... But it's not the "weird part of the setting."I've been talking in some other threads about a setting where what in our world is spiritual/religious/cultural metaphor is the actual factual basis of the setting, where myth is science.What started this was, to summarise it, that if magic fireballs don't need to burn anything why does the sun have to be a giant nuclear reactor? Why can't it be the eye of the God of Wisdom peering in through the veil of heaven?But like I said, this is actually the "normal" for the setting, so it's not like (to intentionally pick examples everyone will understand) Discworld where it's meant to be funny, or Planescape where it's meant to be weird*, but it is THE SETTING, as-is.*I know this is a massive oversimplification.
>>93907989You have Glorantha, I think. Not sure about the others.
>>93908172That's a good shout, yeah.I guess what I'm getting at is why fantasy worlds have to be so normal, and if they're not it's done for the reasons I mentioned. Something like A'Tuin is metal as fuck, but you know there's an element of 00s-era Atheism (I know Pratchett wrote this way before then, but I think it's the same sentiment) where underneath it all we're meant to laugh at the absurdity. You can imagine Pratchett reading about Hindu cosmology and having a moment where he's enlightened by his own intelligence. This is kind of what I mean when I said it's meant to be funny.Why does it have to be "funny" or "weird" as their primary effort? Loads of settings have really cool cosmologies, then just make everything normal. And "mortal mental stress" style arguments can go to hell. Why would beings made for this setting think a dead god in the sky is weirder than a giant floating rock?
>>93907989Is it meant to be funny to the denizens of Discworld, or funny to the readers? Like, I'm not sure what you're asking here. If you do that in your setting, even if it isn't meant to be weird for the people living in the setting, it's still going to track as weird to the players.
>>93908299I suppose I'm thinking about it this way:Imagine a setting where one of the celestial bodies is a head of primal being forever within the firmament. Then transport them to our world."Oh my god!" he's cry out when he sees the moon, "What is that? Is it going to fall on us?"No, you'll tell him, it's our moon and it just sits there."Where did it come from?" he'd demand, trying not to sound worried.You'll say that we don't really know (which makes him more concerned), but mention that ideas point to an ancient cosmic impact where our young planet suffered such a cataclysm that an entire quarter of it was blasted off, and that became our moon.>>93908310I think you can have something that is "funny" that isn't written that way. It's sort of like if (to keep with popular properties) Star Trek was written in the style of Douglas Adams. No one would be able to argue that we're meant to take it seriously.
>>93907989I'm somewhat reminded of Unsounded, the webcomic. Its afterlife and how it works is heavily involved in the setting, being related to its magic system and figuring into the plot. One of the background facts is that all land was formed by the corpses of giant ogres that existed in a previous version of reality. But at some point someone rewrote physics, and the biggest ogres all collapsed because they could no longer support their own bodies. Smaller ones survived, but were trapped, their thrashing causing earthquakes until they finally died. But it doesn't lean on the weird, partly because it's all normal to the people in the setting. Undead labor? Yeah, that ended institutional slavery. Ritual human sacrifice? That's the largest religion in the world, and how we've honored the gods since time immemorial. Weirdly short- and long-lived "castes" of humans in Alderode? Yeah, their founders hacked the afterlife way back when. Those weird, flying eels appearing out of nowhere? Those are ghosts that appear when shit's going down. Don't worry, they're harmless unless they get into your magical trinkets.Suffice it to say, it's a decent departure from "regular" fantasy that mostly resembles the real world and shrouds its magic in mystery. But it's also a fairly grounded setting, where the weirdness is deeply interwoven in its fabric of reality. There's no weird stuff for its own sake, and if you see something that deviates from the known rules, you had best start asking questions.
