I haven't done a ton of worldbuilding over the years, instead mostly relying on other already established TTRPG systems (D&D/Forgotten Realms/Dark Sun, Pathfinder, Warhammer 40k, etc). But about 10 years ago a friend and I decided to try our hand at creating our own far-future hard science fiction TTRPG system. We called it Rho Cassiopeiae, or just Rho for short.

It was a nearing-post-scarcity, transhumanist, but also somewhat post-apocalyptic setting due a galaxy-wide catastrophe occurring; Rho Cassiopeiae, a hypergiant star relatively near to Earth, going supernova. The subspace interference the nova created rippled out, creating rolling blackouts of the FTL network that humanity relied on, before eventually completely crippling it. This resulted in complete societal collapse in the majority of inhabited systems; All the systems that were not yet self-sufficient, and all the core-worlds that were no longer self-sufficient due to having depleted local resources, resulting in an over-reliance on external trade, and having exceedingly massive populations.

Fast forward another 1000 years, as the subspace interference is finally starting to subside enough to reestablish FTL travel in what was once the Fringe worlds (but have now become their own unique, flourishing civilizations), and that is when the game takes place.

That may sound like a somewhat standard scifi setting, but my friend is a political scientist, I have been in IT for the majority of my life, and we're both obsessed with world history... so we took the political and technological ideas for the setting as far as we could imagine them; With us envisioning a myriad of different societies based on every far-flung (or regressive) technology and political system we could think of.

E.g. In some polities, organic bodies are a thing of the past, and mind-backups/restoration and even mind-cloning is commonplace. In others, genetic engineering has been taken to the extreme. In others true post-scarcity and atomic level 3d printing has been achieved, causing massive societal changes at all levels. In some profit-driven Corporations control every facet of life starting from conception. In others, post-apocalyptic warlords reign supreme. Etc. Etc. Etc.

And due to FTL travel now being possible again, and all these vastly different societies now coming into contact (and conflict) with one another, players are able to play a wide variety of campaign styles, all within the same setting. And all this variety is possible without the need for "alien" civilizations thanks to the circumstances of the collapse, and the extended time all the various pockets of humanity have been isolated from one another.

Oh my, I love worldbuilding! Perhaps too much since I tend to create new settings rather than do much with them (although I am trying to get better about it).

Since I've got a fair few worlds knocking around in my obsidian notebook I'll just leave some brief summaries for each and if folks are interested they can reply and I'll give more detail :)

1. Beyond the Awakening - All of humanity across the galaxy awakens sans memories and surrounded by extraordinary technology that they can no longer manufacture. Rivaling factions like the Last Kingdom of Mankind, lead by super powered humans, and the Confederation of Independent Worlds, who are the only ones to possess FTL ships, spread out to rediscover and "help" all the lost worlds. This is one of my first worldbuilding projects and has been a FATE campaign setting for my partner and I over the last 6 years.
2. High Winds - Humans live on floating islands which rise up from unknown depths below the clouds and spiral around an eternal storm. Setting is mostly focused on the ecology of the islands and how humans interact with it, eg. bacteria that produce hydrogen to keep things afloat, people graft plants into their bodies, what energy rich but land starved industries might produce. My plan (long on hiatus) is to use this for a graphic novel setting where a swashbuckling crew would be sent to investigate some new dangers rising up from the clouds below.
3. 100 Years Adrift - Human terraformers spend millennia terraforming a planet but right before completion they lose contact with Earth, leaving them now on a world overbuilt. The human society is divided into three parts who engineer the social, biological, and material world and all have conflicting views on how to proceed. The focus is on the tension between the engineered (fit for purpose but often overly rigid) and the natural world (chaotic and wants to change). All of the creatures on the planet are bioengineered to accomplish specific tasks. This setting was used for a novella that I need to heavily re-edit and might try to expand into a novel some day.
4. Superstore - Humans are shrunken down and live inside a gigantic magical dilapidated shopping center/grocery store. Each area of the store contains unique magic that humans can pay (price might range from taking many peoples lives to just a few bits of food) to be imbued with magic that corresponds to that area. Some random examples: apples - create poison (cyanide), bananas - morph into a clone of every other banana, alcohol - sacrifice others and gain mind control powers, etc. I use this as a thought exercise space where I pick some object that can be found in a store and maximally anthropomorphize it: what magic would it have, how would someone dress to represent it, what kind of society would it have, how would it relate to other similar items, etc.
5. Hallowed Ground - A nation goes and steals heaven from the gods, chaining it to the ground. From this they can harness many magical powers, but the gods regularly create and send giant magical beasts to try and retrieve it. This has resulted in a world simultaneously ravaged by the magical beasts everywhere but the central city around the Hallowed Ground and experiencing an industrial revolution of sorts as slain magical beasts become a source of power and sustenance (think like 1800s whaling). This is my current project where I hope to turn it into a TTRPG book based around the wild words system.

