Kobold King

It is ultimately revealed that time-traveling aliens created quasars and pulsars as cosmic baubles to celebrate Nighthound's death. It all makes sense now, says a bewildered humanity.

Can we invite the folks at Alpha Centauri? I think an Earth-wide festival is too small.

Most intriguing! A couple of questions: Do you mean that the entire species is united under seven elders, or that individual tribes are led by seven-man councils? I reckon that a species-wide government would be hard to maintain for a nomadic tribal society. Where on the world-map did you intend for these guys to live? I currently inhabit the only polar mountain range I am aware of. While your kind would be welcome to live somewhere on the mountains in small numbers, I'm afraid the inhabitants I designed wouldn't be too keen on sharing the slopes of the mountains with anyone who makes a habit of melting the ice they come across. Now for new Diaemite animals! Woodstalker (Arbokopisaurus) ((Requested by Mailliw73)) Like a dinosaurian grizzly bear--or better yet, a freakish cross between a theropod dinosaur and a dirk-toothed wolverine--the woodstalker prowls the southern taiga of Diaemus, preying on a wide variety of mammals and dinosaurs. It is a temperate relative of the snowsaber, with which it shares multiple features; chief among these are the animal's powerful forelimbs and specialized front fangs. The woodstalker takes the quadrupedal gait further than the snowsaber. While the snowsaber runs on all fours only when covering great distances, the woodstalker is as much a quadruped as any mammalian carnivore. The forelimbs are just as strong as the hind legs, and the woodstalker rarely rears itself upright. The only times you'll find an upright woodstalker are when the animal's making a threat display, or when it's snapping branches off trees to mark its colossal territory. Preying on a more varied diet than its polar relative, the woodstalker has front fangs that are less developed and more multi-purpose. They are not quite as efficient at slicing the jugular veins of large prey animals, but in exchange are shorter, sturdier, and allow the woodstalker to pursue a wider range of prey. This makes the twenty-foot long carnivores far more dangerous than the larger snowsabers, as they're more than willing to chase down and devour a stray human or Dromean... Fortunately for their prey, woodstalkers are solitary creatures, and cannot usually be found coexisting within a territory. Their fur is a deep brown, almost black, and the animal makes little to no use of magic save for stripes of orange lumuoles which strengthen the limbs when climbing trees. It is not uncommon to find the carcass of a medium-sized animal stuffed at the top of a tree, the only clue to its demise being the savagely torn holes in its throat from a woodstalker's fangs. Song Krake (Asproceras) Meanwhile, the Twilight Ocean resounds with the haunting, mournful songs of large white animals pushing through the arctic water. An Earthling boater might catch a glimpse of the pale white shapes moving under the surface of the waves, and conclude that they were beluga whales or some hitherto unknown white seal. Those guesses could not be further from the truth, for a glimpse at a pod krake under the water reveals an ivory-white shell curled above a mass of squirming tentacles and two huge, squid-like eyes. In the Twilight Ocean, ammonites are highly prevalent. These mollusks are much like squid save for the spiral shells they shield their bodies with, and which can be used for the storage of buoyant gases to aid the ammonite in floating or diving at will. (Example ammonite: The song krake is a particularly large ammonite, just over the size of a small car. They swim in pods of twelve to twenty animals, which keep in touch with constant mournful tones blared at each other through the water. It is for these songs that the animals are named, and it is for them that they are known amongst the tribes and people of the southern coasts. (Probably. I really have no idea what those backwater savages water drulgas value in an animal.) Like most marine animals of the Twilight Ocean, song krakes make use of blue lumuoles sprinkled throughout their bodies to keep their blood from freezing in deep, icy waters. The highest concentrations are located at the tips of the tentacles, which are swirled and dangled in the water enticingly to attract arctic fish which require lumuole consumption for their survival. Some fish get away with nibble away bits of the tentacles, which the song krake can grow back given enough time; the majority, however, are snatched up and shoved into the white-shelled beast's gaping maw.

