Worldbuilding

Dictator-class Command Ship

The Dictator-class command ship is a unique and powerful vessel designed to serve as the flagship of the Diarcesian Mundana Forces naval fleet. Its trimaran hull design allows for greater stability and maneuverability, while its advanced technology and materials stakes its claim as one of the most formidable warships in the world.

The construction of each ship involves a complex process that utilizes cutting-edge materials such as carbon fiber composites and titanium alloys. The nature of these materials provides exceptional strength, durability, and resistance to damage from enemy attacks or harsh environmental conditions.

During trials, each new Dictator-class undergoes rigorous testing to ensure that all systems are functioning properly before being commissioned into active service. However, despite their advanced technology and superior construction quality compared with other classes in use by neighboring kingdoms' navies like Sesbia's Oceania-class and their steel alloy-based material, flaws may arise. For example, during operations, especially if battle damages are sustained, immediate repairs should be done once possible otherwise casualties will increase exponentially at sea battles between fleets since this class has no ability against heavy gun salvos.

This flaw was demonstrated with perhaps the worst Dictator (ship) in Diarcesia's history. The DNS Tyrannus, which was involved in the Cutting of Kaisura during the opening stages of the North Ikuyo seccession crisis, suffered significant heavy gun damage from the secessionists who commandeered Gegonota cae Logica and also employed drones. The impact of this event brought shame and embarrassment to the Diarcesian Navy, as well as political consequences for those responsible for overseeing the ship's design and construction.

Mervin, Monarch Diarcesian

Diarcesia's worst dictator was Mervin, who ruled from 1857 to 1872. He was infamous for his brutal and oppressive rule, which led to the deaths of thousands of innocent people. His impact on Diarcesia was devastating, as he instilled fear and paranoia in the population while enriching himself at their expense in the form of expansionist wars in the name of spreading his Diarcesian Ideal (summarized as all the countries in the known world self-governing with the benevolent guidance and protection of the Diarcesian monarchy). His downfall started with his pyrrhic victory in the Siege of Puerto Rabo. The casualties incurred in that operation, in addition to the near-constant warfare for the greater part of the past century, pushed the war-weary Diarcesians to a tipping point.

In 1872, one of the largest protests in Arcesius's history occurred demanding the Monarch to appear before them in person and address their grievances. Flanked by all of triarchs and separated from the protesters by soldiers, Monarch Diarcesian Mervin exited the Domus Arigotus. Instead of negotiating with the protesters, Mervin ordered the soldiers to have them dispersed by any means. Once the soldiers started shooting, two of the triarchs turned against Mervin and a 2 versus 2 fistfight started. This concluded when Triarchess Grere, an experienced pugilist, landed an uppercut on Mervin. Mervin toppled down the steps leading to the Domus's entrance to his death. With Mervin dead and the other two triarchs barely conscious, Grere ordered the soldiers to cease fire and offered an olive branch to the Arcesian protesters. This lead to more democratic reforms that included the end of expansionist wars, many of the less-willing diereses—mostly overseas and a few in the mainland—seceding without incident, and converting the Fifth to Ninth nonarchs to elective positions.

One of the iconic moments of this event is the protesters' mock salute of Mervin over his corpse.

The planet Neu Valais was a command hub for the human colonial militia during the war. As human territories were lost to the Cyborg Collective, FTL travel paths to the planet opened up and a CYCOL nodesphere, a massive command ship took a position over the planet. In a desperate attempt to destroy it, and experimental one shot cannon on the ground fired. It hit and damaged but did not destroy the nodesphere.

The fight in orbit and on the ground was brutal, with CYCOL attacks creating holes in air defenses to land ground troops to further destroy the air defenses and command centers.

Corporate military forces which had been assigned to protect corporate material on loan to the colonial forces and to protect VIPs were ordered to pull out. The corporations saw the fight as a loss.

The corporate forces eventually pulled completely off the surface and CYCOL focused on assaulting the deeply entrenched colonial military command centers.

