#conworlding

[wongery]

The Wongery — A Site About Imaginary Worlds

Hi! Please check out our site about imaginary worlds!

The Wongery

We've been working on this site for fifteen years, but we've never told anyone else about it until today. Why not? Because we're not very bright, I guess. Is a blazed Tumblr post really the best way to get the word out? Probably not! Like I said, we may not be very bright. Still, I've been on Tumblr for more than a decade (not with this account; I just created this account recently; but I have a personal account I've had for a lot longer), so if nobody ends up visiting the site because of this blazed post, well, I guess the worst-case scenario is that we've just given Tumblr a little money to pay them back for all the time we've spent here. (Well, no; maybe the absolutely worst-case scenario is that somebody does visit the site, and hates it so much they devote their lives to hunting me down and eradicating me and everyone I ever loved, and then this somehow results in the destruction of the universe. But I think that's pretty unlikely.)

Anyway, the site is called the Wongery, and it's at https://wongery.com, and it includes a wiki called the Central Wongery where we post about our own imaginary worlds, and another wiki called the Public Wongery where anyone can post about their creations. It's not limited to just writing text content; there are places where you can post RPG stats for creatures and characters of your worlds, and LEGO models, and video game assets, and more. (Admittedly, there is nothing in those places yet, but they're there.) It's still very much a work in progress, and there are a lot of broken links right now and features we haven't implemented yet, but there's enough there that I hope people can get some enjoyment out of it.

Anyway, please visit our site and see what you think! And please refrain from doing anything that might somehow result in the destruction of the universe. Thank you.

#worldbuilding #wongery #website #worlds #conworld #conworlds #conworlding #rpg

[tanadrin]

Sogant Raha is gorgeous. Do you have any recommended resources for worldbuilders who might want to do something similar?

no, because i did sogant raha all wrong.

it started as a Generic (albeit extremely low-magic) Fantasyland setting for a conlang when I was a teenager, which gradually accreted details at the edges until it was a whole world. but i didn't know what i was doing when it came to conlanging or worldbuilding, and as i got older and read more about historical linguistics, and history in general, i became dissatisfied with it and rebuilt it from the ground up a few times.

sometimes when you build a setting from the bottom up like that you miss the consequences of major decisions. when i started trying to map the whole planet for the first time, years ago, i realized i had put the Lende Empire on the wrong coast--for it to have a big forest to the east rather than be a massive desert, it needed to be upwind of the mountains, i.e., on their eastern side. so i had to either flip all the maps, on paper and in my head, or make the rotation of the planet retrograde. i opted for the second one, because reorienting my mental map of the Lende Empire would have been terribly confusing.

another example: i didn't realize how dramatic the consequences for the climate for having a low axial tilt would be until roughly, uh, yesterday. i just wanted to rough out some climate details and maybe calculate day lengths at different latitudes and seasons, and it wasn't until i started googling around to find formulas for average daily and annual insolation at different points on Earth that i realized low axial tilt produces a markedly different polar environment than what we're used to. the result is certainly more interesting, but it means there's some notes i have that are now just, well, wrong.

if you are starting a project like this as a big worldbuilding project, and you know a little bit about climate and astronomy and stuff, i think working top-down can save you from a lot of errors like this. damon wayans' worlds on Planetocopia are like this: but then, he seems to typically start with one High-Concept Worldbuilding Idea, and then see what the results are. i just had stories i wanted to write, that turned out to be connected, and gradually built the world up from them.

in some respects, this means as a world, Sogant Raha is not particularly exotic. the stories i wanted to tell are stories about humans, in societies not too dissimilar from ours, so the world is not too dissimilar. if i had known at 15 or w/e everything i know now (and had access to similar resources), i might have intentionally complicated certain parameters more, so that i could play with the results. but the stories are what has kept me coming back to this world year after year--and while an ice planet of methane breathers would be more interesting from a high-level view, i don't know what being a methane-breathing being on an ice plant is like, and i don't think it would have had the same perennial narrative appeal that has kept me interested all these years.

