Random Conworld idea thread

[Creyeditor]

I somehow missed this post. So here are my answers.
1a+1b The expected timing probably varies considerably between subgroups.
2a. I was inspired by Modalism, so this is maybe a mystery.
2b. And yes, it is probably part of the secret knowledge.
3. The supreme deity and the anti-god have probably interacted in some way. At some point I was thinking about the reason for the surpreme god to leave Fredauon again, and I think he might have tricked the anti-god, or died to save people from him (and probably there were further ideas that I had about it). So they must have come to Fredauuon at the same time, probably anti-god first, then he was defended by the supreme god.

[lurker]

a detail for some culture: when dealing with bureaucracy, it's customary (in more intricate or substantial cases) to give the person handling your case a flower - this isn't a bribe or anything, it's just a respectful acknowledgment that the official is doing their duty.

So what happens when you don't give the flower? Would that be akin to, say, giving the bureaucrat the finger?

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Anyhow, here's a little tidbit of history I thought of last night. It's basically: "(female) trolls protect the world against the commies/Nazis/etc"

So long story short, in my conworld there's a Nazi-Communist-Russia-Prussian con-nation that's the closest to an actual pure evil called Keintapa. A Mutualist Revolution (the equivalent to our world's Communist Revolution) overthrew Keintapa's traditionally autocratic monarchy and replaced it with an autocratic republican dictatorship that's basically the same thing, except worse in some respects. The Mutualist regime is even more chauvinistic, xenophobic, and politically oppressive than the monarchy. However, many women and lower-class citizens turned to the newest technology of the time - the instant telegraph - to express their discontent.

Over the course of several centuries, these nameless women and lower-class citizens would hack telegraph systems - mainly those controlled by the government, media, and/or elites - and basically troll them. For instance, a troll would waste the bureaucracy's time by pretending to make appeals or ask for help in order to waste the bureaucracy's time. Or, trolls would send pornographic images en masse to media outlets, and so on. Or, they would send nonsensical threats to upper-class citizens. Because the telegraph still wasn't as well-developed a technology, it was often difficult to track down these often anonymous trolls who took on pseudonyms (i.e., like internet usernames), and, furthermore, many of these trolls were in fact activists from foreign nations. Plus, there was just so many of them anyways.

In fact, the art of Trolling became associated with the so-called Amazonian rebels, who were stereotypically women in Northern Keintapa who led a prolonged centuries-long rebellion and guerilla campaign against the Keintapans (in reality, they were equally men and women, but Keintapan propaganda turned them into women). By the time the Keintapan nation collapsed, thanks in part to trolling, the "trolling culture" had spread to much of the lower and even middle classes and was an integral part of their folklore and group identity, with famous trolls - whose true identities often were unknown or simply made up by storytellers later on - becoming folk heroes akin to Robin Hood. It spread beyond its original home of the telegraph, being an important part of the now even newer technologies like the internet, or even to older communication systems like newspaper printing and books and urban grafitti.

The trolls were called the "Magnamites", after Magna Pareigus, a famous Empress consort of an even more famous Emperor of the Empire of Aidis, Xomeos XVI Daius. Although the real Magna was actually a very nice person albeit with a bit of a temper, her personality was exaggerated and completely changed by later storytellers, who made her look like a proto-troll-activist. A caricature of Magna - who in reality was a tall, attractive brunette - was used by the trolls as their unofficial symbol.

The end.

When I read "trolls" I thought you meant the monster not the internet persona lol.

Have you by chance read The Victorian Internet? It's a nonfiction book that compares the societal impact of the telegraph and the internet. Very interesting to me at least because I work in computer networking. No trolling per se but there was hazing of new telegraph operators that kind of fits.

The whole "revolution tries to overthrow a broken system and just becomes more broken" thing rings uncomfortably true. I like it.

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So as not to double post, here are some scraps from my current project. It involves a race of arboreal canids with prehensile tails and paws like an opossum (except with four fingers and two thumbs, one on either side). They are not bipedal though, so I'm having fun thinking of how their ergonomics would look.

