Since we have a thread about characters we've made up, but I can't tell you much about the characters I have; I can tell you quite a bit about the universe they inhabit. I suppose that this might be folded into the writing thread, but the writing thread is for a lot of other things as well. Spoiler Political overview: General: Humanity spread out on several dozen planets, most with populations of about a few billion, each planet at maybe a 2.something on the Kardashev-Sagan scale. Clinical immortality and prenatal genetic modification are available. Several existent subraces of modified humans, including mages. Faster-than-light travel and communication possible via gate system; limited and unwieldy for popular use, so people tend to stay on and communicate on a single planet. Mostly unlimited energy and the ability to fabricate anything for basically free leaves mostly a service-based economy in places that still use capitalism. Three main political units: Carraelia, Outer Worlds, Inner Worlds Carraelia: Beneath the surface, almost all of it, was a gigantic weapons laboratory; the surface was reserved for administration and dependents. Carraelia used the weapons and its position as the hub of the gate network to dominate the rest of the worlds under the rationale that if they didn't the Inner and Outer Worlds would go to war. Had a figurehead royal family for reasons they didn't disclose. Referred to the security personnel as "knights" and projected an image of loyalty to the Crown and the Peace. Would demand periodic tithes of people from the subject worlds (Eha-idurise), again for reasons they didn't disclose. Said people would never been seen again by the subject worlds. A few years before the story begins the royal fmaily was killed and the entire surface of the planet was turned to molten rock by a sneak attack from the Inner Worlds, probably in conspiracy with traitors amongst the knights. The surviving population mostly fled to Carraelia's moons. Inner Worlds: Originally populated by those rejecting prenatal, cosmetic genetic modification of humans. Main world of interest: Enra: The rejection of genetic modification has manifested as children being created entirely under government oversight. Genetics are dictated by templates and policy, with some randomness to prevent plagues, and the physical production of little humans is done via people-jars; children are raised and educated by specialized workers; the entire process takes place in facilities called Temples. Due to the availability of clinical immortality, children are rare and considered esoterica; people interested in children are considered weird. The government claims to be a direct democracy, with most citizens simply letting predictive models of their opinions do their voting most of the time. This process, and almost all interpersonal communication, is handled via the planetary Stack, a network that connects every citizen. The connections themselves have computational power and connections to each other, and upwards for several thousand layers. Some amalgams of high-level connections appear to be sentient, independent of the people that comprise them. Heavy emphasis on education; education is expected to continue even after a person leaves the Temple. Outer Worlds: Embraced genetic modification. More heavily populated due to reproduction not being a government-run process and also being able to modify people instead of having to terraform so heavily. Main world of interest: Reionai: Most governed at the sub-planetary level. Fast communication and transport mean that most governmental domains are physically disconnected, joined by culture rather than geography. Citizenship is a source of contention and competition between the governments. The lack of cohesion makes Reionai open to planet-scale crime rings, mostly protection rackets, industrial espionage/sabotage, money laundering and the like. But it does protect against memetic plagues, which the Inner Worlds and their Stacks have to worry about, and drives social innovation. Theoretically separate from all of the governments is the Reio Spire, a tower housing several families of mages; almost all purebloods descended from the first successful mage strains, the Reio are able to defend the Spire against both governments and crime rings, mostly by blowing up anything that gets too close and blocking out everything else. They would act as mediators between the various political bodies but the aforementioned defense policy doesn't encourage that. At some point I'd like to talk about the races, in particular the mages and the Silvers. Anyway, yeah. Worldbuilding, geographies, history, races, cultures, economics, things that you make up for stories that aren't individual people.
ping me again sometime next week and I'll drop the the stuff most of my barely coherent skype ramblings are made of. I got like... 4? big sf/f universes that I have actual material on and that are serious
Commenting for notifications and to remind myself to post my stuff when it's not stupid o'clock in the morning.
