Any thoughts on other Tech questions would be appreciated.


Technology
-What is personal weapon technology like? For the military? For civilians? (melee? ranged?)
-What is personal defense technology like? For the military? For civilians? (body armor? personal force shields?)
-What is medical technology like? What can be healed? What cannot?
-What are the Transportation Options? Riding animals? Motor Vehicles? What types of sea travel? Flight? Airplanes? Airships? (Woo Hoo! Big-Ass Zepplins!)

Society
-How many major cultures are there?
-What is their global population?
-Where are they located geographically?
-Do they have earth-analogues and what are they?
-What led to their differences?
-Do different cultures/lineages tend to have certain physical traits and if so, what are they?
-What are class boundaries based on?

Geography
-What is the geographical form of the setting? (ie: is the world flat, round, or a non-euclidean fragmented torus?) 
-What are some major Geographical differences between the Setting and Earth? (do Mountains tend to be much taller? are there large floating islands in the sky? is the subterranean riddled with a vast network of caves?) 
-How many continents are there?
-How much is considered inhabited?
-How much is considered uninhabited? (Why?)
-What is known?
-What is not known?
-What is suspected?

Countries
-How many major countries and/or political blocks are there and what are their relationships?
-Where are they geographically?
-What are their technology levels and population?
-How many and what types of government civics are represented?
-How common are wars?
-What are some common examples of why there have been wars? (Religion?, resources? border disputes? cultural tensions? )

Cities
-How many major cities are there, on average, per country?
-How large (population) would you call a major city?
-How are cities connected and what is the common mode of travel between cities?
-How densely populated (#per sq km, this determines how large buildings are)
-Trade connections? 
-Major trade routes/connecting roads/highways?
-Political setup?

Religions
-What are the major religions?
-What are their cultural ties? (if any)
-How much political influence do they wield?
-Do the gods/spirits/ancestors worshiped talk back? are they capable of corporeal influence? Manifestation?
-What are the common responsibilities and/or institutions managed by the religions? (care of the poor/sick, do they run hospitals, monasteries, orphanages, etc)
-What are their attitudes towards Magic/Technology?
-Do any of them have current (either overt or covert) training centers, mentors, or literature relating to Magic use?

Magic - (including psychic powers and massively advanced technology)
-What forms does Magic take?
-From what does Magic draw its power, and how renewable or directly replenishable is this resource? (mana potions?)
-What can magic do and what can it not do?
-What is known?
-What is not known?
-What is suspected?

Nemesis Race(s)
-Where are they geographically?
-What is their current population?
-What are their long-term plans?
-What resources do they need to survive?
-What resources do they need for their technology or voodoo?
-Do they have Magic? (or analogues)
-Why are they Evil?

this is very extensive and fuckin' saved.
someone should archive or at least screencap.
im usin word.

>>5511339
Not worth an archive, but maybe a few reposts so people in other timezones see it.

Some sort of preservation.

>>5511229
I ask less than this. Surely you can't go wrong if you can answer these questions in a continuum. Bravo. /saved

Saved and formatted to not create massive scrollbars in notepad. This is some good groundwork laying stuff.

*slow claps*
well done, OP. Well done.

OP here, many of these are because of some common plot points I use, such as "-Are there any reasonably common but extremely valuable resources that require a large infrastructure to create or refine?" since this means that if you don't have the infrastructure then you have to obtain it (in some manner) from someone who does, leaving some common "have the party steal it" or "have the party defend it from people trying to steal it" hooks.

Still interested in any thoughts you all might have on other Tech questions.

/saved

Thanks for the questioneer OP!

Very nice list.

I also like to ask myself about information flow. (I guess it's kind of a hybrid history/society/geography/religion category.)

How quickly does information flow between regions?
In what form is the information passed?
How reliable is this information?
What effect do terrain, intervening populations, magic, and technology have on the transmission of information?
Are there repositories for shared knowledge? Where are they? How extensive?
What is the education level of a given populace?

>5511521

What powers their technology? (hooks into Resources)
Names of famous inventors is good flavor. Actually, any cultural icon is good flavor, I didn't see them mentioned in the questionaire.

Recreational tech?
Information tech?
Communication tech?

How does tech interact with the environs?

>5511611
>Education

This is a huge thing that a lot of settings miss out on using for great effect. Definite addition to make.

