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>>97933880
>Everyone has their take on dragons and their take on orcs and their take on golems. What about mundane species? What mundane creatures did you put in your world that are still distinct to a planet or continent that you wouldn't find on Earth?
I don't get it, what exactly do you mean by that? Like twists on IRL animals or the more generic concept of fantasy fauna as opposed to explicitly monstrous species?

To try and answer your question, for my dieselpunk CoCy setting, the northern sea is mostly nothing but hundreds of species of wriggly lampreys, eels and hagfish. The northern nations have developed lots of ways to process them both for culinary and industrial purposes, creating a wide range of variably viscous and universally smelly products, from industrial lubricants to long-lasting hag jelly-cakes.

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I may have a stupid question. I'm wrestling with whether or not to have a creation myth for my setting. The big reason for this is that I didn't intend to go deep on cosmology and faith this time. I only wanted to detail a small section of the world so that adventures had relatable, consistent backgrounds for various play sessions and campaigns. But I found, as I started to put gods into the pantheon, that without a creation myth the religions felt hollow.

Yeah, great, the sun is a big fucking Pomeranian and that's real cool. How did it come to be a giant flaming dog? What does that imply for the other stars? What about the world itself?

So now I'm wrestling with whether I should take the time to plot out and explain this, or just leave it as "the clerics all give different answers and none of them satisfy you" if the players ask.

>>97933880
TQ: The Ray-tailed Eagle, or Storm Eagle, is a species of sea eagle with a long and deeply forked tail that has two distinct yellow streamer feathers on its outermost edges. Storm Eagles are said, in folklore, to call up storms at sea and can bring them back to land if they are not successful in their hunts. In truth, while they may not call up storms, they use storms as part of their courtship rituals: the eagles make complex dances between clouds, using the buffeting winds to pull off tight acrobatic maneuvers. They are very strong, and when flying in concert they are able to generate streamers of corposant between their forked tails.

Storm eagles have been the symbols of strength, foresight, and imperial power for centuries. A ray-tailed eagle, both streamers erect and displayed, was carried before the armies of the Ardentine Empire in ancient days. In the present era, they are used only by kings and emperors claiming descent from the Ardentine and are both majestic and feared for what their presence portends.

>>97934189
Just fantasy fauna.

>>97934193
>But I found, as I started to put gods into the pantheon, that without a creation myth the religions felt hollow.

Creation myths are kinda overrated IRL, as in many religions didn't have big ones.

Arda is such a shitty generic name for a world

>>97934834
am I not correct in assuming it's just an old ancestor/relative of the modern word "earth"? to my understanding Tolkien was a big linguistics nerd and intended his world to just be a mythological past of our own

>>97934905
okay so it's just a dressed-up version of Earth, real fucking clever there Jolkien

>>97934834
>Tolkienschizo won't stop crying about Tolkien in this thread either
Zoom-zoom.

>>97933880
>Everyone has their take on dragons and their take on orcs and their take on golems. What about mundane species? What mundane creatures did you put in your world that are still distinct to a planet or continent that you wouldn't find on Earth?
The thurael[striding-prescence] is a large flightless bird used as cavalry and mounts mainly by the elves as they lacked horses until humans arrived on the continent, most breeds are are fast and agile but more stocky ones exist too. Within the northern rainforests more primitive forms exist that are closer to their dinosaur-like ancestors and there is a whole eco system of similar animals in the deep jungle.
I imagine them something like a mix of terror birds, emus and chocobo.

Would it make sense to wear weighed clothing on a low-gravity world so that you could move normally and counteract the health effects of low gravity?

>>97935278
I don't think weighted clothes can stop your bones becoming less dense

>>97934470
Right but it's just... I know people will ask about it especially if one of them plays a cleric again.

>>97935329
It's no different than taikonauts using treadmills and resistance training on their space stations. It helps but it won't cure everything. Not that spinning a station will work either; the bones aren't going to pretend there's actually gravity pulling them down.

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>>97935775

I personally like very much when the GM gives me some WB powers in fantasy. Meaning, I would like to be asked "alright cleric, what IS the crration myth? At least according to your sect teachings. Is there only one?").
I think players are half the time good with shit like this, yours might as well.
Altough the pomerian is probably not the most inspiring image.

Pic more or less doggie sun-god related.

>>97933880
>What mundane creatures did you put in your world that are still distinct to a planet or continent that you wouldn't find on Earth?
Most land and mammals and many of the larger lizard.
Basically anything over the size of a boar is a new creature.

However beyond domesticated animals they rarely come up in games or stories since mundane fauna isn't really a threat or source of conflict the vast majority of the time. Maybe if someone took up certain craft skills and was hunting something to get materials, But otherwise wild animals avoid humans and the like. After all, they are the beings that fight the monsters, which are a threat to everyone including the wild animals. So a wild animal would have to be extremely desperate to attempt to attack/eat a person unprovoked.

>>97935777
>taikonauts
Dude really?

>>97935278
I ain't a expert but I strongly doubt it would negate the health effects or allow someone to actually move normally.

I would use "super science" as a handwave in a sci-fi setting for the health issues (nano-machines son) and fully embraces the movement buff of low gravity.

>>97935889
>Since weights don't work, scientists use elastic tension to "trick" the body into thinking it’s under the pull of gravity.

>Instead of a heavy vest, astronauts use garments like the Russian "Pingvin" (Penguin) suit or the newer NASA/ESA Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit.

>Axial Loading: These suits are made of elastic materials designed to be slightly shorter than the person wearing them. They exert a constant pull from the shoulders down to the feet, compressing the skeleton just like gravity does on Earth.

>Resistance over Weight: Instead of lifting heavy objects, astronauts use the ARED (Advanced Resistive Exercise Device), which uses vacuum cylinders to provide up to 600 lbs of resistance. This provides the "load" needed to maintain bone density without needing the actual mass of heavy plates.

>>97935278

My gut-feeling is "fuck no".

Zero-g problems are, let me quote from AT

permanent degraded vision (so far only observed in male astronauts, may be due to enzyme polymorphisms that increases astronaut vulnerability to bodily fluid shift in free fall)
accelerated aging
bone damage (1% to 1.5% per month, like osteoporosis)
hypercalcemia
kidney stones
muscle damage
immune system changes
cardiovascular changes
red blood cell loss
fluid redistribution
fluid loss
electrolyte imbalances
vertigo and spatial disorientation
space adaptation syndrome aka "drop sickness"
loss of exercise capacity
degraded smell and taste
weight loss
flatulence
changes in posture and stature
changes in coordination

Low-gravity would be most of them.

Maybe, MAYBE you could do something with some fixed weight for legs and back when you're moving certain ways, definitely not like clothing. But if on the ISS they don't chainmail the astronauts with a suit of springs I would just make your N/PCs go with threadmills and the like.

>>97935777
Ni hao, Sao. The Great Wall is dental floss.

>>97935777
>the bones aren't going to pretend there's actually gravity pulling them down.

/tg/ doing actual alternative physics, what a time to be alive

>>97933880
>the stronger the god is, the less the god can interact directly and indirectly with mortals and mortal realms; exceptions being gods of fertility and demigods
A good reality law to explain why most gods don't just fix everything that isn't teaching mortals to be self-sufficient?

>>97935777
>the bones aren't going to pretend there's actually gravity pulling them
gravity is just acceleration, so "fake gravity" is still gravity

>>97935982
how much of this is from low gravity and how much is from the sterile controlled conditions in places like the ISS

How do you know when something is too much? I'm working on a setting and I'm looking at the gods I need to come up with. This is just for a single culture too.

Life - Fertility - Seasons - Hunting - Agriculture - Health
Death - Disease - Decay
War - Strength - Nightmares
Forests - Rivers - The Sea - The Mountain
Law - Cities - Wealth - Crafts - Roads
Knowledge - Music - Magic
Sports
Water - Earth - Fire - Wind - Underworld - Overworld
Minimum: 27 deities need to be written up. Maybe 30.

Sure, I can make some of these just a name and nickname, but there are still going to be gods who need some level of description to interest clerics or druids.

>>97934834
>>97934951
All the best fantasy planets are just named various extremely uncreative things: Exalted's Creation, GURPS's Yrth, Tolkien's Middle Earth, Martin's Planetos, etc. The name should be bland, like our planet's, not tryhard bullshit.

>>97934193
>So now I'm wrestling with whether I should take the time to plot out and explain this, or just leave it as "the clerics all give different answers and none of them satisfy you" if the players ask.
As somebody who's mostly interested in religion as a sociological phenomenon rather than a collection of myths and cosmologies, I think the one of the big things that makes individual gods actually interesting is stories about them. So just make up some bullshit stories about each god and you'll probably cobble together enough to have a creation myth.

>>97936434
With that many I would strongly consider just copying or stealing gods from something else like forgotten realms or grayhawk unless making up gods is your thing.
That or consider cutting the number and giving each god multiple domains. They don't even have to be related domains if you come up with a lore reason for it.

>>97936584
I think I just want more to show how my setting is different from, say, Faerun or Dragonlance. I'm realizing as I work on this that I've got a lot of shallow influence from modern polytheistic faiths, Glorantha, and pagan revivals that I think it'd be interesting to show to players. At least, it has enough elements that stand out that I think it's best to create new gods to suit the cosmology.


In the age before Laterre’s creation, the primordial mother Moihne and the primordial father Doirhae shaped the great void into the vast and lush plains of our night sky. To this expanse they brought life: star sheep and sheepdogs to herd them, the great and luminous ram Armetram, and their favored children: the godly shepherds of the night.

Yet such creation could not stand independent forever, and outsiders encroached upon it. Wolves of the darkness, and devils from beyond its bounds. In time, Moihne and Doirhae died, and their godly children raised a great mound at the heart of the pasture. There, water arose from the blood of Doirhae. There, fire arose from Moihne’s transfiguring flesh. There, air came from Doirhae’s unexpelled breaths, and the mountains from the primordial’s unbroken bones. And these were new things.

To this barrow came the most attentive of the primordial’s children, their most beloved. Such gods found this new thing, to which they gave a new, true name: Laterre. The gods watched as water fed earth to raise forests and fire touched air to raise mountains, as Armetram circled the barrow, unheeding. And they descended into it to see what more would come, and give name each new thing that arose upon Laterre, hallowing and blessing it in turn.

>>97936746
And in a span greater than all the years of Laterre, yet shorter than the merest blink, ages passed. This world took its shape, under the eye and thus the influence of the gods. And the gods wrought new things in forms that mirrored their stellar pasture, yet marked by their will; from this come all the beasts of land, sea, and sky. And the gods wrought new things in echo of their primordial parents, yet blessed by their whim; from this come all mortal races. And when the first mortal opened their eyes to the light of Armetram, Time began.

Such is the tale told in Kerne of the birth of our world of Laterre. The loagh people share this legend and a heritage between our races. Yet other tales are told, by nations great and small. The myths of the Argenthai speak of pastures with herds of many beasts and flocks of birds; the kobolds see not starry sheepfolds, but primeval forests and the glint of nightbirds. From the firmament above, however, all gods descended to our world of Laterre.

Our Kernish people worship these same gods, or their descendants. It is our way, for the gods created the Kerne and blessed our people with wisdom, strength, and will to determine our own destiny long ago. A dozen legends of this moment exist, each one treasured by a branch of our scattered and divided people. What remains true for all is the existence of an explicit covenant with the gods of our people, the Tailaddyr, which dictates rules of divine conflict, manners of sacrifice, sacral obligations, and duties required to maintain this world of Laterre. When our people knelt to the Lateran Emperor, the Tailaddyr was woven into the divine hierarchy of the empire. In the Dark Centuries that followed its fall, the Tailaddyr protected our gods from loss and brought more into our fold as Kernishmen brought new faiths home. And the Tailaddyr remains in force unto the present age, both binding and protecting the gods as they were and as they are newly-born.

