/wbg/ - World Building General

It informs the world around my players, and gives flavour to it. The players may not care about specifics, but there is a reason for the kinds of dungeons they delve, the monsters they fight, and the treasures they find.

I also have a Faction Turn kind of game that happens between sessions that also informs the goings on of the campaign world and what possible adventure seeds there are for my players.

If i'm building a world map, is it recommended to just put capital cities and well known land marks and leave the rest for exploration, or should i map out towns and outposts as well? I want to leave places out to encourage exploration (not to mention if i think of something new i can add it to the map) but im afraid the map will make my players think the world is empty and boring

Look at the 13th Age map.
Capitals and major landmarks are a must.
Minor locales are great because they inform the exploration that will be done within the space of the setting, just don't overdo it, keep it to like 3 minor settlements, etc.

What do you guys think of a map editor that uses voronoi tessellation?

I like the constraints of hex and tile-based map editors, but they are obviously very geometric because they're using regular shapes. Freehand maps tend to rely on you having some kind of artistic skill to make it look good. Voronoi tessalation might be a nice middleground if I can make it look nice.

Pic is a Javascript prototype I put together over the weekend. Still very basic, literally just changes colors of the individual polygons. I want to have more randomized boundaries between biomes to make it look less geometric.

It was discovered in a smiliar way to how it was discovered irl. Basically just witches, warlocks, and alchemists dicking around in their laboratories it's been around for a while but given the secluded nature of the first two it was only a small scale invention and didn't become popular until alchemists of the faith discovered it. Nowadays firearms are used but they've yet to see large scale combat

Because if I don't my players will keep telling me the setting is empty but if I do they won't read it anyways

What is voronoi tesselation?

put down a bunch of points
divide it into cells based on distance from a point so that boundaries between cells are where there is equal distance

shit forgot pic

Just reposting the lore of the world I created a few days ago.

Cloth? Perhaps something like Berber tribes? It doesn’t perhaps they are tradesmen? They don’t make they sell, their craft are the mercantile institutions they’ve made.

My favorite interpretation of guns is that they are mans perfect combination of metal and fire (aside from the steam engine).

Fire being mans first tool, the key to civilization. Metal from old Fairy myth being inherently antithetical to magic.

So guns are essentially anti-magic, they are the weapon of the mundane that man can use to conquer all.

im sure we'll start caring if you post it enough

How’s this for an idea-

A dimensional hopping fantasy adventure-

The main world went through a world war that destroyed pretty much everything onehundred years ago, including the environment and all the old empires. Following that any government left soon unified the world and set about rebuilding the world.

As a result most of the planets surface is a single city with very modern architecture, with only some barren stretches of fields mountains and seas between.

The world is now peaceful and comfy- the world government is pretty heavy-handed at times but it’s not a dystopian dictatorship. However the world is overpopulated and running out of food. One solution was to tunnel into other dimensions for room to expand and farm.

What they found were various themed worlds, including among other fantasy themed, and cyberpunk, almost all of them grimdark.

However with superior organization, resources, and/or technology, they’ve helped stabilize those worlds and are trying to incorporate them into their government.

Aw, sorry user, I thought I was posting on a worldbuilding thread, y'know, the kind of thread in which one just share stuff about worldbuilding like, I don't know, their works of worldbuilding. My bad. Perhaps I'll post that on /d/, it will be more appropriate after all.

You realise that a warrior culture (runic nations) could NEVER be matriarchal, right? make it patriarchal because matriarchies don't make sense for a warrior society.

Why ?

erm, what?

Temperature of region? In modern Scandinavia (cold hills essentially) there is metals such as iron, copper, nickel, zinc, silver and gold. More malleable metals of those are copper, zinc, silver and gold (all able to be melted in a basic bonfire). However in real life, the Turks who conquered Byzantine would use iron cannons that they would melt and re-cast every time they moved. So possible for Dwarves to do the same (which means nomadic wouldn't really be an issue)

In more temperate regions their is similar metals. Iron, copper, zinc, gold but also tin (which means bronze is available). Non metals include fluorite, marble, pyrite, limestone, phosphate rock, coal, Ball clay, lignite and, barite.

