i've got like forty million separate universes bouncing around my brainbits, but my personal favorite is one i just call headworld, tho its official name is The Great Empire of Veiroa Spoiler: headworld okay so this universe/setting/idea is something i've had in my head since i was about 11? and i suck at drawing and am only semi-passable at writing, so i've just been kind of collecting as many pictures and stuff as i could to get the general feel of the place across. i've got like three different stories going on and i've revamped it like five different times. it's basically a weird brain slushy of uglies/pretties/specials, the hunger games, random other sci-fi & fantasy stories i've enjoyed throughout the years, final fantasy 10 & 13, marie antoinette/rococo fashion, art deco & art nouveau, venice, france, tokyo, and las vegas. In its current form, The Empire is a chain of islands, a post-flood-apocalypse Utopia, where everything is glittering and perfect and shiny, and everyone is blessed by The Mother Goddess, Lunara, with long life and prosperity. There is no war, disease, hunger, or even unpleasant feelings. Only giant noble mansions and shopping malls and balls and Veiroa City, where all the most glimmering and wonderful celebrities live. But that's only if you're highborn enough to deserve it. Anyone not highborn are the lowborn, and the myth goes that they're the leftover wicked people who were spared destruction from the flood Lunara sent to punish them, and that because they weren't remade pure by the Mother Goddess they must be kept locked away, as the taint of the corrupt god Adima still lies within them. So lowobrn (who are a cross between Native American and Maori people in looks/culture) are herded into the Warrens, which are high-walled concrete cities where everyone is poor and everything sucks. Contact between lowborn and the outside world is Strictly Forbidden, except for missionaries from The Temple that are dispatched to preach the word of The Mother Goddess. There are a few different tribes of lowborn who escaped the Warrens and they are called the Wilders. Most of them just keep to themselves, but there are a few clans who are engaged in a ridiculously petty war with the Empire over what they see as their God-ordained land. To the Empire it's basically just an annoying temper tantrum they have to devote resources to. there's a bunch of pictures and stuff on my blog tagged headworld for inspiration, and i basically just make fanmixes and outfits instead of writing anything, but it's certainly a fun aesthetic to play around with.
I saw homestuck. Maybe I'll post my super in depth Whostuck world building here later. . . (I have been perpetually working on a Doctor Who/Homestuck crossover for years and I haven't been involved in either canon in a longass time, whoops)
..... does worldbuilding for a universe that's more-or-less Our Universe (with Magic, Faeries, Incompetent God-beings, a Twist of Lime and 256-Bit Encryption) count because boy do I have a lot of that stowed away somewhere in my head...
This is reminding me I have to think up (and write down dammit) proper cultures for the people of the Red Goddess and the Other Goddess (who needs a colour. white would be traditional but she's not a purity goddess, she's the goddess of life and growing things and hedonism, rly. hrm.). Mostly what i know is that the RG's people are Srsfaced and the OG's people are like WHOO PARTY ALL THE TIME. I might use this thread to provide a place to brain-vomit thoughts down if folks don't mind.
More dumb self-indulgence: Spoiler The particular part of Enra where Teka lives is covered in grass for hundreds of miles in all directions. The streets are covered in grass. The buildings are covered in grass. The only things not covered in grass are the river and the trees. The buildings are sloped to look like hills. Some are terraced, some are even climbable. People sometimes live on top of buildings, only going inside when it rains, which climate control makes sure happens periodically. The entire outdoors of the region, as with most of Enra, is lit all the time, either by the sun or by artificial lights hung from the trees. Darkness only occurs indoors. All other types of exterior decoration is entirely virtual; a trip up the levels of the Stack reveal various sorts of advertisements, announcements, warnings, and other graffiti, all with no physical presence. The Temple is covered in grass. It lies in the center of the grassland, a circular hill with a crater down to street level in the middle, like a ripple in the land. In the center of the crater is a massive tree, possibly the largest on the entire planet. There's at least one hypothesis floating around the Stack that claims that the Temple workers worship the tree. Another claims that the tree is a fractal storage system containing secrets only known to the Temple workers. Temple workers have been witnessed climbing the tree from time to time. The children raised in the Temple don't seem to understand what the fuss is. There is a sect that reveres the tree but they're not overrepresented in the Temple compared to the general population. Outworlders are generally not brought to the region due to their distressing tendency to wear hard-soled footwear. The grass is resilient, but boots are a bit much. Anyway the nearest spaceport is quite far away anyway and the only thing of interest in the region is the Temple. The grass is edible but tastes awful, extremely bitter by design to discourage people from eating it. The water from the river is clean enough to drink and doesn't taste too bad. The leaves of the tree probably also taste awful but no one has ever mentioned trying any. Food in general is a thing of the past; nutrients are created artificially, a holdover from the spaceship voyage that first brought people to Enra where food in the usual sense was too inefficient to justify the weight cost, and intake is handled by the nanoswarms. If people want to taste things the Stack has any number of virtual simulations of the sense, of varying accuracies.
