#worldbuilding: lore

[chamoemileclown]

imagine being parkour champion and you dont even know what rain is

[avemakuta]

Thinking about minecraft languages again I fear.

We know of at least two diagetic writing systems used in the world of minecraft— enchanting table language and some form of the Roman alphabet. We know that some form of the Roman alphabet is diagetic, because it exists in the world already before the Player arrives. Whoever built the desert temples assigned significance to the letters "TNT" enough to put it on their explosives. Pictographic writing also seems to exist, based on naturally-generating chiseled blocks, but that's harder to definitively state isn't purely decorative.

Villagers also presumably use some form of writing, given that they have librarians, but whatever that writing is, it doesn't seem to be legible to the Player, since we can't read books until we write in them ourselves.

The villager/illager species definitely creates symbolic art, given the use of banners by the illagers and of creeper face symbols on clerical robes. Piglins also use symbolic art, given the snouts carved into bastions, and it seems reasonable to conclude that they have some form of language.

This gives at least three languages in the world of minecraft— Piglin, Villager, and Desert Temple. Possibly a fourth, with Enchanting, but that could just be the writing system used by villagers, given that the Player doesn't seem to be able to read it.

What would those languages be like? What kinds of poetry are written in the Hnnngs and Hrrs of the villagers, or the grunts and snorts of the piglins? Could a piglin and a villager learn each other's languages, or are they too different not just in terms of vocabulary but in terms of the physical features required to communicate? Do piglins carry information in the flapping of their ears? Do villagers produce complex tones by resonance in their large noses?

And what about etymologies? For villagers, wool comes from sheep, but to a piglin, if wool exists at all, it's woven from strider hair. If the inhabitants of the desert temples had a word for gunpowder, was it related to their word for creeper? If piglins do, is it related to their word for ghast?

[illwilledomen]

Nether life forms

(Constructs and undead not included)

[buzzkillchainsaw]

Yes I'm serious, no I'm not okay

(I'll be tagging this and further parts as #buzzkill aquatic so feel free to use that tag too if you use my aquatic expansion in your art/animations/fanfics etc)

Next part (tail edition):

[living-dead-guyy]

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

[dunmeshistash]

Do you have anything on the clothing of fashion of different races? Specially half-foots, but all are appreciated!

The new adventurer's bible and kui's blog have some pages about clothing! But there isn't much about half-foots specifically, theres pages about tallmen elf and dwarf fashion. I'll try to put everything I have here with the translated versions for the ones I can find (without much organization hope that's ok)

[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

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.

[canisalbus]

What if I told you that RoobrickMarine went and wrote an entire novella starring my 16th century dog couple? It's very canon-adjacent, well researched and thoughtfully put together, has inspired me a ton during these past months and it's now publicly available at AO3. I highly recommend it.

✦ Separation ✦

[grailknightmonty]

upon the heart of magic mountain 🌸🗻

from the oceanic goddess revered in the cyberpunk city on its hillside, to the stories of the ochre-feathered canary who's song hasn't been heard in years, it has been long thought by theorists that perhaps the magic imbued into this mountain was no coincidence- but rather the creation of mystical beings seeking to make a haven of sorts, a home protected by the powers that lie within this volcanic formation.

[strange-house-art]

Age of Rot is a haunting exploration of forgotten stories, doomed kingdoms, and the struggle of surviving in a world of rot and decay. Through fragmented tales, cryptic dialogues, and hidden truths you'll be able to navigate the delicate balance between the rot curse and your own fading humanity.

Disclaimer: This game doesn't exist.

[filurig]

SO my old basilisk refs and things felt grossly outdated esp now bcs i have changed some things about them. So now have a new ref and some more extra informations about them. or at least the basilisk community most relevant to pareidolia...

[illwilledomen]

Piglin

Hog-folk of the infernal nether. They’re in a post-apocalyptic state now, but they were once the most advanced civilization in Minecraft, even trumping the Ancient Builders. They use machines instead of magic.

