Zompist Bboard Again

I keep wanting to throw out three-quarters of the Monster Manual to make a more coherent setting, but I can never decide on which three-quarters. For this project I'd just accept the kitchen-sink supernatural elements and concentrate on the natural world being more consistent.

I get the idea about the genetics of the races but I probably wouldn't be that specific myself. The real science would only go down to the level of mundane plants and animals, with the origin of the sapient races including humans and monsters left ambiguous. As for gods and magic, I'd keep all the m...

I've been thinking about the modern kind of physical, planetary worldbuilding, and wondering how you would apply it to making a campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons. None of the major settings seem to have been created this way, so it might be a new, interesting approach. A couple of assumption...

I haven't seen Knives Out , but a reviewer said that an Australian actress had some difficulty saying "alt-right troll" while playing an American character - the American vowels in that phrase are hard for Australians to copy. That reminded me of a Doctor Who writer deliberately including ...

Reading over the answers, either this is simpler than I thought, or the pronunciation of "skull" varies more than I thought. New Zealanders tend to vocalise dark "l"s - people joke about spilling mook on the beach taos - but I don't think I do it.

Thanks for the answers. I might not be transcribing the American speaker well, here's the video with the first "Skrull" at 1:54.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4GR2NV7Isk

The Skrulls are alien invaders from Marvel comics, and I've been amused at the variety of ways people pronounce their name. A Scottish podcaster consistently calls them "scrolls", whereas an American on Youtube calls them [skrlz], with a syllabic r and a syllabic l, almost like "squir...

I'm not sure how this is a failure; I was in a meeting today where this very thing happened. Fair enough. The worst social prediction I've seen wasn't actually from an SF story, but by the futurists who wrote about American generations and invented the word "Millenial". They predicted the...

I suspect that the world of the future will not be "21st century America but more liberal," but rather something much stranger and more unpredictable, whose issues are things we wouldn't even think about, and whose people don't think about our issues, or think it's ridiculous that people ...

I've heard there's a quote by Gene Roddenberry that "real" 23rd-century people would be disturbingly alien to present-day audiences, so he deliberately made Star Trek as present-day characters in space. Does anyone know where he said this?

What would a sincere prediction of the future that falls flat on its face in social issues look like if written today? Anything we write now is inherently doomed to fall flat on its face - social issues are much harder to predict than economics or technology. You can identify trends, higher birthra...

Just "principles we understand today" doesn't specify much about the technology of 2100. So I'll introduce a couple of other limits. These are not based on any kind of extrapolation, but are arbitrary choices to keep the setting recognizable from our perspective. Call one the Human Brain L...

It's not really prediction I'm talking about, you can always have unexpected applications of known principles. I wouldn't really expect Archimedes to predict the internal combustion engine, much less monster truck rallies or exurbs. It's more about understanding the principles behind it.

"Past performance is not indicative of future results", maybe. Sure, but there's nothing else to base the setting on.

Economic growth by itself doesn't give much detail to the setting, but once I combine it with the warfare cycles and population it should help me sketch out the history. The next topic Barnes covers is technology. He makes an important distinction for forecasting, between devices that you can unders...

GWP (3).png After grumbling a bit, I went with a modified form of the economic cycles Barnes uses. Tweaking the period of the longest cycle makes them roughly match GWP growth rates from 1961-2018, and the 2020-2100 extrapolation is above. My first attempt had no growth at all for 25 years, which w...

Thanks. I'm not sure it's necessary to generate data for every country, but the result is interesting. As for Congo, there's a temptation to merge countries together to save effort when you're creating these settings. The past few years have shown that's not necessarily realistic.

Considering the feedback, I've decided the average GWP growth will be 2% per year. In 82 years, that means the economy will be five times bigger. Maximum annual growth will be 7%, and worst annual shrinkage (probably not the correct economic term) will be 5%. As for how the growth varies between the...

The thing is, for near-future fiction, you kind of have to decide how you're going to handle climate change, oil depletion, and automation/robotics because these determine what kind of society you have, at a very vivid level. Sure, I'll deal with that in more detail later on. Barnes' article doesn'...

Thanks for the feedback. The exponential economist thing seems valid, but they're talking in much longer timescales than I'm dealing with. They also agree to rule out any economically significant use of outer space, which might be going a bit too far. As for 3% being too optimistic, I'm assuming tha...