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.

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>>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.

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>>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.

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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.

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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.

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>>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.

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>>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?

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>>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.

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>>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.

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>>98033674
Based or cringe?

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>>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.

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>>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.

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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.

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>>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.

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>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/

>>98038787
I explained myself poorly, but I found something that helped me get going. It leaves the particulars of the quest design up to me.
www.thedailydungeonmaster.com/1-15-2025/how-to-dm-building-a-d-d-town-a-step-by-step-guide

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>>98038315
>>98038642
-Increase your oceanic jurisdiction, pic related.

-Grow valuable crops that your mainland can't support, like sugarcane, hemp, chinchona.

-The endemic biome has, or might have, medical applications. It might be a plant, it might be a fish within the local reefs.

-Your rival(s) wants it. You might not know why, but if they want it, there must be a reason right? No way they are being stupid or spreading misinformation.

-Your nation simply needs fishing areas. Might be a chronic lack of farming/herding land, like Japan, or a new tragedy affecting your cattle/arable lands, like the Dust Bowl during the 30s.

-It's close enough to your rival's trading route. You can watch, recon, maybe even raid or mine if needed.

>>98038382

Are we talking professions or structures? Both?

>>98038382

https://ia601202.us.archive.org/4/items/tgReferencesfolder/Town%20-%20A%20City%20Dweller%27s%20Look%20At%2013th-15th%20Century%20Europe.pdf

This is probably a good point for real (if not scholarly) references in a middles age setting.

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>>98026956
On making a sentient alien race.
How do you make it truly "alien"?
Like, on this video
https://youtu.be/9dGZju583QA
Even though it look nothing like human, everything about that alien works like human, to the point of grooming habbit. It's just use different approach to reach what a human would do if it have a body of spider.

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>>98037539
>Generally this is considered as just the consequence of the crab bodyplan being optimal for the specific ecological niche it fills, but some fringe religious movements believe it to be a divine sign.
Boy, these people sure do sound cancerous to be around!

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>>98040851

>>98030063
>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.
Women also tended the field. In fact, they did a lot of the mind numbing labor, even hard labor, just not the hardest (nor defense). This also paired with hypergamy. They were willing to show how hard they could work (such as transporting water in big ass jugs over their heads) as to have a better chance with a higher status male. The real bargaining chip of men is protection and risk taking (such as large game instead of, for example, opportunistically catching a rabbit or rat while collecting fruit or farming).
>This is why in modern industrial society, where women can easily be as economically productive as men
Not true. Men still dominate the most competitive REAL jobs (which involve autistic topics which women tend to find little interest in, risk taking and/or right-tail skewed performance in a world where greater male variability holds). So I would say that no, at least not "easily".

>>98041345
>Women also tended the field.
Yes, and in the societies where they didn't use the plow, and thus women's agricultural productivity was similar to men, women had a relatively high social status.

>Men still dominate the most competitive REAL jobs (which involve autistic topics which women tend to find little interest in, risk taking and/or right-tail skewed performance in a world where greater male variability holds).
The most competitive "REAL" jobs, unlike the fake jobs we just pay women money for as a big jape. Nurses aren't doing a REAL job, hospitals just pay them for fun. Teachers aren't doing a REAL job, parents just pay them for fun. Such a fucking stupid sentence it makes me wonder if I should even waste time addressing your other point.

Women who don't have kids make 93-96% of what men make, and thus, should be expected to be similarly productive.

>>98041383
>Women who don't have kids make 93-96% of what men make
More women than men have kids, as shown by out mDNA and Y-DNA variability (on average, 2 women for each man, with the peak difference being during early agriculture where the difference jumped up to 17 to 1 in favor of women).
>and thus, should be expected to be similarly productive.
In an unfucked economy, sure. In one that is artificially propped up and meddled with constantly, no. Unless you think the state is incredibly efficient per dollar when it comes to delivering goods and services (it isn't).

>>98041402
>More women than men have kids, as shown by out mDNA and Y-DNA variability (on average, 2 women for each man, with the peak difference being during early agriculture where the difference jumped up to 17 to 1 in favor of women).
Women who choose to have kids then choose to spend some of their time and effort on raising those children, which reduces their productivity in pure GDP terms but does not reflect reduced bargaining power in social relations (since they could have instead remained part of the work force).

>In an unfucked economy, sure. In one that is artificially propped up and meddled with constantly, no. Unless you think the state is incredibly efficient per dollar when it comes to delivering goods and services (it isn't).
Did you know there are private hospitals and schools and those ALSO heavily employ women?

>>98041415
>Women who choose to have kids then choose to spend some of their time and effort on raising those children, which reduces their productivity in pure GDP terms but does not reflect reduced bargaining power in social relations (since they could have instead remained part of the work force).
Yeah, I do not disagree with that. That is a good thing all things considered. I was contesting the productivity claim. Also, it is not just about choice, but also hypergamy and the impact it has (along with ohter factors) on gender differences in historical reproductive success.
>Did you know there are private hospitals and schools and those ALSO heavily employ women?
Yeah, and a lot of them have also seen an explosion in paper pushing (or worse) positions. I could fire 90% of HR in most companies and, without external influence (such as from the FED's favorite: Blackrock, for example), it would have zero impact on productivity.

The Necro-Civic Schism: Sovereignty, Utilitarianism, and the Post-Mortal Destiny

To comprehend the catastrophic civil war that has fractured this civilization, one must first discard some moral frameworks surrounding the animation of the dead. In this society, there is no debate regarding whether necromancy should exist. The practice is lawful, culturally integrated, spiritually theorized, economically essential, and politically unavoidable. The dead are not cast out into the shadows, nor do they fall under the exclusive purview of rogue magic users or cults. They remain a vital component of inheritance, agricultural labor, warfare, family continuity, architectural engineering, religion, and statecraft.
The civil war begins because the unrestricted mastery of necromancy eventually forces an unavoidable question. That question concerns the rightful destiny of the dead. This conflict involves not merely the physical corpse, but the remembered identity, the family claim, the civic duty, the military necessity, the spiritual trajectory, and the technological possibility of true restoration. When a society possesses the capacity to indefinitely suspend biological death, citizenship must be restructured.

The two great factions of this civilization answer this question with mutually exclusive philosophies:

The dark-coded faction argues that the dead are a common and civic resource. They maintain that death remains a real and final threshold for the individual soul, but nothing dead should be wasted. The Corpse-State must harvest the remains for the collective good, prioritizing efficiency and perpetual utility above all else.

The light-coded faction argues that the dead are latent kin. They believe death is a temporary interruption that should be overcome through family devotion, high-fidelity restoration, and unbroken lineage. The Ancestral House must retrieve and elevate its own, ensuring that the legacy of the bloodline transcends mortal limitations.

>>98041592
This ideological divide makes the war not a binary conflict between necromancy and anti-necromancy, but a devastating civil war between two competing necromantic futures. One side preserves death as absolute disposability, while the other side attempts to banish death entirely through aristocratic ancestry. One side turns the grave into a warehouse and a military armory. The other turns the grave into a family archive waiting to awaken. Both factions are deeply sincere in their beliefs, both are horrifying in their execution, and both believe the other has fundamentally betrayed the dead.

The Shared Necromantic Infrastructure

Before dividing the factions by ideology, the shared background of this world establishes the stakes of the conflict.

This civilization is built upon public corpse registries, family crypts endowed with stringent legal protections, sprawling necromantic academies, and battlefield recovery guilds whose authority rivals that of the military command. The legal code is dense with preservation laws, tax categories for various tiers of undead labor, and complex heirship rules for restored relatives. Insurance systems exist to guarantee posthumous treatment, funding an entire technocratic class of funerary engineers, bone-artisans, memory-binders, spirit-scribes, and embalming mathematicians.

The integration of necromancy into daily life is absolute. Entire towns operate on localized necromantic contracts where the living citizens lead peaceful and prosperous lives unburdened by famine or hard labor. In exchange for the protective administration of a lich or a guild of necromancers, the citizens sign post-mortal labor contracts, agreeing to be reanimated as skeletons for a fixed term to work the fields, herd cattle, and maintain infrastructure for the benefit of their living descendants.

>>98041440
>Yeah, and a lot of them have also seen an explosion in paper pushing (or worse) positions. I could fire 90% of HR in most companies and, without external influence (such as from the FED's favorite: Blackrock, for example), it would have zero impact on productivity.
No, you couldn't. HR performs valuable functions in the company, that's why all the companies use it. Most importantly, it reduces employee turnover, which is extremely expensive.

>>98041602
Taxonomy of Undeath

The factions disagree vehemently because undeath is not a monolith. It exists on a spectrum of cognitive, biological, and spiritual fidelity. The categorization of these states dictates the socio-economic and military application of the remains.

The lowest tier is corpse-stock, which consists of low-grade animated bodies with minimal cognition. These are utilized for mass labor, infantry, hauling, and hazardous work. The dark faction utilizes them heavily, while the light faction strictly avoids human corpse-stock to prevent the desecration of human dignity.

The next tier encompasses basic animated laborers, which includes both zombies and skeletons. These are fundamentally the exact same category of undead. The difference between a zombie and a skeleton relies entirely on the specific application, technique, and magic required for their creation. Zombies retain their flesh and are often used for brute force or frontline military efficiency by the dark faction. Skeletons are simply the sterilized version of this same magic, stripped of flesh to prevent disease transmission, making them highly efficient for long-term agricultural and manual labor. The light faction condemns this entire tier as a tragic reduction of life.

Thralls represent a more complex middle ground. They are semi-autonomous undead servants capable of speech, memory retrieval, and mimicking personality. They are valued as pseudo-citizens and administrators by the dark faction, but they are suspected of being blasphemous puppets by the light faction.

Animal revenants include reanimated beasts of burden, cavalry mounts, and heraldic animals. They are extensively utilized by the light faction to preserve human dignity while maintaining practical necromantic infrastructure, allowing human remains to be reserved for higher purposes.

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>>98041643
High-fidelity restored undead operate with total cognitive autonomy, complete agency, will, technique, and identity. Beloved revenants, such as restored spouses or heirs returned through immense care and emotional anchoring, are simply a special case of this high-fidelity tier. Both possess perfect cognitive fidelity. They are not merely animated matter, but sacred companions and deeply contested metaphysical entities. These restorations are often incredibly overpowered, especially if the deceased was noble or wealthy in life. Because of this immense power, necromancers rarely leave their own safety to chance. Most "one-man army" resurrections include strict necromantic protections for the creator, which can manifest as an unbreakable mental block or a selective force field tuned to the undead's specific magical signature. This forces any renegade undead with a vendetta to get highly creative to harm their former masters.

Finally, ancestral powers are ancient family dead awakened to serve as dynastic guardians, judges, or patrons. This tier represents the long-term civilizational dream of the light faction, establishing a multi-generational fortress against oblivion.

>>98041655
The Dark-Coded Faction: The Corpse-State and Total Utility

The dark faction is not a single, monolithic ideology, but a coalition of three compatible, yet tension-filled programs. These include the Corpse-State, the Puppet-Citizen Regime, and the Necromantic War-Economy. These programs are unified by a strict reliance on utilitarian extraction.

The Ideology of the Corpse-State

The Corpse-State treats death as a simple administrative conversion. In life, a person is a citizen with agency. In death, the body becomes a resource belonging to the realm, the army, or the civic order. The ideal is total posthumous utility. This ideology sounds relentlessly civic-minded, adopting a rhetoric of ultimate egalitarianism. Proponents argue that since the dead served in life, they should not stop serving in death.

