My Fantasy RPG World, Feedback and Ideas appreciated

I have much art in the pipeline.

Diana Rathfoth is working on a grootslang illustration right now.

Harper James is working on elemental themed trolls.

Zeta Gardner is working on some gnomes when she gets done with her vacation.

I just need to get over some indecision with the trolls and gnomes. I'm going for an air troll with flying squirrel-like arms, a firebreathing fire troll, a thick skinned earth troll and an amphibious water troll but I need to make up my mind on facial features.

All I got so far is big, ugly, pointy teeth, clawed hands.

Tusks, yes or no? Big ears or little ears? What shape of ears? What style of noses? How hairy should they be? How scaly should they be?

The grootslang, I have a pretty good idea what I want, and I already got some preliminary sketches. Scaly snake body patterned off of zebra cobra. Elephant head with tusk/fang hybrids.

I am probably going with the general snake pose in sketch 8 and the people position in sketch 7

 

The finished troll art should be done in a week or two and Worldember 2024 has begun. Four articles so far and half of them involve hats.

Gnomes and Phrygian Hats





Scarterran Hat Culture in General

 

According to the ranking I'm in 8th place by Word Count but this hasn't been updated in 2 days. I'm 4000 words above this


Based on previous Worldember, 7th through 10th place is usually where I hover, so nothing new there.

My daily viewership is up from previous years but not by a crazy amount.

I'm trying to have more visuals and tighter editing than previous years.

Anyway, here is the main Worldember 2024 page

Here is my personal Worldember 2024 page.

And here is the cornerstone of my Worldember 2024, my overview article for comparing Medieval Earth to Scarterra, which currently has six new satellite articles: hats, privacy, attitudes towards strangers, banking and usury, effects of magic on crop yields.

And two old articles I wrote long ago and added to the index in, messengers and farmers.

I guess I can't not make indexes...

 

They finally updated the leader board, I guess I slipped down a bit ranking wise.



Here are some links to articles I have recently written for Worldember include but are not limited to. You check out all my Worldember 2024 entries here.

Why humans are the dominant race in Scarterra

It took me a lot of retries and rephrasing to get a good AI image of an ice sculpture of a duck. For some reason, most pictures had an icy body but an orange living bill.


Blueduck Ice Garden

It also took me a while to approximate what Scarterran ice cream would look like. Note is a very large serving of "Fumayan Apple Snow"


I invented a concept for Scarterra called "Blue Rain Houses" which are sort of like medieval fantasy Air BNBs. For the moment I have given up on on getting Midjourney to create a medieval peasants house with a blue door or a blue rainbow.

Thinking Medieval Series, things that are very similar between Scarterra and Medieval Europe

Scarterrans and privacy

Market days

Market fairs

Scarterrans' love/hate relationship with strangers

Expectations for rich people to stay "respectable"

 

I didn't go as crazy as I usually do for Worldember. My final word count was 84,040 and I ended up in 11th place by word count.

Number ten had 99,406 words and number twelve had 80,040 words.

Most of my efforts was comparing and contrasting real Earth medieval history and cultural versus Scarterra's fictional history and culture. I wouldn't be Scalenex without a grand index of links that is still ongoing and here it is.

Overview of Scarterra versus Medieval Earth

It's possible that I have bots on scarterra.com. It's scary how many bots Lustria-Online has. Bot cleaning was the main reason wise and mighty Red Devil moved the server recently. But let's assume that World Anvil and Scarterra are not bot-ridden.

My website is steadily increasing in daily views. I'm over 1000 views/day now.

I have three artists I provide business too now.

I got some commissioned troll art recently, I just haven't updated all my troll articles to incorporate them. I have a really awesome grootslang commission in the pipeline that should be ready in a week or two.

I got some gnome portraits in the pipeline as well.

I am commissioning the art because I guess my mom liked to patronize artists and that rubbed off on me, but I figure I might as well as get art customized to my specifications, but most of the art is something I can hypothetically use in an RPG book of some sort.

