Worldbuilding

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I'm especially curious in the case of fantasy settings. I'm admittedly not super well read in the genre, I know about the Ways from the Wheel of Time series[^1] , and I'm sure D&D has its fair share of fast travel mechanics.

Anyway, in my case I use mass routers. Rather than a dry lore dump here's a slightly less dry lore dump in story form!

spoilerHe glanced nadirward through the observation window at the green and blue surface of the planet. A river, coruscating in Focus's rays, wound through the verdant jungle passing below. It was THE river, the measure to which all other rivers were compared. It was so old that it didn't even have a name. Every other river on Yih, and every watercourse wrought on other celestial bodies by pioneers in the intervening millennia, was, after peeling away one hundred thousand years of sound changes and semantic drift, named after this river.

But he had seen this sight countless times, and it failed to put his mind at ease. He spun the metal prayer ring on his writing claw, feeling each of the twelve teeth pass under the pad of his outer thumb. The ring had belonged to one of his sires, who had often handed the shiny trinket to him to amuse himself with when he was barely a pup. It had been years since he had prayed it, not until this morning just before being shriven. It had been years since he was last shriven, too. He'd be the first to say he wasn't the most pious Wayfarer, but there was a real possibility, however infinitesimal, that today his life would come to a messy end, and he wanted to have a clean conscience if it came to that.

He turned to face the cause of his anxiety. Attached to a bulkhead opposite the window was a cylindrical machine barely larger than a suspension capsule, with a bore just large enough to fit a single yinrih, and maybe a satchel if the yinrih in question was particularly svelte. He floated over and looked through the bore. It was like he was staring down the business end of a railgun.

«You're going to be fine, Hearthfire.» He tried to reassure himself. «Nothing's going to happen. We did gross upon gross of tests. Equator to pole, Low orbit to surface, surface to moon, even interplanetary hops, all the way from Hearthside to Moonlitter. Inert object tests, live tests, and all the tree-dwellers we sent came out perfect.»

«Except Moonbeam.» nagged a tiny voice in the back of his brain.

«Poor Moonbeam. I know you're not supposed to name them. Makes it harder when... That happens.» The little tree-dweller went in fine, but the impulse buffer on the egress router failed as she dropped back into realspace on the surface, retaining all the momentum from the ingress router in orbit. In the span of a temporal quantum she ceased to be biology and turned into physics, ending up impacting the opposite wall at 20 times the speed of sound. The barrier was built to take it, but her poor body wasn't. She ended up a maroon smear on the wall.

«Time to get strapped in.» said a sandy-furred engineer floating next to the mass router.

He took a deep breath and floated into the bore, slipping his forelegs into the harness, then his hind legs, then his tail, and finally his head.

A voice came through the earpiece around his left ear. «Hearthfire, this is Morningstar. Everything's up and up down here.» It was the same cleric that had given him absolution this morning. «Just for review, you're being routed through an intermediate router on the surface before egressing at the antipodes. The impulse buffer is good on both the intermediate and the egress, in case a packet gets dropped along the way.»

«Ingress and egress buffers are synced.» Said the sandy-furred engineer.

«Acolyte, begin the countdown. May The Light illuminate your way, Hearthfire.» Said Morningstar.

«Twelve...» The sandy-furred engineer began solemnly sounding off the numbers.

«Eleven...» In a matter of seconds, a thin sheath of realspace containing Hearthfire's body would be shunted into the Underlay.

«Ten...» This realspace bubble would be encapsulated into billions of discrete packets.

«Nine...» From the perspective of a hypothetical observer embedded in the Underlay, these packets would appear discontiguous, and could take separate paths to reach the same destination.

«Eight...» But from the perspective of an observer contained within one of these packets, the entire space would still be contiguous.

«Seven...» Blood would still flow, and nerve impulses would still travel uninterrupted.

«Six...» Or they would if the traversal through the Underlay weren't instantaneous.

«Five...» Hearthfire's stream of consciousness would not be broken.

«Four...» There would be no ontological question that what emerged from the egress router was the same Hearthfire that entered the ingress router.

«Three...» These packets would hop instantaneously through an intermediate router directly below at the surface.

«Two...» This router would, in mere nanoseconds, direct the flow of packets to an egress router at the antipodes.

«One...» The egress router would absorb all the momentum that Hearthfire had while in orbit before shunting him back into realspace. Should the intermediate router drop a single packet, the whole flow containing Hearthfire's mass would be shunted harmlessly back into realspace at that router, provided it, too, absorbed his momentum correctly.

