The Quick Questions About World Building Thread

I've been looking into logistics! Portals and pocket dimensions seem like wonderful solutions, but I'm worried about the power level getting too hard to control :/ (e.g. why wouldn't everyone just start opening portals in their enemies' capitals and marching their armies through it, instead of doing any conventional campaigning?)

It's a cool idea to explore - what if portal magic made military conflict obsolete and everyone had to rely on diplomacy and intrigue instead? - but I don't think that's the kind of story I want to tell here.

edited 1st Sep '17 7:56:57 PM by eagleoftheninth

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

You could always give it weight/distance ranges as limits.

Or limitations on how easy it is to open a portal. You can't really open a backdoor in your enemy's capital if it requires twenty mages in a circle to chant for an hour and every mage within ten mile can sense the spell being cast.

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

Hmm, these all actually got me to finally think of something kinda coherent.

• The spirit magic system will revolve around a Ley Line/faerie path-inspired mechanic. Spirits reside on a separate realm, bordering the mortal one along a hidden network of spirit-roads that runs across the continent. The boundary between the worlds thins out at sunrise and sunset, and it's generally inadvisable to hang around known spirit-roads during these times, lest you attract the attention of some hungry spirit who doesn't take kindly to impudent mortals.
• Shrines and monasteries are built on the crossroads, and their architecture is designed to function as sanctuary for denizens of both worlds. Mortals cannot contact the spirits unaided, so to do that, you'll need to:
  • Ask the local shaman, who has been trained in the art of spirit-whispering all his/her life. Shamans are raised from infants who do not cry at birth, and they're organised in a different fashion in each of the world's cultures.
  • Use a Language of Magic. These were independently developed by the Empire's client cultures to send messages into the spirit realm by mimicking the spirits that inhabit their native lands. The feudal river-valley domains that make up the core territories use a form of dynamic calligraphy. The hill clans use gamelan and gongs, played at an irregular beat. And the plains nomads are mostly illiterate, but they have a knot-record system that can be strung up into patterns that project into the spirit realm. If you're a non-shaman, however, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to comprehend whatever semblance of a response that comes in return.
  • Have a spirit cross the border and come to you. You'll generally want to avoid this, for quite a number of reasons.
• Shamans don't sleep, but they need to spend a lot of time in meditative trance. This is their way of navigating the spirit realm and getting to know its inhabitants. A shaman's skill in communicating with the land's native spirits could mean life or death for his or her companions.
  • While in a deep/extended trance, shamans may fall into a Meditation Accident, which basically traps them in an indefinite coma. Their body becomes a thin screen between the two realms, and anyone who tries to tamper with them risks getting hit by outbursts of spirit magic or being possessed by escaping spirits. On the upside, when you get a sufficiently powerful shaman to wake them up, they'll be partially infused with the essence of dozens of hungry spirits, wielding the magic as if it were their own. The downside is that they'll be very confused and possibly amnesiac.
• Spirits can possess tangible objects and creatures, whether voluntarily, through an agreement with mortals, or by entrapment. If you, say, follow a spirit-road to the foot of a volcano, then whip out a lute and play a very specific melody, you might just be inviting the local volcano-dwelling spirit to bind itself to your instrument - and there's a good chance that your next chord will be followed by a wave of pyroclastic cloud.
• Finally, a shaman standing on a spirit-road may open a gate to the spirits' side through a ritual, which may or may not involve a sacrifice. From the mortal world, the spirit-roads may look like little more than barely-discernible lines on the ground, covered by pebbles and undergrowth. From the other side, it's a wide, well-surfaced road - surrounded by illusions and treacherous terrain, as well as the occasional travelling spirit. You need an experienced shaman to ferry you safely along the spirit-roads, negotiating with or warding off ravenous spirits along the way. The spirit-roads wrap themselves over the mortal realm in curious ways: a stretch of forest might take a whole day to pass on a straight dirt road, but taking the spirit-road that loops and winds around it might get you there in six hours. When travelling along a spirit-road, mortals turn nearly-invisible to other mortals, unless viewed from certain angles directly down the road.

