/wbg/ - World Building General

they'd do most things at night when its dark and cool?

Hit the discotheques in search of liquor and love

1) depends on how much time they have for leisure vs necessities, and whether they are settled or roaming. Settled would have houses of some kind, various crafts. Roaming would be less material, with an oral tradition and such

2) "arctic wastes" implies a lot of snow and cold. So large, rounded shape to contain heat with wide or multiple legs to not sink into snow. Alternatively a streamlined shape that tunnels through snow and ice

Also
>drain living things of blood, but feed not on organics, but on warmth
that must be some magical thing
because there are better sources of warmth
and if they want to get warmth from living things they could just hug everyone to death

>What is the most interesting race in your setting?
Elves, or the remnants of them
>Describe what makes them so, whether it be appearance, culture, environment or something else entirely.
The elves have long since given up their mortality in pursuit of necromancy. They have all but abandoned the idea of being a race, instead becoming islands in and of themselves.
>Whereabouts do they (primarily) live? And how are their relationships with fellow races / civilisations?
They mostly live in icy islands around the South Pole. The setting is focused on the Southern hemisphere so that cold equals South. Their relationship varies based on the individual, but many have taken to a life of piracy to capture new subjects for experimentation.
>Do you think it's more interesting to have humanoid or truly alien sapient species in a setting?
I think humanoids provide just enough interest to allow for effective mystery to draw people in to edge them out.

>the night

I finally completed my map. Sort of.

Here's some info about the geographical features.

>What is the most interesting race in your setting?

Ghostspinners: gargantuan sapient spiders that can produce bioluminant threads of silk.

>Describe what makes them so, whether it be appearance, culture, environment or something else entirely.

They are among the oldest living races (and species) on the planet; their earliest ancestors prowling the towering fungal forests long before trees or vertibrates colonized the earth. They can live for thousands of years, and since they never cease growing the oldest of their kin are the size of mammoths.

Mature Ghostspinners are all white, while juveniles start their lives completely black, developing white marking and patterns on them as the grow, until these patterns cover them completely. No one Ghostspinner has the same kind of patterns develop on them during adolescence, and fittingly it's when they're at their most individulistic.

Ghostspinners get their name by the silk they spun; they place traps made of normal webbing, with globules of glowing silk shaped into animal shaped puppets. To the eyes of hideous Shantaks flying overhead these traps look like glowing morsels of food in the shape of sheep or mountain goat, and as they swoop down to snatch them they get tangled into the sticky web instead, becoming only more tangled as they try to desperately flap away. The tremors from the strugling prey is transmitted via the web to a waiting Ghostspinner who'll come around to finish off and feed on the hippocephalic hideousity.

Ghostspinners have a mathematical system of counting using strands of silk with pebbles and pearls, similar to an abacus, as well as system of writing by scratching symbols on tablet-shaped stones found naturally in their home Plateau lands.

Flat square world, I guess? What's the scale approximately?
Keep in mind that if the moon crashed, there's no more tides.

>Whereabouts do they (primarily) live? And how are their relationships with fellow races / civilisations?

Ghostspinners used to live around the world, but can now only be found in the frigid and sun-shunned Plateua lands, located north-east on the Arcanian continent. Surrounded by mountain ranges from west and south and by the sea east and north it's as difficult place to reach as it is remove and uninviting; the climate is bitter cold around the year, and worse still thick stormclouds block the skies all the time, leaving only the hardiest tundra plants and lichen a fighting chance of growing there.

Due to the remoteness of their home most other races have never even heard of Ghostspinners, and those that have consider them as nothing more but tall-tales or fancy imaginations of eccentrics.

Ghostspinners, despite their fear-inducing arachnid appearance, are harmless to anyone besides (Shantaks, yaks, and the odd wild sheep every now and then). The silk they produce is incredibly strong, which they will happily trade with travellers for mere glass baubles and dyes of colour, which they use to create tapestries and cloth of superlative level as gifts to anyone they deem friend.

Their only enemies are the Gugs that also inhabit the Plateau lands; once the Gugs lived a peaceful coexistance with the Ghostspinners, but after the Outer Gods which the Gugs worshipped left the world for good somehow the Gugs put the blame on the ancient arachnids, and now mercilessly hunt down any Ghostspinner they can find.

>Do you think it's more interesting to have humanoid or truly alien sapient species in a setting?

Whether a race is truely interesting doesn't depend so much on whether its humanoid or not, but more on other qualifications. Obviously non-humanoid, truely alien races have an exotic appeal to them but imo just including them is not nearly enough to make a setting interesting.