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Sorry if this post is a bit scattered, but I've got some catching up to do.

The topic at hand: the translation spell. I would personally tone it down a degree, make it more fallible, and add a few more quirks based on Potentis's motives for casting it. Just because it might not be common knowledge doesn't mean that the history behind such an ever-present part of the setting shouldn't be developed by the writers, and it would be the logical source for more flavor. Was the spell made to ease trade between cultures? To establish a multicultural settlement on Felarya? (A note, the spell predates the very first village that would be come Negav by seven years.) Was it an attempt to communicate with predators? To band people together against some threat? Or was Potentis just trying to increase the audience for his horrible puns that only worked in a near-dead language? I also think the spell should be a little more limited; it shouldn't just be "any and all spoken languages make perfect sense"; while it should generally be good enough for day-to-day use, all languages have their idiosyncrasies, and I think some of those should carry through the spell. For example, using real-life examples, Japanese often has inferred nouns, leading to sentences that would sound incomplete to us, while Latin (and child languages) have genders assigned to inanimate objects, and German has words that are basically a half-dozen shorter words smashed together in a compactor. In Felarya, I'd expect most predators to talk in quite simple languages, with few conjunctions and other linkers, which would simply be missing in the translation. And, of course, we have to decide what the end result is: does it translate into meaning through the listener's language, or through pure mental concepts? If the latter, how does it handle concepts the listener simply has no comprehension of? It's really quite a complex spell, and while we don't need every single corner case covered, it would be good to have both a basic overview and some quirks laid out.

As for technology, I think there's a basic solution to be had: lay out baseline tech levels for each culture, and generally stick to them for major things, and do the same with magic. For example, going by the wall picture from months ago, Negav big guns look to be roughly early Industrial; large-caliber, smoothbore, and big, but not that long, but they're clearly magically enhanced, with runes tracing complex, well-developed magic spells. The Vishmital, on the other hand, have a very high-tech, downright soft-ish sci-fi level, but likely little to no magic. Delurans are more advanced than Negav, but not so advanced that they've moved from ferrous materials to alternatives (aluminum and titanium are both hard to refine and work, but often exceed steel in usefulness, while fiberglass, composite materials, and ceramics are even harder to work but highly customizable). And, I think, most of these cultures are not trading knowledge with each other–at least, not often. Psi'ols basically form the general Negavian base tech level, and while the Vishmitals cooperate, outside of places like the Blue Zone their tech is very rare, and they most certainly aren't interested in the Psi'ols learning even the basic physics behind it. The Psi'ols feel the same about magic; both sides jealously guard their secrets, and both have the advantage that they're advanced enough in their own fields that it's difficult to reverse-engineer their products without the centuries of groundwork that lead to them. A Psi'ol wouldn't be able to even understand what almost any part of a Vishmital laser rifle was for, and the Vishmital would have a similarly hard time deciphering an enchantment on a high-grade Psi'ol staff, which likely features not only the base enchantment, but additional spells woven into it for efficiency, ease-of-use, and safety. I think so long as we keep the mixing of technology and magic slow, we should be fine. Keep Clarke's Third firmly in mind here.

Lastly, on the topic on concept art, what I think would be really useful–and likely inspire a lot of fanart–is style guides. I used to play EQ Landmark, and despite hundreds of different players working on hundreds of different builds, the results generally looked good together because the players followed the style guides. Shape language, colors, and proportions need to all be covered. It also makes it easier to add to a culture later, since you already have the basics to work from.

Alright, I have a compromise.  It's clear that I find the idea that the reason monster girls and non-monster girls can all speak English being a literal case of A Wizard Did It to be absolutely dumb.  Yet, as I suspected, people don't want that explanation to go away on the grounds that it's *an* explanation, flimsy and moronic as it is.  So, how about this: There is no definitive answer in-universe as to why monster girls and non-monster girls all seem to share a spoken language.  However, people like to attribute it to the work of this wizard guy.  Details about him are nebulous at best; his age, motivations, race and even gender are shrouded in mystery. Even his/her existence has its share of skeptics, as there are very few surviving records of him that can shed light on whether or not he was an actual historical figure, or merely a mythological hero from a bygone civilization.  Either way, people like to speculate about him/her, and everyone usually has their own interpretation of the guy.

There, we keep it sufficiently vague so that there is still an element of mystique, but now we have a legendary figure people both in-story and out can write tales about.  People over the ages would obvious craft myths about some of the things they don't understand, and Bael was all into Felarya having more legends a while back to fill in that niche, so he gets to have his wish too. The only issue is that, in order to enact this, we need to remove mentions of him from the chronology article, as he would need to hail from an era WAY before the age of Ur-Sagol for it to work. In fact, putting a date on when monster girls and non-monster girls could suddenly speak English just feels wrong to me and further robs the thing of its mystique.  Fortunately, it's a minor edit at best.


As for the specifics of the "spell" itself, well, you know me and lifting shit from D&D and being called out on it without even giving the idea a chance.  I was always under the impression that the "spell" was essentially a permanent Comprehend Language spell on a global scale.  I'll just copy-paste how the spell works in the game:

Quote :

You can understand the spoken words of creatures or read otherwise incomprehensible written messages. The ability to read does not necessarily impart insight into the material, merely its literal meaning. The spell enables you to understand or read an unknown language, not speak or write it. [...] It does not decipher codes or reveal messages concealed in otherwise normal text.

Now, Karbo has gone on record and said that written languages are unaffected, so as far as the global effect on Felarya is concerned, it only applies to spoken words.  Where it mention that it doesn't necessarily impart insight into the material, merely it's literal meaning, I always interpreted this as things like the meaning behind idioms, play on words, puns and the likes specific to a given language aren't translated.  Another way to put it is how in real life, even if you speak a language, you probably won't get what a specific idiom means at first unless you studied it.