But that all happened back in '73 and the war ended not soon after that.

Everyone knows the ending of the war, so I won't retell it. The surface of Neu Valais an urban wasteland, the nodesphere above it derelict. Some crazies out there looking for scraps. Even some CYCOL out there that were never quite right after they lost the nodesphere.

Nowadays, VB-Sierra is the planet that's the big last hub for humans heading out past the stable areas. The corporations even made nice with the Arweli, which rubs some people the wrong way given how the war went, but I guess it's easier to forgive frogs than tin heads.

But profit potential is enough to keep the peace, more or less. VB-Sierra's infrastructure is growing every year. Which is amazing for a planet with mutomorph infestation.

When the Universal Corporate Council reorganized in '75, the Prosperity Church gained a primary seat as a recognized corporate power.

By then, there was a lot of religion going around.

But '75 into '76 was a lot of rumbling in the corporate controlled spaces. The colonies had collapsed during the war, leading to their populations flooding into corporate space. Many of them had been put to work, but it was clearly an unsustainable situation. Some groups of displaced colonists had gone on a one way trip to earth, but the results of those trips was yet unknown. Many other colonists, especially military veterans or those with special expertise looked to go back out into the old warzone, what was now thought of as a frontier to make profits in salvaging valuables or surveying for the rebuilding of colonies.

What is out in the frontier are a great deal of unknown unknowns. Teams that head out into the frontier are not just seeing what has become of human colonies, but venturing into what used to be Arweli or CYCOL territory and seeing things never before seen by humans.

The Universal Corporate Council, UCC, was a collective entity representing the interests of the major corporations. Before the war it was powerful but balanced by the combined powers of the colonies. After the war, it is the only central human political entity remaining. At least aside from possibly earth, but no one really knows what it is like anymore.

The UCC wants to expand its tendrils into the frontier by directly controlling the new colonies that will be rebuilt. Of course now that there is little external opposition, the infighting among UCC members and executives is in full swing.

Sketch idea for a small colony ship. The idea is the ship enters the atmosphere, discards its detachable heat shield (which lands a reasonable distance away with a controlled parachute fall, so its material can be recovered later). The ship lands and the ring on it becomes a premade perimeter wall. The variable arms holding the rest of the ship adjust and lower until the bottom of the center is on the ground. Heavy cargo and prefabs get moved out. On top, the large space engines detach and are briefly piloted as independent vehicles, and landed next to the colony to be repurposed. The flight pad on top of the structure is extended and supported with an additional strut. This initial colony is a little cramped, but a good foundation that is built to be secure, able to support air traffic, and able to support basic agriculture. I'm picturing it being several families worth of people.

Just something that came to me last night while trying to think up unique ships and tech.

Bought Aseprite during the Steam sale and decided to do some Lonely Galaxy pixel "art". I'm by no means an artist though.

This picture shows a yinrih using a pair of HUD specs, which serve as a visual output device for a portable computer. Being quadrupeds, they can't dedicate a limb to operating a device. The input is handled by a paw keyer that's held in one of the forepaws while knuckle walking. Yinrih usually walk on the palms like a baboon or lemur, but can knuckle walk for short periods while holding a small object.

HUD specs are designed to friction fit snugly but comfortably on the muzzle without touching the whiskers.

The bandpass membranes shown in the image serve to narrow the bandwidth of incoming light. There are four pairs of these membranes, usually colored silver, gold (both shown in the image), blue, and red. They appear specular, like mirrored sunglasses. Yinrih who want to affect "puppy dog eyes" around humans will close their gold bandpass membranes and open their primary eyelids wide. Their real eyes are actually pitch black, which many humans find unnerving.

Here's the planet Hearthside. It's tidally locked. The arid day side is called the Nightless Desert. There's a green belt around the terminator and a night side which I haven't really developed.

