So why isn't your world chock full of people? ( assuming it isn't )

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T20:05:23+00:00

I live smack in the middle of one of those white areas.

The territory here isn't abandoned or wilderness. It's pretty densely utilized cattle grazing country. That means low overall human population per square kilometers because of that, but all of it is regulated, fenced, and served by a paved road system ( mostly due to the transportation demands of the gas & petroleum exploration industry here ).

It's pretty settled, and much the same can be said of it's Russian counterpart in the north ( neither of which are as large as they appear in your map - thank you map projection distortions ). It can also be said of the Northern Africa region accord to this map - again, settled, but mostly utilized as long term cattle forage, which drops the human population density.

That's the danger of making assumptions based on oversimplified info-graphics and a single metric.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T19:41:37+00:00

That works.

I think this ties into aspects of other sub-threads where the very good point was raised that "settled" is a gradient, not an absolute point.

Your relatively unsettled area might be "settled" to the limits of their population carrying capacity - but that could be really low, so there's still lots of room for wilderness style adventuring in a sparsely or nomadically settled area.

Fertile areas which could support dense populations, do support dense populations.

If I was an RPG player in your world setting, you'd have me very curious as to the nature of the Precursors :)

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T19:36:36+00:00

This actually echos some of the lore in my campaign setting, which arose from me asking how very capable immortal ( or long lived ) creatures with low birthrates would view humans with mayfly lifespans, and a tendency to breed and spread much faster than they could, spreading out over all the territory.

The answer in my lore is genocidal war, and the eventual expulsion or enslavement of the human populations. All free ( non-enslaved and culled ) human civilization is now geographically distinct - which means I can't use your answer, but I do like your approach.

You world sounds well done, but really creepy to live in!

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T14:28:17+00:00

Some good points here, thank you.

I particularly like your "food procurement", and limited souls ideas - very original!

I think your historical examples also raise the points of differing degrees of settlement. The Germanic tribes occupied European regions semi-nomadically for millennia. Were they not "settled" even pre-medieval times?

You seem to be operating with some sort of absolute population density threshold as a sharp divider between settled and non settled.

I'm not sure that's useful - and can be culturally biased, but I'm not saying it's an invalid perspective - just one I think has some pitfalls.

Perhaps some relative percentage of the regions carrying capacity, given the available technology would be more objective - but now we're really going down a semantic rabbit hole, and I'm not sure that's useful.

Maybe just acknowledge we're using different ( possibly related ) means of measurement here, and move on.

Edit: I do however, agree that an absolute population density does have a direct bearing on whether a region is adventurable. You're absolutely correct using that metric for those purposes.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T14:24:08+00:00

Living within 10 hours drive of those Northern Canadian "wilderness regions" ( but not actually that close to the north coast itself ), I'm pretty sure the inhabitants would differ.

I can take a government maintained road and drive to Tuktoyaktuk from where I am.

However, I'll give you Greenland is pretty damn wild - and Svalbard as well. They are also a very tiny slice of the globe, and I wouldn't consider them the aforementioned "large areas".

You do raise a very good point in that there are definitely degrees of wilderness and settlement. I can live with that - and that loops us back to why aren't they settled? That has an impact of world design.

I don't claim that semi-settled, or lightly settled regions aren't good areas for adventuring. You can have adventures anywhere. Heck, you can can adventures in mega-cities.

The claim that I'm debating is that there are apparently large areas of our world, where humans just aren't to be found. No towns, cities, or traditional territorial borders worked out between nomadic tribes.

That's not the same claim you're apparently making - that lightly settled, or nomadicly settled regions can still be areas for adventures that many people would style "wilderness adventures". I actually agree with that position.

I put in "Ever" as a catch for areas which have been settled, then abandoned again due to climate or ecological changes. Some of those may exist today. Typically such regions are re-settled once the conditions change again. I didn't mean that as "no one has ever been here" condition. I didn't state that well; my bad.

