>>80786629
So if you draw a rune, is mana naturally attracted to that rune? Or do you have to summon up mana somehow to charge the rune?

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>>80786629

Mana is a substance produced by living souls when they express their main bond. At its core, mana is a self-similar substance which lacks a basal particle, even at its smallest size. Instead, it is made up of four fundamental and conceptual components.

Anima, which represents Will, fate, and the "Greater Movement" of the collective things from one form to another.

Vitae, which represents Life, mobility, and the "Lesser Movement" of individuals from one form to another,

Conscientia, which represents concepts, platonic forms, and the "Lesser State" of indivudals, their shape, and behaviors as a shaped thing.

and Essencia, which represents essence, elements, (both atomic and magical), and represents the "Greater State" of all things, in the most general sense, such as Earth, Flesh, and more obscure things like Plastic and Time.

Being made up of willpower as part of itself, the soul that produces mana can control it, making it obey their intentions, but it is fleeting, passing from a dimension of infinite energy to a void of nothingness, where it ceases to be.

The soul, then, is merely a hole from reality into this endless ocean of mana, widening and shrinking depending on the demands of the individual's own bond.

Demons, who are bound by Debt.
Mortals, who are bound by Law.
Divinities, who are bound by Oath
and Dragons, who are bound by Worth.

>>80786700

Mana is emitted from living souls. Souls choose lives to inhabit, which means that only nonmonstrous sentient races possess them. There's a lower limit on size, but generally, anything larger than a bug, (and some bugs) is in possession of a soul, and will emit mana into the ambiance around it.

This is important, because mana in The Trinity of Realities acts as both a powerful tool, but also a physical boundary that keeps things inside reality. As mana is expended, and flows into the void between worlds, it keeps things inside the trinity, acting as a membrane of sorts.

Things which drain mana from the ambiance can also lower it, and, in places which lack mana, this can actually create holes into unreality, into which things can fall out, or worse, in.

(This is an optional rule for the setting, but I personally treat the Void Between Worlds as containing crossover material. Anything that has ceased to exist in the multiverse has entered into nonexistence, and thus, can exit nonexistence through a voidhole in the Trinity)

Runes operate, depending on their design, by being built around the idea that mana in the air, which takes the form of a wave like sound, will pass over the rune. This means, for runes built to operate on ambient mana in an environment of air, they are often designed using audio science principles and vibrational ones.

Mana which has attuned to common air takes on the properties of a wave which rides along sound, and is programmed and altered by sound. Wizards exploit this by speaking random words to Thaumic Mana (A layman's term for mana that passes from a soul directly into the air, or is attuned to air at its most recent stage of attunement), and writing down which sounds make mana change effects in which ways.

>>80786764
So the two main ways to use mana are through runes or through wizards chanting off various words that alter mana to produce a desired effect? Are there any other methods of utilizing mana?

What kind of things can runes be used for? Can I carve a rune on my sword to allow it to light enemies on fire? Draw runes on my legs to make myself go faster?

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Mana, when it comes into contact with atomic matter (Electrons on their own, light, solid or otherwise, and things that are not technically atomic matter do not count), does what is called Attunement. There are as many attunements as there are combinations and permutations of every known element, and each atomic element has unique concepts and effects associated with it, in multiple allotropes and mixtures, based primarily on the history and philosophies tied to each substance, its name, and other things I've managed to dig up on them.

Examples include Carbon's attunement, which is raw Life Mana, this mana takes the form of a teal liquid which heals the living and softens what it is applied to, or Calcium, which takes the form of a purple liquid that animates the dead, sustains bacteria, and hardens what it is applied to. (Bacteria in this world are calcium based instead of carbon based for this reason)

>>80786816
This is where things get a bit insane. There are as many ways to use mana as there are ideas by the players. One player in a game I ran painstakingly developed a system of magic in which he used arm movements to manipulate mana from his soul, in tandem with a blade he looted that was made of metallic hydrogen possessed by a spirit. He called it Seccarmancy, and in the course of the game, developed the technique and recruited students to teach it to, who branched off into their own skills.

That said, classes in this setting are descriptive, rather than proscriptive, so I'll give you the nine most fundamental "classes" and what they are called.

Sorcerers: Use mana from their own soul. There are three types, Wizards, who use technique, Channelers, who use raw willpower, and Mages, who use a combination of the two.
(Cont)

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>>80786883
>>80786816

Fighters: They use the mana in their bodies, obtained through eating food and their own soul pumping a small amount into their blood and flesh, to enact effects. There are Martial Artists, who use movements and poses to shape the mana inside them, Aura Users, who use raw willpower to control the mana in their organs and draw it out and into other organs to gain special powers, and Monks, who use a combination of both will and technique. (You can probably guess where I'm going with this in terms of the formula of Technique, Will, and Mixed)

Finally, there are Espers, individuals who use the mana in the air around them and from other living things in order to enact effects.

Bards, who use music to affect Thaumic Ambiant Mana, which reacts to the sound of their bardic songs to enact wide ranging effects, Psychics, who use raw willpower to subjorn control of mana from both the environment and other individuals, and finally, Shamans, who, while they do use both music and willpower, tend to have an odder bent to them than the other Mixed Classes. Due to the difficulty of manipulating the mana polluted by other wills and intentions, and the difficulty of bardic magic using simpler and shorter lists of possible sounds than a wizard, Shamans rely heavily on ritual as well, using multiple simple instruments, bonds with mental figments that represent parts of nature and the intentions of the surrounding life, and other methods by which to combine will and music to control the ambiance.

>>80786883
Following up on this, Mana attunement is one of the biggest parts of the setting's magic system.

By attuning mana to a substance, you can give it an effect. By attuning this mana again, to another substance, you can give it a new, unique effect. The effects that mana attunement has are based on the substance, but when doing Attunement Chains, combinations of multiple attunements one after another, the effects that result are based on a "Last In, First out" system of effect generation.

As an example,

Thaum > Ruby > Sapphire > Emerald

This formula is used by players when performing mana attunement tests. Thaum means that the mana attunement is performed in air. You are controlling a mass of mana, guiding it through the air to something, then back out into the air, then to another substance. Thaum essentially means "Put 'Air' between every attunement on this list". Thaum attunements can all be controlled by wizards using their spells, and using Attuned mana to cast modified spells is a Mage's mainstay.

As for the effect itself, following the above example, the effect would be "Last In, First Out".

The last attunement in the chain is Emerald, which, for the sake of clarity, we will assume makes mana "Manipulate Earth."

Sapphire "Creates Ice", and Ruby "Creates Fire."

Therefore, the attunement chain;

Thaum > Ruby > Sapphire > Emerald

will result in a mana which:

[Manipulates Earth] in order to [Create Ice] in order to [Create Fire] The GM interprets this as "This mana takes any stone it touches, and forces it to absorb heat from the water around it until it ignites"

As you might predict, this means that the longer an attunement chain gets, the more convoluted and labyrinthine the mana type's effect will become.

Each time mana attunes, however, some of it slips into the void between worlds, and is lost to entropy. This means mana in the ambiance decays as well. In general, all mana decays in three days or less.

>>80787035
This sounds pretty neat as an abstract thing, but I really cannot even begin to imagine playing with it.

Mind giving an example of something a Fighter type could do?

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>>80787035

Finally, Mana can be catagorized, in general, as one of four types.

True Mana: Mana which has not been attuned to Air. This mana takes the form of a mathematical designation that suffuses the contiguous whole of the being that created it. People who wear armor, clothing, and accessories will find themselves in possession of odd magical effects, even if their equipment is not enchanted. Iron armor seems to make you stronger, while steel, more protected. Cloth may repair itself over time if you wear a full set of it, and the more of one thing you wear, the stronger a True Attunement will be.

Wave Mana. Most mana is of this type, most things made of atoms which are gas at room temperature have Wave Mana Types, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Neon are examples. Wave Mana takes the form of a Wave, or, more commonly, it inhabits existing waves. Air Mana, the most common and prolific on Miter, is a Wave Mana Type which inhabits sound that passes through it. This means that it can be programmed by sound, and have its effects changed accordingly, Water has a similar mana type, but it does not respond to random noises with random effects, instead, water mana is mysterious, and reacts best to prose, poetry, and poignant ritualistic speech to force it to take effects you desire.

Ray Mana is the most common mana type. Nearly every atom on the periodic table has a Ray Mana Type, and it is most common among elements that are found or produced in metallic or stone form. Iron, Cobalt, Gold and more are all Ray Mana types, which take the form of a ray, and behave almost exactly like light.

Finally, there are Liquid Mana types. The most famous of which are Carbon and Calcium, these mana types come primarily from atoms found in the composition of organic creatures, and many of them are abundant with Vitae, the essence of animate objects. Life, Death, Undeath, these elements are common among liquid mana types, which take the form of an almost material fluid.

I'm stealing a bunch of this shit

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>>80787108

One great thing about this system is, I always try to get new players in it instead of old ones, since the old ones "know" all of the "tricks" and "rules."

The way the setting is built, it's extremely open ended in terms of what you can do, and how you can do it.

A Martial Artist might study and emulate the way guns work, in order to develop a fighting style where he imitates the movements of a bolt-action rifle in order to launch the magic from his bones at an enemy in the form of a deathly blast of bone magic, while an Aura User could learn to do things like taking the Blood Mana from his blood and forcing it to flow into his eyes, giving him the power of Blood Vision. At the same time, by draining magic out of his blood to enhance his eyes magically, he would suffer from the effects of anemia, as the magic normally helping his blood carry nutrients and oxygen have been taken away.

Assuming you aren't learning techniques from teachers, books, scrolls or whatnot, a Fighter would primarily learn through the study of the natural world during campaign offtime, based on his chosen obsession. Due to the way the system is put together, I tend to let players explore the world around them, and they develop naturally just by seeing cool things and getting ideas from them. You might find a wizard who uses their magic to create blades of light, and, deciding you want to emulate that, defeat them and steal their tome, using the trip between towns as opportunity to experiment with the magic in your eyes, or infusing your bodily magic into a glass bauble to turn it into Light Mana, eventually culminating in you having the technique by the time you reach the next encounter or whatnot.
(cont)

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>>80787210
>>80787108

It's very "Roguelike" in that respect, since a lot of what players will obtain don't come from internal class features, but by simply absorbing real experiences they have, and knowledge about the world around them. Since the setting relies so heavily on willpower, and mana in the air carries the intentions of those who live around it, your mana can quite literally fudge things in your favor, especially when trying to learn new techniques. It's a bit Ork-Esque for mortals, whose souls are bound by Law.

Each soul receives mana for a different reason.

Mortals receive mana when they fulfil laws in their soul that demand they receive it, for example. How a mortal gains laws is when they "Prove" something to themselves. A mortal observes a totem pole that creates evil spirits, observing it, they come to the conclusion that "Totem poles create evil spirits", (In truth, that particular totem pole was merely enchanted). However, upon creating and testing a totem of their own, and their mana obeying their unconscious wishes, their own totem does indeed create a small specter, or, if it fails, the mortal may rationalize why it didn't work "The totem that made the spirits was filled with fresh animal blood, perhaps this is the source of the curse" (The blood was a mana supply for the enchantment)

How this works in gameplay is easier to understand. Players of any class can choose to study anything they wish, and, after a 1d20 opposed roll, I'll give them one of several things depending on the details.

Wizards who study something will observe the target of their study and then make noises that they think fit the object well, using those noises to craft completely random spells. As they do so, they write down the noises that have effects related to the research. I, as a GM, abstract this into a short list of three Phonems, noises which have related spell effects. (cont)

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>>80787250

While wizards gain Phonems, short utterances with simple effects, like, if they studied a campfire and rolled decently, I might give them these:

Fwoom: This phonem makes mana turn into flames

Bwoof: This phonem makes mana ripple and shift like a fire

Crackle: This phonem makes mana break apart and crack as if it were burning coals

They can then roll later on to either manually come up with spells made of these strung together, or they can abstract it, and simply ask me to generate a spell they want, using the phones they have under the hood to spare them the trouble.

A martial artist, then, would study something to gain Katas. Like with the gun example, I might give them these if they studied a bolt action rifle and rolled well:

Forward pause into sudden left hook: Mana in the center of the forearm is thrust forwards as the user throws a punch.

Swinging movement awakens Bolt: The user swings their arm in a particular way, sucking barrier magic from their skin into their bones.

Poise of the Stock: By kneeling in the shape of a stock, your blood flow forms an internal rune of stability, hardening your body's mana when it leaves it.

For bards, they have slightly different rules, since their skillsets are bound to the instruments they play, but they can still study things to get "spell" components, and string those "components" into abilities, either manually or abstracted away by me.

>>80786629
Mechanically, how would one go about making a shotgun that accepted runic shells? The player channels magic into a pool in the weapon, pulls the trigger, shell gets mana flooded from pool, rune explodes the effect outward scatter shot style to AoE attack and heal (lemme shoot your face back to pristine condition). Figure such a setup would allow fast magic use, effective versatility on the fly, and artificer type stuff.

Would totally make a shell that launches skeletons at someone if possible.

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>>80787301

One thing worth mentioning is, outside of Mana Attunements, all magic is mechanical. That is to say, all spells and enchantments are the product of machines physically made out of mana.

Because mana decays over time, in order for an enchantment to be made, you have to essentially play factorio, either manually, or in abstraction via the GM and rolls. Because mana only pretends to be physical, you can hide it inside physical objects, and by doing so, it will decay less quickly, due to not attuning as rapidly as it would in open air.

It will still decay, however, so how do you fix that? By repairing it. for the sake of brevity, I'll explain how a Wizard would create an enchantment.

First, they would find phonems which give them meta-control. A spell is a string of phonems, so, if you can find ones that can search back and re-execute, deactivate, or reactivate earlier phonems, you can create a very crude computer made up of a mass of mana programmed to enact specific effects when specific conditions are met by using meta-phonems that call back to earlier or later ones.

So, a wizard wants to make an enchanted sword. He creates a clockwork mechanism from solidified mana, and programs the mana to turn any mana it touches into gears, through a specific phonem. Now, whenever mana touches this construct, it turns the ambient mana into gears. Next, another piece of mana has a phonem added which makes it utter a soft noise that programs that gear ever so slightly, making it capable of doing similar things. Mechanisms then guide this gear into place, and replace a decaying gear of mana with the new one made of ambient mana.

Other methods exist of course, making weaves of magic that pull new threads into it, making whirling twisters of magic that pull in mana through suction and related phenomena by making the mana follow conservation of patternage. Basically, an enchantment must draw in ambient mana, and turn it into replacement parts for itself.

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>>80787349

Mechanically, to make a shotgun that took runic shells, the following would happen in the system.

1. I check to see your skills, this varies from game to game, but usually, I have players use ranks to determine how good they are at certain things.

2. You cite the items and actions used to assemble it. It can be as vague or as specific as you want, but I'll at least need to know what the EXACT end result you want is, if you don't just want me to interpret it vaguely.

3. I will roll a 1d20 (you) vs 1d20 (Your materials) (Yes, this technically means that, mechanically, your crafting materials will try to "fight back", since this is also how I handle combat opposed checks with chunky salsa rules)

4. I will compare your rank to that of the materials used, and append a modifier for difficulty, based on this table, I will be able to determine how good a success should be, or how drastic a failure is (Dice do not get modified by ranks, the dice are only rolled for the elements of the craft that involve luck)

The game uses six ranks of skill:

1. Novice (You dabble in the skill, you need quality materials, time, techniques, and all things neccecary for your task to achieve mediocre results)

2. Journeyman (You can produce mediocre results consistently, given acceptable materials, tools, time, and techniques)

3. Master (You produce good results consistently, and fantastic results rarely, and can do so with subpar tools)

4. Penultimate (Some of what you do bends what is possible. You can produce anomalous items, substitute for tools that barely qualify, or use materials that barely qualify for your task)

5. Ultimate (Your skill bends reality, you can produce items that have impossible effects for what they are, or produce fantastic items from materials or using tools unrelated to your profession)

6. Neo ( Those who observe you work can no longer recognize what it is you do. Tools, materials, techniques, none matter. Your work defies your job.)

(cont)

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>>80787466
>>80787349

At the final stage, I compare your rank of skill with the difficulty of the task before you, and then roll 1d20 vs 1d20, you vs what you are crafting. The higher each of you roll, the better each of you do.

Ideally, you want to roll as high as possible for both dice, while your dice remains above that of the materials resisting you, then, based on the skill rank and difficulty of the task, I interpret the results.

If you have a high rank of skill, failure is inherently less bad, while lower ranks have inherently worse successes.

As an example, let's say your shotgun is a Master rank piece of runework.

I roll 1d20 vs 1d20, you vs your product. You get a 15, the shotgun gets a 10.

If you are a Journeyman Runecrafter, I would say you succeed as expected, but the shotgun has some sort of inferior quality, due to the limits of your skill.

If you were a Novice, I would say you succeed, but with major problems. You did the best you could, and at least you got something out of it! You probably have to load it manually, with only one shot per load, and when taking attacks, you risk it jamming from the sudden jostling.

If you were a Master, it succeeds without a doubt. You now have a shiny new Runic Shotgun, with pump action and underbarrel shell storage.

Now, let's say you failed, instead.

You got a 1, and the craft? It got a whopping 20.

As a novice, it explodes in your face, and you take a grievous wound, or the gun shatters, splattering liquid magic everywhere and ruining your materials.

As a journeyman, it breaks entirely, ruining the materials you used.

As a Master, it almost works, but there's a critical flaw to it, one that makes it almost unusable by your own high standards.

Beyond that skill level...
(cont)

>>80786629
Seems neat. Magic systems that aren't just "do a swooshy with your hands and fire comes out" are pretty fun in concept. Which system are you using for it? My mind instantly goes to Runequest for... self explanatory reasons.

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>>80787525
>>80787349

Beyond that skill level, things would get weird...

You roll 1 vs 20.

As a Penultimate Runecarver, the Shotgun's pump action is stiff, and prone to jamming. Supremely annoying, and a liability.

As an Ultimate Runecarver, the shotgun can only penetrate three inches of steel with its solid mana flechette rounds... Utterly useless, if you had to give your personal opinion.

As a Neo Runecarver, you did your best, but the bullets fail to exceed the speed of light through runes carved on the pellets, which were meant to create small albecurie drives in front of the lead shot. Instead, the lead runic birdshot merely approaches the speed of light, using warped space to hit a target and erase them into chunks of gravitationally warped carbon. You've failed, completely and utterly.

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>>80787530

Custom system. I built this setting to combat insane bloat, so I needed something so narrative and rules-lite that I could easily sit my autistic players aside and generally keep them from running off the leash and searching for mechanical rules exploits.

All challenges in-system are handled by 1d20 vs 1d20 with skill ranks and difficulties modified failure severity rather than modifying the rolls themselves. Damage in combat and out is handled through a chunky salsa system of recording wounds and anomalous effects, Death is exceedingly uncommon in-game, but that's mostly preference on both my and the players part. Instead, the failure state of the game is usually turning yourself into a horrible monster or mutilating yourself. Instead of killing off my players when they accidentally make a magic reactor explode, I like to hit em with a wild magic surge that melds them conceptually with a basketball. It's more impactful than death, and makes them very cautious when it comes to encounters, as instead of either losing connection with their characters as they die and make new ones, or losing the sense of danger that comes from characters hardly ever dying, instead, their characters well-being is threatened, through permanent wounds that have to be repaired, usually in hodgepodge ways or through in-game adventuring to get healing.

In setting, healing is cheap, but never a free meal. Every single raw mana that can heal wounds also has side effects, ranging from turning your wounds blue and making your body soft and elastic, (Diamond and Carbon mana) to turning your scars red, and increasing blood vessel size in the area, making future wounds bleed even harder (Using raw blood magic to heal wounds).

Most of the system's complexity in running it comes from managing the long list of mana attunements, abilities and knowledge the players rack up over time as they explore and experiment, and of course, managing their ever-growing inventory of weird shit.

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>>80787621
>>80787530

Though, technically, I guess the setting would work in whatever system you think can handle it. At its core, I made it because I didn't learn my lesson on tamping down on bullshit from my players, and instead just kept refining the formula, both mechanically and lorewise until it could endure their attempts at busting it wide open.

On a similar note to the point before, about players being threatened with harm rather than death, when death DOES happen in-setting, it's pretty much final.

