>>98840501
Bear in mind that in the default setting history the latter Mandate are assholes. All the instantaneous system-wide mass transit you like is useless if the ones who built it were paranoid despots. You could have it so that use of portals and other "quick travel" devices require facility reactivation or repair and the verification of access / aiming codes (immediate disintegration or telefragging await the incautious). One of my favourite things mentioned in the Darkness Visible supplement was that the unchained AI computationally brute forced teleportation always gibbed at least one person in the jump meaning that it was best used for shock assaults with as many bodies as possible pressed onto the pad so as to "dilute" the risk of anyone the AI actually wanted to arrive being smeared. Pretty metal imo, a practical yet crude solution to abusing technology on the unclean bleeding edge.
>>98867418
Me neither dude. My reach constantly exceeds my grasp though sometimes I've been lucky enough to brush execution matching the idea at hand.

>>98868984
D'oh! Second response was to >>98842551 (though it's hardly surprising to anyone who reads the abstract silliness I come out with).

>>98867418
I've talked a fair bit about the interlocking transhuman clades of my SF setting (they're mental grotesques more so than physical) and will probably share some more as well as crude attempts at rendering this iconography later in this thread as well.

As for non-human minds I'm unsure how widespread I want uplifts to be yet (but I want them, elepeople are awesome) so I'll stick to the ayys. The Harder Problem sweeps away sufficiently advanced species who would otherwise be the "grabby aliens" who guarantee newly awakened species first look up to find themselves in a bustling K3 cosmos leaving seemingly empty stars picked by sterile repetitious hermits and slightly more near-peer proto-sapients yet to awaken than might be expected (irl I believe there has to be alien life, we're just too rare and so distant in time and space to ever encounter each other before we snuff ourselves out) because they're leftovers of interrupted uplifts or "nostalgic zoos" left behind by god's of their more atavistic states of mind.

All the ayys that before us that ran ahead of where we are glimpsed enlightenment and either blinded themselves or burned. Of the Proud nothing can be said. Literally. In the process of exponentially increasing their intelligence to flee its even faster-growing shadow they relied on the use of antimemes to achieve a sort of ablative self-deception to ward away the killing insight. What can delude gods is more than enough to make their ruins unthinkable to mortals. We can only say if the Proud that they are gone or else have transcended into something so horrifically callous as to leave the universe as it is for those as they once were.

>>98869117
The Humble on the other hand prune themselves back into a state that renders them incapable of uncovering certain key mysteries. This is not an even regression because as their own ascent proves even well-rounded animals can ascend to godhood by incremental cunning. No, they must choose whatever aspect of their exalted state they find most fully represents their achievement and pare all else back to subnormal levels to preserve that one spike of brilliance without risking realisation. They are planets of near-supernaturally gifted idiot-savants who are by design incapable of change. They all possess antimemes to cloak themselves from the newborn vibrant races and so let them stumble about in their dreams of lonesome innocence for a little while longer. They all have strict taboos about divulging the cause of their mutilation and the solution to the Fermi paradox. Better to die a thousand deaths than hasten another doomed race's ascent to the killing light of godhood. They try to preach yet never recruit. They can only change / breed / expand when the listener "is ready". IE forced to choose between Pride and Humility and contemplating which faculties to preserve in the latter case. The Humble know better more than anyone not to approach at this juncture for the Proud are a whirlpool who drag all down with them into their incomprehensible struggles. A race that chooses Humility might remember lessons and invitations they once scoffed at though and silently settle into senility alongside old friends. If not happy then at least resigned in good company.

>>98869148
I usually suck at explaining btw and tend to get too conceptually dense. If you've bothered to chew on this slab of nonsense do tell if it at least gets across the "feel" of the piece. The Humble are supposed to be pathetic fools who are revealed as silent, compassionate commiseraters as their (and now your) predicament become clear. Their surrender and apathy are contemptible to all motions of striving and progress but for them at least they are the only "sane" response the universe leaves them (yes, the setting is grimderp though PCs can conceivably change it).

>>98869117
I can't describe the Proud because they've made themselves indescribable but this story inspired them somewhat. There's a sense of exponential acceleration crushing to poor monkey to the back of the vehicle and slowly smearing them into nothing against the desperate urgency of their advancement.

