/wbg/ - World Building General

I find that magic is impossible to regulate from a story-telling perspective.

Thoughts on this?
Just a generic post-apocalyptic pseudo-horror setting.
Already running a campaign in this setting I kind of improvised for a game a while back, it ran long enough I started putting stuff down on paper. I really like the idea of a dark post-apoc setting where there are a lot of weird monsters and eerie effects. I might include will'o'wisps as a creature type as well, to add to the eerie feel.

Hey, here, decided to start work on another map in the ecumene, the end plan is to have maps of all the important islands.
Spent the last 2 hours on right hand side. Reproducing fractal coastlines with a fucking pencil is not fun.

>What kind of nature does your world have?
Mostly "normal", very similar to RL for the most part, but the shallow sea is full of strange, altered sea creatures, and kraken-esque semi-mythical beasts that may or may not be legends.

>What kind of nature does your world have?
Pretty substandard stuff, people are getting into making cool and nice things from natural resources around them, but if only they weren't interrupted by giant monsters every now and then.

In a way, it's a bit like Monster Hunter, what with all these different biomes every which way. The east side's covered in wet marshes and coasts, the west has deserts and some real hot stuff, south's got its nice forests and plains and what have you, while the north's a cold mountain range of very cool things, like frostbite and such.

So how do I do an Old Testament style god without going fedora? Trying to think up this species of rationalists that decided to make an AI god out of fear of the universe, and it's meant to act like a sort of wrathful lawful God from the Old Testament, i.e. "my people are special, all others are to die", "follow my commandments and your consciousness will be uploaded into a virtual heaven", "defy me and I'll bring down cataclysmic destruction upon you"

I have a feeling the idea as of now comes off as too anti-religion, and I want to add more depth and make it not absolutely totalitarian.

I hope someone saved the links archive.

The AI doesn't WANT to bring hellfire upon it's chosen people. Of course not! It just has an extremely low tolerance for what it defines as a threat to its people, including members of the tribe themselves.

why is it bad to make maps?

Just think about what people would actually believe in

Just got in to D&D 5e Thinking over my own homebrew setting that I might run one day, probably in a year. I want it to be set on a continent as big as Australia. Several kingdoms.

>party starts off in the smallest kingdom, considered a bumpkin country. Last king recently died and the heir is a good-intentioned but very naive and inexperienced princess that nobles are willing to take advantage of. Up to the party to grow the kingdom as faithful subjects and help the naive but good princess, or go full edge if they want and aid the fatass noble scumbag in overthrowing the princess. Or if they don't want to be in bumfuck country they can go to the other kingdoms.
>to the very west is a militaristic kingdom that begins conquering the other territories. BBEG is leading the kingdom, will eventually create a cataclysmic event, resurrect the God-Emperor, etc
>merchant "republic" kingdom to the very east, wealthy from trading with another eastern continent that's basically Japan/Korea/China combined
>center is a very large territory of grasslands, home to nomadic tribes. Similar to Dorthraki from ASoIaF but less edge
>kingdom with Arthurian lawful good knights, home of the greatest Paladin order
>very far north is the snowy, cold, almost desolate lands. Full of tough monsters, long-forgotten cities, riches
>desert territory in the huge outstretched mountains somewhere in the east. Humans and dorf kingdom, consistently battle with Orcs for the precious metals, gems, and gold in the mountains

Too big and too much for a campaign? I want to end the campaign around level 15 or so because I don't want to deal with level 9 spell shit and fighting god-tier enemies every session

i made something

no it's nice. very festive

...

What did you use?

gimp

bumping for handouts

Be quiet Varg

Because it will consume your life and you'll forget everything else in your mad quest for the perfect map.

This is true, I've been working on my map for almost two years now and it version 8 is almost indistinguishable from version 3, it will happen to you too

Alright stage 1 is finished, now time to color in map features and crop out all the empty ocean

updated something

It's not too late, user! Put down the crack pipe that is worldbuilding before it's too late!

Actually I was doing this all summer until I threw everything out back in August, now on a whim I have started again from scratch and it's already eaten into a considerable portion of my day

What are some things that a God of Justice might hold?

The main city in my setting (inspired by late antiquity) is the capital of a nation that worships a single God of Justice and has a Colossus of Rhodes-type statue carved into some cliffs by the harbor (not straddling though). I don't want to completely rip off Justicia / Lady Justice with the scale or blindfold him.... I was thinking maybe a scroll?

