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World building
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2019-01-04 at 5:38 PM UTCDoes anybody here do this? I've been creating a universe as a way to work out some philosophical ideas I'm struggling with. So far I've come up with a few thousand years of history for a number of races and their cultures with corresponding maps. Every day I add in a little more detail. The end goal is to create something that will serve as the basis for a roleplaying campaign, but the further along I get, the prospect of a novel becomes more tangible. It's very time-consuming, though, and almost defeats the more productive intention I set out with.
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2019-01-04 at 6:03 PM UTCYes.
I like to think about portals that go to other planets with aliens and strange technology with spaceship laser battles before I go to bed. -
2019-01-04 at 6:22 PM UTC
Originally posted by Zanick Does anybody here do this? I've been creating a universe as a way to work out some philosophical ideas I'm struggling with. So far I've come up with a few thousand years of history for a number of races and their cultures with corresponding maps. Every day I add in a little more detail. The end goal is to create something that will serve as the basis for a roleplaying campaign, but the further along I get, the prospect of a novel becomes more tangible. It's very time-consuming, though, and almost defeats the more productive intention I set out with.
No, I didn't get in the beta.
https://civilization.com/ -
2019-01-04 at 6:57 PM UTCYea I let my imagination run wild sometimes and imagine up fantasy worlds. I'll write about some of them in my notebook sometimes. Some of them are ongoing movies where I am the director, and I'll close my eyes and play them out.
I have a "mind movie" these days about a space war in a crescent shaped galaxy. In the void inside the crescent, there is a black hole, and this is a cosmic barrier to travelling "across" the croissant, and this serves multiple purposes.
Also, the cosmic scale allows me to imagine futuristic tech but also the political intrigue that is enabled by slow communications, as it used to be before the invention of telephony. Many classic political dramas are impossible because phones exist, old school military tactics are impossible because of telephony and satellite+aerial reconnaissance. But not so when you're dealing with cosmic distances.
In space, momentum from high speed travel is also difficult to reverse or brake due to physics. So ship dogfights play out like naval warfare in 3 dimensions. Everything is about time, trajectories, information and decision making. These battle sections are about teamwork, politics, how the ships work like an organism internally, they are clashes of commanders and their philosophies, their skills as leaders and their relationships to their crews, rather than a direct battle of arms.
There are also small skirmishing "fighter" crafts for more traditional dogfighting combat scenarios, which allows personal, individual storylines to develop.
I write down the least trite stories.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2019-01-04 at 7:20 PM UTC
Originally posted by Loing Yea I let my imagination run wild sometimes and imagine up fantasy worlds. I'll write about some of them in my notebook sometimes. Some of them are ongoing movies where I am the director, and I'll close my eyes and play them out.
I have a "mind movie" these days about a space war in a crescent shaped galaxy. In the void inside the crescent, there is a black hole, and this is a cosmic barrier to travelling "across" the croissant, and this serves multiple purposes.
Also, the cosmic scale allows me to imagine futuristic tech but also the political intrigue that is enabled by slow communications, as it used to be before the invention of telephony. Many classic political dramas are impossible because phones exist, old school military tactics are impossible because of telephony and satellite+aerial reconnaissance. But not so when you're dealing with cosmic distances.
In space, momentum from high speed travel is also difficult to reverse or brake due to physics. So ship dogfights play out like naval warfare in 3 dimensions. Everything is about time, trajectories, information and decision making. These battle sections are about teamwork, politics, how the ships work like an organism internally, they are clashes of commanders and their philosophies, their skills as leaders and their relationships to their crews, rather than a direct battle of arms.
There are also small skirmishing "fighter" crafts for more traditional dogfighting combat scenarios, which allows personal, individual storylines to develop.
I write down the least trite stories.
So your idea for a movie is basically a rehash of star wars and/or star trek? Yeah you really put some originality into that one.
. -
2019-01-04 at 7:45 PM UTC
Originally posted by Zanick Does anybody here do this? I've been creating a universe as a way to work out some philosophical ideas I'm struggling with. So far I've come up with a few thousand years of history for a number of races and their cultures with corresponding maps. Every day I add in a little more detail. The end goal is to create something that will serve as the basis for a roleplaying campaign, but the further along I get, the prospect of a novel becomes more tangible. It's very time-consuming, though, and almost defeats the more productive intention I set out with.
Could you tell us about one of your favourites? -
2019-01-04 at 11:28 PM UTCOh I forgot to describe the actual world.
