Worldbuilding

RE: mstdn.party/@Crystal_Fish_CaveWhat if it's not in the unlocking the secrets of the multiverse at all? 🤔 What if instead the every increasing complexity of the questions we ask ourselves increases the complexity of the multiverse? That would mean thoughts create reality as much as reality create thoughts.Anyway that's the theory of my fictional multiverse 😁@worldbuilding @humor@fedigroups.social @humor@lemmy.world@philosophy @joinin#Thoughts #Guide #To #The #Multiverse #Philosophy #Theory

YIP (Yinrih Internetworking protocol) is used to address nodes on the realspace internetwork. intra-planetary links are made with optical fiber, and inter-planetary and interstellar links are made using FTL Underlay tunnels.

Balanced bace-27 (BB27) is used in vulpithecine computing in a similar manner to hexadecimal. Yinrih computers are based on balanced ternary instead of binary, where each digit can represent -1 (written T), 0, or 1. Balanced base-27 uses 27 digits which can represent the decimal range -13 to +13. The Yinrih Internetworking Protocol (YIP) uses BB27 to represent YIP addresses.

I just finished The Last Dragonslayer series by Jasper Fforde.

I differentiate between “figures” and “characters”. Characters are given more of a personality, and might be someone you could identify with, as you’d expect from a literary character. Figures are people primarily known through their effect on the world around them, the stories told about them, etc.

Who would have thought creating an entire world would be so complicated and interconnected, but here we are. How do you keep track of it all?

Cloud cities. You know them, you love them, and I want them in my conworld. The last story I posted here takes place in one.

”Where’s your bathroom?”

A hearthkeeper’s duty is to bring physical and spiritual light and warmth to her congregation. This is accomplished through lighthouses, places of worship of the Bright Way. They evolved out of the open bonfires tended by shamans prior to the Theophany. These bonfires grew into sheltered hearths as the yinrih’s society advanced. With the discovery of electricity the hearths evolved into small power plants distributing electricity to the homes of the faithful. These plants burned fossil fuels at first, with a ceremonial hearth located in the sanctuary and the loud and smelly power generation equipment located elsewhere on the property.

I have a science-fantasy world with intelligent non-anthro animals living in harmony, which I’ve posted some lore about this in the past. Think “communist non-anthro Zootopia with sci-fi technology.” This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while and combines my interests in worldbuilding and software. I want to create a fictional social media platform for the animals in my world, and stage fictional threads in the typical Reddit/Lemmy format discussing news and politics taking place within the world. Then post screenshots here with context explaining what is happening. I just thought this might be a more fun way of sharing lore about my world than just the articles themselves, almost like an ARG. I’ll also be able to introduce some of my main narrative characters through their social media presence.

Part 1 in case you missed it.Fr. 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 street lights in town. 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”

This came up on /r/worldbuilding from time to time, mostly “how do races of vastly different size coexist?” but it can be equally interesting considering how very large or very small races would go about things once you at least nod in the direction of the square-cube law.

The Mechanists were a group of Neoshamanists who formed the first group of colonists on Newhome. The numerically smaller neoshamanists saw an opportunity to found their own polities far away from the Claravian majority on Yih as planetary colonization became technically and economically feasible.

I shall continue posting my nonsense until more people start posting theirs. I should have mentioned this before posting all my stories, but I use Italian quotation marks («») to denote alien speech, whether uttered naturally, written, or synthesized by a human, except in stories where no humans are present in which case I just use regular quotes ("").

The Bright Way inherited the spring, summer, fall, and winter feasts from primordial animism, along with the role of hearthkeeper as bringer of light and warmth and the practice of using the bones of the dead as architectural adornment.

Standing a mere stone’s throw from the Eternal Hearth, the edifice was supposed to be a monument to the friendship between the only two sapient species in the galaxy, and to the yinrih who built it, it was just that, but to most humans visiting the holy world of Hearthside, it was–well–a tower of human skulls.

Orbiting a dwarf planet on the edge of Partisan territory are the remains of a massive megastructure. It looks like the head of a yinrih, wrought in colossal proportions. It was clearly meant to be part of an even larger mechanism, and has been left unfinished rather than having been completed and then dismantled or broken later. Strictly speaking, nobody knows why its there. No records can be found relating to the terraforming or colonization of this particular dwarf planet, but there are records of the planet’s existence before the head appeared, so it had to be built by a group of yinrih colonists at some point.

“I really wish you wouldn’t wear that thing on campus,” Sarah plucked a sticker from Sunshine’s back reading Fur is murder! “Last time I took a whole can of red paint for you.”

This is by far my weakest attempt at a story, but it gets at the heart of why The Lonely Galaxy exists. Much of this project is my attempt to work through the emotions related to the aging and eventual passing of my retired guide dog, as well as my relationship with my current dog, who inspired the phonetics of yinrih language. This is why the yinrih are canine and why they live so long. As clumsy as this story is, it was extremely cathartic for me to write. I wrote this in 2023 when my late dog was still very much alive but was beginning to show her age.

The processes used in terraforming lifeless planets were pioneered not by the Bright Way, but by the Lifebringers, a sect of Neoshamanists. Whereas the Bright Way sought sapient life dwelling among the stars, the Lifebringers attempted to recreate sapient life anew through artificial selection. They never achieved their goal, but did contribute tremendously to the fields of biology, ecology, medicine, and planetology along the way.

