Mention a random quirk of your world

With a total of 40 total True Divines and Black Monarchs (twenty to each), humans have been known to assemble their own pantheon of deities in different combinations. Some devote themselves to a single deity, some exclusively worship a few True Divines and some exclusively worship a couple Black Monarchs. There are also five groups who worship combinations of True Divines and Black Monarchs, though it's also not uncommon for this to happen on the individual level.

While there are a number of worlds with a significant lack of technology compared to the rest of Occupied Space, they don't exist with enough frequency to necessitate universal laws governing the proper conduct when dealing with these worlds. Cue people such as combat cyborgs and corporate trained psykers declaring themselves gods on these worlds.

The nature of the primary means of FTL, the Zerospace Breacher, necessitates the placement of gravity sinks that for the most part are incorporated into the ship's architecture. You can't place sinks in conflicting positions or it will put unneeded strain on the ship, so the classic decks of a ship configuration ends up being standard for Zerospace capable spacecraft. Meanwhile, spacecraft lacking Zerospace Breachers must make due with either rotary habitats or simple microgravity. Some ancient ships would take advantage of gradual acceleration to produce gravity-like effects, but that sort of thing isn't very cost effective.

The True Divine Voxlga is one of the few True Divines with a physical avatar on earth. She appears as a beautiful young women and is known by the titles: The Voice of The People, The Speaker of the Many and The Desires of All. She is a recent True Divine, as her existence is entirely tied to human beings in a collective mindset of views and desires. This also affects the views of her other avatars. As such, hateful masses invoke her avatar Voxlga'Conten and masses with a collective desires for good invoke Voxlga'Delic.

One of my worlds has made cybernetic augmentation safer through the use of a stem cell like substance called Gene Paste, which is used to alter humanity subtly to better accept cybernetics, or alternatively grow new body parts.

So...Meld?

Never heard of that but if it's anything like what I described then yes. I think...

Cybernetics tend to cause tissue rejection the more they interact with the human body. There are drugs that can counter this but this makes the prospective cyborg dependent on these drugs to survive. There was a project to create a genetic modification that could remove this dependency but as a result the function of the liver was altered and the body require certain cybernetics in order to survive.

From my sci-fi GURPS campaign:

Cybernetics do not eat your soul. The belief that they do is rather widespread, however, resulting in serious social penalties for anybody with a lot of visible modification.

The reason the rumor got started in the first place is that most people who end up having to get lots of cybernetic replacements also have some serious cases of PTSD to go with it (or, if they had their arms and legs chopped off voluntarily to get some cool chrome instead, were probably a little strange to begin with).

Cybernetics don't eat your soul in my setting, unless you get cranial implants. Different story then.

And gene paste is used as a bonding agent for the cybernetics mostly to avoid depency on drugs or specialized implants.

edited 4th Nov '14 4:06:22 PM by EchoingSilence

Good Republic, Evil Empire is inverted. The Empire is what happened when the creatures that would normally be divided along Five Races and the Fantasy Axis of Evil put aside their differences to counter the kingdom of Dragonheim's opression. Thus ghouls, beastmen and orcks stand shoulder-to-shoulder with dwarves, men, and elves, and are armed and chaplained by the local Saintly Church.

edited 5th Nov '14 2:25:21 AM by dvorak

The CEO of the largest company in the world is the personal champion of the Black Monarch of progress. His company's success is very much attributed to the influence of the deity.

None of the factions in my Sci-Fi setting are race-specific: all species are present in all factions.

Kitsunes are more than foxes. They can be any kind of canine, including wolves or any breed of domestic dog. One of the main characters is a Pug Kitsune.

Your Character Sheet is as good as a Resume throughout the Empire.

edited 22nd Nov '14 2:56:08 AM by dvorak

Generally, most people are aware of half-truths on how the universe really runs. There are some really weird things out there, but not any details on this weird stuff. People's head sometimes explode for no good reason, there are objects and persons that blatantly defy physics, there is information such as sounds and sights that can completely alter the inner workings of a human body, strange psychic signals from unknown entities prelude catastrophic events, edritch forces lurk in Zerospace, but nobody knows anything beyond that, and the last detail is still in its infancy and not widely recognized. This is how most of the government and corporate conspiracies like it.

edited 6th Nov '14 10:03:23 PM by MaxwellDaring

In my Urban Fantasy setting, human magic revolves around manipulating the physical properties of objects. A cotton shirt becomes as tough as kevlar. A sheet of paper becomes as stiff as steel. A chunk of concrete attains the density of air and volume to match.

One of the things Shapers (magic users) have done with this is create the Paradox Bow. The Paradox bow is favored for two reasons. The first is that , due to the nature of Enchanting, items start to loose their abnormal propeties as soon as they loose contact with the Shaper. Bows leave you in contact with a projectile up until it's launched. This permits the Shaper to use Abnormal Ammo to it's fullest as everything from human hairs, lead pipes, rolled up clothes, and even a chunk of styrofoam can be crafted into lethal arrows. Coroners had a nightmare of a time explaining how a man was impaled with a baseball bat until they got used to magic.

