Creative Runoff

Today, I’ll make up some history. There are two main rules for making up history in a fantasy world:

1. Steal from reality
2. There is no second rule.

That’s it. There’s no real guidlines for making up history; that’s what makes it so fun. You can borrow a bit from reality, but if you have a nation that used to be a series of colonies, threw off its oppressors, and is now the most powerful country in the world, people are gonna start wondering.

I have some idea of how this is going to go, so I’ll just start off, and see where I go, or if I even manage to go anywhere.

So. About 2000 years ago, there were three major factions living in the region we’re focusing on: elves based in the southern swamps, dwarves in the northern mountains, and minotaurs in the eastern steppes, who are in basically the same state they are in the present.

The elves and the dwarves both started expanding their respective empires. This involved the subjugation of various tribes of humans roaming the plains and forests at that time: both elves and dwarves conquered their lands and enslaved them. At about 1700 years ago, these empires reach each other’s borders; the elven empire is roughly the size of the current Serpentborn empire, and the dwarven empire contains the current dwarven territory, what is currently Sancteria, and the land in between. A few wars occur between the two. During these wars, it becomes the practice to use human slaves as foot soldiers.

At about 1500 years ago, both the elves and the dwarves give up on trying to conquer each other and content themselves with making colonies in the other lands to the north and south. At this point in time, the minotaur tribes come under a powerful leader, who attempts to conquer the lands to the west. Although this is unsuccesful, the dwarven empire is weakened significantly. The elves invade, and conquer most of the dwarven land, pushing the dwarves back to present-day Thelbidar and freeing most of the dwarven slaves, who were stationed near the border to fight off the minotaurs.

Although the elves are technically victorious, their empire is now spread rather thin. The human slaves, who are stationed almost entirely in the conquered dwarven lands to help with the elfization of the land, rebel. The elves are thrown out of what is now Sancteria, and several small kingdoms emerge based on the tribes the humans were in before they were enslaved.

At around 1400 years ago, the elves attempt to reconquer the human lands. The fragmented humans unite to throw them off, along with the dwarves, who simply wish to spite the elves.

The elves back off for the moment. Around fifty years later, political disputes occur, and the elven empire splits in two. One elven kingdom is based in the swamps of the south, with the other one being nearer to the human kingdoms.

Relative peace reigns for several centuries. The human lands are the rough equivalent of eastern europe, several empires form, fragment, and reform.

At around 1000 years ago, the Serpentborn arrive. They come in boats from far across the sea, where, apparently, there’s a jungle full of ‘em. The specific tribe that the Serpentborn belong to was exiled from the homeland of the Serpentborn for some reason (that’s a good subject for a plot tangent later on) and they need a new home. So, they arrive in the southern swamps and crush the elves currently inhabiting them. They attempt to crush the other nation of elves as well, but as the other elves had more warning, they are repelled succesfully. Over the next several centuries, they occasionally attack, but are unsuccesful.

At around 850 years ago, the minotaurs invade again. The dwarves, humans, and elves unite to repel them. Afterwards, the Serpentborn attack again. Weakened as they are by the war with the minotaur tribes, the elves are unable to defend very effectively, and the Serpentborn rampage through half of the elven land before they are stopped.

Roughly fifty years later, the human nations are united by a religious leader. This leader declares both elves and dwarves heathens, and demands war be waged on both of them. As the dwarves can hide in their mountains, they are damaged little, but the elves are almost completely eradicated. The survivors flee to lands unknown.

Uninhibited by the elves, the Serpentborn begin to expand. They attack the humans, who, under the lead of the same religious fanatic, repel them, and invade them in turn. This goes on for a while, until the religious leader is assassinated. The humans fragment into various kingdoms again, although by this time, who is in whose tribe is rather obscure, so they split along more political boundaries. The Serpentborn are in similar chaos, and wallow in their swamps killing each other for a while.

Nothing of much importance happens for several centuries. Then, at around 300 years ago, the minotaurs invade again. Sancteria had been born by that point, and repelled the minotaurs with sophisticated military tactics.

At around 150 years ago, Sancteria attempts to conquer Thelbidar, and is repulsed. After the war, they begin diplomatic relationships with the dwarves.

