/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

Help me improve upon my homebrew lore for 5e. I wanted to keep it fairly simple since my players are fairly casual, but I'm hoping this doesn't sound too unimpressive.

Humans are the descendants of giants, who are in turn the children of the empyreans, the first children of the Greek gods. Human settlements often have a giant or two protecting and assisting their town, with larger cities supporting larger giants. Giant colonies still exist in mountain ranges, much to the displeasure of the dwarves. Many races admire the humans for their ability to adapt to other cultures as much as they loathe them for contaminating cultures with their own ideals.

The empyreans and giants initially warred against the dragons, their ancient foes, until Bahamut sought peace with the humanoid races. Some of the empyreans could not abide by this peace treaty and a bloody schism occurred, with the evil empyreans taking their children to new lands to rule over (much to the distaste of the dwarves and other races). While their distaste for dragonkind is strong, the good empyreans and most human-friendly giants tolerate the dragons that uphold their ancient treaty.

1/6

Dragonborn, much like drakes, wyverns and so on, are a subspecies of true dragons, the children of Bahamut and Tiamat. They are often treated with caution and distaste by humans as much as they return the favor, and though this is not a universally held prejudice among either race, a definite prejudice is held towards chromatic dragonborn, despite them having little to no alignment tendencies.

Dragons themselves were born when magic was first manipulated by the gods, which created Bahamut and Tiamat. Having innate control over magic and the elements, extended lifespans beyond any mortal race, and being able to procreate with any mortal species, dragons long believed themselves to be the true dominant species, warring with the children of the gods for time untold. When peace was proposed with the giants, Tiamat fought her traitorous brother Bahamut in a great civil war until he banished her to Hell. While metallic and chromatic dragons are now historical enemies, many on both sides still feel the natural arrogance of their kind when dealing with "lesser races".

The Norse gods forged the dwarven race from iron with divine fire and lightning before cooling them deep within the earth, birthing them from the earth itself. While dwarves hold a natural affinity for the earth in the mountainous places of the world, they are also known for their naval power and skill in sailing. They have a historical conflict with giants and dragons over territory and resources, but they maintain a cold respectable distance from the ones that have upheld the giant/dragon treaty. They do not hold humans accountable for the actions of giants, as according to their literal dwarven reasoning, they are only humans, not giants. Dwarves and humans have shared much of their trade goods, culture, and gods with each other, and are among the closest race to one another.

2/6

The Celtic gods came from the fey realm, bringing with them the elves and the gnomes grown from great trees within the fey world. Eldritch and mysterious, the fey-folk’s magic is considered to be the most potent and raw in its connection to Gaia (the material plane). The fey races have warred with humans in the past over their desire for “progress” uprooting the natural world, but have maintained peace with them in exchange controlled resources. While most of the older generations of elves do not care for the cross-cultural contamination, younger elves and most gnomes enjoy the ambitious and youthful energy of humans, resulting in many cross-cultural combinations and the half-elf race.

Halflings have little official recorded history, so no one really knows where they came from. Some legends say they were here on the material plane before any other race, even the Titans.

Tieflings are a lineage of humans cursed by Asmodeus to inspire sin in the hearts of mortals, despite tieflings having free will and no real moral inclinations.

Orcs are one of the many children of demonkind, with half-orcs being the result of centuries of war with all races. An orc breeding with any race results in a half-orc. Half-orcs are typically caught between their abyssal ancestry and the desire to be something greater than slaves to their base emotions.

3/6

Most of the gods outside of the major three pantheons tend to be beings from the mortal races that ascended to godhood in one way or another. Their relationships vary with each pantheon, though they are considered lesser deities/new money in any pantheon compared to the “natural born” greater deities/old money. This does not make them any less divine or powerful. Examples include Lolth, an elf who sought to keep the elves pure from the other non-fey races. An elven cold war cumulated with the first elven murder by another elf, where Lolth stabbed the first elven king in the back at a peace negotiation. The celtic gods banished her and her followers to the deepest roots of the great trees, only for her to rise in power in the Underdark as a dark goddess, corrupting her followers into the Drow race.