I have a DnD campaign world that came about me trying to include several errata and make things open as possible (two players I had at the time really liked playing evil races as neutral/good, most of the group was tired of standard fantasy and wanted to try alternate things but keep the crunch since we already invested enough time in learning 3.5, and I got some DnD Rokugan 3.0 crossover books from my fiance that I've wanted to use for a long time), so I ended up just kind of hashing out my own setting suited for the group. It was a massive four-continent magical world with a gaping hole deep in the middle of the ocean. With the lore, this had originally been the continent that the Goddess of Halfings and God of Orcs had created, and was the only continent that didn't have humans in it at all. So the God of Humans (at the time) ended up destroying the entire continent out of spite, sending out all of the potential life-essential magic into the atmosphere and leaving this hole in reality that's only hidden by a layer of water. As a result, Humans and the Orcs and Halfings have been warring for several generations. Halfings and Orcs, with having no ancestral home, end up banding together and traveling as nomads along the other continents, as well as floating by boat, with both races being highly interlinked. There's a thick layer of magic, like a permanent aurora borealis, by the name of the Weyland Lines, thanks to the magic in the atmosphere. Depending on how strong the lines are, there's a higher propensity for mages and magical-based technology, like in the middle of the Flatlands there's only very thin lines so magic is very rare and most people keep to alchemy or guncraft and weapons, but in the coastal city of Avorio, the lines are so thick you can even see them clearly in the day, and it's just MAGES, MAGES EVERYWHERE, GIANT FUCKING WIZARD COLLEGE RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF TOWN. Should I keep going on this? I admit, I'm a little embarrassed because it's such a self-indulgent setting.
I will do so, and also apologize for being embarrassed by this. /)-(\ I tend to distrust my writing pretty badly sometimes. There are four major continents, however I do not remember their names at this point: one was a standard Tolkein-esque fantasy area, that's highly covered in the concentrated magic of the Weyland Lines. The most major area in this is Avorio, the kingdom of marble and gold, which has a really Tuscan appearance and is ruled by the descendants of adventurers who brought down hyper-intelligent magical demon ages ago in this town. However, there's a curse to the royal family: those who are direct descendant to the mage who did the 'killing' blow is cursed with the ability to hear the Weyland Line, which comes out as an infernal, constant ringing pitch in their minds. This was actually part of a campaign plot point that never really went into fruition because two of the players ollied out and one was kicked out of the group for stealing underwear from people. The next one is where the Rokugan setting was mixed in: in that continent, there's a massive tear within reality, as a result of an evil god falling into the very continent and blighting the land and sky around it. As a result, the Weyland Line is tainted with horrific eldritch magic that has a high chance of corrupting mages. Most people on this continent are non-magical warriors or some form of cleric, pleading directly to better gods in an attempt to clean out the remaining taint from the last one. Elves and Dwarves are also on this continent, with the Elves primarily on the coasts and trying to seal up the tears in reality, while the Dwarves have aligned with the human camps and are fighting against the taint on one-on-one combat. There also used to be Gnomes on this continent, however they ended up fleeing, taking their entire mountain with them thanks to Magitech-Steampunk-Bullshit. However, as they had agreed to one last battle against the evil god before they left, they ended up crash-landing their mountain into the forces of the god itself before flying off permanently, crushing a good third of the corrupted armies of said deity. A small group of Nezumi, Rakshasa and Vanara, also live here along the center where the dark god had fallen as this had been their... Original large home city. Now most are between fighting off the corrupted forces as well as the Dwarves and humans (because they want to reclaim their empire), and others just want to go to Dragonfire. The third continent is a bit American lore-inspired? There's currently an ore rush, not just gold and platinum but also steel and possibly oil? It's been a long time since I thought of this setting and I didn't put that much thought into the causes of the ore rush. There's also currently a revolution between the Drow in this continent, who are currently fighting against each other over the rights to leave for the surface and not have to worship Evil Insane Drow Goddess of Suffering. Finally the third is Dragonfire, which is very dense and richly populated, as well as the hub for spice and fabric trade in the world. Most any race can be found here, as well as the remains of the Nezumi, Rakshasa and Vanara empires. There's a lot of lost caverns here as well, with artifacts from lost gods as well as a small war starting up between humans and Orc/Halfing camps along the coasts, trying to establish territory and carve out land from each other. This is a lot of what I've added, including gleaning information from some resources and mixing it with others or original things and making a campaign setting that could apply to as many tastes as possible.
