Questions tagged [low-fantasy]
For questions focused on worlds where magic exists, but is rare, in a world otherwise abiding to natural laws.
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What kind of environment would lead to the development of traits typical of fantasy races? [closed]
I'm not actively working on my world, but I'm currently thinking about races for it. I want this world to seem like a typical fantasy world at first glance, but have scientific reasons behind it. So, ...
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Societies After A Sudden 'Ice Age'
About 300 years ago, my world underwent massive climate change. It suddenly shifted from something we'd consider normal/livable to a climate similar to that of the last glacial maximum. (Side note: I ...
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Will a Humans Tolerance Keep Going Until Full Immunity?
Context: This is a post apocalypse low fantasy, soft science world. In it megacorps have built a protected city for citizens to survive. The world outside the walls in dangerous, with toxic gas, ...
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Alternative chalk board materials
For the sake of context, this is a fantasy setting where this character has no access to magic and lives in a small village. He would like to write a book and since wiriting materials are a little ...
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How can kaiju exist in nature and not significantly alter civilization?
I'm building a world where kaiju-sized creatures exist alongside regular-sized creatures. How these kaiju don't crumble under their own weight doesn't matter, and can be explained away by them being ...
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How to utilize dragons that are too small to ride in warfare?
Dragons in my setting are significantly smaller and less physically powerful than most depictions. The large males reach about 100 kilograms and just over two meters tall. This means that they ...
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How to serve the gods
TL;DR: How can a mortal become worthy of being listened to by the gods?
I'm seeking a logical framework to establish a specific relationship between gods and mortals.
The Relationship:
Mortals can ...
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What would a potion that increases resistance to damage actually do to the body?
Alright, we are in a medieval fantasy setting. In this setting, northern warriors (basically vikings or typical fantasy barbarians) have berserkers that use certain potions that make themselves ...
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How to non-lethally capture a sapient gorilla using only what can be found in an average American kitchen? [closed]
I'm writing this story where a good friend of the main character gets kidnapped by a clan of sapient Gorilla-like creatures. In order to find where they are keeping him captive, the MC decides that ...
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Unconventional ranged weapon for primitive sci-fantasy race?
This race lives underground in massive caverns/cave network. Hundreds of square miles large per cavern. Large/wide/tall enough that they have their own atmospheric conditions, essentially large ...
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How long do Brown Bear coats/pelts last?
I have a character who intends to wear the pelt of a Brown Bear at a particular point in time. That doesn't come about for a decade. I was wondering how badly degraded, or preserved will the coat be ...
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Building a settlement in a place in temporal stasis. What problems the settlers would face?
In my low-fantasy world there is a place where the environment has been frozen by magic in some kind of temporal stasis. It's an antarctic type of environment, with mountains and huge ice sheets: ...
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Star that creates millions of galaxies through a massive coronal mass ejection. Does this make any sense? [closed]
I want to base my novel off of the idea of a star creating millions of galaxies from a gigantic coronal mass ejection. Due to this it spawns the void which threatens to absorb the entirety of space, ...
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What problems would a truly gigantic fantasy city encounter?
Supposing a world that falls somewhere between low and high magic, what would stop a city of truly epic size from existing?
The city is a city-state that has existed for millennia.
It is pretty much ...
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How can I heat my buildings without fire in a low-fantasy setting?
In my low-fantasy setting there is a civilization of blind people living in a very safe and isolated region of the world. Thinking about how this civilization could have developed throughout the ...
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Removing slaves' digit to prevent uprising
What digit, if removed, would hamper a human from fighting using medieval weaponry? (I'm toying with both thumbs but this may be too limiting in the work that the slaves can do or both little fingers ...
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Would dual wielding daggers be a viable choice for a covert bodyguard?
In the setting of a royal court in a stereotypical 'medieval' low-fantasy world, the royal princess must obviously be guarded. Assuming this society sees it as 'unbecoming' for a woman to be armed, ...
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Peak Copper Age Society
How far could the technology of a copper age society get; Could they work up to the level of late antiquity?
Context:
Im working on a si-fi/fantasy world were people have been transplanted onto a ...
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Help with a planet that resembles Mercury: double sunset/sunrise etc
I'm new. I'm here because I need help for the geography of a fantasy planet I'm building. I don't want to be scientific, but I also want that my planet is credible. I imagined a planet that has maybe ...
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Can ecological collapse happen in a person's lifetime?
I'm writing a story for a character who is a an old monster hunter. In his younger days, he used to make a living by hunting the most dangerous monsters which are basically the story's equivalent of ...
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Question on gravity and its relation to weight and force
I'm working on a character for a story that has the ability to somewhat play around with gravitational forces, mainly weight reduction stuff but I'm sure there's other applications. Practically this ...
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Formula for calculating aging rate of a decaying half-elf dynasty
A powerful human king had a child with an elf princess. His life expectancy is about 70 years (human average), hers is 2000 years. The half-elf prince is expected to live for about 1000 years, more or ...
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Humans breeding with dragons [closed]
Firstly, by dragon I am referring to the type with 4 legs a tail and wings. Their actual sizes vary greatly, from the size of your average house cat to feasting on planets in one bite. Most are ...
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Amazon drones controlled by magic, how to control as many as possible with your brain given low technology level but runic alternative to coding [closed]
My research:
In the real world the technology to read and interpret the human brain has been arround for almost a century now and the idea of controlling devices with your brain has been around for ...
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How do you motivate people to post flyers around town?
This one feels a bit trivial, but I am genuinely stumped on how best to word a job specification that one of my characters is posting in a fantasy world.
The basic idea is I have a dwarf who is in a ...
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How do I Make the "Anime Girl Warrior Physique" Realistic?
