/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

Third party is Australia, they've recently discovered weapons grade banter

The way it could work it would be if Britain and US had a later war, Britain managed to win and take a chunk of US, this create an idea of revanchsim and they don't bother bother with the affairs of Europe in WW1 and 2.

Or the big stick policy failed and the European Empires managed to beat the US and keep colonizing the Americas, that should create a gap that the US doesn't fufill.

The third adversary could France or Germany, either of them grew too powerful and managed to be the dominant power in Europe.

cpatcha: Rocade PLANTAGENET

Actually in this setting Britain is only a superpower because aliens, but shh.

Is it a war of the wolrds setting where they managed to reverse engineer the martian's tech and colonize mars?

Then it doesn't really make much sense that britain didn't manage to straight up conquer everything.

Not so much war of the worlds. but aliens crash landed, realized they were outnumbered and with weapons like railguns and nukes we could kill them, despite their technology. So they decided to conceal themselves and manipulate chosen factions for their own needs.

the aliens are divided too. and you dont give all your tech to primitives you hope to control.

Due to random rolling, I've accidently fallen into building a fantasy Planet-City setting, with magic/tech capable of low-key interstellar travel. The local Magocracy lost it's Great Power status by starting a race war and Losing, the Dusk Elves have gone extinct, the greediest Dwarf ascended to being the God of Cash-Money, and a magical plague just caused the first Aasimar ever.

This shit's so good though. I should bullshit this stuff more often.

Well, then all bets are off, its just a matter of who has the more tech on their side.

sounds a bit like the dark city movie

The original idea was to have the aliens manipulate north korea because kim is a tool who could be easily controlled.Work the norks work better?

>dark city
No Alien-Illuminati guys yet, but I'm still rolling for events covering a 5,000 year period, so anything could happen.

do read Johnatan Strange and Mister Norrell
you'll know why
damn that's a fine read

>If your setting is Fantasy rather than Sci-fi, have you given any thought to cosmology? There could be interesting things hidden above.

I'm dumb as hell I'm not even gonna try that shit, just assume the stars are there and serve the same purpose they do on earth, to make the seas navigable and look pretty when you're out with your bitch laying in some dumbass field because she needs some cutesy shit for insta

>Does your mundane spinning ball of dirt have any close neighbors?

the moon

>Does your plane have a ceiling?

I don't even have planes, its supposed to be mostly low fantasy how am I supposed to just put a fucking international airport in a castle

>Are there edges to your flat Earth?

my setting isn't woke enough for flat earth theory, I'll keep my beliefs about the topology of our planet in real life thank you

>Are they physical boundaries or planar ones?

I cant riff off this shit, have the picture that killed the last thread.

I'm too scared to stop drawing this continent and move onto the southern and western world, help

brexit, but instead of leaving the EU they're joining america

by force

Oh, awesome. What do you want to hear about, the tech stuff, the magic, the coming war, generalities, what's the itch?

>Right now I'm trying to see how I can mesh magic and technology with military strategy and see how different their WW1 would be from ours.

see too. A wizard altering the course of regular Napoleonic war

Would yanks welcome glorious Britannia into the union

at this point, you guys might eek it out

I think most blue voters would vote for britbongs to enter, most reds would say no, but a lot of neutral people who didn't vote would get swept up in the craze probably and vote for whoever, throwing in wild cards as fuck

I have trouble with my world's mythology.
>There're God and Devil, they created a world (or so they and their followers claim. with world being built around Devil as prison is good indicator they ain't lying). Humanity was created too, so the world isn't that old.
>There's also basically Cthulhu who (apparently) predates God and Devil and in best Cthulhu fashion been sleeping in a sunken city for millions of years. His servants are more ancient than how old the servants of the God and Devil claim the world to be... and they would know, they are ageless
>And then there are elves and other gods, and I have no idea where and when did they appear in the world

Should I go TES route and have no hard facts and just opinions?
Or should I go Gunnerkrigg route and have all contradicting claims be paradoxically true at the same time?

Who should be the third power, america is kill. Russia, south america, or?

New Jengis Khan Empire
make western Russia kill too, and have Mongols rise, claim Eastern Russia with all its military bases and stuff, and forge a mighty fanatical empire, led by a guy who declares himself Jengis Khan reincarnated.