In hotter regions copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium (fun), coltan, tanzanite, ruby, garnet, limestone, soda ash, gypsum, salt, phosphate, dimension stones and graphite can all be found.

Also things like bones and leather and fur could all be used by these dwarves.

This doesn't include materials that only exist in fantasy (such as mithral and adamantine) but that is obviously up to you.

>guys you need to get the plate tectonics and wind patterns of your world right, otherwise your world is trash and it makes no sense whatsoever. Here's a book about how different biomes form....
>u can have a matriarchal warrior society tho that makes perfect sense lmao

Shhh you'll upset the reddit hivemind

Okay, but why are you annoyed?

Because warriors in history were only male (no, a grave of a woman in armour, or rare examples of women who sometimes fought don't count), so you can't have warriors led by people who aren't warriors. dumbfuck samefag

erm, I can't see why warriors can't be ruled by housekeepers. It makes sense to have treasure and politics managed by people who don't care about glory and bloodshed, but care about survival and prosperity.
I've seen examples in fiction, they are pretty cool. And no, I'm not same user. But I will stick a matriarchal warrior nation in my setting too, because given thought I really like the idea.

...

In the runic nations, women are not warriors. They are the leaders of clans, diplomats, managers, tacticians, they take care of all creative and intellectual tasks. Men are combatants and when they do not fight, they take on manual tasks.
So yes, it's a society with a very martial culture but which is at the same time matriarchal, I don't see the problem.

>you can't have warriors led by people who aren't warriors
While I agree that having a matriarchal warrior society is fucking retarded warriors have been led by non combatants since man began. Samurai have followed the Emperor even though he hasn't been a warrior himself for millennia. Knights have followed Bishops and Popes. The person in charge just needs to have some form of authority(religious is the norm) over the warriors that isn't being bigger and badder.

>don't care about glory and bloodshed
You don't know anything about women do you. The women in history who've risen to the top are just as bloodthirsty as the men or moreso.

Top two ways to do do a matriarchal society is the country being run and all the decisions being made by the court harem or by the oracle/priestesses of a god. Let's be honest though this is all femdom fetishes coming through into our rpgs.

>tfw seek glory through bloodshed and distinguish myself as the greatest warrior in the clan and lead our forces to victory
>come home to get henpecked and bossed around by matriarchal leaders even though these leaders have no grounds for claiming any type of competence, knowledge, authority or leadership skills.

There's good reasons why there are no examples of matriarchal societies in our history. At least, none that weren't immediately wiped out as soon as they encountered a patriarchal society.

>Let's be honest though this is all femdom fetishes coming through into our rpgs

No, really, I just love the concept of a martial society led by women, in a non-sexual way. If I wanted to integrate my femdom fetishes in my world, I would have created an island with amazonians warriors capturing men and making them their pets, I already did that. That's fun but that wasn't my goal with the runic nations.

There have been NO matriarchal societies in history. Yes, there have been some societies where women had more of a say, but there have been no women led societies.

When you're a warrior, would you rather fight for a strong leader ,or somebody who doesn't fight and doesn't have the capability to do so?

Keep in mind that even the men that didn't fight and led people understood how men and groups of men thought, women don't.

Talk like that is a good way to get flayed on the orders of the High Mother of the Followers of Nyetipeth. Don't forget that incurring her wrath will lead to you being crushed and digested by the great bull Hihel for all eternity.

>a martial society led by women, in a non-sexual way
>in a non-sexual way
But why?