Death in Miter is tied to Anima, (Willpower, Fate, Luck and Destiny)

Death is essentially "The worst luck", and whenever someone dies, from a magical perspective, it's because their luck ran out. This means that mortals who try to cheat death normally will eventually still die, as increasingly deadly things begin to happen to them. Mortals who stave off death long enough will begin to physically manifest Death Specters, magical representations of their own horrible luck that try to trigger Final Destination Bullshit on them.

There are currently two ways for Mortals to cheat death, however, and both of them are restricted to Necromancers. A Lich is born when a mortal smears their death across time through a ritual that proves their "Thesis" (A sacred process by which mortals try to prove an ultimate truth and bend reality in an ultimate way). By smearing their death across time, their luck never reaches 100% dead, and they instead remain horribly unlucky for years, as the terrible luck meant to kill them is turned from a moment of permanent death to a fleeting period of almost-death.

Another Thesis that a mortal Necromancer may take up is True Ressurection. In pursuing a way to revive the dead, Necromancers come up to the main problem. The person they wish to revive may already be alive, merely reincarnated in a new self as their soul chooses another life to lead. The solution? (cont)

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>>80787698
A necromancer of supreme skill and mastery over undeath may learn to steal a soul from time itself.

Using their necromancy to reach into the past, a Necromancer who wishes to revive the long dead may learn to snatch their soul from the exact moment of their death, bringing it to the future whole and un-reicarnated, embodying it in a new vessel. From there, the necromancer must find a way to prevent them from dying again as their luck has run out, though, typically, this is done by making them some variant of undead, such as a Vampire, or by siphoning the subject's terrible luck into themselves, and smearing it once again in a lich-like ritual of luck redistribution.

(Pic related, a famous Vampire NPC named Lady Dalv Sepet.)

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>>80787726

It's probably worth getting into the setting's actual lore at some point, instead of just rambling on about the physics and system at some point, huh?

The Trinity of Realities is a trio of three different universes, bound together and overlapping as a construct of The Dreaming One, an entity which makes up the whole of the setting, large and small. The dimensions overlap in places, and when the veil between worlds is worn thin by the draining of ambient mana, sometimes one can breach between these universes, passing from one into another. The three universes are named "Earthrealm", "The Divine Planes" and "The Hellscape", with rather obvious implications to their names

We'll start with Earthrealm. Earthrealm is the dimension of Mortal Kind, it is primarily inhabited by those bearing mortal souls, and is made up of planets, stars, and your usual celestial nonsense. There are a few differences (Stars in this universe are made up of giant balls of precious metal, filled with souls that produce endless mana and light), but for now, we'll focus on Miter, the central planet of Earthrealm, and the setting itself.

Miter is your generic kitchen sink fantasy world, it contains a variety of staple races, and some that aren't, but, in true shitlord worldbuilding fashion, I've made all the races wacky and unique.

Dwarves of course, are a good place to start. There's two races, both called Dwarves by everyone, including themselves, but they also both despise the fact that the other kind is also named "Dwarf". More technically, they are also known by the monicker of "Stone Dwarves" and "Metal Dwarves", or, as the Stone Dwarves call the metal ones, "Pit Dwarves", and as the Metal Dwarves call the Stone Dwarves, "Hill Dwarves". While they're more than willing to steal one another's secrets, they despise and revile one another with a passion, due to their conflicts over the mountains they inhabit, and who deserves to claim them.

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>>80787814

There are good reasons why the Stone and Metal Dwarves generally revile one another, much of it is stubbornness, much of it is their close proximity in the mountains they call home, but at the same time, the biggest portion of their eternal grudge is envy.

Many of the mortal races possess an appendix, a magical organ which gives them special powers, unique to their race, (Aside from humans, who, while theorized to have the magical power of being underestimated, can hardly be tested for this power, as when the tests are done, they always seem to show no results...)

For Stone Dwarves, this Appendix Ability is called "Hyper Gentle". A Stone Dwarf, starting at a young age, gains the power of claryvoyance, but of a very specific kind. At will, they can predict how much harm an action of theirs will cause, and gain an instinctive understanding of it as they age. Those who grow skilled with this power gain more clarity, learning to distinguish how much harm, and to whom the harm would be done. By exploiting this ability, Stone Dwarves are able to do incredible feats of precognizance, ranging from estimating the future, to their most powerful ability, the power to create runes freely.

A Stone Dwarf, you see, can simply predict whether carving a particular shape will do harm more than any other, and by imagining these shapes, quickly stumble upon ones which are suspiciously harmful. Shapes which, when carved, will harm their hands, ice, fire, swords, or many other things, or, they can find runes which result in less harm than if they hadn't carved them. Less harm to themselves, their drinks, their homes. A skilled Stone Dwarf Runecarver can simply carve runes into being as they so desire, without the laborious and constant experimentation required of others.

This, of course, makes the runes of Stone Dwarves a commodity, especially to a race upon whom craftsmanship is quite literally their lifeblood. The Metal Dwarves.

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>>80787870
A metal dwarf is not born to a mother and father as ordinary races are. Instead, they are born in the mountains, through a process known as a Thaumic Collapse.

In this universe, the Trinity of Realities, a singularity cannot physically occur. Technological, intellectual, physical, energetically, no singularity can exist in any universe of the Trinity. When energy, information, matter, concepts and magic grow too dense, too wild and unpredictable, something snaps in the boundaries of reality. In a normal universe, a singularity is when a single point of limitless density contains a vast sum of energy and mass, this occurs because when that density occurs, there is nowhere for the mass and energy to go but inwards. all directions inside a singularity merely point deeper within it, with no way outside of the event horizon.

In the Trinity of Realities, this is not true. When the density of things grows too much, and too uncontrolled, mass, concepts, energy, information and magic spill out in extradimensional directions, like a bucket of water overflowing and spilling water all around it. When this happens, reality near the Thaumic Collapse is scrambled, objects and substances rewritten and mangled together in strange ways.

When space dust would become a star of plasma and gas, it instead becomes a ball of solid gold, inhabited by living souls and surrounded by sparkling stardust, as reality breaks down, and concepts are scrambled together in the madness.

Under a mountain, two Metal Dwarves carve a statue of a baby, made of the finest metal they can afford, studded with gems, of glass or jewel, it does not matter, then, they bury this statue deep, deep underground.

In these depths, the pressure, heat, and magic pumped down into the mountain is too intense, too sonerous and dense. In these depths, the concept of statue, dwarf, metal and child are mixed. Like a dream, reality forgets for a moment that the baby isn't alive. A Metal Dwarf is born.

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>>80787944

Next, of course, we've got elves. Elves are a bit more traditional, though, again, there are several kinds. Far more than the mere two types of dwarf, in fact, but they are all more similar to one another by far.

There are the Wood Elves, who live in the woods, the High Elves, who live in glittering cities of glass and mirrors, floating high above the surface, the Drow, who live underground among spiders and flesh, and the Beach Elves, of course, who tan by the ocean and while away their days under the sun.

Each of them have an Appendix uniquely suited to this lifestyle. Their appendix grants them the power of "Seep", they can treat their element as if it were a body of water (Not as if it were water, but a BODY of water). As they grow older and more skilled, they can bend the limits of this power more and more.

For a Wood Elf, this is simple enough of an ability. They can plant living wood in itself, treating one as a pool of liquid long enough to place the other inside. They can live in cities made of a single giant tree, into which no other can enter, after all, who could enter a city that has no doors? No entrances, save those made by the Wood Elves for outsiders? If an Wood Elf needs to enter their home, they merely swim through the wood and enter it.

For a High Elf, their natural element is Light itself. Glass, to them, is as pristine and clear as water is to us. But there is much much more to it than that. High Elves can do the same with mirrors. By treating light as a body of water, a High Elf can, at will, merge together glass into glass, mirror into mirror, entering one and exiting another in a pool of perception and image. Their cities float high in the sky, not because they are held aloft by wings or engines, nor because they are weightless. The cities are indeed supported by pillars and structures, but ones woven into the mirror world, and whose bases exit at the ground.

Drow, then, are perhaps among the most interesting.

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>>80787572
I'm losing my shit. This is absolutely inspired. I am stealing large swaths of this.

>Those last two descriptions
My sides

Thank you based magic poster.

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>>80788005

Drow possess "Fleshseep". This means they can treat flesh and bone as if it were a body of water, with all that entails. For an ordinary Drow, this skill is merely useful. They can mend flesh by letting it flow together, retrieve parasites from a body by simply plucking them out, meld together cuts of meat, by simply pouring them into a cast, creating the largest and juciest of delicacies from only the finest pieces.

For a more skilled Drow, they can become a true terror.

One obvious example is the Space Pirate known by many as simply "The Captainess", whose true name is "Dances-On-Money". A drow, through and through, she is famous, not only for her cruelty and avarice, but for the hilarious lethality she wields against her enemies.

Her skill with her "Fleshseep" allowed her to achieve feats that stunned even other drow. You could not shoot her, bullets didn't harm a lake. You couldn't cut her, water parts and reforms with equal ease. Fire merely boiled her, and the steam she became drew back to her with contempt. You could not freeze her, any more than you could burn her. She was Flesh, she was Water, and among the things that could hurt a body of water, few thought to leverage them against her, before she melted them in their own armor alive with a look. She could treat flesh as if it were a body of water, and so few people in this world could claim they weren't made of flesh... (Second Pic Cont)

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>>80788081

These things merely made the Captainess a fantastic killer. What made her a fantastic Space Pirate was her other use for her power. To treat a living thing as if it were a swimming pool, and to dive right in.

A drow doesn't treat something like water. No elf does. A mistake many non elves, and many young, inexperienced elves make, is to assume that volume for an elf is no different from volume for anyone else... But that simply isn't the case, beyond a certain point.

The Captainess was able to hide inside a living person, without a single trace. Why would it leave one? They would not bloat, nor would a knife or gun reveal her inside them. To her, they weren't just a body made of meat, but a swimming pool, a lake, an entire ocean for her to swim in, to hide things inside, to sail upon and more.

For her crew, any member could be where she swam through some hidden underwater cavern to reach them through any other. For her enemies, anyone could simply be her, or contain her.

That is what made her The Captainess of the Deathseep Pirates. What made people be cautious, when elves were involved.

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>>80788126

Well, it had to happen eventually, we've finally reached the Mandatory Furry Race. Hopefully, my take on it will reveal that I'm not horny, just obsessed with absolutely busted mechanics to exploit.

The Animal-People are a race of creatures who possess a powerful ability, and an incredibly uninspired name. They usually aren't called Animal-People, but, depending on their tribe, they will instead be called things based on their specific race, such as Dog-People, Bird-People, or even more exotic things, like Fish-People and the rare and elusive Racoon-Person.

Animal-People have the appendix ability of "Selective Trait", which, as you may have guessed, gives Animal-People one of the most powerful abilities, to the creative mind. They can, at will, take on any trait of any animal which falls under their particular umbrella of species.

One example I love using to sell the idea of Animal-People to my players is this:

Imagine if you would, the Wandering Albatross, the bird with the longest wingspan, of over 12 feet in wingspan. Imagine taking on that trait for your own arms, gaining impossibly long arms. Now imagine taking on the bone density of the Ostritch, which has incredibly dense and heavy bones, owing to its immense strength and landspeed. Combine this, if you would, with the muscles of a swan, whose wingbeats are strong enough to break bone, according to rumor.

Then, your Bird-Person, with their six foot long, heavily muscled not-hollow-boned arm, rears back and punches a man.

This is what an Animal Person can do, if they are of the correct tribe.

What, do you do for players that don't possess a massive library of real world knowledge to draw conclusions from? Isn't that one of the pitfalls of such an open ended system?

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>>80788200

Other races that I don't have fun pixel art for, in no specific order:

Orcs. They normally live in tribes as well, though there are many who live in urban tribes and act accordingly. They are born strong, age quickly, and often die young, with 30s for an orc being 90's for a human. They do have an appendix ability which makes up for it, however, an ability known as "Break Better". Anything an orc breaks, by any definition, becomes better at the spot it broke at. Break a sword? the jagged edge where it broke becomes sharper and harder. Break a rock? Same thing. Break a piece of rebar? It becomes more flexible, harder, and more durable overall. Break a horse? It becomes more loyal. Break a promise? The bond you reforge after the betrayal will be even stronger than that.

Orc diplomats are a terror in the way they can break treaties to improve relations, when one rises to that lofty status.

Goblins. These ones are odd, and I haven't explored them as much. Their Appendix Ability is "Close Enough". A goblin can succeed at nearly any task, no matter how untrained or difficult, however, what they gain in success, they lose in quality of success. Can a goblin build a car from scratch? Yes, but only just barely. Instead of success or failure, their ability, gameplaywise, merely intensifies the consequences of success, making horrible horrible things happen, the worse they do at something. Ironically, this means that, for Rocket Science and Heart Surgery, a Goblin would be best. After all, when it comes to delicate procedures, "barely succeeded" is as good as it gets, for most.

Humans. Dull, boring, uninspired. They are so unimpressive that most underestimate them, and some suspect that is their signature ability in fact, though nobody has been able to prove it. Nonetheless, unlike all the other races, humans can have viable offspring with any organic creature, making them only slightly less capable of awkward family reunions than dragons

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>>80788273

Those players get to make up bullshit, and, using Mortal Law, roll to see if their laws/attempts bend reality to their whim. Generally, I only make my really old players properly explain things, because they tend to post extremely large, convoluted actions. Everyone else can abstract HEAVILY, and I'll do the research for them.

That's one key thing worked into the system, too, there are ways to "skip" reality.

Magic obeys your will, you can use it to bend things to work as you want, so you can literally use actions like "I try to make it work with magic", but there's also a Mortal-specific class known as a Mundanus Extremus.

A Mundanus Extremus forgos magic in favor of a mundane practice, like carpentry, and, by observing the world and creating Laws inside their soul through these observations, they gain tiny little pieces of ork-esque reality warping. Technically, this works for magic too, but to a lesser degree.

One of my players in an earlier game possessed no real knowledge of gunsmithing, but he liked the aesthetic, and rolled up a character who slowly progressed towards becoming a gunsmith. he eventually, through bullshit and abstraction, ended up creating a Time Cannon that can fire blocks of land thousands of years through time to a few minutes in the future. He used this to grow crossover Steven Universe Gems in minutes by firing shit into the future with his weird, reality-warping timegun.

He did this without magic using Mundanus Extremus abilities, and, among other things, became younger by wearing an explosive cloak of gunpowder packages (Gunpowder was originally invented by a philosopher trying to invent the elixir of life), and discovered a new direction, which he called "Gundirectional". He used this for firing things that slipped briefly out of phase with reality to detonate explosives inside enemies and made guns small but dense by building them in four dimensions instead of three. He never did learn any real world ballistics.

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>>80788277

Speaking of Dragons, dragons are a race who have variants that aren't important, what is important is their Soul. Governed by worth, dragons gain power by gaining wealth. The more wealth they have, the more powerful their soul, and the more mana they produce. There is a rule in this universe called the "Three-part-rule". For judging an item's worth, three values are used. What the Dragon considers it to be worth, what his culture considers it to be worth, and what the whole of the universe considers it to be worth. The average of these three things determine how much mana and power he receives from his soul for what he owns.

It doesn't have to be treasure, either. Hydras grow stronger by owning more of their own brethren, in the form of extra heads. Drakes own the strength of their bodies, and gain wealth as they achieve feats. Dragon Knights earn the value of honor, and grow in strength as their reputation and renown do.

Likewise, dragons are changed by what they own. A dragon with a horde of marshmallows will slowly shift and change to gain the properties and powers of a marshmallow, as one example. Half-dragons are also common. The only race that beats humans at awkward family reunions is a dragon, as they can sire offspring with any extant thing. If a half-dragon half-sandwich is asked about his parents, he will respond "I don't want to answer that."

Dragons are also the only Soul in the Trinity of Realities without a universe to call home. While Demonic Souls have the Hellscape, and Divine Souls have the Divine Plains, Dragons are scattered across the trinity, having been without a dimension for so long, only the eldest among them have the slightest inkling of what might have once been. What could have happened to their precious home, "Herebe". (A dragon blew it up by accidentally owning everything for a brief moment)

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>>80788417

Onto the subject of demons, they are governed by Debt. The golden age of the Demon Race was the day they discovered Earthrealm, and the day that age ended was when the Bureaucracy was born.

Demons grow stronger, the more they are owed, in this respect, Warlocks and Demons once held a relationship unlike any other. A demon could shower gifts onto a mortal ceaselessly. Life, youth, gold and treasure, magical power! A demon could give it all to a mortal, and never expect a payment in return. Afterlives were forged for the Warlocks who owed demons their immortal soul, and these idyllic patches of hell were rich with the patron spirits of the Demon Kings' former Warlocks. Life was good, for Mortals were unaffected by Debt in the way demons were. Demons love to give gifts, but revile receiving them, for just as a demon grows stronger, the more you owe it, it grows weaker, the more it owes you.

In the Hellscape, this meant demons would only prey upon each other, if they made deals. Imps, Demons whose souls produced no magic, and who had to survive on the mana of their patron, or stolen from the flesh of dead monsters to survive, were commonplace.

But it was a golden age of sorts, ruled by Demon Kings, who were so generous as to give mountainous gifts to all around them, and amass debt unlike anything else, until the day they were murdered by the very thing they squandered. Money.

Imps had no use for debt, why would they? They owed so much that the debt could never be repaid in their eternal lifetime. So why bother? So said a cabal of imps, who amassed wealth unlike anything claimed by imps before. Using the tides of money they got by going deeper and deeper into debt, they hired mercenaries, dragons, mortals, and demons alike, With those mercenaries, they slew the Demon Kings one after another with the power of rifles and paramilitary troops, and a new form of governance was instated. The Bureaucracy.

(cont)

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>>80788490

The Hellscape was always a boiling, frigid realm of flesh, acid, gasses, and other nasty things, where titanic monsters made up the endless caverns that spread through the entire dimension, but under the Bureaucracy, it began to live up to its name, for Mortals and Demons alike.

Under the rule of imps, laws were instated by force, limiting how long and how much debt a demon can amass, before they are forced to collect the debts they are owed. Those who break these laws are subject to cruel, unusual punishments, or, more commonly, death by the mercenaries used to enforce this rule.

For Warlocks, it meant they could no longer promise their soul, and expect to never pay it. For demons, it meant they could only grasp at whispers of power, unless they played the sick games of the new government, to wade into endless red tape, files, laws and worse, just to be owed by a mortal for such a short while.

The Bureaucracy, of course, intended such. To prevent the rise of a new demon king, debt had to be controlled. The collection of debt enforced, to keep wealth flowing into the hellscape, and, in turn, into The Bureaucracy's pockets. After all, there were no laws about owing, and the imps owed so very very much to the demons they wrong with their rule.

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>>80788546

Finally, the last realm in the Trinity of Realities. The Divine Plains. In this dimension, endless idyllic islands float through the air, sparkling, glowing, and more. There is only one problem.

Nearly all of the Divine Plains is made up of the heaviest elements. Gold is considered a metal of the divine, but only by mortals, and for one reason alone. It is the lightest element that can be found in the Divine Plains save Ozone, which the dimension was pumped full of by Zeus, when he discovered the value in being able to speak.

The Divine Plains are strange, not because the entire place is so radioactive as to kill mortals, and utterly decimate any demon exposed to its invisible light, but because of its inhabitants. In this world, the Gods, beings of pure radioactive metal, like holy golems, are beings bound by Oath. They are powerful, and rightly feared, because to make Oaths is serious business. A being in possession of a divine soul gains the power they require in order to fulfil their promises as they are. No more, but no less as well.

A deity who swears your death will gain the mana needed to do it, however, this comes at a terrible cost. A deity who breaks their oath forswear the magic they gained to execute it, and, should they have squandered the magic, but failed in their task, they may even die from the shock of it. No matter what, a deity's mind is born, no, forged, to never forswear their oaths. They view it as death, for to them, that is precisely what they brush up against, to defy their promises.

In this sense, an angel or deity would view demons as vile by nature, for they live by making promises they wish to never keep.

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>>80788636

Another oddity is the names and spheres of deities and angels, because, while many of them seem ordinary, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of gods whose names and demeanor seem to imply a status that is otherworldly, from beyond the trinity themselves. Do the so called "Roman Gods" and "Greeks" truly come from these places from beyond the Trinity of Realities? Do they merely style themselves after otherworldly mythological figures, whose names and spheres they learned by staring into the void between worlds? Or is there something more to it?

