Thread Question: What are the most common battle injuries in your setting?
What treatments have been developed to deal with such injuries both in the short term and the long term?

>>98027172

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

>>98027627
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/injury

>>98027172

Because most soldiers wear some form of protection, injuries are often concentrated where armor is weakest. Arms and legs are prime targets. Deep slashes often result in severed tendons or "defense wounds" on the forearms. If you aren't wearing a closed-face helm, your face is essentially a target for slashes across the jaw or nose. Being stepped on by a warhorse or falling from one while wearing 50 lbs of gear causes frequent breaks in the femurs and pelvis. Blunt force result in flail chest or punctured lungs, or intracranial hemorrhaging which are almost impossible to treat. When an arrow hit, it often drags bits of dirty wool or linen tunic into the wound. This almost guaranteed a systemic infection. Removing a barbed arrowhead (like a broadhead) often does more damage than the initial strike.

Statistically, you are more likely to die after the battle than during it. Without an understanding of germ theory, even a minor puncture can become fatal within days. A "gut shot" from a sword or spear is a death sentence. The resulting peritonitis (infection of the abdominal lining) causes a slow, agonizing death that even the best barber-surgeon can't stop.

File: 373635607.png (1.36 MB, 1200x1200)

1.36 MB PNG

>>98026956
How do you create believable matriarchal societies, unlike picture related that only functions at all thanks to their goddess meddling? On a related note, what are some plausible biological reasons why a group of humans or a related race would evolve to have females as large as male members, if not more so?

>>98027172

Low-velocity gunshot trauma. Unlike modern high-velocity rounds that can pass cleanly through tissue, muskets fire heavy, soft lead balls. When a .75 caliber lead ball hit a femur, it doesn't just break it; it turns the bone into "shrapnel" within the leg.

Bayonets and long pikes (often 16 feet long) cause deep penetrating trauma to the torso. These were frequently fatal because surgeons had no way to repair internal organ damage or stop deep hemorrhaging. Cavalry charges result in horrific "slashing" wounds to the head, shoulders, and arms. Scalping or the loss of fingers and ears is common in the chaos of a melee.

Artillery isn't just about big solid balls; it is sometimes "case shot" (essentially a giant shotgun shell filled with musket balls or scrap metal). A direct hit from a solid cannonball doesn't leave much to "treat," but glancing blows often result in the complete traumatic amputation of limbs. Cannonballs hitting the ground or stone walls send shards of rock and wood flying, causing blinded eyes and shredded skin. The standard treatment for a shattered limb is amputation. This is done without anesthesia.

File: 2adf85b9637af8240c4c68d3c(...).jpg (71 KB, 743x1000)

71 KB JPG

>>98027807
It depends on what level of society, a clan, a kingdom, or is this some kind of race?

An issue I see with matriarchal societies in terms of writing is that they kind of always come off as some feminist power fantasy or someone's femdom fetish dream. Still, they probably have to be to be believable if you wanna make it so that all the males are at the bottom and can't do anything other than being useless himbos, their only use is breeding and flexing oiled muscles at feasts.

I think the simplest way to make it believable is to let women still rule all the higher positions. But men can climb the hierarchy to middle-management positions without becoming eunuchs, maybe? They have some rights and can live comfortably; it's just that they aren't allowed to hold higher positions of power, maybe besides the military, where experience and veteran status matter more for leadership than just being born a woman

>>98027807
>How do you create believable matriarchal societies, unlike picture related that only functions at all thanks to their goddess meddling?

The key there is to understand why patriarchies outcompeted matriarchies in the first place. Historically matriarchies used to be fairly common in antiquity, but the died out as civilizations became larger. Why?
The answer, as far as well can tell, comes down to risk taking. Put simply, men take not just more risks, but bigger risks. Its not cultural, its biological: higher amounts of testosterone correlates to increased risk taking behavior, because it numbs your brain to thinking about negative consequences as being real. Essentially, men are less likely to worry about the part of fighting a tiger where the tiger fucking disembowels them, because they are too busy thinking about what will happen 'when' they win. Not if, when.
This has remained true into the modern day. You see it play out with both gambling and the stock market: men get easily bamboozled by the promise of big returns and invest in risky shit they really shouldn't.

