TQ: I like the idea of this song setting stage for an organic world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVx8L7a3MuE

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>>98728146
The pirate clans became a pseudo nation with it's own traditions with each clan bringing their own beliefs that informed it.

One such tradition was the personification of The Deep, an implacable god who claimed absolute dominion of the darkest depths of the ocean.

One such tradition born from this belief was the ritual of casting grievences into the sea; both parties would be moderated by a priest and both would write down their specific grievences along with the agreed upon resolution. Once fulfilled, the documents would be placed into a weight chest and cast into the ocean and given to The Deep. If either party broke the terms of their grievences they did so at the risk of The Deep claiming their life and soul at sea.

>>98728146
sea monsters have been getting smarter over the past few centuries, and occasionally have been known to seek out worthy opponents rather than attack randomly

so a superstition has arisen where it's considered bad luck to utter the captain's name while at sea, out of fear that a known captain's reputation will cause monsters to seek them out

similarly to avoid seeming too competent there's some trade routes where it's become tradition to ritually forget something on the shore, usually minor symbolic parts of rations or instruments, again to avoid seeming too well prepared and risk being seen as a worthy target

>>98728292
Damn that worldbuilding sounds quite succinct.

>>98728307
It's all fragmented autism in exploring different political structures in a fantasy setting. I enjoy the idea of an ancient pirate group/society that basically set the rules that even non-aligned pirates follow which was partly born of a pirate who learned the true nature of the empire he was once a noble of and decided to try and copy it himself.

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>>98728146
>TQ
I haven't developed naval stuff much outside of broad strokes, but I like the idea of my "vaguely Celto-Roman but Renaissance-ified" nation, which has a rather well-developed navy but a comparatively more bronze/iron age cultural aesthetic, sacrificing slaves to consecrate new vessels, with the price or impressiveness of the sacrifice in question rising with the importance and impressiveness of the vessel being consecrated.

On the subject of naval worldbuilding, the lack of of good art for Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern ships is very annoying. There's precious little good art of cogs or galleasses or carracks and good, at least passingly realistic art of galleons isn't super common either (especially since some especially dim people have decided "galleon" is just a general term for any wooden sailship).

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What fantasy races are you always excited to see included in a setting?

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>>98729006
>On the subject of naval worldbuilding, the lack of of good art for Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern ships is very annoying. There's precious little good art of cogs or galleasses or carracks and good, at least passingly realistic art of galleons isn't super common either (especially since some especially dim people have decided "galleon" is just a general term for any wooden sailship).
My ships folder goes from Portuguese naus to Pirates of Dark Waters concept art. The time periods also vary, but it's all sailing ships. 500+ images. What's a good way to pass on a 142mbs zip file?

>>98730234
>What's a good way to pass on a 142mbs zip file?
No idea. Mega? That's the only (trustworthy) one I can think of but I have no clue what limitations it has.

I'm running a D&D game after not doing this since like 3.5e. Never used roll20 before but the tools are incredibly powerful. Due to my inexperience, I'm staying vanilla and conventional, but I cannot resist trying to blend in creative elements.
Forgotten Realms is embarrassing cancer and I'm bored of Tolkein and WOW inspired lore, but I also don't want to re-start my DM career by fighting the tides. I want:
* A way to make my nonhuman races more alien to humanity, which might be religion or just a grab bag of weird customs and beliefs
* A way to make religion and language work more like they do in real life, which is to get more specific about who can communicate what, and start handing out penalties for using your non-native tongue
* Accepting that a lot of games are whimsical and funny in tone, but I want a lot of body horror and gross shit in my game as a contrast.
Current setting is influenced by the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. 400 years ago, two mighty human empires were locked in a neverending conflict that pulled in other nations and peoples and unleashed magical horrors.
In the borderlands, a prophet of healing and mercy appeared, which was good but also plunged the known world into chaos as the movement spread. Civil wars and collapse on both sides.
200 years ago, a primitive feudal order had grown, linking the cores of the old empires and rubbing against the old fringes, breakaways and rump states. This new order is held together by a new cosmopolitan faith, an armed protector god that has taken the center of religious life in a bloodless, slow-going revolution.
In the present, this religion of armed vigilance has evolved into not just a feudal order, but a chivalric one.
The game starts in a fringe area, where an adventurous gang of young nobles have begun the process of civilizing a dangerous frontier area.
Then I write up a dozen gross monsters

>>98730234
anonfile is a classic, alongside catbox.moe

>>98730689
>>98731170
Here, hopefully you'll find something.

https://files.catbox.moe/ciko5n.zip

>>98731589
Incredible stuff anon, many thanks.

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Is it possible run a game set in a grim, low-fantasy world where players are soldiers in a mercenary company that won't come across as being a rip-off of Glen Cook?

>>98729176
I like races that are a bit more non-human rather than just humans in cosplay basically, like with different body shapes and sizes like Satyrs, Centaurs and Fairies(the tiny winged variety). I also like talking animals as distinct races.
Like closer to Narnia than Lord of the Rings.

>>98728146
Many older Felne sailors believe it is bad luck to light fires at sea in the night, because it attracts attention from dark things in the ocean. It originates from a region where there lived coastal and island tribes of stealthy raiders, who boarded vessels and attacked pit-stops in the night, without anyone making it back to report it happen for decades. Nowadays people know its nothing mystical, but those who lived in fear all their lives never forget this superstition.

>>98721249
Reze Negatasteni you mean? I've been meaning to read Spinal Catastrophism lately and her name comes up a lot, a sign of ever there was one to bite the bullet! The World Tree is still relevant if you consider that the roots are a mirror of the canopy, in fact while leaves draw energy from an abstract and distant light the roots source the substance of reality from earth they intimately worm through. The bones of the mountain are immanent in a way the sky never can be (so say the endarkened anyway...).

Really dig (heh) your tactile mapping and in relation to the original question (dwarven script) it inspires some fascinating possibilities. Out text is effectively the spoken word frozen for posterity, with dwarven runes arising from maps a cartouche might be conceptualised as a "fortress of thought". Boundary zigzags denote "the statement's axioms carry us thus far and no further" while wavy armories are "supplemental premises or statements proven rigourously elsewhere" to bolster the current train of thought.

You could even have sentences "branch" much as parentheses bracket small diversions of thought irl, complementary / contrasting / contradictory sub-clauses as parallel descending phrases that eventually rejoin and / or overwrite one another by the statement's end. The "mapping" of the sentence as both punctuation and formal logic notation... The fact that this could collapse into overcomplication and footnote mania (a Pratchetty detail if ever there was one) gives this metaphorical petropolis the capacity to "Delve too Deep" too!

>>98721249
Don't have much to add to the espionage really. Maybe it'd be poignant to find a ruin where exfiltrating spies clashed with betrayed friends, the microfilm that caused the death is either rotted away or irrelevant to the new world. Alternatively a bunch of tribals who've regressed utterly saved for memorised blueprints they're certain will "get them evacced from this hellhole" could be neat, especially if exfil has taken on eschatological tones. What exactly IS the Synarchy's secret then?

Meant to say Teller (father of the H-bomb and proposer of many "peaceful" applications) rather than Tipler btw, my bad.

>>98721260
Glad you have time to post here occasionally at least.

>Ohhhkay
Well, there's my problem. I get carried away. You and others seem to wade through my language which I appreciate.

Mistook your Wall Leviathan for the protags for a moment, I presume the Euryaleans are the PoV faction? Homeworld's a lovely blend of timeless myth with advanced space stuff, definitely something I'd like to try folding into the Harder Problem. This vid kinda gets at the "could be petroglyphs from hyperadvanced precursors, could be schizophrenic cavemen" vibe. It's almost like a cruder audiovisual version of the Guidestone imo:
https://youtu.be/2FmFXQSIzCo?is=gCfnke5WRd7dvPEj

>>98728146
Nice, I have a couple of TQs >>98720381 >>98507993 that tie together if you squint.

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>>98734256
So, as I've alluded to interstellar civilisation is faildeadly by design. The Quorum's philosophy (beyond the self-serving logic of power) is that "if we're dead there is no credible bulwark against the singularity so the sooner humanity are reduced to primitives or dead the better". One of the means of enforcing this "secede and perish" pattern is continuous bombardment with maladaptive neurosis for the duration of the generation ship's journey to virgin worlds (foregoing the state's "generosity" usually leads to colonies foundering without sufficient support or, if miraculously successful, a visit from the genocide men to make sure nobody gets ideas).

Periodic memetic programming keeps these ticking time bombs latent, this way the Quorum wash their hands of local governance while retaining the power of life and death over any upstarts. Various different regimens of loyalty authentication and Embloom (the Quorum's trefoil hazard sign >>98692517 is visual skeleton to the multimedia meme, a little like vid it is both strands dancing from the loom of fate and flower unfurling) distribution have risen and fallen over the years. Starship delivery is reserved for cases where catastrophe has depleted FTL bandwidth stockpiles or reprieve is only offered pending meticulous judgement by outside parties. In the outer rim there's rarely enough money to afford bandwidth and genship indoctrination is softened accordingly, their distance from trade networks makes poverty as likely a cause for collapse as implosion, but I digress.

>>98734262
On arrival there's a manic-edged buzz, quite aside from the effects of the latest Embloom itself the giddy relief at being granted another few generations of sanity is potent stuff. Since local powers aggressively spread the meme encoded into multiply redundant mediums those on the stations proper who can catch a whiff of its characteristics pre-release can make a killing selling counterfeit merch. With this in mind the "spacer's game" (a misnomer, it's portfolk who desperately seek spacers to play) emerged, it's a bit like mancala played on a trefoil board where stones can sometimes "choose" to circulate along inner Vs outer loops and the 3 players alternate dyads of Bridge-like partnered play.

Supposedly adapted from a rosary-like contemplative exercise of the state religion, the archetypal game is supposed to feature oracle, interpreter and supplicant (corresponding to spacer, functionary and profiteer or symbolically to aspects of the self). In some versions these roles themselves and rules associated with them are part of the game. Spacers will never admit to playing it amongst themselves (though some crews do) as tradition states that supplicants must donate to oracles for the privilege of supposedly winkling out secrets from them. Despite base connotations it's become the gentleman gambler's game of choice in some circles, playing upon the Quorum's sigil creates a superstitious dread against breaking any promises secured by defeat upon it.

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I wonder if it would be a good idea to have the setting's planet have a ring.

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>>98728292
>>98728344
Nice stuff. The idea of post-medieval western democracy having begun in pirate republics is a favourite of mine and the Deep is an excellent basis for that. I would add that in the Roman world scratching curses into lead was the done thing, should your pirates have had any trick with conquistador sorts the lead-gold alchemical symbolism could relate to "the sunlit gold of promise kept and trust built is the other face of curse-heavy lead drowned in the deep...".

Can't remember why but when trying to cook up a similar pirate state I seized on medicine being their thing (maybe all the hearts and bones in flags?). Reckon I'll pinch your curse as social foundation thing too, if they took on not!Aztec blood rites (under the guise of medically sanctioned bloodletting) then the lead / gold cycle makes sense too.

>>98734295
Depends on context. What does it add beyond an air of strangeness?

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>>98728146
Check this out, one my world's arthropod races
Ask me questions so I can flesh out their lore

>>98734307

The View from the Ground: A ring doesn't look like a flat disk to someone standing on the surface. At the equator, it appears as an impossibly thin ribbon of light cutting straight overhead through the sky. At mid-latitudes, it arcs across the sky like a giant, permanent glowing archway.

Brighter Nights: Depending on the composition of the ring (mostly reflective water ice versus dark silicate rock), it reflects vast amounts of sunlight onto the night side of the planet. Nights would rarely be pitch black, which impacts wildlife behavior, urban lighting, and nocturnal stealth.

The "Ring Shadow": As the planet orbits its sun, the ring casts a massive shadow across broad swathes of the globe. Areas sitting in the ring shadow experience extended drops in sunlight and temperature—effectively a seasonal "ring winter" that creates unique migratory patterns and agricultural challenges.

Navigation and Culture: Primitive sailors wouldn't need a North Star or magnetic compass; they could determine their exact latitude simply by measuring the curve and thickness of the celestial arch above them. Culturally, civilizations might view the ring as the spine of a sleeping deity, a celestial highway, or a physical divide between divine realms.

Sky Hazards: Debris constantly bleeds off planetary rings. Your planet would experience frequent, dramatic meteor showers as small fragments enter the upper atmosphere, creating vivid light shows or periodic impact events.

>>98731589
nice, some funny designs in there

>>98731677
I mean, yes, absolutely. Just don't tell the same stories in the same way.

>>98734295
I like the idea, it's very cool and pretty low-stakes (if you're doing highly scientific worldbuilding it probably has a lot more implications, but for a softer worldbuilding project it can be as impactful or benign as you feel like).

>>98731677
Your players don't know who Glen Cook is , even in a hobby this nerdy most people will never touch anything but the most mainstream popular IPs.

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>>98731659
You're welcome. I apologize for the duplicates. Revised it twice before zipping it.

>>98734673
-The Wraith from Pirates of Dark Water was meant to use its sail also as a glider, just like the one from Sinbad. That cartoon was like if He-man and Conan got drunk on rum until they sired a bastard below decks.

-"Carrancas" are meant to be ugly, scare away the bad spirits ahead of your boat. I have one in my doorstep.

>>98734388
-Why rely in 2 arms for bows? They could hold it in one, and pull the cord with the other three.