In some Anime, Women look nothing at all like men, yet are capable of nearly the same exact feats of physical strength:
Image from Dragon Ball Super
Is there a way to manipulate biology and ...
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How to prevent super-strong slaves from escaping and rebelling
I have a fantasy setting that is about as advanced as the late 15th to early 16th century. There are humans and many other sapient non-human species; humans are one of the only species to create large ...
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How can I make combination weapons widespread in my world?
I'm writing a low fantasy fiction in a XVIII century-tech kind of world.
The reason of the setting is that I love early modern muzzleloading weapons, and I think guns can make fantasy more interesting....
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Sea serpent evolved into dragon anatomy?
In my story there are scary monstrous sea serpent like creatures of all shapes and sizes. What the people don’t know, is (reverse whale evolution theory) they came to shore and turned into something ...
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In a world without stars, how would travelers navigate at night?
On Earth, sailors would navigate the oceans at night by using the stars as guides; since there are no landmarks in the ocean like there are on land (save for the occasional island), that's pretty much ...
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A Pangaean civilization has its land split apart by something
I want to write a story that has a Pangaean like world, but human civilization already existed during that era. Basically, the earth just has one giant piece of land while the rest is the sea.
People ...
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How to design a “legendary looking bow” that fits a Medieval European fantasy? [closed]
Introduction
We often see bows and archer heroes (and heroines) being depicted in various fantasy series, wielding some “legendary bows” with bizarre and pointy shapes which looks like unattended ...
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How would technology differ in a society with different intelligent species than just humans?
In my story, Longhorn, there’s five races descended from five gods of the same names, which consist of humans, keratas (anthropomorphic big cats w horns) lykos (anthropomorphic Wolf/hyena creatures) ...
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Best Way to Style Ridiculously Long Hair (for magic purposes)
Okay, so for the story I am working on, I have a problem-or, rather, Serena the Shaman/Witch has a distinct problem. She has only one low-mana spell-Hydro Jet-and it deals low but consistent damage. ...
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What's a viable reason for why underground societies are more accepting of slavery?
In fantasy, a relatively common trope in fantasy settings, particularly D&D, is underground societies that are more willing to endorse slavery than surface-dwelling societies.
We see it in the ...
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Clothing preference and Skin type of race which can absorb heat energy via skin?
My alien race is able to absorb energy via the skin, like plants using sunlight for photosynthesis.
The race eats a lot of food, like humans, But they need this absorbed energy for their proper inner ...
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Is there development of advanced polymers/composite materials?
Background: seeking modern technologies, resources, etc that could potentially be discovered and applied in a fantasy setting where manufacturing processes, while advanced, are more akin to the late ...
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What would prevent the genocide of a legitimately dangerous race?
I’m writing a low magic fantasy story in which there’s a race of creatures called shadow-thralls that were basically bred as a slave race by a wizard thousands of years in the past. In the present day,...
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Why Would Serazor Wield Axes? [closed]
Serazor. These odd dragons in Dracoriri are unusual in that their eyes appear dark, but they act about as intelligent as a primate or bear (yes bears are, in fact, intelligent). With their chiseled ...
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Development of Firespines [closed]
The land of Dracori contains many magical creatures. One of these is the Firespline Landfish (also called a Terrakanthes).
The Terrakanthes looks like a chubby lizard, with a ridge of magical spikes ...
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How Would Humanoids Form Their Own Gems?
Sequinoans. This strange race of Amazonians has many unusual traits, but the foremost our scholars are concerned with are their gems. You see, Sequinoans somehow form gems naturally, perfectly smooth ...
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How Can a Bug Larvae Hijack a Robot?
When inactive, the robot looks like a Steelstone arch. Steelstone resembles marble only it is virtually indestructible. The knowledge to work Steelstone was lost thousands of years ago.
When the robot ...
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Why would a herbivore be armed and aggressive?
In Dracoriri, I plan to have a species of small dragon called a Malidge (by small, we mean about the size of a human). These dragons are red, shiny, and covered in plates instead of scales, a natural ...
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How Can a Creature With Rock Armor Also Have an Inflating Head?
Globold are darkeye dragons with some rather unusual traits. Their bodies are more or less cylindrical, with a rounded chest and a sloping back, with two small arms and two big legs and a tail like a ...
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An earthlike world is flooded with fantasy flora and fauna. What happens to the ecosystem, and how long does it take to recover? [closed]
Let's assume for the sake of argument that:
It's a 50/50ish split between new prey/predators herbivores/carnivores being introduced. So already a bit imbalanced.
The creatures/flora make sense ...
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How Can Crashdrake Live In a Pine Forest?
Crashdrakes. These dragons are, for just about any intent or purpose, a cassowary, or in other words they are big, flightless, highly aggressive and yet herbivorous death birds. Seeing that dragons in ...
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How could people in the medieval times defeat an armored vehicle?
In my setting there is a mad artificer making armored cars for the army. The cars have wooden frames with 10 mm of steel on every side, wooden wheels with metal plates covering them, and are propelled ...
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Canidrakes: Determining Their Niche
Canidrakes are a well-known and relatively common species of darkeyed dragon, which due to convergent evolution and perhaps some magic resemble wolves but are bigger-most Canidrakes are like dire ...
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Best Non-Arctic Environment for Chimerake
Chimerake are a species of brighteyed dragon, known for their aggressive and territorial natures. They are like tyrannosaurs, but the size of an Indian rhino, quadrupedal and covered in fluffy fur, ...
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Gastric Reversion: How Can It Work?
Scerafin, a species of quadrupedal darkeyed dragon that resemble sharks but live on land, are known for their telescoping necks (range of 3 yards), razor-sharp lance (read: snout horn) and tailfin, ...
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