a writing blog, sort of.

sideblog for ttrpg- & writing-related stuff. eventually I'll get around to tagging everything.

[young-replica]

[hbmmaster]

rpg setting with multiple competing units of damage/resilience used in different regions. you gotta worry about the conversion between hp celsius and hp fahrenheit

[hbmmaster]

"1 hp is the amount of damage dealt by a one gram sphere of pure iron traveling at one meter per second against a 1x1x1 meter cube of graphite at standard temperature and pressure" versus "it's so intuitive, 100 hp of damage hurts a lot and 0 hp of damage doesn't hurt at all so you can just think of it as 'percent pain'"

[hbmmaster]

it actually makes a lot of sense if you look into the history of it, see back in the first age Fantasy Dan Fahrenheit was a skilled artificer who designed high-precision health bars that were way more reliable and consistent than anything else that existed at the time. yes, the calibration points might seem archaic now, but at the time it was the most practical system realistically possible to reproduce at scale. and also it's like so intuitive because if an attack does 100 hp of damage it hurts a lot so it's l

[hbmmaster]

well technically originally* the international wizard council defined 0 hp to be equal to the "KO point", and yes for most practical applications when someone has 0 hp remaining they fall unconscious and need immediate medical attention (which we can all agree makes way more sense than how it works in hpF), but our understanding of health and damage has grown a lot in the centuries since then, and we now understand that the "KO point" isn't a true constant. so these days it's incorporated into the rest of the Fantasy Metric System by defining the Gargamel Constant precisely in terms of hp/mp*s², which is much more rigorous and exact.

*well if you want to go all the way back, when it was originally proposed the standard Health Point Celsius Scale was the opposite of what it is now, so someone's hp total represented the amount of damage they've taken instead of the amount of damage they could still take before reaching the KO point. this was extremely hard to use so it didn't last very long

[untitledworldbuildingblog]

Axmas

The yuletides of war

There hasn't been this much Christmas trouble since the Cuban mistletoe crisis.

[jethroq]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Random mansion generator

The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/random-mansion-generator.html

[something-from-elsewhere]

Oooooh! Saving this

[lady-feral]

That’s fun

[vesperlionheart]

Hey, but don’t fall asleep on this Medieval Fantasy City Generator   

[awrenthatwrites]

Reblogging for the last!

[writingquestionsanswered]

NEAT.

[cipheramnesia]

Random Mansion Generator sounds like a way to describe modern building practices.

[returnsandreturns]

i made my character a human fighter who’s a housewife/empty nester seeking adventure and wholesome fantasy violence after discovering that her husband is having an affair

is this……

is this how you dungeons 

is this how you dragons

[thegoodqueertheywarnyouabout]

im sorry, but is her age “it’s rude to ask a lady her age”?

[returnsandreturns]

yes. also her weight.

[fishbizkit]

this is a million percent how you dungeons AND dragons

[cedar-west-deactivated20230408]

If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...

Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?

Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?

Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?

Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?

Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?

[mishkatelwarriorgoddess]

Thank you so much for this!

[aquitainemariner]

This rule from A Pilot’s Purpose is not the first of its kind, but it is part of my attempt to bring the grid-based tactical game into the 21st century.

In A Pilot’s Purpose, the tactical game is only complex enough to sell you on the stakes and drama of the social game. Whenever the tactical game stops supporting that other half, we stop playing it!

If there’s one real contribution this game can make to the TTRPG space, it’s probably Downtime Cards! But the above attitude keeps everybody on the same page about why we’re playing. A Pilot’s Purpose has tactics and you can absolutely min-max your mech to pull off crazy combo. But the game isn’t ABOUT those things. Important distinction!

