Basic Overlooked Worldbuilding Questions

Happy Halloween!

Here's your modern monsters character!

Her name is Victoria 'Ick' Eyessacs.

She's a conspiracy theorist who may or may not be completely human.

She has a pet dog named Snapper and lives in the back of her bug van from her grandfather's long ago shut down exterminator company.

She found a picture of 'Johanna Ever', a cowboy's long lost love only to realize that she looked a little too similar to Johanna Everstone '2'.

The mysterious stranger who claims to be a distant relative of Evermore's founding family that, like her 'long lost cousin' was named after the original Johanna Everstone, who didn't 'survive' the witch trials.

Needless to say, she's more than a little curious especially when she finds other strange photos and paintings that look an awful lot like the new stranger's friends....

Hope you like her!

Love her! She sounds fun lol.

I loveee fantasy settings doing magical exhaustion:

burnt out pyromancers emitting steam and smoke

tired cryomancers shivering with visible foggy breath

weary necromancers looking ill and hearing voices

frazzled healers receiving the same cuts, bruises, and injuries of their patients

Here's your Modern Monsters' character's boyfriend!

Silas Pan.

He's a modern day Satyr and unlike the other monsters in town, he's pretty new.

He runs into Ick not long after roaming into town for the annual Everstone Fall Festival.

Cute! He looks great, thanks!

Something Dungeons & Dragons gets right about its worldbuilding is that most of its iconic monsters are both capable of speech and willing to argue about incredibly stupid shit – just A+ understanding of the medium there – which makes it doubly perplexing that the game goes out of its way to specify that skeletons can't talk. Skeletons are, like, the classic monster to engage in ill-advised banter with, and it's preemptively taken off the table. What the fuck.

Small fantasy worldbuilding elements you might want to think about:

A currency that isn’t gold-standard/having gold be as valuable as tin

A currency that runs entirely on a perishable resource, like cocoa beans

A clock that isn’t 24-hours

More or less than four seasons/seasons other than the ones we know

Fantastical weather patterns like irregular cloud formations, iridescent rain

Multiple moons/no moon

Planetary rings

A northern lights effect, but near the equator

Roads that aren’t brown or grey/black, like San Juan’s blue bricks

Jewelry beyond precious gems and metals

Marriage signifiers other than wedding bands

The husband taking the wife's name / newlyweds inventing a new surname upon marriage

No concept of virginity or bastardry

More than 2 genders/no concept of gender

Monotheism, but not creationism

Gods that don’t look like people

Domesticated pets that aren’t re-skinned dogs and cats

Some normalized supernatural element that has nothing to do with the plot

Magical communication that isn’t Fantasy Zoom

“Books” that aren’t bound or scrolls

A nonverbal means of communicating, like sign language

A race of people who are obligate carnivores/ vegetarians/ vegans/ pescatarians (not religious, biological imperative)

I’ve done about half of these myself in one WIP or another and a little detail here or there goes a long way in reminding the audience that this isn’t Kansas anymore.

I was worldbuilding two bog standard fantasy species, wise old tree dudes and impulsive little rat guys, when I realized it was far funnier if they had each other's personalities.

The rat guys think fast and talk fast, but they're incredibly conservative and like to cover all the angles before they take any action. This comes with being a prey species: their ancestral environment had lots of clever traps and devious hazards, so you get rat councils wisely working the problem.

The tree dudes speak and move slowly, but they will propose and then do the most insane things you can imagine. They can slot together a rocket in an afternoon and will then use it without so much as a test fire first. They test new potions by quaffing them down, sometimes not even waiting for it to cool (though they're tree dudes, so I guess quaffing a potion just means pouring it over their root legs). This comes from the ancestral selection process too: the tree dudes that won were the ones that took big risks, that grew faster, stronger, and tried new things without worrying about consequences. The tree dudes evolved in an era when they had no natural predators and their only competition was each other.

And this is, of course, initially confusing for any human who makes contact with them. If a giant bearded tree nods at you solemnly and tells you to go through a portal, your first thought is not that he's curious about what will happen to spacetime. And if a hyperactive little rat guy tells you with some urgency that you must accompany him into a ruined city, you won't immediately think that this is step 11 of his branching 27 step plan.

Eric Triggs Family Tree;

Note: this does not include family born after the apocalypse and is subject to change as i edit the characters.

Quotes From My Characters (Part 3);

-Johanna Everstone, from 'Modern Monsters'.

Staff I made for my Modern Monsters character, Morana Crimson;

Can we talk about how in zombie shows/movies/books they always find a veterinarian and not a surgeon? Are veterinarians deemed more likely to survive the apocalypse?