At the start of 2025, my goal is to have my ducks in a row in order to peddle Scarterra in early 2026.

Progress is slow, there aren't a lot of intellectual property lawyers in "flyover country" where I live, and they are slow to get back to me.

 

Here is a commissioned sketch of a Scarterran grootslang.



I got to figure out if I want any last minute changes before finalize it.

I maybe give it a more striking colorization since Scarterran grootslangs are a merging between elephants and African spitting cobras. Nature has provided a lot of badass snake coloration and scale pattern option but maybe earthy is the key because burrow in and out of the ground like the monsters from Tremors.







Scarterran gnome sketches are in the pipeline. I have some Scarterran trolls done done as well, I'm just not done with thier related articles yet.

 

First competed gnome portrait. Valdix, an elderly farmer.

 

I'm entering the 2025 World Anvil Awards. I don't expect to win anything but I might get some exposure. The articles I've submitted are here.

I have started the legal process to get a formal copyright for Scarterra.

I must be on a list because I had three artists cold call me on Discord soliciting their illustration services. I am rolling it with for now because they are offering quality work at reasonable process. Potentially three new artists into the Scarterra family. One of them is working on character portraits for me and if that works out well, I'll have her do a short Scarterra comic for me.

I'm working on a written example of game play and the idea to present a narrative description of what the players and saying and rolling side-by-side with a comic of what their character are doing.

And some artists I've worked with before are working on new stuff right now. Zeta Gardner is working on gnomes and Diana Rathfoth is finishing up a grootslang.

I'm in contact with a guy who designs character sheets professionally. Hopefully I'll get a top tier character fairly soon

 

And now we have Fumaya's high priestess of Mera, Beslyfle

 

EDIT: For some reason, I'm having trouble hosting images on Lustria-Online. Follow the links and you can see a pretty picture.

I have a veritable swarm of artists I've never met contacting me out of the blue on Discord. I never advertised, but I'm a giving a shot to the artists who offer reasonable prices and work in an artistic medium I can use.

I'm offering a test piece to them, and if I like working with them, I'll keep working with them. A new guy did this portrait and I'm planning to work with him again. This is Luvon, a satyr holy warrior for Mera. Luvon is not a particularly exciting character as is, but my plan is to use Luvon the satyr, Selmara the gnome, and Cobmak the tengku as a sample adventuring party and use their adventures as a teaching tool for my RPG system.

Luvon the Satyr

This next one is from Diana Rafoth, an artist I worked with before. She's probably the best artist who ever made art for Scarterra...she's also the most expensive I've hired, but I don't mind it if I get what I pay for. I can't afford to have Diana do everything, but grootslangs are probably my favorite monster. You can see the finalized version of the grootslang via either of the two links.

Here's my grootslang centered story

And here is the general lore article on grootslangs

 

I have tried three new artists this month. Results are mixed.

I do like one of them. Here a composite of three illustrations he has done for me. Cobmak the tengku, Luvon the satyr, and Selmara the gnome are three sample PCs I have made for demonstrating the rules of my game system.




Zeta Gardner is not a new artist. She is an artist I worked with many times before and I hope to continue working with her for years to come. Here latest completed a portrait for Carcelli, arcane priestess of Greymoria.

 

Zeta Gardner has made a gnome child and helped me have a new header for my geu-puppies article.



I've tried some artists who are not Diana Rathfoth or Zeta Gardner with mixed results.

Here's a scene with a kalazotz bartender. It's not bad, but he was more expensive than most artists I've worked with and it took a gazillion revisions.



I got two more new artists' works in the can. Technically three, but I have given up on the Sunk Cost Fallacy and have figured that I should stop throwing money and time at something that won't pan out.