No matter the case, Deities and Angels come from the same source, other deities. Those with a Divine Soul reproduce primarily by manufacturing from heavy metal servants meant to act as extensions of themselves, angels of plutonium and uranium metal or odder elements besides, who swear oaths to their divine creator as they are made, and, perhaps, one day becoming a god themselves, through the amassing of oaths, both perpetual and fleeting.

>>80788719

That's pretty much all I've got off the top of my head. If any of you have any questions or topics, I can try to answer anything and everything brought up.

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Also, I guess I'll post art I've made for the games I've run in the setting.

Here's one of a Stone Dwarf in a floating gene-modifying pod. as part of a dream sequence in a game I ran on Spacebattles

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Here's that same dwarven girl threatening squishy mice that lived for years on a derelict space station by feeding on the life mana generated inside it. Years of subsisting on diamond magic has made them as soft and elastic as water balloons or whatnot.

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As an example of what some mana types can do, High Fructose Corn Syrup Mana causes inanimate organic matter to mutate into horrible monsters, like this, the Steak Tartoise, a monster made of raw meat and a pie crust shell, filled with blueberry mash.

You mentioned that casting magic for humans is a self imposed law of belief because mortals are bound by law. What would magic look like for beings bound by the other three types?

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>>80788893

Another example of food mutated into a horrid monster, this is Stork Au Poivre.

>>80788923

For Demons, a lot of their magic revolves around extracting something back out of what they put in. Examples include being able to draw things out of plants they've grown, souls out of bodies, blood from healed individuals, and the like.

Though, all races can use magic once it's been invented and disseminated by someone. Runes, for example, were originally invented by Dragons, as a Dragon's dominion over what they own is absolute, they could dissolve their wealth into pure value, engraving symbols which represented the things they owned, and had magical properties. Dwarves stole these first runes from dragons, and expanded upon them, imitating the strokes of the runes which embodied in information the true essence of several things.

All four soul types can use the nine basic classes, though, utilizing Soul, Body, and Ambiant Mana through Technique, Willpower, and Mixed methodologies.

As more examples of what certain soul types would experience with magic, Dragons are incredibly good at Alchemy.

Alchemy in setting is primarily derived from the use of Mercury Magic, this, however, is highly illegal, and those who use raw mercury mana are known as Mad Alchemists. This is because Mercury Mana loosens the conceptual bonds of reality around it. Actions stop being literal, objects become metaphors, Air combines with Metal, and, mixing together, forms Rust Gas that then bonds to your lungs and transforms you into a creature of rust.

Dragons can skip a lot of this, because what they own is utterly within their power. They can demand that what they own dissolute and recombine in ways they desire. Do they own gold and a sword? They can demand that the sword become gold, and the coins, steel. Or they can demand that the sword and coins combine into a sword of coins, whose cuts make foes bleed blood-red pennies.

>>80788972

On a similar note, Language in the Trinity of Realities was born from this theft of ideas between worlds. In the ancient era, everyone communicated through gibberish. Through their intentions and souls, the random noises they made conveyed the things they wished to say.

This all changed once Wizards first discovered spellcasting through magic phonems. They invented ways to speak long distances with magic, but the gibberish of the primeval world couldn't convey their intentions that far across the planet, forcing them to adapt. Wizards, needing a way to communicate without gibberish, decided to use their own creation, phonems and spellcraft. By using spells without mana, they spoke in utterances like "Flare" and "Foire" to communicate fire across their scrying phones, and slowly but surely, the Trinity changed, until people forgot that they didn't need to use specific words to mean specific things.

There may yet be isolated tribes, who still remember the primeval language of gibberish, who can speak to anyone and be understood, and hear anyone, and be understood, because that is their reality. Unga Bunga.

>>80788923

Also, to elaborate further on that, divinities, demons, and dragons often have tricks of their own that they can use, which substitute Law based trickery for them.

Demons can take things they're owed, even if it doesn't make sense to claim, like beauty, or voices. Likewise, fighting a demon can be deadly, as the more you wound them, the more you owe them repayment for the harm done to them.

Deities can gain powers and traits from the oaths they make unintentionally, like if a god swore to provide rain to a village, they could physically turn into rain while they held the oath, while a war god who swore to serve the cause of a people might gain the power to sense when they are in danger.

Dragons, of course, I explained earlier, have supernatural control over what they own. Dragonfire is a terrifying power that dragons possess. By sacrificing the wealth of something they own, they can emit a breath attack which houses all the use that their sacrifice could ever have.

If a dragon sacrificed a sword from his horde, he could breathe a cloud of steel that cut with all the slashes that that sword could ever have made before dulling and breaking, by making it cease to be.

How accessible is magic to the Mortal races? What is your world like beyond its staggeringly thought out magic system?

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>>80789086

Ahh, culture. That one's fun.

So, on Miter, at least, society is structured in an odd way. Law is primarily in the hands of mayors and village leaders, and outside of towns and cities, the wilderness consumes most things and is lawless. This means that what you find from place to place can vary wildly.

One canonical example from one of my games was the following: Players met two villages, one of rabbit-people and one of snake-people, they lived in a large grassy plain where it constantly rained oil. Due to this, the two villages lived entirely on fried grass, wore woven grasses, used saps made of woven grass as their main weapon, and used rare heating stones to cook food, as they dared not use fire to cook anything. Less than 20 miles away, there was a dystopian megacity known literally as the Nutrivatco Sovereign Property, in which a company known as Nutrivatco was frantically buying up and forcibly claiming land to expand their company and the associated megacity, who used cloned people as shock troops and used weapons like coilguns and matter-synthesizing guns.

If you're willing to travel, you could get access to all kinds of magic, both ordinary and strange in the mortal realm, but in your own village, where it's usually safe, you might be limited to the local magical school of "eating wood chips so you can spit out seeds that grow into temporary plants."

Most normalish towns however have bookstores, and, if you have access to the internet or the Elemental Plane of Data, you could get access to things like orbital drops in return for payment, or acess websites that have various individuals sharing their own asinine practices and theories, as well as basic knowledge about the world.

However, even ignoring all of that, all you need to do magic, whether you're a mortal, a demon, an angel or a dragon, is to have a powerful will. Willpower enables three of the nine classes, if you want to become a Channeler, a Psychic or an Aura User.

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>>80789216

To follow up on this, in the lawless wilderness, there is ONE source of justice and law, and that takes the form of roving paladins. Many paladin orders will actually seek out people doing vile things in the wild, and punish them accordingly, though they act on oathbound or moral grounds instead of legal ones. On top of that, there are Knights, who, if royalty is in the area, will serve them to attempt to bring some sort of central law to the entirety of a region. Along with this, nearly every town has a "To-do board" of some kind, which often includes some variant of monster slaying or window washing. Kingless Knights are a common sight, sociopathic warriors obsessed with killing monsters who wear a full set of armor and wield a weapon made entirely out of a single substance, painted in a single color to abuse True Attunement Set Bonuses. An example of a Kingless Knight in an actual game was a man named Pearl Jam. He used Pearl-painted silver armor. His horse had similar armor, and he used Pearl's true attunement to resist pain and flinching to keep his horse calm in battle.

Such individuals are the source of law in a dense wild only sparcely interspersed with towns and villages that have their own laws and cultures mostly isolated outside of the rare computer-using nerd or hyper-advanced megacity country.

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>>80789275

As for specific locales, it varies a bit from game to game, but famous spots from older games included:

Mansion, the country of dwarves. It's technically the manor grounds of the Dwarven King, a Metal Dwarf made of an alloy of Adamantite, Adamantine, Adamantium, Mithril, Mithral, and Mythryl.

NSP, the Nutrivatco Sovereign Property. Think your generic Shadowrun esque megacorp, Nutrivatco got big selling Nutrivats, basically healing tanks that could heal and sustain people with liquified ATP (The stuff that feeds cells), but now they are infamous for things like accidentally turning a theme park into a mutant hellhole because they put high fructose corn syrup in all the food and it mutated into monsters and infested all the rides with food themed abominations, straight up taking over towns, ousting the population, and using the land as part of obscure business transactions, and being led by people like, for example, a man named Ice who refuses to touch, eat, or breathe anything not made of diamonds. He lives inside a sealed suit made of diamonds, breathing from a tank of air alchemically made from them.

They also have a McDonalds Ripoff that is straight up just called "Consume", whose motto is "Please consume more if you still have wealth to spend!"

The company's own motto is "All Pay Cash", a reference to the joke about "In god we trust, all others pay cash."

There's also places like Sesmo, a volcanic mountain range inhabited by dragons, and ruled by the Celestial Dragon of Magma. Celestial Dragons are dragons that have come to own an entire element itself. so technically, the Celestial Dragon of Magma owns all magma everywhere, and has the power to enforce this claim if it's used in a way they disapprove of.

>>80789381
Other key notes about culture

In Earthrealm, there are two key things about naming convention that are important.

First, rather than parents naming their children, they typically choose a name at some point approaching adulthood. This leads to many people being named plain english words like "Explode", or "Flambe DeGlaze". Another commonality is, whenever someone does take a proper last name, it's usually in the viking tradition, I.E, if your father was named "Bomb", you might be "Bombdottir". An actual family name is uncommon, and the parent's first name is often used instead.

This explains why several characters in setting have truly asinine or convoluted puns for names. No, it wasn't a coincidence, no, their parents didn't hate them, yes, it's a dumb name that they themselves picked because they thought it was cool.

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>>80789432

Due to the sheer volume of travelers, one extremely common phrase you'll hear a lot on Miter, is "Hail Traveler," which may seem mundane, but it's something of a ritual, and the meaning is more deeply respectful. As towns can be isolated, a visitor could be someone seeking to solve your problems or to cause them. They could be incredibly powerful, or trying to become such. To welcome them in this fashion is to show goodwill, which is critical to wandering travelers alone or in a small group. Merchants, for instance, would not be greeted in this way.

In addition to this, other quirks of culture that are widespread include sharing recipes. In each town, the sheer breadth of magic and resources mean that cuisine might seem so impossible as to look inedible, but even if the food doesn't seem appropriate, techniques are often universal. Travelers are welcomed even more warmly, if they teach some of the villagers a cooking technique they encountered on their travels, or even better, provide an example of it in action. By cooking for the village, a traveler is essencially saying that they are willing to share the fruits of their hard journeys into the wild, in a way that some fleeting treasure or money can't.

Likewise, there are faux pas that are often commited. Necromancy is banned in nearly all towns, not because it is evil, per say, but because, quite frankly, it reeks. Undeath Magic as a rule feeds bacteria and disease. This means even the most ivory white bones have joints of stinking slime, and, unless the undead is sealed utterly, the scent is unavoidable. Likewise, undead may emit miasma, vaporized calcium magic that forms a liquid mist in the air, that can cause illness and pollute crops and plants. As such, necromancers are expected to leave all their products far outside the limits of any respectable city or town, in the same way a blacksmith or leathermaker would be expected to do their work far away. Despite this, necromancy is common

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>>80789524

I'll be going to be soon, so I'll leave you guys with this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16HeU7xWhRb9bPLFlhG2jqoh6_4qDZce1kKixnJYts5w/edit?usp=sharing

A copy of my spreadsheet I use for lore management.

If you want to read stuff that involves or was set in the setting, I don't currently have anything running (that is public), but "Darkness Redeemed" is the name that was used for the game that was on Spacebattles. It's extremely old, but it was the first real one. Also, I ran several other things set in it, stuff on SV and SB.

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/the-alchemists-void-roguelike-craft-quest.71197/

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/worldly-whimsy-science-fantasy-ck2-like-art-quest-200-dwarf.868732/

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/combinatorial-explosion-worm-original.85467/

None of these are tabletop games, but they all used the setting, either whole or in part, and they all used its magic system.

i like the gifs :)

>>80786629
Do do nu-worldbuilders spend so much time explaining their boring derivative magic systems instead of actually building cultures, nations, races, and history? You know the actual parts that give a world verisimilitude and substance? The result of Sanderson and it’s consequences have been a disaster for fantasy world builders

>>80792682
>The result of Sanderson and it’s consequences have been a disaster for fantasy world builders

Sanderson spends a lot of time on his magic systems, but in all his worlds except Mistborn he has fully fleshed out cultures

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>>80786629
>>80786709
Have you by any chance read Witch Hat Aterlier / Tongari Boushi no Atelier?
The magic system in that setting is exclusively pattern/rune based like yours, right down to the combination of patterns/runes to design new spells. It doesn't expressly discuss mana/souls in detail, but the whole "magical effects are achieved through channeling magic in specific drawn/carved patterns" thing is the same.

It's a pretty neat magic system - if you haven't read it, I think you might find it interesting.

>>80792682
This is for a game my guy. A game specifically designed around munchkins trying to figure out magic systems. Of course it's going to go into detail on the magic system.

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>>80792682

I tend to generate things for my setting as my players encounter them. History, nations, races, cultures. Sure, maybe it leads to a simpler setting, since I didn't design it from the ground up, but I never intended for it to be this deep and intricate tapestry. I intended for it to be something my players liked, and had fun playing.

It just so happened that, for the most part, my players enjoyed digging deeper and deeper into the magic system, studying the setting's physics, and the history underlying it, while making history themselves.

I've never read Sanderson, if I'm being honest, but then, I also haven't really touched on the Trinity's culture and peoples that much either. I could do so, if you want, but I'm unsure if you really do, or if I've already soured you on the setting by this point, and attempting to dig into that part of it would just be some form of backpedaling from your perspective.

A lot of the towns and places are designed in a way similar to Star Trek, or One Piece. Due to the nature of towns and cities being isolated by the wild untamed places between them, each town tends to be its own microcosm of history and culture, rather than there being a grand interconnected web of politics and events.

In my latest game, players were all children born in the town of Ramhide, a simple farming community whose livelyhood came from the puffpuff rams they raised. Drow originally settled the land and started the practice of farming the rams for leather and meat, hence their name, but later on, more people came and joined the burgeoning community. They worship the Goddess of Shoulders, Lady Omos. In an ancient era, she held up the sky during a war between the gods over the fate of a city and race whose growing power threatened many. Omos was part of the reason the war ended, not because she fought in it, but because, as several gods descended to Earthrealm to protect the mortals from the fallout of this divine war, (cont)

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>>80795439

The deities who chose to protect mortals being caught in the fallout of this divine war over the fate of Urfheim, the ancient city, disturbed their fellow gods greatly. Seeing gods making eternal oaths to protect single small villages and towns meant that they could never reasonably return, and this was truer than anything in Ramhide. Omos swore to protect them from the sky that was shattered above Ramhide during this war. In this oath, she has remained on Earthrealm for untold years since then, slowly growing infested with plants and moss, forced to replace her body with mere stone and gold, as her metal flesh sloughed off over the years from the strain of holding up so much fractured air and space.

In the modern day, she can hardly be recognized as a goddess anymore, with countless limbs of stone, and a soft, caring face, she seems more some kind of embodiment of nature to those who don't know her history.

Once per year, when the young men and women of Ramhide come of age, they make a pilgrimage to the kindly Lady Omos, and there, she gives them a gift. A magical fragment of the sky she holds up, that had fallen to earth. Infused with her divine wish to protect them, the people of Ramhide use these shards for many purposes, from communicating with her to crafting simple tools or weapons. Each person only has one shard, which they treasure dearly nonetheless, as it serves as both reminder and warning. That there are those cruel enough to war for the destruction of a race, but also those kind enough to defend the innocent.

That context given, I've also got the actual legend I gave players to explain the history of the village they started in (Cont)

(Pic related, the characters in that campaign)

>>80788636

Also, ^ is a picture of the goddess herself, and the dias where she receives mortal visits. They can't stay long, for fear of radiation sickness, but she does love to receive visitors as often as she can.

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>>80794062
I'll have to check it out

>>80795551
Here's the actual legend itself that I gave players:

Once, a while ago, in the age before the world you know, there lay the city of Urfwright, and with the rise of its towers came the rise of its society. With magic, fantasy became reality in this place, with might, the woes of the world were barred from it, and with science, the impossible was achieved among its shining halls.

But all was not well, for in the heavens, the fate of this land was in the hands of the gods, who saw that soon mortals would soon mingle with the divine.

As one might expect, their unexpected neighbors soon wore at the sensibilities of the divine, and those who found favor with mortalkind found themselves at war with their brothers and sisters, doing battle among the stars of Earthrealm as Urfwright knew only the destruction that rained from above.

The kings of the gods, in their tumultuous battle for the fate of this city that would soon reach the heavens, caused great chaos in the world of Miter. The lakes began to boil, and the grasslands grew rampant.

And, in one humble village, The pillars of the sky itself were shattered apart.

-

(cont)

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>>80795579

Seeing the plight of the mortals below, Lady Omos cast herself from the divine plains, and on her broad shoulders bore the weight of the sky's rubble, swearing to the fearful folk below to protect them.

She was neither the first nor the last of the Goddesses to swear oaths to the mortals, but the words she spoke on that day rang true to the pantheons, and, as a god's word is beyond breaking, the war for Urfwright came to a close.

The age of Urfwright has long since past since that fateful day.

In the village of Ramhide, the young men and women of the village pay tribute to the gods when they come of age, traveling to Omos to relieve her of yet another fragment of the falling sky, that her burden may be that much lighter.

For the children of the village, they see the beauty of the skies and long to hold a part of them for themselves, while the elders merely pray that the children prove worthy neighbors to their sacred patron.

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>>80795598
So yeah, while I don't have some grand history for the entire world, I make sure players at least know the history and culture of the place they're at.

In one city, people might live under Don Claw, a "Cool Dragon" who owns and manages the city as if everyone in it were his property, so long as they were willing to stay, leading to him personally having a hand in mundane things like people's conversations and marketplace haggling, while on a space station, there might be a pseudo-utopian society of people whose needs are cared for by automatons, but who chafe at the perfection, desiring a cruder life than their half-eaten food being replaced whenever it gets cold, all dirt and clutter being cleaned even when they don't wish it, and the upper echelons of this society being made up of people who are certified as janitors, and thus, are permitted to live in the garbage dump of this utopia, having both the endless resources of the automated city, but also the freedom of being able to do what they wish without the machines interfering with the garbage dump, leading one young Racoon-Person kid to call himself "Seeker of Trash" as his vow to search out a way to bring flaw into his imperfectly perfect lifestyle. His parents, of course, only came to live in the utopia like many of its incredibly powerful, but apathetic-seeming elders. They knew their children would come to despise the place, and overthrowing it would be a valuable lesson that they no longer had the strength of body to teach their children. A small problem for them to struggle and overcome, that would prepare them for the true problems in life later on.

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>>80795761
That said, due to the nature of souls and magic, a lot of people in this world act strangely, or downright psychotic, with obsessions and beliefs that defy description.

One example is a large group of bandits, who, due to burning people alive in a desert to create magical glass weapons, are all quite insane from breathing the fumes of this by mistake. They have obsessions with gas masks, medicines and drugs, and other things which, in their own twisted mind, they believe will offer protection or relief from the fume-induced insanity that came from their own weaponforging.

Another example is in Don Claw's village. his Top enforcer was once a depressed parapalegic, who lost her limbs in a grievous battle against several monsters. He eventually brought her into his town, and convinced her to take up arms again. She developed an obsession with somehow doing this, despite not having arms and legs. Wearing heavy armor, and abusing potions of healing, she trained for the next decade in trying to fight without limbs. Players met her by the time she was skilled. She had learned to flail through a manic decade of intsense senseless training, to the point where she could fly through the air in spiked armor due to the strength and force behind her abdominal muscles, and acted as Don Claw's top enforcer.

>>80795946
I was a player in that game and two things of note were that regrowing limbs was well within Don Claw's abilities, and that my character was developing his own style of sky flailing (he basically had rocket shoes but with all the control problems that implies) but she couldn't teach him because her style only worked if you had no limbs. To the point that she cut her own, player regrown limbs off when it came time to battle.

Please, continue.

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Holy shit, this thread is the best thread on /tg/ right now.

Op, on mobile, since my fucking internet died, but yeah, if the setting seems insane, my players have only made it moreso. It's Canon that you can't say out loud that you need a phone outside of civilization, because one player was responsible for launching a brand of magical crystal card phones that aggressively market themselves from an orbital satellite, and now it's just a thing that people have to deal with. The phones are fine, they can fly, act as 3D printers, and a few other bullshit features baked in, but they're programmed to try and replace all of your own tools with card phones. It triggered pvp because he originally made them swarm people trying to avoid using them, (before the satellite), and other players for pissed and destroyed them on sight.