«Zero.» Hearthfire felt a tingling sensation, as though his whole body had fallen asleep. The feeling lasted but a fraction of a second, then he felt the weight of his body pulling him down. He had made it. In less than the blink of an eye, he had gone from a space station in low orbit over Yih to a lab on the surface on the opposite side of the planet. Hearthfire was the first yinrih to traverse a mass router network, and he had done it without a hitch.

This was going to change everything.

[^1]: fun fact: the Ways inspired the Nether from Minecraft insofar as one step in one dimension is multiplied in the overworld

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What are some interesting ailments you've invented? Probably with spoilers for the grosser details.

I have a couple. The first is my take on vampires.

VampirismVampirism in Ortharen is caused by a parasite called Esor crorum, commonly known as dracula (singular draculum). They spread through contact with blood and can infect most animals.

Dracula stop you from producing red blood cells but allows you to use blood you ingest, so if you don't drink the blood of unafflicted creatures you'll suffocate without a way to move oxygen around your body. Most blood will work for most vampires, but blood of your species and a compatible blood type works best.

This condition also stops you producing melanin and makes you more sensitive to bright lights, but that's less important than the blood thing.

Vampires are very resilient to other diseases because dracula will ruthlessly attack any other bugs you might catch. But not stuff you already had when you became a vampire, probably because it recognizes those as part of your body.

A living vampire can kill their dracula by eating lots of alliums with other immune boosting foods, but they still won't be able to produce new red blood cells and they'll need regular transfusions or they'll suffocate and die.

Then there's one about eyes.

SnolpirsiThis one is mostly like a common cold, but if you leave your eyes open for too long they'll crust over. If that happens and then you blink, they'll shatter and you'll go blind. You can usually recover from this with eye drops, but most people prefer to avoid having to deal with that and wear blindfolds to make sure their eyes stay shut.

Snolpirsi is common enough that plenty of people learn tactile writing systems so they have something to do while they wait to feel better.

The idea for this one comes from how i thought blinking worked when i was little. I don't remember why i thought that could happen.

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Got any interesting funerary rites in your setting?

Yinrih do not bury their dead. They usually dissolve the soft tissue and put the bones on display, usually in a lighthouse (house of worship) or other publicly important location such as a school, government building, library, etc.

Some professions or religious communities have unique traditions on top of this. Research monks use their dead in impact and ballistic testing. Claravian orders of healers use their bodies for teaching medicine to novice healers.

Since healers traditionally shed their fur for hygiene purposes, they are unique among yinrih in that they wear clothes when not working in order to retain heat and block sun exposure. Old and venerable healers who have retired, regrown their fur, and died, will have their pelts made into a hame, a ceremonial cloak given to other healers as a badge of honor.

The practice of displaying the bones of the dead causes a cross-cultural misunderstanding after the yinrih are given a bunch of human cadavers to study. The yinrih healers want to do right by their new human friends by showing their remains proper respect, which they do by building a library to hold all the new medical knowledge gained by studying those cadavers, and encrust the facade with the skulls of said cadavers. Needless to say, a tower of human skulls is not what most humans expect to see when they visit the house of friendship.

Incidentally, I based this practice on ossuary chapels such as the Capuchin crypt, and only much later realized that the yinrih are space doggos what build stuff outta bones.

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Yinrih don't use nukes, as they never bothered to weaponize them before discovering how to yeet things at significant fractions of the speed of light.

I've mentioned retribution fields before, which are force fields that absorb the kinetic energy of projectiles and then fire that energy back at the attacker. They were invented to counter...

...Quasiluminal munitions (Commonthroat gkg rDFrlmqrLPq or more often known by the military slang term gkrdfg, a clipped and reduced form of the above) are projectiles that travel at relativistic speeds and whose destructive power comes solely from their kinetic energy rather than a incendiary or nuclear payload.

Force projectors are used at shorter ranges. As the name implies they project force at a distance. As weapons you mostly see them on paw gauntlets as part of powered armor. By thrusting the palm forward a force extends outward beyond the reach of the attacker's foreleg, sort of a long-distance punch. They have scalong issues though. they convert surrounding oxygen to ozone, and can't be operated in atmosphere beyond a certain size for reasons I have yet to figure out.

