/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

My various settings had things cut at some point or another and at least three of them underwent massive ground-up rebuilding at some point.
It's mostly due to being ideas I no longer like and that didn't come up in campaigns or stuff I know will never come up.

>Have you ever had to cut content out of your world? What was it? Why?
Fuckton, I basically cut most of what I started with. Races got slashed the most, going from potentially about six or seven sapient life-forms to pretty much two-and-a-half.
The setting originally contained - completely non-human sapient life-forms:
>Sapient large termite-like insects
>Highly intelligent and social sea mammals not really looking anything like humans, forming simple societies, highly skilled in tool use, sometime living in symbiotic relationship with the fishermen tribes

Plus "human breeds" (basically various sub-species"):
>Tall Ones
"giants", people who looked essentially exactly like real-world people suffering from gigantism and slower metabolism: often reffered to as Meek Giants for their cautious, conflict avoidant nature. Heavily inspired by Aldiss'es Non-Stop
>Old Ones
Men who had in the past gone through transformation turning them near immortal. They were heavily inspired by Borges'es short story "The Immortal" and some characters from the manga Nausicaa: most of them are little more than breathing mummies or statues.
>Pale Ones
Humans adopted to long term life under ground, inspired partially by naked mole rats s social organization
>Infans
A rare breed of perpetually child-like people, once "breed" essentially as a slave-race. A species pretty clearly set to die out soon, as they were at a perpetual evolutionary disadvantage.
>Moon People
Gracious, slightly grey alien-like people allegedly coming in "from the stars".
>"Celestials" (formerly known as Gardeners)
Humans transformed beyond recognition to function as safekeepers and workers on a giant floating island ecosystem once designed as an ecological experiment, now essentially living it's own life. Celestials were inspired by God People from Shuna's Journey (pic related), but less green and slightly more human-like.

Out of this list, only Tall Ones, Old Ones and Celestials made it into the final cut, and Old Ones were sterilized in the process, so they don't really count as a race anymore.

Mermaids - the "smart" sea mammals are still under consideration, but more on a level of being slightly above dolphins than an actual sapient race.
Infans were cut because they felt like they might be way too close to my magical realm, and I did not want to risk going there.
Most of the rest were cut because I never figured out a way to make them feel meaningful or necessary to the settings. When I realized the race does not communicate some kind of strong feeling or sentiment, when it's there just for variety sake, I abandoned them.

Outside of that, I abandoned some entire kingdoms or plot-lines when they did not feel interesting enough, abandoned several different iterations of my map (I assume even more will be abandoned in the future), cut several different cultures, including one that was based around a worship of an old, abandoned airport (I swear to god I wrote that segment before playing New Vegas) and it's airplanes as gods.
Air-ships were originally supposed to be in the settings, but got cut when I felt like they are cheapening the world and travel in general.
Telepathy and psychic powers were cut too and with them, "talking" animals.
I also cut a concept of stronger tidal forces causing much bigger tides over a slower cyclus, periodically flooding MUCH of the world's coasts. I'll use that in another setting, it caused way too many problems for coastal economies.

Ultimately, I suspect the list of shit I cut to be much longer than the list of shit that actually stayed in.

>Have you ever had to cut content out of your world? What was it? Why?

I basically had to gut every civilization because I realized I was handling agriculture incorrectly in a world where the average temperature was about 30 degrees Celsius.
I then had to basically throw or forget everything I was using that was based on temperate/northern agriculture, hit the books, and relearn as much as I could on tropical & hot climate agriculture.

I've learned a lot, but I can't help but feel there's gaps in my knowledge that might be more obvious to someone who's just LIVED in a tropical climate since they'd know all the obscure, undocumented, personal fruits, vegetables, roots, beans, n' shoots.

(OP) #
On cutting floor lies things that just didn't work, didn't fit or were just pain-in-ass to work with. Not all ideas have to be in one setting.