Sows are slightly larger and fatter than males, with smaller tusks. Boars are more muscular, with bony faces and coarse black manes. Boars often adorn themselves with jewelry, body paint, and the like, to woo sows, and bachelors marry into groups run by old matriarchs. Sows of high rank in bastions usually have a harem of males serving both as concubines and bodyguards. Piglin are for the most part polyamorous.

They communicate in Piglish, a mixture of signing and vocalisations. Complex sentences are signed, and sounds are used as emotive context clues, like auditory tone tags.

[clownomics]

"Featured here is the lifecycle of a clown, specifically illustrated through a Circus Clown. Although individual characteristics may vary, such as the shape and color of the camouflaged egg, the size and texture of the Goofball, and the emerging colors of the Jollie, all clowns undergo similar developmental stages. These stages encompass a diverse range of traits exhibited by young and adult clowns, influenced by their respective breeds or subspecies."

[jabberwick]

Writhing, King of wyrms

(she/her)

Writhing is the king and mother of wyrms. She is an important character from my story.

[tomswifty-fr]

Tundra hatchlings leave their eggs with horns and a full coat of fur and are capable of walking and running short distances just hours after birth (though they typically won't choose to for at least a couple of days).

On hatching, the horns are covered with a layer of mostly-hairless skin. The bone here is sturdy enough to serve a similar function as an eggtooth, but is still developing along with the rest of the skull. It will remain soft and somewhat malleable for the few few months to a year of life. The skin covering will die and be replaced with keratin of the same color when the horns are fully developed in late adolescence.

It's easy to affect a horn's development when soft, either accidentally or deliberately. Something as simple as a hatchling spending too much time leaning on one side can train a horn to grow in a "wrong" direction. Some cultures will go to great lengths to correct bent or asymmetrical horns, while others don't consider it a big deal as long as it doesn't affect the hatchling's health. Horns that are severely asymmetrical or curved in a very atypical way (straight forward, for example) can cause neck issues, problems balancing, or even cause stress or injuries to the rest of the skull.

On the other hand, some cultures consider it normal to deliberately sculpt a hatchling's horns. This can be done for purely aesthetic reasons or as a clan/family identifier. The latter is most common in very traditionalist Tundra communities in the Southern Icefield, where it is a very old practice, and is almost never seen in northern flights or mixed-breed communities. Folklore has it that it began as a way to recognize clanmembers in storms strong enough to blow away scent - skeptics say that visibility in a storm like that would be too low to see someone's horns at a distance anyway. The former is highly controversial for being fully elective, so to speak, and Tundras who practice traditional horn modification see it as deeply weird and kind of cruel to saddle your kid with a horn shape that won't be shared with anyone else.

All stances are controversial to someone, and medical opinion is mixed on whether "standard" horn shapes are inherently healthier than just letting them grow, whether deliberate modification is necessarily harmful, when it's justifiable, and how much is too much. Add in the fact that any procedure is irreversible and can only be done when the hatchling is too young to say yes or no - it's a mess.

On the fur front, a hatchling's "baby coat" is waterproof, thin, and extremely soft. Its purpose is to keep the egg liquids away from the skin and protect them from the cold just long enough to crawl under the closest parent. Adult Tundra fur is not waterproof; it keeps them dry by being thick and heavy enough that snow or liquid simply doesn't make it to the skin. A hatchling will start growing their adult coat almost immediately after making it out of the egg, and sheds their baby coat within a couple of days.

Shed baby coats are occasionally collected and woven into fabric in the same way that adult wintercoats are, but it's far less common for several reasons. The first being that the last thing on a new parent's mind is going to be collecting fur from their brand new infant - they have other things to be worrying about! The second being that one baby's worth of fur, or even a whole litter's, isn't enough to really do anything with. At best, you get a little keepsake bandana.