The crescent is split into two halves, roughly. Down the middle there is disputed territory, the warzone.
One half of the crescent is a confederation of nations of various sizes, from planetary to massive interstellar civilizations, lead by a senate that is directed by a high council of 12 equal, elected parties.
The other half is a pseudo-theocratic multinational empire, governed by the immortal philosopher king Yari, a mycelial brain that has engulfed a planetary system and is sustained by the radiation from a core of circling binary stars.
With virtual invulnerability and no need for sustenance, Yari has pondered for aeons, his primary interest being the black hole's gradual devouring of the galaxy.
By absorbing and processing the raw radiation it comes into contact with, Yari has gathered massive amounts of data from the galaxy and surrounding space, including on surrounding civilisations. Yari has gained dominion over half the galaxy purely through conversation and diplomacy.
Somewhere in the heart of the warzone is a hidden rogue planet that holds a secret that will decide the fate of the galaxy.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2019-01-04 at 11:37 PM UTCGood one, Loing.
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2019-01-05 at 12:57 AM UTC
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2019-01-05 at 1:03 AM UTCFuck ur mom
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2019-01-05 at 1:24 AM UTC
Originally posted by Loing Yea I let my imagination run wild sometimes and imagine up fantasy worlds. I'll write about some of them in my notebook sometimes. Some of them are ongoing movies where I am the director, and I'll close my eyes and play them out.
I have a "mind movie" these days about a space war in a crescent shaped galaxy. In the void inside the crescent, there is a black hole, and this is a cosmic barrier to travelling "across" the croissant, and this serves multiple purposes.
Also, the cosmic scale allows me to imagine futuristic tech but also the political intrigue that is enabled by slow communications, as it used to be before the invention of telephony. Many classic political dramas are impossible because phones exist, old school military tactics are impossible because of telephony and satellite+aerial reconnaissance. But not so when you're dealing with cosmic distances.
In space, momentum from high speed travel is also difficult to reverse or brake due to physics. So ship dogfights play out like naval warfare in 3 dimensions. Everything is about time, trajectories, information and decision making. These battle sections are about teamwork, politics, how the ships work like an organism internally, they are clashes of commanders and their philosophies, their skills as leaders and their relationships to their crews, rather than a direct battle of arms.
There are also small skirmishing "fighter" crafts for more traditional dogfighting combat scenarios, which allows personal, individual storylines to develop.
I write down the least trite stories.
Originally posted by Loing Oh I forgot to describe the actual world.
The crescent is split into two halves, roughly. Down the middle there is disputed territory, the warzone.
One half of the crescent is a confederation of nations of various sizes, from planetary to massive interstellar civilizations, lead by a senate that is directed by a high council of 12 equal, elected parties.
The other half is a pseudo-theocratic multinational empire, governed by the immortal philosopher king Yari, a mycelial brain that has engulfed a planetary system and is sustained by the radiation from a core of circling binary stars.
With virtual invulnerability and no need for sustenance, Yari has pondered for aeons, his primary interest being the black hole's gradual devouring of the galaxy.
By absorbing and processing the raw radiation it comes into contact with, Yari has gathered massive amounts of data from the galaxy and surrounding space, including on surrounding civilisations. Yari has gained dominion over half the galaxy purely through conversation and diplomacy.
Somewhere in the heart of the warzone is a hidden rogue planet that holds a secret that will decide the fate of the galaxy.
I really like the concept of how communication breaks down over long distances. It’s like a recapitulation of an old theme of mankind—that we struggle to maintain power over distance—which we thought had been eliminated through telephonic innovation but really wasn’t done with us. The mycelium-brained philosopher-king strikes me as a very original spin on an already potent narrative device, I have to wonder if it isn’t for the best that he rule the galaxy despite my objections to any kind of government endorsed by Plato.
Unless I’m mistaken, it sounds like we have something in common in our imaginings: that the primary, antagonizing regimes of our stories have acquired their hegemony through diplomatic violence, rather than by waging open wars. It probably works better in your setting than mine, given the modernity of such strategies.
I’m especially interested in the confederation. What is the background of your galactic Senate? From what do they derive their authority and what is its genealogy, and who are their constituents? Why is this arrangement, in their view, preferable to the kingship they oppose? Are they aware of the existential threat (the black hole consuming their galaxy), and if so, how do they prioritize it?
Originally posted by Loing Could you tell us about one of your favourites?
