It’s World-Building June! So I’m building Worlds! Aerax/Expectant Woods over on Patreon, and Bear Empire and a new thing here!
Bear Empire
(The setting for Carrone and Deline, Chased in the Bear Empire)
1. Tell us about your world, what’s it about?
The Bear Empire is an arctic nation spanning the northernmost part of a landmass and bordering at least one other nation (Dekleg).
The weather there tends towards the frigid in winter and the temperate in the summer. Continue reading
Originally posted on Patreon in June 2018 and part of the Great Patreon Crossposting to WordPress.
It’s World-Building June! So I’m building Worlds! Here on Patreon, I’m building “Aerax”, the world of Expectant Woods. Over on WordPress, I’m working on Bear Empire, the world of the so-named story, and a new thing called United Space.
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1. Tell us about your world, what’s it about?
Sky Islands!
The world I call Aerax, or at least the continent that the story Expectant Woods takes place on, was the center of a massive Mage-War approx 500 years ago.
The notable remnants of this are a series of islands high in the sky, isolated from the forest, ocean, and mountains below, and ruins of places on the edges of where those islands once were in that forest and those mountains.
Magic is generally considered to be a myth on the islands, but it is still very much alive in the down-below world, although mostly in protected pockets.
Exploring the connection between these two is the subject of the story Expectant Woods; spoilers below.
The islands were raised up on gigantic flower-like stems, bigger than any tree on earth, long-lived and durable but still, in the end, a plant. Travel between the Sky Islands and the lower area is both nearly impossible and completely taboo, which means that the societies have been evolving separately for quite a while.
This land used to be fertile farmland and the heart of a city. Now… Now the ground below lies mostly in jungle and ruins, and the islands above make their own way, each one only tenuously connected to the next.
Want more?
This is a description I wrote up for the Cloverleaf MUX Cal & I are working on, although it’s, uh, a little long and doesn’t even get you very far into the library. But here it is!
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Hummingbird and Roosevelt (the intersection of its address)
Sitting just off of Main street in Tinco Circle, the library is a monument to Greek Revival architecture.
The stairs go up an entire story, and are flanked on either side by leisurely, carefully designed ramps that take their time getting to the top.
Once there, large pillars make the building look even bigger and taller, stomping across an open front area where six-foot tall versions of a few books – Sherlock Holmes tales, Oh The Places You’ll Go, (something else) stand ready to be read one inch-thick page at a time.
To the left side, down a much more sedate little walkway, complete with yellow bricks and poppy flowers to either side, leads through a emerald gate (but not a real green dress that’s cruel… wait.
(but not real emeralds that’d be dumb)
to a bright green door. Inside there is the children’s library. Continue reading
Everyone gets their inspiration from somewhere; every setting has its seeds in something.
Stranded – well, Autumn – came out of the book Blue Highways.
According to Wikipedia, this book came out in 1982. I don’t think I read it that early at all – I would’ve been six – but someone recommended it to my father, and I read it. I was probably in my early teens.
read on…
I was playing around a little with Pinterest and Image Search today.
Here’s some pictures that are pretty close to Autumn’s garb at the Ren Fest, although her costumes are almost always in red, orange, gold, and brown.
Day 12, oops!
So, I’m doing what, every 4 days?
Before the Curse hit their little corner of the world, the Shou were known as the finest artists in all the land – poetry, painted art, sculpture. Now they are known as the finest artificers, but they do still hold some vestiges of art.
They live a shorter lifespan then the average human-variant, but they make up for this with a very quick childhood and a very intense apprenticeship/scholarly period. The apprenticeship is known as “the hard years” and is both headed and followed by one-year “wander times”
Child: notey (NOTE-ay)
(this is a word that is about as generic as “child,” meaning any non-adult.
Apprentice – Het tppey (HET tp(pop)-hay)
to apprentice – Het tpp o
(Fiassh apprenticed to Eyone on her tenth year, when she stopped being a child).
