Worldbuilding

  1. I Wanna Be a Wizard When I Grow Up! (Part 2)

    As promised, here's a brief overview of the way my school system works. The magic system in my world is elemental (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), but mages (Wielders - working name) are more like Avatar benders than energy-wielding Aes Sedai. Magic ability is inborn: there are four "nodes" around the world that emanate energy, so the people who live near each node have the chance to be born with the ability to use the related elemental magic. There are several groups and organizations that...
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  2. Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology...

    There have been several threads about magic and tech on this forum, so I thought I'd write a post about it. So you're writing a story, and it's either fantasy or urban fantasy, and magic and tech coexist. Great. The only problem is, you don't know how to make it work. Before I begin, I'll assume that you've got a fair idea how your magic system works. If you don't, you'd better sit down and do that before anything else, because you'll never get anywhere without it. Now then: * How long...
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  3. Necessity is the Mother of Invention

    I'm going to backtrack a bit here. Since I started off with fantasy, I didn't really see a need to worry about technology, so I skipped over that part. Some time after doing the basic world development, though, I asked myself that magical phrase "what if?". In this case, it was "what if the world had more advanced tech before the Sundering, akin to Final Fantasy?" (Refer to this post for more info about the history.) That got the gears turning. Since I'd already determined that the...
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  4. The Cost of Doing Magic

    If you write fantasy, one of the things you'll hear (probably over and over) is "magic should have a cost" (or, often, must have a cost). I saw it many times when I was looking at magic systems for my story, and I've seen it plenty of times on this forum too. While I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment (it makes for an interesting story), it's become something that people parrot without any real comprehension, like "show don't tell", or that whole thing about dialogue tags. (Hint:...
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  5. Money Makes the World Go 'Round

    Since my characters are going to be travelling to various nations, I did some research on coins and currency. Coinage is one of those things that seems really minor, but it's the minor details that more verisimilitude. There's an amazing variance in the kinds of coinage used throughout history. The first coins were created in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE in Greece, India, and China (aka, the earliest civilizations). China even had paper money about a thousand years ago. Coins can take a...
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  6. Mysteries

    Everyone loves a good mystery. I'm not talking about the classic whodunnit, but the less common mysteries you find in fantasy worlds - the abandoned city, the ancient statues, the strange carvings lining the face of a cliff in the middle of nowhere. Who made them, when, and why? This is something that's often overlooked in fantasy stories. Take our world, for example. Angkor Wat, the Nazca Lines, Macchu Picchu, the Cahokia Mounds, the Easter Island moai, Stonehenge... all of these are...
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  7. Elves and Dwarves and Orcs, Oh My!

    So you've created a world and populated it with various cultures. You've probably already decided long before now whether or not to add non-human races, and which ones they'll be, so let's take a moment to think this over. In the 80s and 90s, it seemed like elves, dwarves, orcs and such were pretty much required to appear in any fantasy world, thanks to the influences of D&D and similar RPGs. In the last 10 years or so, though, fantasy is becoming more human-centric, with the other races...
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  8. A Rose by Any Other Name...

    What's in a name? Quite a lot, actually. You probably know the saying "the clothing makes the man"... well, it's the same with names. Unlike real people, characters can get any name you wish to give them, so you should make the effort to give them something that fits - both the person and the story. You don't want to call your fantasy knight Joebob Bumblethorpe III, unless you're writing a parody, in which case it's perfect. As I mentioned before, I write fantasy, and it's tough for me to...
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  9. Cultures and Nations

    I couldn't think of any clever titles this time. These two kind of go hand-in-hand, so I thought I'd deal with them in one post. I've been working on cultures and nations for awhile now, and it's been coming along, slowly. One thing that helped me was to come up with a "continental archetype" - that is, what type of culture is predominant over a given continent. For example: Ivros, the continent housing the Creuzland Imperium, is largely European - Creuzland is Germanic; it rose to power a...
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  10. Makin' Magic, Makin' Magic

    Yes, it's another magic entry. Last time I just blathered on about my magic system; this time I want to talk about magic in general. For the purposes of this entry, those who use magic will be referred to as mages, the use of magic is casting, and the end effect is a spell. Magic Types There are dozens upon dozens of different types of magic. In her guide Magical World Building, Stephanie Cottrell Bryant describes four basic types: Sorcery: Also called wizardry, this is the classical magic...
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  11. All the World's a Stage...

    World-building, for me, is hard. I know some people can spend all their time doing nothing BUT world-building and coming up with millennia of history and entire books of lore, but I just can't seem to do that - all those little details escape me. Even if you're only doing a small portion of one, you have to include geography, climate, economics, and sociology (basically: where is the place located, what kind of weather does it have, what kind of coinage and industry does it have, what kind...
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  12. Worldbuilding: Starting at the Beginning

    I've hemmed and hawed over doing this for awhile now: would anyone read it, would they find it worthwhile/interesting, was I just wasting my time. Finally I said screw it. Blogs are mostly self-gratification anyway, a way for people to carry on about things that interest a handful of people besides themselves, and maybe it'll help me get my thoughts in order and motivate me a bit. So. What's this all about? World-building. No, don't worry - I'm not going to carry on about how great my world...
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