Blue lumuoles actually aren't directly related to cold--they're related to water, but as they can change water into any of its states of matter (and change the temperature as well) they can be used for hot-and-cold related feats of magic. For instance, a number of tundra animals use blue lumuoles to prevent their blood and cellular water from freezing, thus allowing them to live in extremely frigid areas. Likewise, creatures which use blue lumuoles to prevent the water in their bodies from evaporating should also be possible. How advanced does a species need to be to use magic, you say? No "advancement" is needed at all! Non-sapient forms of life, including barely sentient forms of matter like plants and fungi, are more than capable of using lumuoles, and some of them can perform quite complex magical maneuvers. Technological advancement is also not necessary; in fact, many of Diaemus' most potent magic users are tribal cultures of hunter-gatherers. I might be wrong--I hope not, since I've been working with this assumption--but I don't believe that hot-spots are associated with one particular type of lumuole. It seems like lumuole hotspots will recharge all lumuoles equally. Think of a hot-spot like a wall socket; you can plug a vacuum cleaner, a blender, or a lamp into it, and will get very different results, but the root energy powering all of the outlets is exactly the same.

I like to think his offer of giving her a real "fun time" would result in him getting buried waist-deep in tar and treated to a long moralistic puppet show about a sleazy man who gets suffocated in a ball pit by an all-powerful candy goddess.