Since yinrih are quadrupeds they can't practically use human guns. Modern soldiers use back mounted drone capsules that hover nearby and fire at enemies, similar to the Option power-up from Gradius. Older firearms are saddle-mounted and sit on the back and have a tail-actuated trigger.

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Original question by @mo_lave@reddthat.com

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Original question by @mo_lave@reddthat.com

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Steadtree fruit

This is a steadtree fruit along with a drinking bowl filled with steadtree fruit juice. The fruit has a bluish-purple skin with a vivid violet sheen, and its flesh is an extremely saturated shade of blue.

Steadtrees were the yinrih's primary shelter when they achieved sapience, and the fruit formed a significant part of their diet. It's highly symbolic across most yinrih cultures, especially within the Bright Way. The fruit is offered to guests after liturgies, regardless of creed, and the juice, usually fermented, is drunk during fasts, when Wayfarers are expected to abstain from solid foods.

Humans find it to be extremely sour, comparing a single bite to eating an entire bag of warhead candies.

Wind Fruit

This is a wind fruit. It is green with four fleshy lobes. It contains a sugar that is rapidly fermented by the yinrih's gut flora into alcohol. A single fruit is enough to get a yinrih drunk. Gas is a byproduct of the fermentation process, lending the fruit its name.

The fruits appearance and effects on the vulpithecine body have made it a frequent source of analogy. Politicians are frequent targets for such analogies due to duplicity (compared to the fruits many facets) lack of awareness or intelligence (alluding to the fruit's intoxicating effect) and tendency to make longwinded boring speeches (referring to the fruit's gassy byproduct).

Redfruit

This is a red fruit (Commonthroat qfBqg /huff, early falling weakening whine, huff, short low weak growl/). Like many words for fruits, the word qfBqg also doubles as the word for the corresponding color.

There are two species of tree that bear nearly identical fruits. One is a harmless treat designed to lure seed dispersers including yinrih and their tree dweller cousins. The other is fatally poisonous and mimics the appearance of the first species. The toxin is potent enough to kill even larger animals like yinrih in mere minutes. The animal dies before it can leave the vicinity of the tree, dropping to the ground so the tree can be nourished by its decomposing corpse.

Over time, the color red became associated with risk. Risk then morphed into bad luck, and that's why yinrih with red fur are considered unlucky.

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Cosmology (i.imgur.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by early_riser@lemmy.radio to c/worldbuilding@lemmy.world
 
 

According to the Bright Way, there is a symmetry between epistemology and cosmology. The realm of the Known is the set of all things that are known. This epistemological concept corresponds to the noosphere (AKA the mind sea), which is the sum total of a sapient species' thoughts, experiences, ideas, and communications, as well as their effect on the world.

The Realm of the Knowable corresponds to the physical universe. Things and events in this realm can (at least theoretically) be grasped by mortal minds, though certain things may be beyond the ken of a particular species on account of its neurology and sensory system, in the same way you probably couldn't explain nuclear physics to a chimp. The Bright Way seeks out other sophonts in part to fill hitherto unnoticed gaps in the yinrih's knowledge, and for the yinrih to offer the same in kind.

However, there are things that lay outside the Realm of the Knowable, beyond the grasp of any mortal mind, regardless of how it is organized. This is the Realm of the Unknowable, or the Empyrean. This is where the souls of the blessed dwell in the beatific vision of the Uncreated Light. Faith, to trust in the unseen, bridges the Realm of the Knowable and the Realm of the Unknowable. Heaven is thus conceived of as being "outside" and the physical universe as "inside".

Wayfarers refer to the Empyrean as cBqDFp the Great Outside, and to the physical universe as rjGJfdMr sMlr This dear little Creation.

Here is what First Contact looks like from an epistemological perspective, the noospheres of humanity and vulpithecinity uniting as one.

What precisely this union consists in is a matter of debate in Claravian circles. It could be as simple as forming friendships between individuals of either species, or it could be as concrete and straightforward as physically uniting the two species' respective Internets, as is held by the Farspeakers.


Since I don't want to double post, here's a bonus lore dump:

The stargazer's prayer is a simple prayer taught to pups. It is, as you probably guess, said at night while gazing up into the stars. Below is an English translation.

I see the stars in dark of night
shining down with holy light.

keeping sophonts safe and warm
whatever be their shape and form.

When their eyes look to the sky
Do they see my star and I?

Do they chant this little verse,
O Maker of the universe?

One day soon before too long,
may we hear their joyful song.

May all our minds and all our might
reflect the Uncreated Light.