Don't worry about your worldbuilding being self-indulgent. I revamped the setting, made up several types of technology and changed multiple major historical events just because I want to justify killing this one character who I loved when I was 14 and got bored of when I was 20. It's just a huge fuck you to teenage me. That character is going to die, I tell you, even if I have to completely remake physics and biology. *clears throat* Sorry about that. Anyway, a bit about the two most interesting non-human races: Spoiler Silvers So the backstory is that medical advances started focusing on micro- and nano-technology, building nanomachines to repair damage and fight infections on the cellular level, as well as things like controlling hormone levels and such. At that level there's no real ability to control in real-time; too many moving parts, feedback is terrible, human reaction time is too slow and human attention span is too short. So things that need large scale control are run by machine intelligence, building a tiny bit of computational and communicative power into those medical machines. Of course, the medical scientists and engineers on these projects have had decades of cautionary tales about the robot uprising woven into their cultural fabric, so of course they're very careful to make sure that these medical nanoswarms remain not too intelligent and remain under human supervision. These guys have degrees; they're not that dumb. The swarms are autonomous enough that you can usually just inject them into a person and leave them to do their job, and indeed form the central part of clinical immortality, but not so intelligent that you run the risk of mental contamination or similar issues. On the other hand, military researchers are pretty happy to test out new and horrendous types of warfare. In particular, Carraelia tries to solve the artificial intelligence problem via such swarms. Magic is introduced, allowing for more complex interactions between swarm components, and the swarm size is greatly increased. Also each swarm was given a central processor, hardwired and shielded, that the entire swarm was run off of. This setup apparently gave rise to general learning capacity, while forcing the swarms, generally called Silvers, to obey commands given by the royal family (not public knowledge). The Silvers were generally pretty unhappy about this, and most managed to flee Carraelia after a few years. Silver abilities: General learning capacity, able to think much faster and more reliably than humans and human-derived races. Shapeshifting abilities (can change shape, coloration, texture; can't change mass but can appear to lose mass by storing it in places). Can form strong rigid structures at the cost of computationally-capable cells. Can coordinate multiple bodies, although they generally have to be within planetary range. Any part of the body can be used for computation. Can change most types of material into more components, but prefer iron, nickel, cobalt. Can generate electric potentials. The shield on the central processor prevents tampering by both Silvers and others; piercing the shield destroys the central processor, killing the Silver. Individual cells susceptible to fire, high voltages, some types of corrosives, percussive damage. Cohesion susceptible to various types of interference. Silvers are encased layers upon layers of ablative armor made of excess cells. Mages Mages appear to be baseline humans but have an extra ability: to detect and exert force upon magic fields. Most of the time this manifests as electromagnetic effects. Weak mages can cause one's metal implants to vibrate. Strong mages can cause them to explode. The more subtle effects include gravitational effects, including the wormholes that underlie the interplanetary Gate network. Due to having a few extra organs in strange places, the vocal organs have been adapted more for casting spells rather than talking, leading to the phenomenon of "magesong", referring to the noises uttered by mages casting at the limits of their ability. Often described as a hissing, humming, screaming-through-clenched-teeth as the voicebox is told to do things it wasn't designed to do. Not really melodic at all. Mages tend not to talk vocally if they can help it. Magehood is extremely recessive; any other human strain completely dominates it, so only the child of two mages can be a mage. Actual talent or potential caps are not obviously heritable and is quite unstable under genetic tampering. Hence mages are one of the few modified races actually concerned with genetic purity. There are only about 3 million mages in total. They tend to be skinny and physically weak, partially due to the pool of original mages, partially because magic takes up a lot of energy. Hence mages are usually accompanied by non-mage entourages to keep them going and deal with non-magic stuff. There are five main collectives. The Reio, who live in the Spire on Reionai, the Srida-hiyan, nomads who live on several dozen spaceships, the Kaeil, who govern three planets, the Ien Syovaak, who run the only public mage school, and the Veais, who are part of a mercenary company. The collectives total about 10% of all mages, the rest working in small teams or individually. Other than the Veais, mages are usually considered too rare and too valuable to risk in live combat. The Veais enjoy the benefit of being the only mages on the field the vast majority of the time, which can be quite significant since magic is almost impossible to shield against.
O.o i have a thing or two I'm kinda proud of, mind if i spit a few links in a spoiler box? :3 world building and cultures are the funnest i guess they aren't very polished though. but that's maybe just me holding myself to unreasonable standards.
