/wbg/ World Building General

I forgot why I'm posting this but I'm challenging myself to make a setting that involves gem waifus that's just as different from steven universe and houseki no kuni as steveven universe is from houseki no kuni.

Basically they live underground, and are in charge of guarding and teaching the earth's attempts at making a race worthy of being the heir to its fortunes. So the underground place they live is a weird testing zone for avian, reptilian, insectoid, mammalian, etc. attempts at making a proper human race. Regular humans succeeded and GTFO leaving the gems completely fucking irrelevant and stuck babysitting furries. Metal and mineral people were the earth's first attempts at creating a guardian of humanity but they were too cruel and carefree respectively. The gem's geode cities are fucked but I don't know why. The caverns that the failed humans live are described by the type of soil that's prevalent in them.

I have three questions that are spoofing my goose:
>Part of the challenge requires the major enemy of the gems to be from outer space.
>I need a reason that the gems are living in squalor outside of their geode city.
>I don't know how the environments in the human caverns could sustain life or be interesting aside from being an ocean of mud or sand that looks cool.
>I can't think of a good aesthetic for the place where the metal people live.
Any random ass idea is something I can work off of but for now my goose is utterly spoofed.

perhaps I shouldclarify, I'm ok with stuff like heaven and mount olympus for the gods and souls in the afterlife, the warp and stuff like that is ok, but it's when crossib over them is not unusual it bothers me, like how in DC and Marvel how it's like every other story they bring in multiple universes and stuff

>What do you use for city maps?
The main city in my setting, like all the other cities in the setting, is inside a giant cave. Because of that, it actually filled in both ways from above and below. I have to represent it as a couple distinct layers of habitation because of that, so the map is actually five or six maps that you stack on top of each other to get a complete-ish picture.

I tried doing something similar for the world map but gave up after finishing the top most layer and realizing the hole I was digging myself into, no pun intended.

What are you specifically talking about, then? Just...science-fantasy? Weird fantasy? But those ARE all concerned with their science-fictionish elements.

What's even the problem with weird shaped worlds? I mean, personally, I have a problem with "fantasy" worlds which are literal planets revolving around a sun.

As long as planes are used tastefully I'm okay with them. It's fun to have secret worlds you can explore that you can't get to without magic. Boring planes are boring though. Alternate universes are usually the result of lazy writing. Weird shaped worlds are usually boring because "dude its a donut lmao I don't have to do anything interesting to it or seriously think about the consequences. Time travel is also lazy writing because it allows you to erase changes. Extradimensional beings are good, but ONLY if nobody knows what the fuck they are and they're incredibly rare, one of a kind things to see.
I'd say it only makes you boring if you don't know how and when they can be properly used.

Wait fuck, I had a reason for posting that half way through posting it and that was four problems instead of three questions.

Then you should create your setting with only a few of these alternate realms and make them very strange and methods to cross or go to them very rare.

No teleport spells. You need a magic horse that belongs to the God of Speed to ride between realms, and even then you need protection spells to avoid getting your life sucked out by astral wraiths and shit. Sounds totally doable.

Or maybe there are only two realms, the real world and the other or nether realms. Ghosts and shit come from the nether realm, and haunted houses are where the layer between them has grown thin. You can only access the netherrealm as a living person in your dreams through eating magic mushrooms that were grown on the corpse of a hanged man, etc.

i dont like space travel in fantasy so the shape of the world shouldn't matter, it should jsut appear flat
yeah like c'thulhu kinda stuff is good, I guess my problem is more when this kind of stuff distracts from rather than contributes to the story

>or seriously think about the consequences
Nigger you better not be talking about real-world geography and physics.
>Time travel is also lazy writing because it allows you to erase changes
That's like saying gods are lazy writing because it allows you to pull deus ex machinas. It CAN be used lazily, or, on the other hand, it can be used well.
>Extradimensional beings are good, but ONLY if nobody knows what the fuck they are
This
>and they're incredibly rare, one of a kind things to see.
Not this, though.
Space travel is good when it's done in a fantastic way. For example, people go to space in lots of myths and chivalric romances. They do so on magical wooden horses, or on carts pulled by swans.