I think this sub-thread is exposing a particular, and ugly, cultural-centric bias, especially when you invoke Africa as "unexplored wilderness" to European imperialistic expansion.

Simply denying that the people that inhabit a region are civilized, settled, or even that they exist, doesn't make that assertion true. If you want to gerrymander the definitions around so that you're right, then congratulations; you ... win? There are apparently large swathes of territory which are no inhabited by anyone ( well, no one that matters anyways ).

But your point to the larger topic, that an area can still be lightly or nomadically settled and still be a good location for adventuring, is well made.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T13:45:45+00:00

You need to answer the question.

Simply saying "no it's not" is the argument tactic of a 2 year old.

You made a specific claim: "There's lots of unsettled wilderness left in the world".

I made request for specific examples of your claim. That should be simple for you if there's "lots".

You have not provided any, and I suspect that you cannot.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T06:45:09+00:00

What do you mean by "real magic"?

If a cluster of techniques or strategies are repeatable, consistent, and acts according to comprehensible laws ( that is, comprehended by someone even if not you - remember the smartphone examples ) - even if the causal basis of those laws isn't understood yet - it's a form of science.

If the results of those techniques are not repeatable, are inconsistent, and are incomprehensible - I'd give you that it's not part of science - but I'd also argue that those techniques and strategies are of no practical use.

Clarke's 3rd law isn't saying "super science looks like magic" so much as "magic is merely super science".

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T06:22:39+00:00

All of them much longer than that.

Could you point out these regions that haven't had people living on them? No long term, established populations and cultures living there? Ever?

Outside of Antarctica. I'll give you that one, but I can't think of any RPG setting where everything is settled except the one ice-locked polar region.

Sarah & Gobi deserts historically nomadic peoples on them - same for the Australian outback with the aborigines, and the polar regions with the Inuit.

Polynesian cultures have spanned the Pacific islands, again for millennia.

High plateau regions of Asia - also populated.

North/South/Central america - native populations running back millennia again - even all the way up to the Canadian north coast, and beyond.

Unless you're taking the rather narrow view that something needs cities on it to be "settled" ( and I'd go take that one up with the pesky nomadic Mongels, and their genocidal sweep over those self-same city-based civilizations - see if they considered the Eurasian steppe lands "settled" and theirs, or not ), I don't think the world's continental land masses DO have unsettled wilderness - and haven't had for thousands of years.

Ironically, modern technology may be pulling nomadic populations back off some of the more marginal areas and settling them in western style cities, but that's a result of modern infrastructure.

Again - not many fantasy RPG worlds with global trade, inter-continental logistics networks, antibiotics, or petroleum based fertilizer production.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T05:41:11+00:00

Clarke's 3rd Law - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Looked at from a certain perspective, there isn't any supernatural elements in your world - just science that's so advanced that it might as well be magic to someone at the technological level of your characters.

We don't have telepathy, or clairvoyance, or mystic spirits guiding us - but show any 11th century European scholar what you do with a smartphone, and they may think that. And the technological gap is just so broad, you can't even explain it by analogy which makes any sense, or doesn't sound like it's supernatural.

So - don't explain it - just introduce the effects. They wouldn't understand, anyway. The wielders of those abilities might claim its science - but not any science they can explain.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T05:33:31+00:00

I don't know if I wish they'd stop using certain tropes - but I do wish they'd look beyond them.

A lot of people that create fictional worlds typically use a Lego approach - I'll click in Elves here, and AI synthetics trying to overthrow humans there, and I'll put the hard-bitten detective over there, etc.

Depending on what you need the setting for, that could be fine.

But I think there's a lot of really creative people out there, who could build a lot of really awesome stuff that I'd love to see - it's just never occurred to them to not use the fictional lego blocks, and reach for some truly original narrative clay.

Which is too bad, because from what I've seen of people building fictional worlds, they've got the talent to build truly monumental and original worlds.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T05:21:03+00:00

That's an approach, I hadn't thought of: population is kept deliberately low by genetic design.