This doesn't have any in-universe relevance, but it is very relevant to the project as a whole. My elderly dog passed a few days ago. She was the inspiration for a lot of the yinrih's characteristics, including their longevity. This project was partially a way to work through my sadness as she aged and the knowledge that she had much less time ahead of her than behind.

I wrote this story about a relatively young 150 year old yinrih fretting over his aging human friend. It's by far my weakest attempt at a story, but was very therapeutic for me to write.

What are some interesting ailments you've invented? Probably with spoilers for the grosser details.

I have a couple. The first is my take on vampires.

Then there's one about eyes.

I'm especially curious in the case of fantasy settings. I'm admittedly not super well read in the genre, I know about the Ways from the Wheel of Time series[^1] , and I'm sure D&D has its fair share of fast travel mechanics.

Anyway, in my case I use mass routers. Rather than a dry lore dump here's a slightly less dry lore dump in story form!

[^1]: fun fact: the Ways inspired the Nether from Minecraft insofar as one step in one dimension is multiplied in the overworld

Got any interesting funerary rites in your setting?

Yinrih do not bury their dead. They usually dissolve the soft tissue and put the bones on display, usually in a lighthouse (house of worship) or other publicly important location such as a school, government building, library, etc.

Some professions or religious communities have unique traditions on top of this. Research monks use their dead in impact and ballistic testing. Claravian orders of healers use their bodies for teaching medicine to novice healers.

Since healers traditionally shed their fur for hygiene purposes, they are unique among yinrih in that they wear clothes when not working in order to retain heat and block sun exposure. Old and venerable healers who have retired, regrown their fur, and died, will have their pelts made into a hame, a ceremonial cloak given to other healers as a badge of honor.

The practice of displaying the bones of the dead causes a cross-cultural misunderstanding after the yinrih are given a bunch of human cadavers to study. The yinrih healers want to do right by their new human friends by showing their remains proper respect, which they do by building a library to hold all the new medical knowledge gained by studying those cadavers, and encrust the facade with the skulls of said cadavers. Needless to say, a tower of human skulls is not what most humans expect to see when they visit the house of friendship.

Incidentally, I based this practice on ossuary chapels such as the Capuchin crypt, and only much later realized that the yinrih are space doggos what build stuff outta bones.

Yinrih don't use nukes, as they never bothered to weaponize them before discovering how to yeet things at significant fractions of the speed of light.

I've mentioned retribution fields before, which are force fields that absorb the kinetic energy of projectiles and then fire that energy back at the attacker. They were invented to counter...

...Quasiluminal munitions (Commonthroat gkg rDFrlmqrLPq or more often known by the military slang term gkrdfg, a clipped and reduced form of the above) are projectiles that travel at relativistic speeds and whose destructive power comes solely from their kinetic energy rather than a incendiary or nuclear payload.

Force projectors are used at shorter ranges. As the name implies they project force at a distance. As weapons you mostly see them on paw gauntlets as part of powered armor. By thrusting the palm forward a force extends outward beyond the reach of the attacker's foreleg, sort of a long-distance punch. They have scalong issues though. they convert surrounding oxygen to ozone, and can't be operated in atmosphere beyond a certain size for reasons I have yet to figure out.

Since yinrih are quadrupeds they can't practically use human guns. Modern soldiers use back mounted drone capsules that hover nearby and fire at enemies, similar to the Option power-up from Gradius. Older firearms are saddle-mounted and sit on the back and have a tail-actuated trigger.

Original question by @mo_lave@reddthat.com

Original question by @mo_lave@reddthat.com

This is a steadtree fruit along with a drinking bowl filled with steadtree fruit juice. The fruit has a bluish-purple skin with a vivid violet sheen, and its flesh is an extremely saturated shade of blue.

Steadtrees were the yinrih's primary shelter when they achieved sapience, and the fruit formed a significant part of their diet. It's highly symbolic across most yinrih cultures, especially within the Bright Way. The fruit is offered to guests after liturgies, regardless of creed, and the juice, usually fermented, is drunk during fasts, when Wayfarers are expected to abstain from solid foods.

