/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

So Alone Edition

Online map-making community:
cartographersguild.com/
reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/
reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/
discord.gg/ArcSegv

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

Online map designer software:
inkarnate.com
experilous.com/1/project/planet-generator/2015-04-07/version-2

Offline map designer software:
profantasy.com/
experilous.com/1/store/offer/worldbuilder
hexographer.com/free-version/

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

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

More worldbuilding resources:
kennethjorgensen.com/worldbuilding/resources
shaudawn.deviantart.com/art/Free-World-Building-Software-176711930

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 is more important to you while you are making a setting: Internal Consistency or Inciting Specific Feelings?

Other urls found in this thread:

experilous.com/1/project/planet-generator/2015-04-07/version-2
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning
youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
strawpoll.me/13401363
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Internal consistency.

Inciting feelings is important, but not so much that you forget that you're making a setting, not a story. A story is for feelings. A setting is something to put stories in.

I see my "controversial" statements from the previous thread at least caught someone's interest. That is actually great, more than I hoped for.

>but not so much that you forget that you're making a setting
The problem I have with this statement is that a setting still IS a story. It's a slightly different way of telling story (or more precisely a bunch of stories), but at it's core it's still the same. Just instead of giving individual plot-points in chronological order, you tell stories through settings you drip-feed the audience/player randomized elements and then let HIM make the connections between them, reconstructing the story as he explores. But in the end - setting IS noting more than story/stories of your world.

It's even why people value internal consistency so much. If your setting is widely inconsistent in bad ways, it's the same as if write a story in which individual plotpoints contradict each other - makes the story impossible to follow.
Meanwhile, if you maintain consistency, then the stories that ARE your setting will start to come together because they will allow individual elements of your world to be linked together into stories reliably. It's what people need to decode that story that is your setting. It's why people often claim that if a setting is inconsistent, they can't "care" about it, or "be invested in it". Precisely because wide inconsistencies threaten the function of settings as a narrative device.

The problem I was trying to draw attention to is mainly that consistency alone does not make the actual "story" of your setting interesting. The other problem is that while consistency is needed, it does not have to be INTERNAL. You can make a story that is symbolically and thematically consistent, but not internally. The examples of LOTR, but also all mythology and folklore and magical realism books come into mind.

How do I write up setting fluff in short, quick, evocative bursts that aren't too fucking wordy or annoying to read?

Bullet points.

If anyone had a actual fool-proof solution to this question, I can guarantee that world-building would look very different today.
The answer is: if you are not a talent, skilled or experienced writer, you won't. And honestly, generally fluffing your setting in an exhaustive manner (e.g. not just completely random "trivia" info) is nearly impossible.

If you have some literary talent though: you can try and make almost anything work. I liked to do "postcards", short literary sketches that just take a random place and random moment from my setting as set it up. Like: "looking out the window early morning in the village of X ethnical group" just describing what you'd see. Or "lazy afternoon in a caravan boarding house."
Alternatively, "travelers diaries" is similar but more structured tool. They allow for the personality of the traveler and more extended narration that gives more space to expose. But they probably won't be all that brief.
Alternatively, inspired by Borges, I also tried my hand in writing faux "academic" or "official" articles: like historian's notes on certain events, reports for some secret police-like organizations, bits of transcribed interviews with inhabitants of my world etc...
Whenever you can manage to make any of those brief, evocative and not annoying depends on your ability to write well though. I think I never succeeded. Skilled writer can make all of those work. I... don't think I ever succeeded though.

I'm trying to build a sci-fi setting with horror elements, and because im autistic i cant seem to make my mind up on what the present is actually like for it. All i have is that its set in relatively near future after an AI named Osiris went rogue and caused a crisis which left a lot of things abandoned, ruined and forgotten about, because often their very existence was wiped.So theres all these pre-crisis treasures which act as dungeons. I was thinking of having Osiris be fighting something else, but it couldn't communicate to us what it was fighting for some reason and we misinterpret it as attacking us.

Should i have it be Post-apocalyptic or a World-in-recovery but still very weak with lots of things taking advantage of the crippled state of humanity?

How do I come up with a name?

>Players ask me for a map
>Spend a few hours putting one together, all labeled
>Looks like a fucking fish drawn in crayon with writing all over it

How do people in real world come up with names? Ask yourself that that and you should never have particular problems naming in your world.