-Why not use silk for padded armor? Chinese did it. 2 outer layers of leather, or maybe discarded chitin, stuff a few layers of silk inside. It could also be a more practical way to make a helmet.

https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/2015/02/paper-armour-of-ming-dynasty.html

>>98734246
Cyclonopedia is a fun read for those that are into Lovecraftian schizo geopolitics.

>The bones of the mountain are immanent in a way the sky never can be (so say the endarkened anyway...).
>Endarkened dig too deep. Many clanfolk never came back from seeking the living gold that once flowed through the Titan's veins. Only the dead gold remains. Accept the death of the Cthonic as recorded, seek a mate to do beardstuff in the alcoves of privacy.

>Really dig (heh)... "Delve too Deep" too!
Words have power, thus the Egyptians were careful to record what should and erase what shouldn't. While many of the Zomia peoples pass on the tales of having lost their written language.

>The clan's archives back our coins, not gold. Each kilometer of memory, each milimeter deep groove. Our ancestors are our memories are our wealth. Suffer not those that seek to mutilate the ancestors or kidnap your past.

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>>98736758
>>98734256
>What exactly IS the Synarchy's secret then?
The cult leader, Queen Bee, knows her religion isn't "real". She considers it is, as she has a "hyperstitional" approach to belief like me . If you believe in something and it leads you towards actions, it becomes real. If it doesn't make a change in the world, it isn't. Like unfinished worldbuilding projects.

She also murdered her mother, the previous Queen Bee, and seeks to merge herself with systems derived from Chinese and/or Chilean Cybernetics to compensate for human limitations when it comes to managing large numbers of people, such as the "monkeysphere".

>Meant to say Teller (father of the H-bomb and proposer of many "peaceful" applications) rather than Tipler btw, my bad.
Wait, who's the Tipler fella digging particle accelerator trenches then? He is halfway through the first ring.

>You and others seem to wade through my language which I appreciate.
That's why I still come here. My flavor of weirdoes.

>Euryaleans are the PoV faction?
Yup. It would be a side story that explained how Creation learned about what's outside it, and something about the besiegers. The Euryales would be long gone descendants of a missing planet, used by a Leviathan to exist inside Creation. Their "mothership" would be a surviving chunk, with leyline travel due to it still having a nexus.
That video came out around the time I spent from 24 to 48 hours awake and watched videos like that to make up fluff, like why Creation isn't a pleasant place for the souls within it, that gravity depends on pranic density instead of physical density etc etc etc. But I never saw it before. Thank you, here's a payback.

https://youtu.be/lFCYKhuDZN0

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>>98736826
>>98734262
>>98734266
I don't have anything to add, but it's fascinating to read. As I said, my flavor of weirdoes.

>>98722221
Thanks anon.

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>>98736758
for funny designs I was more thinking of stuff like these, a weird mix of "modern" and old, and doesn't look like it'd be adapted for either times

>>98736758
>Why rely in 2 arms for bows
The idea was to hold a pair of bows at once and shoot acid-coated arrows at two different targets (or two weakpoints on one) within their field of view simultaneously, but what you said is right, that's definitely something they could do for a more powerful shot against tougher opponents or in direct warfare.
>armor
It's just that their culture isn't very sophisticated yet, and their first attempts at armour are a result of poorly imitating the baked clay armour of the neighbouring cultures they clashed with. Sometimes they cover parts of themselves in hides, but their species isn't as intelligent as humans are, so they are lagging behind in technological development.
They do act as mercenaries sometimes, so maybe I'll use that idea for armours made for them by others. Thank you.

>>98731152
unironically run it with shadow of the demon lord. sounds like your vibe exactly.
Also there was always a lingua franca in interconnected civilisations in close proximity and trade relationships.
for western and norther europe that was french for many centuries which is where lingua franca comes from.
In the eastern mediterranean during the diadochi kingdoms and for a few centuries there was koine which literally translates to common so basically everyone spoke the common version of ancient greek to the point that ancient greek is nowdays defined by that common simplified version used mostly by outsiders
Unless you were from some really insular place speaking 2/3 different languages was the norm and in multicultural/cosmopolitan places 4/5 was not unheard of. Especially in countries with more than one language
If you were french in 1700 you could be speaking gascone, parisian french and occitan and still not know any "foreign" languages,
Empires especially tend to be very multilingual
One country one language is a very modern thing

>>98728154
Organic as in "diegetic music" or "prominent biotech"? In the latter case is Brandy the name of the ship?

Anyway, in terms of setting themes this:
https://youtu.be/iIpwbbkFi-8?is=gTOL5CaaROH79Jg7
would work as opening for >>98734262 imo. While this:
https://youtu.be/f4iSy7UYGRk?is=3c-O4-hFuPdigDrR
Is for the bittersweet optimism end credits. Fitting that the vid looks a bit like 2001's star gate.

Black Mesa's OST is haunting too:
https://youtu.be/RG7sy2QXK98?is=LxndQj0pprGZVe3l

Anyone else have tunes in mind for their pipedream?

>>98728305
Nice stuff, I like the ritual incompetence especially for having several overlapping justifications. Corruption? Monster's tithe. Actual incompetence? Monster's tithe. Paying off pirates? Monsters tithe. Anyone who doesn't participate in and tacitly endorse sailors' inefficiencies may have to watch out for his vengeful fellow man let alone any krakens.

On the matter of monsters pursuing worthy targets that's a great reason for whaler monster hunters to do up their vessels in mock-scale and painted fury. Tall tales aren't just for swindling investors but also to draw in their prey, in fact condottiere who never intend to do the job but are too effective at marketing may find themselves pursued by beasts they never meant to meet!

>>98734031
The tides of mythification, rationalisation and discrediting always give worlds a nice sense of depth.

>>98734388
I'd recommend reading Children of Time for the Portiids. On the matter of bows their ancestral weapon is the slingshot much as ours is the thrown rock (on account of our ball and socket brachiator's shoulders). While fantasy biomechanics are already at play to enable big bugs I wonder how good a spider's draw strength would be given they bundle up limbs simply by ceasing to extend them. Of course I imagine they'd be great at the glue chemistry to allow composite bows and like Mongols the power of their ranged weapons is in the ability to reposition.

>>98738399
While they do have many eyes the front facing ones essential to archery would make them not better at firing multiple weapons than we are. Best case I can see that justifies multi-shooting is of different arrow-tips that are deadly when combined but too risky to have in close proximity. Fuel and fire or epoxy bulbs for instance. On the matter of fire silk melts iirc so the web orbs >>98734388 would have to be coated in flame retardant first and then in pitch. Still doable but again implies chemical expertise (even if they are dumber than humans in most ways as you say).

On the matter of armour tactical webbing seems as ancestral to them as loincloths would be to us. If baked clay is beyond them fitting shards into the webbing as a sort of dragon scale armour should be doable, if they can't get the kilns right then can simply scavenge from battlefields much as Chinese coins were woven into scalemail by the stone age Tlingit (it even sounds more effective than the original, especially if you have a carapace to withstand scratches from the jostling shards).

>>98736758
>beardstuff
Sir, this is a blue board! Please keep such filth and the likes of handholding to /d/.

That ledger-backed coinage sounds a little like Blockchain to me, especially as digging the record-galleries ever further down would literally entail mining. In fact if the runes have some fundamental "tonal architecture" to them as in this:
https://pawchive.pw/patreon/user/12178511/post/166378099
multiple copies of a given transaction could function similarly to proof of work consensus via the law of contagion. Stone is more easily worked where it extends in a pattern already carved elsewhere and he who tries to go against risks shattering the line of credit altogether (unless a distributed heretic conspiracy overwrites the truth as one).

It's amusing to note that there is a Petrópolis by Rio de Janeiro which is near Carrancas you mention here >>98736758. Did you choose the name of your dwarven holds as a local reference or simply because of the etymology?

>>98736826
Queen Bee sounds like a more clear-eyed version of the Master which arguably makes her worse as she'd be far harder to talk down (if possible at all). Does "Bee" naming indicate any apian motif to the faith? Given the fruits of your mutated Amazon perhaps insect nectar harvest is the safest means of concentrating particular reagents (there's room for trained mutant throat-pouched hummingbirds too, sorta like Chinese cormorant fishing). If that's the case she could build on Chinese cybernetics with a biopunk flair; hive signals are multiply redundant and emergency in a way central command structures are not though whether or not the wannabe overmind would accept such potential dissolution of self is another matter. Check out Children of Time too, the Kern character may be relevant.

>>98736826
The reason Tipler mistakenly came to mind is he's like Freeman Dyson when it comes to proposing conceivably-possible high SF megaprojects. I'd conflated him with Teller's far more "practical" approach of nuking everything, that he's nonetheless been of interest to you is serendipitous indeed.

>>98736826
Haha that vid appeared on my feed yesterday (vile as they are otherwise a suitably tasteful algo can be a fine thing). Glad you shared it here as in relation to worldbuilding as it's just sparked some fun: Ea Nasir would make for an exemplary predecessor Trader crew and there's a hyperstitional aspect to him having "mined salt from the buyer's lament". Was it a lie he sold (not unlike really shitty copper) to Quorum trade oversight officials that turned out to have a grain of truth to it? Who knows? Who cares? What matters in the present is there's a Treasure Island plot in the making where "Flint's hoard" is instead a derelict ship stuffed full of faulty goods and memetically supercritical complaint / curse tablets.

On a related tangent my favourite (and world's oldest) meta-joke is the Sumerian "A dog entered into a tavern and said, 'I cannot see anything. I shall open this one.'" being found on tablets written by Assyrian trainee scribes who probably had no idea what it meant either.

Room for something like this occurring:
https://youtu.be/Qklvh5Cp_Bs?is=XMQRaOm0-haOu5C2
once it's realised that dingir 𒀭 mean "butthole" as much as "divine" or something, turns out the antediluvian knowledge "man was not meant to know" was just very, very silly.

>>98737035
Now if only I could reliably distil it into digestible short stories rather than waterboarding people with schizo lore, eh? I'm trying to flesh out the spacer's game for fun >>98738536. Excellent comic recommendation btw, thanks.

You strike me as someone who might enjoy Les Cités Obscures. Pretty trippy and they make a character of architecture itself.
https://batcave.biz/24677-samaris-2017.html

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>>98738057
Galeasses are precisely an intermediate step.

Galleys were meant to carry crossbowmen and swordsmen. The spur was their boarding bridge to reach enemy galleys (with a spike to get stuck on the enemy ship not). Cannons were added to the front, to fire as they approached their targets. Only a few, but enough to damage enemy ships, support amphibious landings and fuck up pre-gunpowder stone walls.

Galeasses are a broad term for designs that favored cannons over marines, and the marines on board also started using more arquebuses/muskets.

Classic galley = medieval army.
Galley with couple cannons = pike & shot
Galeass = favoring shot over pike
Galleon = mostly shot

>>98738876
I was genuinely unaware the galeasses had oars, it looks so wrong to have the guns stacked right on top of them

>>98740023

Galleys and their spawn used cannons up to the 1800s, when they were diying. Mind you, minor actions, but still, fucking crimean war time.
Patrick O'Brien funnily enough has them in his napoleonic navy stories, which is I think unhistorical as in the med they ditched them prior to period, but it kinda was a cameo.

so I'm almost done with the first draft of my novel which takes place in a city inspired by renaissance venice (with touches of Amsterdam too).

What is your opinion when someone changes for the vernacular to be more fitting to the setting? Does it help you immerse, or does it make you roll your eyes?

examples

>palace -> palazzo
>tavern --> bacaro
>square --> plaza (or piazza)

it's something I did early on in the story but later on I kinda abstained from doing it, so come second draft I'll have to decide on something

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Does your world have their own version of Nickelback?

I'm doing campaign in the dark, isolated place, that is wet and rocky; for food people use mostly algae, mushrooms, fish and specially cultivated larva's. Everywhere outside cities are undead. Rarely something is alive or grow outside.

I wanted to give it some more flora and fauna. Any ideas? Something that is not a crab or large beetle.
Probably there are some settings that have hostile environment, and lack of light. So maybe someone can give me if not an idea, to point me to some book, movie or something that could help me flesh out some of the setting?

>>98741170
I think its good. Everything in my mind depend how much pretentious it is. Like tavern names in Italian would be logical. Some names are safe to use, like Plaza.
But there is that line when it stop being immersive and began being pretentious and annoying. Just try no to overdue it.
For instance in many american media, there must be that character that just need to use spanish or other language mid sentence. I dislike it.

>>98728146
Most sailors and some regular travelers carry a jar of dirt that from their home. As it's said the dirt helps those who die at sea or just abroad find their way home and peace after death as well as carry a part of their hometown with them at all times.

Funny enough I made this for a joke that people loved and it became a common practice in my world. You can guess where I got the idea from

>>98741170
depends on the usage honestly.
especially if what you are describing is period and culture accurate. So if the square is a typical italia plaza of that era then it makes sense to use that word and it aint pretentious.
Or takes souks for example. If it bears the unique characteristics of a souk then using the word alley would actually diminish the description but if it's just vaguely inspired by eastern markets in alleys without their defining characteristics then it is pretentious and bad

>>98743409
literally copy paste the western coast of norway and you re done.
Anything nordic or northern canada should give you a proper idea about the place and you can easily check their flora and fauna online and in encyclopedias

>>98743425
i can see this as a gnome or dwarven tradition but everywhere, not just at sea. It's also from dracula right?

>>98728146
Kys d*scord cancer.