As for its use in warfare:

• Transportation and logistics are the most obvious. But you can't march a whole army on the spirit-roads, as it's bound to seriously offend every spirit in the vicinity - and you'll never have enough skilled war-shamans to ferry that many people across safely. Plus, the shamans don't like to have commoners in direct contact with the spirit realm. As a result, travel on spirit-roads is mostly restricted to high-value units like diplomats, forward scouts, couriers, and maybe heavy artillery.
  • When travelling on a spirit-road, you stay on the path and listen to your shaman. The rest of the spirit-realm maps onto a higher dimension, so it's inadvisable to step off the path unless you want to end up as a particularly interesting origami piece.
• The local Language of Magic can be inscribed/strung/played over an object, projecting it onto the spirit realm and turning it into a faux-spirit object. This can be used as an anti-tampering measure, or simply to prevent food and perishables from spoiling. However, this thins out the boundary between the two worlds around the object, and you risk getting people possessed by wandering spirits if you're not careful. Objects possessed by spirits will display the same quality.
• Some varieties of spirit magic are unique to their user's native land:
  • The Ashen Plains nomads live in the open steppes, where the spirit-road network is particularly sparse and the spirits often just step onto the wind, using it to travel in lieu of spirit-roads. As a result, the boundary between the worlds is particularly thin in this region, and the annual brawl between the highland and lowland spirits causes freak weather patterns that make it thoroughly unsuitable for farming. The nomadic shamans are adept in getting the spirits to subtly influence the landscape and the weather, allowing them safe passage across the land while denying it to their enemies.
  • The Southern Doi Vang clans build their villages and road networks along spirit-roads from the start, and embrace a direct connection to the hill spirits through communal possession rituals. They also build fortified temples on strategic points along the spirit-road network, each one being a Place of Power and a formal crossing-point into the spirit realm. As a result, their lands are uniquely attuned to the spirits, and they often call in their favours - such as having the spirits bind to forest vegetations and serve as a surveillance/early warning system, or having them bind to the semi-sentient giant turtles that populate the lowland riverways, allowing the clans to tame them and ride them into battle.
• Army movements have to be planned thoroughly to avoid straying into the territories of powerful wild/hostile spirits, though this might be a case of magic as a limitation rather than a power.
• Some spirits may have personal relationships with human families - usually those who protect their home from destruction, or free them from an object they're involuntarily bound to - and their descendants will be able to summon their assistance, provided the means.
• Trying to entrap spirits is generally considered bad form, but there's always a psychotic shaman or two who sees nothing wrong with, say, trapping a glacier spirit in a paper fan and manipulating it to break the real thing apart when his enemy is passing by.

Hmm .___. these are neither quick nor questions, and probably don't really belong in this thread. I also managed to come up with a second magic system - this one practiced by the Empire's neighbouring city-states in place of spirit magic and revolving around Champions, who are supernaturally wise and charismatic reincarnating guardians whose magic is powered by their compatriots' adoration and a borderline-fascist cult of personality established by their home city. But it might be better for me to peace out and rearrange all these ideas in a separate thread where they can be properly taken apart and critiqued. Thanks a lot for the suggestions though!

edited 6th Sep '17 12:40:34 PM by eagleoftheninth

Echoing hymn of my fellow passerine | Art blog (under construction)

Is there any mechanisms to prevent a person from registering marriages towards different partners in different countries?

Y'know, I became curious about that and I found this. This was the first relevant Google result, so make of that what you will.

so i have a race of bug people that have multiple limbs. how exactly might the writing system look like if they used a combination of black pigment on a tough sheet of leaves?

edited 3rd Oct '17 6:28:50 PM by ewolf2015

MIA

I think that it might depend heavily on their manual- and limb- dexterity, how many limbs they use in writing, and what tools they use for it (e.g. pens, brushes, stamps, etc.).

My Games & Writing

If a god converted to another religion, what would happen to their worshipers?

97% of all fandoms are comprised of sane, reasonable people. The remaining 3% are here, on this wiki.

for anyone who wishes to travel in time or in different realities, what rules should be in place? mind you the main purpose of qst is to make sure that people, things, and objects are in the right timeline.

edited 22nd Oct '17 4:57:15 AM by ewolf2015

MIA

@wizardpineapple, you just came up with a great premise for a Discworld novel. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Terry Pratchett used that premise in one of his books. But like, that's a fantastic log line in and of itself.