Rogue AI running things implies post-apocalyptic or reverting to non-networked and man-in-the-loop systems. This was actually a brilliantly applied retcon by Star Trek: Enterprise. TOS tech is so old fashioned and clunky because Romulan hackers and AIs kept ruining the automated stuff during the war.

In terms if your setting, what adventures do you want to run? "Stave off Thogg the Mutant Warlord" is a very different quest from "assemble a crew and recover an untouched pre-Osiris ship's AI core from a wreck orbiting an asteroid. "

Option 2 sounds cool. A crippled solar system still allows for new factions, power struggles and exploration of the 'wilds' . So exploration and re-discovery type adventures. I'm not sure how far to go with the tech level of the setting really, could have it have bare bones 'The expanse' style or talking gorillas and cloned dinos level. Maybe the latter to add some whimsical elements?

bump

>experilous.com/1/project/planet-generator/2015-04-07/version-2
Does this ever generate a planet without polar ice caps? Or at least with smallish ones
I tried raising heat way up

The AI Osiris, using deep space telescopes, witnessed a battle between two alien forces that resulted in the destruction of a planet. Tracing back projectile trajectories and flight paths, Osiris quickly discovered a number of other worlds that has suffered similar fates. A battle among the stars.

Osiris caused the crises to take humanity out of the game and prevent us from expanding out into the rest of the solar system/out of the solar system with our current level of technology, attracting attention that would result in our extermination. Osiris isn't going to let us offworld until we have teched up enough to survive contact with our neighbors.

So not only do you have lost pre-crises treasures for recovery, but some of the AI-controlled factories and cities are building things. New things. Weapons unlike anything before the crises. Some are pointed at space, others are pointed at us.

If humanity is going to survive what is to come, we need to be stronger. Tougher. Able to overcome an insurmountable technological advantage against a superior opponent.

If we can't beat Osiris, we won't be ready for what comes next.

Push past your insecurities, user. The map is only a reference. Focus on the world, and let the map go.

Or post it here and maybe someone else will remake it for you.

Probably not. The arctic circle is basically always going to have an ice cap if it's oceanic, or will be ice sheets, polar deserts and tundra if it's continental. Polar winter is almost guaranteed to be below freezing on any habitable world, especially if the polar region is continental (Consider that Antarctica is so cold that it snows carbon dioxide on a cold day)

You probably can't change the limits on the generator so fat that it wouldn't generate a polar ice cap, because it has probably been designed to produce habitable worlds.

Earth was ice free for much of its existence. Crank up the temperature high enough and they'd melt.

That is most definitely not true. Polar ice coverage may have changed in surface and permanency, but as far as I know, earth was not ice-free, definitely not once surface life emerged.

Is there any difference in continental and volcanic islands other than how they were formed?

Yeah. They look completely different, have a different topology, the sea looks different around them, they consist of different materials, they behave differently from tectonic perspective, usually attack different biosphere, they grow or diminish at a completely different pace and also volcanic islands usually have volcano's on them.

Just look at UK and then at Japanese archipelago.

I once ran with a similar idea. An AI was sent along with some space colonists by Earth to purposefully sabotage them (as Earth was afraid of being displaced by a successful colony). Due to shenanigans it did not activate until after a few decades/centuries, but after that point drove the whole colony into a postapocalyptic scenario. Being set on another planet gave me a lot of room to work in, not worrying about messing up some sort of real life details.

Eh, your points are valid. It's really kind of dumb to try to pick one or the other when the two are pretty much the same in worldbuilding.

How big should a band of bandits be? Hundred? Thousands?

Bandits? Definitely not thousands. You need a major infrastructure and complex organization and logistics to actually maintain a group of thousand people who make their living by fighting or stealing. You need discipline, ranking and chain of command, you need specializations, cooks, officers, couriers for those numbers of people.

Even hundred is actually stretching it. I think what we generally know as "bandits from our history mostly refered to groups between 5 to 40 people at max (the famous Alibaba's forty bandits were supposed to be a symbol of UNUSUALLY LARGE and thus unusually dangerous group, that is why the number was actually specified - to inspire awe and dread at such large group of dangerous people).

You could argue that say - entire army regiment has deserted and temporarily turned to banditry, but those are going to be niche situations. Your average, vanilla non-marauder bandits, the kinds that harass villages or attack caravans and traders in the forest are very unlikely to be above 20, 30 people at a time. Anything more and you are basically talking about a paramilitary organization already.