But, just like the stock market, while most big risks predictably turn into big failures, occasionally someone takes a huge, stupid risk... and wins. Gets absurdly rich doing it by sheer luck. All of the people do did the reasonable thing and planned within their means made at best a modest return, while the guy who invested in some memecoin cryptocurrency made millions of dollars despite it being very stupid.

As civilizations got bigger, larger armies meant you could take larger risks with greater returns, combined with not being a tiny village also meant that a risk failing to pay off could now be survivable instead of an immediate death sentence. Lots of risk taking (read: male driven) civilizations crashed and burned, but the ones that didn't got big enough to start absorbing everyone else.

Tldr: matriarchies failed because they lost to lottery winners when they didn't play at all.

>>98029017
So with that pattern in mind, you need one of two things to be true:

1: The Matriarchy plays by the same risk-taking rules that male run societies do by default, allowing them to stay competitive. Female run societies don't lean in this direction, but that doesn't make it impossible to happen

2: Something about the state of the region/world has made large scale risk taking behavior a losing strategy rather than a winning one. Making big civilization risks doesn't pay out, the people that try it just die. It doesn't matter how many people play the lottery, nobody ever gets a winning number.

>>98027807

Matriarchies don't real, anon. Or to be more precise, full fledged ginecocracies don't, and people think about those when talking about matriarchies.
So just read Gimbutas and riff on those themes, but beware you're aiming at "believable shit" not "actully close enough to real documented matriarchies"


>On a related note, what are some plausible biological reasons why a group of humans or a related race would evolve to have females as large as male members, if not more so?

A shitton of primates have males more or less as large as females, hell there is even a case in which the female is larger. Indeed, we Hominidae and the Cercopithecidae are the expections.
So I would say from a biolocial standpoint you are good, for a given value of "related to humans".

>>98029074

I'll add that speaking about biology you might try to make your race evolve from a "matriarchal" society of intelligent social mammals like elephants or orcas. This is not something primates ever did to my understanding, mind you, but maybe can give you some ideas. Society is probably gonna be pretty alien to us, but still.

>>98027807
>How do you create believable matriarchal societies
Supernatural or biological reasons that explain that they aren't bound by earth human logic.
So having a spider goddess that actively mettle in dark elf affairs does make a matriarchal society believable to me. D&D dark elf society has other issues that make it strain credulity.

That or near complete isolation with zero competition for resources with other groups can sometimes in really rare cases lead to something sort of resembling a matriarchal society.
Themiscyra could be used as a fictional example of this.

>what are some plausible biological reasons why a group of humans or a related race would evolve to have females as large as male members, if not more so?
There are none for humans besides extreme sci-fi stuff like gene splicing, since sexual dimorphism is hard coded on a genetic level and directly related to biochemistry. Mess around too much with that biochemistry and infertility happens far sooner than man sized women. So just embrace artificial causes of such a thing to happen, like super science or magic.

>>98029017
>Historically matriarchies used to be fairly common in antiquity
This is false.
They were so vanishingly rare that there is barely any evidence for any existing at all.
Some historians and archeologist make convincing cases that matriarchal societies never actually existed at all.

As far as the real reason why matriarchies weren't a thing, or were rare and easily out competed, it's because of sexual dimorphism, not because of luck and risk taking. Capacity for use of force and ability to do hard labor are dramatically greater in men than women. A society that can't effectively use force or do hard labor will be outcompeated by a society that can. Also the harshness of nature would destroy any society that isn't strong enough to sustain it's self during bad times.

>>98029950
>As far as the real reason why matriarchies weren't a thing, or were rare and easily out competed, it's because of sexual dimorphism, not because of luck and risk taking. Capacity for use of force and ability to do hard labor are dramatically greater in men than women. A society that can't effectively use force or do hard labor will be outcompeated by a society that can.

I fail to see how this logic holds true in a world where historically it has been old men running kingdoms for most of human history. No one is arguing that all of gender roles in society are reversed under a matriarchy, there are clear and obvious problems with using women as your fighting or labor force. But the physical strength of your leaders matters very little, matters are never decided by sending out your king to wrestle the other guy.

