#dnd worldbuilding

I mean, think about it. You vow to be together “‘til death does us part” and then you give them a way to escape death. You’re literally saying “even death could not keep me from you” or “I will never let you go”.

And of course the more expensive the ring, the more secure the promise. Splurging on a ring isn’t just vanity. It’s literally life insurance. (Or should I say life assurance.)

And even if you can’t afford a 300gp ring, diamonds are still the best choice for a stone. That “cheap” 100gp stone? Crush that up and you have a free casting of Greater Restoration. (If a larger diamond is life insurance/assurance, this is health insurance/assurance.)

Assuming that (as per my typical worldbuilding) a simple Lesser Restoration isn’t enough to cure more serious diseases, and given the common practice of making the client pay for the materials, a set-aside diamond could be the difference between life and death for someone who doesn’t have access to that kind of money.

Hi folks, its me, here to talk about fictional writing again! Today I'm just tackling the idea of magical stones/mana stones by looking at existing minerals today and some neat properties that they have, and how you can apply these things to a fictional world. The goal is mainly to help you if you are stuck trying to come up with a unique magic system, or a unique identification/characteristic of your mineral.

First Things First: Mineral Shapes

I am exhausted, petered out, down-right fatigued by seeing every mineral depicted with having the crystal structure of calcite and quartz. There are soooooo many cooler, more interesting crystal structures, don't you think you would stop and take a look at a perfect cube in nature? It is completely unsettling.

Second: Color

Color within minerals can either be really important, or not important at all! It is your choice to decide if color is going to be something that means something to your mineral. But what are some times when the color is important? Well.... there are some elements that are called chromophores, this classification just indicates that these elements, when present, will determine the color of whatever they are in. So, if you wanted to treat mana like a chromophore, you could say, "Oh everything that contains mana turns green!" This could mean that regardless of the mineral, if that mineral is a specific color, it means it contains mana. This concept is exciting because you can just stop here and use minerals that already exist! You can also use it as an indicator for a magical ore! Chromophores are typically metals, so if you are making a new metal weapon, making the ore of that metal a unique color would make a lot of sense!

However, your mineral can also just be every color of the rainbow like quartz and perhaps that's what makes identifying your mana stones elusive and create an illusion of scarcity that your character can solve.

There are other things that can change the colors of minerals, like radiation damage, and electron exchange, but I think that is beyond what would be helpful! So lets talk about some unique color properties that happen in nature that seem magical in the first place! Maybe you don't need to design a mana stone, but you want a unique gemstone that only the royal family passes down or something (IDK).

The first one is the alexandrite effect! This is where a mineral can change color in natural light vs. incandescent light. (the mineral itself is not changing, but the lights contain different amounts of different colors that then get absorbed by the stone). Even if you don't use electricity in your fictional world, you could have the colors change in the presence of light magic. This could create fun misunderstandings about what the mineral is reacting to!

Pleochroism

Pleochroism is something that most minerals have, it is frequently used to help identify minerals in thin sections, however minerals are usually not pleochroic enough for it to be visible to the naked eye! Pleochroism is just a fancy name to describe the change in how light is absorbed based on the angle of the mineral! So if you scroll up to the first image where I showed a lot of crystal shapes, most of them have angles where they are longer and shorter! This will effect the way light travels in the crystal. Tanzanite is a popular mineral that does this.

Photochromism

This is when a mineral will change color (in a reversible way) when exposed to UV light (or sunlight), I am not going to go too into the details of why this is happening because it would require me to read some research papers and I just don't feel like it. The mineral that is best known for this is Hackmanite!

Alright! These are all the really cool color effects that might inspire you or maybe not, but now I am going to talk about how you might find your minerals within a rock!

When I see a lot of magical caves/mines, typically I see them with some variation of a geode honestly, but most minerals are not found like that! Now I am sure most of you guys have seen a geode, so I will not really talk about those, but I will talk briefly about porphyroblasts which is when the mineral grows larger than the minerals around it, this happens in metamorphic minerals!

sorry random stranger, but this is an image of garnets inside a finer-grained rock at gore mountain in New York!

Another way you might find minerals is in a pegmatite! This is when all minerals are really large! This is a formed from really slow crystalizing magma!

