Work In Progress
-
Apr
28
L is for Loony
Filed Under Worldbuilding | Leave a Comment
The moon gives us light in the night sky, and is the cause of insanity – that’s where the word lunacy came from. In this entry of the A to Z Worldbuilding Challenge, we’re taking a look at the moon from several different angles.
Astronomy
What is the moon in your world? Is it a dead piece of rock that circles their world? If it is, do they know that? Does your world have more than one moon? If so, you’d better make sure you know what effects it will have on the physical world.
Culture
Every culture comes up with explanations for things they don’t understand. That includes, of course, what’s up in the night sky. Where do your people think the moon came from? In the Gates of Amduat, the moon is a pearl from Basret’s necklace and the stars are diamonds scattered in the sky to give the people light in the darkness.
What do your people think when they look up at the moon? Do they see a face (the Old Man in the Moon), or something else, like a rabbit?
How about the effect of the moon on people? Is it believed to cause insanity, or do “the crazies come out on the full moon”? Why do they believe this? If your world has werewolves (or other shapeshifting beings), is their ability to change their shape tied to the moon, or is that just superstition?
Apr
26
K is for Karats
Filed Under Worldbuilding | Leave a Comment
I wish I had a wonderful story to tell you about why I’ve not posted K, L, M and N, but all I’ve got is excuses. Time for me to do some catching up.
Today’s entry for the A to Z Challenge for Worldbuilding is K is for Karats. Here’s an excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica:
a measure of the fineness (i.e., purity) of gold. It is spelled carat outside the United States but should not be confused with the unit used to measure the weight of gems, also called carat. A gold karat is 124 part, or 4.1667 percent, of the whole, and the purity of a gold alloy is expressed as the number of these parts of gold it contains. Thus, an object that contains 16 parts gold and 8 parts alloying metal is 16-karat gold, and pure gold is 24-karat gold.
And that’s what we’re talking about today: gems, gold, and other things that your fictional cultures consider valuable.
The first thing that comes to mind when we think of treasure is gold, jewels, and lots of lots of money. But that’s not the only thing people can consider valuable. Let’s take a look at the Aztecs (who are the culture I used as a starting point for one of the cultures in Kolrath).
The Aztecs produced gold ornaments, salt, and garments made of fine cloth. These were traded to the people of the lowlands for what the Aztecs valued: jaguar skins, tropical-bird feathers, rubber, cotton, chocolate, and cacao beans. Cacao beans were also used as currency, and there’s evidence of counterfeit beans – and that’s a really big sign of how valuable the Aztecs considered them.
Treasure doesn’t need to be something material either. The aliens in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull valued knowledge – that was their treasure.
So, what do your people consider valuable? Rare shells from the sea? The seeds of an exotic plant? A mineral or metal mined from the ground? But even as you decide what they value, you need to figure out why. Is it for the item’s beauty? Do they use it in their religious rituals? Is it extremely rare and/or difficult to get?
Apr
21
J is for Jail
Filed Under Worldbuilding | Leave a Comment
There will always be people doing the wrong things, breaking the law either willfully or otherwise. Rules to live by, be they purely social or something that’s actually codified into laws or part of a religion.
When doing your worldbuilding, you need to think about laws, crime and punishment, if only because of the conflict it can inspire in your story. What are the laws and what’s the consequence of breaking them are the two obvious questions, but you should also think about why a law exists. For example, why might a religious law forbid the consumption of a particular animal. Perhaps there is something about the animal that caused illness, so it was banned for safety reasons. Maybe the animal is considered sacred, so eating it would be an affront to the gods.
If someone breaks a law, then they will face the consequences of caught. The most common kind of punishment – or perhaps the best well know – is from the Code of Hammurabi: “An eye for an eye.” You do something wrong, you must pay in proportion to what you did. Steal a cow? You either give it back, pay for a new one or replace it with one of yours (note that the Code listed maximum penalties, not the only ones to be paid).
If the laws of your culture require penalties along the lines of locking up criminals for lengths of time, you need to figure out how that’s taken care of. Are people shipped somewhere for their sentence, then allowed to come back if they have the money to pay for passage? Are criminals locked up in equally lousy lice and rat-infested cells, or are the nobility – and those with the money to pay the bribes – give special treatment?
Apr
20
I is for Innocence
Filed Under Worldbuilding | Leave a Comment
There’s innocence in the criminal justice system, and then there’s innocence as related to children, and that’s what we’re looking at in this “episode” of the 2011 A to Z Blogging Challenge.
How does your fictional culture view children? Are they considered to be tiny adults and treated as such? Are they hidden away in nurseries and schoolrooms until they’re ready to be presented to Society, trotted out only at specific times or when their parents want them? Seen, but not heard? Are children considered to be treasures and doted on by everyone? Are they considered to be vermin? (That last one was thanks to my son. Where on earth do 11-year-olds get ideas like that?”
And what about races that look like children to one race, even when they’re not. For example, a halfling could very well look like a human child. How about people who suffer from dwarfism? Are they treated as adults when they reach their age of majority, or are they treated like children because of their size regardless of their age?
Image Attribution:
Apr
19
H is for Hamlet
Filed Under Worldbuilding | Leave a Comment
No, not the Prince of Denmark, but a small village (in Britain, a hamlet is a village without its own church, and is part of the parish of another village or town). They’re features of the landscape and unless your story is set in the vast tracts of nothingness, your characters are going to have to deal with them.
So why do people tend to congregate and then settle down into villages, towns and cities? It’s all about resources. People go to where they find things they need and then stick around. A fishing village in a sheltered bay. A city at the mouth of a river. A village at a crossroads in fertile farmland.
When you’re deciding where your settlements are going to be, you need to figure out why they’re there. There has to be a believable reason. Is it a mining town? No real usable resources around but the city is there? Are the resources almost used up, or perhaps it’s a holy site.
-
GoodReads
Subscribe