For computer input, they use a set of four chording keyers, one for each paw. The keyers are gripped like handlebars and have a key for each digit (meaning 6 per keyer and 24 overall.) They lie on their back in a chair similar to a bowl chair or mushroom chair, with a hole to accommodate the tail. Since the tail is prehensile, there may also be various analog controls around the base of the chair for the tail to actuate.

They use AR goggles instead of screens for output.

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An Amnion is a sort of suspended animation chamber used for interstellar travel. You get inside and it fills with suspension fluid. The fluid does a couple things: It acts to cushion the occupant from high acceleration. It serves as a liquid ventilation medium, in other words, you breathe it in. It serves as a neural interface to the Data Plane (basically the Matrix) as well as the ship's "LAN" for lack of a better term. It detaches your mind from your senses and inserts its own input into the signal chain between the eyes/ears/etc and the brain, so a real-life version of the Brain in a Vat or Des Cartes Evil Demon thought experiment. It stops metabolism and thus aging while keeping the brain aware and active via Science™. The brain's time perception can be altered while in suspension. If you're on an interstellar voyage, it speeds up your perception to make the journey seem faster. If you're in a crisis situation and need time to plan, it can slow your time perception. It does all this without any body modification whatsoever. No tubes or jacks or anything.

The downside is that when you come out of suspension you're blind and immobile for anywhere from a few hours to a week depending on how long you were in there, which limits its usefulness somewhat. It also doesn't really work on humans yet.

[lurker]

Random idea: a tome of eldritch lore or spellbook of unimaginable power. The original version was lost, but at some point it was transcribed into braille. Since braille books span many volumes, whatever lovecraftian cult/mage school that wants the secrets hidden in the book has to find all the volumes, which are now scattered far and wide. Braille is also a fragile medium, so sections of text could be crushed flat over time, rendering the information within lost forever. Perhaps people who try to read the book by looking at it go blind, so you actually have to read braille properly to comprehend the book.

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A slightly sillier idea is a codex of dark magicks taking the form of a cookbook called the Omnomnomicon.

[Visions1]

So this is an idea I think I had a year ago. I want to eventually use it, but I don't know when I will. So I'm putting it here.

A major part of the ????'s spiritual beliefs be would be this class of people who can affect things by using a hook. By holding a hook in their hands (the shape something like a question mark - ? - but without the dot) and moving it to various positions in the hand while chanting, they cause things to happen or stop happening.
The chants themselves would be really interesting. Their language uses morae instead of syllables, and so movements can be pinned to a particular mora(e) in the chant. As well, this allows the chanting texts (oral texts, mind you) to be arranged as arrays, have chiasmus or symmetry (in multiple angles or even dimensions), and include an unending amount of double entenderes, puns and references, splitting and groupings of words, and meanings and interpretations.
Understandably, only the most adept and effective of these people can come up with chants that will actually work with the hooks - in terms of writing style, and acceptance by others.

[lurker]

A genie, witch, demon, fey, or other wish-granting entity offers mortals the ability to poop solid gold, but they must give up their sight in exchange.

[Keenir]

A genie, witch, demon, fey, or other wish-granting entity offers mortals the ability to poop solid gold, but they must give up their sight in exchange.

well, that mortal would definately have

Spoiler:

really bad hemroids

from that point onwards, assuming they accepted the deal.

[lurker]

A genie, witch, demon, fey, or other wish-granting entity offers mortals the ability to poop solid gold, but they must give up their sight in exchange.

well, that mortal would definately have

Spoiler:

really bad hemroids

from that point onwards, assuming they accepted the deal.

I imagined it as transmuting only upon leaving the body. This was inspired by how wearisomely frequent the question of how blind people wipe after using the restroom comes up on Reddit.

[lurker]

Here's an old setting that never really went anywhere.

A world that exists on the inner surface of a sphere. At the center of the sphere is a sun-like light source which is actually a god of order. Completely surrounding the sphere, "under" the ground from the perspective of its inhabitants, is an eldritch entity that appears as an endless mass of viscera gnawing at the roots of the world. This entity is a god of chaos and entropy. This world exists either near the birth of this universe or near its end. It's not clear to the setting's inhabitants which is true. Either the god of order is trying to bring the new universe into being by banishing the chaos and establishing physical laws, or fighting a losing battle against the incarnation of heat death. Magic is possible either because the laws of physics are still sorting themselves out, or because they're breaking down.

