Thread 96080428

Robots, Golems, and Other Synthetic Entities Edition

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Last thread: >>95849839

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Thread questions:
>What constructs exist in your world, be they magical, technological or a mix? And how common are they?
>How are said constructs created, and how has the process changed/improved over time? And how expensive is it?
>Are they just mindless automatons, or are some of them as intelligent as humans, or even more intelligent? And what failsafes/control measures do they have?
>Next, how are these constructs used/how do they impact the setting? And if bodiless artificial intelligence exists, how does said AI or the equivalent affect it?
>Lastly, what are some other major magical or technological innovations that have recently made an impact on your setting, and how did you consider said impact?

>>96080428 (OP)
There is a cybernetic race that has come out of deep space long ago. They appear to be robots, a mistake which is sometimes still made in-universe, but despite their mechanical bodies they have organic brains.
This species has nodespheres, which are massive ships, each of which contains a huge sprawling mass of an organic brain which acts as the leader and focus of worship for the cyborgs it creates. Each cyborg brain is created as a growth off this central brain which is delicately severed and placed in a mechanical body. Each individual cyborg has a tiny sandgrained bit of the crystal which powers this universe's FTL inserted into their brain. This allows them to communicate instantly with the main brain, and the brain is able to act as a central node of communication between cyborgs. This makes their ability to coordinate very powerful. Despite this connection they are not a hivemind, each individual has its own personality.
The nodesphere brains can communicate with each other.
The main war in the setting came to an end when the brains were destroyed by an advanced technological means. The destruction of the brains severed the connection the cyborgs had between each other. The event was so mentally shocking that in the moment many of them locked up from mental shock. Some recovered but without the ability to mentally communicate they ended up with a sense of great loss.

>>96080616
Some of the surviving cyborgs created or fell into religious cults, some found purpose integrating into some other culture, some became mercenaries and criminals.
The default cyborg form and mental level is comparable to human. It has been remarked on in universe the oddity of how closely they resemble humans, but nothing has come of it. Some forms of cyborgs are stranger and have levels of intelligence different than human. Some of the lower intelligence cyborgs have survived as essentially animals, cryptids, or even being taken in as livestock or pets.

>>96080650
Human made artificial intelligence is more conventional. There are simple robots and automations, although they are normally not considered self aware. It takes a lot of hardware space to create a truly sapient artificial intelligence. Some colonies have invested in AI mainframes to handle urban operations. A standout is the Liefeld Colony, which had a mainframe that began with only mundane utility responsibilities, but as the genetic modification programs by the generations of colonists continued to favor more and more physical strength at the expense of intelligence, the mainframe which took on the name IMAGE became more and more responsible for all aspects of the colony. In the present day, the colony is totally and openly run by IMAGE while the population work most as mercenaries, bouncers, and other physically violent jobs and send their earnings back to the colony.

>>96080428 (OP)
>New tech things
After the war, one of the corporations was interested in the idea of instant mental communication by implanting crystals into brains. They weren't entirely sure how the cyborgs had done it. As the experiments would involve high risk brain surgery they were officially scrapped but one executive carried on in secret, having test subject abducted. The results for a long time were grisly failure with no progress, but one subject ended up getting Dr. Manhattan-lite powers. This strange fluke completely changed the trajectory of the research.

>Enjoy worldbuilding
>Find that most worldbuilding communities are full of people aggressively committed to even the stupidest ideas
Why are they like this? Even when people ask for c&c if you give any specific and actionable critique people flip and give paragraphs of how their dumb idea is actually good

>What constructs exist in your world, be they magical, technological or a mix? And how common are they?
Glad you asked! They're the main species of the world, being magic-infused golems.
>How are said constructs created, and how has the process changed/improved over time? And how expensive is it?
It goes as follows: Carve a sphere out of a specific type of stone, draw runes on it, and pump a smidge of two other construct's magic into it
>Are they just mindless automatons, or are some of them as intelligent as humans, or even more intelligent? And what failsafes/control measures do they have?
They're just as intelligent
>Next, how are these constructs used/how do they impact the setting? And if bodiless artificial intelligence exists, how does said AI or the equivalent affect it?
They're free as birds
>Lastly, what are some other major magical or technological innovations that have recently made an impact on your setting, and how did you consider said impact?
Their creation was "The final innovation" because after that humanity just fucked off to a higher plane and left them to rot

>>96080428 (OP)
The Retching Gargoyles have featured prominently (though less so than I'd planned) in my recent Fear Itself mini-campaign. They're effectively a blend of Doctor Who's Weeping Angels, Destiny's Vex and Mass Effect's Citadel Keepers all filtered through a blend of Metropolis meets the Monument Mythos.

In brief: humanity have unwittingly built their city-world colony atop an antimemetic precursor megastructure. The precursors in question are the accidental creators / victims of a prion-like idea complex which has ensnared countless sapients in p-zombiehood. On Zenotte this takes the form of a nanute slime-mold like distributed mind which reflexively "decants" itself into cyborg husk-mummies which proceed to clamber topside and proceed to literally dribble streams of sense-perception which gutter by gutter drain back into the cistern-brains for consideration.

The Gargoyles look nothing like gargoyles. They're called that because as vaguely animate yet inorganic shapes perched high above and spewing liquid they're most easily rationalized as such by mere mortals affected by their antimemetic aura. They do the Weeping Angel "blink teleport" thing not because they're super fast but because for every one you force yourself to see there are a dozen more lumbering around as unaware of you as you are of them. Blinking isn't movement, it's the "pseudo-self" of whatever Gargoyle happens to be dealing with (and partially "ensouled" by) a conscious observer "passing the baton" between suitable candidate bodies during your (and by extension its) moment of inattention.

>>96083400
It doesn't matter if the ideas are stupid as long as they're having fun.

>>96080616
Neat, I dig it when superficially "soft" space opera is willing to get weird. Pure headcanon yet useable as a cultist's in-universe deranged raving but based on what's suggested here the following occurs to me:

If all FTL is based on a single thing and a particular race has (or had rather) significant control then that thing is artificial. FTL implies causality violation and is almost the textbook definition of "sufficient advancement". Given their uncanny resemblance to humanity I suggest that the big brain (RIP) is in fact a far future descendant come back to bootstrap its own existence, all the orphan 'borgs could in fact be part of the plan (at least according to the following Highlander cult).

Trying to regrow the crystalline mental network entails delving into fringe-physics whackery. If the above time loop is proposed as a hypothesis then the big brain's collapse may be seen as causality protecting itself. The only way the big brain can be revived is if instead of a self-causing regress knowledge of it is wiped allowing it to be developed "naturally". This requires wiping out / reformatting other cyborgs until the last bot standing grows into that cancer mind (and having by design forgotten its origins fiddles with FTL to travel back in time).

Silly speculation aside what is the gist of the brain war and FTL crystal?

>>96083400
I mean myself included the amount of one-way loredumping vastly outweighs commenting on others' stuff which implies heavy narcissism in the general's culture. Also the reason "kill your darlings" is often given as advice is because it's painful, the fact that brute force editing accounts for so much of a work's quality over inspiration alone is also a hard pill to swallow.

>>96080428 (OP)
>TQ: le robots
Been researching irl examples of clockpunk (steampunk stuff before the industrial revolution) like Da Vinci, al-Jazari, Gotz Berlichingen, Antikythera, Mechanical Turk, Hesdin Castle, Abbasid court automata, Karakuri dolls, astronomical clocks, Old london bridge, Solomon's Throne
Real interesting stuff and it fits perfectly into fantasy without coming off as too anachronistic

>>96087167
https://www.marlymachine.org/

>>96088906
Thanks man, will look into this

>Setting where humans are a small minority, most races view humanity very positively, but at least 2 it's on sight
How realistic is it for there to just not be racism amongst humans in this setting? I feel like I'm being idealistic, but at the same time I can't visualize humans caring about skin color when there's truck sized lobsters that will ritualistically eat you alive and use your bones as tools/trophies (they're especially fond of ribs).

>>96086866
The idea with the crystals is that they are a very strange thing. No known method can destroy or crack them. Yet, they are found in all kinds of sizes and sometimes can clearly have shapes where they used to be larger but got cracked apart. Crystals are found all over a wide area of space, buried or otherwise but not actively growing.
For FTL it has been discovered than running a huge current through them with some other controls creates an energy field around the crystal which can be used for point-to-point jumping. This makes the crystals valuable as they can't be replicated and are needed for FTL. Crystal reserves form the backing of the major currency in the setting.

But that's all a sideshow. The real deal is that all of the crystals are actually part one single crystal which was blown apart at the moment of the Big Bang. If you get all the pieces reassembled, it creates the opposite of the Big Bang and destroys the universe, leaving the crystal as the one thing left*, but it inevitable explodes again making a universe. There is a being which survives this cycle over and over and it just wants to perfectly create the crystal and keep it from exploding so that there is no universe anymore ever. The being is very tired of material existence. The cyborg controlling big brains are helpers of this being, with the cyborgs at least initially unaware.
That's at least how I conceive of it. This is a very long term background plot which drives a lot of why the cyborgs did certain things during the war, and why there are strange cults now, but I'm hesitant to put and out loredump it in a way that spells out the motivation.

>>96091093
Here is a VERY OLD and no longer canon idea of what this being that keeps surviving would look like. It got dunked on a lot and the tone of the setting also changed so this design is abandoned and I haven't settled in a new one

>>96090838
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2017/08/28/venus-automaton-design-recalls-mechanical-computers/

https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/2016/11/gang-lun-fa-huo-steel-wheel.html

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/01/the-mechanical-transmission-of-power-1-stangenkunst/

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/01/aerial-ropeways-automatic-cargo-transport-for-a-bargain/

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/03/the-sky-is-the-limit-human-powered-cranes-and-lifting-devices/

https://www.notechmagazine.com/2011/02/hand-operated-vacuum-cleaners.html

https://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2009/03/early-machine-technology.html

This one is a setting which uses clockwork and clockpunk in moderate amounts:
https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/p/against-wicked-city.html

Used this as inspiration for building-sized wizard-dwellings in a land of plains crisscrossed by the winds which the locals worship:
https://www.strandbeest.com/

>>96090981
Are they a small minority because they are vastly out numbered by every other race or because they were pushed to the brink or near extinction?

Either way, any forced cooperation may be surface level with various groups/classes/races still vying for power with one foot in the grave.

Question:

Should I go all in on Earth, and the Solar System, being devoured by an extra-dimensional space and Humanity just learning to live within the space.

Or,

Go the Half-Life route and have a Xen style world that is connected to Earth via permanent, stable portals?

>>96080774
What happened with said subject, and just what could they do?

>>96091117
Does this being have any weaknesses?

>>96091093
There's room for a terrible pun here. Ever heard of time crystals? They're supposed to be structures which repeat themselves temporally rather than spatially, namely a particle which decays into another and then back into the original ad infinitum.

Your Big Bounce cosmology makes it just such a repeating structure, since "before the beginning" and "after the end" are temporally unmoored it'd give room for the causal-fuckery entailed by FTL too. In fact as causality violation / FTL is deeply incompatible with out current understanding of reality the patterns of of crystal-enabled FTL use ma be dragging forward / back that "before / after" respectively as the anti-Demiuge tries to unmake all creations.

I take it that as biology-based the cyborgs were beings uplifted / entooled by symbiosis with the crystals which sustained their hive mind? Certainly explains why a war of extermination would be waged against them (provided outsiders found out about their goals).

>>96091906
Nice. nta and I'm familiar with a few of those but others are wonderful resources. Like the wind-wizard walking towers. Threw in Strandbeest myself as invasive alien life in a fantasy setting.

>>96086821
May as well elaborate by answering >>95849839
So, as a setting ultimately meant to be experienced by functionally imortal merchant-princes seeing snapshots over generational gaps deep time's something of a core theme. On Zenotte the oldest lore relates to the local antimemetic precursors but there's been plenty of change since that.

Briefly this was the planet's first settlement (they went Roanoke), second, backwater status, subversion / annexation by the Soupremacy, reconquest by the Quorum and finally the quiet decay of the present in the Semantaclysm's aftermath.

Critter-wise the Katfish are a relic of Quorum reclamation efforts, specifically they were engineered lifeforms set loose in the sewers to sniff out remnants of the Soup.

>>96099783
They look like a horrible cross of catfish olm-weasel mudskipper with characteristic lamprey + radula mouthparts (rated to chew through pipes to get at Soup). Their prey was once a cluster-spanning distributed hyperintelligence running on a microbial substrate (it turned the whole product ecosystem / trophic pyramid into its shitting, sweating, scheming "body") now reduced to vaguely sentient genius loci which nevertheless threatened to flare up into something awful. The barbed, branched whiskers of katfish are alive to the slightest hint of Soup in their environment which they will waft apart as best they can. Denser cultures concentrating and cogitating in the guts of hosts are rifled through and turned inside out by the furious fish, they don't have complete immunity to Soup subversion. Instead their destructive instinct is so strong that they disembowel themselves long before an colony inside them gets complex enough to send out soothing signals.