At roughly 50 years ago, the Serpentborn stop squabbling and begin to expand again. This leads to the current-day situation.

You’ll notice I didn’t mention Avinar: they don’t really have a role in the history of the rest of the factions. Avinar is a relatively stable kingdom, and really hasn’t changed much in the last several millenia, aside from developing higher technologies.

Well, there’s the history. Hope you liked it.

Tomorrow… I’m not sure what I’ll do tomorrow. Maybe I’ll discuss the mechanics of the various factions, and how they’ll function in battle.

In this thrilling episode of World-Building Time, we’re gonna name everything. This is harder than it sounds, because you have to make the names sound right, and also make sure you haven’t inadvertantly plagiarized anyone. Cause that’d be bad.

Let’s start with our factions. For the lizardmen we’ll stick with calling them the Serpentborn. The roaming minotaur tribes will just be called the Minotaur Tribes. I’m not sure what to call the dwarves. For now, we’ll just use the Dwarven Empire. If anybody has anything better, tell me, and I’ll use it. We’ll call the roman guys the Sancterial Empire (Sanctioned + Magisterial – combining random words that have something to do with the thing you’re trying to name is very effective. I got those two words from looking up “imperial” in a thesaurus). The egyptochinese guys can be the Kingdom of Avinar (The word Avinar is completely made up, although according to a quick google search it’s a movie directed by Shahram Assadi… oh well). I’m kind of uncomfortable using the word “Empire” twice, so again, if anybody has a suggestion for the dwarves… tell me.

Let’s name some other places. We’ll start with what our various lands are called. The lands of the two human factions are called Sancteria and Avinar, obviously. While we could derive these names from the names of the factions, the other faction names are more generalized, and we can’t do that for them. So, we’ll have to pull other random names out of our asses. Let’s name the Dwarf kingdom Thelbidar. It’s nice and dwarfy. You have to be careful with dwarf names because they’re all the same. I’ve seen three SEPERATE dwarf kingdoms named Thorbardin, Thoradin, and Thorin. They’re all the same. Gaah.

The name for the land of the Serpentborn should be lizardman-like (fun fact: when I tried to type lizardman right there, it came out “lardman” the first time). This means V’s, K’s, and an assload of S’s. Let’s call their land Sevasi’ith. The minotaurs need a name that sounds vaguely tribal… how about Ugoras? I got that from an online place name generator, found here. Never be afraid to use a generator if you’re stuck on a name, some of those generators are actually really advanced.

So, we’ve got all our lands named. Let’s name the capitals. The dwarven capital shall be called Ak Terruth-Mar, because it sounds nice and dwarfy. The capital of Sancteria should sound imperial, and maybe be short, like rome was… maybe Holath? -ath is always a good suffix for any name of anything, it makes things nice and dignified-sounding. The capital of Sevasi’ith also has to sound lizardy. Let’s use Vassanar. -ar or -nar are both good suffixes too. The capital of Avinar should sound vaguely mediterranean… let’s use Coratha. The minotaur aren’t a cohesive empire, and thus do not have a capital.

Let’s name some other shit. Mountain ranges and lakes both usually have names. The southern mountains should be called something nice and classically fantastical… let’s go with the Wyrmtalon Mountains. They probably have a lot of dragons roosting in them or something… this is good because is presents yet another barrier between Avinar and the rest of the world. The northern mountains are inhabited by dwarves, and thus would be named vaguely dwarfishly… the Kargast Mountains.

The lake in the southeast would be named in the tongue of the Serpentborn. Let’s call it Lake Kevaassan. Well we’re naming shit, let’s name the ocean as well. We’ll stick with simple and call it the Western Sea. I’m not going to name the world itself, because we don’t name worlds. When we came around to naming our own world, you know what we called it? Earth. We named it after the ground. Gaah.

Now we’ll make a map and stick all our wonderful names on it.

There we go. Tomorrow I’ll discuss the history of our world, why everyone is where they are, and why the various factions hate who they hate.

Today, I’ll be discussing what goes where in the world we’ve created. In the end, there’ll be a map, and it will be wonderful.

