Tag Archive | worldbuildingjune

Worldbuilding Day Four: History

4. History

Aunt Family
Ooh!

In World History, the Aunt Family ‘verse parallels our own. The magic that exists here is mostly personal magic – it can change a single person’s timeline, or a single family’s, but rarely the world’s.
(Yes, I know that there are ways that A can change B, but this is not so much an AU as it is a world in which personal problems sometimes have unusual solutions).

The Aunt Family themselves… their history is lost in myth and fuzzy retellings, and every branch of the family tells it a little bit differently. What we know is that, at some point, the strong personalities in a long-ago family decided that their thin but interesting powers could best be handled — and family feuds avoided — if they kept the power in the hands of a single childless woman.

And as the family grew, so did the power.

Portal Bound

Many centuries ago — nearly a millennium — portals opened between an untouched planet and several other worlds, and a few people came through, a farmer and his family.

You said that already, Lyn.

Ahem.

That farmer’s settlement became the basis of the capital town. He brought through others from his home village — which was in chaos at the time — and, when the portal opened somewhere else, brought through those people, too.

Other portals formed their own settlements. Over time and trade and more than a few battles, over quests by Key-bearers from other worlds and mighty adventures, the settlements on these islands/small continents settled into a few nations.

The nation our story is set in became a monarchy with a very strong bureaucracy . Which was fine for quite a while.

And then the Crown Prince vanished.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1337879.html. You can comment here or there.

Worldbuilding Day Three: People and Races

Jun13

Dragons Next Door

As the title of this setting suggests, the Dragons Next Door world has Dragons.
It also has quite a few other magical sentient races: ogres, harpies, pixies, tinies, elkin, and centaurs, to name a few.

In addition, it has a deep and broad human population, very similar to the real world (it’s an Urban Fantasy setting, after all) and then dweomers, who are humans with magic, or at the very least humanoids with magic.

For a very long time, these races lived primarily separate lives with their own civilization. There were dragon nations and pixie towns and Centaur Isles and so on; the elkin had a remote mountain nation that spoke to no-one except the Tinies and the harpies, for instance.

The Tinies were the only exception to this rule: Tinies have always lived everywhere.
Only recently – since the 1930’s – have the races begun to actively mingle.

(I wonder if this matches the previous notes on Smokey Knoll. Shall have to check).

Portal Bound
The continent that Portal Bound takes place on has only one sentient race: humans.

On the other hand, because of the portals, there are two factors at hand here:

* what counts as human varies slightly from dimension to dimension, and so there are those that are very nearly elves or fairies or such (or Klingons or Romulans) in appearance
* because of the broad spread of the portals across the worlds in all these dimensions, the humans come in all ethnicities.

Sometimes, if a portal stays open for a particularly long time, a city will end up with a small enclave of people of a particular ethnicity and world-origin.
More often, however, people come singly, and thus they find a place and settle as they can, bringing their own traditions but integrating into the massive whole.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1336994.html. You can comment here or there.

Worldbuilding June Day 2: Geography

Jun6

2. Geography
Desmond’s World
Oops, I already covered a bunch of this in the first post.

The City Desmond lives in (100 words to anyone who names it something that fits with the names that I like and another 100 to someone to name the nation) straddles the river leading to the ocean.

It’s definitely got high ground (High Street), mostly to the north of the river, and lower ground, which sometimes floods, to the south of the river. The river directly to the south is all parkland, designated so 100 years ago when a leader ordered the slums torn down so that the houses on the north side did not have to look at them.

This, of course, just moved the slums a bit more inland, but there’s a nice wall of trees now, and the houses bordering that parkland are high-rent for the area.

The City office and school are on the north side of the river. Desmond grew up on the south side.

Portal Bound
There is already a map for Portal Bound, here.

The main city of needing-a-name is settled into an oxbow in the river of also-needs-a-name. Inspired by the Mississippi, the river has moved several notable times over the centuries since the first buildings were hewn from the forest all around.

(The capital we’re discussing is just on and around about where the left end of the upper wild-rice roads are on the above-linked map.)

The river runs through a flattish forest area, making its way towards the sea. Much of the land in the area is still forested, with small townships growing up among the trees.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1335387.html. You can comment here or there.

Worldbuilding June Day 1, B

Jun2

1. Introduction
B. Portal Bound
Many centuries ago — nearly a millennium — portals opened between an untouched planet and several other worlds, and a few people came through, a farmer and his family.

Over time, those portals shifted — when they were open, where they opened from — until a clever wood-carver discovered that with the right bits of magic and the right bits of wood, you could stabilize a portal. It still opened when it pleased, of course, but with the proper doors, it would open to the same place and in the same place.

The main nation of this story is run by a bureaucracy that balances on the mandate of the long-missing Prince. It runs well enough, this nation, and the bureaucrats like it that way.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1333342.html. You can comment here or there.

Worldbuilding June Day 1

Jun1

1. Introduction
Desmond’s World
The world Desmond lives in is on the cusp of industrialization, a word in which most people don’t believe magic exists. Poverty, class struggle, hunger, and crowding are, however, all too real.

The nation Desmond lives in is isolated on all four sides: on three sides by nearly-impassible mountains, and on the fourth by an ocean which is inhospitable and almost entirely non-traversable. It’s a small nation, seven days’ travel by horse long from pass to pass and three days’ travel by horse wide at the widest.

While magic is not believed to exist, it underlies everything, just as the tight isolation, the high price of any trade goods, and the stratified class society do.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1333031.html. You can comment here or there.

There’s an Actual Worldbuilding month from Tumblr

May30

And it’s June!

So pick up to seven days and give them a setting, and I will follow the list of prompts here (http://worldbuildingjune.tumblr.com/) and your list of settings.
If a date isn’t setting’d, I’ll pick whatever I want 😉
1
2 Desmond’s Climb
3 Dragons Next Door
4 Aunt Family
5
6
7
8 Stranded
9 Things Unspoken
10 Things Unspoken

11
12
13 Fairy Town
14
15 Fairy Town
16 Science!
17
18 Space Accountant
19
20 Space Accountant

21
22
23
24
25 Dragons Next Door
26 Stranded
27
28 Aunt Family
29
30

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1331504.html. You can comment here or there.

Alder's Grove Fiction

The Worlds of Lyn Thorne-Alder