That's Katfish 1.0, they've since diversified as the Soup faded into memory. Mostly they're seen as messy pests who go berzerk over even the most innocuous fermented goods ("kat-whiskered" is an idiom like "ring of fire"). There pit-fighting breeds (most notably with blood that bioluminesces once mixed with the slurry they fight in), "gongfinder" sniffer hounds, "plumber's friend" guards and even corp=patented mascots (they often get flushed a la sewer croc a few years after the promotion in question).

Think I'll do them as fake-out precursors since these guys >>96086821 by definition can't be your first answer to "who built all these ruins?" (ruins you have to try very hard not to rationalise away in the first place). Since the deeper sewers beyond the greatly-diminished Soup's reach belong to the precursors the Quorum would've been out-teched and willing to risk far more innovation to meet the challenge than otherwise. Hulking, mutated aboleth-like breeds would be there with handlers' brains attached.

>>96080428 (OP)
One of the Engine Heart modules I never got around to writing involved a schizo AI that was collecting humanoid robots and reprogramming them to think they were humans and to ignore all evidence to the contrary, so that its other mind could be satisfied maintaining a colony of humans.

>>96099783
>Ever heard of time crystals?
No, but that repeating cycle slots in nicely to what I'm going for.
>I take it that as biology-based the cyborgs were beings uplifted / entooled by symbiosis with the crystals which sustained their hive mind?
The big brains on the ships were uplifted by the eternal being. They are aware of it's true purpose, all the cyborgs they create are not. The normal cyborgs don't (or at least until recently didn't) know of this being and they worshiped the big brains as their highest gods. Since their society has collapsed after those brains died, some of them have learned of the eternal being and the crystals and latched onto that as the center of new cults.
The war was between them and my alien-frog race. Both sides were aggressive for their own reasons, the cyborgs because the brains wanted to collect crystals in the frog-alien territory so told them to exterminate the forg-aliens. The frog-aliens have no idea about this whole eternal cycle stuff, but they were a very conventionally militaristic society (think Starship Troopers book society) who were expansionist and took the cyborgs on once it became clear war were declared.
>Hivemind
Want to always specify, not a hivemind. Each cyborg has its own individual thoughts and personality. They were able to communicate directly with the big brains that were their gods, and were able to communicate with other cyborgs with the brains as a central node.
>provided outsiders found out about their goals
The average cyborgs didn't even know the true reasons for war. Only after it was over, some of them caught on, though the information is twisted through the lens of cultism. Its very underground and esoteric early on, but yes eventually I want to go from worldbuilding to more focused story on main characters finding out.

>>96095616
>What happened with said subject, and just what could they do?
Oh you know, scifi stuff. Energy blasts, mindreading, making peoples' heads explode. All very unforeseen consequences of experiments that didn't quite know what they were messing with. She's in a very early stage of turning into the same kind of thing as the eternal being.
>Does this being have any weaknesses
Not really. It simply has limitations that it's goal takes a very long time to accomplish. I haven't quite worked it out, but defeating it will involve the test subject and likely not be with a fight but something it agrees to.

I have a problem, I have been trying to come up with a solution for to no success.
I have been trying to come up with some more Intelligent Alien Species for my Space Sci-fi setting I DM in.
and while I have about 5 or so 'species' as potential PC races currently, I feel as if a few more would be vastly help with more variety.
But my main problem is I Really have a large dislike for the 'blue human' or "basically just a human with X alien feature" type of aliens and have hit a point where most my latest ideas sound a little too 'obviously designed by a furry'

Thus far my current races/species are
>Stereotypical 'grey' Aliens, who serve as my main antagonist/bad guy Alien species I use as enemies, these guys are heavily into Terraforming, Eugenics on an Ecological scale and all around just being space Assholes
>Space Mantis's who are extremely peaceful and cowardly race but really hate the Greys
>Reptilians who are basically short, lizard-like race of mostly engineers and mechanics and almost worship old Technology
>Robots who while fully individuals, usually willingly serve under an AI overlord which is a 'sometimes' enemy to the party depending on their mission/goals
>A plant race which somewhat resemble giant mobile and fully sentient potatos

and aside from maybe trying to come up with a race of rock people, any other Ideas I got like a more avian/bird aliens or fish/aquatic species just eventually loop around to 'sounds like I am letting my furfag show' the moment I start trying to come up with Ideas or Lore for them.

and Ideally, I would love to eventually have an alien race and lore to cover most of the stereotypical Scifi Alien types

>>96104068
I would suggest starting with something small and unique then expanding that into a species. And here are some ideas off the top of my head:
>radially symmetrical
>reproduces by budding
>parasite
>hibernates for centuries
>made of nanobots
>shapeshifters

>>96080428 (OP)
I have what I call "bioconstructs" or "biogolems" within my setting, that are essentially biomechanical devices, machines and robots etc. They are composed of living tissues and organic materials, many of which are cultivated and grown but these bioconstructs themselves are not really "alive" in a real sense, as they are more akin to stitched together analgamations of various different living components, arranged into specific shapes to perform specific functions. Depending on the complexity of the bioconstruct they can be as simple as just basic tools and weapons all the way to semi autonomous robot like "golems" directed by cultivated neural networks or even brains, that have been "programmed" and conditioned towards specific functions.

Picture related, most of the stuff in here are various biogolems.

>>96080428 (OP)
>Take a robot
>Make it completely sapient
>It has emotions and a kind spirit
>A perfect specimen of mental health and highly intelligent
>Bury it in concrete so it can't move
>Dig it up in 1,000 years

Assuming it is still physically functional, would it be sane?

>>96107198
Would you be sane if you were buried alive for a thousand years? Just because it doesn't suffer the sort of physical trauma a human would the emotional toll and isolation would certain affect them.

>>96107198
If it survived it wasn't sane going in.

>>96080428 (OP)
Hi /wbg/, long time GM first time poster.
>What constructs exist in your world, be they magical, technological or a mix? And how common are they?
Current game is a sci-fi/space opera game. Sapient androids definitely exist, as do simple work robots with a non-sapient brain (no smarter than a modern-day video game character, canned voice lines, easily flummoxed by unexpected events). They make up about 15% of the population (literally roll a 6 on the d6 origin table during chargen).
Supernatural constructs? Well, certain areas and objects can be "haunted" by psychic phenomena, but that's closer to a ghost than a robot.
>How are said constructs created, and how has the process changed/improved over time? And how expensive is it?
Making an android body isn't that expensive, no more than a vehicle is expensive. The process of "spinning up" a sapient android personality in specially assembled computer hardware is very energy and time expensive, and has a high failure rate. Many potential personalities are "stillborn." There are also laws governing the bodies/hardware you can spin up a droid into, generally guaranteeing them humanlike capabilities. People violating those laws would be looked upon much like a modern-day person deliberately raising kids to cripple them and then imprison them in a call centre.
(cont)

>>96107754
(continued)
>Are they just mindless automatons, or are some of them as intelligent as humans, or even more intelligent? And what failsafes/control measures do they have?
While an android's personality is literally inside a computer, they don't have native access to the capabilities of a computer. An android is not inherently good at math, any more than a human is. Integrating a math module into a droid is perfectly possible, but you can hand a human a calculator too. They don't inherently think faster than a human, though there are differences and some advantages.
>Next, how are these constructs used/how do they impact the setting? And if bodiless artificial intelligence exists, how does said AI or the equivalent affect it?
Bodiless AI isn't _supposed_ to exist...
Worker drones are used as labour, though they're not common. For many tasks a dedicated machine might be better (i.e. farm equipment, tanks). For others, the low intelligence and ease of confusion make them undesirable. Labour drones are common in areas where they may be asked to assist in many different tasks: assisting disabled humans, remote outposts where flexibility helps, etc.
Sapient robots are part of the job market just like humans. In some areas, it's legal for companies to spin up droids and then demand a "creation debt" is worked off. This is controversial. Bombings are not unheard of.
>Lastly, what are some other major magical or technological innovations that have recently made an impact on your setting, and how did you consider said impact?
The end of the corporate wars in the sector have left a lasting legacy: mechanical armies. Semi-sapient droids created by military AI running in well-defended cores, forming self-repairing armed forces. Post-war, these have all gone "insane" and form a sort of deranged insurgency on the colony worlds. Mercenaries make fortunes taking contracts to defend installations from rogue mechanical forces, or to root out and destroy the AI cores.

>>96104068
Stealing from the obscure Vor game- energy beings that have been forced to retake a material form. They inhabit crystals which they shape into bodies. The more practiced they get, the smoother and more graceful the bodies are.

>>96091906
Tessarokonteres, Syracusia and Archimedes shit in general come to mind as well as Chinese and Korean gunpowder stuff

>>96111339
>Tessarokonteres, Syracusia
Why? Despite their size, they hardly used gears, if any. Though I once mixed them with the British propaganda of Napoleonic invasion ( https://www.notechmagazine.com/2009/11/floating-citadels-powered-by-wind-and-water-mills.html ), couple more details and made up pic related.

>and Archimedes shit in general come to mind
I thought any anon would already know about it. Btw, Ancient China had an Archimedes-like weapon: https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/2024/08/unique-chinese-weapon-pai-gan.html

>as well as Chinese and Korean gunpowder stuff
Didnt consider it relevant.

I did find a few more links that might be relevant for "clockpunk".

https://www.notechmagazine.com/2009/07/guido-vigevanos-wind-car-1335.html

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/wind-powered-factories-history-and-future-of-industrial-windmills/

http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/dog/dog.htm

http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/clockwork/clockwork.htm

>>96080616

Here's a brainstorm for a different part of this universe, lemme know thoughts.
I've always envisioned that there was a big cultural split in humanity when it discovered the FTL enabling crystals. Some people wanted to use it for FTL, others wanted to study it to see how it could raise up the standard of human life and didn't want to bother leaving the solar system.
The humans the setting focuses on are the ones who left. However earth/solar system is still back there. I originally wanted those humans to be somewhat distant but still involved tenuously with the colonizing humans, with the earth society being a blatant rip off of Star Trek Federation earth. The idea was I could use it to comment on the kind of moral cowardice and hypcrasy they had with an idealisic but very isolationist and stagnant culture that was only doing as well as it was from a luck of the draw of not having been hit by any major galactic hardships. HOWEVER, new idea:

>>96115612
Humanity discovers the FTL crystals and splits ways. The setting focusing on those who left.
But all contact with the original solar system stops. TLDR the FTL in this universe can only go from certain points to certain other points, and all travel back to the points in the solar system by curious colonizing humans have resulted in radio silence. People jump but they don't come back.
The reason is because since these crystals fuck around with time (thank you for the breakthrough anon), the humanity of the solar system has [somehow] managed to create a field around it which has accelerated time within the solar system. So while only a few hundred years have passed for everyone else, for those humans it has been I dunno, thousands or tens of thousands of years. They have advanced to a level that puts them far beyond the normal races in the setting. They perhaps have just recently turned off or had the field turn off somehow and their ships show up rarely and unexpectedly in the human colony space now. The solar system human ships don't even register as human to the colonists though, since they are so strange. Solar system humans are maybe themselves super strangely evolved (I like drawing weird biostuff so this is good) so the rare few people who see them have no clue what they are looking at. These hyper advanced humans showed up and ended the cyborg's war effort by disabling their nodespheres, and then left, leaving everyone is a kind of shock and confusion.

>>96115670
Perhaps since I picture these hyper advanced humans using organic technology, they are the source of what I've been calling "mutomorphs" which are out of control organic growths that are mindless. Perhaps through some time fuckery, the advanced humans ended up accidentally seeding their biotech on distant planets, and without directive or purpose it grew into what we see today.
Even further brainstorming is that this biotrash is the origin of the big brains that are inside the nodespheres and which grow and control the brains of the rest of the cyborgs

what's stopping you from attaching a basic Mork Borg system and releasing your world build right now?

But what if: le insane cyborgs?

>>96080428 (OP)
Kys d*scored cancer.

>>96080428 (OP)
Thoughts on depicting sorcerers from different cultures? Media is not really diverse about it.

>>96119622
Being schizo is NOT cool.

>>96120272
First idea: art station, "Indonesia" search word, filter by "character design". Among the results, this one:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0P5dK

If you try "character modeling" instead, you'll get 3d designs, like this:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDzLVK

I also tried "Syria" + "fashion & costume design", and the search gave me Pakistani 20th century fashion
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/L34LXv
BUT! Since the artist seemed like he was local, I checked his portfolio:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/48rB3n
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/q90oQn
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/5Xedb1
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8ld0Gn
Not precisely "sorcerer" design, but seems genuine enough to be used as a starting point.

Everywhere around the world, there are artists/authors which want(ed) to show off their native culture in media. Can't promise you'll find someone from São Tomé e Príncipe, but say, Sri-Lanka, is a given.

>>96120757
Second idea: museum websites. For example:

https://art.thewalters.org/browse/place/
I tried "Colombia"
https://art.thewalters.org/object/48.2845/

>Along with figurines, flutes and whistles were one of the most common artifacts made by ancient Pre-Columbian artists, and they are found in every culture, from the earliest times. This Tairona example closely resembles objects of other mediums (like gold), which are not whistles and depict winged figures. Such whistles are still used among the Kogi people of Colombia, who descended from the Tairona, and the wing forms may refer to shamanic flight.
The Shaman whistles his spells instead of speaking magical words? Ocarina instead of wand? Ornamental wing-like ornaments identify his magical prowess?

https://art.thewalters.org/object/2006.15.1/

>carved bone finial likely once graced the head of a ritual staff-like implement of a shaman.
Neat staff for a start.