And from that, to take as an apprentice, Tcho het tpp o, which shortened after some time to Tcho o . Technically, that just means to take on, but it is always used in meaning to take on as an apprentice. One who takes on: tchotey.
Sound Inventory 2
I’ve used F, t, pp, S, sh, tch, h, n, kw
ee, e, oou, (a) e, ia (yuh), ey (Fonzie!), o
Desmond’s World
Okay, yay, gender in Desmond’s world!
Gender in this world – or at least in this nation – is marked by clothing, by behavior, and by voiced preference. The clothing is pseudo-Edwardian in style, so it is often the case that Male People wear Pants, Female People Wear Skirts, and so on.
However, people a) sometimes choose to wear robes that hide everything, thus obscuring the question of gender – often for political-functionary roles where gender has no place in the role.
Many roles are still very gendered: someone has to stay home and watch the children, someone has to do the heavy labor, someone has to make meals, and these are often but not always split along gender lines. However, one can choose to put on the role and pronouns of either gender – although in a marriage or other partnership, it is generally considered polite to discuss such things with your partner and work out the roles ahead of time or, if not ahead of time, in teamwork with your partner.
Marriages are often for a combination of procreation and protection of the young, especially among the lower classes, and for those things and for financial unions among the upper classes. Thus, it is generally considered useful to have two people with the appropriate sex organs to make a child together in a marriage, but there are several ways around this, and nobody would ever ask outside of that partnership or forming one. What sex organs you have and who you have sex with is generally considered private business as long as it does not lead to babies.
Babies are raised as genderless until they begin to express a preference, at which point they are generally dressed as that preference until they take over dressing themselves.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1343352.html. You can comment here or there.
Desmond’s World
Stone is is ample supply all around Desmond’s nation, and that is amply evident in their building, which is wood-supplemented stone for the most part. The oldest buildings are often dry stacked stone, some of them just literally stacked, others carved cleverly and carefully to join perfectly while losing as little stone as possible.
In the Capital City, further from the mountains than many of the, stone and wood are used more equally: buildings are often wattle-and-daub over timber frames (think “Tudor” houses) wit tall stone foundations, often mortared together.
You can often tell the mage-wars-time buildings, because their stones are improbably large, their joins improbably tight, and their polishing improbably bright even after hundreds of years.
The Potentate’s Palace and the City Hall Building are from that time.
(Another feature of buildings from that time is an Escher-esque opinion about dimensions and architecture, even in houses now owned by the lower-middle or lower class. You might still wander into a poor person’s home and find that it improbably fits an extended family of twenty comfortably in a narrow building in a tiny lot that does not tower over its neighbors. Sometimes these buildings have views of other places, as well, out windows that should not show anything but the neighbors’ underwear: the mountains, the sea, even another nation. These houses are tightly-guarded secrets which nobody speaks of, often owned by the same family for centuries, by some deed from a long-dead Potentate.)
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1341890.html. You can comment here or there.
The Tinies are creatures of the Dragons Next Door setting and are loosely based on my memories of the Borrowers books.
This was meant to be a short microfic – oops.
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The Tinies had lived alongside humans as long as the humans had been living in houses, and, although they were a scattered and fragmented society, they had traditions and unwritten rules that they carried from home to home and community to community, mostly carried by the old, those past their adventuring days.
I’m a bit behind on the next chapter of the Expectant Wood, so have a piece of history I wrote a while ago in the meantime.
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The land was rising.
The people on the islands and the small nation of Aerax clung to whatever support they could find. The last magical explosions of the Roquelan Wars had been over for days. Nobody had expected another attack.
I don’t even remember what I wrote this for, but it suits the theme of May.
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They liked their god, and so they’d kept him. Around them, the world had crumbled to pieces, the new gods, creatures like him, warring against the self-appointed protectors of humanity. In their little fort on the hill, though, they’d been drunk, happy and content to stay that way. And every season, they’d paid homage to their new god, for all he gave them.
Free for all “Trunk” Level Patrons!
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1339074.html. You can comment here or there.
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.