Mention a random quirk of your world

My Lizirdpeople have a none indicative name, they are Dinosaurs.

Here's another one from the setting.

The Northern Union is one of two superpowers in the year 3018 and is mostly comprised of what is currently Greenland, Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia with a few extensions and claims further south.

However The Northern Union in it's current form (and even the name "The Northern Union") is only 100 years old. Prior to this it was run by a straight up dystopian government that locked down it's boarders and kept it's population ignorant of the fact that any other major human populations survived, and was in the process of enacting a plan to eradicate all knowledge of any past human populations.

It collapsed because it turns out it's really hard to orchestrate a military campaign against another superpower (the Southern Alliance) while simultaneously pretending that superpower doesn't exist.

One random setting of mine has no alien life, but it is filled with a bunch of different kinds of humans. Humanity has become a loose definition, every form has a human origin and so is counted. Due to the advanced science fantasy setting it isn't entirely surprising that I decided to do this.

• Base - You know this, the bog standard human, magic or cybernetics aside, they more or less look like people do today. Dependable and reliable, the most numerous form of humanity seen across the stars.
• Advent - Advances in Cybernetics, Robotics, and AI has resulted in an artificial bodily form. Artificial Intelligence or Human Upload, Advents choose not to say and often define themselves differently, one may say they are an artificial intelligence despite being an upload for instance. Advents can also be found inhabiting numerous frame bodies called “Shells”, much like one may wear numerous outfits or have special dress uniforms for social events.
• Post - Theoretically Post-Humans should represent hyper-idealized human forms with imperfections done away with and advanced abilities to improve efficiency installed, instead Post-Humans are furries, the genetics technology used to make them advanced enough that they can alter themselves to a desired form over their lifetime.
• Dwarves - Growing up on heavy gravity worlds with survival engineering for genetics has resulted in this form of squat human seemingly reminiscent of dwarves of fantasy. These squat forms are sturdy and strong, and they can often be found around mineral rich locations such as asteroids.
• Elves - Lighter World Humans who made use of survival genetic engineering to ensure they did not lose bone mass or strength despite their new height, the end result surprised everyone when humanity started to reconnect with their lost worlds around the early 35th century, including pointy ears.

Medieval fantasy setting where there is such a massive cultural taboo towards horses throughout the various human civilizations they instead bred wargs (a species of giant wolves as big as clydesdales) to be use as their main riding animals. These riding wargs eventually becoming a species of giant dog called.....

Pomeranian. As in, exactly like the ones in real life. Except they're the size of horses and used as such.

The only times humans ever actually use horses in any way other than treat them as dangerous animals to be feared, hated, and occasionally eaten are either criminals, mostly prairie, desert, and/or wasteland bandits, or humanity's weird symbiotic relationship with female centaurs. But that latter fact is for another day....

7 facts about my world, Meleti:

1. The planet is fifth in line from its parent star at a distance of ~42Gm (0.28 AU), orbiting every 86.43 Earth days (approx. 120 Meletian days). It rotates around its axis every 16 hours, 41 minutes, and 9.6 seconds.
2. Since it orbits an early red dwarf, the sky is white and the plants are black. The clouds are various shades of red and yellow due to lower Rayleigh scattering.
3. Both of its moons, Monte (inner) and Maci (outer), can eclipse its parent star due to orbiting in a 3:10 (Maci:Monte) resonance.
4. It has about 0.8x the surface gravity of Earth, since it is 1.5x heavier, but only 1.4x larger, making it less dense.
5. Its atmospheric pressure is pretty high, at about 1.8x denser than Earth's. Its high oxygen content and low gravity make fires burn higher and easier, and wildlife is far larger.
6. Most of the surface is covered by water, but there are a few volcanic island chains. Sailing the seas is equivalent to a death sentence on these cultures.
7. About 2% of the atmosphere is made up of water vapor due to the high surface water content. This makes storms harsher and lightning more prevalent.

Edited by DivineFlame100 on Jul 10th 2021 at 6:42:21 AM

My world, The Infinite Province, is so utterly huge that it has been eons and only now have the factions met.