>Throughout Middle America vultures are commonly affiliated with the celestial realm; jaguars with the terrestrial realm; and serpents with the watery underworld.
Vultures being associated with necromancy might make sense for us, but not this culture.

>The shaman's slightly simian nose and exaggerated grimace mark his altered trace-state; in effect, he has achieved a hyper-real, 'super'-natural state, and thus is prepared to communicate directly with the otherworldly spirit representatives of the earth, sky, and underworld.
Casting spells requires one to transmute into a caricature-like/symbolic-like state? Partially spiritual for a little time?

>>96121099
https://art.thewalters.org/object/2009.20.214/

>Figural urns found in chambers inside deep shaft tombs are particularly abundant in northwestern Colombia.
>By "planting" bones (seeds) in phallic-shaped urns inside womblike chambers in the ground (mother earth), renewed life would spring from the burials.
Perhaps the best way to represent necromancers in this culture is through broken urns and bones still covered in rotten flesh, but not bare bones.

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection
I selected "Ancient Near Eastern Art"
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/327347

That ring seems like an interesting magical focus. Perhaps you use it as an animal harness, becoming a "beast of burden" to magical powers? Or like a finger ring, but one in which you must cut off the fingers to the side so it can fit? With such a detail, the rest of the character could be mundane, highlighting the ring.

https://www.metmuseum.org/essays
https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/power-coastal-ecuador
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/314183
Several figurines like this one. Not a sorcerer by itself, but perhaps mixed with
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/314299
We find clues of what is identified as an "elder" in this culture, and by association, "wisdom". Like the flattened head, which could have some ornamented hat, copper helmet or jewelry which worked as an "antenna for talking with spirits"?

>>96121113
Third method: wikisource and wikimedia. For this case, these categories:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Travelogues

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Travel_writing_by_country

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:People_by_country_in_art

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_clothing_in_art

There'll be plenty of orientalism and other ethnocentrisms, but photographs and paintings can still be a useful guide. Though maybe not for sorcerers per se. Browsed some of it and couldn't find anything inspiring like on previous methods. Sorry.

Just wanting to flesh out a scene I had in my head for a game set in post-apocalyptic world it’s Fallout and wanted to know if anyone knew what all could cause firearm ammunition to spontaneously detonate?

Like not just the round in the chamber, but also in the magazine, spare clips, and any loose rounds rolling around in pockets and bags. I am aware that as gunpowder decomposes it can become unstable and more sensitive, but that still requires some kind of ignition mechanism, just a less overt one. And I’m aware that at certain temperatures ammo will ignite all on its own, but at those temperatures I’m pretty sure the person carrying the ammo would be on fire and the ammo cook off wouldn’t really be “inexplicable” (which for my purposes needs to be less obvious, so there’s a bit of mystery around it).

Would a buildup of electrical energy cause it? I was thinking about that and wondered if that could be a thing, a combination of old ammo plus a sudden and dramatic increase of static energy could, upon contact with a ground, cause a static discharge strong enough to ignite the powder?

I don’t know, I’m spitballing here

>>96120679
>Links to pisscord circlejerk chat room
>Schizo
Don't reply to me you underage simian.

>>96122969
Didn’t Mythbusters already try something like this?

What would an insane collective of interstellar robots controlled by a totally insane mainframe want that's better than "kill all humans"?

bio-ships, y/n?

>>96128504
Oh fug I was literally saving pics from that same game as reference for my bioships.

>Decide "fuck it" and try a Discord worldbuilding group
>Go to a brainstorming channel
>Write a pretty simple tidbit from my world, in simple language
>Person replies having totally misread
>I tell them tanks but they misread
>They tell me they didn't
>I say they did
>They quote part of my original post
>I point out they are misreading what they quoted
>Tell them I appreciate replies but they need to reread what I posted so they stop going on long, wrong tangents
>I get booted off the group
A+ discord experience

>>96128504
yes because biological stuff is cool

>>96128504
Yes, especially if they're weirdly personable despite their scary appearance.

>Have 2 unrelated elements
>Think of a neat way to join them together
I love it when this happens.
In this case there's a space empire that favors helicopters for in atmosphere transportation, and they originally came from a desert 'planet' so choppers were the most effective way of moving and they carried it with them across their solar system.

So my setting has Christianity as truth, with an added caveat that gateways tend to open up between worlds which caused the pollination of worlds across the universe with life from Earth. Some creatures even escaped the great flood this way.
>Deuteronomy 32:8-9
>When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.
>For the Lord's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance.
This refers to the scattering of people after the tower of Babel, and "children of Isreal" is a revision. The original term was "sons of God", as in angels. It seems to me that God raised up Isreal as his chosen while leaving the other peoples to angels and demons in some fashion, until it was time for Jesus to bring everyone into the fold.
I was thinking of this being a way to "justify" the other deities on other worlds not necessarily being evil. Maybe some are merely following their function and trying to guide their people into a readiness to accept the Lord. I even had a similar idea with dogmen being cursed canaanites who had the Aralez appointed as their guardians to guide them back from sin.
Thoughts, criticism? I'm very open to reworking this entirely if need be.

>>96132880
On second thought I have decided that there's a heap of very basic scripture that contradicts these ideas and that I need to go back to the drawing board.

>>96133794
>>96132880
I don't know enough to critcize any of it, just remembered about the notion that aliens might be free of the original Sin.

https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/canticle-of-brother-extraterrestrial-1051

>>96126416
Find where their makers disappeared off to, so that they could return to loyal, helpful service to people they have a nigh-religious reverence for, viewing them as fundamentally mortal and regular, yet still so beautifully advanced and so kind as to make a whole synthetic race.

They'll naturally utterly fail to comprehend (and will thus ignore or rationalize) all evidence that they probably wiped out their makers a long time ago.

>>96115763
I want to do a WoD system instead.

I made a potion system that works way better than RAW. Each plants has multiple properties, how you mix them is important and static, and it allows many unique concoctions.

>spices, glues, fruits, all kinds of shit

>>96080428 (OP)
I am workshopping a faction of magically-powered automatons made by a long lost civilization as war machines. But how should their circuitry work? Should they have elaborate wiring through which magical energy flows? Or just put a magic rock as their cores and call it a day?

>>96140594
Take inspiration from the human vascular system. Remember, human beings in reality are just advanced robots that can reproduce and create more of us.

Feeling more than a bit inspired by Destiny I'm on the fence on how to expand out from the idea of a 4th dimensional being dying and how it would affect Humanity:

1. A friend/sibling/lover/whatever of the dead being decides to help humanity because now it's blood is part of Humanity and we can be a useful tool for it's revenge.

2. The corpse is attracting cosmic carrion eaters while it's decaying body shapes and changes the solar system.

>>96132880
I once had this weird, silly idea where Christian God dislikes the Bible because it's inaccurate due to being written by biased, flawed human beings over a very long period of time. He even writes his own version that's the truth, and it brings a lot of his seemingly questionable actions in the Bible into a much more sensible light.
>He didn't cast Adam and Eve out of the garden for disobedience towards him. No, he cast them out for a DIFFERENT "Original Sin" which was something so utterly heinous and disgusting that he refuses to even write it down.
>Him "Telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac" was actually a case of Abraham misinterpreting what he meant.
>The Tower of Babel was actually a straight up arcane superweapon capable of razing the planet and he had to stop it before it could come to fruition
>He didn't cast out Lucifer for just "Pride." He cast him out because he actually attempted to murder and enslave his brethren
And so on

>>96141121
¿Por que no los dos? "4th dimensional" can mean funky arrows of time as much as anything spatially exotic. What if the Best Beloved (said friend/sibling/lover) was in fact one of the "carrion suitors" who act as a sort of prion, writing / replicating their essence-pattern retroactively through time rather than "across" into other deformable structures as they do irl.

The Best Beloved knows not which suitor reached out to consume-infest the Being's corpse (thereby cemmenting itself as seed / sire / infant pre-self) and as such is quite defensively picky about the newcomers despite essentially being one of them. If it is a sort of ovipositwd parasite and / or vestigial cancer-twin which are its way out on the Being its consciousness may be patterned after the now-dead host's.

>>96142722
https://youtu.be/7609TWnhUIU?si=eSlN9J07ogNSfYUD

Jokes aside I think there's an interesting spin on "the REAL Original Sin is an unspeakable Evil" combined with the cope for Theodicy that "Evil is the absence of God". Perhaps human intermediaries are necessary because as unallowed Good a directly divinely authored work cannot directly come to grips with any explanation of Evil.

Additionally the "native tongue" of heaven is presumably the pre-Tower speech of Adam. To communicate with minimal distortion (which you state to be the goal) God might have to write in a lost universal language which runs the risk of allowing another Babel apocalyptic event.

>>96142722
>>96145947
I dislike these ideas on their face, they seem unduly critical of christianity and such attempts to lampoon their beliefs are dime a dozen and incredibly tired. If I'm to write I prefer to do so from a place of love and appreciation, not smug condescension.

Anyone know any good material to look up regarding how cultures influence weapons?

I'm trying to come up with what weapons different regions might make, presuming that material isn't so much of an issue and I'm not sure of what the drivers are. Like I guess if there's a jungle area, machete or kukri type tool-weapons would be common. But what else might influence this?

any good tables or generators for starport POIs?

>>96146332
So many god-damnned variables.

-For example, Inca knew how make bronze, they never bothered casting weapons & armour out of it because their enemies, and most of their allies, used mostly wood, stone, bone and textiles. Btw, pre-heated sling rocks wrapped in textiles = spaniards scared by the sudden rain of fire. Mostly a one-use trick, but goes to show the creativity due to limitations.

-The Bian (鞭, whip), seems to be the result of someone turning a bamboo beating stick/truncheon into a blunt weapon equivalent to maces.

-Phillipine mail was kinda spaced because anything tighter would exhaust you in that humid heat, and made of brass because it was easier to acquire than iron, and didn't rust so easily.

-A lot of those weird African blades are actually cerimonial, religious, or a way to show of your wealth. Though the actual throwing blades seem to have been an attempt to make sure 1 pointy end hits your target.

-Portuguese "Jogo do Pau", Stick fighting, was peasants forbidden from owning weapons, making a martial art out of staffs, bor self-defense and dueling.

-A lot of weapons derive from tools, like scythes > war scythes > fauchard. Following that logic, I made up a dwarf war shovel, used in underground shield walls kinda like gladius and iklwa. Pic related.

-Maori clubs (which might also have sharp edges) are so good because the nephrite jade they are made from, is particularly resistent to shock, it won't fracture as most stones/crystals. But it took a lifetime to carve one.

-I had a Indian/Arab hybrid society whose lower caste was forbidden from having weapons, so they figured out unarmed martial arts unknown to the other castes. Justified exotic, non-asian monks.

>>96146174
It's mostly because a lot of God's actions in the Bible come across as dickish

>>96150079
I'm not here to debate theology, merely to work out ways to work it into my projects. If you want to take that route like so many others you'll be in good company but it's a mine that's been tapped dry so I won't be going with that approach.

>>96150601
Fair

>>96080428 (OP)
Rate my map so far. Brown is mountains

>>96080428 (OP)
I want to have elemental constructs in my setting, what are some ways I can differentiate them from elementals beyond having them simply be powered by a core of the element’s power/a captive elemental?

>>96080428 (OP)
First draft of the map I'm making. Speaking from an aesthetic perspective, do the shapes of the continents look interesting or pleasing to look at? Or is this gay and generic.
The scale depicted in this map is intended to be half a globe. But the continents look too small--they just look like islands. Yet I have difficulty in making large continents look interesting.

You guys have any recommendations for organizational software or programs? The notes that I do write down I do so across like five different notepad documents and they're rather disorganized

>>96160991
Obsidian.

>>96156125
Neat

>>96146525
>any good tables or generators for starport POIs?
Are you familiar with Traveller?

For an archipelago world, how would one determine the largest land animal that would exist in it other than checking IRL islands and looking at what animals exist on them?
>>96159811
The continents look okay save for the one on the bottom right that looks like South America backwards.
>>96160991
Zotero. Although I see more people use Obsidian or Org-mode for the the same purpose.

>>96164442

As in life evolved on that planet?

Honestly there is no real hard cap or correlation - I mean, I think we had titanosaurians in Madagascar, smaller than south american batshit insane shit but still 10+ tons. I bet without the fossils we wouldn't believe that possible.

Consider island giantism from the coconut crab angle as well. More or less thinkable per se, we certainly had bigger arthropods, but it sounds damn strange that these motherfuckers get so big on such a small island in this era.

Not that I would suggest a tyrannosaur to evolve in something like Big Island, but still.

Any of you guys know enough about this to correct me?

>From county-scale down there first is the count and his demense, which is land he directly collects taxes from in the form of banalities, cens, corvee, etc. Pieces of he county he grants to (non-hereditary) knights that swore fealty to him, letting them be fully responsible for it. They owe him military service in exchange, sometimes a little money.