This philosophy creates a civilization of massive scale and predictability. Massive agricultural fields are tended exclusively by skeletal workforces, ensuring living populations do not fall victim to famine. The use of skeletons rather than traditional, rotting zombies for agriculture is a calculated logistical adaptation. Flesh-bearing zombies introduce the risk of spreading disease and souring crops, whereas properly prepared skeletal laborers eliminate the threat of secondary plagues while providing a tireless workforce. The virtues of the dark faction are efficiency, infrastructure, and military resilience. The horror of the dark faction is that it accepts the permanent death of the person. It does not truly promise immortality or reunion. It promises only that one's remains will be requisitioned and rendered useful, feeding the endless machinery of the state.

>>98041670
The Puppet-Citizen Regime and the War Economy

The subtler branch of the dark faction focuses on the development of semi-autonomous thralls. These are dead or post-dead entities whose agency is constrained, simulated, or externally governed by the state. A dead magistrate may continue signing decrees. A dead scholar may lecture from curated memory loops. A dead officer may command troops using pre-programmed tactical routines. The dark faction argues that if an entity speaks, works, remembers, and fulfills its social role, personhood is satisfied. They philosophically reduce a human being to their functional output.

Simultaneously, the militarist branch turns war into a self-feeding process. Every casualty becomes a future asset. Every battlefield becomes a harvest zone. War no longer consumes manpower in the traditional, exhaustive manner. Instead, it metabolizes the fallen. Even military defeat can be mathematically converted into a partial logistical recovery if enough bodies can be reclaimed by the necromancers before the enemy destroys them.

A soldier’s career in this regime features two distinct stages. The first stage is a life of training, agency, and fear. The second stage is a service of deployment, silence, and absolute obedience. The war-economy despises sentiment because sentiment slows the logistical recovery of bodies. Its motto is grimly practical, insisting that grief is merely a delay, delay leads to decay, and decay is a form of treason against the state.

>>98041678
Internal Tensions and De Facto Disenfranchisement

Despite its projection of uniform order, internal tensions constantly plague the dark faction. Corpse-State bureaucrats who desire sustainable, predictable corpse-pools for long-term infrastructure conflict heavily with war-economy generals who demand immediate battlefield harvests and forced mass mobilizations. The bureaucrat argues that a corpse is a resource to be carefully allocated over centuries. The general argues that a corpse is a weapon that is waiting too long to be fired. Furthermore, puppet-engineers who value the sophisticated illusion of consent clash with crude mass necromancers who believe mere forward motion is sufficient for victory.

However, these disparate groups are united in their structural subjugation of the dead. By breaking the deceased down into mindless corpse-stock or strictly programmed thralls, the dark faction ensures the dead can never challenge the living. The dead are disenfranchised de facto through their lack of biological autonomy, true memory, and cognitive capacity. This guarantees that the living retain absolute executive control over the Corpse-State at all times.

>>98041683
The Light-Coded Faction: Ancestry, Reliquaries, and the Gilded Cage

The light-coded faction directly opposes this utilitarian nightmare, presenting instead three compatible visions of a post-mortal civilization rooted in reverence rather than extraction. These visions include the Ancestral House Commonwealth, the Chivalric Reliquary Order, and the Post-Mortal Family Civilization.
The Ancestral Commonwealth and the Chivalric Reliquary

The light faction believes the dead belong first and foremost to their lineage. A house is a layered institution containing living children, sleeping grandparents, restored founders, and revenant champions. The household becomes a multi-generational fortress against oblivion. This vision decentralizes necromancy, violently resisting the state’s claim over the dead, while simultaneously empowering old families to unprecedented degrees. A wealthy family with restored ancestors possesses centuries of accumulated advice, martial skill, memory, and political authority.

Within the Chivalric Reliquary Order branch, restoration is treated as a high art and a selective sacrament. Not everyone is restored immediately. The dead most worthy of return are beloved spouses, legendary knights, martyrs, and oath-bound champions. This is where the resurrected husband becomes central. He is a perfected revenant, a dead spouse restored into a one-man army to defy mass-produced death. The reliquary order dictates that practitioners must never animate the dead downward, but must always restore them upward.

>>98041690
This ideology gives the light faction its breathtaking visual identity. It is a world of ivory crypts, mourning veils, revenant warhorses, ancestral chapels, sacred armor, and necromancy performed as an act of profound devotion.

To reconcile their need for agricultural and infrastructural labor without resorting to the desecration of human corpse-stock, the light faction utilizes animal revenants extensively. Reanimated oxen haul stone, skeletal hounds guard estates, and undead horses carry the living nobility. This creates a heraldic, almost fairy-tale aesthetic.

The dark faction frequently mocks this as hypocrisy, accusing the light faction of spending animal corpses to spare human ones. The light faction maintains a strict philosophical distinction between beasts of burden and latent kin.


The Institutional Disenfranchisement of the Light Faction


While the reverence of the light faction appears beautiful, it harbors a profound and sinister structural hypocrisy. Because the light faction restores the dead with high fidelity, returning their brilliant minds, memories, and martial prowess, they accidentally create a demographic inherently capable of ruling.

If families continuously restore their founders and patriarchs, the society risks becoming a true gerontocracy. If a restored dynastic founder could legally reclaim their former property, titles, and executive authority upon awakening, the living heirs would be permanently reduced to the status of eternal children, economically and politically disenfranchised by their own ancestors.

To prevent this, the living must construct an invisible, impenetrable web of institutional bindings. While the dark faction strips the dead of agency physically, the light faction strips the resurrected of their agency legally.

>>98041698
When a highly articulate, fully realized person is brought back, they do not reclaim their former estates or their executive authority. The living utilize strict probate laws, mechanisms of civil death, and doctrines akin to historical coverture to legally paralyze the restored.

A resurrected founder is treated as a perpetual ward of the court or a life tenant. They possess the aesthetic of nobility, but the living descendants exclusively control the finances and political maneuvers.

The resurrected husband serves as the prime example. He is a legal dependent. His legal identity is entirely subsumed by his living spouse. He cannot sign contracts, dictate the deployment of family wealth, or refuse a call to arms without his living spouse's authorization. Therefore, the light faction's iconic, protective phrase, declaring that "the cadaver will not fight", is ultimately an assertion of property rights. It is the living declaring that they alone hold the legal leash of the beloved dead. The dead are elevated to the status of sacred icons, yet they are simultaneously neutered, transformed into perpetual, politically neutered and superpowered wards of the living family. They are family, too, but also the functional cornerstone of elite military might.

>>98041723
Necromantic Safeguards and the Constraints of Vengeance

It is crucial to acknowledge a specific mechanical reality regarding the creation of elite, high-fidelity undead. The necromancers who forge these "one-man army" resurrections rarely leave their own safety to chance. As a matter of standard arcane protocol, creators embed profound protective countermeasures into the resurrection matrix to guard against overpowered creations eventually turning on them. These safeguards are deeply integrated into the binding process and serve as an absolute insurance policy for the living master.

Depending on the specific arcane tradition of the necromancer, these protections typically manifest in one of two ways. The first is a severe mental block or magical geas. This compulsion forces compliance by inflicting catastrophic psychic damage should the revenant attempt to disobey a direct command or harbor harmful intent toward their creator. For a high-tier undead entity with substantial magical resilience, the psychic damage from breaking a geas might be survivable, but it serves as an agonizing, crippling deterrent. The second common method is the deployment of a selective force field or semi-permeable magical barrier. These advanced deflector shields are specifically tailored to filter out the unique necrotic signature of the resurrected individual, allowing normal environmental interactions while acting as an impenetrable wall against any aggressive action taken by the bound entity.

Consequently, if a high-fidelity revenant manages to slip their societal conditioning and harbors a vendetta against their former master, they are physically and psychologically barred from executing a simple, direct assault. These renegade undead are forced to get exceptionally creative to harm their perceived oppressors.

>>98041735
Because they cannot strike the necromancer with a sword or a direct spell, they must employ environmental loopholes, manipulate proxy agents, or utilize indirect sabotage to exact their revenge. An undead assassin might collapse the cavern ceiling above a target, maneuver living enemies into the necromancer's path, or systematically dismantle the infrastructure that supports the creator's power. This dynamic ensures that any rebellion by an overpowered revenant transforms from a straightforward physical confrontation into an elaborate, high-stakes game of asymmetric, loophole-exploiting warfare.

The Psychology and Mechanics of the Vengeful Raid

The drive for vengeance among these high-fidelity undead is not merely a trope, but a deeply embedded psychological phenomenon altered by the state of undeath. The pursuit of revenge is fundamentally an addictive behavior, rooted in the brain's pain-processing centers and the subsequent craving for relief. In a living human, fantasizing about or acting on revenge floods the brain with dopamine, lighting up neural pathways identical to those triggered by substance addiction.

However, the neurology of a resurrected entity is sometimes severely compromised. When a high-fidelity undead individual is wronged, betrayed, or subjected to unfair legal wardship by their own lineage, they experience the intense psychological damage and moral injury associated with the betrayal. Yet, because their biological systems are dead, they cannot experience the corresponding dopamine release that traditionally accompanies catharsis, fueling a potentially endless thirst for vengeance.

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>>98041735
This creates a terrifying psychological profile.
The unspent anger has nowhere to go, preventing the undead from experiencing any sense of emotional relief or biological satiation. The rage turns inward and rots, creating a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance.

The mind craves balance, but the body is too broken to provide it. Consequently, the renegade undead who harbor family grudges become relentless. They do not raid for wealth or resources; they raid in a futile attempt to alleviate a psychological pain that their post-mortal biology physically prevents them from resolving.


The Renegades of the Outskirts: Maroon Societies of the Free Dead


The absolute hegemony of the living is not perfectly absolute. Magic is volatile, memory is persistent, and the will of a high-fidelity soul is inherently resistant to permanent subjugation.
The light faction’s pursuit of perfect restoration possesses a fatal flaw. If a soul is restored too perfectly, it will eventually remember what it means to be free.

Over centuries, a small but significant number of these high-tier, meticulously resurrected undead have recognized the reality of their legal bindings. A restored founder realizes they are merely a political mascot for their great-grandson's ambitions. A resurrected knight realizes that their eternal vow of protection has been weaponized into endless, unconsenting warfare.

>>98041755
They slip their wardship, break the magical and legal tethers binding them to the Ancestral Houses, and walk away into the deep wastes, the high mountains, and the forgotten borders of the continent. They become the sovereign undead, forming the ranks of the Free Dead.

It is a widely held, though fiercely denied, suspicion across the civilized world that the light faction is the sole source of these high-tier resurrected renegades. This suspicion is logically sound, as only the light faction possesses the philosophical motivation and the localized resources to produce undead of such high fidelity and cognitive retention that they would possess the capacity to remember, resent, and systematically rebel.

The undead of the dark faction are mostly mindless or so heavily programmed with state-sanctioned memory loops that the concept of desertion is cognitively impossible for them.


The Architecture of the Undead Frontier


These escaped revenants have established a network of small, independent towns at the extreme outskirts of civilization. Their societal structure draws heavy parallels to historical maroon societies, forming sovereign communities outside the reach of the dominant imperial powers. They utilize harsh environments and guerrilla warfare tactics to repel the vastly superior numbers of the civilized empires.

The architecture and rhythm of these frontier towns reflect a society completely divorced from biological necessity. There are no granaries, no bakeries, and no aqueducts, because the Free Dead do not experience hunger, thirst, or fatigue. Instead, the towns are built entirely around particular obsessions, philosophical pursuit, martial defense, memory preservation, and structural repair. Buildings are constructed from heavy stone and petrified wood, designed to withstand centuries.

>>98041777
The Peaceful Builders and the Vengeful Raiders

The society of the Free Dead is not homogeneous. A significant portion of the Outskirts is populated by peaceful exiles. These are high-tier undead who have simply opted out of the civil war. Their philosophy is one of profound exhaustion and the establishment of existential boundaries. They seek only the right to exist without being classified as a state tool or a family idol.

In these peaceful settlements, former paladins, ancient clerics, and legendary warriors who were resurrected as household guardians live side-by-side in quiet contemplation.