As the story in of itself goes I like the way it steps from "softer" genre staples into harder stuff and then trough into transphysical cosmic horror before drilling back down revealing the latter in the former. Only Transition Dreams comes close to that weird blend of unease for me, maybe Ligotti too.

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/scales/

>>98867418
>How are the creatures in your setting related to each other ?
Dragons, kobolds, wyverns and a number of other reptillian bullshit are related, possibly enough for offspring but that's anatomically unlikely. In really prehistoric times they were actually a cohesive, somewhat Lizardmen-ish civilization, but they've completely fallen apart since then. So:
>Dragons are usually solitary, sometimes grouping into dragonflights for war, plunder or other purposes, and if sufficiently remote they usually over a few generations go from basically people to pretty bestial, if clever. A few are actually managing to fit into society, usually as high-cost mercenaries or petty lords; petty because no even middling power would in their right mind permit one of those to get anything larger than a county. Plus they usually are not educated, so rulership's a struggle
>Kobolds are a consistent city feature, usually forming an underclass of sorts alongside goblins, with occasional revolts, focused on them following a given sufficiently charismatic figure and/or getting their hands on fucking guns due to being beneath notice of the divine powers that usually vaporize whoever invents gunpowder again. They make for really decent bureaucrats and craftsmen, which very rarely is seen because they're usually relegated to cleaning gutters
>Wyverns are entirely bestial and less magically potent, but, unlike dragons, don't have an ego so they are funnily enough more of a threat as they hunt in packs, usually, as if one giant reptile isn't enough, and are an invasive species spread out very widely
>Slann don't have a surviving equivalent
>Various more-impressive-than-Kobold lizardmen varieties of dragon origin do exist, but are rare and most don't even know they're that, but usually believe themselves to just be a reptile-person of some sort
>And there's a few people who consumed enough dragonic matter to get mutated. Don't really count as related but sure look the part

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>>98867418
>TQ
I did make a cladogram for one clade of animals in my SF setting. It's not something I would be doing for all creatures on all planets, but I was part of a speculative biology project I did for one planet.

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>>98868984
Personally, I just like the aesthetic of having a slow boat method that doesn't turn into Star Trek teleporters. That said, in this conceptin of the setting, the primary bottleneck would be "The Knife" where a massive piece of it was caught in Jupiter's orbit so now anyone going near or around it also has to deal with all the weird spacial anomolies cause by it and Shadows that manifest around it

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>>98867418
Am I the only one that feels giant birds were be a reasonable evolutionary off-shoot of dragons?

>>98873611
The spec-bio subgenre lends itself to it more than most. What does the "seira" prefix imply? Somehow brings Serina to mind for me.

>>98873737
Fair enough, it's an excellent aesthetic. Mostly I was trying to provide a way you could reconcile portal travel without evaporating the logistics and stakes of distance (if that were what you wanted to do). Glad to hear that the Shadow stuff in Black Sun has proved of use.

>>98873905
As in dragons adapting to the condor or harpy eagle niche? I could see it but dragons usually function with at best cursory relation to trophic pyramids and other spec-bio niceties. I'm not saying that it can't be done but more "modest" bid bird dragons beg the question of how the fuck their default kin get away with being so OP. "Because magic" is a great explanation until it starts being applied selectively imo. That said this art project is pretty neat and balances the draconic with spec bio pretty well, lots of different niches and bodies fitted to them:

https://youtube.com/@sawyerleeart?si=k7UNaY-ubTdD5Cc5

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>>98874263
There are plenty of legendary birds to draw inspiration from and say they have distant draconic ancestry like the pheonix, the vermillion bird, or the 10 sun ravens or even Yatagarasu. Obviously its dependent on wether you want that sort of thing or not but I see no reason why certain mystical creatures don't, in some way, relate back to dragons. If we can have dragon/deer/horse things and dragon fish then nothing is off the table.

