I am trying to somewhat explain a planet where life can thrive in this massive trench, but the rest of the planet is uninhabitable. I think my explanation is flawed and was wondering if there’s a more grounded way this could happen? Maybe something to do with temperatures? Otherwise I’ll just settle with my more fantastical explanation. :)

For me it’s

“Yes my world has guns, they’re flintlocks and they easily punch through the armour here, do we use them? No because they’re slow to reload”

My brother in Christ just write a setting where there’s no guns

In my world, the brain is a complex organ capable of more than just controlling the body. It's unique design allows it the ability to manipulate magic. Over time as the mind develops it will craft special nodes in the neural works of the brain that, when stimulated, can cast magic.

These powers are technically innate but evolve in certain directions over time. But you don't typically start out knowing these abilities. Instead you need to have your first stimulation, typically this occurs in a dream, but can be pushed into activation through mindful meditation. One can even choose how it evolves through rigorous meditative practices.

Almost anyone can have these powers.

Later in the future, humans design a form of hypnosis using spinning devices called fairy switches. These tools could be used to alter neural circuitry and reprogram the mind. Each fairy switch has pegs adorning the sides that form an irregular pattern. And a strange spiral symbol at its center. When these pegs rotate around the center piece, they create a hypnotic pattern that alters the brains neural pathways.

This allows for universal spells to be learned. Amd through this anyone, even those who still have dormant magic, can access these simple spells. However, doing this degrades the dormant nodes within the brain, making your Innate magic less potent.

When using fairy switches, the neural pathways are changed over time to allow for the use of magic without repercussions.

Another method, however, activates multiple neural pathways simultaneously. This allows the hypnotized to use magic without the training (for a short while), but the overstimulation is agonizing and sometimes even paralyzing.

These two fields of hypnotism are often pursued by psychologists and therapists.

Eventually, people also learned of demons. These are basically infected nodes that are tied to traumatic events in the user's past.

While these demons rarely affect the world around them, instead preferring to torment a single victim, there are demons strong enough to actively cast curses on the surrounding area.

Curses are typically the warping of perception. Almost like hallucinations that attach themselves to a person rather than induced by drugs. These hallucinations can be objects, entities, or environments.

Hypnotists also specialize in demons, though there are conflicting schools of thought on how to approach them. One is repression. A quick method that suppresses the demon within the person for a time, but never really deals with it. Then, there is extended care, where the demon is slowly unraveled over several sessions of hypnotic healing.

While innate powers are much less constrained, universal spells often have to do with the following.

Enhanced perception/ strength/ endurance: those who experience the proper hypnotic treatment can use their awakened mind to alter their body and mind significantly. Surviving poison. Supercharging organs or muscles. Slowing blood flow. Even having the mind process more information at a faster rate.

There is a group of individuals that learn to control their demons through meditation and elixirs. While their methods are effective, there are those who believe that to harbor a demon at all is evil.

Eventually, in the future humans design kindred spheres, tools that can replicate a brain and thus spells, but are modular enough to be changed on the fly and used much faster than a fairy switch. Meaning multiple spells can be cast from this device, so long as it has a scan of a brain in the first place.

However, due to how this technology works, only those who provided the brain scan can use the kindred sphere.

A magic system flaw isn't, a weakness added on to it. Think Earth bending not working on platinum in Avatar.

A magic system fall, is something where even if the power is working properly. There are still risks. Think how Fire bender can kill themselves, if they bend lighting through thier chests, or if you can turn your body into stone, you are kind of dead if someone can already damage it.

Not to say it's a bad thing to take inspiration because, that's the whole freaking point of writing. But we're all guilty of ripping off something cool.

And dont tell me your world is 100% original because that's literally not freaking possible. I'm calling bs immediately.

Hello! First post here, please be gentle 🙂 I have been carrying the concept of my novel-which I am now writing- for almost 10 years and in that time, the layers of my fantasy Mer-realm have grown. There’s types of magick, an ancient battle that triggered the separation of these magicks, general rules about the usage and so on. What I’m curious about is this: there will need to be names, spells, ancient warriors that may be referenced throughout this work (I’m planning on a trilogy). How much of the lore, the foundation of the system, the battle, the bits that make the magick so important-how much would you drop into the first part of the first book? I’d like it to not read as a lore dump, and I’d like the reader to discover things in bits but also not be confused by the mention of someone or something. How subtle or explicit would you write it?

I mean things that are so weird that they *appear* supernatural or just a writer writing stories. But the phenomenon is 100% real. In a way, you're kind of teaching people about things they wouldn't have known otherwise.

I have three examples:

1. A character hallucinating about his home while exploring a cave under a desert. Cave hallucinations are real and you can see and hear things that aren't there.

2. Singing sand; a phenomenon where sand falls down a dune at the perfect frequency to hum and rumble. It is creepy. I recommend checking out videos on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwZeTs2WtUU

3. Random pillars comprised of different lengths, thicknesses, and angles. This is an example of nuclear semiotics placed into a fantasy setting.

FTL stuff is kind of a big no-no in most hard Sci-fi stuff, I feel, because of how FTL travel of any kind violates a bunch of big universal laws. And while I like hard sci-fi and want to do it for my world, I also feel that FTL travel is able to spice stories up a lot. So what kind of compromise could be found?

does your world have any widely spread beverage drunk on daily basis by all creature no matter their social status or religious beliefs? what are the regional ways of consuming and preparing of this drink? where does it come from and how has it reached your entire world?

In the comments under another post, someone said something to the effect of "I can always see when an author is atheist, because their religions lack depth". And I can certainly see how someone who has never had much contact with organized religion may struggle writing authentic religious experience.