Dozens more likely, unless you have some regular way to feed +100 people.

What could cause never ending storms over an ocean? My players are arriving at a planet that is plagued by the things, and we all enjoy when there's SOME science behind the shit they find. Is it even possible?

I've always heard that the larger the percentage of water covering a planet, the more storms you'll have. But that might just be a half remembered bit of dialogue from a Stargate Atlantis episode.

Well, while no storm is going to be never-ending, it's not completely unreasonable to dream up a storm that lasts for very long proportionally to human life. Jupiter's Red Eye has been lasting for minimum of 200 years now. On Earth, there is something called Catatumbo Lightning, which is not one continuous storm, but it's a local meteorological phenomenon that cause a lightning storm over the area to exist 260 days a year, ten hours a day.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatumbo_lightning
You can read more about it's mechanics there.
We know of certain semi-permanent cyclones too.

The problem is that we know that there are multiple different factors that can cause a storm, and we don't know much about what causes the kind of long-lasting storms on planets such as Jupiter or Venus: we clearly do know it's not the same thing that causes say the Catatumbo. At best we can speculate: lower wind drag caused by lack of solid surfaces on Gas Giants might explain the long-lasting storms like Red Spot (we do know that storms in general last much longer over sea than on land) but at the same time the same can't be applied to Venus polar cylones - and in fact we know that it IS THE DRAG of surface that causes the Catatumbo... So it's pretty hard to say.

I think it's best left basically to audience's imagination. Climate is a mess anyway, just state those storms as a fact and don't worry about it too much.

I was trying to explain why my world has greater storms over sea in my world and eventually gave up: just like I gave up on giving really detailed explanation why otherwise a very much earth-like planet has oceanic megafauna orders of magnitude bigger than the biggest sea organisms on earth... Just roll with it. It's not COMPLETELY scientifically implausible, that is all you need to know.

The vast majority of us aren't good writers, and even after reading hundreds of books and writing thousands of words, that won't change for a lot of us. It might come off as depressing or pessimistic, but being a "good" writer inherently means appealing to an audience greater than yourself, and unless you know exactly what your audience wants you to write in that kind of catering is an almost futile effort.

Even what one person finds wordy or annoying changes compared to another, so for some people one paragraph is already wordy, for others adding in any adjectives or unnecessary wording is wordy, for others still they can go through a full page of purple prose and still not consider it wordy. At the end of the day the only person the author can really hope to satisfy is himself.

>The vast majority of us aren't good writers, and even after reading hundreds of books and writing thousands of words
Actually, I think this is only half true. Reading a lot of books won't make you a decent writer (though it generally is required as one of several things that in combination will).
Writing thousands of words - as long as you actually also subject those words to criticism and consistently learn from feedback: that can actually help a lot. Writing is 80% craft (like any actual expression if you want it to be good) and virtually nobody has ever became a good writer without writing mountains of shit before.

I also don't agree that being a good writer inherently means appealing to some specific kind of audience. I think there are more universal criteria of quality of writing than popularity or appeal - that is, at least, popularity and appeal within limited time and space. Subjectivity of taste is something people put way too much emphasis on these days: it's a pretty terrible habit of our current generation. A wise person can identify something as good even if it's not to his liking - it is possible to seek solid (though not universal) criteria for quality in most art, writing included.

That said: good writing is just hard, arduous craft, and like everything, talent helps, but it is unfairly distributed.

Would a more whimsical approach be more refreshing then? Having it start out as some isolated bumfuck mars dirt farmers or bored earth city slickers but as you explore you find things like the husk of a Osiris mecha overgrown with flowers just leaned up against a crumbling building in flooded London, A tech cache door that wont let you pass until you answer its riddle , Velociraptors from the Moon, an underground jager fight club, a village in Yorkshire being terrorized by a were-badger. Stuff like that, all stuff that was forgotten, lost or got out during the 'crisis' that might be mystical but eh.

I'm running a campaign in pseudo Scandinavia/Iceland, the soil is rocky and barely able to fed the population, but makes for great pasturage. Though it doesn't mean much for my group as they'll inherit a small domain to lord over with very few sheep herd and next to zero ships to fish.

I intend to have them take over a castle perched on a crag, can a crag somehow hold water enough for a village and the small castle?
Was thinking to have an underground river running near the crag and the previous holder of the castle made underground cisterns to fill the castle. Sadly for them they pissed their jarl and he sent my players to take over and they'll have to navy seal their way through that underground river all the way past the walls.