As for me, I like the idea that people can choose to speak in their native tongues whenever I feel appropriate.  Like, say, when someone gets upset, he or she has a tendency to exclaim insults in their own language.

A bit offtopic, but as for world building..I'd really like to know about the portal supposedly hidden in Q'Tada'x'silath's hive :p

I think having a technological baseline for each race is interesting looking but you are forgetting some things but let's discuss The Isolon Fist first. The Isolon Fist may have began with a few platoons of volunteers but after the Vishie Psi Cold War died Vishmitals have canonically been seen to have traded tech with the Psi'ol who likely did share some magical secrets and therefore your disbelief in them trading would be moot. Edit: Never mind that article has been updated to reflect the hostilities between the Vishies and the Fist. <.< Almost as if to trip me up on purpose. *Fry suspicious face inserted here*

The other thing you are forgeting is Offworld Trading and Scavengers. It's not a super common practice but the adventurers who return to Negav do not always find lost temples riddled with magical artifacts. In fact the more profitable ones probably scavenge ground vehicles that have been left behind by uninterested predators or bits of tech that are basic on other worlds, like flash lights/torches, and bring it back. Oh sure they may keep one or two as a trophy but the majority probably sell it to afford rent, feed their family or otherwise upgrade and replace their own gear.

Another source of tech and other goodies is Offworlder tourists and traders who are eager to off load something common on their world for something rarer from Negav. Say Ascarlin for simple heating units or solar panels. Now there's likely a trade committee who makes sure that not just any kind of tech or aeven offworld magic can be brought in I would say...except the Dimensional Gate isn't much more than a stub on the wiki is it? So for changes I would suggest maybe adding a TSA of Felarya, your welcome for that strip idea Karbo, who keeps WMDs as well as potentially dangerous artifacts out of the hands of Negav's stupider and criminal element.

- - -

On the translation spell. Personally I think it works just fine but I must admit adding a few of those quirks to the lore couldn't hurt it any. Making Alikmar Potentius a more mysterious figure? Sure why not? Very little exists to affirm his identity as it is. I do think we should leave the day the spell was first activated up but shoul add "Was said to have been cast" to help shroud it without removing it entirely. Though this makes me very tempted to talk about the gross lack of building even stub bios for our historical figures....but I'll wait....

Water Nebula wrote:

 A bit offtopic, but as for world building..I'd really like to know about the portal supposedly hidden in Q'Tada'x'silath's hive :p
 

O_O Even as old and obsessed with the lore as I am I don't know that rumor. A portal like the great Portal of Ur-Sagol? That would explain how the insect armies over took the dridders so quickly actually...<.< Sneaky magic resistant bugs.

jedi-explorer wrote:

Water Nebula wrote:

 A bit offtopic, but as for world building..I'd really like to know about the portal supposedly hidden in Q'Tada'x'silath's hive :p
 

O_O Even as old and obsessed with the lore as I am I don't know that rumor. A portal like the great Portal of Ur-Sagol? That would explain how the insect armies over took the dridders so quickly actually...<.< Sneaky magic resistant bugs.

"Q'Tada'x'silath is said to guard an old portal, deep in the Hive. Nobody can tell what this portal is about, or how it somehow ended there. Some claim the Queen actually built the Great Hive around it in order to better guard it, which raises some interesting and unnerving questions about what kind of being could come through it.."

Shady Knight wrote:

Alright, I have a compromise.  It's clear that I find the idea that the reason monster girls and non-monster girls can all speak English being a literal case of A Wizard Did It to be absolutely dumb.  

I like the effect, I don't like the fact that a Wizard did it. I think the fact we credit a wizard for such an immeasurably massive spell is...inexplicably...asinine. I've said it for years myself, back when Fish was still around. xD

One of the things that I found rather difficult as a new writer was that I knew nothing of that to do. I find the idea of a tutorial along with guidelines to be really good since it will probably make it easier for people that wants to create.

Another point that I agree on is the changes to the soil, from the first time I read it I found that to me it seemed a bit over the top. I mean since no one can die from old age it more or less creates a problem with overpopulation especially in bigger cities like Negav like you've already talked about. There should be more things that should be able to kill humans than them being devoured by nagas for example or killed by their own like in a brawl and so on.

I don't feel like we should remove too many things from the wiki, however instead what could be done is to have a look through of how to make them more interesting; adding of special characteristics and behavior, how do they reproduce?, anyway for a human to survive an encounter with them? More or less fleshing them out more. Sure some are probably in need of scrapping but what could be done is borrowing things from the scrapped material to help other get fleshed out. Another idea is to merge spieces.

interesting side note, we have 3600 spieces of snakes in the world.

As for a tech limit I don't really know. For me I see Felarya as a Steampunk/Medieval/Magic Fantasy world. Since everyone has their own view of it it may be good to set a limit to it, however I'm not proposing a ban to sci-fi things since I still like the idea of Negav's gateway and that there are people from Sci-fi empires and worlds that travel through it. for me I find it a rather difficult question since if people with highly advanced tech appeared they would probably have an advantage and it may be considered overpowered.

Undead skeleton can't exist but vampires can? Always found it a bit strange.

Having the creator of the translation spell to be shrouded in mystery feels like a really good idea. It helps to create a mystery and there is nothing more fun than to try and solve it. I also find it an example of "show don't tell" since writing out too much information can make things a bit boring.
I love the idea of having different written languages in different areas, it helps to create different cultures.

This is just my rambles though pay attention to it if you wish to.
Cheers, iZy out.

iZyren wrote:

One of the things that I found rather difficult as a new writer was that I knew nothing of that to do. I find the idea of a tutorial along with guidelines to be really good since it will probably make it easier for people that wants to create.

