My Fantasy RPG World, Feedback and Ideas appreciated

I watched a few videos on how to use Nightcafe, and decided to drop $20 on it. If I decide it's not worth it, I am only out $20.

This video has given me some pause on using AI Art programs. I'm still going to try it out just for fun. Here is my first attempt "icon on weathered on stone tablet" using a familiar base image.



I haven't found a result I like yet, but assuming I figure out how to transplant this image on suitable fantasy iconography, I will try the same process with the individual Nine's symbols.

I also found another artist I like on DeviantArt that I might patronize, assuming his rates are within my budget.


Damian Krzywonos makes amazing cityscapes.



If anyone can visually create a compelling First Age cityscape, a beautiful sprawling city scape of dragon towers, he can.

Anyway, I asked him to send me his rates for stuff like this, linked Scarterra's wiki, and described what I am looking for.

Ideally, I'd like the same city twice, once at it's peak of prosperity and a second time while being battered by elemental chaos to represent the First Unmaking.

Theoretically I can make ask for a Second Age cityscape too. I'm still not 100% sure what I want it to look like and this is important because some Second Age buildings and ruins are somewhat intact and others have been copied.

 

This is interesting.



It's got an aboriginal glyph feel. Pendrake's original version was fairly uniform I could try to create one where each of the Nine has a moderately different stylistic segment.

Anything that doesn't have nine spokes is not correct, but I do like this style.



In a way the limbs look like extensions of Turoch or stab wounds into him.

Now this is pretty badass.



I obviously want to refine it but I could make a symbol of the Nine using this basic design, but every surrounding circle is a glyph for the Nine.

Nami is some wavy wind lines. Korus is a sprawling tree, Greymoria is an upside down heart, Mera is a hearth flame in a water droplet, Khemra is a sun with an eye in it. etc.

But those are the basic symbols. The way I figure it, Scarterra has dozens of symbols for each of the Nine. This way I might actually be able to show examples.

I think this is how AI art was met to be used. I'll stick what sticks to wall and use these images as inspiration for more specific things, things that I can try to tackle myself or pass on to a more skillful artist.

This one I'd wear in a Scarterran cosplay!



If you need I'll be making variations of this symbol all night.

 

My muse has seduced me away from more practical stories.



And now I am pondering a Scarterran version of Randy Macho Man Savage wailing on people on stage with a magically nerfed sword.

Between illusion magic, the ability to use magic to make lethal weapons only knock people out, and magical healing, I think Scarterran stage combat would be freaking amazing.

 

And now the article is complete. I am not sure whether to be proud or ashamed of what I have wrought my hands.


Jelly Spear Plays

"You better talk to my opponent now, because when I'm done him you'll need a spirit loa to talk to him after I beat him nine times over. OH YEEEEAAAAH."

-Randy "The Barbarian Man" Savage

 

Perhaps I am not using the tool correctly, but for me it's a numbers game.



I have to enter my prompts over and over again and wait for something to stick.

I learned 1) AI generated characters usually have weird hands when they are holding a weapon or tool and 2) using a picture tends to get better results, I don't know why so many pictures cropped off the head.

 

I have created an article about how Scarterrans eat their meal. Everyday meals in Scarterra.

I basically took a lot of research I found on medieval meals and etiquette and made a few minor tweaks showing how dwarves and gnomes have slightly different dining practices. Dwarves are more likely to eat with metal cutlery, tengku often have ostentatious plates and bowls, gnomes prefer simple dinnerware, etc.

But the big deal is not the material, it is the fact that I made liberal use of columns and embedded pictures to change the style of presentation from what I normally do, big blocks of text occasionally broken up by subheadings and quotes.

Let me know if you think it made a difference. I don't think I have the time and sanity to do this to all my articles, but I might revamp some of the more important ones thusly.

There are even more advanced article layouts I could try.

 

Holy sketches Batman! Activate the @Warden signal!

I manifested art into existence today, I wrote a draft of a new kalazotz article and shortly thereafter I got an update on my zotz art. Diana Rafoth gave me some preliminary sketches to choose from.




"Cama 2" and "Cala 2" are flying. It should be "Kala 2", but I'm not going to nitpick spelling on words that will never be posted.