[thydungeongal]

i dont know how else but "confrontational" that guy could have meant the thing about eureka's grapple rules and "excess mechanical complexity"

actually that's kinda like exactly what the post was about wasn't it because he wouldn't know how smooth or not-smooth the grapple rules run in gameplay unless he played them RAW first but he's already cutting them out and that might risk breaking other elements of the game that interact with those rules

It's a sadly common impulse in the RPG hobby, one which even I'm not immune to. A lot of people are a bit too willing to coast by on first impressions of games and draw conclusions like "This will produce nothing of value in the game so I will simply make the executive decision to cut it out." Which, if you haven't even tried running the game yet, absolutely runs the risk of not getting the intended experience out of the game, but also as you pointed out runs the risk of affecting other parts of the system that interact with the "unnecessary" system!

Like, you know how I've railed about people who run D&D with only one set-piece combat encounter a day and it inevitably leads to challenging the player characters being much more difficult? That phenomenon has arisen from a similar situation: of people concluding that D&D, the game about resource management and dungeon combat, is boring if you play it as a game of resource management and dungeon combat, so they end up removing most of the resource management in service of having a cool combat scene that never happens because the game isn't supposed to produce that experience.

Like, D&D 5e does suffer from a lot of marketing and a culture of play that treats the game as a blank slate, but if you read the rules the game actually cares a lot about resource management and conserving resources throughout an extended period of time. So of course the game starts to suffer once you remove that consideration.

Now none of that is to say that designers are perfect: designers can in fact design systems and mechanics that do not output desirable results, either because they're nonsensical (within the fiction of the game) or don't harmonize with expectations of play. But you won't find these mechanics unless you play with them. It's valuable for designers to also stress test their own mechanics and find the circumstances in which they stop working as well.

[lily-stabby]

So imagine a DnD character who's whole motivation is 'X guy killed my parents and I need to find them' and the party just thinks 'ok, revenge quest, that's normal'

But when they finally find the guy the person with dead parents is just like "Hey buddy, long time no see. It's a shame we got separated, here's some money" and they're super chill.

The party is just confused and goes "Wait, why are you giving him gold?"

The guy just goes "Cause I owe him money?"

The party "But he killed your parents???"

"That's why I owe him money!"

[just-illegal]

[grasshoppergeography]

Hey All,

I've been away for some time, as we've been working really hard on something quite exciting:

let me present to you the world's first ever global ocean drainage basin map that shows all permanent and temporary water flows on the planet.

This is quite big news, as far as I know this has never been done before. There are hundreds of hours of work in it (with the data + manual work as well) and it's quite a relief that they are all finished now.

But what is an ocean drainage basin map, I hear most of you asking? A couple of years ago I tried to find a map that shows which ocean does each of the world's rivers end up in. I was a bit surprised to see there is no map like that, so I just decided I'll make it myself - as usual :) Well, after realizing all the technical difficulties, I wasn't so surprised any more that it didn't exist. So yeah, it was quite a challenge but I am very happy with the result.

In addition to the global map I've created a set of 43 maps for different countries, states and continents, four versions for each: maps with white and black background, and a version for both with coloured oceans (aka polygons). Here's the global map with polygons:

I know from experience that maps can be great conversation starters, and I aim to make maps that are visually striking and can effectively deliver a message. With these ocean drainage basin maps the most important part was to make them easily understandable, so after you have seen one, the others all become effortless to interpret as well. Let me know how I did, I really appreciate any and all kinds of feedback.

Here are a few more from the set, I hope you too learn something new from them. I certainly did, and I am a geographer.

The greatest surprise with Europe is that its biggest river is all grey, as the Volga flows into the Caspian sea, therefore its basin counts as endorheic.

An endorheic basin is one which never reaches the ocean, mostly because it dries out in desert areas or ends up in lakes with no outflow. The biggest endorheic basin is the Caspian’s, but the area of the Great Basin in the US is also a good example of endorheic basins.

I love how the green of the Atlantic Ocean tangles together in the middle.

No, the dividing line is not at Cape Town, unfortunately.

