File: 3ed09f4c51c47aab8cc6b7a96(...).jpg (50 KB, 1024x576)

50 KB JPG

>>23571386
Thread Questions:
>In your setting, what are the major gods like? And what was your process when designing these deities and pantheons, where did you look for inspiration?
>What about the faiths that worship said gods, what are their religions, like, their holy garbs, rituals, festivals, etc.? And how did you design 'those' in a way that you can see real people belonging to them, where did you look for inspiration besides Christianity?
>How closely do you prefer your gods to interact with their priesthoods and why? And how much power do clerics and other religious officials have, both mystically and in society?
>What are the origins of the gods in your world? And how much power do they actually have over things, do they have rules governing what they can do, especially in the mortal world?
>Lastly, do the gods have any angels or other celestial beings as their servants, and if yes, what twists did you put on your take of the idea?

File: 1000_F_442359973_9YCJhZR7(...).jpg (244 KB, 1000x469)

244 KB JPG

>>23571386
What do you need to remember when creating gods and religions for fantasy settings versus more science fiction oriented settings?

I'm trying to come up with a team sport you could play underwater. It's surprisingly difficult. Something like blitzball in Final Fantasy X. But that's basically just handball in pool. I'm looking for something a little more refined, something that really takes advantage of being 3D, with appropriate rules.

>>23571386
>>23571390
In one of my settings, there are two divine beings, more like vital principles of reality really. I was inspired by the Triat of Werewolf: The Apocalyse, the extended Hellraiser universe, and various actual religions like Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism particularly. They're called the Monster Mother and the Machine Maker. The first is a gigantic womb that's is constantly spewing blood, pus, and afterbirth, continually creating all manner of abominations from twisted bone and sinew amidst a sea of gore.
The Machine Maker is a vast, celestial factory that just happen upon the realm of the Monster Mother. Disgusted by the chaos and imperfection, it set out to carve into it to create order. It created the Mechatron from its exalted assembly lines, wonderful and terrible contraptions that serve as instruments of its will. The Monster Mother hated intrusion and all those that dare to impede its perpetual self raping, so its offspring, Those-of-her-flesh, warred against the Mechatron for eons upon eons, eventually creating the world as the characters know it.
By the "modern day", the Mechatron has splint into three after a great war. The grand factory has gone silent and the Mechatron despaired from the lack of gudiance. Some saw it as a sign of the end of days, others thought it was better to wait for the Machine Maker's return, and a few choose not to fight, so the great monolith of order is fractured.
Those-of-her-flesh and their descendants still kill and rape each other, as always, only occasionally mounting assaults on the Mechatron, and even then, it isn't terribly uncommon for a party of lofty Mechatron to sometimes align themselves with members of Those-of-her-flesh over the rare mutual goal.
I am having trouble trying to come up with how the mortals really work, much less how they worship these things, if they do at all. I am thinking every mortal race just basically existed in a spectrum between influences by the Machine-Maker and the Monster Mother, but I don't know, I feel like something is missing.

Anybody got any tips for developing an evil magocracy? The one tip I've got so far is to remember that these sorcerers are there because of their magical abilities foremost - they could fireball everybody to death if they were inclined or psycho enough to do that.

>>23573528
Depends. What is the nature of magical capacity in your world? Is it by blood or can anyone learn it?

>>23573535
Still in the extreme early stages of this project, but magic was divinely bestowed by older and now deceased Gods. The five rulers of the nation are extremely ancient mages.

>>23571386
found out my idea was used in a kids book in the 90s

im starting to achieve levels of autism i didnt think was possible

>write 80 pages of a draft essentially finishing the first book (trilogy)
>start refining the draft and expanding on it
>slow down because of worldbuilding
>make a map (unfinished, but quite a bit done)
>start making lore music on suno
>plan to make a song for each and every nation, event, faction

it will never stop, will it

Isn't it rational, if immoral, for Mages to allow monsters to eat a few more people so that they can net a bigger reward after killing it?

The reward in question is the crystalline magical core of the monster. It's basically pure magic energy, invaluable for alchemists. Mages take it after they kill monsters.
Said monsters hunt people in their dreams to keep themselves materialized in the real world.
Point is, doesn't this scenario create perverse incentives for Mages to let the monsters kill more humans? Maybe even summon more monsters?

>>23573528
Magic is an amorphous term, anon. Do explain how it works.

At any rate, it shouldn't be hard for sociopolitical structures to form around powerful mages and their loyal mage supporters. That network will inevitably transform into hereditary aristocracy, followed by Kingship.

File: winter_s_wrath_skadi_by_m(...).jpg (114 KB, 828x621)

114 KB JPG

>>23571386
Well, my current setting has four pantheons, one for each of the seasons. I can come up with a few spheres of influence for each season, like War and the Sun/Day for Summer, Harvest for Fall, Death and the Moon/Night for Winter and Life and Medicine for Spring, just to give a couple of examples for each group of gods and show you what I'm thinking of so far, I have a few more ideas beyond just those but I want to have several more deities for each season, possibly even one for each month of the year in each pantheon, so I still need more, what do you think, do you have anything that will work for them, and if you have any seasonal gods in your own worlds, what exactly are they like?

Regarding their clerics, the ideas is that the gods swap between temples as the seasons change, so in summer one of the Summer gods would take up primary residence in a temple, but when autumn comes one of the Fall gods would take the primary spot without much fanfare since it's as natural as the seasons changing for that to happen (to accommodate that there would be smaller altars that would be used for the other three gods in the "off-seasons" as it were, so the gods aren't completely absent outside of their respective seasons). The clerics would also switch the primary target of their devotion between gods as the seasons change, using robes with different colors and decorations to signify the switch in which god they're following at the moment (though I'm not sure if the decorations being generic to the season or specific to the god works better), and which god's blessings are most prominent as a result. This would possibly not occur in places like the poles or the equator where there isn't much change between the seasons, so the Winter gods and Summer gods would have permanent temples at each respective location, though I'm less sure about the Spring and Fall gods, maybe they each have a region exactly halfway between the equator and poles where they have permanent temples. Again, what do you think?

>>23574008
Shouldn’t the monsters be able to eat animals too?

>>23574008
>>23575046
Yes, the second anon brings up a good question. Why can't they simply let them eat animals? Is humanity special in this regard in that it has to be humans in order for there to be a harvest?
Furthermore, you must also consider just how useful this sort of practice is. Is it really worth it to kill your fellow man for more of this thing? Do they produce that much more of this crystal fi they eat a few more? Mage or not, I don't know if it's worth of possibly incurring the wrath of the majority I can understand if monsters are few in number. I would think to even keep or even breed them (if it's possible) so the harvest of these cores can be ensured if that is the case. Additionally, is there a way to guide these monsters to target specific people or is it random? If it is random, how do mages track them? If guding is possible, I would think first to target convincts, prisoners of war, and dregs of society, because these sorts of people would be the least remembered and thus it will make harvesting easier. Can you make deals with these monsters? Are they sapient? If so, it could make "guiding" far easier. Perhaps you let them eat certain people in exchange for them to offer some of their offspring to you.
Lastly, what are the morals of this world? Would any human societies be fine if some of their own are sarcificed? Maybe they deem it worthy and they offer the soon-to-be sacrificed a brief life of leisure and status, like how. For instance, when the Aztec still ruled Mesoamerica and thought the world would end if not for sacrifice. They would sacrifice an impersonator of Tezcatlipoca during, a powerful god. This impersonator will spend an year playing a flute on the streets and have four lovely women as companions. When the month of Toxcatl came, he would have a feast in his honor on the day of his sacrifice and he would willingly allow himself for the priests to kill him. Think of how societies would approach it in general.

>>23573673
What was the idea? I’d love to hear it.

File: 1713689151557996.jpg (95 KB, 500x829)

95 KB JPG

>>23571386
oh god i'm... i'm... IM WURLDBUILDINGGGG

>>23577011
I think simply writing the story with no background to it is actually lazy and uncreative. Besides worldbuilding is fun and I see no harm if someone just wants to start doing it as a hobby. It might lead to a story if they get really into it.

File: Untitled62_20240518234419.png (302 KB, 360x438)

302 KB PNG

>>23577044
who tf said write a story with no background? Im saying you faggots arent writing a story AT ALL

>>23575046
>>23576160
Monsters can only eat humans for sustenance because humans are the only entities with an immortal soul. Eating humans also lets them manifest in the real world without needing to set up their own Barrier Realms*.

And for the most part, whether the authorities are fine with it depends on whether they can or will stop the Mages. Because remember, most of the authorities ARE Mages and the only counters for Mages are priests.

But thanks to the rise of atheism, priests with actual divine power are in short supply.

At the same time, they do want to reduce "overgrazing" and maintain a monopoly on magic.

*basically an enclosed region where the monster is practically a god. Monsters naturally only appear in nightmares where they try to eat humans and get enough juice to enter the real world

>>23576160
>Lastly, what are the morals of this world?
Calling it Dark Fantasy would be an understatement. It's not so edgy that it won't last five days, but it's a very miserable world to live in.

Calling it a Kakotopia won't be entirely incorrect. The bad guys have won.

>>23574008
It doesn't work because the longer you wait to get the monster, the higher the risk that someone content with smaller profits takes it out first, and you get nothing. And the more trouble the monster makes, the more famous it'll be, and attract more willing takers too

>>23577269
sounds like crypto

>>23577269
Hmm, yeah, I hadn't considered that angle. So Mages would likely be really jealous about guarding their hunting spots.

>>23577289
I've noticed this tendency in many multiplayer games, where you can either work together to accomplish well-paid objectives, or rake in quick wins. The most successful players will almost always go for the speedy style, because everything they get is directly away from others. So rather than trying to score big and risking a bust, it's safer to ensure nobody else can score big either, while earning steadily points over time.

>>23577422
The worst fear of mages in such a situation is the forming of a cartel that controls large areas and has power over both risk and reward distribution. Realistically, the formation of such cartels is inevitable. Smaller groups are swallowed by larger ones until there's only one or two left, which then collapse from the inside, and the cycle starts over...

>>23577568
>The worst fear of mages in such a situation is the forming of a cartel that controls large areas and has power over both risk and reward distribution. Realistically, the formation of such cartels is inevitable. Smaller groups are swallowed by larger ones until there's only one or two left, which then collapse from the inside, and the cycle starts over...
And those Cartels can be the foundation of the first Mage Academies.

Well, that was really instructive. I came wondering about economics and ended up creating socioeconomic motives for the existence of Magocracies.

This is why I love discussing worldbuilding.

What would be the economic implications of a genetic plague that's making men weaker, shorter, scrawnier, and more listless?

It hasn't effected everyone yet, but a significant percentage of the male population is actively reversing the historical trends of populations growing larger and stronger than their parents. It's basically a result of pollution that reduces testosterone in men, making them tiny and weak bastards that are also more likely to be obese or sterile.

Do you think that's likely to cause major socioeconomic effects?

>Female wizards are much weaker than male ones
>Magic is only passed through the mother
>Medical technology is much more advanced than our world

Will these three conditions lead to kidnapping female Wizards becoming a common war tactic?

>>23578698
If anything, all sides have pressing reasons to discourage targeting women, since the future of magic as a whole depends on them.

>>23578698
I feel like in a scenario like this, it would be considered kind of barbaric to do that.
There would be substantial market for magical women, but I also feel like society would recognize the importance of keeping them safe and happy and thus discourage kidnapping.

is worldbuilding your endgame?

>>23578698
of course, but there would also be other significant implications

>>23578698
What's the ratio on magical users? Are female wizards more prevelant than male wizards?

>>23579018
for these mutants, there is no endgame. only eternal self indulgent crabbing in their femboy neet dungeons

File: main-qimg-3db1399cebf63b4(...).jpg (113 KB, 602x752)

113 KB JPG

>>23571386
I had an idea a day or two ago for a world where all the gods are either aligned with the cosmic force of Order or the force of Chaos, with a singular god of Balance at the top keeping the others in check. I have a few ideas for spheres of influence that each side would have, like a god of Justice for the Order gods and a Trickster god like Loki for the Chaos gods, but I still need more ideas that aren't just copying Warhammer, especially since I want good 'and' evil gods on both sides. What would you suggest for me please?

>>23578698
What causes this weakness? And are there outliers?

>>23578821
Thing is, everyone would rather have it so that the newborn Mages are on THEIR side. Or at least not on their enemy's side.

>>23578825
So society would become more chivalrous in the "ladies and children first" sense?
>>23580404
Because a significant part of their potential is diverted to making new magical children. And yeah, there are.

To put it this way, there is just one woman in the 1000 strongest Mages in the planet. But there are next to none in the 1000 weakest ones. Almost all women are just average levels of strong.

>>23580495
Taking overt action against the women of the enemy side would naturally spark a much harsher retaliation, the unavoidable conclusion of which is that mages go extinct.

But your premise here isn't just that female mages are weaker than male mages (for no other reason than your personal preference), but that they are UTTERLY HELPLESS and basically just consumables moved around. Which says enough about the author's world view.