Once they get in place I'll have them juggle building their settlements and doing adventurous shit like they used to, bandits clearing, bear/wolf hunting, stealing sheeps from another domain or buying them off. Right now I'm having them making a name for themselves and they pissed off one of the few jarl that would have helped them get into shape once they earned their noble titles.

>can a crag somehow hold water enough for a village and the small castle?
A crag, like most pieces of a fucking rock, can't hold water very well.
That said, you can chisel in a cistern to collect rain water. Or you can just make a bloody well right next to the crag and haul the water in manually. Considering that there is a village (presumably not on the crag itself, but beneath it), they already had done that. You don't really need underground rivers: just basic level of ground water which in semi-Scandinavian/Scotish type of landscapes should not be exactly a problem.

I've been reading too much RoTK related stuff, reading about how you basically need a 500 hundred strong army to dislodge a group of bandits from an area and even that might not go as planned.

How is it explained there?

Not any of the guys you replied to, but I have a hard time seeing a bandit group of over a 100 men without getting localized. Not to mention they need to steal enough to feed a 100 people multiple times a day. The bandit network has to be huge.

Does latitude(and temperature) determine where deserts are located, or does a lack of mountains determine where they are?

Thanks in advance

Not him, but 500 men does not necessarily mean "this is the minimum because the bandits have a comparable force". For one thing, you want a considerable advantage to ensure your losses are reduced.

But dislodging bandits is not the same as defeating another group of soldiers in a straight fight. Tracking down and cornering bandits is a manpower intensive job, especially as bandits have to become very adept at evading and harassing any force on a police action. And they will have the home advantage in the rough terrain where they make their base and/or support from locals who give shelter and support in exchange for some the spoils.

That said, a bandit group which is just some guys camped out in the woods living by robbery and extortion with no real support network is going to be pretty small as the others mentioned. They will either eventually split up, get caught or if they do grow larger morph into warlordism at some point if there is a vacuum they can occupy. Small bands are mobile and harder to find though, which is where you need lots of bodies to hunt them.

Does anyone have any experience with Medieval and Renaissance Law? Specifically Northern Italy. I'm looking for a good overview before throwing my PCs into a Thief Campaign.

Latitude has something to do with it, yes. Around 30 degrees North and South there is a line of latitude called the Horse Latitude. Regions along this line without nearby water sources (like a sea) will become deserts.

What are the consequences of multiple moons? Extremely complex and powerful tides?

Wouldn't that mean Europe should have deserts?

If you forgot where Europe is, here's a helpful reminder

There's also this little bit to consider:
youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

Ohhh, shouldn't china have a desert then?

>what is the Gobi desert
>what is the Badain Jaran Desert
>what is the Hami Desert
>what is the Lop Desert
>what is the Ordos Desert
>what is the Taklamakan Desert

But china is mountainous, does it not matter? Thanks user, you are da best

It also FUCKING big, and much of it lies on the Horse Latitude.

You're welcome.

So I want to run a game in the near future where I can rustle my friends' almonds a bit. Basically, I need ideas on how to flesh out these factions, and perhaps even additional factions. I want to be able to have the factions be agreeable in their views, but also be noticeably flawed, challenging my players.

And all of the factions will have their opinions on others. For example, Ezekiel Hobbes believes Ms. Bhatia is naive, and possibly insane(or just stupid) to think a machine could properly rule humankind. A human understands humans best.


Or the democratics believe Hobbes to be an egotistical and flamboyant pyscho, with delusions of grandeur that believes in the Great Man Theory.

Or the Anarchists just plain ol' don't like anyone and range to disappointed to actively disgusted that they'd make the same mistakes.

And so on.

Any tips? Ideas? Anything? I only just wrote it down, after musing over it in my head for a few days.

>How is it explained there?
I would assume that you are going to need 500 men to circle the area so that the bandits can't slip away, and then the woods or the mountains, house by house, hole by hole, tree-top by tree top. Not to actually fight those guys.

The problem with bandits is going to be the fact that they are going to be extremely difficult to PIN, because they probably have just a small camp or a very well hidden hide-out, and there is just a couple of them, and they will likely take residence in very-difficult-to-access terrain. Getting them is going to be like dislodging a small guerrilla unit.
The actual FIGHT with them is irrelevant. There probably won't be any: at worst they might try to make a break for it, but they are not soldiers. They won't "battle", they'll hide or run.

