50 Worldbuilding Setting Ideas For Your Fantasy Book

Does anybody have that image of what cyberpunk dialogue is like. "to crack a cyber lemon this nasty" or whatever

Last time I wondered if Danish vagabonds, also known as Landevejsriddere (country road knights), live by some sort of code because even though they’re usually drunk they’re always very pleasant and friendly and as it turns out, yes they do. LINK

You can’t just put on a festive hat and push a pram with your earthly belongings and call yourself a vagabond in this country. You have to be mentored by an older vagabond and travel along the vagabond routes for two summers and one winter before you get your vagabond name at an annual ceremony at Hjallerup Marked where all new vagabonds are ”baptized”.

They also have an annual ceremony at Egeskov Marked where they vote on who should be their king for a year and help settle conflicts in vagabond society. They give the title to the vagabond who has been the kindest and best behaved all year.

The vagabonds have rules they live by: no lying, no stealing, no fighting and always be polite. If they catch any of their members breaking the rules they beat them up because it’s important to their survival that outsiders can trust them. They make their living by sharpening knives and scissors or doing manual labor like helping you chop wood, clean up your garden or the like.

That’s why if you see a vagabond you know you’re in safe company no matter how drunk they are. Should you come across one support an old tradition full of rituals and kindness by giving them some coins or a sandwich.

Here, take these

there’s been a really bizarre trend in the past couple years of TERFS/radfems getting pissed off about biology posts. posts about the bilateral gyandromorph cardinal (one half male, one half female), posts about older hens beginning to crow and act like roosters, posts about animals being animals. and it’s hilarious because they interpret these posts as some kind of agenda. no! these are animals not choosing any gender identity or sexuality but being born into bodies they have no control over. weird how that happens in nature huh

Cultures/creeds for a gonzo transhuman fantasy setting constructed entirely from repurposed Dungeons & Dragons tropes:

A community of serial reincarnationists under a permanent enchantment that causes them to eventually reappear in a new young adult body with personality and memories intact any time they’re killed, whether through violence, disease or old age. The exact form the new body takes is random, and is as likely to be an animal as a humanoid; their cavalier attitude toward death is tempered by a strong cultural expectation to learn how to live with whatever body you end up with, so it’s not uncommon to encounter - for example - a respected member of the community who currently happens to be an owl. Socially they tend toward agrarianism, though they have no particular objection to urban living; in their ethos, a sprawling city differs from a bird’s nest or a beaver’s dam only in scale.

A mob of undead skeletons obsessed with the transitory nature of existence. Their culture is dominated by short-lived art forms, like sand paintings, improvisational music, and elaborate wooden sculptures which are burned on completion. They’re able to freely swap bones with each other, or replace them with suitably prepared substitutes taken from non-undead skeletons or carved from wood or other dead organic matter, and it’s not uncommon to encounter a skeleton with none of their original bones remaining; pondering the resulting ship-of-Theseus problem with respect to personal identity is regarded as a fun intellectual exercise, but it doesn’t actually bother them. Alone among the creeds, they never directly produce new members; every one of them is a former member of some other creed.

A society devoted to the pursuit of knowledge by transforming life forms through experimental wizardry. They regard experimenting on others - even animals - as horrifyingly unethical, and as a result, each of them uses their own body as a testing ground. Individual members range from mostly human with only a few odd physical quirks, to entities not readily recognisable as life, let alone people. While novel transmutations are always self-directed, they’re willing to perform the most thoroughly tested and proven procedures on others with informed consent, a service that comes in high demand. Likewise, interventions to rescue other members of the creed from experiments gone awry are permitted, though only after careful deliberation - after all, perhaps your neighbour meant to spend a year as a rock!

Skipping the sales pitch, I spent all day just to make this and I'm very happy with the result!!

If anyone else has the urge to crochet a tiny little guy for yourself or someone you care about, you can download the pattern below and fold it into a zine <3 (pls tell me if this works. I'm happy to update this with a pdf instead!)