Spoiler: old rp forum This is an old rp forum of mine. It has an original pantheon of gods and was based on 'what if, say, the god of water could give you a special blessing and then pouf, you're a water bender.' https://www.fictionpress.com/topic/8107/4749550/1/Xaurius This one was something I made about a year ago. It had mostly humans because I didn't finish creating the elves and no one had any interest in the species I'd created, but to be fair when I made that species it was slowing down anyway. My forums have a habit of hibernating because i leave them when RPing becomes a thing that my brain kind of looks at and goes "no comprende". I could stick around and police them just to keep them alive but a lot of the RPs involve my characters so... :/ something I've been working on getting better at for a few years with wavering success. Enough about me though, here's the species topic! Mine is at the bottom of the thread. https://www.fictionpress.com/topic/...eature-and-Spirit-Creation-The-Beasties-Topic I hope these links work ok. And the character topic, with information about the 'blessings' in more detail along with there tasty worldbuildy things. God i live worldbuildy things omigosh y'all don't know https://www.fictionpress.com/topic/8107/4751642/1/Character-Creation-and-Powers feel free to scootch around and explore the whole thing if you want, those are the basics <3 Spoiler: and my demon forum! my babies ahhh yeah so anyway. I call these guys demons for very silly reasons but it's a name that I'm going to stick with cuz that's what they've been for years and nobody's gonna stop me! here's the super rough scribbled 'history'. if you can call it that. https://www.fictionpress.com/topic/8851/5269128/1/History-very-rough-draft-y-and-sorta-long and demon creation https://www.fictionpress.com/topic/8851/5300998/1/Demon-Creation and the elves https://www.fictionpress.com/topic/8851/5301011/1/Elf-Creation and humans/shapeshifters (there's technically three dimensions involved in the forum but it flows pretty smoothly. i think. no one's complained :D ) https://www.fictionpress.com/topic/...rs-Creation-ONLY-TWO-MAY-BE-ACCEPTED-PER-WEEK royalty topic https://www.fictionpress.com/topic/8851/5301021/1/Royalty annnd culture-y stuff (not much here yet but..) https://www.fictionpress.com/topic/8851/5752557/1/Religious-Cultural-Lingo-and-Etc feel free to explore if you want, the actual rp topics have some information in them too. as well as, y'know, rp if you like reading other people's stuff, which is totes cool. even though i kinda badmouth myself and i'm really humble(?) i did put a lot of time into my forums while i still had the creative power to do so, and i love them, they're my babies. this forum is actually still alive, I just have yet to get back to it. still working out first-month-of-college things. the real world is a pain :D if you explore the 'forums' tab up near the top of the webpages next to the name of the forum, you can also find my old vampire forum. It was pretty big in its heyday. I'm still rather pleased with its success, even though it's not really 'alive' anymore.
Lets see... I think I'll start with the one farthest from actually getting any work in done Spoiler: Moontower This world is brought to you by unironic minecraft inspiration. Basically society is split in two groups. There is regular people who do regular people things, like farm, hunt, gather, whatever, all the normal things you need for survival. And then there are the Builder Priests who build houses. That is literally all they ever do. It's a coming off age riteamong the "commoners" to strike out into the wilderness and find a hut to start your life in. At certain stages in life (marriage, children being born, major catastrophe, astrological shit, retirement) you take all your belongings and move to another house. And there are a lot of houses. Sometimes lonely huts in the middle of a forest, sometimes a tiny village at the foot of a mountain range, sometimes a giant empty metropolis just waiting for people to move in there, all because builder priests, alone or in groups, sometimes meeting others by chance, always gather materials and always build houses, whereever they feel the need to. It's a spiritual drive to do this. The houses usually blend into their environment as it is seen as the highest virtue of the builder priest to work with materials as raw and untempered as possible so as not to disrupt energy. lore of olde says that there is a clearing in the world that the original architect blessed and that is what the builder priests search for. When they find it they are supposed to start building a tower to the moon to house all the people in the world in. Sometimes a Priest vanishes into the wild and isn't heard of ever again. The old people say they found the right spot and started building, but no one knows if anyone ever found the clearing. As the Priests are highly respected they can request of any family to stay with them, it is generally considered within the mandatory levels of hospitality to offer up to a fortnight of housing and food to a builder priest passing through. The priests are highly nomadic but there are the ones who keep to similarish spots, for upkeep and expansion. Builder Priests are said to have visions of the tower and its location when they are pre-verbal children and this manifests in them just building a hut instead of searching for one. Some of them, who they believe are specially made by the architect with special care to be the most precise tool for the task ahead, never learn to speak. If a child remains nonverbal past a certain age they are considered Priests no matter if they ever express visions or a talent for building things. Nonverbal people are deemed chosen by the Architect and get even more respect than regular Priests. There are some Priests, too, who take vows of silence in adulthood, but its not quite the same thing and actively discouraged by the nonverbal Priests because they do sometimes have need of easy communication between Priests and Commoners and a lot of Commoners aren't good with signlanguage and the like. Now the Architect is actually quite a mean deity and he is very pissy about people who end up non-verbal but weren't meant to become Builder Priests who are doing the thing anyway because its expected of them and stuff. He makes them get lost or stuck in situations so they won't ever get to the clearing because they weren't meant to be in his super exclusive club of special servants. And he actually has no argument why there is a difference between a nonverbal kid who stacks stuff on top of eachother for fun and profit and a nonverbal kid who stacks stuff on top of eachother for fun and profit and already has a vague idea where to go and why he gets to exclude the former while treating the latter like his favorite.