#
Can't think any from top of my head, but I figure that when working for new races for rpgs (playable ones in particular) you want to ponder some questions like relatability, playability/viability, fluff, etc.
Lot of races in rpgs are mostly due to their renown and popularity (people wanted to play Hobbits from LotR), so it is hard to introduce new ones, lest entice players to play one. I think they should be introduced relatively simple, as NPCs in games, and see how they are received.

gracjantriglav.blogspot.com/
This is so oldschool in design, details and even the way how mapping is done, it's a wonder the guy does it unironically or without even realising the hell he's pulling

>Have you ever had to cut content out of your world?
Of course
What was it? Why?
I think the biggest world-builing project I ever participated in was for a browser-based RPG, which as a main selling point had a detailed setting that was GURPS-ish in nature - you could as a player pick only just bare basics of the setting or go really fucking deep to make a character anchored and grounded in the setting to the T.
Thing is, said project was an on-going two year effort and cointuned to be made for another 5, changing and evoling. When I came to the board as the "fresh pair of eyes", I've convinced everyone to start out with booting most of races out, not leaving behind any single "classic". Mostly because they simply didn't mesh at all with rest of the setting even at that stage of works.
While working on it I first introduced idea for specific religion, all the influences of it, socio-economical impact yadayadayada only to remove it myself few months later, realising half of the game was dangerously close to turning into a theocracy, which didn't suit the mood at all.
Once we laid down most of geography, we handled it to befriended Geo students to work out climate model for it. Turned out third of the map on global and almost half regional maps needed a serious rework if we wanted to get what we needed.

Also,on semi-related note, one of the guys in the workgroup ended up enrolling for Sinology, so he could better model few ideas he had, despite the setting lacking any sort of Not!Asia or Not!China.

Good times.

>Have you ever had to cut content out of your world?
There was an entire continent filled with dragons once. Don't know if it's still there.

>Got any specific questions?
It's more that I want to read some other perspectives to help me work and try new ideas, than that I have any particular questions.

What is wrong with that author?

>Have you ever had to cut content out of your world? What was it? Why?
I'm debating whether or not to do so right now, actually.

Typically, dragons in my settings are one of two things:
1) Super intelligent, magic-using doom on wings, with one's arrival being on par with a surprise attack by the Huns/Mongols.
2) Big, scary, flying lizard that breathes fire, but still just an animal.

For my current project, I'd like to go in a slightly different direction.
Rather than making them big lizard-like creatures, I want to try designing a race of shape-shifting, Lovecraft-esque super-beings who have no 'true' physical form.

They're closer to being gods than mortals, and their power equals, and in many cases surpasses, even the greatest of demon lords. They can become just about anything they like: humans, orcs, dwarfs, lions, tigers, bears, lizardmen, demons, etc. They also have no fixed gender, and can appear as any sex that strikes their fancy.

The "big, flying lizard" thing is just a persona they can choose to adopt when striking fear is important. Essentially, they invented the idea of a dragon by combining things most mortal races find to be ether horrifying or worthy of great respect. There would be no way for nature to create something like an 80m long, fire-breathing mass of scales and genocide, but they can use their power to become one regardless. In ancient wars they used these forms often, so the common concept of their race became synonymous with that form.
However, they really don't have a set "base" physical body.

The idea would be to use them as an NPC race, typically as a BBEG, and as an interesting bit of lore. I love the idea that any random shmuck my PCs meet on the road could conceivably be a walking atomic bomb.

That being said, I'm worried that it's a bit too much, and too weeb-y, so I've been trying to decide whether or not to cut 'em and use one of my regular flavors of dragon.

Minor update to my battle diagram, having added some archers on the cliffs.

I really like this idea. About the ancient wars, were they more numerous then, or have they always been rare? Also, what justification have you come up with for why they haven't taken over the world, if they are that powerful?

>An opposed medieval beach landing

Whats your justification for this in world?

Why would anyone ever land and try to fight instead of simply sailing a bit further down the coast and disembarking there?

So I'm having a small problem with creating a scenario that gets my players to work together in game. I'm running a small scale Boshin War era campaign where the party is made up of a Shinto priest, a geisha, and a mid level samurai. The problem is that I'm trying to be semi accurate when it comes to the caste system and that means there's no real reason for the three to work together.

The hook that I have planned so far is that the geisha and priest both witness a murder and are jailed as witnesses to the crime. The samurai is sent in to find out who the murderer is and meets up with the geisha and priest. Together, all three work together to solve the crime.

Now that's what I currently have planned for an introduction to the setting and as a trail leading towards a wider conspiracy that I want to lead them down. The only issue I'm having is that once the initial crime is solved the samurai has no reason to continue with the other two.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Also if anyone has any ideas for side quests in a Late Tokugawa era/Early Meiji era Japan that would be awesome too.