So I just figured out a thing for my world and needed to tell someone about it. Spoiler Magic in my setting, or more particularly the miena satae akuherrhe particles that constitute magic, is sensitive to electromagnetism, much more so than other materials. In particular, when the particles encounter a material with sizable magnetic domains, they bounce off the walls between the magnetic domains in complicated fashions, hence why metallic iron has long been known to be prohibitive to magic. It's not a problem for para- and diamagnetic materials because the domains are too small and the effects cancel, but for unmagnetized ferromagnetic materials the domains are large enough that the minskeru just scatter in various directions. The phenomenon has been studied enough that laws for it are known, but these laws are too complex for mages to compute how given amounts and distributions of iron will affect their spells in anything resembling real-time. This is okay when you're just trying to blow stuff up, but not so much when you're trying to do something more delicate. I just realized that, of all the entities wandering around the setting, there is a group that could dedicate the computational power to churning out brute-force numerical simulations in real-time. And now I've got a reason for them to have a hard-coded inability to think about the mina sa'kuhrae, which I wanted before but could never really justify. For those not following the Constructed Languages thread, the terms in italics all refer to the same thing, separated by historical reconstructions of a dead, forgotten language.
yessss I am here for this O: sadly I don't have any particularly creative worldbuilding, my main project is working on a homebrew Material Plane/ DnD setting mostly because I know fuckall about the established settings like Greyhawk and Neverwinter and what-have-you and would soon become disgraced if I attempted using one and my players knew it better than me :B I have a horrifyingly long world setting document (and it's written in a pretty abbreviated fashion) and it's STILL NOT ENOUGH, SOB. want to run a campaign but I need a better handle on how a few of the important nations in my setting work first. @___@ (here have my shoddy undetailed world map if you're into that :V) (huh though do we even have a DnD/general tabletop game discussion thread anywhere I wonder? cause I would be on that like white on rice.)
So a while back I was like whoo worldbuilding for my hamsteaks and then promptly forgot to actually ramble about it! So yeah let's go with Buddhist cyberpunkstuck I guess. The first important thing about Buddhist cyberpunkstuck is that the world conforms to Buddhist cosmology and metaphysics. There is blending of different kinds of Buddhism within the setting, however the main law of the land is fundamentally Thai. So rebirth, karma, asura, and what not? All of that is real! Very, very real. Next thing is that the Buddhism extends to more than just universal law setting dressing. It also affects the aesthetic which the city that people live in has. Namely it is a chaotic mix of various aesthetics from Buddhist nations. Also I've decided to make it snowy just so I can have an excuse for epic battle scarfs like in an Inshinomori production. The Handmaid gets a scarf because she needs one for murder time. Which leads to the fact that the Buddhism also leads to what exactly our characters are doing and what sorts of roles they are playing. Doc Scratch and his bullshit I feel is a good start for that. So Dr. Donald "Scratch" Strider is the leader of a gang. Namely the illustrious and infamous Felt, which is one of two large gangs that controls most of the city of New Derse. Scratch ends up meeting a rakshasa, a sort of malevolent spirit being, who reveals to him a series of truths and "truths". Under the tutelage and employ of this rakshasa, who is represented with the doll Lil Cal, Scratch sets out on a plan to destroy all of reality. For you see the end of the world is to come over a course of many thousands of years. Progressively a series of seven suns will rise and burn the entire world until no life remains and then the wheel will turn yet again leading to the world restarting. But this is not what Scratch nor his employer desire. They desire something a damn sight more permanent than that and so Scratch seeks not only to force the Seven Suns to rise far quicker and earlier than they should but also to bring about the rising of an Eighth Sun, the Green Sun. With this it is believed that they will be able to permanently destroy reality. Scratch thus serves as being what is basically the representation of a sort of world hating nihilism, one of the many viewpoints that Buddhism criticizes. However this is going to be a hard thing. Partly because it will involve powers that humans do not have. And thus Scratch sets out to find ways to force open the senses to their full potentials. Over the course of his experimentation he comes across a method and under the guise of medical research for a new vision correction technique he gathers six test subjects. Each who will serve as the Six Masters of the Doors, beings who have one sense fully opened to its greatest potential. Basically having the senses of a god. These are Rose, Vriska, Aranea, Sollux, Kankri, and Terezi. Rose being the Master of the Sight Door, Vriska the Master of the Touch Door, Aranea the Master of the Mind Door, Sollux the Master of the Sound Door, Kankri the Master of the Taste Door (he has the most comically useless one), and Terezi the Master of the Scent Door. So Rose has what is basically the Divine Eye. She