I did not communicate clearly that camazotz and kalazotz can pick up things with their feet or hang upside by their feet.



I figure a camazotz or kalazotz in flight is going to hold weapons or object in their feet, so I need to tell Diana this.

Otherwise, I like the headdress of "cala 1" and the net position of "cala 3" but again, the net should be in the zotz's feet.

I like the wing position and upturned spear of "cala 1" and the clothes of "cala 2"

I like the pose of "cama 2", picture 1, though again the rock should be in his feet.

For the ground "cama 1" I like the pose of picture 3 best.

I'm going to ask for fur like this for the kalazotz.

and something like this fur for the camazotz.

 

It seems Wizards of the Coast has waved the white flag and completely backed off from their plan to write a new ganky OGL and have legally solidified the old OGL and even opened up it up to Creative Commons rules.

That said, they have already alienated a lot of their fan base and it would take an obscenely large truckload of money to make me even consider adapting Scarterra to D&D 5th edition. I'm going to keep building my own theme park.

 

To backtrack a bit. Are all the city generators random or is there a way to play with it? I think it might be easier for me to make something like this from scratch.

The PCs in my main campaign have an ancient map of an ancient Second Age nation and presumably they will want to explore the ruins of a forgotten city, so I guess I want to make a dungeon out of a lightly buried ancient city.

The city was built by ancient elven master horse riders (the Moriaclar) with a small number of tamed monsters and this city located on a now dead river bank was used as a trading post with other nations.

I figure it would be a fairly wide city but not a very tall city. As a dungeon, different sections of the ancient city will probably be the territory of different monsters, at least one of them will be the descendants of the Moriaclar's monstrous steeds. Maybe one of the sections of the dungeon will be claimed by a dragon. I hear dungeons and dragons sometimes go together.

 

Psychic Spiders

I created a new monster last night and I play tested it today. I call them psychic spiders, and I am very proud of this fantasy concept, and it turned out to be a very satisfying encounter, dynamic and challenging but not too challenging.

I haven't posted it to World Anvil yet because I'm still fleshing out some details.

Spoiler: Psychic Spider Fluff

Psychic spiders are an exotic supernatural spider of unknown origin. They have the cognitive abilities somewhere in the grey area between extremely brilliant beasts and extremely dim mortals.

Unlike some spiders where the females eat the male spider after mating (or even before mating), psychic spiders females don't try to eat their mates. Also, unlike some spiders, psychic spiders won't try to eat siblings or strangers, just because they can. Psychic spiders will not only not kill each other, but they will hunt in packs.

Fully grown, they are roughly the size of Saint Bernard Dogs. Most of the time, psychic spiders will hunt insects, mammals or any animal they can catch and overpower. They swallow small prey like insects and mice whole. Larger prey, they will kill, bundle in webs and pulverize into a liquid state than drink the slurry later.

Psychic spiders only display their psychic powers when it is time to mate. Females must feed on the psychic energy of intelligent prey such as humans in order to be able to lay a clutch of viable eggs.

Males will try to arrange things to make it easier for a female to get the psychic energy they need.

Females are much stronger and hardier than males weighing around 200 pounds on average than males and males are much smaller and faster weighing around 130 pounds on average.

Males have a venom that will induce unconsciousness in humanoid targets and females have a venom that will drain mental attributes.

Both males and females can spin webs capable of trapping small prey outright or greatly slowing down a strong human adventurer but males have a special secondary form of webs known as webs of madness.

Webs of madness looks like normal gauzy cobwebs that ordinary small spiders might weave but anyone who exposed needs to hope their will is strong or the webs of madness will slowly and gradually bring out their deepest fears and insecurities. This effect is slow and subtle enough that many afflicted do not realize they are afflicted, often taking several hours to fully manifest.

Beyond making them fearful, paranoid, and/or short tempered, the webs of madness also cause the victim to release pheromones that attract psychic spiders from a great distance, so psychic spiders can always tell who is afflicted and who is not.

A female psychic spider can drain the mental attributes of any intelligent target, but those exposed to webs of madness have much weaker resistance to this. This is why males weave webs of madness in the first place, to attract mates.