I'll be perfectly honest, all justification has to be retrospective. The idea came first, then then reasons. However, I have come up with some explanations since, usually involving a) storms, b) an enemy fleet blocking their exit, c) supplies, d) the only bay on a rocky coastline.

I admit I don't know much about medieval warfare aside from the general misconceptions, but I am aware that beach landings didn't happen (or at least I can't name one). Rule of Cool, I guess.

Fair enough, rule of cool is all you need.

>they invented the idea of a dragon by combining things most mortal races find to be ether horrifying or worthy of great respect.
Funny you should say that, because most likely, that is literally how the idea of dragon came into being in real world. It just seems to be a chimera of traits/concepts that people found together to instill most fear, or most respect, creating the "ultimate threat looming over us" image.

With that in mind: your concept of a dragon generally sounds s LOT like Dragons from East Asian mythology - Chinese in particular. In fact, in general it's not extremely unusual approach to dragons in fantasy fiction either. I don't see anything particularly weeb-ish about it. It's certainly a viable concept, it's just a question of execution.
It might be hard to do them well, without making them come across as a magical GM pet race.

So I think the real question is: do you feel confident enough that you can make them come across as nuanced and interesting beings? It's basically a question of how good at character "writing" you are.
If you are somewhat confident in that: I'd say go for it. And maybe study a bit of chinese mythology and folklore for inspiration.

They've never been numerous, and their numbers declined even further during said wars.
>Also, what justification have you come up with for why they haven't taken over the world, if they are that powerful?
They tried. Many of their earliest wars were for territory and were fought against each other. It got so bad the gods had to get off their lazy asses and intervene personally.
Now there are a few prevailing philosophies amongst their kind.

Some are still trying to take over, but want to avoid another world war with their dragon rivals (or another divine intervention). These dragons often use covert means to gain power, such as disguising themselves as mortals and building empires the old fashioned way (ie, having people Alexander the Great turn out to be a dragon the whole time).
Others were so freaked out by their near extinction that they've tried to rebuild their population. Unfortunately, dragons can only reproduce and create a being of equal strength if they mate with another dragon, and dragons have an inherent distrust for each other. So now there are a fair number of half breeds running around. These half breeds are often killed on sight by the more purist dragons.
Others still saw the error of their ways and try to help the world get along in the shadows, but these are the minority and most other dragons can't stand them. This would be like Gandalf turning out to be a disguised dragon. They don't do much directly, but their fingerprints tend to cover important events.
But most dragons are simply bored. They don't want to die, so they can't raise too much hell, but they're stuck in a world of ants and aren't allowed to use a magnifying glass. These dragons often take up odd occupations or just putz around looking for something interesting. They will get involved in random issues or start shit themselves just for the entertainment value.
And then there are the classic dragons who sleep all the time and love gold. Because gold is lovely.

>most likely, that is literally how the idea of dragon came into being in real world.
That's actually what inspired the idea.

I've certainly been looking at East Asian myth for inspiration. They've got a load of great content we rarely see in the west.

Wow, I could not have formatted that any worse unless I forwent paragraph breaks entirely.

Here's phase 2 of the Battle of Greyspur Bay.

The Haelichi approach was too slow; Prince Porgil (P) has managed to form up the Helxians into a battle-line, although thin, and behind his shieldwall the ships continue to land more soldiers. The approaching Haelichi slow as they gather their nerves for battle. Captain Hael, commanding the left flank, spies a weakness before him, but, knowing it would disrupt his king's battle-line, does not charge. For now, the frontline is static.

On the cliffs, the Haelichi archers continue to rain down arrows on the Helxian forces, but now find themselves in turn threatened by fire from the Helxian boats.

Neither side has yet gained the upper hand, but as the armies near, bloodshed is inevitable.

>They've got a load of great content we rarely see in the west.
I agree. Modern-day Shinto in particular might be actually my all time favorite form of mythological perception of world. Shame that our knowledge of the cultures is mostly limited to exposure to second-rate anime.

I have to say, the whole idea of dragons being creatures intentionally forming themselves into an image that scares people (and that being consciously inspired by the presumed history of image of a dragon in real world) is really weirdly meta to me. Makes me think of a world where some kind of celestial beings shaped our history in such a way that it looks like it make perfect sense without the idea of divinity, while it was god-like being all along guiding us.