>>93908349Thats not really what people are like. Even in a world where everything is composed of the four natures modified by four natures of wetness, dryness, heat and cold, people constantly wonder why that is and what can be done from it and dedicate their entire lives to trying to turn lead to gold not because they feel like it but because it OUGHT to be possible if you can change the lead's nature by stripping the cold sulphur from it and replacing it with warm. Thats why it is so rarely done. To do it well you need to write a universe proof against human meddling, and if i wanted to, say, write a setting where alchemy was law i and everyone at my table would need undergraduate degrees in 14th century pseudochemistry
>>93907989Goblinpunch's Centerra has a similar thing going on, though it's a bit more "old timey versions of science" on a lot of things. The Sun is the palace of God (the Authority, as the local overdeity is called), and it orbits Centerra. Your race is determined by the circumstances of your birth, not your parents' race. Maggots do just spawn from rotting meat. The Prince of the Air (Jesus-esque) is hosting a tea party in the Immortal Mountains, and if it ever ends, his guests will leave and destroy the world. If you're a sinner, when you die, your sins weigh down your soul and you descend into Hell; if you're a good person, your lightweight soul ascends up into Heaven. The Earth is hollow. Etc.Exalted also has some stuff like this, though it's more focused on astronomy/cosmology: the world is a flat plane, surrounded by infinite Wyld (primordial chaos, basically), and the sun, moon, and stars are just floating above the planet. Reincarnation is true and real and reliable, and you are judged by an overworked bureaucrat who decides if you get a good reincarnation or a bad one.
>>93907989This is just an existence meant to enforce artistic ideas and interpretations.A simulation. Funky art like that can’t just come into being from causality alone.It’s like arguing nature can form a perfect statue of Buddha. It can’t. Art is intelligent. Something isn’t even art until it’s considered to be.
>>93907989How is any of that normal? Everything >>93909963 said. If you exist in an overly fantastical setting you just have to assume it’s being upkept by something. Nature doesn’t entertain your bullshit. It gives you the tools to entertain bullshit.
>>93909963>>93909984AI running the simulation = “the gods”
>>93910016Descriptive words to replace definitive words. Magic in a world of science only survives as a word to describe/deceive, not a word to define/affirm. God (“God”) to the physicist is simply the sufficiently advanced/powerful alien being. God (“God”) to the Christian is simply He, Yahweh, Jehovah, etc. A Name. To the Christian physicist, it is both.
>>93909447I sometimes check GP's lore stuff and while I realy like it, it makes me wish I played with him. At no point I feel I could run that clusterfuck on my own or do it justice.
>>93910877We owe that definition of god to a christian philosopher
>>93909963>It’s like arguing nature can form a perfect statue of Buddha. It can’t.Yes it can. That's like arguing that nature can't form a perfect snowflake.
>>93908349>an entire quarter of it was blasted off, and that became our moonOuch, the moon's a lot smaller than that, if that hypothesis were correct it would be about % not 25%.
>>93913747*1% not 25%
>>93907989I just finished up my setting's cosmology, which ends up with the setting being along these lines. My approach was that the "reality" of the setting's world should reflect the past way that people in the past thought about it.We don't see the ancient world as gonzo because all the gonzo has been systematically removed from accounts across the histories, but chroniclers at the time thought it was real enough to include in what would otherwise be considered critical firsthand accounts by modern historians.
>>93915411This guy says you should absolutely embrace the gonzo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua8IrWDwedo You can sprinkle it with realism for purposes of verisimilitude but in fantasy you should embrace the weird.
>>93912567>Yes it can. No, it can’t. You may as well argue that a gun factory would naturally pop out of the ground. It wouldn’t. Some things nature is required to first produce an intelligence to make it. Nature is an overly sophisticated blind idiot.
>>93908299I recognized that old cgi planet. Gave me a smile.
>>93912567A “perfect” snowflake is just a product of ice-math lol
>>93918766>It wouldn'tYes it would, lol. You don't understand what your talking about, do you? Why would a world, devoid of intelligence, where the natural state and its evolution are inclined to produce gun factories, not produce gun factories?>>93919172And ant bridges are just the product of monarchy. I'm afraid I don't get your point.