Ratio wise, a pack of psychic spiders will usually have a 3:2 ration of males to females. Males will try to wound or slow down targets afflicted by the webs of madness without killing them in order to let the females get the psychic energy they crave. Males will generally try to kill any target that fights back that is not afflicted with webs of madness.

Both males and females will fight bravely, but they are not suicidal and will withdraw if clearly outmatched. Once a female has a taste of psychic energy but not quite enough, they will fight that much harder. Males will prioritize the safety of females over themselves, but not to a suicidal degree.

Female psychic spiders do not have to kill their prey with mental damage to get the psychic energy they require to lay eggs. Once a female has enough psychic energy to lay a clutch of eggs, the female will withdraw from combat.
Once all the females are slain or have withdrawn, the males will follow suit. Most males and females alike will flee if they themselves are severely wounded.

I like the idea that females actually enter the astral plane to lay their eggs, then they die and their hatching spiderlings eat the mother's corpse for sustenance and use this energy to crawl out of the astral plane back into the material plane (often appearing in a far flung location away from where their parents were). The spiderlings act as normal spiders until they grow to their adult size at which point they develop their telepathic powers at the same time gaining a desire to mate.

Spoiler: Psychic Spider Crunch

Webs of Madness

Resisting the webs of madness takes a Willpower roll. Difficulty 6 if the character only had a light brush with a small bit of the webs or difficulty 8 if they are exposed to a lot of the webs (such as if they don't worry about the "ordinary" cobwebs and just push through).

Characters that pass their Willpower roll don't notice anything is wrong. Characters that fail will gradually have their negative personality traits come to the fore as their fears, resentments and insecurities bubble up to the surface. Given that psychic spiders tend to dwell in scary dark corners of Scarnoctis.

The effects will wear off in four or five days. Half the time if afflicted persons allies give them an emotionally uplifting pep talk (assuming they realize something is up)

The effect will wear off in a few hours with Purification ●●● magic. Again, half recovery time with a heart felt pep talk.


Male Psychic Spider

Willpower 5

Dexterity 5, Strength 4, Stamina 5, Appearance 0, Charisma 1, Manipulation 2, Intelligence 1, Perception 3, Wits 3

Abilities: Alertness 3, Animal Ken 2, Athletics 3, Brawl 3, Dodge 3, Empathy 1, Legerdemain 1, Stealth 3, Subterfuge 1

8 dice attack pool: five dice damage pool (bite)

6 dice soak pool. Due to their exoskeleton they count as an H class target.

Targets hit with one or more unsoaked lethal damage from a male bite attack must make a Stamina roll to resist three additional levels of bashing damage (note lethal damage kills characters, bashing damage renders characters unconscious)

Male Spider Health Levels: OK, OK, -1, -2, -3, -5, Dead


Female Psychic Spider

Willpower 7

Dexterity 3, Strength 6, Stamina 5, Appearance 0, Charisma 1, Manipulation 2, Intelligence 1, Perception 3, Wits 3

Abilities: Alertness 3, Animal Ken 2, Athletics 3, Brawl 3, Dodge 3, Empathy 1, Legerdemain 1, Stealth 3, Subterfuge 1

6 dice attack pool: eight dice damage (bite)

6 dice soak pool. Due to their exoskeleton they count as an H class target.

Targets hit with one or more unsoaked lethal damage from a male bite attack automatically take one point of mental attribute damage, unless they are under the effect of webs of madness, in which case the target takes two points of mental attribute damage. Once a female has inflict three or four points of mental attribute damage, she is full and will stop pressing an attack and attempt to flee and find a safe place to lay her eggs.

Male and Female psychic spiders can create webbing which requires a Strength 4 feat of strength check to escape. While this will ensnare small prey pretty easily, it will generally only inconvenience a human-sized target, so psychic spiders don't usually bother trying to use their normal webbing to catch intelligent prey.

Spoiler: What the Mahrlect is Attribute Damage?

Attribute damage is a long lasting de-buffing effect. Attribute damage sucks, but it is not permanent, unless an attribute is taken below zero, then your character is dead.

The full rules are here if you are curious. Physical attribute damage is relatively common in my mechanics stemming from poisons, vampire bites, and a specific terrifying Transmutation ●●●● spell, or from a less damaging but easier to use Necromancy ●●● spell.