i guess my actual advice would be some or all of the following: be omnivorous in your interests. the fun thing about conworlding is that literally every domain of human knowledge is relevant to it. be willing to make weird choices, and equally willing to force yourself to justify them. sometimes you make an artistic choice, and you come back to it a little while later and go "what the fuck was i thinking?" you're tempted to erase it. but figuring out how to make that choice work often produces a much more interesting result. pay attention to what projection you're drawing your map in. try not to think in standard fantasy archetypes. no matter how original your spin on the ISO Standard Fantasy Races, they're still ISO Standard Fantasy Races. full blown conlangs are optional, but constructing even simple naming languages can make worlds feel much richer. don't use apostrophes in the names of things unless that apostrophe actually has a phonetic effect on the pronunciation. read a lot of history. real-world history is bigger and weirder and more interesting than you can possibly imagine. it's good fodder for worldbuilding.

#still thinking about slapping a big fat landmass in the ehyran ocean at some point #all that space is just going to waste! #sogant raha #worldbuilding #conworlding

[lady-inkyrius]

Mapping a world other than Earth

So a while back I made this world map for a worldbuilding project that never really went anywhere beyond this.

I wanted to find a good projection for this map, so I originally made it in equirectangular, because G.Projector takes it as input and the distortions are relatively easy to work out compared to other projections (Everything is the right height, and just gets wider near the poles, the main hard thing was having to make a polar island basically blind to what it was going to end up like.)

If you want to see the actual continent shapes the easiest way is probably the orthographic projection (What things would look like from space, but if you were technically infinitely far away, i.e. the projection lines are parallel), the south hemisphere is a video to get the entire thing in.:

A new layout of continent shapes gives some really interesting opportunities for which projections work well and which don't because you lose some of the familiarity for distortions with a map of Earth, for example I dislike equatorial aspect cylindrical and pseudocylindrical projections on this map because it feels like it distorts the poles in a way that seems wrong to me. Like we're all used to seeing Antarctica big but I don't really want to see that small island stretched across the north pole line.

This is going to be quite long so I'll put a cut here.

Projections that don't really work

In general I don't think flat-pole pseudocylindrical projections that are common for world maps of Earth really work for this planet. Here's the Robinson (A very common projection) and the Kavrayskiy VII (My personal favourite general-purpose projection):

I think the problem is mainly because there's more coastline outside of 75°N/S here. Antarctica is big so most of it's coastline is relatively far from the pole, and most of the coast of Russia and Canada is further from the pole than the coast of the southern continent here.

For reference here's the Mercator projection cropped to 85°N/S like most of the ones of Earth are:

Like while the Mercator makes Antarctica very big with Earth, it doesn't actually cut off any coastline. In general I just think common map projections for Earth distort the northern continent or the southernmost peninsula on the left of the southern continent.

If you really need a projection centred on the equator, you can sort of get away with the point-pole projections that have "lobes", like the Van der Grinten IV, additionally you can shift the centre to 34.2°W without cutting through any land, which I think reduces angular distortion of the problematic bits somewhat, though results in an asymmetrical graticule.

At the time I originally made it, my favourite way of presenting it was an Equirectangular projection, centred on 45°S. This keeps the land away from the high distortion areas, there's basically no land within 25° of the "poles" of this map, and if you really want to have no land being interrupted you can offset it horizontally like the second image to put the north polar island back together.

Recently I've found a bunch of other projections that look good for it, most of them oblique. Originally I was only using G.Projector which is great but only has a few projections that allow for oblique aspects, but recently I've discovered Map Designer Raster which is much freer in that regard, so I realised that this aspect looks pretty good with the Mercator projection (cropped to the golden ratio):

For comparison here's a Cylindrical Equal-Area version (standard parallels at 30°), they're mostly pretty similar except for the bits closest to the top and bottom:

In general these two are probably both more useful than the Equirectangular what with one being conformal and the other being equal-area, though aesthetically the equirectangular is a good compromise.