The year is 1996, and it's been almost a decade since the Last Soviet Techospell went awry and linked every mall on the planet together into a pocket dimension that has come to be known as the Infinimall! What was once the local watering hole and centerpiece of their respective towns is now a portal to another world full of resources, adventure and merchandise of incredible power for those who choose to seek it out!

While many people use the Infinimall to transport themselves and cargo across the Earth in a fraction of the time and cost it would take otherwise, things that were created in the mall can't be removed, so there are those who have given up all contact with the outside world and live off the land as thrill seekers and adventurers, journeying deeper into the mall for fame and glory! Most everyone who chooses this life dies, but the few of well renowned are known to the outside world as the MALLCRALLERS!

You know, I've never really shared it with anyone but since I already mentioned it in the strategy RPG thread - I've had an idea for an SRPG video game called *Moss & Steel in my head for years. I doubt it's ever going to come to fruition because it's just out of my skill, but I figure I may as well get some of the base stuff out of my head.

Moss & Steel would take place a far-flung future where a mix of cataclysmic events - a pandemic, water levels rising, and an eventual nuclear war - forced an apocalypse and a resulting gap in human history. It's unclear how anyone survived, but what came of it is a set of kingdoms in relatively stable balance with one another. The main character is a princess of the most militarily powerful kingdom who, despite her father / the king's wishes to keep her as a diplomatic figure, receives tactical education from her brother. As it turns out that her father is a warmonger who plans to quash other kingdoms and consolidate power, she becomes exiled and has to travel to rally a force that can reclaim the castle and prevent a great war.

My Fallout influences are showing, but the main character's kingdom would have been established due to massive hording of technology and weapons, and settled into a monarchy. Since years have degraded tech in inconsistent rates, a mix of scavenging and knowledge of how to use them would direct much of the ability for other smaller groups to conduct commerce and survive. I'd want the other kingdoms to reflect different styles of governments, cultures, and people to help vary the backdrops for fights, objectives, etc and also to provide a theme of needing to fight against a single cultural identity.

Some other locations would include a generally prosperous and seemingly open moderate kingdom that's mired in a trudging political machine which the main character would need to navigate to get any aid; an urban city sprawl that's governed by gang and mafia-style factions who won't band together out of fear of ceding control past mutual agreements; a Library of Alexandria style structure in a desert which is fiercely guarded against outsiders; etc etc. The results of trying to resolve the issues of these other kingdoms would end with the main character having variable success about how her reign would look instead of her father's.

The setting would have a mix of complexity in technology that ramps up as the story continues, as those in power try to cling to it as a cudgel to enforce their hold on their regions and the party scraps along with what they can find. Slug weapons, swords, and motorcycles would make way for laser weapons and hover equipment as the game progresses. As this build-up and power fantasy happens I'd love to break it down by throwing bandits with lower scrap weapons at the party and test the player to see if they'd recklessly wipe them out with abandon instead of considering their new position of power.

