I Think One Of The Reasons I Get Mildly Annoyed About Worldbuilding Threads That Are 200 Tweets Of Why

hiiii i usually refrain from making text posts here but i wanted to quickly mention: my OCs are not for public use! they’re not for your roleplays, theyre not for you to copy and paste, and theyre not for your OC inspiration mood-boards. I’ve been seeing a lot of people tag my (sometimes extremely personal) original art with the names of their own OCs, commenting about how “this is just how i picture X looking!” If you really have these sentiments, keep them to yourself, please! I guarantee 90% of artists dont want to be told that their OCs remind people of their own OCs or of existing fictional characters. It’s not a compliment, I promise you.  

Guess what, the bots are evolving They sent crap to my askbox you've got to be kidding me

Universal Lore- Part 4, The Elemental Planes

All life has the drive to evolve, whether they know it or not. Some are fated to lose the race of genetic and intellectual superiority, some never achieve the creation of civilization, and it is debatable whether or not some will ever even achieve sentience.

Some beings are beyond evolution in the High Realms they isolate themselves in, beings that perceive themselves as the closest to the ideal of perfection and thus are stagnant so long as they believe so.

Some beings are the purest form of evolution, elemental beings that can alter the shape and thought of life through assimilation but could be mistaken as mindless to those that fail to understand a simple truth: the purest defiance of fate is evolution.

If the High Realms represent the driving hand of fate, the Elemental Planes represent the breathing will of life.

These elementals, of course, have their own realm, or rather level of existence, that they are born in- physically it is beneath the Lower Realms, but is as deeply intertwined to the other's existence as are the High Realms and Lower Planes, and is (if anything) closer to mortals than High Realms beings are.

The purest of elements are Stellar, Flame, Air, Earth- the first elements that drive evolution before water and nature come forth, and thus these elements are the ones that make up each sector of the planes where the first elementals came.

The planes form as a vast cave system would, the four largest chambers each holding an elemental core, and from these cores do the energies coalesce and birth new elementals into the current Existence.

The elementals, though beings of pure energy, are unstable lifeforms in their first century of existence, and there is a high chance for their forms to separate into core and body.

The body is capable of developing its own core through the energy created by the division, and so it becomes a physical elemental. The core does not develop its own body, but in exchange gains greater intelligence, and so it becomes an ethereal elemental. On occasion, one half may not become an elemental at all and collapses back to a basic energy state that lacks consciousness. Some elements are more prone to splitting compared to others, and some may only form as a specific type by default.

Air is closest to the ideal of formless freedom, and thus they may only become ethereal elementals.

Stars are second closest to the ideal of steadfast perpetuity, and thus they may become both physical and ethereal but have a greater tendency to form as the latter.

Flame is closest to the ideal of mastery through trial, and thus they may equally become physical or ethereal.

Earth is the closest to the ideal of corporeal self, and thus they may only become physical elementals.

The few elementals that remain whole in both physical form and ethereal mind become Potentates that anchor the Planes, voluntarily falling into eternal stasis until their cores burn out to maintain the existence of the realm.

But what of the impure elements that too drive evolution, and what of hybrids of the four?

They do not exist on the Elemental Planes, instead being born upon individual worlds in the Lower Planes and the in-betweens of space.

Some are "natural" in a sense, water and nature elementals while not being true elementals are at least considered half-elementals and naturally come into existence upon worlds with Potential, although they are a sort of byproduct of evolution. Due to this, they can freely choose between a physical or ethereal form.

Some are created unnaturally, being hybrid elementals born from the collision of pure elementals and/or half-elementals. Whether they are physical or ethereal is dependent on the property of the material they resemble, with storm elementals being ethereal and crystal elementals being physical.

All, however, are capable of assimilation and all share the drive to evolve and become greater beings. They seek Potential and to spread their influence, either being born from said Potential or drawn to it from the Elemental Planes.

When a world meets the threshold of Potential either through an event or natural evolution, Elementals will cross into it and fuse with certain mortals to their whim, merging their ideals and thought and spirit and form in order to create an "evolved being".

These evolved beings become almost a separate race from the race they came from, with some being genetically different(or may not even have genes left) and some still having genetic similarity to their original race but difference in ability and appearance, though all will now have a core akin to an elemental's, and so their lives become intertwined with the power of the core and the ability to pass onto the Realms of Death is forfeited.

When the core's energy fades or the core shatters, so will their consciousness, and they too will meet the same fate as an elemental that fails to return to their birthplace should they have one- reversion to their element's base material.

Such was the fate of the Sky Lords of Avianaen that became no more than the passing breeze, and so did the silent Åskorhaia sentries that became stone and Mountainheart.

