/wbg/ - Worldbuilding General

sounds like notchristianity

Quick. I need ”special” terrain types. Stuff that aren’t basic plains/forest/hills/mountains/swamp, but are still overarching enough to fill at least one six-mile hex - so no ”hot spring” or ”forest meadow” or ”ruin” unless it’s a megacity ruin. And ideally they should be feasibly plopped down next to any regular terrain type.

"dusted" Basically a spot where nothing can grow for any reason magical/mundane. Possibly have dust devils in it.

heroes.thelazy.net/wiki/Terrain

I will be running my first game of DnD in the near future. Because it's my first time as a DM I figured it would be best to keep both the scale of the adventure, as well as the setting small and contained. I like islands, so a small island seemed perfect to me for this game and it's going to be very easy to expand the world eventually or incorporate it into my already excisting fantasy world.

>Describe a region, castle, dungeon, city, or other significant place in your setting.
The place will be called Grundel Island. I'm too unimaginative to come up with good place names so I picked a random last name from someone I know. I wanted it to be a place similar to let's say the Shetland or Faroe Isles in some ways. A coast with a lot of cliffs and low vegitation that is mostly grasslands, inhabited by a lot of sheep and a small (mainly) human population. There's two very small settlements but most of the population lives in farmsteads outside of those, the largest and most luxurious one being the hall of the hall of the Sheep King who owns about half of all the island, although nominally being a subject of the lord who rules over the island as a whole. Said lord is subject to a king on the mainland.

>What makes it important?
There's a silver mine. The small population living on the island doesn't really bother with mining and make a living as either sheepfarmers or fishermen. The isolated location of the island combined with the valuable resource that is silver makes it really useful for the king back on the mainland. Political enemies often get exciled to this place and the mine is being exploited with the use of forced labour from criminals transported there. Meanwhile the crown gets to enjoy regular shipments of delicious, tasty silver.

>How does it change with the seasons?
Winters can be pretty harsh, but nothing too extreme. Again, think of a place like the Shetland isles. The weather is generally more rainy and foggy than average.

Thoughts?

The slavery is sort of a lingering trait of the culture they come from. I love they idea of favour-trading and debt-slavery though, since they have a deep connection to the fey and that's the sort of thing they do.

Pits/chasms/crevasses/holes leading to the underworld
Great lake. Can't go wrong with a great lake.
Self-replicating clockwork from magical accident. God knows what it does, doesn't grow much any more, doesn't like being mined.
Geologically active area. No hot spring, more like a hellscape of mineral baths, acid, scalding water, and sudden mudhole swallowings (no laughing)

Any thoughts on my generic gray-ish apocalypse setting? Should I add more spooky monsters and random events, or should I try to ground it more? I want it to be believable and taken seriously, which it has been so far (I think people were getting too into it, in some ways) but I am curious what I should improve.

The idea would be the god is uncaring for the most part for anything but actual complete world destruction. Individual's lives and the rise and fall of empires are not any of its concern. That would be the idea.

>church has for centuries worked to suppress magic among the population, while secretly hoarding enchanted items which they use under the guise of miracles to both reaffirm the populace's faith and swing battles/heal crowds/whatever the fuck's on the agenda
>turns out all magic is derived from the Fae realm, which has a variety of different kinds of fairies
>enchanted items are created by dismembering a living fae and bringing the pieces back to the human world while ensuring the fairy survives
>alternatively, some human bloodlines have made pacts with fairy tribes for easier access to magic, limited in power by proximity to portals to the fae realms
>the church raises orphans into their knightly orders to both venture into the fae realms for harvest and act as enforcers in the political sphere
>one knight, disillusioned by orders to massacre a suspected pact-bound family, goes on the run after over a hundred copies of his book explaining how to access the fae realm appear all over the world
>initial suppression efforts were too slow, and the book has birthed a thriving black market trade in magical goods, and gangs of fairy hunters who adapt slowly but surely to the deadly and surreal effects of the fae realm

Thoughts? I'd keep it all confined to a world only slightly larger than Europe, with no large kingdoms, as the church ensures nothing grows larger than a petty kingdom for long.

>keen gedonder!

I see a cross-dimensional war getting ready to happen.

?