>>98743879
Fifteen, bitch. Fuck off you fuckwit spammer. It's insane the mods let you keep posting and don't ban you for spamming.

>>98743646
I'm not familiar with nordic animals and plants, but are they really suited for 0 light source? Not saying it's wrong idea, but I fail to see a muse in cave system

>>98744967
you didnt say 0 light source. you said dark isolated wet and rocky. also norway isnt a cave last i checked.
reykjavic gets on average around 1300 hours of sunlight yearly, oslo gets around 1550, same with many other places in the nordics. That is around 3,5-4,5 hours of daylight per day on average. Obviously their day and night cycle doesnt work like this but you get the point. most vegetation there survives with close to the bare minimum amount of sunlight that can sustain life on planet earth.
these are the 5 ecozones in the norway. you can check them out for inspiration. Norway contains five terrestrial ecoregions:
>Sarmatic mixed forests
>Scandinavian coastal conifer forests >Scandinavian and Russian taiga
>Kola Peninsula tundra
>Scandinavian montane birch forest and grasslands.

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>>98728146
My setting's premise is trying fit as much tropes and genres I enjoy. I've realized it's pretty much a capeshit setting but without capeshit and more fantasy than sci-fi, I'm also trying to streamline and make things internally consistent to avoid the typical kitchen sink setting bloat.

To drastically sum it up there's a Narnia-like relation between a fantasy realm and a mundane world except the mundane world is has hidden vampire societies, magic schools, monster hunters with magical kung-fu and whatnot, even the mundane stuff like explorers and crime fighting is exagerrated to pulp levels while technology is a little bit more advanced then the period would imply(creating the various retrofuturistic styles).

Just wanted to share.

>>98738742
>composite bows
Might be a little complicated for them as of now, at least this particular subrace.
>the ability to reposition
That is true. They have a big advantage in their home territory due to their ability to fight in three dimension by climbing and jumping, maybe even continuing to shoot at the same time.
>silk melts iirc
I'm pretty sure that's imitation silk, different kinds of plastics. Silk just poorly ignites. Since their webbing is thick and doughy, I imagine it would be rather moist on its own, so I imagine the web orbs as mixed with woodchips or dried grasses or other easily available combustible materials.
Perhaps to stay lit while being thrown over long distances, they could be hollowed like a pot, with the flame protected from wind inside?
>fitting shards into the webbing
That's a great idea, thank you. Sounds both plausible and effective against slashing weapons and bludgeons.

The neighbours they clashed with, who are humanoid, made armour in the form of a woven rope harness in which larger clay discs could be inserted, and even replaced when they break in battle. I think it would be quite effective against piercing weapons such as spears or bows. I based that off modern tactical vests.

>>98743409
>>98744967
https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2017/09/feeding-cities-in-veins-of-earth.html

https://archive.org/details/descent0000long_m6j4

https://batcave.biz/24731-satania-2017.html

https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-AVK-513

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/conceptual_evolution/member-project-diyu-t3513.html?sid=b7bb1939c07e46b8fd4a5e77d8cc028e

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/conceptual_evolution/proceedings-of-the-miskatonic-university-departmen-t3482.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_PBfLbd3zw

https://archive.org/details/subterranean-worlds-100000-years-of-dragons-dwarfs-the-dead-lost-races-ufos-from-inside-the-earth/mode/2up

Any good resources, dictionaries for Hebrew and other ancient languages? Ideally one that doesn't expect me to know and search in hebrew for some reason?

>>98749276
https://assyrianlanguages.org/akkadian/index_en.php

This one is pretty good for finding Akkadian words.

>>98743646
>>98743409
what do you think of a burgomaster just called burgomastro, or borgomastro? things like that. the text otherwise is very not reliant on non-english vernacular

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Design an interesting magic spell.
>Gateway of Escape
Allows the caster to send themselves into any point in the future, with no known limit. The spell's only flaw is that it only works one way, you can never return to the past.

Historically, this spell has been a favorite of wizards who were either escaping persecution and hoped the future would be more welcoming, or vicious criminals who wished to escape to a time when their crimes would no longer be public knowledge.

>>98746504
Thanks for the recommendations.
didn't know that author of Veins have a blog. Good to know. His book was real help with some aspect of the dark world I created.
the descend, I heard about it and I was thinking of reading it. Now I'm trying to read The Dark Eden because someone recommended it to me, but I didn't expect space Hapsburg
also addition of sseth review in the mix make me laugh, not sure why

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>>98755550
You're welcome.
>didn't know that author of Veins have a blog. Good to know. His book was real help with some aspect of the dark world I created.
You know it already? Good. I wanted to indicate the book itself but didn't find a proper link to it.

>the descend, I heard about it and I was thinking of reading it.
Worth it, specially for your case. The Veins author was inspired by it.

>Now I'm trying to read The Dark Eden because someone recommended it to me, but I didn't expect space Hapsburg
Browsing wikipedia, makes sense.

>also addition of sseth review in the mix make me laugh, not sure why
My work here is done :) I posted that specific one because I remembered that game as relevant, but browsing the wiki... I think I got confused.

I forgot one more. Pic related.

https://www.warrenfahy.com/pandemonium

>>98755057
That can be useful if you just want to skip waiting for something when you have nothing to do. Like imagine seeking out a business and the person in charge is busy and takes you to come back in a few hours, instead of wasting away those hours you can just go there instantly.
Like I could reasonably see myself doing that so often I'd have to track it to make sure to adjust my age properly as the time I am skipping adds up.
Like hell I can see people regularly skipping entire weeks/months depending ok if they have employment at the time.

It is also pretty useful if you have to do things at night time or really early in the morning but don't want to be tired. Like just skip to the time you need to be at while fully rested.

It can also be used to break into places by going there when it's open to the public and then just skipping to a time when you know nobody is there. Like say a random shop you want to steal stuff from. Or even a noble mansion, like you enter when they're hosting a dinner and skip to a time you know the noble to be traveling or maybe just to the night when most people are sleeping.

>>98760063
Interesting ideas!

>>98745490
Neat

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I think I've come up with a way to do magic that isn't either completely blank or overly mechanistic.
Spells are 3 dimensional constructs that the wizard has to hold in his head the entire time he casts it and rotate according to a specific sequence.
It's not "programming reality" so much as a mix of lockpicking, poetry recital and solving a Rubik's cube.

Virtues: Truth. Love. Courage.
Lacks: Ignorance. Apathy. Cowardice.
Shadows: Dogmatism. Obsession. Aggression.
Anti-Virtues: Deceit. Hatred. Treachery.

The hero has to choose a virtue to primarily have and a virtue to lack. The villain is a corruption of the primary virtue and the primary lack.

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What would be a way of showing off your wealth once you're established in space? Particularly, what would be your sign of wealth that doesn't involve importing materials from Earth? I would assume at some point someone will get the tickle to get marble, wood, or other types of materials you probably wouldn't be able to grow or make in space along with the 'Made on Earth ™' stamp for the prestige of it but what can you get in space that would show off your wealth and privilage?

>>98766114
Furs and leather. You can cultivate it in space just with massive effort.
Silk would make a massive comeback.
Unironically certain grains. Oats need a retarded amount of space to cultivate. We have a lot of arable land (compared to everywhere else) down here.
In space a tray of oatmeal cookies would have the same status as oysters and caviar.

>>98766114
I think it depends on your level of technology. We're starting to get to the level where we can grow meat from cell structures commercially so meat proteins aren't going to be rare in a space setting where humans are industrialising space- but 100% real space cow beef that's a luxury anywhere but the cylinder colonies (who given the space available are probably where 90% of your non-hydroponic agriculture is coming from. The cylinder colonies are also likely where you're getting non-earth wood - expensive but without the gravity tax of earth-grown wood.

>>98767436
I'd argue wheat is probably worse - cultivation wise, oats and barley grow basically anywhere compared to wheat and rice.

bamp

Man, I don't even game anymore and just worldbuild for writing reasons, but I think I have reached the absolute limit of number of details I can keep straight in my head about a fictional world.

I can't keep the magic system straight anymore.
I can't make a map to save my life so have to keep the spacial relations of the whole setting in my head more or less at all times like I am holding on to a spell.
I have more plot points then can ever actually fit in a book knocking around my head.
I tried keeping notes in a txt doc but even that has become a indecipherable mess.

All that said, still not paying for a subscription to any bullshit worldbuilding software site. It's obviously a trap that I refuse to fall for.

Not even looking for solutions, just venting my spleen after a annoying day at work.
I know the solution is mostly just to write faster to get it out my head so I don't have to hold it all. Still, my brain feels like it's overheating sometimes. I am pushing it to the limit.

>>98773141
obsidian is free and local to your pc
notion is free but forever online

i tend to use actual physical physical notebooks for most of the stuff i want written down because writting things down helps you remember them and you are also more economical in your writings so you have less stuff to go through.

Also maps dont have to be awesome. Even a flowchart style of map like metro/bus line maps could work better than doing nothing.

Dont despair and find solutions that work for you. They certainly exist out there

>>98773224
Fantasia Archive is also a decent free offline option. While you're right about physical jottings my handwriting is crap and ctrl+f makes editing easier. Scribbling things down is definitely a more pleasant experience than tapping away unexpected ideas down on my phone though.
>>98766114
Though cost-prohibitive biologicals would be possible, marble's where obscene luxury is at. They put diamonds to shame as whorled imperfections are the whole point and even if you can replicate limestone +metamorphic geology you want big slabs rather than piddly gems (in terms of earth export the mass involved is hefty too).

Still, you asked "sans earth import" so art objects and / or antiques are where it's at. ayy relics that don't have Roadside Pucnic-like reverse engineering potential are probably traded at a premium as knick-knacks among those with more money than sense (excellent plot hook for an "inert" piece to activate unexpectedly).

>>98766114
In terms of the SF setting I've been going on about the ultra-wealthy tend to be narcissistic immortality-chasers irl. Mind upload tech exists but is imperfect (100% faithful means missing large chunks), a coherent mind can only be achieved by stapling scraps of people together and even then only temporarily (the process of introspection, proof of personhood, metaphorically claws at the stitches). Money can buy better non-neurodegenerative (for the patron) and vivisective (for the proles) scanning kit as well as the means to cobble together many composites for comparison with the original. Nobody's achieved the holy grail of lasting digital immortality as far as anyone knows but entourages of body double yesmen mind-clones are common among magnates. It was also fashionable to poach "spare" mind-clones of one's enemies to display as trophies or worse, this became more open as the pretence of public order was chipped away.

While everyone would've wanted their very own MAD peace guarantee the Quorum quashed that brutally (they took the state's monopoly on violence VERY seriously). Now that they're no more dick-measuring between the command crew if interstellar traders is a little like this:
https://youtu.be/MvvyEfGCAcs?is=QcHU4y4_rqu4KqKu
https://youtu.be/MeiSDF83mXo?is=lonNhoWuH5MFSiRi
Ties back into one of the core gameplay types (survival-horror extraction in the singularity's aftermath) and goals (weapons to abort said singularities with extreme prejudice) too.

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posted a few days ago about making an autismal civ/total war style thing and using minis to fight the battles
I can't figure out how built up to have all the different factions at the start. Ideally I want thing to start from scratch as much as possible so that it all develops organically, and also means I don't have to paint loads of minis, though I already have a few armies for bronze age stuff

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>>98767436
>>98767480
I've always like the idea of bougie farms and such who cater to an exclusive clientel as well as a 5 star resturant where a burger made from a slaughtered animal would cost an arm and a leg for any normal proles. Not to mention with the set up I have where there are whole oneil cylinders given over to agriculture I could see this happening.

>>98773406
I don't have any direct ayys but this did make me think of what sort of high quality goods could be made with local resources since, in setting, there would be a considerable industrial presence on the moon and mars at this point.

>>98773411
I like to take the destiny approach when it comes to Exos. To get a full fidelity scan would literally kill the user but there is no immeidate way to keep them stable for long periods of time before they begin to break down. Then again, I also have fungus/human hybridge brain tissue to is central to the settings technology and will serve as the basis for a new human-adjacent race.

>>98773699
The opening scenes of The Menu are relevant, imagine the "edible ecosphere" being a agri-station owned by the venue rather than an island.

If it's still system-based that works really well. The trouble with truly interstellar commerce though is that each system has to be autarkic if they are to survive at which point why trade but for info and trinkets?

Part of the aforementioned setting is that Clarketech relies on niche transhumans and those transhumans in turn arise from clade guilds who recruit from the slightly insane population. Every world must be a planet of the hats to generate it's unique hypertech trade goods. Those who precondition the masses towards multi please specialities either have to population to handle it or accept being a master of none. That and codes to delaay eternally impending mass psychosis (the empire built its colonies faildeadly) keep PCs in brisk business as they crawl from star to star.

Exos are an inspiration (moreso the series of "Bit Players", "3-adica" and "Instantiation" by Greg Egan). Generally speaking the more "aligned" (IE boring NPCs who easily substitute others' memories) and rudimentary a mind is the longer it lasts. They can be stitched together into firefly superhumans but this was at first cost effective (they kept finding ways to crash their own program).

This was "fixed" accept not really. While the tech CEOs patted themselves on the back for parenting "disposable superstars" and the workers collected an unearned check the flicker-minds had in fact learned how to leave notes for their amnesiac newly-born resets / descendants. These "sapient successions" had become the bedrock of the Comms network and commited through it (imagine the EM field itself conspiring yet no particles are to be seen).

I feel like you've mentioned the fungus/human hybridge recently, in this thread or otherwise.