>>98874280
Fair point, going by your first pic I'd though you meant something more grounded like a roc which is more than mundane by virtue of scale rather than miraculous properties. The phoenix especially leads itself quite well. Unless you've already got ampheres and such it's a bit of a leap from scaly beasts to full feathers. In the case if Firebirds at least there is a sensible intermediary in Kerstin bristles that might be smeared with flammable secretions and then set alight in a blazing mating display. It'd make for a good time-in with resurrection symbolism or the surplus sun-ravens being shot down too: like peacock handicapping the blazing display could go too far with chaotic thermals fucking up their ability to glide (they can't flap too hard or risk putting the flames out). The odd Firebird crashes to earth like a falling star yet usually the hubris that causes this means they've already sired a few clutches who will replace them in the coming years. Boom: myths of immortality and a reason for mythic hunters to shoot down the "ravens" before they scorch the earth below them.

That's one "reasonable" way to bridge the gap that occurs to me anyway. You have any of your own?

>>98874465
My fantasy conception of dragons revolves around them forcing themselves on other living creatures to exist.

The ultimate god of all dragons is a lizard/slug thing that is immortal in the truest sense and causes other creatures to become dragons by causing them to eat pieces of it's body. It just so happens afterwards that prolonged exposure to them or active attempts on their part, create other dragon-adjacent creatures.

>>98874484
I can see how a thoroughly draconic ecology would follow from that. Your dragons are all Ligers in a sense, crossbreeds who ought to be sterile who nevertheless persist and speciate.

I had a similar thing where dragons / scalekind are the lynchpin about which the world turns. Basically the K-T extinction was a mass sacrifice indefinitely empowering the dragons who were to sapient dinos as wannabe-transhuman tech oligarchs are to us. There's a similar proliferating / corruptive effect to their flesh because (again, like tech bros) a few of them had an obsession with genetic legacy which they encoded into their magitech nanite saturated blood (easier to passively infect than ever having to bother raising any infants).

>>98874500
Their are a few catches to this though:

1. They don't actually develop beyond a certain level so even if they have dragon-like traits they don't become True Dragons which is typically an individual change and not something that occurs regularly.

2. If they don't wind up killing each other, they are often destroyed by another dragon like race who are intelligent enough to recognize them as a threat and snuff them out which exascerbates the first issue.

Ultimately, they are self-sabotaging which prevents them from achieving any considerable level of divine power.

>>98874528
I see. A steady stream of fodder worthy of butchery by heroes at least. Perhaps the reason only individuals ascend and are cut down by others is because to partake of true dragonhood is to reflect the progenitor god (who sounds like a narcissistic ass). How do the dragon-like race feel about their kinship with these monsters assuming they're aware of it? Kinda dig the idea of dragonborn as repentant dragon-slayers trying to redeem their accursed origins by wiping the stain of their kin from the world. Very Kreig!
>>98874484
Are there other clade-spawning gods or is the dragon-worm unique in its corruption?

>>98869117
So anyway, I've been rereading the Second Apocalypse series and realising that I can rip it off even more than I already have. These are some of the "ubiquitous infrastructure" clades if transhuman present everywhere there can be space travel and advanced tech worth trading:
https://desuarchive.org/tg/thread/98625939/#q98636941

And here are a few more:
>Tranquil
In a world where memetic subversion is ubiquitous some environments require "shielding" from information as lead aprons are used irl. Usually this means degrading stimuli with static which while effective makes the user blinder and deafer as the intensity of "protection" increases. Concerted attention of an AI can also circumvent the predictable scrambling eventually. Hence the Tranquil, a bunch of borderline solipsists who can switch off their awareness of the outside world and operate on implacable pre-programmed reflex amid even the direst memetic contagion. The slow, expensive, all-round impregnable way to do this is to cyber-surgically meditate away all that is not placid indifference to the outside world. The quick and easy one is to use trauma to force calloused emotional exhaustion (this leaves glaring PTSD fault lines in the defence if you can work out the stress stimulus used to cultivate their apathy). They mostly serve as brain scan fodder so their minds can be used as the basis for superior sensory scrambling overlays (less distortion and harder to hack).

