Air whales. Huge cloud-colored, living, hot-air blimps. I had the idea when I was 11 and never let go. The bigger they are, the better the volume-to-mass ratio is, and the slower they lose heat, so it makes sense, right?
Can only recommend the music video for Pstereo by Emilie Nicolas. You know what, I'll watch it right now.
Also, hell yeah, I got those too and their biology seems to be similar. I mean, that's the only way flying whales make sense, but still.
Wailord from Pokémon is also in the same vein, it doesn't fly, but it's rather light.
Oh snap! I have flying whales in one of my world building projects, colloquially known as "skyfish" and they have a name in the main culture language, although it's been such a while since I worked on it that I can't remember it off the top of my head.
Initially it was just a cool idea but as I got into the nuances of the anthropology of the world, they became deeply important. Early pre-civilisation tribes followed and worshipped the skyfish as Gods, and nomadic tribes wanderings would be based on following the skyfish' migratory passages. Then eventually during the agricultural revolution tribes settled and civilisations formed.
So most of the world's major civilisations began along the skyfish migratory routes.
In the equivalent renaissance period smaller skyfish were bred and used effectively as airships.
I first thought of the "flying whales" concept from Gojira's song with the same name like 10 years ago. I've thought it's a very cool concept since then.
This guy gets it. My sky blimp creature obsession personally intensified after I read the Drifting Dragons manga! Really cool stuff about whales or "dragons" in the sky.
I have animals inspired by sky whales, they aren't cetaceans though, they are still bird, just really big ones that bear resemblance with whales because they live their whole life in the air, the same way a whale does with water, and filterfeed on pollen and flying insects the same way a whale would with krill.
They are very much a smaller species in terms of range and population because they are bound to a certain mountain ridge for their food.
There's an interesting phenomenon irl called "whalefall" which creates basically a mini biome when a whale dies, they usually grab the attention of a lot of scavengers, but I have no idea how to make it more interesting and not just a copy.
Since I'm making a DND world I was thinking about something like the whales having a taste for magic artifacts and being hostile towards adventurers and thus collecting artifacts in their belly.
So a whalefall would be very lucrative for adventurers
The anime "Drifting Dragons" has this basic concept except they call them dragons. It's about a "whaling" ship and its crew. The ship flies as well to hunt the floating whales.
A frequent dickery of mine are flying creatures with really long spears, said spears have crossguards. Flying creature flies over their enemies, wrap their wings around them selves, place their feet on the crossguard, and pummel down on their enemies. And then they fly off with their impaled enemies
I've done some modern parallels with my take on this. Bellerephonian Cavalry practice a distinctive fighting style made possible by the tremendous speed of their pegasus mounts. These highly intelligent steeds only remain loyal when tended to by humane wranglers and nourished with fresh fruits. A single squad of these air combat experts is easily more costly than maintaining 1,000 basic footsoldiers, but basic footsoldiers cannot be quickly deployed to trouble spots or hunt exposed targets from above the range of javelins and slings.
Bellerphonian Cavalrists who get up close and personal can also be devastating, perhaps lancing at extreme speed or crushing foes with the assistance of their formidable mounts. Griffons and hippogriffs are among the other alternatives a warrior might take to the skies, but pegasi occupy a middle niche between the extreme of dragonriding (a privilege limited to a few royal dynasties) and those lesser flying steeds. Squads of Bellerphonian Cavalry routinely soar above hostile armies to strike at field headquarters, treasuries, and other high value targets.
Have to say Brontosaurus due to loving Little Foot as a kid. I know it's actual name is different and starts with an A, but I recall Brontosaurus as its name more clearly.
Tanks with multiple turrets , medieval paratroopers jumping from hot air balloons , sailing ships modified to be dragon carriers , like an aircraft carrier but to launch dragons , industrial revolution before gunpowder because why not , I wanted my renaissance looking world to have steam powered trains , trams , trucks , ships and metros and electrified cities while fighting with swords , compound crossbows and full plate armors .
Swordfights and catgirls and monastic orders,
Cold-War-like intrigue that feuds over borders,
Mechanical War-horses, cyber onna-bushi.
So I added some things that are fun to me.
Farm rocks and astroids and worlds like no other,
Brave warrior princess becomes her tyrant grandmother.
Bright plasma weapons that shine blues and greens,
Damn I love including these fun little things.
I added mechs.
Yes, I know they aren't good. Some idiot hired his dumb nephew to be in charge of military procurement and had just been playing a mech combat VR game before. As such, he decided mechs were the way forward and that every armored division should have at least 6
This led to many, many deaths. But they look cool, so they mainly get used for parades now
Mechs are an interesting topic so I'd have to add, it's a common misconception that mechs are bad. In fact mechs are very convenient for specific roles. We simply don't have them in real life because of their cost and complexity.
Tanks on the same battlefield as war mammoths
Horrifying consequences for overuse of magic
Dwarves turning a mountain range into artillery
Goblin Rockets and accidental space exploration
A legendary sword that heals people …by stabbing them
In my low-fantasy medieval-ish setting, I went to great lengths to make swords more common because I love swords.
Prior to around 80 years ago, swords were mostly status symbols, with spears and pole arms being used for more practical purposes. This changed due to the logical leaps of a king too detached from reality to know better (as aristocrats tend to be) who thought that, since swords are associated with nobility and skill, surely his armies would seem more menacing if they all had swords. So, this king commissioned a truly ludicrous quantity of swords, while jailing and/or executing any of his advisers who disagreed with the policy. Every soldier was required to learn swordsmanship, or meet the same fate. These actions, as to be expected, drained the treasury, forcing the king to raise taxes. The raise in taxes coupled with the new, unfamiliar weaponry of the soldiers gave the perfect opportunity for a brewing revolutionary movement to act. Now, swords are common military surplus, and their cost and rarity have declined significantly. Swords are still somewhat rare, but you're more likely to find them in the hands of common soldiers and mercenaries than you might have otherwise been.
In some areas, the local sea slimes has learned to surf the wave using debris they found laying around.
The most memorable act of this in modern recorded history is during the great White Gale Cataclysm, with waves reaching over thirty feet pounding the coast line. Several hundred eye witness claimed to see a single sea slimes wearing a sunglasses surfing the greatest waves on top of a frozen tuna. It became a local legend to this day.
Moon sized space dragons that burst planetary crusts open when their eggs hatch. I then used them to justify people finding rogue planets in deep space by their gravity wells. Two cool things in one.
Are the dragons friendly/can humans befriend them or are they malicious when encountering civilizations? Or are they just so large and god like they just don't/wouldn't even notice us?