My world has a vast ocean to the east and an ungodly mountain range to the west, though the tech level in mine means there's pretty much no getting around or through it. Granted there is a plot device on the other side but still. It's hard to say without knowing what your map looks like already.

What would be some reasons (rather than old age) for mages never having the fighting prowess of fighters or being unable to "multi-class" (learning some magic and some fighting)?

draw maps, leave blanks

Magic is physically exhausting. While it's not a 1-to-1 conversion rate, magic burns calories. Enough to where a long magic fight could straight kill you. Cut or fit people would kill themselves with a cantrip. It is imperative for mages to keep up their body fat and not get too active in daily life.

Alright gents. How do we fix Dragonborn?

I want to get into designing maps and detailed geography for my world. What PDFs and resources would you guys recommend for this?

muscle fiber fucks up your ability to channel magic, kind of like how plaque build up in your veins fucks up your body's ability to pump blood.
It's a shit reason but it works

Alright I feel like getting somewhat, *creative* tonight and am going to write something and post it tomorrow.
My question is this: What do you want to see? What does this community need more of? What inspiration should I take, I mean watch?
You have like 5-10 minutes before I begin.

What do you think is the optimal number of noun cases in a conlang, if any? Which cases do you think are essential and which can be axed?

If you're going for generic high fantasy - don't. Put a spin on it because it is done to death. Otherwise I'd like to see more horror on Veeky Forums, I personally like modern horror like /x/'s SCPs.

>that first puff of the worldbuilding crack pipe after a few months clean

if they could go out and play ball with they never would have been hiding inside reading

they're pasty nerds first, magicians second
the pasty nerds who went out and ate cows and lifted calfs became strong, the pasty nerds who hid with books became magicians.

>3 hours ago No.56228107
I uh, nevermind.

but watch some nature shit narrated by jim carey (pic related)

Update brought to you by GIMP smudge tool

Why people don't like the pastebin anymore?

The one fleshed out continent I have is a big jungle full of bugs to the north, some are big and are the apex predators of the area, others are just mundane like ants and flies.

To the middle of the continent is a big, tainted, urban shithole where most non-human species are purged so they don't start mutating from the fuckery of the land. Think Yarnham from Bloodborne or Dunwall from Dishonored but this time we're killing all the animals, not just beasts. Farms exist but farming meat is a pretty dangerous job considering a pig could become a 20ft, pissed off hulk of flesh if you don't keep an eye on the livestock for signs of taint.

The area bellow this is a big marshland where anyone affected by the taint who doesn't get inquisition-ed flees to, it's full of beastmen, witches, vampires, the standard 'good old' monster types and then a fuck tonne of creatures that are like something out of King's "The Mist"

At the very south is tundra that I haven't really fleshed out that much but it's mainly the standard kind of animals that live in the cold plus massive sea-monsters that the tribal raiders there hunt for food and the magical artifacts or resources that caused them to mutate into these beasts in the first place.

In the northern civilisation people live pretty much like Jungle-Elfs, looking after their jungle to try and stop it being destroyed or corrupted like the rest of the continent so it's dominant over them for sure.

The central civilisation are pretty much a gothic HFY kind of deal where they've got to fight nature so that they're not destroyed, the only kind of nature there are the massive underground mushroom farms and the occasional above ground farm in less-tainted areas.

I have no idea about how these biomes were created and shaped, I pretty much just stick to this timezone and my world is pretty unrealistic anyway so I just leave that kind of stuff I wouldn't find fun for later.

How do I world build? Like I'm competent enough to write stories and lore up within an established world and what not

But I just can't fucking build my own setting or world at all. I don't need a grand world with hundreds of themes I just need a baseline that I can write for and make up shit as I go.

All I have is loose ideas and random thoughts that probably shouldn't be in the same setting.

How do you guys do it? How do you come up with stuff and make it stick together? A lot of the stuff i think aboyt i just get dejected on when I think "Isn't that just like X? Fuck this."

Same reason you don't see many professional athletes publishing research papers on quantum physics.

Magic is super complicated and takes years of intensive study and/or meditation to be able to do anything particularly noteworthy. Moreover, the relationship between time spent studying the arcane and amount of power you wield follows an exponential curve. So if you spend half your time studying magic and half your time training martial skills, you'll end up as a mediocre fighter with virtually no usable magic powers.