South America, make it that the Hues managed to unify the latinos and Stalin merged the USSR with China, causing the USSR to be absorbed by China.

this, holy shit

YEEESSS, that would be amazing!

>Implying there is a timeline we Hues want to unify with those dirty Latino brethrens

>1km wide 3km tall Great Wall of China, outfitted with turrets and active defenses separating two superpowers
>chemo-nuclear wasteland of eastern europe / western russia as kind of the Zone from STALKER, with secret agents of Mongolia and Britain trying to sneak through in high-tech suits to sabotage stuff
not bad

Baron von Stenberg, is that you?

goddammit, I actually forgot about him! Ahaha, now I like my own idea even more!

How do you decide what races to use in a fantasy setting?

Hmm, I tend to make them numerous to give a impression of that there are many other peoples in a setting.

Just use the ones you like as long as the terrain suits them (don't put mermaids in a desert).
I personally prefer to to use a limited amount of races. But you could also just go warcraft style and cram an endless amount of races into the same world if you want all your favorites to be there.

for a few latest setting I made just for amusement (they are fairly unusable for any purpose, I guess) I tried to avoid cliches, conventions and references and just make up brand new races with everything about them justified by their settings
a few did end up resembling classical fantasy races, but only because I had a cool idea and realized too late it looked similar

>don't put mermaids in a desert
you WHAT?!
>desert in question is a sea of incredibly fine sand, that behaves pretty much like water
>in it live kinda fish and kinda whales, and also humanoid creatures with fish-like tails, skin like parchment, squinted eyes and dual bags for holding moisture, since they don't consume actual moisture and its otherwise a bit harmful to them
>moisture comes from humans and other unfortunates that they drag into sandy depths and drain of blood (and other liquids. no, not in the sexy way)
>they bring that moisture to the depths of the sea, where they use it to make kinda cement of the sea sand, creating domed chambers capable of withstanding sea's pressure they fill with eggs
>the new born sand-merrow feed first on their egg-shells, then on the dry blood of the walls of their egg chamber

Here, made it up on spot. Enjoy.

>an empire has Elector Counts, like WHFB
>for centuries, a people of only one bloodline were ever elected, so they are basically a dynasty for all purposes and intents
>the only time noble from another line was elected, he was beheaded, his castle razed, his lands ravaged, and the elector who cast the deciding vote executed as well
>since then the Emperors weren't as bloodthirsty, but still nobody dares elect any other noble family

1) Would such a political system work?
2) What would be the point of the Election? I'm not good at politics/intrigue, so I dunno what kind of power play such Elections could open

These elections would be like north korea and pretty sure that system would be an absolutist one, since the main bloodline is that powerful that can intimidate everyone into playing pretend.

Given the time, said elections could actually part of a new emperor's ascencion cerimony, which is something I did on my setting.

But I want the Elections still cause a lot of intrigue and behind-the-curtains backstabbing and power play. I want them to still affect something besides being a ritual.

Is that possible?

Kinda, if the Emperor isn't all powerful (unlike my setting) and said election perhaps have multiple members of said lineage and the electors have some sort of duty towards the one they voted, but not that won, kinda like a reverse democracy but still democratic.

But I think the detail are for you to sort out, I would love to explain how mine works, but i feel like it would a cop out when we're talking about yours

okay, I kinda figured it out
>12 Electors vote one-by-one, but votes are not disclosed until all have voted, so no one knows others' vote
>order is defined by complex ritual
>Imperial dynasty is okay with Electors voting for each other, as long as the representative of the dynasty is elected
>noble houses that were voted for (but obviously didn't win) still get a lot of respect and unofficial power
>the Election is also a huge game of chicken, because no Elector wants to be the one that casts the decisive vote that takes the throne away from Emperor and be horribly murdered for that; so its "play safe" vs "get my pawns a lot of influence"
>the complex ritual that defines the voting order is also important part of the game, as everyone wants to vote among the first, to minimize the risk of casting a decisive vote in case Emperor loses

Ok, that seems like a good system, but what are those benefits that they get from not voting in the imperial house and what gives the imperial house that much power that it can remove nobles?

How do you handle insults and vulgarity in your world?

Specifically, do you just stick with regular, modern-day insults to make it easier for the players to offend your NPCs or do you come up with culture-specific insults?