There are only two sapient races. What we would label humans, elves, and dwarves are actually human subspecies, and the other race is the kobolds, which are canine in appearance and have their own subraces based on dog breeds.

This was the setting I played around with the longest, with roots going back to (pause to allow the wave of existential dread to wash over me) 2005 during my freshman year of college. I wrote almost none of it down, except for some painstaking calculations about the size of the inner light source to make it look like the sun, as well as who knows how many sketch langs. I did, however, spend many an idle daydream plodding through its windswept prairies and delving through its dank ruins.

The kobolds eventually grew into the yinrih. At this point they were bipedal and lacked tails, but they already had prehensile feet and reproduced via womb nests.

[Pabappa]

My world has male lactation and women who can suspend their menstrual periods. Neither trait is universal, but people with each ability enjoy a higher social status than those of their sex without it.

Also, women in most societies are taller than men. Among some cultures, such as the Moonshines, women have total control of all aspects in society and their only enemies are each other. They are far more extreme than male-led societies like the Dreamers are in the other direction. The Players are another very feministic society which for much of their history allowed a woman to assault a man for any reason, and also call for the arrest of any man without evidence of a crime, even if the man was smaller and physically incapable of threatening the woman. Men also assault each other, as they see little connection between good behavior and societal rewards.

[thethief3]

The outline of a setting i developed.
The Forest
A vast continent spanning forest which is inhabited by animals which inhabit the material realm, incorporeal spirits which inhabit the spirit realm and of course animal spirits which are hybrids between the two and mainly inhabit the material realm but are intelligent and can use tools and build houses as well as walking upright. In ages past the forest was ruled by a royal family of martens who came from a foreign land but kept the balance between material and spirit realms. However in more recent times the royal family was assassinated including the current Crown Prince which broke the unbroken line which ensured their right to rule. So the various noble clans of the forest fell into disunity, banditry abounds, bad spirits and pathless spirits now abound and rivals from both the west and east including the Rival Wolf Dynasty of the east as well as a new force from the Western plains the Royauté des Chattes a foreign force bent upon exploiting the forest and which doesn’t live with harmony with the spirits but sometimes seeks to help the native inhabitants of the forest have risen.

Factions
Royauté des Chattes
A foreign clan who are currently the dominant power in the forest. They seek to extract the wealth of the forest as well as make the citizens lives better but they have disrupted the culture of the forest which is about living in harmony with nature and the incorporeal spirits. They also maintain an order of knights who stop banditry and enforce their rule in The Forest.

Sablesash Clan
The former ruling dynasty of the forest until one day assassins killed the royal family including the prince in waiting overthrowing their lineage. The off branches of the family have decided to pool together to try and restore order as the kingdom falls into chaos as well as to oppose the Royauté des Chattes but they lack legitimacy due to the violation of age old principles such as the unbroken lineage from the original founder of the clan known now as She Who Guides.

Pinefur Clan
A powerful clan tasked with the administrative details of ruling The Forest. They have grown more prominent with the fall of the original royal family. They have allied themselves with the merchant clans at least to a degree and are responsible for levying taxes to fight merchants.

Crownguard Clan
Originally the clan tasked with guarding the royal family and all its branches, especially the pre-eminent prince or princess. They have recently sought power to enact more militaristic decrees to oppose bandits as well as the actions of the Royauté des Chattes.

Other Noble Clans
Many other Noble clans inhabit these lands and unlike the other three they are generally composed of other species. Some have allied with the Royauté des Chattes in hopes of gaining power with them while others bitterly oppose them and have as such faded outside of prominence except in the areas where the royal family still controls.

Merchant Clans
Although named clans these aren’t hereditary and instead function as companies although hereditary leadership has been seen in older times when they wished to present well to the other noble clans. The most prominent of these is known as The Great River clan composed of mainly Otters which is responsible for trade along the great river although Foxes and other species are sometimes used for trading across land.