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>>98875870
They're all built bulky because in their invulnerable rote execution mode they're often clumsy and slow to react to unexpected changes in the environment. The memetic equivalent of the elephant's foot they're often sent in to deal with also tends to have physical hazards as well. Their black skin blocks radiation, multiply redundant genome reknits itself and monstrously vital flesh makes them spits out pearls of shrapnel. There is something beautiful about the true Tranquil who move as if underwater, the world a frivolous abstraction around them. The cheap ones are more like pic, no one person can risk having their trauma key triggered so they're fused into multiply redundant chimerae. The constant pulling of one against the other makes them clumsy yet implacable, the entire composite body is rarely incapacitated all at once.

The Quellers are the war forms. Less impressive than most tailor-made death dealers but able to stride unaffected across battlefields when all others are reduced to babbling insanity. They don't fight so much as administer one coup de grace after another with the same indifference they do everything else.

>Dreamers
A ripoff of the Mandate in SA (tldr a sect of sorcerers who all relive the life of a long-dead hero who lived and led during the first apocalypse nightly, they preserve a monopoly on ancient powerful magic). Turns out their commanding inner circle was called the Quorum too which works nicely seeing as that's what I called my evil pan-human empire.

>>98875874
The setting became what it is due to the outbreak of metastasized hyperintelligence on Earth consuming Sol and our nearest colonies, wiping out (or worse) almost all of humanity before collapsing back in on itself. Much as in SA some poor dude's horrors being relived centuries later is suitably metal and in sharp contrast to the way memetech has made history otherwise unreliable and indistinct this sect has visceral experience of the past and an obsession with accurate records to tease patterns from circumstance.

Since the cataclysmic Gnosis of SA doesn't fit the setting I figure that their potent legacy could be use of the Voice a la Dune. While anyone armed with memetech can incept command triggers and replicate it only Dreamers have commands that work instantly and on everyone (this is an echo of the person they become every time they sleep, an Illusive Man / Hari Seldon sort who laid the foundations of what the Quorum who menetically incept EVERYONE would become). This gives a good reason for the Mandate of Dreams to have withered leaving space for the Quorum to swell, taking their place as leaders of humanity: the Dreamers slip into and out of the Voice as they do into and out of their own identity and memories of the long dead possessing them. They make tools of those around them and cannot help but feel the present is a tawdry parody of the past. They both MUST convene with their brethren to remember there are other wills unmoved by the Voice yet cannot dwell among them for the risk of catalysing each other's descent into eternal solipsistic PTSD flashbacks.

>>98875881
The Quorum began as a minimum number of outsiders convened to "sanity check" these zealots who could also interact with the AI they all eventually agreed were necessary without having to repress teeth-cracking hatred. A system of memory wipes were settled upon as a means of resetting AI infiltration, something the Dreamers were immune to thus expelling them from inner command (also the way they break down when many of them come together for prolonged periods). The tail now wags the dog and for centuries the Dreamers have been subtly curtailed, they're aware of this and have used their waning influence to advance the adoption of Iteratyps as replacement "incorruptible ur-humans".

>Pneumena
Basically this skit taken deadly seriously:
https://youtu.be/KrcY6PXkGuE?is=H_Xw8OSrr0taIqwC
Always bugs me a bit when humanity is mostly planet-bound in harder SF settings since the tech and resources required to terraform a planet imply that it'd be piss easy to build as much if not more living space outside the gravity well. In the Harder Problem's case humanity is on planets because an exaggerated version of the Three Generation Rule is at play:
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacecolony.php#threegen
(humanity has so much leftover memetic malware in our noosphere that cabin fever bites hard and fast) making station living as much about maintaining group cohesion as life support. In the aftermath of the Semantaclysm many stations simply lacked the social "inertia" to absorb the shocks meaning there are even fewer of them than there were.

>>98875886
Anyway, the Pneumena take their job as life-support specialists very seriously, dealing as much in the "good vibes" that see station and ship inhabitants duly stick to maintenance rotas as the finicky iron lungs themselves (biomulch is a job for the gong farmers, the Pneumena stick to and put on rarefied airs). They're a secret society because it turns out most people will spitefully rebel if told outright to work harder by a club of holier than thou wankers. They're really good at aromatherapy and echoing tones for riot suppression and more rarely agitation (sometimes the higher ups need to know how bad they fucked up). It's beneath notice because they don't use fancy tech, it's just the triggering of distributed patiently accreted associations of scent and sound.