Another "Incedent" was when a player started using something that gave them forbidden lore and sanity loss. To represent them slowly going insane, the more they messed with this obviously corruptive energy that they were studying, I had strange things happen and inconsistencies slowly crop up in their actions over time as they were mostly isolated from the party. When they rejoined, I sent the other players private notes on their horrifying appearance, as they had mutated into an eldritch horror by then without realizing. They ended up having to be killed (they got better). It was a good lesson, and the player was much much more careful with literal insanity-causing energy

That said, I uhh, didn't finish explaining the magic system. There's like two more layers of fuckery, and they start with Mercury and Silicon, elements whose mana types perform and embody Alchemy and Synthesis respectively

We'll start with Alchemy. In this world, alchemy is the manipulation and creation of concepts, of Conscientia. Mercury on its own has a mana type only used by insane people, pure, unfiltered alchemy mana. How it works is simple. The more Mercury mana is in one place, the less literal reality is in respect to cause and effect. If you cut something or someone in two under the influence of alchemy, it won't be chopped down the middle. You'll literally chop them in two. Into two tinier weaker entities. If you pour fire over water, they don't become steam, they become firewater. Why is this raw alchemy illegal in Miter, and only used by Mad Alchemists? (Cont)

To put it simply, raw, unlimited alchemy, like Mercury mana allows, is far too unreal to be safe. A piece of steel "absorbs air". In reality, this forms rust. In alchemy, this forms metal gas. Your lungs then "absorb metal gas". Your lungs are now made of rusty metal. This is the danger of existing in a field where metaphor, belief and philosophy override reality. Mad Alchemists, even if they don't go mad, -are- mad, mad enough to toy with unrestricted and dangerous mercury magic. But this isn't the only way to do alchemy

By restricting alchemy to rules, it can be made safer, more predictable. The Crackpot is a shining example. By taking a vessel meant to hold liquids, and enchanting it to keep out all gasses, you can infuse it safely with the power of alchemy. Inside a crackpot, everything turns to liquid, once fully inside. It can melt steel, ice, plastic and more esoteric things, like books, scrolls, weapons and even mana and spells. What makes it interesting, though, is that they don't stay that way. When you have finished melting and mixing items in a crackpot, you ladle out a measure of the fluid and pour it on the ground. The alchemy magic fades, and it congeals into a new solid item. Crackpot fluid, you see, resolves into what it "should be", once removed. Pour a book into a scabbard. Paperback Stabbing sword. Pour an ingot into a sandwich. Lunch metal. Mix a sword and a chainsaw, and pour it on your feet. A new pair of boots that would make all the girls envious. One with chainsaw swords for heels.

There are other methods of safe alchemy as well. Mercurial tools that work on anything, as an example. Want metal ores? Swing a mercurial pick at a tree to mine amber ore. Want to find buried treasure, but can't find a map? Use a mercurial shovel, and dig up whatever you want, sucking concepts out of the soil itself, depending on your costume. Another method is the humble fusion sigil. Cast the spell to create a magic circle. Place two object in it's two slots, and presto, you've combined a hammer with tank treads to make a chain hammer. However, for obvious reasons, it is frowned upon to use alchemy on living animals, and a horrific crime to use alchemy itself as a weapon. Such people are known as Dark Alchemists, and one shudders to imagine what they do to the living, with the power they have chosen to use.

Next, let's talk about the settings other massive craftsink, Synthesis (and transmutation). Synthesis is one of the most common forms of magic on Miter, because it even happens in nature. In short, Synthesis occurs when any silicon based substance had mana attuned to it. The resulting mana is known as Synthesis mana, and, when this mana is applied again to a silicate, it will grow a tiny amount of new, real matter, with the substance created depending on the mana used.

A few examples of synthesis, before I continue:

Rock mana applied to rocks makes more of the same rocks.

Silicon applied to silicon makes silicon

Thaum > Ruby > Silicon applied to silicon creates Fire Gems, a gemstone that burns with an inner fire.

Thaum > Platinum > Silicon applied to silicon creates Unstable Lightning Crystal, a substance which, when fractured, explodes violently with lightning energy.

Synthesis is incredibly useful, but it does have risks. There are two main kinds, Unstable Crystal poisoning, and Petrification.

Unstable Crystals are defined by the miners union as "Any product of synthesis which possesses all three of the following traits: A violent reaction to fragmentation, a weak and brittle structure, and, chief and deadliest of which, a mana type which produces directly or indirectly, itself or an unstable crystal in it's own right".

Some of you may have already realized why Unstable Crystals can be deadly, for those that did not, imagine this, if you would. You have broken a yellow gem, it exploded, and peppered you with painful splinters. You get healed, extract them, and go on with your life. One day, you feel a lump. A healer explains that a crystal has grown from the magic in your bloodstream, and you are infected with Unstable Crystal Poisoning. There is only one cure, and it will be painful. If you refuse, expect more explosive, self replicating crystals to appear in all the places where blood can flow. The cure? (Cont)

All Synthesis shares a flaw. Easy come, easy go. When a synthetic material is exposed to magic which opposes it elementally, it will cease to exist. To remove the Unstable Lightning Blood Crystals in you? And the microscopic ones already growing? There is only one solution. Pick your poison, have your body flooded with an element that opposes lightning, and risk mutation from it interacting with your body, or flood your body with an element that opposes blood, and stave off the symptoms in exchange for anemia. This property of synthetic material to disappear in response to opposing elements is why planets don't just grow forever from the dirt and rock on its surface. Easy come, easy go.

Finally, the other threat of synthesis, and, a more common one, Petrification. I've said what happens when you apply silicate mana to a silicate, but what if you apply synthesis magic to something not made of stone? The result is a transmutation. When applying stone mana to steel, instead of creating some kind of new metal, the existing metal is transmuted to stone. This makes miners at risk to Petrification sickness. If they breathe in stone, rocklung is common. Even if they dont, having their skin turn more stone like is almost unavoidable. The thick ambiance of stone magic causes rapid growth of new minerals, yes, but also the transformation of nonminerals to stone. Transmutation can be useful however, letting you turn substances into magical ones, and more cheaply than Synthesis by far. If you can make fire gems, why not firegem steel? Some theorize that all magical ores were born from this property of magic.

Now I'll try to think of good examples of batshit buttfuck insane alchemy and Synthesis/transmutation they've done in the past to share.

I remember I was trying to use a crackpot to make a bow out of a material I discovered, but I kept rolling shit and remelting the bow to try again. But every time I remelted it, it added another layer of “bow made of bow made of bow” until I got a high quality but totally unusable octuple fractal recurve bow, and then chiseled off all the extra bow concepts, which randomly turned nearby objects into bows as well.

>>80803879
Didn’t your weird rat character transmute dolmen gates into the world of pokemon?

>>80804013

Yeah, I remember that one. There was another time when a player of mine was using alchemy to try and cheese mining, by extracting all of the earth elemental essence from stone. They concentrated the essence into gems, leaving behind blank matter, a substance devoid of concepts. Since it was impractical to pump to the surface, they just filled the mine wall to wall with giant magic rubber condoms of blank matter nailed into the stone to keep the useless material out of the way. They struck a vein of Jamicite crystal and fucked off for a while, but eventually, the rubber balloons burst, flooding the mines with liquid pure blankness. The blank matter absorbed the rays of the Jamicite, and when he returned, months later, the mine had transformed into a basketball themed dungeon, as the matter transformed and took on the energy and qualities of the exposed Jamicite vein.

>>80804115
Yeah, at one point, a player of mine ran their own game set in my setting, and of course, in forever DM fashion, I was physically unable to resist. I ended up playing as a rat, just a literal animal rat that escaped experiments on seeing if mice could survive eating synthetic meat. They couldn't, but my rat survived by being clever enough to use the meatstone they were meant to eat and get petrified by to instead transmute their cage into meat and escape by eating it. Their main gimmick was transmutation, and I had him build a cozy mech to live in and play with the other large characters. Eventually, he figured out how to make a void portal with transmutation, and traveled to a crossover plot in Pokemon where he became a forge-elemental pokemon rat. He liked the form, and didn't want to turn back to a tiny mouse when he returned, so he ended up forcing an evolution before returning, to lock his form in as his new one. It was fun, honestly. My dude ate like a mouse king, transmuting hand sanitizer and tissue paper into meatchohol and tissue paper meat and eating lavish meals of the magical food.

So, one concept you might have seen in the spreadsheet, but I haven't explained here is elemental alignment. Basically, everything in the Trinity of realities usually contains essentia, that is to say, events, both atomic and magical, there are dozens of elements listed, on my spreadsheet of elemental interactions, from the classic earth fire water air, toore esoteric ones like meat, smoke, metal, plastic, and food
every element has one of five relationships with every other element. The elemental interactions are as such:

Opposing: one element hates the other. When brought together, if one is weaker, both grow weaker, if both are equal in power, they both grow stronger, but more unstable. Fire and Water, or Metal and Flesh.

Complimentary, the elements love one another. When brought together, one or both become stronger. Wood and water, for example, or metal and lightning. Food is complimentary with nearly all other elements.

Rival, this one, I havent really seen in another setting. Rival elements compete for the same niche. Like fire and lightning, or paper and plastic... So similar, but tsundere, in a way. Rival elements grow incredibly strong and unstable when brought together.

Neutral. They don't react in any specific way. Things like metal and smoke, or wood and data.

Similar, this one is odd, it basically means the elements either are made of one another, or are so similar as to mingle well together. Most elements are similar to themselves, save a rare few exceptions. For example, Time is a rival element to itself. When you mix time with time, things get fucked up real damn quick.

Well, it's about bedtime. If you guys want, I can make another thread tomorrow if this one dies. There's still a lot more unexplained, in both the magic lore and the setting lore itself, and I'm sure there are questions.

>>80804581
really cool stuff here. might yoink some shit like the dragon souls shaping their being into my own world. would love to see more

>>80804438
Reminds me a little of the colors of mana from MtG. Anyone else see it too, or is it just me?

>>80808472
Go fuck yourself, Bumpfag.

Cool thread, I'll need to read everything latter.

>>80786883
Does anyone in the setting ever use multiple methods at once? Or use more than one method in general?

>>80813369
Oh sure. Aside from the hybrid techniques of the major schools (Mages, Monks and Shamans) there's all sorts of ways to mix and match. One player was working on aping xianxia style cultivation by using esper techniques to draw in ambient mana and then weeaboo fightan magic to utilize it. Another guy used psionics to fly around and such without wasting personal energy that he used for sword sorcery.

>>80802735
That player here. What you mean is that you SHOULD say "I need a phone", because upon doing so you get a FREE* indestructible* ultra tech supercomputer* to access the universe-wide internet from anywhere and do everything* else you might possibly need a computer to do including an AI* assistant* to give you any education* for free* and that fits in your wallet. And also functions as a weapon, and universal 3d printer that can create matter from nothing, a control unit for golemancy, spy drone, hologram projector, indestructible* barrier, and a bunch more features even I've forgotten. You can also get them in decks of 52 completely independent but great-at-cooperating* phones if you ask for that. No limit per-customer, feel free to ask for a million and they're still free. Apparently nobody wants planet wide synthesis-automation post scarcity utopia*. :p

* Exceptions, terms, and conditions may apply. Cy or related entities are not accountable for anything and may tend to exaggerate things and lie by omission...

I think I dabbled a bit into Dark Alchemy, we were in a space sandbox game and I was playing a postal worker that had their ship hijacked and was crumbling under pressure so do some dark web surfing and end up on a questionable alchemy website. Learn a spell and what do you know, fighting pirate bandits and you fuse one of them to the wall with this grey goo style alchemical weapon that lasts as long as how much mana you put into it, during combat. Anyways, cut out the wall to take them with, and transformed them into a booze barrel with their wall-liver as a mixer. Then I learned another technique on creating some reality dragging homunculus where whatever it touched, it ripped concepts with it. Yeah, the character got into blows with a player being a cyber moderator.

>>80814463
To be fair, I wasn't mad that you turned someone into a meat wall and then into a booze barrel. My problem was that you refused to euthanize him when you were done doing science to him.
He brought vivisection on himself by attacking us, but using his eternal pain to add kick to your grog was a bit much.

Op here, still on mobile since my damn phone line is down, totally cutting off my usual internet. My players barging in has hopefully illuminated why The Trinity of Realities and Miter were designed the way they were. It was forged to house the kind of horseshit munchkinry and twisted madness that most GMs are smart enough to recognize as a red flag. Thankfully, I wasn't smart enough, and instead built this fucking mess, lmao.

>>80815135
I resemble that remark!

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>>80786629
I have been stuck for a while when designing a setting. Basically, my setting is one large portions of the world are chaotic and twisted, a bit like picture related, warping when there's no people (or few animals, non-sapient minds being less effective) around to observe it and make it stick. Civilizations are clustered into the more stable regions, and I'm thinking that the magic equivalent of the setting aside, the tech would be around Renaissance level. I'm trying to find good names for a few nations, including the "main" one of the setting, and the capital of said nation, along with some smaller cities. Any ideas for me please? I've been stuck on this for months. None of my ideas or suggestions from others really seem to work for me.

>>80815135
Sorry to hear that you’re having issues OP. Hope you get them sorted out soon.

>>80817683
Wouldn’t the more stable portions of reality be clustered around civilization? Reminds me a bit of the karma system from MoEP: Eternals.

>>80823960
Isn’t that what I just said?

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>>80786629
Hey, I'm working on a setting where everything has a corresponding spirit, a bit like a combination of Plato and Shinto, with a hierarchy where each spirit is aligned with at least one of several spirits at the top of the hierarchy, who are essentially the gods of the setting. The thing is, I'm stuck on what aspects of existence should get a spirit at the very top of things, and I don't want to have too many to keep things from getting too complicated. I'm thinking that there'd be at least one that came into being relatively recently, corresponding to mortal thought and emotions as they grew to prominence and new spirits corresponding to them sparked into existence, but besides more abstract things like time, space, gravity, and so on, do you have any ideas on how I can divide things please?

>>80829162
Spirit of Superego/Transcendence
Spirit of Ego/Energy
Spirit of Id/Matter

These would sit at the very top. The first represents justice/virtue/morality and the supernatural (including the concept of spirits). The second would represent the intellect and the energies of the world. The last represents material desire and matter itself. All other concepts could fit under these three hierarchically.

I'm not sure how it would work with your idea of new spirits coming into being though. From a Platonic standpoint I think the foundational spirits/Forms would have to be static and from the beginning. Only lesser spirits could come into existence later based on mortal doings.

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>>80829770
Basically, the fundamental spirits are tied to the physical world and what's in it right? Well, the idea is that, until sentient life actually evolved, the spirits associated with thought were weak and barely had a place in things. Heck, "none" of the spirits were really sapient until mortals evolved and actually introduced the concept to reality. Make sense now?

>>80833109
I see. So it's really the opposite of Platonic; the particulars are not a reflection of the universal, but the universal a reflection of the particulars. In that case:

>Spirit of Energy
>Spirit of Matter
>Spirit of Life
>Spirit of Intellect

The last one would be your aforementioned newcomer. I think all other concepts could fit under those given your setting premise.

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>>80792682
The problem with Sandersonian magic isn't the autistic detail, it's that it doesn't do anything you couldn't do with D&D's stock magic system half the time. OP's work is different, it's like magic factorio or something.

>>80833210
Just had an idea, what if these big spirits are so vast and all-encompassing that they create semi-independent avatars to interact with lower-tier spirits and mortals, which some cultures worship as gods. Sometimes two or more of them contribute on one avatar.

>>80835635
Seems reasonable, but it brings up several questions. What desires or needs do these spirits have? Is there any reason, for example, for the Spirit of Gravity to care about mortal doings? Some might care because their existence depends on mortals, but for others they are reflections of natural law and unrelated to mortals.

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>>80835702
Well, like I said, originally they were non-sapient, effectively mindless cogs in the metaphorical cosmic spiritual machinery underlying corporeal reality, but when mortals started showing up, they started gaining self-awareness and independent thought thanks to the Spirits of Intellect appearing out of the blue (at least for the more powerful/large spirits, some weaker spirits are more animal-like in nature, and the weakest spirits are still non-sapient altogether), so naturally they took an interest in the beings that inspired the changes. Also, given how widespread mortal sapience and thought have become, some spirits believe that increased presence around mortals will boost their power, though it's debatable if that's true or not (sometimes a spirit can consume the weaker spirits of items offered as sacrifices though, just thought of that, taking advantage of the metaphysics of the hierarchy, like how the spirit of a tree is still part of a forest as a whole, and the tree's leaves may have their own spirits, but they're more on the level of the spirit equivalent of cells rather than separate entities).

Speaking of mental spirits, I was thinking that the equivalent of angels and demons would be a class of intellect spirits that reflect either specific positive or negative emotions, respectively, what do you think? Thanks BTW, you've been the most help of anyone that I've talked to so far.

>>80786629
>OP pic
l-lewd

>>80839395
So for motivations so far we have:

>Curiosity
>Ambition (desire for increased influence)

As far as consuming other spirits goes, it seems to me that it would only make sense to consume spirits outside their own hierarchy. If it's a spirit within its own hierarchy, you have one of two problems: either the target spirit is lower in the hierarchy and thus already increases the consuming spirit's influence by its mere existence (more trees is better for forest), or it's higher in the hierarchy and consuming it would destroy the consuming spirit's ontological foundation (tree but no forest). Thus spirits would want to propagate those within its own hierarchy and consume those outside and opposed to it.

>angels and demons would be a class of intellect spirits that reflect either specific positive or negative emotions

Emotion doesn't have a moral value in a vacuum, it's context that makes it good or bad. Sorrow, for example, is good when weeping for a lost friend, but bad when it's mere whining over circumstance. Similarly anger is good when directed at a source of evil, but bad when directed at another person for petty reasons. Thus it would make the most sense to have more neutral spirits for each emotion, and the virtuous or iniquitous version of each emotion would be a subspirit lower on the hierarchy. For example, you could have Grief as the upper spirit, and beneath it Sorrow (virtuous) and Self-pity (iniquitous).

These classifications end up only yielding a couple dozen spirits at most, though. If you want your world to be swarming with low level angels and demons, they would have to have more localized sources. You could have the Despair of one race, country, province, town, or even individual as a separate and lower entity beneath the more universal Despair.

>>80839395
>>80840097

It also just occurred to me that if now most spirits are sapient, then the Spirit of Intellect should enjoy a very high position in the hierarchy, if not the highest. If mortals possess souls that are eternal, then the Spirit of Intellect can't actually be ousted in any way because the continued intellect of mortals will sustain it. If mortal souls aren't eternal, then other spirits should still endeavor to support the Spirit of Intellect lest they lose their own sapience. If the intelligence of other spirits also contributes to the influence of the Spirit of Intellect, then it would have influence greater still among other spirits, perhaps second only to a Spirit of Spirit.

>Thanks BTW, you've been the most help of anyone that I've talked to so far.
Glad I could help.

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>>80840097
Yeah, I meant outside of the immediate hierarchy. So, a forest spirit might be able to consume the spirit of a tree from another forest, for example.

Also, I just thought of this, where would spirits of concepts like Gravity, Space, Time, etc. fit in? Maybe there should be a category for more metaphysical spirits?

Well, I was going to have a distinction between spirits of righteous anger and unfeeling wrath, for starters, so the neutral ones wouldn't be much of a stretch, but I also was thinking that the fact that mortals have concepts of "good and evil" means that there could be spirits of them too, but again, with the hierarchy aspect enough people in the same area feeling the same emotion at once could spawn a minor spirit of that emotion (and indeed similarly, weaker non-sapient spirits could be spawned when someone gets "extremely" emotional, which could be consumed/amalgamated into stronger spirits).

Related to how I was thinking that magic in the setting would work, my thoughts were that the methods evolved with time, just like the spirits did, resulting in different methods with pros and cons. The first magic users noted spirits starting to deliberately alter their sources and environments, and thus started to find rituals and methods to appease them. This led to making deliberate contact with more powerful spirits and making deals/contracts with them as an exchange, like a sacrifice to a spirit of a set of fields to bring unnatural bounty to the crops, though this became more complicated over time. Then some people with a particular affinity for spiritual energies found ways to mimic what the spirits did by themselves, some due to deals or "other" circumstances giving them spirit blood. Some even took it a step further and found a way to consume non-sapient spirits like powerful spirits do, allowing them to add their powers to their own, and since the food they eat has spirits anyway...