That said, I do know of a few cases that were a little more hardcore. In Slovakia in particular there was a castle whose lord became a "bandit knight". He was a noble that just started happily preying on and robbing people passing his castle, which happened to be deep in the mountain above a fairly important route and one of the only passages through the mountains.

I think his posy consisted of only about 20-30 men (like most lords actual companies would). But after he stopped being satisfied with just banditry, he started raiding villages and small cities.
Eventually they had to send a fucking imperial army after him, and the siege of his castle took several months.
So that is one of the cases of banditry getting a bit out of hands. Most bandits however, did not have the luxury of having their own castle though.

Potentially, yes. Though not necessarily. It really depends on how they synchronize in their orbits. It's more likely that the tidal cycle is going to have multiple stages and the tides might differ from extremely low to considerably larger.
By the way, bigger tide has actually a pretty major impact on your coast-line biomes. We once did a draft for a world on habitable moon of a gas giant, part of a pretty fucked up (but physically more-or-less-plausible) planetary system consiting of a massive gas as parent body, and then four big moons: first one was a small gas giant, second was our habitable world, remaining two were fairly regular solid moons.

Shit was fun to calculate and speculate about. There was a 14-days long tidal cycle during which the strength of a tide grew (according to estimations of your friend physicist) about six times compared to the lowest tide, and we estimated that the ocean level would shift up to 16 meters up and down during this cycle.
This meant that at the high tide, the water would flow often 2-5 km inland before retracting, creating this 1-5 km long tidal regions that had some REALLY fucked up biomes.
Tidal strip is fucked up. It's a death-trap and at the same time, insanely rich with organic material. Really amazing material to work with.

Haha, what a fucking lunatic.

Do viking orcs who plunder seem like a good idea? I've been only using generic orcs in my setting, but have wanted to include them as essentially not!Vikings for a pretty long time, and a large horde of not!Mongols, dunno if ill make them humans or elves.

It was actually very common in middle ages. Bandit knights were a massive issue especially in central Europe.
This case, however, I think only happened during the rule of Emperor Charles the Fifth, that is late middle ages. It was unusual for that time, though that part of the world was a bit of backwards hole at the time. As for the length of the siege: well, that is how sieges worked. You could hold a castle for months with just 3-5 men, actually, and there was not much the army could do with that most of the time.

I'd say no. Orcs are generally an awful idea, and any kind of noble savage/warrior real-world culture orcs are even worse. But I'm probably not going to convince you to give up on it, right?

Well at least viking orks are slightly more interesting than Barbarian orcs, japanese orcs and mongolian orcs...
Still, it's like a child of the most tired, boring cliché tropes in fantasy imaginable.

I just have no idea how to use them without the cliche going in somewhere, as it's become essentially ingrained in them.
Thought I think it would be cool to have my not!roman empire do something in order to stop the not!vikings to stop raiding all the ships and harbour towns, if I go with this idea I'll go full autism with the lore and just rip off the entire nordic pantheon for orcs.
How would one go to make such a type of orc not noble savage? I imagine they would consider themselves not savages, but the "civilized" races would no?

Also, my mongolians where to be either human tribes or elves, and i'm torn between them because I haven't given a shit about elves.

>anti-capitalist story on the red planet
Heh.
The "Anarchist" and "Communist" factions kind of overlap, unless they're specifically supposed to be Leninists or something. It would make sense to draw a divide between libertarian socialists and authoritarian socialists.

Seeing as democracy is a core tenant of several ideologies, you should probably call the "Democracy" faction something like Liberals or Republicans. They seem to be going in the "Capitalism can still work, this is just crony capitalism" direction.

There should definitely be more fascist factions though, and not just as the "bad guys". Otherwise it's just leftist wank fiction.

Not him but the problem with that is the user said he wants all nations to be friendly among one another. So I don't think he will do fascist factions justice if he puts them in for the sake of diversity.

Fascist factions wouldn't be friendly with all of the others.

I can't imagine any of these factions coexisting without some amount of violence. I think what user was getting at is that the factions are agreeable to the players, not to each other.

best answer ive seen in one of these threads.

Could we stabilize the orbit of Deimos? Was thinking of having a quest where Deimos's collision with mars has been sped up by unknown factors and it has to be stopped.