But it's also good when it's done in a conventional way, a la BotNS's dying Earth. A citadel built out of old rockets is a major setting, for example.
>I guess my problem is more when this kind of stuff distracts from rather than contributes to the story
Such as?

that sounds ok yeah, there just needs to a suitable amount of mystery about the whole thing, explains why stuff like 'the faerie realm' is kind of ok with me when its more 'midsummer night's dream' but not the D&D one where there's just a different kind of elves and stuff living there

>Such as?
I mentioned DC before, this is the main cause of this hatred, I absolutely hate DC for all it's multiverse shit, it's because I was really getting into the whole lore of it when I came across all the 'universe crashing into each other' stuff it was like a ruined orgasm

But DC isn't even remotely fantasy. And it's shit for a whole host of reasons.

It is difficult to do unless the setting has meta knowledge of levels or you just accept it as a part of the gamist nature of things. You could also not play a game with levels and play a game where skill improvement is how you progress.

>Nigger you better not be talking about real-world geography and physics.
You'll want to consider real world geography and physics where you can. They should be used as guides instead of hard rules. If its weirdly shaped due to magic you're still going to want a reason and method because thinking about that can expand to other areas of the setting to make the world more interesting as a whole.
>That's like saying gods are lazy writing because it allows you to pull deus ex machinas. It CAN be used lazily, or, on the other hand, it can be used well.
Yeah I was lazy in implying that its always lazy. I dislike having to be constantly flip-floppy and vague in order to appease autists. You should be able to trust other people's intelligence enough to know that they can figure out that exceptions and other circumstances exist.
>Not this, though.
You're right, I can see a situation where having them be common would be interesting.

How do you feel about the Witcher?

As a game: I don't like not being able to make my own character in an rpg and geralt doesn't interest me personally

As a universe: I'm not too sure on the lore, it's something to do with a monsters and fantasy stuff coming in from a different universe or something isn't it? As long as the whole thing is mysterious and the universe stuff is done with after they get there I can live with it but I'd much prefer they all just existed in the same world to start with

>Tell me about your best cities anons, what makes them interesting?
I try to give them several hooks and at least one character that people might want to know. Can't say they're really unique or anything like that. City of gladiator arenas, ruined city turned into a necropolis, capital with huge underground sewer/aqueduct, archipelago inside a marsh etc etc.

Chinese fantasy has that. Perhaps it might help you:
pastebin.com/BqUg9uKn
>Chinese Fantasy and Mythological tips.

>As long as the whole thing is mysterious and the universe stuff is done with after they get there I can live with it but I'd much prefer they all just existed in the same world to start with

Well, it's certainly mysterious but there's plenty of dimensional stuff going on. A bunch of elves tend to come in from an alternate dimension and pretend to be evil ghosts for one. Worth noting about the Witcher universe, humans claim to be from the regular world but there's evidence to the contrary. Essentially, no one except people who were actually there, of which there are a few, can really say when exactly stuff did or did not happen because everything else we know comes from unreliable in universe narrators.

Why would having it all come from the same world to begin with make it more interesting?

>You'll want to consider real world geography and physics where you can.
I disagree. Imagine God takes off his signet ring and turns it into The Universe. Congrats, you've got a doughnut-shaped world, but it's also obviously not the kind of world which is going to be affected by the (real-world) physical ramifications of being a doughnut.

What I'm really trying to mean is that there's no fucking point in it being a doughnut if you treat it as you would a spherical world.

Why would there be a point to making it any shape then? If it were flat, then one could walk to the edge of it. Same with any shape other than round. So there is a point, even if gravity doesn't behave any differently.

Sure, it could be round, but if it's never elaborated on whether or not you can fly into space then it's just as arbitrary as anything else.

Don’t you die on me bump.

I want to have exactly 1 (One) beastfolk race in my setting, because I feel having more then one kind of waters down the appeal and makes it feel crowded.

But I'm not sure which one to pick. So far I have;
>Empire of Canines. Different castes or racial bloodlines that look like wolves, hyenas, coyotes, foxes, etc.
>Sheepfolk Gypsies. Travel around and sell their wool in the summer to other races. Known to be gifted in many kinds of magic and knitting, but people think they're shifty crooks.
>Proud race of Minotaur. Vegetarians but brutal warriors. Live among herds of cows and oxen that they sell to other races for food, don't find this weird at all. They practice poetry and songs because proud warrior race guys.