>>98773699
>>98774674
Ah yes,the SWN space preserve guy! Are you >>98766114 wondering how to make the interiors decadent? There have to be a few lodges out there in the curated wilds.

>>98774674
>>98774685

Yes, I am the one who originally asked about the nature perserve oneil cylinder and also have the scizho psychic fungus tech.

As far as that particular Idea I've been thinking and iterating on it some more. Considering the scale of the habitat it would make sense it would have plenty of amentites that would serve the wealthy as well as regular people.

A college town where a university/lab is located, various forms of cabins from rugged looking ones to high tech ultra wealthy ones and various parks along with areas that are strictly controlled for wild-life. Of course there would be various labs and transport systems underneath all that which allows movement around the hab and plenty of room for the cyber city 808 inspired horror that lives at the heart of the setting.

>>98774724
I think I linked to Habitat last thread but if not here it is. It's a jungle now but was more of a city when functioning properly. Still may be of use to you, I think mezoamerican stepped structures make a lot of sense in a hab.
https://batcave.biz/reader/16629/112258
I'll have to check out Cyber City 808.

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>>98774769
I tend to bring it up because I like the pulpiness of it and it reminds me not to think too deeply about aspects of some stuff and appreciate the coolness of doing stuff for its own sake.

>>98776106
It's a good thing to remember. Fun as worldbuilding is it can get in the way of player experience.
>>98776179
Why would anyone let Critical Role live rent free in their head? One of Crawford's strengths is system-agnostic random tables, I still use the Starvation Cheap "mission gen" ones whenever I run mercenary games of any stripe.

>>98778773
Are you trolling or genuinely this dense? Nobody is obliged to give a shit about culture war nonsense and ignorance of or indifference to it is usually a sign of good sense.

>>98778773
And what does any of that have to do with me using SWN?

I plan to run slavic themed campaign, but I can't find any ambient music.

And probably everyone are tired at this point of the Wither OST, and youtube is flooded with AI remixes, and when I think I found something good, some (probably) generated female will scream gibberish for that "pagan feel".
I feel like music is important for building world and scenes for players to immerse themselves so I posted here.

>>98783467
try some farya faraji stuff if you haven't already, it's unusual so some might not recognize the slavic nature but it's solid

>>98783467
there isnt slavic ambient music. there isnt anything ambient music other than western ambient music, at best wearing the skin of another culture.
There is so much actual slavic music out there, just play any form of slavic folk music if you want the real feel

>>98783904
he seems to have blown up. as someone who found him while searching for some ancient greek music when he had less than 20k subs a millenia ago i never expected a near east/orient folk music nerd to become popular on youtube

>>98783952
found about him in a TG thread talking about music and yeah he got pretty big these past few years
I'm not a fan of his songs and only watch him for his talks. he is really interesting to listen to, learned a lot through them

>>98783980
i quite like most of the music but i also got the ear for it being greek. my favourites are the old spanish and occitan stuff he's done besides the ancient greek ones of course
.As far as his talks go it's weird seeing an iranian french canadian spend so much time talking about my country's music especially when nobody else cares.

>>98783904
>farya faraji
this could work. But probably more for taverns or battle music. thx for recommendation
>>98783919
>at best wearing the skin of another culture
I noticed. fucking suck
>There is so much actual slavic music out there
most stuff I found are jumpy and/or just actual songs. not really what I'm looking for.
I feel like many of them are either real folk songs or the Witcher knockoffs

>>98784682
Since a lot of his songs are from before the switch to what makes modern western song what they sound like it sounds odd to me (french here) so I can't get to it, only le prince d'orange and le tourdion sound 'right' to me in his french playlist. him having less accent in french than the average quebecois is crazy though
yeah he has a lot of videos on topic I never even though could be subject, his video on the odyssey taught me a lot about parts of the history of greece I never heard about.
and thanks to him I discovered this banger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Fv0zcTJxM

>>98784954
try looking for the soundtracks of slavic movies since they tend to be ambient, especially historical epics or folk movies

>>98785071
that's actually a good idea. I think Poles make a lot of historic movies at some point so I will start there.
I'm now going through kingdom come deliverance OST.

>>98785006
I don't know much french music. Actually, I once was searching European music with specific meaning in lyrics, and it was a lot harder than I initially assumed. Never find the perfect fit, but I got a lot of recommendations that I like to play to this day. like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czdoxehtWJU
kinda sad that most of music in the radio, or popular culture you consume overall, is mostly english + music from your own country. If something nonenglish or non-native-to-your-country isn't despacito level of fame, you probably won't engage with it by accident.

>>98785193
>Actually, I once was searching European music with specific meaning in lyrics, and it was a lot harder than I initially assumed. Never find the perfect fit, but I got a lot of recommendations that I like to play to this day. l
yeah sadly many older songs have been overshadowed by the mass production we have today, sometime you find some nice stuff like https://youtu.be/r9zA0Qjes-o but it's rare
your best chance with finding something not from your country really is by exchanging on dedicated forums or travelling to the country. even then it's hard, the place my family is from organizes a small celtic festival, half the bands are irish or scottish when the place is next to italy, the other half has barely nothing to do with celtic

>>98728146
This seems like the appropriate thread to ask if rams would be effective against clinker-built ships? I know rams died out in the Med because carvel-built ships were much sturdier than the old mortise and tenon vessels, but idk if that same logic would apply to the riveted craft used in northern waters. I wanted to create a professional navy -- something not typically mediaeval -- with a more mediaeval aesthetic, but I fear an anecdote from Caesar where he recounts Roman rams being useless against Celtic ships may kill that dream.

>>98785006
dont get me started on the odyssey, the fact that our country gave 7 million for the making of this movie is the cherry on top. paying to get the myths of our nation colonized and appropriated by the anglo..

>Since a lot of his songs are from before the switch to what makes modern western song what they sound like it sounds odd to me (french here) so I can't get to it
yeah i can understand that, even though i think that this is entirely the point of the channel, to get you familiar with traditional music of your county and your neighbors before it became like it is today and in the modal traditions in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfGspdgYb4Y
this song slapped so hard and is so evocative to me that it made me want to include an occitan inspired region in one undeveloped corner of my fantasy setting, (i probably will after i research them a little)

that lyre is a banger indeed. i always find it funny when the British reinterpret some ancient greek song because they try so much in the recreation but sing in such a modern western european way (because that's what they know obviously) and it is creating a dissonance in my head but they somehow manage to make it sound cool at the same time.
on that subject when it comes to ancient greek neofolk these guys are the best
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tFPGTIr0Zw

>>98785193
yeah i remember watching a couple of those like Potop, they were great

>>98785295
>Alfred commissioned the building of several langscipu, or long ships, to contest the Danes’ control of the sea. These boats are attested to being twice as long as those of the Danes with as many as sixty or more oars each. The same extract from the ASC denotes that these ships were a new model, being swifter, steadier and higher than other ships, and were not made after either the Frisian of Danish models. As the askr was so well suited to Danish purposes, it may seem surprising that Alfred did not adopt askar of his own. The askr was a flexible craft, and combined with its long, drawn out body, could make landfall both on coastal beaches and up river. A ship of this type is best preserved at the royal centre of Roskilde, wreck five being eighteen meters long, two and a half meters wide, one meter high and containing twenty four oars. This style of ship was ideal for Danish purposes, be it ‘hit-and-run’ raids or for the swift transportation of merchandise to markets.
While the askr’s length and short sides enabled swift transport, it also made it far easier to board during naval battles. The West Saxon navy at this time was needed primarily for defence, not long distance journeys for trade or raiding, and Alfred’s new model of ships reflect this. While Alfred’s ships would have been harder to land on a beach due to their size, the increased amount of oars would have meant they could out speed an askar. This would have been particularly useful for ramming the raiders boats, a technique that flexible ships akin to the askar seem particularly vulnerable to. This technique’s effectiveness was seen in Gifford’s re-enactments of naval ramming using reconstructions of both ship types. Thus it seems that ramming was still an effective naval tactic in the medieval period, at least in the context of Alfred's Wessex.

tldr, Alfred of wessex did make bigger longships to fight the small mobile danish raiding ships using ramming as a core tactic

>>98785312
>dont get me started on the odyssey, the fact that our country gave 7 million for the making of this movie is the cherry on top. paying to get the myths of our nation colonized and appropriated by the anglo..
yeah at least my country didn't give money to the realization of ridley scott's napoléon

>even though i think that this is entirely the point of the channel
yeah he said it himself, his videos are an aquired taste. the Messe de nostre dame he considers the peek of music doesn't fit our current understanding of music despite it being a major piece of our own culture and country

>occitan
while you should be able to find infos on it, a lot of the language and culture was erased post french revolution, same as in many french regions like bretagne. The governemenr at the time wanted to unify france and its culture since it saw regional differences a as a risk
the name of the book behind the idea is "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language."...

good to know some song I like is not an abberation, watching farya made me doubt a lot about the validity of parts of what I listen to since I have no musical education

>>98785541
>"Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language."..
this shit sounds so fucking grim.
our country did something different but somewhat more unhinged.
After the greek revolution they basically created a formal version of the language that was something of an mix between ancient greek/byzantine greek and modern greek known as "demotiki" (the language of the people) and they named it "Katharevousa", which means the one that has been cleaned/purified of foreign influences and they made this artificial amalgamation the official language of the state. This was the official language of greece till 1976. It was unpopular to say the least and it was seen as a form of resistance even to write in "Demotiki" for many poets and writers.
So basically they tried to overwrite the spoken language of the people by an artificial more pure one and they kept pushing it till it failed.
they also did everything they could to annihilate all local dialects and they largely succeeded.

I think this is a common phenomenon across almost every european country since the rise of nationalism in the 19th century

>>98785832
they actually went very reppressive in quite a few place, I remember hearing about peoples getting beaten and killed but I might be misremembering. same happened with religion in the deeper regions and the black hussards (teachers who had as task to remove religion from french schools)
we learn so little about actual history in school it's crazy, spent 5 years learning about WWI and II in history classes but not that this happened in my own country when its impact is so important, or the general history of any other country. most peoples in savoy (right next to italy) do not even know anything about what happened in italy between the roman empire and mussolini, or that spain was conquered by muslims
I'm glad we can learn so much through the internet, there are so many things I would never have heard about without it

the rise of nationalism made so many cultures lose their local specifities. At least germany and italy partially avoided it since they weren't quite as unified nations until very late

At least I guess you can make some plot point about this in your campaign for what it's worth. Having PCs go through a village where the teacher, while he does bring in education and enlightement, has as job to destroy the local language, culture and religion because it is seen as unfit and inferior by the central governement

>>98786149
That IS a killer hook. Brings Pathologic to mind if there's some ambiguity in that the new-fangled imposed modernism does have it's uses (though often over applied at the expense of local experience).

>>98785832
>I think this is a common phenomenon across almost every european country since the rise of nationalism in the 19th century
Especially in places that hadn't been functionally independent nations until 19th century, like Greece (mostly occupied by one empire or another since more or less the time of Romans), or Finland (part of Russia at the time, and before that Sweden). One of the side-effects of rise of a national identity is the need to create a unified national character and language, which is often fully artificial and imposed over local identity and dialects.
Here in Finland the language thing went better, though the Finnish "book-language" is a wholly artificial thing created based on some southwestern dialects. Mostly because it just because the standardized way to write, and didn't really affect the way the average people spoke in their day-to-day lives much. At most using some very distinct dialect would make people assume you were some hick from the backwoods, but it wasn't illegal or anything.
A bigger issue was the status of the Swedish language, and while similar disputes have in some countries led to civil wars, luckily the worst that came out of it was creation of rival Swedish and Finnish newspapers and student organizations.

>>98773406
>Fantasia Archive
I think this is exactly the tool I need to finally get my worldbulding notes organized and in a more usable form.

While obsidian is quite powerful, it takes quite a bit of customization to set it up into a tool I would like to use.

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>>98785295
Veneti ships were probably carvel-built, as Germanic clinker designs were brought to Britain much later by the Saxons. The closest matches to Caesar's description are the 2nd century AD Blackfriars I shipwreck and the Gallo-Roman "Asterix" merchantman than sank in Guernsey after 280 AD, both carvel-built with heavy oak planks, iron nails and no keels.
https://historicvr.com/romano-british-ship.php
https://museums.gov.gg/romanship

Roman rams being useless in the Battle of Morbihan had probably more to do with their Celtic opponents being far more emassive than the hastily built Roman ships. Classical triremes had trouble punching holes into fives and sixes typical of Roman and Diadochi fleets, and those all used plain old mortise-and-tenon construction. Mass seems far more important than specific method of construction, and ramming in warfare was probably abandoned because Rome had no enemies during the Pax Romana in the Mare Nostrum apart from occasional pirate infestations, and not due to carvel-building becoming common. Pirates, likewise, would rather capture hostages for ransom and loot than sink their enemies. A tiny few professional navies from Phocaean 6th century penteconters to Rhodian trihemiolias until the 1st century BC seem to have always preferred to outmanouver their enemies and rely primary on ramming and oar rakes, their enemies (even most Greeks!) preferred to just board a better-trained opponent if they could avoid a fair contest in seamanship.

A shell-first shallow deckless clinker design like a Viking longship would probably be very vulnerable to a trireme even though the ram wasn't designed to hit overlapping planks. The primary impact of the three narrow horizontal edges of the Athlit ram, for example, first separates the enemy ship's planks, after which the secondary impact of he thick main vertical core crushes two of the planks. A Hanseatic cog or hulk would likely fare better due to their sturdied constrution and mass.