Asmodeus is an angel who sought a way to punish mortals for their evil actions without giving more resources the demon lords. Heaven gave him permission to create Hell as a way to contain evil souls without fueling the demon hoards. Too late did they realize his true hatred for mortals for their mindless wasting of the gift of free will, and his eternal mission to corrupt all mortal life to fuel his own “rightful army” to conquer the demon hordes once and for all. His immense influence and control over so many souls have ascended him from angelic status to true divinity.

That's it I guess, I overestimated how many posts it would take. Still not complete, as I would still have to fill out a basic universe creation lore, and then mortal lore which always really tricky for me to write.

I'd rate 8 flags/10 steampunk scooters

Really? Shit, well maybe on the next thread then.

Thoughts on this generic gray-apocalypse setting? I kinda want to give it the feel of that 15 years later PDF I saw here a long time ago. That, mixed with Bresinki paintings (or however you spell his name.

Is this useful to anyone ? I quit world building but maybe you guys would like it.

Medieval price list
medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html

I'm still working on the God's Eye setting, trying to get my ideas on paper to start formatting it into a setting design document. Its difficult, I have a lot of nebulous ideas and can see how things work in my head but figuring out where to start explaining it all has been difficult.

That and I'm trying to iron out the major religious institution in said setting. I want it to be a mix of the Catholic church (In the sense that its almost a national entity in and of itself what with the Vatican and how much political power it used to hold), and eastern religions. Its been hard to nail it all down and make sense, but I have some cool art in the works for the asteroid cathedral city that makes up the Vatican of the setting.

Are there any good and easy methods for making maps into hexmaps?

Looks good.

Is it fine to have things like fashion, radio, audio & visual technologies, automobiles, and consumer electronics set in the vein of the 1920s while leaving everything else two to three decades behind? Like ships and guns and income prices?

No, jesus no. I mean you could, but it would result in a shitty setting that makes no sense.

Think about what implications any given technology has on the wider society, and how the world would change by having some tech less developed than others. In general, you need to have a very good reason for society to have not invented certain tech while still having others, because technology tends to lead directly into new technology as people discover more and build a greater understanding of the world upon the discoveries of what came before.

The fact that you have cars and radios and electronics on any kind of 1920s level, yet income prices are locked to that of decades ago would create a vast and horrific dystopia in which a radio costs well beyond the price range of anyone but the most wealthy. Guns are surprisingly simple mechanical devices, and military tech is very often one of the first sources of new technology, so you would need a very, very good reason people are still using muskets. Even more so with ships, which are the lifeblood of any large economy outside of landlocked nations.

Essentially, the world you describe is one where hyper-wealthy nobility who literally own everything and everyone listen on their radios as peasants murder each other with muskets for their entertainment and the world is either set on a single continent, or continents connected by land bridges that render shipping unnecessary. The weather on such a world would likely be quite horrific.

You've essentially made a hell on earth for everyone except the top 0.01%, who live in a 1920s paradise beyond anything even the most rose tinted view of history could possibly imagine. While I can actually think of some interesting plots involving that, I doubt it's what you had in mind.

People weren't using muskets as a primary firearm in the 1900s user. At that point there were several breech loading mechanisms and cartridge developments that made muskets woefully obsolete. And why not just convert the prices of from 1920s to prices in 1900?

I've been getting into the /wb/ mood again recently. Does anyone have any recommendations for good science fantasy settings that I could draw inspiration from?

I've heard good things about the Book of the New Sun series.

Destiny has some neat "all combat is a debate of ideology" justified by all the space magic. Plus time-bending robots versus literal zombie insectoids led by a lich.

Lord of Light is a bunch of people using Clarke tech to imitate the Hindu gods and cosmology in the far future.

Nice.