>someone's interested in my fluff
oh golly!

>do spirits literally sit around forever in the ethereal planes waiting for the end of the multiverse?
Pretty much. Even the gods don't really understand why it works how it does; they just stepped into the primordial chaos, started ordering things, and then time just...happened, leaving all these copies of itself to build up infinitely. It's like the ethereal plane is some kind of cosmic librarian, keeping record of everything that has ever been all neatly catalogued. You can travel through the ethereal and revisit things, but you can't affect them. They're just shadows, save for spirits or perhaps they're shadows too.

The closest you can get to genuine time travel is by going to the astral sea. From there it seems as if all of time is happening at once. Someone dreaming may have visions of the past or future, Gods perceive as much of time as they like, and the rare times a soul reincarnates it may plop out at any time.

>>or you can delve into the ethereal and confront one directly
>why is this a bad idea? what is the ethereal like?
The ethereal is very clingy. It doesn't like things moving out of their places. Spirits for example suffer their progressive madness because the ethereal keeps stripping more of their traits away the farther they get from their assigned resting place. Chasing the present just distances them further and further, eventually leaving them completely detached and forced to adopt other traits to keep from becoming formless and falling into the abyss, hence why they obsess over things.

When the living delve in a similar problem occurs; the ethereal doesn't quite know how to identify you. You might end up picking up traits that aren't yours; one such instance is what brought lycanthropy into the world. There's also demons who would love to copy/inhabit you and run amok in your place, which they can do much more easily if you're on their home turf.

I decided to solve the road network layout problem permanently with 72 lines of code. It takes a heightmap, settlement locations and settlement populations and spits out a road network. I tested it on Skyrim's map, and it generates something reasonable and even recreates the in-game road network in places.

To give slightly more detail on how it works.
1. Weighted pathfinding using slope of heightmap. Steeper slope = less favourable for a road
2. It decides what roads to construct first based upon a "Gravity model of trade" prioritisation of connections between cities
3. The pathfinding weighting is then re-weighted to bias reusing existing stretches of road

did is cool

thanks. I'm wanting to work in more but I'm not sure how. Also, most of that was pulled from here: dandwiki.com/wiki/SCP-682_(5e_Creature) I just made a few changes.

I still don't fully understand how is desert formed. I get mountains scraping clouds and places that are so far inland that rain never reaches them, but how are there deserts that border on oceans?

Something something ocean currents wind patterns

I suppose this is as good a place to ask as any, how would you feel about Golden Age Destiny for a space opera setting? It basically amounts to nothing more than a premise, so much fluff work would be involved, but the idea of spacefaring in our own solar system and not in faraway, purely fictional ones seems pretty cool to me. All the terraformed moons and planets could make for a lot of variety, especially if you have more than just one or two important locations on them. I would also say, break canon and let space magic out of the bag earlier than the end of the Golden Age.

IIRC, specifically when the Sahar is concerned, it has to do with the wind patterns preventing cloud formation (I forget the exact mechanism), which combined with the latitude, means it gets a lot of undissipated energy from the sun. This also means no rain.

Dreaming up the sort of world this might take place in.

Gypsies

>Neo-Templar overlooks mountain pass, prepares for charge to spearhead 10th Crusade and take the remains of Jerusalem (2404 AD, colorized)

Castle Bertholt. It was an ancient castle erected to defend from a forgotten foe. Notably, there is a Heartwood tree there - a type of tree that grows only in certain spots. Those being places of great bravery in death. It also serves as the major defense point right in the middle of the northeastern mountain range.
Nowadays, the Lord of that particular province lives there, one of the king's most trusted men. It also holds Bertholt's sword, which is of course a cool relic.

It is particularly cold in winter, as the tundra is just further northeast from it.

Location at the horse latitudes, rain shadows, unfortunate ocean currents and wind patterns, things like that. All continents currently have deserts at the same latitude both north and south of the equator, although the smaller land masses on the southern hemisphere make this less obvious to see. You could just plop some deserts there.