Culturally there would be a mix of influences at play, but something I'd like them to focus on is the appropriation of different sources as the sort of Bible and founding set of principles on those countries. There would also be a magic component to the world which never gets fully explained, and to which different sects of a church would have a spin or interpretation, but no one would have a full grasp on.

The main character would have some in-universe control over time, or at least the ability to retain knowledge - going as far as information needing to be pulled from later in the game to earlier for a different ending, and potentially certain key items remaining in the inventory even when loading a save from earlier in the game. There would be some awareness from the main character that something is off by maintaining global flags if the player restarts a level or reloads a save.

The way I would really love to tell this, though, is that the game is incomplete. It's a beta created by a defunct company in the 90s, uploaded to the internet by someone coming across it on a lot. (UFO 50 beat me to that, lololol) There could be scattered notes and some fake information about the project; fake letters between the developers and publishers, magazine blurbs or advertisements, etc. One of the head developers would have had some grandiose ideas that the game would be a hurrah against 3D games by using the technology of CDs to create a 2D game with impressive scope, a la Symphony of the Night.

It becomes clear as you experience the fragments of the game's beta that the scope creep started to balloon out of control. The developers' frustrations start to leak into the game, where things like debugging saves morphed into using those save states as the main character's inconsistent time travel powers. The story itself would have clear parallels to the developers, their struggles with each other, and their difficulty getting the game to ship - reflected by what parts of the game even exist in the beta, how it changes from start to end, what was incomplete or crashes the game, and the inability of the developers to compromise their artistic integrity for the sake of getting the product out.

And since there's a team working on the project to get the game playable, there would be some questionable interpretation of how the game operates vs the intent of the developer... Culminating in a fake DMCA by an irate developer wishing to hold onto the dream that the game really would come out someday, and leaving a community to have to host the game without a central source of information.

Naturally, uh, I have like no skills to ever get this into a program. It just this sits in the back of my head, and certainly none of that is projections about my own experience imagining this world! Haha. Hmm. Maybe someday...

I've been considering doing this for a long time, but have never started. To be frank, I'm at a low point in life (lowest, so far..) and finding any kind of creative spark has eluded me for some time now. I liked to write as a kid, and dabbled in dreaming up worlds too. I haven't done anything creative lately, aside from doodling sporadically. My life is half gone. I have no social outlet, which is fine by me. But what I miss most is being free to dream. I want to change that. Now, apologies for the forced therapy session there, but I feel like I needed to be honest with myself about why I want to do this. I tend to start things and give up, and I don't want this to happen here. I have no expectations tbh.. I would just like to be able to create something new and enjoy doing it.
Are there any resources someone like me should use on how to get started? Any other tips will be greatly appreciated.

I have two different universes in my novels. My first one was built around the standard idea of gates uniting worlds across the galaxy, though there are a couple of twists. The Gate Builders in this universe are long vanished, and those using the gates don't really understand them or control them well. And the gate on Earth is partially ruined, and no longer has a physical site, but rather, appears for only brief moments and tends to send people, animals and everything else to random gates across what I call The Web of Worlds.

My first three novels are centered on one world in the Web, called Maailma. It is one of only five worlds that has a leftover from the Builders when they abandoned their project to build and expand their gate network. This is a tool they used in terraforming, but which allows certain people with talent to manipulate matter and energy with their minds. Humans aren't the only ones who can access this power, which is called Mahti. Two other things of note about the world Maailma are that it connects to other worlds in the Web only at long intervals, and even then just briefly, and Maailma has few metallic ores, and so technology there is limited.

The three novels based on Maailma are loosely connected and focus on characters who can use Mahti. Both men and women who access the power are called mages. At the moment, I only have one novel published featuring more technologically advanced societies in the Web of Worlds, though I have two others finished and I'll be publishing them soon. This latter trilogy has relic hunters as the main characters.