Another point that I agree on is the changes to the soil, from the first time I read it I found that to me it seemed a bit over the top. I mean since no one can die from old age it more or less creates a problem with overpopulation especially in bigger cities like Negav like you've already talked about. There should be more things that should be able to kill humans than them being devoured by nagas for example or killed by their own like in a brawl and so on.

I don't feel like we should remove too many things from the wiki, however instead what could be done is to have a look through of how to make them more interesting; adding of special characteristics and behavior, how do they reproduce?, anyway for a human to survive an encounter with them? More or less fleshing them out more. Sure some are probably in need of scrapping but what could be done is borrowing things from the scrapped material to help other get fleshed out. Another idea is to merge  spieces.

interesting side note, we have 3600 spieces of snakes in the world.

As for a tech limit I don't really know. For me I see Felarya as a Steampunk/Medieval/Magic Fantasy world. Since everyone has their own view of it it may be good to set a limit to it, however I'm not proposing a ban to sci-fi things since I still like the idea of Negav's gateway and that there are people from Sci-fi empires and worlds that travel through it. for me I find it a rather difficult question since if people with highly advanced tech appeared they would probably have an advantage and it may be considered overpowered.

Undead skeleton can't exist but vampires can? Always found it a bit strange.

Having the creator of the translation spell to be shrouded in mystery feels like a really good idea. It helps to create a mystery and there is nothing more fun than to try and solve it. I also find it an example of "show don't tell" since writing out too much information can make things a bit boring.
I love the idea of having different written languages in different areas, it helps to create different cultures.

This is just my rambles though pay attention to it if you wish to.
Cheers, iZy out.

Well, while I do agree a tourial may help some newcomers, I actually started out by reading most of the Wiki before even making my account here on the fourms, so I would have a basic understanding of the Nature of Felarya, how it operates, the rules governing its characters and such. If you read most of the articles, you'll get a decent idea of how Felarya works, though everyone seems to have some minor differences and interpertations, depending on the story and subject.

I'm still on the side of keeping immortality though. If you imagine a normal naga eating about 5 people per day, and including the nonsentient preds (which many forget about), theres a lotof people that need to be eaten just so they all don't starve! Many are treasure hunters, lured in by tales of huge riches.

I agree with making things more interesting! Like the Jotuns I feel are a fun race, but rarely used! Those aligator girls seem fun too! (As a aside note, my Felarya RP friend actually likes using some of the more obscure races in our story based RPs, it really has helped to make things much more fun!)

Actually, I'm pretty sure the vampire thing is extremely minor. I think what happened was that someone in the early days added it and Karbo didn't mind at the time. These days, it makes no sence and its honestly a major change that needs to come.

I don't mind either way about the translations spell. It's kinda like Star Trek, every creature and race speaks english so you can understand them! If you don't have this, then we lose the pred/prey communication that I love so much!

Vampires seem to be outcasts left stranded here away from their apocalyptic and dystopian worlds. They don't occur naturally in Felarya due to the lack of necromancy, and can't reproduce because of it. It appears that certain undead beings can be released into Felarya, but are quelled rather quickly with no way to spread their pestilence or even defend themselves. Vampires are the general exception since their increased agility and speed gives them a foothold

iZyren wrote:

I don't feel like we should remove too many things from the wiki, however instead what could be done is to have a look through of how to make them more interesting; adding of special characteristics and behavior, how do they reproduce?, anyway for a human to survive an encounter with them? More or less fleshing them out more. Sure some are probably in need of scrapping but what could be done is borrowing things from the scrapped material to help other get fleshed out. Another idea is to merge  spieces.

We could have Felarya edition Ark dossiers

Or I guess make a survivalist's guide or something. It would be cool. Things like "Appease revada guards with music", "Slug girls hate salt", "Herodontes are attracted to gold trinkets"..etc

Water-Nebula wrote:

iZyren wrote:

I don't feel like we should remove too many things from the wiki, however instead what could be done is to have a look through of how to make them more interesting; adding of special characteristics and behavior, how do they reproduce?, anyway for a human to survive an encounter with them? More or less fleshing them out more. Sure some are probably in need of scrapping but what could be done is borrowing things from the scrapped material to help other get fleshed out. Another idea is to merge  spieces.

We could have Felarya edition Ark dossiers

Or I guess make a survivalist's guide or something. It would be cool. Things like "Appease revada guards with music", "Slug girls hate salt", "Herodontes are attracted to gold trinkets"..etc

Survivalist's guide would be really awesome! Though there would still need to say what a revada guard is and other minor species, so people dont bomb us with asking what these creatures are.

There are several ways to address the immortality issue imho. Removing it altogether is one but it would bring a lot of problems. It can be altered in a couple ways. One I thought a little while ago is to have cities being places where the effect from the soil is a lot less potent, as contact with the soil and the general nature is a lot less frequent and there are too many people around.
Basically it would be greatly diminished in Negav, but would work in a native village in the middle of the jungle. That would create an interesting dilemma where to get that immortality you also would have to be more exposed. That's a possible way to adresse the cities overpopulation problems, what do you think ?

Shady Knight wrote:

do some concept arts for things in Felarya.  Since we got Kelerm in development, why don't you make a series of pictures that showcase what the place and people look like?  If you want to get the community involved, do concept arts like you did with the Vishmitals and ask them which design for the average people, soldier, and sandship they like best.  Make pictures of the various fauna and carnivorous plants to be used for the wiki.  It will give you an excuse to update it for the first time in months if nothing else.  Also, maybe show some scenes of the daily life in various places in Felarya, and for added bonus, make their description a mini story of sorts.  RoninDude, an artist on dA, made a few pictures in that style using his character Lin going off to work.  I should add that RoninDude is not affiliated with Felarya in any shape or form; in fact, I doubt he knows we even exist, but I'll show you one of those pictures as an example of what I'm talking about.