The cool Canary Current at the western coast brings just enough moisture for shrubland, but not much more. The strip north of the Atlas mountains has Mediterranean vegetation, but that range blocks also northwesternly Atlantic wet air from entering Sahara. The even higher Ethiopian highlands block the East African monsoon, causing the eastern desert to have the most extreme temperatures. The West African monsoon is stopped at Sahel by the hot and dry northeasternly Harmattan winds. Since the desert has no moisture in the air and clouds can't form, temperature extremes are exacerbated.

Unlike, say, Australian deserts, Sahara experiences lush periods full of lakes and swamps, vast areas of grassland and forested highland when climate and monsoon patterns change. These cycles are know as the Sahara pump theory. The "Wet Sahara" phase is associated with periods of warming (from the end of the last glacial period 12.5k years ago to late Holocene thermal maximum at 5.9kya), and the current "Dry Sahara" phase with a cooling climate. The 5.9 kiloyear event, a sudden cooling, caused rapid desertification, and forced North African pastoralist peoples to move east to the fertile Nile valley, eventually resulting in the Egyptian civilization. The same event also probably caused the cooling of Europe resulting in harsher winters, the decline of pre-Indo-European cultures and destruction of many of their settlements, and the associated migration of Indo-European steppe herders westwards.

tl;dr Shit's complicated and you should probably hit a good textbook or check google scholar for more information. Also Sahara is often not a desert.

On page 1 I thought it was too generic, but it is actually a pretty neat little.. pdf thing. As a Veeky Forumsfag and autistic editor I could throw tons of suggestions at you for improving prose, but I don't think that's necessarily what you want or even need. I think you could work at cutting or tweaking the most cliched elements to improve it, maybe, but you started out saying it was generic, so I don't know if that's really what you are looking for.

I personally am enthusiastic about post-apocalyptic or science fantasy settings where the contemporary past is veiled in archaic terminology, or just generally "wink wink nudge nudge" moments in these kinds of settings. Basically hinting at what you are referring to, rather than explicitly stating it, like calling "The Refinery" instead "The Smokestack" or "The Skytower" or something like that which is less explicit. But again, this is what I consider editorial nitpicking. I like what I've read enough to offer more help, but nothing leaps off the page at me with obvious solutions, so if you could narrow down your request (as it were) that would help me help you. Or you could simply accept that nothing in it is bad enough for me to say "this is cringy af change it immediately" and not change anything. I could also suggest, as I said, prose changes, but that's not really related to world-building as such.

Hey, man, if you have good ideas on how to improve the prose, I'd be more than happy to hear them. I've agonized over it a bit myself. My idea for the world came from shit like pic related, about 2 years ago, and was followed up by some apocalyptic Garry's Mod maps I played on, as well as some grim-dark /x/ and creepy/depression images I found in different places. I just wanted to make a really dark world full of genuinely creepy and terrifying things, so that the little makeshift strongholds and towns people lived in were all the more valuable, and you cuddled your wife and kids close at night because who knows what might be out there? I got really into describing the weird northern lights type effects on the horizon when I ran this, as well as them occasionally seeing weird shit like pic related happen for no good reason. Unkillable spirits haunting certain locations, that sort of thing. But still having the generic "bandits and warlords" elements as well.

>captcha actually has "zona" in it.
the lord favors me

Also I'd be curious what you think of the Sentinels and of the Reborn. The group I ran this setting for (back when I was just making shit up) are christian so I feel like they kinda didn't like the way I seemed to be portraying Christianity even though I insisted it was meant to be a wacky cult. One of the themes I wanted was religion being the force that binds humanity together after an apocalypse, for better or for worse, and watching modern religions corrupted into weird cult shit. So I am curious what you think of the Reborn as well, since they are similar.

I unironically based my current setting's landmass off the Wet-Sahara model.

I've outlined a world where the last bastions of humanity are large fortress-cities (perhaps just one?) which are built around and sustained by eternal springs of holy water - the only water - blessed by their diety, who is said to have visited from beyond the veil in man's greatest hour of need in ages past. The lands beyond are lifeless, dreary wastelands, basaltic sand deserts, or arctic hellscapes.

All that breaks up this monotony are the labyrinthine ruins of man's past, now largely infested by the eternal enemy - hordes of eldritch abominations who fester like a disease on the old world and who can only be truly eliminated when their nests are infiltrated and purged from the inside.

