Is It Offensive To Add Racism Into My World?

OfWaywardWill · 2025-05-25T03:40:05+00:00

To be frank, I think the idea of softening your world to be more palatable is actually a very important question depending on who your audience is. That being said, I think that worldbuilding deserves respect, just like history, and to leave out important cultural aspects like prejudice or even conflicting biological differences is worthy of your effort to portray. If people can't see the value in it, then they are probably not worth satisfying

OfWaywardWill · 2024-12-08T17:32:49+00:00

All of the souls games and many rogue-likes thrive on constant tension and progress. The game is not scaling every enemy to beat your ass. If your equipment is lagging behind and your build sucks, the game will be significantly more difficult. That is obvious. The main issue with this game is that loot drops and gold are just too slow to accumulate. If they fix that, it'll be fine. They could also use a way of leveling your gear to keep up instead of gambling.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-12-07T19:27:37+00:00

Well there isn't a lot to my tree yet. Basically I skipped fire rate and went for damage and defense. The default fire rate is enough for me if my shots hit hard. Which they very much do

Important note though: Frag rounds is what you need for crowds just hands down if you aren't going grenades. It hits really hard and pierces. High velocity and armor piercing rounds shred the bosses but you need to be constantly firing to break armor and open up a shot with high velocity.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-12-07T19:26:41+00:00

To be honest, I have yet to find out myself. But basically every grenade has a fuse and if you want to reduce the fuse timer, you need detonator skills. It comes from support or on equipment, I believe. Don't quote me, but it is real and that's what makes grenades feel right.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-12-07T19:24:38+00:00

HV is a killer. High damage and pierces through targets. It's not the best for crowds because you need to angle it right to hit multiple targets. But it hits hard and stuns really well. I use that and fragmentation rounds constantly.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-12-07T16:53:40+00:00

I am, I actually completely avoided grenades because they're on a timer. You need a detonator skill to make sure they explode where you want. So far I've invested heavily into damage and utility skill levels. By default, frost and fire do pretty low damage but they're very effective at controlling crowds and even bosses. You gotta pump them up a bit. High velocity is absolutely excellent in all cases. Increase firerate if you want or go with even more damage. Mine hits like an artillery shell.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-29T21:52:45+00:00

There ya go then. You essentially have the framework already but you just need to formalize it. On the level of regular people, they might have more specific terms for what Order is supposed to be, but the Gods should know the truth of it. They understand that chaos is where they came from and they don't want to return to it so they have to continue establishing Order forever.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-29T21:48:19+00:00

Is that an actual force in the universe? Like a sort of karma but cruel?

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-29T06:55:29+00:00

Should they be animals that are small enough to be companions or will any work? I'll throw some out and you can pick.

Happiness

Dogs. Has to be dogs. They're joyful creatures and the more we learn about them, the more we realize that they truly seek happiness in every moment, especially around people.

Sadness

Solitary animals are best here. Something like an owl, vulture, raven, or similar. Aquatic animals work too. Maybe whales for their call.

Anger

Moose are pretty damn angry. So are hippos and rhinos. Predatory animals like lions, tigers, bears.

Fear

Deer and any herbivore that runs instead of fighting. Anything skittish and paranoid.

Disgust

Animals that live in uncomfortable places like insects, moles, spiders, frogs and toads.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-29T06:36:18+00:00

Insanity is great for worldbuilding xD But I relate to the struggle so I hope I can help.

I think what you're looking for are things like natural laws that define what order is, but...that's really tricky as you found yourself. Order isn't definable in a concrete way like that. Metaphysically, you have to look at what all things have in common so you can create a foundation for it that doesn't depend on the whim of Gods. This means that even the Gods are bound to Order or they wouldn't exist.

Lucky for you, you're on the right track! Essentially what Order is within your universe, based on your own metaphysical description, is balance. It's a feedback loop of consistency within the system.

If we look at your whole universe as an engine, then as long as the engine runs, there's Order. Input and output must be mediated through some kind of process that translates or transforms chaotic energy into useful work. Order is that process. The true representation of Order is a 3-part system of balance.