>>97936748
For gods are not static statues nor cast bronze, to be hewn once and held immutable throughout all time. They are living, yet vast; touched by emotion, yet wilder and more intense than any mortal can comprehend; intelligent, yet implacable in their wills. None may gainsay their whim in their remits, and none could deny their desire but other gods. So they shape themselves and this world, even now.

The gods have loved one another since the starry days of Moihne and Doirhae. And they have loved mortals since they descended to Laterre and gave name to Love, Hate, Heart, and all other emotions. From such couplings have come later generations of gods who work their influence even now: Bringaw, Gelert, Adetta, and more besides in distant nations and little temples. Gods are born, gods may die, and we may seize the stuff of godhood within our own blood to take our place beside them. So the Tailaddyr records, and so the priests repeat.

Yet, as with men, not all gods are equal. The first and Greatest of the gods are those we Kernish called Shepherds, what the Argenthai deemed “The Apex Powers.” These are the children of the Primordial Parents who descended directly to Laterre from the starry fields. Some we still see in our night sky; little-moving, ever-watchful, and with names few living may speak. Those we know are the masters of the fundamental forms of Laterre and the great powers of nature.

The second rank of gods are the descendants of the Shepherds, what we of Kerne called gods in our ignorance and whom the Argenthai deemed “The Great Powers.” Such deities rule the vast, yet bounded, concerns of mortals: death and birth, time’s passing, or the substance of law itself. The chiefs of the Tailaddyr belong to this rank, and Bringaw is highest of them all.


And then I'd go into a list of gods players are likely to worship.

>>97936754
Fuck it, who needs sleep anyway?

The second rank of gods are the Shepherds own children, whom we of Kerne called gods in our ignorance and whom the Argenthai deemed “The Great Powers.” Such deities rule the vast, yet bounded, concerns of mortals: death and birth, time’s passing, or the substance of law itself. The chiefs of the Tailaddyr belong to this rank, and Bringaw is highest of them all.

The Argenthai, as recorded in the Runemistress Adetta’s treatise “Lordre Dei Chauvas Divinax,” catalogued even more levels of divine power and rank. Whether such ranks were useful or even accurate, few can now say. But where our bards once called all beneath the Shepherds “the gods,” our priests now hold that there are three ranks beneath the Great Powers.

The third rank of gods are the “Kindred Powers,” children and allies of the Great Powers who serve them in their spheres. Of greater focus, and lesser strength, each is a master of a field that impinges upon Laterre and mortals. Their will determines how such may be directed in worldly concerns: to Krunervech does a warrior pray upon the battlefield as he swings his sword, hoping to live where his opponent falls. Likewise does a mother burn the cord of a firstborn child in thanks to Mother Deon, hoping the Godmother to bless following pregnancies.

The fourth rank we call “Demi-gods,” for they are both divine yet mortal. Before the Lateran Empire, many we called “heroes” would have been demi-gods. Gelert the Great was certainly one such demi-god, and his later ascension to Bringaw’s kith and current worship owe as much to their shared bloodline as to Gelert’s own deeds of war and weather-mastery. Here too are placed ancestor gods, remembered as goodly spirits but long-since passed from life. Yet, as the Runemistress Adetta herself shows, such private gods may grow and spread their influence until they ascend to the rank of Kindred.

>>97936849
Finally, the fifth rank are known as the Numens Loraxi: the spirit of a river, the voice of a grove, the mountain itself. The loraxi are “little gods” of earthly places, which are held in their charge so long as man respects them. Though they are not mortal like demi-gods, who may be slain by sword or sickness, a lorax may die from neglect or the pillaging of their protected charge. Thus, they become fierce defenders and monstrous dangers to all mortals if respect is withheld. It is to the loraxi of the woods that lumberjacks make their daily offerings, or to the loraxi of the river which townsmen sacrifice when floodwaters rise.

Below such spirits as the loraxi are inchoate spirits of will but no name, ghosts of mortals unremembered, and even the vestiges of gods now forgotten. Each retains will, and influence, but on a level even below that of the loraxi bound to their sacred ground. With such powers, bargaining is possible, and even a dead god may rise from their ranks to return to power in some form.

Lastly, a word on devils. We name such those powers that our priests call “Outsiders,” those from beyond the pasture of the night. Comets are the greatest such beings, luminous wolves which stalk and claim the weak of the starry flocks. Yet others of lesser power have slipt past the diminished numbers of the shepherds of the night and crept unto Laterre, drawn by the primordial power within the world. These devils tempt the unwise and the wicked with promises, exacting terrible price from the innocent and raping the land for its innate wonder in their greed. Such creatures the gods and their priests would slay, along with any who strike their twisted bargain.

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>>97933880
>Thread question: Everyone has their take on dragons and their take on orcs and their take on golems.
>What about mundane species?
>What mundane creatures did you put in your world that are still distinct to a planet or continent that you wouldn't find on Earth?
I tried to really focus on these for my setting, both as bestiary fodder (stuff like the Catoblepas) and as just eccentric flora and fauna.
An example of the latter are the Greater and Lesser Devil Rays (pic mildly related) which manta sizes and larger. The lesser serves as an important source of catalysts for lightning magic and they both are major sources of hide, oil, and meat for some of the major civilizations of the region. Their hide in particular has hydrophobic and magic-resistant qualities that are very nice for an iron age civilization.
There are even some spergs in setting who chug Ray Oil in the hope that it will give them magic resistance. It (kinda) works, although it's unhealthy as you might expect chugging fish oil would be.

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>>97933880
>>97937160
As for the bestiary monsters, the main source of this is Fiends, which are normal animals and plants warped bye either atrocities or the meddling / negligent contact of the gods. That's the origin of everything from evil psychic trees, hydras, chimerae, and pretty much every monster that is basically 'normal animal plus evil and magical'.
Some of my favorites are:
>Lizardmen
Basically Tolkien orcs, the result of one god's autistic fixation with replacing the sapient races with her master race of sentient crocodiles
>Furies
Catch-all term for a wide assortment of fucked up birds, ranging from those with knives for feathers to Shrikes and Magpies with breath attacks who are the size of a small horse.
>Shamblers
Catch-all for any fungus-based fiend, ranging from corrupted animals (and people) a la Last of Us to hulking brutes, mimics, and entire pseudo-locations that share a mycelia hive mind.
>Vile Beasts
Herbivores corrupted into berserk man-eaters by the God of Slaughter.

Finally, as a weird outlier, there is the Lion Men which are Sapient, violent, but otherwise mundane humanoids which evolved from Mandrill / Baboon like monkeys. They are belligerent and hostile as a culture but have the capacity for good. Many cultures see them like the lizardmen but they are entirely non-magical in origin.
>Emissaries / Heralds / Archfiends
Mundane flora and fauna chosen as a vessel by one of the gods. Depending on culture either worshipped as demigods or seen as horrible monsters. Eldritch, viciously intelligent, and have a gigantic superiority complex towards non-fiends.
Main source of spooky-ass cults.

>>97937160
>although it's unhealthy as you might expect chugging fish oil would be.
But fish oil is really healthy for you. Cod liver and krill oil are among the best things you should be taking if you want to avoid high blood pressure.

>>97937935
Healthy in small controlled doses.

Chugging the stuff isn't a small controlled dose.
It's too much. Which is unhealthy.

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Does anyone else enjoy making in-universe media? I feel like it makes the world feel more alive.

>>97938233
Only when I'm running an active campaign.

>>97938233
I kinda do it on the side when I'm bored

Red-Haired girls (especially virgins) hold special properties when cut open and raped according to mythology in the country.

>>97938233
I like to present most of the background information of my worldbuilding project as in-universe publications, but I haven't written in-universe news articles. Could be fun to do it at some point.

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>>97938233
>EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT!

>Elven Queen supremacist caught with Orc lover scandal exposed by random adventurer party, read all about it!

>>97939079
Reminds me of that one game were you were playing a king and could marry a skeleton lady and the newspaper then called your weird fetish out

>>97935100
>ZOMG IT'S POOPFARTSCHIZO
Fuck off dude, relax, this is my first time posting here

>>97939124
The one with the most shit rts gameplay, while the most interesting part were the interactions between your advisors?
Supreme dragon commander or something like that.

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Tell me about the courting rituals in your setting.

>>97936434
you should consider a minor known god of crossroads

>>97936434

I strongly dislike dnd-like encyclopedic domains, at least as a way to come up with a pantheon and characterize the gods.

That being said: you can certainly concentrate some domains here in a single god, like nature for the biomes, or health+fertilty+life, and ditch wholly the elements for example.

The only thing of the "classics" here that I don't see is fate/luck. And love/sex, if that's not under fertility. I would consider an "outsider" troublemaking god that is still necessary for the cosmos, like Set and Loki and to an extent Susano.

>>97939124
>>97939513
Divinity Dragon Commander

>>97938233
Not really.
Literally never comes up in games in my setting.
Occasionally it's part of the first draft of a written story, but I always end up cutting such things since there are usually better ways of getting across plot relevant information or it wasn't very important to the story in the first place and therefor cut. I write pulpy high action short stories so I don't have the space/time for fluff that isn't vital to the plot or characters. Most of revisions are cutting things to the bone. So ironically a lot of lore and world building never actually makes it into my written stories.

>>97939528
No.
Be horny on a not safe for work board.

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Knightly orders, has anyone here done anything interesting with knightly orders in the past?

I already got a few ideas for some that being

The order for lowborn and commoners within the military that have been selected by senior knights for their time and experience to become knights who act like elite foot soldiers yet in reality their purpose is to give the footmen hopes of something to achieve one day as the benefits of being a lesser knight is enough to give your family the means of living a more wealthy and comfortable life than working out in the fields. But despite being "knights" they are still treated like the lowborn that they are who going to find themselves at the front of any battle and away from the "proper" knights who are currently on a hill watching the battle instead

A religious knightly order that works closer with the Empire's Church than the Crown as they mainly protect the temples and pilgrims from pagan heathens in the less developed regions of the empire where the church has yet to spread the faith to and also to show up to strong arm and bully anyone that tries to challenge the church politically. Although in recent years they become more into beast hunters after some of their order encounter some monsters attacking a church and declared a crusade against all monsters within the empire that this "crusade" has go on for so long their stronghold is filled with pelts and taxidermy creatures that it more of a huntsman lodge than anything else, it newer members are just bored third born noblemen who want hunt something big and dangerous to feel special with themselves than religious reasons and started to sell off their trophies to make a profit

>>97940461

And that about it so far as you can see it rather bare bones that I just slap some ideas together and thought "oh that be cool" and I haven't think of what to even the name them but that for a another day, I don't know if I wanna do a controversial order, like a order of criminals, the worse of the worse kind of sort who are trapped within the armor and must do suicidal tasks, dirty jobs that nobody wishes to be caught doing or want the sins on their souls so let some soulless piece of shit do it instead to hopefully one day to get out of their suit. They work alone or in very small groups to complete whatever task they been giving in hope of getting pardon or die trying

>>97940461
>has anyone here done anything interesting with knightly orders
My setting doesn't have horses, so technically no.

>>97939748
I think the list is more of a
>What do people need gods for in their lives?
Luck and Love are definitely two that are missing.

I'm not sure I'll make one for Luck though; Fate is a powerful god here, one who predates the world. If Luck is a factor, it might just be dependent on whatever god someone is praying to for a specific purpose than a generic Luck domain.

I think I took the opposite path from what you recommended though. I split Health out into one for birth, one for barbers, one for herbalists, and one for apothecaries. And I'm wondering if that's the wrong way to go.

