#worldbuilding details

[amaiguri]

Worldbuilding Eating Utensils in Fantasy

Okay okay okay... so I just watched this Utensil Design video and I was like. Omg. This is SO COOL! It's got some pretty sick real-life worldbuilding, so I immediately began to think about it in my world.

Maybe I am WAAAAY too detail oriented with my worldbuilding but honestly, it's not like I'm neglecting my characters and storytelling -- I just also wanna visually design everything to be slightly to the left of reality...

The Tl;dw:

Forks only became popular because of Italian pasta

Christian Priests thought forks were "the Devil's utensil" cuz like pitchforks. No forks. God gave you hands for a reason.

We should bring back eating knives

Chinese Chopsticks were considered to be refined while knives were considered barbaric by early Confucianists -- and thus, they belonged in the kitchen, while daintily picking up pre-chopped food with chopsticks is good

Chopsticks in Japan are considered a bridge between food and your mouth, just like bridges cross rivers or trees bridge you to the Gods. There are celebrations surrounding chopsticks when you're born and when you die. It's a BIG big cultural thing.

In India, your different fingers activate different chakras, so eating with your hands helps connect you to the natural world

So anyway, with those VERY COOL revelations (but seriously, go watch the video), I did some more worldbuilding on Yssaia's eating utensils. Please reblog or something to tell me about your world's eating utensils!

Here's mine:

Northern Culinary Tools

Northerners primary use eating knives -- cutting off their portion of food at the table -- and everyone carries their own set when going to eat at another person's house. This is also because, if someone is going to stab you, everyone is going to want to have their weapons on them.

Finger foods are not unheard of, but are more rare due to the prevalence of gloves year round. They are considered to be more intimate and/or lower class, depending on the context.

Soups are just drunk out of the bowl. Spoons are only for serving.

Demons

Eat with their hands or other shapeshifted appendages. Why would they waste effort making them when they can just bring the food to their mouth with their hands?

Among the Northern Demon Lords, there is probably some etiquette about how you do this (You can't just like gorge yourself with your mouth and dump it into your gullet all the time). It probably has to do with appearances to other people and maximizing your politeness and minimizing how easy it is to steal from you.

Sealfolk

Selkies are known for eating bowls of mackerel, eels, and sea grass whole. Because they can. They probably also invented forks for stabbing slippery things and then eating them. However, unlike in Western culture, you are not expected to eat the whole thing in one bite. You can stab and then take smaller bites off your fork.

Southern Culinary Tools

Southerners use chopsticks and bone spoons in conjunction with more disposable utensils, such as bread, to eat -- due to the heavier reliance on frying and boiling in their cuisine. Their food is generally warmer overall and, in some regions, spicier, thus making it physically harmful to eat with just your hands.

Also, the heavier reliance on fermentation in Telethens means you don't wanna put your filthy hands in the brine or you'll ruin its balance -- you have to use chopsticks to pluck stuff from the jars.

Sidebar: When I do revisions on my webfic, I am ABSOLUTELY going to have to have a scene where Arlasaire learns or even simply complains about having to use chopsticks and that is HILARIOUS.

That being said, the Blood Tsars -- particularly in the South East -- eat more with their hands due to long term connection with Demons. Designing food correctly for manual consumption + the ability to elegantly eat food with your hands and disposable utensils is considered peak culture there.

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.

[canisalbus]

What if I told you that RoobrickMarine went and wrote an entire novella starring my 16th century dog couple? It's very canon-adjacent, well researched and thoughtfully put together, has inspired me a ton during these past months and it's now publicly available at AO3. I highly recommend it.

✦ Separation ✦

[midnight-the-pony]

Good evening Candybug enjoyers come get your food

[creation-help]

"Wah this section of worldbuilding I'm doing is so minute and kinda pointless to the larger scheme of things, hurr durr I'm just focusing on some whatever part when I have actual story and plot to figure out-" WHO CARES. YOU ARE THE GOD OF YOUR UNIVERSE. HAVE FUN CREATING IT.

[dimespin]

Saratoan Life Stages

The simple rule of thumb for guessing a Saratoan dragon's human-age is a kind of reverse dog years - divide their age by 2 and there you are. But as is the case with dog years, Saratoans develop on their own timeline.

They themselves understand their ages based on set of teeth, of which they can have a maximum of 7 across their lifetime.

First Teeth

The first set of teeth erupt shortly after the joey detaches from the mother's body about 6 months after the initial birth and arrival in the pouch. The joey is not yet old enough to permanently leave the pouch at 6 months but a few months later they will leave the pouch permanently and spend a few years clinging to their mother's back instead.