My second universe is built around a future Earth that has suffered a partial collapse of civilization through limited nuclear wars, followed by economic chaos, starvation of much of the population, and a retreat into barbarism across much of the planet. Most of the world governments were taken over by corporations just before the collapse, and those areas of the world where civilization still exists are controlled by these corporations and the families that run them. My story starts some sixty years after the collapse, and follows the story of a scavenger in California who is hunting technology that was developed just before the world came apart at the seams. Her grandmother was a scientist involved in that process, and the scavie, Lena Reyes, hopes that if she can locate the lab where it was discovered, it will help her gain entry into one of the only enclaves of civilization left on the west coast of North America. There are two novels in this short series.

At the beginning of the pandemic, in fact on January 6th when the capitol got stormed, I decided to finally put to digital paper a universe I had been casually constructing through RP in games and asset creation of various types for the past 20 years. It was first inspired by a 4x space game from Egosoft, but grew into its own entity over the years.

Cartel Incorporated is a soft sci-fi adventure that begins when three streetwise friends happen upon a piece of technology that helps them escape their impoverished existence and start over on a new planet 40 light years away. It's set in our current timeline, and explores the idea that humanity was seeded here by our ancestors millions of years ago and almost forgotten, while that society grew to encompass most of the galaxy through unchecked expansion.

I wanted to bring a level of street-smarts to the genre with a bit of tongue in cheek levity by exploring what a group of 20 something punk/metal heads from rural New Mexico would do to get by in a completely alien environment. There are car chases with rolling gunfights, epic space battles, nifty spins on technology ideas for things like FTL, a sprinkling of MacGyver, and not a small amount of adult themes and language. I wanted to entertain more than intrigue or educate with this, so if you go looking for the books, don't expect deathless prose :p

I have a story I've been kicking around since I was a teenager. I don't have the story, and maybe never will, but some day I'd like to turn it into a trilogy.

The setting is a fantasy setting, but no magic (to start). In my universe, the concept of achieving full enlightenment and ascending to a state of both omniscience + omnipotence is real. The hand wavy part is that a natural condition for reaching that state is that you would not be someone who would use that omnipotence. Omnipotence is a side effect of enlightenment, and you only unlock the power when you're, at your core, someone who wouldn't use it.

It's a given that some unspecified number of people have ascended in this way, and the concept of "divine within" is central to many of the world's belief systems over thousands of years of civilizations that come and go.

The conflict comes when one character achieves enlightenment, but (hand wavy) stumbles at the critical threshold. He saw through the fabric of reality, the way the universe works, and for a moment he couldn't handle it. He reacts subconsciously, like a knee jerk, to quiet it all by splitting himself in two: one aspect is nearly "omnipotent". The other aspect is omniscient. He knows everything from the beginning up to the present, no exceptions. He also has a decent read on the future based on his complete knowledge of the present, nature, and being able to see through complex statistics. He doesn't see the future but makes highly educated guesses; his weakness here is around human behavior, which his time in isolation has left inaccessible to him. He's worse than median at predicting human behavior; it's like a blind spot for him.

They tried to coexist for a short time, power and knowledge, but it just didn't work. Everything the omnipotent aspect wanted to do, the omniscient half explained away as a bad idea. Power wanted to reshape his world, unknowingly clinging to his mortal past. Knowledge was ready to join the ethos and ascend, but knew he couldn't without Power rejoining them by choice.

Eventually fed up, his power aspect casts his knowledge aspect to a comfortable planet on the farthest reaches of the expanding universe. Impossibly far from anything the power aspect cared about.

The next millennia see him using his power to impact his world. He would be described as a benevolent but clumsy god. He gets over involved, he makes dumb mistakes, he hurts people. But that's not who he is, and he really does try his best. He seeks advice from his knowledge aspect and after scrutinizing it for ulterior motives, he takes it. He withdraws completely and gives the world magic: conveyed slices of his power given to specific humans (wizards) to be used for good.

The story I want to write begins when one wizard is doing research on teleportation. He doesn't get it, but in his research he is able to open unpredictable portals to random locations in the universe. He's opening portal after portal, recording stars and trying to make sense of the magic. On the umpteenth run of the experiment, until then only looking at dead surfaces of rocks in space, a portal opens to a shock: a verdant world with an old man sitting expectantly on a chair that is positioned as if it were waiting for the portal to appear.