Yeah I agree with that. There's a couple pictures coming that are going to be world-driven ( history especially ). And I clearly have to do one for Kelerm as well.

Shady Knight wrote:

Magic that restores life to a deceased creature always fail.
Magic that attempts to reincarnate a dead creature into another body always fail.
Magic that turn corpses into undeads, or create undeads at all, always fail.
Magic that traps a newly dead soul inside a container works; however, the soul cannot be used to animate a dead body.
If a soul is transferred into a golem body, it does not grant the soul new life in an artificial body.  The soul merely acts as a core that animates the body.  The resulting golem or animate armor remains mindless and otherwise exhibits no personality trait from the soul that empowers it.

I agree with that, although I'm a bit more mixed on the golem part. I could imagine a golem body remaining sentient if the craft is really good and designed for that in the first place, and if the soul is strong enough.
For resurrection and why it would be near impossible my reasoning is that you would have to prevent the soul from leaving Felarya for Heaven or Hell which would be, in itself, already very hard. Then you would have to somehow pull the soul and force it back in its body ( another very hard thing to do ) and then make sure the soul don't leave again immediately as, most of the time, the body in question simply can no longer sustain it ( the soul left for a reason in the first place ). That's something very few beings besides gods could accomplish I think.

Krisexy26 wrote:

In my point of view, a more mature version of Felarya would be to stop being childish. The amount of humor is ridiculous for a world that should be dark, scary and treacherous. People die in Felarya, there's a tone that should come with it. I understand the manga style comes with some light hearted moment, but to be honest, it ruins it all. It's fun to contribute to Felarya, but Felarya is not a fun world. It's a deadly place where people get eaten without second thoughts. You want Felarya to mature? Change the tone. Predators should know they're being cruel: i mean, preys can literally speak the same language as them, and yet they decide they're mere food. There's an attitude that comes with that. It strongly depends on the writers and illustrators style, but, as a mortal fetish world, theres a darker tone that should accompany it. People try to make Felarya like a pink happy world where everyone is cheerful, while it really shouldn't. Following that idea, I think it'd be nice to add up more threats to giant predators. Poison, diseases, anything. Giant predators should also constantly fear for their life. Felarya should be unforgiving to any living thing in it. As of now, giant predators had it far too easy.

I don't really agree here. First changing the tone of the world would be a huge thing that a lot of people would, with a reason, disagree with. And second I just don't think it's a good idea. I don't want to have a serious and dark works ala Attack on titans for example. That just wouldn't be Felarya anymore and I'm not sure I would enjoy it nearly as much personally. Having said that there is always some middle ground that can be found. More dangers and perils for the predators though, yeah I can get behind that.

Shady Knight wrote:

Alright, I have a compromise.  It's clear that I find the idea that the reason monster girls and non-monster girls can all speak English being a literal case of A Wizard Did It to be absolutely dumb.  Yet, as I suspected, people don't want that explanation to go away on the grounds that it's *an* explanation, flimsy and moronic as it is.  So, how about this: There is no definitive answer in-universe as to why monster girls and non-monster girls all seem to share a spoken language.  However, people like to attribute it to the work of this wizard guy.  Details about him are nebulous at best; his age, motivations, race and even gender are shrouded in mystery.  Even his/her existence has its share of skeptics, as there are very few surviving records of him that can shed light on whether or not he was an actual historical figure, or merely a mythological hero from a bygone civilization.  Either way, people like to speculate about him/her, and everyone usually has their own interpretation of the guy.

There, we keep it sufficiently vague so that there is still an element of mystique, but now we have a legendary figure people both in-story and out can write tales about.  People over the ages would obvious craft myths about some of the things they don't understand, and Bael was all into Felarya having more legends a while back to fill in that niche, so he gets to have his wish too.  The only issue is that, in order to enact this, we need to remove mentions of him from the chronology article, as he would need to hail from an era WAY before the age of Ur-Sagol for it to work.  In fact, putting a date on when monster girls and non-monster girls could suddenly speak English just feels wrong to me and further robs the thing of its mystique.  Fortunately, it's a minor edit at best.
.

You could have done without the snarky jab here. The point itself is valid though and could work. And this one wouldn't be too much of a problem to change, as I haven't seen the language question being used in detail very often.

Gamma wrote:

Sorry if this post is a bit scattered, but I've got some catching up to do.

The topic at hand: the translation spell.  I would personally tone it down a degree, make it more fallible, and add a few more quirks based on Potentis's motives for casting it.  Just because it might not be common knowledge doesn't mean that the history behind such an ever-present part of the setting shouldn't be developed by the writers, and it would be the logical source for more flavor.  Was the spell made to ease trade between cultures?  To establish a multicultural settlement on Felarya?  (A note, the spell predates the very first village that would be come Negav by seven years.)  Was it an attempt to communicate with predators?  To band people together against some threat?  Or was Potentis just trying to increase the audience for his horrible puns that only worked in a near-dead language?  I also think the spell should be a little more limited; it shouldn't just be "any and all spoken languages make perfect sense"; while it should generally be good enough for day-to-day use, all languages have their idiosyncrasies, and I think some of those should carry through the spell.  For example, using real-life examples, Japanese often has inferred nouns, leading to sentences that would sound incomplete to us, while Latin (and child languages) have genders assigned to inanimate objects, and German has words that are basically a half-dozen shorter words smashed together in a compactor.  In Felarya, I'd expect most predators to talk in quite simple languages, with few conjunctions and other linkers, which would simply be missing in the translation.  And, of course, we have to decide what the end result is: does it translate into meaning through the listener's language, or through pure mental concepts?  If the latter, how does it handle concepts the listener simply has no comprehension of?  It's really quite a complex spell, and while we don't need every single corner case covered, it would be good to have both a basic overview and some quirks laid out.