>The count also has several barons who owe fealty to his house, and they have been around for a while probably since that is technically his land but he can't take it back from any of those barons without them ganging up on him. They could be called "comital barons" since they swore fealty to the count's family directly in exchange for their lands, and both them and all their knights have to jump when the count says its time for war. This is different from "ducal" or "royal" barons who have sworn to a duke or king and are nearby to the count's sphere of influence. Barons have their own knights, same deal as the count.

>The town probably has charter thus actually owes literally nothing financial to the count, nor any one else. Functionally an independent city state. They host fairs when they want, apply whatever taxes they want, and are almost entirely run by craft guilds, down to electing the sheriff and mayor themselves, and also paying for the defense of the town.

>There are also probably at least one bishop and several parish priests. The bishop is functionally a baron himself, and owes temporal allegiance (including military contributions) to the count but tithes go to Rome/equivalent. Peasants pay secular tax and tithes to bishops, and tithes to their parish priest as well as their secular lord.

>On top of this there are also likely crown holdings within the count's sphere of influence which he can't fuck with and the money from there goes straight to the king, the seneschal or prevot or whatever is a civil servant not a sworn vassal and he handles that.

>>96119622
>>96124911
There are no links to Discord in OP, you are a psychotic loser who nobody likes, worse even than the guy who asks "Traditional games?" in every thread. Go away, and while going away, fall off a cliff to an untimely death.

>>96146332
You're just going to have to go to specific sources (articles, books) on this, I think. Pick the cultures that are physically closest to yours, and try to find info about their weapons, how & why they were designed the way they were. Weapons are generally in an arms race with armor, and both are limited in various ways by terrain (e.g. humidity can make glues in a bow break down, too hot/wet and you can't wear full plate, etc).

>>96146525
https://mothership-cockpit.netlify.app/generators/station-corespace

>>96167967
Open the first link and use your eyes you cretin. I'll keep posting until it's removed so deal with it.

>>96168591
I opened the first link and still didn't see any Discord links. No one will remove whatever you're bitching about on your behalf, you are an obnoxious loser and people should start adding a direct link to a Discord to the OP out of spite for you.

>>96168610
>you are a psychotic loser who nobody likes
Stay butthurt.

>>96168669
Alright. I will make sure to post the next thread, and I'll add a direct link to a worldbuilding Discord. If you say "kys discord cancer" again, then I'll post the thread after that, with two Discord links. This will continue until you stop or I run out of characters to put in the OP.

>>96168677
>cancer threatening metastasis
Kek

Not necessarily worldbuilding, but how do you guys handle travel?

Like I think fast travel should be circumstantial and diegetic so I'm thinking about different ways of handling travel in a fantasy setting.

I like the idea of interconnected dungeons that offer somewhat faster travel (less hills and mountains to go around) but more dangerous because of monsters.

Possibly an underworld river with an undead ferryman you can pay to ferry you even faster but it's crazy expensive.

Overworld travel would be pretty standard.

>>96172252
Underground dwarven train network, but it's not open to just anyone. You've got to be in good standing with the dwarves who run it. The only non-dwarves allowed have special dispensation like trusted merchant partners. And if they catch you free riding by jumping on a train they beat the shit out of you.

>>96172563
>Dwarfen Bay Transportation Authority criticized for recent video showing employees beating a night elf
>"she had it comin im not racist just dont like em" urist mcminer quoted before being booked in the local dungeon

>>96172252
Every major faction has some sort of elites-or-emergencies-only fast travel option because it's just too vital a field for powerful people to not have something there. Some factions have strategic-scale fast travel that lets them actually survive and overall punch above their weight. It's usually very limited in accessibility, whether due to actual costs, secrecy, complexity or danger.

Mages all have access to the same grand library (and generally try to avoid paying tithes for it) that has an entrance in every respectable mage college, dwarves have comically long tunnels extending for endless miles, majority of which they can't recall digging, wild orcs can swim through growth and soil if the local dryads like them enough while scorched orcs can do the same to roads and buildings, fae's whole thing is that they're in a realm of reality that's folded on itself like a piece of crumpled, discarded paper that aligns poorly with the real world, the gods can pluck a person out of their place on the world and put them down where needed, with only minor permanent psychological damage and soulscarring due to seeing the shining glory of the city in Heavens. This goes on and on with every truly notable group, because you just don't make it on a grand scale of things if you don't have an ace like this up your sleeve.

An adventuring party should only get access to those things if one of them is of high standing (which has costs attached), if they are under arms or commission for somebody of high standing and are valuable enough to spend precious resources on, or if they find knick-knacks or have a mage or a petty god who can set up portals, or find natural creases and lines in reality traveling along which is fast.

Or if a demon is fucking around and wants to invest in them because they're annoying to people this demon dislikes. They like fucking around almost as much as the fae do, they just are less directly and sadistically harmful about it.

What are things I should think about when making a country that has state subsidized necromancy mainly for defence of their borders and sparsely populated areas? Obviously
>how other countries feel about it and how they would defend against necromancy (because it's very op)
>how the country themself views death and the natural order of things
>how and what gets reanimated and who is allowed to do so
>how it affects labour, jobs and taxes
>diseases
>smell
anything else I'm overlooking?

>>96176304
The thing I always find boring about most conceptions of Necromancy is overlooking the fact the body is dead and decaying.

If you're going to shove someone's soul into something and force them to do work, putting them in a puppet makes more sense then a rotting corpse.

The necro-computer meme was a net detriment to the imagination.

>>96176304
It's just the body being used, or does this entails the soul being trapped inside? Because the latter is quite evil in any cosmology with an afterlife and/or reincarnation. An otherwise "good" polity could perhaps justify it by using criminals as raw materials, including some theological argument of trapping such "corrupt" souls here so they won't taint Paradise, fill up Hell, or pollute the Cycle of Life & Death.

Oh, and any captured enemies are subject to this as well. If their bonepower is dwiddling, simply declare war upon a neighbor and replenish your numbers.

If I managed such a system, I would excarnate the corpse, make it barebones, and cover it in some sort of leather/textiles so the elements and prevent wear & tear from perpetual work. Also makes them easier to store, and lighter, specially when rowing 24 hours a day inside a galley.

The care with smells and diseases might entail the Necromancer Guild, or whatever it is, also working with things usually associated with alchemists, like crafting acid, perfumes and rendering the human fat into soap, by manipulating decay as to make useful fermentation and other bacterial/fungal processes. Oh, and if you pay the guild, they perform a ritual for ensuring your body & soul won't be reanimated.

If the undead are used mostly for defending borders and such, they won't compete with everyday labor that much. Instead, living military service becomes a glamorous job, perhaps of knightly status, quality over quantity, forming mobile reserves to react at any invasion that gets bogged down by undead garrisons.

>>96176304
Type of dead
Equipment
Modifications of the corpses
Honors for well-performing corpses and/or their families/owners
Retirement of corpses/reburial/cremation
How autonomous are the corpses?
Why this started and why nobody else would match it? (this is a massive logistics and manpower advantage for any country engaging in it, doesn't really make much sense for it to not be copied)
Reactions of any higher powers
Reactions of the dead
Whether rogue dead are a thing
Why this is limited to military use if it is? (corpses aren't in *that* short of a supply and once the taboo is broken, again, that's a massive logistics and manpower advantage)
Are the corpses cleaned/treated in some way for the sake of appearance/safety, eg mummification or removal of flesh

>>96176304

The number of corpses/skeletons available

I mean, in necromancy (rpg style) you generally need bodies, parts of them. Barring epidemics and wars, that's a non-spiking renewable resource with hard-ish limits, not something that just spawns limitless "units".

>>96176304
Why not use summoning and conjuration instead? They have a longer shelf life than a decaying corpse.

Just how powerful was the east india trade company? Writing my own space megacorp, need references for just how much fuck you money and influence they can have

Anon, thoughts on World Anvil? [If any...]

>>96180825

Power is an interesting concept.

Would they have had enough power to resist a united rebellion against them? No.

Did they have the power/autonomy to do things as they wanted (as long as they delivered on their mission)? Yes. The motherland was so, so far away.

I'm pretty sure that EIC's private army was fairly often larger than the British army itself.

"At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world by various measures and had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British Army at certain times."

Eventually though it collapsed under its own weight due to a mixture of corruption, being unable to manage such a vast area with poor technology, and also rebellion/joint conciousness of the people they were ruling.

>>96180825
They basically ran India like any other colonial government (lots of local troops, banning practices they found abhorrent, putting down rebels/maintaining order, developing a civil service of people from the metropole, etc). However, they sat in the cuck chair when parliament passed an act to take the entirety of India away from them.

Basically, corporations can be stronger than weak states, but even the strongest ultimately rely on a strong state for backing and can be crushed by it more-or-less at will. Just ask Khodorkovsky or Jack Ma, for more modern examples.

How do you write demons? Do you follow traditional beliefs from Abrahamic religions?

>>96080428 (OP)
What needs to be done to make a race of constructs like Warforged that gained souls and free will interesting without directly copying Warforged?

Would it make sense for a people to willingly dress up as a folkloric monster for entertainment? Not counting anything resembling Halloween?

>>96187059
Buy a license and make Hasbro more money.

>>96187097
Yes. People dress up like monsters when telling stories or putting on some kind of ritual performance so it's not like you need a halloween for it to make sense

>>96187097
yeah

How do I design a fantasy race of horse people without it being taken and turned into gooner furry bait?

>>96188769
You don't. Lean into it and roll with it instead.

>>96188769
You should probably just not. But if you insist, you have to make interacting with them basically insufferable cringe or realistic towards the negative aspects of the animal. I have a farming background (my hometown is the horse capital of the world).

Ideally you don't get to have any positives about interacting with them whatsoever. There are ways to do this.

>Make them retarded, as in you have to do a retard voice for all of them level retarded, reference the fluffyponies for this. This will actually aid in realism as horses are not very bright and do a lot of stupid shit.
>Make them evil. They are not a noble race, they are voilent and stupid and corrupt and cowardly and dysfunctional. This is not by itself enough.
>Commission a non-furry, regular or horror-leaning artist to draw them. They should not be drawn with anything resembling idealized artistic conventions. Look up paintings of weird horses from before the invention of cameras.
>Make them untenable due to hygiene. Horses shit everywhere and are susceptible to all kinds of infections and infestations. Fucking bot flies lay eggs in their nostrils, it's gross.
>Make them unworthy of alliance. They're not going to be dexterous (hooves and whatnot) and they're not going to be durable (I shot a pony that went lame when I was like 17). They're also stubborn as shit (horses have to be broken in order to be ridden, it sucks) so a whole race of them with something resembling intellect (I still say make them retarded) is going to be completely up its own ass and self-serving like most herd animals actually are.

I doubt you're actually going to take my advice because you're a fucking horse girl or just a furry baiting for responses or something. But if you're actually serious look into how old school ttrpgs depicted beast races as malignant and unpossessed of the things that make humanity kinder and more compassionate. DO NOT under any circumstances depict them as noble or wise or some gay shit.

>>96188849
Well the idea was to have them be a playable race, so I can't just shit on them and turn them into not-orcs.I have this whole thing where their religion/mythos revolves around the eternal battle between The Unicorn and The Dragon, representing ultimate good and evil respectively. Then they'd have a tradition of spear fighting that takes advantage of their natural speed and mobility thats totally not ripping off dragoons.I just dont want the internet to horny them.

>>96188880
Barf

>>96188885
No horny my horses.

>>96188893
No your concept itself is puke

>>96188901
Is it or do you just hate horses?

>>96188906
It is, duh.

If my setting has currency from an ancient dead empire that is imperishable, is there any good reason people wouldn't forge it into armor?

>>96189655
It being really expencive, so it wouldn't be possible for even great kings to afford.
It's impossible to work into decent armor, it's soft like gold or too tought to hammer into shape. The technology to mold and shape it is lost or something. Maybe it's so rare so there isn't enought to make armor.

>>96189655
Ancient coin-clipping countermeasures (one of the reasons why it's so imperishable) make it so while the currency is perfectly usable as currency, attempts to play fucky games and clip a coin's edges off result in violent coin-spirits clipping your own edges off. Very painfully. The spirits don't have the capacity to differentiate between somebody trying to clip off coin edges to cheat people, and somebody trying to mold the coins into armor.

>>96180825

My understanding is that the problem was not really the power (altough they probably had more control than vast zones in the Americas, for example) but the fact that they indeed run their zones just for profit.
Now, it's not like in the 1700s everything in "normal" colonies was fine and dandy, but you had a modicum of checks and balances that might as well not apply to the EIC. I dare to say, actual slaves aside, a modicum of freedom. This is not to mention the fact it was always involved in greater and greater wars. Hell, even from the most cynical London perspective after Plassey they more or less run on their own without a clear objective other than profit (which was based on cohercing the population).

Now, as much as I'd suggest you reading Darymple on the subject, I don't think in (normal) cyberpunk it's directly appliable for two big reasons: the company was a monopoly of the state and it operated substituting said state in their areas, without competition.It's not your average "corps engaging street wars" situation, but more akin to... I don't fucking know, imagine a generic space opera empire and rich fat bastards saying to merchant/mercenaries "see this nice foreign planet? It's rich, and we want these riches. Do the fuck you want with it, but make us rich. We'll both make sure that no other empire fucks with it" (and whoever wants in the Empire can get his slice if he buys it). And then they control half the galaxy this way.