Doing, although at less rapid pace. I actually kinda wrote a light system rules, but that is still WIP.
I also made bunch of appearance variation-sheets for bunch of races; for example., horn curvature, jowl size (associated with masculinity), snout shape, eye, scale conditions, etc. Stuff like that. Ultimately it is visual, but should help me coming up with varying looks. And players, probably.

I've been also thinking about buggos.

Treasure Planet
Outlaw Star
Negima

What advantages and disadvantages do straightened/elephant-like and arthropoid/bug legs have over each other? The "spider tank" page on TVTropes says that spider/bug legs are more spread out and usually more stable (pointy feet aside), but I'm still not sold on them, as I think straighter, elephant/sauropod-like legs would still be better at supporting weight, especially if the creature or machine in question is a multi-ton APC designed to carry at least six giant 12ft-tall warriors.

I would just go with an old-fashioned tank with treads and all, but I don't feel like it aesthetically fits with the tribal and animalistic motifs of the culture and advanced magitech used by said giant warrior race.

Well, I've got two things I'm working on, a Star Trek Adventures campaign that's gonna be streamed, I've got the first two adventure ideas down for it

for my D&D campaign, I've been thinking of ways to provide a meaningful journey across a country [that the PCs are wanted in] to the Grand Library of Xandos, which is on the isle of ash.

They had the choice of venturing through the first level of hell to find the infinite staircase to shortcut to their destination, but it was more perilous.

There's only really one advantage "straightened/elephant-like" legs have and that's simplicity.

How are arachnid legs not worse at supporting weight than straight legs?

straight legs require a complex system of interacting muscles and nerves that are easily damaged when carrying excessive weight and when damaged they cant be safely removed because they don't have the facilities to distribute weight effectively.

How does that make them simpler? And what are these "facilities" that distribute weight? How come arthropod legs have them when elephant/sauropod legs don't?

What about a straightened mechanical leg with a spring system or some other form of suspension or shock absorber?

My current races are shaping up to be;
>Humans
>Alpaca/Sheep men- live in nomadic flocks or shire villages, sheer and sell wool in summer to other races for clothes and cloth
>Manos(?)- Large handed simpletons that excel at crafting weapons and armor, but not so good with lockpicking and delicate tasks. Orange skin, square faces.
>(No name?)- Desert dwelling shrill people, short and fast, tend to be clever and good at hiding and survival. Feet end in talons that act as improvised weapons.

I'd like to refine these concepts and maybe add one more, but I'm not sure what I'm really missing here.

>76 pages

2/8

Here's my regional loredump for my game. Curious what people think.

What biomes do your non-humans live in? What are they like physiologically? Are you handymen amphibious? Are your desert dudes bird people?

So I made a thread for this before I realized it should be posted here. Woops. Sorry about that. Reposting:

I'm working on an HG Wells world for an RPG. It's set in 1930, after a second martian invasion. What Wells and Verne stuff should I include for flavor? So far I've got:

Tripods, black smoke, red weed (a slower-growing strain but one that survives Earth's microbes), heat rays (now reverse engineered to be mounted to tanks or miniaturized as "heat rifles"), land ironclads, carolinium bombs, plattnerite, cavorite, the selenites, and the invisible man's serum.

From all quiet on the Martian Front, I'll be adding lobotons and some of the martians' extra technology. I'm also adding some Tesla devices for that turn-of-the-century feel.

>invisible man's serum
>Verne
Reeeeee

That aside, you could have Verne's Florida moon cannon, in From Earth to the Moon, as part of a human counterinvasion/fortify the Moon against Martian attack. You could have submarine development be influenced by the Nautlius instead, which allows for underwater adventures.

Verne also did a Journey to the Center of the Earth, so you could have hollow earth adventures against an underground Martian remnant.

Currently designing a conlang for some swamp-people in my setting. Just started but I can already create some cool proverbs, such as:
"Gobav jigob, ba maifuv jimaifad", or roughly, "toads in the swamp, and fish in the ocean", meaning something akin to the English "Birds of a feather flock together".

