Planar Lensing
How many wheres are there?
There are three major media franchises these days that all work with the idea of multiplanar worlds. Sometimes this involves creating a huge and complicated network of just coincidentally competing brand merchandise lines, where two companies bickering about a contract results in a storytelling direction that explains why Uncle Ben is a different guy, but sometimes it’s a direct choice and it’s done because you want a new place to be, a new whole world to play with.
When building worlds, adding these ‘alternate worlds’ – referred to as planes hereon out – can be a great way to continue the ongoing need of the worldbuilder, which is where am I going to put all this stuff? What I’d like to present here are just some ways to talk about how you’re using planar spaces in your worlds.
Continue Reading →Hecsenfore, Part 2
This article builds on the previous two articles about the formation and lived culture of the necrostate city Hecsenfore, in the setting of Cobrin’Seil. If you have questions, it’s probably answered there, to start with, and this article just jumps straight into describing more of the districts of the city and what life is like in them.
Continue Reading →Hecsenfore, Part 1
The previous article involved a long form discussion of the history and potential formation of a necrostate that could, hypothetically, in the future, integrate with the Eresh Protectorate. With all that preamble out of the way, this article presents the first part of the long-form writeup of the city state that is known by its name:
Hecsenfore
Coastal heavily urbanised independent city-state, The Land of White Ravens, the Graveless State, The Internal Labyrinth, The Obsession, The Eresh Outcast
Continue Reading →Hecsenfore, A Necrostate in Principle
There’s this quote, from The Great Dictator:
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…
So long as men die, liberty will never perish. This is an idea that works for a variety of places to represent bad rulership, to show undying and unrelenting leaders. In Cobrin’Seil, I use places with undead rulership enough to give them their own technical name, that of a necrostate. A necrostate refers to a polity in which the ruler or ruling class is represented by the dead. In the real world, there is an extant necrostate (North Korea), but that’s ceremonial, in much the same way that a theocracy doesn’t need a real god to exist for the power to be situated in the hands of religious leadership.
But where dictators do not die, where the ruling class do not naturally cede power as human structural limits, can you form a reasonable, tolerable, culturally diverse and stable necrostate? How does something with an immortal, predatory ruling class get created and managed in a way that still creates a place where the people who live there are not in danger of permanent loss of life or exploitation, and what can sustain this kind of place over time? Is it possible to create a necrostate that, at least in the context of social and political structures, is not worse than places with things like noble orders?
What does that look like, and how do we get there?
Continue Reading →Goblin, Vandal, Sugg
Every word you’ve ever used comes from somewhere. The structures you use to discuss ideas is informed by ideas that came before it. I’m not getting all Sapir-Worf about this (and if you don’t know what that is, you don’t have to know because it’s probably not true), but rather wanting to draw your attention to the way the world you live in is in part defined by the words you use. If you’re an English speaker, there are ways you describe food that are a byproduct of French invasion centuries ago. Words like ‘technocrat’ and ‘hyperspecialised’ are constructions that borrow from how intellectuals used to use Latin. Your swear words are almost all from the poor working class, and used to describe sex, god, or excrement, and that’s not how all swear words work in all cultures!
Your world shapes your language.
In any given fantasy setting you work on, you don’t usually have the same linguistic history to justify why the people there talk like we talk now. In fact, to be completely fair, they probably don’t talk like us at all: you have fantasy languages, across fantasy constructions. Any given phrase a character in your world says is probably not using the exact same words as we are and we’re all working with a sort of fictionalised fantasy that makes the concepts reasonably translate across.
There’s a whole treatise then about how we handle Native American names and loanwords that we italicise like etouffee.
Point is that you have words, in your world, and you can attach stories to them. You’ve probably seen me talk about Orcs and how they relate to language and stereotypes, along in my long post on the word ‘Orc’. Here’s another set of examples I like for my world of Cobrin’Seil, as they pertain to the best little evolved raccoons, the Goblins.
‘These Two Provinces Should Kiss’
Let me talk to you about Cobrin’Seil, a big country, a big war, and something gay.
What’s Marriage For?
Marriage is a thing that’s so important to our culture and media that you’ll see it in an embarrassing quantity of everything. Setting aside media genres that are just dedicated to some version of it (and yeah, a lot of those ‘romantic’ things people are making are really just just about marriage things), there’s still stuff in our language and everyday common existence that speaks of marriage. If nothing else, consider we have a mode of address that specifies whether or not a woman is married, and asking to not be treated with that language is seen as a different dispensation. It is, to the audience of most of this conversation, a thing that The Empire tells us
What does it mean to be ‘married?’
Speed of Words
Hey, how fast can you get a message to the nearest major settlement you don’t live in?
I bring this up because I’m about to talk about fantasy worldbuilding, okay? We’re about to get into the cool dork stuff in a minute, but before we get going we’re going to wind up talking about a bunch of real world communication stuff that you may not have examined unless you’re like me and hang out with cool academics talking about it.
Continue Reading →