can see reality down at the level of kalapas, Buddhist atoms, and can see karmic flows which gives her what many mistake to be clairvoyance. Sollux can hear the voices of beings in the realms beyond humans. So he can hear the hungry ghosts and the people screaming in Hell and the fantastic songs of the devas. Kankri has a useless power and can basically taste things super well and taste things from other realms. Terezi has what is basically her comic power with her nose. Vriska can quite literally touch "luck" and she happens to have a very damned good sense of where things are based on vibrations. Aranea meanwhile is entirely blind unfortunately but can instead "see" with mind and nothing more. She's thus able to "see" and interact more directly with things that the others are merely hearing or looking directly at. These are Scratch's perfect precious guinea pigs and he plans to use this research to turn himself artificially into a god. A crazy bastard needs more than just test subjects though. He needs assassins and spies and the like. While he does have his gang and while they are quite useful he needs more than that. So with the help of Cal he finds that there is a young girl with just the right karmic line to be reborn as an asura, a sort of godly being whose life is punctuated by extreme rage and pride. And so this girl, the very unlucky and miserable Damara Megido, is killed. Her reborn self as an asura is kidnapped and then bound to his will with the use of Sak Yant tattoos. This being raised into his slave maid/assassin who gets called the Handmaid or the Demoness variously by people outside the mansion. Scratch himself exclusively refers to her as Girl. The Handmaid is just one of two people who are exceptionally rage filled gods though. Another girl named Aradia is murdered as well and is reborn as a godly being as well. Unlike the Handmaid who is an asura though, Alpha Aradia is a deva. Specifically a Wrathful God. Whereas the Handmaid represents the many negatives of rage, Aradia represents a sort of especially focused righteous rage. A fierce devotion to fixing shit. Even if she happens to be kind of terrifying and weird. Together they are the twin sides of wrath and of servitude. The Handmaid of course has three faces and six arms. Alpha Aradia however only has one face and four arms. One is bound by the Three Marks of Existence and the Six Realms, but the other is both Death and also the peace giving Four Noble Truths. The Felt is just one gang though. There is also the Midnight Crew, led by the ever so lovely Spades Slick. Slick ends up stumbling into shit and becoming an artificial asura. So a frightening six armed hell beast. For more godly fun one is also capable of preventing beings from being reborn as well. Namely by taking their stream of consciousness hostage. Which results in what is basically a karmic overload to begin building up which can force people to be reborn as exceptionally short lived if very powerful gods. For culty fun Aranea ends up accidentally building a cult around herself. Her followers are amazed at her exceptional powers of perception and her great knowledge, which presumably extends to great wisdom. The Makaras are involved in another cult meanwhile. A rather traditional thing based around the veneration of a variety of gods who have dual facets. Together Scratch, Slick, Aranea, and the Makaras aren't just villains but villains who fit into specific types. Scratch is a rationalistic nihilist who sees no point in reality. He has no morals. Merely reason and science. Slick is also rather nihilistic but he is materialistic and hedonistic. This life is the only one we've got in his mind. While Scratch went off the deep end and decides everything is pointless, Slick views life as something to make the best use of. Have fun. There are no morals. There is merely one's own enjoyment of one's single life. He is thus effectively Carvaka philosophy. The Makaras represent a sort of traditional and superstitious obsession. They go about extremes of pain and pleasure, but primarily their main fault is thinking that gods actually mean something. They are our Brahmins. Aranea meanwhile is a very clever woman who has learned, to some extent, how reality works. However she is exceptionally proud and wishes to use this knowledge to become a highly respected hero. She doesn't care so much about helping others and saving herself as she does furthering her own ambition. She also refuses to accept that people and things must end and have no-self, refusing to let go of individuals she is fond of. Aranea thus is our Devadatta. Intelligent and respectable in many ways, but deeply flawed and a slave to her own ambition. This madness all takes place in the city of New Derse, as had been stated earlier. It is a world where the rich live in their nice happy pretty districts which are starkly white and what not and the not rich live in areas of not prettiness. In fact in many places the standard of life is pretty amazingly shit. The high level of tech meanwhile exists primarily to look cool and also be something through which Buddhist bullshit can be expressed. Questions like "are AI sentient beings with a spot in the rounds of rebirth?" can be asked. Also we have sick ass robot squids who assist the police and secret acid. Because they are cool. Terezi calls hers Mr. Minty Swirl due to him being white with lines of bright green running about him. I'm never quite sure if I want everyone to be human or if I want there to be the other species from the comic. Just all smashed into this one city. Both are fun options. Either way. BUDDHISM INTENSIFIES.
