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The first option is to make it something where your player characters have a lot of opportunities to intervene with very clear and immediate results. The play is a little bit like this. There's tons of moving parts, and Brennan is playing Lash, Olgud, all the fairies, Vokjan Murzat, the Candescent Creed, Hannan, and the audience. However, everyone has plenty of opportunities to act and participate and the impact of that is immediate. Murray gets the fairies to bother the Candescent Creed. Hal is constantly able to help out with the play. Thaisha is able to choose to head to the Creed, and uses Call the Corners in a climactic moment, and Vaelus feels the Stone of Nightsong and both she and Azune are able to see more than most people in this moment. It's a largely NPC action scene, but the PCs are constantly influencing it and are rewarded very quickly for those choices, which is important - this is not a situation where you can play the long game.

The second option is for the scene to be a culmination of longterm character work. The Sundered Houses meeting is that. Einfasen's testimony is ultimately the result of extensive work from many characters (most of whom aren't present due to West Marches, but would be in a more traditional campaign and are present as the audience). The Seekers and Schemers both laid the groundwork for House Einfasen to be able to make his accusations, and Wick's work with his grandmother allowed him to be there in her good graces. We gain some information from the scene to be sure, but a lot of it serves as the payoff from those arcs. The characters already did their influencing, and the scene serves to honor that.

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them

Things like gravity and electromagnetism (electricity and magnets), nuclear force... also things like wind, centrifugal force (or rather, inertia), solar energy, radio waves, light waves, etc.

Animals WOULD interact with forces like these, but it absolutely would be unlike anything humans recognize as spellcasting.

As smart as crows are, they aren't out there building nuclear reactors or taking off into space or lighting their nests with lightbulbs or trying to figure out how the FUCK magnets work. But... they do navigate at least in part through magnetoreception. MANY birds make use of Earth's magnetic fields to navigate.

Bats and cetaceans echolocate. Their brains evolved to interpret vibrations such that they can 'see' sound, in some fashion.

Things like circadian rhythms existing even in places devoid of changes in light levels suggests biology intertwined with nature's rhythms.

There's probably a million other examples but the point is that i don't think animals using it would look like humans using it. Even different species would look different. You might see things like birds with intricate mating displays enhancing their displays- maybe not because they figured out human spells, but because their song activates the magic. Bears whose dens become an impenetrable fortress when they hibernate because their sleeping energy affects the magic around them. Whales who leave messages in the waters where they travel, so that other passing whales activate their songs. Cats whose purr actually magically heals.

And yeah, dogs who cast magic missile and chase after it. But it's only dogs, not wolves; it's dogs who were trained to use a human spell, the same way we train them to sit and roll over and perform certain actions to medically alert people. Dog magic enhances their sense of smell, dog magic lets them find the smelliest thing in the yard to roll on. Wolf magic lights up the sky when the pack howls, and dances like the northern lights.

Many stories of haunted houses may be related to Cyclosa imago, also known as the Haunting Spider.

When a colony settles an abandoned building, they collectively defend against human intrusion by forming dense webs, which have been interpreted as ghostly apparitions.

Over millennia, we have inadvertently selected the spiders that would better imitate a human shape.

There is an easy excuse in real life! You may not be able to get both a pacemaker and a DBS device because they're both pieces of sensitive equipment that could theoretically interfere with each other, and nobody engineered them not to. Trivially you can extrapolate this to all cybernetics. If your various augs weren't Specifically designed not to mess with each other (and of course the various megacorps might take things a step further, making their shit actively hostile to mix-and-matching), you might have problems; and obviously, the more pieces of hardware you've patchworked yourself with, the worse things get. You'd have to be one real crazy motherfucker to tell a back-alley doctor to load you up with whatever they've got.

The manual for one of Medtronic's DBS devices has a similar warning:

It's a bit of a pain in the ass, but to learn more I would recommend going to various medical device manufacturers' websites and seeing if you can find the manuals for their devices, which have a wealth of interesting information beyond warnings about other devices. You'll have to do some digging, but they'll probably be in there (check the "for providers/physicians" section of the website and go through links that look like they might lead to technical documentation; if it asks you to search, look up devices from that brand and grab a model number). Here are a few to start:

Medtronic implanted neurostimulators manual (found here via searching B35300)

NeuroPace RNS 320 physician manual (there's a surgical walkthrough in here!)