This brings the knowledge aspect back to civilization. The story that unfolds would follow a band of protagonists that get sucked into this story without realizing what it is, and builds towards reunifying the two aspects.

I'm not actually sure how it would happen. The knowledge half would lie and conceal things that he knows would turn away people he needs. He's frail and old (however sharp and immortal) and relies on the support of others to get around the world. He is wildly eccentric since he's been isolated for so long, and the reader wouldn't know his true nature for a while into the story.

The happy ending would be the heroes reunifying the "god", but I'm not sure if he continues his x,000 years old ascension journey, or if it fails and he dies a mortal death.

The unhappy ending would be the omniscient aspect using the heroes to trick the omnipotent aspect into imprisoning himself forever. A torturous existence that never ends. I'm this ending, the knowledge aspect's motives were poisoned over time and he was seeking revenge, not enlightenment.

Inspirations include Ultima 7.2: Serpent Isle, and Lost.

I've been playing with the idea of taking the world from the TTRPG I ran and spinning it off into into an alternative story where the party was defeated. And it's a difficult prospect because right now the writing seems very on the nose but it didn't back in 2014 when I first wrote it.

Long story slightly shorter: The world of Enundara is built around power and influences in the world manifesting themselves physically. The nothern pole is marked with a vast mountain range of crystallized mana, representing magic and the supernatural. And on the southern pole is a world tree from which all natural life and power came to be. And orbiting the planet are hundreds of moons. They are essentially the catatonic bodies of the many Gods who tried to lay claim to this world and were infected with a reality virus, but that's a whole separate issue.

Over the course of the timeline, as certain powers and entities grow in influence, their manifesation grows in size. During ages of high magic and arcane progress, the peaks of the mana mountains are practically in low orbit. But when natural and scientific progress takes precedence, the crown of the world tree envelops most of the southern hemisphere.

Similarly when different religions or cultural norms gain influence, the corresponding god grows in size. Even if all these gods are essentially dead, their influence and power can be accessed through acts of devotion and faith. The most powerful practitioners of divine magics are those who know that the gods are dead and still believe in the cause of that god, because that gives them near unrestricted access to that pool of faith based energy.

The timeline I want to work with is after two long term campaigns. The first game was a Post Apocalypse story after a worldwide war between the north and south went nuclear. It hit such a fever pitch that the god of war grew big enough to consume the sun and was in the process of being reborn. Highlight of the campaign: party learns about the cult of the war god that orchestrated this global war to reawaken their dormant patron. Party did a lot of negotiating to broker a lasting peace between the sides and weeded out the most militant factions of the cult. And the big last battle was freeing the sun by splitting a moon.

The second game is a thousand years into this golden age and the planet is running out of resources to fuel societies rapid progress. And when the powers that be go against all common sense and decide to start blast mining the World Tree and Mana Mountains, they unleash the reality virus that killed the gods.

My regret for the tabletop is that it was played over the last year of uni and start of us all working so we didn't really explore the themes and setting as much as I wanted to. I ran it like more of a cathartic Saturday Morning Cartoon to get everyone through the stress of the time. And looking back at it, the party fixed everything by punching the right bad guy hard enough which was admittedly lazy writing on my part.

Was going through my notes and dug up two characters I draft named Conscience and Consequence. One was a person who woke up in the woods with no money or memories and the other was a genius inventor and spouse of a major monarch. They were barometer NPCs. Characters that represent the state of the world and who would almost always be personally affected by the players actions. I probably planned to keep track of their progress, even if they never met the party. And I want to explore their lives now because they are primed to take drastic actions depending on how things went.