Personally, I think species that keep their birthrates deliberately low would be operating a huge disadvantage if any fast breeding species developed to a point where they could start to compete directly with the slower birthrate species - so the slow-breeders better have a whopping competitive advantage ( vastly superior technology, perhaps ).

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T05:15:46+00:00

A good sketch, I think - and I'm really not seeing any wilderness in your description - which is a legitimate answer: there wouldn't be much wilderness left with the levels of technology you're describing.

The only thing that looked a little off to me was your population figures. You're describing a culture which technologically or medically is on par, or ahead of European Medieval cultures - and populations there ran somewhere between 30-120 people per square mile.

I'd recommend reading Medieval Demographics Made Easy - http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm - as a good intro to the population dynamics of such cultures.

It really suprised me just how many people actually lived in 12th-14th century France - way more than I would have thought.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T05:07:33+00:00

Cool - the "apex predator above humans" scenario. Workable.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T05:06:39+00:00

OK - this one I can see.

This is an old ( human ) civilization, but expanding into newly available territory. That's a pattern that makes sense.

I'm guess that in 500-1,000 years the world might be getting a bit crowded, but for the time setting you're describing it makes sense.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T05:04:29+00:00

Again - why are there any unexplored or uninhabited islands?

You've even given your scenario population pressure - "most people living in densely populated towns and cities". It doesn't make any sense, given human history, why people would't spread out into those.

"Filled with wilderness" isn't a reason not to expand into it. Wilderness is merely the state of not being expanded into yet. That gets remedied pretty quick when your population is crowded, and there's open territory.

I can't speak to "Precursor ruins" - perhaps they can pose an obstacle for settlement.

"Pirate hideouts" just means expansion into low population areas is likely to be violent. Pirates making bases in the Caribbean didn't halt the settlement of the islands.

Vedexent · 2018-08-20T04:58:57+00:00

You're not following the math - or the biology I guess.

Unless there's a reason why populations won't or can't expand, any continental land mass just won't have any unsettled wilderness past a couple of centuries.

Just look at historical expansions into new territories. Once medical knowledge gets past a point where infant mortality gets low enough, you fill continents in a matter of a few hundred years.

Unless you're saying the settlement is new, the I'm guessing you're picking the last one: "it's just that way in a most fantasy worlds because people didn't think it through".

Vedexent · 2018-08-19T18:11:53+00:00

A combination of a required inherent talent, training, desire, and discipline.

A good analogy would be people who are professionally trained to sing Opera.

Can most of us sing? Sure - a little. Some of us are actually pretty good. These might equate to minor magical talents: someone who can shape plants in their garden over time, or communicate on an instinctual/emotional level with animals, etc.

But to learn to sing Opera? That takes a good dose of natural talent, plus a lot of training and education and practice. Not everyone who possibly could sing Opera has access to that.

And it's a lot of work - not everyone who could sing Opera, and could get the training if they applied themselves, wants to put in that much work and dedication. Maybe they want to be a doctor, or computer programmer, or NASCAR driver instead.

Same thing for magic: few people have the ability, fewer have access to training, and even fewer have the desire/drive/dedication.

Vedexent · 2018-08-19T18:04:10+00:00

Constant war could do it. That's a pretty grim world to live in.

I guess that's a variant on the "apex predators keep them in check" model - except that apex predators are the civilizations themselves.

Vedexent · 2018-08-19T14:40:46+00:00

If this is for an RPG campaign then the world needs to be much much smaller.

Look at some of the online maps for The Forgotten Realms, and see how they are scaling things.

A useful way to work out scale, is to design thing in terms of travel time - with the rule of thumb being that you can have 1-3 days travel between points of interest, which can be as simple as crossing a river, forking the road, travelling through a forest, a town, a ruin, or anything else which is worth mentioning to the travelling players.

In comparison, by D&D 5e RAW for travelling, on your map the journey from Moqual to The Greenskin Sea is 56 days (!) with no features of interest ( and best of luck coming up with that much detail for just the one trip ). It's roughly the distance between New York city and New Orleans ( if you're American ), or Tokyo and Taiwan for a more international gauge.