They stay in the world because there is a technique they wish to pass on, a personal duty they wish to fulfill, or simply because they enjoy the camaraderie of those who share their unique, non-disposable state. They occasionally trade knowledge and rare frontier materials with brave living merchants, but they remain fiercely defensive of their isolation.

Conversely, not all who escape the light faction find peace. Some awaken to unlife with a profound, burning rage. These become the raider clans, consisting of undead who refuse to let go of old family politics, or who feel deeply betrayed by the living descendants who weaponized their remains.

These high-fidelity undead strike from the wilderness into the civilized territories. They retain all their martial brilliance, tactical genius, and memories of the lands they once ruled. They form warbands and ride out from the Outskirts to raid the estates of the light faction. Their motivations are rarely driven by a need for standard currency. They are driven by immortal, multi-generational vendettas, seeking vengeance for past wrongs.

>>98041798
An undead patriarch might lead a violent raid against his own great-grandson's estate to punish the living heir for allying with a rival house, believing he must violently correct the course of his lineage. A resurrected knight might systematically hunt down the living necromancers who bound her to a cowardly lord, bypassing their magical force fields through elaborate, indirect sabotage. These raiders introduce a terrifying dynamic to the civil war. They are not mindless zombies. They are elite, untiring insurgents who know the exact defensive layouts of the Ancestral Houses they once built.


The Multi-Directional War and the Existential Threat


The geopolitical relationship between the Outskirts and the two main factions is highly volatile.

To the light faction, the Outskirts are a tragic embarrassment and a legal crisis. They represent a collection of lost or stolen family heirlooms that must be legally and physically recaptured to restore the honor of the Ancestral Houses. The light faction routinely dispatches posses of living wardens and loyalist revenants to hunt down these outlaws and drag them back to the family crypts.

However, the dynamic between the Free Dead and the dark faction is one of absolute, existential hatred. The Outskirts vehemently oppose the Corpse-State due to the fundamental conflict between their very existence as sovereign, irreplaceable individuals and the dark faction's core philosophy of universal, disposable utility.

>>98041807
To the dark faction, the Outskirts are an offensive contradiction. They view them as a piece of machinery that has deluded itself into believing it is a citizen. Furthermore, the dark faction views these frontier towns not as sovereign settlements, but as unsecured stockpiles of incredibly high-grade, fully processed necromantic hardware.

The Corpse-State has no interest in negotiating with the Free Dead. Their only goal is to capture them, wipe their high-fidelity memories, strip their souls, and integrate their highly capable bodies into the mass zombie infantry.

The Free Dead understand that falling to the dark faction means total ego-death and reduction to corpse-stock. Consequently, even the most peaceful Outskirt towns will fight with terrifying, suicidal ferocity against dark faction incursions. They are fighting for the ultimate stakes, which is the right to own their own deaths.


The Final Destiny of the Dead


This necromantic civilization has long since accepted that the dead remain a part of society. Its catastrophic civil war began when that acceptance became too successful, forcing the populace to ask the ultimate question regarding who gets to decide what the dead become when death is no longer final.

The dark-coded faction organizes undeath around scale, utility, and centralized power. It preserves death as the end of true personhood, then extracts relentless value from what remains, building war economies and puppet-citizens who simulate continuity without true freedom.

The light-coded faction organizes undeath around family, fidelity, and restoration. It attempts to abolish death through lineage, resurrecting beloved spouses and ancestral champions. Yet, in their desperation to conquer mortality, they build gilded cages of legal disenfranchisement, ensuring the living retain absolute control over their resurrected kin.

>>98041817
The dark side fears a future ruled forever by restored aristocratic ancestors. The light side fears a future where every person dies into state inventory, their body rendered down for the machinery of empire.

Somewhere between them, on the harsh frontiers of the Outskirts, stands the Free Dead. These are the resurrected husbands who broke their leashes, the ancient founders who walked away from their own estates, the peaceful scholars who refuse to be weaponized, and the mad undead consumed by intergenerational ancestral vengeance, defective or not.

The central, defining phrase of the war is transformed by this three-way conflict. When spoken by the dark logistician, the assertion that the cadaver will not fight is a statement of defect, meaning the body is broken and must be recycled. When spoken by the light widow, it is a property claim, meaning the body belongs to the family and is shielded from the draft. But when spoken by a renegade of the Outskirts, standing before the heavy stone gates of an independent frontier town, the meaning changes entirely. It is no longer a diagnostic, nor a legal defense by the living. It is a declaration of absolute, posthumous sovereignty. It means that the dead belong only to themselves, and they will no longer fight the wars of the living.


Any ideas that could be further explored in this setting? It still is a rough sketch.

>>98041755
This looks like AI.

>>98041882
I used AI to make it more concise, but the style and concepts are the same as those in my draft.
I also made the pictures with AI.

>>98036797
how would you do orcs differently then anon?

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So, the more I learn about history, that more clearer is that city life sucked for a very long time, especially during and after the middle ages. For the vast majority of human history, moving to a city was essentially a trade-off: you gained economic opportunity and social "freedom," but you paid for it with your health and, quite often, a shorter lifespan. This is sometimes called the Urban Penalty.

Population often had a negative natural increase, where the death rate consistently exceeded the birth rate. Cities only grew (or kept their population) because of a constant stream of young migrants from the countryside looking for work. If the gates had been closed to outsiders, many of these cities would have simply vanished within a few generations.

Until the mid-19th century, most major cities were demographic black holes. In cities like London or Paris, the death rate consistently exceeded the birth rate resulting in a Negative Natural Increase. Cities only grew (or even maintained their size) because of a constant stream of young migrants from the countryside looking for work. If the gates had been closed to outsiders, many of these cities would have simply vanished within a few generations.

The physical toll of city life was visible in the bones of the inhabitants. Urbanites were generally shorter than their rural counterparts. High population density meant that even if food was available, it was often contaminated or expensive. More importantly, the high "disease load" meant that children’s bodies spent energy fighting infections rather than growing.

While cities had "exotic" goods, the average worker lived on bread, ale, and whatever cheap (and often spoiling) protein they could find. Peasants, while poorer in coin, often had better access to fresh vegetables, dairy, and clean water.

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>>98042496


The "living on top of the dead" wasn't a metaphor. City churchyards became so packed that "cemetery gases" were a genuine public health concern, eventually leading to the creation of suburban cemeteries (like Père Lachaise in Paris) and the use of catacombs.

While some medieval cities had rudimentary gutters and "night soil" collectors, they were woefully inadequate for the density. Urban planning rarely kept pace with growth. Without modern germ theory (which didn't take hold until the late 1800s), people didn't realize that their well water was being tainted by nearby cesspits. We often underestimate how much historical cities *reeked*. Between horse manure, industrial runoff (like tanneries), and human waste, the stench was a permanent fixture of urban life.

If cities were so miserable, why did people keep coming? Because the countryside offered stability but zero growth. In the city, a peasant could become an apprentice, a craftsman, or even a wealthy merchant. The city was a high-risk, high-reward gamble.

It wasn't until the Sanitary Revolution of the late 19th century that urban birth rates finally began to outpace death rates.

>>98042501

The irony is that people weren't trapped in; they were desperately trying to get in to escape the crushing boredom and poverty of rural life, even if it meant a 30% higher chance of dying young.

>>98042510
Poverty, certainly, boredom probably not. There's that story of a patriarchal African village that had tap water installed with first world funding so that the womenfolk wouldn't need hours each day to carry water from a remote well to their lazy husbands. When the benevolent westerners later asked why the wives still continued their miles of walks to carry water on their heads, the women of the village replied that they had a wonderful time socializing and chatting for hours away from their husbands.

As anon's research IIRC concerns the Industrial Revolution on the British Isles, it's worth noting that the life of an English peasant woman before that time mostly consisted of spinning wool thread while carrying a distaff around (outside of certain short times like the harvest). She could at the same time do simple home chores like taking care of young kids and cooking. It's an easy, meditative, physically non-demanding job that can be quickly stopped if one of your kids is in danger of dying stupidly. It isn't as profitable to a peasant family as selling your crop surplus, but it keeps your family clothed and gives you extra disposable income. A hard working widow could keep one or two kids from starving solely by spinning fiber into thread. Imagine the average doomscroller addict of today with her nose glued to her phone: she would've been spinning wool and chatting with friends and family back then.

Starting in about 1600 when stocking frames (used to mechanically knit cotton) were invented and became widespread over the century, the rural small-scale cottage industry for textiles was increasinly destroyed by innovation. Women found it difficult to change from spinning wool to a different fiber in cotton, and the first recorded sabotage against textile machinery happened before 1700. It's no wonder rural poverty increased when something like a third of a family's income just disappeared, or that huge masses of young women became factory workers.

>>98026956
Kys d*scord cancer.

>>98042791
I love you too.

What would be needed to create a targetting system that can keep focusing a laser on a mach 7 object?
It's meant to be the core of a fictional super jet that helped alt America win the cold war the cool way.

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>>98043328
A rl possibility that fiction seldom uses is that the optics of a laser weapon can be the optics of its targeting system as well.

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php#id--Lasers--Targeting

Besides that, 21st century software and hardware systems for ensuring accuracy.

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent2.php#id--Laser_Cannon--Accuracy

Did you consider phased array optics? A network of optic fibers distributed through the fuselage, each end is a low-powered laser, good enough for targeting. As it adds up, it goes from excellent targeting to actual offensive power. 20 lasers fry missiles, 40 damage enemy jets, 80 burst the fuel of ICBMs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased-array_optics

https://defense-update.com/20140307_successful-excalibur-test-brings-darpa-closer-compact-high-energy-lasers.html

And it will be shiny, everyone looking at your super jet will go blind.

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmenergy.php#id--Lasers--Laser_Blindness

Crazy lore idea:
The gods who originally created the world did not include a death god, so death did not exist in the original state of the world. At some point, though, a god of death barged in from beyond the world, killed the previous pantheon, and twisted their divine corpses into new, undead, monster gods which he used to twist the world into a demented hellscape for his own twisted desires.

Thinking of having any given players I pitch this setting to find the lost fragments of the original gods to empower themselves and become a new pantheon, to overthrow the god of death and his puppet gods.

>>98046801
Isn't that how Krynn worked except Chemosh was invited to the world from beyond? And Birthright has something similar with Azrai only becoming the evil god after the world has been around a long time and causes the death/self-sacrifice of the entire pantheon. Then pieces of the gods get split up and transferred to a bunch of people around the battlefield and they become progenitors of divine bloodlines.

>>98038438
That is basically where I'm at. The gnomes enforce a thalassocracy through dominance of the sea to maintain coastal enclaves and harbors, which makes them the dominant power. And yes, the gnomes would have bigger crews, but their smaller size means they can build ships the same size as classic human ones but require more provisions and have more marines.

>>98046801
I feel like I've heard this concept somewhere before

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Would it be too much bullshit to allow telekinesis to be used to create artificial gravity?

I've framed telekinesis as the main power while trying to keep everything else as grounded as possible (i.e. without massively augmenting your body, space is still bad for the Human body)

Even then, these powers require technology to fully utilize.

>>98047400
Do you have artificially brains in jars or something to run 24/7 for a ship, or is each individual responsible for providing their own gravity when in space?

Like logistically how would it work?
How would it effect the game?

Why don't wargame based settings at least try to delve into the political aspects of war? Surely there's a niche market for Clausewitz nerds that want warfare to be just politics by other means?
I'm asking because I'm really interested in the idea of a warhammer style setting where the wars have actual political dimensions.

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>>98046842
Chapter 14 of The Age of the Galley (1995) discussing the logistics of pre-gunpowder Italian merchant republics includes this nifty map of the major fortresses established by the Venetian Republic shortly after the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 during the 4th Crusade to secure the nation's communication route to their lucrative Black Sea trade colony of Tana. These are the fortified cities with harbors large enough to supply a galley fleet and survive a siege, something that easily gets lost in other maps of Venice's possessions. Each circle has a radius of 150 km, so about two day's sustainable speed rowing between 10-14 hours a day at 3-4 knots. They also represent the effective area of sea a "fleet in being" with 4 days' supplies of water could control, if they decided to start commerce raiding, or if they tried to intercept an enemy fleet.