>be High Mother
>ask warriors to flay their battle brother for some stupid reason
>everyone realities you're a woman and you can't actually do anything
>realise you have no authority whatsoever
>society becomes patriarchal and functions a lot better
>quickly becomes apparent that the other clans are no match for your clan now that its not constantly shooting itself in the foot by letting women be in charge.
>generations of in-fighting end as the runic peoples are united under your clan's empire
>begin raiding the neighbours to the south
>turns out that the southern women are docle and obedient
>take the most beautiful women home as wives
>many generations pass
>runic nations become renound for beautiful women, high quality of life and high GDP

>be High Priest
>ask warriors to flay their battle brother for some stupid reason
>everyone realities you're a priest and you can't actually do anything
>realise you have no authority whatsoever
>society becomes atheistic and functions a lot better
>quickly becomes apparent that the other clans are no match for your clan now that its not constantly shooting itself in the foot by letting priests be in charge.

and yet priests were in control for thousands of years IRL

>be warrior
>question authority of High Mother
>can't understand why your fellows won't rise up against her tyranny
>get flayed by fellow warriors
>get devoured by bull for all eternity
>warriors who flayed you get honey wine, hot baths, homemade dinner, and constant sex in their afterlife.

That’s the whole ‘consent of the governed’ thing. You only have power so long as people say you do. But as long as people say you do- you do.

If society were as misogynistic as that user thinks (even back when it was really misogynistic) there’d have been no queens, because some random person with a penis would rally all the other people with penises to revolt.

Who is running a Ubik setting and when can we get married?

Suddenly you're talking about a theocracy instead of a martial society

>warrior society
>doesn't value warriors
Uh-huh...

Also tyranny is inherently unstable, even chimpanzees won't be ruled by a tyrant for very long. Its unlikely that there's an entire region of kingdoms that are all engaging in the same unstable and sub-optimal strategies.

>misogynistic
There's a difference between having the occasional female leader and being a matriarchy. A monarchy that happens to have a queen doesn't mean that the kingdom is now a matriarchy, the UK isn't a matriarchy. And to consider a human matriarchal warrior culture a ridiculous concept is simply common sense not misogynistic.

what do you do when you end up with large unoccupied territories on your maps? by design there shouldn't be neither a forest nor mountain nor kingdom there, so I'm tempted to clap down "nomad shepherds" or "wilderness" there, but that's so cheap...

what do you do in such cases?

What prevents the formation of a kingdom or other polity in these places? What sort of terrain, climate and so on do they have?

This happened a lot throughout history and still does. Some areas just aren't feasible for settlements

Point being that anons objection to a matriarchal war society was ‘hurr durr stupid women would be overthrown by manly me’.

>theocracy instead of a martial society
Most "martial" societies have strong ties to or look to religious authorities to forgive them or approve of their violence towards fellow people. A state run by warriors who follow a religious head is not far fetched. ie most of Japanese histoy, various bishoprics of Europe, ancient Egypt, Babylon, etc. Hell most secular rulers like kings rule "by the grace of God."

>doesn't value warriors
It's not that warriors are not valued it is that dissidents are dangerous to society. Faithful warriors are rewarded just like anywhere else with land and salvation in the afterlife. Those who rise against the status quo are dealt with. This is no different than a military firing squad.

I wish I was running any PKD inspired setting. A Ubik espionage campaign would be amazing, although other ideas I have are a Time Out Of Joint style surreal mystery, a Flow My Tears The Policeman Said style cyberpunk thriller, and a Deus Irae style explorative post-apocalyptic adventure.

The reason it's the thread picture is because of the brief excerpts from adverts for Ubik at the start of each chapter. As you probably know in one of them it is sold as a beverage. One of it's forms in the story too is as a tonic, and considering it's what holds the world together I thought it would be apt.

>and when can we get married?
I'm free everyday but Wednesdays.

>Point being that anons objection to a matriarchal war society was ‘hurr durr stupid women would be overthrown by manly me’.

As opposed to "hurr durr stupid men would do everything they're told by strong independent womyn"

By a strong independent anyone irrespective of gender.

Easy. Monsters. Unexplainable. Horrific. Monsters.

Humans will do just about anything they are told to do by a man/woman/figure/avatar with power. Moreso when pack instincts come into play.

That's why you get 20,000 meat sacks to meet up in a field somewhere and drain each other with bits of metal on the end of a stick.

And yet there's no examples of matriarchal societies in the real world.

And? Why does that bother you so much? I get realism boners, but why does someone else doing something in a setting that will never influence you trigger you so much?

How do you guys come up with names for countries/towns/races/etc? It seems as though I always come up with a name that sounds good to me, only to later discover that it's the name of some prescription drug or foreign motor company or something.

