World building general /wbg/

Fair enough. I've just been seeing shit exactly lining up with what I happened to be studying that week.

It's fucking following me home.

What college do you go to, if you don't mind me asking?

>If people have other ideas that aren't specific to the grassland biome that is cool too. I love hear everyone's ideas.
Burr-Oak Dryads, old and matronly, who are known to use and grant enchanted acorns that can burst into a great confligration when impacted.

These Dryads and their trees are old, rare, and isolated, and are generally viewed as wise patrons and guides for individual tribes

>How do I make my great plains more great and less plain?
been thinking about this myself lately

kansas, for instance, truly is an elemental plane of endless flat bullshit, but most "plains" are less boring than that, with noticeable elevation changes, steep river valleys, and different types of plants

so, have notable river valleys or canyons/gorges, with broad shallow rapids/fords, have areas where the plains are rockier and more hilly, with strewn boulders and strange isolated monoliths/mesas/tors (home to flying creatures), have areas with different vegetation/scattered trees (maybe an area where the grass is like 6+ft tall, or where the trees are only a hundred feet apart), litter it with old forts and abandoned towns/windmills, giant termite mound looking monster lairs, giant ankheg burrow colonies, caves, lakes (home to floating raft towns or large wide boats that people live on), areas where the wind and/or weather behave strangely (like wind "corridors" where the wind blows stronger and consistently in river-like paths, or something), draw where the colossal herds of not-bison roam (where the grass is gone and the dirt is all turned up) and remember that the not-lions/not-hyenas/not-indians follow these herds

remember that plains creatures will be built for speed, endurance, and/or long-distance eyesight
realize that africa is the only place with really neat plains animals because that was the only place where they survived the end of the ice age; europe/asia/north america had them too

in one of my old settings, there was a floating castle-town that rode around on a massive shallow bowl-disc at a slow walking pace, about 12 ft from the ground
maybe consider having floating islands or structures, home to more advanced humanoids, or cloud giants/dragons or other monsters

I was already planning on having forest guardians and dryads, but I like the idea of blessed acorns.
I like the idea of ind rivers, canyon lands and other cool wonders of erosion, probably near the mountainous regions.

Anyone have idea of what i can do with a tundra?
They're cold and they suck, but I wanna make them fantastical in some way

Tundras are absolutely beautiful during the brief thaw. Small flowers bloom and cover the land, Alaskan blueberries give fruit, and all manner of bees and butterflies can be seen about

Play up the plimportance and vibrancy of the Thaw. All manner of monsters, plant creature, and elementals arise when the thaw hits. Water Nymphs arise from the ground as the subsoil ice thaws and prances about the fields of flowers. Great rovers carve their way through the ground as they melt from the glacial mountains, and enchanted Fireweeds collect the sunlight and watch to produce pyrotechnics displays at night

Sounds really cool. I was gonna have my players fight some sort of winter elemental keeping the thaw away anyway, so that sounds like a cool visual payoff

Glacial dungeons, Battling a lake monster that breaks through the ice below you. The noble mammoth trumpets across the tundras in the gorgeous light of the aurora borealis.

Yawn.

>I was gonna have my players fight some sort of winter elemental keeping the thaw away anyway
I'll bring up vedic mythology whenever I want
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vritra

Occasional valley or cliff ruins that leads down into an underground city of modern like catfolk who war with the gnolls up top for food.

Crazy and/or quickly changing weather patterns

Soil composition is almost waterproof so, when it rains 70% of the plains become giant ponds that takes a few days to dry out.
A seemingly erradic and endless sea only few inches deep.
plants and animals have adapted to such enviroment and present some anphibious qualities.
I wonder what type of water veichle one can come up with.

University of Idaho

The joke is I just described Native Tribes that lived in the Great Plains.

Shame, Texas Tech University here. Was hoping I had found someone to actually play meatspace games with

That
Flash flood can really make for a fun travel session when water can slowly but surely exhaust them when not downright acting as quicksand.