>>23580525
>Taking overt action against the women of the enemy side would naturally spark a much harsher retaliation, the unavoidable conclusion of which is that mages go extinct.

Take your meds.

>>23579087
Like what?

File: XVIII Tribe - World.jpg (1.68 MB, 2048x2048)

1.68 MB JPG

Map progressing well, I'm doing it bit by bit and I also wrote down a few pages to snap out of worldbuilding disease. Finally finding the balance in this autism

File: istockphoto-1148705812-612x612.jpg (19 KB, 612x612)

19 KB JPG

>>23580984
What have you written down, and what's this about "worldbuilding disease", got any advice there please?

>>23573528
Magical paperwork in magical bureaucracy

Have you ever thought of "tipping points" in the history of your world? Moments where chaos spontaneously erupted and completely destroyed the otherwise rigid status quo of the world?

>>23581794

My world had an empire that was seen as the origin of modern civilization, like ancient Rome or Greece in ours. They conquered almost all of a continent, established a common currency, a common language, revolutionized many industries and arts, and so on. Then a big, bad dragon showed up and wiped out the mainland.

>>23581906
Why? Why wipe out the entire mainland, I mean.

>>23582296
Monsters evolved in a highly competitive underground environment, where the dragon is the apex beast. So when it found a way above ground, its first instinct was to erase competition.

>>23582323
It considered humans to be competition? Why?

But the idea of the apocalyptic monster being the equivalent of a fox or cat in an isolated island ecosystem is wild.

>>23582332
It dug its way up in the middle of the capital city and found masses of people throwing arrows, spells, and the kitchen sink at it, and figured the quality of life was better without such things. When the dust settled, it thought the ruins of the royal castle made for a nice new nest with a great view, and it's still there today and it still doesn't like people. May it never realize there might be an even better home built elsewhere in the world.

File: 360_F_551617701_olmGkxyWJ(...).jpg (28 KB, 360x360)

28 KB JPG

>>23582537
Why did it do that, did some rival force it up to the surface or was it just curious?

>>23584055
Monsters have an inborn drive to seek the surface world. It's like the young penguins in Antarctica that cross many miles from the land where they're born to throw themselves in the sea. When a big one comes up, it often chases smaller ones ahead of it, and smart ones follow after it.

File: storyboard.jpg (749 KB, 2529x1268)

749 KB JPG

I generated a bunch of slop with dall-e based mostly on what I find evocative and aesthetically pleasing. After a while I decided to try arranging them into some kind of storyboard and this is what I came up with. I like the apotheosis aspects of stuff like fullmetal alchemist, evangelion, etc.

several questions

1) I've read a decent amount of fantasy and mythology, but have never tried writing (fantasy or otherwise). So mostly I've just let stuff I've enjoyed sluice through my brain without taking notes or being rigorous about identifying influences. And with AI, it's possible there are unintended influences that are not apparent to me. I don't really care about being "original", I'm more just curious about what's been done so I can learn from the best examples.

2) Do you think the story depicted would be good enough to stand on its own, or would it be better as something to fill out the background of something else, to serve the role of in-universe mythology? (I mean obviously someone skilled enough could make something good out of cliche material, I just want a sense of how stale this seems to you; 0) is the story clear from the pictures, or is that just the illusion of transparency since I'm the one who has been looking at them and thinking about them?)

>>23582537
So it just destroyed a capital city? Not the entire country?

Well, that sounds a lot less horrifying.

>>23584552
In times without mass transport systems, nations tend to be focused around the capital, and have their roots in a singular city state. The main population center and other nearby major cities wiped out, the mainland was practically gone. But worse are indirect effects. In any empire like this one, there are numerous smaller satellite states, which did escape direct destruction. But cut off from all political leadership, trade, economic, and military support, flooded by terrified refugees, these states succumbed to chaos and anarchy, and were abandoned. Like this, the entire civilization was done.

>>23581430
>What have you written down
Writing the story in the world I'm building.

Worldbuilding disease is when you want to write a story, but get stuck into a loop of building the world. You end up with 500 pages of technical documents on how the tectonic plates in your world moved since the mythical age, but you don't even have 1 page of the story.

>>23584407
This is what I interpret form looking at your photos:

First row: creation of the world(and humans)
Second row: humans wage war, cardinal sin, they worship pagan idols|
Third row: monsters, calamity, tower of babel, cannibalism, the apocalypse
Fourth row: salvation, the ark, monsters and spirits and cults
Fifth row: eldritch and evil gods, another calamity

I don't know what story you interpreted from it, but it's just a different shade of any creation myth. The photos are quite nice though.

>>23580984
>World's End
>Right in the middle where anyone at the top would look down and see that there is, in fact, quite a bit more of world around

>>23584593
There must still be some remnants left. Most empires aren't so centralized that just the destruction of a single capital will destroy the civilization.

>>23585118
The splintered lands that were far enough eventually started over as independent. But their peoples were ethnically different from the mainland all along, retained very little of its science and culture, and had virtually nothing left in common with each other. Similarly to Europe in the wake of Rome's collapse.

>>23585173
Man, sounds like this empire was already on the road to collapse. The dragon just hastened the inevitable.

>>23584220
How does anything still live on the surface that isn’t a monster then?

>>23585985
There was no discontentment or unrest. Only maybe excessive dependence. The sub-states were content to reap the benefits of the central land's progress, but made no real effort to understand how all the cool stuff was produced, the theory behind it, or how to improve on it. Those annexed most recently had the worst of this. They had too much catching up to do to make the culture and know-how truly their own. The gap between other human nations and the empire was simply too wide.

>>23584631
Hm interesting. My intention was to span a much shorter time (but still perhaps quite long) with more continuity of characters.

Row 1:
The king studies the mysteries of heaven and earth. Unknowingly opens himself to Eldritch influence and receives a vision. Contemplates long and goes seeking answers. Finds an old hag with the seeming of a beautiful Oracle who gives poisoned knowledge enabling him to continue on the path. He receives another vision. Builds a physical and spiritual fortress. Continues contemplation of his visions, dreams of change.

Row 2
Develops and drinks an alchemical concoction, corrupted by his encounters with the outer beings and the hag. His physical form is burned away along with the lives of those surrounding him. As a spirit / ghost himself (I realize this part, along with many others were not very obvious) he now cannot interact with the physical. He scrys upon a woman to act for him. He sends her maddening visions and knowledge. She forms a cult in order to perform rituals, providing the spirit of the king whatever he desires. He receives enough (whatever) to perform another great act

Row 3
He pierces the outer veil and travels outside to encounter the being from his first vision. He receives further knowledge, gaining the power to physically instantiate himself in the world. His cult grows into a religion, a temple is built. He presides over many sacrifices, grants power to an inner ring

Row 4 (Writing this out, I realize some of the pictures aren’t quite in the right order)
A realization, the building of a hidden site for the start of a grander ritual. Long years of preparation and and contemplation within the cave, dreams of apotheosis. He envisions a vortex of souls funneled into the temple, enabling rebirth as a god. Careful preparations, millions of souls reaped. Funneled into him, instead of a god he becomes an eldritch being, a herald. A hole is torn in reality, a long horn descends from the sky. An echoing note, a swirling mass of color appears, expands, explodes into the wild mass of limbs, claws and teeth. The beings destroy the world, the end. Last picture > if the outer beings simply tricked him, ignore it, he’s dead with the rest of the world. If they granted his wish, then I guess he’s a god now.

I was thinking about making the woman in the second row end up as the hag in the first with some kind of time shenanigans, but IDK. They just seem like they’re too important and too minor at once right now. maybe need to show up at the end.

I was thinking about it being a creation story at the same time, with the body of the god being a new world or something, but that was secondary.

>>23580984
Maybe include a inner sea somewhere.

File: prometheus_god_of_flame_l(...).jpg (298 KB, 1024x1449)

298 KB JPG

>>23571386
In my story's world the four elements are the primary power and source of magic, a bit like in Avatar but with both Eastern and Western-style nations, races, and cultures. This extends to the gods as well, with each god representing one of those four elements in addition to one or two other domains, like the god of War being a Flame element god. Unfortunately, I have hit a major block, so I need further ideas for which domains I can assign to which element, like Freedom going to a Wind god or Earth having the god of wealth, does anyone have any ideas they can help me with please, because this is killing me. Thanks!

Is there any settings where the world is literally on a giant tree? Like Yggdrasil? I'm sure there are some but I can't remember any.

File: 360_F_564289073_jjPceWRx6(...).jpg (52 KB, 540x360)

52 KB JPG

>>23586774
There's an RPG literally titled "World Tree" like that, take a look if you're interested.

President Aisha Bin Nguyen
It is said that once upon a time, Tripuran citizens grew sick of their government. They considered the career politicians to be incompetent, cowardly, greedy, corrupt liars who were ruining the country. They started voting for populists, but those populists were even worse than the old ones!

And then a 9 year old girl became a social media sensation by airing a comically amateurish campaign on Umetai (Tripuran YouTube) where she declared that she was only running to get out of school, promised that she would do no work and veto all laws, and spend her entire time making video streams about the running of government.

She won with 67% of the vote, becoming the youngest President in their history. On coming to power, she fulfilled all her promises. Inflation went down, unemployment plummeted, the military budget got slashed because she refused to enter new wars, and the entire bureaucracy got stalled because she refused to work past bedtime.

When she willingly retired at the end of her 10 year term despite being offered an extension, she became the second most popular President in Tripuran history, before and after Independence.

>>23588428
She would be the first, but hardly the last, of the "Anklet Presidents". Named for the anklets young girls traditionally wear on their feet so that their parents know where they are. They take them off at age 20 to show that they are now adults and don't need to be watched over.
In other words, she is the first of a series of increasingly powerful and despotic Presidents who are literally teenage and prepubescent girls that nevertheless got the job to be the most powerful man on the planet.

>>23571386
I had an idea for a video game, an RPG, that I'll never make because I don't have the skills. So there are times I've thought about pivoting and writing a novel or series within the world I've imagined.

In the game, the idea was that you've emigrated to a planned City of the Future, after a major cataclysm where the world is in chaos. And, as you completed quests, the city would tangibly change based on your actions. You could also go into different roles to have different impacts; if you joined the political quest line, you could become aide to the mayor and affect political outcomes. Criminal track, affect the underworld. Etc. I'm oversimplifying it.

The setting though...
In the near future, there's a series of terrorist attacks emerging based on global currency failures in most developed countries, which have cascading effects across all rungs of society. That's the trigger, but due to the profileration of social media and the internet, people were already split off into splintered and extremist groups, and once the currencies failed, things were already ripe for revolutions. But, the revolutions were halted, because these terrorist attacks caused the government to step in, highly regulate the internet and social media, and everyone accepted it for the most part due to feeling unsafe. In the US, most places are shit, but this City was planned by billionaires using the most up to date tech, so it's the place to be. A portion of the wealthy district was destroyed in a terror attack, but is planning on being rebuilt, bigger and better than ever.
I'm oversimplifying it. I had a doc written that explains all of it in more detail. I'll post details from it if anyone gives a shit.

>>23588428
>>23588435
TL;DR: a literal toddler becomes the leader of the free world by making funny youtube videos. And somehow, it works out fine.

>>23588428
>>23588435
A little silly, which is what I suspect you were aiming for; but underneath that silliness is actually a cool idea. I like the ankle bracelet aspect.

>>23588441
If you make a setting as dark as mine, you kinda need to sprinkle in a few jokes to lighten the mood sometimes.

>>23571386
>Our God is not the God of the Dead, but the God of the Living
Great quote. I use it daily. It's a reference to the Edition prompt.

>>23588428
>President Aisha Bin Nguyen
Bin is used for boys. It means "son of". Women use "ibnat".

>>23588440
BTW, it's funny and cute. But I recommend making her older for some plausibility. Maybe 14?

>>23572999
can they all breath underwater? otherwise i would say maybe have something be worth more points when it is scored deeper in the water. there might be some teamplay going on to help one team mate with "the ball" or whatever get as deep as possible with just one lung full, kinda like people ride in the wind shadow of one of their teams cyclists.

>>23573206
which god would hate the anti natilists more?

>>23573528
if nobody can take away their magic and they are rally ancient, then are they even interested in mortal affairs anymore? why would they want to control people?

>>23573673
i mean most ideas were used already. does not make them bad. execution is what counts.

>>23574008
yes, if willingly letting humans die maximizes your objective function then it is rational.as others have said there might be game theoretic problems with other mages going for the same monster. also if the people can organize against the monsters or the mages to make their lives worse then it might be better to not let monsters get too big. kinda like not raising rents so high that people revolt, if you know what i mean.

>>23574062
my mind immediately goes to migratory birds. would people be migrating with a god?

you could also make up seasons depending on what happens around that time. like the japanese do with their cherry blossom season.

is there a cicada type god as well with a prime number year cycle?

>>23577829
sounds like the omegaverse

>>23578698
i mean kidnapping does not work as a war tactic, because the pay off happens in the next generation. so the actual tactic to win a war would have to involve something else anyway.

besides that it sounds a lot like aristocracy to me if i understand this correctly. so only some females can give birth to mages? then you control who can procreate with them, so nobody else has access to that power.

and killing off all magic users in a certain area would make sure no new ones could spawn and you would have power over those normies, if that is useful to magic users at all, idk.