Humans find it to be extremely sour, comparing a single bite to eating an entire bag of warhead candies.

This is a wind fruit. It is green with four fleshy lobes. It contains a sugar that is rapidly fermented by the yinrih's gut flora into alcohol. A single fruit is enough to get a yinrih drunk. Gas is a byproduct of the fermentation process, lending the fruit its name.

The fruits appearance and effects on the vulpithecine body have made it a frequent source of analogy. Politicians are frequent targets for such analogies due to duplicity (compared to the fruits many facets) lack of awareness or intelligence (alluding to the fruit's intoxicating effect) and tendency to make longwinded boring speeches (referring to the fruit's gassy byproduct).

This is a red fruit (Commonthroat qfBqg /huff, early falling weakening whine, huff, short low weak growl/). Like many words for fruits, the word qfBqg also doubles as the word for the corresponding color.

There are two species of tree that bear nearly identical fruits. One is a harmless treat designed to lure seed dispersers including yinrih and their tree dweller cousins. The other is fatally poisonous and mimics the appearance of the first species. The toxin is potent enough to kill even larger animals like yinrih in mere minutes. The animal dies before it can leave the vicinity of the tree, dropping to the ground so the tree can be nourished by its decomposing corpse.

Over time, the color red became associated with risk. Risk then morphed into bad luck, and that's why yinrih with red fur are considered unlucky.

According to the Bright Way, there is a symmetry between epistemology and cosmology. The realm of the Known is the set of all things that are known. This epistemological concept corresponds to the noosphere (AKA the mind sea), which is the sum total of a sapient species' thoughts, experiences, ideas, and communications, as well as their effect on the world.

The Realm of the Knowable corresponds to the physical universe. Things and events in this realm can (at least theoretically) be grasped by mortal minds, though certain things may be beyond the ken of a particular species on account of its neurology and sensory system, in the same way you probably couldn't explain nuclear physics to a chimp. The Bright Way seeks out other sophonts in part to fill hitherto unnoticed gaps in the yinrih's knowledge, and for the yinrih to offer the same in kind.

However, there are things that lay outside the Realm of the Knowable, beyond the grasp of any mortal mind, regardless of how it is organized. This is the Realm of the Unknowable, or the Empyrean. This is where the souls of the blessed dwell in the beatific vision of the Uncreated Light. Faith, to trust in the unseen, bridges the Realm of the Knowable and the Realm of the Unknowable. Heaven is thus conceived of as being "outside" and the physical universe as "inside".

Wayfarers refer to the Empyrean as cBqDFp the Great Outside, and to the physical universe as rjGJfdMr sMlr This dear little Creation.

Here is what First Contact looks like from an epistemological perspective, the noospheres of humanity and vulpithecinity uniting as one.

What precisely this union consists in is a matter of debate in Claravian circles. It could be as simple as forming friendships between individuals of either species, or it could be as concrete and straightforward as physically uniting the two species' respective Internets, as is held by the Farspeakers.

Since I don't want to double post, here's a bonus lore dump:

The stargazer's prayer is a simple prayer taught to pups. It is, as you probably guess, said at night while gazing up into the stars. Below is an English translation.

I see the stars in dark of night
shining down with holy light.

keeping sophonts safe and warm
whatever be their shape and form.

When their eyes look to the sky
Do they see my star and I?

Do they chant this little verse,
O Maker of the universe?

One day soon before too long,
may we hear their joyful song.

May all our minds and all our might
reflect the Uncreated Light.

Author: @IndigoGollum@lemmy.world

First, a little background about my world. I like to think of it as an inside-out planet. A vast open space surrounded by earth on all sides, with a sun in the middle and everything interesting in the world on the inner surface. Much like Pryan from the Death Gate Cycle books, which inspired this shape.