>>97940574
Then again, now that I think about it, I could flip the script. Have a general "Health" domain and list a couple of gods with short descriptions players and NPCs can call on at different points of treatment or in different places. No need for big wordy write-ups.

>>97940461
>who are currently on a hill watching the battle instead
So is the plan to have some kind of Gempei war/French revolution affair kick off, or are you just using the noble-born knights here as a way to mock your boss by proxy?

I’m working on a cyberpunk/science fiction setting. Basically, the players are replicants from Blade Runner (though not all sociopaths and more models for more character options) and Earth has a few dozen colony worlds, theoretically administered by corporations, but with control there currently being at a nadir. There are aliens, but most of them really can’t hang out with humans very well. The closest are basically ogres/orcs in terms of social behavior and size.

I’m considering adding a technological alien species. To contrast with the corporate control of human colony worlds, these guys are basically run by a interstellar East Germany. Some of them flee alien space into human space. They are more technologically advanced, but not that much; it’s just that they started their industrial revolution like 1000 years ago instead of 400. Does this seem like a good fit, or is it changing too much implicitly? The aliens only have one point of contact with human space (it’s all wormhole networks, so making a second contact point isn’t really possible), and don’t have plans to invade or anything; in terms of play experience, it’s mostly relevant because they have intelligent services, refugees/defectors, and high quality alien military technology.

>>97940574
>I'm not sure I'll make one for Luck though; Fate is a powerful god here, one who predates the world. If Luck is a factor, it might just be dependent on whatever god someone is praying to for a specific purpose than a generic Luck domain.

My setting has a greater spirit (think rank a couple steps below a god but still powerful) called Lady Fortune who is literally a female dog. As the name suggest, she is associated with luck, fate, games of chance, and similar such things, and is known to be extremely fickle with her favor. (Yes, Lady Fortune is literally a bitch. Though if you ask those having a run of good luck they will tell you she is the goodest of good girls, lol. )

My setting only has two true gods per the current world (possible to expand to more if I do a multiverse campaign or story) and one false god.
Rest are spirits, with the greater spirits sometimes having D&D style domains they are associated with. For example Salamander the great fire spirit, or Anglia speaker of Sol/messenger of the Sun God. Mid level spirits are associated with particular places. Like rivers, mountains, occasionally cities might develop a spirit, etc.
And lesser spirits which are split into the named and unnamed lesser spirits. These are the ones people can form personal relationships with (for better or worse) and make deals with, rather than more abstract figures who sometimes have trouble wrapping their head around individual mortal people like greater spirits.
And below even them are the sprites. Who aren't important until far into the future of my setting when spirits start beginning to materialize. But I haven't gotten that far yet. For now, think of them as motes of light that can sometimes transfer mental images and emotions but otherwise don't even communicate.

Don't know why I suddenly felt the urge to spill out the details of my setting's spiritual hierarchy, but I already typed it so might as well post it.

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There is something really fucked in the head of people who decide
>I'm going to do a writeup of the geography of my fantasy world
>I'm going to go continent by continent and paint them with broad strokes and give a brief history of the land as well as their people
>I'm going to have subsections that go into more detail and talk about mountain chains, abandoned fortresses, and major cities of the various nations that inhabit my land
>I'm going to have atmospheric art placed strategically for each category
>AND I WILL NOT PUBLISH A MAP

Seriously. Fuck off. Your writing is nowhere near the level that players or GMs can create a map in their heads of all these Proper Noun places that have 2 sentence descriptions.

>>97940694
Half the point of /wbg/ is to share your setting and get reactions. It's an interesting idea, almost like Shinto kami.

>>97940657
How can refugees, defectors, and spies mix in with the human colonies if there's only 1 point of contact? It's like if The Bridge was the only place people from East and West Germany were able to cross, and that would be monitored at all times.

I would ask why you want the aliens to exist in-game. Is it just to say that there is something other than human corporatism? You've already said aliens can't really hang out with humans anyway. Just leave them all as background flavor for the setting.

>>97941001
>How can refugees, defectors, and spies mix in with the human colonies if there's only 1 point of contact? It's like if The Bridge was the only place people from East and West Germany were able to cross, and that would be monitored at all times.
Neither side was initially aware they were on the same planet (boonies in both cases), and a significant colony was made on that planet before first contact, so you can just walk over to the other side of the planet.

Spies get over the same way as always: diplomatic credentials.

>I would ask why you want the aliens to exist in-game. Is it just to say that there is something other than human corporatism? You've already said aliens can't really hang out with humans anyway. Just leave them all as background flavor for the setting.
My general worldbuilding principle is that more content is better, so long as it is interesting, distinct, and doesn't clash with the rest of the setting.

Most of the other aliens serve NPC roles similar to Indians in a Western: threats, guides, local color, and so on.

>>97940985
I don't understand it, it's so much easier worldbuilding with a map so I know where all the shit is

>>97941058
I figured it out. You're supposed to buy the maps of the regions separately. This product is just, like, an index.

>>97941068
Map will be extra + tip

>>97941058
Easy to say unless you are shit at map making, in which case it isn't worth the effort to take up a new skill only for everyone to point out your noob attempts at making a map are shit and your knowledge of how anything works is wrong therefore your whole setting is garbage.

So it's much better to just not include a map.

It similar to the reason you should NEVER try to explain how tech works in a sci-fi setting in any detail since someone with actual knowledge on the subject will explain in detail all the ways you are a total retard and thus unworthy of putting your brain farts out in public.

I mean it's fine when your stuff is only released among friends and doesn't have your name on it, but you are held to impossible standards if you put stuff out to the public especially with your name on it. If you aren't basically perfect don't put it out. Stick to your own lane of what you are actually good at. Otherwise people will make it their personal mission to punish you for your stupidity and incompetence.

Only way around this is to pay a legit expert to make proper maps for you, which most people don't have the money to do.

Maps are a nice to have but aren't vital. Why potentially kill your whole project over a nice to have?

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Anyone can make a map. It's not hard.

>>97941727
I'm sure some geological autist will get mad about the mountains not following realistic lines or some shit

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I like the 16th-17th century stuff. It allows one to steer away from medieval fantasy and it is a strong transitory stage to modernity, but what sort of fantasy twist would you make to make it unique?

>>97940985
Not sure what exact setting you're talking about here but for something like tabletop games it could be an intentional decision to allow the GM more leeway with choosing what they want to include in their campaign. e.g. If you think Kingdom B and Kingdom F have the most interesting lore then you can run your campaign with them right next to each other whereas an official map might put Kingdom C which you find really boring in the middle.

>>97941727
Not one worth paying for or publishing.

>>97941747
No rivers, Mountain ranges make no sense. All the different forests are random. No cities or towns. Not even a fucking Compass to tell you what's North.
WORST MAP EVER
(LOL JK)

>>97941882
No but it's infuriating that they would commission flavor art for a campaign setting book but no map. Imagine LOTR but the map of Middle-Earth was never produced. They even have maps of the Outer Planes and their interpretation of the Material Plane when nothing in the book even talks about how you get to the Outer Planes aside from death.

>>97941250
Okay ChatGPT, but most fantasy maps even in published media look like dogshit so it literally doesn't matter

Long story short I like big breasted goblins, but if they get too big they start to sag. So would it be more biologically feasible to have an internal structure that could hold them up from the bottom or from the top?

>>97941250
Total non-issue. A map is useful to have just so you know what's next to what, whether you want to make it geologically accurate or not is up to you and ultimately doesn't matter.

>>97941747
Who hurt you?

>>97942870
Breasts sag because over time the skin and ligaments lose elasticity. If you want your goblins not to sag just make them more resistant to that loss of elasticity, you don't need anything fancy.

>>97942870
have them wear bras

>>97942901
yeah I was going to say to just give them stronger ligaments
honestly though, if this is all fictional anyway, I don't see why a reason is required to just not have breasts sag

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Im making a pokemon ripoff and I want to put this little fuckers on pic related (see the Moomins for more info). Does any of you know how much should I change to not have problems with legal rights? Besides changing the name from hattifatteners to "electric dudes"

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>>97944438
This is some lore about them. Looks almost as a pokedex entry. I should make up some similar shit, but i like that they do make boats and travel around without ever speaking shit.

"Hattifatteners are mysterious creatures whose only motivation in life is to keep moving towards the horizon. They are pale grey-white in colour and look something like mushroom stalks with paws that extend directly from their trunks. They grow from little white seeds – but only if the seeds are sown on Midsummer’s Eve – and can become charged up with electricity in lightning storms."

“…the little white creatures who are for ever wandering restlessly from place to place, in their aimless quest for nobody knows what.”

>>97944438
Those things are in Girls Last Tour and Elden Ring too, just change the name

>>97944457
Just change the name, maybe give them a color that is not obviously Moomin too.

>>97942731
>>97942731
Your dumbass knows full well that post wasn't made with a chatbot.

>>97941250
One of the most beloved scifi book series (not only mine, but generally in the world), Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, starts with a plot point in Red Mars where wind mills are supposed to heat up the planet. This is physically impossible and an honest mistake on Robertson's part, one such basic that it would make one doubt if he ever graduated high school.
Nobody cares about the scientific inaccuracy, though. It's an inspirational, well-written story overall, and enough NASA nerds loved it so that it was physically sent to Mars in real life via the Phoenix lander, and Robinson's name will be remembered and venerated until the human race goes extinct.
Whether your world becomes beloved or not does not depend on the approval of imaginary internet judges who measure fictional seafloor spreading rates and tut-tut with disapproval if you made a mistake.

>>97945576
>starts with a plot point in Red Mars where wind mills are supposed to heat up the planet.
I would've questioned this if I ever read it. I started with Blue Mars though, and put it down after the first chapter.

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>>97941250
This is spiritual cowardice.
As this anon >>97945576 points out the keys to a good setting are sincerity and immersiveness. Every single setting has weaknesses just like every story, campaign, and person has weaknesses.
Do NOT fear the retard pedants who will nitpick every stray mountain range of your map or inconsistency in your NPC accents. They cannot kill you in a way that matters.
Again, as that other anon points out, in the cases that you have an expert in your game they are far more likely to either politely pull you aside to advise you that you made a mistake in your worldbuilding or (most likely of all) just shut the fuck up because they're trying to play the damn game with you, not make you feel like a retard.

Be brave, anons.

>>97941837
I'd just explore the fantastical version of the Renaissance with a heavy focus on a rapid advancement of magical knowledge, especially in regards to things like Alchemy, Astrology and even things like automatons, like a lot of stuff people IRL at the time researched and wrote about you could even introduce actual recently discovered things like Paracelsus's Homunculi and Elmentals or Da Vinci's mechanical knights and the like, and then also explore the impacts of stuff like this.
The time was also heavily influenced by colonialism causing an influx of wealth/goods into europe from other continents, which you could pull adapt into dealing with other magical races I guess, though I personally would find it more interesting if it was still done to other humans and they just had different magic traditions/religions and the like, which could also have pretty interesting implications. Like IRL europeans looted tombs in Egypt and mummies straight up became a resource used for painting and very often even eaten as sort of miracle cure(though that actually mostly stopped in the Renaissance), which could have very intersting implications in an actual fantasy setting.
Of course how the general theme of the times affects organized religions could also be worht exploring.

>>97946346
Again, when among friends getting stuff wrong isn't a big deal.
However for things that are released to the public or sold it very much matter and those "pedants" have killed whole projects with their nit picking thousands of times before any you aren't special or whatever enough to be a exception.
It's not about bravery, it's about the reality that putting out shit that is wrong is worse than not putting something out at all.
If you are selling a product and you don't know how to make a map well, and you can't pay someone to make a map for you, then you shouldn't include a map.
Just throwing some shit together half-assed then publishing it to the public will rightly get you banished to the shadow realm.