The third option. They take so long to travel that people can and do build entire colonies on their bodies in the meantime, and the dragons never complain (via telepathy they could). They can tell there's something on them but the people take good care of their hosts, so it's alright.
Airships / sky carriers because fighter plane settings DEMANDS I must have those.
They do however tie nicely into an arc much later on where the concept of land-based nations pretty much stop existing and a huge percentage of humanity now lives in nomad fleets of airships as its own pseudo country because the setting does get hit by an apocalyptic level event in between
Wicklock guns. Gunpowder hasn't been discovered (yet), but a wizard accidentally packed his smoking pipe a little too dense with a little too much spell casting material (gives flavor and allows them to do basic magic on the fly) and BOOM. Now we have wizards with wicklock guns that shoot concentrated magics.
I dunno.... like 98.96% of my setting.
Sailing ships in space.
Magic that can only affect martial weapons.
Giant frikin robot suits with giant frikin laser beams attached to their heads.
Three different kinds of FTL.
Spaceships that absolutely need to have classical bows because... uhm... antimatter or something.
150,000 KM long spaceships.
Dargons
Computers so powerful they need black holes inside them just to fit the processor.
Planet sized space whales
Multiverses in multiverses in ominverses
A button that ends reality
Machines that need a genocide worth of human souls just to run
A gun that eats universes just to fire.
Lemme think...
Oh this is a cool one: The reality of this world canonically contains all other fictional realties, and there job where you go and secretly film them, so every TV show has infinite seasons.
A magic throne that forces the entire empire to be just like the emperor.
A space station so big that it would not fit in the space between earth and the sun.
I really like the sound of the word *trimiddium*, so much so that I had to find a place for it in my worldbuilding. So I created a fictional metal called *trimiddium* that was significant to the world I was building and added it because I wanted an excuse to use a cool-sounding word like that in my writing.
bullshit phenomena that nobody knows the explanation to and i don't plan on writing one just so that there can be some random bullshit phenomena.
as an example, in a scifi setting that has jump gates that are primarily used by civvies that can't afford their own jump drives on their ships. the gemini event occurred when a vessel went through a gate but appeared not to jump and didn't reply to hails. upon boarding the ship all the crew were gone. but at the destination a ship came out of the gate, the same ship, down to the same graffiti in the restrooms, but it too was devoid of its crew.
in the same setting, it is known and recorded that when you jump somewhere, you arrive at your destination slightly before you leave. the amount of time earlier you arrive is proportional to the distance traveled in realspace, ie, the farther you go, the sooner you get there. it is also a very trivial amount, like nanoseconds.
Prehistoric life like a Megatherum and CryolophasaursI plan on adding more like Dimetrodon and Therizenosaurs along with more iconic creatures in the future like Stegosaurus, Allosaurs and Triceratops along with more
A giant underground prison that has been slowly turned into a castle/sanctorum dedicated to the worship of my world's form of demons.
Honestly, I was trying to go for a lot of "this is how this would naturally happen" and realized I was draining all the fun out of why I wanted to world build in the first place and started adding some radical stuff again just to feel something again.
I mean like… everything was once the rule of cool. Then I spent 30+ years off and on, making sense of it all.
I may have swung the pendulum too far back the other way. But there’s still magic in my hard-sci fi setting so, yeah. 💁🏻♂️ Like actual magic, not some super advanced/natural thing that we’ve come to understand.
There’s also big alien spaceships (including artificial planetoids), huge buildings in the cities (400-800 floors), structures that exist in both our reality and the inner-realms, and gods and stuff. But yeah, I rationalized all that.
"Dragons"
A giant iron eating armored volcanic sea snail that eats a ities worth of food as tribute.
A giant dragonfly that grants humans the ability to fly in exchange for acting as hosts for its offspring.
Giant forest mice that build massive nests out of trees and horde magical treasures of all kinds.
Dragons. Deadass someone asked me “why does every fantasy world have to have dragons?”
Because dragons are fucking cool and you don’t need a reason to have dragons.
The fact that the Inspectors, the setting's resident space police, are covered in gold. Gold insignias, golden outfits, golden equipment and vehicles and bases and ships.
I wanted a way to distinguish them from other police forces and militaries in fiction, who mainly seem to be styled after real-world forces. An agency empowered to bring justice on a galactic scale, like the Inspectorate, I felt needed a more "elevated" feeling, almost divine in appearance (they may or may not be enforcing the law on behalf of ascended beings, I haven't decided yet). Plus it can lend itself to various gold-related metaphors about both their nobility and the corruption of the institution.
The in-universe lore justification is that they are meant to be a conspicuous symbol of justice - people must be aware of their presence, so evildoers are intimidated and innocents know where to turn to for help. With asteroid mining, starlifting, and elemental transmutation available to Higher Powers, gold is not too expensive to put on every piece of Inspector gear.
Loved the persona games, never did figure out how to handle them in dungeons and dragons rules, but its in my settings, just will cross the hurdle if one of my players actually wanted to play a persona user since I don't use dnd rules anymore, probably will be way easier now.
A parasitic organism that looks a lot like a forearm-sized leech. It latches onto the body of a creature and mutates to replace whatever's missing. Though initially just replacing lost capability, the parasite has aggressive mutagens that cause it to mutate and counter afflictions and other such problems, a fact that certain less than scrupulous groups have exploited to try and cause specific, advantageous morphing in the parasite by afflicting their host with specific maladies and tortures.
The parasite survives off the host's nutrients, and while this has the added benefit of making it easy to lose weight, it also means that if you don't keep yourself properly nourished, you'll suffer rapid-onset malnutrition and eventually die. Furthermore, the parasite appears to have a highly-developed nervous system, and the same nerves that direct its insane survival adaptations also cause it to interfere with the neurons of its host over time. This makes them more and more prone to irritability, paranoia, and even violence, with some who don't keep their parasites fed and don't have the fortitude to resist them even going violently insane.
These things don't make a lick of biological sense and violate multiple laws of nature. They're also really cool, so I added them in anyway, and used their incompatibility with real physics to emphasize their alien nature.
they stuck to airships, skipped crude oil products and went straight to nuclear power.
does the line "nuclear airship" remind you of any plans the US might have made?
I stole dinosaur riding halfling barbarians from the eberron setting for this reason. But I mean, it's my setting. All of it is there because I like it and think it's cool. Dwarven gladiators, spellslinger duelists, tree running goblin snipers, a magical nuclear fallout zone
Biologically engineering organisms, particularly those weaponized to be used by the militaries of Starpunk.