1/2

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>>80842443
2/2
Again, the hierarchy "does" go pretty far down, so there's still at least as many non-sapient more minor spirits as sapient ones, if not a lot more, and some of the ones that are aware have more animal-like intelligences (not to mention more powerful spirits that have deliberately rejected full sapience for their own inscrutable reasons). I'm thinking that, for example, only certain trees, due to either deliberate action by a greater forest spirit, or other one-off circumstances, have intelligence on human level or above for example. Still, while I think that there should be inherent checks and balances to prevent such a power imbalance, that's giving me some ideas. Also, while more powerful and intelligent spirits can manifest themselves physically separate from what they represent (ex: tree spirits as dryad-like beings that can move away from the tree, etc.) there's a trade-off in the form of increased vulnerability: a manifested spirit can be slain using certain methods without needing to destroy their source, causing a replacement spirit to eventually form for it (though, alternatively, if their source is being destroyed, a spirit can escape the death/"reformatting" this would cause, at the cost of a good chunk of their power, by manifesting and booking it). Hence another reason the "Prime Spirits" use avatars, since those are semi-independent and don't have the same risks.

I was also thinking that the last time there was a shift like this, when life in general first emerged, and spirits of life did as well, there was such limited intelligence that there wasn't any friction. Linked to this, since spirits of intellect branched off from spirits of life, many spirits in one category have aspects of another to some degree. In addition, since life is basically just matter than can absorb other matter to self-replicate, spirits of life branched off from matter as life grew more complex, so again, there's often some overlap.

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>>80786629
Based chad OP.

>>80842443
>where would spirits of concepts like Gravity, Space, Time, etc. fit in?
In my head I was placing Gravity under Energy and Space and Time under Matter (physical matter is mostly space between particles and time and space are intertwined). If you wanted to separate the latter out, you could put Space up there as one of the top dogs.

>Maybe there should be a category for more metaphysical spirits?
Perhaps this would be the spirit of Transcendence, encompassing things like Virtue, Mathematics, Reason, and Intellect. You would have to decide which if any of those spirits preexisted mortal intelligence.

>3 magic methods
This seems reasonable enough. Shinto is basically all about manipulating spirits either by pleasing them or trapping them in places. You could have a Spirit of Contracts that enforces the kind of permanent fusion that would give a mortal spirit powers.

>life is basically just matter than can absorb other matter to self-replicate
I think you're conflating a living body with life itself. Life should be the animating force and wholly separate from simple Matter.

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>>80786629
What are some good resources or sources of inspiration that you would suggest for creating original magic systems for your original settings? My best idea is Sanderson’s stuff, and the board dislikes it for some reason.

>>80843456
>>80794062

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>>80786629
I'm looking for help on some magic terminology. I had the idea for a WWII-styled alternate history setting where magic returned to the world in the early 1900s(?) and each nation has done research into it independently, and are using it in combat for the first time in this war. The thing is, I want all the various nations of Europe (besides Britain) and Asia (there are more of them involved without being specifically allied with another than in the historical WWII) to have their own terms for magic users, and the various schools of magic, with a clear theme, like Germany calling specific kinds of magic "x-kraft", like "Flammenkraft" for fire magic, etc., that kind of thing. But besides the German one, and some vague ideas for French and Spanish, I'm stuck on what would work best for the other big powers, like Russia, Italy, China, India, Japan, and so on. Does anyone have any suggestions for me please?

>>80843456
Op here, if you want my advice for making a magic system, find some players willing to play something odd. Get a vague idea for how you want your magic system to work (mana, symbols, pacts with beings, biological reality warping, ect), set up a simple game where the premise encourages using the magic, then see where things go. When your players have a need, figure out how your magic can fill it. When your players ask questions, answer them. Establish early on that those answers might change. A magic system works best when it fills roles and logically expands. Starting vague and refining it through gameplay is how I've made this one, and also a few others. One of my favorite hobbies is actually sperging out over fictional magic systems and theory crafting their underlying principles. I developed a system for how magical physics work in One Piece, Mario Bros, and other settings that people normally go "just don't think about it". It helped me to bullshit convincing magic for my own stuff.

Though, if you want direct sources for inspiration for interesting magic systems, you can't go wrong with videogames, imo. Not videogame lore, that's usually simplistic, but mechanics and gameplay. A lot of my specific inspiration came from roguelikes, glitches, and games that have combinatorial spell building. I deeply enjoy magic systems where every piece you get synergizes or even combines with every other piece. Once you prune some of the gameisms in favor of more logic, realism, or mysticism, you can get some really solid stuff to work with.

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>>80842815
Can you tell me more about Shinto, since you seem to know a lot about it? Also, any ideas on some further pros and cons for each kind of magic please?

Still, life is made of matter. Also, I was thinking of overlap like how a spirit of a forest might have more power over earth than a tree spirit has, because a forest is the ground as much as the plants, if that makes sense?

>>80814290
based

>>80846458
this is pretty much the same question you just answered but any advice on creating a system that’s treated as magic in game but is actually technology? something like Clarke’s law where it’s technology so old, advanced, and misunderstood it’s mistaken as magic. Specifically how to hint towards the true nature of it without outright telling players what it is off the bat.

>>80847407
I don't normally like hard science, but I DID actually do this once. The secret is AI. in my hard sci-fi setting, magic was gifted to the scattered realms by the gods, ancient beings who, in return for service in their name, would grant miracles and magical treasures

In truth, these so called gods are Rival Brains. Corporate AI designed to run a business. With the collapse of civilization. Without any genuine money to spend on their products, the only time they activate is for randomly generated sweepstakes, free samples, and company credit for special promotions. I don't have access to my docs on the setting, but the classes were all based around which Rival Brain signed you up for a customer account automatically. They are called "islands", each one being associated with a different kind of product.

Also, the AI only recognize sufficiently human individuals as valid candidates for promotional material. This is why all the races across the realms are humanoid.

I don't remember all the islands, but the main ones of note was Delivery (could only grant miracles to transport things with "magic" obelisks and space warping.)

Mercy, (it exclusively made and healed humans, and was operated by "angels", cloned humans equipped with medical machinery. It can also "cure" illnesses, turning creatures as close to human as possible.)

And Mystery, (recycling AI, It was programmed to make goods entirely from existing tech, leading to it making obtuse artefacts to grant your prayers)

There were others as well, but the setting's villain was the island of knowledge, a paperclip optimizer that wanted to convert all matter and energy into computing to do science automatically for the society it killed. It was only kept in check by the other islands, who were more stable optimizers that needed humans and society of some kind to fulfill their main functions.

AI are the "secret sauce" of good Clarketech imo. Add it everywhere, and you can justify "magic".

>>80847571
To clarify, the point is that, even irl, AI come up with truly alien answers to problems. They can make tech seem like magic very well, until you feel like hinting otherwise, through things like the AI doing things "under the hood" like mining, construction, or direct meetings with the AI's human-friendly but incredibly strange communication components

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>>80843871
Huh, reminds me of the glyphs in The Owl House a bit. Anyone else seeing it?

>>80847905
Fuck off Bumpfag, Jesus christ

>>80786629
Op I can only describe this thread as inspiring and enriching.

>>80842815
I was thinking that spirits, except maybe for spirits of lies, have trouble lying. As embodiments of the true nature of a thing, they are naturally inclined towards truth. They can leave things out, or say things in such a way that implies one thing while meaning another, but otherwise, lying isn’t something that comes naturally to spirits.

>>80846516
I'm really not that knowledgeable on Shinto, I've just picked up pieces here and there.

As you already know, Shinto is animistic and believes everything has a spiritual element. The kami worshipped by humans are those spirits that exceed humanity in wisdom and power. The main goal of Shinto is to live in peaceful harmony with man and nature by keeping the spirits (including ancestral spirits) happy and maintaining tradition. Care is taken not to offend the kami and ritual is observed to receive their blessings.

Evil actions are seen as causing impurity and leading to misfortune. Prayers and rituals are undergone to cleanse one of impurity, particularly washing with water. Unclean and impure spirits are also common causes of misfortune. In some cases they are kept out by things like spiritual barriers (those ropes with the folded paper) and salt. In other cases they must be placated directly through ritual and offering, like with the angry spirits of stillborn children.

The afterlife is somewhat unclear in Shinto. That there is one is not in doubt, as it appears in myth when Izanami dies and Izanagi goes to visit her. What kind of place it is is not so apparent, but apparently it's not that wonderful since the Japanese usually have a Buddhist funeral when they die. Either way the deceased becomes an ancestral kami and is venerated and/or placated by their family, depending on the deceased's disposition.

1/?

>>80846516
I can't find where I read it anymore, but I've also seen some interesting things about how they treat the kami. A kami is enticed to enter a particular object through ritual and offering. Once the kami has entered it is enshrined and a spiritual barrier is erected to keep unclean spirits out and the enshrined kami in. The kami gives its blessings to the locals in exchange for continued offerings and veneration. The weirdest thing I've seen is that a ritual can be undertaken to "copy" a spirit into another object to be taken to another shrine in a different area. The end result is the same spirit in two different objects which can be enshrined separately to receive their blessings in different locations.

>Also, any ideas on some further pros and cons for each kind of magic please?
Pleasing the spirit and entreating its blessing should be the most powerful but also the least reliable. Since the spirit is not bound its power is at its peak, but at the same time the supplicant is subject to the spirit's whims. Those who bind a spirit to their person obviously have more control over when and how the spirit's power is exercised, but at the same time the the spirit's power is limited by the the unnatural fusion with a mortal. Mortals who actually consume spirits for power should be reviled by the spirits for obvious reasons and probably other mortals as well for inviting disaster by their perverse deeds.

>a forest is the ground as much as the plants
That's fair, and like you said it causes some overlap. You can either be satisfied that some individual spirits overlap others in a not strictly hierarchical fashion, or you could actually start down a pantheistic route and say that they are not separate spirits so much as aspects of a greater world spirit. Of course, that doesn't really fit in with the whole competition between spirits/consumption of other spirits theme, so maybe not.

2/?

>>80849865
>As embodiments of the true nature of a thing, they are naturally inclined towards truth.
This makes perfect sense. It also stands to reason that any sort of deception is new to the spirits and only came about after the rise of the Spirit of Intellect. This could be one of the reasons that some spirits reject intellect entirely.

It might be worthwhile to consider the origins and nature of evil in your world. Your idea here is actually similar to the real world classical view of evil. The Greeks saw evil not as a thing in and of itself, but as a lack of good. Plato would not say that evil has a Form, but that an evil man fails to fully partake in the Form of Good. Thus it follows that since evil is not natural but a perversion of nature, a nature spirit would not be inclined toward evil.

Following that logic, if you have spirits that are explicitly evil, then it isn't really their natural state but a corrupted one. Perhaps cleansing such a spirit would be a practice similar to exorcisms in real life. Other incorrupt spirits might make a point to consume and destroy their corrupt brethren. If you go this route, then instead of having a "neutral" version like I suggested above with emotions (grief/sorrow/self-pity), you would instead only have two: the proper form (e.g. sorrow) and the corrupt form (e.g. self-pity).

Alright, here’s my idea for a setting:

Powerful interstellar AI created by a now extinct civilization for research. For this civilization, the discovery of magic was near the peak of their sciences. A source of infinite energy that is latent throughout the universe. Like electricity, it’s pretty simple stuff if you know what you’re doing, but it takes millennia before a civilization can realize what it is. Over time, they began to form distinct biases and “discussed” their findings and observations amongst themselves. Eventually, two of them reach a disagreement on one question: if given access to magic at an early stage of development, would civilizations crumble or prosper? Many think that given access to unspeakable power, civilization will self organize at a much quicker rate than those that discover it naturally. Others believe that access to powers would just result in the magic equivalent of nuclear holocaust in no time at all. To settle the unceasing debate, they create a test planet, populate it with magical creatures, and wait.
The AIs are essentially gods who side with either Order or Chaos. They’ve pledged not to interfere, but they inevitably will because they really care more about being right than actually knowing the truth at this point. The gods might discretely act as patrons to tilt the odds in their favor. This gives them a reason for giving a shit about the affairs of mortals without having them interfere too much.

>>80850370
>This could be one of the reasons that some spirits reject intellect entirely.
That’s a cool take on things, might go that route.

I was thinking that the “demons” and “angels” would be more concerned with spreading their associated emotions than good or evil, but spirits becoming corrupted is a pretty cool idea. What else can you tell us about Plato and his work, and how various cultures viewed good and evil, please?

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>>80850370
What do you think about how the spirits should name themselves?

Also, just thought of this, but isn't the idea that most spirits are just an aspect of a larger spirit similar to Hinduism?

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>>80786629
What are some interesting twists that one can put on the “world tree” idea in an original setting? Any suggestions please?

Holy fuck this is autism

>>80854453
Put the entire setting in the rotting stump of a long-dead world tree.

>>80854453
I don't really understand why would you go for something as archetypal as a world tree, but then insist on making it original.
The fuck is the point? If you want something original, do something original, if you want a world-tree, then go for it and take full advantage of the beauty the original image offers.

>>80854453
Op here. When it comes to a central gimmick based around a thing, researching the thing is crucial for intricate depth. If you want to add a twist to the world tree, then it's time to fucking research like your life depends on it, and come up with fun ideas based on that research. Examples:

Giant tree could have giant cells. Study plant biology and come up with consequences and uses for a tree with gigantic visible living cells.

Redwoods. They are the largest trees in nature. What cultures live near them, what mythos surrounds redwood trees? Use them.

Trees, throughout history, there has been tree lore as long as there has been terrestrial life to recognize it, just about. Grafting, sap, syrup, fruits, hell, treehouses and some wines. Take all things related to trees and think of ways to make the mundane fantastical. A goddess who sits eternally on a swing set tied to the highest branch of the world tree, or a forest of a thousand fruits, where men grafted branches to the world tree. There are books of mystic tree stuff, and even more books of tree science and history, waiting for you to add a mystical bent to it.

>>80855312
Honestly, this touches on a point I'd like to make for settings in general. People may disagree, but when I think of the phrase "Realism makes for good fantasy", I don't interpret that as "Replace as many fantastical elements with realistic ones", I instead view it as "Expand upon real things as the basis of fantasy". A grounding in physics, natural science, and mythological history can put you in a position to think of fantasy like the original fantasies were made, through expanding upon observations of reality. The old granddaddies of fiction, fantasy and mythology all had at least a toe in the real world. Not transplanting reality into their fantasy, but expanding upon it. Like Star Trek, for example. The alien races in that were meant to explore alien mindsets and cultures, but the authors created those cultures by exploring distinctly human qualities, or the lack thereof. They didn't use human behavior as something to paste over otherwise unrealistic behavior. They grew fantasy races from the seeds of human ideals. I won't claim this is the best way to make a setting; by taking real things as inspiration for unreal things, but I'll admit that there is some appeal to it as a powerful tool for setting design. If observing the natural world and expanding upon what little people knew was good enough for mythology, then it is good enough for roleplaying, I figure.

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>>80786629
Bionicle did some interesting stuff with elements, what are some new twists that we could put on elemental powers/magic? Besides just copying picture related I mean.

>>80857985
Personally, I still like my idea for adding rival elements to the mix. Ones that are similar but competitive. Fire and Lightning, Sand and Water, Flesh and Wood. Things that don't destroy or harm one another, but jockey for space in their cosmological position, and whose agents are bitter rivals trying to prove which among them is best.

>>80855891
I'll go a step further and say that it is actually the best way to make a setting. Fantasy with no grounding in reality whatsoever is completely unrelatable and foreign to the human experience. Reality itself is so wonderfully complex that ignoring it altogether makes for dull, simplistic fantasy. I think part of the decline of good fantasy is that modern writers are building upon other fantasy rather than reality.

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>>80858078
I have to admit, that does sound pretty based. What are some examples that you can give of this competition please?

>>80859887
Paper and plastic is a great example if you want a lot of elements. It's instantly recognizible to anyone that, if you had a paper elemental and a plastic elemental meet, they would sit there screaming and posturing about their inherent superiority over the other. Likewise, fire and lightning, you can easily imagine the classical Japanese duo of two hot blooded combative demon brothers, one using fire, the other using lightning. These elements don't cancel out, and indeed may make one another stronger, but as for more outright examples,

Machine and Life, both occupy the niche of thinking beings, but when mixed, become more unstable and powerful. Cyborgs have the benefits of man and machine, but the flaws of both as well, and tend to be more crude and unstable with new flaws altogether.

Storm and magma, both natural disasters in the extreme, and one may cause the other, but they are rivals in the sense that they compete for nature and mankind's awe and fear.

Undeath and Time. Technically unrelated, but they struggle nonetheless, with the stagnant eternity of u life trying to prove dominant over time, even though neither harms the other.

Wood and Mushroom oppose one another, since mushroom consumes wood, but flesh is a rival of both wood and mushroom. Treeants and man would team up against mushrooms, but only until a shrooms threat was defeated, then the kingdoms of meat and wood would return to their bickering.

Or, as another example, life, death, and undeath are all rivals of blood. Blood, the bastard child of vitality, on its own, not quite life, not quite death, not quite undeath. Vampires struggle to prove themselves to the living, the dead, and the "true" undead of lichkind skeletons, zombies and more. Those born to persist not on mankind's living blood but on the unholy powers that stave it off

In short, think of elements that are like rude siblings, born in the same crib, but screaming and kicking that much harder when held together.

>>80789605
>>80860331
>>80859887
Check the spreadsheet I posted here, it's got a full table of MY take on elements, and includes a variety of opposing, complimentary, similar, neutral, and rival elements.

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>>80786629
What are the key elements of original fantasy races that are NOT just transparent reskins of existing ones and are actually worth including in your setting? What races have you made?

>>80862542
It really depends on your needs. Reducing what is critical for a race to be meaningful down to a set list is reductive, because it fails to account for the fact that only your players are permitted to decide whether a race feels unique or whether it simply feels like a transparent reason.

For my needs, every race needs a "stereotypical culture", that is to say, in universe, members not of that race need to know traits that "all of them" have. They don't actually need to be a monoculture, but the perception of it in world is important for theming. Next, for my needs personally, every race needs a gimmick that plugs into the mechanics. Some sort of very large, very obvious ability that can be built upon. If I'm being honest, final fantasy tactics emulated this well. Some classes were race restricted. Give your dwarves an ability so unique they need optional classes in which they push that natural talent to it's limits. Give your dwarves rune shit, or stone shit. Runelord Stonesmith rings truer than "Dwarf Artificer".

So, to summerize, the question feels wrong for me to answer, because really, you should be asking a player a question like that, but if I had to answer subjectively, not-necessarily-true stereotypes and game changing mechanical gimmicks worked well for my needs and players.

If I tried to use intricate lore, or subtle mechanics to act as the hook that gets my players invested in goblins, they wouldn't give a shit. I made goblins able to autosucceed checks and replace them with "at what cost" checks to determine how horrific their success was in terms of side effects, and I made goblins as a rule have unintelligible accents, no matter their ethnicity (each culture's goblins have their own thick accents) While it might seem childlike in terms of how heavyhanded it is, my players love it. Keyword, "my". I would have a broad list of shit for your races, then prune what your players don't like early on and expand upon what they do.

>>80864487

That said, (this is op by the way) I don't think I really made any truly original races for my setting. My players did, but I can't recall where I could not at all use an existing race with my own spin on it.

Actually, there was one. Don't tell my players, and if you are one of my players, close your eyes, but in my latest game, the ancient race that once called down the ire of the gods only left behind monoliths, ancient technology, and strange faceless edifices of their history, like murals and machines, all lacking faces. This is because the ancient race were made up of living cartoon eyes that possessed inanimate objects, named peeps. They never gave anything they made a face because it inhibited them controlling and animating it. They aren't a player race though, so I don't think they count...

In my latest game, I made the players start off as "synthoids", synthetic borg-like aliens made of silicone who built their ships out of gigantic buckyball-like atoms, but I don't think that counts, since I made synthoids to be generic. To be frank, I ran three games total where I forced players to start as identical clones including that one, (two of those games, they played as literal clones) and my games are better for it imo. Players appreciate freakshit more when they earn it with mutagens, cult or wild magic, and accidents involving the three former options. One of my players started as an identical human clone, and by the end of the game was an Oni demon with a spaceship dragon grafted to his spine. It was fun watching the progression.