>>97949949
>However for things that are released to the public or sold it very much matter and those "pedants" have killed whole projects with their nit picking thousands of times before any you aren't special or whatever enough to be a exception.
But this just isn't true, like at all. It really feels like you're just seething about some specific incident that personally happened to you that you can't get over.

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>>97949949
If you're releasing something for the public, it's more unacceptable to not have a map when you half your book is describing locations. Even something as bare as this helps ground GMs and players. Pretending that maps are bad because maybe the person drawing them doesn't take the time to learn how to make them at all doesn't change the issue that having no maps means there's no point to anything that's been written.

>>97949949
>Just throwing some shit together half-assed then publishing it to the public will rightly get you banished to the shadow realm.
Completely wrong, I have seen too many half ass dogshit maps made for fantasy books.

>>97950128
>Completely wrong, I have seen too many half ass dogshit maps made for fantasy books.
Wheel of Time immediately comes to mind
>a fucking RECTANGLE

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>>97949949
Are you SURE you're unable to draw a simple in-universe map?

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How traditionalist is the main nation in your setting?

>>97951179
>puckee spamming his commission again
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/x6ywyc/king_philip_v_of_caduvia_campaign_npc_commission/
https://desuarchive.org/_/search/image/LyShG8cuLH6vuHGGEoIsdg/
>62 times since September 2022

>>97940657
It sounds like you want to have them so go for it.

>>97941250
>If you aren't basically perfect don't put it out. Stick to your own lane of what you are actually good at. Otherwise people will make it their personal mission to punish you for your stupidity and incompetence.
Extremely bad advice, your audience probably doesn't know any more about geography than you do and if they do it's fine because actually intelligent people aren't insecure enough to tear down others.

>>97942870
Sagging breasts are hot and I'm tired of pretending they're not.

i've been building a map for the past 4 years. once it's finished. my intent is to pay some guy on fiverr to use it as a frame of reference and rebuild it from the ground up but with realistic geology.

can i post it here for you guys to cook me for all the unrealistic geological and hydrological aspects of it? which may be a sizable portion, most of, if not nearly all of it.

>>97951179
The fuck does that even mean in the context of a made up original world?

I don't even care that you spam your shit commissions, but you really need to ask better questions if you want positive attention.

>>97951880
Why are you pretending this is your first day on the internet.
You are on 4chan and /tg/ for fuck sake. You know for a fact that isn't true. You are just being contrarian.

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After almost a month of using cooking/food tweezers I can say for a fact that they are extremely viable as both a cooking and eating utensil.
Longer ones work better for cooking, shorter ones for eating.
Ones with wider tips were generally worse and less useful then ones with narrow tips. Narrow tip ones were able to do everything the wider tip ones could do, but the wider ones could not do what the narrow ones could.

While metal, especially stainless steel, is the best material I was able to handicraft some wood ones that were functional, if at bit fragile and finicky.
I suspect food safe bronze or copper might also work, but my metal working skills aren't good enough to build a prototype so I can't test this. There are smaller bronze twezers used for repairs where non-magnetic tools are required. So I don't think too much issue would happen if this was scaled up.


What this means for my world building is it's fully viable for a culture, or cultures in my world to use food tweezers as their primary utensil, along with spoons.
It is reasonable that this was the case for that culture or cultures since the equivalent of the bronze age.

Next test will be the viability of my idea for "paired knives". Where for eating a person of the culture in question uses a dull wide knife in one hand and a sharp somewhat pointy knife in the other, to eat meats and vegetable dishes.
Basically developed for the opposite reason that forks were developed in our world (the cultural taboo of sharp knives at the eating table in some cultures).
Basically I have a culture that takes pride in personal power and being able to act on a threat at all times. So having even more knives while dinning matches the culture more than inventions made to banish sharp dangerous knives from the dinning table.

I have also introduced a lot more "finger foods" and hand eating to several of the cultures. As well as a lot of flat breads that sort of also act as utensils.

>>97951884
Depends.
There is youthful bountiful sag.
Mature and refined milf sag
Then there is old lady sag.

I love the first two but the third isn't hot to me. Tolerable, but not hot.

>>97933880
Kys d*scord cancer.

99% of worldbuilding resources start out like "so you're building a cliche swords-and-sorcery fantasy planet, and..."

>>97956766
OP is literally just trolling.
I mean did you read the last thread where they weren't the one to make it.
They got pissy and spend the whole thread trying to ruin the thread with trolling.

>>97956790
In my experience most stuff involving world building advice is like
>so Brandon Sanderson said this
>So tolken did this
>bla bla bla Hard or soft spectrum bla bla bla
>here is this other author or game that we will view through the lens of what brandosando said or what Tolkien did
>R R Martin said/did therefor you should...

Or
>So you are making a D&D setting and I will assume everything about your setting is for/compatible with the game conventions of 5E
>here is a thinly veiled history or science video about my last google/Wikipedia rabbit-hole I did

>>97956820
Actually, the current OP beat me to this thread, that's why the number of discord links is the same as last time I posted the OP (>>97784855), lol. If I'd posted it there would be even more Discord links.

Also, to be clear, that guy is a loser who posts that regardless of whether or not there are Discord links in the OP.

>>97956897
Point still stands that you are a troll that actively tries to make the thread worse when there is any push back on your bad behavor in any way shape or form.

>>97956918
The bad behavior is the guy who has been spamming the thread for years, which actually makes the thread worse rather than being a link everybody auto-skims (keeping in mind he posts that whether or not there are any Discord links in the OP).

>>97956924
Dude, no one is buying your bullshit.
It is likely you are the "Kys d*scord cancer" guy too just to justify your own worse behavor.

Also you will troll in unrelated ways when someone else makes the thread in a way you don't like.
You are just a jackass. Worse than anyone you claim is worse.

>>97956932
>It is likely you are the "Kys d*scord cancer" guy too just to justify your own worse behavor.
Schizophrenia.

>>97956924
>keeping in mind he posts that whether or not there are any Discord links in the OP
Actually this
>Resources for Newfags: https://sites.google.com/view/wbgeneral/
link goes to some faggot's personal website which links to a dead thread general that doesn't exist anymore and his list of pisscord "servers" which have no relevance to 4chan and shouldn't be given free advertisement.

>>97956933
Then how come you both are only active at the same time?

You are the same dude.
You are just a troll out to make the thread worse.

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>>97955853
Very cool, I love springy low tech metal tools.

>>97955139
I'll only give you shit if you have river that split downstream

>>97936434
I would limit it to 12-20 Gods total, with names, domains, personality and all that. If you have multiple cultures, I would summarize them and maybe have 3 main gods. If theculture is the main culture, maybe 12 gods. Try to keep it to a minimum.
For example in my setting most cultures are animistic and polytheistic with thousands of spirits and gods. I would summarize each cultures religion like
>The people of Härmälä believe in nature spirits and a few greater Gods
>Jahti is the God of the Hunt and War, he is a wild God that loves a fair hunt and fight. For good luck and favor people sacrifice their furst bounty of game to Jahti.
>Maatar is the God if fertility, nature and harvest. She accepts worship and sacrifice of vegetables as her offerings.
>They have many local gods, with smaller domains such as The Lady of Rautkymi, the God the river Rautkymi
>And so on for all the relevant gods

Or even just
>The people of Härmälä believe all aspects of live to be governed by gods of different domains. They have a God for all aspects of live from death to housekeepping.
This way the GM and players can have their local lore. No one is going to read all 30+ Gids of all the cultures anyway, just keep it to archetypes and info needed for gameplay.
In my game worshippers of gods have a relationship tracker for a spesific god that works like a d100 skill. It is hidden from the player and it can be increased by worship of the god in its favored way, and decreased when asking for miracles. Asking for a favor from a god is a normal skill roll, the success level needed to have the favor granted depens on the favor. Asking Haavatar the Goddes of wounds and healing to heal a minor wound may need onlyn 1 sl, but asking her to kill someone might need 6. This is why I would write what domain the god rules, it's personality and how the god should be worshipped.
I leave a lot of it up to the gm or players to come up with.

>>97935777
>the bones aren't going to pretend there's actually gravity pulling them down.
Wow, didn't know that human bones are smart.
What next? Bones know the difference between quantum tunneling and quantum teleportation.

>>97957917
i have two deltas

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>>97958736
I hope one of them just decides to give up and sudokus in the middle of the continent!

>>97959053
>>97959053

To be fair the Okavango Delta is dope as fuck and people should copy it in settings

>Not usually a fan of 'fantasy is actually advanced sci-fi'
>Got idea for demons in setting to be spirits that were effectively AIs that have gone rampant over millennia of isolation
Still not sure how I feel about this

>>97960791
I personally love fantasy as sci-fi OR sci-fi as fantasy as long as it's done with enough love and creativity. If you run with this idea and the result is a generic DND rip-off except "guys trust me it's totally different because it's all AI under the hood" I won't forgive you

>>97960803
I try to make it not so generic. This setting was actually derived from a sort of fantasy as sci-fi idea I never really managed to get working with asteroid wizard towers and moon vikings. But the demon stuff came from the latest round of revisions I did after not touching it since last year. It used to be the world was made by this massively powerful entity to imprison humanity, who used to be this powerful atlantis/stargate type civilization.
But some new ideas I had were the atlantis people still existing, and them being the ones who made the prison world, and the inhabitant's ancestors were sent there for crimes to be determined with the entity appointed as the warden.
Or it being a prison for this evil race who used souls as a power source, and some people got locked in there with them with the hope they' burn through the limited souls and die out. (they did but there are still people left over and forgotten about)
None of it particularly matters to the average goings on of the world, of course.

What are some settings you thought had potential but ultimately bored you or disappointed you?

how do you think having a very high adult death rate would impact a society if that has pretty much been common as long as humanity can remember?

one basic idea of my setting is removing barriers for population booms through magical advances in things like agriculutre, food storage, sanitation and health care, doing stuff like basically completly removing common struggles of premodern societies like food insecruity, death in childbirth, infant/child mortality and generally the majority of death through diseases.
Basically ensuring there are a lot of people being born and raised to adulthood, which I can then use to fill up things like large megacities, standing armies, countless bandit camps, all kinds of guilds and the like, but most improtantly it allows for constant death through things like monster attacks, war and crime, which keeps the population from growing too large.

But it got me wondering how something like this would actually impact human relationships when there is a high likelyhood that whoever you are close to ends up being dead, like the average family would raise like 5 kids into addulthood and can reasonably expect like two of them to meet violent deaths. How would even things like marriages/couples properly bond if that is the norm.
Like do you assume people would just not get as attached, maybe just get over grief easier, or should I just lean into everyone being kinda traumatized?

>>97962366
>or should I just lean into everyone being kinda traumatized?
I think that has the best potential.

Should also think about cultures with a strong funerary, remembrance, and honoring of the dead rituals and practices. They probably will have traditions and customs dictating exactly how to morn since it's something so many will have to deal with. Probably a lot of superstitions around death and the dead too.


Overall I like your idea and think you should keep in the direction you are going in.

>>97933880
I'm messing with a world that is a massive dungeon.

Essentially humans live at the bottom of it and innate magic allows for simulated day and night cycles with weather for crop growth. The dungeon is a living organism that relies on humans for sustenance so it has treasure and shit inside it they can use to advance their society. The catch is the layout, biomes, denizens, etc are all uniquely made for any given party makeup. So three guys can enter and find a dinosaur populated jungle, a fourth joins and it's a Hellraiser type labyrinth, two enter and it's a pristine marbled Gothic setup, one of the two swap out and it's a cyberpunk type world.