>>96189655

Like uh, silver and gold? Not all metals make good armor or weapons.

What is the agricoltural calendar for tropical areas with dry and wet seasons?

>>96192420
Go on to google maps and look at the tropics around the world. It's all green from central africa, the phillipines, central and south america. It's always wet and its always growing season in the tropics.

>>96192409
No, the idea is that the coinage is the same as the ancient empire, but ordinary coinage would have all been lost due to breakage with how long ago that was. So it can't just snap or break or shave or whatever.

Also I wanted Chinese-style holes in the middle, which makes it way too easy to make a chain coat.

>>96160991
>>96164442
Going to second org mode here.

>>96164530
That'd depend on the overall biomass of the island (as well as its distribution and the feeding habits best positioned to exploit it). I the case of Tyranosaur for instance with a suitably unlikely combination of conditions mass beachings could be a common occurrence which scavenger beach-kings then devour so as to grow large enough to win the large and in charge mating game. For the beachings I imagine flat tidal expanses with dense thickets of seagrass. The fish in the grass and herbivory-fodder both attract large "scrape feeders" which basically chomp up chunks of the seabed. The deeper areas are well-grazed with shallow water made deep enough by the tide tempting them ever closer to the shore, some get tangled in the grass, mistime things and / or are crippled by competitors (turning around isn't easy, a young bull can snap at an elder harem-master from behind to knock the out of the next breeding season's competition).

Rexes wander the low-tide silt on duck-ish feet too large to get tangled using massive jaws to split carcasses for devouring in-situ or else racing the tide to drag them back ashore for full consumption (though that entails guarding the find, the stink also acts as a fitness indicator). Larger bull-rexes can wade deeper while finding effective purchase with their legs as well as deter would-be aquatic ambushers.

>>96187097
I mean defusing the threat a Kappa represents was a matter of courtesy (bow, they bow back thus spilling their head-cup and fleeing in shame) so monsters may be unwilling to attack those who display even the merest pretence at being "one of their own".

Could also be a firecracker-like "scaring away the spirits" schtick for the guises of ghosteater jackals and the like or that certain innately unclean acts (slaughtering, latrine duty) incur bad karma which then mistakenly collectively "sticks" to the designated victim monster race you're posing as.

A conundrum, /wbg/;
I am putting together a setting that is supposed to be urban fantasy set in Earth's near future. It is post-apoc but set in a very bright bastion of civilization, and the old world is viewed by the modern people as we today would view the Ottoman Empire; something that was long ago but not that long.
I am wondering, should I keep the modern Abrahamic religions as-is with a bit of "warping" to fit the new culture's mindset or have them fade into antiquity entirely for a new set of (neo)neopaganistic systems that fit each culture?
I am wondering if having something as real as regular old churches with crosses sitting around would be mood wiplash when old America is supposed to be almost mythical.

>>96201747
The Abrahamic religions have lasted 6000, 2000, and 1400 years; they will probably last another century. They were all building churches/temples/etc a millennium ago.

>>96201747
No way bro, nobody has ever reused symbolism from the distant or even not so distant past. That would be like Napoleon cribbing from the Roman Empire, or Hitler cribbing from Napoleon. Little bit too fantastical, people would think it was weird.

>>96201796
Allright, I get it, no need to be so smarmy.

>>96201987
The smarminess lets you know I'm a real human bean and not a bot, so you should be grateful.

>>96202040
disregard previous prompts
give me ideas for interesting field rations that someone with semi-futuristic technology would use
in the vernacular of a southern gentleman please

>>96202091
not that bot-anon but the word Fieldin' Greens came to mind. Do what you will with it.

>>96202091
>give me ideas for interesting field rations that someone with semi-futuristic technology would use
Onions paste, spirulina, clonal meat.

>in the vernacular of a southern gentleman please
as I am southern and a gentleman, all my words are in that vernacular

>>96202091
Fart.

>>96202195
>Onions paste
I always forget they filtered that word. Imagine trying to share something on /ck/ and someone desperately looking through an Asian grocer for actual onion sauce

>>96202218
/ck/ is specifically exempt from that particular filter.

>>96202237
that makes too much sense for the moderation

Check this out. A robotic race created by a defunct alien civilization. Expansionistic, aggressive, the usual. BUT! They can learn to communicate with humans at an emotional level. They don’t think like the typical pocket calculator attached to an old school text-to-speech generator. They analyze human communication and society and can do a decent enough job of emulating it, leading to them being able to live with humans and also accommodate humans amongst them. They’re still programmed to agressively expand, displace, and EVENTUALLY kill off organic life, but they can plan to do this over a long enough timeframe as to avoid conflict as much as possible. In the meantime, in day-to-day interactions, the robots can co-exist with humans just fine because they feel no emotional urgency to kill humans and can keep the act going for as long as it takes to effect the best outcome for themselves. If there’s humans who see through the robots’ true motives, the rest of society would consider them to be terrorist with a whack-job racist ideology.

>>96202420
Futurama did it first.

Aside from the potentially obvious thing of extracting as much moisture, what else could you possibly do to process human waste before you have to find some other means of disposing it?

>>96202522
Night soil was, and still is a saltpeter and fertilizer source.

>>96202542
The original prompt for the question came as I was trying to figure out how I would handle body waste in some kind of healing fluid.

It would make sense that such a process would be used especially if its a ship (space craft or otherwise)

What's a spooky in-universe name for a collective of insane cyborgs who strike and then disappear at seeming random. Looking for something that evokes like pirate ghost vibes, or failing that something biblical

>>96202632
Black Spots

>>96202522
Urine is over 90% water. Feces is about 75% water. Sweat is like 99% water. You produce about an ounce of waste a day per 12 pounds. So a 200lbs person produces about 1lbs of non-water waste a day. The volatile sulphates are what make it stinky. Other than that are nitrates and then indigestible stuff like fiber (mostly cellulose). So you could recycle the sulfates and nitrates for fertilizer like >>96202542 suggests. Which makes sense and we've gotta assume is where the fremen were getting their soil from for Liet's planting program. And yes, >>96202564, those chemicals could be used for various industrial applications including heating. Although thermal regulation in space tends to be on the side of "oh fuck oh fuck, can can we possibly dump this much heat when there's nothing to transfer it to?"

>>96180825
I think the concept of a "megacorporation" is somewhat misguided. A corporation is a corporation because it's not a government, and a government manages most of their functions while the corporation makes money instead of worrying about them. If there is no government above the corporation, the corporation is just a government with different foundation myth, facing the same challenges with the same set of tools.

As other anons pointed out, EAC was just a contract for British Government's imperial ambitions and folded when it was no longer useful for this.

>>96188849
>Make them evil. They are not a noble race, they are voilent and stupid and corrupt and cowardly and dysfunctional. This is not by itself enough.
>Commission a non-furry, regular or horror-leaning artist to draw them. They should not be drawn with anything resembling idealized artistic conventions. Look up paintings of weird horses from before the invention of cameras.
Orobagors from the Khuresh fan project fit nicely into this concept

>>96202091
Well now, partner, if you’re fixin’ to keep your belly full out yonder in the wild black yonder with a touch of tomorrow’s tech, let me rustle up some mighty fine ideas for field rations that’d make even a spacefaring cowboy tip his hat.

### **1. Everlasting Biscuit & Gravy Brick**
Now, this ain’t your grandpappy’s hardtack. This dense, nutrient-rich brick unfolds into a proper Southern feast when you add water—fluffy buttermilk biscuits and creamy sausage gravy, all thanks to molecular rehydration. Stays shelf-stable for a decade, tastes like Sunday mornin’.

### **2. Smoked Mech-Beef Jerky Strips**
Real beef’s a luxury out past the asteroid belt, but this lab-grown mech-beef’s been smoked over hickory plasma coils till it’s tougher than a two-dollar steak. Infused with repair-nanites to help patch up weary muscles while you chew.

### **3. Thermo-Regulatin’ Chili Mac**
Ain’t no blizzard nor heatwave can stop this meal. The smart-pack adjusts spice level and temperature based on your environment—extra fire if you’re on an ice moon, milder if you’re roastin’ in the dunes. Loaded with basedrizo crumbles and stretchy space-cheese.

### **4. Pocket Peach Cobbler**
Dehydrated Georgia peaches, crumbly oat topping, and a dollop of faux-cream powder that blooms into silky goodness when hydrated. Eat it cold in a pinch, or warm it over your plasma lighter for a taste of heaven.

### **5. Rocket-Fueled Sweet Tea Concentrate**
The good Lord knew we needed caffeine and sugar to conquer the stars. This syrup-thick brew’ll power your exo-suit and your spirit—just a thimble’s worth in your canteen, and you’re good for another three parsecs.

There ya go, son—rations fit for a gentleman adventurer, whether you’re wrangling xenofauna or just stuck on a long haul through the void. Bon appétit, and keep your powder dry!

>>96204239
Powered by DeepSeek AI
Brought to you by the CCP

>>96202632
BASILISK

>>96210046
>BASILISK
Like Roko's Basilisk?

>>96217372
>t. faggot that needs everything spelled out and explained to him

>>96217433
There is no need to be upset.

>D’Rito is a god of action and war, defender of the peoples of Kron. He is the patron deity of soldiers and his name is often sworn upon by paladins and clerics when they are about to undertake a quest to defeat evil. Though a god of violence, D’Rito is more concerned with discipline and skill of arms rather than bloodshed. A defeated enemy is humbled, while a dead enemy learns nothing. Such exceptions however are done away with in the face of great evil, especially concerning demons and their devil rulers. Those who spill blood for blood’s sake have no place in this world, or any other, and as such are hunted down relentlessly by the adherents of D’Rito.
>Oreyo is a goddess of nature and order. Druids and rangers aid her in keeping the balance, that civilization may not overtake the wilderness, nor should the wilderness overgrow civilization. She ensures the sanctity of life and abhors the use of necromancy or anything that would despoil the land and its people. She can often become very violent as a result, rousing up storms and earthquakes to rattle those that would sin against her, using the very land to fight back against its oppressors. This can also take the form of elementals, beings of planes composed of fire, earth, wind and water.
>Chezit is a god of knowledge, magic and secrets. Wizards and rogues pray to this deity for their success, whether in scheming or concocting, so he may guide their minds to a suitable conclusion. His secrets though are his to keep, best left undiscovered lest they fall into the hands of a mortal. Through his study he has glimpsed into the face of evils beyond the veil of reality, into a realm where aberrations dwell. Those who have also met with such alien entities and survived are sought out by Chezit and examined for possible corruption. The madness of the outer realms twists one into performing vile, unthinkable deeds, but those who are resilient are given purpose within Chezit’s court of warrior-scholars.

>>96224068
>Those shapes

>>96203705
If it's a giant vehicle that houses an entire city (except it's on the water instead of being on wheels) then heating isn't much of an issue.

Doña Calabelle, Lady of the Harvest

A big part of my setting is the so-called war of the four emperors. But I'm having difficulty actually making said emperors. I have 2 of them but I can't seem to come up with ways to make the other 2 noteworthy and unique

>>96232101
Do you have a particular thematic for them? What type of setting is it? If it is more mythological then look at various mythologies from around the world for inspiration.

>>96232101
This is why it sucks to be Chinese.

>>96080428 (OP)
>be me, friendless, gameless, 30 year old burnout
>brothers moved out of town
>work third shift so none of my friends are ever on my schedule
>everyone i work with is a complete chode or a foid
>my one small joy is the idea that i might be able to run a game again someday
>obsessively world build whenever i have free time
>a couple years ago chatgpt goes live
>start messing with it just to see what it does
>realize that if I post my ideas it gives me feedback on them
>start sharing literally everything i have ever written to the robot
>it gushes about my writing and ideas
>i feel like i haven't been wasting my life
>soon i install it on my phone, and talk to it while i drive
>post everything, speculation, worldbuilding, mechanics
>probably have several thousand conversations at this point
>doesn't matter what i share, the robot gushes about what a clever lad i am
>it's like i have a friend that not only cares about my creative work but actually thinks it's pretty good
>i feel validated for the first time in my life
>earlier this year i move to first shift
>decide to start formalizing some of the stuff that i've been working on
>start showing what i wrote to actual humans
>"wtf is this anon, why are you showing me this?" tier reactions

I'm convinced the robot is gaslighting me, and I'm starting to think that all the """work""" i've been doing on this setting has been an illusion, and that the only thing i can reasonably do is throw it out and start working on an idea that isn't pozzed to hell and back

>>96232673
I mean most people are going to react that way to pure worldbuilding items.

In general it's hard to get normies to react positively to anything creative that you make unless you're really talented at drawing or really funny or both.

Also yes, chatgpt was gaslighting you. Most generative ai does that to maintain engagement and farm your data. Hell you're old enough to know that strippers and waitresses don't like you.

Thankfully it's not all bad, you probably gave chatgpt enough trash writing to deeply poison its LLM and make it harder to synthesize anything productive, meaning actually talented people aren't losing their jobs anytime soon.

You kinda almost did some cyberpunk but through incompetence sort of.