>>98030010
What exactly do you think a matriarchy is?
It isn't about who leads a country top down.
It's about how social structure is arranged from the family level up, especially related to property and inheritance.

Since there are no examples in the real world of a functional matriarchy most arguments are crafted from baseless theory and hypotheticals.
The closes examples in the real world from actual history were deeply dysfunctional, underdeveloped, and had all of the problems I described of not being able to defend themselves or do hard productive labor.

A country having a queen doesn't make it a matriarchy, if that is what you are arguing.

>>98030010
The vast majority of people in any given society are not monarchs, and indeed you did see, for example, the patriarchal medieval European society produce queens.

For normal people in agricultural societies with the plow, the increased upper body strength of men meant that men were more productive than women, since they could produce more calories. This gave the men an excellent relative bargaining position, from which they extracted concessions ("patriarchy") from women.

(With pastoralist societies, patriarchy is instead related to individual capacity for violence, since wealth is highly mobile so it's VERY EASY to go over and kill a guy and steal his cows, but the basic logic is the same: the men are more necessary to the survival of the household than the women, and thus they have a better negotiating position in their society.)

This is why in modern industrial society, where women can easily be as economically productive as men, women are treated as social equals to men: men no longer have the leverage and relative value to the household that they used to.

File: 34b61100ab0dc4233fdad8a20(...).jpg (525 KB, 1200x1500)

525 KB JPG

How do you make beastfolk interesting? And no, I don't mean the furfag furry kind I wanna make that clear

So in my setting, I have humans, got elves and etc etc but I wanted to add something a bit different, so I thought, why not animal folk or beast folk or the Wild-Race as I probably going to label them as, I been thinking of making them the barbarian race along with Orcs, but unlike the Orcs they slowly accepting more of civilised races' way of living and they are the result of warlocks doing reckless magic on animals to make a servant race that escaped into the wilds and slowly becoming their own race and that about it so far

And I might just make them rabbits, because I love rabbits. I once had some as pets as a child (I still miss them)

>>98030368
>How do you make beastfolk interesting?
Give then interesting story lines.

A "folk" being interesting is generally about what they do, not what they are.
As long as you have them doing interesting things in the setting that lead to stories and adventure hooks then they are interesting. It really is that simple when you boil things down.

>>98030368
What do you mean by interesting?

Do you want them to just play a specific role in the setting, like Orcs?

Do you want them to have an internal conflict, like what you're saying about them slowly accepting civilized ways which would lead to conflict between those that want the "old way" versus the new?

Do you just want something that has a backstory people can read and go "oh that's cool" or "oh that's different?"

>>98030368
>rabbits
Rabbits eat their own shit and go out of their way to wallow in piss. The ugly reality of animals is what you should derive their culture from because that's alien and interesting. Not pleasant, not at all, but pleasant isn't very interesting. Cat people would seem pleasant until one grabs you by the neck and drags you off with completely ambiguous intentions because affection and predatory behavior are often very blurred with them. Ignoring these realities is really just what furries do and what makes them furries in my opinion.

File: 1679222253188530.jpg (643 KB, 2000x1067)

643 KB JPG

If I said
>Gnomes are just hairless human chimpanzees, with the muscle strength to match
would it make sense for these gnomes to dominate a Classical environment through their galley-based navy? I'm thinking they would be great rowers and riggers, they would be very efficient marines, and they could dominate the fairly shallow coastal waters.