RE: the timeline. I like it, and there are some things we can take from it, but I don't think it all works. Humans arrived only twelve thousand years ago on Diaemus, and the general consensus is that they are not native to anywhere on the planet. At least, that's the impression I've gotten. The Dromeans had been on the planet for well over a couple million years already, and considering the hefty lumuole presence in the natural ecosystem, it's almost certain that Dromeans already had a symbiotic relationship with the little magical critters since the beginning of their existence They are a part of an inherently magical ecosystem. Almost all living things on Diaemus connect with lumuoles in some way; that's what makes humans so strange in this world, as they're the only ones that don't naturally have an affinity for them. The Dromeans are native Diaemites. We shouldn't think of them in terms of "when they started using lumuoles." Lumuoles are a fact of life on Diaemus, and all living things have been using them since the dawn of time. I don't think we can establish a point at which the Dromeans "started using them" any more than we can define our own history by how long we've symbiotic bacteria in our guts. They've simply always been a part of the Dromeans, since before the earliest of their ancestors could be called a Dromean. For the "Armageddon" stage in your timeline, I would prefer a thousand-year period of general unrest to a full-blown war. A full-blown war would imply organized empires capable of waging a continental interspecies conflict, which implies unified cultures with long histories of their own, which would restrict the independent lore-making capabilities of our participants. While the Dromeans and humans would probably compete--and I say 'probably' because it would by no means be a necessity in every region--I feel that this competition should take the form of accelerated breeding on both sides and maybe the occasional scuffle between isolated cultures. There'd be a lot of pressure on species, which could drive some underground or deep into the tundra, but anything so catastrophic as a continental war seems a bit much. Besides which, I prefer McKeedee's timescale of human development on Diaemus. In his idea, humans would only have been civilized for the last two thousand years, making any conflict between them and Dromeans extremely recent events. As hunter-gatherers, humans would be perfectly capable of existing alongside Dromean packs, especially if they preyed on different food sources like lions and hyenas, or tigers and dholes, or any other large Earth-predators that exist in the same ecosystem. Where the plague is concerned, I feel it would be unnecessary. If we make the earliest humans on Diaemus hunter-gatherers, then there's more than enough time and space on the map for them to have split up and founded different cultures and ethnicities, without muddying our lore with an ancient unified super-race that fell because of a vaguely defined virus. On Diaemus we should celebrate a diversity of cultures that rose from countless unique circumstances, not the crumbling remnants of a single empire that fell because of a single incident. Finally, judging by Seonid's Sorukaan Empire and my own Ice Kin metropolises, the Dromeans are by no means a beaten, crumbling race confined to the parts of the map humans don't want. If anything, it seems like the Dromeans get first pick in regions, not the humans. Though like I said, there's really no reason that the two should inevitably go to war just from coexisting in the same space. Humans and Dromeans don't necessarily fill the same ecological niche, any more than lions and jackals do. Hope I'm not sounding too aggressive in my counter-arguments. I would like to propose my own humble, loose timeline for Diaemus, one founded with the intent of providing maximum freedom for individual participants. The Wild Age This was the primordial dawn of Diaemus. In this era, which stretched millions of years from the beginning of the world to around two million years ago, wild things struggled in a game of tooth and claw, forging the modern dinosaur-dominated ecosystems that make Diaemus distinctive. The caverns were opened up, allowing many unique forms of life to evolve within their cavities. Lumuoles appeared and began bonding to flora and wildlife across the globe, and the first Rachnyx intelligences began dreaming from inside their deep underground webs. The First Age of Wisdom The wildness of early Diaemus gave way to the Dromean Age, a time when the first anatomically modern Dromeans began exerting influence over the world. This era began three million years previously and ended twelve thousand years ago. Also known as the Dromean Age, this era was marked by the evolution of most of the notable sapient beings of Diaemus' surface. Anatomically modern Dromeans emerged at the beginning of the age, quickly spreading across several continents and founding varied cultures and societies. (Most of these were hunter-tribes, but this would be the ideal age for any ancient advanced empires that anyone would like to incorporate into their region's history.) Presumably Haornithi, Skitches, water drulgas, and Nixos also arose in this period, though probably not in the precise cultural configurations that distinguish them today. The key to understanding this time period lies in its mixture of budding civilization and an endless wild frontier. A massive Haornithi empire could hold court on one end of a forest, while a primitive tribe of Dromean hunters resided on the other. The evidence of both cultures could either be preserved in the fossil record, or washed away by the hundreds of thousands of years that separate the First Age of Wisdom from the modern day. The First Age of Wisdom would be the time of proliferation for most of Diaemus' unique species, and the time when they were channeled into their modern forms. Most of its history would be lost to the millennia, but cultural remnants, artifacts, and even gods could be leftover from its wonder and splendor. The Time of Seeding This was a particularly chaotic time, and extremely recent too--this occurred only twelve to thirteen thousand years ago. Nonetheless, it shook the delicate primordial balance of the First Age to its core. Unknown forces, presumed divine or magical but ultimately unfathomable, "seeded" an entirely new species onto the surface of Diaemus. Human beings were sprinkled seemingly at random across the surface, left naked and without any form of oral tradition on every continent and in nigh-on every biome. The occurrence was completely inexplicable, and most of the prehistoric inhabitants didn't believe it until the hairless primates were already on their land, spearing game animals and crafting tools out of wood and flint. The result was a long, slow period of unrest. In some areas, humans got along swimmingly with the natives. (Twi's tundra would be a prime example of this.) In other areas, brutal tribal wars might break out between staunchly entrenched holdouts from the First Age and the alien invaders. There were no set victors. In some areas humans became dominant, in some they were driven out, in some they allowed to live by benign but superior overlords, and in a few they began to peacefully coexist with equal but radically different neighbors. The Time of Seeding also brought with it an unknown cataclysm which resulted in the toppling of the subterranean ecosystem, which prompted the Rachnyx to leave the safety of their webs and to begin forming civilizations. The important part of this era, to us as worldbuilders, is that it brings humans into the world and provides an element of chaos for us to work with. Do you have a group that chose to live in isolation from the rest of Diaemus because of a mysterious catastrophe? Clearly they were out-competed by humans or by another group displaced by the humans, or else they thought it was the end of the world or some such mythology. Do you have a group that lives among the ruins of an ancient kingdom that fell long ago? Clearly the Time of Seeding wreaked the fall of this kingdom. If we wanted to spark maximum drama, we could even say that the non-dinosaurs of Diaemus, like some of Seonid's beasts and Mailliw's otters, were also brought to the planet during the Seeding. Maybe mammals wreaked enormous havoc with the ecosystem, sparking further famines and other hardships that would shake the world to its foundations. The Second Age of Wisdom Finally, the dust settled. Humans (and possibly their mammalian cousins) found their roles within the planet's ecosystem, and no longer did cruel, savage Darwinism drive Homo sapiens' interactions with other intelligent beings. The wars slowed down and became less severe. Famines halted as the ecosystems resettled themselves. Life on Diaemus was going back to normal. Two thousand years ago, a handful of human societies learned how to grow grain crops, and began to form the peculiar social structure we call civilization in the Diaemite ecosystem. Cities were built from the ground up. Some humans began smelting metals like copper, bronze, and even iron, much to the amusement of the handful of Dromean societies which already knew how to do it. In time, bustling trade routes started criss-crossing the map, as goods were produced and shipped across the continent. This is the modern era, a second golden age. It is largely medieval in feel; merchants and a handful of travelers might see the outside world, but by and large most people regardless of species prefer to stay at home. It's a dangerous world, with roads packed with bandits and wild beasts. Occasionally, the skies are darkened by the smoke of wars and marching armies. This new age promises advancements and discoveries never dreamed of in the First Age of Wisdom, but with those promises come the tidings of strife and turmoil. How will Diaemus fare now? Will the diverse cultures of the world learn to get along in peace and harmony, trading goods and culture as they forge a better world? Or will the planet be plunged into war by an angry empire, or consumed whole by one of the foul ancient gods whispered of in legends? Will this age flow into an age of heaven, or is all of our work merely the calm before the storm? Well don't ask me. That's for you to figure out. ... It's not perfect, and it needs some filling in for the gaps, but I hope this could provide a loose framework for our history. The Wild Age gives us prehistory and evolution. The First Age of Wisdom gives us a foundation for our non-human species. The Time of Seeding gives us humans, Rachnyx, and a hefty dose of chaos and turmoil. The Second Age of Wisdom gives us a playing field for our current cultures and civilizations, watered by the chaos of the Seeding but with roots anchored in the First Age. What do you guys think?

