>>97784855
What qualifies as lesser-known? Lots of people know about the Celts, but if I'm basing language on Manx, does that qualify?

>>97784855
Kys d*scord cancer.

>>97786426
Eleven. You really are a stupid fuck.

Would it be believable for a space setting to have FTL travel but not FTL communications, and you end up with an interstellar Pony Express carrying messages to and from the frontier?

>>97786572
what's stopping people from just building a relay of multiple automated ship that jumps back and forth between jump gates/nodes/points to deliver messages?
i feel like any digital mail is going to be highly automated if possible, especially if your setting's ftl method is unhealthy for living creatures
physical mails and posts might go on a cargo ship if travel time is not a concern, but express mails and posts might qualify for the "pony express" treatment just like they go on aircrafts irl

>>97786572
This is a fairly common trope, used in Traveller, Dune, and 2300 AD, among others.

Realistically, I think there are three metrics under actual physics which plausibly create FTL (wormholes, Krasnikov tubes, and warp drive). Warp drive specifically requires an "engine," and thus communications can't be faster than ships (though you could have unmanned devices with warp drives that shuttle messages faster).

In general, this is the major limiter: if you need an "engine" to move between A and B, then comms will be limited to vessels. Otherwise, you can probably get around any limitations of the FTL via comm buoys - a simple device at individual systems which receives laser/radar/whatever signals and relays them to the destination, by hopping in and out of hyperspace, popping between Alderson points, or whatever else.

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>>97784855

I'm thinking of going all the way back to original Indo-European myths for inspiration. Not sure if there are many sources, though.

>>97784855
>now adding random unrelated discords
You need to stop dude.

>>97786572
It wouldn't be believable to me on the face of it, but if there was a decent in world explanation as to why then I could buy it.

>>97786807
>You need to stop dude.
I'll stop when the kys d*scord cancer guy stops. He refuses to, though, so there will only be more Discords.

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In this episode of putting far too much brainpower into a tiny detail that doesn't actually matter: Eating utensils
Started with the thought that the exclusively meat eating culture of the lizardmen (still working on the name of the species) might use only knife and skewer, not bothering with other utensils.

Then I thought about how different peoples in different areas with different cultures might develop their own utencle combinations. Like chopsticks+spoon, sporks, skew and spoon, no utencis instead having a culture of making everything in a finger foodable form, etc.
Then I thought how I didn't want to many earth connotation so probably chopstick and spork would break immersion. So that would mean coming up with new names that also don't sound dumb as dumb sounding names would also break immersion.

But yeah, been thinking about utensils and the cultures around them a lot. Like a lot a lot.

Can you make a hard scifi setting constrained entirely to the solar system because FTL is impossibe fun and interesting?

>>97786945
Eclipse Phase minus the wormholes. Cyberpunk 2077. Ghost in the Shell. Transhuman Space.

Yes.

>>97786945
I personally can't but if you mean in general most certainly yes.

>>97786945

The solar system alone has capacity for a star Empire that dwarfs most galactic empires in fiction. Once you consider every asteroid all the way to the Port, cloud, you could have an enormous empire that makes even today's superpowers look like a lone tribe in the Amazon.

>>97786916
Oh no, I found out kitchen tweezers are a thing.
I must try them for possible world building reasons now.

>>97786916
ever heard of kitchen scissors? as in scissors used to cut stuff like meat or pizza?

>>97786916
You know what kitchen utensil I didn't know I needed till I moved to Korea. Meat scissors.

Changed my fucking life - it's so much easier to just use scissors to cut meat into slices or chunks for frying/stewing etc. than using knives and chopping boards and it just wasn't a thing I'd ever seen before coming here.

>>97786945
I've thought about doing one around a blue giant. If a star is many times as massive as our sun it would have many times as many planets, right?

>>97787526
>or pizza?
We don't do that here.

>>97787526
>>97787529
But yeah , have heard of and used kitchen/meat scissors.
Personally prefer knife for the style of cooking I do most often.

>>97786572
It depends on what is meant by FTL and how hard or soft your world is. You could easily say something like
>You can't transmit a laser through subspace
>You can't propagate a radio or microwave through the interplanetary medium fast enough to negate transmission lag anyway
>Building a transmitter and receiver station in a system is just like building 2 FTL starships

>>97786626
He didn't say anything about whether they're automated or not, so I'd assume they are. It opens up opportunities like intercepting a drone to hack into its secure data storage to access secure message data.

>>97786945
That alone doesn't make it hard sci-fi but the answer is yes. Look at Ender's Game.

>>97786916
I started doing something similar for a harpy race. Then I decided it didn't matter if the players weren't likely to encounter them in their native land, and only meet expatriates.

>>97787532
It would also last many times fewer years.

>>97786626

Yeah, would assume something like that is what would happen.

That being said if anon's thing is to make communication slow (but not as slow as physical transportation), I think it could be done.

Imagine that there is your old network of space jump nodes (because I mean, what else were precusors to do with their time if not preparing a nice way to space opera for us). Every solar system has at least two: if you just want to communicate from planet A in sistem As to planet B in system Bs, you radio to the robotic relay standing close to the node. Then on the other side of node in system Bs that relay communicates to planet B. Some hours and voila. Clearly faster and cheaper than the months/weeks/days you have to use to transport shit through the same node.

But to communicate to planet C in system Cs, you have to use the other node, quite possible at the other end of the system (hoursx2). So time accumulates and in the end yer space empire DOES communicate cheaply and relatively within close planets, but from the extreme systems it's not really an effectively zero-time communication like we've had from the beginning of last century, or even before with trans-oceanic cables.

>>97787562
>Building a transmitter and receiver station in a system is just like building 2 FTL starships
I'm stealing this one. It could be really interesting to use in my space vampire idea.

>>97787529
I find something very weird and morbid about cutting meat with scissors

>>97786945
Easily. Look at the expanse and the various realistic space battle cgi movies

>>97786945
I like to think my hard sci-fi one solar system wars of the diodachi in space setting is fun and interesting

>>97786637

I have some bad news: it doesn't exist. Since the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived roughly between 4500 and 2500 BCE, long before they developed writing, we don't have a single direct scrap of their original stories.

However, the good news is that we have Comparative Mythology. By looking at the common threads between Vedic India, Ancient Greece, the Norse, the Celts, and the Hittites, we can somewhat "reverse-engineered" the original myths. By looking for the cognates (words and names that share the same root) and the mythemes (story structures that repeat across the globe) you ended up with a lot of parallel elements.

>Sky Father

Nearly every branch has a "Sky Father."

-Greek: Zeus Pater

-Vedic: Dyauṣ Pitṛ

-Roman: Jupiter

-Norse: Týr (originally the chief, later displaced by Odin)

>The Twin and the First Man: Manu and Yemo

Manu ("Man") and Yemo ("Twin") travel the world with a primordial cow. Manu sacrifices Yemo to create the world (Yemo's bones become mountains, his blood the sea, etc.).

>The Chaos Kampf (Striking the Serpent)

A hero or god (usually a Thunder God) must slay a multi-headed serpent or dragon that is "blocking the waters" or causing drought.

-Thor vs. Jörmungandr

-Indra vs. Vritra

-Heracles vs. The Hydra

Indo-European Poetry and Myth by M.L. West is the absolute "Gold Standard." It breaks down everything from how they described the dawn to their specific poetic metaphors.

For world-building, keep Georges Dumezil’s "Trifunctional Hypothesis" in mind. He argued that Into-European society (and their gods) was always split into three roles:

-Sovereignty: The priests and rulers (The Law/The Magic).

-Force: The warriors (The Muscle/The Storm).

-Fecundity: The farmers and herders (The Wealth/The Earth).

Most of their myths involve the interaction (and often the conflict) between these three groups.

My world has a parallel world for druids that I've been hinting at because one of my PCs is a druid and the player is really into druidic lore. The idea is that instead of fae insanity like the Feywild it's more like what the world would be like without human intervention, so I guess basically like the Emerald Dream from Warcraft except without the dream part.
So far it's only been in the background, but the way the story is going, the PCs will be going there for a romp soon. Any ideas for where I can steal ideas and material?

>>97790709
>it's more like what the world would be like without human intervention,

Unironically read up about the pleistocene.

>>97790747
Megafauna is a good idea and something I've had on the cards. At one point I was even thinking going full Permian with giant insects and weird reptiles, but decided that wouldn't really feel druidic at all.
I want there to be magical aspects to it too though, and that's what I'm most having trouble with: getting that magical wilderness atmosphere without leaning too much into fairy territory. I guess (mostly) non-sentient magical beasts could do the trick. Not yet entirely sure if I want there to be any sentient natives there.

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"The sky over Golgotha is the color of a bruised plum. A false prophet screams from a soapbox until a Centurion's spear silences him. In the shadows of the Temple, the knives are already drawn. You have three silver pieces, a rusted gladius, and the absolute certainty that tomorrow will be worse."

The Gutter-Born Sicarii: You hide a curved sica dagger in your filthy robes. You are a zealot and an assassin. You get a bonus to striking from the crowded marketplace, but you are marked for death by the Roman garrison.
Fallen Zoroastrian Magus: You followed a star from the East, but you found only misery. You wield ancient, esoteric fire magic, but using it risks drawing the attention of both the paranoid local kings and terrifying astral entities.
Defrocked Temple Butcher: Your life was slaughtering hundreds of lambs and doves for the wealthy Sadducees, until you saw something you shouldn't have in the Holy of Holies. You start with a bloody cleaver, heavy guilt, and a terrifying secret.
Sun-Scorched Desert Ascetic: You survived on locusts, wild honey, and hallucinogenic roots in the Judean wastes. You are unarmored, deeply unwell, and occasionally hear the voice of an extremely angry, apocalyptic god.

Jerusalem is a powder keg suffocating under the brutal, exhausted grip of Rome and the treachery of wealth hoarding temple elites. Here, miracles offer no salvation, healing the sick or multiplying bread are reality bending omens that drive crowds to panic. Out among the tombs, chained wretches snap their own bones and scream in forgotten tongues. To counter this desert sorcery, grim Imperial priests gut prisoners and birds alike, reading bloody entrails to maintain their stranglehold. The heavy scent of frankincense and myrrh fails to mask the stench of endless temple sacrifices and the rotting, crucified flesh lining the roads. Everyone knows the apocalypse is mere weeks away, and the desperate are prepared for atrocities.

>>97790900
In a fantasy nature, you could also have:
- Native animals have human-level intelligence (but animal motives).
- Non-animal things have sapience or at least beastly intelligence (e.g. treants/dryads for trees, naiads for rivers, etc).
- Some kind of incredibly big/powerful apex predator that is extinct in our world.(e.g. t-rex) that holds a given territory, warping the local fauna and flora accordingly.

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>>97786945
Yes absolutely. We're working on one right now.

>>97786431
Make that twelve, you discord fuck.

>>97791082
>combining jew and islam
Anon, ftl is more believable on hard scifi than that.

>>97786945
Yes.
People tend to forget the scale of the space. Our solar system is huge.
If you want unique planets, you can just terraform mars and venus. You can even create thousands of space colonies with the asteroid belt.
The only advantage of galaxies scale scifi setting is aliens.
Even then, you can just biologically modified human into strange alien-like being and you still can call it hard scifi.

Would players attention be held by a handout written like this or is it too much:

>With his new wealth, Dowda embarked the royal fleet on a visitation of the Seafringe. Openhanded, with neither net nor sword, Dowda paid for fish and rays and puffins from dozen upon dozens of fishing vessels before planting his standard on the sands of Marnie's Bay. Yet the 80 galleys and towerships were as much a threat as any army, word of their presence sailing with the fishermen and birdcatchers who returned to their homes unmolested and flush with silver.

>Ottar IV was compelled to come.

>The fleet of the Marshalcy was the most skilled and experienced in our land, it is true. It was the father of fleets and a paragon of sailcraft. Of old, Gelertingia had forged it from the people of the skerry-bounded coasts, and it had survived the fall of that grand old kingdom. Assembled in its glory and led by their distinct drake-headed longships, the hundred and twelve ships which made landfall upon the strand were the flower of the Seafringe and the last living symbol of Gelertingia’s glory.

>Prince and marshal met upon the sand under the banner of truce. Over bounty and beer, a bargain was struck: A marriage for Maelle, Ottar's youngest daughter, and fleets for Dowda’s expedition in exchange for a bridegelt vast in silver and gold. With victory in war would come recognition of Kermeneur’s ancient rights, blessed by the touch of a king. The Marshals were to be marshals again.

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Back in early 2024, I made this setting and ran a brief game (of *Badass Kung Fu Demigods*) in it. Encounters included a battle with a dragon mage inside a submarine filled with 1989-style supercomputers.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cKI4l1V3CwTVA28qw_498Xp6-iRt0miSwKLwSEWlha8/edit

Unfortunately, the setting was very poorly received by the players (who apparently wanted something grittier, more grounded, more realistic, low fantasy, and so on), and the game went nowhere.