A High or Late Medieval war galley used pretty much the same technology as a Classical one, with the same complement as a trireme of 200 men, although they were slightly more heavily built, replaced archers with crossbowmen, and relied on winning the boarding action after a successful ram, not solely trying to punch holes in the enemy vessel. They were heavy enough to allow 30 liters of water per man (= a week of drinking water), or an extra 6 tons, to be carried if needed. The gaps south of Ragusa and Constantinople are about 7-8 days away from the next Venetian fortress. These coasts of course included plenty of friendly and neutral ports among Italians, Turks and such where resupply was possible if required.

The twin fortresses of Modon and Coron on both sides of the Messenian peninsula, "the chief eyes of the Republic" some 30 km apart by sea were the most important, as they also lay along other trade routes to Egypt and the Levant. A message from one fortress could reach the other in 4-5 hours by galley, or before nightfall overland through secluded paths if either fort was blockaded.

Should kids be barefoot most of the time, particularly in summer, before the industrial revolution?

>>98047698
people can easily make sandals by weaving any fibrous plant together
there's basically no reason not to wear them

>>98038315
If it's set a bit earlier it could be guano- bat or bird droppings that are useful for both fertilizer and gunpowder. It's entirely redundant by the WWII era though, due to synthetic fertilizers and the switch to smokeless powder. Coal refueling stations might also be an option for an earlier period.

For WWII an airbase, monitoring of traffic lanes for submarines, potentially a launch site for missile or rockets.

>>98030636
Chimps have a much higher ratio of fast-twitch to slow-twitch muscle fibres. They would be good fast rowers- useful for battle- but terrible navigational rowers. You'd need to have good sails set up so they don't exhaust themselves before battles. Shallow coastal waters, or inland seas, would both be fine. Any navy of this kind would have to focus on conserving their energy for the final rapid push. They'd probably navigate into engagement range using sails or slow rowing, then line up for a charge outside of projectile range and try and use their strength advantage to rapidly overcome the distance and swarm the enemy. Something that might be useful would be the ratio between oarsmen and marines- I think it was around 3:1 in favor of the oarsmen, but a smaller, more compressed figure would be able to help squeeze more on. To add to this, you would probably lack enslaved or press-ganged oarsmen, as allowing them to switch to marines could provide some additional surge manpower. I think the ancient greeks avoided using enslaved oarsmen, unlike the post-classical mediterranean which relied more on slaves. This would probably have broader social ramifications on how egalitarian they are. You could probably pull from chimps social structures for this.

>>98047767
basically if you can have woven baskets, you can easily have sandals

>>98047767
>>98047698

In many cultures, children remained barefoot for much longer than they do today, often receiving their first "real" shoes as a rite of passage. In Ancient Greece, boys were often not "sandaled" until they began school around age seven. Shoes were a status symbol used to denote the social class of the child’s family. For a vast majority of children throughout history, being barefoot was the default state, particularly in rural or impoverished areas. For the majority of the population, shoes were expensive handmade items, one of the most expensive items a family could buy. Growth spurts in children didn't help. Children’s feet can grow up to half a shoe size every few months during a spur. Parents often bought shoes several sizes too large. In many rural communities, shoes were strictly for winter and Sundays. On the first warm day of spring, children would cast off their shoes and remain barefoot until the first frost

>>98047805
thank you anongpt

>>98047698
I don't know about "should".
You can do that "depending on climate" but there isn't a necessity to do that. Even poor people in poor parts of the world before industrialization can still get cheap disposable footwear like simple sandals.
There are also quite a few environments where shoes are required.

My setting has two major powers. One is an earth based empire.
The other is split between two factions - the Inner Colonies (everyone between Earth-Moon and the Sun) and the Outer Colonies (everyone between the Oort Cloud and Mars).
The Inner Colonies are divided between the metropolitan region in the Earth-Moon system and...everyone else.
The Outer Colonies are divided between the Horusian Zone of Mars, Jupiter, and the Asteroid Belt vs the outer gas giants.
The Earth Moon system is divided between the space colonies in the Lagrange Points and the terrestrial remnant.
The other inner solar Colonies are divided between Mercury and Venus.
The Horusian Zone is divided between Mars and Jupiter.
......

My setting has two major powers.

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>>98038382
That bog is a little puny to warrant even being called a bog.
That would be more of a seasonal floodpit probably that is swamped in spring and autumn rather than recognized as a proper bog all year round.

Also, make fields with the brush tools instead of the field assets, makes em more organic and is very easy to scale up.

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How do civilized peoples view the barbaric cultures of your world?

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Do you have "main" world where you aim to fit most of stories or are you content with having many worlds? Can you summarize your main world in one paragraph?

>>98048255
That dynamic doesn't really fit my setting.
>>98049039
what a weird way to phrase such a question.
Why do you ask; is it something you are currently working on in your own setting?

>>98027807
The drow don't make sense not because they're matriarchal, but because they spend all day stabbing each other to death.

The Haudenosaunee are not just a gender-reversal of patriarchal societies, but the women had near-total control of agriculture, food stores, land, etc. The clan mothers nominated the chiefs, could veto their decisions on war and peace, and could strip the chiefs of their title. This was driven by:
- Matrilocality, so the women hung out with her sisters, cousins, aunts, mom, grandmother, etc, whereas when the men became adults they moved in with their wife.
- Hoe-based agriculture, wherein women are about as agriculturally productive than men, and thus can even theoretically come to dominate the economic production of society.

Note that in matriarchal societies like this, you don't get a straight reversal of our own patriarchy. Men in these societies formed artificial fraternal organizations, playing lacrosse, hunting together, etc, which meant they had strong intra-gender alliances (versus women in patriarchal societies like Athens or Ming China, where any such alliances are weak or nonexistent). They also were the actual military leaders and tended to make foreign policy decisions, since they did all the fighting.

They were relatively sexually libertine, since women's anti-infidelity is driven by not wanting their husband spending all their money on his side piece, but this isn't as big a deal when the women control all the actual wealth of the society. (Note "sexually libertine" means closer to us, not some free love stuff - it's bad to cheat on your partner &c, but young couples may try out fucking before getting married, infidelity is a personal slight rather than a lethal offense, etc.)

>>98048255
>puckee aka pucke℮21 spamming his commission again
https://www.reddit.com/r/ImaginaryCharacters/comments/177feyo/kor_taker_of_widows_by_pedro_silva/
https://desuarchive.org/_/search/image/p0x6NdWbUAg05zZ1d7iuBQ/
>84 times since July 2022

>>98049039
My setting is a space opera so no it has many worlds

I'm thinking of adding a significant element of social pressure or collective trauma to the population of the southern villages of one of the countries. Namely, that until very recently, the whole area was a killzone of slave raiders who attacked annually before the construction of a formidable defence line of forts, walls, watchtowers, Earthworks and Ditches, ancient forests (or the opposite with seas of felled trees designed to complicate raids), strategic towns, etc. Everyone has a family member who was taken, to never been seen again. As result the villages are hyper-militarized, with every man, woman, and child expected to pick up a sword/gun and defend their village, even if the peak of the slave raider era has ended.

>>98052105
Sounds good to me.
I think you should go for it.

>>98027172
It's easy to regrow any part of the body except for the brain owing to advanced medical science, however those who have had many parts replaced overtime are sometimes mentally overwhelmed with a "ship of theseus" like feeling that none of their original body is left, and so they may not technically count as the same person.

If you refer to a pantheon as a compact between the gods, is it confusing to players if I use compact and pantheon interchangeably in background docs? I just don't want to keep writing
>The pantheon x...
>of the pantheon...
>in the pantheon...

>>98052567
they aren't reading it, they don't care anywhere near as much as you

>>98047522
Yes. Veil Organiods are special organisms made from Human cells and a special fungus to create a pseudo brain and nervous system to can be tailored to use certain psychic powers and allows machines to interact with psychic powers at all.

They only work at scale via large facilities and, in the case of the one actual space station they are used in conjunction with spin gravity to offset the effects of zero g and selective minimal gravity is certain areas that are not part of the spin portion of the hab when needed.

Should the Empire be ***genuinely*** shocked and confused that barbarians don't want their benevolent rule?
They are convinced, for religious reasons, that they're entitled to Thanos Snap all the useless people so that they can build industry, modern agriculture, educational institutions, and research centers in their place. They also feel that all the people who'll die in the process should be proud to die For The Greater Good.

Since they're practical a collective themselves, and have a strong cultural acceptance of sacrificing any individual - including themselves- for the good of the collective, they see it as a pretty good deal. I want them to be genuinely confused why other people don't feel the same.

>>98052810
Depends on the level of communication between them and the "barbarians".
If communication between the two is sparse and difficult then it's believable that they could come to erroneous conclusions based on assumptions and taking their values as universal constants.

However if there has been lines of communication open for years and they are capable of understanding communicating with others that aren't themselves then it wouldn't be even slightly believable that they don't understand that the "barbarians" don't see things the same way. What is more believable in that case is that they would ignore how the "barbarians" felt about it in the short term because they fully believe it's for their own good in the long term and thus according to their morals it's the right thing to do. Even if they kill millions in the process. Similar justification has popped up dozens of times in our own history. From religion, to political philosophies, to economic reasoning. People who are convinced they are acting for the greater good are capable of the worst atrocities.

>>98027807
>>98028267
>>98029017
>>98032750

Well the reason why it's hard to get a believable matriarchal society in the first place is as it was mention is matriarchal societies often a feminist fantasy, a femdom fetish, or some woke BS that's mostly gender changing the characters of an IP or what they were inspired by for DEI points and all.

In the real world most matricarchal societies often fell quickly due to rarely having the people to defend from attackers. As remember back in the day, it wasn't uncommon for children to die so often having 7 kids means maybe 3 made it to adulthood. Also going towards fantasy/historical side of things. If a woman is in charge. She needs to be able to lead an army or at least rise one. That's not easy for most people to do. Let alone one where they should be spending half of their time with a bun in the oven. (Often a widow might be able to do it due to the respect the men have for her husband/brother/etc. However they rarely could get to that level with their own feats. It's possible but you see one or two of them at most. Not half your fucking military brass.

However it is possible if you know what you're doing and can be real about things.

I had made one before however it's not the "woke anti-man fantasy" most think when they hear matriarchal and all. This was an amazon nation. However, it had three kings (not queens or rulers), and the military was mostly men. Men had great power in the society however, women controlled the power via all voting in the lower levels comes from them and only those born from them get noble and citizen status. However only men were the ones who to leadership positions often in odd numbers if more than one for tiebreakers. So the women chose a man to lead but could drop them for someone else at any time. The men of the nation did choose which men got to be pick for leadership. (As if they didn't want him they wouldn't support and cause everything to drop.)

>>98052876
My idea was that they conquered almost everyone so easily that they never really needed to communicate with them. They just show up, tell you to surrender, and conquer you within a month regardless of the answer.
But then all the easy enemies got conquered and the only nations left are the ones strong enough to make negotiation the rational option.

And so for the first time in thousands of years, the Empire is actually talking to people and feels utterly shocked that the reason people keep fighting their invasions is because....they don't want to be conquered.

They genuinely never even realized why almost everyone kept resisting them. They just never considered asking because it wasn't necessarily. Their enemies were too weak to pose a challenge.

It's basically a civilization level "are we the baddies?" moment by a society so unified in thought that their ability to empathize has atrophied.

>>98052876
Basically, their thought process until very recently has been this:
"Why are these people fighting us? We're here to save them from poverty, violence, and disease. Oh, whatever, it doesn't really matter because we'll easily beat them anyway. It's not like deaths matter."