Project Weird Vulcans

Project Weird Vulcans started as an attempt to recreate the Vulcans from Star Trek. The initial idea was something I thought about for a long time: what if Vulcans were actually logical? Not just common sense with pointy ears, but a species that was truly structured around logic. That would be at the formation of their language and the way they interact with the world in a very deep way. So I started writing and kept going for a while. I wrote the most about language. How they have an actual language of thought that is bootstraped in the way people write a programming language using another, and then make a compiler in the new language. Although that may change, my Vulcans are largely incapable of thought without symbolic representation. Anyway, there is a lot to write and think about.

In a week, I wrote 5000 words. To a very slow writer like myself, that is quite an achievement. I'm starting to understand why people love worldbuilding so much. This is way more fun than just writing a story.

Here are some summaries of the Theraki[1].

Philosophy

It is basically Pythagoreanism with logic in place of math. They do not believe that logic is reality, but they do believe that logic is at the essence of everything. So they know that there are things that are not logic, but they express those things through logic.

Their Planet

An extremely cold, apparently bare sphere receiving little light from a sun that is more powerful than ours but also farther away. The planet has a high number of cave systems that go extremely deep. Some of those contain water, forming extensive, connected, underground lake systems that are inhabited by aquatic life similar to the abyssal creatures from our deep sea.

Physiology

They are like us in many respects, suggesting a common origin for our species and essentially confirming panspermia. Their brains are 2% smaller than humans'. However, while humans only devote 20% of their basal metabolic rate (BMR) to the brain, the Therakis dedicate half of their BMR to it. So its supercharged.

Intelligence

The Therakis' overwhelming dedication to logic does not make them smarter than humans. Some things that are difficult for humans are trivial for them and vice versa. The human brain "plays dirty," guessing what it can and taking every shortcut available to avoid spending energy. Theraki brains may work on overdrive, but they have to process a much larger amount of reasoning and information even in the simplest activities.

Language

They have an actual and formalized language of thought. They also have an operational language and speech. Right now, it resembles arguments in standard form, which sounds very awkward for humans. However, they speak very fast. They sound like a remarkably ordered swarm of bees. The only way for us to understand it is through slowed-down recordings. So, despite the fact that their language is, to us, woefully inefficient, it becomes highly efficient due to the immense speed at which it is uttered and decoded.

Logic

Unlike their fictional counterparts, the Theraki do not suppress or reject emotion in any way. However, they express their emotions through logic. Theraki logic[2] is a true and nuanced system of reasoning, not a subdued vibe riddled with fallacies and inconsistencies like the fictional Vulcans[3]. When prompted to define it in a foreign language, most Therakis will show signs of frustration, like a sighted human trying to explain the aurora borealis to someone who was born blind. When their stress level reaches a certain point, they disengage completely. Their incomplete attempts translate to us as the disorganized speech of a psychotic patient.

Sex

I wrote this topic later. So I didn't rewrite or summarize it much for the comment. I merely translated it into English using GPT.

Given the information previously presented, the reader might assume that sexual activity among the Theraki is infrequent. At this point, by logic, some might even conceive of it as nonexistent. Relying on their propensity to understand the universe through rational means, perhaps the Theraki reproduce mechanically and view sex as an activity unworthy of their attention.

If the esteemed reader thinks this way, I must inform you that you could not be more mistaken. It may surprise you to learn that the Theraki not only engage in sex but do so with a frequency and liberality that would make even the most depraved human blush with shame. This is because, unlike us, the Theraki have no equivalent to our conceptions of romantic love or the cherished institution of marriage. To them, sexuality is eminently personal and freely expressed.

In this context, it is important to clarify that the Theraki are incapable of engaging in sex without consent. In an abstract sense, this seems to be a side effect of their logic or the way they express it, but it is more than that. They seem physically incapable of it and always have been. In this context, humans are clearly an evolutionary aberration. Whether as a group or as individuals, the Theraki seem incapable of conceiving the idea that non-consensual sex could be possible or desirable. This inability to even imagine the possibility of sex without consent is what has enabled not only their liberal attitude toward sex but also the removal of any need for deeper ethical discussions on the matter.