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Taglist for writing-

@aneci

If anyone else would like to join the taglist, feel free to DM me or send in an ask! I will also have a separate taglist for art posts.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

play in this space with me

Geology of Natural Disasters and How to write them into your fictional universe.

So, you want to write about a natural disaster to advance your plot and torture your players/characters even more? Let me tell you how, accurately.

I feel like unless it is a volcano, natural disasters are a pretty slept on plot drivers, and some of them are really cool and unique! Today, I will talk to you about land slides, earthquakes (And earthquake related disasters), and volcanoes.

Landslides: Probably one I see the least in stories, but one that would be incredibly interesting to write into a plot where they believe in curses. Landslides can happen along ocean bluffs, slightly hilly areas, and highly mountainous areas, this means it is something that can happen in most landscapes. But what can trigger a landslide? Mostly all you need to trigger a landslide could be just abnormally large amounts of rain, excessive deforestation (with a little bit of rain), or an earthquake. If you don't want to use deforestation or an earthquake as a catalyst, a really cool indicator that the land is slipping and may be prone to a collapse is J hooked trees.

This indicates that there is soil creeping slowly over time, and it may lead to a major landslide.

2. Earthquakes: Probably one of the easiest things to write, earthquakes can happen anywhere, but they are most common in places that are tectonically active areas. There are about three types of environments you can expect earthquakes to be common. The first is just rugged mountains, if your landscape looks like this, you should write in earthquakes. Associated hazards could be landslides, avalanches, and large falling rocks.

The next landscape could be a thin mountain range, next to the ocean, very scenic, but very dangerous. Essentially, I am describing a subduction zone environment.

Earthquakes in these areas could equal a couple different associated disasters. Scenario one: A very large earthquake happens, and the ocean begins to recede. This is a tsunami, enough said. If you are writing a tsunami though, please, please, do not write it as a large wave, thank you. Also, a common way people are hurt by tsunami's are from them going into the ocean because they don't understand a tsunami is going to happen.

Scenario two: A large earthquake happens, your characters are in a valley and suddenly the ground begins to liquify as the ground shakes, once the shaking stops, the ground becomes solid like nothing ever happened, except everything has suddenly sunk into the now hard ground. This is called liquefaction and it typically happens in areas that have loose dirt or lots of saturated soil.

Scenario three: There are a lot of small earthquakes, they do not cause a lot of damage, but you begin to notice that one of the isolated mountains has a plume rising. Earthquakes can indicate lava moving underground and the filling of magma chambers.

The next environment that can host lots of earthquakes would be regions that have a lot of really deep valleys and small mountain ranges (not cone volcanoes), but overall seems pretty flat.

This indicates a transform fault like the San Andreas. If you want to hint at there being earthquakes in the area, you can show fence posts that are suddenly several feet out of line at a dilapidated farm or something similar.

(These earthquakes are different because they are cased from sideways movement, not an up-and-down movement this hint can only be used for this environment). Volcanoes would not be found here, but liquefaction and landslides could still occur here.

4. Volcanoes: If you thought earthquakes had a lot of information, volcanoes do too. First you have to ask yourself, what kind of volcano you want to have, what kind of eruption style? So lets break down the kind of eruptions you can have and what their landscapes look like. Hawaiian Shield volcano: This will produce a smooth fast lava, the landscape typically is pretty flat, but there will be small cones and the rocks can have a ropey or jagged texture and the rocks will be almost exclusively black to dark red.

Stratovolcanoes: These will be solitary mountains, typically, that look like perfect cones (Picture shown in earthquake section). These will have large ash cloud eruptions and pyroclastic flows, they may have some lava, but typically most damage is done from the pyroclastic flows (think Pompeii). Some hints of these, other than describing the cone features (which can be hidden by other mountains), would be to talk about petrified wood! Trees can get fossilized in the ash and I imagine it would be very strange to find this rock that clearly looks to be a piece of wood, but its a rock. Subcategory- Calderas: Used to be a large stratovolcano, but they erupt so explosively that the entire cone collapses and creates a basin.

There are a lot of kinds of volcanoes out there, so forgive me for just putting an infographic and then talking to you about these really rare types of eruptions that I feel like people should know about.

Okay lets talk about blue lava (kind of) and black lava

You will notice the lava is still red in the middle of this image, during the day these would look like a normal eruption, but at night the burning sulfur would make it appear blue. Some cool features other than this, would be that any water in the area would become very acidic and burn the skin due to sulfuric acid. This would again be really cool if you are trying to describe a 'cursed' land.

Black lava: This happens only in the east African rift I believe, but it is a carbonatite lava, but if you are writing in a rift valley (where the continent is tearing apart to form a new ocean) this might be a cool feature. The lava will cool white and will quickly erode, it makes for a very alien landscape!

