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sinsin08051

Hey btw, another worldbuilding thing: You can, and actually should have weird and impractical cultural things. They’re not inherently unrealistic, for as long as you address the realistic consequences as well.

Let’s say you’ve got a city where there’s tame white doves everywhere. They’re not pests, they’re regarded as sacred, holy protectors of the city, and the whole city cares for them and feeds them like they’re pets. They’re so tame because it’s a social taboo to hurt or scare one. Nice pretty doves :)

Then someone points out that even if they’re not seen as pests, doesn’t having a completely unchecked feral pigeon population - that not only isn’t being culled, but actively fed and cared for - mean that there would be bird shit absolutely all over the place?

A part of you wants to say no, because these are your nice, pretty doves. To explain that there’s a reason why they’re not shitting all over the place, maybe they’re super-intelligent and specifically bred and trained to not shit all over the place. The logistics of how, exactly, could anyone breed and train a flock of feral birds go unaddressed.

An even worse solution would be to not have those birds, editing them out of the world. No, they spark joy, you can’t just toss them out!

Now, consider: Yes, yes they would, but the city also has an extensive public sanitation service that’s occupied 90% of the time by cleaning bird shit off of everything. One of the most common last names in the area actually translates to “one who scrapes off dove shit”, and it’s a highly respected occupation. And thanks to the sheer necessity of constantly regularly cleaning everything, the city enjoys a much higher standard of cleanliness, and less public health issues caused by poor public sanitation.

The doves do protect the city. By shitting fucking everywhere.

moonybyte

While I absolutely love your idea, I just want to say that you can easily reduce public bird shitting from Pigeons by offering them comfortable lodgings where they can sleep and feed. Sure, you need to clean THOSE, but the pigeons shit a lot less all over town.

The Augsburg concept has one big pigeon house every 500m in which wild pigeons are fed, protected from weather and have nesting opportunities. Cities doing that have WAY less uncontrolled populations (since they can take out eggs if they feel they need reduce the population), way less shit AND a healthy population since it’s easier for veterinarians to notice and get to sick animals.

So I’d say one can of course still keep your general idea……but there’s also those MASSIVE palace-like pidgeon houses and only the most worthy are allowed to enter and directly interact with the pigeons (feed them, heal them, clean their lodgings). One big entrance for the human servants (priests??) and millions of small holes for the pigeons.

In fact, one could potentially turn your idea around IN THE PIDGEONS FAVOR. So your world is like ours and most major cities have a big feral pigeon population. And most of those cities HATE the pigeons and try to fight them and stuff. And they think that pigeon worshipper town is frigging cuckoo. BUT when comparing, then pigeon worshipper town is ridiculously clean and beautiful. No bird shit everywhere, no ruined house facades and statues from erosion through bird poop. Pigeon haters go “how tf are you so clean, you have birds EVERYWHERE???” and the worshippers shrug and show their little bird temples spread around town that keep their precious birdies AND their town pretty.

plucky-passerine

I think this is a really good example of how research can greatly improve your worldbuilding! You don’t have to be perfectly accurate - it is fantasy after all - but the real world is so much more clever and beautiful than any of us know

curlicuecal

advice that’s stuck with me: you don’t have to work inwards to justify a premise (e.g., ‘how would it ever be plausible to use snakes as currency’) as long as you work outwards in interesting ways from that premise (e.g., ‘how would a society that used snakes as currency look different? what would they use for wallets?’)

gholateg

I love this idea that OP thought there wasn’t a town that had already handled it’s “We fucking love birds you guys, like for fucking reals” problem already through sheer human chutzpah.

Humans are THE pack binding specie. A way will be found.

shaudo-of-a-doubt

For anyone else interested in or looking for more information about pigeon houses, the traditional word for them is dovecote.

mcnostril

Herbert, knight.

Good, trustworthy, excellent reviews on yelp.

thecollectibles

Wolf Journey by toubitan

#humblewood

typhlonectes

warmer-gaze

veth version of caleb hands >:3

txttletale

h… how is any of that racist

assuming that you mean my posts about the 5e monster manual entry for orcs and how insanely racist it is–by happy coincidence i have a bunch of sources about this strewn haphazardly across my browser so i’m happy to answer this.

so we will start with this. the words ‘tribe’ and ‘chief’ are deeply, deeply racialised. they have been used throughout colonial (and well into modern and present-day!) history to describe groups of indigenous peoples across the world—with implications of 'primitive’ people and societies within the Western myth of linear societal progress. europeans have nations and kings–africans and native americans have tribes and chiefs. the 'tribe’ is not a neutral concept–it is a concept that was constructed by europeans in positions of global military domination over a century to justify a narrative about the linear progress of civilization to justify domination [1][2]. of course, it’s not just the use of the words 'tribe’ or 'chief’ but their deployment here in the context of what is obviously supposed to be a 'primitive’ method of of government–the 'orcish tribe’ is inherently violence, a 'savage’ society entirely built on “bloodlust” and “fear”

regis stella puts it much better than i could in this account of an early 20th-century travel memoir in Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject

while we’re on this point i figure i’ll add all the other language around 'savagery’, 'inherent bloodlust’ and so on in the monster manual here to further illustrate my point: it’s all quite rote and repeats itself a lot.