>>98052876
>>98052904
More of "We can use their resources better then they ever could." Or the classic "If not us it would be someone else and they would be worse than us." Though the people could also just see conquering is just normal process of life and see people asking "why are you conquering them" "why do you eat meat" and all.

Just to clarify, the conclusion I want to reach is the Empire deciding to change their strategy to trying for peaceful assimilation when possible and avoiding direct kinetic conflict with the rest of the barbarians.
They don't really stop being an empire, nor wanting to assimilate the rest. It's just that now they understand that people will fight them for it and why, and therefore desire to make things easier for themselves by not going for needless violence.

It's all very rational, calculated, and unemotional.

I could use your opinions on my worldbuilding. In general, how would you treat displacement of animals in modern setting? I made a thread before seeing this one about worldbuilding modern-day with dinosaurs, but I don't want it to feel like "This is Manhattan/Berlin/Sydney but there's a random velociraptor standing there doing nothing as people ignore it."

I did some research of wild animals just vibing in human society like many elephants and that one rhino, but I'm trying to build a living world where humanity goes on about their day but are now custodians on which dino to keep, kill and why.

I was reminded recently that sanctuaries and eco zones exist so that's a great addition to my worldbuilding right now, and I could use more.

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How much feasible would be to try make a low magic world coming from tolkien/dnd/osr tradition but root it in rl year for a basis of technological level and then tweak some knobs for plausible technological development to get interesting setting?

I want a set of few simple statements which delineate how the fantasy world differs from rl world year, let's say 1400, and from which one can extrapolate dozens of interesting technological advancements. I'm not looking to go into steampunk etc. just things like let's say limited gliders etc. something which makes the world fresh.

Anyone here ever tried something like this?

>>98053871
It's not hard at all. Many people have done it, some more successfully than others. I'm working on something similar but limiting the technological impact to more magical development.

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>>98054126
What have you got? I started on it just now and right now have:
>naturally occurring flax which has higher oil and fiber content and is easier to ret
>persistent lactose intolerance

Downstream effects:
>more plentiful linen rags for cheaper writing medium enabling https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/08/book-consciousness.html
>better/more economical ropes, canvas which enables better sails, some limited gliders now feasible
>more plentiful linseed oil for illumination, leading to more literacy, more efficient human labour
>pastoralism less economical than agriculture
>static pastoralism never develops at scale
>on-demand energy source you can use anywhere (animal power) less economical
>energy sources tied to location (water, wind mills) comparatively more economical
>no such thing as draft animals pumping water from coal mines nor cheap land/canal bulk transport
>can tweak regional/continental technology level by introducing plagues which make human labour more expensive

>>98054449
The fall of the magic Roman Empire led to the poisoning of many cities, towns, facilities, etc. Over centuries, those sites became places where twisted life arose from the plants and animals that can survive and adapt to the poison. The same poison also causes minerals and fungi to evolve into strange, magic-bearing materials.

Humanity has learned to use these things, called Twain, to create potions, salves, tinctures, etc. They use it to create effective anesthetics for surgery, seal wounds with sterile or bacteria-killing biofoam, and to manage personal humors. Tonics can also be used to enhance the fertility of marginal soil or change its characteristics, such as firming up and drying out marshlands or breaking down stony soil. The same materials are used to create fireball bombs that activate when shaken, or seed a rockface with oil that can trigger a landslide.

The effects of making these potions also leads to a lot of magic waste, forcing wizards to live in isolated communities that discharge their poison into cesspools or sinkholes that are reasonably isolated from the drinking supply of other communities. A lot of more esoteric effects requires the construction of towers to break down raw twain into lighter, more energetic substances and harvest the heavy remnants for disposal. Of course, this method of breaking down twain can poison the land downwind of these villages, but the wealth they generate for the wizards is considered worth it.

The fallout of the magic taint in general has forced civilization to abandon its oldest cities and build new ones around places of minimal corruption. Cities maintain influence by distributing untainted water through extensive aqueduct and irrigation networks to smaller towns around them. The best are located in the mountains; the worst, but still most prosperous, are on rivers and on deltas.

>>98055020
Hydraulic engineering for capturing pure water, filtering out taint, and transporting is more advanced than our equivalent time and reliant on large networks of wind-powered pumps which are supplemented with human labor. The need to keep water pure also means there is a higher level of social organization around magic and where its use is permitted, meaning you can't just have murderhobos wandering around burning owlbears with fireball potions but regulate it through guilds established by political leaders.

Even so, there are still large areas of formerly fertile lands that can't be relied on or exploited without constant risk of monster attack or the possibility a crop may be poisoned. Ranching, and particularly sheepherding, has become an important aspect of civilization. Lower animals are more resistant to magic's taint, and they are a little more reliable in preparing buffers against famine. The large numbers of sheep and goats that are raised also mean parchment is a little cheaper and more available for the large, centralized engineering schools maintained by governments to develop and maintain their water infrastructure.

>>98053714

Predators that could prey humans/cattle and do not fear much humans, at the very least, are fucked. See how we treat tigers.

I guess you COULD imagine some sort of Yellostone area in which there just are dinos and they're not supposed to go outside. Indeed, JP Dominion has a situation that might be similar... but you don't have really dinos roaming free the land.

This of course is not considering what the hell would a t-rex even eat.

>>98055116
They could be like hyenas or bears.

>>98053714
I would look at bears and wolves in north America.
Or stuff like bison and wild horses.

For the most part with predictors they are kept to their wildish areas and if they stray to civilized areas with people they are relocated back into the wild after being tagged. If they keep coming back they are moved farther away. If they still keep going around humans they are put down.
Bears or wolves are not allowed to just hang out in the suburbs or enter the city. It's too dangerous for both humans and the animal. So the animal gets relocated, or in the worse case scenario gets put down.

Meanwhile for stuff like wild horses or buffalo if they aren't intentionally protected, usually with force of law or kept on private property, they are exploited to near extinction as a free resource up for grabs.
I suspect it would be the same for most dinos. Those that aren't protected and contained will be shotgunned and harvested.
Those that are even slightly a threat would be hunted down to near second extinction until they only exist in protected wildlife sanctuaries and the like.

>>98056283

Wolves and bisons are basically extinct in the lower states and brown bears are, which is... well, not exactly fertile grounds for OP's question.

Black bears are... well, not exactly safe, but their interaction with humans is waaaaay more maneageable. Guess feral horses are a somewhat good example of cohexistance, but yeah, not what I would picture as an example for your usual charismatic 5+ tons dino.

(to be totally fair, USA is kinda more old school on this, meaning just recently wolves aren't exterminated on sight outside of parks. Europe in this century might surprsingly be a better example, but even there we're talking about shy predators and an uncertain cohexistence)

Also, ecologically speaking, it would be pretty bad for the actual living species of similar size. I mean, imagine a (more feathery) Utahraptor outcompeting wolves in Yellowstone: people would correctly try to eradicate the alien species.

>>98056432
>meaning just recently wolves aren't exterminated on sight outside of parks
50 or so years is recently to you?
> Europe in this century might surprisingly be a better example
You mean the total and complete extermination of all predatory animals across almost the whole of Europe and the total lack of old growth and unmanaged forest?

In all ways Europe is a bad example of wildlife management. They are pretty committed to not having wildlife at all even to this day.
What kind of parallel universe are you from?

>not exactly fertile grounds for OP's question.
I don't think you know what OP means but whatever.
If you are talking about the Dino guy.
My point being that if you tried to lean into realism there wouldn't be coexistance with wild dinos. There would be parallel or segregated existence similar to other wild animals.

To expand on that, it would probably be better to not lean into realism if you want casual coexistance between humans and dinos.
That or domesticate/tame the dinos instead of the dinos being wild.
I mean things are already not super realistic with humans and dinos existing at the same time, so it just seems like not the greatest idea to restrain yourself with trying to keep things realistic. Lean a bit more into the fantasy aspect and let things be a bit more wimsicel with relatively tame dinos being a thing.
You can still have wild dinos in the wilderness and the like, but if you want dinos in inhabited places with humans and those humans to not exterminate the dinos then just make said dinos tame.
That would get exactly the vibe dino guy wants I think.

>>98056527
>wimsicel

>>98056559
I do not have my glasses on.
Also who proofreads shitchan post?

>>98056527

>In all ways Europe is a bad example of wildlife management. They are pretty committed to not having wildlife at all even to this day.

Dude, there are more wolves in Europe (without Russia and Ukraine) than in the whole USA counting Alaska. Like, twice more. With just a tiiiny bit more humans. And yes, it's something that changed pretty recently, so in this sense USA is more old style, was not making judgments and yes I know things are changing (Tump bitching about wolves' protectio status nonwithstanding).
Hell, you could also look at Japan's brown bears as an example: having less human density is not a direct indication to have more megafauna.

>To expand on that, it would probably be better to not lean into realism if you want casual coexistance between humans and dinos.

I agree on that: realistically big dinos cohexisting with humans anywhere on this planet is wacky as shit. But I tought that anon asked about soft solutions for realism, because if not just go Lost World and have sauropods appearing in NYC for no reasons.

>>98056581
>Dude, there are more wolves in Europe (without Russia and Ukraine) than in the whole USA counting Alaska. Like, twice more.
I don't even remotely believe that.

>>98056581
>>98056595
Made me look it up.
>As of 2017, the United States has up to 18,000 wolves
>Canada has over 60,000 wolves
>Europe as of 2018 – excluding Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – has 17,000 wolves in over 28 countries

So that was a fucking lie.

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>>98030368
A related question for the thread: do beastfolk in your setting have more animalistic faces, or human? Pic related.
I'm torn between the two options because furries are cringe but anime-style kemonomimi are too.

>>98056646
"Kemono" are just furries anon, hate to break it to you. The cringe is coming from inside your house.

>>98056661
Can't tell if your answer is "both" or "neither".
Unless you mean it's me that's cringe, but that's obvious. I'm anon, after all.

>>98056646
Both. The bunnyfolk are viera-style, the lion-folk are full on furries, the lizardfolk are monstrous and the bird people are literally just big crows.

>>98056634
https://nywolf.org/learn/u-s-wolf-populations/
https://www.ansa.it/nuova_europa/en/news/countries/poland/2025/03/28/over-21500-wolves-in-europe-increased-by-58-in-a-decade_ccf4a085-528e-45f9-9c08-2d8c32b7695d.html

Not twice, but defintely more.

>>98056646
My beastmen are more kemonomimi because furfags are fucking annoying to deal with but there are more bestial types with more animal features like tengu and lizardmen with far more scales and saurian-like limbs. My humans are also just the simian beastmen.
>>98056661
Kemonomimi means animal ear

>>98056749
>some blog that isn't in English and doesn't work with adblock

I am going to stick with Wikipedia on this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_gray_wolves_by_country
All the sources are backed by citations to legitimate conservation organizations and governments, and more importantly I can actually read and use the god damned site.

>>98056646
The closest my setting has to "beastfolk", which is stupid propaganda from socialist calling everything folk, are Fera, which are more like big foot mixed with a bunch of other American folklore and culture stuff rather that animal + human.
There are Batteraks, which are somewhat similar to bat people, but are more comparable to gargoyles. Only their arms are wings rather than them having wings on their backs. But yeah, basically gargoyles.
And the "spider people" are deeply unsettling in their bad attempts to imitate humans.
Think wearing a lumpy body suit and wooden mask to cover their body while moving and behaving in the most inhuman manner possible and legitimately confused why their human act is repulsive rather than alluring.
"What do you mean joints do go that way? *grinding sounds of joints popping back into place*"
"Eating a dog raw while hanging from the ceiling with my head turned around backward might be a bit rude, but raising your voice is also rude so I think we are even."
I literally designed them to be creepy but lucrative trading partners for my own amusement.
The spider connection is more their silk products and weaving than their appearance.