On the other hand, I can also imagine how someone who is religious can struggle with writing religions other than what they consider the truth – this was for instance an issue for Tolkien, who didn't really portray organized religion in his writings, save for passing mentions of Numenorian practices (both in their worship of Eru/Valars and later of Morgoth).

So... I'd love to see some data on how religious experience correlates with one's enjoyment of writing religions. I tried to make options readable and that led to some simplifications.

By "religious", I mean a person who understands the tenets of their faith and is actively involved in its practices. If the extent of your religious experience is being dragged to Church a few times when visiting your grandma, you (probably) should select "I was never religious". If you follow some school of thought that can't be characterized as a classically understood religion, I leave it to you to determine how closely you feel you can relate to the religious experience. I also fully accept that there are different modes of religiosity depending on faith, culture, congregation, and person.

By "enjoy building religions", I mean... well, generally just that, but extra points if you think you can actually pull them off by adding a decent amount of depth to the metaphysics, lore, morals, institutions and practices.

Sadly, there isn't an option to add more than 6 answers in a single poll (or if there is, I can't figure it out), so no "other/it's complicated/see results" for this one, sorry! If you want to see results without answering, you can tell me in the comments and I'll try to answer later.

Finally... I'm asking out of pure curiosity and not trying to prove any point here. Feel free to discuss how your religious experience of lack thereof impacts your worldbuilding in the comments if you want to, but please let's keep this civil. Please refrain from proselytizing, as well as from the stereotypical "Reddit atheist" comments. Also, if possible, please refrain from downvoting the comments of people whose religious views you disagree with but who aren't actively hateful.

EDIT: also, I know one answer is poorly written, I was rephrasing them and forgot to remove a single word. Sorry for that, but hopefully you catch my meaning!

I'm curious to hear about everyone's Orcs.

Personally in my setting, I imagine Orcs split off from the other races on the evolutionary line a very long time ago and became one of the first species to independently achieve a Neolithic-like Civilization, filling up the hole that the Giants left after their population diminished. Discovering things like agriculture and domestication and the such before Halflings and Humans. This was eventually uprooted when the early Elves migrated to the Mortal Plane from the Fey Realm and left the Orc civilization to be uprooted.
Orcs were pushed back to the deserts, steppes, and plains. Forced to become a nomadic people, the Orcs weren't able to farm crops efficiently and resorted to forcefully teaching the other species how to farm. This gave the Orcs a source of food they could resort to for survival if their livestock were to fail.

Another little tidbits I have is that in my setting Ogres are actually distant cousins to Orcs, like how humans and gorillas are cousins. Additionally, Goblinoids in my world refuged to the Mortal Plane due to Elven hijinks, and such often form bonds with the Orcs due to their similar experiences with Elven Colonization.

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For like inspiration and such, if you wouldn't mind

• Slide 1: Map of Atlantis
• Slide 2: Flag of Atlantis
• Slide 3: States of Atlantis
• Slides 4 and 5: Population of Atlantis, including a breakdown by state
• Slides 6–20: History of Atlantis from 1837 to 1966

Atlantis was uninhabited before being discovered by the Portuguese (alongside Brazil) in 1500. Colonization of the islands began in 1540, with Atlantis becoming a major producer of rice before gold was discovered in the 17th century. The colony was initially very wealthy, but when gold was found in Brazil in the 1690s and Atlantis's gold deposits ran out, the colony entered a slow decline until cocoa began to be produced in the 19th century.

In 1832, Atlantis became independent with Felipe Cândido, a planter and independence activist, as president. The country has gone through several changes of government throughout its history, including a monarchy between 1845 and 1852 and military dictatorships from 1931 to 1946, 1953 and 1962, and 1973 to 1982. The current president is Antônio Silveira from the Atlantis Socialist Party.

Because a spoonful of sugar will balance out the salt.

Y'know, extracting resources from the ground-type stuff.

Is it fairly conventional to our universe's Earth? Do, say, open pit mines encounter different challenges? What resource do they extract, and what considerations do operations need to make?

If it's a fantasy setting is magic used in removing chunks of rock to get at ore seams? Do miners need to take care to avoid disturbing buried evils balrog-style?

How about sci-fi, with asteroid mining and other exotic materials, maybe only found on other planets (or stranger - nuclear pasta, anyone?)

It's probably not something that gets the most thought (goodness knows I'm guilty, I only just thought of this, after all), but being a very important part of heavy industry it honestly deserves a bit of attention, seeing as it affects supply chains, economies, the environment, employment, and probably more things I haven't thought of at this moment.

As for my own stuff, across its three current main arms...

Soviet is straightforward Earth stuff, nothing too special here.

Anstrake would need to mind the density of the compressed rock in mountain ranges, the rapid tectonic shifting, and the unstable nature of just about everything, with chlorine gas being an especially prominent risk deep underground. Flood basalts are noticeably resource rich, most likely full of heavy radioactive elements. How this mining looks is... unclear. I haven't given it much of a look, only mentioned in passing.

Soian is funny case, since the all-powerful empire need not gather resources at all should it desire not to. But it does anyways, just to have something to do (this lead to problems on Anstrake when an extremely rare compound was found in its soil). Valuable UD (Ultra Dense/Durable) materials, non-matter formations, are mysterious in their origin and source. Whether they're created artificially, collected, or made out of pieces is unclear. The ones the Soians use, that is. Natural UD is a thing, it just might not always be the most useful thing.

What do you have on this area?

If you don’t know what Tower Dungeon by Tsutomu Nihei is, I suggest you go read the 14 chapters right now.

But, I wanted to say the way they do necromancy is pretty cool, necromancers create “larvae” that infect and then control corpses with these worm like beings.

Does your necromancy differ than the usual covered in skulls and controls skeletons cliche we see?