now, wait, waiiiit, wait a second. wait a moment. hold up what was that last thing

oh thats not good. having to explain why this is racist feels a little like having to explain why its bad to hit people with hammers but i’ll do it anyway: the comparison of real-life 'tribes’ of people to insects, vermin, and pestilences is a very real element of genocidal rhetoric–from the holocaust [3] to the rwandan genocide [4]. what is the implied correct societal responose to a tribe that is 'like a plague?’

finally, this is the part that made me say “holy fucking shit this is in the 5th edition monster manual?” because it is pure undiluted gygaxian eugenics shit. first of all, the narrative of the ever-swelling horde, the indigenous or Asian people as an undiffernetiated mass of amorphous Other, is an old one and one that’s been used to devalue the lives of people of colour and justify violence against 'the horde’. but the part that’s absolutely jaw-dropping is the use of the tropes of reproductive racism–the narrative of Black and indigenous hyperfecundity is also an established racist trope, one which was instrumental in the forced sterilisation of Black and Native women in the USA [5] and now manifests itself in the “great replacement” demographic anxieties of modern racism [6] – think of White Genocide conspiracy theories and the 14 Words. and of course that is to say nothing of the fact that is made very clear and reiterated (and mechanicised in the form of the Half-Orc player race!) that WotC wants to be very clear about how much orcs “readily crossbreed with other races”. this is miscegenation anxiety, plain and simple–somethign else stella talks about.

so yeah! hopefully nobody will ever ask me this fucking question again! (this is just across two fucking pages of the monster manual by the way don’t get me started on the shit that’s in the other books! god forbid i even think about campaign modules!!)

rain-rome

is there a broader point to be made abt humanoid races being in the *monster* manual in the first place. like whats up w that

txttletale

game critic lucrécia alves wrote a pretty good article on this recently

dailyadventureprompts

Just going to chime in about how in previous editions orcs were specifically mentioned as seeing women as property, prizing them above the many other goods they pilfered during their raids on “civilized” peoples. 5e may have scrubbed outright references to sexuality from its text, but the orcs are still BUILT on the “they’re coming for our wives and daughters” anxiety that most xenophobes and racists have boiling away in the back of their brains to this day.

Also my own longer posts on orcs as an encapsulation of “the savage other” and how d&d unwittingly recycles colonial propaganda

webvein

No one:

Still no one:

Me: What if leaf tailed gecko, but the leaf is carnivorous?

lovelymimic

Welcome to Mimic Ikea! Don't worry about it.

miquellakind

the smiling peninsula

miquellakind

Ailing Hale Village

Bridge of Sacrifice Gain

Callu Baptismal Church

Castle Morne Borne

Church of Pilgrimage Respect

Demi-Human Forest Ruins Development

Earthbore fun Cave

Forest Lookout Tower

Fourth Church of ______

Impaler Doctor's Catacombs

Isolated Friendful Merchant's Shack

Minor Erdtree of some size

Morne Tunnel Non-Indentured Servitude Location

Oridys's Rise

TombsCradleward Catacombs

TombsCradleward Cave

TombsCradleward Ruins

Tower of Return

Walking Mausoleum Cenotaph

Weeping Smiling Evergaol

Witchbane boon Ruins Neighbourhood

don't you want to go?

thecollectibles

Knights by LUOLIN

milobyte

giant mecha cryptid thing i forgot to post here before.

puppygirllaika

The power lines don't go anywhere anymore. The cities they were built to light lay on a spectrum from craters to derelicts, the bricks themselves almost aglow with radiation. The turbines spin aimlessly, what little charge they make seeping into the ground where downed cables have buried themselves over the years, their charge leaking into the dirt hour after hour, day after day. The power would be nice to have, but there's just not enough of us left, not enough to scrounge together the kind of infrastructure we would need to capture it. The only thing they power now is their caretaker.

She's a rare sight. I don't know how many wind farms she was tasked with before the fall, but we've heard over the radio that she wanders at least two states over, and she takes half a year to make her rounds and visit us again. She's dangerous only in the way of wildlife, you just stay out of her way and let her do her silent, pointless work. She checks each turbine once in turn, slows it to a stop, connects to it and diagnoses it, patches up the wires and replaces old components, and eventually spins it up again to catch the breeze. She's careful and methodical, and takes two days to work through every tower in the old farm on the ridge. It used to be a daunting time, a fearful question of the threat she posed. Then in time, it was somber moment, a reminder forced on us of what we'd lost when the bombs fell. but it's a celebration now, we make a night of it. we cobble together something of a feast, we light our bonfires, and we watch her silhouette against the setting sun as she pokes and pecks along the ridge, then drink in celebration as her lights come on at night and we get to watch her work all through the dark. We take those moments of joy where we can, and she's become one of them.