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Author: @IndigoGollum@lemmy.world

First, a little background about my world. I like to think of it as an inside-out planet. A vast open space surrounded by earth on all sides, with a sun in the middle and everything interesting in the world on the inner surface. Much like Pryan from the Death Gate Cycle books, which inspired this shape.

The sun, Sore, is a while hole with a gravitational push. It generates light and heat, and stops the planet from collapsing in on itself.

Outside of the world is, as far as anyone knows, a lot of rock and not much else. But some time ago (no idea when, my notes aren't dated) i wondered, if this place is an inside-out planet, could there be other planets? I don't see why there couldn't be.

Means of travel between these planets would have to be pretty different from normal space travel. Basic movement requires that you either break up the ground in front of you and move it behind your ship, or somehow lower the pressure around your ship enough to liquify rock without melting it to (or and) your ship, and let it slide past you (if i'm not totally misunderstanding phase transitions).

You can't see through solid rock like you can through the vacuum of space, so you need snar (sonic navigation and ranging) to make sure you don't hit another ship or something like the bottom of an ocean.

Gravity would grow weaker as you get further from a planet, then stronger from a different direction as you approach another. You need to be able to rotate the ship so the cabin isn't suddenly upside-down, while keeping whatever digging implements are at the font of your ship facing the right way.

Ports for these ships would have to have snar beacons that ships could listen for, but these signals would have to be able to be heard over a long distance and not stop ships from hearing each other.

And of course, ships need to be able to move over land or in water, because the end and beginning of long trips won't be through solid stone.

While writing this, i wondered for the first time why people would bother. I'm sure the planets are quite far apart, and you can only safely move so fast when your awareness of the things around your ship is so limited. Imagine trying to drive around at race car speeds at night with weak headlights. Space stations, underground areas big enough to seem like they're above ground aside from the lack of sunlight, could exist, but you probably wouldn't want people drilling tunnels around such a place. I certainly wouldn't want to spend my life designing a small artificial world only to have the sky collapse on it and ruin everything. Trying to travel to another planet for the sake of finding other life sounds worthwhile to me, but i don't see any way to detect these other planets at great range. You'd have to set off it an arbitrary direction and hope you hit something good soon.

So while my world could have space travel (for the closest thing to outer space it has), i'm not sure it realistically should. Maybe a similarly "inside-out" universe could have travel between worlds, but i don't see it working for me.

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The Bright Way is not considered to have a single founder. The faith is said to have been revealed to the entire newly sapient yinrih species in an event called the Theophany. It is here, while the yinrih were still hunting with crudely knapped flint paw axes and storing edible seeds in nothing more than holes in the ground, where they received the Great Commandment to seek out other sophonts among the stars. And it is thanks to their monomaniacal pursuit of this Great Commandment that the yinrih went from the paleolithic to orbital flight in a mere 5 millennia.

Pictured above is a depiction of what was seen during the Theophany. It is an orb of light with a fringe of shifting hues, hanging in a part of the sky where the sun did not travel. Despite occurring at midday, the rest of the sky was dark as night and the stars shone unusually bright.

Over time, depictions of this vision evolved into the star and gear used as the Bright Way's usual symbol. The gear evolving from the chromatic fringe around the orb. There is considerable debate inside and outside the Bright Way as to what this glowing orb was. The majority view in Claravian circles is that it was a breach between the realm of the knowable (the physical universe) and the realm of the unknowable (the Empyrean). While not explicitly endorsed by the magisterium, a common assumption is that the light was in fact the Uncreated Light itself, or more accurately, the closest a mortal mind could get to perceiving the Light's inapproachable glory.

If you ask secular historians, especially within Partisan Territory, it was an instance of mass hysteria, possibly having to do with the yinrih's newly sapient brains. But there are multiple accounts of the Theophany that are reasonably congruent with one another that were penned (clawed?) far away from one another, with no time for one group to have been influenced by another.

Others think it was a hallucination brought on by tainted water or a gas seep that collected along the river valley. A disaster of this magnitude would surely have resulted in other negative effects, like dead animals or sick pups, or at least lingering issues with adults that would have been documented. The fact that this is not the case, especially given the strong taboo against intoxication, makes this idea hard to square with what is known.

Perhaps it was something akin to an aurora, but at that time of year? at that time of day? on that part of Yih? localized entirely within a single discreet orb? Highly unlikely. It also doesn't explain the darkened sky.

