#worldbuilding speculation

[earthdeluxe]

Monsters have internal anatomy. Organs and bones and muscles. tendons. whatever. No blood but it's all like. solid-magic in shapes mimicking organs, you know?

organic monsters have recognizable organs and bones and stuff. Mostly.

inorganic monsters? also have internal anatomy. it looks wildly different depending though.

[theantiazdarcho]

The Lancetfish is a species that looks like it comes straight out of a realistic fantasy world building project.

[vcreatures]

PRINTS AVAILABLE

if you’ve been following me long enough you know I love a mimic. From my false faced mermaids that I’ve been painting for years to butterfly dragons, I’m a big fan of illusion in the bestiary world.

I bring you the Ginkgo Draco, another member of the Botanical Drakes. 

[illwilledomen]

Nether life forms

(Constructs and undead not included)

[prokopetz]

I'm a big fan of unhinged worldbuilding in pornographic fiction, but I have to admit I get pretty annoyed when an author goes to all that trouble to explain something that falls completely within the normal range of plausible human behavioural and phenotypic variation. Like, if you're going to hit me with ten thousand words of elaborately justified speculative biology and the payoff in its entirety is "in this world, some women have penises", well, buddy, have I got news for you.

[extrajigs]

NEW ALIEN AGAIN! This one I wanted to stick to being more Earth inspired, connecting with my roots. I'm calling 'em Styraphants cause they're mostly a mix of styracosaurus, elephant, and mollusk of course. Trying to make a quad walking sophont always lends to kind of a centaur-ish body plan, so tried to think outside the box for appendages this go around. They've got a pair of trunk tentacles around their mouth that they use as their hands, which have a fleshy 'zipper' to slot together at rest. They also smell/taste with them so gloves are a very popular purchase.

Oh also! Their eyes are on little stalks that peak out around their frill, they can hide them away if scared. Also all the fellas pictured here are gals! They have a male/female system in keeping with the Earthling megafauna theme.

[wanderingokali]

A species of blep from cold steppes. Like most species of furred tetrapods, it keeps its young in a pouch for months until they are hardy enough to run about and eat solid food. It eats lichens, roots and mosses primarily, but is an opportunistic scavenger if those prove scarce. It lives in groups of variable sizes, with complex familial dynamics, but these groups can be spread out over great distances; they communicate by loud bellows that cover long distances despite great winds.

[living-dead-guyy]

I’m going insane I want to eat it so bad

[sparrowlucero]

Though their initial mutations were the result of long term nuclear war, it's actually an intense culture of propaganda and strictly enforced conformity policies that have kept the Daleks in their current state. Every Dalek undergoes surgery just after birth; not to mitigate the effects of irradiation, but to rid them of whatever is legally considered "imperfections to the Dalek form" (usually throwbacks to a humanoid body plan, such as teeth and hands) and physically ready them for their casing. Additional surgeries must occur throughout a Dalek's life to prevent them from becoming "rooted" - a painful, often fatal scenario in which the Dalek overgrows their own shell and cannot be safely removed. Not only does their homogeneity serve to reinforce their fervent belief in genetic superiority, but the resulting chronic health issues prevent insurrection; a Dalek's fear of losing access to regular healthcare colors much of their judgement, and most attempts at dissent end as soon as their painkillers run dry.

[iguanodont]

The Monoculi (informally dubbed ‘peebs’) are not exactly a new species from me, but they’ve gone through a pretty drastic redesign since I last posted anything about them. These are a spacefaring species from the same universe as birgworld! Details under the cut.

The Monoculi are so-called for the large compound eye that comprises the “head”. The densely packed ommatidia allow for crisp image resolution, and a variation in the depth of the lenses give the eye a range of acuity from only a few feet along the lower half to hundreds of meters along the top. Monoculi are nocturnal creatures which evolved to navigate complex cave systems by day and tangled branches by night; they have good depth perception and low-light vision but are nearly blind in regular daylight, and cannot perceive color.

The Mono homeworld is peculiar for the presence of a ring, the remnants of two moons which collided early in the planet’s history and bombarded the surface with chunks of space rock long after the planet’s crust had cooled. The result is an unusual abundance of heavy metals in the environment. Iridium, a prohibitively rare mineral on earth, comprises orange-yellow compound which carries oxygen through a Monoculus’s veins. The ring itself also has drastic effects on seasonal surface temperatures, though as on birgworld, life there has adapted accordingly.