>have a stupid idea
>put it out in the world for criticism
>people criticize your idea
>call anyone who criticizes your idea "triggered"

There are no orcs in the real world. Yet there were Germanics who came out of the dark forests and destroyed the great cities of Rome. Fantasy expands and expounds upon the real world.

What is your definition of matriarchy? Women in control of a government, or women being the head of a house?
If A the UK has been a matriarchy several times and currently is.
If B there have been several peoples in Asia, and the Americas who fit the bill.

Smash real words or root words together, then play around with the arrangement and replace some letters til it sounds nice.

A. Not op
B. That’s dodging the question.

Get good at making anagrams of other words.

For example Vecna in D&D is an anagram of Vance, named after the fantasy author Jack Vance who described the rules for D&D's original magic system

Not care about that kind of stuff. Even if you got famous people aren’t really going to care about that kind of thing.

I like borrowing and adapting words from Latin and Classical Greek, you can get away with it when not setting things in such places because they heavily influenced english (and most romance languages). Japanese is another good language to steal bits from, although if you take full syllables you can end up creating a word with half a meaning.

The setting is secretly the far future, so I just take real words, Google Translate them into a different language, and then fuck around with the pronunciation and spelling to make it look like linguistic drift happened

>There are no orcs in the real world.
If you want to invent some fantasy race that has an unorthadox societal structure then that's going to be more believable than trying to make people believe that there are human societies that don't make any sense and have no historical analogue.

>If A the UK has been a matriarchy several times and currently is.
Then we can agree that's a silly definition
>If B there have been several peoples in Asia, and the Americas who fit the bill.
Technologically backwards, geographically isolated, and not engaged in wars with each other.

Pointing out that your question is stupid isn't dodging the question.

It’s not answering the question which is, yes, dodging it. Again.

Look just admit you have he-man woman hating autism. Considering that they are much more egregious fantasy tropes out there, a matriarchal society should be the least of your worries.

Also, yes Indian and Asians were at just as much war as Europe or Africa.

And also consider that we have not defined a tech level for our matriarchal society. Stop being such a sperg already.

>unorthadox societal structure
>more believable
This is why I suggested giving the women in the society their power through means other than strength of arms. That is religious institutions or being puppet masters.

>Technologically backwards, geographically isolated, and not engaged in wars with each other.
These do stop them from being societies. Also the American tribes were just as advanced as their neighbors, not isolated from their neighbors, and constantly engaged in combat with their neighbors.

You know, this makes me think of something. I’ve seen a few threads about humans being the boring race. Wouldn’t making humans gimmick that they are a matriarchal society a good fix to that? That human women are naturally stronger than their male counterparts?

Not a human society, at any rate. A warmongering species of social, sentient spiders would almost certainly be matriarchal, for example.

And they say Veeky Forums doesn't have a reddit problem

People who think humans are the boring race know little of humanity. But if that is your prerogative go ahead. But in doing so they are no longer ordinary humans they are amazons or something all together different.

Guns are easy, bullets are rare.
A magical mineral similar to sapphire is carved into bullets. Dwarves, gnomes and other mining races have them, but not enough to conquer the surface world.

The reason people find humans boring is because that is who we are. Everyone you will ever meet and converse with are human. Also humans in D&D at least are the best min-maxing race because +1 to all stats or pick an extra feat, so people (most gamists) are inclined to play them. It isn't culture that's an issue, and matriarchy is rather boring as a cultural foundation anyway, remember "La vie bonne est la vie exotique" so make your human culture as eccentric as possible.

I think that’s the point. Either humans are boring and defaul, or you make them slightly not human.

>the gods DIDN'T make the first men and women different in capabilities (e.g. max muscle mass and muscle growth). They didn't see the point.
>Now women are the politicians, builders, farmers, historians, scribes and defenders.
>The men are the invaders, hunters, unskilled labor and are expendable. Men can still do the jobs that women do since they're equally capable, they're just not often raised to do it.
Would this work?

>It’s not answering the question which is, yes, dodging it. Again.
Why are you a pedophile? If you don't answer then you're dodging the question.