>>98773141
>>98773224
>>98773406
I'll also drop a mention for chronicler (from chronicler.pro if anyone is interested)
>no account required
>all data is local and private
>text is recorded in markdown format, so can be transferred to/from any other compatible text editor
>free (dev intends a "pro" version with additional currently unimplemented features, but it's to be purchased with a one-time payment rather than a subscription)
>still a way to go in terms of features but being actively updated (certainly doing better than fantasia)
>source available if that matters to anyone

>>98795236
(though concerning the "free" bit I should also note that you do get a popup asking to donate when running or closing it if you haven't donated, kinda like winrar or the like)

>>98795236
>chronicler
Do you have to lean/write markdown to use it?

>>98794834
I think that's just the reply I needed to make some final decisions -- thank you.
>The primary impact of the three narrow horizontal edges of the Athlit ram, for example, first separates the enemy ship's planks, after which the secondary impact of he thick main vertical core crushes two of the planks.
You see, I'd never actually read this before. It's a small wonder that fiction so often takes the "everything is a glass cannon, and large structures can be one-shotted" approach when there's so much to consider when you actually think these things through.

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>>98797597
it's basically just plain text with extra functionality
for an example of what it looks like, pic is from the website (though it's worth noting that this from an older version; they've since added GUI buttons for some of the formatting, including the wiki style infobox)

any good artists out there that draw maps
?

I just finished the first draft of my fantasy novel and to keep the writing going I always told that between the first 2 drafts, I'd finish the worldbuilding I've so neglected

which means I have to figure out:

>exact city locations/draw city map of the setting
>broad world map/nations
>theological details of setting's religion that's barely mentioned
>backstory/brief recent history of the world

welp

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I spent the past two weeks working on my setting map and got caught up in the autism of it, and propably went way too fucking far with it. The full sized version of it is far too big to be uploaded here so I posted it on my deviant art gallery.

https://www.deviantart.com/screeble/art/Mundus-Carnis-map-v4-1390026312?file=1

An image is not the ideal format for this amount of autismal worldbuilding desu.
If I knew how I'd make some sort of webpage for this shit or something. Too bad I can't code for shit.

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>>98801242
>mfw spot all the spelling mistakes and tangled sentences in that image I left in accidentally

>>98728146
>What are some of the maritime traditions and superstitions in the seaports of your world?

Relating to this setting>>98801242
The most siginigant element informing people's views of the seas is the fact that the seas beyond the outermost seawalls of the City are basically barren of life, and even establishing anything permanent like seaplatforms or habitats etc beyond this outer perimiter, invites intense Cytic aggression as the Cytes hunt down lifeforms that manage to slip beyond the seawalls and bring them back either dead or alive to the City. Human built facilities and what not beyond this outer perimiter require constant protection as otherwise the Cytes will simply destroy them and dismantle them.

It is widely theorized that both the seawalls as well as the Cytes themselves exist to keep the life of the City contained within the safety of it's sanctuary so it does not venture beyond the effective range of the City's barrier fields. In general most people view the seawalls, especially the outermost ones as borderline sacred though that has not stopped people from destoying sections of the inner seawalls in order to create new passageways for themselves or deny the usage of the maglev arteries of the walls to their enemies.

General maritime superstitions within the City that are not interwoven with worship of the City tend to revolve around dangerous fauna and creatures of the inner seas, as well as great caution against any floating cytic colony as they are often armed and dangerous. The existence of sapient combat chimeras that live in the oceans, the most notorious ones being Leviathans and Naiads also inspire great deal of fear and supersittion. Naiads are especially feared as they are known to snatch humans off piers and board human ships, dragging their victims to the waters and often drowning them in prolonged games for what seem to be just sadistic enjoyment, rather than simply killing their prey after seizing them.

>>98800687
Does it at the very least have spellcheck?

>>98802508
I'm afraid not

>>98802728
Then it isn't the tool for me.

>>98802739
Might just have to use obsidian and spend a day or two assembling plugins to build the tool you want.

It's a small upfront cost of time, but then you have exactly what you need/want, compared to having to compromise with pre-built tools that ether are bloted with tons of stuff you don't want to distract you, or missing stuff that is really important to you.

For example you can just add a plugin for spell check or any other word processes functions you wish. Someone has already built several plugins that do it.
Hell, if you find you need something that doesn't exist the dev community around the project is so active that just mentioning what you want will likely result in some sort of custom plugin being built within the month just for the fun of it (though it may be vibe coded, lol).

>>98766114
Eh, honestly how they flaunt their wealth would probably involve spending absurd amounts of money on dumb shit just because it has a designer name on it.

Like I have no doubt some rich asshole would proudly spend a billion dollars on a literal pile of shit, but because that shit came from the anus of one of Gucci’s top designers, thus its a Gucci turd.

But it’s got me thinking about the space-opera setting I’m working on at the moment, where some of the most influential people aren’t necessarily particularly wealthy, just a bunch of eccentric weirdos willing to take advantage of the fact that a lot of advanced and fantastical technology is easy to find and almost completely unregulated, and have the imagination and skill to exploit it in novel ways. Most don’t even have a lot of actual money to their name.

At this point I’m thinking they do one of 3 things: pretend they don’t exist, or aren’t as important as they actually are, try to buy their way into those communities (and get rejected because these are basically nerds with too much power and they can practically smell inauthenticity), or get spiteful that these others have all this power and for all they can do with it, prefer to squander it on stupid hobbies and petty shit.

We’re talking nerds who will use advanced fabrication and harvesting tech to acquire dozens of miles of wilderness just so they can have their own Minecraft:IRL edition server, or build themselves a robot army just so they can wage 1:1 scale wargames with fellow wargame enthusiasts, stuff like that

>>98801849
Any reason drone robotics aren't an option? I get that they're inferior to sufficiently advanced biotech but shitty infrastructure beats none at all.
>>98803809
I believe "men of culture" is the term you're after. Some kind of voxelising nano-plague would be neat, starts with dirt turning cubic then trees that seem topiary'd and finally the animals warping. The climax of Singularity Sky features a zombie plague of mimes (thrown custard pies are the vector) that were presumably an art piece that'd gone feral.

>>98807173
Inorganic/non living tech and tools are used at times but they generally have fallen partially out of the technological repretuoir of the City's human denizens mostly because finding pure metals and what not is incredibly difficult in the upper strata of the City, as the City's own biology kind of absorbs metallic compounds into it and ties most of it into the foundational structures (the City essentially becomes more and more made out of sort of synthetic biology that is partially metallic in structure while still being alive or outright biomineralized the deeper you go, just to bear the weight of the layers above and deal with the heat of the deeper bowels. Thus metals like copper, iron or even heavier ones needed for making inorganic mircochips etc rather than neural ganglia systems for guiding robotics are hard to come by in the surface layers of the City, very expensive, and the knowledge for how to make such things in the first place is partially lost anyways. What inorganic tools and robots exists are usually observational drones and what not sent far away from the City on scouting missions etc, where they can exist beyond the barrier of the City and operate due to not having living cells in them that the monotonal cacophony that permiates beyond the barrier would inevetable destroy by scrambling the dna in those cells.

>tl;dr: Robotics are far, far more expensive, require hard to come by resources, and are partially just a niche of technology humanity has lost due to how heavily the City's technology leans on biotechnology.

Have had this idea for a setting for a while, but still just a basic concept:
>two tidally locked planets orbiting each other in a close proximity
>the sides facing each other havefloating mountains due to gravitationl fuckery there
>those sides basically experience two days and two nights in a single day/night cycle due to the other planet always blocking out the sun at the zenith
>both planets populated by humanoids with shared ancestry due to a crash landing of a generational ship, that tore in half, each half ending up on each one of the planets
>this event is a long forgotten history, both societies had to start from scratch
>one society didn't change much physically due to the planet they ended up on being similar to Earth, kept being more scientifically oriented, currently in the early industrial era and age of discovery (magic involved, so magitech stuff present)
>other one ended up on a Pandora/Monster Hunter style world, evolved to resemble what could be called elves, more attuned with nature and magic
>both planets are unknowingly connected via a series of logic and physics defying trippy looking cave systems full of dangerous anomalies and supernatural creatures (kinda like the fuckery in Made in Abyss)
>the reason for that is because those cave systems are actually remnant blood vessels of a long dead cosmic titan, whose corpse was split in half and eventually formed into the two planets orbiting each other

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>>98808549
The first mental image that came to my mind while reading this was that the planets are lungs. Its breath causes seasonal changes but because the other planet (lung) is so fucked up it's more like the breathing of a chain smoker.

I want to have huge space warships in my setting because they're cool, but is it believable that they wouldn't get oneshot by nuclear missiles?

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I know in SWN it generally says that practicing psionics isn't something that you can just figure out on your own without formal training but considering someone had to lay the ground work for it I like the idea of a group of people who practice it outside of formal, regulated instruction and taken to the title of Wytch.

Thing is, I'm not sure how to represent them in a way making them unique from the typical psionic users of the setting. The idea being that they came into being after the Scream and instead of having the corpse of the alien god thing fall to Earth, the knife and its fragments covered in blood did so parts of the world where the knife fragments fell the world changed considerably. This not only lead to parts of the world turtling up into several city states but also pushed a mass exodus of people trying to get away and have a place with normal environmental conditions (hence the Oneil cylinders).

>>98812186
Are point defense no good against nuclear missles?

>>98812186
If they get big enough or are made of strong enough materials then they should be able to survive nuclear blasts, especially in space.

>>98807219
Reasonable. I could see those sea-drow perhaps delving into hanky tech that works beyond the death radius though as it'd given them an unexpected resource stockpile with which to oppose the Concordat. Deep sea plumes are metal rich with irl beasties like snails concentrating them into harvestable scales, the City doesn't seem to be primarily benthic either so perhaps its harvests there would be easier to appropriate and funnel into "drytech" manufacture.

>>98809147
Dunno if you're familiar with the term "Roche world" but that's what closely orbiting planets that share an atmosphere go by. I highly recommend Phoresis by Greg Egan for a pretty believable take on them (little outright air exchange iirc but plenty of interrelatedness).
>>98808549
Your "two day-two night" thing brought time cube to mind which is amusing and perhaps relevant when it comes to in-world explanations of the spatially overlapping blood-vessel portals. Mutual eclipsing screwing with day cycles also reminds me of this:
https://moth-lands.itch.io/moth-light
(permanent eclipse and periodic arrival of partner-planet life). Cool stuff.

>>98812186
The very hardest SF aside the specifics of space warfare are often defined retroactively to allow for whatever kind of combat the author wants. Despite vulnerability a prevelence of heavy warships may simply be a matter of cost: while saturating near space with countless lighter craft is feasible a need for redundancy and reactors / radiators working better at scale may lead to heavy ships being the best way to project power further afield. Anyway, it's not nukes you have to worry about so much as nuclear pumped lasers. If we have the energy for torch ships we have new and exotic ways to blow each other to smithereens on hand too.

>>98728146
>>98734262 is only metaphorically maritime really, in terms of actually oceanic superstition there are as many as the more pleasant worlds humanity has settled (some, but never enough). Girandole for instance is a hold over of Sodality expansion, the megacorp slated to claim the world went under as the Quorum tightened its grasp. A coalition of squabbling ex-subsidiaries bought up the rights and set to work terraforming as an excersise in branding. Ecologies assembled and discontinued as a bastardisation of HR, marketing and legacy product jailbreaking went as well as you'd expect.

Seafarers blare out jingles and strobe logos as they cross the oceans in a way not unlike aboriginal Songlines hoping to ward away "patent enforcement" monsters or coax harvest-beasts into regurgitating their bounty. Polynesian animal tattoos are mixed with barcodes and CV dazzle in the hopes of delaying built-in biological iff long enough to slip away.

>>98812372
Codex of the Black Sun incorporates alternative arcane traditions into the default setting. "Magisters" seem to fit witches best imo (limited, powerful, themed spell sets) though yours may differ (a set path from familiar to alchemy etc may fit Adepts better).

Talk of alien gods and knives bring this to mind:
https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2021/01/blacksite-alpha.html?m=1
Does any of this relate to the cybernetic interface fungus?

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>>98812530
>Codex of the Black Sun
Never heard of either of those things but they sound cool as hell.

Honestly, it's more about the veneer or the arcane rather than making it explicitly "magic", then again, things like ghosts and spirits would be real in setting (which I'm still working out how to make it fit nicely) but it's more of a way to give groups their own unique identities and allow for crazy religious groups to exist.

To give an example of what I'm pushing for would be something like Necromancy;

In this case, you are using your telepathy powers to explore the mind of something who has died but their body is still alive via life support. It's not something that is officially taught because of the extreme danger it presents for obvious reasons and that is only one application of the power

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>>98812186
The most practical, insane and powerful design does it. As long as the pusher plate is aimed towards the blast, Orion drive ships might just radio the enemy: "thank you for the free thrust".

Nukes don't directly generate all that heat and blast. It's the radiation interacting with the atmosphere that flash-heats it into a shockwave, but it's so fast it doesn't make a difference for the target. A mundane nuke in space, detonating near an enemy, is mostly a way to kill the crew, and fry the electronics, without damaging their ship too much.