Monoculi molt to grow like earth arthropods, but they only do so one segment at a time. A newborn larvae, one of 2 - 5 siblings, will remain soft and aquatic for about 8 months, until it loses its gills and hardens for the first time. They do not begin growing the first proper body segment until the thorax is as large as an adult’s. Molting and mating are both intimately tied to mineral pools found deep in their ancestral cave system. Without them, a molt will invariably fail and lead to severe health complications. Monoculi are hermaphrodites, and mate by pressing the gonopores (small openings under the first pair of arms) against the soft carapace of a first - third instar body segment, fresh after molting. The spawn will bore directly into the segment and trigger its transformation into a reproductive segment, which falls off after young are produced.

These sophonts are relatively large and long lived, with 200+ year old individuals sporting nearly 20 body segments not unheard of. They are also well into their space age, with a once-thriving space tourism industry buckled by a massive recession in recent decades. Rumour has it that several of the abandoned exoplanetary retreats still harbor stranded staff… but the company that built them dissolved and nobody has scraped up to funds for a rescue mission. They avoid contact with other sophonts, with the exception of the swimslugs, with whom they maintain a friendly cultural and technological exchange.

————

Btw, I do still post almost weekly sketches and worldbuilding notes on my patreon

[azzayofchaos]

Since my other Nether worldbuilding post was received pretty well... I'm back on my bullshit!

This time featuring zoning and biomes of the Neath: Lore below cut

Nether (noun): the formidable hellscape straddling the boundery between the Fragments of the Overworld and Death's Realms.

Derived from Beneath -> Neath -> Neth -> Nether.

The Nether is most easily accessable through outer regions of the nether, regions that are comparatively closed-off, and lacking in biodiversity compared to the Deep Nether where most Neath civilizations are centered.

The Neth is divided into three primary zones, distinguished by altitude and general climates.

The Calfactory Zone: the largest and most icon of the three, the Calfactory zone is blisteringly hot and bone-dry, it's most prominent features are its abundant seas and lakes of magma, and the massive Supermagmas atriums that are common above the magma. In the largest of these atriums, the ceiling may be so high above as to be completely invisible from the ground, obscured by an ever present smog of toxic vapor and minerals formed in the self-generated micro-climates that are generated from the rising heat of the lava that begins to cool at a higher altitude. ��

In the Basalt Deltas and other biomes around the edges of these lakes, massive pillars of rock and crystals bulwark the more-visible ceiling. 

The most common of this zone’s biomes is the Crimson woods, home to hearty thermal-philic fungi and plants that grow on the minerals and vapors of the lakes. Many are carnivorous in their lack of access to water or sunlight, and these forests contain many sub-biomes and ecosystems of flourishing life. 

The Wastes are perhaps the most desolate regions of the Neath, irradiated deserts of red-rock, brimstone, and sharp sand. Even the vast majority of nether-folk avoid these deserts due to the leftover radiation that rots and destroys anything that waits too long. The only forms of life are particularly robust lichens and bacteria that are happy to sit by the pools of boiling pools of sulfur and mud and toxic sludge that dot the landscape. Growing within the rocks themselves are colonies of amorphous fungus, called geocorpus molds that get their spores into cracks in the soft netherack and slowly feed on it, a delicacy in nether cuisine. 

The Temperate Zone: Cradled in the heights of the Neath’s atriums and sat bellow the roof is the temperate zones, the rising heat of the zone below begins to cool and forming distinct weather patterns in this zone and leaving it, while still sweltering, a cooler though much more humid climate.

The main biome are the luminescent warped-fungal rainforests that collect the high-rising minerals and odd moisture from the lakes. Liquid is actually precent here, though if it’s not safely filtered through the innards of the various plants and fungi, this water is usually aggressively corrosive, and it is best to shelter from the  acidic precipitation to avoid chemical burns. The nether folk and ender local to these rainforests are suited to deal with these conditions and the ender especially do not have trouble with the extreme pH of the water here like they would in the overworld. The zone is lit almost exclusively by the biolumincense of the organisms there and have often been described as false-stars.

In the Deep Nether, the ceiling may give way, allowing one to pass onto the plateaus of the Nether Roof and the yawning void above. The bedrock of the nether roof is jagged and layered in huge slabs, sometimes broken up my mazes of pillar-like structures and shallow, thermal pools of crystal-clear liquid. The kind you don't want to touch of course. fogs may hang low to the ground, but when its clear, or above the fog, the entire universe seems to spill out into the sky. The nether roof was culturally significant and a source of much knowledge and inspiration in the early days, but I'll get more into that in a later post 0.0

The Rime Zone: Plunge deep enough and one might find themselves bellow the lava beds. Here, where the heat can't quite penetrate, the temperatures will drop rapidly to sub-zero.