What are some synonyms for land. I'm making a halfling empire in my world based strongly on the Lilliputians of Gulliver's Travels. I kind of want to use Meek, but I don't just want Meekland.

stead? or you could just go with a foreign word that sounds like it could be English like "Lound/lond/lan" or "eard?"

lund works, thanks

H.G. Wells was the first writer to serious consider the idea of atomic bombs. However, he imagined releasing their energy slowly, rather than all at once. So if you detonated it, it would explode for weeks or months, permanently destroying the area around and kicking up massive amounts of dust and debris. Could be an interesting super weapon.

>what are you working on?
Still chugging away at my Dark-Sea adventure world. Since the main theme of the world is that it's alien, I've been trying to come up with different ways to do classic monsters and such with new twists. A couple threads back I presented the Alucid, a carnivorous insectoid race that hollowed out people and turned them into pseudo-vampires.

But I'm not sure what to do with dragons. Since the setting is almost entirely a tropical climate, with a heavy emphasis on psionics, chakra, leylines, and a dash of biopunk, I need something that reflects some of that to a degree. Since I've already done an insectoid-vampire rewrite, if I do it again with dragons I'll have to make a moratorium on insectoids elsewhere. Salamanders or Komodo dragons don't visually appeal to me, despite their other traits being interesting (regeneration, poison, etc).

I do know that I like the idea of dragons hunting down leyline hotspots and nesting in places of high spiritual energy. This gives me some room to make them intensely psionic, but I don't know what to do besides.

I think I posted in another thread that you should read the Scarlet Traces series.

You should also read this because it's awesome.

>"Look to the stars my son. Look to them in all their glory. There they shine in dance on a canvas filled with ambition. It is a sea bursting with all manner of shapes and sizes telling tales triumph, cunning, honor."
>"What star is that Papa?"
>"That my, son. Is Nekkar."
>"Whatis he?"
>A Cattleman."
>"I thought you said there was glory..."
>There is glory in everything. Like Alfirik, the flock. They who blazed a path where all other failed. Achernar, River's End. Where the journey ends and another greater one begins. Or Al-Nair, The Brig-
>"What star is that papa?"
>"...We must go. Now."
>"But-"
>"Now!"

Wrote this short blurb about a race of magically adept peoples who live on a floating island. They're possessed of a self-importance and pride that makes them believe they should lord over those they live above. They're arrival is signaled by the appearance of flaming balls of fire appearing to be falling meteorites. Their frequent devastating raids have sent the peoples below them fleeing. Into the seas... The jungles... The depths of the earth itself... And others to places no one imagined possible.

R8. I'm really bad at worldbuiling coherent ideas and just thought of this

Check out Edison's Conquest of Mars and also Night of the Cooters for giggles

>tfw I've all but abandoned my worldbuilding project because I realize my friends and I will never play an RPG together for more than 3 sessions before something "comes up" for someone every week after and they also work night shift vs my dayshift.

Trying to build a nation of animal tamers but have reached a philosophical impasse.

How do we justify hunting and killing for food while protecting our ever-growing menagerie from harm.
Do wild predators deserve to death for having the audacity to hunt our pets, even though we compete with them for prey on a regular basis?
Can we really call ourselves nature-lovers if we value certain species over others?
How can we avoid bringing some species to extinction for the crime of conflicting with our personal interests and artificially inflating other species to dangerous levels, destroying the ecosystem that we swore to protect?

Any good sources on animistic/nature-worshipping philosophy I can read?

You could go the spiritualistic route

The first herders were saved by said animal eating them above all others
Their god appears as said animal
It could be similar to Hindus and the cow

It also generally depends on the disposition of the herders themselves as far as they could see that Animal was meant to be protected and revered while the otyers just exist for its comvienve or inconvienve
Go the Dothraki and Horse route
Or present their beliefs as inherently alien and unfamiliar

Well then I'd like to change my question then.
>1. Is it possible for certain technologies to undergo rapid advancements due to incentivizing the development of some industries over others? Such as radio technology being more advanced than the military industry?
>2. Can the costs, wages, income, and inflation rate of an economy stay relatively constant for a large number of year? Like having 1900s prices for 1920s commodities?