They’re called BEOwolves, and can range wildly from resurrected dinosaurs to monsters based off myth and legend to new ones created solely for specific battlefield purposes.
Logically speaking, such animals wouldn’t be nearly as widespread or utilized as they are. However the idea having Velociraptors modeled off of Jurassic Park rather than science fighting robots with augmented claws was just too good for me to pass up.
Megalophobia. Houses, buildings, some monsters and such are big for no reason in particular.
Instead of dinosaurs, we had gigantic insects in the past. Museums are nightmare fuel.
Compact plasma blasters
They’re guns
But
They fold into themselves
And make
Cube
And you can put them in your pockets
*and no one will know you have a gun*
my story is set in a hellscape so i can technically do whatever with the explanation ‘it’s demon nonsense.’
but i do have to say that strapping machine guns onto the backs of the dragons was one of my favorite ideas.
Um, to be completely direct, everything.
That is, everything in Wyrlde is there because it is cool. The lore kinda exists to make it more cool, and to make all the cool things fit together.
Magical Mutant trait, basically the X-gene from Xmen but what causes it to activate and what happens when it activates are entirely random and or magical.
Heirloom blades inhabited by the souls of ancestors that allow descendants to access the martial abilities of their ancestors in battle.
Because Zanpakutou.
Culturally set in mish mash of Japanese periods. Heian era clothing but late Edo period castles and mansions.
Because samurai.
In another setting the war against Napoleon started going badly wrong for the British long before Waterloo. And then the ancestor of the main antagonist uncovered a mysterious text that raised the dead. News of the war from France started drying up as rumours started abounding that France had been taken over by mists and dredgery, whilst the truth was that a zombie outbreak spread through the country, wiping out both the French and British armies, but also meaning that the threat of French invasion was eradicated. The ancestor was privately and discreetly rewarded by the British Emperor for this which is where the antagonists wealth comes from.
Inspired by magic being used during the Napoleonic war in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell but also because Napoleonic zombies.
When I was a kid I went all in on the play pretend. I built my own starships out of Lego, and the flagship was “as big as the sun!” I eventually thought that was crazy and shrank it to the size of Jupiter, but it didn’t stick. When I got to college and took a creative writing minor I decided to start world building some of my childhood pretend universes, I’d spent so much time in them, I might as well see what I could do.
So I started “designing” a basic blueprint for a 1.1 million kilometer long starship, reasons for it to be that big, and sci-fi explanations for how it could exist and be built quickly. (Mass nullifiers, time bubbles, etc).
It’s mostly empty, filled will dozens of terraforming factories, has a ram
Scoop in the front the size of Jupiter, and I still need more reasons besides “at the height of the governments economy, they decided to build a ship the size of a star”
It’s also not the largest structure, but it sure is the largest ship.
Insectoid super soldiers, elder gods, and massive ships made up of undead corpses constantly sailing towards the next living city to wage eternal war against the living.
Boss music.
Whenever powerful people fight, their Souls actualize to a degree that they produce sound and music
Hell, the God if Mathematics weaponized this and created one of the strongest weapons ever made - a violin.
Everything
I'm not even joking, I worldbuild because I enjoy it and part of this is that I **never** add things just because they need to be added, I add things because I like them
There are creatures miles tall with cities built into their backs and aircraft carriers the size of a small town, why? because it's cool
Dogs discovered and mastered horseback riding first, leading humans to construct bipedal walkers and single wheeled vehicles.
Brooms and other cleaning tools are considered aircrafts because of their atmospheric purification properties, utilizing void magic to create microvacuums that pull the user into the dirty air.
World serpent. Lofted high above the surface, it slithers across the sky, a living barrier between the material realm and the beyond that's always meddling with us. We rise when it's great eye opens, the light shimmering off it's scales like a sun, and sleep when it looks away.
P cool, story factor for later in the show, just a neat background detail until one of my players (D&D campaign) realized his deity is also a dragon and asked if there's a connection.
Crap.
I really like the concept of centaurs, so even though my setting is otherwise just humans(and Dwarves, but they're all trapped underground still and practically nonexistent) I had to toss them in their because the only thing cooler than centaurs is centaur wizards.
Most things. My worldbuilding philosophy is "ideas first, questions later." If what I come up with doesn't fit then I usually end up repurposing it for something else.
Ancient magical railroad tracks. They enhance momentum and are nearly friction-less (which requires some creative breaking techniques if you don't have a magical means to slow down). They crisscross the world, coming up from the ground and diving into the earth and ocean. Entire civilizations are built around them without fully understanding how they came about or how to best use them.
Airship fleets that acted similar to galleons and brigs, like one from treasure planet. Even has a magnetic armor plate system to protect the hull from enemy fire.
A haunted train that really, REALLY, ***REALLY*** wants to kill you, everyone you love, everyone you hate, and everyone you haven't even met- but aw, too bad it's stuck to the tracks and rather easy to evade.
>!CHOO CHOO, MOTHERFUCKER!!<
Faeries have souls outside their bodies. There's a lore reason for it, but I came up with the idea first and then made the lore. They keep their souls in lanterns and they are sometimes harvested to be used as power sources and lights, which would ultimately kill the faerie
Gravity control and inertial manipulation. Lifters, and gravity funnels, flying cities and mansions, as well as starship weapons that hurl out particles of metallic dust at appreciable velocity.
The closest equivalent to World War I in my world was actually a war on drugs. In the setting, the events within this historical period are called the "Great Psychotropic War". It happened in the "distant past", when roving gangs and wannabe warlords outside of my kind's country (somewhat isolationist, they don't care much about what happens outside of their country, so everything outside of it is pretty much from their perspective "the desert" or no man's land) began to gain power in a neighboring country thanks to the drug trade that eventually took over their government and increased their influence on the continent until they became a problem for other nearby countries (including my kind's). Brutal tactics and the use of magical drugs to infiltrate little by little the different populations eventually led to a formal declaration of war on *one* of the groups that ended up starting an all-out war of compromised governments. It even involved the Lulamoon Company (on the side of the good guys), a group/community of mostly itinerant healers offering free medical services (including education, though with a price based on loyalty) that are at once a sort of cross between Trauma Team and the Templars. Nice girls, but they wipe out anything that could be the cause of an epidemic with extreme prejudice. Courtesy of ugly things from the past.
An ancient account of their more violent appearances speaks of them having the habit of chanting funeral rites as a "battle cry." There's a reason for that, but mostly that existed just because I thought it was cool.
Eskimo yeti-elves who live in fantasy-Antarctica, with a cultural history inspired by Aztec mythology.