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In another post I mentioned the Mindseekers, which was a sect that sought to create artificial sophonts rather than seek other minds among the stars. As they began experimenting with electronic computers, they settled on balanced ternary as the number system of choice rather than binary. This choice was based on some vagaries of yinrih neurology they sought to emulate.

Balanced ternary has three digits, -1, 0, and +1. You can represent any signed integer with these three digits alone. The sign of the number is the sign of the highest-order digit. Here are a few examples using T as -1:

TT = -1*3^1-1*3^0 = -3-1 = -4
1T = 1*3^1-1*3^0 = 3-1 = 2
10 = 1*3^1 + 0*3^0 = 3

You can reverse the sign of the number just by flipping +1's to -1's and vice versa.

11 = 1*3^1+1*3^0 = 3+1 = 4
T1 = -1*3^1+1*3^0 = -3+1 = -2
T0 = -1*3^1+0*3^0 = -3

For reasons unknown, perhaps aesthetics, perhaps for some deeper spiritual reason, the Mindseekers often represented balanced ternary numbers using two-dimensional paths. The rules for drawing such a path are simple.

  1. Pick a starting point
  2. Draw a line in any of the four cardinal directions.
  3. You may turn 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise, drawing a dot at each turn.
  4. You may also go straight ahead, drawing a dot dividing a line segment.
  5. You may not make a 180 degree turn, you must make two consecutive 90 degree turns.

"But how does this represent balanced ternary numbers?" I hear you cry. Well, a counterclockwise turn represents a +1, a clockwise turn -1, and a straight is 0. The number is big endian, meaning the first turn is the highest-order digit, the second is the second-highest, etc. Neither initial starting direction nor line length are significant, so those choices can be left to aesthetics or other constraints.

This method has the pleasantly symmetrical property that mirroring the path horizontally results in an integer of the opposite sign.

Mindseekers would often hide such paths in odd places, like the brickwork on the sides of buildings, embedded in the abstract pattern of a tapestry, and so on. It's thought that certain numbers held symbolic value.

These paths became popular as a way to hide messages in plain sight even long after the Mindseekers faded into obscurity.

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This is a sketch of a typical vulpithecine public restroom.

  1. The doorway is blocked by a curtain. Yinrih enter by pushing the cloth aside with the muzzle. Most rooms that don't need strict access control or environmental protection use such curtains.
  2. A washing pool is accessible near the entrance. It's a shallow basin a few inches deep. The water is vigorously circulated and filtered. Yinrih wash all four paws as well as the tail after using the restroom. There is a coarse bristly floor mat used to scrape dirt from under the claws and from between the paw pads.
  3. The washing pool sits in the "clean" area of the restroom. The "dirty" area where the toilets are is usually set off by a lip in the floor or a change in tile texture. Hygiene dictates that you enter the washing pool directly from the dirty area before setting paw in the clean area again.
  4. The floor is often tiled. How something feels under paw is just as important to a room's style as how it looks. Tiles often alternate between different textures or even different thermal conductivities to achieve a particular tactile aesthetic.
  5. There are almost always perches in the clean area of the restroom. Yinrih tend to be chatty while doing their business, and in some cultures it's considered polite to accompany a friend or coworker to the restroom even if you don't have to go yourself.
  6. The toilets proper are flush with the surrounding floor. The user backs into the stall. There is a ring of rough tile around the rim to help people from stepping in the toilet[^1]. Both male and female yinrih eliminate via a cloaca and stand with the rear paws on either side of the bowl with the tail resting across the back. Toilet paper, usually soaked in a mild disinfectant like wet wipes, is available in dispensers above the toilet. The paper is manipulated by the tail.
  7. There are still partitions affording a modicum of privacy. Just because bathrooms are more social than on Earth doesn't mean people appreciate watching others doing their business, just like many human cultures regard yawning or chewing with the mouth open to be rude or gross. So you can't drop a deuce in the middle of the street and not expect to get a citation. The partitions are low enough to reveal a yinrih's head.
  8. The entire stall is flushed after use. The stall floor slopes into the latrine. There is a grate across the entrance that releases a mild mix of water and bleach to both flush the toilet and sanitize the floor.

Needless to say, this is not conducive to human use. If human-specific facilities are not available, the polite thing to do is yield the entire bathroom to a human in need to use privately.