Which one of these sound the coolest? Or should I just say fuck it and throw them all in there?

Alright, I need help coming up with the fourth corner of this square:

>Biological
>Technological
>Spiritual
>???

The theme is "ways people in a science fantasy setting could modify themselves to achieve power".

Alchemical?

>Proud race of Minotaur. Vegetarians but brutal warriors. Live among herds of cows and oxen that they sell to other races for food, don't find this weird at all. They practice poetry and songs because proud warrior race guys.

These.

Psionic
Magical
Otherworldly / Eldritch
Dimensional
Skill / Mundane

I have a question for everyone.
What would happen if our world invaded your world through a couple of portals (one on land and the other in the sea), and what about if your world invaded our world through the same portals?

Depends on which world.

My high fantasy world would get fucking annhiliated. Even with demigod high level PCs, most magic is support based so no portals or mass damage spells to compete. The tech level is iron age so not a chance in a battle between armies.

In my DBZ inspired setting- our world gets wrecked so hard it's not even funny. The entire point of the setting is tgat your gas station manager could probably lift a car, much less the best fighters firing qi blasts.

My old GM had an idea that we experimented for the Earth itself to be a sort of Matroyshka Doll of sorts that has three layers to it.

Earth's exterior, the sphere.
Then beneath that, a cube.
Then a pyramid as the innermost layer.

Monsters that were inorganic came from the inner layers through rifts.

The game was fun, but the endgame of "stop the maniac from merging all the layers" was real poorly thought out.

What are some cool ideas for explanations of the sun and moon? I'm looking for inspiration. I know that both are stationary objects, and the cube shaped world floats in a sea of night, it's rotations marking the days. I also know the moon has a city on its dark side, a place of shadows and forgotten things. Not sure what the sun could be, lots of myths about a ship or chariot.

I want to make a little card game but ive hit a wall with what sort of setting it should be in. Should it be
>Game played by peasants and Nobles in an alternate world
>Pass-time of spacers, traders and pirates during a manifest destiny period of human space exploration
>Or a game used by supernaturals to pass time and identify each other

Mentally?
Sounds good, did your party reach the centre? was there one?

Those sound fun my friend. With my current setting (Weird Sea World if anyone cares), it’s a toss-up. We have overwhelming tech, but that setting is a logistical nightmare (islands) covered in hostile wildlife that put ours to shame and bio-horrors and eldritch abkminations that would make life hell for any soldiers that come through the gate. The tech advantage might still overcome this, so I’d give it to homefield advantage.

Well, explain the rest of the mythology first. Why’s the world a cube (beyond “it’s a gimmick”).

Make the setting first, or pick an old one you want to run again. The rest will fall together.

So you're making the in-universe reason for the card game to exist? I like it, reminds me how cool I thought Planeswalkers were at first when I learned that magic cards weren't just random bullshit but their battles and 'spells' against each other.

The immortal one sounds interesting, I'm guessing it's more about history then, kind of like playing a King Ramses card and being like "lol I was there"?

I might go with this one. My initial idea was that "spiritual" would be something like the spice from Dune, which is already pretty "alchemical" in nature. There may be a way to make room for both, however.

>Psionic
This is another good one, just gotta figure out a good source for psionics. The bigger idea behind the question is that PCs join a faction that is dedicated to the art of biological/technological/spiritual/??? augmentation of humans, and that's how they get their abilities. These are the factions that keep society going by using their strange arts, sort of like Dune again.

>Mentally
I think this might be a little too mundane, because it is achievable through the other methods.

Okay.
I got the idea from RPG's with card games, Gwent in the witcher, Caravan in fallout,Pazaak in kotor and so on.

>The immortal one sounds interesting, I'm guessing it's more about history then, kind of like playing a King Ramses card and being like "lol I was there"?

I guess, vampires and such making cards out of humans they respected enough seems like a good idea. I was just going to have it be more general rather than having cards for specific individuals.

Do you compile a list of media touchstones for your world? I think this would really help me keep focus when worldbuilding, because I tend to combine too many disparate ideas and the world becomes incoherent.

>Biological
>Technological
>Spiritual
>FINANCIAL

You use money to buy the others, you don't graft dollars to your body/mind.

Drugs. What kind are you use in your setting? Do they make you feel good? Do they make you feel hype? Do they make you get down? Do they make you see things? Are they magic? What are the craziest substances you’ve thrown into a world?