The development timeline for a joey has some similarities with human children (they start talking around the same time) and differences (they take their first wobbly steps as soon as they make their first venture out of the pouch around 6 months)

Compared to their extended lifespan these years are quite accelerated!

This set of teeth as well as the next lacks the pronounced canines the species is known for, very much looking like the teeth of what they are, an herbivore.

This set of teeth is shed at about age 6

Second Teeth

The next set of teeth are heavily associated with the age group called sub-adults, but they aren't officially considered sub-adults until age 15.

Sub-adults are still considered a type of child, but nonetheless are very independent. They are generally at similar levels of education as humans the same age, most of them work and many live away from their families full or part time.

Legally they occupy a separate category from either children or adults, with restrictions intended to protect them like lower legal working hours and it not being legal to sell them things like cigarettes, but they are also legally allowed to live apart from their family even if the family would prefer otherwise.

While they can earn professional certificates and credentials through education they are legally barred from many professional fields and must wait to use those credentials for adulthood. Because of this many take on apprentice or intern like jobs in their desired field to gain experience while waiting to be able to work in the field.

Despite the fact many of them work or are in college and can speak and think as you'd expect of a same-age human, they are known for being a bit childish, still having a drive to play, and sometimes still being emotionally immature and impulsive.

This is the stage at which their physical aging starts to slow down, so they do not hit their adult height until closer to when they get their next set of teeth. Growth does not completely stop but many sub-adults are markedly short compared to adults.

This set is shed at about age 30

Third Teeth

At age 30 Saratoans hit puberty and have their final growth spurt, reaching their adult height around the same time as their teeth start falling out and growing back in (for the Atau full adult height is usually reached around 35, but the tooth milestone and puberty still happens around the same time)

At this age they often become aware of their sexuality and between this and the expectations of whether or not they will reproduce, social roles within their culture are decided and imposed.

As they enter this age group there can be a lot of upheaval in their lives as they suddenly move from education to professional careers, move out, become parents, lose childhood friends and gain new ones, etc., depending on the individual

While they are culturally viewed as adults they are still often condescended to by older adults who view them as still being a bit wet behind the ears.

This set of teeth is shed at about age 65

Fourth Teeth

This set of teeth is associated with the approach of middle age. Normal adults generally dealing with life with now a significant amount of experience, but still with a huge population around them with more experience still.

This age group has a reputation for sometimes being annoying according to elders, as they are second only to sub-adults in their likelihood to rebel. This is the first time many of them have experienced adults (third teeth) showing them respect and following their lead on things, and this makes some start to view themselves as able to question those above them. This is especially annoying as this is also the time when many of them begin being trained for their future as house elders if they are in the position to take that role.

This age group and the next are the ones most likely to make a show of dominance smiling, as the tension between groups of adults who would otherwise be peers becomes heightened. Previous groups had no one to lord their age based social hierarchy position over but those they viewed as literal children, but now with other adults to pull rank on, the age based fights begin to reach their peak.

This set of teeth is shed at about age 100

Fifth Teeth

This set of teeth is associated with middle age and the time shortly after. Many start showing signs of aging during this time, with wrinkles and graying hair starting to appear.

During this time many start to see their fertility slowing down, with pregnancies becoming pretty much unheard of after age 130.

Many in this age group are already taking on important management roles within the house structure, as they are in the important position of both being old enough to command respect from many but still being fairly physically healthy and fit

This set of teeth is shed at about age 135

Sixth Teeth

The last set of teeth many Saratoans ever grow but not the last possible set. This set is associated with elders who are not the house leader. Often seen in the house leader's partner and eldest children within the house structure. Also often seen in older adults who choose to live outside the house structure system.

Saratoans health and signs of aging keep pretty stable from the previous age group through this one, accelerating much more around age 170, when they tend to lose the remaining color in their hair, thinning of the hair becomes visible on the arms and legs, and health decline and age related health conditions start to become a real problem.

This set of teeth is only shed under the circumstance of being left as the most dominant one within a family or group, often due to the death of the house leader when they were the next eldest individual.

Seventh Teeth

The last possible set of teeth when the canines become long enough they permanently protrude from the mouth at all times and unlike the other teeth are dry at all times. Because of this they are called tusks.

Tusked elders are stereotyped as very calm and patient and not interested in making a show of their dominance. They cannot meaningfully hide or reveal their teeth so they tend to relax about commanding respect simply for the sake of it as fourth and fifth teeth often do.