But something else to think about is that your mineral might just be massive, it doesn't have to have distinct crystals, it may be similar to jadeite where small grains grow together which leaves it looking smooth and seamless! A note about all of these is that you would have to mine into the rock to find these, there would not be any natural caves in these rocks! Caves are only ever really formed in limestones and maybe marbles (rocks that react with acid).

How can your characters identify these minerals?

Typically when you are out in the field you will look to see what type of rocks the minerals are found in (The overall texture of the rock will tell you how it formed). If you know how the rock formed, it will narrow down the amount of minerals you need to think about by quite a bit! Next, you are going to look closely at it and observe its crystal structure, does it have an obvious crystal? if so what is the general shape? If it is broken, how did it break? Did it fracture like glass or did it break along uniform planes. Some minerals have a thing called cleavage (breaks along planes of weakness). If a mineral exhibits this habit, it will again help narrow this down. Next we can look at color. Color can be misleading, because minerals like quartz can be any color imaginable, but minerals like olivine will always be green! The next thing your character can do is test for hardness, minerals all have a specific hardness that can help identify it as well.

After you go through all of this, your mineral might have some special property! This could be magnetism, fluorescence, reactions to acid, or any of the color changing effects I mentioned above! Other than that, your character can take it back to a lab and do a number of things to identify it, but the most typical thing would be for them to make a thin section (very thin piece of the rock) and observe it under a cross polarized microscope!

In order to name a manor house, usually a case specific suffix would have been added to the owner's last name, the region or toher related terms. While today almost all of the following may just be referred to as "Manor," these are the original classifications:

Court – buildings in which lords would receive their tenants (Eg.: Ashton Court, Kemerton Court)

Castle – Places of residence for royalty or residences of feudal barons in rule over several dozen other manors (Eg.: Lambton Castle, Hever Castle)

Park – used typically for houses built in the countryside with well-kept gardens and nature (Eg.: Hartham Park, Sandhill Park)

Place – likely a shortened form of "Palace", used for a grande residence with less royal connotations (Eg.: Hinxworth Place, Icomb Place)

Lodge – residences located in a royal forest during the feudal era, occupied by wardens or keepers of the forest (often specified as to the function: hunting lodge, fishing lodge, shooting lodge, ...) (Eg.: Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge, Glen Affric Lodge)

And a bird man? A bird man can be any type of bird doesn’t matter. Owl men, peacock men, penguin men, they’re all birds who cares right?

So tell me, why is it that a cat man can’t be a hyena? Hyenas are part of the suborder Feliformia, literally “cat-like” animals. Hyenas are closer related to cats than crocodiles are to lizards. Like really what’s stopping “Gnoll” from being a subspecies of tabaxi? Why are we so quick to group reptiles and birds together when we’re so specific about mammals?

Power-based hierarchies

Magocracy — rule by those with the strongest magical ability (mages, psychics, sorcerer-council)

Technocracy — rule by engineers/scientists who control critical tech (terraforming, AI, energy grids)

Hybrid Council — mage-houses and tech-guilds sharing power uneasily, always one treaty away from war

Bloodline / biological systems

Genetic Aristocracy — nobility determined by engineered or inherited bloodlines with specific powers

Hivemind/Collective — a psychically or technologically linked consciousness governs as one entity

Ascendant Theocracy — rule by beings who "evolved" or were uplifted into godlike status, worshipped as living gods

Tech-driven structures

AI Oligarchy — a small group of humans front for (or are controlled by) a ruling artificial intelligence

Corporate Feudalism — megacorporations hold territory like feudal lords, workers are essentially serfs

Network Democracy — direct democracy mediated by a neural-linked voting network, prone to hacking/manipulation

Fantasy-flavored structures

Dragon/Beast Suzerainty — powerful non-human entities technically "rule," humans administer in their name

Elemental Confederacy — separate states each themed around control of an element or resource, loosely federated

Necrocracy — the dead (as spirits, liches, or ancestor-AIs) retain legal authority over the living

Dystopian/decayed systems

Warlord Fiefdoms — collapse of a former empire into magic-tech-armed regional strongmen

Caste-by-Circuitry — social class literally encoded via cybernetic implants or magical brands

Puppet Pantheon — a figurehead "council of gods" while real power sits with a hidden scientific elite

Survival-born power structures

Bunker Dynasties — descendants of whoever controlled the original fallout shelter/vault, ruling by inherited access codes and hoarded supplies