>>23586696
flame = love?
water = life, healing?
water or wind might have to do with trade by sea and rivers

there are sometimes personality types associated with the elements. earth might be loyal, wind kind of flaky, fire quite intense.

>>23588758
The what?

>>23588823
just google it :3
or search for the tag on ao3
works well together with werewolves :)

>>23588774
>so only some females can give birth to mages? then you control who can procreate with them, so nobody else has access to that power.
Only female Wizards can give birth to Mages, yes.

And they're soft targets, so capturing them is way easier than killing off the men. And their relative weakness also means that they can at least be restrained, unlike male Mages who are powerful reality warping superhumans.

>>23588829
This is the single most homosexual thing I've ever read. May God have mercy on your soul.

Also, how the hell is it anything like this porn logic genre?

>>23588857
omega males are smaller submissive somewhat feminine low testosterone men, just like yours.

just add alpha males and you have a typical omegaverse fic. you can then add the werewolve pack stuff with knotting/heat (plz google this as well, just kidding).

anyway. in modern society your plague might not have as big effects as in pre modern societies. e.g. in egypt a female was worth about 3/4 of a male workers economic output (i think this is the ratio the egyptians wrote down themselves when calculating there possible outputs).

in modern society you could see how societies getting older has changed them like japan, germany, italy. older men are mostly weaker versions of younger men.

>>23588844
well idk how your magical warfare works, but in premodern wars you could only capture females after you had actually won the war.
unless maybe you can trick or circumvent the others. i mean if you think it would be a typical strategy then the immediate question is what would the defender do against that? and the answer is clearly to guard the women.

another direction this might go is magical eugenics. so maybe some women give birth to way more powerful mages. you would want to keep those around for your offspring maybe. or kill them so nobody can become stronger than you if mages can be immortal or at least don't lose strength towards their end of life.

of course those are all somewhat psychopathic ways to look at your scenario, but war itself is often somewhat psychopathic and devoid of empathy.

>>23588915
Isn't bride kidnapping pretty common thoughout history? Not exactly a city scale war tactic I know, but between tribes/clans, sure

>>23589118
yes bride kidnapping has been practiced and is still being practiced in some parts of the world. but it is not really a tactic to win a war if the enemy mages all survive and just attack back or just defend the women.

so the war would be the means to the end of kidnapping the women.

although if you have wars spanning generations then the kidnapping could be a long term tactic to get more mages into your clan, but again the obvious move would be to protect the women at all time, so you should not be able to get to the women without winning the war first.

>>23589118
this tactic also implies that mages in a clan are very loyal to one another. but single mage having a lot of power on their own makes this all somewhat unstable i believe. do powerful mages need a clan? could mages of a powerful enough clan split off and kill the rest of the clan to have more for themselves?

because each individual mage has more power than a normal human being it is not just a normal numbers game with "the bigger the clan the better" i would guess.

>>23588901
This is the most disturbing thing I've ever read, and I fully intend to forget it.

>>23588915
>well idk how your magical warfare works, but in premodern wars you could only capture females after you had actually won the war.
No, because populations were scattered and raids were a common feature of premodern war. You take a few soldiers and horses and attack smaller settlements for everything from grain to slaves, then skedaddle before the main forces arrive.

>>23589195
Mages aren't the top dogs of the setting, are too scarce to take over (1 in 10000 at best but 1/1M on average), and are egotists that would rather rule than destroy a society.

Besides, they're too dysfunctional in groups.

>>23588685
They have tech that allows breathing underwater without cumbersome devices and allows faster movement. Water ball already exists.

File: [Lui_Rayson]-Aiolia-God-Cloth2.jpg (124 KB, 652x900)

124 KB JPG

>>23588798
This is a start, thanks. Do you have any more ideas, especially ones for Earth besides my idea of Wealth and yours of Loyalty? What would Water be in this personality assessment then, BTW?

>>23589294
earth: fertility, farming, underworld

water personality: cool, calm, collected, adaptable and reactive (like what bruce lee was saying about being water)

File: ezgif-5-91a0cd74a7.jpg (233 KB, 1280x868)

233 KB JPG

>>23589356
Never really watched Bruce Lee. Thanks for the ideas BTW, it's a great start, I just need a few more ideas for each element, so if you can think of more, please let me know.

File: The Inner Sea on Steam.jpg (114 KB, 616x353)

114 KB JPG

>>23586265
NTA, but what does an inner sea have to do with anything?

>>23589697
I just thought a more prominent inland sea could be cool. You could play around with ships, how trade would work, maybe monsters or a possible race coming from it.

how are you guys disseminating your world and worldbuilding? if you are

>>23589266
Tell us more about this tech please.

>>23590724
Implants on the sides of the head create a thin barrier film over the face that only lets air through.

File: b7a02a0b90bd31e9379d68cc1(...).jpg (625 KB, 1600x1901)

625 KB JPG

How does one plot out interconnected family trees? Any advice?

>>23591015
what do you mean with interconnected? like marrying between different aristocratic families?

i guess it should be about relationship between people and families. so some families might have quite close ties. other families have some marriage ties but still hat each other. or some married from two families really like each other but their families hate one another. i mean it should all be able to connect to the story. i don't think there are any special rules to follow. you could even marry siblings like in asoiaf. just needs to make sense. like why would those families know one another. why would they want to intermarry etc.

File: en_map.jpg (501 KB, 1612x1140)

501 KB JPG

>>23586265
>>23589746
Oh, like my map?

File: 1720879136479069.png (9 KB, 251x201)

9 KB PNG

How do cultures and characters in your world respond to gay people(regardless of your personal views)? Read a reddit thread on this, it was quite interesting

>>23591353
In 1/3 of the world they get murdered, in 1/3 they get skinned alive and eaten and in the last 1/3 they are either killed, enslaved or ignored(depending on their wealth)

>>23591353
The concept of gay people doesn't exist, because no desert cult book taught everyone to obsess about the naughty bits.

if i had a character that was half spider, but her human half went down to upper thigh/lower hips, and she could lean back and expose her soft puffy pink vagina, would most readers be down with that?
im not writing smut but there will be some implications

>>23591440
>Spider anything
Yeah, no anon. No they will not.

>>23573528
Just make them gnomerapists bro

>>23574008
If this were the case you would have some evil wizards deliberately ranching these monsters and feeding it humans so it can harvest the crystal or whatever
Do something with this if you want

File: 1686260997098607.jpg (19 KB, 347x330)

19 KB JPG

>>23591440

File: le chins.png (211 KB, 1152x812)

211 KB PNG

>>23591015
Due to how feudalism worked marriage is not so simple as a "relationship between people and families". Blood ties coupled with cognatic primogeniture being the norm meant that if your only descendant is female then it's most likely that your holdings and bloodline will be merged into that of another family by right of marriage.
That image in particular is about the Hapsburg bloodline and the eventual split of the dynasties between the house of Hapsburg Spain and the Hapsburg Imperial house. Here's the QRD:
>Portugal becomes independent from Galicia and they have ties to France through the (old) House of Burgundy
>Later Leon splits into Leon and Castile
>Aragon marries into Sicily and you have Aragon-Sicily for a while
>Navarra kind of just exists
>Castile and Leon reunite as Leon
>Galicia and Leon unite as Leon after the King of Leon uses his birth right to place one of his daughters on the throne of Galicia which would make his descendant inherit the throne after her death
>Two Portuguese Kings support this so the Galician nobles can't rebel
>The majority of the power in the Kingdom of Leon is centered in Castile so the primary title shifts to the Kingdom of Castile despite it being more recent
>Aragon and Castile unite as Castile through marriage
>Navarra is conquered and is just added to Aragon
>French line dies and is replaced by a new French line until you arrive at the (new) House of Burgundy
>Burgundy and Austria unite because, you guessed it, there was only a daughter left to succeed the title and she was married to the Hapsburgs
>Spain is formed
>Spain marries into the Hapsburgs
>Hapsburgs were elected kings of Bohemia so they don't claim genealogy from them
>Hapburgs now control Spain, Southern Italy, the Lowlands, Spanish overseas colonies, Austria, Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire
>inb4 he doesn't know what the HRE is, here's a QRD:
>>Holy, Roman, Empire
>>controls modern day Germany, Austria, Czechia, bit of eastern France, Switzerland, Netherlands and Belgium
>>was an elective monarchy so the right of succession wasn't secured by blood
>>Hapsburgs married into most of the electors or outright bought their votes so they were the de facto emperors for several centuries
>Protestants hated this, France hated this, Italians hated this, Ottomans hated this, Spaniards hated this
>Charles V abdicates a bunch of titles and so the family is split between the Austrian Branch and the Spanish branch
>Spain and Portugal unite because, you guessed it, there was only a daughter left to succeed the title and she was married to the Spanish Hapsburgs
Thus you arrive at that chart.

My advice would be to not approach royal marriages from a modern standpoint. Blood was not thicker than statecraft and marriage followed strategic interests. The English forcefully married into the French Crown to claim it, not to be buddies with them. Such was feudalism and the law of succession.

File: Romanov_family_tree.jpg (242 KB, 783x1178)

242 KB JPG

>>23591656
Holy shit anon it's so complicated. Thank you for the help I'm struggling like fuck here. And then it's the whole, will this boy get the seat or will it go to the cousin who was born first but is indirect blahblahblah

File: 5bcf06eef37a7-1-Bastet-Yl(...).jpg (99 KB, 700x1145)

99 KB JPG

>>23571386
The pantheon of gods in my story’s setting is headed by a couple consisting of a Sun deity and a Moon deity, but they also represent several other things, the idea being that every time they spawned a new god they passed on their influence over something to said new god, but I’m less than certain about which thing would have originated from which god, what do you think? I want a decent-sized pantheon you see.

What if there was a world where everybody lived in, like, one building. And they called it World Building

>>23592249
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Snowpiercer_(graphic_novel_series)&diffonly=true

>>23592229
light
fire
life
truth
justice
/
night
water
death
illusion
wisdom

etc.

>>23592249
or caves of steel
or dyson sphere

whats a good tool to keep and make note sthat syncs between phone and pc?

File: ma'at2.jpg (43 KB, 460x512)

43 KB JPG

I'm thinking of making a cape setting and I'm considering to include a Egyptian deity as a major tier hero, partly to fulfill having a mystical hero around. Ma'at seems like the obvious choice, but I'm open to other ideas.

File: 1720907497100902.jpg (617 KB, 2048x1584)

617 KB JPG

A setting where the various human sub-species survived alongside homo sapiens. Would be interesting to explore how other types of pseudo human think and interact with one another.

>>23592812
I always feel like Homo Sapiens would be be like elves and Neanderthals would fill the typical slot for humans in most fantasy settings. We're weirdly neotenic and smart relative to our fallen cousins.

>>23592565
google keep? docs? what are your requirements?

File: nyx1.jpg (96 KB, 1456x816)

96 KB JPG

>>23592314
This is a great start, thanks, do you have any other recommendations please?

>>23592812
Why wouldn't we exterminate them?

>>23591353
Tripurans accept it because of efforts by gay activists.

Everyone else hates them. Llys just considers them to be genetic dead ends and forces them to have children anyway. It's considered a mental disease that they often try to cure by rewiring their brains.

>>23592229
Which one is the husband?

Has GRRM discussed ever anywhere how did he develop or what is his process of developing lores for the fictional world and characters... How does he begin and bring it to completion?

>>23594107
He just randomly cribs from the most shocking or disturbing elements from RL history without context.

>>23594107
he does not seem to have any very clear process. he calls his writing style gardening as apposed to a plotter and architect. so he just adds details he thinks might lead to interesting plotpoints he can pick up again if he chooses.

he also reuses a lot of stuff from his earlier works. although maybe more so chatacters than lore. but the weirwood network might be a hivemind like in his earlier stories (song for lya).

he also seems to like for fantasy elements to be explainable in a scifi way. for example in house of the worm he lets a character who lives in a feudal post apocalyptic society find whatvis described like a toech light, but the man cannot identify it because he only knows torches. in a similar way their might have been concrete used on dragonstone, with the stone being described as fused together without gaps.

also a lot of descriptions are from unreliable narrators and might be overblown. like whatever power euron has.

i don't think he tries to be very completionist. not much is known about the other continents for example, which fits with him just making stuff up the gardening way as he goes.

then he also takes real life stuff like the war of the roses and remixes it.

