... I may expand to nine kinds of dragon, I suddenly really want plant dragons... and fuck even numbers honestly. but I don't know, I'm not sure they fit the same aesthetic... sighs maybe something where they magically bred themselves into plants? artificial dragon race? maybe???
I've got tree dragons. Gnarled and burned wood on ash-covered soil, and some are large, and their boughs look like wings. Their sap is a deep, rich, colour, but you do not cut a tree in that wood without bringing misfortune down onto your village. You do not venture so deep you lose sight of the edge of the forest, either, unless you are a child. You are permitted to collect fallen branches, and the wood burns hot and long in stoves. It's good for other things, too, if you got long or thick enough branches and tools that can work them. Sometimes there are deep black gems on the ground. They crack easily but their edges are sharper than the finest steel.
Is this thread for anyone's worldbuilding because I wanna tell people about the Dalarn Empire and the Emperor Ishtan vos Chosburn VII (transdude) and his Empresses Hippolyta (transwoman) and Tiamati (feminine genderqueer). Also their like?? Nine kids or seven kids? I need to doublecheck. Also Aspects because I took the idea from Homestuck and ran with it. (Entropy and Destruction and Air and Mind and Life oh my! XD)
Go for it. I made the thread so I could be self indulgent; far be it for me to hold anyone else back.
I wanna flesh out some of those humans-with-a-bit-of-dwarfiness-in-some-cultures but my creativity is tired ;_;
okay I think I'm firming up my outlines of races and such here. Taking this... from the top, semi-literally. Children of the Sky: Dragons. Mostly recognizable varieties, seven general types as I outlined before. All children of the sky can fly (unless they are/have-become handicapped in some way, and if a dragon can fly with neither wings nor magic it's usually considered a mercy to kill them). Worship the sky, have a great deal of astronomy/astrology knowledge as a part of their religious practices. Highly magical; most are shapeshifters, which has resulted in a lot of hybrids over time. Will not settle in deep caves or anywhere they can't reach the sky easily (even those in the deep rainforests live more near to the canopy, while those in glaciers always have skylights). Children of the Clouds, Children of the Wind: Various draconic hybrid races, because some dragons just can't keep it in their pants. (Like, you think humans are bad? oh man, dragons tho.) Generally, "children of the wind" is used exclusively in reference to part-dragon-part-humans who are not direct hybrids, and are less than half dragon overall; that is to say, at least one parent was mixed. This group has kind of formed their own splinter society and can be considered a true-breeding race in their own right. "Children of the Clouds," in contrast, are dragon/anything and usually direct hybrids; because they tend to inherit sapience from their dragon parents, they rarely feel connected enough to their animal kin to breed. Children of the Earth: Mundane animals, including humans. The term is often used in regards to humans specifically, as there aren't really any other sapient races among the earth-children. Not capable of magic themselves, but can use enchanted items. "Leeches": A special subset of human, and the reason dragons don't try to enslave humans with magic anymore; they may be possible in other species, but if so, it's extremely rare. Basically, if a pregnant mother is exposed to a great deal of ambient magic, her child absorbs it - and will keep absorbing it as they grow. Leeches are magic thieves, sapping away the power of spells directed against them, magic items they touch - and even the magic (and thus, life) of dragons themselves, in extreme circumstances. Such as, you know, slave rebellions. The Leaf-Bound: Remember how I mentioned that dragons are up and into anything? Yeah, that includes plants. There's a lot of debate as to whether these beings are descended from dragons in truth (either offspring or, occasionally, you'll hear wild claims of a dragon who has permanently transmuted themselves) or simply are, like leeches, the result of the ambient magic of dragon society. Kind of fey, known to often have completely different priorities from the other races on the surface. They don't have a "children of the x" name because dragons are fully convinced that they're not a natural occurrence. Children of the Shallows: Hybrids with children of the deep (see below), far less common than children of the wind/clouds. Often amphibious, usually pretty alien, commonly called deep-touched when the blood is of a lesser concentration (which, again, pretty exclusively happens with humans). Children of the Deeps: Local horrorterror budget. Three varieties, all with magic equal to, but usually very different from, the dragons, and not often understood by the surface races as a whole. Also, about the only things dragons won't fuck. The Children of the Vast are basically magical alien whales; the 'vast' in this context is the vast and wide open sea, where other creatures cannot really settle. They're the most commonly encountered of the deep children, and the only ones that have a social structure the other races can really recognize (as they stick largely to family groups), but because of their size, there are almost no hybrids. Children of the Dark are creatures from the abyssal sea, where no light reaches and the sky is unknown; though they do sometimes rarely come to the surface, most of what's known of them is from washed-up corpses. There are rumors of strains that live under less pressure in caves, but those are Unconfirmed. According to the Children of the Vast, they fear the sun and believe that being exposed to it will kill them. And then the last is the Children of the Core, which are actually amphibious for a certain definition of it; they're attracted not so much to dark places (they're completely blind) as they are creatures of the core of the planet itself, hence the name. Thus, they're found both at deep sea vents and fractures and also at more surface-level volcanos.