An abandoned magitek elven lunar base. Abandoned cites do count, right?

As magic is decaying out of the world like radioactivity, spells and complex magical devices are constantly losing their power and functionality. Cosmic range teleportation broken down about 15 elf generations, 15.000 years ago but the elves are so incredibly butthurt about it they still continue awarding "Luna Castellan-General" and other titles. They also try to keep finding ways to get back into it, atleast for a peek because in their legends the lunar base is still manned(elfed?) by the best and purest of their kind, uncorrupted by their slowly winding down and withering empire.

The moonbase itself is made out of all sorts of materials and devices that relied on mana to function so only wizards could operate them but most of them are since shut down or the magical materials that made up them decayed into more stable elements. Mithril decayes into iridium, orichalcum into copper, moon diamond into various silicates and so on. The entire base is structurally unsound, prone to errant malfunctions and autumatic defensive systems intermittenly reactivating, as even the diagnostic crystal-spirit(basically an AI) and the golem-servitors themselves are winding down and growing more erratic. Oh yeah, and the containment fields of the deepst vaults of cosmic level shit and portal experiments are also winding down so there might be some minor leaking. Some parts of the base also show non-eucledian geometry and other weird stuff being involved.The base is also haunted, by something more than just the spirits of the last survivors, some of whos bodies are still perfectly conserved in the hard vacuum of the unpressurized areas. There will also be survivors but not what anyone expects.

I intend this to be the very definitve last dungeon of the campaign, packed with mysteries, TWEEESTs and just generally unfair and rage inducing shit. Nothing will force the players to enter but themselves.

Secular?

Man and Machine, God and No God.

Memetic.

>Secular
What do you add to yourself to modify yourself? What is a "secular" alteration to the human condition?

For reference, "spiritual" means things like scientific "magic" couched in religious trappings, such as the spice from Dune.

Might be what I'm looking for, can you elaborate?

>memetics
>people start evolving beyond ideas, becoming concepts themselves
>a single person can transcend mortality by becoming an idea
At least that's what I understand of it.

The ability to manipulate information, ideas, emotions, concepts, impressions. You get form not just a persons opinions but his experiences,his memories, his entire worldview. Force him to conform to your will, accept your ideas, your worldview, your tastes, your line of thinking.
Eventually your reach will become so powerful that your memes ascend and become memeplexes driving societies from the grandest things to the pettiest. You always hated yellow cars and raisins? Well now they are not banned but no one in the right mind would EVER be seen with one!

Might want to read Dawkins too.

There is a japanese series where one villain has a power like this. I think he could control "archetypes" or some shit like that to pit people against each other.
I don't remember him using it but I do remember some scientist guy explaining that if he wanted to he could use it to change the world's current worship of sciente into "science is heretical and evil" and fuck the scientists if they tried to oppose them.
I always thought it was a pretty cool idea.

How does this continent map look so far?

For scale, it's between Australia and Greenland in size and the biggest island is close to Sumatra sized.

>become a living idea
>you continue to live as a ghost of society, a living, permament zeitgeitst
>continue to evolve and develop, maybe even "think" in an extremely random, distributed way
>every single individual human is like a single neuron
>you are the subconscious of humanity
>people unknowingly grow closer and closer to your original personality and opinions each time your memes get transmitted
>maybe there are other shadow groups and living memes already out there
>as long there is a singe book or scroll of your manifesto is exists somewhere you can never truly die, you can lay dormant forever, always ready to infect someone

Don't like it, continents shouldn't be interestingly shaped

I don’t know about that. Look at one of the Americas. Or Asia. Or Australia.

It seems odd that the mountain range would cross the thin edge of the continent rather than running along its spine.

Consider it an old subcontinent collision like India. Or how the Alps cut Italy off.

Fill it in, /wbg/. My gift to you.

Not bad. Did you give up?

Nah. Some user pasted a bunch of real maps together a couple threads ago and I made a base map out of it for fun.

I filled it in with solid arctic snow and ice.

What's a good way to overlay hexes on an existing map? Currently in Photoshop.

So he had the power of the church immediately before the dark ages? Or the alt- right in America?

I always wondered how easy it would be for people to just look over to the other side of the city or the docks in the lake and see anyone committing crimes n' shit.