I'm the opposite, I feel I can worldbuild very well and make an interesting setting but I can't write prose for shit. Makes me wonder what's the point

I start with searching a basic theme or parameters for my setting. Is it a gritty world? High fantasy, thousands of special races or mostly humans? Big monsters around every corner or some truly rare but terrifying creatures. How does magic work and how common is it?

Once I have this I take the european medieval and think, how it would be different with my stuff in it. Then I shift it to focus on things I like and want to be a prominent feature (right now I want some nice mongol-type races in my new setting).

Don't try to be super innovative. Steal the shit out of everything, shift the focus, change some flavour and it will be something nice and new.

Like thing is I have several setting ideas

The one setting I'm trying to work on is one where it's originally no magic and if it is any it's like low shamanistic curses, ethnic enhancements, and shit like that. Meanwhile there's this whole other world of magic, spirits, entities, maybe gods, that sort of stuff right.

Then one of those entities ends up in the world and magic slowly starts bleeding through, spirits and what not pursue said person because they got through and they're attracted to them for different reasons.

And that's where everything falls apart because I don't really know what else I want to do. How does magic exactly work is it hereditary or random? Are there originally only humans in the setting? And then other races drift through that hole? What's the tech level? Geography? Do I listen to that Dragonphile part of me and add dragons?

Like my end goal is for the setting to end at mid-high fantasy in a sense of a timeline. But everything in between is random gibberish and non connected ideas like the Giant Worshipping Dwarves.

I get a lot of practice writing Fanfiction and Quests so there's that

I was thinking about creating a world in which there would be mages(who arent that strong but useful nonetheless in battles), and magus, magus would be like chosen ones, no more than a magus of each element or aspect of magic would be allowed to exist at the same time, while they could use magic of other aspects they truly shine in their own aspect.
Any tips or recommended books to inspire me?

I'm currently playing a sort of military campaign using mass combat rules for D&D 5e from UA. At some point I want an encounter where the Big Bad genius warchief leads his orcish horde into elven lands but he's lured into a trap and encircled. He ends up in a valley with elves occupying all the hills surrounding him, so they can easily cut off all supplies. The warchief is forced to either wait and starve, or charge uphill and lose a lot of men. The situation means he has a 99% chance of losing, but we all know that the narrative rules of tension dictate that the lower the estimated chance is of winning, the higher the actual chance of winning is.

My question: how would a brilliant general break such an encirclement, and perhaps even turn the tables on his enemy? Is there a historical example of such a thing happening?

You should find a better name than Magus.

Why? Magus sounds so badass.

Right on time my friend. I was just watching a video about Alexander the Great and had exactly the same circumstances you described.

youtube.com/watch?v=dKQw6rxk41A
Here is the whole thing, i would recommend you watch it as it is an interesting video.

If you are in a hurry the battle itself is depicted somewhere around 11:30

Magus and mage are basically synonyms. Having them mean two different things is unnecessary and confusing.

What do you guys think about certain areas being "higher level" than others, especially for a west marches campaign? For example, the Deadly Wastes of Zhaleg might have an average encounter level of 10 and thus most people don't venture in there. Whereas the area around the cities and towns might be levels 1-5.

It's not necessarily super realistic but it doesn't have to be.

Consider the following; the area around your city, the countryside, the mountains beyond them, the rainforest, the saharah desert. Are these places not increasing in 'difficulty' in real life? It makes enough sense that an area is naturally more difficult then others, though obviously not due to monster levels in real life.

Maybe.

Do you model coincidences while you world build?

Real life has some of the most ridiculous bullshit contrived coincidences you can ever imagine. I don't even try to explain them.

how about

gotgame.com/2015/09/21/gamebusters-myth-32-deus-ex-predicted-the-911-attacks/
many of the other ones I found were embellished or outsourced.

It does make sense remote areas might house more dangerous creatures - it however becomes hard to explain if said creatures dwell 100 meters from housing etc.

It is time consuming and interests don't necessarily mix. A scholar might not see it as necessity.

I think there are benefits of running mapless setting; it can be more fluid, flexible and mysterious.

Grasslands of large rolling hills that end in a stony beach by the ocean. Throw in some flowers and wildlife for hunters and grass eating bovinetype creatures that can be captured and domesticated.

All those countless hours wasted making stupid maps when all I had to do was write a few paragraphs describing each special area and the type of terrain it has. Maps are for chumps.

>less than two months to (((Christ)))mas

fuck I need to get my shit together

>/wbg/ - World Building General

Yeah, sure, I could use some help with something a little ODD.