Yes interesting points here. The motive is important and yet was really left behind in the entry. As i imagine first it was to band a group of people with very different backgrounds together and the magic somehow snowballed to affect the whole continent. But yeah even just writing that now I feel it's quite forced ^^;

A guide book could be a fun project actually. Do like back in he olden times and give a few hillarious 'Donts' and 'Does' that give one a sample of how you should look at life in Felarya. I recommend one of jungle life and one for touring and living in Negav as points of interest. Heck if we can get an outline we should get somebody to do a digital art version that looks like a real weathered book and pamphlet.

Dragon Ate Her wrote:

I'm still on the side of keeping immortality though.

We are too. Just making it more complex as to the. method of implementation which also plugs into a realistic method of culling the population.

Dragon Ate Her wrote:

I agree with making things more interesting! Like the Jotuns I feel are a fun race, but rarely used! Those aligator girls seem fun too! (As a aside note, my Felarya RP friend actually likes using some of the more obscure races in our story based RPs, it really has helped to make things much more fun!)

Thing is the Jotun belong to Jaette Troll and if we suggest a change to them ....they may vanish. That's how we lost Fancy Dridders and Romaneque Harpies if I'm not mistaken. I do say we should tweak race articles though. Vampires for example since people brought them up. They work excellently in the fact they are less a disease like in other settings but they are not 100% connected to Felarya. That should change a little so there will be less mistakes lime this:

Water Nebula wrote:

They don't occur naturally in Felarya due to the lack of necromancy, and can't reproduce because of it.

Incorrect. Vampires in Felarya can spread vampirism but only voluntarily as the Diseases don't take Hold clause prevents them and were from running rampant.  However there are canonical ways stated in their stub that they use in lieu of Necromamcy. Edit: Apparently I am thinking of an out of date article. -3-; Either that or somebody keeps editing these things to mess me up.I would say first change to vampires is to add this if we still intend to nerf Diseases in Felarya.

If the origin of the translation spell is still a bit fuzzy, we could also try thinking about what other beings could possibly benefit from such a spell, and in my opinion, angel and demons are good candidates. Those beings had to deal with humans from endless kinds of worlds for millenias, and, if they want to spread their influence, have to have ways to communicate properly with them.

So, what if that spell was originally created a looooong time ago by some sort of primordial being with the intention to easen communication between humans and ethereal realms? While it's still a bit similar to the "a mage did it" argument, at least, we can easily over look the time and amount of power such a spell would require to create if it had been done by a being similar to a god and not just a human.

Then, how that spell got itself involved with Felarya, could still be argued. Perhaps the famous mage actually stole the spell somehow, perhaps he made some sort of deal, or perhaps, an event in the past brought a part of hell/heaven to Felarya, and the spell got transfered to it. A lot of speculation and possibilities that's for sure, but interesting nonetheless.

Alright, I thought a little bit more on the subject of immortality and I think I figured out what actually bugs me most about it.  It's not so much that people are ageless that frustrates me, although it does irk me, rather it's how easy it is to acquire.  In its current form, all you have to do to become ageless is to step on Felarya, and POOF!  Congratulations!  Now you can't die from old age and even the deadliest of diseases mean nothing to you until you leave.  I view immortality and its variants as a kind of power that simply cannot be acquired so easily, and having it be essentially granted for free from just so much as entering Felarya's atmosphere greatly devalues that gift.  There's the other problems such a thing brings to the table, but you all know what my opinion on those are at this point.

So, again, I have a compromise:

Instead of it being solely the result of Felarya's soil, it's only partially the result of that.  The soil can only do so much to keep all the monster girls and non-monster girls in the world young and pretty by itself, dryads being the sole exception for obvious reasons.  Rather, it's a combination of the energy soil and the food that people eat on Felarya that give Felaryans their hardiness and seemingly eternal youth.  As is already listed in the wiki, the water of Felarya is infused with minerals of the soil like it is in real life, and it's only natural that fruits and all plants in general are bathed in the same wondrous energy.  Herbivores that feed on plants absorb some of that energy, which is transferred to carnivores that eat them, and so on.   The agelessness, rather than being something that's granted for free, is something that's built slowly gradually over the years as people become infused with its energy from the food and water they consume.  That's why a person's aging slows down so drastically when somebody reaches their twenties-thirties.

However, this also means that this factor has its limits.  Because Felaryans have been consuming food infused in the soil's energy from basically the day they were born, an outsider coming to Felarya wouldn't get the same mileage out of the energy unless he or she stayed there for a very long time.  If a person were to come to Felarya already at an advanced age, depending on how old or healthy they were, there wouldn't be enough time to infuse their body with enough energy to stop the effects of aging, and so their biological clock would effectively move at a normal pace.  This could explain why the majority of adventurers depicted look so young besides from the obvious anime trope where anybody above the age of 22 is considered an old fart.

And this is also where Negav comes in.  Rather than the effect of the soil just being weaker around civilizations because reasons, it's instead a side-effect from Negav being too big for its own good.  Due in part to the large influx of offworld adventurers, the farms alone can't provide the entire city with nearly enough food to sustain its population, and as a result, it has no choice but to supplement its food supplies with imports from other worlds, mostly Mebron.  Because said imported food isn't infused with the energy of Felarya's soil, Negavians in present time aren't consuming quite as much of the soil's energy in their diet as other civilization on the continents like the Kortikians, which leads to them having a noticeably lower average lifespan and being somewhat more prone to illness than most other Felaryans, though they still live much longer and can shrug off more diseases than us Earthlings.