These teeth are only ever seen in the eldest dominant figure within a group. While it is technically possible to develop them after age 140, and much more rarely, as early as 100, it's more common to see them in individuals closer to 160 or more.

Saratoans generally live to be around 200, with the majority dying of old age closer to 190 or so, but still a few live past 200, with 210 being rare but not totally unheard of. There are rumors of even older individuals occurring but the records are sketchy

[extrajigs]

More penta-beasts! Want to get a good grasp of the morphs going on in this planet. So sketched these out between coms! Info below!

First is more of a grazing type of 'animal', though their grazing is more so scrapping at the ground. The top and bottom jaws are used for scratching up edible bits from the biomat, while the middle are used for combing through the gunk they accumulate from scratching. They also got these long curved eyes. I was thinking like how animals with horizontal pupil align the pupil to the horizon, these guys just have their eye built into two modes so they have the wide vision when feeding and just hanging out. Maybe a lil goofy but this planet is just made to be silly. Like this other guy! This is a predatory pentapod, usually stalking up in the night before starting a quick chase. Most of the time the food gets away but if not they have modified their spear into their primary method of dispatching prey. They kill via exsanguination and eat with very dainty little bites as their jaws have atrophied a little bit. Also fun spikey shell to make them extra dangerous! Maybe it's when they have lil spats with each other.

[jayrockin]

what do you mean the centaurs aren’t eukaryotes???

do their cells really not have nuclei???

You misunderstand, they are not eukaryotes because "eukaryote" is a taxonomic category describing a clade of life on Earth. They are eukaryote-like in the same way they are mammal-like. Their cells could be physiologically described as having endosymbiotic plastids.

For the other people who asked, no, I couldn't really describe the differences in their cells from ours for the same reason I've avoided describing alien biochemistry. I'm more interested in describing morphology, and I know enough about biochem to know I don't know anything about it.

[mumblesplash]

i feel like the thing that's hardest to fully get across about the hgcz is that this monstrosity was NOT ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO BE A COHESIVE STORY. CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME. GUYS IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A NORMAL ZINE WHAT IS GOING ON

[stellisketches]

The Destroyer

[rileys-battlecats]

girl help I started writing down oc thoughts and have started contemplating the logistics of how a city carved into the walls of a ravine would have access to fresh water

[galacticsabc]

hmmm. I think I'm getting a bit better at drawing horses.

Here's Titan, she's a phantom horse from my worldbuilding. She kinda ended up having the most backstory ever simply because I was trying to consolidate some old writing that made zero sense with the new stuff I've written.

[syekick-powers]

it's fascinating to me how tumblr users who talk about worldbuilding seem to fall under distinct camps of audiences who don't care about detailed worldbuilding logistics at all, audiences who just want things to make sense and cohere internally even if it's not perfectly realistic, and audiences who seem less interested in stories and more interested in just hearing about the tiniest most irrelevant minutiae of how a fictional world works to the detriment of actually telling a story. and then there are also storytellers on here who also fall under three similar camps of writers who don't really care about detailed worldbuilding and mostly paint their worlds in broad strokes, those who put a fair amount of thought into their worlds but don't really get down into the fine details, and those that plan every tiny little fucking thing out. the variety of humanity is truly fascinating

[tanadrin]

the inability to use modern expressions like "jesus christ" and "oh my god" when writing people speaking in a modern, colloquial fantasy in fiction is actually really awkward sometimes. because almost anything you replace it with is going to sound naff as hell. tempted to just leave the culturally-contextual oaths in and trust people to understand that they're translation conventions. turn linguistic smeerps into rabbits, as it were.

[marlynnofmany]

"You need necromancy to fix a rotten board."

Highlight from a conversation about airship mechanics, and the way you can't just remove rot the same way you'd remove paint or bloodstains. See, rot isn't so much a thing that befouls a surface so much as a sign of what has occurred. Like burn marks.

You gotta regrow the damaged area, and we all know what branch of magic handles regrowing dead material.

("And that's above my pay grade," says the mechanic. "Or above board, if you'll pardon the pun.")

[mistbix]

about like. 2 months ago. my clawthorne family fixation came back strong and i decided to draw a bunch of photos of them, like the kind you keep in photo albums (i'm still doing it) (it's mostly eda)

i dont plan on posting all of them, most are just for my own amusement, but i will share my favorites!! they won't be in chronological order but i will have a tag for these if anyone ever wants to check

i'll post one later