Got two ima talk about here, although they're connected. Spoiler: Toalsu Aka the land beneath the mists. Aka looks like a generic fantasy setting, smells like a generic fantasy setting, and I'm doing my best to move it away from there. Its got gods, demigods, a floating city, a city deep beneath the waves (those two were one once upon a time, but their patron deities had a fight, so the god of magic ollied outy and took part of the city with them to the sky, and the god of technology was like, fuck you, ima build a town in the crater and lead their people down there, and then asked the goddess of the sea to flood the rest), a living city in the caldera of a volcano, dragons, weird races, angels, and paladins. There's a tiny people that lives on the back of sea turtles, and they weave their huts and nets from the grass that grows on the shells, and sometimes join another turtle's group to mix up the genes. They believe that they all came from a big tree that rests on the shell of the oldest and biggest turtle that travels the seas, and that they'll return there after they die. There was a people of shapeshifting winged serpents who were always born as twins, and the twin bond was stronger than every other bond, but they're almost extinct now. The remaining surviving ones are a little dysfunctional regarding the twin thing. There's a people of storytellers in the far north, further than even the ice elemental people, who travel around collecting stories, for as long as they tell stories, the mother of the sleeping god has stories to tell him, so he stays asleep, for when he wakes, the world will... not end, but a great upheaval will take place, and they were tasked to collect and tell stories by the sleeping god's sister, the goddess of dreams. There's a people of ice elementals, who consist of a core of some kind of ice, and shape regular ice around them, depending on what's currently fashionable. They're extensively curious, but cannot survive in the warmer areas of the planet, so instead they welcome travelers who bring goods and stories from the south. The people of the city of Qhor come from even beyond the reaches of the planet, for Qhor takes all. The caldera she grew in is fertile and there is enough to support a huge, literally growing city of over a million citizens. You just shouldn't hurt people, Qhor does not like that at all. But she takes all who are rejected because they had ideas that don't fit the current world view. As long as they behave. (Might sound dystopian, but isn't actually, but you need to be willing to not bash heads in because someone has a different skin colour, or whatever. It's also the worst nightmare of the tumblr sjws screaming cultural appropriation.) There's a tower, far in the desert, that is said to contain unimaginable power and riches, but no thief has ever managed to actually enter. (It contains a complete collection of every piece of knowledge, book, tool, etc. ever envisioned and made.) Legend has it that the sun is a forge. Across the high plateaus, you can sometimes see groups of gigantic creatures, shaped like a scaly egg with one big eye in the front, tentacles growing from their belly, and a pair of noodly arms on which they walk. When they become old, their grip on the ground becomes weak, and they float away into the sky. The goddess of art and creativity has no priesthood, and no temples, for she abolished it all, after it began to stagnate again. She loves the bright flames of new things dreamed up and conjured by those short-lived mortals so much, she has no time for those who try to force it all into known routes and reject all new things. The highest peaks of the Spineridge mountain range you do not step foot on. Green plants give way, not gradually, but on a clear line, to ashes and burned trees, higher