Worldbuilding Month Day 9: Building Worlds

Mar22

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it! (I need more questions, guys)
🌏
This ninth one is from medicmsh3141: What’s your favorite part of mapmaking?

Oh, no, favorites!

…All of it?

Okay, so when I was working on my first-ever Nanowrimo novel, The Deep Inks, one of the flaws in that book is that I spent like… 3 chapters describing an entirely-useless-to-plot town that the antagonists had built… I don’t even remember why.

But I LOVED that town.

Forget killing my darling lines, when I worldbuild–>write, I have to kill my darling TOWNS.

Okay so.

Map-making.

First, I’m rubbish at visualization, so when I make a map, I can start to actually SEE a place come together.

Second, it’s arts-and-crafts, and I really, REALLY like arts-and-crafts. I get to pull out the lentils/split peas/other pulses and play like I’m finger painting, I get to draw shapes that aren’t going to look “wrong” because, let’s face it, it’s an imaginary world. I get to get out the watercolors and PAINT.

…there’s more than one reason I do all my mapmaking on actual paper with pencil. 🙂

Okay, so there’s the haptic side of it, there’s the visualization side. There’s getting to play with logistics, too: where would they put cities? Roads? Fords/bridges?

I’m gonna put floor-plan making in here too, ‘cause it fills many of the same urges. “How would they cram as many people as possible into this space, to both fill basic needs for shelter AND to encourage them to spread out and build proper houses?”

(That one’s Colonize Earth, which I never did get too far with).

Maps and diagrams are all about questions. How would they do that that is different from how I would do it?

I’m still not one hundred percent sure why Cya built Cloverleaf in a series of circles – but I love it. Might’ve been for the tower in the middle, everything pointing like arrows at the giant thing that, after all, is not actually the school.

Anke prompted me with “treehouse” the other day and I’m still playing with all the details of a post-apocalyptic scrounger’s tree house…

…I considered going into architecture, you know. Sometimes I really regret that I didn’t.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1285229.html. You can comment here or there.

Worldbuilding Month Day 8: Tell Me a Story

Mar21

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it!
🌏
This eighth one is from sauergeek: You have storytellers in at least three universes: Autumn in Stranded, Tanakae in Calepurn, and Rosaria in Aunt Family. Am I missing others? How do their styles overlap, and how do they differ? What are their goals in storytelling? (Lotsa questions!)

Ooh! I probably do have other storytellers, because I like the trope of the storyteller. I like telling stories within the confines of the story, for one – some day I hope to do an at-least-triple-nested story, like Arabian Nights. Maybe for Camp Nano in July~

Autumn tells stories for two reasons: One, because she is a small-change artist, and engaging your audience by telling stories is a very good way to get their attention and interest them in buying. As a Neil Gaiman story I just read says, people don’t buy the art, they buy the story. (Paraphrase). Two, because she is a dancer on the strands of life, and she has found that sometimes a story is the best way to engage someone, to get them to heal their own strand damage, to create their own connections.

Tanakae tells stories because it’s her career. She started out doing her world’s version of rap battles, and evolved from there into high art – think like Shakespeare having a patron. She likes political satire best, because if you put something into a catchy phrase, it makes people – if not think, let’s be honest – at least remember the phrase. She’s her time’s equivalent of a Facebook meme on a bad day, and on a good day she’s Mark Twain. She likes the way words flow together, and making them fit properly is like a really good puzzle for her.

(Okay, I probably write a lot of storytellers too because I am, by chosen trade, a storyteller.)

Rosaria tells stories because it’s how she sees the future, the past, and the present – it’s a type of divination. It’s also how she engages her family – some too young to be interested in the truth behind the stories, some too involved in their own world, their own lives. It also gives her a chance to talk to her grandchildren and grand-nieces and -nephews and keep an eye on them.

In terms of style, Tanakae’s style is far more elaborate and ornate than either of the others. Tanakae is much more interested in the wordcraft and in showing off her skills. Rosaria’s stories are the most likely to sound like fairy tales, where Autumn’s are the closest to “no shit, there I was…”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1283884.html. You can comment here or there.

Worldbuilding Month Day 7: Strands and more Strands

Mar16

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it!
🌏
This seventh one is from inventrix:
Does everyone who does magic work with Strands? Corollary: if there are people who think they don’t, is it just like how Autumn uses ink – it’s their approach, not the fact that it’s different magic?

Also, what ARE Strands, anyway.

Okay!

So, in Stranded World, everyone who works magic is working with the Strands. Like Autumn and sometimes Summer, they don’t always directly manipulate the strands, and some of them don’t realize what they’re doing at all, but all magic involves manipulating or reading (or cutting, although I guess that’s a manipulation) the Strands.

So, yes, a psychic might be using tea leaves or a palm-reading, but what they are actually seeing is the way the Strands seem likely to move in the near future.

And the Strands are… the world.

Autumn sees primarily the Strands that are connections between people, because that’s her strong suit. She visualizes them as lines, and there are indeed Strands connecting people – love, hate, co-workers, family – everything that makes people touch and make a connection, even eyes meeting across a subway, causes some sort of strand.

They are the actions of people, too, past, current, and potential, streams of movement running through the world; they are the connections people make with things and things make with things.