Namely, the Rime Zone is made up of the soul valleys, flat steppes of cinder and clotted sand, you can imagine it almost with the blindness effect, a fog that pools by your feet, and a heavier darkness hanging from the sky, it feels massive and endless and claustrophobic all at once. Frost collects as crystals on the irradiated, soul-soaked barrens, and the bones of the massive nether wyrms lie fossilized, breaking up the landscape. The sands are also split with patches of crazing on the ground and vents of blue fire that spills out and sets the sand ablaze.

These same wryms can be found sometimes, ancient things that dig through sand and soft rocks and the magma lakes, far and few between and treated with both fear and reverence.

And in the deepest pits of the Neath are the glowing frozen lakes that are colloquially and rightfully called the Gates to Death, glowing blue from beneath their surfaces. Indeed, any further down and you pass into limbo, the edge of Death's Realms.

Extra Notes??:

Soul sand/soil is tread on carefully or not at all, is one form of remnants from the apocolyspe. Like the general radiated rubble present through the Nether, it's a fault of nuclear fallout. Unlike other areas of radiation, its also been infused with the souls of those who didn't survive the joining of worlds.

This infused quality is also precent in Nether Debris, resulting in a material that takes magic particularly well.

Iron cannot be found in dense veins and crystals like gold or quartz in the nether, but it's a pretty rich mineral a lot of netherack, giving it its ruddy coloring.

Sorry for this massive rant that no one asked for. If you have questions please feel free to send an ask, I may not have an answer yet but I'll certainly come up with one if I can.

I'm also hoping to do a pass on my headcanons about history and culture in the Nether and then we might start talking about character headcanons since this is also an actual AU.

If you read this far, here's some notes on striders and ghast

[earthdeluxe]

Musing about generic universal symbols for people on Earth-With

I think there might be 3 main ones?

[bogcreacher]

what if dragon hatchlings were fluffy. what if gumdrops fell from the sky.

[vcreatures]

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Another Botanical Drake added to the compendium. Today is the tropical Draco Monstera

[selkra-souza]

AF Attack for @jayrockin!

My headcannon is that Talita was taught how to read Portuguese in homeschooling, before choosing to switch to on-campus schooling and subsequently becoming very rusty in it. Here she's reading a reprint gibi* of Turma da Monica (featuring a scan of my own copy of the gibi I've had since childhood). I think Cebolinha would've been her favorite from the turma because she's interested in his meticulous "infallible plans".

*gibi means comic!

[t34-mt]

pilots have had an overall, fun fact. I don't think I've posted about them publicly for a while. freaks from moon sat'tchuckthuck (kyhuine given name in their study of astronomy on altuyur)

22-08-2024 edit: extra colors examples and an actually rendered version (oc)

you can view the evolution of their design under the cut ->

these have never been posted before because i thought they sucked, and also just because i didn't feel like doing it. several sophonts existences in the solar system are friend-only information atm lol

the first version has been posted on their first post, as much as i still like the mecha design by itself (despite the fucked up leg placement) , i think it should only have a single pilot, and i also don't think there was much thought put behind how people sit in there etc.. So it looks a bit awkward overall. their first design was just a quick doodle i need to draw as fast as i can before i forget the idea, so it's not good LOL. its wonky, very wonky.

this one is from march 2023, there isn't much change between the two but i still think they're interesting to have in the row. the clothes look awkward, i don't think i thought about how they'd be put on by the pilots, the layering, and so on. what used to be manipulator limbs look award too

this is when i was trying to make them more fun. i shortened them, made them longer and blabla.. but in the end, they just looked like corgis/ dogs to me and i wasn't satisfied with that. Not that i think sophonts can't look like x earth animal, this is just me wanting to feel satisfied with my own work and not wanting to make dog 2. i don't know the exact date of this drawing, but im assuming its in late 2023

in may 2024, the current design of pilots was made. funnily enough, it just came to me one day. My brain flashed an image and i tried to draw it as fast as i could. compared to the top drawing the limbs for carrying their youngs weren't finalized.

the crest changing between every drawing / versions doesn't matter. because their crest changes color constantly to communicate and speak with each others. like a sort of cuttlefish skin effect, i guess pilots can still be fully white. it's just their coat for when temperatures drops. But since their moon is going through an ice age their body keeps is disoriented constantly. Workers who stay outside all year will have a winter coat constantly. But people who work / stay inside all the time are in heated environment, thus their winter coat never start up. and so on with that

heres test of the freak with winter coat ->

their texture would be horrible, the end bits of their fur is harden, its so thick and packed and feel like velvet. even the non winter coat still feel like velvet

Despite the current design having longer legs, they're still small guys because that's more fun. Pilots are 100 cm (3ft) tall. you can pick them up (they might be sized wrong on the doodle whatever)