>>98030368
in my setting i doubled down on the 'beast' part and basically gave most of them poor prehensility despite the man-like intelligence (these beasts are primarily medium-sized, only a few small and large ones)
they set up a caste system: consisting of sages (king-priests/shamans, given to any and all beast born with magical prowess/abilities even if their parents are inept, uninheritable unless their offspring are also magically gifted); warriors (usually predators/carnivores but can be given to any prey that has proven themselves capable in hunts or duels); and laborers (with a layer of specialized laborers that are slightly above the rest of the laborers)
given that there's a small percentage of the population that primarily subsists on the flesh of other creatures, i needed to figure out the logistics of supplying meat to them, therefore i've come up with several things: in the more wild/rural parts they would have dedicated and maintained hunting grounds where food is bountiful and free, as long as you eat it there and not harvest and bring them outside, but at any time a predator can just come up and kill you there; the sick and the elderlies are forced into duels against predators in order to get treatment from the sages; any beast that are lacking man-like intelligence are culled or turned into livestock
i think this is enough for an organized society with a majority of the population tied to lands and such, the lack of prehensility will make education and technological progression harder except for the beasts who gets to have better prehensility

>>98031841
they do practice agriculture, and i think it can be more efficient than human farms depending on how many different types of beasts are employed
beasts of burden that knows what they're actually doing, beasts with natural digging implements, beasts that will eat up any byproducts to help fertilize the soil, beasts that acts as natural scarecrows and those that will eat up pests

>>98030636
worth noting that chipmanzees are not really stronger than humans.
A male chimp has about 1.5 times as much strength as a human male of the same weight, but they're a good deal lighter so it becomes roughly the same.

>>98030368
personally I like it if they're made a good bit distinct from any random humanoid tribe.

Preferably you'd just take the traits of the base animal and then expand upon them in how they'd affect the kind of society they'd build.
Like for example Rabbits live in burrows, so making them live in underground structures would work, or expand upon their nature as prey animals to make them much more averse to conflict, being very situationally aware and flightly, or you could go into the implication of the ways rabbits rapidly reproduce and what effects this would have on a sapient species, like how they avoid uncontrollable overpopulation. Maybe even add some of their mystical associations like how Rabbits are often seen as trickster figures, how their goots are said to bring good luck and how they are associated with fertility(maybe something they can use in agriculture?).

>>98030636

God how I hate "I feel the need to use dnd races but WITH A TWEEEST" ideas.

That being said, I don't think generic "strenght" is t he parameter. Resistance is probably what you would look at.

Also, it's very simplicistic to have them dominate because of athletic feats, altough it might work.

>>98030368

What would they convey? While Watership Down is cool as fuck, I hesitate to get what they would bring to the table as "generic" bipedal bunnies.

Japan seems to like the idea: we have the Viera and the Tabbit from SW. They're not terribly interesting but they have a specific niche.

File: Rolling the Dice.jpg (100 KB, 1066x750)

100 KB JPG

>>98026956
What are some worldbuilding resources that you would use or at least recommend besides the stuff listed in the OP? I found these, mostly random generator links, in another thread, but what would you suggest?
>https://www.rangen.co.uk/world/worldgens.php
>https://perchance.org/world-building-generator
>https://springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/index.html
>https://springhole.net/writing/index.html
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3eLrbP0H0

>>98027807
Biologically, it makes more sense for females to be larger or similar size as males unless there's a specific reason otherwise, because females have a minimum size they must be to successfully give birth, while males can be smaller. That applies more strongly to animals that lay eggs, since the calcium in the eggshells is leached from the mother's bones so a larger female with more bone mass can lay more eggs or have eggs with thicker shells, which is why it's common for birds and reptiles to have females that are larger than males. For most mammals males are larger than females because they compete for mates in ways where larger body size gives an advantage (same also applies to the reptile species where the males compete with each other for mates). For social animals it also probably benefits makes to be larger since they can more easily protect the young and females from predators (biologically there's a stronger imperative for the male to risk itself to protect the female than the other way around, since if the male dies but its offspring survive its genes still get passed on, but if the female dies its offspring will probably die without their mother to take care of them).

I kind of played with this in my setting, where one of the species is relatively androgynous, with males and females having similar size and build. But most of the members of their clade have females that are up to 25 % larger than females, so instead of their males being small and feminine-looking as it might appear to humans, they're actually extremely large compared to most of their closest relatives.

I'm trying to lay out terrains/biomes in a hex map I am making, from which I will then build up ecosystems, place landmarks etc. Does anyone have a recommendation for this, like a comprehensive list of biomes with typical features etc.?