Warlord Cults — charismatic survivors who gained (or faked) magical/mutant powers during the collapse and built a following around it

Convoy Confederacies — nomadic government-on-wheels/on-foot, laws exist only as long as the caravan moves; stopping too long means dissolution

Magic-returned systems

Ley Line Baronies — territory controlled by whoever's city/ruins sit on a surge of returned magic; power literally comes from real estate

Witch-Doctor Councils — the only people who understood radiation sickness and the new magical plagues end up running triage — and then everything else

Feral God-Kings — something (an AI, a mutated animal, an ascended survivor) got exposed to enough magic/radiation to become genuinely superhuman and just... started being obeyed

Tech-relic systems

Precursor Puppet States — an old pre-collapse AI or automated government system is still "technically" in charge, and everyone plays along because it controls the water purifiers

Scavenger Guilds — power measured in salvaged tech tiers; whoever can repair a working reactor outranks whoever just has guns

Signal Theocracies — worship built around the last surviving broadcast tower, whoever controls transmission controls "truth"

Fractured/mutant systems

Chimeric Meritocracy — post-collapse mutation is common; social rank tied to how "useful" your mutation is (regeneration, radiation resistance, etc.)

Quarantine Oligarchy — the "clean" unmutated survivors ruling over mutated populations through medical gatekeeping (who gets the cure, who gets tested)

Splinter Tribunals — dozens of micro-governments from a shattered old nation, each claiming to be the "real" legitimate successor state, constantly at low-grade war over the claim

Desperation-flavored systems

Ration Republics — democracy, technically, but only ration-card holders can vote, and ration cards are handed out based on productivity

The Lottery Court — leadership rotates via literal randomized selection because the last three "obvious" leaders got assassinated; nobody trusts ambition anymore

Debt-Bond Territories — you owe the settlement for your air/water/food from day one, and you work off a debt that's mathematically designed to never clear

Environmental/ecological power

Weather Thrones — whoever can control or predict the (now magically volatile) weather/storms rules, since agriculture depends entirely on them

Bloom Wardens — territory governed by whoever tends the mutated flora that filters toxic air/soil; basically a gardener-priesthood with the power of life and death

Migration Elders — leadership determined by who best predicts where the safe zones/resource blooms will shift next; power is inherently temporary and route-based

Memory & knowledge-based power

Archive Custodians — rule by whoever preserved pre-collapse knowledge (books, data, oral history); literacy itself is a form of aristocracy

Dream-Speakers — a ruling class that claims to access the memories/knowledge of the dead through psychic or magical means (may or may not be lying)

The Rewritten — leadership held by people who've had memories magically/technologically altered to "know" governance skills from before the fall — nobody's sure if the memories are real

Contract/oath-based power

Blood-Oath Compacts — magically binding contracts replace law entirely; breaking your word causes literal physical consequences, so "government" is just very seriously enforced promises

Name-Bound Courts — magic that lets rulers control anyone whose "true name" they know; succession crises happen when a name is lost or stolen

The Indebted Assembly — leadership is a rotating group of people magically bound to serve until they've "paid off" a debt incurred by an ancestor before the collapse

Hybrid monster/human power

Symbiont Senates — rulers who've bonded with parasitic/symbiotic creatures that grant power but also slowly influence their judgment

The Broodmother Enclaves — settlements ruled by whoever a mutated hive-creature has "chosen" as its human liaison, for reasons no one fully understands

Chrysalis Regencies — power passed to whoever survives a dangerous transformation ritual/mutation event; most candidates don't survive, which keeps the ruling class small

Fatalistic/desperate structures

The Countdown Council — governance built entirely around surviving until some prophesied/calculated end date, everything is triage, nothing is long-term

Sacrifice Rotations — leadership tied to whoever volunteers for dangerous magic-tech rituals that keep the settlement's shield/power source running

Null Zones — anarchic territories where all previous forms of power (magic or tech) mysteriously stop working, so government reverts to pure physical strength or old-fashioned charisma

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Worldbuilding notes on spellrust.

You know how a lot of the western world says Russians never smile? I feel like the Underdark has a similar situation, where smiling for no reason is seen as rude and non-professional, almost mocking - and as a result the surface, where smiling is polite, thinks they must be joyless and depressed

(worldbuilding rant incoming)