>>98056646
I have "furry" like for pureblooded beastfolk and half breeds with others which is often just their ears and tails in the other race. (Or a mixed if it's two different purebloods.)

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>>98056646
Could do both, make the semi-humans the result of either mixed breeding or better yet a result of evolution, their more animalistic ancestors migrated to human major regions, and over centuries, they slowly change to fit more in with the humans, with their only features being tails, ears and sometimes their claws and teeth depending on the animal

Meanwhile, in more frontier, wild and less civilised regions, you still find regular animal folk who just happen to live there by either living in their own enclaves or in settlements. They are still around, but it takes ages and over generations for them to change either back to their more beast-like forms or into whatever the most dominant race there is

>>98057117

They're both in english, and not blogs.

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>>98055116
>>98055248
Yeah I'm trying to see how dinos can withstand some of modern/industrialized man. A Triceratops can definitely do damage to a snowdriver freight train and probably derail, but no way survive the process. Like that video of a bull trying to fight an excavator and losing. It's not the animals fault it doesn't know and man has to clean up after.
Sure there might be those brave to dig through trash like raccoons and bears but have raptors, but those would be the "tolerated" ones.

(1/2) Because it thinks this is spam

>>98058611
>>98056283
>>98056432
>>98056527
I've been looking more into speculative development but also thanks for pointing to looking up wildlife management in detail. I don't want to be pure 100% realism, but I'm trying to see if it's believeable enough that my friends would say "That's something people and dinosaurs/animals would realistically do in this scenario." without any Plot Contrivance. I'm definitely making people be very selective of what dinos can exist or be domesticated, and what to kill outright.
>>98056581
The reason I'm trying to see it in a realistic standpoint is because we're using GURPS and we found set pieces of old dino toys and buildings similar to pic related and I felt intrigued to try.
Still, I take all the input given and this helped a lot.
(2/2)

>>98029017
Women don't have sociosexual hierarchies. Either we lost them to history or they never needed to develop them.
Women don't properly dominate and submit to other women like men do. Rather, women use their power - reproductive, social, to shape others' perspective. They don't confront each other nor do they accept confrontation; it's a risk they don't want to take.

If a matriarchy is formed, it will be a female homosexual dominance hierarchy that extends beyond the lesbian center and seeps into every arena of life. Think of hyena packs, or lion packs with a pampered pet male lion as a shared asset.

Male female relationships are simple because we are so distinct; it's easy to dehumanize the other one as divine beauty that needs protection and care, or monstrous, scary and animalistic that needs to be tamed. When problems arise, we either outsource the truth to a dogma that declares women as a particular kind, or we operate on biological cues and see a scary orc monster that needs to be hindered and stopped.

>>98058697
>If a matriarchy is formed, it will be a female homosexual dominance hierarchy that extends beyond the lesbian center and seeps into every arena of life.
This is how patriarchies were formed as well, by the way.

>>98058697
>Women don't properly dominate and submit to other women like men do. They don't confront each other nor do they accept confrontation


I dunno anon, if there still are ca/tg/irls I would assume they will beg to differ on this.

>>98058697
>Women don't properly dominate and submit to other women like men do
Stacys dominate Beckys and Gemmas, they have a hierarchy of cliques and definitely do confront women that look weaker than them

>>98058792
>>98058731
They do attack one another but they have no proper, ritualized fighting.
>alpha male ape defeats other male, now works in his pack as a beta supporter
Women don't simp for the women who win socially against them. This is a stalemate, not a foundation for organization. It's also why lesbian relationships devolve into violence and divorce. We need female cucks and goons.

>>98056646
Kemonomini is better but is cringe. Truly new species is the best but is also the most difficult to create and visualize. There are some monster girl artists who have found a Goldilocks zone for non-human to human traits.
Think of twi-lek, asari, lamia rather than girls with cat ears.

>>98052891
>They genuinely never even realized why almost everyone kept resisting them.
The only way this works is if there's a very rigid cast system and no communication or intermixing with the conquered barbarians and a very centralized media control. Like zero of it. otherwise various soldiers, diplomats, merchants, and whathave you from the empire who are fucking conquered barbarians and generally integrating parts of them into the empire are going to figure it out.
You can do this, but its getting very anime tier understanding of culture. aka totally wrong to the point it verges on impossibility.
Even at a basic ground level it doesn't really work unless the entire empire is very autistic.
The soldier killing the barbarian knows why the barbarian fights them even if the barbarian knows its going to lose. They see the emotional side of their enemy, so you'll have to figure out some way that doesn't filter in.

>>98059001
You'd almost have to make the empire genocidal while also believing in reincarnation. A very 'we're doing you a favor by killing you so you can reincarnate as one of us'

Which is not likely to endear anyone to the empire. At all.

>>98058841

I would esitate to say I've ever seen something akin to ritualized fighting in males, but maybe my schools were a bit more high-brow and subdued than most.

Also >It's also why lesbian relationships devolve into violence and divorce.

Sure thing bro.

>>98059655
>sure thing bro
Lesbians dominate divorce rates and they fight constantly. This isn't an argument against lesbians, it's just something unbalanced in women. Gay men dominate STD and cannibal stats because them's the breaks for the current iteration of human males.
As for why lesbians / women lack in conflict resolution? They lack both the scary aspect of death by cannibal murder ape that's present with men, but also the obvious villain and erroneous subhuman (women bred men to be the uglier, more animalistic sex - for power, control and to have a sacrifice; meat shield against predators and a fallguy for social situations).

>I would esitate to say I've ever seen something akin to ritualized fighting in males
Boys play fight a lot, just like most mammal cubs do. Rituals aren't necessarily high-brow or even complex. They are also
>"Watcha lookin' at?!"
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhgwy9y5ttA

Plus, ritual fighting to the death is a high-brow thing. Bankers are craven males who win by sacrificing other men whilst hiding behind their own money operated goons - lost too many duels (to the death) and banned the practice to avoid any possible confrontation. Andrew Jackson killed many bankers by his own hand. Violence is not evil by itself.

Men cultivated numerous cooperation, submission traditions, biological, cultural, historical even, largely because men are so cruel and vicious.
Women as softer beings who evolved to be right about everything (their reproductive counterpart is an ugly ass abomination), defining who is correct is difficult.

>>98059701

Take your meds.

>>98059970
May the next woman you touch look like a man.

>>98058697
>Women don't have sociosexual hierarchies
That is false.
How in the world could anyone ever come to such a absurd conclusion?
Have you literally never been around a group of women ever?

>>98060413
Wut?

>>98059701
You do sound like a mentally ill misandrist.

>>98058602
No on my browser they aren't.

One is in Italian (i think) and the other I don't even know. Maybe polish?

Can't read shit on them, but the format looks like a blog.

>>98061274
nta
The .it one started english for me then had a cookie popup chance everything to marioese.
The other one shows up in english.

>>98059001
>s if there's a very rigid cast system
There is. They're supposed to be a fantasy version of a hive mind.
> no communication or intermixing with the conquered barbarians and a very centralized media control
As I said, they usually just show up and demand immediate surrender. This is the first time in their history that they've had to communicate with barbarians.

>>98059168
I mean, their religion IS Pseudo-Buddhism.......and they do "reincarnate" through stored memories being put into new bodies.


I need to make this work, so I'll make whatever changes necessary to make it believable.

>>98060973
Suppose reality is as misandrist as crime rates are racist. Which gender is the cause of most violent crimes? This logic will turn a few things upside down from the typical egoic narratives.
>mentally ill
Projection. My mind is sound enough to access reality beyond what I find comfortable. War and taxes are mental illness but alas... Guess which gender partakes in those?

Well, I am building a world where an evil witch got a thing for corruption and created the first men. Some karmic role reversal happened and she spawned the local orc patriarchies.

>>98062077
Sounds like they conquer places and just exterminate any ‘barbarians’ rather than integrating them like most empires would. In which case I highly doubt any nearby nations will be open for negotiation, since they’ll have seen the populations of conquered nations either completely wiped out or enslaved.

>Set on a moon of a tidally locked planet
>Normally the planet and the other moon shines bright enough that the nights are less dark than those of Earth
>however, the eclipses are more frequent and darker; true nights that can last for tens of hours
>the storms of the planet are massive and can be seen with naked eye, giving rise to various dualistic myths
>The moon is an ocean world with gargantuan trees and their debris forming the landmasses; their roots deep under the ocean on the seabed
>Floating forests drift like islands on the seas, but sometimes get stuck in coral reefs formed on fallen tree branches or rotting tree trunks.
Skyborn and Seaborn races sing their songs here.

>>98062710
The trees carry water and nutrients to the top, their leaves gather sunlight, the trees calm the waves between them.
But the roots often bring dark beings from the depths as well. The sap and the water flow in them like huge rivers or veins. In the crevices of the trees are valleys and caverns, many civilizations and monsters live there. Indeed, most wars are fought against monsters - like Alexander's war against the dragons.

>>98062077
This is a misuse of empire then and entirely at odds with your previous descriptions. It'll work enough if you make sure they're totally alien and operate on anime tier logic, don't think about it too much or explain it too much or it'll fall apart either by no working or by making them so invincible the players don't have anything to do.

>>98062595
100% a mentally ill deranged troon

>>98063431
You can say what you will, but put your money where your mouth is: start breeding the opposite sex to be hairier, smellier, more aggressive and scarier. Make sure your lineage follows that trend.
How many generations until you yield great results? Or will it simply amplify what was wrong with humanity to begin with?

As worldbuilding consideration, perhaps increasing the diversity of male phenotypes is the solution.

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>>98063123
They are alien. As I said, I just wanted a fantasy version of a hive mind alien species.

Don't suppose you can help me work out how it could work?

Any urbanfantasy worldbuild bros around?

>>98063979
I'm developing my world to grow from bronze-iron age fantasy to medieval-steampunk to cyberpunk (and scifi).
Though I wonder if it would be better to make each a distinct world of its own rather than the continuation of a previous one.
Only one way to find out.

>>98064178
and how will this elaborate history affect your players?

>>98064183
Same engine, three games to choose from.
Lots of lore but they share the world and races (except some will be mixed out; no wings in the future).

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>>98026956
We’re all familiar with races like centaurs and Minotaurs, I’m looking to create a folklore and mythology based setting, what are some creatures/monsters and beings that would make great races but aren’t seen as much as the previous examples? There’s harpies, sure, but I want regions corresponding to different regional mythologies in our world, so I need to branch out.

>>98065436
Most fantasy races already are that, from cambions to elves, gnomes and dwarves.
Lamia and striders, lizardfolk, gnolls, satyrs can easily be added.

>>98065436
>El Hombre Caiman
South America has some of the wildest creatures.

>>98063591
Here is a consideration, take your insane sexist bigoted ass out of this thread.

>>98065436
It's not that hard. Just look up mythological creatures for different cultures and put them in regions which correspond climactically to the culture they're from. You could have lammasu for Sumeria or Naga for India.

>>98063979
Isn't like 95% of urban fantasy just our world + fantasy elements plopped on.
Sometimes hidden, sometimes not.

>>98065436
South East Asian stuff, African stuff, Mix in some stuff inspired by Urban legends and modern sightings.

Really a very long Wikipedia rabithole while taking notes would generate far more ideas than you could ever even use. So I recommend doing that or similar.

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>>98065436
Babylonian mythology has some strange creatures and monsters

But it isn't really that hard to make your own, just slap a random animal head on a human body, give it bird wings, maybe crab claws for hands and say it eats human newborns at midnight with its twin mouths that are underneath its armpits

>>98066145
>mermaid
>werewolf
>hydra
>minotaur
Even ancient monsters seem to fit an archetype

>>98027807
Higher female to male ratio due to either bottle necking, such as men dying in waves in war or genetic mutations such as women being more likley to be born than men.
The issue is never make the women girl bosses and never making the man some bad ass chad hero who they all want to fuck for anything other than population increasing.
There's really no other way to do it that makes sense then. Unless maybe only women have the ability to use magic, because there is no point in time where a women doesn't tell a man what to do and he doesn't slap her at some point. Patriarchal have always existed because men are stronger then women physcially and women are also more sensitive and valuable then men biologically speaking. You need to keep her fat, safe and comfortable to make more babies other wise you all die.
Also don't make every man a beta cuck simp either, in a society that's matriarchal, the roles should be reversed. Men should be the treasure and commodity. The princess, if you will.