I know these two colours weren’t the best choice for colourblind people and I sincerely apologize for that. I’ve been planning to make colourblind-friendly versions of my maps for ages now – still not sure when I get there, but I want you to know that it’s just moved up on my todo-list. A lot further up.

Minnesota is quite crazy with all that blue, right? Some other US states that are equally mind-blowing: North Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming. You can check them all out here.

Yes, most of the Peruvian waters drain into the Atlantic Ocean. Here are the maps of Peru, if you want to take a closer look.

Asia is amazingly colourful with lots of endorheic basins in the middle areas: deserts, the Himalayas and the Caspian sea are to blame. Also note how the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra are divided.

I mentioned earlier that I also made white versions of all maps. Here’s Australia with its vast deserts. If you're wondering about the weird lines in the middle: that’s the Simpson desert with its famous parallel sand dunes.

North America with white background and colourful oceans looks pretty neat, I think.

Finally, I made the drainage basin maps of the individual oceans: The Atlantic, the Arctic, the Indian and the Pacific. The Arctic is my favourite one.

I really hope you like my new maps, and that they will become as popular as my river basin maps. Those have already helped dozens of environmental NGOs to illustrate their important messages all around the world. It would be nice if these maps too could find their purpose.

[squareallworthy]

Beautiful.

It appears that there is only one place on Earth where three ocean drainage basins meet, and that is at Triple Divide Peak in Montana, USA. Rain that falls there may eventually flow to the Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic Ocean.

[wintersongstress]

wilf (wip i’d like to finish)

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.

[mindfulwrath]

May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.

[jeanjauthor]

I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.

[oh-opossum]

One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.

[brehaaorgana]

More stuff!:

European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own

Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!

R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.

Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.

Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.

Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide

Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)

Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.

This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.

Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.

And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:

Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...

Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...

Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...

Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...

Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.

Also:

This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.

Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009

(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn't try to read every essay.)

[dedicatedfollower467]

If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!

[oldschoolfrp]

From r/StainedGlass, posted by u/Narkareth -- the moathouse from AD&D modules T1: The Village of Hommlet (1979) and T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil (1987)

[alexanderwales]

Kicked out of the adventuring party because I healed the barbarian when he was trying to make a redemptive sacrifice.

[alexanderwales]

Kicked out of the adventuring party because my leitmotif had the wrong time signature.

[alexanderwales]

Kicked out of the adventuring party because my transformation sequence keeps taking too long and also I'm the only one with a transformation sequence and maybe I ended up in the wrong genre but they really could have been nicer about it.

[alexanderwales]

Kicked out of the adventuring party because I keep using the phrase "petite bourgeoisie".

[jennamoran]

what ELSE are you supposed to call bourgeoisie with 1-3 hit dice?

[rederiswrites]

There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!

[ahedderick]

This is a big reason that I have always loved the Brother Cadfael novels, set in the mid 1100s. Written by Ellis Peters, each book has such a vivid sense of the place and the time period. Many different settings around Shrewsbury are described, along with the people and their various jobs.

[toooldfortumbling]

I love that kind of world building and would add that many resources were tightly regulated that we don't consider nowadays. Examples are the right to herd your pigs in an oak forest belonging to a specific monastery (saw an example where an altar piece had a carved pig to make sure the claim was known and advertised) or down to which farmers had the right to tree leaves in the fall (shortage of other animal bedding in certain Swiss valleys). The idea of a wilderness in a medieval setting is not what we think.

[rederiswrites]

Great points! Thank you.

[batbetbitbotbut]

Forever recommending A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry as an introductory resource for this! The author is a historian of the ancient mediterranean and he has a lengthy two-part blog post on "lonely cities": how fictional cities tend to look in pseudomedieval fantasy versus how real cities actually worked, specifically how they reshaped the land use for many miles around. Part I, part II, or available read aloud on YouTube here.

[terrafey]

up-and-coming model known only as Dima gets his first solo cover story: are we seeing the beginning of life-long career?

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