Mental attribute damage is a lot less common, stemming from psychic trauma or a specific terrifying Divination ●●●● spell.

Social attribute damage is generally the rarest form of attribute damage, mostly the result soul sucking monsters or a specific terrifying Enchantment ●●●● spell.

Unless there are extraordinary mitigating circumstances, a female psychic spider will prioritize attacking opponents afflicted by webs of madness as opposed to those who are not afflicted.

Female Spider Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, -1, -2, -3, -5

Male and female psychic spiders can both spend a temporary Willpower point to heal one level of lethal damage or two levels of bashing damage. Male and female spiders regain willpower points by resting (like almost everyone else in Scarterra), but females can also recover a temporary willpower point when they inflict mental attribute damage.

Other than their unusual size, I haven't figured out what they look like. If I can find a real world spider that looks really exotic, I might just say that they look like that real world spider, only bigger.

Or I might use an AI art program to add fantasy elements to a spider, or I theoretically could get an artist to make a psychic spider for me. In the mean time I have this picture of the mostly featureless silhouette of spider.



I am proud of this fantasy monster I have created, and I definitely am going to use psychic spiders again in the future. That said, I'm not going to use them so often that it is worth it to hire a professional artist to create a picture, unless I win the lottery in which case everything in Scarterra is coming to life.

I also to fill in some blanks, like what their life span is, how long they take to grow to maturity, how big are egg clutches, and especially who or what created them. For now I'm running with "unknown origin" since most creatures connected even peripherally with the astral plane are not well understood so few if any Scarterrans would know where, how, and why psychic spiders came from, but eventual I want to know where, how and why they came t be.

 

I must beautify Scarterra

I just watched the award's ceremony for Worldember 2022.

I didn't win any of the Worldember awards (though I did get a lot of new traffic and a couple new followers).

I will note that all but one of the awards went to articles with fancy article layouts and lots of art. One award went to an article that was basically a block of text, brilliantly written text, but a block of text none the less. The World Anvil owners commented that "If you're work is well written enough, it doesn't matter what your article looks like!"

But no, in this case, the exception proves the rule. If 14 out of 15 winners use semi-professional style graphic design, than this means if I want Scarterra to grow in popularity, I must step up my presentation game.

I recently said I added columns and embedded art to "Everyday Meals in Scarterra".

My newest attempt to do this "Meckelorn Feasts and Group Meals." I chose this extremely specific topic to write about because Kormatin's RPG campaign is in Meckelorn, and I like using dinner events to introduce new NPCs and political plots.

Usually, if I want to put art in Scarterra I will scour public domain sites for useable public domain art or I will scour DeviantArt for fantasy art and politely ask the artists for permission to use their work.

Of course, I have been dipping my toe in the water of AI art.

But in any event, I cannot speak about all AI Art programs, but I can say that Nightcafe is really bad at making people but it is really good at making things.

I tried to look for pictures of fancy medieval dinnerware then after repeated failures I thought I would try Nightcafe and hoped I got lucky. Apparently it is very good at making making these things.





That's pretty badass.

So two things are true.

1) I want more Scarterra specific art
2) Nightcafe is very good at making things, not people

I'm going to try to give some of my older articles a facelift and I thought I'd try to make a bunch of holy symbols for the Nine.

Both the RPG campaigns I have going now, the leader of the adventuring party is a Khemra theurgist. So let's start with Khemra.

Khemra is a sun goddess and she watches over everything, both in the positive and negative aspect of "watching over". So a sun with an eye is an obvious symbol.

Here is the basic thing I made on Microsoft paint a couple years ago.



Here are a couple Nightcafe icons I liked.

This one is a Celtic filter.



As is this one.



Here's an Egyptian filter I liked a lot.



Here's another Egyptian filtered one that I might use for Scarterra's Red Era.



One of my favorites is this one with a Norse filter, I'm using this as the official holy symbol of Khemra's dwarven order.

 

All the above pictures used "gold jewelry" as a text prompt. The next one uses "silver jewelry"

Here is a symbol of the Nine that puts Khemra as the centerpiece..



They won't show up for a while, but I also have a group called the Night Order. Every god or goddess in Scarterra has at least one subsect of fanatical followers who are assholes.