Also, make it harder to follow the right direction and harder to regain stamina when not sleeping on a safe ground (if you're lenient, you can let them sleep in trees)

>I wonder what type of water veichle one can come up with.

For a sea a few inches deep? That'll be gone in a few days? Just wade through it. It isn't like a meter wide wagon wheel is gonna give much of a fuck. I guess fashion may adapt to it though.

>Soil composition is almost waterproof
But that's wrong though. In healthy souls with proper native vegetation communities, the vegetation, root systems, and improved soul textures actually greatly improve the infiltration and water holding capacity of the soils. Further, in many places such as in shortgrass prairies, which generally have sandy soils, the soils tend to be well drained and have deep water tables that can retain a lot of water. There's a bloody reason why the historic features of the Playa Wetlands were naturally ephemeral. The only reason why it seems like it floods easily is because in Prairie systems the precipitation events tend to be short duration/high intensity and tend to peak only at a certain point in the year

You have it confused with deserts

>no pastebin
You fucking idiot.

Put fantastic animals and cultures there.
>Nomadic tribes live on the backs of titanic sized tortoises that make their homes on the planes.
>"Kobald" praire dog communites
>Planesdwelling dinosaurs
>Ruins of a long passed civilization
>Whatever trope you want

It's not actually that large of an area.
It's just very heavily enchanted by deceiving illusion magic, put in place my its tribal inhabitants, to mislead entrants into believing they are crossing huge expanses of land, when they're really just going in circles.
The ruse is so successful that mapmapkers of whole civilizations have been fooled into placing the "Great Plains" on their maps, even though they can't figure out why they have to squeeze everything else around to make it fit.

>Will add giant prairie chickens
remember that prairie chickens only survive with their nests on the ground by blending into the plains.
so even making them huge won't protect them from predators preying on their nests when they leave.
you're gonna have to make them even better at blending in.
so good, that you're adventurers will have to practically step on a giant prairie chicken before they realize that it's a bird, not a small hill.

>kansas, for instance, truly is an elemental plane of endless flat bullshit
t. has never been to Kansas

t. never left Kansas

driven across it a few times, god forbid you fuckers have a tree

Any good ideas for the name of an ancient civilization that was destroyed by its own arrogance (yes, I know, how original)?
Said civilization was a magocracy, but I don't want to just call it "The Magocracy".
I don't care if the name is a simplistic as that one, I just want a different one.

"Magnamaga" (plural) for their pre-fall self-called edgy name, "Hubripols" for "arrogant civilisation", dunno if you want something better or more fantasy-like.

TORNADOES! EVERY year!
>=46 tornadoes in 1.25 days, no weather magic.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Great_Plains_tornado_outbreak

I was going for something simplistic if possible.
All tge nations in my setting have ultra-simplistic names like "The Empire", "The Republic", etc not so much because I'm a lazy dick but rather because I like simplistic names (like how certain works only refer to characters by their title/occupation/class/whatever).
Even so, I would be fine with a less simplistic name, considering this is pretty much the first civilization and thus predates every other nation in the setting.

Trees are found near rivers, where younger many beautiful cottonwoods and willows.

Generally, you don't want too many woody in your Prairie, as it's often indicative of degradation of the natural stable grassland ecosystem and historic disturbance/succession interval. Invasion of woody shrubs and trees such as mesquite and juniper are major ecological issues that are currently afflicting much of the modern rangeland in the country these days, as it often decreases grass and for yields, and makes the habitat less suitable for native wildlife due to the lack of a natural mosaic vegetative community

Also, I'm general having a tree in a grassland can also be a problem because trees are thirsty motherfuckers who will often kill off all other nearby plants by consuming all the immediate water in the soil and taking up most of the soil space, as well as reducing the water table in some places

Does your world have any great buildings?

>what is it?
>what makes it special?
>what is it made of?

North American Biomes are incredibly varied in such a small amount of space.

Would probably be interesting and confusing for your party to go a days travel through immense heat of a small desert, follow a creek through a hilly land full of centaurs the next day(change the human half to whatever and remove any hint of civilization), then the third day they end up in a low elevation plain surrounded by hills with whipping wind making them feel like its freezing.