I am thinking of taking this setting document, polishing it up with more player-useful information (e.g. what PCs could possibly be, clearer campaign hooks) and some brief overviews for the other big empires of the world. This way, I could run it for a different group of players.

Should I bother doing so?

>>97786572
Depending on the FTL method it makes perfect sense. Like if the only way to move faster than light is to use a warp drive/hyperdrive/whatever you call it, you can't exactly strap a drive on a radio signal so you have to send a ship (or at least a probe equipped with a drive) to the other system to deliver the message.

The way I handled things in my setting is that the only way to travel FTL is by using a warp drive, but there is a form of FTL communication taking advantage of quantum entanglement. However, it's limited in that each communication terminal only connects to the one terminal it is "linked to", and the bandwidth is limited since you send data by altering the spin of a single electron and reading the spin direction as either 1 or 0 and you technically can't transmit and receive at the same time (this can be solved by having the terminals constantly swap between transmitting and receiving, but it effectively means you'd half the framerate). A low-population planet might have a single communication center in the planetary capital that has a terminal connecting to another planet that acts as a communication hub, which has terminals connected to other planets, so if you need to send a message to another planet it has to pass through the hub. Most communication is limited to short text messages because of bandwidth limit and real-time communication isn't practical (they're not going to put all off-system communications on the planet on hold because you want to have a phonecall with grandma). Only big corporations, the government and military have their own networks that are more likely to allow real-time communication, and only the extremely wealth and people of great importance like heads of state and military leaders get their own private terminals (usually something like from the CEO's home to the corporate head office, or from the admiral's flagship to the naval HQ).

>>97792636
That just seems so particular to the question asked that it's kinda crazy you have such a exacting match to that particular question in your setting.

>>97792374
Why not?

>>97792636
what stops you from using multiple electrons in parallel to raise the bandwith?

>>97793634
Nothing in theory, but the system necessary to keep the electrons in a perpetual state of quantum entanglement is complex and expensive enough that it's usually not worth it, at least not for the public communication network. Military and and people who can afford to drop several million to stream high-quality video over interstellar distances can do it if they want to, but for the public network the operators rather have multiple terminals sending separate messages than chain them together to send one at higher bandwidth.

>>97792374
What is your goal with this setting info? Is it meant to show the world player should be putting themselves into and be conscious of, or is it background flavor?

If it's background, then it's fine. You can plausibly focus things down to end of the cold war attitude, the tension between the superpowers, and just treat this as window dressing for players to know how to act, what they can use, and consider what abilities they and their enemies have access to. You just need to drill down and tighten it around where you reasonably expect the players to go.

As just a setting, there's problems. I immediately started asking questions.
>Magic and psionics. What's the difference?
Is this tied to lineage or whether you have immortal blood? Why split it? Why not just have chi since you already have Chinese influences?
>Late 1980s, late 1990s
There is a pretty big gap in capabilities between these two eras, especially if you're talking consumer technology rather than just the machines and tools you'll encounter in sessions. Pick one and stick with it.
>Thermonuclear war
Is that really a problem? You have a population 40-60 times what the real world population was in 1980, and there's a limited range to ICBMs. This wouldn't matter to most people unless they're worried about fallout, which is the only reason we stopped using nuclear weapons in our world. Or will you focus down specifically on the potential frontline, the Hawaii/South Korea/North Osea region that would actually pay the price for thermonuclear war?
>Undead
Why 1%? When you say 1% people start thinking "1.5 billion zombies are made every year." Just use "vanishingly small."

>>97793724
I did something similar for my solar system only setting. Large fleet flagships have QE devices to communicate with each other and headquarters. Everything else is routed through short-range radio or shuttles. Colonies make do with the latter two unless their patron is especially wealthy or has a share in the QE cartel.

Are there any theorized methods of going ftl? Or at least approximating it? I'm trying my hand at hard sci f, but 7 year transit times to even the closest star, while I can work with it, it just feels a but much. Even a single year would be better

>>97793881
The Alcubierre warp drive is something that's been proposed, we don't know if it's actually possible but it's the most likely candidate we have.

>>97792636
>they're not going to put all off-system communications on the planet on hold because you want to have a phonecall with grandma
Takes me back to the dialup days.

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>>97793881

Alcubierre Drive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94ed4v_T6YM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk5bxHetL4s

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>>97784855
In my setting Angels have no physical form, so when an Angel needs to manifest in the mortal realm they have to use the ambient matter and energies in the area to construct a functional vessel for themselves. They sometimes make forms more akin to OP's image for combat scenarios against more powerful demons and shit, but most of the time they stick to the typical winged human archetype, with their wings and halos retracting when they need to be incognito. Certain types of matter/energy often take prominence in their forms though, which is most noticeable with elemental-type energies, though preference can influence things as well. So an Angel that manifests during a forest fire might have wings of flame and/or a halo like a ring of fire like picture related, one that manifests in a forest might have wings with feathers like leaves and a halo made of vines, one that manifests in a storm might have a halo of multiple colors of lightning intertwined, one that manifests in a frozen tundra might have wings of ice and a halo transparent like a giant snowflake, one that manifests on a battlefield may have wings of blades and a halo of blood, one that manifests in a graveyard might have a halo of bone and wings made from tombstones, etc. I just can't think of what the wings or halo of an Angel manifested out of raw air might look like, among a couple others, or other common markers that could appear when the Angel in question starts using their powers to any real degree when in apparent mortal form; besides maybe glowing holy symbols of appropriate design for the substance of the form appearing on their skin and appropriately colored hair and eyes, what would you suggest?

>>97794227
shana with a blue archive halo?

>>97793881
Wormholes, Alcubierre drive, Krasnikov tubes.

FTL isn't really "forbidden," per se, under modern physics, it's just that under relativity, any FTL method can produce a time machine. Not *all* FTL trips will, but all FTL methods *can*; it's dependent on the relative velocity of the two points. Backwards causality occurs if you move back and forth between points A and B, with relative velocity v, at a speed faster than c^2 / v (at exactly c^2 / v, you appear to take 0 time from the reference frame of wherever you're arriving; any faster, and you appear to take negative time, i.e. to arrive before you left).

There are, afaik, three ways around this:
- You always move with pseudovelocity c^2/v (or less), and don't appear in the intervening space (so you can't decelerate or whatever). Thus, you pop between Alderson points or whatever "instantaneously," but nothing interesting with causality can happen.
- You have a wormhole network which *theoretically* allows backwards causality, but whenever it would form a loop, the network collapses on itself (due to virtual particles multiplying towards infinity at the point where passing through it takes 0 time).
- You have traversal through hyperspace, which itself has a preferred reference frame (probably CMB). Thus, all the funny time dilation stuff always happens with the same reference frame, and you can't go backwards in time.

>>97790637
Has anyone tried looking at potential connections between the Chaos Kampf and Ancient Near Eastern creation myths? That description kind of reminds me of Marduk vs. Tiamat, Ba’al Hadad vs. Yam, and the Old Testament’s references to Leviathan.

What can you do for power generation in space if you're somewhere like the orbit of neptune or pluto where the sun is basically another speck in the sky? I like the idea of 'those weird people who live out on the edge of the solar system' but then I got to thinking about all the logistics of it
And as a follow up, what would travel times be like? I read that probes have taken more than a year to get to these places but in a future scenario with more space infrastructure and travel and whatnot, what could transit times be cut down to?

>>97796423
Nuclear or wind or harvesting energy from Neptune's magnetosphere if it's a gas giant. Otherwise just nuclear.

>>97796423
nuclear
those outer planets move incredibly slowly so your transit windows are far about if you're using orbital slingshots, less if you're using ship's propulsion I guess? depends on what kind of technology you have

>>97796423
There's a very marginal amount of antimatter captured in orbit around various planets in the solar system, don't think it's enough for a civ, though, so it's just scraping hydrogen to use in a fusion reactor.

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The more I research street sociology and the lives of urchins and teen delinquents, the more I realise why some of them would rather try their luck on the streets rather than endure a "charity" like an orphanage or a workhouse. Holy fuck. You get figures like 87% mortality rates in some of them (and I found one, Dublin Foundling Hospital, with 99.9% mortality rate where literally only 1 survived in 5 years) vs 25-50% on the slums/streets and the social stigma was awful and dehumanizing. It’s no wonder characters like the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist resonate so much. Also fun stuff like Baby Farming where people were paid to adopt orphans, only to murder them with opium, so they would get paid again, and repeat the process.

>>97796423

When you have nuclear fusion, even an asteroid in the Oort cloud it is viable, and you can make a lush colony with it. Also, you could technically send energy from inner colonies by using lasers.

>>97796588

There's the concept of antimatter-catalysed fusion. You can build a smaller fusion reactor if you use antimatter as a catalyzer for nuclear reactions.

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>>97793742

I did show this to my players back then.

You raise good points. Thank you. I have received other actionable feedback here: >>97792803

I will think about what to do with this setting if ever I decide to return to it.

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>>97784855
I was loosely inspired by the Brothers from RWBY, and was thinking that the main deities of my setting would be a Lady of Creation and a Lord of Destruction (who I was thinking would be a couple, with potentially some children of theirs as lesser deities), the former making things all the time and the latter destroying the things that would harm the world at large and refining what he doesn't destroy, like a writer and their editor. What other aspects make sense for them and/or their subordinate deities to have besides Art and Life for the Lady and Death for the Lord (and maybe Disease, because things like diseases and monsters would be what occasionally slips by him and maybe because people pray for deliverance from said diseases)? Maybe Dreams for the Lady? Asking again.

>>97784855
Do you guys have any advice for designing modern cities? I recently finished playing a game that took place in Shibuya and now I want to run some kind of supernatural game taking place in a modern city, but and I know what I'm about to say is really pathetic but aside from driving to work and to the grocery store I don't actually go anywhere so I don't actually know what cities really needs to be cities. I've never felt the urge to explore and I still don't but I don't want my made up city to feel paper thin. So any advice on building a modern city would be really helpful.

>>97803267

Not bitching about your post, but why do you feel that need? I mean, not everyone playing a druid feels like doing a month in the jungle obviously, but I would think it pretty strange if they wouldn't like even a walk in the woods. Something on these lines.

Anyway, I don't THINK there is really a guide for RPGs about that. I assume you're asking for nuts and bolts, not "get the feeling of it" (for which unironically some GTA would probably be good).

>>97800064
It's too broad and I don't know why Creation and Destruction aren't enough for them. Put more into their subordinate deities, and mix it up.

Life for the Lady's faction, fine. But give Art to Destruction as something to memorialize loss. Death could be unintended and a stranger to both.

>>97803267
It depends on the time, place, and culture.

America calls almost anything a city as long as it governs itself and can tax itself. This ranges from towns of 5,000 people to NYC. The UK on the other hand is much stricter or has been historically about what a city is and which qualify, with the designation being stripped from them if they fall out of it or having it restored.

If you just want stuff that people do in cities there's always parks, memorials, recreation facilities like theaters, parking garages, office buildings which provide the economic draw, or factories in less advanced and more primitive modern cities.

>>97786916
Part of the reason we have eating utensils in the first place is that our weak human jaws and dullteeth aren't very good processing food on their own. People with, say, lion heads might just bite into entire chunks of meat instead of bothering to cut it into bite-sized pieces, maybe all they'd need at the table is something like a fork or chop sticks to hold the food in place if they consider eating with their hands to be uncivilized.

>lizardmen
One of the advantages the human mouth (and other mammals) does have is the ability to chew, which is actually incredibly rare (and probably one of the traits that first made our earliest ancestors successful over the reptiles). Some insects and one group of dinosaurs (the hadrosaurs aka duck-billed dinosaurs aka igauanadon and parasaurolophus) did independently evolve chewing, but otherwise it's an exclusively mammalian feature.
Therefore we can imagine that lizardmen (or birdmen) might actually have a need for more utensils than we do, with small mallets used for mashing up food before consumption. Especially if they eat plants which are generally much more difficult to digest than meat.

I need some help here. Which city do you think would feel more fitting as the "biggest" in a story? By biggest, I mean population-wise. It's supposed to be basically like Naples in the 16th century, aka the third biggest city in the whole continent.

>City A
Capital of a fairly sizeable power, has pretty much never actually been mentioned, but the country in question has been refered to as fairly powerful, having, for example, a specific type of guild (in universe thing) whose only other example given is the one in the capital of the big-ass "human empire" type faction.

BUT

It's a coastal city (no big river nearby) in a region that is generally very wet, the city itself is in woodlands but the area close to it has temperate rainforests and wetlands.

>City B
Capital of trade republic, hasn't been mentioned in specific until now but the introductory specifically mentions how it was a grand city they built out of the wetlands and how it required lots of food supply, to the point getting a new supplier in the cheap is what made their faction switch sides.

Still, it's not a very big nation, and it hasn't been really mentioned as having anything special. Half the country is just coastal wetlands. The city itself is between two big ass rivers and the cost.