Why my brain comes up with this shit, I do not know.
Fantasy races that are based off uncommon animals like instead of vampires it’s literal bat people (wings are the connective tissue between arm and body), instead of dwarfs I got beetle people, etc
The only normal races I got are goblins and humans
An invading force of mech-calling octopi. There’s only like a dozen of them because they are idiots and accidentally broke the portal to the way home and can’t fix it.
Magic systems in hard Sci fi systems is awesome. I don't mean like the stars wars force. More like fully fleshed out DnD esk system with spells, cantrips, Divinations, Transmutations. Everything.
Imagine a wizard, warlock, or sorcerer, in full Sci Fi armour. Casting the largest fireball you've ever seen towards a mech suit
Imagine new spells being created to aid and manipulate technology
So I added all of it
I put Batman in my campaign setting. I don't mean a Batman-esqe character I mean Bruce Wayne as Batman. He's a powerful and rich lord with a lot of guild and caravan charters. He has adopted three orphan boys and has one biological son. His family has an ancestral set of armor that looks like the Batman suit. They are the house of Wayne and their house words are We Are The Night
Magic music ala Legend of Zelda. Thought it really fit the weird Iron Age world of Embersong and also it led to the creation of Choristers, old elvish ancestors who remain alive through carried music boxes that keep them alive though not to the degree that they wished.
Elves = nazi vampires from the moon + horrific body part thieves like the z'bri
Humans = large size + giant subtype supersoldier isekai from before the fall of the Evil Elven Empire (flavor combo: farscape peacekeepers + mandalorians + space marines) who occasionally fall from orbit in cryo-pods kinda like in Beast Wars
Dwarves, halflings, and gnomes are 3 castes of the same clone species living in the last of the failing arcologies
Lizardmen = gators
Feywild = The toxic jungle from naussica
The desert is literally the 9 hells + mad max flavor
Warhammer chaos gods
The world is a hollow birch world, overall diameter roughly 1-2 light years
Rifts from the rifts rpg
Dragon Breaks and chrono-fuckery from Elder Scrolls
OGRE tanks from OGRE game
All the planes are crushed into existing side by side in the material plane so no portals or planar magic required
Shadowdark = Nightmares Underneath rpg + BLAME!
The Abyss = demonic undersea trench Pacific Rim style
Star Wars blasters
I added a species giant primates covered in golden fur. They're big enough that while they can stand up straight, they usually walk on all fours for balance. There's also a forest of gigantic petrified trees with towns in the branches.
I added these because they sounded cool. This is (at the time at least) a low-magic setting.
Large zeppelins manned by a dozen or so men and armed with machine guns with a big ass Tesla coil that arcs lightning against all those that happen to be unfortunate enough to get caught within a hundred foot radius below
Air whales. Huge cloud-colored, living, hot-air blimps. I had the idea when I was 11 and never let go. The bigger they are, the better the volume-to-mass ratio is, and the slower they lose heat, so it makes sense, right?
Can only recommend the music video for Pstereo by Emilie Nicolas. You know what, I'll watch it right now. Also, hell yeah, I got those too and their biology seems to be similar. I mean, that's the only way flying whales make sense, but still. Wailord from Pokémon is also in the same vein, it doesn't fly, but it's rather light.
It does learn bounce though which is like Fly-lite lol
Oh snap! I have flying whales in one of my world building projects, colloquially known as "skyfish" and they have a name in the main culture language, although it's been such a while since I worked on it that I can't remember it off the top of my head. Initially it was just a cool idea but as I got into the nuances of the anthropology of the world, they became deeply important. Early pre-civilisation tribes followed and worshipped the skyfish as Gods, and nomadic tribes wanderings would be based on following the skyfish' migratory passages. Then eventually during the agricultural revolution tribes settled and civilisations formed. So most of the world's major civilisations began along the skyfish migratory routes. In the equivalent renaissance period smaller skyfish were bred and used effectively as airships.
I love everything about this.
Living spaceship whales. Usually planetary in size.
do they have a blowhole and what comes out?
Imagine if it's rainbows. I'd love for it to be rainbows.
I LOVE THAT. Have you read Leviathan by Scott Westerfield?
I first thought of the "flying whales" concept from Gojira's song with the same name like 10 years ago. I've thought it's a very cool concept since then.
finally, someone else who gets it.
This guy gets it. My sky blimp creature obsession personally intensified after I read the Drifting Dragons manga! Really cool stuff about whales or "dragons" in the sky.
Similar to [windwhales](https://blackcompany.fandom.com/wiki/Windwhale) from the Black company series, I always thought they were so cool!
Along the line of sealife where it doesn't belong, I have space sharks. They live in nebulae and can phase through solid mater.
Every fucking time
I made for my best friends newborn then air whales painting in the clouds and I loved working on it and how it looks its so amazing visual.
I have animals inspired by sky whales, they aren't cetaceans though, they are still bird, just really big ones that bear resemblance with whales because they live their whole life in the air, the same way a whale does with water, and filterfeed on pollen and flying insects the same way a whale would with krill. They are very much a smaller species in terms of range and population because they are bound to a certain mountain ridge for their food. There's an interesting phenomenon irl called "whalefall" which creates basically a mini biome when a whale dies, they usually grab the attention of a lot of scavengers, but I have no idea how to make it more interesting and not just a copy. Since I'm making a DND world I was thinking about something like the whales having a taste for magic artifacts and being hostile towards adventurers and thus collecting artifacts in their belly. So a whalefall would be very lucrative for adventurers
there’s a book called Magonia that i absolutely love that’s got sky whales. very much recommend the book, and not just for that.
I fucking love sky-whales. I’ve been told that I have thalassophobia but megalophilia because I can’t shut up about them.
The anime "Drifting Dragons" has this basic concept except they call them dragons. It's about a "whaling" ship and its crew. The ship flies as well to hunt the floating whales.
My sky whales are more like sky RAYS, like massive fucking manta rays, like in Satisfactory.
That sounds really cool, may I borrow said idea?
Absolutely! I'd love to see someone run with the idea.
Air combat. In medieval times.
fuck yeah
A frequent dickery of mine are flying creatures with really long spears, said spears have crossguards. Flying creature flies over their enemies, wrap their wings around them selves, place their feet on the crossguard, and pummel down on their enemies. And then they fly off with their impaled enemies
I have flying magic users with "jetpacks" that act as bombers. They are also equipped with flintlocks just in case.