The second, and more perplexing, feature of the paradox bow is the modification of the spring constant of the bow it'self. The user lowers the spring constant in order to draw the bow, making it soft and easy to draw, then raises it rapidly as they release the "arrow", causing it to launch the projectile with inhuman force. This seems a blatant violation of conservation of energy but most Shapers agree that this can not be the case and the paradox bow must be drawing energy from another, unknown source.

edited 6th Nov '14 8:11:04 PM by Belisaurius

In a story of mine where Earth has been irradiated after a nuclear war which has left 55% of the planet inhospitable, the resident mega-corporation/world government has created a special device capable of sifting through, manipulating, and mixing people's genes to make mutation-free children in an attempt to repopulate the planet. As a result, LBGT peoples are not only generally accepted, they're encouraged, with various benefits being given by the company, to use this device to have and raise children.

edited 7th Nov '14 1:15:32 PM by Avenuewriter

A.I.s are split up between True and Standard. True A.I.s are full people just in a artificial body, they are rarely seen due to a lack of senses causing them to go insane with various research trying to fix this.

Standard A.I.s are a little better than autonomous programs being capable of limited thought out of their programmed parameters.

There are two planes that are linked to the physical realm: the Astral Plane and the Shadow Plane. Plane-Striders can shift into them using congruence points, which are the same in both the normal world and the plane they're shifting to. The geometry of the planes once you get there is pretty bizarre, so it can be difficult to find your way back once you go on an expedition in there.

The Shadow Plane has slower time than the material world (several hours inside equate to a minute outside), and the Astral Plane has the opposite effect. The time dilation can also be exploited by Plane-Striders using a skill called skimming, which involves partially shifting into the planes to speed up or slow down time for themselves (or others by touching them).

If you can navigate successfully in the Planes, you can visit all manner of other dimensions and different locations within your own reality. It's easier said than done, though - one recurring character in my novels pops up in different universes while trying to make his way home after being tricked into getting lost in the Astral Plane. Unfortunately, the time dilation means that by the time he gets back 40 relative years have passed compared to his 1 subjective year.

Vgvghhvhvhvg

edited 4th Feb '15 12:05:58 PM by Zulus

A company called Athena Genetics manufacturers a new easy to use short term medecine called a Propak that uses genepaste to seal up wounds and help clot up bleeding for at least 24 hours before your body either heals itself, or you can get to a doctor.

At the top tier of spaceship (this is mainly a civilian word. Militaries prefer "spacecraft" while spacers go for "space vehicle") piloting are the self-aware AI ships. These are leagues above the common drone ships, capable of miraculous feats of electronic warfare and often packing enough nanotech to start a post-scarcity economy. Although many planets have their own laws against self-aware artificial intelligence, very few attempt to enforce these restrictions on an AI ship. The last one to attempt to intercept an AI ship was left with enough space debris from the ensuing firefight to knock out every satellite in orbit around the planet this conflict took place over.

Under AI ships are the Podded. These people undergo full and permanent integration with their ships, giving them total control over every aspect of the ship at the cost of their human bodies. For all intents and purposes, they have become the ship in question. Since it technically isn't brain uploading, simply being a rather roundabout way of producing similar results, nobody can persecute Podded. The Podded almost always have access to a good Black Box to give them constant access to Transnet. Otherwise, they may go insane from lack of contact. Podded are very popular around Transnet forums since they usually don't have anything better to do. Spacers tend to admire Podded to almost hero-worship levels, while planetsiders usually don't get what all the hype's about.

Drone ships are much less sophisticated than AI ships, even if they maintain a personality or seem very articulate. The truth is, they have no self awareness to call their own and are given orders by humans and/or tanshumans. While most drones are small and dependent upon a main mothership, drone ships have no need for a mothership and can go off into space for centuries at a time.

Cyberterminals are ship interfaces plugged directly into a pilot. The simplest of these are compatible with any neural port, while the most complex arrays require dedicated neural ports all along the spinal column to take the data load. Unlike the rest of the high end piloting methods, the cyberterminal still uses a physical interface to aid in the fluidity of actions done on the cyberterminal. Smaller military ships can use a crew of one cyberpilot, particularly the iconic Arsenal Frigate, while larger ships need more than one terminal as well as a number of normal techies, but they can operate on a skeleton crew compared to regular spacecraft.

The world united into various factions, the most prominent being the Western Union and the Eastern Alliance (there exist smaller neutral factions) and a cold war began anew. With the Western Union having begun work on teleportation technology. This lead to a horrible day known only as the "Jump Incident" where bending of reality opened dark pockets of some other reality in various locations around the world.

These pockets make the world a bit like Roadside Picnic and have become popular zones for scientist teams of both the Western Union and Eastern Alliance to put their conflict to truce and try to understand how exactly these Deadzones work. What they do understand is that the human psyche is somewhat influential in these zones.

I only skimmed this topic. Having read some of the answers, it is clear to me that I must binge-read this thread one of these days. Such awesome world quirks some of you guys have (ones I've skimmed over).

The world of my novel here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HMGYHTK Has After the End scavenged-punk version of desktop computers and the Internet (all in green text). Only in the big city, though. It's only a brief couple of passages in Chapter 6, but they're there.

Then there is the thing that's in-progress in perpetuity https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=14143907910A59255900&page=1#5 which has this quirk: The walled city of Flynn is one in which people will eat anything that moves / where most creatures are considered meat, but stray dogs can make themselves immune from being butchered for restaurant menus by eating human flesh. The people there have a superstition about cannibalism-by-proxy and the dogs are allowed to roam because their eating of human flesh actually comes from innocent circumstances.