The world I'm creating is still pretty fresh, I mean to develop it a lot more completely than I have so far and make aspects very concrete, maybe even a continuous narrative. Its core themes deal with how power constitutes culture, that domination is the law, and hubris is the inevitable product. Though I borrow elements from Greco-Roman history in constructing its society, and the races I use are from the D&D universe, much of the politics I incorporate are drawn from modern examples and contemporary philosophical theory. As I'm trying to fit it into a roleplaying system, the results will, unfortunately, be more derivative than I would like, but it's an experiment I've enjoyed nonetheless.
Its base concept begins with a small empire, built over the ruins of an ancient race against whom Men had committed genocide after a bloody and silent revolution, and it is situated across an archipelago of volcanically-formed islands with highly fertile soil rich with mineral deposits. Their emerging culture has been carefully authored by a unique ethnic group and philosophical cult which wields authority through a proxy emperor and channels their imperial resources in the manner of a surveillance state toward a series of political technologies including a compulsory medical system, a state-sponsored body of intellectuals which produces propagandist literature, eugenics programs meant to engineer a subservient labor/military apparatus, etc. Despite these nefarious tactics of power which span the whole epoch of their hegemony, by all conventional measures, their people enjoy spectacular prosperity and have benefited from a peace unbroken for centuries (as in Pax Romana), except for the undertaking of covert 'peacekeeping missions' which purpose to bring surrounding city-states under their dominion, though these never qualify as ‘wars’ and are habitually rationalized by a naïve public mind.
Several chiefs among this hidden authority are literal vampires with an agenda of social control on a vast scale, and their matriarch (named for my evil sister) is obsessed with her sterility. She can only have ‘children’ by biting the throats of targets within the nobility and converting them, and they, in turn, regard her as their mother and submit to her command. Civilization lies in the shadow of her envy for humanity due to her longing to conceive, and her ultimate project is to prepare an artificial, immortal body, to imbue it with a stolen anima originally from the body of the First King (that's me!), and to install it as a god-emperor loyal to her will (a homunculus, really) which replaces the current, human monarch. To accomplish this, she requires a mythological element which can only be extracted from a sacred well of spiritual energy at the axis mundi of their world, and for this task alone she has been preparing her mind and body for centuries. She doesn’t know it, but actually doing this would probably result in disaster.
A splintered resistance has arisen to oppose this whole strategy on multiple fronts, though none of them understand fully the extent of the oppression they seek to undermine—if they were ever united, perhaps there would be hope that they’d comprehend the big picture—regardless, they also can’t see a tremendous existential threat on the horizon. There is an exiled population of a prisoner race in revolt who are increasing their raids on territories of the empire by sea. The Intelligentsia, though largely complicit with the vampiric agenda, has within some rogue elements who publish counterculture for underground circulation which has amassed a growing readership of budding revolutionaries. There is an order of priests who, possessed with supernatural foresight, sought refuge in a cave system a millennium prior to the events of the story; their order, while spiritually enhanced and very powerful, have become entirely blind as a result of their residence. Among them was recently born a deaf, mute child, this array of deformities occurring because he is the rightful conduit for the stolen anima (he is a reincarnation of its original source), and if it is restored to him, he will be returned the memories and faculties of the First King and assert his claim to the emperorship. Whether the citizens would accept him (a profoundly disabled exponent of cave-dwelling inbreeders) is a narrative puzzle for me to solve.
Unless the vampire mother succeeds in tapping the mystical vein of the world, of course. Their islands actually sit atop the caldera of a long-inactive submarine supervolcano and if she does this, it will probably collapse with Atlantean consequences.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2019-01-05 at 6:49 AM UTC
Originally posted by Zanick Does anybody here do this? I've been creating a universe as a way to work out some philosophical ideas I'm struggling with. So far I've come up with a few thousand years of history for a number of races and their cultures with corresponding maps. Every day I add in a little more detail. The end goal is to create something that will serve as the basis for a roleplaying campaign, but the further along I get, the prospect of a novel becomes more tangible. It's very time-consuming, though, and almost defeats the more productive intention I set out with.
I do this pretty much constantly. Started off just trying to make some sexual fantasies more interesting while drifting off to sleep. Now as I lay in bed I start to think about the effects of geography and climate on the culture of whatever the fuck I'm thinking about. Probably have half a dozen worlds that I juggle with their own consistent rules and logic, although they end up being sort of iterations with various themes. Absolutely refuse to put any of this to paper.
also sometimes I wake up in cold sweats balancing game mechanics for a game that doesn't exist. solving immense puzzles of absolutely no purpose, with no virtue to my mental output.