File: aBattle_of_Kursk_6.jpg (51 KB, 525x419)

51 KB JPG

So I am making incredibly slow progress on a fantasy action adventure-type story. It's basically going to be steampunk star wars (as much as I despise that description, it is more or less accurate).
The bad guys, in true star wars fashion, are going to bring a bunch of high-powered weapon systems to bear on the good guys, which the good guys have to strategize and overcome.
For whatever reason, I got it in my mind to undersell the intimidation factor on all the superweapons by giving them lame names, and kind of letting their destructive power speak for itself.
Some elites in the bad guy army use energy rifles, which are called variously plug guns or cap guns, in reference to their weird firing mechanism. Repeating variants of energy guns use a fan to "refract" the beam, and so are called fan guns.
The bad guys have an armada of dirigible battleships. Some of them have been fitted with "wings," which are essentially large katyusha rocket platforms pointed at the ground to enable them to carry out devastating bombing campaigns on cities, forts, and massed ground infantry. These ships are called "condors," because they have big wings.
The main battle tanks the bad guys use are just called oxen. Their main piece of self-propelled artillery is called the eagle-hawk, because they kind of look like they have wings.
The silliest of all is a gigantic, metal automaton that the bad guys use as an impenetrable siege engine during a critical battle. This thing is called "The Big Man."
My question is, does my underselling achieve the intended effect of letting the power of the superweapons speak for itself, or does it undercut their image and make them seem more silly as a result?

>>23594165
>i don't think he tries to be very completionist
What gave it away? Taking over ten years to write one book?

>>23594663
i don't think in writing anything speaks for itself. if your writing can show how powerful these things are then the name does not matter.

big man sound a bit like the nukes fat man, little boy. so that might work. idk if the tanks need a boring name. oxen does not really work well for a tank, or do they just pull and not shoot?

in general i would say better go with names that fit the description unless you are going for comical effect.

>>23594731
>or do they just pull and not shoot?
they're basically just big tractors that can be fitted with cannons or machine guns.

>>23594736
still dunno if oxen sounds that good. i mean what do they pull if they are tractors?

>>23594747
troop carriers

File: 1672078136075049.jpg (255 KB, 899x654)

255 KB JPG

I want what is basically the Catholic Conclave but different enough that it's slightly alien. Do you have any ideas? I love the power plays in the Conclave and want something similar in my book.

File: e1d69261-ede1-4551-bfe3-e(...).jpg (90 KB, 1024x576)

90 KB JPG

>>23594066
The idea was that like in TES, each culture would have a slight different interpretation/manifestation of these two gods, some thinking of the Sun god as male and the Moon god as female and vice versa. Why, does that affect what you would give each one?

>>23592565
Google sheets works fine for me.

File: CeredhCastes.drawio.png (206 KB, 1572x1522)

206 KB PNG

I decided to organize my caste system for one of my cultures properly. Some overview:
>Human
>due to genetic aberrations, more women than men
>therefore polygamous
>men are often nomadic and create trade links, diplomatic ties and semi-nomadic pastoralism while women keep house(s) and oversee land usage
>large steppe-kingdoms and conquerors
>mobility only possible from one tier to the next by marrying a higher-status men as a second/third wife (men have no mobility)
>much of this is somewhat fluid depending on period and governance
Any remarks? Anything that doesnt make sense? Any questions?

>>23595331
I guess what I never clarified:
>indentured, soldiers and scribes have contracts with masters who can hire them out.
>The money goes to the masters, the indentured get paid a fixed rate by their masters.
>Owning a contract beholds to pay the fixed rate
>hiring and owning are two different things

File: maxresdefault[1].jpg (293 KB, 1280x720)

293 KB JPG

So I have a setting with a living god that has to leave due to his injuries, but has three sons

Each kid is with a woman of a different tribe that he married to unite them all

These women disappear with him and are worshipped as goddesses by each of the respective tribes.

However the sons are born to a random woman and man in each tribe

I was thinking of ways the Sages of the three tribes would find them once they receive a sign they are born

The first way is by tying the living god's hair to a needle in a cork, float it in water to make a compass that points to his son.

However I wanted methods to find the second and third son, since the compass would only work if there is only one son around.

Any ideas?

File: trygujhkl.jpg (129 KB, 900x641)

129 KB JPG

>>23595559
Well, maybe tribe-specific relics tied to their father will react in their presences?

>>23571386
Just a concept:
>world where every woman is succubus
>meaning, during sex their drain the life essence of men, keeping them young, potentially living for ever

With this setting, could patriarchial kingdoms still exist? Presuming that, one sexy time will shorten the man's life span by one year?

>>23596280
Yea they could exist but
>every women are succubus
With this, more men will get filtered from the world since puberty age, the oldest men will probably around 30-40 y.o. because they need to be sexually active (shorter life span everytime they have sex right), the oldest man will probably something around 50-60 y.o. and he need to be like nofap god or incelchud who cant get a women in his life.
Back to your question, can patriarchial kingdoms exist? Short answer: yeah, they could, men are leader by nature and women are submissive by nature, but the kingdom structure will always be changing constantly. Say that the previous king died because he had too much sex with his wife, the prince died because had too much sex with his girlfriend, the army general died because he loves to bang women on tavern, and every other person working in the kingdom administrative died because they have an active sex life. Then people will replace them before they died because of sex and other people will replace fhem as well.
This leads to political instability or maybe accelerated society even, because everyone dies young and everything needs to be done in their short life span. That's from sociopolitical standpoint, In sociocultural standpoint, the women could or could not be viewed as something dangerous. Assuming that there's incelchud cult that are filled with 50-60 y.o. old men who refused to have sex, they will automatically hate women, in other side, women will use sex as their weapon if they figured out that sex will eventually kills men. Think of group of prostitute assassin who will kidnap and forces men to have sex with them, maybe the kingdom utilize this as their weapon even. Lots of things will be happening there. Maybe sex will be considered as something taboo and normal people wont do it for the sake of having fun but rather, for procreation only (if they trying to prevent early death for their children). Lots of things.
Your concept is ugly, but its interesting if its done right

>>23596361
Good points.
Also, I wonder if there would be girl infanticide.
Considering all women can live forever, there would be more women, and they might see other women as competitors.

>>23596431
I suggest you to take the 'sex is limited for procreation only' path if you want to continue with this concept. Except you want to make a newborn world where everyone haven't figuring out yet that sex is kill and having a good reason to do that. I mean, human are naturally intellect, they will adapt themselves in every situation in order to survive. In society where sex is kill, then people will naturally limiting themselves to sex for procreation only, heck, they might've even get scared of having sex and making this concept where the men will just cum to a bottle and the women will put the cum bottle to her vagina in order to not have sex but still procreate. What do you intend to do with this concept btw? A novel? A short story? Plot for game?

>>23596431
>there would be more women, and they might see other women as competitors
This is a good point, but I will keep this one in 'near future' timeline where women in your /wbg/ eventually outnumbering men, having no one to lead them and they ended up killing each other because of women thing.
If there's infanticide, I can only imagine two scenario: first, it will be done by incelchud cult who hates women, or two, it will be done officially by the kingdom to keep popultion control BUT it will only be limited to peasants and low class women.
Yeah, there's also tendencies of peasants having a high birth rate like irl third world countries, I imagine the aristocratic peoplr would be more smarter in treating sex and procreation while the peasant, brcause they were not bounded with intellectual thing like writing, being inventor, or adventooring, they will go home, fuck their succuby wife, and died in a short life. Maybe they knew that sex will kill them, maybe they didn't care because the world offers them nothing, maybe there will be peasant genocide because of this, idk, its up to you

>>23596450
>they will adapt themselves in every situation in order to survive
smoking literally poisons you, yet people do it knowing it

>What do you intend to do with this concept btw?
At this point, it's just a thought exercise. Thought think it might be cool setting for a short story. Imagine what 1000-year-old woman could invent. Lack men might result in them inventing weapons that are not based on strength. E.g. instead of medieval melee, battles are fought with poison gas dropped from hot air balloons or something.
Or maybe women-dominated kingdoms would result in World Utopia with no war because women along better than men.

>>23596460
>If there's infanticide
Another factor is lack of caring. Like if every woman lives +1000 years and has +100 children, won't they eventually stop caring about their new offspring and might be okay just killing them?

>>23596484
>smoking literally poisons you, yet people do it knowing it
Its different. Smoking is 'luxury', its not a basic human needs like sex. In your /wbg/ sex is something that is deadly because female is a lifedrainer, its like saying that drinking water or sleeping is deadly to human. In order for them to live they need to adapt themselves so that they would stay alive, survive, and buulding civilization.
Think of adaptation process like the niggas who live in cold region. In order to survive they have to wear a thick clothing, jacket, layers of clothes, anything made by fur material that can provide them warmth, then they have to stockpiling a fire wood, and fishing in order to eat. Its a whole different matter than niggas who live in say hot region like desert.
>Imagine what 1000-year-old woman could invent.
You need to figure it out what will 1000 year old woman viewed themselves in this setting. A goddess? Someone equivalent to queen in terms of status? For reference a senior prostitute/courtesans would view themselves like that (yeah I said prostitue because no way, in your setting, a 1k y.o. woman only have one sexual partner right?), and with those 'power' that are coming from lust and absorbing human lifeforce, what would they be? An antagonistic person or a vilified person? I would say that they will become the former because knowing how to obtain their power itself is an antagonistic behavior.
>Another factor is lack of caring. Like if every woman lives +1000 years and has +100 children, won't they eventually stop caring about their new offspring and might be okay just killing them?
It will be a reversed situation. If women outnumber men and eventually men become a rare species, then they will care for a male offspring and raised them so that they could fuck them when they got older, assuming that the old female in this setting are that evil (hell they might've make a breeding station exclusively for that, capturing peasants women, make them breed male, and doing sinful things with them), but lets keep this in dystopian route. I refuse to believe a 1k y.o. succuba can hold her lust against men btw.
The downside is that they will probably nuked back to stone age, like those amazonian tribes. Forget about construction working and anything. If female outnumber male, the male will just sit back and see the entire world crumbling around them.
The entire reverse situation? Lack of male could also make patriarchial system even stronger (this if you choose a rare male birth route), because nobody could provide these female for actual penile-vagina sex other than male. Maybe they will viewed male as some kind of god who can satisfy them. There's a manga about this but I forgot the name, sole male in female world, he have sex with all the females in there

>>23572999
Maybe do something with those pool torpedoes. Make use of the fact aquadynamic things travel in straight lines versus needing to arc things in a throw

>>23579018
My endgame is making sure all the stupid situations I want to put my characters in logically fit together.

>>23596529
>sole male in female world, he have sex with all the females in there
There are a lot of them, but I presume you're talking about Parallel Paradise.

>>23596209
I think that'd be a good "final" check but I also intended there to be far too many children for it to be feasible to individually check each one.

I wrote up something on /tg/ originally

>First method
Tie a hair of the god to a needle, poke it through a cork, float it in water. Creates a makeshift compass that points to the very first son.
>Second method
Because now there are 2 sons of the god around, the compass method doesn't work as it just spins around.

So after some trial and error a method like this is used (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching_divination#Three-coin_method) where one coin has a hair of the first son and the other two just have the hair of the deity. The first coin merely points to the first son's location, the other two will be used to find the other sons. The three coins are thrown onto an octagon and the corresponding portion the coin lands in is the direction the son is in.

However I intended this second method to fail on the third child because the child is adopted by merchants and is constantly travelling around. I based this off the Kyoshi novels from Avatar.

I also wanted to write the Sages desperate to find the son when he's very young as they want to influence him as much as they can.

File: Screenshot_20240328-10462(...).jpg (1.19 MB, 1080x2220)

1.19 MB JPG

>>23571386
>>23571386
The gods in my setting are all pseudo-lovecraftian entities, and "magic" is practiced by allowing these things footholds into reality to make changes to it. This is only relevant in a meta sense however as 99% of the ancient knowlage on these entities has been lost thanks to the Catholic's long running (and until recently, extremely successful) campaign to eliminate all these beings' influence from the world. All that the average person would know about this is that certain types of spells seem to have certain costs associated with them. I've got a whole handful of them but my browser are the previous post I was typing up so I'm only doing the ones a few of my main characters make direct use of.
I named them after tarot cards because I'm bad at naming things and only extremely niche cults would know their names anyway.
>The Hermit
The being my main character makes the most use of. It governs spells of the cosmic type and mind related things. For my main character, this manifests as his impressive illusion magic he frequently makes use of. The cost meanwhile, comes from the being's eagerness to share its knowlage. Calling upon it results in eldritch knowlage being dumped directly into your head. Now this sounds like it could be a boon, but no care is taken as to what the knowlage is, how you recieve it, or if you can even comprehend it. Sometimes this can mean several precious memories are deleted in order to make some room. Sometimes the knowlage takes a deep root in your subconscious, causing paranoid delusions and hallucinations. And in the most extreme cases, you could even forget your own language in favor of one no one has ever heard of. My main character has long since tred the path of paranoia. He's a conspiracy theorist, seeing borderline schizophrenic patterns and reading omens in everything from the stars to his morning coffee. But there is often more to his mania than pure psychosis...
>The High Priestess
The ancient harvest/forest goddess that occupies that famous spot in the human subconsciousness. All her spells are about debasing yourself to become one with nature. Animal/plant control, wildshaping, that kind of thing. My character affiliated with this entity (pic related) does not so much as use the priestess' magic, as much as she's been USED by it. As a soviet experiment she was exposed to artifacts of the preistess' nature from birth. As a consequence, she exhibits symptoms that normally come with excessive Priestess magic usage, which is this case is being as much lizard as she is human. Not everyone becomes a lizard, some even become plants instead of animals, but the Lieutenant has been so thoroughly changed that she's even largely ectothermic.