I hadn't really though about insults and vulgarity before, but in one of my recent play-tests of my setting, a player decided to play a bit of a vulgar guy who kept bragging about the size of his cock and belittling the cocks of others. Now, for this particular culture I took some ancient Greek notions of beauty, so having a large member wasn't something to brag about, so they player never managed to get the effect he wanted from all his insults and the player later commented that that sucked.

So, /wbg/, should your NPCs be offended by things your players find offensive (and the culture modified to suit if needed), or should they be offended by what makes sense given their culture? For the sake of argument, suppose that the particular culture is the one that the player characters are from, and not some exotic, far off land of weird (to the PCs) customs.

I go with the latter, its kinda funny seeing the players not knowing the context of calling humans robots.

>what are those benefits that they get from not voting in the imperial house
Hm, something like this:
1) Electors are oldest and most influential noble houses. They enjoy a bunch of privileges, etc.
None of the Electors can be elected themselves - the original reasoning being that a lesser lord would be more humble.
As such the Emperor is not an Elector himself.
Now, being recognized by Electors is a huge step up for lesser houses, granting them (unofficial) privileges, respect, etc.
Also some houses are voted for every Election, and as such exercise about the same level of power as Electors.

>what gives the imperial house that much power that it can remove nobles
Huge army, wealth, monopoly on knights (knights swear an oath to the Emperor and it is very important for them), backing of the Church.
Also many lesser houses believe that its better to have stable country under one dynasty, than invite power play and possible civil wars. Also because they themselves cannot hope to become Emperors, but can back one if shit goes south.

Yeah a think a system like that works for the system you're building

I usually don't use non-humans unless plot explicitly calls for non-humans.

I made up some flags for mars, they good?

The left one is nice, but it can be simplified

The second one looks more realistic, in the sense that it's ugly as sin, just like many real world flags.

Look up some color theory if you want your flags to be much more beautiful than the real ones.
youtube.com/watch?v=qoHhL5Xksmw

The one on the left, imo, is sick.

What seems like the best bet for the reason why an emotional vampire who feeds on rage (most are good fighters but she's more of a party girl who serves as MC of their fight club) is missing? I'm stuck between her having been kidnapped by a fish person who doesn't know what he has for experimentation, is in a Fae casino (maybe stuck but probably just there), is lost in a series of underground tunnels that house a city under Boston, is with/kidnapped by lust vampires, or is being held by the leader of a lycanthrope (humans with a spirit of rage, basically viking berserkers) biker/drug dealers who may have either grabbed her or bought her off of the other vamps by selling them drugs for their club.

So I've got this world I've been stewing about for the latter part of a year, and I've decided I wanted to get a bunch of paper notebooks and write down a quasi-encyclopedia series of the setting. The 'books' that I've got in mind now are History, People & Places, Magic, Flora, and Monsters. Is this a good enough set of topics?

You should include the armor of the english by tobias capwell

I go with the latter, usually, but both are fine if they make sense.

I default to human-only settings. The only time I use anything different is when I want to play around with something. Of my two settings involving the classic fantasy races, one is a kitchen sink setting designed as an experiment to see how many species I can include in a cohesive and sensible manner, and the second takes just the core fantasy races and turns their usual traits up to 11 to see where the logical extremes would take me.

I enjoy both, but my favorites are still the ones that just use humans.

I also have a setting in which humans are oppressed by a race of satyrs. Still not sure how that ended up happening.

I don't understand how people don't have a natural sense for color like this. It just looks better, all you need to do is look at it and you can tell it looks like shit or not.

Those things aren't nessicarily contradictions as several beings in the Cthulhu mythos exist outside of time (although I don't think Cthulhu himself does). Although to answer your question I'd probably go with the TES route or maybe even try combining the two.

>If your setting is Fantasy rather than Sci-fi, have you given any thought to cosmology? There could be interesting things hidden above.
Well aliens are invading at the moment, so the cosmology is pretty much the same as ours. But I am thinking of incorporating "the music of the spheres" in a more literal sense, where each planet has a distinct "tune", though no creature is able to hear it. I'm thinking of adding in some Lovecraftian entities from the before time as well.

Also the Gods live on the moon.
>Does your mundane spinning ball of dirt have any close neighbors?
I've been thinking of having there be a "Barsoom" near to the planet, but much less populated.