[^1]: The Commonthroat expression P rlpqN sMp, to step in the toilet means to make a stupid mistake, especially despite being warned beforehand. The more vulgar expression bc g rnqg rp qcf to piss on one's own [rear] paws carries a similar meaning.

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Posting this here since the conlanging comms seem pretty inactive. I FINALLY solved a problem with my Commonthroat lexicon. I was using a verbose pronunciation scheme describing consonants and vowels one by one with whole words. This caused false positives in search results when searching for terms containing the words used in this verbose pronunciation scheme like "weak" or "low".

In the old system, the vowel b would be given a pronunciation of "short low weak whine". This made it impossible to find words meaning "short" or "low" etc, since they appeared in so many entries.

When I started working on Outlander, another yinrih language, I came up with a universal phonetic notation that would cover the whole gamut of vulpithecine speech sounds that I call the YPA (Yinrih Phonetic Alphabet). It's a bit of a misnomer since it's not really an alphabet, just a more compact way of describing pronunciations.

In YPA, b is rendered "1111", which won't conflict with any definitions.

While the Outlander lexicon has used YPA from the outset, I wasn't sure whether I could update the pronunciations in my Commonthroat lexicon to the new system. But I unexpectedly had a large amount of free time today, so I spent 5 hours straight cobbling together a Python script to replace the old pronunciations with new ones.

So here is the fruit of my labor: https://lonelygalaxy.neocities.org/commonthroat

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Original question by: @mo_lave@reddthat.com

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If a conworlding project persists long enough, I'm sure we've all second-guessed some aspect of our worlds.

I've learned to incorporate my own second thoughts into the universe itself. Don't like how I translated something into English? OK, it was a mistranslation that has now become too ingrained to change. Not sure how to portray a particular religious sect? Now there are two different denominations of that sect. Uncomfortable with how I characterized a controversial historical figure? OK, now there's a historical revisionist movement that seeks to paint him in a different light. Have some idea I like that really doesn’t fit the lore? Now it’s an in-universe urban legend/TV show.

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How do you document your worldbuilding? What tools do you use? How do you organize your ideas?

Since the inception of my current conworld I have been using Obsidian. It's great for non-linear note taking. The downside is that the result is less shareable (unless you pay for sync).

I've always wanted to create a publicly viewable wiki. I LOVE digging through fan wikis, even for franchises I'm otherwise unattached to. All my knowledge of D&D and WH40K comes from walking through various fan wikis.

To that end, I've been exploring other options. Mediawiki seems to be the gold standard since it's what Wikipedia uses. However, its designed with a lot of user management and permissions features that work well for a massive user base, but are less relevant to someone who wants a non-linear read-only browseable repository of info.

Dokuwiki looks like a popular alternative. No database to manage, though the fact that a lot of expected features like tags and moving pages have been relegated to 3rd party plugins isn't great. The more plugins, the harder patch management becomes.

Tiddlywiki so far looks the most promising. It assumes only one user is editing pages, so no user permissions to manage. It also runs as a single monolithic HTML file, which has upsides and downsides, but that means I can upload that single file to a simple free web host like Neocities. If the wiki gets very large I anticipate performance issues, as the entire wiki is sent when the page is requested and everything runs client side, so the more I add the worse it will feel. But it's very stable, has been around almost as long as Wikipedia itself, and unlike Obsidian is open source.

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For instance, a species with little to no navigable oceans or a fully aquatic species may find it difficult to develop the cultural skills necessary to run a ship because there isn't a tradition of operating a ship the same way there is for humans.

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It's common in fantasy and sci-fi to have multiple distinct sapient species (races). How did all of yours come about and survive to the present day without any one species becoming dominant while the rest went the way of archaic humans?

My world doesn't have any moon or stars, so keeping track of seasons is a lot harder. That makes agriculture really hard, so populations are only as big as can be supported by hunting, fishing, and gathering. This means everyone had more time to evolve and develop sapience and cultures. Still, that's only 5 people species for me, one of which is extinct and another of which is a kind of plant.

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The attack started between 05:35 and 05:40 CDT yesterday, when the user count jumped from 387 to 909. The attack lasted until around 16:05 CDT (4 PM), when the user count dropped from 787 to 53. For the duration of the attack the user count hovered around 2000, with a maximum of 2591 users at 08:35.

When the attack concluded, I and others were unable to log in, getting a password incorrect error. I received no email notifications after being PMed, and attempts to create new accounts resulted in a blank screen. Some users were still logged in and able to post, but attempts to change passwords were unsuccessful.