This also means that the "immortality" sticks even after someone were to leave Felarya instead of just magically disappearing like that.  Although the effects would obviously weaken over time and eventually disappear depending on how long that person were to stay outside of Felarya.  Moreover, this could go to explain why certain races have a longer lifespan than humans.  For whatever reason, probably because of their affinity for magic, elves and especially fairies can draw even more of the soil's energy from the food they consume, resulting in a significantly greater lifespan and much slower aging.

So when your mom tells you to eat your vegetables because they're good for you, in this particular case, she's not kidding.


Briefly touching on the subject of golems, that's again a failsafe to prevent hack-writers from cheapening death.  Call me paranoid, but I'm of the camp who believes that if you give them an inch, they will take a mile.  Moreover, you just kind of gave reason to believe this wouldn't be really feasible in the first place, Karbo.  In your mind, the reason resurrection wouldn't be possible, if explored in minute details, is because it's next to impossible to force a soul back into its body and have it stay in there because it can no longer sustain it.  Well, why is it easier to force a soul into an artificial body made of stone, clay or iron be able to sustain it?  And what do these fake bodies have that can sustain a disembodied soul that a recently deceased body doesn't?


And to also briefly touch on vampires, I sincerely doubt that article was touched once since its inception.  It clearly states in the very first sentence, however, that vampires in this universe are undead, so someone on Felarya couldn't become a vampire.  That's the issue with most zombie and to a lesser degree, vampire fiction.  You have to establish if turning is the result of magic or a disease.  In this case, since this is fantasy, it looks to be the work of magic.

Shady Knight wrote:

Well, why is it easier to force a soul into an artificial body made of stone, clay or iron be able to sustain it?  And what do these fake bodies have that can sustain a disembodied soul that a recently deceased body doesn't?

Well, as Karbo pointed out, a recently-deceased body is likely that way for a reason, while a truely mastercrafted golem body would be made for the express purpose of containing a soul.  With that said, my take on it would be that it's generally only possible with easy access to the soul itself, which entails either a. transferring the soul before/at the moment of/the process effectively causes death, or b. getting the soul back from the afterlife (likely in a literal deal with a devil).  I'd also suspect the existence to be disconcerting, both for the trapped soul and those around it, and were I writing it, I'd say they have a high risk of going various types of insane (which the simpler, non-sentient spellpowered golems don't have), and for immortality seekers, well, there's always the soil, which is quite a lot simpler.

Speaking of the soil immortality, I like Shady's take on it.  It's sort of an inverse of how pesticides and dangerous chemicals accumulate up the food chain, and I'd add that it would keep herbivore populations (which generally breed frequently) down, and give predators with a choice of prey incentive to go after prey that's further up the food chain, because it will likely have more concentrated Felaryan nutrients.  Now, which species is generally considered a super-predator on most planes they inhabit...

Karbo wrote:

Krisexy26 wrote:

In my point of view, a more mature version of Felarya would be to stop being childish. The amount of humor is ridiculous for a world that should be dark, scary and treacherous. People die in Felarya, there's a tone that should come with it. I understand the manga style comes with some light hearted moment, but to be honest, it ruins it all. It's fun to contribute to Felarya, but Felarya is not a fun world. It's a deadly place where people get eaten without second thoughts. You want Felarya to mature? Change the tone. Predators should know they're being cruel: i mean, preys can literally speak the same language as them, and yet they decide they're mere food. There's an attitude that comes with that. It strongly depends on the writers and illustrators style, but, as a mortal fetish world, theres a darker tone that should accompany it. People try to make Felarya like a pink happy world where everyone is cheerful, while it really shouldn't. Following that idea, I think it'd be nice to add up more threats to giant predators. Poison, diseases, anything. Giant predators should also constantly fear for their life. Felarya should be unforgiving to any living thing in it. As of now, giant predators had it far too easy.

I don't really agree here. First changing the tone of the world would be a huge thing that a lot of people would, with a reason, disagree with. And second I just don't think it's a good idea. I don't want to have a serious and dark works ala Attack on titans for example. That just wouldn't be Felarya anymore and I'm not sure I would enjoy it nearly as much personally. Having said that there is always some middle ground that can be found. More dangers and perils for the predators though, yeah I can get behind that.

While Kris has a point about the stakes, risk, and general lethality of the setting, I agree with Karbo that we should keep the setting more humorous.  With all the death and predation being such a large draw, though, I think it would fit better to have much of the humor be gallows, black, or otherwise dark humor.  I also think a transition between gallows humor and more light-hearted humor would go a lot better in stories than between light-hearted and a serious take on the generally dark reality of the setting.

Shady Knight wrote:

Briefly touching on the subject of golems, that's again a failsafe to prevent hack-writers from cheapening death.  Call me paranoid, but I'm of the camp who believes that if you give them an inch, they will take a mile.  Moreover, you just kind of gave reason to believe this wouldn't be really feasible in the first place, Karbo.  In your mind, the reason resurrection wouldn't be possible, if explored in minute details, is because it's next to impossible to force a soul back into its body and have it stay in there because it can no longer sustain it.  Well, why is it easier to force a soul into an artificial body made of stone, clay or iron be able to sustain it?  And what do these fake bodies have that can sustain a disembodied soul that a recently deceased body doesn't?

This probably doesn't make sense if we're going by your new rules, but if we were to use strictly official stuff that we have so far..maybe we could explain it with the op soil? Like for instance if a normal body isn't able to be used via manipulation magic because it just can't keep itself together, you could maybe animate dirt and rocks together more easily because they already have energies and such coursing through them. You simply need to rewire it to a stream of tapped ley magic and it'll be able to sustain itself for a longer period, unlike a soul which will attempt to break free and cross into an afterlife realm or whatever

Gamma wrote:

Shady Knight wrote:

Well, why is it easier to force a soul into an artificial body made of stone, clay or iron be able to sustain it?  And what do these fake bodies have that can sustain a disembodied soul that a recently deceased body doesn't?

