Mention a random quirk of your world

One character class is known as a Bear Slayer, and while they may look like deranged berserkers who just really hate bears, they're actually holy warriors trained to fight against the bear Eldritch Abomination Ur-Sin and his vile spawn.

They specialize in doing extra damage to bears and casting bear specific spells.

From my crossover setting (which has its own thread on the World Building forum), Equestria is a Fisher Kingdom. This has become a teensy bit of a problem following its merging with Eastern Canada during the Convergence, as all of the humans who were in that part of Canada turned into Equestrian races, and have had to adjust to a lack of opposable digits (griffons, dragons and minotaurs notwithstanding), not to mention that everyone's photo ID now depicts them as the wrong species.

Even humans who weren't in the area at the time of the Convergence can be irreversibly changed if they stay in Equestria for a long enough period of time (roughly one month and four days). Because of this most countries give their ambassadors to Equestria half-month terms so they get home from the job with their species intact. However, in one instance the Czech ambassador of the time had to stay fro three months to sort out a complicated diplomatic incident, and upon returning home, had to explain to his family why he was now a zebra.

edited 3rd Jun '15 12:56:29 PM by MapleSamurai

I assume that at some point somebody makes the prerequisite horrible "Czebra" pun?

Well, that explains why Equestrians are so unrelentingly nice .

Quirk 15: Sir Felix Hawthorne joined the OE in order to escape from his generic high-fantasy home reality after an incident involving a dragon, a king with a lisp, and first class malicious compliance. He serves as a pilot and technical specialist, despite insisting that anything of a higher tech level than the renaissance era is 'technomancery' [sic] and that anything that he cannot explain was probably caused by 'Magnetic Wizards'.

edited 3rd Jun '15 1:38:52 PM by TheManFromOutside

Well, they certainly are NOW!

Actually, since a good portion of the area merged with Equestria was Quebec, kind of the opposite.

edited 3rd Jun '15 7:09:03 PM by MapleSamurai

In the aftermath of the Great Pyrrhic War (it's startling how many of these starts with that phrase), many cities were left uninhabitable due to chemical and radiological weapons. Instead of allowing these mass graves to go to waste, many governments have sold their dead zones to corporations for their own goals. One common fate for cities is use as a battlefield for televised gladiatorial wargames. Entire private armies square off in these ruins for prizes unheard of to the common person. Oftentimes the battlefield is dominated by mechs, making the events heavily centered around the mechs. Mech wars are quickly catching up to anti-gravity racing as one of the most popular sports in Occupied Space.

The Earth has been more or less through the Apocalypse twice, making the story essentially post-post-apocalyptic fiction.

The first time it was the Third World War. The second time it was an insurrection by machines designed to prevent any kind of threat from causing that kind of incident again.

Again from the sci-fi GURPS setting:

Just about every political philosophy has its place somewhere in human space. The Alliance in particular is notable for uniting communists (the People's Republic of Everett's Star), just-barely-short-of-fascist militarists (the Republic of Minerva) and hyper-capitalist libertarians (the Anekis Corporate Council) under one banner.

But what about those who reject all political systems?

Anarchists tend to have it pretty rough in the 26th century. They are decidedly unwelcome in the Empire and even in the otherwise freewheeling Alliance they're less than popular (and on Minerva, anarchist activists tend to have unfortunate accidents in prison).

For many, the only way to go...was up. Anarchist "drifter communes", usually consisting of a jury-rigged old freighter and some third-hand shuttles can be found orbiting numerous stars while others have taken over old asteroid mines and abandoned survey outposts. They're usually ramshackle and just one short circuit aware from becoming lifeless space debris, but they're also known as a decent place to do business, if your business would otherwise be frowned upon by the authorities.

As a rule, the drifter communes reject the concept of currency and rely entirely on barter for their trade needs. One of the items they take in exchange for allowing smugglers, pirates and occasionally even legitimate businessmen transship goods and negotiate deals at their outposts is weaponry, which means that those decrepit old freighters tend to pack a surprising punch. Messing with a drifter hab is in fact a bad idea in numerous ways, since getting blacklisted by them effectively means getting locked out of a significant chunk of the black market.