Faith of the Sun
An organised clergy centered around Sun Worship who originate from the east and which is most prominent amongst and primarily organised by Foxes.

Great Wolf Dynasty
An age-old rival of the Sablesash Clan who have established themselves in the northeast and who have also taken to opposing the Royauté des Chattes as they emerge. They revere their own principles of might and believe they ruled the forest in previous times.

The Order of the Light
Although the practices of The Light were introduced into the forest long ago the Order of the Light originates from the same land where the Royauté des Chattes originated. They have various priests and knights in their charge all dedicated to spreading the faith of The Light. Contrasting with the Faith of the Sun they have less organised scriptures as at its heart The Light is about practice and public worship. Nevertheless guidebooks have been dissimilated notably in many of the dialects and sometimes separate languages of the glades compared to the Faith of the Sun which only writes in the major languages of The Forest including The Ancient Language, Sablesash, Pinefur, Chatte, Wolfhowl and its own eastern dialect brought by the Foxes to the land.


Faiths
Forest Animism
The natural religion of the forest, based on worship of its varied incorporeal spirits and emphasising the relationship between them and animal spirits. It is the native practice of much of the forest at least when not under the influence of others. In general it consists of various offerings to spirits some ritualised and some freeform and which ones being ritualised or freeform varying from area to area.

Great Spirit Worship
A type of Forest Animism based on worship of one or more greater spirits. It is usually only found in the glades in which one or a few have taken up permanent residence and is usually the dominant faith in such glades.

The Wolf of Twilight
A variant of Great Spirit Worship used by wolves to justify their ancestry. It tells of how a spirit of the times in between day and night as well as one who transgresses boundaries and gives power to those who seek it and who birthed the Wolves to be his emissaries in the world.

The Light
A foreign faith which emphasises what it calls Holiness which is based on innate purity as well as right action. Worship is loud and communal and often disturbs the native incorporeal spirits of the land although some attempts of integration of practices of Forest Animism have been attempted. Although it has established itself much earlier than the Royauté des Chattes it is often encouraged by them. In addition it has found opposition by many of the noble clans of the forest who see it as in opposition to their power and it established itself later then the rise of the Sablesash dynasty.

The Great Cat
Native faith of the Royauté des Chattes centered around the worship of the progenitor of the cat race, a mythic hero who set the world into a state of order by calming many mythic Esprits who were sowing chaos in the land. It is native to their homeland but has found offshoots in lands they control and along with the Light it is

Night Shamanism
An underground faith connected to Forest Animism but based on spirits of the night. It shares most traits with Forest Animism except spirits are often more impersonal and sometimes even malicious as well as willing to make pacts with

Winter Shamanism
The native faith of the Sablesash dynasty, based on the worship of the goddess of winter who provides safe passage to survive the winters and emphasises the rites centered around a Shamanka who voices her interests. It has died out largely in recent times but is still held by some people in the north. Some aspects of it have been syncretised into the practices of the upper noble clans as it is not too distinct from Forest Animism. In particular blessings of safety or enchantments to ward off danger use elements from this belief.

Sun Worship
Native faith of many of the fox clans centered around the worship of the sun as the giver of life. Priestesses are in almost all cases female and supposed to ask the sun for blessings as well as to instruct followers on its proper worship backed by a canon of holy books. Unlike other native faiths the foxes encourage outsiders to take part in it.

Starmaker
Worship of the creator who set the stars in the sky. It is based on often philosophical inquiry about their nature and is often done by scholars or outside cults and is rarely a mainstream faith. However certain Coyote clans have done their part to make the most extensive, elaborated and ritualistic versions of the faith.

[lurker]

More of a story premise, but...

A massive asteroid will eventually collide with Earth, completely purging it of all life. Humanity has the means to evacuate the planet in time, but can only stay off world temporarily while the Earth is re-terraformed. The impact is so huge that it completely rearranges the tectonic plates, and old borders are utterly effaced.

Resources are not evenly distributed, and a war ensues over who gets the most favorable spots.