World-Building X

I feel like doing some world-building today. The writer of Creative Runoff is doing it, so I’m inspired. But I feel like challenging myself, so I’ll do it all in one day, and one post. With no humans. So let’s get started.

That is the known world, with a pretty cerulean ocean. The purple lines are mountain ranges. The two big landmasses appear to have collided, forming that isthmus to the eastern edge and the five mountain ranges on it. This is quite new, similar to the Himalayas. The two mountain ranges on the peninsula either show that it’s part of a smaller tectonic plate that’s in the process of crashing into the southern landmass, so that area is very unstable. The ranges on the northern edge are very old, also due to a plate even further north crashing into the central one, but they’ve aged, and it looks like many of the mountains have disappeared.

Now, let’s think about geography.

We have a large desert on the southern continent because the mountain range blocks the moisture coming in, a big steppe (yellow-green is steppe) in the north because the grass continues but it’s too cold to be considered temperate, and some grassland everywhere. The new mountains have created big river systems, and thus, river valleys full of nice vegetation.

Now, what kind of people live here? I’m not doing humans or any archetypal races, so why not just go all the way and stick in lots of crazy weird races?

Race One: They live in the river valleys and are adapted to such conditions: they’re amphibious, newtlike, with six limbs and translucent eyelids. They have two kingdoms, more or less at peace, which are cut off from each other by the range. Every year, one party from each kingdom meets at a specified point in the mountains, bringing supplies of water and warmth with them, to meet and converse on goings-on in ther respective realms. The newt-people from the south tend to be hardier and more accustomed to adversity, whereas the northern ones are more refined artistic from living in an easy environment. I’ll call them the Tethysil.

Race Two: these are the northern grassland-dwellers. They’re humanoid, but they have absurdly long legs, averaging about seven foot ten overall height. They move by jumping through the grass, and they have lightweight bones to accomadate that feature. They’re loosely unified as a state, but they tend towards nomadic, masterless behavior. A different breed of them exists in the hills (green with gray dots) north of the isthmus, with shorter legs and less jumping power but a much more unified social system. A third breed exists in the steppes, with less jumping power but much more running power. The third breed is far more dispersed. The grassland and steppe breeds are quite primitive, basically existing with loosely defined language and borders, and don’t deal much with anything outside their vast grasslands. The hill breed are more social and, as a consequence of that, more military. They’ve never clashed with the Tethysil, but they’ve made frequent incursions into the grassland. I’ll call the three breeds, collectively, the Veltis, subdivided into plain, hill and steppe Veltis.

Race Three: The desert dwellers are mysterious and usually prefer to keep to themselves. The’re insectoid, similar to ants, and they have at least one large tunnel connecting the two major deserts together. They live most of their lives underground, where it has been speculated they have enormous citadels. There appears to be at least two other breeds, queens and generals, both of whom have rarely been seen. The generals coordinate the few and apparently random raids the desert dwellers enact, and the queens apparently dig new colonies out and produce more of the desert dwellers. They’re extremely defensive, having been known to kill anyone who touches a grain of their sand, and they’re quite technologically advanced, having developed at least as far as rudimentary explosives. What their plans are and why they attack so arbitrarily is a secret that will most likely never be known. I will call them the Straquali

Race Four: the grassland dwellers of the southern continent are absolutely nothing like their brethren in the north. They are ordered, violent and militaristic, resembling large demihumanoid lizards. They have two large back legs and two smaller front legs each, able to stand on two legs for extended periods of time and run extremely fast while on four legs. They’re very deadly, the most common  adversaries of the southern Tethysil the Straquali, although they rarely seriously threaten the latter. As technology goes, they have fairly advanced siege weaponry, personal armor and weaponry and engineering, but not much else, seeing as their entire culture is focused on the war effort. I will call them the Augusende.

That’s all I’m going to do. That was fun, but maybe a little shallow. I guess I’ll have to go into this more tomorrow.

~ by pieboy on December 31, 2006.