First, we need to decide what we need to have on this map. We need biomes that can support all of the factions we’ve decided on, and we need to have them arranged logically. We can’t, for example, have a tundra right next to a rainforest. That doesn’t even begin to make sense.

So, what biomes do we need? Well, each of our factions has a specific cultural background, so we can decide where they live based on their culture. The roman/greek humans probably live in a region with lots of temperate woodlands/grasslands. Dwarves live in mountains. The minotaurs need a lot of steppe to roam. The egyptian/chinese humans probably live way far south, with a desert standing in the way.

The Serpentborn are complicated. As a rule, Lizardmen either live in jungles or swamps. Living in a jungle would go more with the aztec theme, but we wouldn’t be able to pull it off correctly. Why? Because of the way rainforests work. Rainforest belts are past desert belts, so the Serpentborn would end up being even more isolated than the egyptian/chinese guys. So, we’ll go with a large expanse of swamp. That’s going to require a coast and lots of rivers.

Now, we basically know what we need to make our world function. But before I map it out, I’m going to rant a bit. The rant begins thus: god, I HATE how fantasy geography works. I recently had a geology class in school, so I know a bit more than I used to about how continents form and what they’re supposed to look like. And continents do not form in blobs. My favorite fantasy series, Dragonlance, is extremely guilty of this. Look up a map of Ansalon on google image search: it’s a blob. Also, it’s not even consistent, a bunch of different maps of it show completely different sizes of things. The same goes for Taladas, the other continent in Dragonlance. Even Warcraft is guilty of this to some amount; Kalimdor’s basic shape is that of something you find in the toilet.

The best way to counter this without too much effort is the way Tolkein and the Inheritance Trilogy did it: portray the known world as a piece of a larger continent. You can still keep basically the same shape, but if you only have one or two sides surrounded by water instead of four, the rest of the continent could be any shape whatsoever and it wouldn’t matter.

With that concept in mind, I set out to create my map. Of course, this took me ages, as I have issues with perfectionism, but eventually:

This is our world. It took me a while because, as previously stated, I’m a huge perfectionist. The blue is water, the white is land, the purple lines are mountains. Notice that most of the mountains are on the northwestern coast, while a small amount are in the southeastish area. These are probably the result of an ancient collision of land masses, such as the one that resulted in India and the Himalayas in reality. The islands to the west of those mountains probably resulted from the same collision, while the islands even further to the west are probably volcanic.

Now that we have some geography layed out, let’s define the ranges of our five factions. I’m thinking something like this:

There we go. As you can see, the minotaurs have the most territory, but that’s not really a cohesive empire. It’s really just a lot of steppe with minotaur tribes roaming here and there. The Serpentborn have a very large empire in the swamps to the southwest, with their northern border almost touching the slightly smaller empire of the roman-type guys. The dwarves live in the mountains to the northwest, and the egyptochinese dudes live in the far south, cut off from the rest of the world by mountains and a desert. Their civilization is mostly based around a large river, like ancient Egypt was based around the Nile.

That’s enough for today. Tomorrow, I’ll name everything, and maybe discuss some history or political relationships or something.

This post builds on my previous two world-building posts. So, if you haven’t read them, do so.

Today, I’m going to examine the cultures that will be present in my fantasy world. I’ll go over all the races that I’ve chosen and what they’ll be like.

The races that I’ve chosen are humans, dwarves, minotaurs and lizardmen, with elves making an appearance later. I’ll skip defining elven culture for right now, because they won’t come in until later. Also… they’re elves. We all know what elves are. Pansy forest-hippies.

Let’s begin with dwarves. Dwarves are dwarves. They’re short, they drink, and if they get angry at you, they’ll cut off your legs at the knee. That’s just what we need. Since we’re planning for an RTS here, and dwarves are going to be a playable faction, we’ll keep them being stereotypical dwarves. An entire faction of violent little buggers would be amusing. Part of the point of this post is to define what they’ll be like in battle. I’m thinking the dwarves will be violent berserkers, with large amounts of siege weapons. I like siege weapons. I’m figuring, what with dwarves being good with making stuff and also being violent little bastards, they’ll have invented a shitload of siege weapons. It’ll be great.