Anyway as always, this is supposed to be an introductive guide for the basics of writing geology to create cool landscapes/features into dnd or fictional universes, if you are a geologist please understand my oversimplification of tectonics, I didn't want people to run away.

Universal Lore- Part 3, The Mortal Realms(The Lower Planes & The Lesser Realms)

A Cycle consists of the beginning and end of an Existence and the nothingness before and after. An Existence consists of the universes and realms that are born and die within it.

This Existence was born with the gleaming light which pierced through nothingness, with that light having brought forth the flow of time as a seemingly endless stream of sand, the tapestry of strings that formed the expanses of space, and the possibility through alternatives that allowed the creation of new branches on the tree of universes. But of course, you've heard the whole story by now.

In that light was a force of creation that stretched throughout all the universes of existence, swathes of iridescent cosmic gas that quickly formed the first stars and planets.

To the beings that lived and remembered many previous Existences, this all came at what felt like the blink of an eye, and this plane that would belong to true life would become known as the Lower Planes.

What distinguishes the mortals from the denizens of the High Realms is what eternity is to them. To mortals, their lives are finite but what comes after is infinite- they have souls that can pass on to somewhere beyond the reach of the High Realms, an existence where there is no end other than when they feel it should end. To immortals, their lives seem infinite but what comes after is nothingness- they lack souls, with their options being to reform back in their home realm and toil once more or cease to exist; an existence where the end dictated to them is the one of all nonliving things.

Those of the High Realms lack a concept of a soul, and most do not understand what one is, save for Nix- but even he does not fully understand the origins of souls and thus can only create imitations of them, false lives that are unstable and lack a true free will.

In the Lower Planes are countless souls of civilizations and species that once or will or do exist, and thus with souls comes a force called "potential". This "potential" gives them the ability to evolve, and some by slim chance become more than mortal, but less than immortal. These evolved beings may have been created through manual evolution, magic, technology, or a fusion with elementals(should the world have them), and some are born through pure chance, but these beings often have the ability to faintly see the threads of Space.

Through these threads do they slip into a space in-between, above the Lower Planes but below the Realms of Death, and here can they thread their own strings into the grand tapestry of existence and create Lesser Realms.

These Lesser Realms are only able to be created in relation to a place in the Lower Planes, such as a city above the clouds or a mirror of the environment reflected by a lake, but some more powerful beings may create a Lesser Realm bound to a unique concept or state of conscious, such as a realm of dreams or a realm that is only accessible to those that understand a fundamental concept of a belief.

As such, some species may consider these evolved beings to be "gods", or at the very least an embodiment of some aspect of their world or civilization.

Lesser Realms are often inaccessible to High Realms beings, but if the location one is bound to or if the concept it relates to is fathomed or influenced by a High Realms being, the Realm can be subject to the influence of a force of creation, such as corruption from the Abyss' nothingness.

These realms can persist after the evolved being dies so long as they willed it, but when they die, the Realm begins to unfurl its "strings", and thus can be destroyed by another evolved being that comes across it.

In the grand Order of this Existence, the High Realms house both outsiders and creators, the clockmaker watching the clock and only reaching down to repair cogs and gears-

To the Lower Realms, the face of the clock is all they perceive, and every atom that composes the face is another world and civilization.

The hands move because Fate dictates as such, and the numbers that are raised above the clock face can observe the space above the face and the movement of the hands.

These numbers are the evolved beings, and with their differing perspective on their place in existence, they may alter the face of the clock ever so slightly to leave a scratch or dent that can slip past the eye of the Creator.

These dents are the Lesser Realms, a miniscule puncture on the grand tapestry of Space, and the way for mortals to alter Creation's truths akin to ants on an endless field.

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Taglist for writing-

@aneci

If anyone else would like to join the taglist, feel free to DM me or send in an ask! I will also have a separate taglist for art posts.

Organizations of the realms in the Elvaria Universe

Boriasonde is crossed out since it collapsed(refer to Voiskanan lore)

Fandom Problem # 4074

The following two opinions can and should coexist:

"No one owes a fanartist/fanfic author/other fancontent creator comments/reblogs."

AND

"If no one leaves positive comments/reblogs on fanart/fanfic/other fancontent, they shouldn't be surprised if the fanartist/fanfic author/other fancontent creator slows their updates or even stops publishing content all together."

And yes, the phrase "positive comments" is important here. If the only comments are flames or demands for more content without otherwise complimenting the fancontent, they'll do the same amount of good as zero comments, if not worse.

heya! I don't know if you celebrate but:

merry christmas❣️🎁 and a happy new year!✨

Hello!!! I don't really celebrate but happy holidays to you too 🎉!

If you're from NA I hope you're doing well and keeping warm these past days, the weather is brutal right now-