>>97810633

Why has city B problems in getting food? Coastal wet plain is how you MAKE food.

(yes, not the wetlands in a pre-industrial setting. But a biggass river that ends up "directly" from the uplands in a briny delta is very rare)

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>>97812128
Listen man, I just drew the continental shelf, the height, and then I used FMG to generate the biomes and rivers.

This is what it has, there's some highlands in the middle, then there's a big-ass river that flows into the sea, but the coast is all wetland.

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>>97812245
This is the "biome" map, the darkest green means wetland.

>>97812262

Yeah, seems the hinterland is a nice agricoltural zone (if not exactly free from flooding, but peasants, who the fucks care?). Like Venice and Veneto.

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>>97812368
I suppose you're right.

Looking at the rivers in the region made me realize how a bunch of it looks stupidly fucking retarded, though. I don't even know how I'm gonnna begin to fix this.

>>97812416
>>97812128
>>97810633
Even in deserts, rivers are oases. Even in the American Southwest. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the Nile or the Euphrates. It could be like the Green River. It also depends on the type of soil around it and the natural humidity of the climate.

>>97810633
>It's a coastal city (no big river nearby) in a region that is generally very wet, the city itself is in woodlands but the area close to it has temperate rainforests and wetlands.
Sounds like Sarnor. Even assuming they don't have a "major" river, like Ravenna, they should still have a river that manages to be a transportation highway. That's what, in addition to drinking water, made cities capitals of trade and gave them a reason to be a political capital. This can be different if you're looking at an artificial capital like DC or Brasilia or Berlin. Or if there are specific circumstances, like Ravenna, which was the capital because it was fortifiable.

for City B, even Venice was not self-sufficient despite its coastal holdings. It still imported tons of food. You just have to tone down how much it requires. Wetlands not only implies fertile land that, like the Netherlands, could be turned into farmland, but also fishing.

>>97813645
My research seems to say that Naples, despite having like 200k people by the 16th century, had no major rivers nearby.

>>97813659
In fact, I cannot find even a single mention of any river at all even close to it.

>>97813659
>>97813683
looking at a map, it seems naples would have fertile volcanic soil from mt vesuvius right next to it

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Been slowly chipping away at this custom campaign setting for the last year or two.
>humans worship a 3 headed dragon
>wyverns are basically demons and the church has a wyvern-hunting unit
>the dark elves are chinese
>dwarves have a monotheistic ethnoreligion, worshipping a god that lives at the center of the earth
>orcs used to live where the dark elves now live (Yunzhai), now live on a reservation on the western edge of Yunzhai
>wood elves are hippies whose society is slowly stagnating
>dwarves once ruled the continent during the bronze age before men learned to work steel and with the wood elves destroyed their empire
>wood elves have a near-monopoly on Orichalcum, a super dense metal that feels much lighter to the person holding it than it actually is. Because it's so dense, forging it takes forever, so only the elves have enough time to work it in large quantities.

>>97813856
The small rivers that formerly crossed the city's centre have since been covered by construction.

>>97813645
>>97813659


Not sure why people assume oldtime bigg-ish settlements needed bigass navigable rivers for their inhabitants.

Indeed Naples had these in classical times, but we're talking mediterrean smaller rivers which ended up being covered in modern times. I assume wells and seasonal basins did their work well enough.

>>97814022
A lot earlier than you imagine, it was already gone by the 1600s to the point they made a memorial foe it.

>>97814070

Well, generally because navigable rivers are economic engines. It is much cheaper to send good by ship than by land. Having a navigable river is extra good, it is a highway deep into your lands.

>>97810633
I'm not an expert but I feel like a big city isn't going to be in a woodland, the land around it would be used to grow food for its inhabitants.

>>97814137

Not coincidentally Naples is a seatown! Basically you can't use navigable rivers for inland commerce if there aren't any (which is more or less the case in peninsular Italy, or indeed almost anywhere on the Med).

Okay, I want you guys to tell me how racist people should be in my setting.

2000 years ago, there was this guy named Moloch. He created a force called the Giagas. It was crazy. They didn't do any work besides killing people and stealing their things (cows, crops, etc). They ate people. They didn't have kids the normal way, but kidnapped kids from people they beat and inducted them into their society. They did a lot of damage, but eventually petered out after a few decades and collapsed on themselves; however, Moloch ascended to godhood off the back of all the murder.

About 600 were some guys, the capgrians. They were aliens from another world who bodyswapped with people here, with fleshcrafting magic. They took over the local equivalent of Rome. They also mutated their bodies in all kinds of ways because they wanted to improve on human/elf bodies for their purposes. They got kicked out of not-Rome like 300 years ago. But the weird bodies they created became truebreeding races that survived (orcs, ogres, goblins, etc).

Moloch has survived all this time on spiritual cannibalism. About 80 years ago, he kills and eats the top Goddess of Law to gain power. He starts a new version of the Giagas with these "capgrian" races - they're ultimately called the Dread Horde. They proceed to basically destroy much of civilization over the next 40-ish years, completely petering out into more normal warbands and conquerors about 20 years ago. Nobody does the insane "we will not sow, we only murder and steal, we are cannibals, we will not have kids the normal way" bit any more, but some of them do have "vassals" who have to give them food in exchange for protection, etc.

How racist should people be to the capgrian races? They do have a Church that you can roughly model as the Catholic Church, which believes everybody has free will and no races are inherently evil &c.

>>97814160
>woodland exists
>cut down woodland
>no longer woodland
>win
And then you can use the wood to build a home.

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>>97814628
Go full Doom Came to Sarnath except everyday one of these Giagas are captured they are tortured and blasphemes are made against the god that created them.

>>97784855
I'm trying to reimagine the typical D&D wizard where cantrips are replaced by a set of basic spell like abilities that can be modified in a number of ways. Part of the inspiration comes from looking at old 3.5 books and seeing feats like Call of 3 Thunders of black lore of Moil but I'm not sure what to call these "modifications" that you can essentially equip in your downtime and affect how you use the cantrip level spell like abilities.

>>97814985
>Go full Doom Came to Sarnath except everyday one of these Giagas are captured they are tortured and blasphemes are made against the god that created them.
Oh, I mean, they definitely fought and killed a bunch of the Dread Horde itself. It no longer exists, though. Everyone involved collectively gave up living like that, and given how violent it was, and how weird its generations are, most of the ones who actually participated in Unlimited Murder Works are now dead.

>>97814160
Depends on the setting, "big" cities prior to the industrial era were hardly even big, so if we're assuming the generic medieval/early modern fantasy world you really don't have to do much deforestation at all for farmland. Most of the deforestation in Europe actually happened due to the demand for wood for shipbuilding.

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What elements should be considered in an underworld ecology? Not just the rank-and-file gangs members, urchins, prostitutes, beggars, or thieves, but the overall ecology, and significant nodes?

Beggar Kings
The Tavern Keepers (The Gang Office)
Disgraced Priests and Monks
"Patron" Merchant
...

Lately I more often than not began replacing standard fantasy races like elves and dwarfs with beast people(hare folk, kitsune, wolfmen tribes)
Weird thing, I fucking love standard races and usually all up for them, but it's just harder and harder to use them

>>97815511

An underworld isn't just a collection of bad people; it is a parasitic mirror society of the "Upperworld," requiring its own logistics, waste management, and social services.

The majority of any real system, legal or illegal, is made up of:

Facilitators
Maintainers
Intermediaries
Not frontline actors.

>The Service Infrastructure (The "Organs and Nerves")
These nodes allow the underworld to function without drawing the eye of the law. They are the essential non-combatants.

-The Fences (The Lungs):
These are the linchpins of the underworld economy. Without a fence, stolen goods are just heavy baggage. Fences act as the interface between the underworld and the legitimate market, often doubling as "Patron Merchants."

-The Unlicensed Healers ("Sawbones"):
Disgraced surgeons or underground folk healers who provide medical care with no questions asked. They are the only "socialized medicine" the underworld has. These are incredibly vital. They are what stops a wound from turning into a sepsis.

Most people die of disease, not violence and rarely of just hunger (hunger makes you more vulnerable to disease). A competent or semi-competent one is more valuable than gold.

-The Forgers and Scriveners:
The architects of identity. They provide the false papers, seals, and deeds that allow the illicit to pass as legitimate. This is a very dangerous job and the law punishes these particularly hard.

-The "Cleaners":
Those who handle the "aftermath". This includes professional launderers who can remove bloodstains, access to high-heat furnaces (blacksmiths), chemical vats (tanners/alchemists), or livestock like pig farms.

-Information Brokers (The Eyes):
Often disguised as the lowest class (blind beggars, chimney sweeps, or "night soil" collectors). They don’t want power; they want the secrets of those who have it.

Beggars
Porters
Servants
Sex workers
Tunnel-Rats and "Sewer-Jacks"

>>97815762

>The Power Nodes (The "Brain")
These are the figures who stabilize the chaos. Without them, the underworld collapses into a riot.

>The "Patron" Merchant
This person is the "Apex Consumer". They aren't "in" the underworld; they use it as a tool to bypass taxes or eliminate competition. They are portals to the legitimate world.

-The Tavern Keepers (The "Safe Harbor"):
A neutral tavern is the underworld’s version of a courthouse or a bank. The Keeper is the arbiter of "local law."

-Grey Arbiters (Informal)
These are rare, retired master-thieves or respected elders who settle disputes between rival gangs to prevent "Heat".

-The Corrupt Bureaucrat (The "Bridge"):
This is the contact who ensures certain gates stay unlocked or certain patrols are diverted.

- Moral/Spiritual:

These provide spiritual insurance. They can be anything from disgraced monks to card readers or oracles. They exist to provide psychological release valve that reduce psychological strain.

>The Ecological Dynamics
To make it feel like a living system, consider these "cycles":

>Node - Input (Resource) - Output (Waste/Value)

The Slums: Desperation. refugees -> Raw labor, Urchins, Muscle
The Docks: Foreign Contraband -> "Clean" goods.
The Rookery: Stolen goods -> Information, untraecable currency.

>Money Laundering
In a world with taxes and coin-counts, having 10,000 coins you can't spend is useless. You need to make it legitimate. The Patron Merchant often fills this role, but sometimes it's a Gambling Den or a Luxury Brothel where dirty money goes in and "legitimate" business profit comes out.

>Street Creed

Your creed also matters a lot. An urchin with no backing will never get paid as much as an adult thief, even if the kid has just stolen a book that costs more than a house. Who are you going to complain to?

Reputation
Affiliation
Track Record
Capacity for Violence
Replaceability

All of it determines how much you will be cheated.

>>97815762

The Fence is the only person who can turn a "liability" (stolen goods) into an "asset" (spendable cash). They take the highest risk by holding the physical evidence, which is why they usually take 70–80% of the profit.

BONUS:

The Tax Man (The Protection Racket). Even the underworld has taxes. If you operate in a certain district, you pay the local "Power Node" for the privilege of not being robbed by other criminals. This "Internal Tax" is what funds the "Social Services" (the healers and the bribes for the bureaucrats)

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>>97814985
To better explain what I'm trying to go for. I wanted to create a series of spell like abilities that represent the schools of magic that can later be upgraded and modified by things like the subclass you choose or other class features I haven't figure out yet.

Stealing from Warlock, a basic blasting spell like Eldritch blast would become the basic representation for the evocation school, generating a shield would be abjuration, arcane senses for divination, a version of presdigation/minor illusion for illusion, etc

>>97813659
>>97813683
It started as the northernmost Greek colony on the Italian mainland, and the Greeks didn't care about large navigable rivers near their settlements, they generally just wanted a sheltered port on the coast, some farmland and a few springs nearby, and would let the landlubbers do any of the possible overland trading. Shipping by sea, for example grain from Crimea to Athens or Corinthian pottery from the Greek mainland to Etruria, was cheap over massive distances.
The freshwater situation in Naples was so shitty the Greek colonists already in the 5th century BC constructed the 10 km long Bolla Aqueduct, partially running underground, to supply the city from a marshy aquifer area on the foothills of Mt Vesuvius. Sebeto was the only river of any importance flowing nearby.

Think I finally nailed my units of length
Base unit is a foot.
There are 5 feet in a standardized pace. 3 in a step. Used in the same context of yard. So something is such and such paces away. Or two paces long. etc.
The hole is 3 steps deep. The stone slid 4 steps to the left. etc.
Strides are 4000 feet. Based on the average distance someone can walk in the wilds in one hour. So its not uncommon phasing to describe directions as being a hours stride north west, or 2 and a half hours stride east.
It is around the middle distance between a mile and a kilometer and used in the setting's context in a similar way.
So a person used to miles can think of strides as similar to miles in their head. While someone used to kilometers will think of strides similar to kilometers.

Anything smaller I use comparisons or fractions rather than smaller standardized units.
I doubt I will meaningfully need larger units so those too can be handled with comparisons to get scale across.

>>97784855
Quick question - is there any fantasy or urban fantasy equivalent to the Space Marines? They're made by implanting various extra organs with some genetic modification from the geneseed. I can't think of anything else quite like that in other settings.

