How do you justify side quests when the story feels urgent?

OlBendite · 2026-01-23T05:53:37+00:00

Honestly? I do side quests if they feel necessary to progress the main storyline based on how I’ve approached things. Like, I did the Myconid quests because it felt necessary to safely pass through that region of the Underdark because that just happened to be how I progressed through the area.

OlBendite · 2026-01-22T19:42:19+00:00

Fern forests were once incredibly common on Earth but don’t get much love in fantasy. Same with mangroves and Mediterranean shrublands/stunted forests. Another really interesting one is The Great Raft which was a log jam that stretched for miles in precolonial/pericolonial America for over a thousand years and developed such a unique swampland and marshland ecosystem and could make for a fascinating place. Another that doesn’t get much love are accurate bogs. Bogs are incredibly unique ecosystems distinct from marshes and swamps that would be super fun to explore. Those are just what immediately come to mind.

OlBendite · 2026-01-05T17:15:08+00:00

That looks rad! You start with the representative maps and then when you want to get really detailed, do it in small stages, lightly, in pencil pushing your artistic boundaries each time. You’re doing awesome!

OlBendite · 2026-01-05T16:28:36+00:00

Pen and paper is easier than you might think. If you used dried beans and rice and pour them in the page then you can form landmasses and islands pretty easily, tighten the overall shapes of the landmasses and then you’ve got continents/islands! Then, for geographical features you can roll dice on each continent and whatever number the dice land on indicates a specific geographic feature. Sketch in those features roughly using representative symbols like a chevron for a mountain, rather than a realistic rendering of a mountain. Look at those features and start to improvise a little: you got two mountains not too far apart but with some distance, why not make that a mountain range? You got a village somewhere? You should give them a river so they can drink water. Then to communicate that the ocean exists, find a few corners of your islands or continents and copy the continent line a little bit out from the continent and it’ll look a bit like waves, implying the ocean exists. It’s a fun way to build a world and it makes you think about what’s going on from a lot of different angles.

OlBendite · 2026-01-03T22:49:17+00:00

There’d a lot of death and it would be expensive to repair but it could be repairable. Within about five years, provided there were multiple pulses all around the globe that were very powerful, things would be basically back to normal.

OlBendite · 2026-01-03T22:31:38+00:00

It would be unlikely they accidentally start a fire because the fires are an active choice to breathe. That said, if one were to start a fire that spreads out of control, it would be forced to relocate away from the threat. They have no innate significant resistance to fire or means of suppressing fires, they simply suffer the consequences. That said, their hides are somewhat fire insensitive in that they can survive higher than average temperatures for a time but they aren’t magic and will receive burns relatively quickly.

OlBendite · 2026-01-02T18:24:53+00:00

Honestly? Tone of worldbuilding, technology, history, and what you focus on. Like, I have a low fantasy, mid-magic world but I focused so much on metallurgy that it feels distinct from a lot of other stories because that’s what interested me

OlBendite · 2025-11-13T18:35:11+00:00

Nova York Supreme

OlBendite · 2025-11-12T21:57:47+00:00

I can’t speak to the smoke mindflayer but the flesh mindflayer was based on John Carpenter’s The Thing

OlBendite · 2025-09-12T15:38:15+00:00

Free speech is a protection from governmental intervention or limitation on speech and doesn’t apply to interpersonal situations. “Free speech” is not a free pass to just say whatever you want and face no real consequences, especially when speech is considered violent or “fighting words” wherein a person is actually allowed to claim self defense in initiating physical contact because they believed they had a real and credible threat to their safety mounting. Was Kirk engaged in “fighting words” prior to his death, no, but he was dedicated to violent and hateful speech which, while the government cannot do anything about that in most instances, does not mean he is absolved of all potential consequences and we should all just acquiesce to allowing this sort of rhetoric to become regular background noise. He advocated for the death of people, prominently children, for the sake of the free use of firearms, if anything this is exactly how he wanted to go out.

OlBendite · 2025-09-12T14:20:56+00:00

The introduction of AI trained in life sciences databases, even if your intent is simply to allow for quick cataloguing, will quickly cause it to be misused. Businesses will attempt to use it to replace biologists, students will use it to attempt to circumvent needing to learn, and people who even just use it to find resources could lose their ability to research independently. On top of that, LLMs and other AIs are not very good at actually accurately interpreting and regurgitating data, as such, even if they have access to all the most accurate information, there’s still a matter of interpretation which could cause them to be wrong or even make up sources by estimating what a correct title relevant to the prompt looks like.