To complement the op's questions, here are some typical medieval demographic dealies, and holy shit are they useful.

http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm

Did you know that "A square mile of settled land (including requisite roads, villages and towns, as well as crops and pastureland) will support 180 people"?

>>5511703
I did not know that, but now I do. That is information I have wanted for many, many years and many, many campaigns.

Cool, now I have a source for some serious research in that direction. I'm planning on doing a lot more work on making my games/settings/campaigns realistic and believable.

>>5511703
having only 1 inn for every 2000 people would screw up the gameplay of dnd players worldwide!

Very nice OP, will definitely use for when I do world building. Thanks for posting this!

>>5511861
How many people do you think actually would pay for an inn regularly?

>>5511861
In d&d, adventurers traveling the wilderness would likely miss or ignore most small settlement. If you need a place with a priest, a blacksmith, and a well-stocked shop, you won't go to the Herpderp's Meager Hamlet Lost in Fuckmints Range, you'll go to the closest big village or a small city.

Besides, you know how all those monsters roaming the wold sustain themselves? Yes, places like Herpderp's Meager Hamlet. Two hundred people nobody knows or cares about, unless a drizzt happens along or a PC with half-assed background was born here.

Small settlements are the level 1 NPC minions of d&d geography, the PCs only notice them if they trip on the corpse.

>-What are class boundaries based on?
Like social classes, or gameplay classes? or some other kind of classes?
Anyone else get this?

>>5511740
Well now you know.
And knowing is half the battle.

GEEEE - IIIII - Joooooe!

>>5511985
Could be both. And social segregation and character classes are related. You won't find many wizards in poor areas with no literacy, or scores of druids and rangers roaming the city. Fighter will tend to show up in war-torn areas or under patronage of nobles.

Thanks OP. This is much more efficient than the method I was using.

>>5511985
its under "Society" so i'm guessing social classes, should refer to is there a hereditary caste system, (Japan, India, etc) or land owned, (Europe) or money, (America) etc.

yup, social classes.

>>5511363

Agreed! *_*

There is an extremely easy to make a setting more 'realistic' than most prebuilds in about an hour.

First, draw tectonic plates however the fuck you want, and keep in mind which way they move with big fuck-off arrows. Do the arrows and faultlines in pencil.

Then, continents. Bang that shit down wherever you want, the big ones don't matter. Continental outlines in pencil for now.

Look at where the bits of continent touch fault lines. Bits ramming face-first will have huge fuck-off mountains. Bits pulling apart will have fucktonnes of lava, or at the least bits of hot earthen interest like volcanoes. Bits rubbing sideways will have smaller mountains, a handful of volcanoes, and tectonic activity like a motherfucker.

Where these lines are in the ocean, similar. Face-on, big mountains, archipelagos and such. Apart, huge-arse trenches and volcanic islands. Across, a few volcanic islands.

Then consider your continental movement. Where plates move together bits rammed each other a long time ago, so make the continents look a little awkward. Where they pull apart there'll be continental drift, so make it look like an eroded puzzle piece pulled off and stick a heap of islands in the middle.

From there, change the pencilled bits to look more aesthetically pleasing and utilitarian, then pen them on.

Now for climates and shit.

The middle of the map is going to be hot and wet and have monsoonal rain. The edges of the map will be colder and possibly drier and have more regular rain.

Now figure out how wet things are. Pick a direction for the wind to generally blow from the water to the land in each continent, or more than one if that's how you want it. Watch it go all the way to the nearest lot of mountains. Bits oceanward of the mountains get regular rain. Bits oceanward of mountains and on the edge of the mountains get lots of rain. Bits inland of the mountains get little rain. The bigger the mountains the more significant this is, so if you've got molehills it won't do a damn, but if you've got the Andes just sitting there one side will be lush and the other a damned desert. Also, the further inland you are, even if there's no mountains, the drier it gets.

Once you've got this down, put your general greenery in place. Wetter in no-equatorial areasmeans more dense forestry e.g. English woods. A little dry means less dense e.g. Australian bush. Proper dry means african-style scrub plains all over the joint. Very dry means desert. DO NOT USE ENGLISH PLAINS AS AN EXAMPLE THEY ARE HUMAN-MADE.

Then, for equatorial areas, wet means ridiculously rainforests, drier means jungley areas, properly dry means flat but with still more trees and superdry means scrub deserts.

Once you've got these down change them for aesthetics and utility then bang them in in pen.