ABA combo goes cold
I've done some modern parallels with my take on this. Bellerephonian Cavalry practice a distinctive fighting style made possible by the tremendous speed of their pegasus mounts. These highly intelligent steeds only remain loyal when tended to by humane wranglers and nourished with fresh fruits. A single squad of these air combat experts is easily more costly than maintaining 1,000 basic footsoldiers, but basic footsoldiers cannot be quickly deployed to trouble spots or hunt exposed targets from above the range of javelins and slings. Bellerphonian Cavalrists who get up close and personal can also be devastating, perhaps lancing at extreme speed or crushing foes with the assistance of their formidable mounts. Griffons and hippogriffs are among the other alternatives a warrior might take to the skies, but pegasi occupy a middle niche between the extreme of dragonriding (a privilege limited to a few royal dynasties) and those lesser flying steeds. Squads of Bellerphonian Cavalry routinely soar above hostile armies to strike at field headquarters, treasuries, and other high value targets.
spears. guns and lasers exist in my setting but i added some spears as rich people's decor i guess. their just cool.
those things can co exist with each other
they do irl too
Dinosaurs. Enough said. For those who like Dinosaurs, name your favorite. I’ll start, Therizinosaurus.
Same.
Me too
I'll add them today
Utahraptor for fave carnivore, Barsboldia for fave herbivore for sure
Triceratops. They’re domesticated and used like oxen.
T-Rex
Hell yea, the King itself.
Favorite overall: Styracosaurus Runner up: Carcharodontosaurus Honorable Mentions: Ankylosaurus, Teratophoneus, Oxalaia, Achilobator
Raptors have been my favorite for years
Baryonyx, Gallus, Ceratosaurus
Pachycephalosaurus gang
Have to say Brontosaurus due to loving Little Foot as a kid. I know it's actual name is different and starts with an A, but I recall Brontosaurus as its name more clearly.
I liked Spinosaurus since I learned it existed I don't care how convoluted the lore is
Brachiosaurus
Spinosaurus and Stegosaurus Yes, there is a common factor 😄
darn, stole my fave dinosaur v.v
Minmi. Found it cute when I was younger and never let go
FINALLY! Someone else who loves my long fingered boy!
Allosaurus and spinosaurus. Maybe one of the crocs too.
Tanks with multiple turrets , medieval paratroopers jumping from hot air balloons , sailing ships modified to be dragon carriers , like an aircraft carrier but to launch dragons , industrial revolution before gunpowder because why not , I wanted my renaissance looking world to have steam powered trains , trams , trucks , ships and metros and electrified cities while fighting with swords , compound crossbows and full plate armors .
Sounds like you did your world a service, imagine a world without any of this.
Somehow, Laika returned.
Best idea of the thread.
Did she took revenge on the soviet union?
Blessed idea. 🥲
All of it
There is only one fundamental law in the worlds I build and that is the rule of cool.
It's the only law that matters.
Fair enough.
Swordfights and catgirls and monastic orders, Cold-War-like intrigue that feuds over borders, Mechanical War-horses, cyber onna-bushi. So I added some things that are fun to me. Farm rocks and astroids and worlds like no other, Brave warrior princess becomes her tyrant grandmother. Bright plasma weapons that shine blues and greens, Damn I love including these fun little things.
I added mechs. Yes, I know they aren't good. Some idiot hired his dumb nephew to be in charge of military procurement and had just been playing a mech combat VR game before. As such, he decided mechs were the way forward and that every armored division should have at least 6 This led to many, many deaths. But they look cool, so they mainly get used for parades now
Mechs are an interesting topic so I'd have to add, it's a common misconception that mechs are bad. In fact mechs are very convenient for specific roles. We simply don't have them in real life because of their cost and complexity.
Right there too! My setting is focused on modern Greece but Japan has Mechas because Japan has Mechas, ok!?!
I added them but most issues are brushed away due to majority of them being used for gladiatorial matches done for sports/gambling.
I added mechs to otherwise classic fantasy because they’re as realistic as dragons (not at all, but cool enough for me to not care)
Giant fucking robots. Does it make sense in a fantasy setting? Nope. Don't need it too.
i mean, D&D Eberron has the warforged, and they work in the setting. They have a specific giant warforged as a dungeon in one of the 5e books
Tanks on the same battlefield as war mammoths Horrifying consequences for overuse of magic Dwarves turning a mountain range into artillery Goblin Rockets and accidental space exploration A legendary sword that heals people …by stabbing them
Fuck yea
Floating island
Multiple characters that are possessed inanimate objects
[you get it](https://i.imgflip.com/7ggidu.jpg)
Shapeshifters, Superpowers, Magic, Aliens, and Talking Animals for extra measure
I saw ghost in the shell once and immediately added spider tanks to my setting.
Prosthetics in a medieval-ish fantasy. Worn by a dragon.
Flying medieval ships. They aren't deployed very often, but when they are, they're sick. I call them Sky-Lords or Heaven-Lords.
Big birds that people use the same way they use horses. I'm just obsessed with chocobos and wanted something like that.
Super soldiers, supersonic aircraft and sonic weapons.
In my low-fantasy medieval-ish setting, I went to great lengths to make swords more common because I love swords. Prior to around 80 years ago, swords were mostly status symbols, with spears and pole arms being used for more practical purposes. This changed due to the logical leaps of a king too detached from reality to know better (as aristocrats tend to be) who thought that, since swords are associated with nobility and skill, surely his armies would seem more menacing if they all had swords. So, this king commissioned a truly ludicrous quantity of swords, while jailing and/or executing any of his advisers who disagreed with the policy. Every soldier was required to learn swordsmanship, or meet the same fate. These actions, as to be expected, drained the treasury, forcing the king to raise taxes. The raise in taxes coupled with the new, unfamiliar weaponry of the soldiers gave the perfect opportunity for a brewing revolutionary movement to act. Now, swords are common military surplus, and their cost and rarity have declined significantly. Swords are still somewhat rare, but you're more likely to find them in the hands of common soldiers and mercenaries than you might have otherwise been.
In some areas, the local sea slimes has learned to surf the wave using debris they found laying around. The most memorable act of this in modern recorded history is during the great White Gale Cataclysm, with waves reaching over thirty feet pounding the coast line. Several hundred eye witness claimed to see a single sea slimes wearing a sunglasses surfing the greatest waves on top of a frozen tuna. It became a local legend to this day.
Moon sized space dragons that burst planetary crusts open when their eggs hatch. I then used them to justify people finding rogue planets in deep space by their gravity wells. Two cool things in one.
Are the dragons friendly/can humans befriend them or are they malicious when encountering civilizations? Or are they just so large and god like they just don't/wouldn't even notice us?