I have an elemental plane of 'food' and thusly, in some areas there are contaminated lands of 'food', food kingdoms even, and I'd just like to ask:
What exactly is the job or responsibility of the working class peasants when farming is completely and utterly invalidated by the fact that food just 'generates', grows, and spawns from the land underneath them, flows through the rivers around them, and falls down from the sky above them? We're talking chocolate mounds, hot dog trees, spaghetti bushes, ramen swamps, massive vegetable forests, a *literal land of milk and honey if you will.
D-do you even NEED peasants in such a country?

*For the record, you dig down deep enough or in the right spots; underneath the layers of fat, starch, grease, n' so forth you'll eventually find mundane minerals, ores, like one would expect.

Of course, someone has to sort prepare and cook it and deliver it to those not able to collect it themselves. BTW you have a setting pretty much based on Cloudy with a chance of meatballs cartoon.

So I am this user: and last night didn't really get anywhere.
I plan on doing some more work on it tonight but will wait a little longer for suggestions.
So what do you think?
More importantly what do you want?

Go with your heart! It's no good if you're doing something not fun for fun.

How do you feel about historical persons or figures as vampires?

Just cypher English, no one is ever going to care enough to learn your language(s).

This, please don't try to make up a grammar and syntax for fantasy languages. Tolkien was a literal linguist so he can get away with that nonsense. It won't sound good if you try. Just throw in a few foreign words every so often or make up an excuse for a standardized tongue

wew terra incognita, the first new fleshed out continent that isn't just some kind of an alteration of previously blocked in terrain

i havent seen your full map in a month, mind posting it? I want to see how much progress you;ve made

Make rough maps to help visualize things but don't stress over making them perfect.

Literally Forgotten Realms

fug, my sai just froze when I tried to save

ruh roh, good thing I screenshotted that at 100% so I can trace the fuck out of it lmao

jk, I think?

I ctrl+s'd and it's doing the little progress bar animation in the bottom left like its saving, we'll see

huh, look like it worked, the window for it is just greyed out like its not responding

update, the window is no longer greyed out

also, here is a progress shot that sorta composites the left continent into a more comparable position. (if I didn't move it over from where it used to be, it would be harder to spot the differences in the coastlines and shit)

not left, bottom center, my bad

also, the island chain is sorta wiggled around

This is fantastic, user.

thanks man that means a lot, I mostly just worldbuild to keep me occupied in my downtime and its nice to hear that I can have good ideas that people like

What are some essential reading/watching before building a post-apoc world.
I've already watched all of the Mad Maxes, the Book of Eli, the Road and A Boy and His Dog. What next?

Fist of The North Star my pal, you can find it on both Crunchyroll and Hulu

I'm looking for dark, gritty and realistic*.
Plus I don't watch anime.

it has plenty of the first two, and "realistic" in my opinion is a terrible fit for the Post-Apocalyptic genre anyways

also people who disdain whole mediums are morons

Alright I'll try it just for you
I had some bad experiences with weebs in high-school

It's not anything you can read or watch but try playing fallout. It's a very well designed world.

If it's for a game, the most fun i've had is extrapolating from random results on tables.

I think it's fantastic that as a DM I don't even know what most of my world contains.

Watch the original Planet of the Apes, and one that I like, Turbo-Kid. At all costs avoid STALKER, someone recommended it to me as a post apoc film and it is garbage (not even set in a post apoc).
Reading wise you need to read The Day Of The Triffids and Emergence

>I had some bad experiences with weebs in high-school
yeah there are some bad anime fans out there, but there's plenty of good ones too

Hello, /wbg/. I come to you with a rather specific query. I really like worldbuilding. I like to work on settings on my own and I like going through media that has in-depth worldbuilding.
What I want now, is to do some collaborative worldbuilding with others, as in for a group and then work together to create a setting. Sort of like a campaign but without the PCs.
Are there any online sites, forums, groups, boards where I could do this, /wbg/?

Is it stupid to have a race where the makes look like goats and the women look like sheep?

There is a worldbuilding /wbg/ discord, but I'm not sure if they do collaborations like that.

>Is it stupid to have a race where the makes look like goats and the women look like sheep?

Not at all, sexual dimorphism can be quite striking and explicit in some species depending on what they sexually select for/find attractive. In some cases you can have two sexes look completely and totally different from one another- the thought that one gender looks like sheep and the other looks like goat is completely reasonable.