Me too, very surprised of the knowledge some anons have

Thanks, this gives me some ideas

You don't really need a full explanation for a phenomenon no one can completely explain here on earth. As points out most of the facts. It's an appropriate place to shrugs and say it doesn't matter, and if they insist just point out the facts.

Whatever magic changed it's orbit could certainly change it back. Other than that, a decent mass driver or fusion plasma accelerator could provide a minimal amount of thrust over a great enough period of time to properly effect things.

The last few times I've posted about various projects, it's been almost totally ignored. Now I want to get started on a new worldbuilding project, but I'm kind of wondering if it's even worth typing my notes up for feedback and input from the thread.

Perhaps reddit?

>reddit

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or serious

You can't ever really expect people to react to you here. It's just not the way these threads work. You can come here with a more concrete question or problem and ask for help, and that way you are more likely to get answers. But if you just present your project - well, you might get lucky, but most of the time people won't have anything to tell you. It's actually very difficult to comment meaningfully on other people's brief, short summaries of their world-building projects.
If you post here: do it for yourself. it's a good opportunity to summarize shit in your head (you'll find out that a lot of things sounding good in your head will sound a lot less good if you try to explain them to others).
Maybe you will get someone's attention: but most of the time you won't. Or if you do, you'll end up pissed off because they'll tell you something you don't like to hear, or you'll be frustrated with them misunderstanding your ideas or something.

It's not so much because people here don't care, or because your worlds are bad, it's simply because organizing a good world-building discussion and sharing space is hard as balls, and there aren't many easy ways to go around it. And Veeky Forums is particularly ill-suited for this.

Not him, but it does not have to be sacrasm. I know there are world-building specialized subs out there. And purely due to format, they seem to work marginally better than those around here.
I've done a bit snooping around those and eventually decided that it's not worth if for me, but you might actually look around if you want perhaps more reliable and certain feedback. Though I would not expect too much even there.

I'm that user and it was truly honest. I think it's a thing about format. Your post will be up way longer and you're more likely to be read by someone who appreciate your work.

I believe that's because a lot of people come here for help, more than to help. Like, only people that are actually building a setting/world would ever click on this thread. And he would be hung up on his own ideas too much to give proper feedback about the political-cultural setting of someone else, for example.

BUT, I believe you should always type your notes. It makes your ideas clearer.
Its worth a try too anyway, there has to be lurkers around who would appreciate your stuff

When I was a kid, I found an old science book at my grandparents' house that claimed part of the formation of the oceans was a single storm that lasted a million years. That might not be current science anymore but it's a hell of a story.

Yeah, Im looking at Leninism right now and that seems like a good idea to implement so that the Anarchists are unique.

Also, the idea behind the democracy faction is that no one can decide on what kind of democracy. Socialist Democracy, Republic, Confederate, and a whole slew of others. They may not be able to decide upon it now, but they agree with each other that they'll handle that once everything is peaceful.

Also also, any ideas for fascist factions? Perhaps a "Martians are superior to Terrans because of Stoicism/not living in luxury"?

Far from it, actually. It would be a constantly shifting web of relations. One month the Commies may support Safiyyah, the next they're damning her and her machine as another "elaborate bourgeois tool of oppression".

>I think what user was getting at is that the factions are agreeable to the players, not to each other.

^This

I dont want my players to go "oh well obviously we gotta fight for democracy kings bad, people good".

I want to be able to see them argue with each other and discuss what might happen if they assist one(or multiple) factions. I want them to discuss.

Also, sorry for replying so late, it's my day off and I slept in.

That would be nice, especially if the AI preserved all the pre-Fall knowledge so there's no annoying "permanent dark age" crap.

>Also also, any ideas for fascist factions?
Good old racism.
>niggers can't live on Mars, therefore niggers are inferior
>keep the red planet for the white man

>I believe that's because a lot of people come here for help, more than to help.
I'm honestly not sure of this. I have gave up on the ambition to share my own ideas around here good while ago (I usually got ignored or mad)... but I still come to these threads with the rather explicit intention to offer help or opinions.
But in the end... I find out that there is just nothing I can actually say 90% of the time to begin with. It's easier when somebody comes with a specific question, but when people just present their settings, maybe with a vague "what do you think..." kind of deal... As much as I'd want to be more helpful, I end up with: "I'm not sure how or why could I actually care about any of this, much less some details". It's either too vague or too specific, and almost always not actually in any way stimulating any kind of response that could make for a decent input.
I end up trying to challenge people on more systematic levels (hence the whole "internal consistency" discussion from a previous thread that influenced todays OP's question), but that almost always ends up making people really mad.