Well, as Karbo pointed out, a recently-deceased body is likely that way for a reason, while a truely mastercrafted golem body would be made for the express purpose of containing a soul.  With that said, my take on it would be that it's generally only possible with easy access to the soul itself, which entails either a. transferring the soul before/at the moment of/the process effectively causes death, or b. getting the soul back from the afterlife (likely in a literal deal with a devil).  I'd also suspect the existence to be disconcerting, both for the trapped soul and those around it, and were I writing it, I'd say they have a high risk of going various types of insane (which the simpler, non-sentient spellpowered golems don't have), and for immortality seekers, well, there's always the soil, which is quite a lot simpler.
.

Or I guess just this :p

The idea of a golem body being specifically designed to contain a disembodied soul makes sense, but I think it should come with limitations, mainly that creating such a body is a ridiculously difficult task that even master golemcrafters struggle to create, and maybe that the body must be constantly fed energy to sustain the soul, as opposed to most standard golems whose magic used to animate them is typically self-sustaining. In other words, for the soul itself, being in that body would be like being on life support.

If you have to somehow envelop the whole continent in a magical effect, I'd recommend the Correctors- we already know they had at one point the ability to totes trash Felarya, so I'm figuring maybe they could've used that spell at one point to deliver a global ultimatum. Something along the lines of...

"WE OFFER EVERY SAPIENT ENTITY PASSAGE OUTSIDE FELARYA. WE PLEAD YOU LEAVE AND ENCOURAGE ALL YOUR CONSANGUINES TO LEAVE AS WELL. YOU WILL BE GRANTED TIME UNTIL THE EVENTUAL DESTRUCTION TO FREELY DELIBERATE WITH ANY YOU PLEASE, FOR WHICH PURPOSE WE WILL LEAVE THIS SPELL ENABLED. ALL THOSE WHO PERSUADE OTHERS TO ACCEPT WILL HAVE THEIR CHOICE OF REWARDS, IRRESPECTIVE OF EARLIER SITUATION."


As for the no-resurrection rule, that's something I think may merit changes. Is it specific to Felarya, thus making it so that the world at large DOES allow for revivals? Do people die and come back in Belerim, Londore, Korchiek? I have a hard time imagining people coming back to life in Deluria, amongst the Vishmitali, heck, even amongst the Ps'Isol.

Having to spell it out makes it look like you claim far too much inspiration from works where people come back from the dead without turning into undead. Rather, I would leave it unsaid that people don't revive, and just point out neither necromancers nor no one else have had any sucess here with their arts. The golem thing doesn't agree with me- thought we wanted it to keep things dangerous, not just because for some inexistent plot reason we just had to nerf revival magic of all things.

This is neither here nor there, but...:

======

Now I know I'm getting into some itchy territory here, Karbo, but I think you forgot, again, to involve your followers in dA and in Eka's. Who is this forum for now? Is it the community you want to ask, or just us five guys? If it's us five, why do we need a whole forum?

On that same note, I think you should really consider leaving this forum behind. Please consider ditching this joint, get a proper website for Felarya, and start over. This place is so far behind the times that it's actually dangerous, it stores passwords as plaintext and all that jazz. Find a new stompin' ground to call your own, see if you can shanghai a new crew from the usual watering holes, change the air a little. It's been past a whole decade already in here.

Stabs wrote:

If you have to somehow envelop the whole continent in a magical effect, I'd recommend the Correctors- we already know they had at one point the ability to totes trash Felarya, so I'm figuring maybe they could've used that spell at one point to deliver a global ultimatum

Or the Outer Ones, along the lines of

"Eemmbbbrraacccee ttrruueee ppooowweeerr mmooorrtttaaalllsss, sssuuucccuuummmbbb ttooo ccooorruupppttiiooonnn"

Well I find myself agreeing with Bael's idea on the soil that Shady touched up and balanced. Nicely done. I also to a degree like Karbo's idea that living In a paved stone city means less access to the soil. It would be intriguing and lead to some humorous results: Psi'ol making a dirt room or Lesona in a mudd bath of concentrated soil. =3 Like a piggie he he he!

As for the points somebody said on Felarya having so many dimensions it's 'stale salad '? WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?! Felarya is described as a nexus of nexuses. It picks up dimensions and holds on to them and connects to the multiverse. As in every realm which brings up a question I want to ask but will wait till one or more of these issues is solved.

Golems: Our one canon entry is titled 'Steam Golems' is it not? So the way I see Golems is the way I see all tech in Felarya: versatile with no one rule on how to do it, only commonly employed methods and workarounds For example I imagine it's near impossible yo create an artificial soul any more than it was in FMA or Bleach. If you succeeded and it didn't turn into a monster that wanted to end humanity? It would be simple minded or just plain quirky. Mich easier to do clock work operated by magical code as a core. You also get more of the Arthur C. Clarke vibe Shady wanted.

As for ressurction again I will say it's a moot point. I would like to point out Karbo said gods can do it though and they love to come to Felarya so there's two times canon revival means now.

I like the idea of a rumor that the Correctors made the Translation spell, but not so sure about the actuality. In fact why not write a bunch of rumors and have it pluggin to the mysterious factor?