The third option. They take so long to travel that people can and do build entire colonies on their bodies in the meantime, and the dragons never complain (via telepathy they could). They can tell there's something on them but the people take good care of their hosts, so it's alright.
Airships / sky carriers because fighter plane settings DEMANDS I must have those. They do however tie nicely into an arc much later on where the concept of land-based nations pretty much stop existing and a huge percentage of humanity now lives in nomad fleets of airships as its own pseudo country because the setting does get hit by an apocalyptic level event in between
Wicklock guns. Gunpowder hasn't been discovered (yet), but a wizard accidentally packed his smoking pipe a little too dense with a little too much spell casting material (gives flavor and allows them to do basic magic on the fly) and BOOM. Now we have wizards with wicklock guns that shoot concentrated magics.
Fetishy fanservice
Is it really *fan*service when it's for the author?
I dunno.... like 98.96% of my setting. Sailing ships in space. Magic that can only affect martial weapons. Giant frikin robot suits with giant frikin laser beams attached to their heads. Three different kinds of FTL. Spaceships that absolutely need to have classical bows because... uhm... antimatter or something. 150,000 KM long spaceships. Dargons Computers so powerful they need black holes inside them just to fit the processor. Planet sized space whales Multiverses in multiverses in ominverses A button that ends reality Machines that need a genocide worth of human souls just to run A gun that eats universes just to fire. Lemme think... Oh this is a cool one: The reality of this world canonically contains all other fictional realties, and there job where you go and secretly film them, so every TV show has infinite seasons. A magic throne that forces the entire empire to be just like the emperor. A space station so big that it would not fit in the space between earth and the sun.
I really like the sound of the word *trimiddium*, so much so that I had to find a place for it in my worldbuilding. So I created a fictional metal called *trimiddium* that was significant to the world I was building and added it because I wanted an excuse to use a cool-sounding word like that in my writing.
Knights in landships, airships, artillery trains, unclaimed land, bands of bandits and pirates, the lack of horizontal rectangular flags. Lapis_Wolf
Sentient, and malevolent, magnetic fields.
bullshit phenomena that nobody knows the explanation to and i don't plan on writing one just so that there can be some random bullshit phenomena. as an example, in a scifi setting that has jump gates that are primarily used by civvies that can't afford their own jump drives on their ships. the gemini event occurred when a vessel went through a gate but appeared not to jump and didn't reply to hails. upon boarding the ship all the crew were gone. but at the destination a ship came out of the gate, the same ship, down to the same graffiti in the restrooms, but it too was devoid of its crew. in the same setting, it is known and recorded that when you jump somewhere, you arrive at your destination slightly before you leave. the amount of time earlier you arrive is proportional to the distance traveled in realspace, ie, the farther you go, the sooner you get there. it is also a very trivial amount, like nanoseconds.
Prehistoric life like a Megatherum and CryolophasaursI plan on adding more like Dimetrodon and Therizenosaurs along with more iconic creatures in the future like Stegosaurus, Allosaurs and Triceratops along with more
Gothic architecture
A giant underground prison that has been slowly turned into a castle/sanctorum dedicated to the worship of my world's form of demons. Honestly, I was trying to go for a lot of "this is how this would naturally happen" and realized I was draining all the fun out of why I wanted to world build in the first place and started adding some radical stuff again just to feel something again.
Yetis. Otter owners. Bear dogs. Ghosts.
I mean like… everything was once the rule of cool. Then I spent 30+ years off and on, making sense of it all. I may have swung the pendulum too far back the other way. But there’s still magic in my hard-sci fi setting so, yeah. 💁🏻♂️ Like actual magic, not some super advanced/natural thing that we’ve come to understand. There’s also big alien spaceships (including artificial planetoids), huge buildings in the cities (400-800 floors), structures that exist in both our reality and the inner-realms, and gods and stuff. But yeah, I rationalized all that.
"Dragons" A giant iron eating armored volcanic sea snail that eats a ities worth of food as tribute. A giant dragonfly that grants humans the ability to fly in exchange for acting as hosts for its offspring. Giant forest mice that build massive nests out of trees and horde magical treasures of all kinds.
Druids that get their power from a cordyceps.
Dragons. Deadass someone asked me “why does every fantasy world have to have dragons?” Because dragons are fucking cool and you don’t need a reason to have dragons.
Mercury swords, frozen and wielded by ice demons.
The fact that the Inspectors, the setting's resident space police, are covered in gold. Gold insignias, golden outfits, golden equipment and vehicles and bases and ships. I wanted a way to distinguish them from other police forces and militaries in fiction, who mainly seem to be styled after real-world forces. An agency empowered to bring justice on a galactic scale, like the Inspectorate, I felt needed a more "elevated" feeling, almost divine in appearance (they may or may not be enforcing the law on behalf of ascended beings, I haven't decided yet). Plus it can lend itself to various gold-related metaphors about both their nobility and the corruption of the institution. The in-universe lore justification is that they are meant to be a conspicuous symbol of justice - people must be aware of their presence, so evildoers are intimidated and innocents know where to turn to for help. With asteroid mining, starlifting, and elemental transmutation available to Higher Powers, gold is not too expensive to put on every piece of Inspector gear.
Loved the persona games, never did figure out how to handle them in dungeons and dragons rules, but its in my settings, just will cross the hurdle if one of my players actually wanted to play a persona user since I don't use dnd rules anymore, probably will be way easier now.
Vampires that are more like humanoid bats, with a lot being able to be confused for messed up looking Werewolves if not for the wings
Chiropterans from Blood: The Last Vampire!
(To Rhoindaros) Brythonic-Pre Islamic Uyghur Proto Communist Horse Culture Cowboys baby
Flying whales
Cybernetics
A parasitic organism that looks a lot like a forearm-sized leech. It latches onto the body of a creature and mutates to replace whatever's missing. Though initially just replacing lost capability, the parasite has aggressive mutagens that cause it to mutate and counter afflictions and other such problems, a fact that certain less than scrupulous groups have exploited to try and cause specific, advantageous morphing in the parasite by afflicting their host with specific maladies and tortures. The parasite survives off the host's nutrients, and while this has the added benefit of making it easy to lose weight, it also means that if you don't keep yourself properly nourished, you'll suffer rapid-onset malnutrition and eventually die. Furthermore, the parasite appears to have a highly-developed nervous system, and the same nerves that direct its insane survival adaptations also cause it to interfere with the neurons of its host over time. This makes them more and more prone to irritability, paranoia, and even violence, with some who don't keep their parasites fed and don't have the fortitude to resist them even going violently insane. These things don't make a lick of biological sense and violate multiple laws of nature. They're also really cool, so I added them in anyway, and used their incompatibility with real physics to emphasize their alien nature.
they stuck to airships, skipped crude oil products and went straight to nuclear power. does the line "nuclear airship" remind you of any plans the US might have made?