What if he made Nathan look like Lightwards? Or Nighthound?

Nah, my toes are nigh-unsteppable. Don't worry about it; I was just trying to make myself seem less useless by pointing out that I was planning on doing something, eventually. Thanks for editing the title.

I was going to make that thread later, once I'd separated everything into their proper biomes. But I'm glad you took the initiative. My one suggestion would be, could you change the name to "Diaemus Project - Biology"? That would give us some crucial conformity between the species and maps threads, making the threads easier to navigate and understand at a glance. Conformity and organization will also be crucial in getting our own sub-forum, if that is indeed the goal of many of our participants. Question here for anyone with a love for dinosaurs and speculative animals. We decided early on that dinosaurs will be a common sight on Diaemus, but so far it's unclear whether they will comprise the dominant clade of fauna. There are otters in Mailliw's biome and giant flesh-eating scorpions in Winter's; Diaemus is already a more variable place than Earth. With that said, I feel some small degree of planet-wide continuity would be pleasing to the mind to have. After all, life on Earth is extremely diverse, but you can still find differing breeds of the same rodents, ungulates, and carnivorous mammals on every continent. For my own part, I've been fleshing out the south of Diaemus with a concept of predominantly early-Cretaceous fauna coupled with advanced flora from the Cenzoic era. I have been treating pterosaurs as a replacement for birds, marine reptiles as replacements for seals and whales, and for land animals I've been focusing on iguanadonts, nodosaurs, and carnosaurs as the dominant families of dinosaurs. (Pictured here in order, for reference.) In my vision for Diaemus, these three groups are the most successful of the world's large land animals, comprising the bulk of terrestrial megafauna. However, Diaemus isn't about my vision, nor would I want it to be. It's about all of us bringing out our own unique visions to the world, and stitching it together in a beautiful Frankenstein of imagination. Still, I enjoy conformity, so here is my question to you plural: are my dinosaurs the typical inhabitants of Diaemus, or are they a a rare exception found only on the barren tundra? I'd love to imagine relatives of the snowsaber stalking the temperate forests to my immediate north, or scuzzard-like pterosaurs that gather around carcasses on the dry savannas. Are these things I can expect to see or help to create, or am I essentially creating "The Lost World" of Diaemus, an exotic land populated with animals found nowhere else on the planet?