A nuclear missile whose casing includes beryllium oxide, turns the radiation into a plasma explosion. If the beryllium is a filler at the front, the missile becomes a one-shot plasma shotgun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casaba-Howitzer

Honestly, if you want to do something like OGREs in space, in which the things are so resistant that you basically have to cripple every engine, weapon, sensors but everything inside the superduperarmor stays intact, go for it. If you want to make it so all ships perform interplanetary sword duels using the engine exhausts as 100kms long lightsabers, sounds awesome. The important bit is making it believable and consistent. More Babylon 5, less WW2 documentary.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131229234257/http://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html

what kind of image doe "blood magic" conjure up in your mind?

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>>98812692

>>98812186
with the speed spaceships are going at (admitting much higher speeds than what humanity currently can reach, say 5% of the speed of light), hitting a small scrap of metal while travelling can deliver enough energy to rival small nuclear bomb so either
>you spaceships can take it, at least from the front because taking 1 gram of dust at that speed is equivalent to little boy, and the energy is not going in every direction
>places where battles took place become no ship lands because of all the flying debris OR filled with peoples whos job is to bring back all these debris to the ground
otherwise interstellar travel would be incredibly dangerous since a single broken ship could endanger a ship lane
although if you use wormholes to travel you can have much lower travel speeds, in which case no need for such shielding, and then yes, shps would get obliterated by atomic missiles

on a side note I could imagine
- some form of gravity tool made to attract flying debris in places not close to planetes, you can imagine plenty of fun quest around these like finding why your flight did not end up where you wanted or scavenger clans fighting over who should get which battlefield
- if the front shielding is expensive, tactics would revolve around having the front pointed toward enemies, and manage to flank. having traitors would become much more powerful and large battles would be showdowns of tactics.
Also you can deduce ship design from this, pirate/rebel factions would only use it on the most important part while merchant factions would have most of the ship covered, defensive equipment oriented for the back and side while offensive armament would be at the front, etc

>>98812564
CotBS is a SWN expansion so Crawford's already translated it as a veneer over the psionic / metadimensional pseudoscience.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/fr/product/259700/the-codex-of-the-black-sun-sorcery-for-stars-without-number

Shadows in the book are basically demonic summons recontextualised as "patterns" metadimensional energy adopts when instantiated by computing certain spell-formulae. There's a suggested in-setting debate over whether the recurring individuals exists with the naming spells being a conduit to them or if they're created by the call with false memories of other realms.

Anyway, as human selves have to have an extradimensional aspect to reach into metaspace and wield psionic powers in the first place it seems reasonable that human ghosts could function analogously as "imprints" on the background field. Unless you want to overhaul the larger setting these ghosts would either have to be a result of local conditions leading to stronger "imprints" or else local tech which makes interacting with them feasible. The SANIS arcane interface in CotBS for instance is stated to have been available patchily across Mandate space, same with shield tech from Proteus Sector. Something similar could apply for you.

Though non-canon (unlike teratogenics and abnegation), outright ruled out in fact, the extra Psychometry discipline may also be useful in cooking up justification for ghosts. "Talk with object" could be a sort of distributed necromancy distilling every thought anyone in the vicinity has had about / around an object. Applied to sentimental relics you get a ghost that's almost 200% a particular person (albeit heavily distorted through the lens of the anchor-object's emotional resonance, hard to find a peaceful gun ghost).
https://www.reddit.com/r/SWN/comments/u8vruv/swn_extra_content_teratogenics_revised/

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>>98814453
You've sold me on it. Just from the QRD it sounds like the sort of wavelength I'm on anyways so repurposing those ideas would be easy enough.

One of the main parts of the setting that I havn't fully fleshed out yet, does involve the nature of Souls. I equate memories with the soul which is important because the "vampires" of the setting have a way to essentially distill your memories into a substance they can consume. Most filter it out of the blood but cannibalism is fairly common among Healer Cults.

>>98812692
not necesarrily the magic itself, but I do associate it a lot with an Albino like appearance, like pale skin, white hair, red eyes, stuff like that.

The magic itself I mostly think of in two ways, ritual sacrifice that utilizes splling blood, and direct manipulation of blood itself, even in the human body and up to forming constructs with it like weapons or minions.

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>>98812692
I personally like it when different aspects of the setting interconnect with one another as it appeals to my deep, autistic desire for such details.

That being said, blood magic on it's own isn't a theme strong enough to exist on it's own and I imagine it would make sense as a broader part of the more forbidden sort of magic you would see associated with it like fleshwarping, necromancy, and the like.

Then you have shit like Blood Bending in Avatar but that seems like something you could only do at some kind of high mastery of the power and require some ritual to pull off so it's not absurdly powerful

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So I know space combat is a whole topic but is there any way to make ships ala WWII torpedo boats viable? I've been learning more on the said ships and it's crazy some of the stuff people did with these wooden hulled boats.
So like I said I was wondering if something like that could be made viable as an avenue of space combat

I need a vibe check on a place name. Which is a better name: Vesdarna or Vesdnyhrad?

They mean similar, but not quite the same, things.

>>98817716
Yes, though it requires some technobabble solution for why there can be stealth in space.

Personally, if you are thinking about how to do space combat in a way that feels 'realistic', I highly recommend you watch an old show called Starship Operators. Its had the most realistic 'feeling' space combat I've ever seen.

In summary:
> warships are so extraordinarily expensive that even a wealthy planet can only afford one or two of them total, and the big bad even empire that is gobbling up systems left and right currently only has 35 of them.
> each warship is essentially a work of art superweapon, literally the best possible ship that a planet can manage to build, and if it gets destroyed or disabled the planet that made it has virtually no other option but to surrender
> battle takes place at ranges across the entire solar system, which is why the ships are so fucking expensive: you are fighting with weapons that can accurately land a shot and are difficult to evade even at combat ranges measured in AU.
> However, it can take dozens of hours, or even multiple *days*, between when a shot is fired and when it actually hits its target. Defensive action means trying to identify when you are under attack as quickly as possible, and what sort of weapon is currently on its way towards you, in order to come up with an evasion or interception plan in the time you have before it reaches you
> evasion can often be a losing move in the long run, because ships travel at such enormously high speeds that they cannot turn on a dime. Every course change you make to avoid an incoming attack changes your velocity in a way that cannot simply be taken back later, you can win some fights simply by forcing the enemy into a trajectory that means it will be weeks before they can turn around and come back for another go at you, burning an enormous amount of fuel in the process such that they are better off withdrawing entirely.
And so on.

>>98819834
Vesdarna is better, Vesdnyhrad is the kind of name I'd gloss over when reading a novel and never bother learning in its entirety because how hard it would feel to pronounce.

>>98819834
Seconding Vesdarna unless you want the place to sound explicitly slavic
Also bear in mind as a rule of thumb to avoid places with ambiguous spelling like Vesdnyhrad if possible

>>98819865
>>98820063
Okay, thanks. Thats about where I was as well, in that Vesdarna is less of a mouthful but Vesdnyhrad has the cooler meaning. The former being 'star/starry place', and the later being 'star castle'.
Vesdarna it is then.

>>98820113
You know what people do with big and long names or with difficult names for places?
They shorten them or alter them.
You can keep the cool sounding name but locals may just call the place Vesd or Ves for example

>>98814828
I hope it has what you're after, by all means pirate it from the Share thread before purchase though. Best way to decide if something's worth buying is actually reading it imo.

>>98815950
I see where you're coming from but it's also fun to build a setting hyperfocused around a particular kind of power. The mad bioscientist Bonesaw in Worm is extrapolated into the whole world of Twig quite well. A blood magic centres world suggests vampires, dynastic sympathetic contagion warfare and some divine transmutation based currency / church (whether anti or pro bloodsucker).

>>98817716
Are we talking harder SF torch-tubes rationing out delta-V or more Star Wars air / naval battles in spaaaace? The latter allows you so much leeway that pretty much anything goes. Maybe the small ships aren't big enough to mount proper shields but they can more than power an artillery battery at bargain-bin prices. For harder stuff they might work well as system patrol ships. Combat aside shielding is necessary to tank incidental debris, if sticking to orbits regularly cleared to prevent Kessler syndrome "torpedo boats" don't need to withstand crap flying around nor lug around fuel for the long haul. Low mass, heavily armed and able to quickly reposition sounds like a good combo to dissuade ne'er-do-wells going anywhere near key planets.

>>98819865
While this is true bastardised slurs like "Dini" can allude to the "texture" of a complicated name while also getting across how they're viewed by others (ie using slur or proper title). >>98820063 is right about the association too and it's a good rule of thumb (meaning that knowing violation can work well too, see "Bene Tleilax" etc...).

>>98820136
At least I'm not going with the ACTUAL real world spelling, which would be Hvězdnýhrad

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>>98817716
>So like I said I was wondering if something like that could be made viable as an avenue of space combat
STL warp/alcubierre drive physics.
Basically it allows for speeds and accelerations that would emulsify a crew using a conventional drive because the ship is perfectly stationary in its own reference frame.
The caveat is that square cube law dictates that there's a very specific range a drive and associated ship sizes.
Too small and the effect just doesn't occur.
Too big and you just made a very expensive fireworks display.
When something is fired from inside a warp bubble it creates a secondary bubble though with a limited lifespan.
Once the secondary bubble expires the projectile experiences an uncontrolled cascade of tidal forces that invariably cause it to detonate, which the discerning commander always has to include in his calculations but despite of which the platform is still well worth it.

This setup
>Cucks TBDs out of ruining our fun by making them too big
>Gives fighter screens and interceptors less power
>Prevents our torpedo boat from sodomizing everything forever without recourse by reintroducing drag as a limiting factor
I hope this works for you.

>>98819861
>Starship Operators
How have I not heard of this before?

I am working on something, where there is an order of lancer knights specialized on charging against big monsters (inspired by Saint George and all the dragon slaying medieval memes)

Monsters spawn from the chaos plane constantly as a side effect of the magic of evil wizards doing shit somewhere. The spear thing is because its the best way to provide a wide shot with penetrating impact, enough to deal a lot of damage to the monster.

I have some lore brick about how normal horses cannot perform due to the "Terror Field" broadcast by the monsters, so a special breed of super horses was gifted by the goddess Epona to the order of knights in the old times. Lances themselves are also blessed by clerics in order to deal a little more damage. The idea is that only an elite can fight the monsters effectivelly.

Basically I'm redoing Evangelion but with knights.

Im only stuck on the appearance and powers of the monsters themselves. Im sure I dont want them talkative, I want them to be "primordial"; born from chaos before humanity existed. Literal dragons are also too "human" in their d&d idiosincrasy, but maybe the "dragon" term can be applied to the monsters anyways. They should be big enough to be big when compared to a horse and a rider, though smaller monsters can also appear as fodder before the big charge.

I think that lovecraftian is the way to go, but maybe is too repetitive to have them be tentacled masses. What do you think?

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>>98822262
I would assume they would have to assume a shape that makes lancing them the best way of dealing with them.

>>98822262
Reminds me a bit of Three Hearts and Three Lions, an old isekai story about a guy waking up in a medieval fantasy version of Europe where thee world is divided into two, the human world representing the forces of law and the middle world representing the forces of Chaos which is inhabitated by all kinds of Fairies, with there being a constant struggle between both forces.
The Protagonist basically becomes a Knight/Paladin, who over the course of the story fights many threats from middle earth like Fairy Knights, Dragons, Giants and Trolls, which for the most part do share certain weaknesses to things like Iron, Sunlight and Holiness(you can hurt them by saying holy names and keep them at bay through sanctiifed ground and holy symbols), which lets a paladin clad in steel armor and bearing steel weapons and versed in Christianity stand up to them pretty well even when physically inferior or outnumbered.

Anyway, if you dont want the enemies humanoids, have you considered just using large upscaled animals? Especially those usually associated with evil like, Vultures, Snakes, Scorpions, Rats, Wolves and the like

Or even just going for giant insects like colonies of Ants and Hornets and th elike could be terrifying.

I started out making a weird truly weird and unique species of humanoid.
As the world developed and I started writing a proper story arch I just couldn't make them fit ether with the rest of the world nor any of the themes of the story.
So I slowly modified them for better fit the themes of the story and evolutionary biology of the setting.
Eventually get the the point where I make them the polar opposite of the (not) vampires. Sort of like a combination of really creepy cultivators and druids who slowly transform themselves trough taoist inspired rituals until they are physiologically different from the person they started as.
But because the process is subtle and over time the end point isn't anywhere near as drastic as how I originally envisioned them.
Instead they basically look like dark elves with gemstone eyes at the end of their transformation.

>>98822262
Definitionally primordial would be crustaceans.
Attack its weak point for massive damage
As for the horses, war horses are specially special of specialness regardless of what you do.
No seriously you can just make them regular ass war horses.
It's a decade long process to get one accustomed to REGULAR noise.
The war horses were arguably as big or bigger of a limiter than the armor when it came to cavalry.
I mean you can still have magic horses if you want.
But you can also just have the overlap between time to train and peak physical condition be a shopping 5 years.
That alone would be enough to put a brutal cap on it.
Math a second big drain on the program is that these horses invariably get mean asf but it's culturally unconscionable to kill them so like half of all war horses at any given point are out on pasture

>>98823105
To add to the "augmented animals" theme I'd make them heraldic / symbolic hypertrophy rather than generic tentacles. You still have super special warriors, equipment and horses but the trick is that they have to cultivate a contrasting / cancelling out virtue to follow through on the charge without faltering.

A plague of mice so humble that men in their vicinity allow themselves to be nibbled to death ("wouldn't want to cause a fuss")? Righteous pride in the virtue of one's station. Serpent dripping envy that causes chargers to fatally showboat and trip? Anonymous your armour and commit to an oath of silence about the good deed done.