It’s ambiguous in-universe whether demons are real at all. The Claravian magisterium discourages even discussing them, as they see it as a Morton’s fork of “they don’t exist so you’re wasting your time” or “they do exist and the best thing to do is ignore them”.

There is an entire clade of small creatures filling rodent-like niches that have evolved the ability to store an electric charge in capacitor-like organs below their eyes. They can discharge these organs into any would-be predator attempting to eat them. These critters are called sdFrdFg, which (very loosely) translates to “zap rats”. Zap rats have even developed aposematic coloration, bearing mostly bright yellow fur with white, black, red, or blue accents being present in varying degrees depending on species. Unfortunately for the zap rats, the yinrih LOVE the mild shock they get from eating them. It’s like sticking a 9-volt battery on your tongue. They’re either eaten live or, if you don’t want to risk them going off in your gut instead of your mouth, you can quickly kill them by holding the animal between your inner and outer thumb and puncturing their dorsal nerve cord with your writing claw.

Firefly was hatched on a dwarf planet in the outer belt in the waning centuries of the age of decadence. His sires and dams were active with the missionaries. Although none of them had been selected to go on a mission, they assisted in other ways like mission control and wayfinding (searching for potentially habitable planets to send future missions to.) It was their greatest hope that one of their pups would be selected to go on a mission someday.

Are there any strange confluences or patterns in your worldbuilding that arose by chance and you ended up embracing?

THUMP

Background (imagine this as a Star Wars-esque text crawl):

As I prepare for my fifth eye surgery to fix a prosthetic lens, I’m reminded of how dumb elective cybernetic implants, augmentations, or what have you, would be in real life.

I’m not posting these in any order. This story takes place a few months after First Contact, a few hours before The Tornado.

This was originally going to be a response to the “spare parts” post, but it grew into an afternoon project.

The main core of the network stretched out before me: rack upon rack of black boxes extending into the distance, their chassis scintillating with link lights blinking softly as packets rushed in and out of each interface. Meticulously bundled cables of various colors spilled forth from the racks and ran here and there along runways above my head. A cold breeze from the heat pump rustled my whiskers. Permeating this cavernous chamber was the rushing white noise of thousands of cooling fans. I turned my muzzle up, taking in the whole scene. This chamber so huge that I couldn’t see the far wall, it was all but a tiny ganglion in the vast interplanetary nervous system, the body of the noosphere.

I’ve had scifi on the brain for a bit now, something about current events making me long for some aliens to show up and just want to get to know us. And I’ve been thinking about what they might tell us, why they decided to make contact now, and decided it’s essentially because we’re at the beginning of a very crucial phase and we are fucking blowing it.

Arkess (Diarcesian Latin: Arcesius)

We all have one, that place where we keep all the really cool ideas that just don’t fit in the world we’ve built. What you got? What’s that cool thing you made that toy can’t really use?

This got promptly deleted when I proposed it on /r/worldbuilding, but let’s see how it fairs here. I’ll start with one. Feel free to add others. Fill in the blanks in a way that makes sense in your setting.

Local flavor is something that can very wildly between different regions and adds a ton of detail to build with. What do the folks in your world eat?

Horses are boring. What critters do you use as mounts?

Earth/Fire/Air/Water? Got any extras? Eighteen types like in Pokemon? Or are your elements completely different?

Not sure what I’m rambling on about here, but I took the time to write it so I might as well post it.

I just thought I’d put this out there for comment.

Big ol’ stompy walking war crimes! Not in the least bit realistic, but man are they ever awesome! For the purposes of this post a mech is any limbed or otherwise zoomorphic vehicle that is controlled by a living pilot either internally or externally.

I’m interested in tornadoes, as you can probably see from one of the stories I posted here. I think they have a lot of unused potential for speculative fiction and worldbuilding.

Hi! I'm currently building a hard sci-fi world and I was wondering about the idea of war. Because space is huge - really huge, and most ships probably won't interact with each other for years or centuries. But if two space ships or fleets were to meet on a new stellar system and declare war to each other, what could this look like? What weapons could they use?

Hearthside does not have stores as they exist in the US, where you have a cart and shelves acting as both storage and display for products. For groceries, there are two separate businesses that are usually colocated. A market selling fresh produce and meats, and a grocery store selling premade, processed, and frozen items. The market is usually outside under a pavilion if climate permits, much like a farmers' market. The grocery store is more of a warehouse optimized for storage rather than sale.

Schools in my world of Beckyland can learn just about any widely spoken language as an optional class, though many choose Korean, Mandarin, sometimes Cantonese, or a Romance language.

How would political borders work in space? I'm currently treating interplanetary space as ocean and planets as landmasses. A polity has complete sovereignty over their planet and its gravity well. For large planets, the space occupied by the planet's orbit is also considered an exclusive economic zone. foreign entities may travel freely through this zone, but may not exploit resources found there or set up permanent orbital colonies there.

Have been planning a Dark Sun style campaign, but recently we have done an adventure set in a desert so I want to add some variety.

Dictator-class Command Ship

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

Got any interesting funerary rites in your setting?

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.

Original question by @mo_lave@reddthat.com

Original question by @mo_lave@reddthat.com