World Building: Designing a People

When building worlds from the ground up it is very important to design who will live in that world. For worlds this is "simply" creating a culture of a people. In this case however I would be creating new races.

When writing fantasy the usual picks are humans, elves, dwarfs, orks, and trolls (or some mix & match). These races have generally well defined rolls already before the writer ever touches them. I for one started no different.

I wanted to have the basic rolls that elves, humans, and dwarfs offered to each other. One race to be smart and mystical and others to be strong and brave, but this got to be too much like every other piece of work in the field. I wanted to bring something new to the table. So I made a few rules:

1. No humans allowed. I wanted to make something new and humans are too relatable.
2. All races could not be one of the usual fantasy races with just something extra. No long tailed goblins or furry elves.
3. All races could not be an animal morphed to look like people. I did not want this to become a montage of furry-ness.

This in mind I did decide the best way of making organic creatures was to start with critters I knew and expand and change till I had something that felt different. So I grabbed a zoology textbook and thought about how different worlds would/could make different types of people. One of these ideas lead me to study how varying gravity and atmospheric conditions would alter a creatures interaction with a world.

To this end I wrote out a list of probably around 100 creature ideas. I played with the roles of the classical races. Then I thought about it in terms of a game.

When I thought "How would I make an online MMORPG about this?" my ideas and how I should build things seemed simpler. Designing my world to be lived in my more sense than designing it to look pretty. This also gave me a lot of perspective the people.

On an online game having hundreds of races would be just plain annoying. Also trying to talk about too much in a book would bog down the important stuff of the story. So I settled on around 7 races as being optimal.

As I created religions for these groups a lot of the story fell into place for me. Thinking about how they would interact created how the races should be like.

I settled on taking the function of the fantasy race I needed (example orks) then combined them with the attributes I found interesting (such as pachyderms) and combined those thoughts with a real-world country of the same time period as the book (the Spanish Empire) and created a race of creatures I felt was not a complete rip off of one thing, but a combination of several ideas.

Next time religion building.

On Planning of a Novel: World Building One

My first thoughts for my novel was a jumbled mess of concepts and ideas. To put it lightly I knew I wanted fantasy adventures and I wanted ultra-action. That is to say I wanted to write something fun and to have fun writing it.

I started by thinking some random things I would want in a novel for me to have fun with. I decided that magic, steam-based technology, and zombies would be pretty sweet to fit together. I let my interest guide my ideas.

After running these ideas over and over again in my head I started to think about how all those things could fit together as I wanted them to. I started off with a single idea--the airship. This single thought acted like a seed. After I started thinking of my world like a swash buckling adventure.

I asked questions like: how would you defend a city from a floating fortress? How would an army with magic and technology fight? What would people in a would like this look like?

From there I started studying, collecting, and cataloging pictures from the internet to reference as I created my world. I would Google image search things like: steampunk, fantasy, dragon, magic, troll, airship... etc. I also started looking into art from the 1700's (an era I choose to set my technology on). So I went to the local library and read everything that I had a gap in understanding for.

For example I read a book of 18th century navy ships. I contained drawings of ships by floors, uniform descriptions, and history of important battles. From this I gained a detailed look at how the warfare of the time would work.

The end result was something workable and interesting to me, but it was nothing more than a series of concepts.

To put them together I would need the people to live there and how they would look and interact...