@SirJerric: That map looks awesome! I'm glad to finally have a defined calendar system in place. As for dating systems, I'm going to guess that every culture is going to wind up using a different system with scholars trained in converting dates between calendars, simply as we haven't established any spectacularly world-shattering events recent enough for use in a calendar. @Seonid: the Skritches and the Haornithi couldn't be more perfect. I've dubbed them Anaxosuchus and Sapienavis respectively, by the way. Query: phylogenetically, would the Skritches be considered "related" to any group of organisms found on Earth? Are they archosaurs, like dinosaurs and crocodiles? If one were to trace their lineage back into Diaemus' prehistoric past, would they be descended from Permian-esque mammal-like reptiles? Apologies if I'm trying to apply too much reason and science to this. For my part, I would not object to a "Life of Diaemus" thread.

There's a police pony in one of the official MLP comics named Ride Along, whose sole duty is to make siren noises when police investigations are in progress. Guess where I'm going with this.

I'm just gonna leave this here again, in case anyone missed it the first time.

I guess he could, but since he can kill him and the zombie both with a stare with the same effort I don't see what the point would be in most practical circumstances.

He could burn the last remaining chocolate factory in Portland to the ground. That ought to earn him a place on the ATTD list. By the way, we gave CM his meta-powers back, right? I was never really a fan of the retcon powers being shoved on him.

Sounds like my cat, Blackthorn. Last time we took all the cats to the vet, we had to wrestle Loki and Splotches into their crates, earning quite a few scratches in the process. With Blackthorn, all we had to do was open the door and he contentedly walked in and lay down.

I've been working hard on a lot of things, but I've got most of a Sam post written and a Vondra/Deathwish post isn't too far in the future. Vondra thinks pugs are useless luxuries, but he'd fall in love with them given the chance.

No, this isn't about the spectacular Doctor Who episode. I'm talking about what I can't believe no one else is talking about here... The discovery of liquid water on the surface of Mars. For the first time, we know that there are streams of fluid saltwater flowing across another planet. Moreover, a planet that's right next door to us in the Solar System. The implications of this are breathtaking--could we build a functioning colony there? Could there be microbes lurking in the streams, or in aquifers underneath? If conditions for life are feasible on so many hotspots throughout our solar system, could we be on the brink of finding single-celled life that is not of this world?

Congrats! And that's a 'congrats' to both of you, since he must be a phenomenally lucky pug to have scored you as a caretaker.

I think everyone can agree that continuing resolutely down the wrong path while whining incessantly is the worst thing any human being can do.

Today our church service covered part of the Book of Numbers. This made me finally realize that the Israelites were essentially Lucentia. "We've been enslaved by the Egyptians! Please help us!" * miraculous rescue from Egypt through the Red Sea * "Now we're starving in the desert!" * miraculous bread and partridges fall to Earth * "Ugh, now all we have to eat is this stupid manna! We had garlic and onions back in Egypt. We should go back there!"

Personally, I think McGonagall just says that to kids every generation, making them all think they're the worst-behaved students in Hogwarts history. It works remarkably well--better, at least, than Hogwarts' means of keeping kids in their bunks.