>>98026956
For a sci-fi spacefaring setting that includes a race that bears a striking resemblance to an earth animal:
Do you like their origin to be convergent evolution or an animal elevated by a precursor race?

>>98033543
Convergent evolution. If it was precursors uplifting animals from other planets that just happen to be similar to Earth animals, it's still convergent evolution. And precursors taking animals from Earth and uplifting them might be an interesting plotpoint but I feel that if you're doing that it should be a major plot element so if we're talking in terms of generic SF setting stuff I wouldn't do it.

File: nice South Park.jpg (18 KB, 300x170)

18 KB JPG

>>98032750
>there are biological justifications for having dommy mommies

>>98033543

I'd say it depends on the role. If it's straight golden age scifi aliens, let them be aliens.
If it's more space opera I think I prefer "earthy" aliens, less headaches overall.

>>98033904
I prefer convergent as well. I think in-universe people will have debates about it. And also I recently found out that Traveller did uplifted with the Vargr race.

>>98034552
It's definitely more space opera. Roughly 600 years after a war on earth broke out and reconstruction moved a lot of humans into space. I agree with "earthy" aliens. Rather than designing a whole new biology you can just take something existing and extrapolate how a culture would come about from people who looked like more animal like when compared to humans.

>>98026956
Based on >>98027172’s questions, what do you have to consider when determining what magic can and can’t heal?

File: Sisterhood shardguns.png (296 KB, 830x993)

296 KB PNG

>>98027172
The most common firearms within my setting are shardguns, and thus most combat injuries are wounds inflicted by these weapons.
They essentially fire sort of hardened organic crystals that lacerate and shred flesh even when they just pass trough, and if they happen to fracture or shatter on impact/as they pass trough the target, they often induce even more grievous wounds, embedding shards of themselves into the flesh of their targets. It is akin to being struck by razor sharp hardened glass. These crystals are formed from a highly voatile "ammofluid" which is catalyzed within the firing chambers of the shardguns, that induce this fluid to crystalize within fractions of a second, while producing an explosive byproduct gass which is used to propell these crystals forwards.
Though the lubrication used within the firing barrels of the shardguns often is toxic as well, and thus these shards are coated in toxic compounds, the usual way via which they actually kill their targets is just blood loss due to the laceration they induce.

Because of this, shardgun wounds are quite nasty, and difficult to treat, as they often don't make clean entry and exit wounds and instead tear trough tissues and cause a lot of internal bleeding, especially if the shard shattered/fractured as it passed trough. Treatment of acute shard wounds require potent colagulent agents, disinfectants/neutralizing chemicals, skin patches as well as medical gells to stem the bleeding, sterilize the wound and to induce rapid tissue regeneration around the wound. Long term treatment of such wounds often requires outright surgeries to remove any shards still embedded in the tissues as well as the injection of specialized chemicals that disolve any microshards within the victim's bloodstream/tissues to prevent them from accumulating/potentially causing long term medical issues.

>>98033543
>Do you like their origin to be convergent evolution or an animal elevated by a precursor race?
Convergent evolution. Thylacines ("Tasmanian tigers") look strikingly similar to wolves, despite being separated by over a hundred million years of evolution.

File: 20211021_081643-1.jpg (2.98 MB, 2370x3546)

2.98 MB JPG

>>98027172

Due to the various nature of weaponry that evolved in the century that marked then the event known as Sunfell and the period in-between the dissolution of any form of society, the supposed death of magic and the brief period of resurgence that saw one of the main continent's regions see technological advancement, the brutality of the land now known as the Wildlands (previously Gwyrdlas, namely the region of Herisos) sees for the most wounds caused by bullets and shrapnels, with blunt-based injuries (especially ribs and hips) as a lot more frequent. Scars and missing fingers are mundane, a missing eye or a missing limb sometimes denote someone that fought like an animal amd won... or a coward who sacrificed a piece of themselves to survive.

Magical-based wounds however are rare, the few wizards that wanders the land are usualy rare to sight, and the inhabitants of the Wildlands lost what once was an almost universal base protection against magic, but so do magic users, who's fleeting powers usualy leave their fingers, mouths, eyes and organs scarred each time they cast a spell (as the art of casting has been lost save for a few societies and secretive sects).