The site is back up, but I'd update your passwords.

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Greetings once again friends! This is your mayor, Liam Deamhany, here to talk about the great strides our industrious city made in serving as a shipping partner. Since the early 1900s Diston has had two busting shipping ports on our shores. First was the Coposa Harbor founded at our city’s founding. Coposa Harbor has served as a major shipping and in the 1920s as an immigration channel for our great country. While it started life as a family-owned business it was transfer to the stewardship during WWII to allow for quick and efficient deployment of the war effort. Affectionately known as the “South Docks” by us natives, it still serves as a port for goods coming on shore to this day. Second, Tsuris International Harbor came during WWII and was the go-to port for the citizenry of Diston to send and receive goods in a way that would not choke up the logistical needs of the war effort. In conjunction with Diston’s own Estrie Family (who still manage the harbor to this day) to help continue to allow immigrants and refugees fleeing Europe during the early days of the war. This harbor has become known as the North Dock in reference to Coposa Harbor. And finally, we have our most recent harbor; Lobisomem International Harbor. Finished in 2010, this state-of-the-art harbor has taken the “center stage” for the shipping and logistical needs of Diston and the state overall. This harbor sees billions of dollars of commerce and trade cross into and out of our great city. it is a primary employer of a large portion of your friends and neighbors. Often referred to as the “Central Docks” it sits between or two legacy harbors. I hope you have enjoyed this brief overview of some of the amazing businesses and services that our great city has to offer. We look forward to working with you. And remeber; If you lived here, you'd already be home.


http//;hunter-net.net/htr/diston/this-frecking-city Subject: Docks To:Hunterlist/Diston/All From:KindSoul803 Guys, these docks are a rat's nest. In all meanings of the word. The Lucient Company has their hand in all three. They are either the new parent company for the subcompanies that own and operate these harbors or they are the controlling partner on the board of directors for the Central Docks. Everything comes through these docks. People, drugs, guns, creatures. Heck, I’m sure that whackjob who blew up his trailer trying to take out all of those Wolves imported his Tannerite through one of them. I wish I could give you guys better info. But all of them are dirty, and all of them are compromised.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by early_riser@lemmy.radio to c/worldbuilding@lemmy.world
 
 

Hopefully nobody minds my spamming. Here's another story. As with the last one, alien speech is indicated with Italian quotes («»).

EDIT: classic typo in the title. Thankfully Lemmy lets you update post titles, unlike Reddit.

spoilerFr. Shaheen took a drag of his cigarrette as he stared up at the night sky. A few stars were just bright enough to shine through the gray haze cast by the town street lights.

Just at the edge of the trailer's porch light sat an old foundation where a sizeable rectory once stood. It had been far too large for a single resident, so he had it torn down and was now living in a much more modest mobile home. At one point a youth center was planned to take its place, but the number of heads devoid of gray hairs that could be found in the pews of Our Lady of the Cedars could be counted on both hands.

Rare was the night where the priest couldn't be found puffing away in front of his trailer. Restful nights were few and far between. Maybe his smoking habit was to blame. His new housemate did comment frequently on his snoring, loud enough to be heard from the other end of the house.

That new housemate was awkwardly lying on the bench across from him, a haphazard jumble of limbs. He was covered wet nose to prehensile tail in black and white fur. He broke the silence with a cough. "Why you cleric breathe that smoke stick?" came a tinny robotic voice from somewhere in the tangle of legs. "That smoke make cough. Smell bad bad." While the little quadruped's English was improving by the day. The intonation was off, with stressed syllables appearing everywhere but where they should.

"We all have our vices," sighed Fr. Shaheen. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

"You cleric friend, ask ask."

"Why'd Iris insist on you staying with me?"

After a long pause, "She iris think you human maybe follow Light more good than us yinrih. Maybe again you cleric make me friend believe."

"I think Dr. Staples has been giving you guys the wrong idea about humanity."

"He doctor show us how strong human, how fast human. Show us beautiful arts. Show us human help other and not think self."

"Yeah, that's what we aspire to be," grunted Fr. Shaheen as he rose to his feet.

"Where you cleric go?" asked the creature as he oozed down from the bench and planted his hexadactyl paws on the wooden porch.

"Come on. We're going to get more cancer sticks." The priest walked to a dust-caked pickup truck parked next to the trailer. After a deep bowing stretch the alien trotted behind him.

