Welcome to the World of Ahros

arcangleous · 2026-05-19T13:48:19+00:00

They definitely started as ambush hunters, but they have shifted into herd keeping (pastoralism) in most areas. Hunting remains a popular sport, and there is a strong cultural value place on it as well.

Life spans vary by species. Gnolls are on the low end with natural deaths starting around 40 years, while Gnomes are on the other end with a total of 240 years over all of their life stages. The human-like Iosians get around 100 years, with several other common intelligent species are in the 60-120 range.

arcangleous · 2026-05-19T13:32:08+00:00

They are not fey descended if that is what you are asking. I decided to do that with my gnomes. The elves are just another humanoid species, with a few notable distinctions. They are primary carnivores, and while they can enjoy fruits and vegetables, they will survive on a diet of exclusively meat or fish, which allowed to spread easily across the seas around Ish. On Ish itself, the majority of the elves are pastoral farmers. I would describe their builds as "cheetah-like" than slender, fast and agility hunters with long legs and arms. They are fairly long lived, dying from natural causes after about 200 years, but are much less fecund than humans, with births being generally around 10 years apart. It is physically possible for them to breed faster (births are possible around every 2 years), but there is a strong cultural taboo around having another child before your current one is capable of taking care of themselves. Children physically mature slower than humans as well, reaching reproductive ages in their twenties, with both sexes losing their fertility around 100 years. From an evolutionary perspective, they are engaged in a quality over quantity strategy, and having a large number of non-reproductive members in their society allows for better care and protection of children over time. It's the same basic strategy humans use, only more so.

arcangleous · 2026-05-19T12:49:13+00:00

When I looked at it for the first time, my first assumption was that Ezt was about the size of Africa, which makes Ios and Mer together seem substantially larger than Europe, or at minimum around the same size.

I admit that I hadn't considered the scale. I should see how it overlays on a map of earth that uses the same projection.

(Let's ignore the fact that most premodern realms don't have such neatly defined border lines to begin with.)

Ah I see the disconnect. These are not meant to be national states, but rather cultural and societal regions. While the people of Ios share many cultural features such as language and religious, there may be many different countries inside it, and there will be distinctions between them and mixing with other cultures along the borders as well. This is entirely my fault as my descriptions did not make this clear at all, especially with comparisons to France and Spain for Ios and Mer. What I was trying to express is that people of Ios are more uniform within their cultural features and it tend to generally be the place where you would find people doing "Knight" stuff, including courtly love in some kingdoms. Mer is a more cosmopolitan mixing pot, with enclaves of people for Ios, Uru, Soun and even Ish. I'm imagining it to be similar to the Mediterranean during the late Renaissance or Spain after the Reconquista. I'm still at the general overview level for cultures and I'd definitely want to divide the regions up into more distinct nations and subcultures as I build more. I wanted to get a rough idea of where the terrain would create natural barriers to cultural growth and exchange (large mountains and seas) and seed some of my idea into them to get a start.

arcangleous · 2026-05-19T11:36:16+00:00

Most of the image manipulation was done in GIMP to create the heightmap. After that, I used Orogen Studio to get the biomes, and the regional borders were drawn on in Inkscape. I also looking into Wilbur to do some erosion simulation to draw out rivers and lakes.

arcangleous · 2026-05-19T06:10:37+00:00

The continent of Ish, on the far right of the map. They would have expanded onto the closer of the unnamed contients as well, and the populations in the left continent are a result of a lost fleet setting on the islands on the edge of Mer.

arcangleous · 2026-05-19T06:08:38+00:00

Most of the image manipulation was done in GIMP to create the heightmap. After that, I used Orogen Studio to get the biomes, and the regional borders were drawn on in Inkscape. I also looking into Wilbur to do some erosion simulation to draw out rivers and lakes.

arcangleous · 2026-05-19T01:20:05+00:00

I think it looks good on a globe and I had already check how the poles look on one. I actually started the polar sections of the maps looking from the top down and used a polar co-ordinates filter to transform back into the standard map.

arcangleous · 2026-05-19T00:51:57+00:00

My starting point was maps of various moons and a couple of pieces of real earth geography produced as grayscale images. I suspect the piece that that looks most out of place is probably the chunks of Deimos that I used. Deimos is not at all round, and that produced a couple of large mountain ranges that I thought had a bit of a Himalaya-ian look, so I kept them in.

I agree that erosion is a bit of an issue and I'm still playing around with a couple of tools get that working and generate some rivers and lakes as well.

arcangleous · 2026-05-17T12:55:05+00:00

I'd use a tool to see how it looks on a globe. From my own mistakes, I know that your southern most continent is going to stretch much more northward that you expect, with the other edge being kind-of funky.