>>97818348
Oh wow.
Just thought of a secondary measurement system for one of the particular people groups. Because it wouldn't make sense for them to use such a human eccentric measurement standard even in their own settlements.

So in my setting the Guyin people use Yins as their length measurement system.
One Yin just so happens to be exactly one meter.
Can add prefixes to yins to go up and down in scale similar to meters. centimeter/centiyin, kilometer/kiloyin etc.

So the foot based system is called the Walker system of standardized measurements, also known as the Walker System (WS for short). The yin based system is simply called the Guyin standard (GS).

>>97818424
Witchers.

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>>97818549
Oh yeah! Sweet anon thx.

>>97818523
Forgot to include the reasoning of the Yin as a unit of mesurment.
A yin is the average height of a Guyin converted into a standardized unit.

Still haven't settled on units of time and weight.
Probably will just keep most time units the same (seconds, minutes, hours).
Will intentionally keep vague about how long the day and nights are.

Months/years are totally different though.
Such time scale is based on the lunar cycle which takes around 400 days. So instead of months a cycle is broken up into the 8 phases of the moon.
The world doesn't have the same tilt or wobble of earth so the differences between seasons is very mild across the world, mostly taking the form of wet and dry seasons.
You generally will only see snow on mountain tops.
Debated with myself if I should make seasons a full lunar cycle long but decided against it and instead will just wing it for whatever best fits the mood I am going for at the time.

But yeah, really not sure on weight. Even if I transpose one from earth I am not really sure which one I should grab and if I should change the unit names or not.

Long in the future, some hyperadvanced civilization has constructed monstrously massive pylons. They’re hundreds of lightyears wide, billions of lightyears long, and they lattice across the universe like a gargantuan spiderweb. These pylons are full of entropy-defying engines, producing matter and energy in a universe where all the stars have long burned out and all the planets are cold wastelands. These pylons are home to septillions of people and… That’s where I get stuck because I have no idea what to do with this setting.

>>97784855
>Do you use any lesser-known mythologies, histories, or regions as inspiration? If so, which ones, and what appeals to you about them?
One of my main religions is based on Manicheanism.
http://www.gnosis.org/library/manis.htm

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So, I wonder, how do you solve the problem of Mortals Ascending to Godhood?

In my setting, Aretta is the goddess of sorcerers. She was the last of the great Runemasters of the Argenthai, a dying race whose blood is the source of sorcerous power in the modern era. She was the last Runemaster whose ability to cast sorcery was not restricted by the bloodline failings which followed her, and her descendants are far weaker than she is. Aretta was worshipped as an ancestor after her passing, soon venerated as a household god. And as her descendants spread and rose to power, her worship was standardized and proselytized outside the family (though still only people who retain Argenthai blood are the only ones who see a need to worship her.)

How do you bridge the gap between Aretta's death and her ascension? Did her soul come back to become a god? Is it the same Aretta?

Pic unrelated.

>>97823450
There’s two ways to have this go:

First, the god Aretta is a new god based on memories and tales of Aretta- The woman’s actual soul isn’t anywhere in the mix

Second, Aretta’s soul became a god while in the afterlife, griwing in power and importance until she popped out of the afterlife as a super-duper soul that qualifies as a god.

The real question is how the afterlife works in your setting.

>>97823450
How about making them two seperate entities, but both thinking they're the same.
Like the worship created an entirely new goddess in the image of Aretta with all her memories, while the old Aretta still remains in her afterlife.
Like how Heracles in Greek Mythology after death became both a god of Olympus, while his mortal self remained in the underworld to be later visited by Odysseus.
Or how in DC Swamp Thing was originally believed to be the scientist Alec Holland turned into a monster by weird chemicals and a weird swamp, but then it turned out that Alec Holland died in the swamp and the chemicals gave birth to a new creature with all of Alec Holland's memories(the monster also ended up being the planetary avatar of all plant life).

>>97819473
>resting bitch face McGee
The Polish brand of drug-coping hypermasculinity is like scooping heaping tablespoons of raw sugar and stuffing it all in your mouth. No water. Nothing to drink. Just here, shove a pound of granulated sugar in your throat.
What might have been a pleasant accent has become an obnoxious and even mildly dangerous expression of fucking stupidity. It's so fucking off-putting. Imagine trying to go grocery shopping with Geralt.
>Do we need butter at the house?
Mmm. Wind's howling.
>Geralt? Butter. Do we have butter or do we need to get some while we're here?
What now, you piece of filth?
>Geralt...
You smell wonderful at this funeral.
>Geralt, you're the one who hasn't bathed in weeks while you've been tromping through the medieval mud and wallowing around in monster guts. I'm getting the fucking butter, go find an onion.
Ever fought a Witcher, you piece of shit?
>Every fucking day, Geralt. You're the worst fucking roomate ever, and if the fucking Boomers hadn't fucked the economy so hard, you would still be homeless and I would be happier.

>>97818424
Orcs, in many settings. Including fucking Lord of the Rings. Seriously.

>>97823645

What the actual fuck am I reading here

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How would you make machines that are not built for military use dangerous enough that they can't be steam rolled right away?

So far the idea I'm going with is the majority of an invading alien force is that they primarily work on resource extraction and ignore things until they get in their way. Human shooting at them would obviously constitute this.

My initial thinking is that they would adapt some of their tools or make impromtu weapons to defend themselves and keep the Humans at bay like giants swinging trees around or something.

I guess what I'm asking is what else can I have them do to be dangerous and prolonge the fight? It's suppose to be a conflict that lasts 15+ years for Humans to finally kick them off of Earth before going out into the Solar system to deal with them else where (and keep adapting their technology).

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Do peasants in your setting form militias to fight off threats?

>>97825422
>So far the idea I'm going with is the majority of an invading alien force is that they primarily work on resource extraction and ignore things until they get in their way
Sounds like they should just have weaponry built in then instead of needing to improv shit. They aren't full-on warbots but if they're supposed to be able to take care of themselves and defend themselves then why wouldn't they have built-in tools for doing that instead of needing to repurpose their mining lasers or whatever?

>>97823491
>>97823610
Man, I didn't want to answer the question of what waits in the afterlife because it was better to leave as something to wonder about. Readers would see death, see the passing of the soul under the protection of a psychopomp, and things would cut off before we see how they are judged. I guess I have to think about this. But I think , instinctually, I don't like the idea that the god is something other than the true person.

>>97825597
In areas far away from the bigger cities, or castles they do.
And some of them are even quite formidable.

>>97825597

No, they get conscripted in the army for 25 years.

>>97825789
Alternatively, how about you just dont have her enter the afterlife then and maybe use some sort of mystical preservation method to retain her existence in some form on earth, like maybe she boudn her soul to a family tomb or something which could have become a place of worship that ascended her soul to godhood, hell maybe she even used something like magical mumification to keep her soul in her body and prevent it from passing on, which eventually lets her resurrect as a divinity.
Maybe her becoming a divinity was even something she planned for and prepared to happen over time.

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This is an interesting stream. Just posting this here for people who have cartography question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p29Ztx2P-50

Any good ways to explain the difference between a mortal and a monster in your fantasy setting?

Been thinking about world where while has fantasy races being known such as more typical people like dwarves and halflings but also more stranger cases like slime people and living dolls being considered mortal races.. Was wondering in your guys opinions how would you make the distinction between a race who is considered mortal and one who is considered supernatural monster?

>>97825597
Walled towns do, mainly for possible monster attacks, but cities have their own professional armies on stand by at all times.

>>97825745
Up until the point they encountered Humanity, they never dealt with any intelligent species that could put up any sort of resistance that wasn't part of the Created.

>>97826060
True monsters are not "alive" in the proper sense. Their bodies are made of magic energy that originates from a core projecting that energy into the shape it has. Even though it can be cut and bleed once the core is removed the body and everything from it turns back into the magic energy an dissapates

>>97826060
Mortal: A creature that is natural to the world. A man, a bunny rabbit, a dragon. All mortal.

Monster: something that only exists because the world is broken. They are only born in dungeons, regions where the break in the world lets otherworldly pollution into reality. This pollution flows with water, and so many plant species around dungeons are technically monsters that have evolved to live with the pollution than be killed by it. Same is true of any beast or being that does the same.

>>97826060
Monsters don't live in the conventional sense, they don't reproduce sexually(maybe they're just magically created, maybe they're spontaneously born from other creatures, maybe they're misbegotten offspring of gods, maybe they convert others into their kind) they don't need to eat fo live (they could still do it, but it's not necessary for their survival making their place in the ecosystem mich more flexible, maybe they limit themselves to sapient mortal races even), they don't seem to degrade with age(maybe some potentially get stronger with age)

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>>97826060
My setting's monsters are pretty far on the monstrous scale.
They are inhuman, often eldritch, entirely unnatural beings that violate every rule about living creatures. They are so far removed from a normal living creature as to be incomparable.
They have pseudo-flesh that isn't biological.
They don't need to breath, sleep, eat, etc.
They literally materialize/spawn due to ambient arcane energy concentrations being high enough rather than being born of biological processes.
when slain (which takes specialized equipment or magic) they don't leave behind bodies. They instead dematerialize and turn into a glowing dust called spark, which is a essential magical component in the setting.
They don't feel, they don't have biological drives, they don't really have emotions. The only thing that drives them is a compulsion to inflict pain, death, and destruction to all life capable of feeling pain. For reasons totally unknown and incomprehensible. Some have theorized that monsters were the result of a planet wide spell cast during the age of the immortals, but no one knows for sure and there is no evidence to support that theory. It's just speculation at this time.

"mortals" by contrast are all biological beings. They feel, they are driven by biological imperatives,instincts, thoughts, emotions. They are made of meat. When stabbed by a normal weapon they bleed. Then they die a body if left behind.
You probably get the idea.

Biological beings have species, there are kinds, there are family trees. You can neatly categorize them. There are patterns to them. There is logic and reason that can be imposed on them.
Monsters don't work that way in my setting.
Monsters don't take on any particular form. Each instance is a unique amalgamation of wrong. A mockery of nightmares, a maddening parody of parts mashed together in sickening ways.

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Do you draw your maps with hexagons or with squares?

>>97826308
(A 128,000-square-mile tile on a world map is about the same size as Poland, Japan, or Ecuador.)

>>97826308
Squares.

Mostly because the main time I make maps its of interiors to places.
So squares work better imo.

I don't really do the hex craw thing. No shade on it, I am sure they are good fun, just ain't the style of game I run.

>>97825933
I can't do that. Magic isn't strong enough anymore.

>>97825870
Pre-USSR Russia?

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Been thinking about roads again.

>>97826060
>Any good ways to explain the difference between a mortal and a monster in your fantasy setting?
I have three different types of soul, the aetheric soul of mortals, the elemental animus of elementals (elementals that have become self aware/distinct "races" essentially) and I forgot what I called the liminal/fae version. So "monsters" would be different from mortals on a fundamental level. Although mortals can become corrupted or otherwise changed into monstrous forms so I guess the distinction isn't so clear cut in all scenarios.

What are your in world slurs? Do elves call dwarfs diggers?

>>97827264
Race based slurs aren't really impactful or all that insulting/offensive in my setting.
Like the Blooded might refer to "lesser" peoples as stock (as in livestock, you know, because they literally feed off them or use them for their utility). But people are generally more concerned with what the blooded do, not what they say. There are still stories from before the Apex was revived, when powerful blooded did whatever they pleased in their domain, including horrific fleshcrafting and unethical experimentation. So just being referred to with dehumanizing language is basically nothing.

Fera will refer to humans as hairless or baldies, since fera are covered in body hair. But it's generally seen as a childish insult with no real impact or venom behind it.
Lizardmen will occasionally call the other races apes, but again there is no bite behind it.

People got more serious shit to deal with then fantasy racism.

Hell, to the people in Centennial, comments about piss and shit are FAR more offensive to them.
Meanwhile to the people of Soul, blasphemy in general and especially blasphemy against their main god Sol, are fighting words that will get you killed. They have zero tolerance for it.

>>97822512
What kind of stories are you looking to tell or games you want to play?
Let your narrative or design goals inform and influence your worldbuilding.

For example the whole ecology of magic in my setting is designed from the ground up to be a ongoing conflict motivator that ties directly into why monster filled dungeons exist and are actually a good thing, as well as always giving a reason to go out into the dangerous wilds since it's highly lucrative to those who can consistently survive.

>>97784855
>Do you use any lesser-known mythologies, histories, or regions as inspiration? If so, which ones, and what appeals to you about them?
Hinduism. I love its pagan immorality because it's great fodder for dark fantasy.

The more I research, sociology, the more it seems like all puritan beliefs, sexism, radical ideas, racism, and wealth insecurity, and gilded attitudes, come from the upper middle classes.The "middle" is where the most intense social friction happens because that’s where people have the most to lose and the most to prove. Therefore, they must perform the most to pretend that they are rich, more moral, more upright, etc than the actual upper classes and lower classes. Everything from the cult of domesticity, to sexism, to everything seems to come from them or is more zealous about them than anyone else.