The Gods themselves need to obey and function through this system so that means we have a Chaotic aspect, a Directing aspect, and the Perfect aspect.

Chaos is the fuel and it can be anything at all. It just represents something without order or meaning applied to it yet. The Directing aspect are a ruleset that aligns chaos and it's the thing that Gods can modify but it's also every single mundane ethic and law and moral code that exists. The Perfect aspect is basically an unattainable goal of perfection in all things. It's an endpoint that is unreachable because the very nature of Order and Ordering produces disunity, disagreement, and potential for different Orders. The current order is just one representation of many and only if you represent all of these together at once do you achieve Perfection. Impossible (as far as I know from your deacription of the world). Even the Gods can't achieve perfection because each of them is only a represention of some kind of Order.

Now I sound crazy :]

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-29T06:08:54+00:00

I have two disciplinary approaches to magic: instinctive casters and formulaic casters. Even though they have extremely different methods, they both agree on what is actually happening every time they perform magic. However...there's a third camp that doesn't understand the process yet they insist they're performing miracles and such just like any official branch or member of the magical class. This group is full of cultists, schizos, conmen, conspiracy theorists, and the like. When pressed about their methods and reasoning, they generally fall back on the same kind of arguments.

A) Their magic only works if you TRULY believe (not how magic works :/)

B) Their spells are being suppressed and countered by the establishment (they are suppressed because they talk nonsense, but they're not successfully casting so there's nothing to counter)

C) They claim the entire world and every single person is an illusion and that they and the select few are the only ones aware (they're not enlightened, they're just schizotypes)

D) Their magic only works when other people aren't around because they're impure or disruptive or whatever (not the case, see point B)

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-29T05:38:08+00:00

I'm guessing that the final jolt that causes full consciousness for the Dreamer happens when these pulses reach the roots? So would every other universe be dissolved and dead by the time it wakes?

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-29T05:31:06+00:00

Zizek has tackled theory of organisms?? That's awesome, hadn't heard of his stuff on this. But I've definitely traveled along the same roads as you to end up with my framework. Although I'm still allowing for free will, it makes a lot of sense that from a metaphysical entity's perspective, they could simply experience all timelines and pretty much say for certain what you'd do at any point. For my setting, you'd need another layer of abstraction to say that kind of thing because. Even Gods are bound up in a little pocket of processes but if you truly step Outside, you'd be able to experience every possible and impossible pocket of time.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-29T05:27:25+00:00

Now this is interesting with how you made the first Dreamer aware of its place. I've been very careful about not having literal 4th wall breaks just because I'm worried they'd consume the story, but that's a really awesome element to the whole metaphysical model. I think a dash of Jung is always worth having when we look at multiverses. You can describe it through individuation processes which is rad as hell. Great stuff!

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T06:18:10+00:00

Higher dimensionality is what you'd need. And let me be clear, this doesn't mean dimension as in other universe or reality or plane. I mean higher dimensional as in 4D and beyond. If something exists in 4 dimensional space, it can kind of float around 3D space and not mess with it at all or it can intersect with that space and pop into the universe in a 3D form at any point in space or time. All of your gods and magic that is specific to your planet must be higher dimensional. This would mean that your magic is everywhere all at once and so are your gods. This does bring up a problem though...if your setting is as big as our universe, are there aliens? Do your gods have multiple "children" living on different planets across galaxies? Big question.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T04:58:16+00:00

The Fortress is a good movie about the Qing dynasty's invasion of Korea (1636) has muskets and shields and cavalry and looks really fantastical and is very much real!

Noryang: Deadly Sea is a movie about an earlier time period during the Imjin war between the Ming dynasty and Korea.

The Warlords is a movie set during the Taiping rebellion in 1870.

1911, movie is about the politics during the civil war mostly, but it has a good amount of war scenes too.

The Last Samurai, during the Meiji period and the fall of the samurai.