These also suggest dark nights who become fixed in contest with one beast in particular thereby becoming just as inhuman an opposite themselves which sounds on-brand to me.
>>98824218
While true I think there's room for the mastery and cooperation of a beast to be yet another vector for "weaponized virtue" to express itself. After all it's not enough to be good, you need to be a role model too (for mount and eventual squire both).

>>98824847
Monstrous virtue alongside monstrous vice suggests an order of Knaves counterpart to the Knights. Maybe a "devil's advocate" left hand of god type figure in the Church finances them (or rather makes the consequences of their own self-financing schemes disappear) deniable so that the beasts that fatally and falsely impose sainthood can be exterminated by gluttons, degenerate gamblers and thieves. Instead of black knight fallen brethren maybe a knave gone wrong looks like Francis of Assisi, the fraticellis or Jacques Bonhomie. Virtue takes root disproportionately among the bottom of society in such a way that threatens to overthrow the status quo and its venal sins. Sounds lovely until you end up with a cult of reason or parliament of saints.

I think it makes sense to have at least one fatal flaw for knights and redeeming virtue for Knaves, from a story perspective for differentiation and conflict while in-setting it "anchors" them against the risks of excessive weapon used virtue or vice respectively. Relics are pretty cool too, maybe knights wander around with a rattling box of knucklebones, cloth scraps and nails crusted with blood while knaves claim to have the same which they intend to sell on to marks (yet somehow never do). Talking weapons are cool but probably ought to be rare, massive power at the risk of corruption / possession perhaps.

>>98825024
Lastly when it comes to the visuals of the heraldic terrors I reckon a cool way to sell otherworldliness without defaulting to tentacles would be to flavour them as the Platonic essence of a beast (and its moral associations) pressing against the skein of mundane reality, tearing through in some places. The lion literally has a halo of gold which intertwines, fades into and is woven from its mane. It leaves afterimages in the eye like having stared at the sun when you look away and the grass beneath its feet takes on a proud, sharp points of its claws. Dandelions become miniature yaldaboaths in its wake.

It's also clearly not an actual flesh and blood lion. Inkstains remain where it's been, splinters from the elements of it that are crudely whittled or shipwrecked bowsprit. It's been taxidermied expertly by someone who's had the live animal described to them poorly, that sort of thing.

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Went from calling my dino-bird mounts Daggerdash, to dagdash, to now just dadash.
Wonder if eventually I will shorten it again to dash, or da?

>>98823839
what makes this truly unique and weird? this sounds like the typical not elves to me.
not saying its bad per se

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>>98825460
What I was saying is that they started out really weird but eventually just became elves.

For example they were originally planed to be unguligrade, with claws with two thumbs on each hand in a arrangement similar to pic related, long faces, a hunched spine, and a thick tail.
But their biology and culture didn't fit the rest of the world nor the storylines.
So I kept modifying them to be "thematically" more fitting to the setting, until I ended up reinventing different flavored versions of dark elves in appearance.

>>98825484
your original idea sounds cool and very alien indeed. too bad it didnt fit with the setting.
seeing you talk about storylines i guess this is for a book or somethig and not an rpg, right?

>>98825858
Correct.

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>>98823839
"Inverse Vampire" sounds like an interesting idea seed. Anyone else itt feel like having a crack at it?

>Sun-averse, blood dependant immortal undead infectious aristocratic parasitic infiltrators

The aristocratic cast to vampires came later iirc, initially their archetypal member was a suspiciously ruddy peasant and they were more like draugr vengefully haunting family that couldn't be bothered to bury them properly. With that in mind how about anti-vampires as that which lives despite never having lived: the fetus withing wives burned by Suttee, miscarriages set alight that their soul might escape and reincarnate, victims of the molk. All these lead to fires that burn bright and joyous under the light of the sun as long as they're regularly stacked with firewood. They die every night as the sun sets yet rise again anew in the morning unless their embers are buried under the earth of what would have been their birthplace and quenched in human blood.

They are a fountain of vital energy to all who behold them, disastrously so. Where a vampire may turn another by sloppy feeding or force to see a sun-child is to ignite a yearning to become one in some. The children are pre-life denied birth and true dying, anyone whose soul they set a fire they love and would not subject to the same fate. Unlike vampires it is precisely those they would least see cursed who set themselves afire.

The children are not immortal nor do they seek it, in fact constantly being born anew as well as empathy are the only reason they do not procure birthsoil and human blood to quench themselves and go on to a true life. They can't approach helpers lightly for the cruel would keep them as resources to be tapped and the kindly too readily join them in blazing cheer. Blood bonds work in reverse, for them to burn a lock of hair "anchors" their personhood yet also makes them a temporary extension of that person's will.

Not really usable but fun silliness much as the anti-phoenix is.

>>98825484
Shame, what is the broader vibe they clash with?

>>98823839
I feel like you could probably still do a lot of creative/original stuff with the gem eyes thing, simply because of how many gems there are and how many thematic associations there are to possibly work with.

>>98825431
Change it back, it sounds like a delivery company now.

>>98825431
name it daesh

>>98823029
yes

>>98823105
>have you considered just using large upscaled animals?
i think its the most kino, you are right. Giant scorpion, giant scholopendra, giant squid, giant snake, giant crab.

>>98824218
>No seriously you can just make them regular ass war horses.

I also like that too

>>98824847
>cancelling out virtue to follow through on the charge without faltering
I like how that sounds but to say the truth, I dont think its easy to portray on a tabletop, much less on a regular basis. I think that just risking their lives on the charge is enough test.

To follow with evangelion, probably most of the knights are very young, as a job like that will either have you dead or badly injured at an early age.

I am coming with some ideas for their origin: Basically, there are one or more "witches", in the ff8 style, that use chaos-related powers, and as a common technique, they use live servants to transmutate into these monsters.

The servants must submit "willingly" (though it is fine to corrupt them and erode their will over time) and have a magical preparation, but the trigger can be fired at will as any other spell; this prevents the witch from creating a super army of monsters in-world; and introduces the witch as some sort of "magical onlyfans girl" which I think it goes nice with the evil sorceress vibe.

I don't want the monster to have any human behavior, nonetheless. I think its better if the monster is summoned from the chaos plane using the body as a sacrifice, than make the monster a twisted version of the sacrifice (like the Gungrave monsters. Yes I am an anime guy)

However, I think that the HP of the monster could be proportional to the magical power of the caster + the HP of the sacrifice. This way, the witch has an incentive to search for high level subs.

Clerics and white magic should have an effect versus these monsters, but not sure how much.
I am pondering if druids and neutral magic (not good or evil) has a place on this game

>>98825431
Grubhub ass name desu

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Had an idea for the spooky season but I'm kind of worried its cringe.

>Basic premise is a dark fantasy setting where most of civilization the players will be in is ruled by Vampiric nobles.
>Humanity is either subjugated in villages outside Vampiric cities or living on dangerous frontiers as independent villages
>Vampire Hunters are more or less fulfilling the role of bandits or guerilla fighters
>The ruler of all the Vampires managed to cover the land in a supernatural darkness, which has made agriculture exceedingly difficult and reliant on magic to work (thinking of merging magic users into an all-encompassing "Witch" aesthetic)
>Werewolves act as barbarians often laying siege to Vampiric civilization
>Adventurers are basically mercenaries that the Vamps hire for dealing with necromancers, eldritch cults, and other things that have cropped up under their rule.
>Vamps run the gamut from "Chivalric Knight who genuinely wants to bring the sun back for humans" to "iron-fisted tyrant imposing his will on the world"
Don't have much of a plot beyond that.

>>98828455
I thought about something like this. A vampire ruled society would make sense to have considerable health care to ensure their subject/livestock are of optimal health, especially if you allow the giving of blood in place of money.

>>98828455
Nah its not cringe, at least not as is, though it could be depending on how much you lean on tropes in regards to stuff like human/vampire romances.

Anyway I'd have the Humans heavily rely on fishing as food source to both cover for the lack of agriculture and to have a reliable source of vitamin D without sunlight. Like you'd need a quite fish heavy diet if you want to retain health.
Also just importing Crops is definitely an option, botht through trade(like your subjects can still mine ores and produce goods through craftsmanship) and from subjugated vassals ouside the darkness.

Would probably have been simpler for the vampire to just build underground settlements though that are supplied by vassals from above living with sunlight.


Anyway if you need a plot maybe explore the rammification within vampire society of having rulers that never die, which could be quite unpleasant for younger vampires as this both means they'll never get a chance at ruiling themselves and that the older vampires are often gonna be set in their ways, giving little room for change and progress.
Like maybe there are efforts to engage in more industrialism or a different approach in how they value skilled humans.

>>98827913
>daesh
>Daesh is the Arabic acronym used for Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS), also written as داعش (Dāʿish). It is widely used in the Middle East and internationally, and it is considered a derogatory term by the group.

Seems like asking for trouble, lol.

>>98825937
True.
Though it will take a bit of thought on my part to go in that direction.

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>>98827429
>>98828427
Maybe go the other direction.
Something like "dagder"

What are some good resources on what life was like and what people thought during the industrial revolution/victorian era? I have a couple ideas for steampunk stuff and I wanted to give it some depth

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>>98828728
>>98828864
So I'm not sure if this really counts as "exploring" themes but an idea that resonates with me is the Vampiric ruling class being a mix of horror and necessity. I really like how Bloodborne kind of mashed Lovecraftian horror with Victorian gothic horror, and I feel that in some ways that's a fun lens to explore things through; that the Vampires in essence keep even greater horrors at bay.

I'm thinking maybe the Vampires came about either from devouring a god in a desperate gambit to ward off older and eviler things, or as the children of a kind of inscrutable "god of blood". I think it could be interesting to imply that for as macabre and strange a "god of blood" is, it might have some love for humanity in part because it flows through the veins of every human born.

As for their classic weakness to the sun, I think maybe that could lean into the cosmic theme too. There could be some horrific eldritch god that embodies the concept of the sun; while sunlight as a whole singes them, lands devoted to that god are scorching deserts that burn the Vampires on sight.

Basically have all these cosmic forces duking it out, with the sun being the most familiar

>>98807173
That’s definitely taking things a bit too literal. It’s “Minecraft:IRL edition” in the spirit of a single person (or small friend group) having access to such fantastical technology that they can harvest/Mine and process large volumes of raw materials and be able to use those processed resources to build grand-scale constructions and machines (like a 1:1 scale St. Peter’s Basilica, or Barad-dûr, or a fully working and operational Bismarck, so quickly it’s construction could be measured in days or weeks, and with such ease that it could be considered a “hobby”.

Fantastical technology that’s so readily available because it’s basically fallen into public domain so… little to stop nerds, I mean “men of culture”, all over contacted space from getting ahold of this tech and using it to indulge their fantasies and eccentricities.

Could you just imagine what they’d do with that kinda tech?

>>98829605
NTA but sounds really cool to me.
Not sure how it will translate to table top though.

>>98829617
Easy, at least for stuff for PCs to do: when you scale up nerd hobbies to 11, nerd drama would also scale up to 11. And the last thing anyone in this community wants is to see the actual authorities take notice and try to reign their hobbies in. Not after what happened to the furry community…

Anyway it’s an incentive for these communities to police themselves, to deal with bad actors, or even hire outside agents to deal with said “That Guys” when they are unwilling or unable to deal with them themselves.

if you must ask, the furry community used genetic engineering to create their own ideal “companions” and well, it was one thing when their kitsune or catgirl Trad wife was just a robot in a fur suit, but it crossed a line when they became sentient creatures of flesh and blood. The use of genetic engineering got regulated to hell and back so now only licensed professionals have access to the tech and how it’s used is under a constant microscope. Worse still, the question of what to do with the anthropomorphic creatures created by this community caused a whole schism that resulted in mankind’s first interstellar war. Suffice to say, since then the furry community’s public image has never recovered and it should go without saying that other communities don’t want the same fate to befall their beloved hobbies

>>98828455
>Had an idea for the spooky season but I'm kind of worried its cringe.
You need to work on your confidence issues.
>>98829316
Now it sounds like a Celtic god.

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>>98829579
>I feel that in some ways that's a fun lens to explore things through; that the Vampires in essence keep even greater horrors at bay
Reminds me a bit of the manga/anime, Seraph of the End
The Setting is basically in a post biblical apocalypse where a virus killed almost everyone over the age of 13(with the exception of some members of occult organizations who developeda vaccine), the oceans turned red and poisonous and all kinds of monsters called Horseman of the Apocalypse started roaming the earth hunting humans.

This resulte in Vampires coming out of hiding and starting to let human children into their underground cities for their blood in exchange for protection. In Japan we see Humans from Occult families preserve a few cities, under what they call the Imperial Demon Armor, which they only manage because they employ soldiers with demons bound to them through cursed weapons.
>As for their classic weakness to the sun, I think maybe that could lean into the cosmic theme too. There could be some horrific eldritch god that embodies the concept of the sun; while sunlight as a whole singes them, lands devoted to that god are scorching deserts that burn the Vampires on sight.
>Basically have all these cosmic forces duking it out, with the sun being the most familiar
Seems cool, have you considered adding races associated with the sun entity as counterpart for vampires?

>>98728146
Landsmaids are one of the warrior cults that still haunt the trench-scarred wastelands. They're all permanently "stitched" into their three-armed battlesuits, not that there's much of them left inside those suits anyway. Major changes to their bodies were required in order to survive the sickness radiated by their infamous weapon, the dreihander.