Oh, and in regards of these posts:
I find the whole "you have to explain why they had not taken over the world" problem incredibly silly and pointless. In a mythological world, where gods and magic can be real, why would you assume that everyone find world-domination an inherently desirable goal valid? Classic mythologies certainly don't have to explain why gods or dragons, even if powerful as hell, did not try to take over the world.

Why would you need to explain that in your world?

plenty though right now Im more focused on trying to get a proper mechanical feel for the entire setting and the right mechanics to back that. I do remember there was in the early days an entire shift in the color of plantlife when I realized I'd done some math wrong though.

Fair enough, but in mythological settings the reason why their monsters haven't taken over the world is because the gods did it first. Take Greek myth. The Olympian gods there rule the world, but the reason it's them, and not the Titans/Giants etc is because they beat them and imprisoned them. It's reasonable to assume intelligent and malevolent 'super-beings' would have attempted domination, and confirms that they did.

>but in mythological settings the reason why their monsters haven't taken over the world is because the gods did it first.
Not really, at least not universally. In greek mythology it's true that Titans were overthrown by the next generation of Gods, but it's also somewhat false to assume that titans were inherently monsterous. I mean Prometheus was a Titan too. The main reason Greeks saw Titans as bad was because they worshiped their enemies, but otherwise it's not monsters/malevolent beings against good ones.
In most other mythologies, monsters and gods exist because they represent the state of the world as it is: monsters represent the aspects of world that are inherently threatening, gods usually those that are in some ambiguous or even beneficial. It's a "translation" of the world into a story.

OK, I'll try to put this in a different way:
It's not a SPECULATION. Stories in mythology exist to represent the world as it is, not speculating about how it possibly could be. My problem is not so much with the idea of some kind of primordial war or wars (after all, Marduk had to win a war to save world from Tiamat, Indra and Vishnu have to defeat the demons, Hor has to defeat Seth and so on).
It's more of the speculative "if they are so powerful, you have to explain why they did not try to run for world-dominantion" that I have an issue with. If the story calls for a conflict, then have a conflict, but if it does not, mythological worlds don't need speculations like this. Not to mention that it's really silly to assume that every sentient creature with considerable power HAS to desire world domination.

Hell, it's like askign why Tom Bombadil did not take the ring to the Mordor himself.
The answer is: because then the story would not make it's symbolic sense.

Right so I don't want to overuse the Angler-fish type monster for my setting so which sound better?

A) An Anglerfish type monster that has "Sirens" on the end of it's rod and uses that to lure ships to their doom and get some food.

B) A horror from beyond the Stars that looks like pic related and has on the end of it's rod the love child of Mephistopheles and a game show host. To explain all my Yog-Sothery is based off of corrupted versions of Tarot cards and this one is the Wheel of Fortune.

All your points are good. I don't disagree, I just wanted to ask some questions originally.

this is the scariest thing about drawing my map, I'm worried I'll miss something

also, anyone wanna help me decide what should go in the blank spots in the swamp?
drylands?
evil unnatural black part of the swamp?
>rando plateaus with mud all on them and stuff always seeming to be lurking around each pillary stack of peat and moss, but you never can quite tell if its real or just your eyes playing tricks on you

go cheap, make it sky islands.

the thought is there, but I might do that around the center instead

hey fuckos

I'm making a setting that's a fusion of just the -worst- anime shit there is. In this setting, there are magical swords which are pretty much a 1:1 ripoff of zanpaktou from bleach.

Almost all the shit in the setting has a cool japanese name. What's a good japanese name I can use for the swords?

Hitogoroshi (Hitokiri?) means "manslayer."

user you've made mistake number one when it comes to shit anime settings. While making them Japanese sounds like the route to go you need to go deeper than that. You need some random bullshit from norse mythology that makes no sense, (Like Gungnir or Fenrir) or some gratuitous German stuff.

Why the fuck not, I google it and cool anime shit appears.

Origato guizamasu baka gaijin desu

See I'm actually going to do japan-trying-to-use-other-languages as a theme.

You've got an area full of valuable gas and crystals that give the adapted locals anime powers and give normal humans painful deaths, so the big sci-fi nations outside use the feudal anime characters inside to fight proxy wars and secure mining sites from the rival nations. All those nations are revered as gods inside, and they all have ""foreign"" names which consist of semi-random words from mostly european and middle eastern folklore.

...

??

>Have you ever had to cut content out of your world? What was it? Why?