@ewolf, as a general rule I'd advise that with alternate timeline time travel fiction you stick to distinct monodirectional timelines, a bit like that Futurama episode where Fry the Professor and Bender loop through history. Makes things less confusing. Having stuff go back and forth in the same timeline can quickly become a mess.

_____________________________________

Personally, I have something of a vague question, which is how should one best implement alternate historical and geographical elements into a work which is otherwise set on earth without making it jarring for a viewer? Things like fictional nations, fictional organisations, fictional (notable) people, etc.

Is there a correct balance which can be achieved between the real and ficticious so as to not make the ficticous elements seem as if they are interloping into a work which is otherwise recognisably set in the real world?

edited 6th Nov '17 12:54:18 PM by MemesAreDangerous

Ban memes

I liked The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer's take on time travel, although the fact it's even time travel is a spoiler. In short, time is like a river. If a kappa is born on the river, then walks to the source and blocks it off with a large stone, the kappa doesn't die just because the river doesn't exist anymore.

edited 6th Nov '17 3:48:21 PM by Victin

How can I have a country that contains a huge amount of Author Appeal (Gratuitous German, Heavy Metal (and various subgenres) being very popular, Tabletop RPGs being very popular, mild Transhumanism being common (it's set slightly more than 20 Minutes in the Future), no more Sci Fi Ghetto, and Neopagan and Native American Mythological themes being common (so basically Post-Cyberpunk with Nerds, Metalheads, Neopagans/Followers of Native American Religions, and artistic influences from all three)) without making it a Straw Utopia?

I don't want it to suck to live there, but I don't want it to be perfect either.

edited 21st Jan '18 2:44:07 PM by SomethingRandom113

Umm... so, I was here, I guess. If I wasn't, someone hacked my account. So, yeah.

The only difficult elements I see with that setup are Gratuitous German and Native American Mythology, as there is basically no Sci Fi Ghetto in europe irl, tabletop games and metal may be more liked in your 'verse, and transhumanism/cyborgs are a rather common element.

I don't know where you want to set it, but due to you mentioning mythology I assume it's the USA/former native american territory. So, for the german, you'd need to have it in a state where german is often spoken. This may be helpful. Other than that, you could it explain by one or two large waves of german immigrants.

For the mythology, maybe the christian missionaries weren't as successful in converting the natives, while the germans that moved there/their descendants were converted by the indians. Didn't happen irl, but is plausable enough for alternate history.

---

So, we know the First Contact Team, but what disciplines/people would it actually consist of, especially if it has only place for 6 people? (not every spot needs to be filled)

So far I have come up with:

• a government official.
• a mathematician.
• a biologist.
• some linguists to cover several subdisciplines and enable "quick" establishing of communication with the aliens.

Now, what else do I need? Did I include someone that isn't needed? The matematician might be unnecessary, especially since the aliens know that we exist and that we're intelligent.

Life's too short for being hectic.

@Lord Vladek Thanks for your suggestions. The story I am thinking of is not Alternate History, and is set in one of the Divided States of America.

However, although you were helpful, you still didn't answer my original question, which was "How do I include a huge amount of Author Appeal without making a Straw Utopia?"

I can undestand if you didn't get what I was asking, though.

As for your First Contact Team question, I'd personally suggest a military guy just in case things go south.

Umm... so, I was here, I guess. If I wasn't, someone hacked my account. So, yeah.

As I said, I didn't really see a problem with the elements you chose to become a Straw Utopia. The only thing that would have been needed to be handled with care would have been the transhumanism, but that's pretty much the case in any story. But that was under the assumption that it was alternate-history-ish, so my bad.

Under these circumstances, it is becoming more difficult to keep it logical. But since that this isn't what you asked, I'm saying this: The elements you chose are, while not common, often enough used. As long as don't overdo it with the Author Appeal I don't see any reason why it should become a Straw Utopia.

Also, thanks for suggesting a military guy. This isn't something I thought about at all due to humanity wanting a peaceful First Contact - even though two of your linked tropes are right. Nobody knows that, though

Life's too short for being hectic.