that sounds extremely cool and if I may ask are AIs sentient beings with a spot in the rounds of rebirth? *glances at Lil Hal*
The answer is eventually yes. And I personally think that if we can or have create an AI that is at the very least on the level of an ant then we've effectively created an entire new realm to be reborn in. Which is a strange thing.
For once, I'm trying to do something with a setting (but I have way too many ideas to make them all fit in there), so, here it is. Or at least, an early version. Spoiler (Yes, this is a sci-fi story with a flat Earth, magic, and water instead of space. I was reading some Flat Earth Society stuff, noticed some weird map on a forum, and started thinking about all the story possibilities.)
Not actual worldbuilding, just a bit of a rant about Science Marches On: There's a book called Schild's Ladder, by Greg Egan, that is sometimes billed as one of the hardest hard sci-fi books ever written, in that it's Egan's attempt to figure out what theoretical physics might look like several thousand years from now, and has some vague semblance of a story attached to pages of diagrams and speculation and descriptions of computational methods and experimental design for post-quantum physics. I can believe that his description of post-quantum physics might be a viable theory based on what we knew about physics in 2002. I am less convinced by the part of the story where this theory has gone unmodified for millennia. I mean, sure, at some point we're going to run out of ways to test the limits of our theories within the observable universe; we're already running into that issue on Earth, it's not too unthinkable that in maybe a few hundred years we'll run out of observable universe. But lack of observables hasn't stopped string theory, hasn't stopped higher gauge theory. Physicists aren't about to stop tinkering just because they run out of data. Why does it take twenty thousand years to launch the experiment that kicks off the story and in the meantime nobody expects anything to happen? What happened to "if we set off a nuclear bomb, we might ignite the atmosphere"? Which is why I can't justify my own story happening any later than maybe 2200. At least Vernor Vinge made the lack of technological progress a plot point in his Across Realtime novels. Anyway, Egan makes up for this in Orthogonal; there the level of knowledge and technology is still limited enough that they don't really have a good notion of theoretical physics to begin with so it makes sense that they haven't dreamed up a lot of stuff yet. But yeah, hard sci-fi is difficult.
Hey everybody, thinking about getting this thread moved to creative works. Does anyone have any objections to this being viewable to non-members of the forum? It's in Top Sekret because that's where the "Tell me about your characters" thread is, but I've never been really clear on why @Void put that thread in Top Sekret. Anyway, I was thinking taking maybe a week for people to lodge explanations, protests, objections, concerns, complaints, counterproposals, rotting vegetables, etc before telling one of the admins to move this thread.
A must read: somewhere between roleplaying and conworlding: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/1...five-thousand-years-in-an-alternate-universe/
Spoiler Miscellany about Reionai: Despite having cheap energy, physical material is still at a bit of a premium on Reionai. Elements like hydrogen and carbon can of course be gotten ad nauseam, but the rarer elements and compounds need to be mined, from asteroids and comets, or synthesized, via chemistry or nuclear reaction. Both mining and synthesis require some sort of incentive, which drives a good chunk of the economy and the crime on Reionai. Daela's government officially recognizes five major events per year-cycle: -Alignment, when people formally declare which government they're going to attach themselves to for the next year; most governments aren't happy when their citizens realign anytime else. Functionally new year. -Landing, celebrating when humans first arrived on Reionai. -Siilendrait, some obscure holiday that apparently arose during the trip those first humans took to reach Reionai from an already-inhabited world. -Tithe, formerly when Carraelia would demand its tithe of goods and people, no longer relevant now that Carraelia's a smoking wasteland. -Ireilaeth, in remembrance of when the people of early Reionai fought off an invasion of InWorlders bent on killing all of the mages, used as an excuse to annoy the Reio with less-than-usual fear of retribution. (The associated InWorlders remember a very different history). Other governments recognize different sets of events. Despite easy travel and non-geographic governmental boundaries, a large amount of Reionai identifies by physical location, dividing geographic territory into "villages" and "towns". These villages and towns still tend to align as units since the cultural and social similarities that lead to the formation of villages and towns often include political similarities.