Pic related: early sketch of your average wastelanders

>>98035596
That's true. People like to go far out with speculative biology but if you have similar conditions to the original animal it's likely you'll get a similar result.

>>98027807
If you want your humans to otherwise be like humans in real life, and remain plausible, then it is not possible. In such a scenario you could alter your humans in such a way that could justify it, but it would be an artificial mechanism or alteration that would cause it to happen. Reduction in male births, reduction in male size, reduction in testosterone in males, gene modding, etc. You could give females higher testosterone, but left at just that they start to look like men (bone structure, body hair, etc.), which the overwhelming majority of men and women IRL find displeasing.

The easiest answer is to make your matriarchal society nonhuman. Gnolls are the first obvious choice, but it doesn't have to be them. You could easily create reasons for why elves, goblins, orcs, kobolds, and even dwarves could be a matriarchal society. Why? Because they don't exist. However, it is important to remember WHY some people are interested in playing or interacting with certain races, so don't change the core idea of what people like about them too much, or else you risk alienating players from your races for the wrong reasons. Also, it is not necessary - indeed, not recommended - to create a Planet of Hats, so you could justify your matriarchal society of humans being such a way for specific reasons to them. Just be sure to account for as many factors as possible to help reinforce WHY they ended up being different from the rest of their race, such as religion, geography, biology, etc.

File: worldbuilding satire.png (16 KB, 2043x813)

16 KB PNG

>>98033674
Based or cringe?

File: 418_O231.jpg (1.28 MB, 4032x3024)

1.28 MB JPG

>>98035792
I read better strawmen, and read worse. Mediocre.

>>98035306
Magical healing in my setting is pretty complicated and requires special training for all but very weak versions.
One must have very detailed knowledge of the body, detailed knowledge of the condition being treated, it's mechanism of action, a detailed level of knowledge in arcane medicine, and how to effectively apply treatment to a known condition.
Basically if there are gaps in knowledge then someone can't heal the thing effectively using magic.
Arcane medicine is closer to magic assisted surgery than just dumping a potion on something to make it better. There are potions and medications that work a bit like that, but to avoid horrifying or deadly side effects such auto-potions are intentionally super weak and typically used topically. Otherwise the chance of a concoction causing magically enhanced super cancer is high. Meaning that for any serious healing using magic you must use a trained arcane healer. There are exceptions, like people who learn a very narrow range of things like a battlefield medic or trauma team, who just stabilize someone enough to get them to a proper healer. Or Mothers of the earth temple generally being trained in midwifery and fertility related issues including limited arcane medical training in those particular fields. But for most things you are best seeking direct treatment from the magical equivalent of a doctor, aka a arcane healer. That or mundane healing, which is decent and cheap but slow in effect.

In theory someone with perfect knowledge and unlimited resources could heal anything short of death. But no one has perfect knowledge or unlimited resources, not even supernatural beings of the setting.
And no, the gods in the setting are distant, abstract, and literally can't directly single out individuals for special treatment even if they wanted to. It would be like if the sun came down to earth to fix someones bum leg. It would be a world ending disaster since their presence on the planet would obliterated it.

>>98035398
Very interesting.

>>98035651
Crabs are a favorite example of this.

The amount of times things independently evolved to become something similar to a crab is fascinating.

why are orcs so boring? they only come in three fucking flavors

>savage
>noble savage
>green humans

>>98036689
Gameplay wise it means only people who spec into healing skills can do magic instant healing.
Even healing objects/potions require having the proper skill level to use.
Don't have any arcane healing, then you are stuck with patching yourself/team mates up with mundane healing until you can pay a healer in town to permanently fix what is wrong with you.

It also means poison is actually a serious threat since if you can't identify it then you can't heal it. Which has been a plot point several times.

File: tumblr_nkpl1sao221qd1ip7o1_640.jpg (153 KB, 576x861)

153 KB JPG

>>98035306
Physical Empathy is the category of psychic powers that allows a user to interact with living things. They learn how to avoid triggering the immune response of foreign energy and apply it to help affect the body's natural functions. This has helped with things like speeding up recovery times from surgery and also enabled the augmentations and prosthesis to advance.