Working on having easy random tables for fast and nasty world building and monster population.

>>97957917
Rivers splitting downstream isn't impossible, though it's rare (except braided rivers and deltas, where you have new channels forming and disappearing very quickly, so there's no time for one channel to capture all the water flow, and they either connect to the main channel or are a relatively small distance from the mouth of the river anyway). Normally if the river splits, all water will from down the channel with higher flow rate, resulting in the other branch drying out. But sometimes you do get situations where the river gets split by some obstacle, like an erosion-resistant outcropping of rock, with the terrain on either side being about as favorable to the flow, causing it to split into two branches that may or may not merge together further downstream.

How essential is hygiene in your setting?

>>97962738

Very important. Western kingdoms are often seen as smelly and dirty because they refuse to take baths due misguided beliefs about water opening up pores and welcoming bad air after the last Great Plague. Being "clean" for westerners means wearing a crisp, white linen shirt that absorbed sweat and oils. In the western kingdom, if your collar and cuffs are white, you are considered hygienic, even if you hadn't submerged in a tub in months. Foreigners are often struck by the heavy odors and are horrified by the smell and perceived lack of cleanliness.

>>97962766
That sounds horrid.

>>97961187
Megastructures. I'm a die-hard Blame! fan but it turns out the premise is hard to do much with in non-visual mediums.

>>97962462
Good call, thank you.
I did put some thoughts into funeral traditions, but was mainly thinking of just defaulting to cremation since it's a good way to save on burial space and a decent precaution against the rise of many kinds of undead. But yeah with death so prevalent I should put more thoughts into the actual mourning process, and how prominent honoring/worshipping/venerating the dead is.
>>97962738
Extremely so, while people don't know about germ theory or anything like that, they were able to figure out the value of most hygienic practices through divination and trial and error, so a lot of value is put into cleaning yourself and the environment, isolating the sick, properly preserve and handle food, proper sanitation/waste management and a general tradition of using alchemy to purify water and produce cleaning products.

Not gonna lie, how disgusting life in many fantasy setting must be, even if not focused on was a decent motivator to make things different, even if I primarily did it to justify better health.
The threat of monsters and war is one thing, but shitting in buckets, never washing your hands and eating half spoiled meat is something else.

>>97955595
>that redditor who thinks you're supposed to be shitty on 4chan

>>97958736
A delta isn't a river splitting, it's the sea reaching to it.

>>97963007
>Not gonna lie, how disgusting life in many fantasy setting must be, even if not focused on was a decent motivator to make things different, even if I primarily did it to justify better health.
>The threat of monsters and war is one thing, but shitting in buckets, never washing your hands and eating half spoiled meat is something else.
This is part of why I decided to make a sci fi setting instead. I wanted to make a generally pleasant setting for escapism and a world with realistic medieval hygiene isn't something anyone wants to live in.

>>97957917
You mean like Two Ocean Pass?

>>97962738
Humans and the little people of my setting have high standards of hygiene, with each culture and even each city having their own spin or tradition around getting and staying clean.

Goblins are very lax/messy when self managed but can be quite clean and tidy when managed by someone else who isn't a goblin. Basically if a gang of goblins had a house as their territory then they would very quickly turn it into a hoarders house. They also rather enjoy their earthy natural musk so rarely bath unless they get covered in something unpleasant. However if those goblins were living in a military barracks they have no problem following orders and keeping clean to the organization's standards.
My druid mixed with cultivator people use magic to purify themselves and keep "clean", but they sometimes enjoy being covered in living soil, or amongst fungus, or other such places full of life that humans generally would say are unclean. They do tend to bathed or have a dip in a body of water to clean off before going into a settlement of another people.

My wilderness bigfoot people mainly use dry brushing and quick wipe downs when wet when in the wilds or in their own camps. They will brush then use scented oils when in settlements or otherwise indoors for a extended period of time.

The psychic cats have similar hygiene habits as normal cats but also have privacy preferences more similar to humans.

The bat people are very strict about keeping their bodies clean, but are fine with utterly disgusting living conditions.

Ironically the sun worshiper religious people and the vampire faction both have it as part of their culture where it's a something of a flex to have specialized body servants and make use of spa and grooming services. So they both enjoy being washed, groomed, and pampered to emasculate levels of hygiene, as well as keeping their territories clean and in top condition.

>>97957917
>>97959053
>>97963136
its ok, i found some dude on reddit and i'm paying him 500 bucks to remake my entire world map from the ground up - and make the geography more realistic

>>97963987
I just used that song of the ancients alpha and generated worlds until I got one that looked similar enough to my original

>>97962738

High, but dependant on the local conditions. For example spacers are mocked as smelly because it happens that water on space travels might be regimented.

I'm building a world and campaign for a D&D session. It's my first time as DM and I'm taking it a bit easy in terms of not being super original but I like to take my friends's likes and dislikes to make the campaign.

The campaign is essentially a mix between The Chronicles of Prydain, Final Fantasy, Greek mythology and some bits from other stories.

So the world has a giant tower that goes above the clouds at its center called the Tower of Babel. It has a bunch of different biomes and leads eventually to a Olympus type of heaven area. It works as a mystery dungeon type of gauntlet but is not the main focus and you can "save progress" as you climb higher.

The main story itself focuses on saving an oracular dog and defeating the Dead Magus, a king that has taken all of the dead soldiers from the land, put them into a cauldron and made a massive undead army that keeps growing every day. The players have to grow strong enough to eventually go into the Dead Magus's stronghold and finally fight him. The oracular dog, if it is obtained by the Dead Magus, will give him the answers to ultimate power and eternal life. So the players must also protect the dog at all costs.

The Tower of Babel is only necessary to go into it at one point because it holds a magic object that can grant permanent protection to the oracular dog.

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What's the best tool to make a semi-detailed map of a planet? I'm working on a donut steel planet for my WH40K playgroup. We want to make all our battles take place on that planet, follow the progress on a map made of hexagonal tiles etc. Having a proper map with important locations would help a lot.

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How do you make a serial killer interesting?

My setting world is pretty standard nothing really to speak about but in it but one of my major plots is going to be involving around a murderer on the loose in a city-state where crimes like murder is common to the point that most of the city-watch who already got their hands full with so many other crimes they just shrug it off as

>"Oh it just a another dead drunk bum who died in a tavern fight, who fucking cares? move along!"
or
>"It the husband, clearly who else would beat this ugly wench up? you telling me how to do my job?"

But when folk from all walks of life from beggars to nobles start showing up looking like they gone through a public anatomy dissection butcher knife?, that raise eyebrows and cause panic. And been tapping my fingers next to my keyboard on how I can make it more interesting, so far I been trying to avoid typical tropes like jack the ripper who only targets were pretty much street prostitutes and what not so far. I might make them a revenant as they are pretty underrated but their only goal and mindset is just REVENGE and that being the only motivation is pretty lame

>>97965526
if you want to go full autist? campaign cartographer

>>97965820

Serial killers aren't really that interesting per se. They're just heavily disturbed dudes, the "genre" runs on the horror of the beast among us and as a vehicle for detective stories.

So, I think you have two ways of doing this: completely straight investigation, and a subversion ("you tought it was Jack the Ripping Off, but it actually was a complicated ritual by a cabal of mages to ward off an arguably worse evil!").

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>>97965526
Would Traveller icosahedrons work for your purposes?
http://toybox-sw.blogspot.com/2013/08/3d-traveller-style-planets-maps-for.html

not enough fantasy worlds that are actually the body of a giant entity

>>97966314
other than bionicle I can;t really think of any

>>97966393

Isn't the world of Dark Souls a giant tree?

>>97966401
What? No? Do you mean Elden Ring? Even in ER the world isn't the Erdtree

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>>97966393

In Aztec mythology, Earth itself is a starving primordial half-death monster with many crocodile mouths that wants nothing more than to eat everything at all times and demands regular blood sacrifices from the gods so it won't eat their stuff (and body parts) anymore.

>>97966423

Cipactli didn't just have one mouth; every joint of her body was said to be a snapping, hungry maw.

>>97966423
If we're just going by real world mythologies then Norse mythology had the Yggradasil world tree and also Odin and his two brothers making the world from the primordial giant Ymir's corpse. Also sumerian/babylonian had the world being made from Tiamat's body I think?

>>97966401
No, thats Forgotten Realms and that one about the cats.

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>>97966314
It's not quite on the body of a giant entity, but it is their burial mound.

In the age before Laterre’s creation, the primordial mother Moihne and the primordial father Doirhae shaped the great immanence into the vast and lush plains of night. To this expanse they brought divine life: star sheep and dogs to herd them, the great and luminous Armetram, and their favored children: the godly shepherds of the night.

Yet such creation could not stand alone forever, and outsiders encroached upon it: Wolves of the darkness, and devils from beyond its bounds. Seeking only to slake their hunger, they chased the star-sheep to consume their radiant fleece and transform them into likewise cold and hungry beasts. The family of the pasture defied this predation; together, they raised creation’s first wall and set the first watch upon its bounds.

Moihne, Doirhae, and their children worked tirelessly to guard the flock, repair the wall, and give life to the pasture. Yet, after timeless eons, exhausted and spent, Moihne and Doirhae died; and this was the first death. In grief at this new thing, their godly children placed them at the heart of the pasture and raised a great mound over their bodies. It was the shepherds’ intent for their primordial parents to be the pasture’s great heart and mighty fold, a place where the flocks could shelter and bring forth bountiful stars.

There, water arose from the blood of Doirhae. There, fire arose from Moihne’s transfiguring flesh. There, air came from Doirhae’s unexpelled breaths, and the mountains from their unbroken bones. And these were new things.

To this barrow came the most attentive of the primordial’s children. Such gods found this new thing, to which they gave a new, true name: Laterre. The gods watched as water fed earth to raise forests and fire touched air to raise mountains. And they descended into it to see what more would come, and give name to each new thing that arose.

>>97966712
>TL;DR:
The world of Laterre is, in the cosmological myths of the setting, considered to be the barrow of the primordial mother and father. These two creator gods made the night sky in the form of a vast sheepfold, populating it with star-sheep and sheepdogs to herd them. They also gave birth to divine children as shepherds, and raised a wall about the sheepfold to protect the sheep from predations by predator comets and demons from outside the pasture.

When the creator gods died, their children raised the barrow over them. That barrow created water, plants, and life. As a result, some of the shepherds descended to the barrow to name everything and create more things, including animal life and mortals. That is how Laterre was created.

>>97966712
And the sun is a giant glowing ram, so there's that.

>>97965820
how about making it so they aren't actually a serieal killer but just an assassin working for someone else who sticks to a particular style of killing, and all these seemingly random targets are killed for specific purposes as part of a larger conspiracy or something along those lines. Maybe even one the killer is only partially aware of, like they know who they're killing but not that the death is just there to cause a distraction as a differetn crime is going on or getting rid of a witness or maybe its even to cause emotional distress to someone specifcally connected to these people.

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Is there a coat of arms maker that lets you do more...complex stuff? It feels like most of them just let you do simplistic stuff instead of the actually complex ones.

>>97970215
Like uh, for example, there's the CoAmaker, right? Except their charge selection is missing a bunch of stuff, or locked it behind a paywall.

>>97958164
yes but unironically on a scientific level

animistic world where every form and type of being is connected to a spiritual power according to their nature. except for humans, who have somehow lost their connection to the divine, making the strongest gods the ones who grant the wishes of insects and oceans.

>>97970215
Not without paying a fee

>>97970700
I'd rather not.

Refined aspects of the secondary magic system of my setting and now have to do some rewrites of how certain "classes" works.