OK, I have a different kind of question. I want to create a "pantheon" of sorts for a antsy setting I'm working on, with four main deities known as the Sentinels. I was planning to have the Sentinels be a Four-Element Ensemble based on The Four Gods from Chinese mythology—but at the same time I'm worried about the implications of drawing blatant inspiration from a culture to which I do not belong. What should I do?

edited 6th Feb '18 9:45:44 PM by ElSquibbonator

the...implication that you like chinese culture?

thats not really something to worry about is it?

also, you would hardly be the first nor the last author to do it.

fantasy authors have taken blatant inspiration from cultures they were not born into for aaaaaaaages and the typical fantasy landscape post-tolkien is a good and very prevalent example of this. even moving away from high fantasy, most fantasy cultures tend to share distinct traits with multiple real world cultures, and if the authors were only allowed to use the culture they belonged to, well it'd all start to feel rather samey.

---

im sure that, provided you arent displaying a blatant disregard for their culture in doing so, chinese readers would not be offended by an omage to it in your setting. i'd recommend researching chinese culture as thoroughly as you can bring yourself, possibly immersing yourself in it, in an effort to understand precisely how they view these aspects of their culture you want to use and why, but i dont particularly believe it to be necessary to go beyond simply understanding what it is you're trying to make use of.

edited 7th Feb '18 2:17:05 AM by Tarsen

Well, the problem is that the other aspects of the setting of my story aren't based on any particular real-life culture. So I don't know whether it would be appropriate to have their mythology be an exception, or whether I should create that from the ground up too.

edited 7th Feb '18 9:32:51 PM by ElSquibbonator

Since you're already on the fence, I'd suggest you build from the ground up, but you can take some General cues from the Chinese gods you want to emulate. Like, the fire one is the Vermilion Bird, so maybe your version can be a different red animal. Or the Water one is a turtle, so maybe use a different reptile like a gator. Just a thought. I think your instincts are good, especially if the rest of your story doesn't have any relation to Chinese things.

Creator of Heroes of Thantopolis: http://heroesofthantopolis.com/

I think El Squibbinator is referring to how Asian culture (especially Chinese and East Asian) has frequently been used as a Far East background prop for decades by non-Asian people, unfortunately often with Mighty Whitey heroes.

Generally, I have two pieces of advice:
1) Do your research on The Four Gods and try NOT to lump in other East Asian cultures with them, because Japan/China/Korea have a whole lot of bad blood between them.

2) Just avoid any obvious kung-fu-dragons-and-Fantasy-Buddhism bullshit. "The Four Gods" by itself is pretty neutral, and you can make it your own in a lot of different ways by using different animals or different sets-of-four (like the four winds/directions, the four seasons, the four elements etc).

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

edited 8th Feb '18 9:57:05 PM by Sharysa

I've been directed here after originally posting this question in the OTC subforum's Space Thread.

In Neon Genesis Evangelion, a cataclysmic event known as the Second Impact (which involved the near-total vaporization/destruction of the entirety of Antarctica's ice cap and underlying continental mass) caused, among other things, a shift in the rotational axis of Earth such that the global climate patterns changed to one degree or another, with Japan in particular being described as being stuck in a "perpetual summer" (which sounds to me like a different way of saying "tropical climate"), and one Japanese character reminisces the days when the country "still had seasons".

Assuming that "perpetual summer" is only a figurative statement — that is, rather than Japan having a uniform climate the whole year, it's just that the the colder "seasons" have become so much warmer that there's barely any appreciable difference between them and the hotter ones — how much of a shift would be required to result in this kind of climate change? And what changes should we expect for the rest of the world based on said new axis?

FWIW, here is a discussion on the same subject.

edited 9th Feb '18 4:01:12 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Assuming that you aren't asking someone here to run an entire climate simulation to test the theory, the simplest way to give Japan "eternal summer" is to shift the rotational axis of the Earth so that it's on the equator. Seasons are primarily created by the planet's axial tilt against the plane of its orbit. For the Earth, this is between 22 and 23 degrees, and in this scenario, the equatorial region experiences the longest periods of warm temperatures during the year.