Because the middle and upper-middle classes lack the inherited "old money" security of the elite and the "nothing to lose" grit of the working class, they are trapped in a constant, high-stakes performance of respectability. The lower and upper classes don’t have to "perform" because their status is assumed. They can be eccentric or messy because their bank account provides the safety net or their behaviours can justified as "base" and rough due destitution.

To maintain their position, the middle-class must constantly signal that they are "better" than the class below them. This leads to Hyper-Conformity: following rules (like the Cult of Domesticity or rigid gender roles) even more strictly than the elites do, just to prove they belong.

To keep this status, the middle class became the primary "moral police" of society. They created the "right" way to raise children, the "right" way to eat, and the "right" way to behave, often looking down on the lower classes for being "unrefined" and the upper classes for being "decadent."

Because the upper-middle class often manages the institutions of society (education, HR, media), they are the ones who codify what "good" looks like. If they can define morality in a way that requires expensive education or specific "refined" tastes, they effectively gatekeep the upper echelons of society from everyone else.

>>97830897
This is just basic Marxism.

>>97830897
sounds like a load of commie nonsense

>>97830897

Wouldn't say, but I guess it kinda depends on what you call "puritan".

Certainly not all "sexism" is upper-class demanded, actually it's possibly the smaller fraction.

>>97830897
The middle class wasn't really a thing until the very late 19th century. Also what you described has nothing to do with puritanism, at least not any standard definition of the term nor the people who practiced that offshoot of the faith.
Also you are being taken in by Marxist propaganda that isn't really a accurate way of seeing the world, nor historical, nor functional.

>>97832288

Genuine question: did Marx even say something remotely similar to that? Hell, did he write about sexism?

>>97832320
>did marx say something about dialectical materialism

You really can't be serious right now.

What does this even have to do with world building anyway?
I don't come to /tg/ or this thread to argue about commie talking points and will not tolerate the thread being derailed with political bullshit that belongs on /pol/

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Tell me about your setting's Plains Peoples

>>97832352

I'll take that as "I just enjoying talking out of my ass".

>>97826723
Fuck it, I am making cement and concrete in different forms the main material for making most roads.

Be it "stabilized earth" and gravel roads that use small amounts of dry cement added and shaped before being moistened and compacted to create rough but decently durable roads.
To high quality, high strength wet formed concrete roads.
Romans had cement and concrete. The tech isn't particularly complicated. And it doesn't require the petroleum tech branch to be apart of the world, which I am trying to avoid for now.

>>97832384
Now you are just projecting in it's purest form.

>>97832365
You first dude.

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>>97832400
I don't know if this counts but there is a confederation of many tribes of Centaurs who basically inhabit and own a large swathe of plains in the within the Italian/Mediterranean kingdom of my setting. They are technically part of the kingdom but basically control the region as a loose confederation of Tribes.

>>97832417
They are a facet of the region as well and their territory is more or less respected in general by the kingdom since there is nothing of value on these plains.

>>97832417
>within the Italian/Mediterranean kingdom of my setting.
Is your setting a alt-earth?
Or is it just inspired by the region in some way?

>>97832471
Culturally it's like a Med/Italian Medieval State think Northern Italy in the Late Middle Ages. But it's an original setting. Same aesthetics though as Medieval Italy. It's called The Kingdom of Trirella.

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>>97832518
>>97832518
Actually here is a pic showing the general environment of it.

>>97832523
>>97832518
>>97832471
Whoops messed up the reply,

>>97832523

Definitely looks more southern than northern italy, nice tough.

>>97832288

Puritanism is an example of the middle class, or more historically accurate "Middling Sort", of precisely that. Puritanism wasn't just a set of religious rules; it was a worldview that validated the lifestyle of the industrious commoner. It was a grassroots movement that put the middling sort at odds with the elite establishment.

One of the most powerful Puritan ideas was that all work is a "calling" from God. You didn't have to be a monk to be holy; you could serve God by being an excellent blacksmith or a meticulous merchant. This gave the middling sort a sense of spiritual dignity that the traditional feudal hierarchy (which favored the idle aristocracy) did not.

Because the middling sort were self-employed (yeomen) or business owners (artisans), the elites couldn't easily starve them into submission. This economic "breathing room" allowed them to develop a distinct culture.

>>97832548
Thanks. Whoops I meant environmentally more Southern Italy, but the kingdoms power etc. is more like Northern Italy (They are a quite powerful kingdom) etc. haha. And their north border would be more temperate but their is a Great Goblin Kingdom that raids and attacks and the northern border dukes are marcher lords who are constantly at war in the "Goblin Wars" against the Great Goblin Kingdom, but to the south in the kingdom heartlands shady political intrigue happens a lot.

>>97832518
>>97832523
I see.
Legitimately interesting.

My setting doesn't really allow for easy settlement of non-defensible locations. So every settlement is pretty heavily fortified due to the threat of monsters.
So no equivalent to plains people. There are a few nomadic groups, but those nomadic groups prefer areas with natural defenses, hiding spots, and cover and tend to avoid open plains.

Open plains tends to equal very big monsters.
Also the reason people avoid deserts in my world unless they are intentionally hunting monsters. More open space means monsters are free to get bigger.
Less open space means they are constricted in size. It's why ironically monsters in dungeons are significantly easier to deal with, at least individually, than monsters of the wilds.

>>97832554
>more of this nonsense
Traditional games?

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>>97832622
>>97832630
Traditional games?

>>97830897

This is a bit oversimplified and pushes those ideas much further than most scholars would. However, it is true that people with something to lose (but not fully secure) tend to be more concerned with appearances and norms. Teachers, managers, merchants, yeomen, shopkeepers, craftsment, bureaucrats, media professionals help define “acceptable behavior.” Groups try to signal morality, discipline, and refinement to gain or protect status.

It is however simply not true that they are all sexism, racism, puritanism and morality come from the middle class. More accurate is to say that classes in the middle of the hierarchy often experience strong Status Anxiety, which can lead them to emphasize norms, respectability, and moral behavior as ways of maintaining or improving their social position than other classes would Everyone performs; just differently.

>Elites perform through:
Signal status through effortless distinction: Exclusive tastes, etiquette, education (think “old money culture”). Can break rules without losing status.

>Middle classes perform through:
Signal status through visible correctness: Gatekeepers of "Good behavior,” politeness, following social rules. Buying things that signal taste and upward mobility (not necessarily luxury, but the right kind of lifestyle).

>Working classes perform through:
Often signal through authenticity, resilience, or group loyalty: Toughness, authenticity, community identity.

That creates believable social tension.

>>97786945
The Expanse...?

>>97832887

Or Gundam.
Or Eclipse Phase.
Or Transhuman Space.
Or many if not most Heinlein shit.

The question is really asinine.

>>97825597
>puckee spamming his commission again
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1m5p93c/artcomm_edmund_cruft_medieval_fantasy_dd_peasant/
https://desuarchive.org/_/search/image/s-9odapy5EaryUxR4j2RRw/
https://desuarchive.org/_/search/image/2bloBO94VPyI8EioQNuUyw/
>combined 23 times since June 2025

Just thought up modifing my spider people's culture to have a distain for worm produced silk.
Mainly to justify a quest line where they give several task related to sabotaging silkworm based silk production. Starting with local shipments of the stuff and eventually leading to a quest where the players are expected to go to the other side of the world to directly somehow stop worm silk production.

Just a side quest idea though.

>>97833541
No one cares.
I actually welcome him to post his questions in the worldbuilding thread rather that clog the catalog with questions that don't deserve their own thread.

>>97832365
The Nemerii were a pastoral herding culture that occupied the central plains and forests south of the great desert, they are the most practical and grounded of their dark elven brethren. To the main adherents of their people a life not in the saddle on the backs of their Thurael birds is a life not worth living, this naturally puts them at odds with their more civilised neighbours and the settled and coastal Nemerii that are much more influenced by the Lacusii's Tollure(empire) and the theocratic Ignarii states.

They are prized as messengers and guides through the continental interior, their skill at riding is largely unmatched until the arrival of the humans during their long decline. Even before the arrival of the humans they were a declining culture due to constant warfare with the Malorii tribes that plagued the continent. The plains Nemerii are largely extinct as a culture in the present day and the settled and coastal Nemerii are much more assimilated into the surrounding Lacusii and Ignarii.

They would also influence the Oskun human peoples and heavily imprint the Tirnaeth with their language and culture. Their unique breeds of thurael riding birds are still the most prestigious today, fast and versatile but not strong enough to stand up to horse cavalry.

>>97794265
>blue archive halo?
Not him, but what's the deal with Blue Archive, anyway? I keep seeing them around, but I don't really get it.

>>97797528
the anglos are the end point of inhumanity and you cant really go worse than them

>>97797528
As anon said, great britain society only works if you go for dark fantasy
Human rights wise it was the worst place in Europe and often very backwards(very ironic because politic system wise they actually did pretty well and reformed system for it to work, but maybe because they were first to have something like Hanover-Stuart Wars). Only feudal japan can really compete with them in being a shithole

>>97816048
just straight up steal them from 3.5 whole sale.
Check out the wizard/sorcerer alternative class features (acf) as well as reserve feats

>>97830897
Two things you have to understand is that social conformity is a form of survival instinct and that all the beliefs you describe are fundamentally reactionary.

The more a society struggles with it's survival, the less material they have, the more conformist their views are.
Look at how tribes in the amazon or deep in Africa work for example. The social cohesion is immense despite rigid social hierarchies and organisations. Obviously this reverberated in the ancient world as well. The direct greek democracies were exactly a product of this social cohesion and possible precisely because of it for example.
Coming back to the post 15th century world, the origin of the middle class is with the city dwellers. It was the people between the peasantry and the elite/nobility. Obviously in the post renaissance world of western europe this class started to grow and eventually outgrew it's previous constraints.
At the same time they outgrew their strict survival needs.
So you have a class of people that along with their very conservative, uneducated worldviews tries in an extremely reactionary way to maintain that social unity and cohesion lost but the ample quantity of resources available to them.
Nothing sped this process as much as industrialization in modern human history and no place was it more prevalent than Britain.

Interestingly the elite/nobility adapted much better than the purported middle class to such changes. Both in changing their worldview and by creating and socially enforcing a strict regiment of living and forced proximity through boarding schools, social clubs, social centers like courts. The most famous one being Versailles of course but the same was true for London just in a less extravagant french way.
This eventually led to the creation of a very closed circle and complete lack of proximity to the actual people of the country led to the elite being incredibly unaware of the true conditions of the low classes with all it's consequences

>>97832523
one pet peeve about country roads with grass in the middle. This is entirely anachronistic and a product of modernity. The center of the road was always the most well tread part of the road both by beasts of burden, horses pulling carriages and by people walking there.
The nature would always encroach on the world from the sides and slowly diminish it if it was under less use than what it was originally constructed for.
If you have ever walked a mountain path you will know what i am talking about.

Btw mediterranean fantasy is pure kino and much superior to the generic northern european fantasy

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>>97834348
>great britain society only works if you go for dark fantasy
Thousands of books in dozens of other genera begs to differ.

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Would hunting outpace agriculture for the source of calory intake if large prey like the American bison were more endemic, and most of the continent not easily colonized by human settlers?

I'm working on making a setting where the reason everyone, even women, knows how to use weapons in combat is because their land is geographically just supernaturally* good for grazing, which led to ginormous animals proliferating there.

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>>97815762
Nice summary, thanks.

>>97786637
Dunno if it counts as "lesser known" if only because I'm working with it and am generally a basic bitch. Also the fact that it's basically most of the best-known pantheons (Groman, Norse, Hindu) reduced to primordial soup.

This guy's PIE-coded "Concavia" stuff is pretty neat btw. I particularly like how dark spirits are modelled after funky-headed cave paintings.
https://kemono.cr/patreon/user/63597877

>>97790637
Thanks for the West and Dumezil recommendations though desu I've been playing so fast and loose that bringing things back in line with authentic myth might dampen some of the magic at this point.

>>97835117
For instance I accidentally stumbled into the Striker and Many-Headed Serpent's rivalry with some of the usual roles reversed: A key aspect of the world is that it's a tautological time loop. One of the titans-aspirant will eventually consume their peers and then the whole world retroactively becoming the Ymir / Pangu primordial being who dies and decomposes into creation (which just so happens to contain the hungry hungry humans who will / already have eaten their way to retroactive godhood).

The Serpent is less a manifestation of Chaos than alternate Order based on such alien principles as to be incomprehensible to us. What if something other than humanity dominates all and so cemented itself as the foundation of all? The Serpent is both "scaly-nasty-water-thing" of visceral revulsion and the interlinking chains of impartial cause and effect which drag our worldview away from naïve anthropocentrism and into a nihilistic wasteland where people are nothing special (or worse yet throughput for whatever else IS).