Shady Knight wrote:

Alright, I thought a little bit more on the subject of immortality and I think I figured out what actually bugs me most about it.  It's not so much that people are ageless that frustrates me, although it does irk me, rather it's how easy it is to acquire.  In its current form, all you have to do to become ageless is to step on Felarya, and POOF!  Congratulations!  Now you can't die from old age and even the deadliest of diseases mean nothing to you until you leave.  I view immortality and its variants as a kind of power that simply cannot be acquired so easily, and having it be essentially granted for free from just so much as entering Felarya's atmosphere greatly devalues that gift.  There's the other problems such a thing brings to the table, but you all know what my opinion on those are at this point.

So, again, I have a compromise:

Instead of it being solely the result of Felarya's soil, it's only partially the result of that.  The soil can only do so much to keep all the monster girls and non-monster girls in the world young and pretty by itself, dryads being the sole exception for obvious reasons.  Rather, it's a combination of the energy soil and the food that people eat on Felarya that give Felaryans their hardiness and seemingly eternal youth.  As is already listed in the wiki, the water of Felarya is infused with minerals of the soil like it is in real life, and it's only natural that fruits and all plants in general are bathed in the same wondrous energy.  Herbivores that feed on plants absorb some of that energy, which is transferred to carnivores that eat them, and so on.   The agelessness, rather than being something that's granted for free, is something that's built slowly gradually over the years as people become infused with its energy from the food and water they consume.  That's why a person's aging slows down so drastically when somebody reaches their twenties-thirties.

However, this also means that this factor has its limits.  Because Felaryans have been consuming food infused in the soil's energy from basically the day they were born, an outsider coming to Felarya wouldn't get the same mileage out of the energy unless he or she stayed there for a very long time.  If a person were to come to Felarya already at an advanced age, depending on how old or healthy they were, there wouldn't be enough time to infuse their body with enough energy to stop the effects of aging, and so their biological clock would effectively move at a normal pace.  This could explain why the majority of adventurers depicted look so young besides from the obvious anime trope where anybody above the age of 22 is considered an old fart.

And this is also where Negav comes in.  Rather than the effect of the soil just being weaker around civilizations because reasons, it's instead a side-effect from Negav being too big for its own good.  Due in part to the large influx of offworld adventurers, the farms alone can't provide the entire city with nearly enough food to sustain its population, and as a result, it has no choice but to supplement its food supplies with imports from other worlds, mostly Mebron.  Because said imported food isn't infused with the energy of Felarya's soil, Negavians in present time aren't consuming quite as much of the soil's energy in their diet as other civilization on the continents like the Kortikians, which leads to them having a noticeably lower average lifespan and being somewhat more prone to illness than most other Felaryans, though they still live much longer and can shrug off more diseases than us Earthlings.

This also means that the "immortality" sticks even after someone were to leave Felarya instead of just magically disappearing like that.  Although the effects would obviously weaken over time and eventually disappear depending on how long that person were to stay outside of Felarya.  Moreover, this could go to explain why certain races have a longer lifespan than humans.  For whatever reason, probably because of their affinity for magic, elves and especially fairies can draw even more of the soil's energy from the food they consume, resulting in a significantly greater lifespan and much slower aging.

So when your mom tells you to eat your vegetables because they're good for you, in this particular case, she's not kidding.

.

I like this. It's not an overly complex explanation and it makes sense. It clicks better than my theory too. I'll make a journal on the DA group speaking about the whole issue ^^

As for golems hosting souls, I feel it could be possible but only with resident spirits, that don't have departed for Hell and Heaven for whatever reasons. In the case of pulling back the soul from a freshly deceased person, it still would be almost impossible imho.

Concerning a new forum. Well I'm not necessarily against the idea. It can be a manner of making a fresh start ^^ Do you have some host site suggestion?

Lastly about naming new editors for the wiki, I'm still plenty in favor to that but unfortunately it will have to wait a bit. The perso who is hosting the wiki is going through some trying times on a personal level and have expressed the will to shut his servers down in the near future. I have not yet worked out if it's definitive and when that would take place since communication with him is quite difficult ( he has been working on a ship lately ), but this might means the wiki will have to migrate as well.

I would add that pavement of any kind, be it concrete, stone, wood and all that does interfere with transferal of the soil's energy to a small degree, and that "organically" grown Felarya food and crops does fetch for a higher price at Negav.  Not outrageously more expensive, though.

At any rate, I think you ought to address the points Stabs raised beside just moving to a different forum, Karbo, because they are very pertinent to the issue at hand.  If I got what he said correctly, he believes that Felarya is trying to do too many things at once and that this kitchen sink approach to world building is doing more harm than good.  And on that front, I wholeheartedly agree with him.  Looking back at it, the Guardian/Corrector War would have been fine in a vacuum, but we already had the whole Heaven and Hell and the Tenebris War for a good long while, which could have just as easily substituted the entire Guardian/Corrector conflict as the cataclysmic event that nearly ripped Felarya asunder eons ago.  As it stands, it's nothing more than a footnote in the setting's mythology - something that's mentioned as important, but ultimately means nothing in the grand scheme of things.  Things like this particular example shouldn't be glossed over.

On that note, there is another aspect of Felarya I'm not sure how I feel about anymore, and it's the whole dimensional nexus thing. Nothing has been done to really distinguish the other dimensions themselves. All inhabitants come from the same pool of humanoid races - there are no weird monsters like the inhabitants from the Void from League of Legends for example, and the humanoids that aren't native to Felarya all share the exact same characteristics as every other human, elf and neko. The worlds Felarya are connected to feel less like they're from different universes and more like planets from a single shared universe. This is something else I think needs to change.

Oh, just remembered I think we previously touched on the topic of tree size inconsistencies. Looking back at some pieces like the deerataur pic though, there appears to be several layers of tree lengths overlapping in one environment rather than just a set point differing from scene to scene. I was thinking about writing up an article thingy to classify the phenomena with, like associating certain niches of plants to certain jungle zones <3