I had to cut fey, as much as I hate to, but I'll probably move them to their own setting. It just didn't mesh well with the direction everything else was going, especially since most spirits in my setting tend to be ancestors/elementals and pretty much 99% of magic is blood magic. Nature based magic just doesn't really have a place.

I mean nature based magic can very much be blood magic. Depending on your flavor or fae they might fit better than more amorphous spirits even. I can easily see there being a race of wee-folk who are bound in a vicious cycle of growth and consumption of each other and try to trick mortals into offering up sacrifices to help sway things to each others side.

I don't know if this would be more of a game design or worldbuilding question, since it involves both, but what would you say to a magic system that has a cooldown time for spells?

I envision it as a sort of semi-Vancian system. Human minds cannot actually keep all the information needed to cast a spell in check using natural means, and the magic circles/magic arrays needed for anything even remotely complicated are huge (say, at least 15' in diameter).
However, a magician can then write a second, even larger magic circle around a spell which allows them to "store" the first circle in their mind. It melds with them and becomes hard-coded into their being (though spells exist to erase or override stored spells, though this is time consuming).
There is a limit to how many time a magician can do this, and casting spells this way is physically hard on the body, but it means you can cast on the fly without drawing a huge circle every time.

The cooldown bit comes from how the spells are powered. Once a spell is "stored" in a magician, their body naturally sends magical energy to "charge" it. Once the spell is fully charged, it can be cast at will.
However, the more powerful a spell is the longer it takes to charge, and it's incredibly difficult to purposefully increase the amount of energy being sent to recharge a specific spell.

So, small stuff like cantrips may recharge in 20 minutes or an hour, but it could take a month or longer to get that "summon meteor" back in action. If you want to cast the same spell more than once in rapid succession, you must store multiple copies of it and wait until they're all fully charged.

Thoughts?

Anyone here ever base characters on celebrities?

Simply? No.

I create the fluff first, then start building. Several are started by PCs coming up with a niche and me running with it. One thing my players don't care for are relatively minor plane touched race mechanics, so I'm working on better versions.

In a game long ago, the dragons vie for power and prestige among each other and are using the PCs as pawns. Everything was wrapped around another nugget! The dragons weren't even on this plane unless they manifested.

I set up the game after a war among the BIG magic folks and all maps are suspect as many were propaganda and false intelligence. Also, maps of the area are discouraged by Wizards and all the other high end magic types because a river network forms a powerful (planet level) rune of protection, mythic level..

I once had an entire pokemon table top campaign where the various gym leaders were old school Heavy and hair metal rockers. Does that count?

Do you have a custom salute, /wbg/?

Does it look stupid/awkward?

I'm looking for a specific map maker that's not in the pastebin. It's an online tool that uses a grid system and you can paint tiles, trees, crates, and some other stuff. It looks dark blue and like similar to blue prints. It's not used for large scale items like actual maps but more like small buildings and such.

This PDF is dope. Anything else like it?

Do you think 'Mancaps' is a good name for a race of mushroom people?

I split up a ton of concepts that I had thrown together into 3 different settings because I just couldn't make the various elements work

I think it's fine

But that should be the name that other races have for them rather than the name for themselves.

>half-sunken ancient city
>villages on stilts filled with evil swamp people
>sealed off city that is normal, filled with lizard peeps
>giant sunken pit going down to evil underground city
>big swamp forest that is beautiful, full of nice good faries and shit
>giant walking crabs/insects, 100ft tall, slowly walking around
>ancient battle happened here, loadsa corpses, think of blighttown
>small civilization of regular people, their homes and farms float on swamp mini islands

Right, I don't think they could even speak like we can

What kind of supernatural powers would you associate with the sin of Greed?

Rate the autism.

I had a mental image of the moon being three times larger in the sky than ours, but with no differences in gravitational force and reasonable density. It took me entirely too long to put together the system of equations for that (see post end for the interested). There was one solution - this moon had to be 14 orders of magnitude heavier than the sun and 1000 times farther than Neptune. I tried making it 3/4 hollow by diameter and it barely helped, though I discovered you could have a tiny neutron star a couple hundred meters above Earth. I spent an hour and a half doing math with nothing to show for it but I had fun kind of

Is it autism?