The Striker on the other hand is "fertile" disorder. Their tool-weapon is both the Ur-flint, an aching wisdom tooth knocked loose by stone (as well as that percussive surgical instrument) and an idea itself extracted from the skull in pursuit of peace and quiet. Peals of thunder are as much swearing at having dropped something on his foot as vast oaks or fearsome foes falling before his wrath. Most of the "firsts" he's responsible for are accidents refined by others but the very fact he has no clue what he's up to is what makes him a wellspring of creation and especially anathema to those creations which limit alternative creativity.

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>>97784855
Anyone focus on glass as an important industry in their setting?

Pretty sure for a lot of the west and Italy and Venice in particular, Glassmaking was an important and highly exported product. Often being highly covetted in places like China in a way that Fine china ceramics were coveted in Europe.

I always thought that it might be interesting to make a european inspired place the "foreign and exotic location where you get luxery goods" If you are in a non european inspired place like if it is more Arabian, Southeast Asian, or Japanese. Think I got the idea in part when I was playing Scarlet Heros which has some more southeast asian derived settings.


If you want to go for something more magical maybe stained glass windows and fine crystal wineglasses that vibrate and hum with magic but will shatter if the magic is not kept in check could be a cool idea. Or maybe you are a glass blower that literally blows in the breath of life to animate glass objects. Glass has a lot of interesting potentials.

>>97835314
>always thought that it might be interesting to make a european inspired place the "foreign and exotic location where you get luxery goods" If you are in a non european inspired place like if it is more Arabian, Southeast Asian, or Japanese. Think I got the idea in part when I was playing Scarlet Heros which has some more southeast asian derived settings.

The issue I see with this is that the East having all these exotic goods wasn't just a coincidence, it's way more likely that tropical countries are going to have valuable goods than a northern temperate climate. For example if we assume that there's a one in a hundred chance any given plant will produce a useful spice/dye/medicine/whatever, you're way more likely to find it somewhere like Indonesia which has over 28K species of plants than Britain which has only around 1K (Indonesia being an archipelago also helps a lot here compared to somewhere like Africa since it creates more endemism). This is why all the fancy spices and dyes came from places like India, Indonesia, and China and not Europe. Also there's animal-based goods like silk, ivory, pearls, animal skins, etc to consider as well.

Of course not all goods are as ecologically related, like minerals or some manufactured ones like glass that you mentioned, but it's still important to consider because unless you're setting your not-Europe in the jungle they'd probably still need to have a trading relationship with some exotic tropical region to get certain goods.

>>97835681
Fair enough. It wont be exotic in the "same way" as warmer and more bio-diverse climates are to europe.

I wasnt trying to imply that the not-europe would ONLY export exotic stuff, just that some of the stuff they do export would seem exotic in a non-European inspired main location.

ON the topic of glass and silk, I also find it interesting that glass making processes were also jealously guarded just like how silk making processes were in the east. The Venetians being an obvious example, but later on I believe there was like only one small German state that had the knowledge to make the finest telescope lenses and people from all over europe bought them and tried to get the secret. European telescopes more broadly meant were also another major luxury export across the globe.

>>97834742
>cogfop
Cringe.

>>97835314
It's just something that exist in the background.
It isn't a focus in my setting.

There are some fairly advanced applications of glass, like it being a information storage medium, but that is because the tech level of my setting is intentionally all over the place.

So I started writing a historical chronicle as a way to populate my setting with towns, castles, and significant political dynasties. The first part covered 6 pages. Now I'm at 30 pages of just chronicle, covering 3 different wars and the time in-between. I know that that is all I want to write about the backstory, but how do I stop making it so long? Each war just takes longer and longer because as the kingdom grows in size and takes more territory and gains more capabilities, the wars it fights grow bigger too.

>>97834974
I doubt it, but I can't say I actually know for sure.

Even with megafuna farming and raising livestock still would be a far more consistent source of food then hunting ever could provide.

>>97835913
Point still stands that the setting can be used for more than dark fantasy.

>>97839266
But why would we? Dark Fantasy sells.

>>97835314

I had a character who managed to get a copy of glass-grinding ratios. Then he proceeded to sell it for booze. He accidentally started the scientific revolution and glasses 150 years earlier. You'd be surprised by how much progress was delayed due guild and churches hoarding knowledge and even sending assassins.

>>97839610

To give you an idea, glasses alone were revolutionary. Beforehand a craftsman career often ended around early to mid 40. With glasses you extend the career of craftsmens by 20 years or more.

>>97839371
No, porn sells.
We ain't making romantasy dark shadow daddy porn in this thread.
We are making up game worlds or imaginary places to tell stories about. Neither activity is likely to result in profit. "We" do what we do for the love of the game.

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How do the ecosystems work in worlds where monsters exist in the wilderness alongside real earth fauna?

>>97840195
monsters already exist as part of the fauna
what are bears, wolves, tigers, and snakes really if not monsters when compared to a prehistoric man?
apex predators are already a thing in the real world, adding another layer on top does not change the fact that they are still a part of the ecosystem

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>>97840231
Would you consider an ogre an animal or like a person in this? Ecosystem wise?

>>97840236
depends on how sentient/intelligent they are
the closer they are to having emotions and the ability to think rationally, plan in advance, spatial knowledge, language, etc., the more they are considered a person if not by their humanoid shape alone
personally i think that they'd be seen like how we see those uncontacted tribes from the amazon/sentinel island

>>97840247
correction/addition for last line:
they'd range from anywhere between a great ape (chimpanzees to orangutans) to those uncontacted tribes
some people are already calling for 'great ape personhood' so it's not a stretch that they'd be considered a person as well

>>97839673
Well, the game worlds that make the most money are grimdark ones.

>>97840195
I suppose they get hunted for food. It would probably delay human civilization until we can whittle down their numbers.

But we can do it. We already did. Humans are born to master the world.

>>97840293
They aren't set in Victorian England or something inspired by Victorian era stuff so I am not really sure what that has to do with anything.

My magic is based on combined knowledge of Hindu mythology, including Buddhism and some imported Greek concepts. The basic concepts are:

1. Prana: The vital life force or breath. This is the energy that flows through the body and the universe. Think Ki from those old anime or Wuxia movies.
2. Maya: The power of cosmic illusion. It's a lot more complicated, but you can see it as old school magic that just creates illusionary realities, Matrix style.
3. Mantra, or using words to create magical effects.
4. Yantra, or using geometric diagrams to channel divine power.
5. Mudras. You remember JJK and those hand signs? Yeah, they're Mudras. I can give you a rundown of what each individual handsign means, if you wish.
6. Samsara is the cycle of reincarnation. The world basically keeps resetting itself.
7. Dharma and Karma are obvious enough. Keep to the religious path and you get good karma points. Do otherwise and be punished by the heavens.
8. Astras, divine weapons you'd know from Fate Stay Night. Some of them were basically magic nuclear bombs in effect.
9. There's also the flying vessels called Vimanas.
10. There's also the Siddhis. You'll know them from Journey To The West and its many adaptations. Sun Wukong would be considered an average high level Sage in Hindu myth, which it was derived from.

There's also the usual stuff like alchemy (transmutation, immortality spells etc), and a giant list of supernatural creatures- most of which are evil.

The cosmic ladder is just the gods, the devils, divine serpents/dragons, nature spirits, humans, and Pretas. Pretas are just humans who became vampires due to lots of bad karma. To be killed on sight.

>>97840592
That many magic systems in one thing is going to be very difficult to keep track of or make use of in a game or story.
I would highly recommend focusing on one system and getting really really deep with it, rather that have half a dozen that you can't realistically flesh out.

>>97840619
It's all just one system.

>>97840633
If you say so dude.

>>97840619
Looks simple-ish enough, actually.
Prana is the stand-in for magical energy of other systems and settings, but more integrated into the world, so you can't just up and banish it from an area without killing everything inside.
Mantras are the verbal, and mudras are the somatic components, and yantras are the local take on magical circles. It's all facets of the same system.

>>97840592
One thing I don't get is the Maya thing. What do you mean by cosmic illusion and illusory realities?
Is it just an illusion over the real world? Or is the real world an illusion too, and you simply swap parts for some of your own making?
I mean, the latter kinda fits the "Matrix-style" description.

Also, magic is mostly subtle and monk-like, I presume?

>>97840195
A lot of the animals are different from earth animals in my setting.
The few that are unchanged are stuff like rodents, insects, and birds. The main exception are a few random domestic animals that live exclusively within settlements.
Everything else follows two main strategies of surviving in the wilds with monsters being a thing.
Being durable enough to fight monsters off
Or being very very good at evading monsters.
Some, like boulder bears, use both strategies depending on the threat level of the monsters in the area.
Like if it's a human sized monster with nothing really special about it, the boulder bear will probably stand their ground and fight to disable the monster enough that it's no longer a serious threat.
But a very dangerous monster the boulder bear will curl up and use it's natural camouflage to look like a big rock in the hopes the monster will pass through without noticing it.

Another example is quite a few snakes have developed octopus like camo that not only changes color but also texture to REALLY blend in.

>>97840882
>One thing I don't get is the Maya thing. What do you mean by cosmic illusion and illusory realities?
>Is it just an illusion over the real world? Or is the real world an illusion too, and you simply swap parts for some of your own making?
>I mean, the latter kinda fits the "Matrix-style" description.
>Also, magic is mostly subtle and monk-like, I presume?

It means that the actual physical world, the one our senses see, is not the real world. We are simply seeing an abstraction, a mistake of the senses. Like being trapped in an illusion or a VR simulation.

Or in more practical terms, the Matrix as a metaphysical framework.

>>97841284
Okay, that covers the Matrix-like nature, and it's pretty cool, but where does the magic of the system fit in exactly?
Like, in Matrix itself, people could pull stuff off by the virtue of, basically, hacking the system. Is that what this world's magic does for people?
Also, *is* there a real world? Like, a physical realm, or is it all illusions or dreams of some godhead?

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>>97784855
What rabbit-folk races have you seen? And what are the key things to consider when making one?

>>97842199
based on different stuff I've seen the obvious includes
>high fertility/rate of reproduction, when it comes to straight up powers I've seen this represented as full on duplication power.
>incredibly sharp sense of hearing, but also a pretty good sense of smell, and a wide field of vision good in low light condition
>are good at digging and tend to live underground
>large muscular legss resulting high speed/agility and exceptional leaping ability
>slight luck bonus, I've also seen this causing others to hunt the rabbit race for their foot.
>being flighty, strong situational awarness and quick to avoid danger rather than confront it.
>stric herbivores

>>97842199

Don't.

Well, no, you can do them, but it's gonna be just a joke at best. Embrace it, like the Viera.

>>97842199

Watership Down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZsY2i0Cz_k

>>97843477

That's like calling your cat catfolk.

They are rabbits, if thinking and speaking ones. Nothing "anthro".

>>97843517
>That's like calling your cat catfolk.
Jokes on you
I call my talking psychic cats kots.

>>97842199
I liked how different the version of rabbit people were in Sylver Seeker series.
They basically had super speed to the point of being able to use blink, haste, and blur at will, but to maintain such perks they had to be totally nonviolent (at least avoid direct violence).

Most other versions I have seen were just adaptations of cartoon antro rabbits, or Japan being horny as usual.

>>97841840
>Like, in Matrix itself, people could pull stuff off by the virtue of, basically, hacking the system. Is that what this world's magic does for people?
Yes, it's why they can ignore the laws of physics.

And the "real world" is just God. The strongest classes are people who can somehow communicate with God and hear His commands. Because I don't care if my setting is more pagan, I only have space for one God.

>>97842199
Sure, had one for tribal natife amazonian kink

Harefolk were the first non-human race formally integrated into what would become the Aurelian Empire. When the human kingdom was still rising, harefolk settlements already dotted the frontiers—small villages, trading posts, hunting camps that expanded alongside human territory. They are counted among the Empire's founders, a fact central nobles politely forget and harefolk themselves rarely mention.

Their communities are fluid, organic things. A harefolk might be born in one village, travel with traders for a season, settle in a town for a year, then move on. Groups form, dissolve, reform. There are no borders between harefolk territories—only networks of kinship, acquaintance, and shared custom. This makes them both ubiquitous and elusive: there are harefolk everywhere, but they do not always stay.

The Academy, as a static institution, presents a unique challenge. Harefolk students naturally cluster into stable groups, recreating the communal structure they would have at home. These groups are not closed—members can and do shift between them—but they are the fundamental unit of harefolk life within the walls.

Harefolk are humanoid, distinguished by long, expressive ears (usually held upright, but can lay flat against the head when wary) and short, fluffy tails. Their skin is uniformly rich brown, ranging from warm amber to deep chestnut. Eye color varies widely—gold, hazel, deep brown, occasionally grey or green.

Females average two meters in height, with lean, powerful builds built for endurance. Their movements are fluid, with a coiled readiness that can shift to explosive speed in an instant. Males are notably shorter, averaging 1.6 meters, and more solitary by nature—they often serve as scouts, traders, and the first point of contact between communities.