>Advancement in communication and information technology ends up making the world *less* culturally diverse.
>As differences shrink, hyper-individualistic space colonies become radically less tolerant of microscopic cultural differences.
>Nanoassembly and 3D Printing make arms manufacturing a decentralised cottage industry, at least for small arms.
>Since you can't run a space colony with a lawless workforce, governments are forced to become increasingly more totalitarian and repressive.
>And since most of them can't afford to expend the resources necessary, many of these militaries just end up overthrowing the civilian governments.

Internet turned the future into Star Trek with the death penalty. Post scarcity exists, but only because Robocop and Skynet are collaborating to keep humanity shackled but alive.

.....I'm not even sure if this is a dystopia or not. Sure, it's not an ideal world, especially for the hippies, but it's a damn sight better than the one they'll end up creating.

>>98062655
Any negotiations would only result in a temporary truce. The Empire may be rational, but it's innately hostile.

I just need the truce to last awhile so that both sides can delay their apocalyptic final battle.

>>98026956
A black dragon introduced a sport called Gnoming to his peers.
The sport is deceptively simple: select a sufficiently irritating gnome, grasp them firmly by the ankles or belt, and with a powerful flick of the tail combined with a precisely calibrated gust of wind magic, launch them in a high arc across the sky. Official Scoring Categories (as recorded in a discovered private obsidian tablet):Distance — measured in miles (personal record: 4.2)
Hang Time — bonus for sustained screaming
Spin — additional points for rotations and flailing
Ricochet Multiplier — landing on or near other gnomes
Style — artistic bonus if the victim manages to curse your name the entire way down

>>98067236
>Men should be the treasure and commodity. The princess, if you will.
You have given me a idea for my creepy spider people.
The males are rare and very picky about who they mate with, because if they choose wrong there is a very high chance of them loosing their life while mating since a female that is unable to restrain her "passion" during mating will break and/or poison the male without even realizing it.
Something about them being "pretty yet delicate", despite being nearly as hideous as the females to the eyes of a human. Just smaller and less durable.

Though it works for the species since a single successful mating can produce a clutch of dozens of eggs, regardless if the male survives.

So the males are coddled and spoiled as little princes of sorts until they eventually reach physical/sexual maturity. Then will be expected to choose a mate as a unavoidable duty of being a male. If they don't choose a mate within a certain window of so many years one will be chosen for them, which has significantly lower odds of them surviving the experience then if they pick the right mate.

The effect it would have on games and stories would be that most player and POV charcter interactions with the spider people would generally be with the females of the species. If they prove themselves to be a trustworthy ally or faithful trading pardner then they might encounter a male within their territory. That male will generally behave similar to a prideful or spoiled noble especially if still young, but if the player/POV character is able to get passed that inflated ego then they can find out their tragic fate/backstory that they are duty bound to most likely die for the sake of the next generation.

Probably weird, but the spider people are meant to be creepy and weird, so I think it would probably work.

>>98063858
Okay, I get you have some ideas but it will help a lot if you start with those from a zoomed out perspective rather than trying to make it sound like a familiar fantasy setting.
>This is an alien hive mind who doesn't understand humans they have conquered
is very different than
>>98052810
>>98052891
and even >>98062077

It sounds a bit like its a powerful magic sort of setting but I have no idea at this point so making it work is tricky.

How are they a hive mind? Do you mean a collective unified consciousness or a queen, warriors, ants sort of set up? How does it maintain communication either way? How did they get started and become so advanced compared to everyone else? Too many gaps to make suggestions.

>>98027807
>believable
This is a presentation issue. Think of Yubaba from Spirited Away as an example of a dystopian female ruler, who rules with power.
Warhammer's Kislev has the Ice Witches (women only allowed among them) versus the Patriarchs. Dark Elves are becoming matriarchal because their male king is killing all other males capable of magic.
Do you want the matriarchy to be a biological reality, a social organization that could be altered, or a contested state that fluctuates?

Modern Setting: Matriarchies
>New tribes born among hippies, cultists, travelers - form nomadic communes that center around women. Men work the physical jobs, women teach, lead, heal and have sex etc. Goddess cults glue generations together, and their parallel society works like a Solarpunk Amish or Cyberpunk's nomads.
>Urban matriarchies: Corporate HR takeover, subtle hypnotic suggestions, maximized cancel culture for the sake of power, forced feminization of men (you can sexualize this but in a realistic scenario it's Swedefication of men; bearded sassy men, not cute femboys)
>Female led prostitution rings: findom, simping turned into a multigenerational pattern. Predatory women take over men's work and money through various schemes, fetish content, paywalls, blackmail.. Train men like dogs. Form punk and witch covens. Treatment of men varies. Hostile males are targeted by witchcraft

>>98068816
I feel like it needs to be pointed out to you that matriarchy doesn't mean female leadership.
Nor does patriarchy mean male leadership.

It's about how lineage and property inheritance structure within a family, clan, or tribe works.

>>98068816
For historical/fantasy or even scifi matriarchies, it could vary a much greater deal.
>Old women ruling. Women live longer and keep it that way.
Classic. You can give them blood magic and make them akin to the Forsworn of Skyrim, or the Hag witches of Warhammer.
>Their race has bigger sexual dimorphism than we do; men are dumber than their women
Journey to the center of the earth had this iirc. They would be intrigued by outside men being smart but also insecure about it since they would rate themselves off of being more intelligent. If other people produced smart men their way of life could be in danger.
>Life is so harsh that childbirth is seen as the highest value
Likely one of the reasons for Neolithic matriarchies, but is also seen in places like Russia and Finland leading the gender equality movements, all the way to 20th century. It's not like men had no negatives but women were more valued than men.
Naval societies have also leaned towards female rule since women had to do more of the day to day work when all the able bodied men were off to the seas for work days.
>Women are fed up of the patriarchy and take over
This has happened irl. Though it's advisable to avoid the topic in games because it's likely to trigger people without offering them anything.

>>98068838
Oh, I actually understood it the opposite way. I would have claimed that Netherlands and UK are patriarchal even though they have maternal heritance. Judaism too is matrilineal in inheritance but a strict patriarchy.

>>98068903
Likewise, the most extreme patriarchies have treated women as a trade resource, or as breeding sows to produce soldiers and laborers; men who were seen as beings of value.

>>98068800
>How are they a hive mind? Do you mean a collective unified consciousness or a queen, warriors, ants sort of set up? How does it maintain communication either way? How did they get started and become so advanced compared to everyone else? Too many gaps to make suggestions.
I'd set out to basically make a fantasy equivalent of a hive mind, using inspirations from Heinlein, Card, andStar Trek. The most famous hive mind species I knew of, basically.

The idea was that they were formed hundreds of years ago by some Bodhisattva style dark sorcerer that wanted to remove the ego from human beings in the hope that it would lead to a utopian society.
The mechanism behind it is that all members of said society are connected to an extratemporal dimension that stores all thoughts and memories. They eventually (10 seconds in real time) end up dissolving and become part of a fantastic hive mind that treats every individual body attached to it as a single node in a network.

It kinda worked for a while. Wars dropped off, they solved famine by collaborating to make vast agricultural infrastructure, industrialized, and basically became the second most advanced civilization in existence.

Problem is, they won so hard that everyone in the region either joined their network to share their wealth or was destroyed. And a few centuries later, the hive mind evolved beyond humanity to become something deeply weird and creepy. And then it decided that it needed to assimilate the entire human race and move to the stars...and maybe end up converting the entire universe into themselves.

But they eventually started losing wars, and were forced to research why people don't seem to want to enter their wonderful society. And then they actually had a Formic moment, changed strategies, and here we are.

>>98068892
>>98068903
>>98068931
Your historical revisionism and refusal to ever look up anything you try to talk about with authority really grind my gears.

I also suspect you are the same mentally ill misandrist from above that was told to fuck off.
Please, I beg you, read a actual history book for once in your life.
Not a feminist one, not a critical theory one, a normal ordinary, respectable history book.

>>98069006
>They eventually (10 seconds in real time) end up dissolving
Unclear what this means. The eventually when they die? When they sleep? They phase back and forth between dissolution and being?

How do you join the hivemind? Does it just let you in and you automatically become enlightened?
How much of the individual remains conscious if you convert? Why wouldn't the hive mind just go with forced conversion all the time?
How are they actually losing?
Why are they bothering to listen to the unjoined at all?

>>98069029
I'm sure oligarchy is not a place where oligarchs rule.

>>98068681
On thinking about his for a bit longer I wonder what place spider people society would have for males that mated and survived.

This idea is young so I am open to suggestions.

>>98069068
Do they only mate with fellow spider people or are they a more universal threat? In a magical setting they could work like the Gerudo. The male who survives becomes the ruler but this is so rare it's almost unheard of.

>>98069050
>Unclear what this means. The eventually when they die? When they sleep? They phase back and forth between dissolution and being?
It means that they stop existing as anything except nodes in a network. It's in universe compared to dissolving sugar in water. There is no sugar or water left anymore, just sugary water.

Imagine having not just your own memories, but also those of millions of other people. There's no way you could ever tell which memories are yours. Not even if you spent ten thousand years. All you'll know is what one individual body is feeling right now....and you can't even tell if it's yours.
The boundaries between individuals no longer exist.

It's meant to be so alien that they genuinely stopped realizing that most people actually dislike the idea of not having a self anymore (dying).

As for how you join, there are ascended missionaries specially built for the purpose. They're called Princes, and they're comparable to Boddhisatvas. They're the only ones that have individuality to some extent, but only because they're so fanatical that they can't wait to stop existing. They can understand the "concept" of wanting to not become a member of a hive mind, they just don't understand why. It's like trying to tell a Christian about how awesome child sacrifice is. You'll never convince them, no matter how hard you try.

And the reason they don't convert everyone by force is....well, I already explained it. Everyone who could be forced to convert has been. The only ones left are those too strong to be forced.

>>98069029
>Not a feminist one, not a critical theory one, a normal ordinary, respectable history book.
Taliban and ISIS are very recent. I can then add things up and conclude that people who behaved the same way and believed the same things didn't behave saintly in the past.
Heck, there are even factuons who seek to replace women with artificial wombs.
>feminist / critical theory
What are those?

>>98069029
What happened to all the Goddesses during the reign of Abrahamism? To all the priestesses?
What happened to the village healers, many or most of whom were female?
How did Henry the 8th treat his wives and religion?

Heck, you can play Europa Universalis and even in a softened version of history, the struggle of the empires is clearly a horror show on repeat. Men fighting men, dying horrible fates. Torture and war- the fruit of the ass hair ogre; homo faggotus warfarencis.

>>98069094
>It means that they stop existing as anything except nodes in a network
It's why AI art becomes slop.
There is something alive in our Universe and it dies in networks.

>>98069094
So its immediate? Okay. That entire line was missing words.
There isn't really anything to make work here in response to your initial question, or we figured it out by getting you to clarify.
>>98052810
They're not shocked. They're confused but won't be able to get over their confusion, they literally can not comprehend it. There's no dialogue to be had, its mutually incompatible world views. The hive and any other grouping will very quickly realize that. Its just war time now. Maybe the hive has ongoing parly where they send an envoy node they know is going to get killed to preach at whoever. You could do some
>individual vs society
sort of monologues while fighting if that's a thing you like.
Could have a larger even weirder hive mind try and take over the humanish one as them figuring out but you're into writing a novel instead of a game world now.