I'd share with you some of the weird worlds I've created but as I said, I've got a strict no-communication policy. Somehow, I think these worlds are more real that I'm comfortable with and they should not be disfigured with the dissolving glow of any kind of public attention. They are like mushrooms, they must be kept in the dark.
would be an interesting topic to discuss how you guys build up your worlds. usually something catches my imagination in a way that opens up a scenario in mind, and then I work backwards to construct a world around it, then with that world I can move the scenario backwards and forwards that makes sense within internal fiction logic. for instance, I spent at least two or three hours a few weeks ago completely enamored in daydreaming this sci-fi world of smugglers and diplomats and spys and things. Was basically meditating but instead of trying to clear my mind I was trying to create a world. It was totally inspired by my playthroughs of Aurora 4x (an incredibly opaque game with no graphics that requires imagination) and Star Traders Frontier (the game's politics is like Dune), where I tried to imagine the absolutely dry, Microsoft Excel tier gameplay that Auroa is, with a rich history of culture and politics and family feuds and smugglers. So I spent hours fantasizing about running a shit tier ship with no money, a few friends as shipmates, getting accidentally embroiled in politics and spycraft.
I mean, anyone can have power fantasies and sexual fantasies but it's so much more fun to create the whole world around where you actually matter. Who cares if you're the grand king of the universe if this universe is empty and has no conflict or story? -
2019-01-05 at 3:51 PM UTC
Originally posted by Zanick I really like the concept of how communication breaks down over long distances. It’s like a recapitulation of an old theme of mankind—that we struggle to maintain power over distance—which we thought had been eliminated through telephonic innovation but really wasn’t done with us. The mycelium-brained philosopher-king strikes me as a very original spin on an already potent narrative device, I have to wonder if it isn’t for the best that he rule the galaxy despite my objections to any kind of government endorsed by Plato.
Unless I’m mistaken, it sounds like we have something in common in our imaginings: that the primary, antagonizing regimes of our stories have acquired their hegemony through diplomatic violence, rather than by waging open wars. It probably works better in your setting than mine, given the modernity of such strategies.
I’m especially interested in the confederation. What is the background of your galactic Senate? From what do they derive their authority and what is its genealogy, and who are their constituents? Why is this arrangement, in their view, preferable to the kingship they oppose? Are they aware of the existential threat (the black hole consuming their galaxy), and if so, how do they prioritize it?
The confederation is a loose galactic alliance formed in opposition to the growing influence of Yari.
Yari's text is considered an information hazard, a malicious data structure that spreads memetically. The affected do not appear enslaved, but genuinely convinced. The other half of the galaxy is not united in any official structure, but have voluntarily aligned their economic, political and governmental structures to align with Yari's ideology, have free trade and massively growing prosperity.
However, his apparent end goal is to find a rogue planet that has been circling the black hole laterally to the plane of the galaxy, and crosses the plane at unknown times with unknown regularity. This planet holds a scientific secret that might have the power to reverse the flow of the galaxy into the black hole, a way to create controlled inflation in a region of spacetime, and create distance between the rest of the galaxy and the black hole, and this could be repeated indefinitely.
The confederation is united on one thing: while they are open to hearing Yari's message, they want to control this possible secret first.
Over the years, Yari has effortlessly absorbed nuclear strikes, directed gamma ray bursts have only fed him and doubled his size, and all energy directed at him only seems to make him stronger. The black hole seems to be the only thing that threatens Yari, and would be the only way for the people to hold him accountable.
It is also feared that this technology could potentially be used by Yari to gain limitless control over the fabric of the universe, and elevate him into true godhood. This idea has untold existential consequences, so the confederation is ostensibly just exercising caution. That being said, their motives might not be as enlightened at every level.
I read about your world. I have a lot of questions. I will make a detailed post later. -
2019-01-05 at 5:42 PM UTC
Originally posted by Zanick Does anybody here do this? I've been creating a universe as a way to work out some philosophical ideas I'm struggling with. So far I've come up with a few thousand years of history for a number of races and their cultures with corresponding maps. Every day I add in a little more detail. The end goal is to create something that will serve as the basis for a roleplaying campaign, but the further along I get, the prospect of a novel becomes more tangible. It's very time-consuming, though, and almost defeats the more productive intention I set out with.
but you can write a novel of great interest. Are you aware of the 9 point outline of creative writing? you can borrow a concept from a former event. like the Black Dalia murder or conspiracy’s such as JFK and change names and aspects to work with your creative world.
Also you and everyone here loves eating dog cocks.