Both sexes age similarly to humans, though harefolk remain vigorous well into their later years.

Customs
The Group is the Individ

>>97844875
Naruhodo.
>And the "real world" is just God. The strongest classes are people who can somehow communicate with God and hear His commands.
In that case, imo, it'd make more sense if God isn't present as a separate entity, barring avatars, rather communicating through indirect means.
Just makes sense, if the God is the universe itself.

That said, what's your idea on it's personality? I figured, there would scarcely be any, at least observed/observable.
A kind of peaceful detachment, like a dreamer merely observing the dream, rather than playing around in it.

>>97845401
I'd rather not speculate on the nature of God. It's too abstract to be relevant anyway, I'd rather flesh out the stuff players are actually going to interact with.

>>97845753
Dunno, I think it can be pretty interesting and fun. But you're guaranteed to ruffle some feathers if you dare to portray god as anything but all loving, all knowing and all powerful

>>97846150
And I'd rather not. Metaphysics is not for me. I just care about adventures where you kill monsters and return their stolen loot to the proper authorities.

>>97846150
Evil gods are a extremely common trope and no one cares unless you are shitting on a real world religion directly.

>>97846150
Anon, you do realize you're practically asking for it now?
If people get all upset over a fictional god being portrayed different to their bearded man in the clouds/Morgan Freeman they got used to so much…
Well, it really is their problem. Abrahamic religions aren't the only ones out there, and not all gods are nice and all-loving.
Hell, just read the old testament - YHWH was an absolute cunt of a deity, and he was, and technically still is, the big G.

>>97846264
Something something (minor) god(s) of the hunt.

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>>97834437
I think you can go either way with your roads depending on local circumstances and personal taste.

"Carts ruts" on Malta are trackways carved into limestone (softened when wet) by wagon wheels dating back to before 700 BC, and possibly all the way back the 4th millenium BC. It appears the wagons were unconstrained by uneven terrain like hills or dense vegetation, and some of the roads can get quite wide with multiple lanes, and there are plenty of railway-like junctions where turning around a terrain feature was required or where the road split. Of course, in contrast to a normal well-traveled road on harder ground, wagon wheels were forced to follow a trackway after it had become deep enough
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Għar_il-Kbir_Cart_Ruts

Etruscan sunken roads, the "via cave" of Etruria of the Villanovan culture Iron Age do show plenty of central grooves where foot-travelers preferred to walk. The rock is tuff which is less durable than wet limestone, and the roads can get very deep and narrow, as the region is quite hilly. Some segments even show animal hoof-marks left on the rocky surface. As the grooves grew too deep to allow easy traffic, the Etruscans would level the road, explaining why they became so deep over generations. Sometimes the grooves would double as drainage channels so that the rest of the road would stay puddle-free during heavy rainfall. The road network usually connects to a necropolis, so might have had religious importance in addition to standard reasons of trade. Just like in the underground cities of Turkey, tuff is easily tunneled even with relatively soft tools, and stairs carved into the rock are common features.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/07/via-cava-cave-roads-of-tuscany.html
https://www.andrewswalks.co.uk/pitigliano.html

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This pic of a via cava in particular shows how humans and pack animals have chosen a central part of the stairs to travel on.

>>97846770
i was talking about "dirt and gravel" roads as shown in the pic posted that were the norm.

what you posted about is roads through hilly terrain traversing soft rock. My brother went to Malta for a few days and he told me there are a lot of cool sites around the countryside.
it\s very interesting to be sure.
I don't really know much about the Etruscans, certainly an underrated ancient civilisation.

>>97846795
i have seen the same happen to wooden stairs in old homes, obviously not as pronounced of cource

I find interesting the different ways different societies handle crime and underclasses.

Service State: In a society like, for example, 17th Moscow society is like a grid where everyone must occupy a fixed square. An outcast is a a wasted resource/lost tax revenue; essentially a theft of state resources. If you fall out, you’re pushed back in to serve a master, sort off like "rehabilitated" as in: “Put him back where he belongs”, usually back to being a serf, a master, or to the army (if they couldn't find a master) unless you manage to join the Cossacks.

Moral-Economic State: In a society like Elizabethan England, society is an spectrum. Outcaste are a moral contagion/public nuisance. "Fuck the poor" vs. "Help the pathetic": You can fall to the bottom and stay there forever and become a career criminal, and entire subcultures exist outside norms “Punish and manage them”. street > jail > street > workhouse > repeat (if you didn't die of typhus in the process).

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Thinking about introducing a disease or curse that if left untreated can cause a sort of ogreazation, where the body slowly transforms to become more ogre like with the final stages being a slow degradation of the person's mind.

At first it seems like a boon. The person gets stronger, more durable, taller. Sure they are hungry nearly all the time but it's probably fine. But as it progresses the growth becomes uneven and ascetically unappealing. Maybe one arm becomes hyper developed, their face looses symmetry, they start growing boils and parts of their skin harden. None of it hurts but clearly something is wrong.
Then hair starts falling out, or growing where it never grew before, teeth grow to the point that some no longer fit quite right in their head, and hunger pain is the only kind of pain they even feel anymore. Damage to their body heals wrong. Their bloated hands become clumsy bloated things that make doing most trades and crafts difficult.
And the whole time they are getting bigger, not just taller but wider as well.
Until after a long time, several years usually, their mind starts to degrade, memories from before this happens to them become harder to remember, abstract thinking and higher level reasoning become nearly impossible, and who they were slowly fades as they become someone, something else.

>>97840195
>puckee spamming his commission again
https://www.reddit.com/r/ImaginaryAnimals/comments/1rjuhwm/boar_by_patricia_pria/
https://desuarchive.org/_/search/image/gLH9OMs8P5G48Gjpf3RMCg/
https://desuarchive.org/tg/search/image/iRRE_rljYR2Gbx0q49XWHg/
>combined 7 times since February 2026

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Which type of divination would be most useful? The ability to see the past, the ability to see the present, or the ability to see the future?

>>97851382
what stops society from culling these individuals before it gets to that stage?

>>97852233
useful for whom?
if let's say a wizard would want to unlock the magical secrets of an ancient civilisation then looking at the past is obviously the best but if he is the advisor to the king with the goal of foiling a rebellion then the present would obviously be the best etc

>>97852406
The fact that there is treatment for it, mainly to halt it's development.
The problem is access to that treatment is far from even or fair across the world. Get the treatment early, before much change has happened then you end up with a minor strength and durability boost along with a few extra inches in height. Get treatment too late and you are stuck with the mutations more or less.
If you can't access treatment at all then you don't really have a choice, you are going to end up going full ogre.

So say someone in a capital city of centeralia with decent money catches it, a trip to the local doctor or healer can get them fixed up before it progresses. But because of cultural and development reasons they can't fix what has already been mutated, only stop it from getting worse.

Meanwhile in Blackmar they can in theory use fleshcrafting and blood sorcery to reverse everything but the mind damage, but the ones capable of doing it do not give the faintest fuck about "lessers" unless they are able to offer something that sorcerer values on a individual level.

Meanwhile you happen to catch it in some isolated outpost then you are truly shit out of luck unless you can get a express ship out of there.

Then with people who regularly go into the wilds there is a certain amount of trying to edge the trade offs of the condition. It will make you stronger, harder to hurt, easier to heal. In a situation where your life is constantly on the line there are a few who try to reap these benefits then seek/use treatment to halt it's progression. But there is the temptation to wait just a little longer to get just a little bit stronger, or a little tougher, until suddenly the condition worsens and spirals out of control in regard to physical degeneration. Since the progress of ogreazation isn't a constant predictable rate. After that point you are stuck ogreish unless a blood sorcerer happens to owe you a favor.

>>97852233
That is entirely situational and depends a lot on application.

However I will say that the historical prevalence of fortune tellers and humanity's obsession with predicting the future shows a clear desire to know what's coming through supernatural means.

Besides dousing and scrying there aren't that many methods devoted to supernaturally looking at the hear and now.

And supernaturally looking at the past is mostly done to connect to ancestors not literally take a peek at the past or sus out what happened at some time in the past, since there were always better non-magical means to figure out what happened before. So most of divination in that direction usually related to stuff like speaking to the dead or connecting to the spirits.

How much nutrition would affect the different social classes? It used to be typical for the nobility and steppe people to be better feed than urbanites and serf, let alone the poor. Typically this means one is naturally taller than the other. What are other markers? I guess it depends on the missing nutrients:

Rickets? Missing teeth due scurvy? Glassy eyes? Night blindness? Lack of muscle and fat? Brittle hair? Grey skin and sores?

What about cognitive changes? More intelligence? No hunger lethargy? Irritability? Short-term vs long term thinking? Impossibility? Mental dullness?

>>97852835
Considering the physical accomplishments serfs and even urbanites had, the stories of them being malnourished are probably exaggerated. I doubt a malnourished person could pull a longbow string, for example.

>>97852835
Depends on each settlement and overall setting.
That question is too broad to be useful.

>>97852835

The body is a remarkable and flexible machine. If it lacks nutrients necessary to achieve the genetic peak, it will prioritize survival instead. It will also try to catch-up and sprint if it suddenly gets an influx of nutrients during key windows. About 60% to 80% of your height is determined by the DNA passed down from your parents. Severe malnutrition or chronic illness during childhood can stunt growth.

The primary reason you stop growing is due to your epiphyseal plates, more commonly known as growth plates. While you are growing, these plates (located at the ends of your long bones, like your thighs and shins) are made of specialized cartilage. This cartilage is soft and constantly dividing, creating new bone tissue that pushes the bone outward, making you taller.

As puberty progresses, your body increases the production of sex hormones (estrogen and testosterone). While these hormones cause the "growth spurt," they are also the ones responsible for ending it. Over time, these hormones cause the growth plates to harden and turn into solid bone. Once the plates are completely ossified or fused (turned to bone), they are "closed." At this point, no further longitudinal growth is physically possible.

Malnutrition is one of the most significant "external" factors that can disrupt the biological clock of growth. While genetics provides the blueprint, nutrition provides the bricks and mortar. If the body doesn't have enough energy or specific nutrients, it enters a "survival mode" where non-essential processes (like reproduction (puberty) and bone lengthening) are put on the back burner.

If the malnutrition is chronic and lasts through the entire window of development, the person may end up with stunting: a permanent deficit in height where they never reach their genetic potential, regardless of how much they eat as an adult.

>>97852835

Puberty can also be delayed. For puberty to start, the brain needs to know that the body has enough fat stores to support the massive energy demands of a growth spurt. If a person is severely malnourished or has very low body fat, leptin levels remain too low to trigger the "start" button in the hypothalamus. This is why puberty is often delayed in athletes with extremely low body fat or individuals with eating disorders.

Going back to bones, it isn't just about getting longer bones; it's about bone mineral density. Most people build the "bank account" of their bone density during their teens. If puberty is significantly delayed due to malnutrition, the person may miss the window to reach peak bone mass.

Even if they eventually reach their full height, they might have "brittle" bones because the bones never properly mineralized during that critical window.

>>97852835
>Rickets? Missing teeth due scurvy? Glassy eyes? Night blindness? Lack of muscle and fat? Brittle hair? Grey skin and sores?
You're conflating different kinds of nutrition here. Historically the issue for most people has been getting enough raw calories, and to a lesser extent protein. Vitamins and micronutrients have almost never been a real issue outside of very specific contexts, for example scurvy was only a problem at sea because of the difficulty of keeping fresh vegetables on a ship for months at at time. When you consider that even something as simple as a potato has enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy in only a hundred calorie serving it becomes clear that the real issue for your average landlubber peasant is getting their ~1400 calories a day, not vitamin content.

Nutrient content is more of a concern nowadays because of how easy it is for people to meet their caloric needs eating nothing but chicken nuggets, this has not been a real problem historically when a significant portion of even the most destitute peasant's diet would've been vegetables, and if there's a famine they'd be struggling to meet caloric needs at all rather than worrying about vitamin content.

>>97852656
the rich would probably treat this as some late game eugenics then

>>97854326

Fair enough. Still, I think vitamin deficiencies would be common amongst the destitute, like urchins and street elements who survive on stale bread and soup.

Peasants often had access to a bit of butter, an egg, or foraged greens. A street urchin surviving on "ale and bread" lacked these

Medieval pottage was actually a nutritional powerhouse compared to modern fast food. However, certain seasons like winter and early spring would be particularly bad.

While full-blown maritime scurvy was rarer on land, "latent scurvy" was rampant. This manifested as bleeding gums, lethargy, and wounds that simply refused to heal.

Even if an urchin managed to eat a decent meal, they often didn't get to keep the nutrients. Almost every member of the medieval lower class carried a significant load of intestinal worms (roundworms and tapeworms).
These parasites would "tax" the host’s nutrient intake leading to chronic anemia.

It’s worth noting that medieval "stale bread" wasn't the nutrient-void white bread we see today. It was usually "brown bread" (maslin), a mix of rye and wheat. Because it wasn't highly refined, it retained the germ and bran, providing essential vitamins.