So the problem is not really in not enough people offering help: it's in the fact that offering help is just fucking HARD in these threads. In the end, the only thing most people around here can help is the stuff that is most "objective". Hence the discussion almost always ending up around debating river slows, "realism" of maps in general, stuff like discussing impact of moons on tides, discussing historical precedences to take inspiration from. Those are things people know how to deal with. But when it comes to someones brief desciption of their special flavor of magic emperor...

Internal consistency isn't any more important than being able to write letters in writing. It's base line, incredibly easy to do and not something you have to worry about if you know what you're doing because you'll be doing it automatically without needing to ask yourself. Consistency is required for a setting to function, but it does not and cannot make a setting good. You need to focus on making the setting worthwhile, interesting and artistically valuable if you want anything good. Consistency is the cement that paves the road and it is utterly fucking worthless if you don't ride anything on it.

The whole argument is stupid because you need both.

That may be a good idea. Could also be a good way to generate hate between factions. For example, I've imagined Ezekiel Hobbes as being descended from a black-white couple from South Africa, and I could see a racist fascist calling him a disgusting mutt.

Or perhaps a Black Supremacist faction that despises Hannibal Cromwell because he's white.

This is the future, so most ethnicities are going to be present, if not because their home countries have a space program, then at least because they immigrated to a country that has one.

Was gonna have Osiris fragments about rather than the AI itself still active, if humanity is broken the AI is too.
Both, i think you should try and maintain a feeling/atmosphere but not fucking up your own worlds logic helps present it better.

>Also also, any ideas for fascist factions?
Fascist capitalism: Look for Pinochet
Fascist: Look for Mussolini
National Socialism usually falls into fascism too, look no further than Germany.
There is also Jorge, Argentinian fascist dictator, but I don't really know much of him. And Franco in Spain. Look for those

Also don't forget to have Republics like in old Rome, and Republics like the modern USA.

Remember capitalism under Tyranny of the Majority, and capitalism under the control of a deep state (every candidate is part of the clique group, all have huge advertisement, leaving independent candidates with no chance of winning due to the high marketing the clique candiates have), and true Capitalism where everything is fine and magical.

>This is the future
SPACE FOR SPACENOIDS

Those who have their souls bounded by gravity are genetically inferior to those born free from the gravity of Earth. Bonus point if they actually are inferior and less adapted to space

>Working on a settling called Lost&Found
>A land where lost people, objects, civilizations, knowledge and so on end up from multiple worlds
>A chaotic mix of displaced technology and magics and the people struggling to survive
>Players start in a tropical island south of the mainland
The first civilization I planned on them coming across were a group of humans descended from a colony ship that flew into a nebula and surfaced in a lake, then promptly sunk. They managed to keep bits and pieces of their technology and most of their education in tact (and have used modern economics to bring down a slaver empire). More recently, a forgotten deity pranced through and gave them the ability to breath water as well as air, and from a passing elementalist, learned to magically "grow" metals underwater. They are using their newfound industry to expand and are looking for lost mercenaries to assist them.

Does this at all sound interesting?

Humans sound overpowered and I don't know where this is supposed to go.

I reckon the format-anons have it right.

Let's be honest here, a lot of the time we just get a slew of posts with little context or reason to care dropped into middle of a thread with a plea for attention.

10 posts about the how the lineage of Prince Fuckface can be traced back to the time of the War of the Badger's Nose just makes me want to scrollpast and resent the poster for the intrusion. Doubly so because it is usually crap.

Writing it up ala is a better format and looks less ugly/wall of text while containing clearly laid out information for those who do want to read it. And lo, it's generating discussion and feedback.

why not make the communists evil? they could be leninists or maoists just looking to put another dictator in power while the 'anarchists' are farmers from the un-terraformed seeking liberty from both sides?
also one aspect of an inhabited mars that nobody really looks into is the possibility of the red planet 'relapsing' and rejecting the terraforming like an improperly transplanted organ
if mars were inhabited long enough the people living there could become settled to the point of forgetting the advanced technology that allows them to live there, leading to a complete collapse when mars reverts to its original state.