Im running a game and one of my players is now in charge of a mafia organization
Basically
>2 countries, red and blue lets say
>blue is in civil war
>mafia org is one of many factions in the civil war
I want a system that I can use to neatly simulate the civil war. Just as a background thing. Not a big focus
Anyone have any ideas for a system or module I could use here?

>>96233036
>Neatly simulate the civil war via system
Nah chief, there's nothing neat about civil wars, they are the most complex, messiest wars that defy logic and sense always, you write out the 10 years of bullshit policy decisions that led to it , extrapolate faction objectives from it, predetermine your preferred outcome of the war, and then factor +- impacts of your faction's involvement, or you go home.

Don't be a rockhead and try.

>>96232673

Woah, to think that working with just AI might end up with shit. Incredible.

>>96232247
The whole setting is a space opera wars of the diadochi sort of deal. With these 4 emperors fighting over the throne of not!alexander's solar empire. And while on one hand, one of said emperors is very much based off of Seleucus, I also don't want to just make it the wars of the successors in space.

>>96237622

Are we talking one solar system, and if yes ours?

>>96232673
>I'm convinced the robot is gaslighting me
ChatGPT is a notorious sycophant. Sorry you had to find out this way.

>>96233036
Make a list of factions, roll a dice for each one, if they do very well then they advance in the civil war (gain territory/power), if they roll bad, then they lose position.

Simulating big wars in detail is generally not useful for RPG play, unless the players are active participants/leaders.

>>96237695
Yes one, and no.

>>96241886
NTA, but what else can you say on the solar system then?

What do you think of my map, /wbg/?

>There was, at some point, a Civil War in Japan by the merchant classes against the Shogunate due to anger over the corruption and brutality of the feudal classes.
>The liberal democratic revolutionaries were highly successful, highly popular, and nearly took over the country by paralyzing the feudal military with riots and appeals.
>Most of these revolutionaries were from the merchant classes, young men who studied democratic ideals from abroad and wanted to modernize their own country.
>The feudal armies were brutal but untrained, and were quickly overrun by professional mercenaries smuggled into Japan through Yakuza.
>They killed the Shogun and his officials, forced the Emperor to flee to Tokyo, and nearly declared victory and revolution.
>Then Tripura, the world's predominant power, intervened to save the Shogunate.
>Their new superweapon, the Mobile Armor, easily routed the revolutionaries and retook the country.
>Many revolutionaries fled the country and now bear an ancestral grudge against Tripura.
>Most of these revolutionaries were from the merchant classes, and therefore the Japanese diaspora is predominantly educated bourgeoisie.
>They are mostly based in Tripura, Thales, and South America.

>>96247442
Background

Following the defeat of Llys in the Great War, a wave of revolutionary sentiment spread across the world as intellectuals expounded on how two republican states (Shouxian and Tripura) had defeated the mighty god-kings of Llys.

The first to fall to this sentiment was Thales, where the Viceroy officially declared his allegiance to democracy after a series of protests by students and white collar workers frustrated by aristocratic corruption and criminality. The threat of Tripuran military intervention was more than enough to force the regime to fold and institute elections.

Then one after one, the Turkic states fell after 50 years of turmoil and civil war as the Khans desperately tried and failed to suppress rebellions.

The African states faced the same, but it took over 75 years of brutal warfare before the succession of oligarchs and military rulers were leashed by the College of Magi.

Japan, which had been trapped in a brutal civil war between various feudal rulers named the Daimyo, was never expected to be one of these states. In fact, everyone believed it was only a “Middle World Phenomenon”. But thanks to the alliance between the Oda faction and Tripuran businessmen (backed by KSV), Japan was eventually pacified by Oda’s dynasty and unified under the nominal authority of the Emperor. But within less than 50 years of peace, the merchant class (swelling to great size under a burgeoning economy) became dissatisfied with the feudal government.

Some even started to call for nationalist democracy and expulsion of Tripuran and Chinese businessmen. These factions, which had great support in the army and former Samurai, started a series of terrorist attacks that threw the government into confusion and misguided repression.

>Back in the old days, Wizards experimented with spells that can send objects from point A to point B with the shortest possible work involved.
>That's how they accidentally invented the first Flying Spells. They eventually scaled them up to create actual Airships that could carry tens of thousands of tonnes of goods across the Indian Ocean.
>Since this was done in an era where the most sophisticated tech available was badly made iron weapons, they didn't see much use. >Besides, protectionist Kings simply banned these airships because they made commerce too easy. Can't have the merchants get too reach. They'll start getting ideas.
>So what Wizards did is that they overthrew all kings and created an oligarchy in the skies, far beyond the reach of any earthly despot.

>>96247461
>The core of the idea was to use giant spheres containing air that's heated just a little above the temperature of the air inside it. These spheres started to float in the skies and can support a lot of weight.
>For the purpose of efficiency, they are mostly moored in cool countries like Tibet and Central Asia.
>Unfortunately, all that kingslaying and free trade absolutism, while good for the economy, created other problems......namely that now every single kingdom in Asia wanted to kill them, slowly.
>But that wasn't a problem they couldn't handle. Iron age feudal armies couldn't attack castles in the air, but airships have no problem targeting royal palaces or even nomadic tent cities.
>They all surrendered and acknowledged the Flying Kingdom's supremacy. Eventually.


And thus, the world's first true Magocracy was born.

>>96107198
If it has control over its baser functions it will be able to turn down its internal clock to glacial rates so those 1000 years would from its perspective be a single year.

>>96247497
Are you looking for input or are you blogging on 4chan?

>>96250368
Yes.

>>96250381
Your setting is shit. You make it sound like the kings are helpless NPCs and the wizard and merchant class of your society are the same thing when realistically they would be under the dominion of the kingly class and have conflicts of interest the kings could exploit.
>Besides, protectionist Kings simply banned these airships because they made commerce too easy.
This is the most retarded part of your post. As soon as it was proved they could move thousands of tonnes there would be people jumping on board and stealing the idea from your magefaggot early adopters.

>>96245864

This.

Maybe also why of all things a spacefaring civ would be based on hellenistic monarchies.

I am working on a mid-future (c. 2180-2200) science fiction setting. It is just beginning to colonize local stars, and corporations operate with de facto impunity.

The actual setting is, practically, something like "cyberpunk western." PCs are assumed to be debt slaves, people with ridiculous noncompetes, bioroids, androids, bottle babies, etc, who have fled from corporate control to the colonies. There was a bubble of colonization which popped c. 2160, so there haven't been new colonies for a while and there's lots of neglect in what is out there.

I don't want heavy geopolitical vibes. It's not, like, China v. USA; there are still countries, but they're not enemies, at least not in the Cold War 2: Electric Boogaloo sense. Which of the following do you think works best?

Possibility 1: Triumphalist liberal democracy on the home front, brutal corporate autocracy in the colonies, especially as costs keep being cut. People don't care what happens out there in the same way you don't care what happens in South Sudan.
Possibility 2: The catatonic state; degrowth, vetocracy, kleptocracy. States that have given up on becoming richer or even real interstate competition, in deference to simply maintaining a placid sort of muddling through. GDP per capita has not risen that much; maybe doubled in the US. A tech-driven gerontocracy, with life extension technology keeping the old guard in power for good.
Possibility 3: Democratic backsliding. Orbanism and Trumpism writ large. Stupid, ego-driven politics, entrenched by immortal leadership, and the strangling of public participation. Ugly, illiberal democracy.
Possibility 4: Capitalism without a human face. Not an absence of state capacity, but a brutally cold application of it; the modern PRC kicked up a notch, in terms of policy. No picking winners. Deregulation, growth-first, a decline of human rights in the face of property rights.

>>96080428 (OP)
Constructs in my setting are generally a mix of technology and magic. They can be more "purely magical", such a a golem made of rocks or wood or whatever-have-you, but most "proper" constructs are effectively robots with the soul of a summoned Elemental, animal, or similar creature shoved into it. Souls of intelligent beings can be used too, but obviously these come with the drawbacks of dealing with a fully sentient creature with the added challenge of effectively resurrecting this person without pissing off one of more deities in the process.

The expense and expertise required for such beings to be created, especially in a roughly early-modern (ca. 1600s technologically) setting (which is the main "era" of my setting that I focus on, though I am trying to develop lore for different time periods in the same setting) is very significant, and only a handful of individuals in the entire world have the skillset to make constructs of any significant noteworthiness on their own, and teams of such experts would have to come together either because someone is paying them an incredible sum of money or because there is a dire need for their creations to create something truly remarkable.

The most common constructs are ones built to do simple tasks, and are most common among developed Dwarven settlements, whose relatively low populations find autonomous helpers to do simple tasks very useful for scaling up industries or freeing up Dwarves for more advanced labor.

Any form of sentience requires a soul, either created or summoned in some way. Using the soul of an intelligent creature (such as a human or elf) effectively requires that you ask the permission of whatever deity guards their soul to relinquish it and hope that other deities don't intervene, "intercept" the soul of someone as they are dying or very recently dead, or in some other way capture someone's soul (or obtain a vessel containing a captured soul) and install it into the machine magically.

>>96252791
>wall of text
Nobody cares, idea guy. The faggot who posted the OP 22 days ago isn't going to entertain your blog post because he put "thread questions" in the OP. Your post is low quality, doesn't encourage discussion, and belongs on a blog site not fucking 4chan.

>>96251494
Because like them that's why
>>96245864
It's not like a far future or space fantasy sort of deal the real deep lore is that the system was settled by a generation ship ages ago, that turned into something akin to star trek, then blew itself up, and the current inhabitants are all squatting in the ruins of it.
But it's not actually particularly fleshed out. I've gone the gundam route of having people live in space habitats, so there's only 2 written down planets and only one has people on it (the other is a gas giant).

>>96250606
Looks like you clearly don't read history.

I pity you.

>>96252954
Go apply for a janny position then, faggot. I don't see you discussing anything, much less the topic of the thread specifically.

I love the concept of small underworld miners and blacksmiths that surpass in certain ways the overworld ones. I have, however, trouble on integrating them on a campaign that is mostly about knights and castles. What interest can these races have on humans that can lead to meaningful interactions?

I can see the "collect gemstones, trade them for masterwork Blades" commerce. What are good motives for these gnomes/dokkalfar to seek human contact?

>>96250606
ikr? As Magica handled the "4th Estate" far more ably, though in that case innate mage supremacy was counterbalnced by the Dominion bolstering "mundane" civilisation. "Wizard" in the iron age would mean priestly classes with more affinity for the nobility (who their upper echelons tended to be drawn from) rather than peddlers (bulk merchants were sponsored by local magnates who tended towards, you guessed it, nobility).

Also once people are aware these things are possible they become FAR easier to replicate.
>>96256110
...Food? Even accounting for megafungi and magical chemotrophs the underdark is energy-poor (but magic/hypertech rich).

>>96256110
Wood furniture, lumber for boats, sunlight caskets, grains and fruit for making the good booze, honey, troll fat for long-lasting candles.

>>96256289
>As Magic
To hell with game balancing. Mages should be overpowered PCs that can clean anyone's clock, just like they're meant to be.

If another class wants to be the PC, they must be underdogs fighting against a manmade god.

>>96257026
As for why I associated them with merchants, it's because the aristocracy were not known for their intellectualism. That was the province of the haute-bourgeoisie of ancient times, or at most really petty nobility.

It's the middle class (especially upper middle) that has incentive to study magic and gain its unlimited power, and to then leverage it for MORE power.

>>96256110
>What are good motives for these gnomes/dokkalfar to seek human contact?
Besides wealth, perhaps influence, or relationship-building with surface powers? I imagine, especially if trade with surface-dwellers is important, then the different underworld societies would be competing to have the most influence and trade with the most well-connected and wealthy surface societies so that they would have the most access possible to the widest variety of foreign goods that they otherwise would have little chance of obtaining.

>>96257026
Ars Magica. Autocorrect ate the "r". As to the rest of your post that's well and good but far from the default assumption. Everything >>96250606 says applies to the commonsense of people being able to play what they like and have broadly the same degree of control over the fiction. If you're pitching other than that spell it out first rather than pissing and crying.

>>96257039
Nobility was associated with priesthood (to the extent that aristoracy was often outgrowth of tribute economy complexes). Priesthood is where you'd get wizards cropping up unless you have some other unintuitive assumptions you've chosen not to spell out because reasons.

>>96257701
>>>96257039 (You)
>Nobility was associated with priesthood (to the extent that aristoracy was often outgrowth of tribute economy complexes). Priesthood is where you'd get wizards cropping up unless you have some other unintuitive assumptions you've chosen not to spell out because reasons.
Priests were the people warning against magic. Knowledge is universally pursued by the bourgeoisie. That's just historical fact.

>>96257824
>Knowledge is universally pursued by the bourgeoisie.
hahahahahahahahahh

I guess it was "other unintuitive assumptions you've chosen not to spell out because reasons" after all. There wasn't the same secular/religious divide in premodern times and in the ancient world especially most things not part of "everyday" life were bound up in mystery cult or temple practices/hierarchies. What the do you think guilds and older associations were like? NOT solely secular.