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>>98069082
>Do they only mate with fellow spider people or are they a more universal threat?
Generally only spider people.
Crossbreeding between most of the people groups generally isn't something that can be done by natural means. There are like two peoples in my setting that can crossbreed (bigfoot inspired people and humans) but the offspring have fertility issues. There are artificial means of creating hybrids, but this is very taboo because it's generally only done to create living weapons (aka Abominations)
These artificially created people are ether universally compatible or totally sterile depending on how they were made. But it's extraordinarily rare for anyone to willingly want to breed with a abomination. Most are outright killed once they served the purpose they were built for. Others are intentionally built to break down after a certain period.
Then again, it would be extraordinarily rare for someone who isn't a spider person to willingly want to fuck a spider person in my setting. They are the stuff of nightmares when their mask are off.
Not that they are that much better with the mask on ether.

>>98069128
You were told to fuck off.
No one is interested in your nonsense bigot.

>>98069163
I felt the empire should try for negotiations in the hope of gaining a temporary ceasefire. Both sides know war is inevitable...but that's a future problem.

And the future is now. Right now.

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>>98069169
Fuck off bigot

If you want cruel worlds, fill it with cruel and ugly creatures. Though don't be surprised when nobody cares that it gets trashed.

Want worlds where life blooms and feels like life? Add in some sexiness and value. It's like contrasting soviet brutalism (male form) with renaissance architecture (female form). One elevates life and generates it, the other siphons and hinders.

I’m doing that thing where days are 1 week long, so Mondays are hot and thursdays are cold, also really big slow tides. Tell me why that’s stupid or what I’m going to get wrong. I don’t want to build a simulation but I do want to reward players for thinking about things, so I just want to show some token awareness of how that would work in hard sci-fi even if hard sci-fi isn’t what I’m doing.

>>98069277
I ain't a astrophysicist or whatever.

I will say though that worldbuilding wise it would be really weird to still keep the days of the week and similar for a world where such things aren't really comparable. But you are probably just using it for the sake of illustrating what you mean by really long days and the swing in temperature throughout that day.
Speaking of which, the beginning and and of the day should be cold while the middle should be hottest.

Or to use your example, Monday and Sunday would be the cold parts, while Wednesday would be the hottest part.

>>98069226
Depends on how far removed from understanding in an actionable sense the hive mind can simulate or engage with human fallibility. If its still capable of deception then sending envoys to
>we want to understand your resistance and negotiate
as a total lie and stall for time works but if they're so far gone they actually don't get how humans work anymore its harder to pull off. If they can't lie they're not going to be any good at international sovereign politics stuff. The various human polities will be able to stall for time if there's a willingness on the hive's part to talk our of ignorance.

>>98067926
What about Dwarf Bowling?

>>98069542
Good question, but I feel that Dwarves lack the sufficient roundness to be used in the sport, maybe a Tortle?

>>98069277
https://worldbuildingpasta.blogspot.com/2023/06/climate-explorations-day-length.html

"Low magic" setting where it becomes increasingly more gonzo as the party explores the world. Need it or keep it?

For some reason, entropy stopped working right, causing the world to quickly stop making sense. Whenever someone dies, they turn into a zombie that can regenerate from anything, slowly healing from whatever killed them. The world is also a weird expanse of endless small towns, and caches of supplies somehow regenerate over time.

>>98069418
They only started understanding it after a major defeat made further violent expansion untenable.

Emphasis on "violent". They still want to assimilate everyone, and they're still not sorry about using force, they just realized they're not capable of curbstomping the barbarians anymore.

>>98069418
And just to be clear, they're perfectly capable of lying now. They learnt. They'll say literally anything that gets them the correct response because words, to them, are just a means to reach certain ends.

They now intend to keep stalling their enemies with diplomacy while trying to figure out a peaceful way to assimilate them if they can....but if their enemies weaken, they WILL take the chance.

>>98071718
On a meta level sounds like world is some sort of game or being acted on by some powerful outside force similar to the plots of a good number of lit-rpg books.

Could work, especially if it's a mystery with hints and clues.

>>98071216
Lots of gold on this site, though not a fan of their writing style.

>>98072104
My idea was something like that (it’s a game for some kind of higher power) but I’m not immediately coming up with any ways to organically include clues like that.

I'm rather bad with names - or rather just with sufficiently charming names. My naming sense is on the prosaic end, I'll just name a creature what it is and characters by what they do.

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I have an idea for a magic world setting.
In Pavlov's topology, first signaling system is a primitive (part of) neural system that processes signals coming from the outer world, in other words reacts to stimuli.
Second signaling system can generate and process its own signals, it is responsible for conceptualisation and verbalisation.
This world has individuals with third signaling system, which generates signals that the world has to process, directly manipulating the reality with the power of pure brain waves.
In fact every person has third signaling system, but most of them has an analog of aphantasia.

Brain waves combine and interfere with others. The wave field made of the third signaling system signals' weaves the fabric of magic, and its potency is dependent on combined signals in the area. Group magic is naturally stronger. A singular mage casting a spell in an area full of mages who passively produce in-phase waves is stronger than a solitary mage.
Since waves out of phase or at different frequencies produce disruptive patterns, you have to align mages. Discordant mages disrupt each others' magic. Opposing groups weaken each other. Direct clashes between mages are hard, as the only real way for enemies to clash is to mutually align on "We hate you and we're going to kill you!", amplifying each others' magic. So, either you don't hate each other enough and both are almost powerless due to misalignment causing destructive wave interference, or you are nuking each other, no in-between.
As a result, magic is highly ritualistic, requires lots of self-discipline (not study), and produces areas of no-magic between opposing groups (that might any time turn into full-blast areas).
Solitary mages also exist for this exact reason — to stay away from places with high interference.

I don't know where I'm going with this concept, I just like that this magic can have pseudo-scientific flair with solid signal processing mechanics applied to it.

>>98073596
>I don't know where I'm going with this concept
For me asking myself goal oriented questions related to a project help put things into context and determine where my efforts are needed most.
For your example I would ask:
How would you implement any of that into a game with other people?
Like gameplay wise how would such a thing be expressed in the rules or system interactions?
What story lines and quest lines can you create from such a system?
Would your system be compatible with game rules of your group's preferred game or would the game have to be modified?
If writing stories how would you teach your audience how the system works through action within the story rather than direct exposition at the beginning?

I can't tell you how much my magic system has changed from my first ideas to it's current incarnation due to asking myself many similar goal oriented meta questions related to a particular project. Changes that I think are for the better.

>>98072098
They're not really alien at that point, they're just a sociopath/NPD with more than one body. Their lack of capacity to understand exterior perspectives will make the lies very overt in ways the hive won't understand are not as subtle as they think it is.

>>98074463
I wouldn't be too sure. Look at how convincing LLMs can be with nothing more than statistical analysis.

A city having a magicians guilds, which is bascially just a way for stage magicians to organize in a normal guild way, regulating who performs shows in which estbalishment and at which corners, what regular pricing should be and handling basic rules like not sharing knowledge of tricks with outsiders.

>>98069413
I just decided that solar high noon is Sunday at 1 pm, so solar midnight is Thursday at 1 am, just to help me conceptualize. There’s also a magic sun that’s on a 24 hour cycle but it sheds no heat, so the native humanoids still have days and weeks. Four ‘hot nights’ with the big sun up and three ‘dark nights’ when both suns are down. Undead gotta hustle.
>>98071216
Thanks!

>>98073596
This is the basic idea of how magic works in basically every urban fantasy setting but it’s still cool to talk about.
I think the most entertaining approach is to say that opposing mages who do magic at each other end up creating an accidental synthesis of their two worldviews. But that isn’t very game-able.

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Has there ever been a portal fantasy / isekai TTRPG? Where people pick regular, normal IRL professions or backgrounds instead of classes and hope it suits them in whatever the DM throws them into? Or do you think it would turn too much into a "POP CULTURE REFERENCES!" game?

>>98069068
I can see how having your husband alive be basically proof you and your family can hold back and not kill your husband/male during the breeding process. Making it more easier for males to choose that noble family/clan since their women still have theit men. They could be put back in a coddling child-like state. Shown off like a toddler or dog but have little to no say but shown as a example to other males how you would be treated to push more for their clan/house to be seen as worth marrying. Though can see them have a limited amount of sperm or like bees each time higher risk of their dick exploding/ripping off due to them as well as their women getting to heated during sex.

>TL;DR
Spiderfolk husbands are the gay kids/purse dog of their culture if they survived and proves their family women are safe and mostly treated the same as children till their next round of breeding.

>>98074904
I read a manga where an exterminator got isekai'd and then he broke the system by simply using poison and traps to exterminate rats that resulted in him leveling up to ridiculous levels

>>98074913
I mean, if each kill counts as XP. Dale Gribble would be a fucking God.

>>98074943
I think it also had the unintended effects of killing the dungeon ecosystem as monsters would eat the poisoned rats

>>98074913
Every isekai is basically built on exploiting some loophole, so I guess the TTRPG would ride or die on whether the DM can either keep players from doing it or allowing them to do it without actually breaking the game.

>>98074562
It has been good at revealing easy marks for sure.

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The main bad guys of the universe are Dragons.
Actually they're just Daleks but as Dragons, originally created as the ultimate weapon, they now fly through space to conquer and destroy and EXTERMINATE all other life forms.
In classic Doctor Who the Movellans developed an op virus that halted Dalek expansion and caused them to scatter. I want a similar foe to my dragons, but something thematically fitting. Do you know ant mythological/legendary motifs against dragons? My first thought is knights and spears from the story of Saint George.

>>98075026
This is I don't like isekai, it always lame and the same tropes

>Loser teenager
>Hit by a van
>Teleported it into some fantasy world that has video game RPG elements for some strange reason, and levels mean a lot in this world
>Exploit it with loopholes found in video games
>Become super powerful that nobody can stop the MC because it's a one-sided power fantasy
>Win the war against the demon kingdom with tactics learnt from playing Hearts of Iron
>Get harem at the end

>>98075315
Because that's how Japs engaged with western fantasy. Closest was Overlord, but it was still reskinned DnD with MMOslop coat

>>98075315
Konosuba is the only good one because it's a parody of the genre.
>Loser MC stays a loser
>His "harem" is super cringe, even to him
>It's a comedy, not attempting to dramatize slop

>>98075315
being a japanese adult is hellish for 90% of their population. Imagine the most soulless office job, now imagine it being socially acceptable for anyone slightly senior to you at the company to treat you like walking dogshit, also you are required to go drinking with these subhumans every night, p.s. you have to work overtime too so you're sleeping at the office

every moment of their free time is best spent pumping pure power fantasy and wish fulfillment into their brains

>>98069269
This troon drank the kool-aid. (Well favor-aid but still.) This myth that women weren't as bad as men back then is a fucking joke. The only difference is unlike men they rarely were good enough to get themselves in a leadership postion unless they were a royal who's husband and father had enough power they could use or were that good which was very rare. Women often just wanted to be protected and knew they had little power outside what little social power they had from their birth and sex.

why are bronze age settings so rare?
>bros in sandals with swords or big spears and even bigger shields
>hot evil witches with dark skin from egypt
>whole bunch of god damn monsters
>fucking lost city of atlantis with sick ass lost technology
>gods messing with shit all the time
>nobody knows bronze age that well so you can make up whatever else you want
>skymetal sounds sick as fuck
>steal from the bible too who gives a shit
>kingdoms constantly rising and falling
>all your classic fantasy classes are represented

>>98077273
Because nobody wants them. Just look at Total War: Troy and Total War: Pharaoh. Good games but they didn't sell.

Or look at Spartacus: House of Asher. Nobody paid attention to it.

>>98077301
>Total War: Troy and Total War: Pharaoh
>Good games
total war stopped being good after shogun 2