That said, you can't recover missing limbs or close a gunshot would with it alone and overuse can create an addictive dependence that can prevent body functions from working without it.

The only ones capable of actual regeneration would be the setting's vampires but they are already on a time limit as their bodies naturally decay faster from the very source of their increased vitality and strength without consuming more blood.

>>98036798
Oh, and arcane healers can also use "medicine" to provide buff, support, and debuff spells.
Though lore wise these buffs and the like have side effects since they are basically super drugs. Though it doesn't come up in gameplay.

One of my favorites being the haste + blur drug being basically super meth. The base herb used in it's creation is ephedra, and it's negative effects from long term use are exactly the same as meths only worse.
But short term it's extremely powerful and was used extensively in the last civil war of the magedoms. Which has lead to a small addict population after the war who engage in theft and petty banditry to support their continued habit. As well as a network of black market "healers" who supply the drug despite it being banned for non-military use.

>>98027807
>believable matriarchal societies
You can't unless women hold the physical advantage over men.
As long as men have that, every society is patriarchial. Any supposed "matriarchy" only exists by men's allowance, making it not a real matriarchy.

Matriarchy and patriarchy literary just refer to inheritance and marriage laws. If the woman is the head of the household who inherits, gets the children after a divorce or "owns" the collective family assets its a matriarchy, otherwise its a patriarchy.
For example ancient Rome was a patriarchy under the pater familias, that doesnt mean women couldnt hold power, wealth or influence.
Anything else are just coomer fantasies.

>>98036742
We all eventually RETVRN to crab in the end.

>>98036742
One little background detail in my SF worldbuilding project is that the law or carcinization is recognized as an universal biological principle: on any planet with water and multicellular life, some organism inevitably evolves into something humans would recognize as a crab. Generally this is considered as just the consequence of the crab bodyplan being optimal for the specific ecological niche it fills (for the same reason aquatic organisms on any planet tend to have a streamlined bodyplan that's at least superficially similar to fish), but some fringe religious movements believe it to be a divine sign.

>>98037539
Really cool.

I find it interesting how all life's RNA DNA are right-handed, even when there seem no reason why they couldn't be left-handed. Other biological mollecules are left-handed only. This is known as homochirality. Many mollecules that are useful to life become poisonous or dangerous to normal life if switched. Life requires incredibly precise three-dimensional shapes to function. Enzymes (the "machines" of the cell) are built from left-handed amino acids. If you suddenly swap one amino acid for its right-handed twin, the protein won't fold correctly. The why is debated. It may be a case of the winner takes it all, Polarized Starlight destroyed mirror-live on Earth, r because Weak Nuclear (responsible for beta decay) has a "left-handed" bias which gives one a tiny energetic edge.

>>98037588
I suspect it's most likely that the first organic compounds that formed on Earth just happened to have left-handed chirality and that ended up becoming the basis for organic life. It may very well been coin-flip odds and we just happened to get the left-handed result.
You rarely see the effect of chirality of organic molecules brought up in science fiction, though, despite the fact that as far as we know life evolving with right-handed aminoacids should be equally possible as with left-handed ones. Mass Effect has some of the aliens have dextro-aminoacids, but it's a minor background detail that doesn't really amount to anything beyond a mention that their food would be poisonous to humans and other species with left-handed chirality, and vice versa. IIRC in one of Alastair Reynolds' books it's mentioned that native life on the planet part of the story takes base has right-handed chirality so none of the native plants or animals are edible to humans.

>>98037614

I'm not so sure. Experiments in recreating the primordial soup show a 50/50 split racemic mixture. The reason why life favour one over the other is not clear. Either half the molecules got eliminated through some process, like a supernova, or the weak nuclear force gives it a tiny edge over the other over geological scales. It is important because the mirror molecules often disrupt biological mechanisms.

What are some reasons that a small island chain would be valuable enough to seize, in a roughly WWII era civilization? I don't want to do oil or rubber, that's too obvious.