To this end, the great holy legions belonging to the remaining noble bloodlines muster for grand crusades, leaving the city walls in their monstrous tracked monastery-landships to fight the foe with rifle, lance, and flame. A single siege against one of humanity's former monolithic conurbations can last years as hundreds of cohort-fireteams pry every last corridor, sunken shaft, forgotten dungeon, and factory floor.

It's foretold that if the eternal foe can be defeated, their god will descend from the heavens once more and deliver them from this world.

That's the outline, generic but I feel like I could expand it beyond just "eldritch hordes". I'd also like to detail the logistics of a world without water beyond its cities.

I'm a huge fan of plateaus. Might not be the easiest to plop down to some terrain, but not incredibly difficult either.

This map depicts a preliminary scattering of political factions of note within the Galaxy as of the ~20k century.

>Yellow - Humans, basically refugees with guns
>Purple - Valyari, space elves on the brink of genetic collapse
>Red - Draken, space dragons and their mutated offspring
>Dark blue - The Greys, those little shits that like to probe people (cunts)
>Light Blue - Gruks/Grunts, clone civilization using Orc templates
>Gray - Androids, chill dudes from the Data Dimension
>Green - Khurzans, knuckle-walking space gorillas
>Orange (little dot near purple) - Junkers, Kenku Jawas

Humans, Androids, and Valyari maintain a fragile peace between themselves and the Draken. The Greys are powerful enough to be a major player, but they hate everyone. Khurzans like humans, but hate Valyari, while Grunts love everybody (especially killing them in war) and Junkers sell guns to every side.

I've brought up this map, or something like it, before. Just curious if it's clear/good looking yet.

What are some names for a "Common" language in Sci-Fi besides using Common or Basic?

"Galactic Standard"? Probably going to sound generic no matter what.

Symbospeech. Unity. Trade Speech.

The reason basic and common are used because a common language must be basic, and by it's very nature it must be commonly spoken.

Idiot.

No need to be mean, user. Was a friendly question.

How does it sounds?

>Old world similar to earth but in a different space of ours, basically a land in the middle of paradise, hell and physical universe
>Once home a human civilization that came directly from earth and prospered in varius civilizations before falling
>Most of the world now it's a cold wastland on the ruins of the great human empire
>The few human reigns that still exists with inspired style based on Egyptian mitology, norse mitology and middle-Age
>An old evil from the inside of the world itself in the process of awakening
>The nature taking over the rest of the world, with great city now jungles and whole settlement hiding under the sand of the desert
>Lack of faith and hope for the humans in the reigns, contastly in conflict with themself and with the nature of the world itself
>No gods or greater good, just man against man and man against nature itself

I've been pretty short here, but there's so much more that i have in mind, just want to know how does it sounds

>Describe a region, castle, dungeon, city, or other significant place in your setting.
Scarlet Sun Mountain
A massive volcano in the mountains far below southern polar circle.
Surrounding it is a plateau, sheltered by mountain ridges.
The volcano is active and produces so much heat that the plateau is warm enough for people to live (hot geysers help). Geyser water and ash make it also quite fertile.

>What makes it important?
It is one of the few volcanoes in the world that are not also gateways into Hell. Demons desire to gain control of it greatly, but luckily for all they have no access and locals are xenophobic enough to not even let agents of demons close.
Its also a place of power and object of worship for locals.

>Who lives there?
Mostly hardy highlanders on the plateau. They are a bit strange, living so close to the place of power. Might have some magical power or other blessings, but who knows? Its a butthole of the world.
There are also nomad fishermen and shepherds in the lowlands and the half-giants a bit north, who fight the humans, but worship the volcano too. In fact, half-giant pilgrims are allowed to visit the volcano, which occasionally grants them sorcerous powers. Pilgrimage is serious business - no half-giant would dare use pilgrimage to gain entry with nefarious or hostile intent, and no pilgrim that has been granted power ever uses it against the humans living there.

>How does it change with the seasons?
During the long polar night the cloud of smoke and steam over the volcano is glowing bright crimson with the refracted light of lava, earning the volcano its name. Its so bright it actually provides light to the area, like a very dim sun. The sky is rarely seen under the clouds of ash and smoke during that time.
In short summer at noon the wind changes and rips the cloud cover, revealing the cold but bright sun. The locals - highlanders, lowlanders and half-giants all - abandon labours and fighting and watch the sun.

