r/WorldBuildingMemes

So. The humanity and the Zincstili kind of got off to a rough start.

Their “relations” started with the Skirmishes at Yangguang, where the fledgling United Federation of Orion’s Federal Navy would face off against a Zincstili Clan Assembly raiding force. The OFN would win, only barely, driving off the raid at the cost of several valuable ships.

Battles continued throughout most of the 26th-28th centuries. The Orionites viewed the Zincstili as a major threat, pushing most of their navy to their eastern border to drive off the nomadic Zincstili raiders. The Zincstili, in contrast, had an almost lukewarm opinion of the Orionites, especially humanity, who they viewed as both a major source of loot and a respectable, intelligent, and honorable adversary.

It was a long game of cat and mouse and whack-a-mole. Raiding fleets would show up, assaulting Orionite colonies, wherein the Federation fleet would pool itself together to drive them off. The older and technologically superior Zincstili had to be defeated via numbers, unity, and tactics. They were fortunate to mostly face off against individual clans; had the Clan Assembly pooled their fleets together, it’s extremely likely the Federation would have been overwhelmed.

This of course all changed when the Austrickan Transolar Empire swept across Orion, obliterating everything that stood in their way. The twin species of the Federation were subjugated and put under an iron boot; the Zincstili crushed and forced to abandon their nomadic raider life and to settle on planets, much to their chagrin, anger, and grief. However, as the two forces were made to meet outside of glorious combat, the two came to respect each other.

When the Orionite Liberation War came, where the now-four species of Orion rose against the Austrickans, the Zincstili came along on the promise of a return to their nomadic way of life. With the strategic and engineering might of the four species and the tactical and vengeful might of the Zincstili, they managed to defeat the Austrickans, driving them out of Orion at great cost of lives, time, and nation.

By then, the Orion and Cygnus Spurs were thoroughly exhausted. The Zincstili no longer had the capacity to raid as they once did, their navy crippled from the Liberation War. With the Four Species’ navies also decimated, they elected for peaceful coexistence. Eventually, the Zincstili would integrate into the Federation peacefully, retaining their way of life but merely as nomads and traders, not raiders.

Curiously, their respect for humanity turned into a great comradeship. Besides the Europans, whom humanity shared their cradle with, they are humanity’s closest species in terms of inter-species relations. Respect commanded on opposite sides of the battlefield turned to brotherhood on the same side of it, and friendship off of it.

It also helped that humanity, a rather warlike species, managed to match the Austrickan’s freak with all the horrors they invented for the prosecution of warfare. But it was mostly the fact they suffered the same horrors in the same place; when five species were broken, one nation emerged, side-by-side, brothers in arms.

Context

This meme is for Project Vigilant / P.V, an unofficially named, predominately fan-fiction and partially original world-building project that I have been working on at a “snails pace” since 2018 with no envisioned completion date. The project is an attempt at merging elements from no more than 125 of my favorite I.P’s and an assortment of original work in the genres of sci-fi, fantasy and alternate-history into a singular “patchwork universe” that I refer to as the Project Vigilant Universe or P.V.U for short.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Canam is an alternate version of the USA.

At it's height, Canam's territory encompasses most of what would be the USA, the Baja California Peninsula, all of what would be Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Hawaii, all of which are divided into 54 states and several outlying territories. As of 2016, Canam had a population of over 502 Million people.

Canam's name is not a portmanteau between America and Canada ( as one might expect ), rather it is a derivative of a fictional East Coast Native American word for "freedom" and it was adopted by the 13 colonies when they declared their independence from Britain in 1776. Canam's full name is The Canam Republic.

-

Like the real USA, Canam fell victim to a "Great Depression" between 1929 and 1939 and in 1932, the people of Canam elected Franklin D. Roosevelt to function as the nation's great anti-depressant.

The PVU's Great Depression was slightly worse than the real GD and this, combined with other factors incentivized FDR and his administration to seek out some unorthodox methods of ending Canam's economic woes.

In 1939, the U.S Government secretly commissioned a coven of 5 witches to develop an arcane solution to the G.D. After a few months of work, the witches developed a "curse" which would guarantee Canam an indefinite period of economic prosperity by turning one of the nation's major population centers into a "misfortune sponge".

The population center chosen to serve as the sacrificial lamb was Gotham City ( From D.C/Batman ). The PVU's version of Gotham is located on a group of 5 islands in the middle of the Delaware Bay.

The curse, which would become known as "The Invisible Hand" went into effect on Halloween of 1939 and from that point forward, Canam would experience 80+ years of un-interrupted economic prosperity wherein quality of life in every part of the country except Gotham ranged from being decent to fantastic.