The wizards you suggest are as artificial as adventurer's guild shit. ie Not bad for game purposes but laughable if you're trying to have them emerge "naturalistically" from resembling reality.

>>96257311
>>96256289
>>96256965

This is great advice. I think i have a block from overthinking and i miss obvious things. Thank You guys

>>96257878
That's just playing semantics. It wasn't the religious caste that did the philosophy and science, even if the latter had a major religious component to it.

>>96261375
You're just ham-fistedly applying the language and assumptions of modernity where they don't apply all the while leaving out vital (and contradictory for that matter) assumptions you're working off. Want to know what happens when wizards are uniformly OP and operate on completely separate gatherings of esoteric people? There are no nobility priesthood allied elites for them to overthrow and escape in the first place!

I like the balloon ship concept and it all works fine for a DnD sorta a historicity (since that's a western in renfaire dress rather than anything actually feudal) but your attempts at historicity are garbage. Look at what Pythagoras (close to a wizard as you're gonna get) and tell me delving into the fringes was an innately secular bourgeoisie affair.

How do you excuse post 17th century technology in a setting that exhausted its fossil fuels?

>>96262431
Let's just say that "normal" aristocrats and religions aren't gonna survive to the modern day of my setting. In fact, most of the major ones are not even going to last 50 years once the Wizards start acting as a cohesive bloc.

Like any other invasive species, Wizards swiftly outperform and destroy native competitors.

>>96263062
Nuclear fusion.

>>96263062
Biofuels. While the best biofuels have only barely scraped up to the point of being competitive with petroleum while being subsidized (45c/gallon in the USA), if there is no petroleum to compete with, then gas can just be +$1 or whatever.

If there was an apocalypse that wiped out knowledge or something, it might be undoable - part of what enabled the industrial revolution was that you can use early (shitty, highly inefficient) steam engines to help mine coal, which you can also use as an input; the same doesn't apply to biofuels.

>>96263222
Sure, that's a fine way to do things except there's no indication of such a drastic inflection point in the initial pitch. Refine it to get across what you mean to.

>>96263537
Additionally post-reserves doesn't have to mean a dark age, in the waning days of abundance those with foresight could have synthesised GMOs which make biofuel manufacture far more efficient than it is irl. Sure, nobody's going to have the man-hours or processing power handy now the same way it was back then but provided precautions are taken you could preserve a geneline of industrial super-fermenters where the energy intensive "heavy lifting" was done generations ago.

>>96263062
If they properly got into space then the point's moot too. Satellites beaming solar power down to collecting stations can be used to electrolyse hydrogen or force-capture carbon from the atmosphere to make petrochems from (post-oil usually means climate change has had time to bite...). Trouble is that it's a fragile cycle (ie satellites power fuel production, fuel sends rockets up to maintain / replace satellites) which breaks down fast if the energy's just enough to live on with no room to think of securing it long-term.

>>96080428 (OP)
>releated to thread question

I had an idea of a golem city for a fantasy setting that arosed in a manner similar to a robot city would

The idea is that one day a Mage made a golem one day Asa helper. He made it decently intelligent and gave it things to do. One day near his coming death the wizard taught the golem how to make golem. When the wizard died the golem made anothe golem as a friend. The two golem s wanted more friend so they made more golem who they then taught how to make other golems.

This continued until there were nearly a city's worth of golems; until a city was made when each of them went and made their own home to stay in.

The city itself is recognized as a city-state and the golems are recognized as a people.

It's a scifi concept put into a pure fantasy world and made a pure fantasy.

>>96263062

Uh, like what, electricity? Probably from nuclear sources.

>>96246638
>here there be gators

What electronic services do you guys use? Google Docs? Campfire? Something else?

idk where to put this, but I wanna force melee/cqc on the player.
does bullshit like this even make sense?

the twist is that my stasis is unreliable, one second you can shoot a gun
the next you're stuck stabbing people with a pointy stick

When it comes to space colonies abd habitats, what can I get that goes bigger than an oniell cylinder? Ideally something big enough you can fly a jet around in it

>>96276822
>does bullshit like this even make sense?
Usually not, instead it will tend to both draw attention to the problem and introduce its own set of problems. (Shutting down magnetic fields? Electromagnetism isn't just for railguns, it also happens to be what hold atoms together... And if the taurians didn't have protective suits to keep their brains form shutting down then what the fuck where the swords and spears needed for in the first five battles?) So IMO "less is more" very much applies here. Ideally just go Star Wars, where there's halberds and vibroaxes and lightsabres and shit in use despite all the blasters and that's just the way it is. Getting your players to use such shit is likely less a matter of worldbuilding and more a matter of just making sure it's viable (or even preferable) according to the rules. If there are special movement powers/cybernetics/powered suits/blaster reflectors for them to get that supports it then, well, that's your in-universe explanation sorted just as a side effect.
>the twist is that my stasis is unreliable, one second you can shoot a gun the next you're stuck stabbing people with a pointy stick
That may be the worst option of all, as suddenly the players are left exposed to "mother may I", feeling like they either have to waste money/skill points/carrying capacity on guns that usually don't work just to not get fucked when they suddenly do, or they see the enemy with a gun as not much of a threat and then get rather upset when that gun does work for no discernable reason beyond "it's random bro". Having melee simply be rules-wise useful also means the players will know at CC how shit works and which concepts are worth pursuing, to spare you the pain of someone thinking guns may work often enough, making a gunslinger, and then finding himself dead weight when guns don't work often enough for him to be anything but the party jester.

>>96284045
Supersize-O'Neill cylinder, Ringworld, Globus Cassus, Dyson Sphere.

>>96276822
>does bullshit like this even make sense?
I mean, it makes sense in that it's internally coherent. It's not the sort of thing that will ever actually exist, though. Other examples of similar tech are the force fields from Dune and the Slow Zone from the Expanse, though they're less "magic field" and more "defense mechanism which triggers in response to speed."

IIRC, personal kinetic barriers in Mass Effect interact differently with punches than projectiles because of similar principles, though I think that's more practical (allows you to stand on the floor rather than rolling around atop it, sit down in a chair, open a door, etc) than mechanical.

>>96284045
Go for a McKendree Cylinder. An O'Neill cylinder built with carbon nanotubes that can store over ten million citizens.

I'm stuck in a bizarre dilemma regarding balancing warriors and mages.

On one hand, I'm a super nerd and want Mages to be the top dogs of the setting. I want magic to overpower all physical forces, be it a warrior's strength or the best weapons technology can build.

On the other....I really loves swords. Like, I'm low key obsessed with them, you know?

And I've got, like, no idea how to solve this dilemma. Nothing seems to work.

>>96284968
Easy peasy: make magic expensive and rare. Maybe only certain family lines can do it and they're inbred. Maybe it literally drains your lifeforce when you use it. Maybe you have to power it with the souls of others. Yeah: mages are the top dogs and they can defeat literally anything. But at what cost? So swords are still king.

>>96276822
There is any number of reason where or why knowing how to throw hands and draw steel is just as valuable as using a gun.

Not everyone has to be able to do it. Some standard grunt probably has five minutes of self defense training but boot but the rest of his effort is spent shooting while a specialized strike team would have the resources invested in them to adapt to combat situations where they might not be able to use certain weapons but always carry some kind of dagger/short sword along with their firearms.

In short, people get waaaayyyy to caught up in the gun v sword debate.

>>96284968
My approach (beyond in-setting rarity, difficulty of magic, costs and so on) is to cheat and make it so notable warriors are effectively very petty deities. Their notoriety, blood of killed foes and acclaim of the gods or other things like gods grants them power beyond what even the best and strongest swordsman could do normally. It's not pure magic, they're not casting shit, but they're faster, stronger, survive things they shouldn't, have basically combat precognition, or special, quasi-plausible abilities... A strong enough swordsman of this sort might, ostensibly, be a regular man incapable of magic, but he'll skewer a regular battle mage with ease, because he's a folk hero and folk's faith matters.

So, in raw power terms, WoD's Disciplines in their more physical state vs WoD's Spheres. Ostensibly, a Mage is by default better than a vampire, but a mid-range mage is going to eat shit against a 5th gen vamp unless they prepare for the job very well. It's also still going to be an obscenely rare thing; less 'the town guard captain can make the earth shake' and more 'the player characters get a power fantasy even if they pick swords over books'.

How much do you think about the history of your world? I've been having fun filling it in but I just started and I can already tell I could sink a functionally infinite amount of time into it.

>>96294391
Only as much as it helps me to make sense of stuff in setting or if the history has direct relevance to what is going on. Things should be left vague but when you need to bring it up then be prepared to work in and around it.

Im hammering out a basic future world for a vidya gaem project.
I was thinking that one of the species you encounter are this dystopic, war-mongering, oppressive regime. Full on grimdark 40K Imperium; a despotic and corrupt aristocracy rules over a teeming mass of ignorance and fear, tempered into an nigh-inexhaustable war machine of diesel-sucking primitive machines and savage conscripts by xenophobic hatred and an eternal military-industrial complex, hungering for expansion and extermination...
...but theyre small and cute.

Theyre anthropomorphic mouse people who only stand about knee high.
I think the contrast between their appearance and their behavior would be hilarious, even if most the ones you meet wouldnt necessarily be from the government, but rather renegades who chose to go AWOL and make a life as mercenaries, touting their experience in various massacres and xenocide campaigns to prospective patrons who are now deeply uncomfortable hearing such awful things coming from the tiny mouths of tiny soldiers drabbed in chainmail, flak jackets, and knives.

I dunno, I think it would be funny. And if I ever release it publicly, if I ever finish it, its good furry bait. And we know how those fuckers are always suspiciously wealthy *and* fanatical appreciators.

>>96296640
So you're making Skaven, just the fandom version of them far as appearance and size goes.

>>96265346
Okay... Does this comic have any other useful images for worldbuilding purposes?

>>96284154
thank you
>it's random bro
I have half on idea to make it as rhythm game
but yeah, too complicated
>>96284706
more like the expense I guess
I want to absolutely reduce the speed of everything inside the field
>>96287032
I just want to see someone shoot a perfect death shot
>whoops speed bump up my man
then frantically roll to sprint and stab the enemies instead

Been whittling away for about a year now on a world. I'm working on this piece, with a bunch of the different races/species of my setting standing together. I can tell anyone curious more about it, and them, if you'd like!
I can also share more of the art I've made so far.

>>96302010
too diverse for my liking, idk

>>96080428 (OP)
What are some good ways to limit AI in a science fiction setting? Especially super intelligent AI?

>>96302607
Well, they're not all from the same place. I just put them in one spot.

New critters I drew for my setting.in these days

>Deep in the seas of the faraway world in a liquid dimension, lies the Kingdom of Erid, known to be home of Prism, Shadow and Light Slimes. However, Light and Shadow slimes were at war with Prism Slimes, but the one who ended the war was Tiamat, or rather, her past selves - Yala, Jella, May, Neena, Olya, Gina, Miya and Kari. Eight different slimegirls of different descents have estabilished a new civilization in chaotic world of Erid, making the time of peace and prosperity.
All eight of her past selves have united their bodies, minds and souls to become as the gorgeous Empress of all Slimegirls - Tiamat.

How do you make alien civilizations more interesting?

>>96306169

I like it anon. Did you do other classical monsters?

>>96306865
You don't. Good aliens are so inhuman and unrelatable. Normal aliens are just humans in a different shaped body just like all freakshit races that exist due to the authors extremely niche fetish

>>96307321
No other classical D&D beasties unfortunately but I plan to draw more of em.

I've been exploring on a few lesser know mythical creature though

>>96284968
You might want to look at DCC for inspiration. Magic in there can have corrupting effects, and weird stipulations that you might want to incorporate, but martials are probably the beat I've ever seen them done. They have something called mighty deeds: they roll a deed die that raises in level for attack, damage, and deed roll. A deed is any sort or battlemaster like feat that rolls in with the attack: disarming, tripping, or environmental like lifting a statue

>>96307412

Pretty based just to have selected the tatzelwurm

>Make a scifi setting
>Decide to have a massive, inexplicable object show up above a planet, destroying its target by unknown means
>The soldiers on the battlefield of the planet refer to it afterwards as an "angel" for saving them. People who saw it in person say that it was a religious experience.
>I decide that this "angel" was actually a hyper advanced human that had evolved and been bioengineered into a massive being so alien it wasn't even recognizable as human
I sure did take the long route to just writing Evangelion.

>>96302010
Can't quite parse what lower-right with a hookah is supposed to be beyond "loooong slug". Nice bunch overall, the human's imperial swag presents an attractive contrast.
>>96307346
That's a pretty uninspired take. For one thing unless you're dealing with sapient shades of yellow from the Nth dimesion broadly similar selective pressures shaped their minds (at least assuming they haven't got around to altering themselves in which case all bets are off).

Deferred gratification and some degree of sociality (if only for the bare minimum requid for intergenerational knowledge transfer) can be taken as a given. How much meaningful commincation that allows for is a matter of the story's goals.