The sun, Sore, is a while hole with a gravitational push. It generates light and heat, and stops the planet from collapsing in on itself.

Outside of the world is, as far as anyone knows, a lot of rock and not much else. But some time ago (no idea when, my notes aren't dated) i wondered, if this place is an inside-out planet, could there be other planets? I don't see why there couldn't be.

Means of travel between these planets would have to be pretty different from normal space travel. Basic movement requires that you either break up the ground in front of you and move it behind your ship, or somehow lower the pressure around your ship enough to liquify rock without melting it to (or and) your ship, and let it slide past you (if i'm not totally misunderstanding phase transitions).

You can't see through solid rock like you can through the vacuum of space, so you need snar (sonic navigation and ranging) to make sure you don't hit another ship or something like the bottom of an ocean.

Gravity would grow weaker as you get further from a planet, then stronger from a different direction as you approach another. You need to be able to rotate the ship so the cabin isn't suddenly upside-down, while keeping whatever digging implements are at the font of your ship facing the right way.

Ports for these ships would have to have snar beacons that ships could listen for, but these signals would have to be able to be heard over a long distance and not stop ships from hearing each other.

And of course, ships need to be able to move over land or in water, because the end and beginning of long trips won't be through solid stone.

While writing this, i wondered for the first time why people would bother. I'm sure the planets are quite far apart, and you can only safely move so fast when your awareness of the things around your ship is so limited. Imagine trying to drive around at race car speeds at night with weak headlights. Space stations, underground areas big enough to seem like they're above ground aside from the lack of sunlight, could exist, but you probably wouldn't want people drilling tunnels around such a place. I certainly wouldn't want to spend my life designing a small artificial world only to have the sky collapse on it and ruin everything. Trying to travel to another planet for the sake of finding other life sounds worthwhile to me, but i don't see any way to detect these other planets at great range. You'd have to set off it an arbitrary direction and hope you hit something good soon.

So while my world could have space travel (for the closest thing to outer space it has), i'm not sure it realistically should. Maybe a similarly "inside-out" universe could have travel between worlds, but i don't see it working for me.

The Bright Way is not considered to have a single founder. The faith is said to have been revealed to the entire newly sapient yinrih species in an event called the Theophany. It is here, while the yinrih were still hunting with crudely knapped flint paw axes and storing edible seeds in nothing more than holes in the ground, where they received the Great Commandment to seek out other sophonts among the stars. And it is thanks to their monomaniacal pursuit of this Great Commandment that the yinrih went from the paleolithic to orbital flight in a mere 5 millennia.

Pictured above is a depiction of what was seen during the Theophany. It is an orb of light with a fringe of shifting hues, hanging in a part of the sky where the sun did not travel. Despite occurring at midday, the rest of the sky was dark as night and the stars shone unusually bright.

Over time, depictions of this vision evolved into the star and gear used as the Bright Way's usual symbol. The gear evolving from the chromatic fringe around the orb. There is considerable debate inside and outside the Bright Way as to what this glowing orb was. The majority view in Claravian circles is that it was a breach between the realm of the knowable (the physical universe) and the realm of the unknowable (the Empyrean). While not explicitly endorsed by the magisterium, a common assumption is that the light was in fact the Uncreated Light itself, or more accurately, the closest a mortal mind could get to perceiving the Light's inapproachable glory.

If you ask secular historians, especially within Partisan Territory, it was an instance of mass hysteria, possibly having to do with the yinrih's newly sapient brains. But there are multiple accounts of the Theophany that are reasonably congruent with one another that were penned (clawed?) far away from one another, with no time for one group to have been influenced by another.

Others think it was a hallucination brought on by tainted water or a gas seep that collected along the river valley. A disaster of this magnitude would surely have resulted in other negative effects, like dead animals or sick pups, or at least lingering issues with adults that would have been documented. The fact that this is not the case, especially given the strong taboo against intoxication, makes this idea hard to square with what is known.

