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 Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 4:13 pm
I love language creation... smile It is one of my favourite things about Tolkien, for instance. World-building in general is a lot of fun! I have maps and lots of notes... smile
Jasta
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Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 1:05 pm
I'm designing ALL my continents on A2 paper. That's....hard. No, in fact.....it's really hard. If you want your world to be literally physically feasible, then you have to draw your mountains where techtonic plates can rub against one another, draw your continents where the plates pull apart or collide with one another, draw your rivers coming down from mountains, consider where lots of water would be depending on wind currents and the heights of mountain ranges, and which places would be warmer or colder depending on both wind currents, ocean currents and how near or far they are from the equator. I am considering all of these things and it's painstakingly longwinded.
As for language creation, I am creating one language for a particular ancient civilisation. I can't be bothered with rearranging grammatical structures. Tolkien knew how to do that and he'd studied a number of different languages. I'm creating new words and it works along the same lines as the English language does.
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Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 6:39 pm
JastaElf They could role-play, sure! You can world-build for anything: art, writing, RP, board gaming, or just daydreaming. smile The point of it is, you make your own world. And then you do stuff with it! It can be very addictive; I like flags and heraldry, for instance, and so have designed all that for my worlds--so when I describe a badge the soldiers in a particular army wear to show their allegiance, I know what it looks like because I have a picture too. *g*
Do you have a world?
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Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 9:05 pm
Oh Great! You can imagine my excitement at finding another Worldcraftsman. However from reading your first post and some of the stuff after that. What you talk about makes sinse, but is how fantasy worlds have been done for quite some time now. I once had maps and whatnot but I trashed a lot of it in favor of meshing all four worlds and just placing the story on the war torn and broken earth. It's actually a tad bit more difficult to use real cities because I try to stick to some form of reality. Do you have something you can share?
I do sympathize with your struggle for realism, but mapping details are taught to us in elementary school. What I have a struggle with, if you can call it that, is keeping magic from explaining stuff. It's hard to justify the creation of things such as vampires, elves, and minotaur without magic, but I think it's doable. I've proven it's doable. The perfect blend is what's difficult. I love FR and DL so I look forward to seeing what you can do.
Good luck we're pulling for you.
I need a ******** map of the world. I've been trying to get one for a while now, but it keeps getting put off. Once I get one I'll set up current landmasses as of the year 4000. I know sorta where thing are because i had to plot it out to place my five assassin's factions, but I haven't taken the time to do the landmasses yet.
Do you have a story to fit in this world yet? i know that I have ideas, and I know what events in history would make for good stories, but I worry more about the world than the story for now. Once I have my characters outlined, and the world set then it'll be easy to write the rest.
Languages are a b***h, but they're very fun. I had one that I lost for the HIssanti. It was only 14 letters for the primitive people, but I haven't done the other because they do require regrouping and rearranging the language and I haven't studied it enough to do it yet. That'll be a study I'll save for collage, it's too big to do independently.
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Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2007 1:33 pm
Mapping details, aka cartography, weren't taught to us in the UK at all. We did geography, but we were never taught how to draw maps. confused
One continent in my world takes up two sheets of A2 paper, and one other takes four. All the others only take up the one. However, so far, I've not had much trouble with keeping magic from explaining much in the world. There are a couple of areas where it's responsible for a few things, but it doesn't take over the entire world like some others do. An example is Skies of Arcadia or the Granstream Saga where the world consists of continents floating in the sky. The explanation? Magic is the one and only answer. One can't defy physics in that manner.
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Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2007 4:56 pm
Magic is how we define anything we can't do naturally. Magic is a single word, and isn't always the definitive answer. Just because something is unlike what can happen on earth dosne't necessarily mean that magic is responsible, only that something there happens that can't happen here. Maybe there are multiple suns and the continents dance in the gravitational pull or they are pulled and pushed by the magnetic fields they generate. Just because something is diffrent from here doesnt make it magic. Their is a difference. In a world where everything flew walking would seem like magic. The only time magic is the answer is when someone is too lazy to explain what actually makes it work. When they say magic is when magic is what it is and thats when stores crumble.
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Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 1:25 pm
So a sorcerer snaps his fingers and sends a bolt of flame into the air and sears his enemies with a rain of fire that sprung from nowhere, and in between his fingers there is nothing? I suppose you could call it alchemy if you draw a transmutation circle on the back of your glove and call yourself Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist.
Lighting a match is competely different because you're rubbing a flammable material against one of its catalysts, therefore rendering that to scientific explanation.
I'm not having a go, but how would you answer that question Lef? I'm just intrigued to know. smile
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Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 3:15 pm
I never stated that I could explain the workings of worlds, only that it could scientifically be possible there. You say scientifically like it has to make sense. If you want everything to make perfect sense you picked the wrong genera. I simply stated that we needn’t assume it's magic just because we don't know. To say something is magic is lazy. It's not my job to explain how it works it's the worldcrafter's. We generally call something magic if we can't do it, or don’t understand. It needn't be magic, it could be perfectly normal that people generate fire where they live, to them it's science even if the don't understand it completely. To us it's magic. In avoiding using magic to explain something you are simply proving that what you say can be done, seriously can be done in the chosen world. It's the longer road but in the end it's worth it. Even gods are based in reality somewhere in a fantasy world. The Greeks didn't say that lightening was magic, they said it was Zeus. To them that made perfect sense even thought they had no idea how it worked. Science to a Worldcrafter is taking the time to do your job right. Magic is the road more traveled, and less published. We don't call psychics magic, we say that its a brain malfunction. It's still crazy awesome, but they manage to explain it. It’s easy to slap a magic label on everything and never worry about doing your job right. I’m not saying you are, I’m just stating a fact.