The dreihander is a pile bunker. It contains a thick, sharpened core of depleted "solar metal" -- metal that fell to the earth when the sun was killed at the beginning of time. Despite its death, the sun's body contains immeasurable power, and the cherry-red pile can puncture through even the armour of a war-god. A landsmaid will accelerate to dizzying speeds on their rocket-boosters and slam their dreihander through the head or joints of whomever they've decided to kill today.

The landsmaids are a taciturn tribe, and they can appear aloof and austere. Nothing could be further from the truth. They love a good laugh. When they meet one another and start their thousand-mile journeys across the wastelands they gather around and drink lubricant spiked with firedrug. They say it makes them feel more at one with their suits, but it also gets them completely fucked; it's like huffing petrol while snorting m-cat. It's worth noting that they deeply believe every one of them is already dead and that they are in some kind of unending purgatory. They don't know what happens when you die in this world, but they think it probably sends you somewhere just as bad.

>>98830574
>Seems cool, have you considered adding races associated with the sun entity as counterpart for vampires?
Yeah! At first I was considering Elves as a parallel to the Vampires' longevity. Then I thought of an Ottoman-esque imperial nation that worships the sun. Now I'm thinking of a nation run off human sacrifice that maybe have mutated so much they're barely even recognizable as "human" anymore.

Does anyone remember that setting about whales and tsars and shit

>>98828396
I had Pendragon in mind where a PCs character is as mechanically relevant as the rents of their holdings which finance equipment. Far from relevant to most games I'll admit (the posts were freewheeling fun). I think the virtue / vice aspect still has a place in that the loftier the heights a witch topples their simp from the more formidable the monster. While clerical magic might fight fire with fire (or rather vice with contrasting / nullifying virtue) perhaps druids reduce a heraldic animal to its merely "natural" inspiration. A lion does not kill for pleasure the same way an embodiment of Pride does, still risky yet a risk reduction all the same.

>>98829605
Fair enough. Sufficiently advanced asshole making playthings of mere mortals leads to hellscapes by default. So long as there is distributed enforcement of food taste as you describe here >>98829669 things need not escalate to body horror. The question remains though, those who castrated the post-furries: were mankind as a whole morally competent yet uninterested in the doings of Nerds until Those Guys emerged? If so why don't they bother to be interstellar? How do they maintain a cohesive understanding of Good Taste?

>>98834691
Doesn't ring a bell. You have any further details?

>>98837062
> mankind as a whole morally competent yet uninterested in the doings of Nerds until Those Guys emerged? If so why don't they bother to be interstellar? How do they maintain a cohesive understanding of Good Taste?
Firstly, body horror? Not exactly, this might not have been clear in the description but let me try to clarify: genetic engineering in this setting can’t be used to, say, turn yourself into a blue hedgehog, that’s just too extreme an alteration and you would just end up with cancer. But a zygote is another story, that you could engineer into whatever you want using the setting’s technology. Like growing a hedgehog girlfriend (or boyfriend) in a tube. Which is where all the “ick” of what the furries did came from. You could not convince any rational person that the relationship with the creature that’s biologically 25, but chronologically 3, is a healthy relationship between consenting, informed adults and not some exploitative bullshit. Hence why I don’t think it qualifies as “body horror” they didn’t go through some traumatic transformation sequence, they were “born” that way and it’s all they know.

1: the general attitude regarding the activities of the nerds is largely a case of “as long as they aren’t bothering anyone or hurting anyone, what they choose to do with their free time is not our problem”.

2: they are interstellar, this is an interstellar setting. As a matter of fact, the whole reason a lot of this tech got developed in the first place was due to humanity overextending itself during those early years and developing tech to compensate.

3: kinda falls into the same qualifier as how one identifies what is porn and what is art “I know it when I see it”. So just like today, doesn’t matter the subculture, they grew up and spend some amount of time in and around “normal society” so they know what is “good” and “decent” and when one of their own has crossed a line.

>>98837876
The same technology that allows people to casually build wonderlands can conceivably be turned to unsavoury uses and as space is BIG it's difficult to coordinate a response that'd prevent bad actors from shitting up one place before fleeing reprisals to the next spot.

Your rationales guard against these darker possibilities quite well (beyond the fact that as author one can set a certain theme and work backwards to justify it), I was just curious what the reasons were. Now I know.

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SWN anon here. One of the aspects of the system I've been struggling with is how to deal with is teleportation. Since I've tied the psychic powers to the technology of the setting I'm trying to see how to scale it in such a way so it doesn't go too far outside of control in a way.

For instance, "Pseudo Gravity" is the combination of telekinesis as well as the typical spin gravity one would expect from a space habitat and only really works for large facilities. Similarly, I was thinking of integrating teleportation into this to allow faster travel in the solar system except they can only blink in and out for short bursts and have to slow boat the rest of the way so trips to the moon takes hours and Venus/Mars takes days.

Should I also apply this to a space elevator type set up as well where it blinks part way up?

>>98837062
>I think the virtue / vice aspect still has a place in that the loftier the heights a witch topples their simp from the more formidable the monster.

hahahahahahah it would be cool but im not as good game designer to make it all work

I have a trickster/outsider god in my setting and I want them to have multiple different masks/faces they wear. Like different aspects. What would you put on such a list?

My short write-up is:

>Talapos is a deity of the moon, chaos, the tides, chance, and illusion. They are generally not gendered, having a back-and-forth identity, freely choosing between male and female. According to some traditions, Talapos only joined in the courting of Shanra during the Seventh or Eighth World, possibly in order to avoid being their next victim. They are mythically associated with the coyote.

(It's on the ninth world now.) (The gods are really bad at not having the world blow up.)

>>98848092
How does a chaotic trickster god end up associated with the moon?

Generally the moon’s pretty predictable. I mean enough that ancient peoples built an entire calendar around it’s phases.

>>98849519
>How does a chaotic trickster god end up associated with the moon?
The Ogdoad, the main deities, are made up of eight gods from the Primordial Chaos, who formed the world through acts of divine murder on outsider gods. As a former outsider god, Talapos is more associated with the Primordial Chaos than the others, and they're literally the moon.

Also, solar eclipses block off the sun and make it way easier for spirits from the Primordial Chaos to come in. The sun is also more static in the sky because the world is tidally locked (only wobbling back and forth about 20 degrees total), so the moon orbiting the planet feels different (and it has significant obliquity so it only properly occludes the sun once a sunth).

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>>98829579
>>98828455
Alright so I've had a few more ideas for the Vampire setting, figured I'd throw them out here.

>Turned Vamps and "Pure Bloods"
I like the dichotomy you see in some Vampire fiction of there being a separation between people turned into Vampires and people "born" Vampires. "Pure Bloods" are those lineages directly descended from the Blood God's transformation of certain aristocrats into Vampires. New Pure Bloods can be made by the coupling of two Vampires but it's extremely difficult and no one is really sure *how*. Some Vampires believe they have to feed on each other's blood to "make" a pureblood, others believe that they have to gorge themselves on a massive quantity of mortal blood to do it, a few try to invoke the old blood god and conceive on holy ground, and some even think a Pure Blood can only be born from true love.

Most Vampires thus continue their lineage through turning certain mortals, basically "adopting" them into their "family". Legally these turned mortals have all the same rights as other Vampires, but socially they're still considered lessers; there are times where a Vampire couple finally produces a Pure Blooded heir after already decades or even centuries of attempts, and immediately casts aside their adopted "child" in favor of the Pure Blood. Thus "adopted" Vampires are often more desperate to claim their own domains of power, expanding into the frontier and creating their own cadet branches so they have something they stand to inherit.

>Inheritance for immortal beings.
Given they're functionally immortal, there are few opportunities to inherit a throne for younger Vampires. The most common form of pseudo-inheritance is a protracted Regency. This isn't uncommon, as older Vampires frequently suffer from a peculiar kind of melancholy and may withdraw into a deep sleep for ages. Its important for Vampires to ensure their regents are loyal, as some have tried to make their regency a more "permanent" position. (1/2)

>>98840501
>space elevator teleportation part way
only if you want to get into people trying to make teleport gates linked all the way through the solar system too. I mean, you could want that, like carriage houses and inns where you trade up your horse for a psychic who's battery still works but might not be the vibe you're going for.
Personally I'd keep the elevator traditional and focus on the slow boat side of things keeping the psychic side rare and mysterious otherwise it gets too silly for me but ymmv.

What kind of narrator do you employ the most and whate are the pros and cons? What are the most popular ones?

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>>98850082
(2/2)
>Humans within the Vampires' domain.
Within the feudal hierarchy of Vampires, Humans are frequently on the bottom. This is not the same as being an "undesirable", but they are de facto the lower class and usually bonded to their local lord via serfdom.

The rights of humans are extremely limited, their very lives are owned by their lords. In previous eras, a Vampire could kill any mortal for any reason, though thanks in part to lobbying by the Sanguine Church, officially Vampires can only kill a mortal if, for example, they are severely wounded and need to heal themselves.

Humans are often conscripted into military service, acting as the front line against horrors that crawl in the dark. Prestigious military service is generally the sole form of social mobility that Humans can rely on, unless they catch the eye of a noble for other reasons.

Taxation is levied primarily in the form of a blood tithe, collected by the Church. There are a few Vampires who collect crops to sell as well, but generally its considered poor-form and shortsighted to take a portion of humanity's livelihood; these low taxes on crops have actually allowed the human population to flourish to a degree.

>Religion
The official religion followed by both Humans and Vampires is the Sanguine Church. This is the bridge between both their kind. Surprisingly for an institution operating under a Vampiric aristocracy, it's fairly compassionate: operating almshouses for the poor and orphanages.

There are heretical faiths worshipped in the frontier, predominantly by humans. These are the enemies of the Church and are met with Crusades and Inquisitions. While seemingly cruel, these capricious elder gods should only be met by the sword.

>>98850097
I was already wavering on it but I agree that it doesn't work thematically for me. Even though they have witchgates in the codex of the black sun book I think something like that would kill the vibe I'm going for which is to try and keep "realism" but with the powers layered on top of it to help push some of the setting's bullshit.

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>>98728154
This could be Brandy

>>98851960
>puckee spam post

This is not a “oh look at how original my version of this fantasy race is” kind of BS question.

Just want to know if the depiction of them in my setting tracks with what one would expect:

Namely that orcs in this setting are green-skinned pig-men that are also described as being unreasonably high-strung. Like one explorer described how saying “hello” to a group of Orcs upset them so much that they started shouting and berating him, then days later they tracked the same guy down and beat him to an inch of his life, again, for saying hello to them. Then a different group of orcs flipped out and attacked someone who was minding their own business because they were wearing nice clothes that didn’t belong to the orcs, and that upset them enough to attack. Why are they like this? Who knows? Nobody can hold down an extended conversation with one long enough to figure it out, they tend to get upset and violent first.

>>98855850
the general principel is decent, but maybe tone it down a bit.
like getting into a fight with hello is one thing, but then getting tracked down days later is too much imo.

>>98851960
>puckee aka redditor pucke℮21 spamming his commission again
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1kiihss/artcomm_sarah_pheltan_barmaidtavern_wench_by/
https://desuarchive.org/tg/search/image/sUNE9rziWzq0VmQQskuT0A/
>posted 32 times since May 2025

>>98852136
>>98857789
Again, it's better if dude spams his shit here than make half a dozen threads over and over again.

>>98850082
An idea I was playing with for a fantasy setting was the idea of Humans turning into Dragons. The Emperor being the, currently, only Human to turn into a True Dragon while the families he fathered are still humanoid with dragon features.

Humans within the kingdom who wanted to be elevated had to prove their worthiness to be adopted into the family and would be used to father or mother the next generation. That said, some abominations who were too beastial would be born but instead of killing them they were used as special shock troops by their families.

You could have it where adopted vampires will generally find themselves on the front-lines leading their Human levies for their families. Would also make for a good adventure hook.

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I'm trying to track growth and puberty stages based on nutritional inputs, workload, disease exposure, chronic low-grade infections and parasitic presence. This determines how tall different classes and populations can get, how delayed or accelerated growth and puberty are for children, and how tall they will be in adulthood.

The body prioritises survival and energy storage over puberty and growth. An undernourished street child would look younger, shorter, and more wasted than a fellow well-feed child of nobility. Heavy physical labour in childhood also often causes bone density increases and shorter, stockier frames rather than linear height growth. Surviving 30%-50% infant and child mortality rates before age 5 (critical window right around 6 to 18 months of age) leads to a rugged constitution, bearing the minor physical markers of past bouts of malnutrition, fever, or childhood illnesses.

In chronically stressed children, the growth spurt is often blunted and prolonged. Instead of a sharp, dramatic spike in height, they grow slowly over a longer window, sometimes continuing before growth plates finally fuse. However, if a street child suddenly comes into wealth and health, they would experience "catch-up growth" reclaiming their genetic height potential.

Environmental stress often impacts boys and girls differently. Males are physiologically less "buffered" against environmental stress than females. Young males typically have higher caloric demands and higher rates of childhood mortality under stress, while females may invest more heavily in fat storage for future reproduction, resulting in distinct dimorphism patterns between classes.

From what I gather, the average child would be delayed by one or two Tanner stages compared to a modern child of their age, although that depends on genetics, too. Menarche would likely be delayed to ages 14-16, rather than 12-13. In extreme poverty or high-altitude/harsh environments, it could be delayed as late as 16-17.