File: Grand_Village_of_Firnils.jpg (576 KB, 2048x2048)

576 KB JPG

There must be some kind of worldbuilding guide, or checklist, to populating a settlement. Some simple list that makes the scale of the project easier to manage. I need to do a lot of that now that the party's travelling again. Any good ones out there? Picrel.

>>98038315
Strategic importance? Say, the island chains of the pacific protecting china, or Hawaii as the United States' farthest outpost and refueling station. Or (prior to the haber bosch process) bat guano was one of the most expensive substances on earth.

>>98030636
Not necessarily, the seas will be dominated by land-based nations (often agricultural powerhouses) that can supply the crews of their manpower-hungry fleets with 1 kg of grain and 4 liters of water per man per day. If a calm beach with a freshwater spring nearby isn't available, as it often isn't during an active war, your galleys will need a harbor in a walled city (either allied or your own) at intervals of no more than a few hundred km (a few days' journey) for provisions.

It takes about ten days for a galley to journey from Genoa to the Strait of Messina, a distance of some 1000 km along the west coast of Italy, and that's with the prevailing NW wind helping you. The average daily journey of a galley when you can't rely on wind is closer to 80 km. Noticeably higher speeds can be reached by hand-picked expert crews and more lightly built messenger ships that don't expect to fight when they reach their destination. The Athenian navy at its peak of 400 triremes only had 10 such fast galleys.

A 40 m long Athenian trireme (the fastest human galley configuration possible) of 200 men weighs some 40 tons in battle. With its crew eating 200 kg of barley biscuit and drinking 800+ kg of water a day (mixed with wine to keep morale up), it's suddenly 10% heavier if it needs to stock an extra 4 days' rations (~4 tons) because it can't rely on finding freshwater either because no shore is safe, or it's attempting to cross the sea.

As for chimp-sized gnomish crews, I'd assume they'd prefer larger crew sizes and configurations with multiple gnomes per oar (perhaps a two-banked quinquireme or hexareme, 2+2 and 3+3?). The limiting factor of galley construction is the length of timber the tallest trees in a pine forest situated near a river can provide. The Greek trireme with an outrigger maximises muscle per meter of length while keeping the most slender possible profile to minimize friction with water.

File: gnomes and owl bigpic goodart.jpg (536 KB, 1280x1600)

536 KB JPG

>>98030636
Could you at LEAST make it Dwarves? At least sailing dwarf clans and them being muscle manlets have some precedent.

Gnomes are the "little people of the forest who disappear as soon as you stop looking at them" fantasy archetype. They're the "fae" race, basically as close as you can get to a playable fairy without the issue of literally having a Tinkerbell-sized party member. They do not fit a muscular or age of sail vibe at all. Hell even making them a bronze age "Sea People" version of goblins would be better. It's just terrible.

>>98038382
>Strategic importance?
yes. I'm inventing a setting wholesale, but the action we see is limited to a small theatre in a worldwide war. So, I want something that feels like it's important, and worth fighting for, but you also have the feeling that you're on the margins of the real action (So that I can keep unit and fleet sizes to a small-to-medium scale.)
Since the actual interactive part of the setting is entirely this small region, just a handful of islands, the details of the wider conflict are to be entirely built around it. That is to say, I'm open to all ideas.

File: Smeevils.jpg (370 KB, 1600x1003)

370 KB JPG

>Dota 2's setting
>Some incredible creature design and intriguing lore/worldbuilding
>Almost zero online resources and it's a complete afterthought only padded out for cosmetic slop and Artifact cardslop
Actually pisses me off. Where's the TTRPG supplement?

>>98038382
Interesting. I can point out generators, guides and roll tables, but I don't think any of them is quite what you want.

https://www.kassoon.com/dnd/town-generator/

https://og.myth-weavers.com/generate_town.php?do=town?do=town

https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

https://cchogan.com/the-fantasy-town/

https://rollforfantasy.com/guides/city-creation.php

https://rollforfantasy.com/tools/population-generator.php

https://rollforfantasy.com/tools/town-creator.php

https://thecollaborativegamer.wordpress.com/towns/a-system-for-creating-fantasy-villages-towns-and-cities/