>>93907989The setting you're looking for is late 1e Exalted or any part of 2e Exalted. As >>93909447 said, though things like the sun and the moon are actually vehicles piloted by their respective gods, 'Evil' aka 'Creature of Darkness' is a political designation that changes how things affect you, you can actually go and talk to the various gods in charge of making sure things run smoothly, the laws that govern reality explicitly work on different principles that boil down to elemental associations (Air makes things cold and can even do things like freeze lighting solid, Water dissolves things not because they're soluble but because Water dissolves things), pretty much everything about thaumaturgy which is using said spiritual nature of reality to do things like smelt metal, make medicine, attract animals to hunt, etc, etcAnd it's all set in a post-apocalyptic setting set after the fall of the first age (A time when a bunch of god kings built a post scarcity society by doing science to said mythological principles) and is now regressed to a point that varies from the bronze age to age of sail
>>93907989I never really thought about it like that, to me in a magic setting nature is magic. The sun is magic. Why the fuck would it be like a real sun? Why would there need to even be a plane, why not a planescape?
>>93911084Thomas Aquinas stole it. The omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God is Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, the Prime Mover of the Universe. I find it difficult to retcon this rather impersonal force with the Hairy Thunderer of the Old Testament, who can be deceived, who changes his mind, who regrets, who sulks and throws tantrums like a toddler. I reconcile the two by regarding Christianity as bad fanfiction of 2nd Century BC Essene Judaism.But that's depressing. Imagine a really cute image attached to this post.
>>93927298>>93927315lol did you think you were on hmo... Somewhere else?
>>93927315If you imagine the discrepancy between old and new testament yahweh as a kind of maturing of the worldbuilder, then it makes sense. A creator can be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent in regard to their creation, and still be a fucking dipshit. Speaking from personal experience, once I started having a little empathy for the beings of my setting, I toned down the fire and brimstone of the prime deity in favour of a more all-loving, "everyone wins" kinda deal. This could could explain the discrepancy between the "toddler with disciplinary issues bashing his action figures together" and "teen with a persecution complex posting his thesis on r/criticalthoery".Or it could just be bad coopt fanfiction.
>>93928236Well, this being /tg/, it's probably good to keep in mind that when we do worldbuilding, when we create a homebrew setting, we're trying to make a place that will be fun for the players to explore. I know that there are different kinds of people who play pen-and-paper RPGs, different temperaments, different interests. For me, though, the I-am-an-angry-jealous-God stuff is a little too grimderp to be much fun. Even if it's created as parody we still have to identify with the characters and care a little about the situation as part of role-playing. Don't we? At least a little?
>>93908299>I guess what I'm getting at is why fantasy worlds have to be so normal, and if they're not it's done for the reasons I mentioned.Mainly because the further from everyday reality you depart, the less confidence the audience has in typical chains of cause-and-effect. This isn't a terrible consequence in literature but in a game context it can be paralyzing, as players can no longer make decisions rooted in any conventional understanding. This is the same reason why cliche archetypes are commonly used in game contexts - they shortcut the process of explaining "how stuff works" so players can make decisions more quickly. This is part of the same reason why it can be difficult to have "unknowable magic" in a game context as well - without a grasp of cause and effect, players have greater difficulty in making decisions.
>>93907989>summarise it, that if magic fireballs don't need to burn anything why does the sun have to be a giant nuclear reactor? Why can't it be the eye of the God of Wisdom peering in through the veil of heaven?Stars in elder scrolls are just holes in the aetherum spirits went through and the sun is where the big god of magic went through.
>>93932769Have you seen the Turkey City Lexicon? It's a sort of list of advice and hints about storytelling, created by people who write science fiction and fantasy for a living. It is short and to the point, and covers everything from dialogue and sentence structure--maybe less important when you're doing worldbuilding--to characterization, ideas, and plotting, which may be considerably more important for what you're doing right now.https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/You may find it worthwhile. I know that sci-fi and fantasy novels aren't exactly the same as worldbuilding for an RPG campaign, but consider that both modern American sci-fi/fantasy and roleplaying games both come to the present day having made their way through at least a few common sources, like the prewar American pulp paper novels of two-fisted he-man adventure, and there can sometimes be similarities in tone and feel.And I agree with others in this thread. It's fine to embrace the weird and fantastical, so long as you don't go so far and so deep into the Big Weird that it prevents your players from being able to do anything.
