Mention a random quirk of your world

Come on! Anything! Now matter how silly and absurd it is!

I will start: In my Dieselpunk-ish world there are no Funny Animal cartoon. Instead, all famous cartoon characters are either human caricatures based on Vaudeville (and indirectly, Commedia Dell'Arte) or anthropomorphic objects. The Mickey Mouse equivalent is a talking tin can.

What about yours?

Indiana Jones and a bunch of other characters are superpowered.

Also, why might be a good thing to add. For mine, well, in a world where some people have superpowers it's inevitable that it gets into fiction. Superpowered characters generally perform the same job as the Scary Black Man.

edited 28th Feb '11 11:51:11 PM by Gvzbgul

Well, the country of my main charcters appears to be in the Southern hemisphere, completely by accident. I randomly decided on a direction for the rainforest-covered mountain range to be in, and picked north.

It wasn't until a while later that I realised most people would think that "The North" was snow and ice.

Most things in the Zaran il Legio world, from internal heating to flying ships, runs on a phlebotinum called soul stones. Soul stones are made from crystallized soulstuff. The ethical implications of using someones life-essence to power your car is not really explored.

A random quirk of your world? A random quirk is my world.

I digress.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about my world as a whole is what happens when you go too far outside a major city. Simply, if you've seen Andrei Tarkovsky's S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you have a basic idea; less simply, however:

Due to some kind of unexplained cataclysm, the very fabric of reality is warped at certain points in the world, resulting in wide tracts of land in which the rules of time and space seem to cease having normal applicability. Depending upon region and point of entry, one may witness annual flowers last years at a time, ravines change depth, gravity fluctuate as if raised and lowered at random, the sun rising and setting in the span of three hours, and so forth. To wit, these regions are inhabited by any number of odd creatures and entities that have either been transformed by living in the area or have passed into this world from somewhere else. Whether they prove benevolent, indifferent or wilfully malevolent remains to be seen, as few that have actually met them never reach their destination, though they are sometimes seen, wandering...

[oops, wrong thread]

edited 1st Mar '11 8:54:02 AM by Yej

I have no name for my world, but I do know that Dvargar invented ear plugs.

makes sense to me. All the echoes from mining picks.

In What Geass May Come, Your Mind Makes It Real. As a result, parts of Heaven and Hell look a lot like Earth. A lot of people have no idea they're dead.

In Fortress Celestia I am tring to find a reasonable way to allow Fantasy Gun Control to be enforced inconsistantly. At least some cities will have flush toilets and subways, and a few military bases will be protected by gunpowder weapons, but in most areas gunpowder weapons just fizzle and jam, so ordinary soldiers must rely on swords and bows.

EDIT: italics

edited 13th Jul '11 8:26:31 AM by FrodoGoofballCoTV

Anothing random non plot relevant thing from the Zaran comic that I forgot to mention is the fact that instead of using base 10 for counting like humans do (most of the time), the demons, having 8 fingers instead of 10, use base 8. In some of the comics I've done you can see some symbols consisting of lines at right angles and squares. Those are numbers (most of the letter characters, on the other hand, are just random gibberish, since comign up with a language and assigning meaning to all characters is hard. There are some exeptions tho, for example a signs on Zaran's door seen in one panel actually reads "Zaran's room" in demonic).

My universe is made up of layers, and each layer is a world. It takes a spherical shape. In the center is the Dreamer, the Creator of the Universe, where new layers are constantly being forged. Also, the worlds are on the inside of the shell instead of on the outside.

Imagine a wild west world where lead, or more accurately lead bullets, are illegal. Why? Because there is a safer option: Mercyium. A metal which has the odd property of going though air and other inaminate perfectly normaly, but cannot penertrate biological material very well, due to a bizzare chemical reaction.

It usually bounces off human skin painfully, usually hard enough to seriously damage bone if aimed at the right spot. If fired point blank, it can break through the skin, making more vicous gunfights end up close.

Lead bullets ar still around, of course, but unless you're with the army (law enforcement can't get them due to communism fears.),expect them to be rare- and expensive. Lead smuggling is very serious business, after all, with big consenquences for those who the law, or for that matter, the smugglers themselves...

If people can't shoot each other to death, why don't they, say, carry knives? Or use bows and arrows? Is there any sort of hunting at all, and if so, why don't they use hunting weapons on people? Why don't people make bullets out of metals other than lead and mercyium?

edited 2nd Mar '11 12:06:34 PM by NativeJovian

@ ABRICK What then is the point of having guns, given that the only use for them so far discovered in in putting big holes in biological material?

And now one of mine, my world (the non-earth one) has given rise at various times to at least 3 technological species, although 2 managed to wipe themselves out, and the third, hamstrung by a lack of easily accessible minerals is stuck in the stone age.

edited 2nd Mar '11 1:07:26 PM by MattII

The Golden Age of Superheroes occured in the 60's

edited 2nd Mar '11 11:13:14 PM by AtomJames

Whores are called "Penny-girls".

In one setting, the police are called 'enforcers'. It's a resurrected Old Shame from back when I felt weird about using the word police in a medieval fantasy setting. I decided it added a bit of flavour to the setting and left it in.

In my dystopian steampunk world, scrap metal is used as currency. Lead washers, brass tubing and steel ball bearings are all considered adequate payment for things. Value of washers is measured by amount of washers, value of brass tubing is by measurements, and value of ball bearings is by weight. The bearings are typically kept in a pouch, similar to how coins are kept in rolls and bills in clips. A common form of fraud is to mix clay chips in with the bearings to make the pouch heavier and seem more valuable.

There is no FTL travel in my world, but people travel between the most distant of stars in seconds. Try to figure that one out.

Is it subjective seconds? Are the stars really close togethor?

Quirk... Quirk... uh. My world's got a bit of schizo-tech going on, justified because there are dimension-hopping demons that sometimes smuggle in technology from other worlds. Gives my angelic law-enforcement something to do, too. *thumbsup*

Plants that photosynthesize magic energy!

Zolnier: Nope. It's a combination of FTL communication (I said no F Tl travel) and mind uploading, assuming that uploads are the same person rather than a digital clone.

Would that be thaumo-synthesis then?

So basically, you can't send matter FTL, but information can? Interesting. And although magic in my verse exists under a masqurade, it has affected history, for one thing World War Two and most associated horrors happend, but evidently Hitler didn't lead the Nazi Party, which in this timeline was known as the German Reconstruction Party. Also the UN building is located in Paris. And witch isn't considered a term to only be applied to females. And Australia isn't called the Commonwealth Of Australia.

edited 4th Mar '11 5:29:21 AM by Zolnier

Africa + Space Opera + Military Science Fiction + Cyberpunk + Biopunk + Cosmic Horror + After The End + Before The End.

Yeah.