. Having more resources available isn't a bad thing for worldbuilding.

I know they were super popular with ancient Egyptians.

Since one of my favorite /v/ things is getting a new iteration, started thinking up a setting of Not! Monster Hunter. A setting where the strongest materials to build anything with come from flora, fauna and fungi. Metal exists but it is a worse material than what can be gathered from the living things that roam the world (and is difficult to get due to said living things always around). The best materials are gathered from the most dangerous animals. Yay or nay?

Would technological advancement slow due to migratory patterns? Would communities be larger on average due to the need for larger hunting parties and defense? What other differences might occur? Literally had the idea an hour ago, so don't have much beyond what I posted.

it was made from dick-ass wizards, because they're most of the reason this map is just basically a theme park map of cool landmarks.

So was the fields of concentric island rings around that one mid-sized island in the center, which are actually the cause of part of this island chain

(I'm clearly making this up as I go

They ceased being used in actual fighting by the greek dark ages and were instead used like a taxi or a helicopter to get into fighting or get out of fighting.

In the Minoan and Mycenaean era they were likely used in war, debate as to if it was with a long spear and/or javelins or with the bow.

bumb

Pic too small so it all looks like a big hunk of shit and you should kill yourself for ever saving at that resolution.
JK I'm a huge fan of your map, but it hurts to have everything downscaled on this file. Island chain looks way better than before from what I can tell.

It's literally only a problem if Reddit links to Veeky Forums, not the other way around.

Need some ideas for a name for an ancient forest that used to host many witch's covens but now is home to a particularly nasty goblin tribe that has to constantly deal with roving undead.

Is a world with more landmass than ocean uncouth? I'm also worried that having a planned out worldmap will make PCs feel like there is nothing to explore.

Regarding the 'nothing to explore' part, here are 2 ways to do it:
Don't show them the whole map, show them parts of it.
Secondly, have them ''buy'' maps. The more they pay, the better the map is. A cheap map will not be accurate. (You can easily distort images, or just redraw it badly with exaggerated bits and pieces). That does mean you need to track where they are on the real map vs where they ''think'' they are.

My world is roughly circular and roughly 10.000km across.

yeah I posted a full res later when I came to the same conclusion
thanks, gonna start polishing it now

I'd have the monsters in a different area of the world away from the humans. It's kind of hard for a tribal society to develop and grow when there are twenty feet tall creatures with hides stronger than steel stalking around. Other than that, I really like the idea of the creature's skins being the most sought after material in the world.

So in the setting I'm currently working on (pic attached) I've been doing some work on demographics and settlement placement etc (not pictured) and I'm running into an issue.

This whole map represents the human empire made up (so far) of three major ethnic groups; the west, the east and the southern desert. However I'm finding that with such a huge area of steppe to the east and its much lower agriculture and therefore population presents a problem. I cant justify the people from the west not just taking over the whole thing of splitting off entirely. Which is not what I intended.

How can I change the climate of the east a little in order to reduce the size of the steppe and increase its population somewhat.

Oops messed up the resolution.

Perhaps nomadic societies are far more common, as following the heard of literal diamond backs is probably much more practical than staying in a single place, hoping the big ones don't find you.

What are some good reasons to limit the power of resurrection magic? I prefer reasons that make it difficult to do it right than to outright make it impossible.

Easiest is to make it an expensive ritual, or a spell that requires incredible power, automatically making it only available to mighty heroes and powerful nobles.

Obviously you cannot be resurrected to get around dying from old age or disease, you'd just be revived and die as soon as you're alive again - although of course someone who died of a curable illness could be kept in "death storage" until a cure arrives - but even then, it should be preferable to just cure people alive.

Dungeon Meshi had a pretty cool idea with resurrection magic requiring blood and flesh depending on how far the decomposition has gone, something I definitely will steal.

Another element I will use comes from a game I used to play a as a kid called Mordor 2 (which later got released as Demise) which is called an Obliette-like. Obliette-likes are kind of like roguelikes in that there is permanent character-death, but all characters inhabit the same gameworld, so you can pick up the corpse of a previous character with a new character to resurrect them in towns.
Problem is, if the resurrection goes wrong - you come back wrong. As in LOSING STAT POINTS OH MY GOD THE HORROR.