Keep in mind not to mention this to proper geographers or climatologists since this is simplified to the point of being offensive.

Now for hydrology and that wet crap.

Rivers go from mountains to the ocean. That's it. The more rain on your mountain, I.E. the closer to the coast and the higher the mountain, the bigger the river will be. It shoudl have tributaries from that mountain and other mountains on the path flowing into the main river, which meanders however you want it to but generally away from high ground to low, to the ocean, where just before the ocean if it's really big it forms a delta. Bits along that river can have canyons and such for geographical points of interest. Bang lakes and shit of whatever size you want down on the way, so long as you don't have the Comically Tiny River as the main source of water for Lake Fucking Huge. If the river doesn't make it all the way to the ocean because it's too far or it goes inland into the deepest part of the place without escape, it forms either a big salt lake, and the lake will be properly salty, or a marsh, depending on your climate or more realistically your preference. If shit's really dry, you can have huge river paths and vast salt lakes with no or nearly no water for interest.

Now, your civilisations.

Work out your capitals first, because most historic civilisations were based on one capital with a fuckton of small towns around it.

Civilisations are based on people in groups. Groups of people like nice things. Nice things like resources. Critical resources include:

Water. Bitches love water. You will never ever see a city without water. Most or all of your major cities should be on major water sources that are NOT the ocean which is BAD because unlike river or lake water which is DELICIOUS seawater is NOT DELICIOUS. You can have non-riverine towns supplied by wells, but because water's so critical in the 'make town/don't' civilisational paradigm, it'd better have shitloads of good stuff like ten trading routes over a goldmine or something.

Food. You need at least two supplies of food, preferably more. Food from water comes from fishing. Get food from forests and shit by hunting. Get food from anywhere with rain by farming, which if you do will lead to flat farmed plains fucking everywhere.

Good stuff includes:

Good forests, because timber makes good things like houses. Timber comes from forests.

Good quarries, because stone makes very nice houses for rich people. Quarries will be in mountains.

Good mining, because gold fucking rocks and so does iron once you can smelt that motherfucker. Mining, for the most simple example possible, comes from mountains, because preindustrial worlds don't have the tech for flatland mining, usually.

Once you've stuck your major cities where the most of these combine, stick towns in the next best areas and villages in the next. Remember your rule of travel. Farmers, which is practically everybody in preindustrialised times, have to cart their shit places. There will be a village, formed around a market, at most twelve hours from any one point of the populatyed part of your territory. There will be towns every three days' travel, for major trading excursions. Cities will be rare and only where there's a fuckload of useful shit. Keep in mind it's okay to have national areas that have no villages in them, because no nation ever uses al the ground because some of it just isn't that useful.

And now, TRADING. Trading fucking rocks for civilisations. Remember those towns and cities and shit? Trace paths from all your towns to their main cities. This will be where villages are often located since trade rocks. Trace paths from all your major cities to each other, put lots of towns on them. Make the apths wander if you have to, because people woudl rather spend an extra day or two travelling to know they've got a safe night's rest as often as possible. Whenever there is a city to city path on a national border, put a small trading town there. Whenever three or more city to city paths go near each other make them converge and put a city there, a trading city. More paths, bigger city. A 4/5-plus-path trading city will rival your capitals, and depending on what you want plotwise, will be a capital itself.

And now for the moment you've all been waiting for, the civilisations themselves.

Except not. I'm not going to get into the gepgraphical and sociological shit behind culture because holy fucking shit is it complex. If I were to take the most basic shit there is in the most simple language I could it'd take at least ten posts to get done and because I'm a geographel and sociologist I have no self control over these matters and would probably write a fucking thesis by accident which happened before.

Just remember three things when designing a culture. Their culture will be influenced by, above all else;

ECONOMICS - The resources available and even more significantly unavailable will have a huge effect on the path and the speed of cultural development. DON'T FORGET TRADE GOODS AND SHIT HERE.

GEOGRAPHY - The physical home of a people will be fucking crucial in determining what their nature is, and how they develop, especially technologically. It's probably the most important technological influence on people until they learn to change the geography itself. Climate, too, is critical gere.

HISTORY - the history of the people is fucking massive in determining what they are, and is an area in which you have more freedom than the others. Just remember that when making history the neighbouring civilisations are fucking crucial.

And when doing all this shit, just think THESE PEOPLE ARE LIKE 'X' BECAUSE OF HISTORIC/ECONOMIC/GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCE 'Y', and see if it makes sense or not.