Aaaaand I just ran out of space so actually I'll stop here unless people are actually keen to hear more

>>23597603
I would certainly love to hear more about all of this please.

Beyond the two mountains, the streams pool and gather at the greedy mouth of the Honai river, which lead down into the lands of the Eromites. Pale skinned and obsessed with secrecy, the Eromites guard their homeland with the appearance of a race-wide case of insanity over any practical defense. The rolling hills are too gentle to truly ward off attackers and the life too placid and tranquil to breed a more hardy people; as such the Eromites react accordingly. Wearing their squat "armor" of molded multicolored clay from the Honai, they gibber and threaten all their rival neighbors with invasion and superstition dance and ritual. In truth? The Eromites Gods may be the least greedy and demanding of all, rarely does blood stain their sacrificial altars, which cannot be said for the much more aggressive neighboring state of Grogath, or the gruesome parasitical religious ritual of Yeng.

Eromite or not, anyone wearing fired clay will find little protection, and even less stealth from the clinking of the crockery. But the clay armor has a small advantage; it does not conduct electricity, and as such the ever-present lightning skinks and thunderhooves on their high ridge inclines cannot shock the life out of a wandering Eromite soldier or messenger. One would think a society so stuck in the stone age would be incapable of great learning, but the Eromites surprise yet again with their tattooing of sacred words and the scratching of clay "rods" which can play back sound; an invention so unknown to the rest of the world it is rightfully named as an act of magic.

>I have no idea if this prose or exposition-dump is any good. Please advise.

>>23597631
Sweet. When I've got another break at work I'll do another write up then.
>>23597696
I like it, I don't think it's too heavy handed or anything of the like. I'd need to see it slotted into a larger passage to really give the all clear, but on it's own it seems perfectly good to me. I guess my only question is: if the neighbors are so bloodthirsty, how come the act works? Is it just that unhinged compared to what the neighbors are used to?

>>23597603
Key detail about the lieutenant that I neglected: she's gained a lot of lizardy benifits too. The sticky palms of a gecko, the tough hide of a crocodile, the heat sense of a snake, and so fourth.
So, continuing...
>The Moon
The other deity one of my characters will make contact with. The moon is the most lovecraftian of these. Strange, esoteric rituals and signs coupled with horrific dreams. The moon itself can give a wide variety of powers, such as: dreamwalking, spacial manipulation, and the direct traversal of higher planes. However, its price is the most insidious. It begins simply with strange dreams of unearthly vistas, moonlit hills, and a vast ocean. But eventually, those dreams become nightmares. You're not just on an endless black sea, youre drowning in it. Night after night, you'll awaken completely exhausted. Your body feeling like it just spent the past eight hours (or longer) struggling in the water and drenched in salt water of unknown origin. If left unchecked, these nightmares will even come during the day. To outsiders, you'll seem to be sleepwalking through life. But inside your mind, you're there. Falling beneath the waves. And as these were on, a growing part of you might wonder why you bother struggling. There's no land, nowhere to go. And the water, if you would just stop fighting it, wouldn't feel so cold. Almost inevitably that part of you will win, and you'll sink beneath the waves and drown. At that point, when you next open your eyes, your personality will be completely consumed by your jungian shadow. This often comes with physical changes as well, your body having gradually changed itself to better suit your shadow over the months without your realizing it. Some users even claim to have interacted with their shadows as the moon sickness progressed. Debating them and fighting with them.
You can probably guess what kind of things I'll do to the meek nerd that attunes to this thing.
>The Emperor
The most evil and the most chatty. The Emperor believes itself the rightful ruler of all things, and fitting deals with spells that bend the wills and bodies of others. Mind control, necromancy, stuff like that. His price is a "tithe", the physical offering of something to him, usually from your own body. Say your careless, and you cast a spell that costs you your right arm. Maybe that arm will fall limp, never to be used again. Maybe next time you try to write out a spell seal, your arm will make edits to it and change its intention to something completely different. Maybe itll even cast it before you realize what's happened. Or maybe, life will continue as normal. And years down the line, after the emperor has grown tired of watching you, the arm you're using to chop an onion will suddenly plunge the knife into your own heart. Either way, once the emperor has staked his claim something, he doesn't give it back.

Does planetary warfare in space-faring ultimately devolve into police actions only? It seems as though decisive fleet battle is an inevitability. Fixed orbit defenses are not the same as shoreline defenses, they can be stuck and destroyed precisely from across the solar system with mathematics that are old even today, and offer no serious defense. Only defenses that are mobile and can strike out at some attacker matter. Habitable planets are few, Armageddon is pointless even if it is easy. After a decisive fleet battle strategic bombing on a massive scale can begin and continue until the planet capitulates. And invaders that descend would be setting foot on a planet that is already theirs, they would be entirely special forces since that is all that is needed to coordinate with local government and defence to handle insurgents that can't cope.

I just can't rationalize large scale land engagements. Planes, tanks, sea warships, bunkers, all are helpless against the gods orbiting above. A desire to avoid collateral for strictly practical and financial reasons is all that stays their hand. Hence the conclusion that only special forces performing counter-insurgency and police actions would be required.

Or have I made some strange assumptions?

>>23597766
>The Tower
Entropy personified. Decay, rot, chaos, disorder, all that and more. Each of the other entities have their own designs, as incomprehensible as they may be to us. The tower however, does not. It only seeks to destroy the caster and whatever the caster is directing it towards.
>The World
The christian god, coming with all the trappings that we culturally attribute to it. The actual creator of the universe in my setting, all the others are just piggybacking off of his hard work. Worshiped by a much more Bloodborne Healing Church-esque Catholics, for whom exorcism is a common practice even in the year 1990.

And that's all of them! I'm actually wondering if I should add one or two more, but I feel like I've reached the other limits of my creativity on that front. Coming up with an all new price and domain might crowd up the pantheon too much.

>>23597773
You underestimate the power of a bunker methinks
Place it a few kms underground with science voodoo
People never pop their heads out except through advanced periscopes
The gnome insurgency is nigh

>>23597782
I'm not sure that's true, nor that it matters even if an orbital railgun couldn't penetrate it. You cant rule a planet from a bunker, and you can't fight back from a bunker. If the invader has a monopoly on violence he is the leader. The majority will fall in line. Bunkers are pointless. And the enemy still wouldn't need to deploy a "real army" to the surface to deal with a couple of faggot politicians or generals cowering in bunkers, it would still just be his elite forces fighting their way in to the cuck box to drag you out kicking and screaming. Not that doing so is even necessary normally, but still. The invader would simply just look for someone else to become the new planetary government and begin negotiations with them, cutting you out.

>>23597816
What if they didn't know? Consider a populace that's well aware that a threat might be coming. Some live on the surface and will mount the first resistance - as do people which enjoy their birthplace despite all its inadquacy and hostility - others, the cautious survivalists have moved underground. Need not be officials. There's the live example of Hamas performing the impressive feat of out-subveying Israel with most being guerilla actors. But you might not like the idea since it evades head-on confrontation. In which case a space war might indeed be inevitable. Would still invite recourse to science voodoo here. Cybernetic plants or computer viruses launched on small innocuous or hard-to-detect carriers that hamper the efficiency of autonomous systems. Or something along those lines, what do I know.

>>23571386
>>23571390
There are no gods in my world, no religion. I feel any kind of god worship just dumbs down the story. At best I could consider a buddhism tier spirituality and phisosophy, buddha was(is) not a god just someone who gained higher powers, ascended etc. People who wish to do the same might imitate buddha. That's as far as I can tolerate religion.

>>23597773
i don't know all your assumptions here. how much weaponry can a space fleet carry? how many resources do you need to keep it moving? a lot of this has to so with economics of war. just being able to do something does not mean it is cheap enough to be viable.

how easy is it to destroy a space ship with planetary weapons? can they even get near a planet? can't you have way more weaponry on and near a planet?

>>23597816
why can't you rule from a bunker? what does ruling look like? what is being ruled over?

why can you not fight back from a bunker? aren't bunkers made for fighting back from inside them? or can no weapon from a planet reach a space ship?

>>23597834
I'm not sure you're on the same wavelength as me. In the event of no decisive fleet action, the strategic bombing just resolves immediately. The invader doesn't care who is in charge. He just wants his tributes, and public order so he can send people to do business on this territory. If he wanted to be really hands off he could insist on all trade being done in orbit so he really didn't need to give a shit and could be even more heavy handed. If the planetary government refuses to play ball, strategic bombing until someone who is willing to play ball kills the guys currently in charge and cuts a deal. The side with a fleet in orbit has to risk very little, and can demand everything.

Launching shit into orbit is a fairly infrastructure dependent activity, insurgents would be a problem for the new planetary government. Who could say "hey invader fleet, please glass this 40 km^2 please" and resolve the problem without breaking a sweat. Boots on the ground seems totally pointless unless you care about enforcing new social order beyond a government that just pays up their taxes and makes it safe to conduct trade on the planet. Then I suppose you'd want to drop an entire police force (military) and your own people to take over all planetary government roles, squash local religions, go full 1984, etc.

Other than that tho, I still don't think boots on the ground matter at all. Maybe if your new planetary government took over from the ones that refused to capitulate and needs some muscle until they can train up their own. So again, basically just police action.

I am now even more convinced. Thank you.

>>23597889
So be it, have at you. Your dome piece, your imagination, your work. Happy to help.

>>23597860
>>23597865
I expect auxiliary ships along with a main battle fleet which can secure materials in system and turn said raw materials into munitions. I am dealing with torch ships armed with missiles, particle beams, and EM cannon mainly. Some macron guns rarely. All fairly hard SF, I am limiting the magic to just the FTL and torch drive hopefully.

Fuel is the greatest limiting factor, but auxiliary ships can scoop from gas giants so fusion reactors are good forever in system. Food is probably the most limiting factor for a fleet but I'm refusing to hand war over to computers to run and a fleet with intact auxiliaries is good for years.

The main reason why a planet can't fight back against a fleet in orbit is that if you chilled out by the moon (using earth as an example, you have light seconds of distance. Kinetic weapons or missiles launched from an atmosphere are a lot slower. If you hang out in the lee of the moon you don't ever fear sudden attack from a laser weapon (not that a laser from within atmosphere would be as powerful as a space one anyways.

So no, I don't think someone would be able to launch a missile or fire a gun from a bunker and kill or even damage a fleet from a planet. They would need more ships from another system to win if their fleet lost. Not to mention a fleet is also armed with sensors, cameras, etc. Scanning a planet for weapon installations would be a matter of time only, then a quick maneuver to pop out, fire a shell down and crush each one. Presumably any real big surface weapons that pose a serious threat would be detectable on optics (space optics can see stuff on other planets easier than planetary ones) from much further away anyways, like light hours away. Chucking rocks at those would be trivial unless I suddenly allowed force fields or energy shields. But that's a bit too magic.

I'm putting up a defence but only because I'm trying to prove this position is rational. If you can raise an objection I've not personally thought of I'll have to workshop an answer in this framework.

>>23597933
ok i understand you problem better now. i just wanted to say that depending on how you configure your economics and other details you can get either outcome. so your outcome could be viable if it is easy enough to get that many space ship with that many weapons in orbit, etc.

that also means the we probably cannot help you without going of all the details. so it does not even matter if it is rational or not as long as you do not provide all those details, like specific costs and capabilities. i mean at some point i would have to come up with weapon systems you did not come up with but that make sense given some other gadgets you have, and so on.

however your main reason depends on a moon. not all planets have that and besides that you would have to conquer or glass that moon as well and the moon can shoot back as well. are you saying the moon has not the resources available to create enough weapons to shoot back? because this sounds all very post scarcity to me in terms of weaponry. why are not the whole moon and whole planet giant weapons platforms? and if you have to kill all of it what do you still have left that is worth something? like what gets destroyed by an attack would be important to take into account. like if a fleet can outproduce a planet, why have fleets?

i would have thought you would say that some weapons are just not available to a planet. because otherwise the planet or its moon or some orbital stations or other things in that same solar system are probably way cheaper weapon platforms for the same weapons that kill from the same distance.

of course a lot here is just dependent on your world building. so if you sensors and camera can just see everything that is fine. i would say it is actually quite easy to just hide things form optics on the surface of a planet.

i feel like i would have to read the story to see if it makes sense to me or not.

still hope any of this was useful to you

>>23598017
Your assessment on the feasibility of feedback is probably right. I'd mention that the moon thing isn't super relevant and just an example how even a "close" fleet can defend itself against planetary defenses. It's not a core assumption, since again you can sling shells or rocks from across the system to hit a gnats ass on any planet you want with fairly trivial math.

I guess I'll just proceed to make Mahan proud. Or review the Pacific Theater of WW2 for the millionth time and try and determine if any causes there have analogues. No wonder most people stick to fantasy, SF is so much more rigorous.