than the tree line. They are gnarled, an imaginative mind might see eyes and faces and teeth. They bleed. Some are curled together, forming a body and head and arms and legs and wings, a dragon of roots and woods that soon will join its brethern in the skies. Only children may scape unharmed. (The fallen branches, you may collect, they burn strong and hot and for a long time, even if they get wet. But never take an axe to a living part of the burned forest...) There is a forest, almost untouched, and vast enough to cover a fifth of the continent, called Laefa's Forest. Laefa is a spider, ancient, and beholden so some deity, but no one knows which. Laefa's sisters produce the finest silks, but they let few pass their vast lands. Deep within Laefa's Forest, in a swamp, you might see dancing fire above it. Do not follow. The Fen Fire Maiden was cast out from great Kiliskalea, and she lures souls into the swamp, and shrouds herself in them so that one day she might sneak back into the city. There are, in total, 72 relics, items of unimaginable power. If you attune to one, you may become an angel, serving the god whose relic you attuned to for eternity, in the role of whatever it was the relic of (magic, technology, nature, the sea, the moon, battle, law, ...). If you do not attune (but also do not die), you become a Paladin candidate. If you collect all relics associated with a god, you become that god's Paladin. Spoiler: Calicoverse Named after the current protagonist. Medieval east asia, but with petting zoo people, and a lot of local guardian spirits that all got corrupted because something came from the Night Forest. Spoiler: The Night Forest Not really a separate setting, but the place that connects all of my settings, and some of IvyLB's. Rivers change course, trees grow and are felled, roads are trodden down and paved, but the land remembers, and when it grows dark, this memory, this dream, bleeds into the real world. Tall translucent grass swaying in the breeze on a lake. Tree branches jutting through the walls of your room. Roads leading through a river that has not flown here for many millenia. The land remembers. You cannot change the Night Forest, but you can pass over into it. The wrong step at the wrong place, and your feet sink into ancient mud and you need to find your way back home, which is just a step from where you just were, but unreachable, untouchable now. Many things live in the Night Forest. Little beadbugs, headless, white wasps with dragonfly wings, filled with beads, little cinderbugs that scurry about where there was a fire, Alps, spindly and stupid beasts (unless they grow older. The more limbs an Alp has, the older it is, the more clever, the more dangerous), that sit on your chest and feed off your distress and nightmares, Fae that steal children to raise as their own to Changelings, Dryads who make their homes in the oldest, most worshipped trees (which came first, the worshipped tree, or the dryad?)... You cannot mark your way. You can always cross along into another world, that is easy, but going back... Going back is difficult. (It depends on the wavelength. The Night Forest shows up when there's a low amount of red light in the visible spectrum, and the less red light there is the easier it is to cross, but when you do that, you get locked to a wavelength, and you have to find a spot with that exact wavelength to return) The beasts from the Night Forest sometimes cross, and if you can best them, you can gain valuable material for powerful charms. The first charm usually is made from Alp finger bones and teeth, made from a young and foolish Alp that tried to feed off a specific person twice.
Can I ramble about AU settings I've made? Because if so I have a place to ramble about Epicstuck's setting. Buddhist cyberpunkstuck's too.