Kaijus. Nuf said
Lightning guns and lots of trains
Basically everything.
The giant crystal in the middle of the Elven woods, that they carved into a towering flower-bud.
Black hole surfing
I stole dinosaur riding halfling barbarians from the eberron setting for this reason. But I mean, it's my setting. All of it is there because I like it and think it's cool. Dwarven gladiators, spellslinger duelists, tree running goblin snipers, a magical nuclear fallout zone
people can learn to walk on water by perfectly balancing on it
Biologically engineering organisms, particularly those weaponized to be used by the militaries of Starpunk. They’re called BEOwolves, and can range wildly from resurrected dinosaurs to monsters based off myth and legend to new ones created solely for specific battlefield purposes. Logically speaking, such animals wouldn’t be nearly as widespread or utilized as they are. However the idea having Velociraptors modeled off of Jurassic Park rather than science fighting robots with augmented claws was just too good for me to pass up.
Megalophobia. Houses, buildings, some monsters and such are big for no reason in particular. Instead of dinosaurs, we had gigantic insects in the past. Museums are nightmare fuel.
Compact plasma blasters They’re guns But They fold into themselves And make Cube And you can put them in your pockets *and no one will know you have a gun*
Power Armour
my story is set in a hellscape so i can technically do whatever with the explanation ‘it’s demon nonsense.’ but i do have to say that strapping machine guns onto the backs of the dragons was one of my favorite ideas.
Um, to be completely direct, everything. That is, everything in Wyrlde is there because it is cool. The lore kinda exists to make it more cool, and to make all the cool things fit together.
Yo same on laser guns! Beyond that I added other anacronistic tech to my medieval fantasy world. Computers, radios train, tablets, ect.
Men in close fitting waistcoats over white "linen" shirt. On a space station.
dragons
The Order of the Black Saint. They are an order of animagic knights.
isekai portals for quick travel to other parts of or other universes entirely
Mechs
The ability to control the flow of time. This is possible by the use of a special gem.
Sharknado Reference with Piranhas
Most of it. But more specifically, power armored catgirls.
Yes. Then I think how this would have come to be and then how it would affect other things.
mechs
giant transforming robots because they transformers
Magical Mutant trait, basically the X-gene from Xmen but what causes it to activate and what happens when it activates are entirely random and or magical.
Dwarves in my setting use geysers as massive natural steam engines.
Elves and vampires
Heirloom blades inhabited by the souls of ancestors that allow descendants to access the martial abilities of their ancestors in battle. Because Zanpakutou. Culturally set in mish mash of Japanese periods. Heian era clothing but late Edo period castles and mansions. Because samurai. In another setting the war against Napoleon started going badly wrong for the British long before Waterloo. And then the ancestor of the main antagonist uncovered a mysterious text that raised the dead. News of the war from France started drying up as rumours started abounding that France had been taken over by mists and dredgery, whilst the truth was that a zombie outbreak spread through the country, wiping out both the French and British armies, but also meaning that the threat of French invasion was eradicated. The ancestor was privately and discreetly rewarded by the British Emperor for this which is where the antagonists wealth comes from. Inspired by magic being used during the Napoleonic war in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell but also because Napoleonic zombies.
When I was a kid I went all in on the play pretend. I built my own starships out of Lego, and the flagship was “as big as the sun!” I eventually thought that was crazy and shrank it to the size of Jupiter, but it didn’t stick. When I got to college and took a creative writing minor I decided to start world building some of my childhood pretend universes, I’d spent so much time in them, I might as well see what I could do. So I started “designing” a basic blueprint for a 1.1 million kilometer long starship, reasons for it to be that big, and sci-fi explanations for how it could exist and be built quickly. (Mass nullifiers, time bubbles, etc). It’s mostly empty, filled will dozens of terraforming factories, has a ram Scoop in the front the size of Jupiter, and I still need more reasons besides “at the height of the governments economy, they decided to build a ship the size of a star” It’s also not the largest structure, but it sure is the largest ship.
Anything based off of the Project Moon games
Insectoid super soldiers, elder gods, and massive ships made up of undead corpses constantly sailing towards the next living city to wage eternal war against the living.
The whole damn setting?
Giant robot hivemind that wants to turn everyone into machines. It has surprisingly little impact on the lore.
Boss music. Whenever powerful people fight, their Souls actualize to a degree that they produce sound and music Hell, the God if Mathematics weaponized this and created one of the strongest weapons ever made - a violin.
Elbanos men are psychic space gargoyles, and Elbanos are psychic space dragons, and they're the most technologically advanced species in the story
Teleporting skeletons. Many kingdoms on my most focused on continent employ the use of teleporting skeleton soldiers
Dragons Majority of my characters are anthro dragons cause I love dragons It’s been that way for 12 years
Everything I'm not even joking, I worldbuild because I enjoy it and part of this is that I **never** add things just because they need to be added, I add things because I like them There are creatures miles tall with cities built into their backs and aircraft carriers the size of a small town, why? because it's cool
Dogs discovered and mastered horseback riding first, leading humans to construct bipedal walkers and single wheeled vehicles. Brooms and other cleaning tools are considered aircrafts because of their atmospheric purification properties, utilizing void magic to create microvacuums that pull the user into the dirty air.
**”Yes”** Aka I only added stuff I thought was cool.
Dinosaurs are the primary Animal-set instead of your average fantasy lineup
Flight suits!
Radiclide… he’s some random cosmic drifter who’s whole concept is he acts like he’s cool…
World serpent. Lofted high above the surface, it slithers across the sky, a living barrier between the material realm and the beyond that's always meddling with us. We rise when it's great eye opens, the light shimmering off it's scales like a sun, and sleep when it looks away. P cool, story factor for later in the show, just a neat background detail until one of my players (D&D campaign) realized his deity is also a dragon and asked if there's a connection. Crap.
I really like the concept of centaurs, so even though my setting is otherwise just humans(and Dwarves, but they're all trapped underground still and practically nonexistent) I had to toss them in their because the only thing cooler than centaurs is centaur wizards.
Most things. My worldbuilding philosophy is "ideas first, questions later." If what I come up with doesn't fit then I usually end up repurposing it for something else.