I'm sure you guys will have some !FUN! ideas too. I haven't really thought much about possession, accidental fucked up soul implants, etc. but I'd prefer to first get some reasons that feel "natural" to the resurrection process. I mean, if the only danger is bringing demons into the world, you can just only resurrect people in churches or some shit.

Oh I forgot to mention, the southernmost tip of the south desert is at about 34N

I like the life for life theme, similar to what you mentioned above about using flesh and blood to reverse decomposition but more extreme: Souls can only inhabit healthy intact bodies so once the original body dies it is useless. The only way to resurrect someone is to use another living person in the ritual "overwriting" their soul with the soul of the resurrected.

Witchwood?

Need some help, /wbg/

I'm working on a setting where the general feel is say 1650s to 1799. Low fantasy, based on Earth. Problem I'm having is thinking up a good magic system that doesn't dominate the worldbuilding but does allow for interesting things to happen. No wizards chucking fireballs around roasting redcoats by the battalion. Think a sort of Game of Thrones level of magic, I guess - it's lurking on the fringes.

So are you aiming for magic based on actual real world beliefs and theories of magic?

I suppose so, but not mandatory. Mainly I just want a world that hangs together. For example, having read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell as part of prep for this campaign, I was dissatisfied with the world building - without giving much away, the society in the novel had essentially totally forgotten magic despite it being quite powerful and accessible, for no apparent reason. And that really broke my suspension of disbelief for the whole book.

So I would like to have a world that "hangs together" as the primary objective.

Starting to label islands, expanded the map east to show more of Barbos, various improvements and developments. I don't think there will be many more major revamps/expansions to the main continent as far as the map is concerned, the map has probably crossed the halfway point.

>How big is your world, compared to Earth?
The land shown on the map (including blank useless stuff) is approximately 1.75x the size of Earth's land based on crude calculations that don't account for projection. With the land that isn't shown it's around 2.5x the size, but unshown land is immensely unimportant.

Grimwood
Greenwood (for the witch and goblin skin, but the player's won't make that negative connotation)
Darkwood
It's hard to think of anything non-cheesy with the information given. The best way to come up with names is think back in your settings history, to what people would have called the thing when they first discovered it. The name won't actually have anything to do with the Witches or Goblins or Undead, because presumably it was named for any of those factions settled there. You could get away with Darkwood for example, if the trees all had a dark-shaded bark. Maybe the forest is named after the first village settled there, so for example the people of Shire named the forest Shirewood.

software? looks pretty cute

paintNET, cursor drawn

some parts were generated with donjon and then redrawn/edited, not all of it is completely done by hand

>This whole map represents the human empire
>I cant justify the people from the west not just taking over the whole thing of splitting off entirely
I'm not sure I understand the problem, doesn't the West already control the East, since they're both part of the Empire? Or are you talking about inter-imperial territory wars? I need you to elaborate on what you mean.

trying to take suggestions of spaced out larger islands

also fun fact I've included skull island, and the island chains present in the book and movie canons of jurassic park, and plan on including fauna from both on the respective islands.

>so lazy im writing a program to generate star systems and maps for me for easy tracking of players and events
>itll be more work than just shitting one out on paper for the same effectiveness
>too stubborn to stop

This looks fucking great.

I train two of my five cats all the time.

infantry will almost always be viable until you create artificial solidiers who can act exactly like them even then you could still need boots on the ground because it's cheaper.

infantry is the core of the military because 1. they are cheap, 2. they can field a huge variety of arms easily (moreso in modern times but you said robots so yeah) they can make independent actions (considering the implementaion of small unit tactis and a "commander's intent" mentality.)
3.can move in difficult terrain easily. Mud that the heavy bots sink in?, infantry, enemy using emp weapons against the bots? infantry, Need to support your bots with something that can move in with them? infantry.

