It’s World-Building June!  So I’m building Worlds!  Aerax/Expectant Woods over on Patreon, and Bear Empire and a new thing here!

It’s also June WorldBuilding – so we’re getting two sets of prompts.  After I exhaust the answers I’ve written, I might just default to Inspector Caracal’s questions.

Bear Empire
(The setting for Carrone and Deline, Chased in the Bear Empire)

3. Who lives in your world?

People!

Actually, that’s a very good question.

I don’t know about non-human sentient races yet.  If they exist, they probably are either completely integrated into society or they live off in their own little corners.

As for humans, the borderlands have a wide mish-mash of different ethnicities and nationalities, but as you get closer to the capital – up in the frozen north – most of your people are People of the Bear.

The original Bear’s people would have been a specific cult? Religion.  Group chosen by the Mother Bear, but by this point, it’s more of a suggestion-of-ancestry combined with a nationality and ethnic look.

oh!  So the Ethnic looks here come with ways that magic can be used on you and channeled through you; Bear magic, mostly Magery, is made for Bear-people, and is going to work differently on non-Bears.

In addition, it comes with certain supernatural skills that don’t often come up – which means that so does the Haloran blood and that of Dekleg.  They aren’t exactly inhuman, but they do have the blessings of their totem god.

The core of the Empire, what was once a very small nation, is the most ethnically Bear.  As you go out towards the edges, in what had at one point been other kingdoms, you end up with a mix, people who were relations of the Bear-people.  It may be that the Bear Empire includes the Cat (Mountain Lion) people, the Lynx People, the Fox people, and the… Elk People

The Union of Space
(an entirely new setting (probably))

3. Who lives in your world?

The colony was originally made up of 1000 hand-picked people, sought out for skill— and expertise— diversity.  The original colonists were between 20 and 35 years old, with 4 outliers, physically able to handle the work of homesteading a new land, and volunteers, willing to work, all having at least two notable skills.  The application list was three times as long as the total colonists-allowed number.

The world as a whole  — the galaxy — includes humanity with a broad number of chemical, genetic, and mechanical improvements or modifications.  These include very effective prosthetics, individually-modified drugs targeting chemical imbalances, chronic conditions, and early-stage cancers.

Colonizing means taking the fomulae for extant solutions with you, but giving up the nearly on-demand service of a highly developed world’s medical facilities.  

Many of the original colonists — well over 50%- are still alive.  Life expectancy runs closer to 150 than to 80 in this era. In addition, with approximately 25-to-30-year generations and about 1.25 child per person, 3 generations of children have been born in the colony, bringing the population to between 4000 & 5000.

IRL, Accidents cause 146,571 deaths (per appox. 300 mil people) per year in the US. That’s about .05% of the population.  Assume that about 20 people died in the first three years, and after that the death rate dropped down to closer to that .05%  That’s still going to winnow out the population over the years a bit.

Way over on the other side of the planet:

The people here are the product of the same universe that made the colonists, but from a different subset.  Not researchers, this colony was formed at about the same time from approx. 1750 volunteers.

This group was composed of people from three subsets: Researchers who couldn’t get in to the university groups but wanted the new-world experience.

People who were bored with life on explored planets but didn’t want the structure of an experimental colony nor the bare-bones of some of the other drops.

People who needed to start a new life and were willing to go to an unsettled planet to do so.

Their original death rate was higher than the University colony, losing 400 people in the first three years. Their birth rate was also slower for the first 10 years, but after that it settled in to about the same as the University colony.

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Cal Questions, Bear Empire

ENVIRONMENT

1- what type of setting is it? a part of a continent, a planet, a star system?

The Bear Empire story takes place entirely (probably) within the Bear Empire, a nation at the northern end of a continent.

The setting as a whole includes the northern half of the continent and the oceans to either side of it, as well as the polar ice.

2- what are its notable geographical or astronomical characteristics?

The mountains which curl and stretch over the land – the Bear to the north, the Fox to the west, the Lynx to the East.  

The river which divides the Empire from Dekleg is wide and angry and carved deep, and while crossable, it can be deadly to those who aren’t paying attention

The polar ice caps to the north, the frozen north pole, those mark the northernmost expansion of the Empire.  And the ocean to the east marks the furthest it can go eastward.

Somewhere down south and to the east, there may be another continent, or that may be a myth.

3- What type of climate does it have? Wet or dry, hot or cold?

The Empire of the Bear is cold.  It is very chill in the northern reaches, with the mountains catching the last of the winds from the east, leaving a series of very wet, rainy areas followed by arid rain-shadow regions on the other sides of the mountain ranges.

Especially in the region to the far west of the empire, the weather is very stormy, especially in what many people would consider spring.

Winters are often (except in the rain-shadows) very snowy, with blizzards being not uncommon.  There are people that say that the reason the Empire is so cranky (if you want to say that they’re cranky, which the Deklegion often do) is because their weather is such crap.

The Empire, however, smiles and enjoys it and builds some more snow sculptures.

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Cal Questions, Union of Space

ENVIRONMENT

1- what type of setting is it? a part of a continent, a planet, a star system?

It’s a galaxy!  And also five small settlements on one large planet!

The United Space spans a huge range of space radiating out from Earth.  It contains several heavily-settled nearby planets as well as planets, like Ezras IV and V, that are sparsely settled by corporations, institutions, or organizations.

Ezra IV, where I am focusing much of my initial effort, includes settlements on two continents, none of which are larger than a 2500-person town.

2- What are its notable geographical or astronomical characteristics?

Sector 5, in which the Ezra system is located, is notable for being a sector most filled with M-class planets of any that the United Space Exploration Force have yet explored.  It is “crowded” in a spatial sense, the solar systems being closer together than in any other sector — thus why the university studies focused their attention there.

On Ezra IV, notable things include a line of islands between the two sets of three continents that draw a line of mountains circling the planet.  There is also a series of mesas very near the settlements, and a very nice cove that is slightly warmer than all of the surrounding water — it is between these stone formations and that cove that the first colony was set, on a high place very near the water.

(I haven’t gotten to three yet.  That’ll be on tomorrow’s post)

Questions? Thoughts?  Tell me!