a follow up thought has resulted in the addition of critters called Mistrals which are basically the result of dragons trying to duplicate human success with domestic animals via magic and interbreeding. They're children of the clouds that are a medley of small carnivores with draconic traits, and they're semi-true-breeding (ie they no longer need dragons to reproduce, but they're not a perfectly defined single species). It turns out that trying to breed magic into creatures tends to also give them full sapience, and that fully sapient creatures don't typically take kindly to being pets or working animals. Whoops, say the dragons. Fuck off, say the mistrals, as they go off to do Cat Things. They tend to pop up rather randomly around other societies, and humans, ignorant of their origins, tend to view them as good luck. tldr dragons screw up everything, again.
I'm struggling to find a way to differentiate kitsune from nogitsune which isn't Good versus Evil or based on gods which in my 'verse don't intervene like that.
Traditionally, from what I've heard, kitsune are also known as zenko, "good foxes", which are holy, and nogitsune are yako, "field foxes", which are mischievous and sometimes malicious. I was going to have the nogitsune be more closely related to kumiho (Korean fox spirits who eat people).
The obvious one is part of what I've got for my light and dark elves; the "good" ones work in daylight and can interact with humans better than the nocturnal ones. (The good-evil divide isn't actually as sharp as it's assumed to be. I intend to fuck about with it a lot.)
I had this thing where Kumiho originally ate people and were naturally more aggressive than Kitsune, but over time they'd stopped eating people because it resulted in the people's relatives trying to hunt down the 'man-eating fox'.
I think my best option is to go with the kitsune have both powers and limitations that nogitsune lack, and maybe fur colour; especially holy foxes were traditionally white-furred. And maybe hint that gods did intervene noticeably in the distant past and it turned out a horrible mess so they don't anymore... I had an idea for a city which is riddled with magical traps left over from the days when it was regularly under siege. I'm not sure if that's as good an idea as I thought it was, or how best to play it. I need to balance it between Ursula Vernon's "Saints of San Axolotl" and a place people reasonably could and would live.
I have a world I've been building with my cousin, based off of the really old view of the world that was required for the Biblical Flood to make sense. The world's in a hard, somewhat ovoid/pie tin-y 'bubble' floating in an infinite ocean of magic liquid. Water in this world is a magical liquid-what the outside liquid becomes when it comes into a bubble, in fact-and water vapor can go right through the bubble easy. Water volume in the world's maintained by 'doors' in the sky/top of bubble opening and letting more water in. The stars are other bubbleworlds. Also one of the magic systems there is based around poetry. Huge magipoetry recitals can be used to expand the world. There's a bunch of sapient species-humans, which are plainsdwellers, (cold-water)voyagers, and sometimes coldweather mountain dwellers; avians, which are brightly-coloured cat-sized corvids with prehensile tongues, wing-hands, and telekinesis, and who are forest-dwellers; dragons, which are furry and live in hot mountains and deserts mostly aboveground (although many draconic workplaces are underground); lacertillians/lizards, who live with the dragons (mostly underground, naturally being burrowers) and tend to fashion their own shed skins into clothing, and insectoids, who are tropical voyagers (specifically, Pacific Islander counterpart culture). There's a lot of trading.