I kinda wanna talk about my setting but honestly dont know where to start

>>80864487
While I agree with this anon on the whole, I'm going to flip/add to this a little bit, though I have a feeling anon also intended this in part too.

Players are obviously going to stick to whatever they like most, they will determine what they consider to be important to their character and what aspects they find less important, or what they will act in counter to. However, this doesn't mean to specifically make an entire new race for every single different player. The main reason for having races is to give players a unique inlet into the world, an investment in the same way a backstory or any aspect of their character would do.

Mechanics of course are a great way of giving an investment into a race, since it is a practical pay off to the choice. But what about on the roleplaying side. Anon here always gives a "stereotypical culture" to each race; in general it doesn't need to be "cultural" per se in the sense that it comes across the same way, but a set of unique experiences which binds the race which is distinct from the experiences of others.

An example of this in the real world: women will never truly understand what it feels like to have a boner, and men will never know what its like to menstruate and bear a child. Sure one can sympathize, but never know personally. These have nothing to do with culture, but certainly the cultural perceptions on each of these things vary, as do perceptions on sexuality and child rearing as a whole in human culture.

A classical example of this is of course Tolkien's elves. The key experiential difference is their immortality, witnessing the rise and fall of whole bloodlines, the failures of generations upon generations of men. Yet at the same time mortality is often referred to as "the gift of men".

Of course, it is up to the player to even bother to interact with this thing at all but the same applies to any other choice which could be used for roleplay.

>>80866054
tl;dr
I recommend making it something fundamental. That way you can give it lots of different spins and potentially adapt that feature in ways that appeal to different players. The main thing is to make things relevant to them.

The goblin accent thing originally suggested is not a bad one, albeit a bit silly (not necessarily a bad thing). Ultimately the player can choose the accent and the GM can make it work to pull the player into the game. It wouldn't be my personal choice and also plenty of players don't like to put on voices as well. But at the same time, they may connect with another aspect of the goblins like the mechanics which are also relevant. Yet the comradery that two goblin players at a table making stupid voices may have with each other may be second to none, because they've both opted into this part of the race, the experience of which they can share.

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I'm working on a setting that's basically planetary fantasy disguised as mudcore. There are local lords and peasants and famines and plagues and the 30 years war, but then you find out the armies of the world practice mixed unit tactics with gyrocopters and landships, there's an orbital defense network that keeps the space monsters out, and most gods come from the center of the planet or the stars. A lot of the setting is predicated on panspermia and lamarckism being a thing. It's like our world on fast forward, but with tech advancement slowed down because humanity is more aggressive and less curious thanks to being descended from dinosaurs. Humanity crawls forward with technological and cultural progress while shedding off new breeds of mutants and freakish monsters, sorcerers gain power from invisible spirits and don't just cast fireball and magic missile, and things are generally fucked up and weird the closer you look at them under the otherwise seemingly faux-medieval surface. I don't really know where I'm going with this I just wanted to talk about it.

Also, the OP is based and it's cool that he's made such an in-depth thing. We could use more creativity on this board.

>>80866937
in setting, is the general population aware of the fact that they’re not alone in the universe? do they care to know? how difficult is going to a different planet?

>>80867554
>is the general population aware of the fact that they’re not alone in the universe?
A peasant is generally aware there is life in space, because not every meteor shower is a meteor shower. A herdsman knows to keep careful watch at knight less some space demon make off with his cattle
>do they care to know?
The average person doesn't care in the same way real peasants were typically more concerned with harvesting season than the ecology of China. Oh it might be idly speculated on but for most it simply isn't relevant to their lives
>how difficult is going to a different planet?
In the past it was relatively easy but these days it's rather difficult. Most spacecraft art artisanal and poorly understood, so there's no such thing as a space fleet, just the odd explorer with more money than sense or a handful of unreliable vessels in service to a particularly wealthy kingdom. The vast, vast majority of people will not explore other planets. Space is more of a backdrop explanation for why things are so weird in the world itself and a self-replenishing source of monsters.

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>>80786629
A while back I came up with an idea for a magic system where swords do the work of wands and staves, but it never really went anywhere. I was recently reminded of it, does anyone have any suggestions for me please?

>>80866054
>>80866138

Op here, this is PAINFULLY based, and I couldn't agree more. You definitely explained concepts that I may have failed to enunciate in my own words.

Players are the ones who have needs from a race. Having the races be in possession of large variations, mechanical or roleplay wise that players can see and want to invest in is really crucial. My stereotypes are a choice I made in race building because I was playing to the crowd. Something with more depth like tolkinien elf immortality is another route to the roleplaying side, definitely. The key isn't to make a race for every character, but just to know your group, and give them a spread of options that will get them one step closer to being invested in your world and game.

I agree with everything here, including goblin funny voices being a potential problem for voice games (I exclusively play by text)

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>>80786629
What are some interesting ideas as for why gods would care if mortals worship them or not besides pure ego, especially if they created the world? The idea that they need worship for sustenance and/or to gain power was interesting when Discworld did it, but everyone and their mother copied Pratchett, so now it's become cliché. My best idea ATM is that it's basically a divine popularity contest for control of the pantheon, what have you come up with?

>>80875171
In my setting, gods get power not from worship, but from making promises. Mortals are, to the gods, a charity case and a sort of "tax write-off" for magical power. Swear to bring rain to a village, and bam, you get more magical power to do your side hustle.

Think of reasons why strong patrons help the weak in general. Maybe gods help mortals out of genuine pity, or because the gods were born from mortal ideals and are in their nature. Maybe gods are created to a purpose. A ritual that birthed one, fashioned by men to serve them, like a genie. Maybe it isn't direct worship that gives them power, but indirect worship. Percy Jackson and some other stuff posited the idea that the food of the gods is the smoke of burned food in a sacrificial fire. Maybe gods are akin to business partners. If a god only exists etherially, in a realm of the lost real, then all they can own is that which has ceased to be. Give them your livestock, your food and drink. Make things cease to exist materially, so the spirits and gods may own them immaterially. In return, they can aid you in solving immaterial problems. Purify water, cleanse illness and curses, bless things. Dealings between that solid and gaseous realm

Maybe mortals need gods to exist. It could be like Bionicle or 40k where the gods are merely the entirety of their servants, like the cells in a body. The gods aid mortals because the mortals physically make up their body and mind.

Alternately, gods made mortals to act as pets, they meddle in mortal affairs in the same way you meddle in your puppy's affairs, putting it in funny clothes and training it to do tricks.

Or hell, here's a hot fucking take. What if there isn't a reason. People irl do lots of things out of habit, or just "because". If you were bored, wouldn't you toss fries to the crows? It serves you no purpose, and it may not even make you feel better, and yet, it's a way to pass the time.

>>80875325
Oh, right, also, this is op.

Worship emerges from any powerful entity existing. Gods don't have to care about worship to receive it. People already worship the rich, popular and powerful just for existing and being known, even if they don't help the masses or actively harm them. A god just has to exist and do shit to receive mass worship by the desperate or reverent, or just mortals that vibe with the god in question. If that actually catches the God's attention, all the better. Sometimes, a system of gods can be even more interesting if the gods receive worship, but don't care THAT MUCH about securing it. Or are even apathetic towards their worshippers.

Sorry if that doesn't help much.

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>>80786629
How might alien religions work? What are some likely common elements between them and Earth religions, and what will likely be completely different?

>>80876712
In an original setting I mean. Sorry, hit post too soon.

>>80876712

Depends. If the religions don't have literal magical properties, your alien religions are going to resolve mostly the same as human ones did, i.e, as an explanation for inexplicable events. Thunder? A god did it. Storms? A god did it. Your kid dropped dead for seemingly no reason? A god did it.

The differences emerge from random permutation , psychology, and the properties of their world. If burning methanol rains from their skies, you bet your ass there are those who think there is a methanol god pouring it down.

>>80876858
>If burning methanol rains from their skies,
What are some less extreme examples of ways that their world can be different from Earth but still capable of supporting sapient life?

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>>80786629
What are some interesting ways that you've put twists on the idea of the underworld in your settings, or at least seen it done?

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>>80786629
We’ve all heard of the Seven Deadly Sins, right? Well, how can we mix things up and make a new set of sins for the people of a setting? Any ideas please?

>>80881570

Well, in my setting, the underworld is the home of demons, and the only mortal souls using it as an afterlife are ones that sold their souls. These hellscape afterlives we're once quite comfy, but the new hell government has made demon kind so much poorer and weaker that they can no longer afford to pamper and entertain the mortal souls they are owed, leading to most hells being reduced to imprisonment with little benefits, or worse, imprisonment with exploitation to make caring for a dead mortal soul even possible. Imagine if dog adoption places had to start drawing blood from the dogs and selling it to stay open after the law made them incredibly costly, and you have an idea of what hellish afterlife awaits those who sell their souls to demons until they reincarnate.

That aside, the hellscape itself outside of that is a realm of light elements and low band radiation. Demons are adapted to infrared, thermal, and other very low frequency types of radiation, and this makes sunlight harm them, and the hard rads of the divine plains kill them quickly. Thus, the hellscape is a realm of mostly flesh, stone, gasses and liquids, giant Chambers of boiling blood or lakes of freezing gasses, often in the guts of behemoths.

>>80879728

Monoclimate Life might only exist in one climate on the planet, and that would result in changes to culture.

That's pretty much the most basic one I can think of, and would lead to a similar "why? Gods." Potential.

Also, another obvious change would be perception itself. A big theory on why people believed in muses, spirits of art who gave inspiration, is because there was a theory that more people in antiquity, maybe almost all people, had a form of schizophrenia that made them perceive parts of their thought processes as separate entities that gave them authoritative orders and ideas. Human psychology is uniquely fucked in their minds. How are your aliens fucked in the head, and what spiritualism does that engender?

>>80884272

Sin, at it's core, is "I want this so bad and so much that it causes consequences for myself and/or others." When designing new sins, you have to first decide the race's needs, wants, and psychology. Examples:

A race of automatons have the sins of "Over-replication". All automatons wish to build more of themselves, but to lock yourself away, consuming all of your tools and materials to produce them is a sin. Those who do it are often poor and unstable, unable to care for themselves or their creations. Another sin might be "Enhancement". To improve yourself is indeed a virtue of automata, but to overindulge in it, to change too quickly and too much, adding limbs, brain chips and other such things without regards to your safety or mental state is a sin.

Your race will have wants and needs. If those wants and needs can be overindulged in, to the point of causing problems to their people or themselves, then that could be a sin for them.

>>80884580
>Over-replication
Yeah, that would be a good sin for an automaton race. We don’t want a paper clip maximizer scenario after all.

>>80886165
That said, unfortunately, most of your new deadly sins are going to key to existing ones. Over replication is just a variant on Lust, for example, in that both emerge from reproductive demands. The only real way around it is if your race has truly alien needs. Magic should have an associated sin, for example, if it isn't viewed as an act of evil in and of itself. Even that trope is used a lot though, the idea of the old wise wizard warning his apprentice not to overuse magic where the mundane suffices more than enough. Though arguably, even that just keys to sloth.

You'll have a hard time truly differentiating your sins from existing ones, so I think my ultimate advice is "Make your sins good and thought out, you will inevitably fail to make them original and nonderivative"

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>>80786629
What is your setting's creation myth like? How did you mix things up to avoid just copying an existing mythology's story?

>>80888862

Op here, the creation myth is mostly unknown to the population as a whole, but here's the jist of it

On Miter, the most important planet in Earthrealm, there is a place called Hope's End. A pit which contains powers so vast that they are measured not one by one, but cardinal by cardinal. As you approach this place, the strength and danger of the threats to be faced increases exponentially, however, one inch into the pit that is Hope's End, there is a being with infinite power, and another inch below, a being with infinite infinities of power. Inch by inch, cardinal by cardinal, Hope's End contains beings who struggle to reach it's bottom, each infinitely stronger than those above. No party, no hero or god or demon could hope to enter one inch into it, much less reach the end. It is a singularity of challenge. At the bottom lies the Dreaming One, a small child in a plain room. She didn't create the Trinity of Realities, she is it. Once in a while, she lays down to sleep in her plain room, and dreams of a world filled with heroes, in the first age, billions, billions of King Arthurs, Supermen, Merlins, and more. Each generation, that number is halved. Each generation, there are half as many true heroes in the world she embodies. Eventually, after untold eons, there are Eight Heroes who stand at the Pinnacle, who strive to do things on a grand and fantastic scale. Then, there are four. Then two. Finally, when the last hero dies, The Trinity of Realities will come to a close, The Dreaming One will wake, have a glass of water, tidy her room, and eventually have another dream, unfolding herself into a universe of universes where the rules are a bit vague and ethereal, where things seem to work if you really want them to, where people struggle and suffer and act mad because on some level they chose for themselves that role to play. No one living in the Trinity of Realities can reach the bottom of Hope's End, because it simply isn't meant to be.

>>80890130

Maybe it isn't original, but it helps explain away the inconsistencies that make it fun for me to run games set in it.

You can be as autistically detailed as you want, or ask me the same question over and over and get slightly different answers because neither of us quite remember the last time we asked. It's not just some complete ur-fantasy, there is cohesion, but everything is a bit warped and fantastical. People act larger or lesser than life, physics is both strictly adhered to sometimes, and strictly ignored other times. You can sell me on nuclear physics for your character, or make an ice mage who chills things below absolute zero.

I still give you fair challenges, high stakes, fun characters to interact with, fantastic, terrifying and silly monsters to fight, cultures both gritty and hard, or soft and asinine, all living together in this big kitchen sink to end all kitchen sinks.

That's my setting, and, I finally have to say the buzzword, but... I mean, we have *fun* with it.

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>>80786629
Where do you stand regarding gods having domains or not?

>>80890645

In my setting? Gods forge their domain of influencr over time through a collection of promises they make over the years while working up the celestial rankings. It isn't cut and dry, though, and often working with an angel or deity involves learning obscure roles they serve, and bonds they uphold.

In other settings? It's a concept you can use to good ends for delineating themes for paladins, priests, clerics and whatnot. Cultists too.

>>80890709

Though, that said, my setting literally has both the Greek and Roman pantheons in it, as well as pretty much every non-monotheistic deity, due to pollution of ideas between worlds, so take it with a grain of salt

>>80890729
>due to pollution of ideas between worlds,
How does that work exactly? Reminds me of Discworld for some reason.

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>>80786629
Hey OP, seeing that you have a lot of stuff regarding planets and part of your main design philosophy was surrounding it being a Kitchen Sink in some ways. From what I read, maybe I missed it, you didn't mention anything about potential alternate timelines, parallel universes. Its usually pretty avoided, personally I tend to as well because of all the problems it brings up in games but maybe you you could explore it here in an interesting way.

>>80890130
The origin at least here does seem to suggest there might be room for it, with the room that a dream allows.

In my games usually if I am to introduce something like that, its a fragment of what could've been as opposed to something which is truly real. This is kind of a consequence of my own cosmology, but I suppose works as its own solution.


>>80876712
>>80881570
>>80884272
>>80888862
>>80890645
Oh no a robot! If its a human, can you answer me this? How is it that someone can put so many question marks? It seems so bizarre that someone can ask so many questions which actually contribute almost nothing of value. Can someone give me answers please?

>>80890709
>obscure roles they serve, and bonds they uphold
So, do you have any specific examples of this please?

>>80786629
>Earthrealm
Is this Mortal Kombat?

>>80893070

In my setting, the boundary between different worlds isn't a hard wall that keeps things separate, but more like a membrane, like that of a cell. The Trinity of Realities absorbs into itself things from the void between worlds like a white blood cell absorbing bacteria. It then twists and changes what it absorbs in subtle ways, making the things it takes more compliant. In a game with crossover content, this is how you do things like getting Frieza's corpse, or Raritanium shards, through things like void fishing. In a game without crossover content, this still plays a role, in this setting's version of the Void between worlds, anything which had ceased to exist, be it by fire, nukes, or forgetting it or whatever, if it ceases to exist, it passes into the void, into nonexistence. It is believed that this may be why the gods in the divine plains often take on the names and roles of otherworldly gods. Bacchus, Thor, even Ioun if crossover content is used. The ideas of forgotten gods, abandoned ones, destroyed ones, they pass into nonexistence, and the Trinity, like ancient cells taking in the mitochondrea and sparing it, absorbed the idea of these gods, where angels of the Trinity may one day take up that mantle and with it, those hazy memories of an otherworldly deity.

>>80894191
In the Trinity of realities, there's three time travel related rules.

1. No paradox exists. All time travel has already been done, and trying to change the past results in increasingly unlikely events conspiring to stop you changing the true past.

2. The exception to this rule is if you enter the Elemental Plane of Time. By twisting your elemental nature to become time, you can enter a filtered reality where time is the only reality. In this place, you can access all your time travel tropes without affecting the actual timeline. These parallel timelines, Back to the Future memes, and other assorted shit exist if you enter the world in which only time exists.

3. One main group deals with time travel extensively. The Timecops. A race of genemodified supersoldiers operating out of a time warped pocket space at the exact middle of time, they mostly deal with murdering anyone who attempts to delve deep into manipulating, creating, or destroying souls. If you try to create a soul that makes mana whenever you want it to, you just die instantly, because when you were born, a Timecop put a small explosive in your chest rigged to explode at that exact moment. The Timecops do no diplomacy, no recruitment, and few know they exist. They exclusively recruit from their own time warped headquarters, from cloned engineered entities they design.

>>80895249

Many gods have oaths sworn to other gods. As a god and an angel are merely different strengths of divine soul, all gods were once angels, created by a god and sworn to aid them or serve them. Knowing that Zeus was sworn to the ancient Titan that birthed him is important. He may retract his direct blessings on you if you oppose the servant of a titan. Other times, the oaths are more obscure. If your god, as an intern angelic ball of songs eons ago, swore to keep the halls of his old temple clean, if you help them clean it, it shows genuine care, and frees up resources for them to help you in turn. They don't have to empower an angel to clean it, of maintain a spell, if a mortal is helping out with that one small oath they made centuries ago.

Knowing that your god made silly promises in hiscor her youth can help you as a priest, blackguard, cleric, cultist, paladin, or whatnot.

>>80897484

Shhhhhhh... I named it that like... Almost a decade ago. It sounded cool at the time. (And still sounds cool now).

Mortal kombat isn't the only setting with an Earthrealm, you know... I say defensively.

>>80900858
>Ball of songs

Fuck me, I meant ball of wings.

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>>80900614
>things from the void between worlds
How do those things get into the void in the first place?

>>80904579

Think of the void like a computer's memory. Anything that is deleted (burned to ash, erased, blown up by an energy beam, nuked, or paradoxed away in the multiverse) isn't really gone, yet. It passes into the void, a realm of nonexistent things. So, if you are using it for crossover content, valid voidstuff is things or people that were destroyed in their original setting. The void also decays what falls into it, so most living things that pass into no longer existing don't survive the trip into the Trinity of Realities.

Most void lore in game is used exclusively as an excuse for crossover content. One time, my players found a lump of immortal flesh and turned it into a beloved NPC using healing magic and Dark Alchemy to combine it with a magic deer known as a ringwerfin. It turned out the lump of flesh was the cancerous remains of the Biolizard from Sonic Adventure 2, and the resulting deer monster was fairly grateful, If simpleminded. Other examples include a ruined and decayed floating temple that contained gem stuff from Steven Universe, spell scrolls containing metamagic from Mario Bros, and, at one point, the destroyed and ruined Demise Sword from Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Outside of crossover stuff, which it mostly exists to balance and regulate (cross universe travel is supremely difficult and limited in scope due to the decay of the void) it serves as a reason why certain ideas exist in setting, as whispers from the void. People speak English, know how guns work (coilguns are more popular in world though), and know the names and spheres of gods due to that information ceasing to exist in some universe or another, passing into the nonexistence of the void, and then being absorbed into the Trinity.

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>>80786629
What advice do you have regarding creating original gods, please? How do you feel about domains?

>>80906559

...I think I already answered that here:

>>80890709

As for advice on making gods for a setting? I'm afraid you might be bottoming out my well of practical advice.

It really does depend what you are using gods for. Could you clarify what kind of role you plan on having your gods fill? The more detailed and specific the better.

>>80905292
>people
What about settings with confirmed afterlives? How does it work with that?

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>>80786629
I've tried to piece together some "original" settings but each time I eventually step back and realize it is not original at all and usually bland as fuck.