Yes, but there needs to be an underlying reason for that. Wages have been stagnant in real life for quite some time due to an artificial suppression of the value of labor through large scale immigration, for example, so you could have your setting use some form of nearly inexhaustible labor source to suppress wages, you could have your setting be communist, or be in the middle of a horrific economic depression.

Tech can be lopsided too, although again, there needs to be a reason, and you should extrapolate that reason out to the rest of your setting. Maybe some critical issue of geography has forced the development of radio before other technology, if so how, and what has that resulted in regarding other technology? It's very likely that such a discovery will quickly lead to other tangential technologies and the scientific field will even out before too long, but an entire nation dedicating its resources to a single technological development can lead to a rather lopsided technology level, such as the Manhattan Project developed to stop a war, or the V2 rocket program of the Nazis before that, which resulted in rocket designs so advanced they are still used to this day.

Everything in the world is connected, and changing one variable in it will have serious repercussions across the world. Try to think on what those will be, and figure out what kind of place your setting is due to the changes you want to give it.

Animal tamers don't have to keep animals from harm. Look at the Basques. Legendary for having an almost mystical ability to speak to their animals and command them, but they are not kind to them. I caught my uncle calling to his sheep once. Despite him being a gentle 92 year old man in a woolen sweater, he swore some pretty vile things would happen to his sheep if they didn't get in gear.

Thread questions:
>how many races does your setting have?
>do you have humans? If so, how do you keep them culturally distinct?
>How do you keep other races unique while avoiding monoculture syndrome?

>how many races does your setting have?
Five. Humans, Proteans (oozefolk), Shards (Elans), Aeolans (birdfolk), and Guppi (frogfolk) are playable, though there are many nonplayable/monster races as well.
>do you have humans? If so, how do you keep them culturally distinct?
Three varieties. My setting involves heavy mutation due to magic. One group are attuned to sailing, sorcery, and piracy. Another is more of a trader-fighter-explorer sort of culture. And the third one is a religious caste system that worships witches.
>How do you keep other races unique while avoiding monoculture syndrome?
I have reasons why a monoculture would make sense if it exists. Humans have at least three cultures. Proteans are golems, and so have little native culture. Shards deliberately hide their true nature, and so their culture is bare bones to keep their deception straight. Guppi have multiple subraces based off their habitat. And Aeolans only reached sapience a few centuries ago, so they don't have much culture anyway.

Rate my cyberpunk setting

Does it need more or less?

Will be integrated into larger book upon release.

How big is your setting? Just three human cultures seems small, but I have no idea what is appropriate for what scale

Neat, I like how some have two origins. The places are kinda stereotypical the more "exotic" they get but guessing from the art yours is an IST game or aesthetically similar, so that makes sense.

IST?

Also, having things be stereotypical is a concious effort: all my current players are new to role-playing.

>Gods want to create perfect mortal life
>Fail with campaign world
>Fuck off, leaving behind their servants to keep things running
>After a few thousand years servants stop giving a shit
>Magical forces go out of balance, oceans and most coasts become unsafe
>Sea travel done in airships that fly above where the magic takes effect
>Rogue magic causes natural disasters and monsters
>Dwarves are basically pacific islanders but have lost their sailing traditions after centuries of being stuck in their islands interior
>Elves are mountain hermits like standard dwarves except spend their time making spells to ward off the inevitable encroachment of the magic inland

What do you think?

I'm trying to make a deck of cards full of lore blurbs for the players to draw out of at the beginning of the game, only 5 cards in right now. Any ideas? Here's an example of one I've made.

I goddamn love maps.