"Turn off that synthesizer," said the priest as he turned the ignition. "I need to work on my Commonthroat comprehension."

The alien complied, slipping the small chording keyer from his wrist and placing it in a pocketed band around his right foreleg. His real voice came in quiet melodic whines and growls, as though a dog were trying to speak Mandarin in its sleep. The priest had to strain to discern the subtle shifts in volume that were just as meaningful as the underlying sound.

«When are you going to give me a human name?» the alien grunted.

"Eh? Don't you have a perfectly good Commonthroat name? ring...light, isn't it? So like moonlight, but from a ring around your home planet?"

«Yeah, but I want a name humans can pronounce.»

"What's wrong with translating your name as is?"

«This planet doesn't have a ring, and none of you humans have been on a planet that does. I feel like the name falls flat. I want my name to mean something to those around me, not just to the five other yinrih who are with me.»

After a long pause, "Back there before we left, you said you didn't believe anymore."

The alien hesitated, then tilted his muzzle up, a rough equivalent to an affirmative nod. «I was a devout pup. I went to liturgies daily, poured over hagiographies, could quote scripture as easy as breathing. Faith helped me back then. I was...am--» The next few words were lost on the priest.

"Maybe rephrase that last part, Those are some new words for me."

«Well... I'm not sure if you humans experience this, but some of us have something wrong in our brains, a condition that keeps us from feeling happy. I have that condition.»

"Depression," said the priest. "We've got that over here alright. I struggle with depression, too. A lot of humans do. My faith keeps me afloat. Sounds like it helped you, too. But what happened?"

«I always needed something solid I could stand on, something tangible that vindicated my faith. Through my puppyhood I thought I had that something, but I turned out to be wrong.»

"What was that something?"

«Persistence,» said the alien. «For a hundred thousand years the Bright Way persisted. It survived threats from without and from within. It managed to survive so long despite the often profound stupidity of its leaders. I thought only a divine mandate could keep such a mess from foundering.»

"And...?"

«It was a lot of little things. I noticed other Wayfarers could be just as rude and hateful as anyone else, and that made me wonder if the Bright Way is no better than any other group of people, is it really special? Surely the organization that claims to be the bastion of truth and virtue should be BETTER, right? Not just not any worse.

«But the tipping point was when the High Hearthkeeper tried to shutter the missionaries, the whole purpose for the Bright Way's existence, you know? 'Go, dearest little ones, spread your light to the stars, and ye shall become brighter yourselves.' That's the Great Commandment. That's our most sacred precept, that we're not alone in the universe, that we should seek out the Light's other creatures among the stars. So what? We're just going to abandon it now? Than what are we? What is our reason for being?

«That's when it hit me. If our own leader doesn't care, why should I?»

"You sacrificed a lot. It took you 250 years to get here, and it'll be at least that long before you see others of your kind again. If you think this mission from God, this Great Commandment, of yours is just a fairy tale, than why bother?"

«As for me,» said the alien, «I'm not a very gregarious person. The other missionaries with me, they're all I've got. If I didn't go with them I'd likely never see them again.»

"But still... dropping everything knowing you may never return, that's a heavy choice to make, friends or not."

«Well, you can blame Iris for twisting my ear. She said if I were right, and this is all nonsense, I will have lost nothing by coming with them. It's not like we age while in suspension, and it wasn't like I was pulling up roots by leaving home. But if the Bright Way is right, I will have gained everything by obeying the Great Commandment, so--» He quickly flicked his ears back in a cynoid shrug.

The priest was beaming.

«You're showing your teeth. Is something wrong?»

"Pascal!" the priest proclaimed. "That's your human name!"

«I don't follow.»

"Blaise Pascal, he lived 400 years ago. Most people today know him as a scientist, I'm pretty sure there's a unit of measure named after him, but he also talked a lot about faith. Pascal's wager. What Iris told you. We call that Pascal's wager. Lose nothing or gain everything."

Pascal looked out the window as the pickup pulled into a sprawling parking lot. At its center was an equally sprawling monolithic building.

«So why'd you bring me here, other than to get more of your foul-smelling smoking sticks?»

"I told you what Dr. Staples showed you was what we humans want to be. That's all well and good, but you also need to know what we are." The priest got out of the pickup and Pascal followed.

"You're definitely going to need that synthesizer."

Pascal positioned the keyer in his left forepaw, then looked up at the large illuminated sign above the entrance and attempted to sound out the letters.

"W A L M A R T"

To be continued.

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