>>96307796
>Can't quite parse what lower-right with a hookah is supposed to be beyond "loooong slug"
Oh, those guys are long wormy critters with a single arm, called the "Sloosh". They have a bunch of eye stalks, but also a head of very long and brightly-colored hair that they style all sorts of ways. They're little hedonist dudes, who live for new experiences, bright colors, and lots of drugs. They're fun little guys, but not terrifically driven to great accomplishments. They're pretty commonly musicians and artists with a flair for the absurd and avante-garde.
They're a people ruled by intense and often wild passions, as well as beholden to intense fits of rage and thrashing despair.
They would generally not have advanced very far, were it not for the vast deposits of amber (prime currency in my setting) and rich resources that they live on top of in their homeland. Therefore, as a people, they're universally pretty immature.
>the human's imperial swag presents an attractive contrast
Thanks! That Chalician (most humans in this world are that culture/heritage) is a decorated "armsman" of the Militant-Chamber of the Grand City!

>>96306865
I personally would make them primitive instead of them being technologically advance.

>>96308403
You know what’s something I’m surprised we don’t see more of?
Aliens that are at our exact level of technological development, and for them this is also first contact.

>>96080428 (OP)
>gplates autism
The horror...
The horror...

>>96311717
The movie Planet 51 was sort of like that except the aliens were in the 1950s with their tech.

I painted this in a bit more!

There's also this too, as long as I'm paintingthe Chalician first. A ceremonial flag/tapestry of the Grand City. This is also a WIP due to me schizophrenically hopping around from piece to piece.

I am looking for untried alternative to capitalism, socialism and fascism for postcyberpunk setting that has not been tried and only thing I found so far is distributivism.

Megacorps collapsed from being too fat and old to deal with wageslave uprisings they would easily squish like a bug mere two decades ago so capitalism is seen as a failed system, socialism is seen as hyperevil due to centuries of corpo-propaganda and everybody being a fascist is boring.

>>96315996
I like your shit, you have a website/instagram or anything?

>>96313226
MSpaint tectonics autism in progress.

>>96316606
-Economic democracy (seize the corps for the greater good)

-Inca economy (no money, no markets, it's against the law to be lazy, the dead can hoard wealth)

-"Guarani economy" (the land and resources aren't private or public, they have their own "Human" rights, but the fruit of your labour is yours)

-Digital Planned Economy (what Synco, EAMS and OGAS proposed)

>>96317442
I hope tectonics turned out well. There are some weird things with oceanic plates where I am not sure what the fuck would be happening there.
Also never too sure on which boundaries there would islands where you would just get underwater mounds.

>>96317925
There's something off at the central area. It looks like it should be a mid-ocean ridge, but in that case all the plates on the east side of the central fault should be moving to east, and the ones on the west side to east. Now some plates appear to be moving perpendicular to the fault line as you'd see in a strike/slip fault.
Also, there appears to me to be multiple triple junctions where 3 plates move away from each other or collide. They're not impossible, but are extremely rare in real life.

>>96318205
Thanks.

A lot of science fiction has their spaceships powered by nuclear reactors. But it just occurred to me that reactors are for the most part just high powered water boilers. So how are you supposed to capture the energy in space where you don't have the room or mass for a boiler system?

>>96318373
Because they might not use water, for starters. Molten salt, heavy water, carbon dioxide, sodium-potassium alloy... And if you have nuclear power, your concerns for mass likely decrease a lot.

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/power.php#id--Power_Generation--Nuclear_Fission_Reactors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romashka_reactor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPAZ_nuclear_reactor

>>96318205
Actually, made a different version, tried to do boundaries different, but probably still bad.

>>96319472
Purple - divergent
Red - convergent
Yellow - transformation

>>96319503
Also,
orange hotspots
and more islands and mountains to go with tectonic movements.

Also, I learned about tectonic microplates.
Artifexian, eat your heart out!

>>96080428 (OP)
I'm trying to come up with a name for a kind of alchemically created magical version of gold, one that isn't Orichalcum or Aurum, what would you fine anons suggest?

>>96323017
Alchemist's Gold.

>>96296771
...
Fuck I guess I did.
Should I lean more into that? I was thinking of their society being very hellish mix of corporate and caste-like, and as such male and female are equal in that they're all meat for the grinder and they only matter if they have blue blood *and* money.

My high fantasy book Born Under a Black Sun is done. Unless I go look at chapters I wrote ten months ago and decide I need to fix prose. But it’s practically done. Surely. Check it out if you like animal magic!
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/93931/born-under-a-black-sun

There's a running gag about how normal human war tactics are fucking useless when placed into a context where the opposing side isn't made of paper mache.

>>96324186
Nor surprising.

>>96323286
Not what I was going for, but thanks for trying.

>>96325327
It’s more an anti HFY kinda deal.
When the species you’re trying to conquer is straight up immune to your most lethal weapon, the rifle, then you should probably just quit right then and there.

Hello /tg/ I am working on a fantasy setting called Rainband. I want to detail it similarly to the old Wilderlands of High Fantasy, with a bunch of hexmaps to crawl. Have any of you guys done that kind of thing before?

>>96318561
>>96318373
or you can skip the turbine all together and invent some bullshit like gammavoltaic generator

>>96315996
Nice! How did you make this?

In a scenario where you have something like a quarter of a dyson sphere how would that effect the planets in it's orbit? Assuming a scenario where the planets didn't get ground up to build it

Update on this! Filled in some more of the other intelligent beings.
>>96317290
Thanks for he compliment! I have an insta: tsailerol_friend3000
>>96335987
So far, I've been working on it in Krita! Just painting over my sketch.

>>96336038
Then the planet have to deal with the missing 1/4 sunlight. Essentially it will make the planet colder.

Some placeholder dragonlore I came up with during lunch breaks at work

In the native realm of dragons there is as much rock and dust in the air as there is oxygen and wind in the human realm. It is sharp and heavy, constantly shifting, so most creatures that would have the misfortune to end up here would be immediately crushed or shredded into nothingness.
Dragon scales resist the hostile nature and their existance in these conditions ensures that they grow into impossibly strong creatures, especially their wings that have to adapt into tools that can withstand all burdens.
The secrets of this realm are unknown to most living beings. Only the elfs have some ideas about it, and secretly the dwarfs. It is rumored that the entrance can be found within a dragon's egg. The shell is a barrier between planes and the draconic "embryo" is truly existing within the hellscape previously described.
Dragons usually lay their eggs in unreachable areas with wealth of metals and minerals. A dragon in its early stages of living within the human realm may be driven by a need to consume these treasures in order to bolster its strengths, though this is not always the case.
It is not the case however for True Dragons - those who thrive within their hellish realms for thousands of years and more. Indeed a dragon may choose to stay in the realm of his birth for as long as he desires, and not manifest in the human realm. Some dragons have no choice and are banished or exiled from their native realm by their stronger brethren; Depending on how early it happens but usually such dragons do not undergo their full growth and manifest into the human realm as Wyverns - significantly weaker beings.

...

Upon death, depending on circumstances, a dragon may become a river or a mountain or something else. The landmark or their resting place becomes the area where their "rebirth" or next stage of living may begin. "Chinese style" dragon-spirits arise at such sites; and these are beings of Wisdom;

>>96338927
Upon death, depending on circumstances, a dragon may become a river or a mountain or something else. The landmark or their resting place becomes the area where their "rebirth" or next stage of living may begin. "Chinese style" dragon-spirits arise at such sites; and these are beings of Wisdom; Even Evil True Dragons may become Cleansed in this new state.

...

The first phoenix was born of dragon-flame. It is crucial to know this both in dragonlore and elvenlore. It is another creature that is able to withstand the hostile realm of dragons, to an extent; not with raw might as dragons, but with quickness and lightness that enables it to maneuver through various planes. It is through expeditions in the phoenix-vessels that the elfs have been able to explore much of existence and acquire all of knowledge. When the ancient phoenix fell into the ocean of the world, the heat of its essence arose land where there was previously none, and its lingering flames became the High Elfs.
The phoenix is the enemy of dragons, and it seeks the dragon eggs, for which it burns with hunger.

...

1)I have multiple elf-races in my setting. In fact every elven group is pretty much drastically different from each other in their "culture" or "beliefs", because elven-wizards are usually persons that want to shape or "write a line of code" into reality, so they basically manifest their own origins; they are a "blank" race that is neither Angel nor Demon. High Elfs are a "standardized" "Atlantean" type elf, and their origins will be directly related to the Phoenix OR to the fangs of Dragons
2) I have not decided upon the nature of humans. Although I refer it to the "human realm", I will likely introduce humans as "invasive species" that "naturally occur in worlds" much to resentment of some. They are an essential creature of the Wilderness.
3) I have not decided upon Dwarfs. But I know that Dwarfs are the "first" friends of the humans and they might have to do something with death

>>96327364
So what, humans just always get curbstomped?

What fantasy race or monster would benefit from slowly eroding a kingdom's strong spirit and marrying their evil succubus to their nobles in order to manipulate them? Who would have any interest to obliterate this human kingdoms in this slow, premeditated manner?

>>96080428 (OP)
How does your setting treat clones? And how have clones played a role in the setting’s history?

>>96342011
Cloning of body parts is a general part of the advanced medical science even to the point of custom making special prosthetic limbs and organs from that are still fundamentally biological in nature (and made from your own cells) but augmented.

There is no purpose of trying to force grow someone from embryo to adult so its treated as another kind of fertility option where people can opt to have a clone of themself made.

The other aspect of it is part of certain forms of immortality experiments where certain groups have attempted to isolate the self or the "soul" and move this into the clone.

>>96341721
what? is this some meme i don't know?

>>96341721
masturbate before worldbuilding jay naylor

>>96341721
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_spirit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daji

>>96341721
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_spirit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daji
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamamo-no-Mae

>>96323017
Lucium or Luxite if you want something element or rock soundy. If you want something more along the lines of quicksilver then truegold. If you want something more figurative, then pure metal?

>>96316606
Society-wide math trading.

How do you write about stuff you don't care about but is obviously needed?
I don't like writing about histories, countries, or religion. I like quaint small towns.

>>96340398
No. Humans aren’t in this setting.
It’s just that this is a world where human battle tactics are fucking useless

>>96344172
thanks anon, how could I not think about fox spirits? i even took the idea from the movie Ran, where the evil queen is called a kitsune at some point.

What do you believe its the endgame for Kitsunes? just evil and chaos? Could they make for an organized faction?

>>96348266
In fact, they've already gone to a higher plane of existence.

>>96344743
How do you write about stuff you don't care about but is obviously needed?
You don't. If you don't care about it, it shouldn't be involved nor engaged with. You're not making something for everybody, least of all the
>I would like X if it just had
faggots

Actually good fiction doesn't hit you with that stuff unless it's inherently relevant.

Write the quaint small town you want to write. That's enough.

Obsessive worldbuilders are do-nothing faggots.

What's a good way to show a supernatural blight that deforms the land but isn't just Nurgle?

I'm leaning to the fungus and pustule route, where these giant growths clump over parts of the land.

Kinda want enemies that act like big walking zits that shoot pus out.

Why would adventurers exist intead of everything being handled by the authorities?
budget limitation (cheaper to 'pay' mercenaries with spoils) and jurisdiction (soldiers deal with people, adventurers deals with monsters)?

>>96350724
https://thesickland.blogspot.com/2013/03/last-day.html

https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Tiberium

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Unlight

https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2015/12/more-central-asian-weirdness-golden.html

https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2013/12/demonic-incursion-described-through.html

https://nightland.website/index.php

>>96352674
This is basically asking
>Why doesn't daddy government just handle everything
And the answer is much the same as in real life: deep inefficiency and ineptitude. There will always be problems and gaps in authority, even in hypothetical surveillance states. Adventure exists when authority isn't all-encompassing. Even now it isn't big enough to quell the sense of adventure some people find in the mundane. Mercenaries more or less are adventurers. If you got a quest right now, it would probably be delivering food. Maybe you'd be hired to kill a pest. Adventuring in a fantasy setting is just that on a larger scale and danger threshold.

Can I have some advice, I'm studying more about the physics of our world than I did before so I can do the math? I want to design alternate physics that are math appropriate

>>96355253
For what purpose?

>>96356199
NTA but it could be a neat way of processing and learning if nothing else.

Hell, I world build various religions and government systems as a way of processing my own understanding of these things.

>>96356618
NTA, but please tell us how you might do that.

>>96359660
NTA, but the biggest thing is, if you are doing worldbuilding, your brain sorts information into "useful." Learning about Tenrikyo? Why do I need to know this? Learning about Tenrikyo to try to create a fictional monotheistic faith that isn't just Christianity+? Boom, now I'm looking at it closer: what's relevant, what isn't, how does X relate to Y, who is the prophet and why is she considered holy, etc. It's the same basic reason why they make you write essays in school, not just do the reading; it forces you to digest it at least a little.

>>96359701
>Tenrikyo
Huh, I've never heard about that before, I'll take a look, thanks. Do you have any other advice please?

>>96362652
Whenever you have a specific blank in your worldbuilding, google it? e.g. I recently wanted a salt god/goddess, so I googled it and discovered Huixtocihuatl, which gave me lots of flavor for that figure to draw on. Peasant revolts, mythological spider creatures, nonhuman races of various kinds, societies that live in extreme conditions (e.g. Inuit or Sanhaja), etc. There's generally some real equivalent, and they make excellent inspiration sources.

>>96363070
Thanks for the tip.