Have you done the math on that first one? Seems to me the difference in energy cost would be so small it'd be irrelevant.

People randomly transform either into magical girls and boys or eldtrich monsters capable to city wide destruction

Due to a few particularly aggressive would-be world conquerors in the earlier days of my setting, (notably one who hung every noble they captured from the nearest tree) the notions of nobility and divine right are completely destroyed. Resultantly, dictatorships, electoral monarchies, magocracies, and republics (federated and otherwise) have become the norm for governments since then.

The Gods are only permitted to empower and guide their followers due to an agreement known as Divine Protocol. This is due to a brief spat in the early days of the setting which literally cracked the planet in half. Thankfully, the crack was relatively fine and just resulted in some volcanic hot spots.

Mortals are mostly ignorant of this as it's an endless source of embarrassment to the gods involved. They've certainly noticed the crack, though.

In one of my latest stories, there's a place beyond reality called the Aethervoid.

There's two kinds of beings — pure denizens, which are... extradimensional cyber energy alien things that vaguely resemble spaceships of varying sizes, and "Aethernals", half-human half-alien beings who can take on a human form or a spaceship form that looks considerably less eldritch than the pure denizens.

How'd they exist, you ask? Some kind of voluntary breeding program with willing humans, conducted by the Top God of this place, in order to get the Aethernals to spread humanity to the pure denizens.

Edited by ironcommando on Sep 16th 2020 at 9:09:38 PM

I deliberately chose symbiotic bacteria over viruses for my story's Mystical Plague of vampirism, because there's one crucial thing that bacteria can do that viruses can't — exchange plasmids (useful packets of DNA) with each other. The epigenetic enchantments on that DNA are what give vampires their supernatural traits (e.g. abilities and weaknesses). The procedure of plasmid exchange is what gives certain situations a chance (but no guarantee) to work, e.g.: a vampire Weakened by the Light can try to gain immunity by assimilating a Daywalking Vampire's blood sample; someone turned by multiple vampires with no powers or weaknesses in common might inherit most or all of the powers and few or none of the weaknesses; a necromancer trying to control/enslave vampires has an easier time the more closely they match whichever genetic sample the necromancer has obtained, so a smart necromancer will be ready to inject incompatible vampires with compatible strains of bacteria.

blanked

Edited by GoosefromWikipedia on Feb 8th 2024 at 7:15:28 AM

In my superhero story around 50% of all humans have had hereditary powers/mutations since before the rise of civilization, and it's regarded as the natural state of things^note  of course, there are powerless people bitter about not having powers, powered people who want to be powerless, a few people with extremely dangerous powers (though they're also extremely rare) and governments and other entities who either want to enhance their powered people's powers, give powers to powerless people, or to strip their enemies of their powers somehow. But the powered and the powerless are mostly at peace because most people have weak/useless/overspecified powers, and because i conceptualized this thing after finding X-Men depressing.

This leads to some non-superpowered OTL fictional characters to have powers in-universe (one example is when the characters discuss Hogan's Heroes and it's mentioned that one of the characters has a power^note  but not who or what power (the characters are doing a quiz and answer wrong). There are also superpowered people in about every based-on-a-true-story film because of in-universe realism.

Also in this universe, Inglourious Basterds is inspired by a true story, which is the (German) main character's grandmother's and her brother's operations and personal revenge quests in nazi-occupied Europe both before and during the war^note  While her brother died in battle, the grandmother survived the war and went on to fight the Soviets and other occupiers because she also hated them.

Edited by Nukeli on Sep 30th 2020 at 10:54:37 PM

the Theory of Narrative Causality is enforced for ideas (fictional beings), although humans (like, real life humans) are immune to it(1) and can perceive such patterns, ala Discworld.

some ideas can do too, most usually ideas intended to be Player Characters or in a particularly meta work.

some theorize that its a side effect of a Concept's (basically a god embodying a specific thing) existence(2), while others argue that it may be something even above the Concepts, including Reality themselves.

it's true nature is inexact, but its effects can be observed clearly.