Perhaps it was something akin to an aurora, but at that time of year? at that time of day? on that part of Yih? localized entirely within a single discreet orb? Highly unlikely. It also doesn't explain the darkened sky.

In another post I mentioned the Mindseekers, which was a sect that sought to create artificial sophonts rather than seek other minds among the stars. As they began experimenting with electronic computers, they settled on balanced ternary as the number system of choice rather than binary. This choice was based on some vagaries of yinrih neurology they sought to emulate.

Balanced ternary has three digits, -1, 0, and +1. You can represent any signed integer with these three digits alone. The sign of the number is the sign of the highest-order digit. Here are a few examples using T as -1:

TT = -1*3^1-1*3^0 = -3-1 = -4
1T = 1*3^1-1*3^0 = 3-1 = 2
10 = 1*3^1 + 0*3^0 = 3

You can reverse the sign of the number just by flipping +1's to -1's and vice versa.

11 = 1*3^1+1*3^0 = 3+1 = 4
T1 = -1*3^1+1*3^0 = -3+1 = -2
T0 = -1*3^1+0*3^0 = -3

For reasons unknown, perhaps aesthetics, perhaps for some deeper spiritual reason, the Mindseekers often represented balanced ternary numbers using two-dimensional paths. The rules for drawing such a path are simple.

1. Pick a starting point
2. Draw a line in any of the four cardinal directions.
3. You may turn 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise, drawing a dot at each turn.
4. You may also go straight ahead, drawing a dot dividing a line segment.
5. You may not make a 180 degree turn, you must make two consecutive 90 degree turns.

"But how does this represent balanced ternary numbers?" I hear you cry. Well, a counterclockwise turn represents a +1, a clockwise turn -1, and a straight is 0. The number is big endian, meaning the first turn is the highest-order digit, the second is the second-highest, etc. Neither initial starting direction nor line length are significant, so those choices can be left to aesthetics or other constraints.

This method has the pleasantly symmetrical property that mirroring the path horizontally results in an integer of the opposite sign.

Mindseekers would often hide such paths in odd places, like the brickwork on the sides of buildings, embedded in the abstract pattern of a tapestry, and so on. It's thought that certain numbers held symbolic value.

These paths became popular as a way to hide messages in plain sight even long after the Mindseekers faded into obscurity.

This is a sketch of a typical vulpithecine public restroom.

1. The doorway is blocked by a curtain. Yinrih enter by pushing the cloth aside with the muzzle. Most rooms that don't need strict access control or environmental protection use such curtains.
2. A washing pool is accessible near the entrance. It's a shallow basin a few inches deep. The water is vigorously circulated and filtered. Yinrih wash all four paws as well as the tail after using the restroom. There is a coarse bristly floor mat used to scrape dirt from under the claws and from between the paw pads.
3. The washing pool sits in the "clean" area of the restroom. The "dirty" area where the toilets are is usually set off by a lip in the floor or a change in tile texture. Hygiene dictates that you enter the washing pool directly from the dirty area before setting paw in the clean area again.
4. The floor is often tiled. How something feels under paw is just as important to a room's style as how it looks. Tiles often alternate between different textures or even different thermal conductivities to achieve a particular tactile aesthetic.
5. There are almost always perches in the clean area of the restroom. Yinrih tend to be chatty while doing their business, and in some cultures it's considered polite to accompany a friend or coworker to the restroom even if you don't have to go yourself.
6. The toilets proper are flush with the surrounding floor. The user backs into the stall. There is a ring of rough tile around the rim to help people from stepping in the toilet[^1]. Both male and female yinrih eliminate via a cloaca and stand with the rear paws on either side of the bowl with the tail resting across the back. Toilet paper, usually soaked in a mild disinfectant like wet wipes, is available in dispensers above the toilet. The paper is manipulated by the tail.
7. There are still partitions affording a modicum of privacy. Just because bathrooms are more social than on Earth doesn't mean people appreciate watching others doing their business, just like many human cultures regard yawning or chewing with the mouth open to be rude or gross. So you can't drop a deuce in the middle of the street and not expect to get a citation. The partitions are low enough to reveal a yinrih's head.
8. The entire stall is flushed after use. The stall floor slopes into the latrine. There is a grate across the entrance that releases a mild mix of water and bleach to both flush the toilet and sanitize the floor.