Among the Theraki, sex occurs in a very natural manner. To them, it is just another ordinary activity, free from the moral weight with which many still regard it on our home planet. That said, in a way, a courtship stage does still exist, with steps and procedures somewhat similar to our own. The difference is that, from our perspective, Therakian seduction is extremely fast. This occurs as a consequence of the fact that their communication is also incredibly swift and cerebral.

[1] Provisory name, I thought about that for like two seconds.

[2] My knowledge of real-world logic is very limited. Basically intro chapters of various logic books for beginners. That will eventually be a problem if I wanna give the Theraki a more "legit" vibe. I have no wish to turn this into an essay about logic, but it's nice to have some real stuff sprinkled in. At the very least, knowing some more might help me avoid some easy, low-hanging fruit mistakes, making the world a little more consistent as a result.

[3] Logic is a bad and incomplete translation, and, for the Theraki, it means the entirety of reasoning and science and not just the study of the validity of arguments.

Hey it's my favorite drug! Worldbuilding and storytelling are so important to me I've built my whole life around them. In my 50s now and I've got hundreds of worlds kicking around in my brain. They still keep me up at night. Game design and homebrew and science fiction theater, as well as all the digital flavors that have come since, with narration and production of said worlds. Sold some worlds to Hollywood and comics over the years. Met some really cool people. But it's all about chasing that high: when enough independent strands of thought and observation and ingenuity collapse together like a field equation into something crystalline and bright and alive, it's a better epiphany moment than any amount of lsd or peyote.

Like, right now, the world I'm delighting in creating is a fantasy world as medieval scholars envisioned it. The setting is Prester John's Three Indies. About a thousand years ago, the Byzantine emperor received a letter from a mysterious Christian king named Prester John who lived faraway, surrounded by Muslim kingdoms. Believed at face value, it began an at first feverish then long and abiding belief in the mythical kingdom for centuries. First it was placed somewhere around the north or east of the Black Sea. Then it was long considered to be Ethiopia, once it was known widely in the Holy Roman Empire that they were a Christian nation surrounded by Islamic ones.

I love telling extremely constrained tales. So while my worldbuilding will be immense, it will only be glimpsed at through the eyes of a pair of lowly palace guards at the least gate in the kingdom. This will be an actual play homebrew podcast called Leastwatch that is currently in pre-production. Just four of us playing an online RPG that I'm creating. See, Prester John's incomparably glorious city of Nyse still needs a sewer gate, and these are the two louts who man it. They won't know about the palace intrigues, the war with Ecbatana, or even the merchant and assassin guild wars for a long time yet. Their entire existence is manning the stinking gate beside the open sewer canal, and shout "Next!" to the next sad person waiting in the long queue. Sometimes they might have to knock some heads.

In the auditions I say I'm looking for "three delightful people." It has more of a cozy sitcom structure than a D&D grand quest linear plotline. Casting now. Let me know if anyone knows a woman of a thousand voices who can help me play all the petitioners who appear in the queue each day. Think I've got the guards cast although if anyone wants to throw their hat in the ring, I'm all ears.

Otherwise, I'd be happy to help other folks with their worldbuilding. I don't have many masteries in this life but this is one of them. I've committed my life to being the Idea Guy. Whether it's development or scripting or producing or acting or narrating or game designing or filming... Feel free to reach out and ask for that extra helping hand we all need to get the heavy lifting done on these projects so they can actually stand on their own. No credit, for free. Seriously. This is my drug.

To all you creators... this is the flower of civilization! For a fleeting instant in history we've been granted lives of ease that allowed us to turn our minds to idle pursuits. And they became so rich and nourishing that these worlds catch the imagination of the globe and are what give life meaning. Man, we should start a church.

I have some half-baked setting I have worked on a bit for a TTRPG, but I ultimately set it aside. DM'ing is a time consuming endeavor that I haven't been able to commit to. Life happens. Things seem to be looking up, though, so maybe I should dust this project off.