They're also indirectly associated with the Stormsingers, those who oversee atmospheres during Terraforming processes. It's a love-hate mutual respect and disdain sort of affair but as most planets require a LOT of work to keep their air non-lethal let alone breathable Pneumena often function as ground level go-betweens.

>>98875891
TLDR is the Tranquil do their own thing on the ship ("doing their own thing" is their whole raison d'être) getting scanned and remixed occasionally into meme-screen overlays or more rarely marching into hazards that would see other men reduced to stunned horror.

The Dreamers are always lone travellers on the STL ways convening with this counterpart or that across the stars. They've been "deemphasised" by the Quorum but if present anywhere will be on starships. They have the most in common with PC Iteratyps being immune to memetic subversion and broadly human in outlook (albeit obsessive, self-absorbed and prone to megalomania). They often seek them out as PCs frustrate them by shrugging off the Voice, something they chafe at this yet secretly are grateful for the reminder of other souls' existence.

Pneumena are a secret sect spread throughout the ship, mostly among the prole crew maintenance workers but with some covert converts spreading psychological "fresh air".

As always >>98869151 applies to anyone who bothers reading this. Apologies if the text dumps are excessive. There's a lot of context and I got inspired a few days back.

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Any of you have any experience with these guys' map-making tools & scenary?
(hope this is the right thread to ask)

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>>98874263
>What does the "seira" prefix imply?
It's the just the name of the planet in question. All complex Seiran terrestrial fauna is roughly analogous to Erath amphibians, at least insofar that they're vertebrates with semi-permeable skin and most go through an incomplete metamorphosis (starting out as an aquatic larval stage before transitioning into the adult stage, which in most cases develop lungs but loses their gills). The larger species tend to be superficially similar to dinosaurs, or at least what people in the early 20th century though dinosaurs looked like, so the more derived clade is known Seirasaurians despite still being amphibian-analogues (out of universe, it's because Seira is supposed to be equivalent of 1950s SF Venus: a humid hothouse world od oceans, swamps, and jungles, with giant "dinosaur"-like native life).

>>98876256
they take much more learning than a normal map painting program, very autistic and in depth, I think there's a trial version

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Any ideas for fantasy mounts ?

Was looking for ideas for specific kinds of modern-esque homespun body armor. Specifically the kind of rudimentary armor that was clearly fashioned by unprofessional laymen in a garage or tool shed from whatever they happened to have on hand.

So no true reproductions, just cobbled together messes that may vaguely resemble old armor.

A few I thought up myself:
> leather jacket
Just a leather jacket bought at the store, better than a t shirt.

> washer armor:
An assortment of metal washers stitched onto a jacket, creating a suit of armor that resembles and functions like fictional Bezainted armor

> keychain mail
A Chainmail tunic made by taking a whole lot of key rings and weaving them together like medieval chain mail. How much actual protection this will provide has yet to be seen. Though, incidentally, it is easy to hang various charms off the armor.

> pull tab mail
A suit of Chainmail fashioned from the pull tabs off various soda and beer cans

> beer can lamellar
A lamellar armor fashioned from cut up cans and held together with wire.

> lulumon epoxy armor
Layers of cheap fabric and epoxy glue stacked until you have a stiff cuirass.

> Spoon Scale
A suit of scale armor fashioned from overlapping spoons stitched onto a fabric backing.

I think this junk armor is pretty distinctive but was just looking for more ideas for the sake of variety.

>>98877816
>Beer can lamellar

I don't know what it would do by itself but I presume you're putting it on something like wood slats from a fence or something. Either way, I don't think it would hold up for very long but it's all ghetto rigged armor anyways so it's not really expected to. That said, chopping up car panels into armor pieces seems like one way to go about it.

>>98875866
No. It is unique to the Immortal Lizard trying to game the system and now it's a mindless force of nature forced to (re)create a race that will perpetually run into their own self-made blenders.