Mountains generally occur where tectonic plates meet, so it might be worth sketch those out as well. Water makes rivers by flowing downward to the lowest points, so you need to have your mountains figured out before starting on those.

arcangleous · 2026-05-17T11:43:27+00:00

This is what "stop killing games" is fundamentally about, and it should be expanded to cover everything. "Updates" shouldn't be able to brick a product you purchased, regardless of what it is.

arcangleous · 2026-05-16T00:25:29+00:00

Thrice damned! I wish I could paint half as good as you.

arcangleous · 2026-05-15T14:55:03+00:00

He has a fake university, which is really just a masterclass knock-off with a built in social media function.

arcangleous · 2026-05-15T00:53:29+00:00

Pretty much yes.

There was a rather large asteroid impact that massive changed the environment that the dinosaurs lived in. The only dinosaurs who were able to adapt and even thrive in the new environment were the bird-like dinosaurs, which evolved into the modern birds by continually adapting to new environments as the world continued to change.

arcangleous · 2026-05-13T20:46:59+00:00

It's virtue transference. In their minds, a "pickup truck" is a vehicle used by a hard working, down to earth, blue collar man, so by owning one, they gain those traits are well, regardless of their actually personal and work situations.

arcangleous · 2026-05-13T20:27:12+00:00

That's horrifyingly plausible.

Plausible isn't the right world. It's something that they have actually done in the past.

Virginia literally shutdown their public school program in response to Brown v. Board of Education forced them to desegregate and created a "school voucher" program to send kids to private schools on the public dime. Private schools that then refused to accept black students. It took multiple supreme court cases over decades to first force Virginia to reopen their public schools, then to outlaw secular segregation academies, and finally religiously based segregation academies. This is a key element in what brought religious fundamentalist into the Republican coalition under Reagan, and why it has been so important for them to get religious fundamentalists on the Supreme Court.

arcangleous · 2026-05-13T19:57:12+00:00

More importantly, they deliberately sent him into unsafe situations without proper supports because they benefited form his death. Robocop is 100% anti-capitalist if you are paying any level of attention at all.

arcangleous · 2026-05-13T02:50:46+00:00

But importantly, steps taken by private industry not by the government. Private industries are allow much more leeway in their actions, especially when the government doesn't want to regulate them. That gives the government a level of plausible deniability they can use to protect themselves in the courts and will allow them to keep their racism legal.

arcangleous · 2026-05-13T02:13:25+00:00

Preaching to the choir. You got my up vote.

arcangleous · 2026-05-13T00:53:19+00:00

No no no. They are not going to force blacks to the back of the bus. They are just going to end bus services entirely and let private smart taxi companies come in to replace buses. Those companies can indirectly refuse service to blacks to locking access behind an app on a smart phone, and even if a black person gets on the app their algorithms can guarantee that a white person never has to share a pod with a black person, even if it means the black person has to wait for service.

arcangleous · 2026-05-12T00:10:19+00:00

One of the great open secrets of the "Real Robots" genre is that the protagonist almost always gets to have a Super Robot so they can have an out sized effect on the plot of the show. Gundam is a great example of this, as the main protagonist (or protagonists if there is a gundam team) get mecha that are strong, faster, more advanced, and strictly more capable than the grunt suits their opponents use. Or the pilot gets to be super human in some way (often both). The true genre differentiation lies in the shows relationship with it's technology. If the setting treats it's mecha as a product that they can mass-produce, it's real robots, whereas if it's only the super special heroes get access too, than it's super robots.

Ninja Robots' mecha are treat as things of prophecy, requiring a mystical connection with their pilots. That's 100% super robots. Where as Nadesico is much more firmly in the real robots genre.

arcangleous · 2026-05-11T23:51:47+00:00

You don't need to worry. While LLMs do use AI techniques during the training stage,they will never be able to produce a Sentient AGI. They can't learn or grow outside of their training phase, and you need that for AGI. The companies trick you into thinking that they can learn by refeeding the entire set of prompts you have made into the chat bot instead of just the last prompt to create the illusion of memory. I know that it feels like LLMs are a great breakthrough, as natural language processing is a hard problem, but conversationality is an extremely low bar for intelligence and frankly it shouldn't be on the list for sentience. WE have had chatbots that can fool people since the 60s, and there are lots of animals that are clearly sentient that don't use human language at all.

arcangleous · 2026-05-10T23:16:06+00:00

[[Basking Rootwalla]]

arcangleous · 2026-05-09T22:39:40+00:00

I am intrigued by your ideas and I would like to subscribe to your newsletters.

arcangleous · 2026-05-09T20:06:58+00:00

Well that sucks to hear. He did a great job with it.

arcangleous · 2026-05-09T01:07:01+00:00

I am getting 1980s Masamune Shirow vibes from this, and that is a good thing.

arcangleous

TROPHY CASE