That said it's worth the extra effort since it makes the magic system rock solid in it's consistency even for edge cases.
It also allows me to keep a extremely simple formula in the back of my mind whenever it comes to magic to make sure it fits. Because the formula is simple I can adapt things on the fly to fit it, or make up/add classes or ways of casting and still have them fit.

Will have to edit a few of my short stories though.

>>97970215
I remember doing a second grade project where we crafted our own coat of arms/family crest for some reason.

I think you are cheating yourself out of a fun arts and crafts project.

>>97970215
You just needed to google

https://heraldicon.org/

I'm trying to keep my elves classic while doing something more with them.
The idea is essentially that both their massive prior advantage and their decline come from the same source, namely that they're born with all their fancy knowledge already wired in.
While everyone else is knuckle dragging peons that's an unbeatable advantage but after a while it stops being quite so useful.
Is that sufficiently elegant without trying to go full Tekumel "different for the sake of being different"?

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>>97976334
At a very basic level, this sounds like Orks from 40k. So if we compare it to Orks we need to know how it stops being a disadvantage or why Elves are able to make it work.

What are non-elves like? Are you saying the Elvish knowledge grows outdated over the centuries because of other races discovering mass production, or that elves are born knowing everything they need and can never learn anything new?

Like, are there elves who know how to make 1 kind of soft-curd milk cheese and 1 kind of longer-lasting hard cheese, and they can never learn how to make more cheeses from other molds, with other dyes, etc?

>>97976334
make them the roman empire of your setting.
Meaning that the situation got bad enough that they simply lacked the productive capacity to keep going on and their state collapsed. If 1 or 2 less disasters had occurred they would have probably bounced back like the eastern empire did a few times (till it didn't).
Their slow births and their lack of fertility which are the most common classic elf tropes makes them so much more disaster prone that you only need to imagine a couple of great disasters that they couldnt overcome and their states crumbled.
Have your nobles reside in old elven castles and palaces, have a much diminished part of the empire remain in far away lands but their influence and their works still standing etc

How would you pronounce Kiith: Kith, Keith, Ki-ith, or Kayath?

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>>97976334
Could have them going through a state of decadence, where the ruling class, the generals, the elites and else whoever holds actual power within the elvish civilization is closed off from the rest of the world in these vacuumseald world of excess to the point they even become alienated from ordinary life from regular lower elves that they lost any sense of perspective that they forgot how to run anything without the help of others that being those who have to do all the work while they host never ending festival feasts, parties, hold complex rituals courtship rituals and competitive party games. They have no idea what going on outside their little bubble

So when a actual invasion or a threat comes along, the generals who been born with the skills of leadership and tactics to handle any threat to find out they self wired tactics are outdated by centuries that they have no idea how to counter whatever the enemy is throwing at them

>The enemy is using throwing axes and javelins at us and running away?, well uhhh perfect!...just keep marching forward

>They flanking us as we approach in a line formation?, well uhh...umm, just split into smaller line fomratio- what you mean my men are fleeing?!?

And you could have other elves, lower born elves, lesser nobility or knights realized they are so out of touch of the world and instead of staying in their bubble of safety they seek out new knowledge in hope to save their civilization before it falls to ruin

>>97976532
>Are you saying the Elvish knowledge grows outdated over the centuries because of other races discovering mass production, or that elves are born knowing everything they need and can never learn anything new?
Both in a way.
They can do all the fancy pants flying ship teleportation nonsense but things like getting a new kind of water transportation infrastructure on the road is painfully difficult because the brain function that allows for curiosity is virtually absent and they form new memories with great difficulty.
>Like, are there elves who know how to make 1 kind of soft-curd milk cheese and 1 kind of longer-lasting hard cheese, and they can never learn how to make more cheeses from other molds, with other dyes, etc?
Yeah. They're perfect in their specific way but that bars them from improvement.
>>97977973
That's something I have in my scifi setting as the key driver for space exploration (flagrantly stolen from Mindjammer and OAP). The downside of immortality is that it drives people under150 to leave.
>>97976570
Could work.

>>97977937
keef

>>97977937
the same way mike tyson says kiss

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>>97978243
>>97976532
>>97976334
If I got this right, this means that, if the starting conditions changed, their ingrained knowledge is a flaw instead of an advantage. It isn't necessary for the others to advance too much, but something else changing also fucks them over. For example, I have a setting where certain things, like undeath and multiple deities weren't a thing when Creation was created, but consequences of Creation not working as intended. In my setting, your Elves would be unable to adapt to necromancy. It's somewhat like >>97976570 says, but the "disasters" were cosmic/supernatural.

Could also be something more mundane and low-tech, like knowing how to work bronze, but tin sources dwindle and the other races figure out iron.

>>97977937
>Kith
That one.
I might stress the 'I' sound since it's a double 'i' but otherwise I would just read it the same way as kith.

That or double check with text to speech. Which is what I do to check over my made up words and names to see how they should be spelled or sound.

>>97977937
/ki:θ/

>>97976570
why stop at one? I have two roman empires and one roman/british empire that all collapsed. technically the high elven one still exists as a byzantium style rump-state
>>97977937
in homeworld they just pronounce that as kith
>>97979401
You should consider using IPU, it would give you a definitive sound appearance for made up words

>>97977937
Kyþ

>>97980145
>You should consider using IPU
You should consider kissing my ass.
https://www.abbreviationfinder.org/acronyms/ipu.html#aim

>>97982443
I meant IPA

>>97982567
I meant right on my butthole. Get deep in the crack.

>>97982600
Nevermind you're that "kys discord" guy, you should kill yourself for real

>>97982665
I am not.
You however are a troll who can eat my ass. The whole thing.

You aren't and never will be funny.

>>97982680
okay schizo

>>97982682
Fuck off cunt.

>>97982684
take your meds dude

I find it interesting how during the bloody code, between 1688 and 1820, the total number of capital crimes in England and Wales grew from about 50 to over 200. You could get hanged as young as 7. Even when you go to places which are stereotypically seen as harsh (or backwards) like Rome, Imperial China, Ottoman Empire, Spanish Empire, or Russia, you don't find them executing little children at least over stuff like:

>shoplifting
>sheep stealing stealing goods worth 40 shillings
>cutting down an ornamental tree in someone’s garden
>stealing fish from a private pond (even just one)
>appearing in a forest with a blackened face
>stealing a "handkerchief from a person".

I guess it is the difference between power being held by a central monarch or religious authority who viewed the population as "subjects" or "children" of the state vs a group of wealthy landowners in the Parliament.

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>>97973575
nta but this is pretty useful
>>97984371
>no blackface in the forest
How did english common law set this precedent wtf

>>97984426
presumably evidence of poaching

>>97984426

The law was passed in response to a group of poachers known as the "Waltham Blacks." These individuals would blacken their faces with soot or charcoal to blend into the night and avoid recognition while hunting deer in royal forests and private parks. They were often locals protesting the "enclosure" of land that had previously been common ground. By blacking their faces, they were engaging in a form of organized rural rebellion. This lead to appearing "armed and disguised" (including having a blackened face) in ANY forest, park, or high road to be punished by death. The prosecution didn't even have to prove you had stolen anything.

>>97984450
>armed and disguised
If the punishment is death anyway, what reason is there not to just kill whoever would report you or whoever it is coming to arrest you in the forest?

>>97984463

Your point is exactly why Draconian laws often collapse sooner or later. If you are already "dead" in the eyes of the law for having a blackened face, you might as well fight your way out. Gamekeepers began traveling in larger, armed groups because they knew encounters with poachers were likely to turn lethal. Because the punishment was so disproportionate, juries often refused to convict. If you didn't kill the witness, you had a decent chance of a sympathetic jury letting you off. Local communities often supported poachers because they felt the forests should be common land. Other examples include Valuation Fraud: If stealing goods worth 40 shillings meant death, the jury would officially value a stolen gold watch at 39 shillings just to save the man's (or child's) life.

>>97984450

On the other hand, since England had no professional police force until 1829 to reliably catch criminals the laws was really not that easy to enforce. The state relied on deterrence through theater. The idea was that if the punishment was unimaginably horrific, people would be too terrified to commit the crime in the first place. Hangings at Tyburn were festive, gruesome public spectacles designed to show the "majesty" of the law.

>>97984371
Using Rome as a counter example to
>a group of wealthy landowners in the Parliament.
Is quite a choice.

>>97984371
Angloids have always been demented and sadistic fucks.

>>97985017
No more so then any other category of people throughout history. Often significantly less so.

>>97951179
Do modern worlds not have traditionalist monarchies anymore? Like Exandria?

>>97980145
>>97982567
You know you could have avoided the argument if you used words.
Pretty sure other dude is assuming you are a troll for suggesting nonsense initialisms that don't mean anything without context.
Especially when the first one doesn't return anything remotely on topic.
Which is ether a sign you are really dumb or indeed a troll. Ether doesn't make you look good.
I would have told you to fuck off too.

wanted french fries available at every corner stand in my pseudo-medieval world
but what would be the implications of an oil-bearing plant thats so ludicrously productive that even non-industrial societies can have enough surplus of oil that even poor peasants can have a deep fried snack?

>>97986236
are you talking about olives? they did exist you know.
also the fat could be animal based. we dont use them these days but it was all they ever used and they had a lot of greasy fatty foods

>>97986236
Use lard and tallow.
Rich get fresh fry oil, vendors in poor areas reuse the same oil until it goes off.

It's how most things were deep fried for the vast majority of human history.

>>97986236
There are many ways of frying foods that aren't just deep-frying. They could sandfry the fries.

>>97986228
Go fuck yourself, it was an honest mistake you fucking nigger

>>97933880
>Everyone has their take on dragons and their take on orcs and their take on golems. What about mundane species? What mundane creatures did you put in your world that are still distinct to a planet or continent that you wouldn't find on Earth?
This is going to sound extremely strange but I got really inspired by watching this compilation of Mortal Kombat Animalities which could show how "mundane" or slightly fantastical animals could kill people and basically be dangerous monsters in their own right. I especially like Barakas and have decided to add giant, aggressive, carnivorous porcupines to my setting as a type of dangerous beast. Their quills are often harvested by nearby goblin or kobold tribes to be used as arrow heads or spikes for traps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9oqf0H3MmM

If there is necromancy in your world, why isnt it custom to burn the dead to prevent their reanimation?

>>97988461
Vindictive ash elementals.

>>97988461
One of the countries for a custom D&D setting is a !Spain which is famous for healing and medical science. Their particular quirk is born a distant tradition where they would decapitate the dead and preserve the head/skull instead of burying the body which would be used as material for other purposes.

This developed in part with the various caste system where poor families had to settle with completely cleaning the skull while nobles could afford special sealed busts that can be enchanted with magic to preserve the head and hair.

This would come up in a scenario where the head of a noble family matriarch is stolen and held for ransome by a rival noble house.

What's the optimal strategy for an empire that has to appease their rival in one front (to balance a smaller rival), while realizing they will inevitable have to fight it in the other front?

>>97988746
Get the two rivals fighting each other.

Whats a good name/naming scheme for a group of important families that want to be taken seriously as nobles, but are not in fact nobility?
The idea is that this city is built around a central university that draws in trade and wealth. The heads of the university itself hold all of the power, but they delegate municipal administrative responsibilities for various tasks out to certain families, usually ones centered on that field of study. Take a prominent geologist and put their family in charge of mining ventures, give this historian responsibility for maintaining the libraries, etc. Over time these responsibilities became hereditary and the families that held the associated power gained influence and wealth. They certainly want to be seen as nobility, and dress and act the part of an upper class, but since the city isn't feudalistic in nature they are not true nobility.
I had originally just thought of them as minor nobles and would call them as such, but I think I can put do something more interesting with them if they don't actually get to call themselves that and are eternally seething about it whenever they have to deal with important people from other lands where nobility is a real thing.
But I'm not sure what to call them instead.