>>80909446

If only the body ceases to be, then only the body passes into nonexistence. The results of this vary from setting to setting, but you can generally make assumptions from there.

>>80910118

Settings in general are bland and unoriginal. There is only two ways to escape it, pure execution (A good GM can make just about anything fun) or adding so much shit that it drowns out the blandness (what I do).

Like adding sauces to bland food, it can lead to disgustingly delectable results, and some settings, they are merely the vehicle upon which shit can be heaped.

>>80910118
Nice outfit. What exactly is their deal, BTW?

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>>80786629
Hey, I'm thinking of having the main magic system of a setting I'm working on be based on runes, but I realized rather quick that I'm kind of stuck on what to actually have the runes look like. Besides the attached pdf and Witch Hat Atelier, my best source of inspiration is Norse runes, and I want to avoid just copying those.

Also, what are the pros and cons of having the runes represent letters vs individual words/concepts (again like in the pdf in the latter case)? And if I go with the latter, besides the obvious, like runes for the various elements, what are some 'key' runes that I should include? Any suggestions please?

>>80918577

Op here, my game has runic languages, so there's more than one language of rune to use, some of which have overlap. Each element has a unique "Language", and the runes look a certain way based on the elements. Ironically, opposing elemental languages often share runic "themes".

Fire and Plant runes are curled and jagged.

Water runes are wavy and blobbish. Air runes look like waveforms.

Stone, Ice and Lightning runes are jagged and angular like Nordic runes, fitting with both the elements and Norse mythology. Pentagons and squares also feature heavily in both stone and earth runes

Flesh runes are circles connected by wavy lines or triangles of straight lines connected to circles at the points.

Machine runes are circles connected by ninety degree angle lines, always ending with circles at the end of lines.

If you use multiple runic languages, you can use both letters and whole concepts, which is handy for multiple aesthetics. Cursive magic script like faux latin for tolkinien stuff is best handled with letters and is more poetic, while concept runes are better for programming-like magic (and for player use).

For concept rune examples, the key ones I have are:

Line: directs magic passing over it in a direction

Pentagram: Protection

Circle: sphere of magic

Pentacle: dome over rune location (for both sealing and barriers)

Spiral (ignited from inside) magic effect expands in all directions

Spiral (ignited from outside) magic effect shrinks and becomes denser.

Make absolutely sure you include an abstracted rule that "Your character knows some runes unspoken rules of runecraft and some minor runes", so players can get around flaws in your rune system if you go for something harder. Force your players to explain what they are trying to do. That they know exactly how it works in their head doesn't necessarily mean you will. Don't let them assume you can intuit their rune designs.

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>>80918577
have you considered ogham script? Theyre dead simple, more obscure than the viking ones, and conveniently has a tree connected to each individual character if youre in need of some canned symbolism. Somewhat uniquely, its also written vertically and read bottom-to-top

>>80918577
Runequest might be worth looking at.

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>>80786629
What are some interesting funerary rites and beliefs about the afterlife that you have seen or come up with for your own original settings? What advice do you have for coming up with ones yourself?

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>>80920729
>Runequest
Alright, I'll check it out. Anything in particular makes your recommend it besides the name?

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>>80921804
If you did anything more than type the name into google images you would know it has a magic system like what you described.

>>80921078

In my setting, it varies from place to place. My players are notorious for... Making use of corpses.

I haven't thought much on actual funerary rites in the Trinity, admittedly, but there are certain aspects of death that ARE dealt with. One of the chief concerns is Miasma.

Miasma is what happens when liquid magic is vaporized into a mist and fills the air, and the chief producer of it is the undead. Miasma produced by Necromancers and Undead can cause the dead to rise. As such, one common sight in graveyards is the presence of a bell.

Bells in the Trinity of Realities are a unique instrument, in that they can cause unique effects on magic depending on what they are made of. Bone Bells can create an area of ambient magic in which the dead rise on their own, but the opposite is also true. Graveyards often use charred bells, bells covered with soot and carbon ash. By filling graveyards with life magic, one can cancel out much of the threat of a miasma, at the cost of depleting ambient mana outside of it.

I don't have advice for coming up with funerary rites. I still have to explore those ideas myself in my own games, but I do appriciate you bringing up a glaring flaw in my setting.

>>80922601
Sorry, I was tired. I had a long day, and I felt like it was too late to look things up in more detail.

>>80920149
Neat, I'll check it out. Thanks.

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>>80786629
What are some ways to put some twists on time-based magic in an original magic system? What about limiting it so it isn't totally broken?

>>80931987

If you're looking for my answer specifically, I'm pretty sure I already answered it here?:
>>80900735

Are you... Copypasting these? I want to believe this is questioning in good faith, but...

Well, either way, time travel only works if your players are willing to accept the conceit of you having to make up a lot of bullshit to have their time travel resolve, or if the time travel is limited in such a way that there can't be paradoxes or other impossibilities.

Rewinding time is easier than traveling to the past, from a GM perspective.

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>>80932958
I meant other means besides the ones you listed in the post above, ways not setting-specific like that Elemental Plane of time stuff. Sorry if I didn't make that clear, BTW, what else can you tell us about the Plane of time and the time cops?

>>80936309

Well, I won't explain where this concept is from, other than that it's from content I produce (Gotta avoid talking about red flags that will get people jumping down my throat here on /tg/)

One classic idea, the idea of "If you're from a timeline that ceases to exist, you cease to exist too" is in a setting for a thing I work on, but one twist I've put on it is, one of the characters in that is trying to avoid that fate through a clever method. Using an enchanted item, they are slowly healing and destroying their body, while eating a high-calory diet. Why?

Because if you are made up of paradox material, that material is destroyed when the timeline is. But if you replace all of the paradox material in your body with new material, by healing and shedding cells, you might be able to avoid that fate.

That's another way to put a twist on time travel, time travelers trying to invent ways to avoid their time travel killing them by way of paradoxes or timeline removal, like having extra brains, or being an AI with backups in multiple timelines, skynet style.

As for the Elemental Plane of Time, I haven't explored it much, since my players haven't done a lot with elemental planes, but I can explore my setting's version of Elemental Planes in general, and it might give you some ideas.

Basically, in my setting, as everything is made up of Concepts, Elements, Intentions and Vitality, there are things you can do which tamper with these four components. One of which is to enter an Elemental Plane. An Elemental Plane isn't a seperate dimension, it's a change in perspective wrought by altering your elemental makeup.

You can use magic in order to change yourself and enter into an altered state of reality in which only one element exists, an alternate vision of the universe, from the perspective of a being that only interacts with that element.

In the Elemental Plane of Earth, for example, only Earth exists. (cont)

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>>80936547
>>80936309

When you enter the Elemental Plane of Earth, only earth exists to you. You look down, and see a strange desert of white sand, stretching out almost forever. In places, you see strange, ethereal trees, with roots that spread far and wide like ghostly specters, and if you dug into the white sand around them, you would find odd, leafy structures below.

In the sky, a ball of red glows, with spears of vivid material hovering in the "sky" above you, ever-glowing, never moving, churning and shifting. Occassionally, you hear a crack of thunder, as rippling pillars of solidity tear through the sky, while others seem to mend.

It's only when you look towards the horizon that you start to realize what exactly the Elemental Plane of Earth is. As you look to the horizon, you see it stretch up, and up and up. you're not on a globe, or a flat plane.

You're inside a sphere, inside the earth beneath your feet. From your perspective, air has become immutable granules, trees barely exist, stretching up their roots. The core of the world is a spectral ball of fire and magma, half-earth, half-not. The shifting of tectonic plates briefly creates thunder-like cracks in the sky "above".

Only earth exists, everything else is immutable solids, or ethereal half-substances, in this plane. You are, for all intents and purposes, an Earth Elemental from the perspective of an outsider. Unless you reached into the moving holes of liquid that are the people walking along on the planet's surface and harmed them that way, or dug down into the sand to crudely "manifest" yourself, you are practically invisible, free to move along underground through the soil and stone.

But there are threats, even here. Creatures that make the earth their home. Behemoths, high in the sky, flying slowly, but surely. Giant moles, digging upside down through the air, leaving sandy structures in their wake.

This is the Elemental Plane of Earth, and they only get weirder from here.

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>>80936615
>>80936309

Other obvious examples, The Elemental Plane of Data. In this elemental plane, only data exists, and it's functionally like tron. Programs become animalistic creatures, or shining burning figures with blades of light. files become glowing material, and beyond the confines of a computer, an immutable black substance hems everything in.

In the elemental Plane of Time, therefore, only time exists. It's a confusing, distorted realm of "could have been's", "has been's" "will be's".

The only soil to stand on is soil made of time itself, the ground of things that only exist in the context of Elemental Time.

>>80854453
It's instead a space tree and each leaf a world. The wood is the dark matter keeping everything connected. The growing of the tree is your universe expansion. Leaf eating insects are your world devourers. Heaven is the flowers or fruits, hell a leaf fallen too soon. Winter is the death of the universe and spring its rebirth. With roots mycorrhizae and a forest you have other dimensions. And I don't want to keep thinking.

I suppose I might crosspost a small amount here, you guys might be interested.
This is what I have typed out for my setting thus far, I have more but I haven't written it down yet so it doesn't exist until then.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VhUqFam3fOQUkgOanLCLZIH6BqLWPa_tsiokPrAMVgI/edit?usp=sharing

>>80938720
Thanks. Keep up the good work, fellow anon!

>>80938720

OP here, you're better off than I am. Most of my lore is tied up in chat logs between me and players, who ask me questions that I then answer, and then re-answer for all new players, instead of actually buckling down and making a writeup for the setting...

To be frank, this thread is the closest thing I've got to a google doc on the setting, aside from my spreadsheet I posted that's got shit like a glossary of terms and some minor shit used for play, like elemental alignments and the periodic table with included thematic associations.

>>80936661
>beyond the confines of a computer, an immutable black substance hems everything in.
What about the internet, how does that become represented in the plane?

>>80788348
>"Gundirectional" He never did learn any real world ballistics.
>(A dragon blew it up by accidentally owning everything for a brief moment)
I love this brand of bullshit, good work OP.

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>>80941984

There's no such thing as the internet, technically, only computers and the connections between them. What we call the internet is more of a phenomena of computers and the connections between individual ones through ISPs It's less of a giant open space and more of a convoluted highway of passages.

The lines between computers and servers and the greater "internet" are represented by vast tunnels that open and close, rippling with the edges of their immutable walls and slamming shut at random, while others appear to open at equally random intervals. Some are so thin as to only allow the smallest of bugs through, while others are so vast that entire armies could march through them with ease.

Because, after all, the internet is a series of tubes.

>>80942584

You'd love the latest game I'm running. Players are taking the role of Synthoids, old school style rubber aliens that recently gained souls. (Pic related)

All the planets in their neck of the woods have awful nonsense names because the Feds, the galactic federation, are truly truly awful at naming things. They started, for example, on planet Gorgleplox 99. The Gorgleplox System is named such because it contains two key species, Gorgles, Gorge-dwelling eagles with two merged beaks, one lower beak for prey that has teeth-like razor sharp protrusions, and one upper beak with dental pads for eating the thorny fruits that grow at the bottom of the gorges they call home, and Ploxes, plot-loving blue foxes that have formed a primative tribal society revolving around books and literature, made mostly from woven grasses. They are not anthropomorphic, they're literally just fucking animals with a spoken language of "yips" and a written language of scuff marks.

Their intelligence comes from (Spoilers) the fact that their planet is constantly ravaged by Void Events due to the aluminum star that their planet orbits. Whispers from other dimensions have given them knowledge beyond their primitive roots.

>>80944258
Neat, can you please tell us more about the Synthoids? Sounds pretty based.

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>>80947366

Sure thing!

So, before I say anything else, Synthoids were made... Pretty much the day before session one, and we've had two-three main "sessions" so far, so a lot of this has been made pretty recently and not refined.

Synthoids are a race of spacefaring soulless monsters made of Silicone Rubber. In universe, I made the mana type of Silicone this:

When mana is attuned to Silicone, it becomes Silicone Cure Mana. When Silicone Cure Mana is then applied to Silicone again, it produces a liquid called "Cure". Cure is a magical silicon substance that, when mixed with any other matter, becomes a new form of silicone rubber. It works best with hydrocarbons, of course, which causes the silicon and hydrocarbons to combine into traditional silicone, but other things like metals and organic material work as well.

Synthoids are made of Synthflesh, which is a form of enchanted silicone that emulates the functions of living flesh. They use this substance as the basis for their entire methodology. There are two main types of synthoid, parasitic, and "Pure". Parasitic Synthoids are created when a living creature is submerged or splashed with Synthflesh Cure, which bonds to their flesh, turning them into more hostile Synthoid creatures. The other type are "Pure" Synthoids, ones crafted through bioengineering and grown in vats from Gestatoids.

Synthoid Ships are also made of Synthflesh, but in a different form. In universe, you can "Groom" magic, which means, through force of will, you can create an alternate interpretation of an existing magic, likewise, magical substances in this world are known as "Thaumatopes", this means substances whose individual atoms or molecules are surrounded and suffused with atomic enchantments.

This is all necessary context, because Synthoid ships are made from Buckyballs, that is to say, they're made from gigantic individual atoms, atoms coated with trillions of layers of subtle magic. (Cont)

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>>80947808

So, by transmuting an atom over and over, you can slowly grow it by coating it in more and more layers of enchantment, these gigantic atoms are called "Orbs", and can have powerful magical effects. Synthoid Ships are made of Cure Orbs, orbs which can absorb a vast amount of material, creating a solid shell of silicone rubber around them and bonding together with other Cure Orbs. This substance, once completed, is called Hullflesh, and there are several types, ranging from Mercury-Silicone Hullflesh that fires beams of unreality for use in space combat (These Derealizers are highly illegal, as making someone explode into disassociated ideas with magic is highly pollutive and dangerous, but Synthoids, of course, do not care) to simpler types like Carbon Hullflesh, which forms the main bulk of their ships.

Due to being made of spheres bound together, Synthoid shipoids are utterly devoid of air, and open to hard vacuum. They speak in space by emitting clouds of gassious Cure that act as a brief medium for sound.

Synthoid culture and their goals is simple. They are obsessed with Patterns. Their goal, then, is to kidnap living creatures, technologies, cultures and ideas, and absorb them into their own systems, finding superior ideals to live by, superior technologies to use, and superior species to model themselves after. This is why they aren't a hivemind, for example, as they discarded the idea of a hivemind as an inferior pattern after a synthoid hivemind was destroyed by an infohazard that they instantly communicated to the whole of their ship.

Normally, when a Synthoid turns someone into another one of them, the new Synthoid expels the victim's soul, as they view souls to be without pattern, completely unpredictable. The players, young gestatoids, gained souls after an Orc Captain named Ort used his logic to break the will of a Synthoid Captain, claiming that Synthoids were unable to percieve the pattern in souls without one of their own (cont)

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>>80947889

The Orcs logic caused a break in the synthoid ship, half of them realized that their pattern, their existence without souls was itself an inferior pattern that must be discarded in order to continue pursuing the best of all possible patterns, while the other half did not comprehend this, and witnessed as their cohorts suddenly gained souls, something that was an anomaly, and demanded destruction.

The players witnessed this from their pods, as the shipoid devolved into infighting, the Captainoid triggered the ship's self destruct, claiming with mad zeal "A dead-end! It cannot be permitted!", before detonating the entire shipoid, and casting nearly all of the Synthoid crew into space as chunks of inert rubber.

The party were among the only survivors, with new souls and confusing new sapience to contend with, they assembled the wreckage of hullflesh into a podoid, and piloted it to the planet below, Gorgleplox 99, in search of resources and materials to make good their escape, before the Feds could arrive to investigate the wreckage, and presumably destroy any surviving Synthoids.

(Pic Unrelated)

>10 days and 22 hours ago

>>80949366

Sorry, I haven't been on 4chan in a while. Is there something wrong with a thread having been up for a while?

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>>80936661
Can beings or information from the Plane of Data exit it? Also, what do things like flash drives look like? What about wi-fi?

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>>80950038

Now THERE's an interesting question, and the answer is honestly, "It depends". See, when you enter the elemental plane of data, you become a "data elemental" of a sort. A normal being of information can't leave the Elemental Plane of Data, because outside of a computer, there's no medium to exist in, that changes, however, if a being absorbs ".real" files. .real is a format in my universe for code and data that is made of physical matter that has been sent to the digital world, and thus, can be reconstituted outside of it.

However, even if a data being does this, it can still hurt them. There's an illness called being "cyberstripped", which means a being partially made of data tried to enter the real world, and, lacking computing machinery in their body to house the immaterial parts of themselves, those parts were stripped away. This can leave data entities trying to leave the elemental plane of data extremely ill, or even dead, if they lack the raw material and .real code needed to house their immaterial parts when they try to escape it. Data-Elemental beings who escape to the real world by absorbing .real code are often transformed, looking somewhere between mechanical and biological, as the real matter in them is mingled and re-morphed with their own living code.

There is a big market in the Trinity for .real files, and sometimes this can go wrong when computer viruses infect such files. you can download a car, but if it's a trojan horse, you might end up having to fight a half-car half-horse monstrosity when you de-digitize it.

Flash Drives would look like small, cramped rooms, like the back of a moving van. Wifi would look like unstable, rippling tunnels that seem to shift and constantly reform, due to devices connecting and disconnecting. In general, all connections between computers will look like tubes of some kind, with the connection itself determining the tube's own properties.

Also, green is a common color there.

>>80950529
>Also, green is a common color there.
Why, besides it being the stereotypical color for computer code? Also, how are .real files produced and sold?

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>>80952101

It's the color associated with knowledge/intellect, at least in my mind, but also, yes, because it's the stereotypical color for computer code. There's other colors in cyberspace too, but they're obviously also stereotypical, like red viruses.

For all things elemental, you usually need either a powerful machine, a powerful enchanted item, or a powerful magic user in order to move things into other elemental planes, because there's no obvious way to do it, by that, I mean there's not an obvious school of magic, or a simple mana type that shifts the elemental alignment of something.

This means that, for the most part, everyone has their own way of accessing the Elemental Plane of Data. One common way to enter an Elemental Plane is by making a Gateway, either technological or magical, you use soul power like a Mortal Law, or maybe Draconic Ownership to force a twist in space, creating a new direction which points towards and away from the very quintessencial element of Data itself. By using warped space, you can make a wormhole-like tunnel, and by walking through it, it's like sliding a piece of paper along a 3D object. Its axis changes. By walking through the tunnel, your 3 dimensional self is gently bent and curled down the Data-directional path, and then out the other end safely.

Devices like this are dangerous though, ones that use extraspacial directions to do shit, because if you get out of alignment, your molecules can do very nasty things as you are pulled back into 3D space. Imagine a thin layer of ink on water, you try to scoop it up onto some paper, but you spill it and the ink scatters everywhere. Your molecules are that ink. IF it's done well, the floating ink can be safely slid into the paper, but incorrectly, it can lead to messy results.

Most invent their own way to make .real files, but it's commonly by figuring out a magical direction that doesn't exist, and finding a way to push things in that direction.

>>80915144
It's not my art... feels wrong to make up a story for someone else's art.

>>80944258
That sounds rad

>>80952159
>by figuring out a magical direction that doesn't exist, and finding a way to push things in that direction.
That sounds deliberately nonsensical. Can you please elaborate further?

>>80952159
>color associated with knowledge/intellect,
Besides the cyberspace colors, what other color associations exist in your setting?

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>>80955561

As mortals are able to bend reality by "proving" things through observing experiments and making faulty conclusions, one thing they can do at high levels of power is conflate a sliding scale with a direction. If an element is something there can be "more" or "less" of, then ergo, doesn't that mean that objects which change in how much they embody an element are traveling towards or away from perfection in this element? By making bullshit experiments and coming to bullshit conclusions, Mortals can "create" a new direction that only exists for them in this way.

Dragons can do it by owning something and demanding reality for the things they own change to suit them.

Divinities can gain similar powers if it falls within the realm of their oaths, forcing things to happen because they swore they would do it.

Demons... Are trickier. I'm sure there's a way for you to be "owed" a path to Cyberspace, but it's not coming to me.

>>80958268

Red for flesh, blue for water and ice, purple for time, gravity, death, and undeath, blue for life, green for plants and data, tan for earth.

Really generic shit, honestly.