>Look just admit you have he-man woman hating autism.
Ah there it is, you can't criticize my stupid idea if its progressive and about women. Fuck off you faggot.

>This is why I suggested giving the women in the society their power through means other than strength of arms. That is religious institutions or being puppet masters.
Fine, but I don't think that's compatible with the idea of having them also be a warrior society

>These do stop them from being societies. Also the American tribes were just as advanced as their neighbors, not isolated from their neighbors, and constantly engaged in combat with their neighbors.
You mean those native American tribes that were geographically isolated and then got wiped out as soon as they came into contact with patriarchal European civilization? Great example.

Make several versions of your map. The one you give them has more detail in the region they are in.

Dude I expect better of my trolls. Poor show my friend. Poor show.

At that point, there's little reason to call them humans anymore. By all means, make a new fantasy race for your setting that has women who are significantly stronger than the males - I have, myself. I'm the user who suggested matriarchal spider people. But if "humans but short" was enough of a reason to make halflings, then an Amazonian species with muscle girls and soy boys certainly deserves to be it's own separate thing.

Since you're new here, I just want to point out that checkbox at the top of people's posts isn't the upvote button.

Personally I have it that Amazons are a cultural flavor of giants. Albeit a big one.
But yeah you are screwed either way with lorecrafting humans.

I am new here, but I don’t see a checkbox.

(Me)
I think I'll change my question into a more provoking one:

Is there any reason why this wouldn't work?

different user, it's right there at the top of the post next to Anonymous in green letters.
now lurk moar newfag

You could do that but I wouldn't consider those beings to be human.

Sounds to me kinda like the Qunari. I don’t see a reason why not.

>don't think that's compatible
>warrior society
Fair enough. Given that in such societies the theologians and puppeteers wouldn't be warriors themselves even if they were controlling a warrior caste such as knights or jaguar warriors.

>native American tribes
>wiped out
>patriarchal European civilization
I wasn't aware that germs were patriarchal. Europeans merely picked at the bones. Bones that took them around 400 years to pick.

It could not work for a number of reasons such as slaves or advancing technology displacing their traditional employments, or the men craving the power of the women.

>I wouldn't consider those beings to be human.
Well jested friend.

>lorecrafting humans
Read that as lovecrafting humans; on that note how about modelling a culture around Shub Niggurath and her young: like ants you could have different spawn for different tasks (workers, warriors, scouts and indoctrinators) and they could assimilate humans as both unchanged infiltrators to gather more humans as food (they'd do this by making cults that are brought to gather just in time for feasting) and metamorphosing them into hybrid abominations.

That reminds me of the covenant, how the integrated each species the care across into a caste.

>What prevents the formation of a kingdom or other polity in these places?
narrative reasons. I just don't need a kingdom or a major obstacle there

First you need an in-universe reason why it's sparsely inhabited, that should at least inform what sort of options for an acceptable use of space you have.

Got a map, or at least a brief description of the area and it's immediate surroundings?

To the north - sea coast, currently tall untraversable cliffs. The sea is virtually unsailable too, for magical reasons.
To the west - huge mountain range, at the foot of which lies a city-state - which I need to be remote and isolated.
To the south - a forest and mountain pass to civilized lands
To the east - river in a deep gorge, beyond which lies a major kingdom

Area itself is mostly plains, or rather a plateau. It is pretty large area too, kinda the size of the kingdom beyond the river.

Is not!Christian mythos overused?

In a sense.
But keep in mind that sufficiently obfuscated, they are hardly different from other mythos - a fantasy mythology based on Egyptian mythos centered on Osiris will end up looking like Christianity anyway. A god that dies and come alive again is a very popular theme.

Something running on A Maze of Death could also work with some of the same ideas, but go more surreal or horror. Solving a "real" mystery from halflife and having to prevent it could even be interesting enough to spoil the twist right at the start.

The Titan Cold War world in a lot of his short stories would also be nice for a general solar space setting. I like the mundane post-apocalypse with the salesman a lot too. I guess, in general I enjoy the hypermundane in his stories; it's a crazy world, but you can still be some shlub.