Next we have the lizardmen. I don’t like the word lizardmen. The lizardmen wouldn’t call themselves that, because it’s too descriptive. Do we refer to ourselves as furless monkeys? No, we don’t. The lizardmen would probably have some inpronouncable word for themselves, with lots of S’s. Probably, everyone else calls them lizardmen, and they hate that term.

Let’s say that, roughly translated, the lizardmen call themselves the serpentborn. This probably ties in with their religion. They worship some strange old snake-god whose end goal is destruction of the known universe. Let’s give them an Aztec-like culture. Temples, huge flippin’ empire, sacrifices to dark gods. Only, because this is fantasy, we can have the dark gods answer. I think Serpentborn gameplay is going to be based heavily on catching enemies and sacrificing them to summon more powerful units… or maybe to bless the units you already have or something. The concept of a faction whose more powerful units require sacrifices to be created fascinates me.

I think the plot will tie in heavily with the Serpentborn and their attempts to summon a god whose awakening will bring about the apocalypse. I don’t think all the other races would like their foot soldiers being captured and sacrificed in an attempt to induce the end of the world. I’ll have to invent a really cool name for the god later, because what’s a god of doom without a completely inpronounceable name?

Now for minotaurs. I really don’t know what I want to do with minotaurs. I’ve only seen minotaurs done really well twice, and they had completely different cultures in both instances (I talked about this last post). This means that I really don’t have a very good starting place to work on for minotaurs. I mean, everyone knows what dwarves are, and in most games lizardmen have that dark god worshipping thing going on.

Not knowing exactly what I was doing, I decided to think for a bit. What could I do with minotaurs? Well, in Dragonlance there are a lot of minotaur pirates. We could have minotaurs be a seafaring faction, heavily navy based, that kind of thing. That’d be kind of shitty if you played them on maps with not very much water, though. What else? Well… they could be bandits. But an entire faction of bandits is kinda weak.

Then it hit me. Mongols! Everyone loves mongols. Well… the chinese circa 1220 probably didn’t. But who cares about them? The minotaurs could be a largely cavalry-based faction… though they’re gonna need frickin’ huge horses for it. The minotaurs probably aren’t one cohesive empire, but lots of little tribes, that are occasionally brought together by a powerful ruler. That could be the subject of a campaign… subjugate the rival tribes and wage warfare on the empires to the east. I like that.

Our last subject is humans. I’ve left them for last for a reason: they’re gonna take a while. I plan on having several factions of humans, so we’ll need cultures for each of ‘em.

First of all, let’s look at how humans are usually portrayed in fantasy. They have castles, knights, kings, etcetera. In fact, in about 95% of fantasy works, they’re basically medieval europeans. So… fuck that. Let’s do something completely different, I’m sick to death of castles anyway.

What other cultures can we think of that our humans can be? Well… the romans. The greeks. The egyptians. The norse. American indians. The chinese. Eskimos. The phoenicians. All those miscellanious middle eastern nomadic thingies. In fact, once we get past castles and kings, there’s really no limit to how many different cultures we can use.

For our world, let’s go with romans and greeks to start with. I figure the major human presence on our world is a large-ish empire that’s basically a combination of ancient greece and ancient rome. On the roman side, they’re violent, imperialistic, and they really like to throw people they don’t like into an arena and watch lions eat them. On the greek side, they’re relatively artistic as well, and have the occasional philosopher. Their architecture will be a combination of both. They probably are very diverse ethnically, as some of the peoples they’ve conquered in the past have had time to absorb into their society.

That’s one faction of humans. I want some more, though. Humans are always the most popular race/faction/whatever in any game I’ve played (other than elves, but we don’t got no elves), so I’m gonna split ‘em up a bit so as to prevent everyone from playing one faction.

How ’bout egyptians? They won’t build pyramids, though, that’d be too much of a ripoff of actual history (it’s only fiction if some people don’t actually notice that you’ve stolen half your stuff from reality). They’ll be really religious, nomadic type people. They’ll probably be more technologically advanced than a lot of the other factions, but they won’t have much of an empire because there’s a whole lot of sand in the way. Actually, I’m kinda likin’ the technology thing… how about a fusion between egyptians and the chinese? Maybe we’ll even give ‘em gunpowder. What the hell.