I plugged this into java with 4 players, each repeatedly choosing 1,3,4 and 6 respectively and ran 3000 rounds.
Player1: 3000 points
Player2: 6039 points
Player3: 5972 points
Player4: 2964 points
I dont think individual rounds fixes it but it is a start. I think a better idea would be you add a new element, like a coin that determins if you want your number to behigh or low
Example:
Player1 guesses 1
Player2 guesses 4
Player3 guesses 6
The coin is flipped and it lands on tails, so numbers are high
The dice rolls a 3
Player 2 and 3 are above, so they get 3 and 1 point respectively
If the coin landed on low though, player 1 would have gotten 1 point and the other two nothing
I think this still shares the problem but i dont have time to test it right now, ill think about it though

The specific details as to why are a bit beside the point thinking about it now, my apologies.

I'd like some input and advice on how to modify the map in order to change the climate in the east to increase arable land area somewhat and reduce the size of the steppe. For example would a larger inland sea help with that I'm wondering?

I could go into some specifics on the setting and why I want to do this if you really want but that's another thing entirely.

What would cause a high magic elven outpost to be abandoned, and their ghosts to haunt it?

Bit of backstory - elves conquered whole continent, then starting running out of magical energy and had a civil war.

I think the civil war would be a good reason.

I agree, but I feel like there would have to be some defining moment that means their spirits couldn't rest...

There are also cells in the city that were abandoned after the city fell, maybe there was someone who was innocent inside the cells and the spirits are haunted by the fact they couldn't free them.

>but I feel like there would have to be some defining moment that means their spirits couldn't rest
Considering that you are dealing with elf spirits and not human spirits something like that their spirits are drawn and bound to this place could maybe make some sense. Maybe only to me.

My setting is actually earth so 1:1 I guess

Its a fallout/d&d/wildcards kind of setting.. I've played a few games with it with two groups one did pretty okish and the other group nearly broke the game with their heroes antics ( was still hella fun to gm though )

Okay so I take you created this map specifically with realistic geography and windflow in mind. The windflow carrying rain and mist from the sea made the western area grasslands, while the steppeland is far removed that source of rich water, which is why it is less fertile? And you can't just add another wind direction coming from the east, because that would cause the desert to change its climate and geography as well, right?
You could add mountains on the east coast of the desert, and add a westward-blowing wind from the east, thus the desert remains arid, while most of the steppeland remains untouched. If you want to preserve most of the steppeland's climate, you can add sparse mountains to its east coast or something similar, so the water only irridates the coastal regions and you're still left with steppland just in the middle of the continent.
Another way is to add more rivers to the region, and take notes from the Nile in Egypt. The Rivers flood once a year, spreading mineral rich water over its banks, making the strip of lands running alongside the rivers very lush and prosperous, regardless of the rest of the region. That way you could keep a steppe culture spread throughout the entire region, while simply accomodating for the effects a more river-centric geography would cause. Perhaps introduce a minor culture that permanently settles along the rivers, farming them?
As you said, increasing that lake in the centre to the size of a small sea would also help alot, I'm sure.
Assuming there's magic in your setting, you can also really invent any amount of reasons to introduce arable land.

How is death treated by the elves? What do they believe would cause someone to become restless after death? Are there specific things that need to be done to ensure that this doesn't happen (ie a certain type of burial, observance, ect.). If so these can be your reasons: something bad happened, proper funerary observances weren't had, ghosts mad as fuck.

Generally speaking, the idea of a resurrection is a tremendous concept. To breach the veil of death and bring someone back isn't something to be undertaken lightly, as the veil is only meant to go one way, and is quite likely to attempt to pull you right through rather than let you pull someone out. It will resist, sometimes violently.
As it is, only the oldest, largest, and most established churches have the resources, manpower, and money needed to consider such a thing. From the faith needed, to the force of will, to the expense of reagents, to the small army needed on hand for security purposes if something goes wrong, you're looking at something like the Vatican. That makes them closed to outsiders, which means you'll need to be a part of the church first. That can mean considerable works and donations on behalf of the party first before they are welcome enough to have the idea of a resurrection considered. And even if it were to happen, you can bet the burden of debt incurred would be painful. Expect to spend a few months wearing the church robes and serving as part of a guard in dangerous places to work off your fee.

Not sure if this is the right thread but do you guys know of some random generation tables for worlds? Specifically sci-fi planets and their inhabitants.