For Star Trek fans, the Night Order is to Khemra what Section 31 is to the Federation. I experimented with taking out the precious metal features and having no material prompt and I've tried telling Nightcafe to make the icons out of obsidian (I'm not super stoked with the obsidian they create).

I'm still working on what their symbol is but it will probably be something like these:





I'll keep playing around with different key word filters.

I started into making some Nami symbols, which I have been using the key words "Celtic style silver jewelry with a wind icon" or Ancient Greek style, or Norse style, or whatever.

For a recap, here is the super simple thing I have been suing so far.



I've had a lot of good luck for "wind symbol in ancient Greek style", but the next one is my favorite. I am going to make this as the official Nami sponsored vineyard which has already been a meeting place in my RPG and will likely be used again.



Nami is of course more a fan of individualism than Khemra, so encourages her followers to personalize their holy symbols so I can make a huge variety. Nami is the goddess of all weather but her main symbol is winds.

But I figure raindrops are associated with Nami's benevolence or healing and thunderbolts her wrath (or her followers who are warriors). Clouds would be mystery or stealth.

Rainbows are fuzzy, they can symbolize all sorts of things, but nowadays you see a rainbow and you think LGBT. Nami is very openminded with regarded to sexual identity but that is not the only thing Nami embodies. I think in a more medieval context, rainbows symbolize beauty and benevolence.

 

Here are the new preliminary sketches I got. For Cama2 I like the dagger better than the open claw. I'm going to greenlight Diana to continue moving on to completely rendered and colored versions of these poses.



I'm working on a couple new camazotz/kalazotz related articles to debut once I get the new art, and I'm in the process of editing and revising my older zotz articles.

I have a vague idea for a kalazotz-centric fiction piece, but that will have to wait. I'm currently working on making a fiction for Mogak the orc heroine.

 

I have made extreme revisions to my old article on the Children, the primary followers of the goddess Greymoria.

I used lots of pictures, dynamic formatting, and I tried to organize the text into bite-sized chunks.

I would appreciate constructive criticism on it. Assuming this meets your approval, I plan to give a similar facelift to most of the core longer form articles for Scarterra, especially the other eight main religious groupings.

I certainly had fun coming up with some Greymoria holy symbols and factional identifiers.













among others

 

Behold....Pie!



Okay, pie is not that big of a deal, but this is the best AI picture I've managed to make. It's more or less exactly what I was hoping for instead of my usual "close enough" like this dragon in a cornfield.



So I've been making a lot of new art for old articles and/or scouring creative commons picture sites.

As you can maybe guess, my focus today has been food, glorious food.

I have added art to midday pies, Scarterran tea leaves, base camp stew, wheat, rye, and maize

I plan to keep beautifying my old articles, food included.

I still have not found an AI version of a period appropriate mug, stein, or flagon of ale, nor could I find a period appropriate creative commons picture for it.

 

Finished a nice story arc. I certainly had fun coming up with an exotic setting.

With the help of an unreliable off-brand version of Gollum, Kormatin and his allies tracked a pack of morlocks led by a necromancer skinchanger witch named Dhorgorlun to stop them from ritually eating a favored soul of Khemra at the start of the new year.

They traveled through many dark tunnels fighting off fatigue and avoiding or fighting dangerous supernatural spiders before cornering the morlocks and a small number of undead minions in a large underground chamber filled with viny plants fed by a life stone. And the chamber had light gravity akin the moon though the lower gravity had less impact on the big fight than I would have hoped (though Kormatin did fall down and trip bouncing off the ground more than once).

Onward to the next adventure! This time the adventure is Kormatin's player's idea and not mine.

Ever since House Gorisnod put a bounty on Kormatin, he concocted a plan to pull a Trojan horse maneuver with some friends posing as bounty hunters to defraud Gorisonod of a large quantity of gold and/or do some damage behind enemy lines.

 

I have thus far introduced elemental variant goblins, red goblins who are noteworthy because they breath fire, frog goblins that are fully amphibious and jumping goblins that can jump freakishly high and far.

Now I have completed the fourth goblin, deep goblins, who of course are of course earthy.

I have not cross-posted the entire text here because I would lose the formatting, but I'm open to constructive criticism on these guys as they are likely to be major villainous players in Scarnoctis.