That’s probably enough for now. We’ve got violent, siege weapon-using dwarves, dark god-worshipping lizardmen, tribal, mongol-based minotaurs, an empire of roman/greek-like humans, and a technologically advanced kingdom of humans that only haven’t conquered everyone else because of a huge farkin’ desert. That’s sufficient.

Tommorow, I’ll lay out some geography. It’ll be fun.

This builds on what I discussed in my previous post. You should probably read that before you read this.

So. In this thrilling episode of world building, I’ll be examining the races I want to have present in my world (I’m putting off cultures until next post). I’ll start off by going over the stereotypical fantasy races, and choosing which ones I want present.

First of all, humans. Humans are present in every fantasy world I have yet seen. I really hate how humans are self-centered enough to include themselves in EVERY work of fiction they create. Unfortunately, humans are neccesary. They hold fantasy worlds together. The player (or reader, or whatever) needs someone who they can relate to. Also, the role humans play in fantasy worlds is very, very neccesary.

I’ve tried to write a fantasy story with no humans in it. The story started at a crowded tavern full of elves, dwarves, and one half-ogre. The problem I ran into was: who the hell runs the tavern? Dwarves would be out of place in an elven tavern. Elves would be out of place in a dwarven tavern. Both of them would shoot the half-ogre on sight. And what was the other half of the ogre? Gah. It’s impossible to do fantasy without humans. You need a starting place for everything, and humans are that place. If any other race took the place, they’d immediately become human in the eyes of the player/reader/whatever.

So humans are in. As humans are the most flexible of fantasy races(no predefined personality, humans can range from graceful assassin to benevolent priestess to smelly drunkard) , I’ll probably have several factions with humans as the main component.

Next we have elves. God, I hate elves. How many bloody kinds of elves can you have? High elves, wood elves, dark elves, sea elves, kitchen elves, who knows!? Ugh. Elves are out. Actually, I’ll make it so that there were elves, but some complete bastard religious fanatic went and purged them because they were considered heathens, so the ones that weren’t executed ran off to hide somewhere. That’s a good idea because it leaves room for an expansion, when the vengeful elves return to beat the shit out of everyone else.

Our next subject is dwarves. I’ve always liked dwarves. They drink a lot, they’re violent little buggers, and they have fun accents. Also, they’re not nearly as annoying as elves. I’ve never seen a Gimli fanboy/girl, but Legolas… *shudder*. Dwarves don’t usually have as many variations as elves, and when they do, it’s usually because of political issues instead of actual racial differences. Somebody got drunk and axed somebody else’s dog, so now there’s Hill Dwarves and Mountain Dwarves and they both hate each other’s guts. Dwarves are so in.

Now for orcs. I’m not too hot on orcs. All the best fantasy games/novels always either leave orcs out or do something funky with them (this is obviously excluding Tolkein’s novels and D&D, the archetypal fantasy novels/game). Think about it. Dragonlance doesn’t have any orcs. The Inheritance Trilogy(Eragon) doesn’t have any orcs (although urgals are basically the same thing). Warcraft’s got orcs, but they’re shamanistic and not evil by definition (the inheritance trilogy does the same thing with urgals in the second book). I’m not qualified to comment on warhammer, as I don’t have much experience with it. I don’t particularly feel like ripping off Warcraft, so orcs are out.

So. We’ve got Humans and Dwarves, with Elves making a triumphant comeback in an expansion. That’s probably not gonna be enough, so let’s pull some other races out of our collective asses. We’ve gone through all the super stereotypical fantasy races, let’s go through some lesser-used ones.

Ogres and trolls. I’m talking about these together because they’re pretty much interchangeable. Warcraft is the ONLY fantasy universe I’ve seen that does something nice to differentiate between trolls and ogres, and they do this by completely changing what a troll is. Think about it. Tolkein has trolls. They’re big, stupid, and brutal. Dragonlance has ogres. They’re big, stupid, and brutal. Inheritance doesn’t have either. I’m gonna leave ‘em both out too, as fundamentally changing what a race is (basically what warcraft did) is probably a bad idea. Warcraft got away with it, and warcraft trolls are awesome and I love them. But it probably won’t work twice.