IMPORTANT SHIT I SKIPPED

NAUTICAL TRADE ROUTES

This I ignored because HOLY FUCK IS IT COMPLEX. You have to determine the atmospheric climactic variations determining heatflows from planetary convection currents to find out the paths aquatic currents make which plus climate and prevailing winds and climate and the sociology and the technology and the economics will determine which direction boats go what where they stop. Just do whatever you want with these because the sort of person who will understand enough to see that your idea is stupid and understand easy enough to get angry is rare as fuck. I know all the shit, it's in my field, and it still gives me massive fucking headaches. Just make that shit up and follow common sense.

INDIVIDUAL UNIVERSE VARIATIONS

The things I've told you are based off our planet and its inherent shit, which is a fair base for anything you'll do because in any fantasy world you can assume that unless it is specifically mentined otherwise things work like they do here. IF THEY DO, you have to figure that shit out for yourself because the imagination has infinite variation and I don't have infinite space or time to get specific. Figure it out, use common sense, and if I'm on 4chan at the time you can ask me for the civilisational and sociological impacts of dragons existing and being ten kilometres long. Or if you're near a university, take it up with a professor of human geography or sociology because they fucking love this complex shit so long as you don't make it too obvious it's for a game.

This thread is... it should be published.

Okay, I feel I need to contribute what to this thread, so here goes.

Fantasy Creatures:

To get a general population of fantasy creatures (if you need it for god knows what reason), follow this one BASIC FUCKING RULE-
Assuming you're using the d20 system (I use 3e, it's easier for detailed worldbuilding), each ECL increase will make that creature half as abundant. Fucking simple. Take gnolls. Gnolls have a base ECL of 3 (2HD+1LA, 3e rules), which makes it 1/4th as common as ordinary folk. Since they're a "savage" race, however, they can't really do much when it comes to reproducing and spreading, since they're out killing shit and getting killed by shit on a regular basis. Personally, I just divide by 10 whatever the area can support in humans for savage races. Goblins and kobolds suck, so I divide by 5 for them instead. Another example: Minotaurs, having base ECL8, are then 1/128th as common as civilized races in the same area, or 1/1280th if you use the reduction (personally I play it by ear in these cases.) So a country supporting 6 million people will also support around 470-4700 minotaurs. Easy.
But what if it doesn't have an ECL? I used some data analysis to figure out a rough formula. It's roughly (CRx2)+2, until it gets to 5. At that point, it NEVER EXCEEDS the CR+7. Is this intentional? I don't fucking know. All I know is, that's roughly how it works. Are there exceptions? HELL YES. But that's how like 50% of them work.

>"-Are there any reasonably common but extremely valuable resources that require a large infrastructure to create or refine?"

We call it "salt". you die without it, or at least live miserably.

Also keep in mind that these creatures, for the most part, need food. Animals generally need an amount of available food proportionate to their mass. So a frost worm, weighing 8000 pounds, is going to need around 44 times the amount of food a human eats, meaning that same amount of land supporting 180 humans supports just 4 frost worms. ALSO, the trophic pyramid. Frost worms are predators, meaning they only eat other animals. Animals add up to only 1/10th of the mass of their food supply, so Frost Worms, needing to eat the animals that live off that square mile of land, each need at least 2 square miles of land. Also, they live in really cold places, which aren't known for their abundant life, so that could easily extend to dozens of square miles per worm.

Of course, all this assumes they're the only type of predator around, which in this case isn't that much of an assumption, but in other cases can reduce the viable population further.

Whenever you think there might be too many of a certain creature, use the CR and the food method, and pick whichever one is least.

Oh, and another thing: Dragons. Dragons fuck with that CR thing, since you can't realistically expect that less than 1 in 4000 dragons survive to adulthood. It's ludicrous. What I do is I use the average of the wyrmling CR to the CR of the dragon's age category to calculate commonness. With it, I can calculate that in the entire world there are only a few of each type of Great Wyrm, which checks out as more or less accurate to me.
Also, Dragons don't need much food. I usually just let them live off 1/10th the otherwise required amount of food; it works just as well.

>>5512298
>Most or all of your major cities should be on major water sources that are NOT the ocean which is BAD because unlike river or lake water which is DELICIOUS seawater is NOT DELICIOUS.