What font is that? Looks like modified georgian script to me.

It's tiny tengwar, makes are more or less in Sindarin

*names, not makes. Goddamn phoneposting

>>how many races does your setting have?
I'm not even certain anymore. I have four "core" races that are thematically linked, and then I have broader racial categories to encompass everything else. The core races have remained stable, but I've just sort of been adding to the other categories as I've seen fit. So far there's five categories each with anywhere between two to like six races, but a lot are permutations of others, and the whole system is more made from the perspective of how the races view each other rather than how they're actually related.

I like settings with a bunch of sapient races, but I also like them to be organized/tied together in some way so they don't end up seeming randomly tossed in just for the sake of it.

>>do you have humans? If so, how do you keep them culturally distinct?
I try to make them distinct, but also I try to give them symmetry with other races. They're one of the four core races, the others being dwarves, giants and orcs. All are unified in that all four have been on the main world for as long as anyone can remember and they can all interbreed with each other (mostly) without complication, but they are each made unique by being linked to one of the four types of magic in the setting, though more thematically so than literally.

Humans are tied to spirit magic (the beseeching of dead ancestors and creatures/places), and a unifying theme between all their cultures is that they really care about ancestry, lineage, etc, which is something that actually comes off as a little weird to the other races, who tend to be more meritocratic or otherwise. Humans governments are usually inheritance based and in come cases druidic. They are also a little more empathetic and even tend to treat their animals better. They were the firsts to normalize the practice of keeping animals as companion pets for example.

1/2

>cont.
Dwarves meanwhile are tied to arcane magic (the manipulation of the physical world) and are more material, probably resembling modern first world humans the most in mindset. Giants are in tune with divine magic (communing with gods and foretelling the future), are strongly faith-based and superstitious to a fault. They live in castes decided at birth, believing the gods tell them what they should become through unique birthmarks. Orcs are associated with vitalism (the manipulation of vital life forces present in all living things) and express it a little paradoxically by focusing on both warfare and medicine, improving and their own health while also raining death down on their enemies.

All four can have cultures with traits of the others, but as a rule when they stick to their own theme, they take it to more of an extreme than the others would.

>>How do you keep other races unique while avoiding monoculture syndrome?
I try to make sure their cultures generally stick to their themes, but I also plot out their history and set up several points where their cultures can branch. Like with dwarves, their original homeland was a sacred mountain they mined for legendary ore, then some traveled off and found more mountains like the first, others settled on becoming nomadic merchants, others still were subjugated and adopted parts of the regional culture. Or orcs who began as several warring tribes, unified into one with a few tribes escaping conquest, then were conquered by outsiders, causing several tribes to break off and set up far away, where they in turn conquered, were conquered or found other ways to coexist with their neighbors.

Basically, I try to make a believable history, and that naturally produces multiple cultures while still keeping them all tied to the same roots.

Not a fan of magic just randomly doing things, or inverting racial tropes to the point they're unrecognizable.

How do I make a 3-dimensional map where the world contains layers and wild topography that can't possibly be represented on a 2-dimensional map while faithfully preserving distance

I plan to make Dwarves a Nomadic race that follow Giants who turn into mountains on their death a thing in my setting.

Any ideas on what a caravan of midgets following a giant would look like? Any cultures I should take a look at to capture the aesthetic? I largely plan to have the aesthetic change depending on the temperament of the Giant (A giant who doesn't want to be followed results in gloomy, pessimistic dwarves who believe they're atoning for sins committed by family, themselves, or in another life and as such appear to be covered in flagellation scars, drone holy scripture, etc etc) I just need a base aesthetic I can look at when the dwarves know that at some point their object of worship is either going to die or pass away and they'll begin digging into a mountain to form a home

>I want to make my dwarves X!
>I want to make my elves Y!

Why don't you people just make up new fucking races already?

It isn’t a big setting. Whole main map (can post later) and setting falls between the two horse latitudes, and stretches East to West about the width of the Indian Ocean, give or take.