File: juz6xa95elx81.jpg (59 KB, 564x817)

59 KB JPG

>>23571386
My world has a dualistic pantheon, with the primary gods being a creator goddess and a destroyer god, working together to shape the world and its peoples. They also embody other things, like life for the creator deity and death for the destroyer deity, but I feel like they each need more, what do you think would work? For instance, the creator deity would also be the god of art and other creative endeavors, while the latter would be the god of justice, since evil is its favorite thing to destroy.

>>23597342
Yeah, that's the one
The conflict will probably revolved around things like that if you decided to treat the men in your concept as a rare commodity. Foids having war over boytoy posession is stupidly funny.

>>23577113
be careful. You might activate their autism.

File: lo-scarabeo-tarot-world.jpg (41 KB, 200x377)

41 KB JPG

>>23597779
What more can you tell us about this setting? Also, if you want more, you can say that they existed but were destroyed in the past, so if you have more ideas later you can make it so that some cultists discovered their remains and are trying to revive them.

>>23571386
Does this world map look realistic?

File: 9889.png (321 KB, 1024x768)

321 KB PNG

>>23599221

File: shirabe question.jpg (31 KB, 267x411)

31 KB JPG

So I have a question. Now that I've built my world...... the fuck am I supposed to do with it?

>>23599263
Give it to me! :D

>>23599263
you write a story about it, essentially history is lore and it is full of stories, so is fictional history.

Like I wrote 1000 years of lore for my game without giving details. But then I wanted to flesh out details about how ancient fell, so I ended up writing a novella about emperor's brother end up fighting his brother the throne. It allowed me to flesh out the details and explore the world.

>>23599222
The red island is sodomizing the yellow one isnt it

>>23599263
Write your story first then worldbuild duh.
Unless you want to treat worldbuild as creative game or fun discussion with other anon in this general

>>23599027
Not a bad idea, I might just do that. And I'm happy to! It occurs to me, trying to write all this out, how much shit I've actually got in here. But that's a good thing, I wanted to create and tangled web of conspiracies filled with horrible supernatural creatures for my characters to unravel so I'd say it worked! But for the sake of not posting a massive wall of text I'll stick to big picture stuff.
So, setting. 1990s urban fantasy. The biggest and most important change being: the cold war never ended. Even now black ops and proxy wars rage. The wall never fell, and thanks to literal magic the soviets were able to keep their economy afloat. You might even say they're winning as of the start of the series. The west, unwilling to cut ties from the church and viewing magic as socialist, has refrained from using magic at all in any major infrastructure or technological development. And while competition has driven the west to develop a better version of the 90s tech we had, the soviet atompunk magiteck still is still pretty far ahead. The cracks are showing in the soviet government however, as their reliance on outer gods has long since been rotting them from the inside. Cults and infighting plague the country, although from the outside most seems fine.
My main characters are all "Freelancers" aka people you call in to solve paranormal problems when you don't want to call the Outlier Containment Agency (an organization that both acts as the Men In Black and the CIA in my setting) (aka fucking feds!!!!!!) or invite the scrutinizing eye of a church Hunter. But again, magic is far from being accepted in the west beyond academically studying it. So freelancers, while often required, as usually not liked. It doesn't help that they're usually freaks because it's the kind of work only a freak would want to do. Even actually having an ordained minister on the team doesn't stop Paranormal Solutions LLC from having an uphill battle in the PR department.
The KGB and the OCA are far from the only moving parts in my setting however.

>>23600533
Continued
Some of the highlights include...
The remnants of the nazis. Called Millenium, while I think of a better name than ripping off Hellsing. Ground zero for the return of the occult may have been the battlefields of ww1, but the nazis were the ones to really make it center stage on the world stage. Much more esoteric and occult than the nazis we in real life knew, Hitler's own still waits in the shadows of my world. Working from the darkness to bring forth what they believe is their destiny. The "true aryans"...

China is also vastly different. As the chinese civil war raged, a group of the last and most powerful Taoist sorcerers got together and performed a truly profane ritual in an attempt to save their country. This ritual awoke an actual chinese dragon. The dragon, seeing the desolation the century of humiliation and the civil war brought, proceeded to declare himself literal dragon empiror and eat both Mao and Chiang Kai-shek. It now rules the country with an extreme isolationist policy like the days of old, building his army for some nefarious purpose. Of course, as this turn of events relied on magic, most westerners don't bother to differentiate that from what's going on in the USSR. Although the differences couldn't be more extreme.

The already mentioned Catholic Church is making major moves as well. Viewing the previous Pope's policy of staying out of secular affairs as complacency and folly, the church is making moves as a serious political force once again. A crusade is a brewing in the cathedral city if the Vatican baby, and you better not get in their way.

Japan, who's been at the forefront of the West's technological advancement. Now that their economy is dangerously close to overtaking america's, and they haven't completely abandoned magic, america might be turning on them sooner rather than later.

Leviathan. What started as an alliance between a soldier in the trenches and a demon wearing human skin has turned into one of the most powerful secret societies on the world. After cannibalizing the illuminati from within, as well as several other conspiracies, Leviathan has become a major player on the world stage. Its leader, a man named Donovan, seemingly hell bent on keeping the cold war going. That is, going in a direction he favors.

The Nephilum. Driven to ground by the biblical flood, even now they wait. Hidden away in the ruins of their once great acropolises. The machinations are grand and long, and who knows just what they'll do when they deem it time to walk the earth once more.

>>23599619
That's the virgin way. Chads build a world and create a story in order to explore it.
Like Tolkien said he created LOTR just because he wanted to insert his Elvish language somewhere.
And LOTR does feel like a tour of Middle Earth, rather than a story where the settings exist around the story.

File: 360_F_555067051_3xPcPrhgA(...).jpg (35 KB, 540x360)

35 KB JPG

>>23571386
Who here has used AI as a tool in their worldbuilding? If you have, how did you do it, and what advice do you have for it?

File: The Hobbit (1977).avi_sna(...).jpg (73 KB, 640x480)

73 KB JPG

>>23601741
>And LOTR does feel like a tour of Middle Earth, rather than a story where the settings exist around the story.
That's a stupid thing to say and you're stupid for saying it.

>>23602181
it is true though

>>23602123
I used AI to generate a video of those jeets AI generated picture. I think its cool to be able to generate picture of jeets AND make them moves all in the same year

File: image123.jpg (320 KB, 1024x1024)

320 KB JPG

>>23602123
I've only ever found it useful in visualizing places and characters, which in turn can assist in the process of coming up with new story and worldbuilding ideas. In regards to using something like ChatGPT to worldbuild? Yeah, nah. Besides taking away a lot of the fun of actually coming up with your own world and ideas, most of the stuff it shits out is overly generic and not worth using.

>>23571386
I was going to ask is it realistic for a kingdom to run to exist for 1000 years when it is next to a feudal kingdom, but then I remembered Saudi Arabia still has tribes.

>>23602426
The Kingdom of England was longer than that.

>>23603142
actually typo
was meant to say

*is it realistic for a kingdom run by tribes exist for 1000 years

I'm working on a fantasy series containing four different main viewpoints to encapsulate the four strata of the empire it takes place in. One takes place in high society, one in a poor out of the way peasant district, one in a shadowy underground cabal that keeps the empire alive, and one in the wars the empire is facing.

My big problem is balancing these out and not having sections that readers would dread, I.E, using one viewpoint for infodumping and another for plot progression. It's a hard balancing act and I wonder what I can do besides "WRITE MOAR" To iron out the process. I've recently found a way to make my main focus duo of characters that will probably dominate the main narrative a lot more interesting which is a huge step in the right direction, but I still wish I was better at keeping interest through viewpoints without jumping the gun and having these characters, literally half a nation away just meet up early.

>>23603311
>My big problem is balancing these out and not having sections that readers would dread
That is going to happen no matter what. That's why POV exists, so unwanted chapters can be skipped. Like in ASOIAF I always hated Caitlyn chapters.

>>23603400
This, I skipped every single Parshendi Chapter in The Stormlight Archive because I couldn't fucking stand them. In fact there's your advice, don't write literal hundreds of pages across four books about the unga bunga retard tribal bad guys unless its your badass MC's caving their heads in with axes and magic n shit.

>>23603400
>>23603413
I figured at some point I'd have a pov that's utterly boring but I hope to nip in the bud early. POV has a lot of strengths but that weakness makes me apprehensive to adding too many pov's.

And no I don't plan on writing many villain POV's.

File: guardians_of_cistaveth.drawio.png (147 KB, 1232x1169)

147 KB PNG

>>23571386
I'm far too obsessed with making these pointless family trees...
This family tree is about Scotland-like region that is ruled by a great empire that gradually loses control over the region, so they appoint a "guardian" to rule over the region, but the local nobles begin fighting over the title.
Over course of this rivalry, the nobles end up forming cities... So, every location on the map had a known founder.

>>23603400
>That's why POV exists, so unwanted chapters can be skipped
If you find yourself writing shit so that people could skip it, maybe consider not doing it at all?

>>23603534
I can see both sides of this. On the one hand your POV's should each appeal to some readers and they will by nature do so more than others. Some readers may find one character far more compelling than another and straight up not care for some despite being written well enough.

On the other hand you should aim to have each POV section be interesting enough to appeal to the vast majority of people reading it and there should be overlapping themes that keep them all unified and interesting

>>23603554
There's no reason, no benefit whatsoever, from developing such megalomaniac delusions that your story is somehow too big for one focused perspective. POV-switching is a crutch developed by ADHD-riddled hacks, who can't come up with one storyline that would be compelling enough.

>>23603633
Ok I'll attempt to explain the pragmatism in the choice because you seem to have it confused with some failing of the author when I can name several series of great acclaim which have done this, LOTR most notably. The POV switches as the main cast breaks up into different groups as the plot progresses, it accelerates far more from the second book onward and the movies take advantage of this.

POV switching is a good way to worldbuild through examining different parts of the world at once. It also helps in cutting down the fat of scenes where characters would have to travel from one point to another essentially recapping what they have already said about a given location or entering into meandering descriptions of the same fucking thing over and over because you have to retrace your steps.

The characters in a story all have their own POV's, goals, motivations, and viewpoints, and explaining these separately before these characters meet can leave the reader wondering how these two people will interact.

Also 90% of people who consume media in general have some "ADHD" Style goldfish attention span and not admitting that is foolish. God forbid I want to entertain a fucking audience.

>>23593723
People are naturally cooperative. Even different species of mammals are known to work together in certain environments. The assumption that two competing species would always work to destroy each other is unfounded.

>>23603664
>I can name several series of great acclaim which have done this
And here's where I stopped reading your post, because we've circled back to "makes money=must be good". Sticking a giant spiked dildo in your ass in live stream also makes money, you should try that next.

>>23603758
Ok cool so you're just a jaded faggot contrarian with no actual opinions, thanks for sharing and enjoy your miserable existence.

>Having a story told from multiple perspectives is... le bad
What fresh brand of insanity is this.

>>23603932
You're right in what I said was not an opinion but a hard, mechanical, indisputable fact, which also explains why you're out of ammo

File: mountains.png (48 KB, 624x577)

48 KB PNG

>>23571386
I insist on drawing the typology maps with a 2px brush because I hate myself.

>>23603724
People are also naturally competitive. We band together to destroy other bands all the times. Such is nature.

>There are massive godlike monsters trapped beneath the world. King Solomon of Israel trapped them in subterranean prisons to save humanity from their frequent rampages.
>The spell that traps them also uses the energy they create in their writing and stamping (for they don't like being trapped beneath the earth) to counter earthquakes. Therefore, the entire planet has been rendered immune from tectonic changes like tsunamis and Earthquakes.
>Dragons are perpetual motion engines. They will NEVER get tired, either physically or mentally. And they are always trying to get out....and sometimes, they do.

This is why Dragons always emerge from caves and subterranean regions.

>>23604039
Nobody on /lit/ reads books

I'm looking to write a clash between two large hegemonic empires, which you could consider to be confederations of large states.

Is the American Civil War the only historical instance of such a conflict? I want to look at RL events to see how such a conflict would unfold.

>>23571386
I've always enjoyed fantasy and sci-fi and noticed you never see anything involving both, mostly because they are kind of genres at odds with each other. My idea for a fantasy/sci-fi story is one where it starts off in a fantasy setting involving magic/religiosity, but a twist halfway through reveals it's actually a sci-fi setting. Story would go something like:

>Very religious medieval fantasy civilization worships a god that is in the sky, a massive being that encircles the planet
>They please this god by offering up a precious substance to their religious leaders that is very perilous/hard to find in their world (similar to spice from dune). You have to offer up a certain amount of this substance as a quota or else you are punished
>In reality, this god is just a space megastructure created by an far advanced invader civilization which conquered this planet long ago, made to harvest the resource and enslave its population into retrieving it. The invaders created this god/religious narrative to fool them into being willing to do it and not rebel
>ensue rebellion and so forth

Idk if this sounds too similar to Dune though, lmk what yall think

>>23606844
>I've always enjoyed fantasy and sci-fi and noticed you never see anything involving both,
Bro, Star Wars.

>>23606880
fantasy in the sense of the more picturesque medieval knights dragons and wizards setting is what I meant. Tbh I don't think of star wars as fantasy but thats just opinion

File: Human-Thinking-Artificial(...).jpg (348 KB, 2000x1500)

348 KB JPG

>>23602342
What program did yo use to do that?