As a way of illustrating this, take a globe, dismount it, and remount it so that it retains the same tilt but Japan is now on or near the equator — that is, transport Tokyo from its current latitude of about 35 degrees N to 0 degrees N. Based on that, observe the new latitudes of all the other nations on the planet and determine the new tropical, temperate, subarctic, and arctic zones.

There are other consequences besides merely seasons, some potentially catastrophic.

• The centrifugal force generated by the Earth's rotation causes it to bulge slightly at the equator. Water is much quicker to change its shape than solid rock, so a change in the planet's axis would cause a significant shifting of sea levels. Any land mass closer to the new equator would have higher sea levels and any mass closer to the new poles would have lower sea levels. The exact math is too complex for me to do shorthand, but the Earth's axial bulge is 21 km, which is a honking lot of water. I don't know if Japan would suddenly be submerged beneath miles of water, but it would flood like hell.
• Continuing that line of thought, the equatorial bulge would now be at an angle to the Earth's rotation. This would cause all sorts of weird stresses on the crust, likely leading to earthquakes and volcanoes of unbelievable magnitude. It could even result in the Earth precessing back towards its original rotational axis over time.
• From a physics perspective, I'm not even sure how you'd apply the correct force to shift the Earth's rotation by 30 degrees without changing its axial tilt. The math is too weird.
• Assuming you could apply that kind of force, a napkin calculation would give you an energy requirement for it that would probably result in a global extinction event, if not the complete destruction of the biosphere. You'd need an impact akin to that which created the Moon. Standing here on the Earth, it's easy to fail to appreciate the magnitude of the kinetic energy of the planet's rotation, but it's a staggering figure.

If you don't want to alter the Earth's rotation completely, you could try lowering its axial tilt. This still requires fantastic amounts of energy but doesn't cause Tokyo to be flooded by kilometers of water. Doing so would reduce the magnitude of seasons across the entire planet. As Japan is in the temperate zone, more or less at the same latitude as the mid-US, it would spend less time in "winter" and thus probably become warmer overall, but the same effects would occur everywhere else on the planet with the same latitude. Again, the climate math is too complex to do quickly.

Bring the planet's tilt to 0, and seasons no longer exist. A quick search finds this article about how seasons allow agriculture and, indeed, civilization. The agricultural cycle would be completely disrupted; higher latitudes would become uninhabitable due to extreme cold; lower latitudes would be in perpetual tropical (or desert) summer, and things would get very bad very quickly.

edited 9th Feb '18 8:54:24 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Actually, lowering the axial tilt will lead to an ice age - less seasonality means colder summers means larger icecaps and deserts (icecaps melt much faster than they grow, so the coldness of the summer is far more important than the warmness of winters for their size, to say nothing that colder winters mean less snowfall thus less icecap growth. Colder summers also weaken the monsoon and warmer winters cause the westerlies to retreat poleward) which cool the Earth through albedo feedback.

You could compensate for this summer cooling by shifting the periapsis (the point at which Earth's orbit is closes to the sun) to northern hemisphere summer and thus preventing the growth of icecaps and the decay of the monsoon, but that would counteract any winter warming as well (and still favour a growth of icecaps on the southern hemisphere, although the oceanic environment constrains their growth there).

edited 9th Feb '18 9:13:38 AM by SeptimusHeap

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

OK, so... What does all this say about NGE!Japan having what appears to be a tropical climate? That there's no "configuration" that could explain it even if we assume we used magic to move the planet without immediately causing catastrophe due to geological stresses and/or sudden massive shifts in momentum?

Incidentally, I just realized that I had misinterpreted "Earth's axis" on the Second Impact article of the Eva Geeks wiki (the de facto primary fan-site source for translated NGE lore) as meaning "rotational axis", when it's as Fighteer said, that "axial tilt" is what I'm looking for. Speaking of which, the axis shift is only an implied fact, deduced from the explicit statements concerning the drastic change in Japan's climate after the Second Impact event.

I would never ask such a thing unless the TV Tropes staff reveal that they own a powerful supercomputer with which such a simulation can be performed.

edited 9th Feb '18 9:45:26 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.