Boii don't make me flame your ass

It's also because I'm creatively bankrupt

Because some people have fun putting established races into new landscapes.
Though the
>my x are actual [real life culture]
Is the most lazy. There is nothing wrong with taking inspiration from existing cultures, I'm doing that. But putting pointy ears on 17th century french is not creative.

what if I make a setting where there are only humans
no new races
no alternate races
deal with it

People instantly lose interest in a race if it has some weird name they don't recognize

Says who?

>people
Who are you making this setting for? Yourself? If so who gives a shit? Your players? You'd only think of doing that to begin with if you knew your players would be cool with it.

Who cares what "people" think

I would imagine the ultimate goal of all worldbuilding is to eventually use it in some form of media meant to be shared

Is there a idiot-simple world-map making app out there? Somebody with no art skills like me could figure out and use? I don't really need my world map to be a work of art, just indicate to my players what is where in the world their in.

>their
Fuck you, phone. And your auto-complete.

Is it just me or is the world generator on ProcGen not working?

The answer is always to make it yourself in your preferred image editing software or draw it by hand. If it doesn't need to look good then it doesn't matter that you have no art skills.

Anyway if you still want some mapping tools look into Hexographer and Inkarnate (warning Inkarnate maps looks like shit) and see if that's what you want. If you one day want to make some nice maps try out Wilbur or Fractal Terrains.

Much, much less.

>Hexographer

This is EXACTLY what I was looking for! Because I also want to autistically calculate travel times/distances. Thanks user!

Anyone ever thought of doing a reverse Tolkien world? Where Elves are the bad guys and Humans team up with orcs, trolls, ghosts, and demons?

Ahem...

Why would humans be good guys in reverse tolkien? They were good guys in regular tolkien, so should they be the villains in the opposite?

76 pages of writing that, honestly, reads like you should've left it in your native language. If your native language is English, then you've either got to go back to school, or you need to read the whole damn thing out loud to a friend who reads books, and ask them to help you fix it.

Read the second paragraph out loud:
>Civilization’s resurgence over the past century and a half stands in stark opposition to the lands still wallowing in the scars of that caused the Lost Age, and the discord sown by clashes between newly risen nation-states keeps the land churning with blood and oil.
>still wallowing in the scars of that caused the Lost Age
>scars of that caused

>how many
About 6 'major civilized races', give or take. Caowe, Draconians, Desw, Varpu, Satyr, Human. It kinda depends on who you ask, and how you ask it. There are minor ones that are more regionally constrained, and some count humans in them (due to their poor population). Then there is headache of variants, like satyrs (placeholder) having west and east variants - do you count them as separate or one?
>Do you have humans
Yes. There are numerous groups, some being families adopted into Caowe clan (I should probably write thing on those), descendants of refugee scholars of Zere in modern Desw, Zerean desertdwellers, nomadic midlanders etc.
>Monocultures
As said, it is one I thing wanna try to avoid, but haven't really touched since I kinda need to settle on borders/regions. I keep cultures mostly regional, with varying emphasis on various racial traditions that may have or may not have faded.
Lot of modern/urban areas have very mixed populations due to availability jobs/food, and the difference in culture, say, an urban draconian and native draconian living at Southern Barrier can be rather significant.

>what are Easterlings
>what are the men of harad
>Black Numenoreans
>the Wain Riders
Cmon man.

I've already cursed myself to have six types of elves. What are some cool fairies that aren't fucking elves? I'm kind of lost; the only thing I can think of is more elves.
Gnomes aren't on here yet because I'm also thinking of ways to make them cool

garden gnomes, living trees, cannibal mole people.

Would a setting where mages are alike to aes sedai in which they are very rare but powerful work?

Isn't that the default for most settings?

No
Dnd for example

Pointe taken, iHave rewritten the introduction many times at this point, whether that has made it better or worse is up in the air but I've corrected the grammatical issues.