>>23602370
Do you prefer Bing or some other program for such AI art, BTW?

>>23606844
If I were you, I would be concerned about plot twist treatment more than my own concept and the pipeline from plot twist to rebellion arc.
Lets break it down. First you have a story filled with highly religious society. Which means there's a religious organization, an entire culture that was build from their religion, and knowledge or education that was based from that religion, deeply rooted in their people, including politics and some authority related thing, et cetera. Then, naturally these entire religious practice will be attached to their people and their character according from antrophological point of view that is, lastly, the twist is that this religion was supposed to be handcrafted by the evil chud invaders to trick these civilization for giving the unique substance to them.
Lemme interview you for the sake of your /wbg/:
>How would you turn the entire country beliefs upside down after learning thhe fact that their god is nothing but a megastructure?
>how are the reaction from religious fanatics, leader of religious organization in there, some old people who lived their life to witness that lie being unfold right after their eyes
>how would this phenomenon affecting their lives and culture?
From invaders point of view. If I was the invaders, I would obviously be way more smarter than these people that I 'enslave' for centuries (I said centuries out of assumpion that this civilization ran for generations), thus things like this, where people eventually learned the truth about the puppet that I made, would be expected and I would make a solution for it in case these things happened.
The most ideal plan is that I would keep everything in place, a damage control rather than a full counter offensive measure. But I'll give you a space to make those things impossible for the sake of plot.
Then, the rebellion.
Lets say that rebellion act is finally happened, people are rebelling and fighting the invaders. What makes them have the upper hand in that war against the grouo of people who literally made their god, religion, that ended up building their character, culture, and civilization? Like I said, naturally, they have to be super super super intelligent beings and more smarter than these people that they were enslaved for centuries.
>>23608025
Luma.
Post not mine, but it'll give you insight about that lel >>>/wsg/5617566

File: image157.jpg (261 KB, 1024x1024)

261 KB JPG

>>23608025
Bing is a lot shittier than it used to be because of the overly strict filters, but it is easy to use and gets the job done.

>>23606886
So you want scifi in....a medieval setting where they've barely discovered iron ploughs?

>>23606844
isn't this just the ancient alien theory?

>>23608327

I didn't mention it but I considered there being a sort of shadow group of the natives who knows about the invasion but is keeping it undercover for the purposes of waiting for the right time to strike. They're main goal would be acquiring the necessary weapons/tech for having a chance against them. I was thinking of the main character being an officer/captain of the military force, which would be their "in" for getting the good stuff when he finally meets them.

>How would you turn the entire country beliefs upside down after learning the fact that their god is nothing but a megastructure?
another thought i had was to make it a short story and have the main character learn about the invaders but chooses not to bring it to light for the sake of his family/well-being etc. He would betray the "shadow group" who he would rat out and have executed. Basically a bleak ending akin to 1984. If not that, thought, I imagine the population would split between the rebellion and those siding with the invaders because either they refuse to believe the truth or out of safety/comfort.

>how are the reaction from religious fanatics, leader of religious organization in there, some old people who lived their life to witness that lie being unfold right after their eyes
Again, probably the same two groups of people mentioned above. Some would turn to rage against their overlords for being lied to their whole life, and some would stick to their beliefs and fight against their own interests because they prefer their current state.

>how would this phenomenon affecting their lives and culture?
well the rebellion group would still participate in the society since it would be unknown who belongs to them, trying to work their way into politics/military to gain the upper hand on the invaders. The normie civillians who sided with the invaders would be weaponized against them.

>>23608750
the idea is that the planet the story takes place on is far less advanced than the invaders. Either the planet is young and hasnt had the time, or when the invaders colonized them, they took away all their technology to subjugate them. I don't think that's too outlandish of a concept for a sci-fi setting.

File: luma-game-character-8JY9L(...).jpg (58 KB, 600x600)

58 KB JPG

>>23608327
>Luma
Any tips for using that please?

>>23609627
>the idea is that the planet the story takes place on is far less advanced than the invaders. Either the planet is young and hasnt had the time, or when the invaders colonized them, they took away all their technology to subjugate them. I don't think that's too outlandish of a concept for a sci-fi setting.
No, it's not. It can work, and I think it's been done before.

How do I make my fantastical versions of 1890s Europe feel more real without having to create thousands of years of lore for the setting?

>>23611357
just add interesting details to make it believable. like the food, the infrastrucutre, system of government, interior design, etc.

>>23578698
You would have spellblade knightly orders protecting holy mothers; wellsprings of magic and life.
Also, the knowledge might be a secret only the orders and rulers know about.

>>23611357
Ehh, our modern world has collective amnesia. Create a type of Napoleon or preceding figure who reset the world and make the modernization the focus.

>>23609627
I would highly advise that this shadow group is some underground rebel group that has been planning everything for centuries or generation even, otherwise everything wouldn't work that way.
If I were you, I would put both shadow group and invaders in equal terms, while the reader were in the same boat as the protagonist, where they could see everything from protagonist point of view and learnt everything together with him. This way it would be easier for you to make a story treatment before you began writing. Then I would put the entire society and civilization several steps below protagonist and the reader, keep the entire big reveal and aftermath society chaos in denouenement, alongside or after the protagonist fate is sealed. This way it would make the entire shadow group, their underground and secret movement as something that is compatible with the narratives.
Still, the existence of this shadow group is somewhat incomplete in this post, a detailed explanation of them would be good.
>>23611137
You got 30 pic quota per month, 20 per day, with one picture could take up to 8+ hours queue (there's a long line of queue for luma to render your thing) if you're a free user. So use it wisely.
That AI was also ungovernable, there's no prompt, only title naming, so you just put your pic, wait for it to 'dream' your pic off and it will turn your pic into video with its own preference. I think you can extend it with premium stuff, but still, I myself wouldn't pay a dime for my meme

File: projectg_sampler.jpg (316 KB, 1241x1754)

316 KB JPG

>>23602370
>>23602123

>have bingo print out some shit
>mix and match the pieces you like
>adjust colors and paint over in photoshop
>????
>profit
It's so fucking cheeky and cheap, and absolutely hilarious.

File: ecos.jpg (3.63 MB, 3282x2920)

3.63 MB JPG

>>23571386
I don't even know why I worldbuild.
Ultimately to get people interested in your world they must be invested.
And in order to get invested, the world has to experience through a story. And getting people to read your story is difficult...

I guess I just enjoy making up history just for the sake of it, though kinda wish I could use the setting for something...

>>23612219
i guess that is the /wbg/ version of enlightenment.

>>23611814
>I would highly advise that this shadow group is some underground rebel group that has been planning everything for centuries or generation even, otherwise everything wouldn't work that way
This is definitely the kind of thing I had in mind. The shadow group would be known to the society from the beginning, in fact I was thinking of starting the story with the main character (again, an officer of the military force) executing a few of their members. This would also allow for some tension/animosity between him and the group once he encounters them, which he would seek out of curiosity caused by discovering some info that causes him to question the "godhood" of the megastructure. In the "before" society, the shadow group would be framed by the religious leaders as apostate cultists, those who want the worst for society and its members. The populace is basically brainwashed to immediately hand them over to the police force if they are discovered, etc.

> I would put both shadow group and invaders in equal terms
I was going to have the shadow group significantly less capable, having to resort to ingenuity/tactics to get the upper hand on the invaders. In their first battle I was thinking of having their shit get kicked in and lose a few minor characters to really show how behind they were in weaponry.

>the reader were in the same boat as the protagonist, where they could see everything from protagonist point of view and learnt everything together with him.
absolutely. The reader will be with only the main character the whole time, discovering things along with him. I was going to make him a family man with his wife/kids very proud of his status in the society that way he has to make a choice of forsaking his family/status for the truth, or just submitting to the invaders for the sake of his family. Going with the main characters point of view would be necessary for the plot twist to really pack a punch for the reader, and to also empathize with his decisions regarding handling the info he learns.

>I would put the entire society and civilization several steps below protagonist and the reader, keep the entire big reveal and aftermath society chaos in denouenement, alongside or after the protagonist fate is sealed
I'm having trouble figuring out what you're trying to say here. Are you saying to keep the protagonist/reader (who are at the same knowledge level regarding the situation) always two steps behind the shadow group / invaders plans? That way the idea that they have been planning for generations is more believable? That could be used for a few mini plot twists / betrayals along the way.

>>23611814
oh i forgot, another idea I had was to give the natives a god that they've all but forgotten, with only the shadow group keeping it from fading into oblivion entirely. In an ironic second twist, this god would be REAL and would actually have an effect on the story via a prophecy (that the main character would fulfill).

File: Hermes.png (655 KB, 1200x943)

655 KB PNG

>>23571386
After thievery and mischief, what spheres of influence work well for messenger deities like picture related? What are some other combinations of spheres of influence that make sense, but don’t get used as often as you would like, like maybe death and justice, since all are judged for their afterlife in death?

>>23605082
same here, its aight and also makes sense for what I'm doing actually

How would I go about naming an island and its villages that is completely and utterly secluded from the outside world? It was once part of a landmass but due to floods and some cataclysms, this island is left alone in the middle of the ocean. About 300 years go by and this island has many humble villages but due to other factors these people cannot sail out into the water. What logic can I use to go about naming these places?

I usually have a good sense of how locations are named throughout history but I can't come up with an idea for an island that is so extremely secluded.

>>23613089
why did they make hermes be chinese and have fetal alcohol syndrome?

>>23612948
>I'm having trouble figuring out what you're trying to say here. Are you saying to keep the protagonist/reader (who are at the same knowledge level regarding the situation) always two steps behind the shadow group / invaders plans?
Naturally yeah. I would put them in a train-like structure like this:
>invaders/shadow group - protagonist/reader - civilization/society
The invaders and the shadow group are more informed/aware about anything that is happening in their world, they will know the existence of each other and the truth of their society, the protagonist will served as a vehicle for the reader to learn about the story and the society in there, the civilization/normies are not aware of this situation at all, up until the later part of the story.
The protagonist will learn the truth eventually as the plot progressed, moving him to the same level as the shadow group and the invaders, but the civilization/normies stayed clueless as they are until the later later stor, that if you chose to reveal everything to them and showed the aftermath.
>In their first battle I was thinking of having their shit get kicked in and lose a few minor characters to really show how behind they were in weaponry.
Then you'll need a vivid concept for this. My advice would be a part where the shadow group, after hundreds of years, have developed a confidence to retaliate against the invaders, and you set the entire story to weigh in them, when the battle part begin, they will lose and planning for another raid.
The set up and giving reader the false hope is the thing that you need to watch for.
>>23613081
Good idea, but you'll need to build another alternative for this trve god. What makes him better than the current false one? What makes him a proper god to his followers? I would choose the latter option with prophecy in order to answer those question. You might want to play around with prophecy and deconstruct them in order to build this god character as the benevolent solution for this society

>>23613785
i guess it would have different names in different languages. and maybe it would have the name of the re-discoverer instead of the local's name on official maps.

i am kinda thinking of australia and its surrounding islands as inspiration. they have relatively recent names. and the indigenous population probably has its own names for the same islands. or indonesian islands, where there are a lot of different languages because the villages or tribes on the island itself are quite isolated from another. they probably would all have different names for the island. and some "discoverer" from the pov of some outside nation would butcher the name of the island the first random islander had given him.

there could also be different names from different "discoverers" kinda like tea is called something like tea when it was introduced via a sea route or something like chai when introduced via land. maybe the island is discovered from different directions or different nations. idk.

what usual rules do you have for giving names to islands that did not work here?

>>23613927
>i guess it would have different names in different languages
Yeah, that's what one would assume but I'll explain now why it technically wouldn't.

>what usual rules do you have for giving names to islands that did not work here?
Maybe it's just a mental block on optics I have but for some reason the naming method of describing the landscape, using its founder or some important figure doesn't feel right to me in this case but it might just be that I'm not finding a good name that rolls off the tongue.

For example, Hawaii was a very secluded island and although hazy, the etymology seems to be based on the name of its founder from oral tradition. However, the island from my story wasn't "found" as such. It already had people on it, it's just that floods made it so that people migrated towards the parts of the land that weren't flooded. These people have existed for over 300 years in the same place making their own economy, livelihoods and (technically) using the language they had before the flood but obviously languages change.

The village where the main characters live is a small fishing village that is near a dense wood. The island itself would have another name. I guess I'll either name these locations in plain old English and imply that they have their own language or name the locations based on their native tongue and write the rest normally.

>>23613994
could it just have the name it had before the flood? i mean before it was an island the piece of land probably had a name, right? so just use that.

>>23613091
good to hear I'm not the only one, what is that you are doing?

>>23614162
>what is that you are doing?
making up a setting for a paradox grand strategy game, there you need an accurate pixel level map in terms of topography and coastline

are you boys using footnotes to include extra worldbuilding?

>>23614184
Which game? And you don't really need accurate typography map for in-game stuff just for the visuals.