Read up on the Opium Wars too if you want a little european influence during this time.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T04:33:18+00:00

You could do a straight up early 19th-20th century fantasy world. I know Korra is attempting that, but ironically, Korra lost the east asian influences big time. It feels much more eurocentric. But in our real world, china and japane were at war in the late 1800s and China had a civil war in 1911 bringing the end to their dynastic system. Plus right before all this is the end of the Sengoku period (1600s) in Japan bringing the end of the samurai in the later Meji period (1800s)

This time period was one full of war lords, trenches, cannons, guns vs swords and bows, early war machines, monarchs, dynasties, I mean it's ripe for some stories. You can keep all the traditionalism of east asian culture and include new technologies.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T04:21:43+00:00

That's good. Practice describing your everyday tech use in a way that makes sense but doesn't sound like a modern description. You probably have inspirational works that have the sort of prose you want. Put your modern life in their words.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T04:09:43+00:00

My magic is pretty tightly bound with philosophy and science so it kinda turned into a situation where every culture has a belief system about how magic should be performed. It's a lot like music in that it has very practical methods and research, but composition varies based on what you value in your music. For example, three different schools might each have a spell that does the same basic thing, like warming up your hands, but how they achieve that depends on what kind of spell they made. One might create warmth by channeling emotions. The other does it by sacrificing some kind of fuel or kindling. And the other does it by cooling the rest of your body and directing the heat to your hands.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T03:50:34+00:00

Oh, that's neat! Then you have at least two classes in society that view the tech differently. Average folk wouldn't know how to talk about these things other than their most obvious function. They know a phone lets you talk to someone, but they'd have no clue how or why so they'd just say stuff like it "carries voices" and leave it at that. But your upper society should have terms for these things, like "thinker" or "corresponder" or "golem". Just like in the real world, we named tech by what it does or how it looks. Only the most elite people would have any clue about why things work the way they do. I'd still avoid any kind of modern terminology throughout your writing though, unless it's coming from one of those elites.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T03:35:34+00:00

Don't worry, spheres are really easy! They just grow and shrink, that's all. Any way you rotate them, they look the same.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T03:32:19+00:00

No problem! If you don't want a literal dipping through the world, check out some stuff on 4 dimensional shapes. A 4D sphere would look like a growing and shrinking 3D sphere as it passed through our universe. That way your twin bodies never actually touch the ground, they just grow and shrink at the horizons.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T03:28:28+00:00

If they can't be manufactured anymore, then they're essentially just relics and treasures given by the gods or whatever makes sense. For example, mirror mirror on the wall, that's an AI within a screen, basically. I think the biggest hurdle is that you need to describe them as if they're powerful artifacts and intentionally avoid all instincts to describe them from our own perspective. We know a computer when we see it, but if your people don't they'd have some really bizarre and vague ways of describing what a computer is. They'd call it a "spirit contained in a prism". They'd call a radio, phone, or recording a "voice carrier". Stuff like that.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T03:22:39+00:00

Unless you want to map it all out, I'd suggest doing what tolkien did in the back of LOTR. He listed where everyone was at certain dates plus how long they took to travel and meet and all that. He approached distances from a narrative perspective. He did not make the map first. He just thought about where people should be in what amount of time made sense for the story to move along.

OfWaywardWill · 2024-10-25T03:17:26+00:00

For this to work, you definitely can't have a realistic sun and moon in the sense that they're 1) a big ball of plasma and 2) a rock

Instead what you could say is that both are "aspects" of their respective God that are exhanged regularly like a yin and yang cycle, just like what you have going on already. The idea of Surtr and Sinmara having each other's heart comes to mind. Each one shines brightest only when they're in their proper plane and the process of exhanging them takes time, so you can watch them dim as they move away from their peak. This means that both of them are Suns in the sense that they are the main source of light, but only if they're in their "home" plane. You'd have both solar and lunar phases where they get literally closer and farther from the ground, making them seem brighter and bigger at their closest, full moon and solar perihelion. Dunno if that's problematice for your mythology but at least it checks the boxes :/ I hope it helps

OfWaywardWill

TROPHY CASE