(1) - atleast, humans unimportant enough. people exposed to fictional, magical matter long enough become vulnerable too, but they still retain immunity from more blatant examples of the theory manifesting such as the Ball tropes, and as mentioned before, unimportant humans pretty much have immunity.

(2) - fingers are currently pointed at Fate and Reality, but Trope-tan (who is a fragment of Tropes, a dead concept here) believes that a shard of Tropes is causing it

Edited by Awe921 on Oct 1st 2020 at 8:31:11 AM

My world is your normal world, except magical creatures exist and they can disguise as humans. ..that's pretty much it.

well hey, classics can be pretty well done. there's a reason they're classics

earthwalkers (aka humans from earth) have innate Anti-Magic via being from an universe that doesn't involve magic.

while it did weaken over time, they still were remarkably resilient to it, at least to attacks that don't affect stuff we ARE exposed to, like air (a fireball would still hurt like hell because the air around it is superheated).

from the 'theory of narrative causality' thingie i posted above, humanity also can apply its resistance to tropes by easily rending through Plot Armor. they also avert Swords Set To Stun and Guns Are Worthless, but also avert things like Harmless Electrocution and Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid, making earthwalkers as a whole a Glass Cannon.

Edited by Awe921 on Oct 25th 2020 at 5:01:02 AM

One I came up with and am trying to refine now.

In the VRMMORPG that is the main location of my story Skeletons were promoted to playable in an early patch. I think I will have the playable version be called Calavera.

There is a big difference between Gravity Generation, and Gravity Manipulation in terms of technology. Gravity Manipulation usually follows Gravity Generation tech but the issue is always power, so until a race devises proper power sources gravity manipulation takes awhile to make.

As part of its campaign against "superstition", which is seen as a distraction from the canonical teachings of the faith, the Xayusa Temple trains some of its priestesses as stage magicians, or "nothaqasa". They travel as preachers and performers in equal measure, demonstrating and then exposing the sleight-of-hand tricks and props utilized by priests of the faiths that existed in various regions before their conquest by the Qorisayane Empire while espousing the deeper mysteries of the Xayu, "which needs no such base deceptions". This also ties into one of the Five Virtues, ketali: curiosity and skepticism are seen as healthy things to be inspired, so long as it doesn't eclipse any of the other four (more conventional and conservative) virtues.^note A cultural, secular rather than religious virtue. Empress Iveya asked a Song AI remnant for input, and it made the case convincingly.

Nothaqasa are permitted to come up with their own tricks, and guard those secrets for themselves. They must only be honest about them being nothing but sleight of hand, props, and/or phsychological techniques, and not utilize Song artifacts or real magic (which is far too dangerous to use for entertainment). Recently, Xatashi vashon'Soqaxil ul'Oriyith has gone so far as to retire early from the priesthood and dedicate herself to a secular career, performing for audiences in major port cities in the Qorisayane Empire and the neighboring islands of the Federated Kykvelsha Kingdoms.

Edited by KillerClowns on Nov 8th 2020 at 10:30:37 AM

Some facts about one of my superhero worlds:

1. Good-and-evil hard-coded rule of the universe. And good must always triumph over evil. Things go wrong because this rule got broken.

2. One of the ways above-mentioned rule is reflected is the concept of superheroes.

3. At the bottom of the universe lies a dragon-esque entity that eats everything that has died (humans, aliens, objects, planets and even stars).

4. The NP Cs in simulations have become sentient and forced themselves onto the physical world. Since the simulation was run for Earth invasion, these NP Cs look like humans.

5. Unlike other cape setting, gods don't exist here, but mythology does. So, sometimes heroes are commercialized as being god from myths (like Ares and Odin).

Edited by kaalban on Nov 9th 2020 at 4:10:00 AM

Dwarves are all the same. Literally, they are the same person who gets displaced from time and space when killed, so he built a civilization with his past and future selves.

Elves are literally just trees with a high enough persuasion skill to convince you they aren't trees.

Creating an undead Dragon is technically legal it's so difficult with such a high failure rate that nobody sees the necessity of making it a crime.

Despite theoretically having the power to warp all of reality, chaos mages are very pro-science and technology. This is because technology is somehow less likely to blow your fingers off.