I first had to take a list of all 118 historical references in the song (from the Wikipedia page) and turn them, in a localized Jojo's Bizarre Adventure's fashion, into an (ideally) setting-agnostic version of what Billy Joel was saying or alluding to.

Then I had to figure out an effect for each of them, either directly or indirectly connected with the original concept.

Ultimately, I've cut 18 (15%) items to neatly fit them in a d100 roll; most of them had to do with politics, war and the like, since that was the most numerous category; I landed on ones that weren't too widely known, too similar to other items present, or just those that were to hard to convert into D&D mechanics.

I also had to make sure the entirety of the items' effect was balanced (like the original Deck of Many Things) and tracked the main categories that each effect fell into, to ensure enough variety.

It’s why he had the Wick reveal so soon and it’s such a good piece of advice for Actual Play and DMing in general. We want to get to the event that will kick the real story off! It helps the audience and players stay invested!

OP isn't wrong, exactly (saying this for everyone else reading, not at you, OP) and the pasted tags are excellent & about a real issue, but actually further from the thesis of the video.

That thesis boils down to fiction that creates religions, like fantasy novels or RPGs, is very prone to only really depicting the religion's myths and sacred texts. The creation stories, the pantheon melodramas, that kind of thing. Adjacent to this is a big focus on belief. Both of these, ReligionForBreakfast (RFB) suggests, are due at least in part to (unexamined or deliberate) Christocentrism.

The thing that's missing, that RFB proposes as what he thinks would make a big difference and be good to see in fictional worlds, is action. ("Ritual", for certain definitions of the word.) What do followers of a religion, or people within that religion's culture, actually do? How does it appear in daily life, in art and architecture, customs and food, etc.? And not just the Official Approved actions or activities, either.

1 thing they really like, need, or want

1 thing they really hate, fear, or are embarrassed about

1 trait/hobby/nervous tic/relationship

The most important of these is the third. NPCs don't need to be immediately well-defined; they need to be memorable, hyperlegible. Give the players something to latch onto.

"Wears bearskin and uses lots of comparisons to animals" is an NPC. "Smiles too much too fakely and can't stand the commander" is an NPC. "Folksy accent and a penchant for poisoning pies" is an NPC.

You can backfill in connections and dimension later - but realistically? Players are going to give you a lot to go on for an NPC purely based on how they react to their particular "thing". You can lean into Players being suspicious of an NPC, or subvert that. You can take someone they immediately adore and layer in complex fears or loyalties.

Cahoot – Tiny fiend, neutral evil

A subtle silhouette hopping from tree to tree, shimmering eyes watching from above, inaudible whispering filling the minds of the wandering adventurers. The cahoot is a quite sinister creature inhabiting regions wherever dark forests cast their shadows over secluded villages. Only a few know too well to avoid the overgrown paths. Most travelers, however, gravely underestimate the dangers. After all, a cahoot never schemes alone...

Let the new Nosferatu scratch their head two nights in and a chunk of hair falls out. They look in the mirror three nights later and realize how much thinner their skin has gotten, and they touch their jaw carefully, and a strip of skin peels away to reveal the jaw underneath.

Let the new Malkavian be so so so paranoid because they KNOW whats coming, but by a month in, nothing seems to have happened. And theyre so worried, but theyre hoping against the universe that please, maybe they'll be the exception. Maybe they wont fall to the voices. And then they get home and talk to their friend about their worries, and after a little while, they feel relieved. The friend helps, so they keep talking to them. A few months go by and they are happy that they were worried over nothing, and they never even realize theyve been talking to the walls this whole time.

Let the new Ventrue have to figure out their blood limitation themselves. Their first few nights or weeks, they can drink whatever, but slowly the curse sets in. They drink some blood and immediately puke it up. They drink another type and break out in hives. Another sends them into torpor. But they HAVE to keep going. They have to find what they CAN drink, because until they do, they'll feel nothing but hunger and pain and rage and suffering. And the longer it takes to find it, the worse the wrong ones will be

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own

Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!

R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.

Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.

Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.

Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide

Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)

Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.

This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.

Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.

And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:

Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...

Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...

Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...

Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...

Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.

Also:

This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.

Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009

put those racist swords to good use