It may be just me, but fairy stuff looks too generic, how 'bout some original races?

Universal?
All-understood?
Omninative?

at a glance at thumbnail i thought it was a map with a river

Where are the giants?

Is such a situation possible?
Planet is tidally locked to the star with one of its poles always facing the star.
It rotates both on the axis pointing at the star and very slowly on another axis due to tidal lock.

Elsewhere.
They ain't half-giants because they are giants' descendants, they are half-giants because they just ain't that big. I originally called them ogres, but that's a stupid name, so they are "half-giants" until I decide how their language sounds and so how they call themselves.

How would gravity even work in this situation? It is even possible (even if very very very very improbable)?

As far as I know, it is theoretically possible. Though I'm not entirely sure of the insane chain of conditions needed to be met to result in such a condition, and I'm fairly sure the odds of such world being actually habitable, but at least in theory, I'm pretty sure it is - theoretically - possible.

Cool. From your description, Scarlet Sun Mountain sounds like Fantasy Iceland. How do people feed themselves? You mention fishing and shepherds, but is it just sheep and fish?

It is possible, if improbable. The problem is that it needs to be labeled "moments before civilization-wiping collision". There is literally NO physical way this system would be even remotely stable - it's just a bunch of planets on a collision course and really weird timing.

It would work by ripping each of those planets to shreds.

On the highlands, where geysers and fertile ash are there grow some edible mosses, lichen and few hardy plants & trees that manage to survive off the red light.
Highlanders eat those and herd mountain goats and sheep.
In the lowlands it is colder, but some lichen still grows, though people don't eat it. They herd goats and catch fish, so yeah.
Highlanders and lowlanders trade with each other, so you can find some fish in the highlands and vegetables in the lowlands.

Further north where half-giants live there are large woolly animals, that they hunt, and they also hunt whales.

eh, such a cool shot

I mean. If there was some form of higher power or magic then MAYBE, but otherwise it's like said.

/wbg/ I have an issue. I'm working on my homebrew setting and I want magic to feel unique. I have four different ways of casting magic, Arcane, Psionic, Primal, and Arcane. My issue is how do I make each on feel unique without stepping on each others toes.

i've been trying to come up with a rules system that doesn't feel like a science and still feels very magical and i've been using this as a reference guide.

darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html

but I'm still failing when it comes to this.

I want MAGIC to exist as a whole, and the different disciplines (Arcane, Primal, Psionic, and Divine) are just a person's ways of using it. Any help would be greatly appriciated.

how would it feel to have soft sci-fi spaceships, steampunk space-is-ocean ships a-la Treasure Planet and crazy wossnames from Spelljammer all coexist in same setting? Or that's overkill and I should unify it a bit?

>how would it feel
As far as I'm concerned: inconsistent.

everything about this makes me what to play it, just not sure how it would work in actual play user. sorry. not very helpful, but it sure sounds fun.

If you really want to make all of them feel unique you basically need to invent a new system for each of them. Fluff-wise making them unique shouldn't be so hard. But when it comes to rolling they should roll differently if you want them to be different from each other.

okay, let's say you have to get your mind in tune with the ether or whatever you wish to call it

Primalists rely on nature to do so, the sights and sounds. They intone abstract vibrations (google mongolian throat singing) mingled with roars and chirps and rattle of seeds in a dry gourd (imitating rain), etc. and listen for subtle response in nature. After some time they achieve harmony and can do magic. Now, while in harmony they can do pretty much anything, but whatever they do changes the world, so the after doing some magic the harmony begins to unravel, so they have to keep singing/doing ritual noises.

Psions seek attunement through their own minds. They fashion foci of certain materials (each using a material that responds to him or her best) that they channel their raw power through to carve mystic pathways in the focus. By tracing the pathways with their minds they can come in tune and gain the power.
Normally they would choose a focus consciously and have another psion help them attune and channel power through it, but in case of spontaneous manifestation of powers (which can happen to every magic-user, and is rather traumatic) whatever they are holding or touching may become a focus.