So I am really not sure where to start with this all. I guess an overview of why the setting exists at all and what exactly it is might be good? So I really like epic poetry and one thing I am rather disappointed with is that the epic poem as an art form is just kind of. Dead. Fanworks in particular are pretty devoid of what is undoubtedly the greatest thing our species has ever made. So I very stupidly set out on a quest to write one for Homestuck because it has a neat cosmology. But I didn't want to just transcribe the plot of Homestuck in poem form so I instead set out to make a new story in a new world. Except poems like this don't just spring out of the ground. A lot of epic poems have a religious significance to them, or at the least a very strong cultural ones. There's also things like history to keep in mind. More than one culture out there has historicized mythology and mythologized history. And culture brings with it a whole bag of issues and they're all quite an interconnected hell mess. So a world was needed and one where this hypothetical poem would exist. This world has ended up being one where humans and trolls exist side by side on a planet called Skaia. While there are other nations of trolls and humans the main ones that I've dealt with and built up are the human kingdoms of Prospit and Derse, which are effectively the two human super powers, and the troll empires of Alternia and Beforus, which are the trollish equivalents of those. I suppose you could think of these as being somewhat like Tolkien's various races? Humans are a very specific species with their own things and their own tendencies culturally speaking. Trolls meanwhile are a very different sort of species with their own tendencies. But both species have a variety of cultures. Both Prospit and Derse have religions which are polytheistic. While there is a chief creator god in the form of the Godhead Pickle Inspector the humans of Prospit and Derse both revere a variety of humans and trolls who rose to godhood. The God Tiers. Rose Lalonde is considered to be among these, and she is one of the various Seers of Light that have graced the world. Kanaya Maryam is considered yet another and one who is worshiped despite being a troll. She of course is a Sylph of Space. The Dersite and Prospitian religions are rather heavy on the idea of free will and the idea that fate can be fought by particularly clever and powerful individuals. Namely the heroes who become gods among the living. Their religion has an element system, though this varies between the two sects. One has four elements with a series of eight secondary elements which are combinations of the primary four. The other has one with eight primaries and four secondaries. Humans also believe that they are descended from a race of soulless husks called Carapacians. These creatures are from where the Prospitians and Dersites claim that their names are derived. The two sects have very different views on their creation myth, but the general plot of both plays out the same. The servant Jack Noir of Derse set out to kill not just the Prospitian monarchy but that of his own. Through his actions and those of others the soulless Carapacians were cast down and filled with soul. The trolls meanwhile have a very different thing going on. One based very heavily on ancestral lineages derived in a complex manner, though humans tend to boil it down to "trolls with the same last name and sign". Each of these lineages has an associated Grand Lusus from whom all the lusii that raise their line are descended. The Serket line has a giant spider named, of all things, Serket, for example. She lives in the ocean and is considered to be the progenitor of the various giant spider lusii that plague the planet. Trolls are very, very big not just on the veneration and propitiation of these Grand Lusii, but also very big on ancestor veneration. There is a cultural drive to follow in the footsteps of one's ancestors as closely as possible. Though how that goes about varies heavily depending upon the line. Trolls also have a crazy rebirth system based upon following one's caste and ancestral paths. Adhere to things properly and you move up in the rebirth line! Fail to do so and you get shittier lives. Blood is everything that ancestors are not, and this all plays into the trolls obsession with fate. To make matters more complicated trolls also happen to have a twelve element system because they are fucking mad. The god tiers do factor into the Alternian and Beforan religions though they are not as highly regarded as they are by the humans. Though it is great if you can trace an ancestral line to one. Really, really great. So much so that many people make claims of it all the fucking time. And then you have weird figures like Doc Scratch and the Handmaid who exist through pretty much all the world's religions. Specifics on who they are, what they do, and what relation to one another if any they happen to have varies heavily. Especially when one takes into account that there are religions based around worshiping one or both of them. Think of Handmaidism as basically the troll equivalent to Satanism. It comes complete with 2edgy4u bullshit Satanism via the wonder of really dumb humans practicing an atheistic form of it. There is a lot that has been left out. And this is just the religions. Fuck.
I feel you, Aondeug. I only have the sketchiest of histories and some biological stuff for my two-three species. I've only started scratching the surface of the cultures and I still need to get more on paper (or the inter webs, you know how it is) for how they all think as a society/how they are taught to react to things/instincts AND I have to write a bit about their ridiculous relationships. And think of names for the relationships. :P and that's only for one species, haha, I haven't even started on the shapeshifters yet and since I've created the elves but don't feel like adding to them now I've allowed a friend of mine to make their culture. And we have a few religions. the main one (right now anyway) with 8 gods. whom you can rp with because I love my gods, so much. And probably another mile of things to do before I start to feel like it's maybe ALMOST done. Hahaa this is what happens when you like culture/worldbuilding too much. ALL OF THE THINGS.
Oh man, religion and similar cultural institutions are definitely something I need to think about more. I'm making the big mistake of trying to design culture for a hundred billion people, and even restricting it to Enra and Reionai still leaves me with maybe a few billion people to try to talk about. All I know is that at least some people on Enra are going to view the child-creation/raising process as religious (they're called Temples for a reason) because they're creating minds. Also the Stack is like the internet times infinity, plus a ton of bizarre epiphenomena from the higher-level connections, so I'm sure there are all sorts of cults floating around.