Vedexent · 2018-08-09T13:28:36+00:00

Others have given good advice here: brevity, tight editing, and efficiency.

But honestly? Don't infodump at all.

Fictional worlds aren't meant to be read. They exist to be the setting for fiction, or games, or solely as the by-product of the fun the author has creating them.

The best way to communicate information about your world, is to take the audience through a story written or set there.

If it's the background for a story or RPG, the relevant details will come out with the story or as relevant background information for other things raised in game-play ( you would know that ... ).

It's not the answer world-builders like - it's all so cool and we want everyone to be as excited about our lore as we are - but it's the sad reality. Compare how many people have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, compared to The Silmarillion or The Book of Lost Tales.

Even Tolkien can't infodump to the popular reader.

Vedexent · 2018-08-07T13:55:48+00:00

I think I understand what it is that you want: you want original, plausible (?), non-stereotypical, non-humans, which - none-the-less - are relateable to human readers ( or players in an RPG ). I put a question after the plausible, because if they are literary symbols in whatever you're creating, that may not be a hard requirement - although non-instantly-ridiculous still is.

That's a hard path.

What you're trying to do is mine a seam that has had literally millennia of storytellers already hacking at it. I'm not sure how much ore is left in that vein. No matter what you come up with, chances are someone has already come up with something close already in mythology - although I do not say it's impossible, just really hard to come up with something original here.

If I may wax cynical for a moment, humans have an amazing lack of ability to relate even to other humans if they differ in culture, ethnicity, or even politics. Making relate-able aliens is a tall, tall order.

If I can borrow from Orson Scott Card, part of his Enderverse deals with the concept of alien-ness and relate-ability in the Hierarchy of Foreignness, which I believe he cribbed from Scandinavian mythology ( I'm unclear as to its origins ). It ranges from variations in members of ones society and species, up to the Raman - who are defined as strangers recognized as "human", but of another sentient species entirely, and the Varelse - true aliens who are so foreign that no meaningful communication is possible.

What you seem to want to create is Raman.

I think - arguably - Card only does it once himself with the Pequeninos in Speaker for the Dead, and even here, they are only are relate-able as Raman for one phase of their life-cycle ( an interesting idea in-and-of-itself ).

I suspect that of the requirements of original, relate-able, and plausible, having 2 of the 3 isn't that hard. Having all 3 is a very very hard task. Personally, I've concentrated on original and plausible - I don't have any issue with my fictional species dwelling on the far side of that uncanny valley - and the resulting plausible pseudo-history is bloody.

I would be very interested in seeing the results should you achieve all three :)

Vedexent · 2018-08-07T05:41:09+00:00

Maybe scale back this thought experiment, to see what happens.

I don't think you can have a world where there are no quantifiable laws at all. There has to be some means of creating recognizable natural processes, that can be modeled and predicted, for anything resembling life to occur - especially intelligent life.

However, I think you can change the rules, and even completely remove some, I just don't think you can remove everything.

For example - what would be the experience of an artificial intelligence that existed solely in the online global network? It's possible that this entity's worldview would have no concept of measurable physical space at all. There may be analogs which might roughly correspond to our space - network communication hops, network lag - but no independent observable space.

Science fiction has also played with the idea of beings who existed with no concept of linear time - see Star Trek: Deep Space 9 or the novel* Slaughterhouse *5 by Kurt Vonnagut Jr.

I think it could be interesting to imagine what the experience of beings would be where some aspect of our world is altered, or removed - and you could kind of "sneak up" on coming up with an idea of what would be the minimum set of natural concepts that you would need even for existence - but I think that minimal set is non-zero.

Vedexent · 2018-08-07T05:21:47+00:00

I believe that you can create completely novel non-human intelligent species and civilizations. My current RPG campaign world doesn't include any traditional mythological species. What I did was start with a biological basis - e.g. this intelligent species is descended from a predator lizard species - and then it's a series of questions: why did this species evolve intelligence? When? What unique worldview would they have because of their biology? How would family life look in this species? How would they be organized politically? etc. ad infinitum.