Equations:

(mass)/(distance^2) = (lunar mass)/(lunar distance^2)
(desired density) = mass/(4/3 * pi * radius^3)
(angular diameter factor) * 2 * arctan(lunar diameter/(2*lunar distance)) = 2 * arctan(diameter/(2* distance))

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_J._Steele

>A rare breed of perpetually child-like people, once "breed" essentially as a slave-race.

paedophile pls go

Why would ag even be a factor? Are you writing a tretis on farming? Like seriously wtf

>Worldbuilding thread
>Asks why agriculture is important
Are you retarded or just trolling?

I don't get it. She's an attorney and game designer. So? Should I know any of these cases? None of them stand out to me.

Hello GW

I need to create some naming conventions for warforged/robot-race in my fantasy campaign. The setting is heavily influenced by slavic folklore and mid 19th Century Russian industrialization, and I want to give warforged a unique way of naming them that 1) emphasizes their status as property, 2) emphasizes their role as golems/protectors of Not!Jewish ghettos, and 3) avoids something boring like numeric codes or silly like Rood or Bolts or something.

>mid 19th Century Russian industrialization
Literally no such thing.
Assuming you are going for what I think you are going, you are confusing periods. The moment "industrialization" started to matter for Russian Empire was after getting their teeth kicked in during Crimean War and having another insurgence of Poles in 1863, but the real effects didn't pop-out until mid 1870s in (ironically) Polish clay and 1880s for European Russia, which is hard to call it "mid century".

Seriously, the country didn't went for industrialisation (as in - real and serious industrialisation) until first Five Year Plan.

But back to your question - is the setting Slavic in nature or just has Slavic influences peppered here and there? If it's Slavic, why not picking East Slavic naming convention?

To make it as compact as possible and for you to understand why this matter:
As long as the setting isn't about hunter-gatherers or post-apo situation, what is planted makes a fuck-huge difference for the setting itself.
A quick example. Let's assume you are having a Not!Asian setting, with rice planting. Rice can be stored indefinitely (well, not really, but close) without much issues going with it aside rodents. It can be planted twice a year, sometimes even three times. It also requires specific infrastructure. And it's eaten "raw", so no real need for additional infrastructure to prepare food from it once it's cleared from husks.
How this affects the setting? Well, you can relatively easy storage food for long periods (making famine less likely), you can easily have large population (easy surplus, easy storage), you NEED said large population to plant said rice and maintain fields (since it's very labour-needy), population is going to be centered around areas that can be easily watered all year (duh) and you are not going to meet cute miller's daughter.
Now compare it with Not!Russia. You are going to have vast fields of wheat and barley. They can be planted only once per year. They can be machined, but since it's Not!Russia, you are instead going to use large amount of serfs. Since you have a hard-on for serfdom, you are going to trottle down lower classes, keep them stupid, underfed and scared all the time. This in turn will affect your higher classes, "cities" (large quotation marks) and how everyone is doing their best to reap maximum benefit coming from dirt-cheap labour. Mills are going to be mostly water-powered, since the grain trade is going to be centered around rivers anyway due to large country size, lack of roads and the costs of animal-powered transport. And so on and forth. If famine strikes, people die in droves.

TBC

Cont.
And then Not!Amazones. Humid jungle everywhere. Soil is worth shit. Clearing land is extremely labour-needy. So you are going to end up with gardening on a very small scale, so you are going to focus on plants that can provide as much nutrient with as little labour and field size as possible. Meaning everyone is eating starch-rich tubers and different types of nuts, which can be grown semi-wild and don't take much space or work. This also means you barely have any grazing grounds or farm animals for that matter, meaning the only meat you are going to get is from hunting or fishing. Barely any access to vitamins from B group can make things hard
And let's not forget about some Highland areas. Soil is shit, but there isn't much land either. You can barely plant anything there from the get go, but you can't have large groups of cattle too. So you end up with herding sheeps and goats. This means meat-heavy diet, cheap access to wool and really monotonous diet. If there is anything plant-based, it will be probably heavily preserved (hardtack, pickles, that sort of thing) to last for longer, because there is no "fresh" supply that can be easily accessed. Famine is almost always present, but not in sense of everyone starving to death, but being on a verge of malnourishment, with food being hard to come by. In the same time, you are not weather-sensitive, since your herds aren't eating anything that is hard to come by, so drought or long winter isn't going to be an instant game-over for your people. Getting your neighbour herd is still a valid way of surviving.
Comapred with Not!Mongolia, where everything is dandy as long as there is no long drought, which means your cattle is going to die and since your cattle is dead, you need to look for other sources of food pretty fast. Also, everyone is a herder, which affects not just their day-to-day life, but the culture as a whole, as there is literally zero need to have cities or settlements, since no agriculture

So in the end, the what-and-why in agriculture is a very fucking corner stone of each culture you are going to describe.