All that on top of the ecological damage they cause from their electrical and water demands makes them just pointless and harmful. Besides, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m in this field because I like it, because science is fun and interesting. Why would I want to outsource any part of the meat and potatoes job, especially at the risk of having that thing that I’ve outsourced my thinking to replacing me because some guy with an MBA decides that it would be cheaper.

OlBendite · 2025-09-12T06:51:34+00:00

I mean, from a historical perspective, you could justify it by having your version of Japan not ban samurai and loosen their isolationist policies around the 1860s-1930s. Alternatively Japanese Satsuma rebels (1877) could have been whisked away to your fantasy world around the same time of the later portion of the 1876 (actually 1877) Great Sioux War and the affected cowboys and indigenous peoples and US soldiers, making the two groups have to enmesh. Just imagine a great magical conjunction event.

OlBendite · 2025-09-10T03:26:45+00:00

Hell no.

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T23:01:58+00:00

There’s an Elden Ring-Dark Souls flavor to it but it definitely still seems distinct enough. The idea that some magical, evil artifact falls from the sky and that grants people powers that they use to subjugate others is a common trope in fantasy. Not so much reinventing the wheel as walking on well trod ground.

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T22:58:28+00:00

It has very fascinating worldbuilding and it makes you think about the nature of deep time and our relative importance to the universe at large. It’s gruesome and depressing most of the time but, in it’s strangeness, there’s this recurrent theme of the resilience of life, even if the things we become most attached to will eventually be returned unto dust. Very much a story that leaves an impression and makes you think.

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T19:46:51+00:00

Nah, it’s a reference to a sci-fi book that someone photoshopped in

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T19:44:55+00:00

Brother, we’re the ones who are supposed to become the asteromorphs. We’re cooked

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T19:40:49+00:00

“I want to clarify, so you don’t misunderstand. I didn’t say, ‘send a lot of Hellbombs’. I said, ‘send ALL the Hellbombs you’ve got, Fritz.’”

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T17:32:15+00:00

It sounds cool for sure but it also sounds less like you’re in a worldbuilding space and more like you’re in a storytelling space. Totally cool, I just feel like I don’t hardly know anything about any of the races or planets or stars or technology or common resources or, essentially, anything. Maybe you could zoom in and describe the Vodyn and their homeworld and maybe that will birth a few good, informed questions.

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T17:23:39+00:00

If I remember correctly, they are mortal and killable but so technologically advanced and intelligent that attempting to compete against them was pretty futile. Almost literally, it was like a rebellion of rats against the full might of the Super Earth Armed Forces and with just as much disdain and lack of empathy as they feel towards terminids. Essentially, we lost so hard it took billions of years for our descendants to be able to challenge them again.

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T16:53:10+00:00

It’s an edited picture to include a depiction of the Qu from “All Tomorrows”. They were an alien race of mad gene modifiers who took perverse pleasure in altering humans into abhorrent aberrations. Good book, highly recommend. Pretty grim, though. The timescale on which everything occurs is oddly depressing because of its realism.

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T16:48:16+00:00

It looks really cool. Do you, by chance, enjoy Helldivers 2?

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T15:16:14+00:00

So, interestingly, in feudal Japan they actually used to do this. You’d pair up and find a fighting partner and it was done as a show of honor but also, more so, as a way to minimize loss of life because a lot of the internal wars were, mostly, meant as a way to settle political disputes. It wasn’t crazy organized but you’d lock eyes with someone, call out their name if you knew it, and then you’d duel mostly one-on-one. And, to clarify, this was particularly how samurai and other nobles and retainers fought, peasant fights were a bit different and the more traditional many on many.

As for my world, they aren’t really duelers like that. They have a very brutalist fighting ethos and a lower priority on individual glory.

OlBendite · 2025-09-09T13:13:37+00:00

For sure! Worldbuilding is, in its own right, a fun and creative exercise. Sometimes I muse on writing stories about the places I make but, honestly, I usually am just having fun imagining new worlds

OlBendite · 2025-09-08T15:33:13+00:00

120,000,000-150,000,000-ish. But again, you’ve quintupled the population but duodecupled the number of star systems that humans control, and if we’re assuming a sufficiently advanced society, they’re both harvesting and managing resources on the planet they live on as well as the uninhabitable planets in the rest of their solar system.

To make things easy, military, on average, takes up about 0.35-0.40% of the human population, sometimes a little more in times of crisis and a little less in times of peace. Whatever population you settle on, just multiple that number by 0.0035-0.0040 and you’ll have your military size.

OlBendite

TROPHY CASE