Tag Archive | worldbuilding

Fae Apoc: Dragons vs. Wyverns

Jan13

I’ve written a lot about wyverns and dragons in Fae Apoc, but just now, I realized that I was making a distinction in my head that a) was not quite the common parlance description and b) I don’t think I’d explained anywhere outside of a roleplay session in my attic, sitting on Rion’s bed, when it was Rion’s bedroom.

So here goes!

In Fae Apoc, as you may know or recall, a Dragon usually refers to those that are commonly assumed to be the Nedetakaei/Shenera Oseraei Daeva.

Nedetakaei Dragons are shapeshifters; as with Shenera Endraae Daeva, they can change into any look and gender at will; unlike the Shenera Endraae, they can also become Creatures – as they get older, they can become bigger and bigger (or, in turn, smaller and smaller, although then getting bigger does take considerable energy.)  They become dragons, as in mythology, although they – and the Shenera Endraae who hunt them – generally do not let everyday people see them, at least not everyday people who survive long enough to tell tales.  At least until the apocalypse.

The apocalypse came with the opening of the portals, and from the portals came not just Ellehemaei-from-Ellehem (I am certain there is an Old Tongue word for this but I haven’t coined it yet, since Ellehemaei means Those-from-Ellehem and is used to refer to all fae) but creatures from their world: hell hounds and war cats, monsters and critters, and wyverns – animals in the form of giant flying lizards.

Some (not just the flying lizards, things in all categories of Critter) were also created by the Returned Gods, either to help them fight their battle of invasion into Earth, or because they enjoyed having very big pets.

When you come down to it: In Fae Apoc, a Wyvern may be a very clever animal, but it is an animal (and many of them aren’t clever at all).  A Dragon is a sapient, thinking being in a large shape.

Magically, Hugr, Intinn, and Tlacatl (Emotion, Mind, and Flesh-of-Makers) work on Dragons and not on Wyverns; Panida (Animals) works on Wyverns and not on Dragons.

 

Glossary of Terms Used here

Nedetakaei/Shenera Oseraei  LawBreakers/who call themselves Children of the Gods (known for their disdain for humans, their leaning towards extremes in all matters, and their lack of proper Names, which is actually a disdain of Naming)

Shenera Endraae Children of the Law)

Daeva Those who Inspire, a breed of Fae

 

 

 

Federated Worlds – Worldbuilding for Border Banner

Sep6

Written in February 2020, posted at https://ping.the-planet.space/notes/846zh97210 (and other posts), but I cannot find it posted here, so here it is!

Malina’s Border Banners World – Worldbuilding.

🚩

Greetings, I’m Lyn, and I thought up #FediWorlds. 

And that being said, I’m not even sure how to answer this question. 

I did a poll as to what world I’d work on, and “Story for B” won.  This story, appropriately begun on this account, involves a princess of a very long name becoming lost in the desert. 

I think Rick and Evie from The Mummy (1990s) – early in the movie when they spend a lot of the time arguing – fit my feel for this story so far. 

This may be influenced by the fact that they are wandering through the desert, of course, or that the cat, one of the main characters, is obstinate and difficult.  Continue reading →

Aunt Family Help (Mostly Kelkyag) Requested

Mar13

Hi

I’ve started to write the story of Beryl going through Aunt Mary’s journals.

Which means I really need to be able to place Aunt Mary on the timeline.

Preference is earlier but American so obv. not TOO early; I also need to know or name the Aunt that came before her.

1789 is the earliest I can go and be in the timeline that the Rochester NY area was settled IRL.

#WIPWorldBuilders / #WorldBuildingWednesday – The Bear Empire

Jan22

I’ve discovered (thanks to @jessmahler ) this Twitter community called #WIPWorldBuilders.

I picked a world to work on this month as so: 

* a Verse I’m currently writing in.
* not an Urban Fantasy world, one that’s in a completely different world
* Obv. not a fanfic setting

(though, let’s be honest, in most of my fanfic I’ve done enough worldbuilding that I could probably do this – however, they’re all urban fantasy, woe)

Which led me to Bear Empire (I’m writing Found Down Below in the Bear Empire Cyber Era.)

So here’s a tidied-up first seven days of that, with an attempt to get it into categories that’ll be useful down the road.

The calendar: https://twitter.com/pepperdaphoenix/status/1212074023926083588 Continue reading →

Worldbuilding Wednesday – The Jeweled Pomegranate / Digging for Pants

Dec11

Today’s Poll Picked the setting of my current impulse project, Digging for Pants.

Okay this is going to be FUN!

Today’s #WorldBuildingWednesday is a setting I dreamed up for my incomplete #NanoWrimo 20…18? story The Jeweled Pomegranate , which could loosely be described as
*
Academics Having Adventures
+ Magical Items
+ Forced to Be Together (via said Magical Items)
+ A Ruined Wold.
*
So! The Ruins! In a time Before, the world was hit with a series of what are now called subside-ances – pretty much semi-magical sinkholes big enough to swallow, say, the Smithsonian.

That is… almost all I know.

I know there are universities with research professors (& grad students) who they send to explore in these places, either for “grave robbing” (they’re not inherently graves) or information acquisition, and all that grey area in between.

And I know that magical items *definitely* exist.

Oh, and that money exists.

So! I’m asking you: ask me questions! Help me work on #WorldBuilding this world of… exploring a previous era of the world!

Continue reading →

Worldbuilding Wednesday: TIR Talk – Follow-up Questions

Dec5

Kunama asked:

How did the children of Danu become royalty?

Ah, an interesting question from the left there.  Okay.  The children of Danu are royalty because they declared themselves such.