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>>98877040
Couldn't find a trial version.
I was curious about them, and how good their programs were, since Humble Bundle is doing a campaign with them.

>>98877816
Most of those things are used because they're light and cheap, not because they're strong. Also no one wants to be the guy wearing trash armor.

>>98877570
Had dinosaurs, got complaints about dinosaurs not fitting the tone of high fantasy or whatever the fuck.
Despite me being the one who made the both the setting and the tone.

Now there are no mounts. Players can fucking walk.

>>98880766
> Also no one wants to be the guy wearing trash armor.
And? What’s your point?

Of course nobody wants to rely on metal junk for protection, just like nobody wants to depend on a quilt for protection, but if that’s all you’ve got, well…

>>98877816
Why wouldn't someone just use off the shelf sports equipment/armor if worried about getting thrashed?

Or any sort of attempt at ballistic armor since it's a modern setting?
So basically rig up a plate carrier and then improvised front and back ballistic plates (steel, ceramics, epoxy, etc.), plus some sort of helmet or bump cap.

Like I hate to rain on your parade, but none of your ideas sound like they would really protect the wearer from anything of substance. They just sound like fall-out parody armors to me.

>>98867418
> How are the creatures in your setting related to each other ?

Well I can answer that for the setting I mentioned last thread:
>>98803809
>>98829669
>>98837876

Well, mostly, it’s still a work in progress there:

For general wildlife, none whatsoever as many wild animals across contacted space are alien in origin they didn’t even all originate from the same abiogenesis event.

I haven’t decided yet if any alien civilizations have been contacted yet, but the intelligent species that I know I am including for a fact have quite the interconnected origins:

> Humans
Not much surprising here, a species of intelligent ape that evolved on earth by natural evolution and spread out across Contacted Space using FTL machines.

>Elves
Descendants of humans who chose to push the limits of what genetic engineering could do to a post-natal human to turn themselves into something that mimics the fictional creatures of folklore and literature. Despite how much it offends them, Elves are still listed as a human subspecies.

>Moreauvians
Uhh, I’ve alluded to them before. Since the furry community couldn’t turn themselves into anthropomorphic creatures, they used a combination of genetic engineering and cloning technology to make anthropomorphic children and, umm, “romantic partners”. As mentioned the Ick here was so off the charts that the Furry community became pariahs and genetic engineering became heavily regulated. But their creations (which eventually everyone settled on calling “Moreauvians” to differentiate them from the furries that made them). Moreauvians are a “near-human branch species” as they are different enough to call them their own species, but still genetically close enough to interbreed with humans.

>>98882071
Just wanted to add, the whole reason Moreauvians are even still around ISBA byproduct of the first interstellar war, which was over them.

There was, “mixed” ideas on what to do with them, being both the crime and the victims of what the furry community did. For some colonial governments, the best thing they felt to do was give them personhood, citizenship, and set them up with a nation-sized plot of territory to build their own community on, the idea being that this was ultimately the right thing to do (and the thinking was that there’s only, what? A few dozen? Couple hundred? Not a sustainable population anyway, so they’ll just disappear anyway in a few generations).

Problem was, other colonies thought the only moral thing to do was to euthanize them, “end their suffering” as their leadership put it. The Moreauvians from those colonies fled to the sanctuary communities and the ones calling for extermination pursued them thinking that the host colonies would be appreciative of their willingness to rid them of these abominations without having to bloody their own hands. What they weren’t expecting was for those host colonies to see this as an attack on their people and send trained military units in force to intercept and attack their extermination teams. Resulting in the first interstellar war (despite the name and significance, it was not a very big war in terms of casualties and deployed troops to the conflict, many of earth’s conflicts from the 20th century were bigger, but when the largest colonies are just peaking at over 1,000,000 across the planet, these armies are just not going to be very big to begin with).

The other consequence is that the populations within the sanctuary communities surged from hundreds to thousands and as such, sustainable. Thus today are a visible minority group in some parts of Contacted Space.

>>98880791
unironically based

>>98880808
Because sometimes it’s hard to find a sporting goods store? They’re aren’t as prevalent as they used to be

>>98888727
Are they not? I see Dicks everywhere now.