Arcanists attune through the majesty of the cosmos and meaning of symbols. Diagrams and rituals are not inherently magical, but they act as a stepping stone, by representing celestial processes they guide one's mind to actual cosmos where one become attuned to the spheres and can perform magic. However, what an arcanist can do depends on through what celestial objects and processes he attuned, so they have to draw and redraw diagrams and perform different rituals to perform different magic.

You mentioned Arcane twice. What's the fourth one?

I had an idea for how arcane users can do this. Basically all arcane magic uses mana as a system.

Wizards are magical scholars. They have a spellbook which stores their spells, and are able to learn all sorts of spells as well as create new ones with time. typical wizard, the catch is that they can only cast spells they possess within their book and exactly as the spell is written, with no wiggle room for editing. (a fireball spell dealing 6d6 will never deal more unless the wizard finds/creates a spell to deal more.) so they are well read but inflexible.

Sorcerers have the ability to cast spells from raw mana alone and they gain keywords that are associated with their bloodlines, and they can pump additional mana into a spell to boost its effects, but they run the risk of their magic destroying them if they cast magic beyond what they are capable of then the magic destroys them.

Warlocks must bargain with their pact lord for each spell they cast, but they can cast spells that don't follow the rules of a Wizard, and don't run the risk of destroying themselves either.

these are basically what i hope to do with them, just not sure how to go about it.

>Warlocks must bargain with their pact lord for each spell they cast, but they can cast spells that don't follow the rules of a Wizard, and don't run the risk of destroying themselves either.
And how would you make someone roll that?

probably a DC based upon the level of the spell or effects asked for.

Divine. sorry user

ah, then easy. Prayers.

Really like this user. Originally the Gods of my world each gave humanity one way of using magic. FIRE-ARCANE-SPELLS, WATER-DIVINE-PRAYERS, EARTH-PRIMAL-INVOCATIONS-EVOCATIONS, WIND-PSIONIC-MANTRAS

the issues I keep having though have to do with the names I keep giving them as well. as far as a rules system i have to give them names, but if you watch tv or movies, magic is just that, MAGIC, people use different ways of accessing it, but its still all MAGIC. and that's really what i want. that and the magic of the GODS always feel separate and above what mortals can ever actually use, but I don't want to remove the differences from the setting and just go with MAGIC users.

Though perhaps I could just make a list of spells and effects and then allow my players to decide how their magic works, whether it's Arcane, Divine, Primal, or Psionic in nature.

How would a bunch of Medieval aged people react to seeing a giant metal tank in a newly discovered temple of the gods? Would they be completely flabbergasted at a titan beast of the gods or would they just brush it off as a weapon and perhaps try to use it?

WHAT kind of medieval?
ye olde clichee medievale peoplee would just see a pile of metal they can't even scratch. they got no point of reference to even recognize what it might do

realistic medieval people would most likely recognize that the big tube is probably a cannon and from that figure that whole thing may be a battle wagon
however, the interior stuff would be completely out of reference for them, so they wouldn't know what to do. it wouldn't be obvious that levers are controls, because they've never seen anything like that.

and no, tank doesn't look like a beast unless it has a custom beast-shaped body.

Yes it's actually possible. But keep in mind that the pole wouldn't be exactly where you've drawn it. There will be a point tidally locked to the star but it wouldn't be a pole.

The actual position of the pole will depend on the relation of planets rotational speeds around the star and around itself. Eg it will be exactly halfway between the equator and the locked point if speeds were the same.

This is because you cannot have two axes of rotation.

Makes most sense to me that they would recognize it either as a statue, or as a machine, maybe something akin a strange furnace. I suspect it would actually raise a lot less eyebrows than you'd think. It's actually very much possible they would eventually try to strip it for metal and useful parts. It seems completely unlikely they would even attempt to start running it, much less likely they would succeed to do anything that would not instead just break it.