The curse did suffer a temporary failure between 1978 and 1979 as a result of Gotham absorbing too much misfortune and suffering a 391-day long civil collapse but this was rectified.

-

The Invisible Hand is why Gotham is so terrible and why Gothamites with rainforest restoring powers would rather throw hands with Batman instead of doing ecological restoration work. The curse also gives the whole of Canam an impossibly prosperous and functional economy and anyone who doesn't know about the curse and attempts to research Canam's economy would quickly realize that nothing about the nation's economic system makes any sense.

In order to keep the truth of it's success under wraps, the government of Canam has spent it's post-WWII years evolving into an authoritarian and borderline-fascist oligarchy that purposefully keeps the bulk of the population economically illiterate whilst prioritizing the interests of corporations whose success is enabled purely by the Invisible Hand.

Should The Invisible Hand suffer a second and permanent failure, Canam will experience an economic collapse so violent that new words will need to be created to describe the absolute horror that everyone will be forced to deal with.

-

The Ruinbra Family is one of the five Great Families of Sombra City, City of Eternal night. They are the freaks among freaks and are in charge of working the docks. They aren’t your regular vampires and you can read why bellow!

Ruinbra Family: (Curse of the Deep) These Vampires don’t look like a standard vampires looking like awkward mingling of sea like and monstrous bats. No one knows truly why this is but many say that the progenitor of the family had messed with something deep beneath the waves and forever tainted their line. All Ruinbra family members suffer from freakish mutations that are at once their biggest strength and weakness. For their benefit unlike all other vampires they suffer no ill effect of running water and are even amphibious in nature being able to stay underwater with no ill effects. Other mutations include webbed hands and feet, growths of limbs resembling those of squids, crustaceans, or even amphibious animals like frogs or salamanders. This is bazarly mixed with shaggy fur on their non mutated limbs, heads with massive ears, slits instead of a real nose, and bowed limbs with some even having limbs. While these mutations and bodies make them deadly fighters and able to work in areas that would be deadly to other vampires, they are viewed as freaks by all the other families not just for the physical appearance but as well as the fact that they do not simply drink of blood but rather act more like ghouls in that they devours bodies bones and all which is scene as not in anyway how a proper vampire should act. As well as the mutations have made these vampires very very unstable and can be consumed by the mutations forcing them to die or retreat to the depths of the oceans for shelter and well that is a fate many dread as well it’s not known what really happens beneath the waves many in the family have chosen to walk from the city and out of the shelter of the eternal night to die in the light of the sun rather than face that final transformation.

Open to any and all questions!!!

blackguard ftw

I originally was aiming for a cosmic horror setting but along the way I got far too attached to the mortals living on their cool little planet. Callagath is probably responsible for 95% of every problem that occurs(including waking up the Old Gods).

Turns out the galactic core is full of Bees and they don't particularly like humans, for some reason they refuse to say. Man hiveminds are weird.

I really wonder where they went!

Sombra City, the City of Eternal Night, Realm of the Undead, or many of its other names is a city that has quite the reputation. During the War of Apocalypse they have stayed as neautral ground having held off attempts to capture the city from both sides of the war and stands to this day as one of the few places were soldiers of both sides of the war mingle together and (most of the time) don’t kill each other. And one may assume a place that has stayed neutral in such a horrid conflict must be men of high moral character or conviction but in reality it is the opposite. The city is run by ancient vampire families who run the city like monsters rather than a ruling class. The city is split into several districts but the one of importance for this post is the Gem Flower district. A seedy red light district full of brothels and more predetory buisnesses like loan offices, where you can sell your body, blood, or freedom in exchange for money, ghoul yards, where you can sell the rights to your body after your death in exchange for valuables, artifacts, or money, and wolf dens, a buisness in which the few werekin operate who act as mercanaries for hire or if you pay them enough seeking strength and power you can be turned into a werekin yourself. The family who runs this district is the Sangator Family, they are in charge of running and managing prostitution as well as all illicit activity in the area. They are known to be the cruelest vampires in all of Sombra City, which in this city is not a lightly given title. While working with many diffrent people, this vampire family loves displays of actions they commit and this gruesome view is the reason for the name of this zone. As all around the area are beautiful bunches of flowers made of blood red crystals that are displayed as public art around the district. But if you were to tear away these beautiful flowers you would find their source. That being the drained bodies of the family’s victims, their blood a work of art as their hidden corpses are left in this crystal shell of flowers. Kept perfectly preserved and mummified in a horribly gruesome display that many visitors will not even realize when they see them. Things like this are common as these gem flowers are not their only morbid activities that this family commits. They host 'Garden Parties' and at these events people are lured in from brothels with promise of a show but they end up drugged and are made into these macabre art works for the district. So if you ever find yourself in the Gem Flower district maybe just say no to any garden parties if you ever wish to leave the city alive.