It's a shark!

For a sci-fi game, I had a conversation with people and we came up with a butterflyfolk culture.
Basically the idea was that since butterflies have enhanced senses, sensitivity to oxygen, and relatively short lifespans, a developed parallel species would be hedonistic and unconcerned with individual life or rights, with a culture that involved mass-producing important parts of the culture, including alcohol.
Their high oxygen sensitivity would make them either disinclined to smoke, or to get a grater effect out of it with less smoke. Has anyone else worked with insectoid cultures in their setting?

well from living in denver on one edge of a valley
>no you can't

seriously, not even with binocs

bumping this question

Why would you build such docks over a polluted pond?
You could easily launch a skiff from the shore if you were so determined to get on a body of water that undoubtedly smells like rancid asshole.

>Might be what I'm looking for, can you elaborate?
Headology

I've just put it into my setting background that people naturally become stronger and more skilled the more challenges and risks they face. Being in mortal danger 24/7 is the goal and allure of adventuring.

mountain ranges and effects of them are not random

Speaking of vampires, how would you say a vampire society is ran? Oldest vampires in charge by sheer virtue of experience or just the vamps with the most power/influence?

*you guys

Hyenas are more closely related to cats then to dogs/wolves

Weasels. They're actually related to weasels.

I never understood why levels have to be a thing at all.

Equipment and learned skills make for a much better and sensible "leveling" system.

Trying again: What drugs do you add to your setting? Hallucinogens? Steroids? Uppers? Downers? Something more fantastical?

Fantastical stuff. An old one is Saturn dust, which allows soldiers to march for days on end, at the price of turning them into demons. A similar 'red ice' is the modern synthesis of the drug, which erases old impurities and allows soldiers to become demons at a much quicker rate.

there are grills too
so I've heard

oooh I want hyena people now

>opposing army known for using saturn dust
>create ruse so they think battle will be in x days march
>trick them into timing saturn dust demon change at the expected battle
>its all wicker and stagecraft, there is no one to fight

so then I either wait for them to turn on themselves or ambush them as they crash

>capt: LEADING City

what do you think of the start of my map

Or wolverines

>science fantasy
>you can't jizz gold

B-but it's called the moneyshot...

too texture-y
I mean I like the mountains but the "plains" don't fit

also the trees look stuck on, like a sticker. out of place in color tone, shape and contour

I'd go back to the mountains and see about getting them to work with no texture on the plains and worry about the woods later

It frequently happens accidentally, as a result of protracted clusterfucks and general confusion. OOC, the drug's based on mercenary debauchery in the Thirty Years War and similar conflicts; as war rages on, people use cruelty to feed themselves.

A similar strategy was used to great effect by General Costa, of Peninsular Revolutionary Government fame. As the Red War raged, he soaked up much of his enemies' manpower by provoking mass red icings in irrelevant provinces. Red ice demons are much cleaner than Saturnian ones; they see the world only in terms of war, discarding human concerns like lust and gluttony. They will quite calmly carry out atrocities, but only in order to perpetuate whatever conflict they find themselves in. They will never be able to rest, they will never be at ease, but will always see themselves as caught in a struggle without end. Naturally, they are incredible soldiers, but they are impossible to direct.

An unfortunate side-effect of Costa's strategy was that the war spiralled in many directions it otherwise might not have (at least, not for some time). Nonetheless, Costa was a hero.

Red ice is based on the atmosphere of both sides at Stalingrad, as well as the Chinese civil war.

all i could manmage with the burn-dodgle tool and contrast editing

Suppose there's an army of a fantasy military that values their soldiers' lives, to the point where they specifically try to avoid losing anybody in engagements in a renaissance era where others will throw away levies like fodder.

There is a company of that army which takes this to the extreme. They're based off of the maxim that 'courage is not the absence of fear, but to act in spite of it.' The idea is that they acknowledge that they as soldiers fear death, but fight through the fear to make them stronger. They also want to instill that same fear in their enemies, believing that they, unaccustomed to fear, are weaker as a result.

'Fearsharers' is a really terrible name, and I'm trying to come up with something better that evokes the same idea. 'Fearbringers' doesn't strike the same tone.

that's fucking sick mate, you did that just by logic?

Tieflings. Yay? Or Nay?