>space is full of ether
>ether is generally harmful, especially to mortals
>you can use a special device to turn ether into air; it is bulky and casts rays of sorts, so you put it in the open, on the deck (if you have a ship-like ship) or above vents to suck air in, if you're using a spaceship that looks like a submarine or rocket
>this means if you get a breach you ship will soon get full of ether
>you can "submerge" in the ether (in 4th dimension, sort of) to travel really fast, but deep ether is even more corrosive, so you need a thick airtight hull. interstellar travel is thus normally handled by rocket-like ships
>regular ships use solar sails, combustion drives (like modern hydrogen thrusters, but with explosives instead of hydrogen), ether propellers, ether paddewheels (require oxygen above deck), drawn by ether beasts, etc.
>deep ether currents exist in regular ether, looking kind of like rivers. they often appear spontaneously. ship-like spaceships can submerge their armored hulls in them and float much faster than in regular ether
>for really short-distance travel you don't even need a decent hull, but you better hope you don't run into ether storm or that ether current doesn't appear in your way
>there are also wormholes, both static and spontaneous temporary, that allow fast travel between different points of space

how's that for a space travel?
what am i missing?
is it too cliched or too similar to some existing setting?

I'd recommend Myrthras/Runequest's magic systems; they have like five distinct ones with a multitude suggestions for source & usage, like places of power, human sacrifice, innate or external magical energy, etc. There's also Ars Magica's hermetic magic/spell creation & various mystery cult magics, and I hear a lot of recommendations for GURPS' Thaumaturgy stuff. Between the three you could probably find a good deal of inspiration.

I also suspect you're using 4e's power sources as a base, which I also did, and in that case I'd further suggest looking specifically at Mythras/Runequests' Sorcery, Animism, Theism & Mysticism systems for ideas on Arcane, Primal, Divine & Psionic magic, respectively. They align quite nicely thematically.

probably similar to how american tribes reacted to european war technology

Do you need a separate common language though? It seems like an artificial, gamey solution. Why not just make a lingua franca that most people speak, but is also a major language in its own right. Like French during the 18th century, or English today?

You could achieve something like this through careful engineering. For example by using hollow spheres. By adjusting the sizes, weights and velocities of the planets you would be able to make it to rotate with similar speeds allowing for travel between planets.

Gravity would behave weirdly. Even if no planet was moving in relation to another, each point of their surfaces would have different gravity. Circular lines with 0G. Large areas where you would start to drift of from the surface slowly.

And if you want those planets to rotate, then... gravity would be all over the place, changing in sinusoidal patterns and it will change not only its strength but also the direction. Living on something like this would be hell. It also might be a quite weird amusement park (If you have technology and resources to create it that is.).

There is absolutely no way it would be stable without creating it specifically this way.

why is the /wbg/ discord everyone talking about their own setting and no one discussing each other's? Same goes for the threads to a lesser extent

Because everybody primarily wants to talk about their own ideas.

than what's the point in having the discussion at all?

I often offer c&c to people's ideas in the threads. i don't think there's many unanswered ideas. unless they are kinda boring.

Trade Tongue
Dawnchant

>i don't think there's many unanswered ideas. unless they are kinda boring.
>tfw my idea went unanswered

Neat

When I wake up and open up this thread there are already at least thirty new walls of text I would have wade through to fully engage in this topic. I occasionally read what grabs my attention, not expection more from anyone else. Short questions will more likely get you an answer than dumping entire pdf's and asking everyone what we are thinking.

Not quick but hot spring is a thing to small but hot springs could make a very interesting hex a la Yellowstone national, geysers, natural traps, trolls in their natty habitat. You could do a lot.

Missing about 690 pages

Would campaign in

English, duh

The real question is what's your goal because it's totally possible in sci fi terms and the gravity would be the most basic physics problem. Weather would be harder, but any civ that could set that up would be way beyond basic weather control.

So without actually doing all the work, what's your goal here?

It would feel like firefly/serenity I imagine

I'd look up what Herodotus had to say about the Scythians and take my inspiriation from there. It's basically terrifying, human-skin wearing, conquerors who take steam-bathes in ganja, who sports small handlebar moustasches, fancy hats and are covered in tattoos. They have a transgender priesthood and could only be beaten if you massacre their wine drunk leaders at a feast. Oh yeah, and they are probably the origin of the amazon myth.

This
A pdf with nothing but
>what do you think of this
is a colossal waste of time as are people who try to write something different without an actual idea except that it be different.

Honestly wishing we could go back to more maps and less fanfic tier writing.