For context, the ARCTOS is an organization that helped create the other two that are named here and that is among the big red, aka a list of organisations considered terrorists but so effective at stopping it's opponents that they are mostly in a no involvement policy world wide.

The fact that the other two organisations are on the same list at slot 2 and 3 should also be concerning for everyone who tries to mess with them, regardless if they know how to stop ARCTOS and are actively trying to do that.

The fact that ARCTOS head is what you might consider entropy itslef, the biblical snake, the origanal demiurge and fate herself should also be concerning for whomever tries to mess with them

The fact that ARCTOS has among it's members known deities and mithological figures should also stop them

And yet the biggest deux ex machina ARCTOS could pull on someone is that question because they became so accustomed to the effects of it that they purposely ask it after you explain yourself to them, because they do follow the rule of chaotic opportunity

Eddit: most of the time that opportunity isn't their super powers or the fact that they are divine beings or close to a divine being compared to the average Joe, it's actually the fact that they will most likely use brute force on you to comically extents. For example between stopping you to blow half the planet with your nuke and doze the storage for said nuke, they'll chose the later and make a mess worse than the nuke going off would, just by using guns and dozers

The Austrickan Transolar Empire was long considered the “top dog” of their section of the galaxy. Able to subjugate the entirety of the Orion and Cygnus Spurs from their stronghold in the Antespinward Sagittarius Arm; defeating the Hilfar High Empire and slaying their King; facing the Northwest Storm and coming out on the other side.

This was mostly, though, due to them coming in extremely early to the galactic system, and therefore being a highly advanced species. Combine this with their psionic abilities, it’s not hard to see how they stomped basically everybody around them.

That is, until the Orionite Liberation War began.

You see, the Austrickans were not as competent as they may seem. A millennia of victories had made them complacent. Without rivalry, they had stagnated, their empire commanding loyalty over risk. With such a strong military, the Hive-Queen rewarded loyalty over skill as a way of keeping it in check; risk was scorned, groveling commended. As such, most Austrickan commanders were not particularly notable; they were restrained and, at some points, timid, even cowardly, fearful that taking decisive action would see them demoted, or even executed if the decisive action failed.

As such, when the combined forces of the five species of Orion rose up, they were immediately on the backfoot. Constant guerrilla warfare and raids chipped away at their supply while the skittish convoys constantly ran, delaying shipments as longer routes had to be taken.

As such, when the United Federation Armada and Zincstili High Fleet gathered at Procyon to meet the Austrickan First Fleet, it was an utter rout.

The cowardly actions of its commander were credited with the near-destruction of the First Fleet; historians agree that, if the Austrickan commander had pressed an offensive early in the battle, the UFA and ZHF would have been annihilated under sheer strength of arms. However, fearing reprisal if his offensive failed, the commander had played defensively and timidly, waiting for the enemy to come to him (sure their primitive fleets would require short range to engage effectively). When this was proven wrong due to reverse-engineered tech, the fleet would be picked apart at range and subsequently forced to retreat.

This set a tempo that continued through the war, with otherwise brilliant commanders being shunned because they said it how it was; they were losing and needed new tactics and strategies to counter the Orionite Liberation Army’s offensives.

The Austrickans fell to the most numerous causes of the fall of empires in history: Complacency, Stagnation, and Fear.

The Druidic order is the primary religious authority in the territory of the Lithai Empire, their religion being that of their native gods, and their divine command to uphold the sacred law and destroy the enemies of the Lithai to set the cosmos in order.

The Law is holy, and thus cannot be written, for then it wouldn't be remembered by heart by those druids who enforce it. The same logic extends to the songs of the ancestors, and the lore of herbs, rocks, animals, and spirits.

The Therrian order is a breakaway group of druids who believed in documenting the multi-disciplinary knowledge the druids collected in order that it may be built upon by future scholars, and so that their descendants would remember the ancient histories.

The Therrians were named after high-king Therris who supported their project; himself being a Marcus Aurelius like scholar king. Many of the more pious and poor clans, such as those in the Northwest in particular rebelled against the high-king for heresy against the orders of the High-Druid to disband the Therrians.

Eventually they made a compromise that the Therrian order would only operate in the far southeastern portion of the empire, and would in particular only own property near the ancient city of Cair Thernor near the mountains.

There has always been a tension between the pious Druid followers and the learned and yet still faithful Therrians, and there may never be a time in which the tension dies until one philosophy succeeds at destroying the other.

Also once in Lithaiach as well for the fun of it