When she leaves, the question that hangs heavy over all of us is if she'll make it back. She's massive and majestic, but she's advanced and made of countless resources too, ones we won't be able to manufacture for god only knows how many decades. Someone desperate or stupid enough will try to take her down, we know that half a dozen tried and failed so far, but one day they will succeed. either that, or she'll simply run out of parts and power to maintain herself. one day she simply won't come back to us. I hope it's long after I'm gone. I hope my children and my grandchildren get to watch her tiptoe on the ridge above us, get to watch her dance in the setting sun the way I have these many years. I hope she lasts until we are all the kind of people that can come together to keep her among us forever.

[op i hope you don't mind, i was struck with inspiration at this and had to write it <3]

another-rpg-sideblog

Pact of the Body by lucifer1389

quakeandquiver

Is it too late to do #makeaterriblecomicday2025? I can't draw when it's hot 🫠

inbabylontheywept

In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.

dartagnantt

XP without Killing | Rewarding your players for accomplishing things in the other two pillars of the game

PDFs of this and more can be found over on at my Patreon here! I release everything for free, so your support makes this possible. I've also started making a new system based off of 5e, 6th Dawn! Become a patron and join the playtest.

A new trial, mostly for me to come up with things. This time, more XP awards, because although there is a paragraph and 3 listed examples of how to award XP for reaching 'milestones' and another two paragraphs for roleplay. It doesn't feel like they put any actual thought into it, they just point at rules designed for combat encounters and say 'that, but not monsters'. Also, what is a deadly encounter for rolelay?

Furthermore, they only really cover XP budgets in that section not once does it actually tell you what counts for awarding experience. So I'm doing a due diligence and telling GMs to reward ingenuity

And now to plug my stuff. I release homebrews weekly over on my Patreon. Anyone who pledges $1 or more per post don't have to wait a month to see them, and also help fund my being alive habit.

At the moment, they have exclusive access to the following:

Lawyer Background

Circle of the Ooze

Greed Domain

Points of Inspiration

I also have four classes, and two splatbooks over on DriveThruRPG to check out:

The Rift Binder. A class specialising in summoning monsters and controlling the battlefield.

The Witch Knight. A class that combines swords and sorcery in the most literal way.

The Werebeast. A class that turns you into a half beast to destroy your foes.

The Beguiler. A spellcaster dedicated to illusions, enchantments, and general fuckery.

d'Artagnan's Adventurer Almanac. A compendium of races, subclasses, feats, spells, monsters and more!

d'Artagnan's Lycanthrope Survival Guide. A book of lore, stats, and werebeast subclasses for lycanthropes.

bogleech

A small sample of the coming Mortasheen Tabletop RPG Book

At the link above is a 45 page condensed PDF sample of the upcoming 300+ page Mortasheen TTRPG Core Rulebook. This condensed sample contains just the following:

-The Biotypes (player races)

-The College of Genetics location and its Dean

-The Runoff, a sample adventure locale in Mortasheen City

-An explanation of the "Green Goo" that Mortasheen runs on

-24 monster pages, some of them still never before seen by anyone but the original Kickstarter backers, from a planned final count of 152 monsters.

No gameplay instructions, but monster pages retain their statblocks for you to look at.

All full color artwork in this sample is by myself or by @revretch, while pixel sprites are by hashtag_underscore, beachboogyman, myself, and Pokemon: Quarantine Crystal's @latenightagain !

Any money from this zine-sized digital preview will go partially into everyday survival and partially into improving the print quality of the final book. Its kickstarter print budget is still with me, but only covers a just-average quality for the book's first run! There are still better paper weights and color options to consider! After that print run finishes and ships out to all 2020 backers, that final book will go up for public purchase, maybe by the end of this year (2024) if everything works out.

Boost and spread this if you can; I've worked on Mortasheen as a personal world building project for over twenty years, and the coming RPG release is a project that took multiple people at least fifteen years.

FIND OUT WHAT KIND OF MONSTER IS CALLED "SHARKITECT"

bogleech

Boosting this for those who can't wait for the full book or don't expect to afford it anyway; we want it available for general purchase by October to December but it's going to be so huge, the physical version will likely hover around $75!

I never did find a more affordable printing company that can do what we need, but I know there are tons more of them to investigate and all suggestions are still welcome, as we're still in the final draft's cleanup and test printing stages for at least a couple more weeks!

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