Some philosophers haves suggested the whole world is just composed of Strands upon Strands. They may be right.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1278011.html. You can comment here or there.

Worldbuilding Month Day 4: Powers in the Stranded World

Mar9

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it!
🌏
This Fourth one is from inventrix:
Stranded: are there styles of strand-working that are not represented by the Seasonal Siblings?

Yes!

Next question?

Ahem.

Let’s see. Autumn is reading the connections, Winter is smoothing them, Spring is tangling things, and Summer does… little charms, which are really either smoothing, tangling, or making a connection.

In addition, we’ve seen a star mapper – who honestly is a combination of reading connections and interpreting potential connections. Like a life adviser with cheat codes.

There’s also Severers, snippers. Those are – well, they might not be bad people, but it’s a bad power. It eliminates connections, as the name would suggest, cutting them off.

There’s Binders. That’s different from what Autumn does; it’s the power to actually tie a connection where one wasn’t before. (Autumn can strengthen a connection with the right ritual). Tattercoats is a type of binder, knotting people to his will.

There are people who do many variations on the powers of the seasonal siblings as well – a psychic is a star mapper, a curse is what Summer does, and so on.

There are people who can bend the Strands to provide them with energy – not a good idea in the long run – to hide themselves from view by moving sight along other paths, to protect places or people by charming them with a smoother path or a firmer roof.

And there are people out there who can just grasp the edges of what the Strand-workers are doing, but can’t do any of it.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1267669.html. You can comment here or there.

Regarding Tír na Cali and Technology

Aug23

This month’s Patreon theme is Tír na Cali, which got me thinking…

One of the things that always gets me about Tír na Cali is the way it started out slightly sci-fi and, more and more, ends up being modern-era in terms of the technology.

When I started working on Cali, smartphones had not yet come into existence. I thought I was making somewhat magical technology:

Collars with a chip that could be read by any police officer with a reader (probably a smartphone ap now) and tracked by anyone with the right information. Collars with technology small enough to carry all of a slave’s “papers” in an easily-transferable format right on the collar. Electronic “keys” the size of a pen (micro-usb?) with a thumbprint reader and the ability to change a collar’s permissions, update or download the data therein, and so on.

And those permissions: collars that “knew” where a slave was allowed to go and, in one case, a “smart home” with doors that would not unlock if the collar approaching it didn’t have the right permissions.

Certainly, Cali still has a wide range of things that can’t be done by modern tech — changing someone into a cat-person hybrid, changing someone’s gender at the genetic level, complete rebuild of a limb, just for a few examples — but that is all covered under their magic, not under their tech.

Basically, in the time I’ve been playing with this setting, their tech has gone from being cutting-edge stuff that didn’t exist in the mainstream to being — if I hadn’t updated it as I went along — a little backwards. I mean, really, shouldn’t that collar be able to serve as a Bluetooth headset? What do you mean, you can’t text from your slave collar? No streaming videos?

…okay, now I’m wandering off on a whole new brainstorm. *wanders off, muttering about wi-fi hotspots*

*pops back in* New to Tír na Cali? I updated the landing page with a few suggestions for starting places.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1162884.html. You can comment here or there.

Climate Doodle

Aug3

So SeaLemon has this August Doodle Challenge (Tumblr)

I mentioned I wanted to do a Worldbuilding challenge based on the doodle challenge. inventrix made me a modified list.

Day 2 is Climate. The climate of the world around Aerax (that’s an island with a center pinacle on top of a long tree trunk, not the Space Needle) is temperate, wet, and windy, especially up on the islands. (There’s a cactus on the other side because the original challenge was “cactus”, and also because over on the far side of the mountains, the weather is much dryer.)

Aerax and the sky islands are the setting of my Patreon serial The Expectant Wood.

(Day 3 is Seasonal food/fruit)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1151304.html. You can comment here or there.

Who’s Next Door? Help requested

May26

For Five-minute Map Friday tomorrow, I’m thinking of doing a quick map of Aud & Sage’s part of Smokey Knoll

I KNOW I’ve identified harpies and pixies and centaurs nearby, but I can’t FIND them.

What I have so far is:

the Brownies across the street.
Ogres (dragons) next door – cavern-and-castle system – waterfall

The neighborhood around it [Smokey Knoll], the Retibya Heights, is a, ah…”
“It’s an affluent upper-class human neighborhood…”

the Brownies across the street….

“(The harpies)…Their great-grandchildren live down the block from me”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1111881.html. You can comment here or there.

Friday’s Five-Minute Map (give or take): Aereaxerer archipelago

May20

Today’s map is the site of the Patreon serial the Expectant Wood, a series of floating islands described here.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1108988.html. You can comment here or there.

Rin & Girey’s Campsite, Updated

May14

The Cartographers’ Guild does a monthly Lite Mapping Challenge, so I took my Five-Minute Map sketch and … made it better.

Not perfect, but better.

And then I had a small panic attack, and then I submitted it.

It’s one of Rin & Girey’s campsites, early in the story.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1105755.html. You can comment here or there.

Friday’s Five-Minute Map (give or take): Edally Academy

May9

This is a rough top-down view of Edally Academy, done by tracing dimes (see this tweet) because I don’t keep a compass at work.

I’m really enjoying #FridayFiveMinuteMap, and I encourage everyone to join in!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1102970.html. You can comment here or there.

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