>why not make the communists evil?
It would be the antithesis of what I am trying to accomplish. I want to present complicated, layered choices. I love me some good v evil stuff(have a fantasy setting that's basically Fire Emblem meets Bionicle, but whatev. HAvent worked on it in a while), but I also like to ahve stories where competing and conflicting ideas and groups clash.

>also one aspect of an inhabited mars that nobody really looks into is the possibility of the red planet 'relapsing' and rejecting the terraforming like an improperly transplanted organ

I like this idea. Could make some parts of Mars uninhabitable. "The Wastes", or something.

South African fascist movements kinda have that mentality about the colonials being braver/stronger than their European counterparts.

Transplanting this shitpoll from the scaly bara thread because I'm genuinely curious what kind of reptile man I should use.

strawpoll.me/13401363

There is also the option of using all of them at once because beast men in my setting are cursed humans. Maybe with dinosaurs split off into their own thing. Aesthetic is African if that matters.

Fun note about Franco: he was deeply religious, and very monarchist. Oddly atypical of other fascist dictators. When the ETA took out his second-in-command (as well as the entire block he was on at the time) Franco looked to putting the royals back in charge, and picked the one who said he'd revert Spain to a Catholic-Supremisist nation.

Said royal then promptly returned Spain to a secular democracy, cause he was a swell guy.

not even 'wastes' but more like random spots go from earth climate to mars climate. forests and farms turn into kill zones overnight where the air turns into unbreathable, deathly cold carbon dioxide, amd the (presumably) earth native plants are twisted into alien forms by the chemical change in the soil or outright killed by the conditions then are overgrown by legit martian life forms. humans and animals straight up die within minutes unless they are wearing space suits. assuming your colonized mars world has slid back to current day tech from the space age this would lead to death and starvation on an immense level and make warfare dangerous and asymetrical.

Where does salt come from most often? I have a medieval/renaissance trade city and I need to know where such cities got most of their salt from. Said trade city is a ways away from a salt ocean, but close to mountains and a desert.

Is there any historical precedent for mercenaries/warlords taking a nobles holdings while he was occupied?

the germanics who sacked rome had fought as mercenaries
so, yes, there is precedence, entire empires have been taken this way

There is precedent of an independent warlord taking a holding while the owner was away. He wasn't a mercenary, but he sort of behaved like one. He served like 3 different nobles, and betrayed all 3 of them for personal gain. He got executed after he betrayed the wrong noble. "You are too dangerous to live, and I can't afford you as my enemy. So you die" style.

Make more than one, multicultural race. One race for scouts, one race for soldiers, one race for farming (farming? aren't reptiles carnivores?)

Give me some ideas for minor gods

Pick Saruman, as an example.
Though he's not an orc, he does lead them. And he has some twisted industrial revolution vibe to him.
Maybe you can work that side, if you want to escape the clichés? Orcs that are obsessed with metalcraft and burning woods.

somewhat tying into this, I'm trying to create a realm for a God of Mistakes. I'm thinking that a lot of the geography would be the inverse of what would happen in the real world, but only sometimes. E.g. "While I was making my world, I accidentally made the waterfall upside down!" and a gigantic underground cave system with upside down "mountains" coming from the ceiling in an area where the surface is open plains.

On the flip side, I'm also trying to make the realm for a God of Conformity. I don't have any ideas except for "the landscape is the same (feature) for x number of miles." Anyone else have any ideas or input?

Not Gods of concepts, elements, or natural phenomena, but Gods of the people. For example, a city has its own patron God, as well as a Guild or even a family. These Gods, if they exist or have any power at all, are very small and weak, focused more on the protection and legacy of these groups then anything.

Have you ever played Fallout: New Vegas? It's a really amazing story with a similar premise of nuanced politics in a post-apocalyptic world. You could take inspiration from Caeser's Legion - while their methods are cruel and they initially seem like the "villains", you later find out that their lands are better protected from bandits and raiders, and their ideology could be better for the survival of the human race.
Meanwhile, another faction, who espouse the old ideas of representative democracy, find themselves unable to protect their citizens, and their fiat currency failed miserably. Each of the several factions have multiple different pros and cons for the player to think about, pretty much exactly in the way you described.
Oh jeez thanks user, I've never heard that angle before. user literally said he wants a nuanced political landscape that challenges the player's beliefs, not confirms them with blatant bias.