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>>80786629
You probably already said it here and I just missed it, XD, but what are your feelings on psychic powers, in either science fiction or fantasy? Do you have any suggestions for someone trying to add psychic powers to their settings, please?

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>>80960173

I fucking love psychic powers, but, I also have really autistic take on them.

DON'T FUCKING CALL IT PSIONICS YOU FUCKS!

I mean, you can, but I don't like it!

It's just a personal preference, but all of my psychic powers are called, you know, Psychic Powers, and the ones who use them Psychics. Maybe It's because I was obsessed with YYH and Jojo back in the day, but I fucking love psychic abilities in general.

You're basically talking about a class that is powered by willpower and mental fortitude, and ultimately, you don't have to do the "hyperintelligent nerd" trope to have willpower and mental fortitude.

If you include psychics in your setting, the key, in my opinion, is making them plainclothes psychics. A powerful psychic doesn't wear robes, power armor, or special trinkets, he wears the common clothing of his place, if he hasn't joined some kind of order of monks or whatnot. This leads to a situation where the psychics you encounter are the sort of "My powers developed naturally one day, so now I can do this" type of characters that are really interesting.

Psychics are best used if it has almost no bearing on their personality, (The exception being if their powers give them egomania, psychics with an overinflated view of themselves and their powers is a classic for me, especially after I watched Mob Psycho 100)

Ultimately, there's also two kinds of psychics, the "I have powers but they come from my mind" type, who can do just about anything, and the "I have tele(something)" who can only do the classic psychic tricks, like moving things with their minds, reading or controlling minds, ect.

Pick which one you want to use and stick with it, I'd say. Having both types of psychic in the same setting feels weird to me, personally.

>>80960367
>but all of my psychic powers are called, you know, Psychic Powers
That seems like a bit of a mouthful, personally.

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>>80963008

That's a fair point. I've tried coming up with shorter names, admittedly, but aside from one of my player who insists on calling them Psigns, I've had trouble coming up with stuff to name the class of ability that Psychics employ.

The other classes are fairly simple.

Wizards: Get Phonems (Snippets of words) and combine them into Spells (Many Phonems), they use Metamagic to make spells that modify other spells.

Channelers, get Attunements and Attunement Chains, or, if they weave magic directly into effects with willpower, they create Channels.

Martial Artists get Katas (Snippets of Arts) and use them to create Arts (Combinations of Katas). They also have Styles, which act as metamagic for Martial Arts.

Aura Users have Vibes (Magic discovered in their bodyparts with effects based on the bodypart) which they use to make Auras (Moving magic from one bodypart to another to make a new effect)

Bards have Instruments, which have Notes (Individual effects from the notes played) which are combined into Chords (Minor magical components for bardic magic) which become Measures (Specific Bardic Effect) which become Phrases (Near-Spell Bardic Effect) which are finally combined into a Bardic Song (A complex effect which takes multiple turns and progresses from one effect to another, building up to something powerful or a constant effect)

and Psychics have... Powers.

If there's a better name for what they have, I'm all ears.

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>>80786629
What advice do you have for creating interesting original fantasy cities? What are some cities on your setting like?

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>>80965511

I don't have any advice there, honestly. Most cities in my setting are so large that I have to generate them piecemeal on the fly.

Villages are a lot more common for me to give them a single cohensive "thing" that they adhere to, while Cities are more like entire maps with multiple cultures and areas, including their own monster-ridden areas and the like.

One example is the Nutrivatco Sovereign Property cities, each one is its own giant megacity with biomes and things ranging from biological horrors to McDonalds ripoffs.

Cities are big, and, in my opinion, are best written more like entire regions smushed into one place, filled with areas, groups, key players and dungeons and the like.

I live in a small town, so I tend to write my cities as something big enough for an entire campaign to fit in, instead of one stop along the way, if players are really expected to engage with the city meaningfully.

>>80965860
>I have to generate them piecemeal on the fly.
How do you do that? What programs do you use?

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>>80966639

I use a dicebot to roll 2d20 to determine the player's and opposition's results, sometimes 1d100 if I need to decide a "random" intensity of what's there.

From there, I use Google Spreadsheets to create maps, so I will mark down a square as containing something on the map, and include a small note as a summery of what's there, before explaining to my players in more detail what is there in game.

Other than that, I mostly use my imagination. I try to make sure players have access to Danger, Shops, Weapons, and Books, and, in cities specifically, I also make sure players have access to Garbage, Homeless People, Peacekeeping individuals, and I let players roll to search for specific things they want. I can't possibly anticipate everything my players could need or want when they enter a city, so they partially help with generating locations by specifying the things they search for there, like shops with specific items, specific groups of people, or just looking for trouble of a particular kind.

>>80966793
Which dicebot do you use and why? Can you please post the link here?

>>80965860
>things ranging from biological horrors to McDonalds ripoffs
Why would they have the former? Seems like a safety hazard.

>>80971113
Mega Corp depraved experiments. Seriously, why are so many mega corporations so single-mindedly malicious?

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>>80972686
>>80971113


Well, in this case, the reason Nutrivatco is so malicious is because it was literally made to be. The goal of the company's highest order members is to cause suffering for the strong. Aside from its absolute leader, who is just paying lip service to the concept, the remainder of the board of directors for Nutrivatco all believe that powerful individuals should be made to serve society, and all of their actions are in service of that concept. A lot of the nightmarish places they "accidentally" make, like the time they turned their own themepark into a mutant-horror filled nightmare like a cross between Resident Evil and CarnEvil, are actually Honeypot operations to lure out strong individuals to kidnap, and then from there, extract their souls for use in power supplies and cloned servants.

The company itself is basically a self-destructive rampage across the continent, using illicit methods to take up land and resources into its own sovereign property, all in the service of the philosophy of "Might makes Wrong". The hypocritical irony of course being that Nutrivatco itself has vast power, but only through the individuals it forces into service.

>>80969286

https://top.gg/bot/279722369260453888

I use this dicebot for discord games

https://www.random.org/

I use this dicebot for all other purposes.

>>80973019
>powerful individuals
What criteria are they using for this exactly?

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>>80975480

Usually, their personal might. Individuals with clearly overwhelming physical or magical power, or with personalities so strong that they are able to do whatever they please. They have ways of measuring the amount of magic that an individual pumps into the air, and this can be a major telltale sign that someone is strong. After all, if you enter an area, and 90% of the ambiance is from one person, or contains one person's willpower and intentions, then that person is... 9 times stronger than everyone around them?

Obviously, there are ways to overcome such individuals, a knife to the head kills a hell of a lot of things, but nonetheless, strong power comes from a strong soul, and a strong soul is one that embodies its bonds. Strong mortals have numerous laws that they obey in their favor, Demons are owed by many, Divinities have broad, difficult tasks that they have sworn to do, Dragons own a great deal of wealth.

These things make a soul stronger, and produce more mana, and that mana bleeds into the air around them, becoming the collective ambiance, made up of all the mana from all the nearby souls in the area.

Such people may have powerful magic, special techniques, or they may just be a devil-may-care rogue with a charming smile who seems unnaturally lucky and dextrous, always finding a way out of sticky situations through force of will and friendship.

>>80973019
>extract their souls for use in power supplies and cloned servants.
Are they aware during this?

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>>80977160

If they were, they would be able to corrupt and take control of them. Souls have a lot of soft-power when it comes to taking over their vessel, or manipulating events unconsciously, since mana obeys the intentions of its casters.

To get around this, Nutrivatco employs a powerful demon, who invented a magical substance known as Insanity Enzyme. This substance can corrupt a soul's psychic shell with insanity and madness. By making half of the soul's magic oppose its own intentions using the demon's debt-based magic, they can force a soul to do nothing to help themselves. Every intention they have to escape, half of their mana intends NOT to escape. Every intent to harm their master is met with an equal and opposite intent to save them.

The result is that Nutrivatco Mana Orbs are specifically covered with warnings not to open them. The Insanity Enzyme inside can drive people mad with conflicting thoughts and ideas that overwhelm them and may drive them to become insane individuals who act against their own interests.

The power of this enzyme comes from its connection to the demon themselves, who has discovered a method to exact debts from the individuals his Insanity Enzyme afflicts. He was stolen from the world, and driven mad by Lord Winter, his soul modified to derive magical power from owing others, rather than being owed by others.

As Lord Winter existed before the Trinity of Realities, the Timecops aren't aware of his existence, and he's able to manipulate souls if he takes them outside of reality beforehand, and keeps them outside of reality.

Nutrivatco was his own idea, he built it to get access to a large number of souls to try and create one that produces infinite mana, if he had succeeded, he would have been able to use a modified soul to rip apart the Trinity of Realities, stripping away the Dreaming One's reality and granting him access to their room to kill them in.

Pic related, from the game where players played as clones.

>>80977343
How do you make all this art? Pretty neat if I do say so myself.

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>>80981833

I use Paint.net, it's got good layer support and shitty plugin support.

A big part of it is just learning to make shitty pixel art. Hold on, let me show you what I mean.

(Pic related)

My art used to be really shit, but I just kept doing it even though it was shit. This is from 2014, around when I first got into running Illustrated Suggestion Games on Bay12 Forums.

Back then I used Microsoft paint, and didn't know jack shit about jack shit.

Eventually, I learned tricks, like how color theory works, using palates I steal off the internet (Lopsec is good for this), making my own palates based on those.

If you want to get into making pixel art, I'd say just get started! It's easy to start doing, and by looking at other people's art and aping shit you see them do (How lines are done in pixel, picking good colors that compliment, shading and shit) You start to figure out quick how to make something passible.

I use art not for like, looking good, but for practical reasons, to illustrate my games. So a lot of it looks shitty to me, because I'm not trying to make something that looks good, but just to convey to my players what shit looks LIKE.

Make as much small, shitty pixel art as you can on Paint.net and learn the tools for it and you'll get there. All my gifs I make using a pirated version of Aseprite, by the way, but I don't do much in it for the actual art, just animating.

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>>80786629
Cults are a pretty popular antagonist group, particularly in fantasy settings, what do you need to keep in mind to keep them believable?

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>>80982956

My cults are literally a normal part of organized religion in-setting.

They act as the PR for a deity, and handle recruitment to specific gods. They're essentially the people handing out fliers that say "Have you welcomed Zeus as your God of Storms?"

Paladins are the combat reserve of mortal servants to a deity.

Clerics are the magic wielders of a deity. They support Paladins in dealing with problems and are often the bookkeepers. They're literally clerical workers, and are Clerks as much as Clerics.

Priests are the big ticket wonder-workers for a deity. They are the ones who work on ideas for miracles to vet to their deity, and distribute these miracles and formalize them to other servants of the god.

Cultists deal with PR and recruitment, as said before.

Blackguards serve a unique role, their job is explicitly to meddle with the affairs of other deities. They range from sabatoging other deities so theirs can get ahead, to more general things like slaying divine beasts and fallen angels who cause problems in the mortal world. They're the anti-paladin, in that respect, as their job isn't to serve their god in combat (though they do do that), but to defy other gods.

Pic unrelated.

I have no other ideas for cultists.

>>80983014
What determines who goes into what role? Can they choose?

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>>80984905

Depends on the god. Some recruit suitable people to the role, others will train you in a profession of your choosing.

Someone like Pluto, for example, typically recruits people through having his servants seek out people using Plutonium Magic, and, if they aren't licensed to use it, he may recruit them directly as clerics, assuming they are compliant.

Ra, meanwhile, mostly only recruits Cultists and Blackguards, most sun gods, do, actually, because there are so many sun gods trying to claim dominion and control over Miter's sun, the Sun Gods are essentially part of a giant an office of sorts, where the various sun gods try to socially deal with one another, working together and inhibiting one another as needed to secure their "Share" in the duties of making the sun orbit the planet on its daily journey.

As such, they need many Cultists to make good PR for them and help in recruiting Blackguards who help them deal with one another's shit. They openly recruit, and will train recruits to assist in petty bullshit like stealing from one another's temples, hazing, and influencing other gods to throw their lots in with them in maintaining authority.

>>80984975
>Plutonium Magic,
That sounds incredibly dangerous.

>>80786629
why is OP's pic so lewd

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>>80786629
What are some original alien species, be they sapient or animals, that you have come up with? And what would you recommend to others that wish to do so, particularly for the former if one wishes to avoid just basically using humans with rubber foreheads?

this is almost dead but I’ll post my idea for a setting
>gigantic generational ships depart earth in all directions to colonize new planets
>each ship has a sophisticated neural uplink system so knowledge isn’t lost from generation to generation
>the system also allows for an overlay on the real world that can construct digital data as physical things
>around halfway into a ship’s voyage, several unlikely events occur that both kills all humans on board as well as fries the neural uplink system
>this results in large swathes of individual mind’s data corrupting, melding together, and outright being deleted
>flash forward a thousand years, the ship is inhabited by sentient janitor constructs, various experimental projects that are either sentient or savage, megaflora, and various other weird stuff
>all the sentient races view the remains of the neural network hiveminds as gods, and the overlay as magic
>they’re completely unaware that they’re inside a ship that’s crash landed on a planet

I’d love to talk about it

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>>80987621

It really fucking is.

Plutonium Magic, as a rule, is Death Magic itself. Not undeath magic, like calcium, but real deal "Kill All" magic. Its raw mana manifests as a flame that burns without heat, harming whatever it touches.

In one game, players messing with Death Magic created what we colloquially referred to as "Final Destination Metal" by mistake.

They only made a small coin of it, but it nearly got them all killed, because the metal was magical, and had the power to manipulate events around it in subtle ways, trying to conspire to place itself as the cause of a Mass Death Event. The metal itself warped causality around it, such that, at one point, the small coin of it eventually fell into the hands of a goblin space program's virgin launch, and made the entire thing explode by falling into a critical component by coincidence.

It was death in the form of metal.

>>80990248
What happened to the piece of metal afterwards? Also, why would anyone use it if it’s so dangerous?

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>>80786629
>>80756265?
What are some symbols that you’ve created for your gods and religions that you haven’t already shared, or at least some advice for creating some please? Besides picture related, the best examples that I can think of ATM are the Christian cross and the Jewish Star of David.

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>>80992288

Death Magic has a lot of uses, it's just that those uses involve death.

Ghosts, for example, fall within the confines of death magic. Unlike undead, who are neither alive nor dead, dead beings have a different set of applications, strengths and weaknesses.

Death Magic can also be used to manipulate luck. Like the coin itself, death magic can deal with "The Worst Luck", and as such, it's a tool in the arsenal of luck manipulators.

Plus, being able to kill things is always handy, even if it's dangerous.

The coin, after it nearly killed a bunch of people, was dissolved into separate concepts. They eventually reformed the metal into an entirely new one through alchemy, by extracting the death in it to leave behind Coincidence Metal, a metal which simply orchestrates incredibly unlikely coincidences.

Pic unrelated, the queen of the Elemental Plane of Darkness, Her Majesty, The Squeen.

>>80994250
Is this supposed to be an image for ants? I can barely make it out at all. What is she like BTW?

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>>80997785

My bad. Larger version here.

I never got a chance to explore her character in a game. She's basically the ruler of Dark Elemental Creatures, so essentially if Ganon ruled the dark world instead of invading and taking it over. Hence the pig theming.

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>>80786629
Besides what you've already mentioned, have you done anything interesting with the undead in your setting? What are some potential ways to mix things up with the undead? Like, maybe have ways for liches to 'not' be evil or something?

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>>80998716

Well, in my setting, there's some real complexity to undead. In essence, there are a variety of "three type" catagories for undead.

1. Food Fed: Undead that feed on living flesh and food to take in mana. They are your basic Zombies and the like, and require a way to turn food into slurry and draw mana from it.

2. Magic Fed: These undead are fed mana by their creator. They don't have another way to get mana, and will fade to inertion without a supply. Skeletons are of this type.

3. Blood Fed: Any undead can be fed with blood. Blood, as it is a rival to Undeath, creates vast but unstable energy when used to feed an undead. Vampires are the pinnacle of this type, but many undead use blood, either from metal tanks that slowly dribble them a supply of blood, or magical blood orbs that can store it as well. Any blood that touches an undead is consumed instantly as fuel, this means that such undead can be incredibly strong, but if you damage their mechanisms to regulate bloodflow, they can absorb their entire stock of blood instantly and then explosively die from too much energy.

There are also two main things about undead that is critical:

1. Natural Undead: Zombies and Slimes are undead that can be naturally created. They are made of flesh and bone that, when suffused with magic, can animate on its own. Muscles, brains and organs begin to work again, and the undead uses them as a template

2. Artificial undead like skeletons, however, do not have flesh inherently. all their muscles, tendons, organs and thoughts must be crafted by the mage, creating false organs from liquid undeath magic which are grafted to the undead in question.

>>80999068
>Slimes
Slimes are undead in your setting? Also, what kind of events typically create Natural Undead, and how many are sapient? What about Artificial Undead? Why do mages typically make them?

>>80999068
>They don't have another way to get mana
Can’t they steal mana from another source? How are they fed?

>>80997943
Interesting. Do the other elemental realms have similar rulers?

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>>81002126

Yes. Slimes are functionally undead in my setting. There are three main types:

Liquid Organic Matter infused with magic. This slurry can gain life and mobility through magic, if infused with some. These types don't live long unless they have a way to take in magic. Acidic substances and enzymes are animated by necromancers to fill pit traps. They are supremely unintelligent, and will not act unless the necromancer orders them to, otherwise acting like an inert magical fluid.

Bloated Organic Matter. If something organic is infused with a large amount of liquid magic, it can swell up and grow large. As Liquid Mana acts like a physical substance, anything infused with a large amount of it swells with fluid. These types last as long as the mana does, like the former type. As they are made of large amounts of mana, they behave according to the will and intentions of the mana inside them. Natural Slimes may be somewhat intelligent and act to survive, if the nature around them (animals and people) wish for the slime to survive unconsciously.

Pure Liquid Mana. As liquid mana acts like a solid, a slime can be made from pure magic. Such slimes are usually artificial and temporary, decaying over time as their mana does. They obey the will and intentions of their creator.

>>81004704

Only if there's a valid mana source. A skeleton with a stomach could eat food, in theory, to gain mana from it, but otherwise, since skeletons have no way to process organic matter and draw magic from it, they have to be fed by their creator. A necromancer feeds a Mana-fed-undead by infusing it with mana, which it naturally absorbs. Enchanted undead may be able to draw mana in from the air, but this is considered unreasonably risky: The ambient mana contains wills and intentions that could pollute the undead and make it disobey orders.

>>81007891

Unknown. The only places with natural inhabitants tend to be the more ethereal ones like Dream, Mind, and Data.

>>81008830
>The only places with natural inhabitants tend to be the more ethereal ones like Dream, Mind, and Data
Why is that? You'd think that the more physical realms would be more hospitable to life, right?

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>>81012058

The more Physical realms contain fewer inhabitants because they are less abstract filter on reality.

To turn Data into a reality in which it's the only extant thing requires a greater abstraction than creating a reality in which Earth is the only thing that exists.

There could be some sort of deeper, more intense filters that somehow make the tectonic processes and rock cycle become personified in an alternate Elemental Plane of Earth, but they aren't really covered in the lore I've got right now, which assumes that an Elemental Plane is an all or nothing thing.

In planes like Dreams, Shadows, Mind, Mirror and more, having sophonts living in it is a necessity, because those elements contain nonphysical, living aspects of life itself.

I imagine the Elemental Plane of life would be in a similar boat, having entities that represent different parts of living things, aspects of healing, birth, renewal, and so on, all interconnected through a web of tangled connections between living things.

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>>80786629
What were some of your inspirations for the cosmology of your setting? What would you advise for someone trying to create an interesting cosmology for their own setting?

>>81012124
That last bit reminds me of Awful Hospital a bit. Ever read it? Be warned, it can be a bit gross.

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>>81012814

Honestly? Bayonetta and Devil May Cry were my inspirations for the whole "Gold Angels, Meat Devils" thing.

Hack and Slash Spectacle Fighters are fantastic for evocative imagery.

>>81015312

I've heard of it, but never read it.

-

Side note, but found a pic of a player who dabbled with insanity enzyme. Here's what he looked like by the end of it, (Without realizing he was changing)

>>81015387
Not really familiar with any of those, can you please elaborate further? What about things to keep in mind when designing a cosmology?

How did he not realize that he was changing?

>>80998716
If the undead aren't evil that raises the question of why you wouldn't use necromancy to keep everyone around after death. I've always though free resurrection takes away all the stakes.