Somehow I'm on a list, I have lots and lots of artists contacting me on Discord can I afford to be picky now. But I also need to stop commissioning pictures randomly and focus on getting pictures that I know I'll need in my future book, not pictures that I think I'll need in my future book. This requires a lot of planning and editing.

I haven't stopped gratuitous world building articles, that would almost be like me stopping breathing, I have slowed down on that and am trying to be more focused.

 

I haven't stopped gratuitous world building.

As part of my gratuitous world building, I developed Scarterra's languages a bit more.

Dragons have something called in-born language. Even if a dragon is abandoned by its parents, it will instinctually know the Draconic language. Or most of it of it anyway. They know about 20,000 words instinctually. Other words have to be learned or in some cases made up.

Elves and some other races have a Diet Coke version ability. They instinctually know about 2000 words.

I cover how inborn languages manifest and what the implications of this are in this article.

Before I hand waved that Scarterra had a small number of languages because I thought it would be simpler, but I decided to add a little bit more realism. I pondered giving Scarterra a Tower of Babel equivalent story, but I opted to go for a more scientific approach.

As my friend who has children points out, "My kids and my parents do not sound the same when they talk. And British, Americans, and Australians don't sound the same."

At one point long ago, Scarterran humans did have a common language, but over many centuries it's diverged. If you are a Scarterran human, the farther you travel from your home village, the weirder the humans you meet will sound, until eventually you can't understand them at all. But a nerdy academic linguistic scholar can still find root words and linguistic similarities because every human has the same root language. I cover how that works (and how it applies to most nonhumans) in this article.

I am working on an article on how magic can be used to facilitate controversial cruel and unusual punishments. But I'm still polishing that. The gist is that healing magic can become a tool of cruelty because it allows someone to be hurt multiple times. I am even concerning putting an 18+ block on it.

My friend pointed out that if I write about cruel and unusual punishment, and I need to set a baseline for normal punishments. My latest Thinking Medieval Series article covers how medieval rulers tended to use prisons and how this applies to Scarterra.

Brainstorming non-obvious implications of healing magic. One aspect of healing magic is that you can push martial training more intensely in Scarterra than you can in the real world. Because if there is an accident in training, you can reverse...unless someone dies. But in Scarterra, anything short of death can be cured, in theory at least.

This has many applications to martial training, my latest world building article only covers one aspect. In Scarterra you can start young children with weapons training relatively young and not necessarily be a bad parent for doing so. If a kid "pokes an eye out with that thing", you can grow the eyeball back.

I medieval Europe, the average age of a knight graduating his training was 20 or 21 with a few exceptions for 18 or 19. In Scarterra it's 18 with a few exceptions for 16.

There are other reasons besides magical healing why this exists. I cover it in this article.

 

I thought I had come up with a reasonable thing, but my friend coyly pointed out that ScarterraD10 is probably the first RPG system in history with detailed rules for feeding potions to horses.

I regret nothing!

 

Here are some updates!

I write a lot of gratuitous world building articles. But at least this one is season appropriate for Easter.

The incredible edible egg

\/ Here is a picture I like but I cannot legally use on Scarterra.com \/

It would theoretically be a good cover image for various articles about secrets, spycraft, or detective work.



So I have the talented Zeta Gardner, aka Nalebunny to make a Scarterra version.

I like gnomes. Thanks to Google Analytics, I can see that illustrations with satyrs in them tend to have higher engagement with website visitors than other things. So I asked for a gnome and and a satyr spilling some tea. Here is the preliminary sketch.



I plan to use this illustration for many things, but in the short-term I was planning to use it as the cover image for my Adventure April 2025 entry.

For the 2022, 2023, and 2024, Adventure April has been a big deal on World Anvil and the winner got to run a demo to a live audience.

Of course this year since I was ready in advance, the World Anvil team is not doing Adventure April anymore, but there is an unofficial Adventure April, so I'm still doing the same thing, but for a smaller audiences. I got a little bit of polishing left to do, but here is my current entry.

Decadent Arch Villainy