Still making this using some random tables (will share when off phone). It's kinda fucked, but also awesome. In 5,000 years this city planet has seen everything from race wars to divine suicide, global wars, revolutions, and the rise and fall and sometimes rise again of entire peoples.

Fantasy City-World. Ask me anything.

Wait. Does that mean we get the whole Commonwealth too?

Australia or Canada alone would be worth it.

What kind of pests are in your setting Veeky Forums?

Kender

Sand fleas and parasitic worms are pretty common.

I'm working on a sort of speculative evolution and I was wondering what humans would look like if they were forced to live in water

>If your setting is Fantasy rather than Sci-fi, have you given any thought to cosmology? There could be interesting things hidden above.

Tharizdun is a tragic villain in my cosmology who is trapped in a dying reality in constant struggle with his brother (ala 'The Alternative Factor' from TOS), and the gods are merely children of his brother and sister who survived the war to imprison him. Though that doesn't stop him and his followers (the evil/chaotic gods) from wreaking havoc throughout the cosmology and the Material Plane.

>Does your mundane spinning ball of dirt have any close neighbors?
On the grand scheme of things? Yes.

>Does your plane have a ceiling?
No.

>Are there edges to your flat Earth?
The first world was flat (back when Tharizdun and his kin were still around), but it was shattered during the imprisoning war. The second world is round and simply one of the many fragments of the first world.

>Are they physical boundaries or planar ones?
I'm assuming the edges are in reference to the edges of a flat Earth, so I'll answer that with no. There are the standard planes (Feywild, Shadow, Ethereal, etc.) but the planes where the gods dwell are the remnants of the first world floating in the void/space of reality. Some are even part of constellations, and appear brightest on their religious days, etc. To get to them, you essentially plane shift like normal, but you must be allowed into said domain.

What would be a good twist in a modern campaign where as a plot hook an art museum is having issues with its Greek exhibits involving the employees hearing and seeing things culminating in some going missing and others showing up dead. The clues would lead the party to a relatively new Greek restaurant run by a woman known as Miss Theno (actually the gorgon, Stheno) but she has simply been framed for the crime. I was considering having the twist be that the perpetrator is actually a lamia or hecatean hag and either may have a grudge against the gorgon.

Birbs who sing to cause explosions

wet

Read Man After Man by Dougal Dixon, you can find it on the web for free.

I have some rough ideas for my setting, please make fun of me for how lame/overdone it is or give me ideas on how to improve it.

It's a fantasy setting that takes place on 1 major triangular shaped landmass, with mutliple small islands just around each "tip" of the triangle. The center of the landmass is a massive lagoon/ocean, which is used by many of the factions within the setting for trading/fishing ports. A few smaller islands can be found within this lagoon. The climate on the landmass varies, with each "tip" having a particular climate.

The northern tip is characterized by cool temperatures, rocky plains, and massive forests of bone white and inky black conifer trees. These forests exude an aura of silence around them, and an outsiders view becomes hazy and distorted.

The western tip is polar in nature, with massive glaciers and ice flows, alongside an active volcano. Large beasts roam and hunt freely here, and many caves and tunnel networks form a massive underground cavern.

The eastern tip is a massive, sandy desert, where most water comes from 2 interlocking rivers that connect to the central lagoon. Great mountains of wind-blasted rock and fossilized trees form the skeleton of a colossal snake, and sandstorms are common here.

next post will be the races/factions, if its ok so far

What is a good item for a bunch of college students to have bought on ebay or somewhere which will lead to all of them dying of the same curse that killed its last owner? I was thinking it should be something which is either itself somewhat famous or the owner was famous.

>not just using a big ass phallic symbol for Mars

Kurt Cobain's shoes

misquoted, meant to reply to

Some questions user.
>Could an information age/human augmentation advanced civilization live near a steam(not steam punk)/gunpowder/early industrialization empire without one side obliterating the other? (side note, for background information, these nations didn't develop naturally in proximity and just one day appeared next to each other on a new world)

The netflix series was pretty good too

That could definitely work although there is the whole 27 club thing. It could probably work for a bunch of phd students.

Maybe if the information agers are pacifists or maybe if you can explain how they could have advanced to such an extent without the impetus of warfare pushing along their technological development.