Because there's no advantage in having trading docks out to the ocean whatsoever. For that matter, New York and Los Angeles being coastal cities has fuck all to do with their relative prosperity.

>>5512788
When you sum up monster populations, it gets rather frightening. I'd be hard pressed to explain how the civilizations manage to survive while drowning in the sea of kobolds, orcs and goblins, with high CR monsters sticking out like an archipelago of doom.

>>5512939

which, of course, leads to a "points of light" scenario. The marauding demihuman tribes, while common, aren't all ubiquitous. If a tribe of goblins and a tribe of kobolds lived in the same area, they'd probably be at each other's throats whenever they take breaks from raiding the local human settlements. If you take one goblin tribe, one kobold tribe, one orc tribe, one hobgoblin tribe, and one of the various other tribes, their population would be less than the civilized population (using the 1/10th rule). The civvies could survive, barely, but if they tried to send a messenger to send for help chances are he wouldn't make it very far.

>>5512937

Los Angeles and New York are there because *there are rivers there*. the Hudson and Los Angeles River. You don't put your cities wherever on the coast you want, you put them where they can get fresh water.

>>5513023

Aren't there processes for removing salt from water?

>>5513041
EXPENSIVE processes.

>>5513041
Cannot sustain a large population. Or any population.

>>5512250
That's one of the most dwarfy pictures I've ever seen.

bump

>>5511229
Could you give more information?

http:// at . com/om -- ICARE. Do you?

>>5513041
>>5513048
>>5513054
Futuristic societies may improve desalinization techniques to make it possible for cities to thrive where there isn't fresh water available.

Magical societies may create spells that purify water, removing salt and other impurities.

But if you're going for a naturalistic approach to your world, cities will form near fresh water sources.

>>5513048
I wouldn't exactly call a screw pump expensive.

either an archive or some one screen capture this thread so we can all use it when need be. It is truly a marvel

This thread is actually pretty good. As a DM and a writer, I use a system very similar to this to help me organize everything and get my thoughts out.

I request that this thread be archived.

>>5511703
There are so many mitigating factors in that, I wouldn't know where to begin. One big doubt I have is soil quality.
>>5513041
>>5513048
Expensive enough that only one major plant exists in the world today,
>>5513250
Water screws do not desalinate water.

>>5511363
Back, did not expect that much more content to be added when I said it wasn't worth archiving. Archive is a pretty good idea now.

>>5512292
HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!

I haz coppyed it to Wurd!!!!

Archive! for the love of God Archive!

from wiki:

>>Salt created and destroyed empires. The salt mines of Poland led to a vast kingdom in the 1500s, only to be destroyed when Germans brought in sea salt (to most of the world, considered superior to rock salt).

I think I just found my new campaign premise.

relax, it has been archived.

>>5513662
If any thread deserves to live forever, it is this one.

>>5512937
Carthargo and Alexandria are noteable exceptions, both because of the relative value of direct access to the open sea and the necessities of the fleet.

also, on the general topic of World Building, this is by far one of the best and easiest Atlas tutorials, it does a great job very quickly.

http://forum.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=4084

login: crap
password: crapper

>>5513674

Indeed.

>>5513802
here's a real basic rough I made in about 20min with this, concept was a flat world with a cold polar center, surrounding ring of habitable land and oceans and a barren endless waste stretching out beyond that.

>>5513802
>>5513946
What program are these made with?

>>5514159
photoshop, see the tutorial linked in >>5513802

>>5514159
Photoshop

>>5514203
>>5514204
But that's rather random, isn't it? No way to place terrain features where you want them or whatever, no way to deliberately shape the coastline, add lakes...

>>5514234
go through the tutorial, yes you Can place terrain and shape coastlines.

icosahedral > *

I only ever ask myself one question- what do I want?

I figure out the kinds of things I want to have in my system first, then reason backwards from there. I've gotten some surprising results from this- in one campaign, I ended up killing all the gods off but St. Cuthbert to justify the campaign- all because I wanted to have my characters fight a Celestial Mystic.

where can i access the archive of this thread for future reference?

>>5514325
4chanarchive.com but it's in the queue to be approved still and will probably be for a while

>>5514325
Also available at suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com

>>5515719
>>5514589
suptg pwns 4chanarchive

can i get a direct link from suptg? I'm a total newb to that place.

Puhleez?

>>5517129
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/
click on "Archive" over on the left, newest threads are at the bottom.

this thread is:
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/5511229/