Drifters also tend to get along pretty well with the reptilian Tesah who usually live as nomadic traders...and who operate what is probably the largest intelligence network in known space. As a result, any attempts by authorities to shut the Drifters' operations down tend to find nothing but empty space, their targets long gone...

“In a galaxy, where the United Earth Government has fought a civil war, losing several worlds to the Southern Cross and had a war with the Alien Cay Union, hope rides in a ship called Victory ” *cue theme music*

edited 5th Jun '15 6:30:57 PM by TairaMai

Although gene engineered lifeforms going insane and killing everyone doesn't happen all the time, it's enough to require a whole profession dedicated to hunting down genetic deviants. That's where the Genome Slayer comes in. There are usually two varieties of Genome Slayer. The first kind is the civilized one who has more in common with a heavily armed exterminator than anything. They use advanced cyberware and heavily armed powered hardsuits to do the messy part of their jobs and have access to the usual panoptic networks when tracking down mutants. The second kind is the Slayer who lives in post-apocalyptic wastelands crawling with feral war organisms and other uglies. They must fight much more dangerous beings with less resources, relying on knowing their enemies and memorizing their behaviors. However, many have gene mods from before their world went to hell, and many are aware of the irony.

The planet Kalem doesnt rotate, leaving it tidally locked. As a result, there is a sun side where its so hot most life forms would die, and a dark side where its so cold most life forms would die. In between these two extremes sits the habitable band, and thats where 80% of all life on the planet exists, such as the local intelegent species. still, the habitable zones temperature is around the 70 degree centrigrade mark, there are vicious sand storms, and there is enough ammonia in the air that earth life has a hard time getting near the locals.

Pyramid structures have popped up throughout extraterrestrial civilizations multiple times, completely independent of each other (this includes humans), without influence of any other species.

Also, next to every alien species has the equivalent of Giorgio Tsoukalos in some from or another.

The Clerical Order is composed of psykers trained in the art of martial arts in order to augment their already potent abilities. While more traditional martial arts might forsake modern technology, psijitsu makes ample use of Gun Fu and Gun Kata to put users on par with combat cyborgs and powered hardsuit units.

Thoughts are physical interactions like anything else. At least theoretically, with powerful-enough technology (beyond humanity's capabilities at the moment), you can "freeze" the state of someone's brain, analogous to performing a save-state on a computer, and write that data to a storage medium; it is also possible to "run" that on the right program, given an appropriate investment of energy to carry out computation.

This applies not just to humans. In just the right places in the Earth there are vast fractal patterns of information, frozen to last the ages, the tiniest portions of the thoughts of something truly vast, something to which atoms and stars are equally insignificant in scale.

For god's sake don't run those thoughts.

Oh my god. That is really cool.

...Nothing else to say, really.

Somebody gets that "Lovecraftian" means more than tentacles 'n' stuff.

The Kykzavi have a word, "zata". It loosely translates to the hacker-speak mu; that is, it means "I disagree with the premise of the question, so neither a yes nor a no would be accurate." It's a neutral word, universally understood but most common among the academically minded; a stock gag in Kykzavi fiction is for an Absent-Minded Professor to answer a question like "would you like a cup of coffee" with "zata", followed by an absurd attempt to prove the concept of "like", "cup" and/or "coffee" is a flawed premise.

The Uelane have borrowed "zata" as a loan word. Unfortunately, their use of it means it can be more accurately translated from Uelane as "that question is so fundamentally stupid I refuse to dignify it with an answer." They're just close enough to be used in the same contexts, but... well, guides for diplomats and visitors from Uel to Zavi, and vice-versa, are very, very careful to point out the differences of translation.

edited 17th Jun '15 6:56:41 AM by KillerClowns

English really needs an equivalent to Zata

Humans dominate three of the five major empires on Gaia not out of being the craziest, the most fertile, the most charismatic, or even the most stubborn of the mortal races. Those titles go to the Orcs, Beast Folk, Elves, and Dwarves respectively.

No, humans are simply very clever and good at turning that cleverness into ways of getting ahead. The People of Water, as humans are often called, have a long standing reputation of meeting other races, stealing their technology, and then improving it. When the Elves developed bows the humans turned them into composite bows. When the Dwarves discovered iron, humanity added tempering. When humanity figured out gunpowder it took the other races nearly fifty years to figure out how they did it.