You'd basically have to neuter the more advanced people or make it so the steamers have nothing they want

I just suggested it because he managed to pull the trigger on his shotgun with his toe, with his shoes on.

Not familiar with the 27 club thing

I was not aware of that.

The 27 club is a bunch of musicians who died at 27. It includes Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Brian Jones (Rolling Stones), Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison.

Continuing, races/factions.
Living in the west, the Jarls of Vali survive through frigid winters with discipline, order, and devotion to their gods. Essentially, they are a VIking/Norse derivative culture, but with 16th century technology and an ascetic lifestyle, with warrior priests occupying a privileged position as the spiritual advisers and leaders within their culture. They carve out massive temples within glaciers to contemplate the nature of the gods they follow. Hunting is the most common occupation, as very little can grow in the polar west, with fishing being a close second. Vali warriors fight in tight, well-drilled formations, wielding iron poleaxes and arquebuses and wearing scalemail, while their priests fight with clubs and spears made from the sacred ice of the glaciers, and wear little but robes of bear and moose skin. Vali government consists of a council of 6 Jarls, each for a different province within their territory. During the spring, the Jarls come together to deliberate issues that face their society, such as planning for the coming winter, or addressing the dangerous spread of beasts from the underground tunnels, as well reports of the outside world and activity from the volcano.
(lots more ahead, tell me if you want me to stop or if I'm posting in the wrong place)

mind sending a link?

It'd be pretty topical since Sound Garden and Linkin Park just got hit

Speaking of topical, I'm working on a setting after the second american civil war of 2020, where Texas seceded from the union because Trump lost his re-election to actual vote tampering. Cali followed suit, Russians backed them, shit went to hell and some nukes went off, most notably an EMP blast over the continental US. Before systems came back together, the internet lines got severed and the internet has never been the same.

I'm going to then mix that with biblical-esque urban fantasy

Just from that, what do you think?

sivatherium DOT narod DOT ru / library / Dixon _ 3 / 01 _ en DOT htm

that left one is great

Bump

Has anyone ever figured out a good way to map/design/describe a City-Planet? My current setting is basically Fantasy Coruscant, but I can't seem to wrap my head around the enormity of it all.

How would you do it, anons?

Search for medieval Paris maps

>Fantasy Coruscant
Ravnica is a shorter way to say that

I suggest dividing people in caste system, hard. You basically have monochrome areas saying "worker class slums" and ignore any finer details. Make it kinda height map, you know, the colored kind, but color signifying the level of caste living there. Only landmarks mapped are places where top few castes live in / visit.

What should I be looking for, specifically, from them?

A colored height map? I feel like the scale of a whole planet would make that difficult. How detailed would that need to be?

I know this might be the wrong thread to ask, but I still think it is my best bet.
I am somewhat struggling to find a good layout for starship stat blocks for my homebrew scifi and need inspiration.
Do you guys know any games that handle this well and can point me to them or provide examples?

I won't recommend it as a game because that's a matter of taste, but GURPS has some supplements for designing ships and they're worth a read.

A lot of GURPS supplements are worth a read even if you never play to play GURPS, shit's well researched and helps with worldbuilding.

Thanks, hadn't looked at GURPS yet

I need help with two plotlines If anybody would be willing.

The first involves a woman who's most notable features are her red hair and the hooded red coat she's always seen wearing. Shortly after her appearance two people have died days after receiving a bouquet of flowers (wolfsbane). The first was a man found with his intestines pulled out after being cut open with what seems to be a hatchet. The second is a woman who was found drowned with her stomach filled with stones. The only connection they have is that both are actually werewolves of some sort. The problem is that I'm not sure if I should make the killer actually be Little Red Riding Hood or if she should actually be a specific variant of werewolf, perhaps both.

The other plot involves a new nightclub called Wonderland which is run by a woman dressed entirely in white named Alice. I have two problems with this one, I'm not sure what strange things should be happening that get the party's attention and I'm not sure what Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass characters I should use or how to even include them.

Tweedle dee and dum are the bouncers. theres little flasks of drinks for patrons, the club owner keeps a bengal cat called chesire about that likes to watch patrons from a perch in the club, the club is known for a use of hallucinogens made by a fat dude who smokes using the same thing as the caterpillar, the hatter is a bartender.