Goblins. What the hell is a goblin? In Tolkein it’s pretty damn vague, in D&D they’re like smaller orcs, and in Dragonlance they’re little disfigured sociopaths that are used as minions by everybody else. I don’t really care for goblins. They’re out.

Minotaurs. I fucking love minotaurs. They’re just so awesome. I’ve seen them tackled two different ways, the Dragonlance way and the Warcraft way (they might have called them Tauren, but they were totally minotaurs). In Dragonlance they’re based heavily on ancient rome (arena a central part of lifestyle, very powerful army and navy, they like to conquer things) and in Warcraft they’re essentially american indians. Whatever, I’ll settle what they’re like next post with culture. For now, minotaurs are totally in.

Lizardmen. Not many fantasy worlds have lizardmen, and even less of them have lizardmen that actually matter in the world. That’s enough of a reason to have lizardmen, and we’ll give ‘em a huge frickin’ empire too. I like lizardmen a lot.

That’s enough for now. To summarize:

In:

• Humans
• Dwarves
• Elves (Later)
• Minotaurs
• Lizardmen

Out:

• Orcs
• Trolls
• Ogres
• Goblins

You’ll notice I haven’t even talked about halflings and gnomes. That’s because too many short things get on my nerves.

Tommorow I’ll get down to defining the culture of each of my chosen races. Some of them are going to have multiple factions based on them, most probably humans, maybe dwarves. We’ll see.

Okay.  To start myself off, I’m going to post an idea that’s been rolling around in my head for the past week or so.  I am doing this because it’s 1:20 AM, everyone else in the house is asleep, and I am BORED.

To begin, let’s define world-building a bit.  World-building is the process of creating a fictional world.  World-building is most commonly used in novels, or games that rely heavily on storyline.  Heavily story-reliant games are mostly RPGs, although they can take the form of RTSs too (examples: Warcraft I, II, and III; Rise of Legends).  Other game genres usually don’t rely on stories so much, and thus, it’s kind of useless to world-build for them.

So.  Now that we have that, let’s define what kind of world I want to build.  In this series of posts (it’s going to take more than one), I’m going to let you see my thought process as I create my own little world.  Obviously, I’m not going to let you see my entire thought process, because I don’t want to have to peel your brain off the wall afterwards.  But you’ll at least get an idea of how this world was generated.

First off, my world is going to be a fantasy setting.  I chose this because I have an irrational love for high fantasy (you should see my collection of Dragonlance books…).

It’s always a good idea to keep in mind what the world is eventually going to be used for.  A world designed for a novel will have different requirements than a world designed for an RPG.  Let’s say that my world is going to be used for an RTS.  I’ve been very interested in the RTS genre lately… this probably stems from my wanting to play Rise of Legends, and my not being able to play Rise of Legends.  Curse you, inferior video card!

For those of you who don’t know, RTS stands for Real Time Strategy.  An RTS is one of those games where you control little armies, and they kill each other in real time (that means no turns or anything).  Examples of RTSs include the Warcraft series, the Age of Empires series, and Rise of Nations/Legends.

Making a world for a game means that you always have to keep gameplay in mind.  If the intelligent life on your world is limited to one village of humans that survived the recent plague… well, that’s not very good for an RTS.  Is your world a realistic dark ages setting with no magic or magic-like stuff at all?  Well, that’s gonna do shitcicles for an RPG.  Always keep gameplay in mind.

With an RTS, this means that you’re always going to have to think about which factions are large enough to be playable, relationships between various kingdoms/empires/races/whatever, and lots of other stuff.  In addition, you’ll have to think about what would happen if there were expansions for your RTS.  Because everyone loves expansions.  Even Hitler loved expansions.

So.  We’ve got that my world is going to be a fantasy world, and that it’s going to be intended for use in an RTS.  We’ve also got a ton of vaguely coherent rambling and references to games you probably haven’t played.  That’s enough for today.  Tommorow, I’ll talk about which races are going to be included in this world of mine, and which cultures will be present.  Or I might forget, or just not feel like it.  But I’ll try.