Current idea for a setting: It’s mages ruling everything. If you are a king without magic, it is because you have a wizard or several working for you, or using you as a puppet.

This would in theory be in service to a game where all the players are spellcasters of some variety. The central idea of it would be that if you don’t have magic you don’t matter.

>>97855784
Who gets magic and why will be a very important aspect of the vibes and function of such a setting.

>>97855938
I’m tossing around a few ideas for that. One is ‘sorcerous bloodlines, but it can also be taught’

Another, more cosmic horror angle, is that the gods give people magic because they are a stand in for an audience giving characters attention on a meta level. The player characters then would matter simply because they are player characters.

>>97854715
The rich humans have less risky more powerful methods of tinkering with "late game eugenics" in the setting.
Those would be the spellborn, which I am not sure if I wrote about in these threads or not.

But spellborn are created by rich families by using usually secret rituals passed down within a family line to take advantage of the fact that infants are a bit more sensitive to environmental arcane energy. So most rituals involve the rich family creating a artificially energetically dense environment to incubate the baby, which in turn makes them far more adapted to the arcane arts than a normal person. Usually spell born are distinguishable by having unnatural hair and eye coloration, but otherwise are just normal humans who are advantaged when it comes to the arcane arts. Combine this with their wealth allowing for better and earlier training and consistent access to better materials means that mages from established spellborn families are almost always better than mages who aren't.
In certain areas, mainly the magedoms, these family lines of spellborn are pretty similar in structure to family lines of nobility in our world, only with slightly less imbreeding and a lot more spy craft and counter-intel going on between mage families when it comes to the particulars of their family rituals.

There is also the far more extreme and forbidden side of things, which is the full artificial creation of people, mainly to make living weapons, but the results of such experiments are usually loathed and the people who create such abominations are criminals.

By contrast ogrezation is a uncontrolled thing. A complication in a already complex world. A individual and personal struggle, rather than one of class.

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>>97786637
It's art but I think a good inspiration is the work of this Russian artist named Vselovod Ivanov who's art is heavily inspired by Russian paganism (though he's also a wewuz who claims Russia was the original civilization and that stuff like the middle ages and Roman empire are made up by Western Europeans)

>>97856242
Speaking of the artificially created people.

I am thinking of changing their name from "The Chimer" to "The Motherless".
Since I realized that my setting didn't have a myth of chimeras, and Motherless is a descriptive label that would make sense without piggy backing on earth mythology.

The only negative is some might associate the term with the porn site, lol.

At first I thought my idea to make it part of vampire culture to intentionally wear floor length flowing clothing and use their supernaturally graceful and smooth movements to create the effect of gliding, mainly as a way to flex their superior class and grace.

Then I saw that apparently Russian ballet dancers have a similar technique in real life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaE_PiTTMzE

So yeah, I am totally going to include it now.

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>>97833541>>97852097
Hi Puckeefag, you appear to be lashing out at things you don't like which on 4chan is considered "shitposting"! Whoops! Luckily for you, I'm here to help! Here's a pre-written curated list of all of puckee's commissions which I got by searching "puckee spamming" on DesuArchive, pulling all the text, and using Notepad++'s lexicon sorting and find/replace to quickly gather up a list of, count them fifty-one checksums!

https://pastebin.com/R3eynwKB

Thanks to this, you'll not see most, if not all, of Puckee's commissions! I recommend getting 4chanXT so you can shift-click to filter any future images! I hope this helps!

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Need some inspiration for a high tech post-apocalyptic setting. Think wastelands and forests dotted with the carcasses of giant war machines, raiders in cobbled together mechs, and autonomous planes and robots patrolling long abandoned war zones. Main conflicts will be over energy, parts, food, and clean water.

>>97860222
also debating making it an ice age/snowy

>>97791082
>jewish ethics
LMAO

>>97784855
hey /wbg/ im currently working on a setting with industrial level military tech, think 1910s-1920s stuff, but id like to keep the rest of the setting to a more medieval fantasy type aesthetic. What would be a good way to explain why people are still living in feudal villages and riding around on horses when the combustion engine exists

>>97860818
I've been thinking about it recently, but you basically just treat the cool modern technology as something very expensive and only for the elites.

The industrial revolution's major social shift from previous eras is that technology stopped being hand-crafted and became (potentially) mass produced with the aid of machines that vastly increased productivity, such as steam engines. If you have more modern-seeming technology, but it can't be mass produced, most people will still use cheaper technologies. In this scenario, a tank is something that the state can afford, and commoners can't, in the same way it can afford a castle but commoners can't.

Generally, the excuse for this will either be that the top-tech is magic (and thus can only be done artisanally because that's how the magic works) or simply eliding the question altogether. The fact that rising technology correlated to such a huge productivity increase post-1750 is not really predictable in advance, and is odd when you think about it; people in such a world wouldn't find it strange.

>>97860899
I like the explanation of "its too expensive"

I can imagine a scene of some commoner farmer going to the capital for the market, already in awe of the splendor and wealth, then seeing a military parade with tanks rumbling down the street, and this farmer, who still pushes a handcart and uses a horse to plow his fields, being absolutely gob smacked by the sight of it

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>>97860818
It being too costly is a good way for why, it early, prototype level engines that need highly skilled workers to get them working,could make it that only the nobility, kings and high ranking military officials and orders are allowed to have it

You could have also there were attempts for the local peasantry to have access to such machinery but it backfired, didn't know what to do with it, parts were expensive that took forever to be made and accidents and deaths were common that they stop using it out of fear and public outrage

>>97860818
You will NOT come out with a good reason. Industrialization reformed every aspect of material life, because shit is cheaper, better, faster. Hell, not only material life.

However, you might come out with something not totally terrible for your group. Tenra Basho Zero tries to do it in "centuries of war means all we researched was war", but that is technomagic (besides, there is at least a possibile execption in kugutsu).

>>97860899
>>97861414
Neither of these really answer the question. If combustion engines exist for anon's cars and tanks and planes then there's no reason they wouldn't also be used for e.g. pumping water out of mines or powering trains and then oh look you have the industrial revolution again.

>>97860818
The only real way to make this make sense is to have the spread of technology be purposefully controlled because the king thinks it's too dangerous to let the merchant class start industrializing or whatever. This isn't really farfetch'd this is how countries like Russia or China were managed for decades because the existing aristocracy didn't want to risk their hold on power being jeopardised by a changing economy. The main issue with this is it could wind up making the setting more boring since you'd need every single nation/kingdom/whatever to be operating under essentially the same political philosophy with little variation.

>>97860818
Extreme segregation of certain aspects of society.

Military keeps it's tech to it's self, and runs almost self sufficiently as a parallel society that produces it's own tech "in house" from basic refinement of resources all the way to final advanced production.

It wouldn't be anywhere near as efficient as a fully industrialized society, but it would fit the vibe you are going for.
A example from fiction of something somewhat similar is the military government in Full Metal Alchemist, including having alchemist based technology that I don't remember civilians having easy access to.

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Does your setting have a vampire equivalent?
What about other "gothic" inspired monsters like werewolves, ghost, and demon dogs?

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>>97860222

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>>97860222

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What I'm saying is
>technobarbarian motorbikes

>>97860818
Historically it's because the spread of technology is uneven. Do people in this thread really think Germany and France had vast swathes of cars and motorbikes filling the countryside in 1910 when that wasn't even the case in 1945 and horses were still the primary mode of transportation for millions of people? Do people not understand that electricity and mechanics and running water were not a thing for huge chunks of society?

>>97860818
>>97860899
>>97861473
>>97862025

Ive done some thinking and I believe I have a decent solution:

At some point in the distant past, like a thousand years ago, a king decided he wanted to centralize his power and nationalized all research conducted in his kingdom. This meant the king could decide what technology he wanted or didn't want to release to the public, and it goes without saying that trade with other nations would be heavily monitored. The only way to legally conduct experiments or invent new things was to apply for a permit in the capital city, obviously this did not stop everyone, but it slowed progress for the general public down to a crawl.

>>97863595
Later on, think a few hundred years before the settings present day, people, particularly merchants were becoming restless with the slow pace of technological progress. Fearing an uprising, a different, new king, agreed to a compromise: All research would still be nationalized, but the government would only hold a 40 year patent on any new discoveries. After that period passed, any merchants would have freedom to produce those new products to release to the public. This makes it so while the government of this nation has a technological level approximating to our irl 1910's, the general public has a technological level of roughly the 1870's

I came up with this because I decided I would be fine with the setting having more of a "victorian" feel, with the more civilized areas being a sort of gaslamp fantasy, and the frontier areas being western in feel. Luckily im not too far along in the design process and it would be pretty easy to pivot.

Any thoughts?

Cooking up fantasy wild west story. Got a necromancer running a magic gold mine, elf KKK trying to summon a god of racism, any inspiration or ideas beyond that is appreciated

>>97864858
what are the heya hoya folks doing

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I have been informed by my play tester/friend that my original idea for Dran, which are physiologically based quite a bit on these guys pictured here, are a bit too weird for the role they have in society.

I also realize that on second though, having a whole species of pacifistic tree hugging druids doesn't fit in with literally anything else in a world built from the ground up around the constant threat of monsters.

Maybe I should sort of make them something like cultivators.
My (totally not vampires) use vital essence for their blood sorcery, but they get this vital essence by taking it from others, usually using blood as a medium for essence.
So maybe Dran instead can sense, manipulate, and through various means "cultivate" essence both within themselves but more importantly in other living beings. This allows them to still fulfill their role in my world building of being pseudo-druids who make it possible for walled cities to grow enough food within their walls, while also opening them up to more combative options so it makes more sense that they aren't extinct in such a hostile setting.

Thoughts and second opinions would be greatly appreciated.

>>97865044
>Dran, which are physiologically based
How based?

Need to decide how far in the future to set my space fantasy. Will be much easier to name things if I can pick names from Earth's history, mythology and geography but I feel like it'll be easier to get the exotic feeling I want if it's the very distant future, maybe with Earth not even being remembered.

>>97858588
you could also use this as a way to disguise non-human features they might have like a tail or wings.

>>97863595

Honestly I think it's not really believable. Ironically you'd need something more totalitarian than north korea for such a thing. Basically 1984.

>>97863597
this is way too impossible. just copy magepunk and have a limited, unstable and volatile resource as the source of most of the high tech stuff so it's only found in cities and the military while the rest are left behind in a sort of anachronistic renaissance with gas lamps and all you want

>>97862655
The "vampires" of my setting who figured out how to use the healing psychic powers to cannibalize people memories/souls then eat the flesh afterwards.

Doing so not only gave them the victim's memories but also invigorated their bodies reversing the effects of aging and providing a high no mere drug could provide with the downside that the invigoration also caused accelerated degradation of the body.

Such "vampires" often were the figure heads of Healing Cults who use their healing power to enslave people into dangerous addiction to healing to the point their bodies can no longer heal naturally on their own.

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>>97865044
I think I got it.
Total inversion of everything related to my "not vampires"

While the blood sorcerers take essence from others to empower themselves
Dran cultivate themselves to give essence to others.
While blood sorcerers are unnaturally pale
Dran are unnaturally dark. Like coal dark
Blood sorcerers with a combat focus pride themselves on using their magical abilities to augment their weapon handling to supernatural levels.
Dran with a combat focus pride themselves on using internal cultivation to push their unarmed capabilities to superhuman levels.
Blood sorcerers look down on anyone who has dealings with spirits or worships gods, instead only respecting ancestors and greats of the past who they use as examples for their own striving for individual excellence
Dran maintain deep relationships with spirits of the land and work with them to maintain and uplift the areas they inhabit.

Most importantly, made both human looking more or less, most of the time, to eliminate any complaints about them being too weird.
Maybe I will give Dran horns and weird eyes so that they aren't just dark elves in appearance.

I just had a tongue-in-cheek idea for a D&D setting composed of a plane primarily inhabited by Tieflings, who were originally banished from various other canon D&D settings, for overpopulating and being rampantly annoying.

Warlocks replace clerics, and demon or devil worship is the standard, the entire setting is experiencing a population crisis, because most inhabitants are gay, "non-binary" or asexual.

The default world-ending threat for the setting is an intermediate level neutral good deity of life and normalcy.

>>97869015
I think you are lost.

>>97867531
nta, but tapping into people's memories could generally just be extremly pleasing without the act itself being made to do so, especially if it gives the vampire the ability experience things they themselve's cant, like if a vampire can't really eat normal food, take drugs, have sex or even just enjoy properly loving relationship and happy memories, then recalling the memories of someone who did could be extremly desirable, like you could have them linger on the taste of the finest meals people anyone ate, the rush of winning any competition, being in love for the first time, having time with friends, or even more mundane stuff like watching a sunrine(if the vampires are weak to something like that).

This would also further motivate them to seek out a higher class of victims rather than content themselves with the drabble of society who lives in misery.