>>97988461
Because the dominant religion believes that in the final days of the world, their god will call upon the bodies to the dead to rise up to defend their descendants and loved ones from the calamity and fight the final battle on their behalf.

Necromancy is considered an improper art because what it is doing is waking the dead up early, before their appointed time. The church considers it blasphemy, the state usually considers it a crime but is much more lax about it than the church is. The state thus takes in the bodies of the dead to be interred for the final battle in state run catacombs, and on more than one occasion have used necromancers to raise those dead to fight for them in war during times of desperation. The church is very, very unhappy when they do this and it tends to set people off worrying that the end of the world is nigh.

>>97989254

This. Also, get allies that can fuck up the rival ASAP.

>>97988483
but why do they keep the heads?

>>97989292
Patricians?

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>>97990772
It's part of an interconnected back story that goes back to !Egypt. The slaves of !Egypt scattered around the world and took parts of the knowledge that came from it to various parts of the world and those rituals originally came from the practices of removing and grafting heads onto new bodies but the slaves only participated in parts of the process without being told why it was done.

So the !Spanish have distant ancestry with the !Egyptians but much of that history is lost to time.

>>97988160
Ah, a really stupid troll.
Got it.
Nah, you can fuck off. Your input isn't needed in this thread.

>>97988075
>sandfry the fries
That shit is awful and should only be used on foods that you can wash off/scrubbed after cooking.

I am with the other dude that brought up using lard. It's what they would have used in the actual medieval world, and worldbuilding wise only requires pig farming to be a thing.

>>97990786
were the grafted heads still alive?

>>97988461
Necromancy in my world is more literal to the old meaning of the word and is a lost art of divination using the aid of ancestor spirits. Very few families/clans remain that even have ancestor spirits so the practice is extremely rare and the art nearly completely dead even though somewhat well documented.

People generally cremate bodies because of different reasons like the water table being really high so burial is wildly impractical.
Or space being at a premium since settlements have to be contained within heavily fortified walls.
Or even early in the setting's history people realized that the smell of a dead body would attract beast and monsters alike, but beast feared even the smell of smoke and actively avoided fire, and back then monsters materialized less often. So again cremation was practical.

Meanwhile Sun and Earth god and goddess worship is the most common and widespread religion in the setting, at least among humans. It is religious custom that the flames consuming the body returns the sun god's part back to him for it to be recycled, and the ashes being ritually returned to the earth also returns the goddesses portion to her to be recycled. So a properly cremated body is reincarnated much faster. Otherwise one must wait for their body to fully break down before they can be reincarnated according to the main branches of the faith.

>>97986236
> what would be the implications of an oil-bearing plant thats so ludicrously productive that even non-industrial societies can have enough surplus of oil [...]
Funnily enough my setting has such a plant because I wanted the conditions of preindustrialzation and limited use of combustion engines without access to fossil fuels. So a fictional high oil yielding plant became the bases of a biodiesel. In my settings case the was the barrel palm. A fictional plant that is a very stout short palm tree that can be tapped, only instead of sap it drips oil. The oil is then processed and used both as lamp oil and fuel oil. It isn't really used in cooking though.
Normal palm oil is also produced since a particular city state intentionally holds a near monopoly on barrel palm production.

Meanwhile norther regions have experimented and started using rapeseed oil which provides for their lamp oil needs, but isn't enough yet to fully be energy independent when it comes to fuel oil.

The lone fossil fuel exception is that coal is used to a small degree in limited applications. Ironically, before combustion engines to run pumps it was far too difficult to be worth the effort to try and mine coal in my setting. Since for "reasons" most coal is below the water table everywhere it appears. The ground is very waterlogged, and most metal is mined from open pit and limited strip mining of surface deposits. Metal is very valuable so is worth the effort. Coal they don't know the full potential of, besides it creating some useful chemical compounds and it being useful in simple blast furnaces when other fuels are in limited supply. Though it's not particularly liked for the application in the furnaces due to impurities and limited supply. Purifying charcoal through arcane synthesis is vastly preferred for blast furnaces. Especially since mass synthesis has been rediscovered not to long ago.

>>97986236
pretty sure that olives were exactly like you describe them, it was a huge industry in the roman empire

>>97986575
>>97991256
really? I was always told olive oil was fairly expensive in those days since olive trees grow so slowly and the oil was competing with oil lamps for use
unless I am mistaken and olive oil really was a base ingredient

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>>97991645
https://www.unrv.com/economy/olives-and-olive-oil.php
Price depends on the quality apparently, they also used this shit for literally everything

I really want to include beverages fairly similar to nut and oat milks but don't want to call them milk.
Thought about calling it drinking gruel but that sounds unpleasant and is technically inaccurate.
I all don't want to call it nut drink or liquid nut for reasons that should be obvious.

Trying to pick your playable race lineup is impossible

>>97991995
They need to get some liquid nut down their throats

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>>97990837
No. They were used to construct undead servitors who didn't need to eat, sleep, or breath to maintain the Corridors (portal/pocket dimensions) that connected the world to the Moon where the !Egyptians actually lived while traveling between the various great temples they made around the world.

When they fucked around and found out by making a crack that allowed energy from the Far Plane to leak in, many of those Corridors became abandoned and the slaves who made them, along with most of pre history mortals, had their memories scrambled where they couldn't be killed in an attempt to contain the cause of the Far Plane leak.

Most history just remembers stories of a great catastrophe and the noble sacrifice of old gods to stop evil from invading the world and many civilizations who still lived in and around the old ruins just repurposed them.

>>97991645
olive trees grow slowly but they are probably one of the most resilient and they need very little tending to.
They require no water other than rainwater to sustain themselves and they just need some pruning to their offshoots and picking when the time is right.
The reason romans are said to not have deforested the entire mediterranean is because they were burning olive oil byproducts for heating. the lowest quality oil would go into lamps and the rest would go into cooking and it was included in pretty much everything they ate as long as you werent dirt poor of course.
But your dirt poor wouldnt be able to afford market stalls food in late medieval england either.

No source of oil was ever actually cheap in pre-modern times. Well this goes for all food back then where most of ones earning would go towards feeding themselves.

Tldr you would have to make concessions of unrealistic standards to the cost of food if you want cheap fast food in every corner whether it is deep fried or not

>>97990820
When sand is hot it doesn't stick. That is why sandfrying rice and popcorn works.

>>97992437
I have had it.
It's really fucking bad and doesn't actually work if you don't want sand in your food.

How TF do you keep sand out of a clambake?
We got anyone from New England here?

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>>97992817
Mostly by not being retarded and by being careful, you magoo.

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>>97992306
On the subject of fast food for peasants, there's a joke preserved on a 1st century Roman tombstone, or an advertisement for an inn, or possibly both, discovered in Isernia situated next to a well-traveled road. For context, a typical wage was 16 asses a day during the reign of Tiberius.

>Lucius Calidius Eroticus made [this monument] for himself and Fannia Voluptas while still alive.
>Innkeeper! Let’s settle the accounts!
>You’ve had a measure of wine, bread: one as. For the stew, two asses.
>Agreed.
>For the girl, eight asses.
>That works for me too.
>Hay for the mule, two asses.
>That bloody mule will be the ruin of me!

>>97991995
Juice?
>>97988746
Become a primary supplier necesarry to maintain their military, so you can cut them off when you need to fight them.

>>97992817
So it's covered with wet canvas or burlap, not buried, like a pit roast?
That makes more sense.

>>97988461
>burning is pretty common, but mostly for people wanting to save the cost of burial space, as the population is very high as is the number of adults dying violently regularly.
>Necromancy is primarily about divination to use dead bodies to gain information, ash works for it too, so cremation doesen't fully prevent it.
>Reanimation of dead does happen, but mostly as result of monsters or dark magic corrupting corpses over time, also naturally at places of great misfortune and violent death.
>Crementation or not, if there is time to prepare the dead it is is common to have priests do the last rites on a corpse to prevent its rise as undead. Likewise rituals are used to regularly purify/cleanse places like Graveyards, Tombs and places of great tragedy to prevent further misfortune.
>Someone or something that does want to reanimate the dead would probably target travelers anyway and prevent the body being recovered, in the worst cases they'd destroy entire settlements and drive out the survivors so nobody can take care of the dead.

There any good resources on the ancient egyptian afterlife/their spiritual stuff? I've heard stuff about how of course the bodies were burried with stuff they need on the afterlife but also doing stuff to the corpse after death affects them in the afterlife and such, so I wanted to look deeper into that because it feels like it could have cool implications for necromance.

>>97995940
As it happens, the Egyptian Book of the Dead is pretty much exactly what you describe and its a primary source. Translations of it should be readily available online.

>>97994647
in iceland they bury bread in volcanic sand and bake it, the sand just brushes off

>>97988461
The custom is to burn people if they can't afford a sky burial.

>>97991995
If I remember correctly almond milk was somewhat common in many areas of Europe during the middle ages, and called almond milk. I mean you could slightly modify it and then call it something else but then you might be bumping into "calling a rabbit a smeerp" worldbuilding problem.

>>97991995
If you don't want to call it milk, you could use

>Whey/Nut-whey
>Must/Nutmeat Must
>Leche
>Legume Juice
>Vegan Squirt

>>97997414
Must?

>>97997436
Must is fresh-pressed grape juice.

>>97997544
Ah. I was unaware of the term, so learned something new today.
Thanks.

>>97933880
I meant to ask this yesterday, but what does Star Wars do right in terms of world-building that you can apply to your own creations, and what are its failings that you can learn from?

>>97999467
Something I noticed worth considering:

In the original Star Wars trilogy and its prequels, the situation is very simple but we have a solid grasp of it. The title scroll does a lot of work, painting things in broad terms up front that uses blunt, in your face titles and terms to tell you what you need to know. The GALACTIC EMPIRE rules the galaxy. What do we know about these guys? Well, they are an empire that spans the whole galaxy. Right there in the name. The REBEL ALLIANCE is fighting back against them, and we likewise can figure out what their deal is just from their name. We immediately have general understanding of the state of the galaxy and can easily surmise whats going on elsewhere in the galaxy, even in places we have never seen and know nothing about. It's an extremely efficient delivery of information and context, then the rest of the movie adds detail organically.

Now, think about the Sequel trilogy. We spent three movies on this shit. What actually IS the First Order? How big of a deal are they? Because in the TFA it seems like there have exactly 1 star destroyer and a wonder-weapon secret base to park it at, and a week later in TLJ they have fleets and super-dreadnaughts out the ass. What is the state of the galaxy at large? The New Republic was apparently in charge for the first movie, but we never SEE it or anything related to it before they all get wiped out offscreen in one shot (we are told. Again, we don't actually see anything happen). But two whole movies happen after that! Whats going on in the galaxy after the New Republic gets decapitated? Is anyone doing anything? Is anyone in charge? We take two steps away from Rey and Finn in any direction and we immediately step into an absolute vacuum of information where we know NOTHING. Its basically impossible to infer anything about the setting in the Sequel era.

The older movies presented a setting that felt like it existed beyond the scope of the camera, the sequels did not.