>Have you ever had to cut content out of your world? What was it? Why?
Everything, the oldest part of my setting is 1 year old and the setting is 2 years old. I repeatedly replace everything to improve the setting. Biggest things I've removed are magic, the main continent (thrice separately), the entirety of the aesthetic, and the technological era.

Anybody?

>Have you ever had to cut content out of your world? What was it? Why?
I've completely scrapped the world, pulled the important players up and plant them in a new world several times. Not sure if you'd call it "cut content" but radical revisions, and I did leave some details out not directly related to that particular world.

Had to cut a few cliched themes out of current setting because it was a bit too much. gone is not!Atlantis, now there's only not!Ys

previous setting lost two races because one was too boring (sentient spiders with strict obedience to the swam, duh) and the other ended up too furry-like to exist

It's Slavic in that it uses Eastern Euro names, the weather's shit, and the tone alternates between Heroic fairytales and Dovstoyesky grim-darkness. Everyone already uses Slavic names.

>Neither side has the upper hand? Haelichi has a stupidly good terrain advantage.

>what would you say to a magic system that has a cooldown time for spells?
Shit
Source: D&D 4th Edition

I never cut ideas once I bring them in. I just change them in a way that makes me like them again.

What about some kind of complication with the crime past its initial culprits. If the victim was an important part of a political retinue they could expect any number of loyal samurai in the region to investigate further. Perhaps the samurais family are somehow embroiled

A better question is why the Shinto Priest and geisha would work together later.

Drawing from Lone Wolf & Cub and Samurai Executioner, a possible side quest could be catching a prolific arsonist, finding a runaway couple, removing a bandit groups grip over an important supply bridge (in one story the antagonistic group are some guys that in lieu of their being a bridge nearby, wade out and carry passengers on their shoulders for a fee)

True. I couldn't find a very good map, but the Haelichi are meant to be outnumbered, which isn't really apparent as I made their units a bit too large.

>too weeby

As long as the dragons and setting isn't a "simulation-computer sphere" like my last GM you can't make it more weebish that I've had to deal with

Going to bump this once before giving up.

Could I ask for you to expand upon that a wee bit?
Why doesn't it work?

I'm not familiar with D&D 4e.

I'm not familiar with D&D 4e, but if your spells have a casting time, a cooldown time would be redundant and annoying. If casting was instant, I could see cooldowns working.

>Rule of Cool, I guess.

At least you admit it.

They are instant, though. Well, you have to do something like saying the spell name or a keyword to activate it, but once a spell is charged you can cast is pretty much at will.

Storing a spell takes a lot of time and effort, but you're good to go once that's out of the way. And you only have to store a spell once (though storing copies of the same spell can be done, and would have done benefits).

>Have you ever had to cut content out of your world?

All the time.

>>What was it?

It's usually stuff like overly detailed histories, overly detailed family trees, overly detailed economics, etc. All the stuff my inner sperg loves to write up.

>>Why?

Because it adds nothing of value to the actual play on the table top, that's why.

This

I remember working on an "expansion" for the setting I was running for quite some time. I've spend few months reading up, outlining ideas, working on details... and when I ended up with close to 500 fucking pages of text of "condensed" knowledge I've realised there is no point of trying to condense it further (raw sketch was 800+ pages without images) and that nobody is going to read said 500 pages.
So I ended up dropping the whole thing and only using surface-level data from it in my games.

make it so one of the two saves the life of the samurai, and he feels obliged to stay as a means of repaiment

>Why would ag even be a factor

I have never once thought that the Noldor, the Rohiram, the city of Ankh-Morpok or Melnibonéans felt less fleshed out because we dont know where they get their food from. While you do bring up a few good points, these just make up the backdrop of a story unless you're Melville and decide to pad out your story with whaling stuff. Most of what you describe can be infered from a few throwaway lines of dialogue or a short description

bump

One more bump for this question. What do people think about using Yiddish words as names?

Okay.jpg
why would it be an issue

It's not about making the setting more flashed out - it's about keeping it consistent.

Like all things, can go needlessly silly if it doesn't fit.