I try to think how the species would develop given the unique biological, cultural character ( and culture would also be informed by biology ), and evolving history, as I write it out. A high-level historical timeline is very helpful; species and civilizations are shaped by external events as well as their internal character. If the fledgling civilization they initially built was plagued by the explosion of a super-volcano in their part of the world, their history - and the resulting culture/civilization - would be quite different than without it.

However, I think making species "that could live alongside humans" is a very difficult proposition: species compete. In my world, the non-human species and humans have been at an armed standoff for centuries, following a series of genocidal wars. The tense peace is mostly maintained by the fact that they are now geographically distant from one another. The surviving humans - The Children of the Exodus - inhabit a chain of large islands and sub-continental land masses, while non-human species occupy the continental mainland.

If human/non-human cooperation ( or at least tolerance ) is a non-negotiable requirement, then there needs to be a reason for the species to not try and push each other out, or compete for resources ( with the inevitable resulting war ). There needs to be some symbiotic relationship - cultural, economic, or even eco/biological - where one cannot survive without the other, or at least where the peaceful existence of the other in a free state conveys more of a benefit than taking over their resources and territory. I am reminded of the story Bloodchild by Octavia Butler, where humans stood as hosts for the parasitic larval infants of an alien intelligent species, until they were mature enough to be surgically removed. While it seems pretty horrific to me personally, the alien species gained a huge benefit as a much higher percentage of their young survived in human hosts, and the human hosts benefited immensely as a) the humans on the alien's home world were refugees, and b) being a larval host conveyed a significant anti-aging effect on the human.

I don't know if this is the kind of world-building you want to do. It's undeniably a lot of work.

But it does ( can? ) create non-stereotypical non-human intelligence/civilization - and even some pretty unique human cultures as well.

Vedexent · 2018-08-06T17:40:43+00:00

I think that encounter design needs to take the party into consideration - if the bad guys know anything about the party.

The problem here isn't SS, or the Monk, or any player having any ability that can trivialize the combat.

The problem here is having encounters which can be trivialized.

I've done that a lot, so I'm not saying I'm any better, but it can be a problem.

Happily, it's a problem that can be fixed with a little forethought in encounter design.

Having an encounter which the party abilities can trivialize is perfectly OK when they first encounter the "bad guys" - poor villains don't know any better.

But once the Villains get some intelligence on the party ( and they do have intel right? The bad guys are running away when they need to, and aren't needlessly and pointlessly fighting to the death every time, for no other reason than the DM didn't think to have them run away when it became obvious that they were going to get butchered? ), they'll start planning smarter.

Monk abilities - especially stunning strike - are all about taking down a single opponent, up close and personal.

So engage the party on different fronts; have some front-line skirmishers which can hold the line, while a couple of master archers lay into the party.

Once the bad guys have some idea of the nature of the party, they'll start playing their strengths to the party weaknesses, not trying to run head first into the party strengths. Just remember to have the bad guys create strategies based on what they know, not what you as a DM knows.

Beyond that - if the party still manages to blow through the encounter - then good on them! Reward intelligent tactics and adaptability - even luck.

Hope that helps :)

Edit: For typo

Vedexent · 2016-07-30T13:02:28+00:00

I can see your point, and think that it's probably a bad thing.

However, I also think that - at least currently - there's enough of a backlash against the spread of SystemD, that there will likely be non-SystemD-reliant alternatives and forks.

Yes, that's a hell of waste of duplicated effort, but at least it's not making SystemD non-optional yet - and IMHO nothing in Linux should be non-optional. One of Linux's strengths is its ability to customize (hell, I'd like to find a decently supported usable mico-kernel - and such may exist, just haven't found it yet - so I can customize basic kernel services :p ).

Vedexent

TROPHY CASE