And that is a documented fact, so I’m not risking myself in any way with this question.

The children of Danu came here – to California, to North America – when hundreds and thousands of other people were immigrating here, and they found a place where they could lay claim.

Their powers weren’t as strong back then as they are now, but “in the land of the blind” and all that.  There’s no indication in historical records of any specifics, but considering what Queen Larissa is known to be able to do, one can extrapolate backwards to what her ancestors may have been able to do, and a woman with the ability to, for instance, read her opponents’ minds or convince them to do what she says, convince them to love her, convince them that she is the proper person for a position or simply blackmail them very effectively.

Again – there is no proof or even written suggestions that the early Queens and Duchesses of Tír na Cali used any of those powers on anyone.  None of the contemporary histories mention anything of the sort – the women of Danu’s children of that era were immensely charismatic, and that is documented and also unsurprising. Many women of the Danu today are also very charismatic.

But they created the nation and, in doing so, they created the hierarchy and the positions and titles which made them royal.  And thus they are royalty.

And that is the story that the history books tell, and that is the story that I’m going to tell up here.

This is a follow-up to two weeks ago’s “TIR Talk” post – feel free to ask more questions on any of the Worldbuilding Wednesday posts! 

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday – the Aunt Family

Dec5

Last week I was taking questions on the Aunt Family and magic!  I got two.

Eseme asked: Much of their magic seems to be craft based, and involves imbuing magic in items. Does this only work on handmade objects?

I imagine if you were sitting at a mechanical knitting loom or fabric loom and putting all of your magic and will into it, you could probably imbue magic into its creation as well, but I think that’s not as easy — it takes more concentration & attention to the magic – than doing it the “old-fashioned” way. 

Imbuing an object that you haven’t made at all with magic – a trinket from the store – would require a lot more power, and thus would usually be part of some sort of ritual, generally involving several casters at once.

🍰 

@SamTTC on Twitter asked:  Is there any relationship between calorie cost to the caster relative to the energy output of a spell?

That’s a good question.  I’ve definitely done that in other settings – Fae Apoc, Tír na Cali for sure.

In Aunt Family, I’d say that there IS a relationship, but the ratio depends on the strength of the caster and the strength of the connections she has to pull on.

That is, the same spell and effect would take much more physical energy for a weak caster with no family (or family land) to draw on, than for one of the Aunts of a Family, especially if she was on family land – running a marathon vs. walking a mile, for a bit of an exaggeration. 

👩‍🌾

 

It’s #WorldBuildingWednesday!

Nov27

It’s #WorldBuildingWednesday!

Today I am soliciting questions on my Rural Fantasy ‘Verse, the Aunt Family, and if you like specifics, specifically on the magic in that world.

 

The Aunt Family is one of the themes available for my Great NanoWrimo Prompt Call, which is still running!   See here on Ko-fi, and see many stories posted this month here on Patreon.

Worldbuilding Wednesday: TIR Talk (Fairy Odd Powers)

Nov21

So @Shutsumon started doing Worldbuilding Wednesday on Mastodon and that got me thinking and so then I started and…

well, here’s last week’s post. I’m going to try to post them a week after I toot (post on Mastodon) them.

Is anyone interested in these? They do not seem to be getting comments. 🎣

 

The mark of a royal[1] in Cali is generally considered to be threefold, with a fourth not widely acknowledged but no less real. Continue reading →

Worldbuilding Wednesday: Strands in Odd Places

Nov13

So @Shutsumon started doing Worldbuilding Wednesday on Mastodon and that got me thinking and so then I started and…

well, here’s last week’s post. I’m going to try to post them a week after I toot (post on Mastodon) them.

Strands in Weird Places

In theory, Stranded World is composed of “Strands” which make up the connections of every thing and being to every other thing and being; certain people can see, manipulate, or read the Strands but they come into existence and eventually fade away on their own in a constant cycle of renewal. 

In practice, the Strands that strand-workers read/manipulate are like you took a page full of the very lightest pencil lines going everywhere and then added just a few bright marker lines: strong connections between people or between a person and an animal/plant/thing.  

For instance: I have a very strong connection with my husband, a rather strong connection with my cats, and rather strong connections with my grandparent’s house/farm. Compared to my connection to the guy sitting across from me on the bus, the cat I saw at the winery the other week, the apartment we lived in for a couple months when I was 20, those connections are going to be thick and easy to pick out. 

Sometimes, you end up with “Weird” connections:

People who met for three minutes at a bus stop who form a Strand so thick it pulls them back together, so that they reinforce that strand, so that it pulls them together again. 

A place that takes on so much of its own character that it holds on to connections; not only do people remember it for a long time, but it remembers them, and so the strands are no longer dependent on living memory. 

A moment in time will, on very rare occasion, create connections, which form a line between all of the people experiencing that moment and anchor people to that moment.  In some cases, it makes time warp strangely around it, such that even thinking about it for too long can create wrinkles much later on. 

Sometimes you end up with places, or animals, or plants that somehow not just form strands — since everyone and everything can do that to some degree — but manipulate them. 

There’s a tree in the middle of a forest that likes to loosen some bonds and form others, and you never know until you climb up into its branches which might happen. 

There’s a cat who wanders the suburban evenings tangling strands up, leaving a wake of small chaos behind her and caring about as much as she’d care about a ball of yarn. 

And there are events which are so tangled up from their very creation that just moving towards them — Burning Man, but only sometimes, for instance; certain marches on certain places; certain prayer circles and certain parties — changes the person moving, for better or for worse. 

The Great NanoWrimo Prompt Call