Deep sea worldbuilding

What's your favorite sea myths and folks? How can you build a civilization underwater? What kind of magic would you find there?

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Giga Mermaid a better

Best way to build underwater would be to carve out it into the rocks perhaps or make some structures akin to underwater boats that can be moved to different areas when needed.

>What's your favorite sea myths and folks?
Mermaids. My favorite kind are those based off of deep sea fish.
>How can you build a civilization underwater?
One thing you'll need is a fictional metal that is rust resistant so the civilization can progress beyond the stone age.
>What kind of magic would you find there?
Something that could heat said metal so it could be reshaped. The vents at the bottom of the sea won't be enough to sustain a civilization, and anyone going down there would be under immense amounts of pressure.

Sirens have always been a favorite or mine.

You could have a society that was originally a land-dwelling populace, but ended up angering an Ocean God. Said God could curse the entire city, having it sink to the seafloor with its denizens, the inhabitants changed to forever be stuck in the water. Enter Mermaids/Mermen. Just a thought.

Relevant archived thread
suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/27484548/

I think a bigger problem would be the inability to write things without the advent of paper

For the sake of minority culture representation, I like to always include Deepwater Jews since they're so rare

You don't need paper if you have creatures that can live for centuries and can remember decades of knowledge and pass them on, you can use elders as archives, writing only helped us to go around our limitations, and you can use magic to save knowledge in items, or have shells that can record voice.

Or just, you know, carve stone tablets.

Water can still damage stone you know, and carving is a real slow operation.

Carving on clay tablets could work. It's soft enough to be relatively easy, while still able to last for a reasonable amount of time. Possibly something more exotic like using non-watersoluble ink to write on shells.

Doesn't this fall apart fast if a plague rolls through your population and a lot of the knowledge your society had was in the mind of a handful of people and most of them die? Writing is a great way to preserve the wisdom of the ancients, and society without it is poorer for it.

That's why you'd protect the elders and make them sacred things in the society, that's why you'd protect books from fire and dangers, if magic is a thing then a plague won't cause any damage if you can purify water.

What about war or natural disasters?
Also you can mass produce books, you can't mass produce elders.
However if said elders stuck around as ghosts afterward to pass on knowledge that'd be pretty neat.

For a very, very long time you couldn't mass produce books or anything comparable to books, and people still managed.

>it's not off topic if I tack "in your setting" or "worldbuilding" on the end!

God I wish that were me

If it's going to be off topic, at least it's not /pol/shit or wojaks.

Abyssal Depths, a moment in the life of an Abyssal Mermaid named Zarine.

You drift, conserving energy, amid the expanse. Far from the silt deeper below you and the whispered gloaming above. The buzz of distant interlap and electrical sparks frame arcs in the back of your mind that are familiar, allowing you to occasionally push against or glide with the currents to stay within this place.

Where your natural buoyancy is steady, within the boundaries of your territory to hunt and explore. Hunt...soon it will be time to hunt again. It has been days since you last ate, in the distance you feel the presence of small things. Too small, too dispersed, and not nearly many enough to sate your need or be worth the energy.

Your mouth, already gaping and wide, adjusts to swallow the current while your gills frill as you try to settle your nerves.

In this place and moment you debate, do you rise into the reaches above for the chance at something palatable? Or do you risk sinking toward the silt and scour the seafloor for something of volume that will undoubtedly put up a fight.

Briefly, your webbed fingers grip at the necklace of shells and bones around your neck. One of the shinier ones might be worth a meal at the Gatherplace...near the trench.

While for some there are safety in numbers, the Gatherplace unnerves you. So many potential meals and predators in one place, but under the Rust King’s rule none may feast on another of the full mind within its bounds. Though, the raiders from the trench do not abide by that rule.

Chance wasting energy above. Risk becoming a meal below. Or...the relative safety of Gatherplace unless the Sahuagin raid again.

It happened the last time you were there. You acquired a squid beak knife off the corpse of one of them after they were repelled in mutual defense, though it was a close and pitched war…

At least for the effort, many ate well that day.

Perhaps trading at Gatherplace would a good idea after all.

And now instead of continuing this story, shared once a while ago in an underwater horror thread, I bid you this.

Homes carved from rock above the silt for those who require such dwellings. Trench or cliffside walls housing similar structures for those willing to gather in numbers for safety.

Grown realms of Corral for those capable of the patience and supernatural hand to guide it.

The wreckage of ancient vessels providing shelters temporary, or in places with enough sunken vessels to be called a graveyard perhaps you will find a city.

Things in the depths know magnetism, feel the ebb and flow of the water and the bands of electrical force in the world enough to help guide and navigate.

Magic may more often rely on bone than blood. Pacts made with things in the deep, outside of the deep as they even know and understand it, maybe commonplace.

Resources are scarce where there is no sun. It is struggle. It is toil. To float in the abyss and conserve your energy as everything and everyone you meet is just that. Meat. And you must decided what you are willing to do to survive in some circumstances when they view you the same way.

Metal is rare if used at all. Iron and Steel will rust in time, and cannot be forged beneath the waves without effort and resistance to a volcanic vent, but bone and pearl may last a lifetime.

Ive fought one of those

That story was never finished, was it? For the end, only the outline of the plot was posted.

Game set entirely in the deep sea would be kind of hard to do, really, because realistically it would be "roll how many days you have to float in place to get a random encounter". Not much in the way of...anything, really, from creatures to landmarks. I'd like to see players have to visit the ocean floor as a one-off thing, to retrieve some macguffin from a shipwreck or something, and have to deal with moving in pitch blackness underwater, with only heavy protecting gear or warding spells keeping them from instantly dying due to extreme pressure, while having to deal with some sea monster or horrible deepsea mermaids.

Gold would probably be very important to them, given how it does rust or rot and is malleable and thus would be very useful for writing stuff down to last.

Giant mermaids (merwhales?) are also pretty great, as well as somewhat realistic too. The water buoyancy would allow them to support a greater body mass without collapsing like they might on land, and it would even the odds against sailors who, let's be honest, would have almost no trouble fighting normal sized mermaids attempting to take down their ships.

>merwhales?
Whalemaids. Merwhale literally means seawhales, which is redundant since whales already live in the sea.
But yeah, giant mermaids make more sense than most giant humanoids, since ocean has plenty of room and buoyancy counters the effect of extra mass. Theres already lots of very big things in the ocean.

I'll finish it eventually. Though the finished version won't be posted here.

This is cute.

This is alreayd a second time somebody has mentioned they'll write s story with deep sea mermaids but won't post it on Veeky Forums. At least give a pastebin link so I can read it when it's done!

It never ceases to amaze me that 99% of comments on my horrible deep sea mermaid doodles have been overwhelmingly positive (and the single negative comment was so funny I regret not screencapping it for posteriority). I really should draw some more of them again.

I was going to do more than pastebin. I'm using it as a setting story for a campaign. So, sure. I'll post it here later in another thread on this subject.

Or at least a link to where it'll wind up posted.

Bump.

I've always wanted to run a game with where all of the sapient waterbreathing races are little more than savages and the local wildlife is fuckhueg fish with kind of a players vs nature vibe. Sort of like fantasy Subnautica. Late game PCs would get Big Daddy style dive suits and maybe a 20k Leagues Under the Sea-style submarine. I will run this one day, as god is my witness.

...

Same

Even bad art can still be good if it's capable of displaying the intent, reminding me that I need to do some drawing myself

Cute ASF by the by