>>23614235
please don't

>>23614249
probably eu4's successor being teased right now
>And you don't really need accurate typography map
You can make a blurry heightmap but making an accurate really enhances the aesthetics of the map and also is needed of you need high granularity(check out Project Caesar/Tinto Talks teaser to see how granular that game is supposed to be)

>>23614347
*needed if, basically knowing exactly the layout of the mountains and the rivers that flow through them allows you to plot the localities directly

File: 797977.png (75 KB, 438x556)

75 KB PNG

>>23571386
Ultra autism

>>23614562
Sassanid/Umayyad vs Byzantine vibes

>>23614562
give them cool names and elaborate on the results

File: tox.png (552 KB, 2634x1462)

552 KB PNG

>>23614611
Close, but I'm leaning more toward Diadochi inspiration

>>23614681
some nitpicks:
Your rivers make too many inlets, that's not how most rivers work, rivers don't seek out bays to dump water into, nor do rivers form these types of inlets
rivers widening at end =\= inlets

Rivere also shouldnt be used as borders this often, they can make for good long term borders or uncommon boundaries but in your map I can already see an excessive use of them

File: 4334.jpg (448 KB, 982x964)

448 KB JPG

>>23614807
Well,I'm not a hydrologist, but I beg to differ

Rivers follow the path of least resistance, therefore lower the elevation more water will spill over it.
As more rivers flow through a valley more sediment is removed making are deeper and wider, until it reaches the sea.
So, the rivers carve valleys, and inlets/bays are just flooded valleys.

In pic related, it's only natural the river would flow A bay, and not B, because rivers "gangban" the inlet carving, even if the former shoreline used to be in red line, got eroded over the course of millenniums. It's more natural for it the flow that way and then make a twist towards C or B.

>Rivere also shouldnt be used as borders this often, they can make for good long term borders or uncommon boundaries but in your map I can already see excessive use of them

Granted that map is less conceptual, and in a more details map I would probably to map it around cities rather than rivers. But the merit of using rivers comes from how big the rivers are. In this case this continent is the size 2 000 000 km2 so all the rivers are fairly large. Like the river next to the "2nd Eastern War" has a length of 450 km, making it longer than River Thames (350) which served as main boundary between Wessex and Mercia for 300 years. And Thames's lower course was wide that it took until 13th century to construct the London bridge over it.

Regardless, I appreciate you taking interest.

>>23614902
this makes no sense, can you post a real world example of what you mean?

>>23614920
How does it not make sense?

>>23614925
Because flooded valleys are rapidly filled with sediments, inlets with the shapes you've shown simply dont exist as commonly as that.
Please just look at the European coastlines most rivers don't empty like the Tagus does in Portugal

>>23614948
yes, and those sediments carried further into the bottom of the sea
Please look inlets on google maps, and you see every inlet has a river.

>A firth is generally the result of ice age glaciation and is very often associated with a large river, where erosion caused by the tidal effects of incoming sea water passing upriver has widened the riverbed into an estuary.

>>23573206
I'd have sex with the monster mother

>>23589520
Nta, but water can be quite destructive as well. Most sailors would pray for calm waters as no one would want to piss off Poseidon

>>23613918
thanks for the help anon I have a clearer view of my story now. I think I might start with it being a short story to practice making the plot twist count.

File: d9uxyrr-955bc813-35e7-47c(...).jpg (371 KB, 733x1024)

371 KB JPG

>>23616949
Almost given up on people responding to this, thanks. Do you have any ideas for the other elements too please.

>>23571386
How does one make the reader care about the world the story is set in?
Do they have to care about the story and the character in order to be invested in the world around them?

Here's my world building:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA *PLAP* *PLAP* *PLAP* CUNNYYYYYY *PLAP* *PLAP* *SLORP* UUUUUUUUUUUUHHHH

Anyone here /conlang/?

File: bitname.png (369 KB, 600x2524)

369 KB PNG

>>23618289
A bit

>>23617942
Nta but the main four elements are like primary color of red yellow blue, which mean the rest of them are the mixture of those primary combination.
For example combine water and earth you'll get bio element, something with plant, rebirth, growth. Wind/air and earth could give you sand element, something with time, disintegration, et cetera et cetera.
I think you just need to experiment with those primary element mixing if you really insist with these element play

File: 1665341177.silkyfangs_fce(...).jpg (410 KB, 999x1280)

410 KB JPG

>>23618431
I was looking for domains that go well with each of the four elements, not just combination elements, though the idea of the elemental pantheons having a few overlapping domains, such as the Water and Earth pantheons both having domain over plants like you mentioned could work, thanks, got any more ideas besides the Air and Earth pantheons having domains related to sand/deserts?

>>23616685
>>A firth is generally the result of ice age glaciation and is very often associated with a large river, where erosion caused by the tidal effects of incoming sea water passing upriver has widened the riverbed into an estuary.
Sure but you have way too many in your map, it's like you think every single river has to have an inlet.
>and you see every inlet has a river.
Insofar as there is a river everywhere in temperate regions, yes. But you seem to have all(or 80-90%) the relevant big rivers have an inlet, that's not how it works.
Where you have inlets you will have rivers flow into them, but you wouldn't have inlets everywhere because they are not caused by rivers.
Also some of your inlets are gigantic

BTW I've stumbled upon your reddit post lol

>>23614807
To be fair, some of his rivers end at a normal shoreline. What he's missing is deltas, though.

>>23618746
I'm willing to concede that not every inlet is formed by a river, but many of them area. And many inlets are former estuaries of rivers that no longer exist.

Regardless the critique that too many rivers flow into inlet is about the most bizarre cartographic critique I have received, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to change a few of them.

>BTW I've stumbled upon your reddit post lol
neat

>>23618889
>Regardless the critique that too many rivers flow into inlet is about the most bizarre cartographic critique I have received, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to change a few of them.
I didn't spend years looking at maps for nothing! dammit

>>23618372
NTA, but neat, do you have any more of this?

I want to make a fully functional language for my setting. I know this is a lot of work, but for autistic reasons, it's worth it to me. I don't need a linguistics degree, right?

>>23620260
You dont, but it'll require you lots of language-reference in order to do so. Its hard and time consuming, usually language was also have a close ties with lore, culture, and several other /wbg/ stuff. So I think you need to have a concrete worldbuilding first before 'inventing' your own fictional language

File: state_tree2.png (1.42 MB, 5510x3604)

1.42 MB PNG

>>23620165
More root words?
Not really, but I have region names that use those word. Which comes across in pic related state tree, below every state is their literal meaning.

File: MV5BYWQ5ZTM1YmMtNjQ2Ny00O(...).jpg (151 KB, 1000x1500)

151 KB JPG

>>23571386
After War, the Sky, the Earth, Death/the Underworld, the Sun and Moon, Love, the Seas, Justice, and Magic, what are some divine domains to include in your pantheon, especially important/key ones to have if I missed any, and what are some domains that work well together, or at least you think would if you haven't seen that combination before, like the Moon and Magic?

>>23580984
I like this, how can I follow it?
Any deets you can share about this land?

File: az.png (3.58 MB, 2326x2686)

3.58 MB PNG

>>23580984
Ah a parody map, here is mine.

>>23597304
this, the “ball” shouldn’t be inflated and constantly floating away but weighted and streamlined like pool torpedoes, makes the 3d movement aspect easier to emphasize

>>23598083
look into brahma/vishnu/shiva and their various aspects and associations

>>23603724
in terms of human species, in our one and only sample size we did crowd out/breed out all of the rest of them, as well as eventually most megafauna. so it’s worth figuring out how and why that ended up happening for us to be the only human species to end up settling all over the globe

>>23621786
If a more successful and widespread population prevents a smaller population from expanding their territory, obtaining more resources and multiplying, and also makes associating with them more lucrative than associating only with your own kind, then they will eventually die out of natural causes. No open violence required.

>>23603724
This is retarded, our only examples of us "cooperating" with other races is us essentially enslaving them as cattle(literally) or outbreeding them, fucking them into virtual extinction and then actively selecting out their functional genes in our genome

>>23580984
Kenshi vidya gayme?

This is kinda the background for my “femdom” world
Coming up with a story based on the Hindu concept of avatars. Whenever evil takes over, God is said to take form on earth as some sort of mythological hero and destroy it in order to bring about balance again.
My setting treats existence as the manifestation of the Goddess. Wherever evil occurs, a hero literally emerges from the earth, sky, etc to destroy it. These “heroes” are like all of existence’s white blood cells and have abilities that are designed to defeat some specific form of evil in some sort of poetic manner (their battles against evil should be mythical in nature).
The concept’s sort of a modification on Shaktism, where it’s said that the Vishnu takes his heroic forms on earth at the Devi’s behest. .
Heroes look very similar to one another (usually a bluish looking guy or something else idk yet) with some additional attributes depending on their source (earth, fire, dreams, etc). They are pretty strong and while their personalities might differ, all of them love fighting evil which their bodies are specifically tuned to root out in the world.
Apart from their abilities being relevant to whatever big antagonist they were created for, they also have the power of purging evil from the souls who have potential. Purging, when performed on a male with good in him, kills him, allowing him to become part of the hero system I.e. his soul becomes one with the “Hero Collective”. On a female, the purge allows the woman to become a Priestess, an aspect of the Goddess. All evil is purged from the woman’s soul over here and she gets a fresh start. Her role now can be likened to the fire keepers from DS but with some added benefits.
Firstly, they’re virtually immortal.
They have the ability to “consume” evil. This is me ripping off fromsoft again, but heroes basically collect the essence of evil from defeating their foes. They take this essence to their Priestesses who “purify” said essence to construct cool weapons and equipment of “goodness” (idk). The priestesses in turn consume the byproduct of the purification which levels up their abilities allowing them to create cooler equipment but also gives them crazier powers the higher level they are.
Priestesses and their heroes share very strong bonds. While the priestesses are immortal, the heroes are not. Any damage inflicted on the priestess is instead reflected on her hero, a side effect of the “Hero’s Burden” perk. What happens when a priestess’s hero dies? She withdraws into the universe (think Sita returning into the earth at the end of the Ramayana) and waits until her hero reincarnates. I need to workshop this a bit because in my lore, all the heroes are simply avatars of the “Hero Soul” even if a multiple heroes exist at that same point in time, so what exactly do I mean by “waiting until her hero reincarnates”?

>>23622070
The other races you describe were not capable of cooperation to begin with, retard.

>>23621949
i agree that all out violence isn’t the only mechanism of a successful population out competing other populations (and that it probably wasn’t the main mechanism in our case with hominids). i’m more saying, in a fictional setting where multiple human species coexist stably all over the globe for long periods of time over multiple historical eras, you have to figure out what factors you think would have to be different enough from irl to accommodate for that difference

File: 1721802539537206.jpg (98 KB, 736x978)

98 KB JPG

I've hit a roadblock when trying to make a telephone system in my steampunk setting.
>booth with pneumatic powered pipings that forward a message canister to the receiver booth
>booth with a keyboard and gearbox that sends mechanical inputs through a long network of chains to be printed as a message in the receiver booth
The former is predictable and boring since it just makes sense, the latter is innovative albeit overdesigned when there are simpler solutions

>>23623242
It being steampunk (first commercially successful steam engine: 1712; principles known since 1 century AD) doesn't preclude electricity (Volta's battery is from 1800, though the phenomenon was known and studied since antiquity). Otherwise, you're stuck with what you already described, or maybe semi-automatic semaphoric telegraphs, which aren't all that much newer (Chappe's system went into service in 1792).

File: 'When_the_Sleeper_Wakes'_(...).jpg (2.37 MB, 2810x2310)

2.37 MB JPG

>>23623277
Electricity is an antagonistic force in this setting, so yeah that would have to be crossed out. Thanks a lot for the semaphoric telegraph idea though, I was also asking myself how the hell a Zeppelin should send messages to the ground and that solves it.

>>23571386
I find it hard to keep track of all the bullshit.
So many google docks, I can't decide if its better just have one doc or 100 linked ones

>>23623687
Consider using mindmapping stuff like jamboard, miro, figjam, or milanote

Get this past the bump limit, pls...

>>23625246
NOW

>>23571386
How do you do warfare when you have spellcasters and maybe even wizard kings?
I guess it depends on the abilities of wizards, but would make sense to have large organized or semi organized armies? Standing armies as well?
Or maybe have smaller armies but more adept at fighting with magic in mind (enchanted weapons and armor, training to fight in cohesion with spellcasters and so on). Wouldn't make sense to throw lines of spearmen if some wizard king will come, cast mass head explosion spell and fuck off.
How do you do it?

>>23625490
We have today missiles that can kill potentially thousands of people faster than any wizard, but that still hasn't made armies obsolete.

>>23625589
>l potentially thousands of people faster than any wizard,
I can imagine wizards that could do it faster.

>>23625626
Sure, but if you want to go even deeper in the bullshit zone, then you should stop bothering with sense entirely and not ask this kind of questions.

File: realm.png (3.47 MB, 3515x2083)

3.47 MB PNG

>>23571386
I think I could write a novel for every 9 provinces, of course they would all set in different years, because there are 1000 years of history.