>>97999467
>does right
Gestural world building. When the term 'clone wars' is first used its ominous, a past conflict of unknown but significant importance. 'No disintegrations' automatically creates character history and bad-assery.
Stealing from irl conflicts and making it a bit scifi. Hoth is ww1 trench fights but in space snow.
All the spaceship battles in the original three are ww2 pacific theatre stuff in space. Take a thing that's already cool and simple, add a bit of scifi, keep the cool parts don't fuck with it too much, keeps it familiar enough to understand and still excite the imagination.
Good vs Evil. Its simple, its a simple story. Do that on a backdrop for a space opera.
Cool aliens. Its scifi, have cool aliens in the background doing things. Living life.
>does wrong
All the series that elaborate on the gestural world building. Its better as background, the actual rendition of the clone wars is necessarily more lame than any 12 year old's imagination of what it could be. Let the larger than life stuff stay larger than life.
Humanizing the aliens. Keep them distinct and strange, making them standins for short round makes them less fanatical.
Evil is more threatening when its competent. The best of the original three is Empire, because they're a credible threat there. AnH and RotJ the Empire is varying degrees of incompetent to let Good win. Its lame and takes away from the hard earned victory.

>>97999467

I think it's difficult because what it does right is very, very much cinematographic and I have problems thinking it can be done with words. Hell, I don't think it'd be easy doing it now in visual format (yes, the good stuff is in the old movies, don't even think about the newer ones).

Take the ww2 thing which >>97999750 refers to. In terms of actual battles, it's ridicolous, and not even particulary on point as a sequence of events. What fucking battle had a fighter destroy... I don't know, the equivalent of the Yamato by doing cool maneuvers? Where are the iconic battles (battle for britain, stalingrad, pearl harbour, even the battle for the atlantic and sub action)?

But: visually, you get the idea without even thinking. The big "real" war of evil vs good, from the viewpoint of hotshot psuedo-ww2 pilots. Or the tanks in russia in Hoth. It's there, without aping the conflict, just by visual clues - a fairy tales version of ww2 and especially ww2 movies.
(interestingly Lucas tried to something akin to that in the sequels with peplums, but yeah, shit didn't go well)

I think the actual SWs greatness in "worldbuilding" is mostly shit like that, not in the kiddie stuff (which works perfectly, mind you, but good vs evil with vaguely oriental action wizards spouting new age nonsense is hardly worldbuilding). Think of Tattoine set: it does feel lived in, a real house in bumfuck nowhere, for a teenager with a mechanical bent, with a real seedy bar (plus the aliens, it newer forgets it's a fairy tale). Now watch 60-70s scifi and the pristine, artificial environments they used: those don't feel alive (and no one cared). It's often the saving grace in very basic stories.

I don't think you can really take a direct hint from that, honestly. Maybe try to describe environments with shit on background, but nothing more.

>>97936368
Therefore, we could counter the problems of inhabiting low gravity planets by jumping repeatedly in weighted suits, thus increasing the effective gravitational force on us, thus tricking our bones into thinking we are on earth so that our bones don't kill us for getting overambitious.

>>98001017
I don't think it works like that

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I'm sure this has been done already so anyone here has examples/sources of "The united states as a fantasy setting"? I got bitten by the idea recently but I'm sure somebody has done it better already.

>>98001017
You do understand that our experiences of microgravity being an issue for human bones basically all take place in approximately 0.88g? The ISS's apogee is 422km over Earth, which means that almost all of Earth's gravity is still acting on them, it's just in free fall.

>>98002041
Isn't this distinction irrelevant from a musculoskeletal perspective? Likewise, whether you're stood on earth or on a spaceship accelerating at 1g in the middle of the cosmic void, one relative g is still 1g.

>>98001017

Worth mentioning that osteoporosis and muscle damage are just two of frefall/low grav problems

>>98002060
Yes, it is, which is another example of how >>98001017 / >>97935777 is retarded. He thinks there's something magical about gravitational force versus pseudo-gravity from acceleration, which is disproven by how we actually know about microgravity causing bone loss.

If gravity - not acceleration - actually was necessary for human bodies, the longest a human being has ever been <0.7g was ~twelve days (Apollo 17), so we probably wouldn't know.

>>97999694
It's crazy how all of this stuff was only talked about in interviews and like 3 books before Disney abandoned the entire concept of building spinoffs around the sequel films. And the interviews around the first film were all
>What if the Nazis got to Argentina and rebuilt their power?
which the Story Group allowed to become
>What if the First Order not only had the biggest fleet in the galaxy after everyone else disarmed but hundreds of planet-conquering starships
>And then what if the Sith had another fleet of THOUSANDS of Star Destroyers with Death Star superlasers

>>98002293
why the fuck would anyone disarm in star wars to begin with, there endless pirates, smugglers and other threats beyond the empire/remnants even with the EU getting axed by disney. everything about the sequels is just complete dogshit retardation from everyone involved, I fucking hate disney

>>98002320
>why the fuck would anyone disarm in star wars to begin with
real world subtext of rapid disarmament after a war, because people choose to go to peace

>but it doesnt make sense in-universe
stop using star wars as the basis for your worldbuilding

>>98002320
The New Republic demanded a monopoly on violence in order to maintain the peace. They confiscated everyone's weapons everywhere they could.

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>>98001493
>better
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
The nearest I can think of is Pathfinder and I don't think that should discourage you.
I have one in my iron age setting, which is specifically a blend of the CSA and ancient Thessaly. Really excellent cavalry, textiles, and culture but built on top of brutal slave economy with almost all power concentrated in the hands of the plantation elite. Also extremely pietistic, with their brand of paganism serving as one of the glues that keeps their League (IE confederacy) together. They have a President (The Tagus), separation of powers, legitimately free and fair elections on both the local and federal level (albeit with only landowners being citizens) and even an obsession with eagles, a famous cattle industry (and the setting's equivalent of cowboys) and a reputation for always being armed (even the peasants) and either being extremely wealthy and refined aristocrats or loud, arrogant and ignorant.
As a bonus they are bordered by a very stubbornly abolitionist empire (in theory because their Sun God forbids it but un practice because in the past their own slaveholding elite formed a dangerous power bloc that one of the prior Emperors beat into submission during a succession crisis) who is their main link to sea trade. There's an underground railroad of sorts where coyotes sneak runaway slaves over to the Empire. Border skirmishes are frequent as slave catchers chase the runaways far into the border marches and sometimes shenanigans ensue.
Then to the south there is another magocratic Empire which is actively implementing necromancy as a solution to slave labor, re-purposing their slaves as more status symbols / human pets than anything.
It's been a fun time.

>>98001493
This is literally my setting
Idk what to say about it, exempt it's meant to emphasize vast expanses and endless opportunity
The local sheriff matters far more than any king
In fact, there are no kings at all. The setting is mostly self-sufficient city-states with vast stretches of untamed wilderness in between.

>>98002842
>I wouldn't be so sure about that.
Explain
>The nearest I can think of is Pathfinder and I don't think that should discourage you.
I think I remember that source book but not any details from it.
>>98003131
It sounds like you have the great plains but do you have the deserts or the swamps?

>want to make my own races
>dont want to make elves/dwarves/orcs
>dont want to make furries
>dont want to make aliens
>if i make anything at this point it is going to be so weird and foreign and esoteric that nobody will be interested
pain

>>98001493
Deadlands is close enough unless you want actual fantasy and not weird west.
I did a "Shadowrun but 19th century" campaign a while back that was fun. Basically wound up being Arcanum though.

>>98003559
If I were you, I would make races that represent something from your own psyche, or the collective psyche. Reference very old and obscure folklore. Use classic Greek Myrmidions instead of dwarfs for example.

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>>98003559
I know exactly what you're talking about man. I'm trying to find that perfect spread.

>>98003559
I think sci-fi is a little better at this and original animals/environments than pure fantasy.
Humanoid enough to be familiar but diffirent enough to be original.

That said using some sort of folklore or concept as a base then extrapolating out helps.

For example in my setting I based one of my races on various big foot and wild man folklore mixed with different flavors of tribal nomadic groups and cultures.
This created something both original yet familiar enough that someone can still grasp the idea in a few sentences.

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>>98003317
>Expalain
What is there to explain, nigga?
The premise / concern in the post I replied to was:
>I'm sure somebody has done it (a fantasy setting based on the USA) better already
The point of my reply was that - on the contrary - there are like two straight examples of an American counterpart culture in fantasy that I can think of, Andoran from Pathfinder and Cygnar in Warmachine.
In my opinion both of these are aggressively mediocre, so you shouldn't assume that whatever take on a fantasy United Sates you want to do will 'have already been done better elsewhere'.

Capisce?

>>98003559
as the creator, a fantasy race should either scare you, make you horny, or expose one of your deepest vulnerabilities.

>>97988461
Pre-modern cremation was expensive, you needed a lot of wood.

>>98003559
just make weird humanoid variants.

>>98003559
Look to JRPGs for inspiration. Those commonly have fantasy races that don't fall into the Tolkein lineup without also becoming aliens.

Granblue, for example, has humans, Harvin (basically halflings, short cutesy races are a frequent include in JRPGS), and then the Erune (animal eared people who have extremely fast metabolism, to the point that they have to design their clothes to give enough exposed skin to keep from overheating) and Draphs (horned bovine-esq people with heavy sexual dimorphism where the men are all 7 ft tall muscular bricks and the women top out at 4 ft tall).

FF14 has Au Ra (people with draconic features like horns, patches of scales, and vestigial tails), Roegadyn (flat-nosed nordic seafarers that are all 6-8 ft tall and swole as fuck but with skin colors that range from 'chalk' to red or green), Viera (swedish rabbit eared people who live for hundreds of years and have a 20:1 female to male population ratio) as nonstandard races, and then a few more conventional options like the lion-people furry race, halflings again, and Elezen which are basically elves if they didn't live much longer than humans but aged super weirdly where they will go for long stretches of time without changing much at all and then age rapidly in about a month until they level off again until their next growth spurt.

I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for, but somewhere in here is probably the sweet spot you are looking for. Nonhuman, nontolkein, but not wildly exotic or alien.

>>98002320
>why the fuck would anyone disarm in star wars to begin with

If anything, the opposite should have happened.

Imagine if at the end of The Force Awakens, when Starkiller Base is ready to fire and all hope seems lost, the sun gets blotted out as a giant shape drops out of Hyperspace and its revealed that the New Republic has built their own Death Star in secret since taking power. Not because they wanted it, but because they knew that some day they would need it whether they wanted it or not.
The Death Star existed. The Empire built it twice. The station designs were leaked to the rebel alliance. The simple fact is that, no matter your opinions on whether or not it should ever have been made, too many people know how to make one now. The genie is out of the bottle on planet-killing battlestations. Sticking your head in the same and pretending that they don't exist won't make it go away and won't save you if someone else builds one.

And, due to their size and armor, an unfortunate truth emerges: the best weapon against something the size of the Death Star, is the plant-cracking firepower of a Death Star.

Which would have been a really great dillemma to have thrown into a Star Wars sequel: once the reveal has happened, how much can you trust the New Republic? Can the 'good guys' still be the good guys if they have their own planet killer and the threat of its use is on the table now?

>>98004827
Hell, in the old EU the fucking HUTTS tried to build their own Death Star. Didn't work since they lacked the resources of the Empire and also cut corners at every step to make it as cheaply as possible, but they still tried.

>>98005130
Yeah. Its just unthinkable that the plans could be as widespread as they must have become and that people wouldn't try to built another one, or at least their own version of it. Even a weapon system thats a cut-down version of the Death Star with only half the firepower output is no joke.

>>98003559

I'd ask myself IF you need races at all. Generally nerds just do them because others did.

>>98006095

That being said I find kinda funny when people feel they need the usual tolkien triad + orcs.
I mean, elves and to an extent hobbits ARE archetypical enough that I can see the point, but orcs and especially dwarves? Orcs can easily be replaced by a shitload of evil races, and drunken beardy smiths are very niche actually.

(this doesn't necessarily mean they are more or less cool, it's just that I hardly see why people making new races would think in THOSE terms)