Depression-era dust storms could kill a man in minutes by pouring extremely fine soil into his lungs. Except instead of over farming the same crop and no trees its fucking magic yo

I once put a lost kingdom in the plains, absolutely invisible to the observer from ground-level, but if you were to see it from a bird's eye view at night, you'd notice that there's a vague arrow of glowing stones pointing to a glyph location.

Using the proper entry glyph would make the kingdom rise up from the ground like the map of the Game of Throne intro does.

It's a lost kingdom of Man that became abandoned after a rival Elven kingdom unleashed a plague upon all humans who lived there. The curse plague is still in effect, but only against humans.

One answer I've used in some settings on other terrain features:

Make it go on forever.

Not literally forever, mind you, just an absolutely insanely long distance, often magically so.

I've done this in a few instances but probably the best example of how I'd do plains is based on a forest I used at one point.

It's a big forest but it's not THAT big by any normal reconning. You can circle the landmass it's on pretty easily by ship and it doesn't seem like it'd take more than a few weeks to navigate from one side to the other. In fact, it doesn't so long as you're going from east to west or heading south. You can walk north just fine, in fact there's a stone cobbled road leading from north to south. Thing is, if you go north the road doesn't hit the sea where it normally should. No part of the forest does. It just lets you keep going north. Thing is, there are actually terrain features and structures up there. They stay in perfectly normal positions beyond where the land should have hit the sea and there are even some maps of them. The father north you go the weirder things get and the fewer people actually come back. Those who've made it particularly far mention mountains in the distance. No one makes it to the mountains.

Give it craters and underground caverns with tunnels weaving all threoughout

Also, maybe a volcano with some ashy molten shit in the area nearby.
Just 1 or 2 tho.

Quick creative experiment I like.

What kind of headlines would you see in your world? Specifically up to 5 headlines you wouldn't likely see anywhere but. And if for whatever reason your world wouldn't have a newspaper or something similar, just roll with it man.

How can I realistically show the development of different nations in my setting? Like, how they are formed, grow, split, collapse, etc.
Kinda like how some nations in our world were formerly part of other nations that used to be bigger or nations that collapsed and led to the formation of a bunch of smaller nations.

>Dragon struck by lightning, hundreds dead
>Modifying Memories, not just for inmates says source
>Vampire season, make sure your bug nets are up
>Jadhu, God of Sex/Drugs/Music caught making sexual advances toward mountain, quote, “Yeah, well, what are YOU gonna do about it?”
>Historians baffled by alternate timeline, can’t remember what event belong when

>The father north you go the weirder things get and the fewer people actually come back. Those who've made it particularly far mention mountains in the distance. No one makes it to the mountains.

this interests me. what do you mean no one makes it to the mountains, you mean no one has made it back, right?

>The elves are back, and they're pissed: why you should stay inside this month
>Scientists warn that sun going out again would be "extremely bad"
>NEW gallery on the edge: 15 breathtaking photos of the edge of the world that put globe earth thoerists in their place
>Good news for those with deceased loved ones! Evil lich raising undead legions in north.
>Local man crashes world, kills god. More at 11.

Add more grates to your great plains. My great great grandfather was a very plain man but he had a great plain grate on his great plains. We called it plain great great gramps great plain great plains grate.

>Insurgents murder beloved imperial governor under false accusations of corruption
>"The recent sightings of an extremely powerful child claiming to be an artificial human have nothing to do with a secret plan of mine to attain godhood" assures Archmage Crowley
>15 years after the Great War: What have been the Empire's new challenges since the unification of the known world?
>Outspoken critic of the Ruling Council dissapears, Inquisitors claim he never existed in the first place
>Imperial citizens hope to see the Emperor during Victory Day celebrations after 15 years of absence from public affairs