Available in both english and swedish as always!

If there was a way to run SUPER MEGA AD BLOCKER on this website I fucking would

A master post of Thomas Romain’s art tutorials.

There’s not enough space to post all of them, SO here’s links to everything he has posted (on twitter) so far : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. 

Now that new semesters have started, I thought people might need these. Enjoy your lessons!

YOU KNOW WHAT BOTHERS ME

when fantasy books describe the cloth of Quant Farmpeople’s clothing as “homespun” or “rough homespun”

“homespun” as opposed to what??? EVERYTHING WAS SPUN AT HOME

they didn’t have fucking spinning factories, your pseudo-medieval farmwife is lucky if she has a fucking spinning wheel, otherwise she’s spinning every single thread her family wears on a drop spindle NO ONE ELSE WAS DOING THE SPINNING unless you go out of your way to establish a certain baseline of industrialization in your fake medieval fantasy land.

and “rough”??? lol just because it’s farm clothes? bitch cloth was valuable as fuck because of the labor involved ain’t no self-respecting woman gonna waste fiber and ALL THAT FUCKING TIME spinning shitty yarn to weave into shitty cloth she’s gonna make GOOD QUALITY SHIT for her family, and considering that women were doing fiber prep/spinning/weaving for like 80% of their waking time up until very recently in world history, literally every woman has the skills necessary to produce some TERRIFYINGLY GOOD QUALITY THREADS

come to think of it i’ve never read a fantasy novel that talks about textile production at all??? like it’s even worse than the “where are all the farms” problem like where are people getting the cloth if no one’s doing the spinning and weaving??? kmart???

So, tattoo shop AUs are really popping off lately and personally I love it. What’s more romantic than bleeding for art? Nothing!

But as someone married to a tattoo artist, I have been experiencing some mild She Wouldn’t Say That regarding tattoo culture. So here’s a few quick tips that may help inform your AU. With a grain of salt for my mostly-second-hand knowledge:

NO ONE REPUTABLE SHOP WILL TATTOO A DRUNK PERSON. EVER. or even a person they suspect of any kind of inebriation. This is not just for Regret reasons, but also because alcohol is a blood thinner. If someone is on an acute dose of blood thinners, you generally do not want to stab them dozens of times per second.

Maybe this is regional, but in my experience most tattoo places don’t call themselves parlors anymore. It has a kind of seedy vibe. I see shop or studio a lot but rarely parlor.

Most tattoo artists are hot, yes, but none are as hot at my wife

Tattooing janks up your hands. Sometimes in a RSI way but definitely in a changing-gloves-every-five-minutes-fucks-up-your-skin way.

Artists themselves are rarely if ever employees of the shop. They will be independent contractors who pay the shop either a cut of their sales or rent on their station like a hair dresser. They are also (usually) responsible for taking care of their own supplies, tools, etc. except for the stencil printer. What kind of dweeb would have their own stencil printer?

There is always a line for the stencil printer. Always.

Artists generally spend orders of magnitude more time working on art, replying to emails, doing consults, etc compared to time with their needles in skin.

A typical schedule for an artist might be: wake up at noon and guzzle half her body weight in coffee, one appointment from 1-4, and another from 6-9. Home to eat one (1) real meal at 10 pm. Drawing until 5 am. This is good for her actually and good for our marriage and she’s so healthy all the time.

An ideal shop receptionist needs to be friendly, knowledgeable, and encouraging. They also need to be willing to get out the baseball bat that is kept behind the counter.

If a shop has to choose between “good people skills” and “will promptly rebuff Nazis and the obviously inebriated” the later is often a more important consideration.

At any given moment in any given shop there’s going to be at least one apprentice or someone bumming around hoping to be taken on as an apprentice. They spawn on tic and this feature cannot be disabled.

Again I can not overstate how hot my wife is