Needless to say, this is not conducive to human use. If human-specific facilities are not available, the polite thing to do is yield the entire bathroom to a human in need to use privately.

[^1]: The Commonthroat expression P rlpqN sMp, to step in the toilet means to make a stupid mistake, especially despite being warned beforehand. The more vulgar expression bc g rnqg rp qcf to piss on one's own [rear] paws carries a similar meaning.

Posting this here since the conlanging comms seem pretty inactive. I FINALLY solved a problem with my Commonthroat lexicon. I was using a verbose pronunciation scheme describing consonants and vowels one by one with whole words. This caused false positives in search results when searching for terms containing the words used in this verbose pronunciation scheme like "weak" or "low".

In the old system, the vowel b would be given a pronunciation of "short low weak whine". This made it impossible to find words meaning "short" or "low" etc, since they appeared in so many entries.

When I started working on Outlander, another yinrih language, I came up with a universal phonetic notation that would cover the whole gamut of vulpithecine speech sounds that I call the YPA (Yinrih Phonetic Alphabet). It's a bit of a misnomer since it's not really an alphabet, just a more compact way of describing pronunciations.

In YPA, b is rendered "1111", which won't conflict with any definitions.

While the Outlander lexicon has used YPA from the outset, I wasn't sure whether I could update the pronunciations in my Commonthroat lexicon to the new system. But I unexpectedly had a large amount of free time today, so I spent 5 hours straight cobbling together a Python script to replace the old pronunciations with new ones.

So here is the fruit of my labor: https://lonelygalaxy.neocities.org/commonthroat

Original question by: @mo_lave@reddthat.com

If a conworlding project persists long enough, I'm sure we've all second-guessed some aspect of our worlds.

I've learned to incorporate my own second thoughts into the universe itself. Don't like how I translated something into English? OK, it was a mistranslation that has now become too ingrained to change. Not sure how to portray a particular religious sect? Now there are two different denominations of that sect. Uncomfortable with how I characterized a controversial historical figure? OK, now there's a historical revisionist movement that seeks to paint him in a different light. Have some idea I like that really doesn’t fit the lore? Now it’s an in-universe urban legend/TV show.

How do you document your worldbuilding? What tools do you use? How do you organize your ideas?

Since the inception of my current conworld I have been using Obsidian. It's great for non-linear note taking. The downside is that the result is less shareable (unless you pay for sync).

I've always wanted to create a publicly viewable wiki. I LOVE digging through fan wikis, even for franchises I'm otherwise unattached to. All my knowledge of D&D and WH40K comes from walking through various fan wikis.

To that end, I've been exploring other options. Mediawiki seems to be the gold standard since it's what Wikipedia uses. However, its designed with a lot of user management and permissions features that work well for a massive user base, but are less relevant to someone who wants a non-linear read-only browseable repository of info.

Dokuwiki looks like a popular alternative. No database to manage, though the fact that a lot of expected features like tags and moving pages have been relegated to 3rd party plugins isn't great. The more plugins, the harder patch management becomes.

Tiddlywiki so far looks the most promising. It assumes only one user is editing pages, so no user permissions to manage. It also runs as a single monolithic HTML file, which has upsides and downsides, but that means I can upload that single file to a simple free web host like Neocities. If the wiki gets very large I anticipate performance issues, as the entire wiki is sent when the page is requested and everything runs client side, so the more I add the worse it will feel. But it's very stable, has been around almost as long as Wikipedia itself, and unlike Obsidian is open source.