>Imperial ship mysteriously disappears while transporting battalion of slave knights to their certain death on the front lines. "No idea what could have possibly happened" comments naval officer.
>Unrest on the rise in forcefully occupied nations as more and more soldiers are pulled away for the war effort.
>Group of marauding rebels clad in "Involuntary Soldier " uniforms going by "The Band of the Drake" gaining influence over dissenting cities. Emperor continues to do absolutely nothing about it.
>"We're just kind of used to everything being on fire" An interview with the mayor of a village in the heart of brigand country that nobody is doing anything about.
>Sea Goddess washes up dead and half eaten on the western coast. The funeral ceremony is set for this weekend as every pub in the nation desperately prepares for her father's arrival.
>New god king born amongst the oni to the east. What this could mean for the upcoming apocalypse.
Things are really looking up, guys.

>Climax vegetative communities
Do you even ecology?

There's no such thing. This is outdated.

I'm working on a setting that is a relatively standard humans-only fantasy setting fast forwarded into an early 20th century equivalent complete with a world war looming.
I have no trouble with the politics since I'm working from a previous setting of mine, but coming up with ways to reflect through the aesthetics that it's a fantasy setting is another story.
Valkyria Chronicles is the closest thing to what I'm trying to do, but I don't want to rip it off wholecloth.
Other than giving soldier armour plates on top of their uniforms and maybe medieval-ish helmets, what sort of visual elements could I use to hint at the "former fantasy" of the setting? Tanks and planes in particular are a though nut to crack, though making pushprops common can help.

Regardless, I'd check out Full Metal Alchemist. It's very similar, thematically, to VC while doing its own thing.

For you speecifically, maybe reintroduce heraldry? Bring back ceremonial dress and armor? Give soldiers swords as sidearms?

>heraldry
That could work rather well as identification markings. A quick look at an emblem would let anyone know what sort of unit it belongs to, while the details identify the unit.
>swords
Given that relatively little time has passed between the "late medieval" period and the "modern" period, it's possible that the sword hasn't been phased out outside of a ceremonial object worn by officers. It's actually a pretty good idea. Let's bring out an army of 'Mad' Jack Churchills.
Regarding ceremonial dress, I guess that would amount to making dress uniforms fancier.
Thanks, those are good ideas.

Oh yeah, don't forget nobles still have a lot of pull, politically.

Fancier, and possibly a part of field uniforms.

Actually that's exactly what I'm doing. The WW can be boiled down as "monarchies and transitional democracies vs totalitarian regimes".
The kicker being friction amongst high ranking nobles in a large unified kingdom whose "king elect" was murdered, leading to a military coup atempt by revolutionaries.
I'll have to draw stuff and see how to mix 40s and faux-medieval aesthetics.

City states with loose boundaries and limited authority in the regions

Siege warfare - limit tech to early 20th century; diesel powered ramshackle tanks on the same battlefield as cavalry. Limited automatic weaponry. Very limited aircraft.

Aristocrats who play a role in conflicts; some as generals from protected positions, others as leaders on the battlefield. (A good way to signpost nefarious and heroic characters)

>I'll have to draw stuff and see how to mix 40s and faux-medieval aesthetics.
Two words: Floral Design.

Good stuff as always, /wbg/.
>very limited aircraft
Being a planefag I just can't do that. It's more of a WW2 equivalent without jets and other late war techs, but without a WW1 to put ideas on trial.
>floral patterns
I assure you, my lord, that this is the future of camouflage.

Google 'napoleonic wars' and 'napoleonic uniforms'

>heraldry
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coats_of_arms,_badges_and_emblems_of_Spanish_Armed_Forces
This could be a starting point.

What sort of powers would a half-wraith have? And how stupid of an idea is to have Elves be Atlanteans?

>half wraith
how does this even work, is the guy like half-cursed? half-dead? half-possessed?
elves as atlanteans just depends on how good you manage to use it as "ok they're older than your civilisation and got cool shit you don't, you ignorant fucks.", if you mean literaly as atlanteans it's just dumb and kind of meme-y.

Man who was near death fused with wraith to get power.

I don't know, ask the guys who wrote the "shadow of mordor/war" fanfic of LotR.