If it were my world I would say that he had somehow managed to tap into the ethereal power that held the world together and learned to generate fire. On earth it's magic, but there it could be perfectly normal, and thus be science. They go hand in hand, opposing one another. Which you choose to use is up to the write, but they are both there.
Example: High Tides are controlled by the push/pull of the moon on Earth. To us this is science, there is no arguing with it. No questioning it.
Say there is a world where water stays still. To them it's simply a fact that water stays still, for it to do anything otherwise is magical. However, to us for water to stay still like it does there it seems downright impossible.
It is the job of a writer to explain why/not the water moves. You can say it's gravity or you can say it's magic. To explain the science behind it takes more time. Thus making my opening statement that magic and science in our field are circumstantial a clearly correct one.
(This post turned into a thesis statement sorry.)
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Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 11:14 am
DM_Melkhar - from Races in Fiction thread I've drawn my maps on A2 plain paper and scaled it to 2mm for every 10 miles. It could be done as 1mm for every ten miles, but having tried it that way, it means most of my continents would end up being far too big. Two of them are huge.
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Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 5:11 pm
*grins* Now imagine how God felt creating a universe.... LOL!
I'm even learning how to carve leather right now, to make those gorgeous things like belts, purses, checkbook covers, etc., because in my world one of the special artifacts is a large leather map, carved into most of a whole cowhide, depicting the original boundaries of the Kingdoms. I want to have the actual map so I know if people can do with it what I want them doing. smile
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Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 7:28 am
That must be fun, I looked into leather craft a few months ago when I was working on learning the rules of the diffrent boffer societies and whatnot. My weapon designs were to risky so they sorta shunned my concepts, but leather was too expensive for me to use physically, at least armor grade was.
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Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2007 10:49 am
That must be an interesting thing to do. Try designing a planet though! Well, you could call it that. I'm designing every continent, which is a world/planet in itself.
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Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 1:35 pm
Oh dear gods. I have tried creating a world ... my problem is that I think too big ... because at the moment I have a couple of galaxies at the moment and they are like .. in the dark about their existance, like the scientists and philosophers are all uber busy trying to discover their orgins because I haven't created them yet.
There is the issue of all the intricate scientific details and then the religion factor and all that jazz...
I mean its not like J.K. Rowling where you can create this underlying world that exists within this one, and we don't know about it because we don't have the right blood status, but its like way out and on its own. Sure the planet is alot like Earth, and some of the others may have a few Star-Trekky elements to it (because I personally have never been to another planet, and the cardinal rule about writing is to write what you know)
And so yeah ... that's my experience in creating worlds ... like I try to draw maps ... and solar system diagrams and all that jazz and it looks horribly elementary .... its sad...
However, if I were creating a part of an existing world, which I've done as well, its a bit similar, for example, I created a world for a Dungeons and Dragons game I wanted to gm as soon as I got a bit more experience under my belt.
I have several parts of the Harry Potter Wizarding World created from literate roleplays I've been in... so yeah ... creating your own is a bit more a challenge, but, its yours so you don't have to worry about disclaimers and copyrights like you do when you create parts of roleplaying worlds.
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Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2008 5:39 pm
Arisu_Dilandau Oh dear gods. I have tried creating a world ... my problem is that I think too big ... because at the moment I have a couple of galaxies at the moment and they are like .. in the dark about their existance, like the scientists and philosophers are all uber busy trying to discover their orgins because I haven't created them yet. There is the issue of all the intricate scientific details and then the religion factor and all that jazz... I mean its not like J.K. Rowling where you can create this underlying world that exists within this one, and we don't know about it because we don't have the right blood status, but its like way out and on its own. Sure the planet is alot like Earth, and some of the others may have a few Star-Trekky elements to it (because I personally have never been to another planet, and the cardinal rule about writing is to write what you know) And so yeah ... that's my experience in creating worlds ... like I try to draw maps ... and solar system diagrams and all that jazz and it looks horribly elementary .... its sad... Wow, that's certainly taking the outside-in approach to an extreme! I've done a galaxy only once and it was with a friend of mine and for a world where space-travel was the order of the day. I usually start with a continent and a general world concept and go from there. Maps can be helpful, but you don't need to draw them. It's easy enough to describe a place as being "a peninsula in the south-west part of the continent" and let people fit puzzle pieces together as you go. As for writing what you know, I think a lot of people take that far to literally. If we all did that, no one would ever write anything about mythical beasts or magic. Imagination is a wonderful thing. If you don't know a technical aspect of, say, a swordfight, just describe it in layman's terms. You don't have to go through every strike and parry. That's what they mean. Describe a thing the way you see it, don't necessarily stick to the stuff you know inside and out. Berz.
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Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 1:56 pm
I have some worlds I created. Heck, I even created three different galaxies. But I don't really do maps though. I have made some but I don't exactly enjoy making them. mrgreen
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