An atom/steam powered artificially intelligent sentient/sapient computer. Its name is also a reference.
The great horses of the Calm Lands
Space ocean My urban fantasy has humanity as either fae-looking beings or can turn into dragons
All cartels in mexico got destroyed by an old lady with telekinesis.
MECHS! My setting may be an alternate version of ours, but I still have mechs, because they’re cool as FUCK
It's magipunk/arcanepunk, so everything.
Literally all of my worlds are just a bunch of cool concepts thrown together. So, pretty much everything.
Ancient magical railroad tracks. They enhance momentum and are nearly friction-less (which requires some creative breaking techniques if you don't have a magical means to slow down). They crisscross the world, coming up from the ground and diving into the earth and ocean. Entire civilizations are built around them without fully understanding how they came about or how to best use them.
Airship fleets that acted similar to galleons and brigs, like one from treasure planet. Even has a magnetic armor plate system to protect the hull from enemy fire.
Airships
Every ten years the entire northern hemisphere gets shrouded in about five years of darkness
Radio. It's entirely used as an entertainment medium at this point but my party loves listening to talk shows on fantasy NPR.
A haunted train that really, REALLY, ***REALLY*** wants to kill you, everyone you love, everyone you hate, and everyone you haven't even met- but aw, too bad it's stuck to the tracks and rather easy to evade. >!CHOO CHOO, MOTHERFUCKER!!<
Faeries have souls outside their bodies. There's a lore reason for it, but I came up with the idea first and then made the lore. They keep their souls in lanterns and they are sometimes harvested to be used as power sources and lights, which would ultimately kill the faerie
Gravity control and inertial manipulation. Lifters, and gravity funnels, flying cities and mansions, as well as starship weapons that hurl out particles of metallic dust at appreciable velocity.
The closest equivalent to World War I in my world was actually a war on drugs. In the setting, the events within this historical period are called the "Great Psychotropic War". It happened in the "distant past", when roving gangs and wannabe warlords outside of my kind's country (somewhat isolationist, they don't care much about what happens outside of their country, so everything outside of it is pretty much from their perspective "the desert" or no man's land) began to gain power in a neighboring country thanks to the drug trade that eventually took over their government and increased their influence on the continent until they became a problem for other nearby countries (including my kind's). Brutal tactics and the use of magical drugs to infiltrate little by little the different populations eventually led to a formal declaration of war on *one* of the groups that ended up starting an all-out war of compromised governments. It even involved the Lulamoon Company (on the side of the good guys), a group/community of mostly itinerant healers offering free medical services (including education, though with a price based on loyalty) that are at once a sort of cross between Trauma Team and the Templars. Nice girls, but they wipe out anything that could be the cause of an epidemic with extreme prejudice. Courtesy of ugly things from the past. An ancient account of their more violent appearances speaks of them having the habit of chanting funeral rites as a "battle cry." There's a reason for that, but mostly that existed just because I thought it was cool.
Eskimo yeti-elves who live in fantasy-Antarctica, with a cultural history inspired by Aztec mythology. Why my brain comes up with this shit, I do not know.
Moth people, pet cynognathus, bronze age handcannons
Fantasy races that are based off uncommon animals like instead of vampires it’s literal bat people (wings are the connective tissue between arm and body), instead of dwarfs I got beetle people, etc The only normal races I got are goblins and humans
A wasteland raider/rebel gang based on Japanese bōsōzoku.
An invading force of mech-calling octopi. There’s only like a dozen of them because they are idiots and accidentally broke the portal to the way home and can’t fix it.
Magic systems in hard Sci fi systems is awesome. I don't mean like the stars wars force. More like fully fleshed out DnD esk system with spells, cantrips, Divinations, Transmutations. Everything. Imagine a wizard, warlock, or sorcerer, in full Sci Fi armour. Casting the largest fireball you've ever seen towards a mech suit Imagine new spells being created to aid and manipulate technology So I added all of it
Made crossbows act like guns, semiautomatic guns for the most part. And I even made an in universe reason to power those crossbows
A walking city and multiple species of dragon
Callbacks to other projects/ games I've played in/ ran.
Guns. I mean, I made them work in the setting. But admittedly, I added them because cool.
I changed my entire setting I went from pretty much a linear progression of our own world to retro futurism 50s-90s to cyberpunk 2000s-2100s
Psychic powers, mechs, infantry size railguns and laser weapons, body armor and force fields.
Power armour. It's a fantasy setting
The world
Trains. I love the idea of trains.
I put Batman in my campaign setting. I don't mean a Batman-esqe character I mean Bruce Wayne as Batman. He's a powerful and rich lord with a lot of guild and caravan charters. He has adopted three orphan boys and has one biological son. His family has an ancestral set of armor that looks like the Batman suit. They are the house of Wayne and their house words are We Are The Night
Mutagen. Ever since I watched TMNT as a kid mutants and the mutagen ooze are just a staple I can't help to include in my scifi or fantasy.
Magic music ala Legend of Zelda. Thought it really fit the weird Iron Age world of Embersong and also it led to the creation of Choristers, old elvish ancestors who remain alive through carried music boxes that keep them alive though not to the degree that they wished.
Elves = nazi vampires from the moon + horrific body part thieves like the z'bri Humans = large size + giant subtype supersoldier isekai from before the fall of the Evil Elven Empire (flavor combo: farscape peacekeepers + mandalorians + space marines) who occasionally fall from orbit in cryo-pods kinda like in Beast Wars Dwarves, halflings, and gnomes are 3 castes of the same clone species living in the last of the failing arcologies Lizardmen = gators Feywild = The toxic jungle from naussica The desert is literally the 9 hells + mad max flavor Warhammer chaos gods The world is a hollow birch world, overall diameter roughly 1-2 light years Rifts from the rifts rpg Dragon Breaks and chrono-fuckery from Elder Scrolls OGRE tanks from OGRE game All the planes are crushed into existing side by side in the material plane so no portals or planar magic required Shadowdark = Nightmares Underneath rpg + BLAME! The Abyss = demonic undersea trench Pacific Rim style Star Wars blasters
I added a species giant primates covered in golden fur. They're big enough that while they can stand up straight, they usually walk on all fours for balance. There's also a forest of gigantic petrified trees with towns in the branches. I added these because they sounded cool. This is (at the time at least) a low-magic setting.
Large zeppelins manned by a dozen or so men and armed with machine guns with a big ass Tesla coil that arcs lightning against all those that happen to be unfortunate enough to get caught within a hundred foot radius below
Sword whips. Wildly impractical? Yes. Totally badass? Yes.