The core of the setting is a mathematical pun - zeros and poles - the north and south poles of the setting are poles in that mathematical sense. The surface of the "planet" is flat so there is no true north or south. Feel free to throw in some east and west poles, and other fantastic far-away poles beyond those. Read "north" as toward the north pole and "east" as toward the east pole. If we're talking about poles, we can also talk about branches about those poles. That is, travelling once around a pole does not bring you back where you started, but instead brings you to the same position in a different branch of the surface. Travel around the pole again and find yourself on yet another branch. Finally on the third time around, you find yourself at your original position.

At the time I planned on using this for DnD, so I adapt the planes with this meaning. The feywild and shadowfell are accessible about the familiar four poles (north, south, east, west), or certain spells can shunt you up or down between the branches. The fantastical far-away poles connect certain branches to the other DND planes. For example you could read the many abyssal planes as a pole of infinite degree. You can also imagine strange topologies where distances are not equal - two poles might be thousands of miles apart in the material plane, but travel once around either of them and find yourself only a few miles away in a lower branch. All together the surface weaves around itself and into itself as a great tree of branches, and in principal you could travel anywhere with the correct winding and weaving around the poles.

I really like it from a worldbuilding perspective because it brings a bunch of questions. How does the economy or politics work if travel between the planes is so easy? How does the geography work around the poles? How does the weather work? How do the sun and moon and stars work? How does it fit into mythology?

The four major poles are of great importance for nonmagical folk, being transportation hubs to settlements on all three of the prime branches. As nonmagical folk can simply walk around into the feywild or shadowfell, they have more of a presence there near the poles - but the other planes also bleed out into the material plane in the same way. The eastern pole is surrounded by ocean on all sides for many miles, but as such serves critical for trade routes in that region. The southern pole is situated on a temperate coastline in the material plane, and has a large port settlement built up around it.

Think what it would look like to travel up to this settlement. Follow a winding road through foothills, passing villages and rolling farmland. Up ahead, a great metropolis wraps around the base of a small mountain whose peak rises impossibly sharp and steep up through the clouds and beyond sight. To the left of the spire are a long mountain range and scars in the earth, like the spire itself were dragged through the earth by the gods. The sky that way is dark and gloomy, leading toward nighttime in the shadowfell. The spire - and the shadowfell itself - casts a long shadow far to your left, triggering thunderstorms as that cool nighttime air from the shadowfell begins to collide with the warmer humid air of the material plane. To the right of the spire is a bright afternoon coastline, the sun reflecting off the water busy with sailing ships around the docks. The spire cuts between these two background scenes like a bad photoshop, but the foreground is rolling hills and light-play that blends smoothly between the two. The feywild is not visible at all from your current position: you would have to pass through or around the city, looping counter-clockwise about the spire, to see it.

There's a trick you can do by cutting and taping a few sheets of paper together to build a model Riemann (hyperbolic) surface like this, where you can refold the parts of it to move the branch cut around and view different portions of the surface. You can only do this in paper around one pole, so I wouldn't be able to build a world map this way, but I think I could build a real folding map of the region surrounding the port town.

Something I struggle with, though, is story. I have this setting and drop the players into it... now what? By design, the setting doesn't interfere much with game mechanics, so I could run some preexisting module... but I could also do that in any other compatible setting. I need to work out how to integrate things in a way that keeps the setting relevant but makes things engaging for the players.

Wow, what a topic. Personally, I'm piggybacking on my favourite abandonware sci Fi fantasy setting of Phantasy Star for a city building project I've been at for a couple years.

The project is a growth plan in and around the second game's timeline - it's a fully 3D rendered look at how the city of Paseo could grow with the help of the AI Mother Brain, and will all of the underpinnings of a society about to have its view of 'big tech' turned from optimism to terror.

The final deliverable would be a master planning document that explores the lore and location of Paseo through renders, advertisements, reporting and diagrams.

A new baby makes it harder to crunch away at it but I'm still having a ton of fun.