Thanks to advances in neurotechnology, you can quickly download programs that rewire your brain in order to give you all sorts of weird fetishes. About to be devoured by a feral war organism? Download the app and you'll be into that sort of thing before the abomination can open its hideous jaws. Might as well enjoy your death. The getting shot fetish is a best-seller for similar reasons.

God, I hate this kind of worldbuilding. It reads like a Let's Play of the most unbalanced 4X game ever.

Hey buddy, I'm not a fascist. I don't care about "clash of civilization" narratives. They bore me to tears. I care about people, and the lives they lead. Stop trying to make me care about your precious ubermensch.

Ugh.

Goodness, SOMEONE'S feeling hostile today. . . regardless. Quirks.

My world's Dwarves field Romanesque legions of heavy infantry (tower shields, lances, all that), while the nation most based off Rome in climate, formation and culture does no such thing. They prefer fast-moving, mobile soldiers, often with an attached ship. They rule an archipelago, so it makes sense.

Eh. I don't bother trying to write different races—partly because it'd be a devil to model historical, economic, social, and ultimately political systems without falling into the trap of stereotyping, but mostly because humanity in all its variety is fascinating and rich enough for a lifetime of studying and storytelling.

For some of the earlier parts of created existence, there was no afterlife. This was mostly because living beings had yet to actually experience death and there was no need for it. When the concept of death was finally introduced and made a regular part of mortal existence, the number of lost souls that had no afterlife to go to steadily increased.

Most dead mortal souls began to group together and, over time, merge into a single entity. This entity, as it began to grow larger and more powerful, would eventually physically materialize into Legion (after the group of demons that possessed a man who Jesus would exorcise).

Legion was soon put down, but not killed, and imprisoned in a pocket dimension, but not without a few of its spawn having been left to wander the world and provide the usually terrorizing of villages and eating of random adventurers.

Direct mind control is possible, but to also describe it as illegal in the Interplanetary Alliance would be to make the understatement of the century. There is basically an entirely separate legal system built for the explicit purpose of hunting down and punishing anyone found to be using the technology by almost any means necessary. The primary enforcers of the laws against mind control are very unironically referred to as Inquisitors and are empowered by the IA's Constitution to ignore most legal protocals afforded to people in more conventional situations. Using direct mind control technology is one of two crimes eligible for the death penalty (the other being murder of no fewer then 12 victims).

On the other hand, Inquistors have zero law-enforcement authority when it comes to more conventional crimes. You could vandalize public property right in front of an Inquisitor and all they could do is yell at you and call the conventional police. Plus Inquisitors caught abusing their power are punished almost as severely as the people they prosecute (unless they were using direct mind control, in which case they are punished much more severely).

As for why the Interplanetary Alliance is so paranoid about Mind Control technology, let's just say that one of the most pivotal historical events in my Sci-Fi setting is called "The Mind War" and leave it at that.

Weapon classification of energy weapons follows.

• Small Ship Standard Gun AKA Laser
• Mega Cannon
• Blaster Cannon
• Blaster
• Rifle

Laser is a bit of a misnomer for weapon classification, it is actually a charged particle beam fired continuously. Mega Cannons do not exist on fighters and are kept on Capitol Class and even Carrier ships, space ships with incredible power generation anyways.

Blaster Cannons are a UCSF recent invention where it conserves condensed particles and power by firing only short bursts and are becoming incredibly common on all Federation Fighters.

The Standard Blaster is a recent invention used by Combat Frame A.I.s for extra power in a firefight.

And a Beam Rifle is pretty much how it's like in Gundam, meant for specialized mechs, the power of a Mega Cannon condensed into a handheld form.

Spaceships don't carry escape pods. In case of a reactor emergency — loss of cooling or reactor leak — the reactor block (which is always located at the extreme rear) is jettisoned instead.

The idea is that even a damaged spaceship offers more protection and is more resilient than any small craft, and it contains redundant life support and emergency power plants. In the event that the ship is so damaged as to be uninhabitable, then everybody inside is dead anyway.

edited 21st Jun '15 2:29:12 AM by Aetol