I also wanted to make one that showed the northern continent well and realised that despite cutting the southern continent in half an equatorial aspect of the Stereographic projection works pretty well. The centre of that continent would probably be relatively sparsely populated (most of it would probably be pretty dry, so cold or hot desert depending on latitude):

(Of course if you want to only display the northern continent, a polar azimuthal projection would work fine.)

There's another Stereographic aspect that I've found works really well to show the whole globe without interrupting any land (centred on 15°E 30°S):

This is personally my favourite projection for this planet.

There are a couple of other things you can do with this aspect, you can rotate the hemispheres by 45°, or can also use the same aspect for the oblique cylindrical projections, which results in something like this for equirectangular, though personally for the cylindrical projections I think the 45°S aspect from earlier works better:

I actually worked out how to get this aspect working with the Peirce Quincuncial / Adams Hemisphere-in-a-Square projection, and it's probably a personal choice whether you prefer this to the Stereographic. They're both conformal it's just where you want the area distortion, the Stereographic spreads it out around the circle, while the Peirce has higher distortion confined to a smaller area (close to the corners).

I think I'm definitely a big fan of conformal projections for world maps, it seems more worth it to use a conformal projection with low area distortion than a true equal-area projection.

I think if I ever did a real world map with more detail and stuff, I'd probably go with something like the stereographic one that cuts the southern continent in half, it's the one that I could realistically see getting widely used in-universe, at least pre digital.

#cartography #maps #worldbuilding #long post #conworlding

[paradoxcase]

(I wonder how many people are actually going to see this...)

#gods #conworlding #conreligions

[off-kilter-creative]

This blog will be dedicated the the worldbuilding process of my and my partner's fantasy world

#conworld #conworlding #fantasy

[theblackbookofarkera]

Gynlin Taylor

unnamed Tanogeni warrior

Woodcut

#low fantasy #conworld #worldbuilding #arkera #world building #a song of ice and fire #creative writing #dark fantasy #dune #fantasy world #high fantasy #historical fantasy #pulp fantasy #sword & sorcery #weird fiction #cosmic horror #game of thrones #lord of the rings #world of darkness #dragon age #fullmetal alchemist #the dark tower #malazan #conan #dungeons and dragons #role playing games #bloodborne #dark souls #warhammer 40k #warhammer fantasy

[tepat-side]

Lexember 2023 Master Post

Lyak - Pay, Tûn - Swûl, Nôt - Tsaltep, Kyeng, Ngyûp - Ngôw, Lum, Lûn, Kôn - Klup - Lôy - Luke - Han - Neng, Mûl, Nôk, Lit - Swûq, Hyat - Xûl - Swim - Tsapay - Win, Wip - Kyuk, Mey, Ngan, Lin - Thung, Xhûp

(All posts tagged Lexember)

#lexember #conlang #yuktepat #tepatic glyphs #logograph #writing system #conworld #conculture #worldbuilding

[nuclearspringworldbuilding]

I 3D printed some coins from my world

Originally posted to r/worldbuilding, I'm moving my stuff to Tumblr because of the recent Reddit shenanigans.

These coins are from Bluelake, the largest city-state in the desert of Laroth. The silver ones are called senn, the gold ones glen and the copper ones fen. The smaller silver and copper coins are called valsenn and valfen.

1 gold coin is worth 10 silver, 1 silver is worth 10 copper and the smaller variants are each worth 1/4 of the larger coin.

The senn that's been cut into 3 is called an arrowhead because of the shape and is worth 1/3 senn.

They are cast then sanded down like ancient Chinese coins, and that is why they have a hole in the middle, so they can be put on a rod and rotated to sand them down (the triangular ones are reuloux triangles so it works for them too).

#worldbuilding #world building #conworld #fantasy #fantasy worldbuilding #post apocalyptic #post post apocalypse #fantasy art #original world #reddit #reddit migration #3d printing

[jackhkeynes]

a gest "de facto"

a gest /a ʒɛst/ [ɐˈʝɛst]

de facto, in practice, in fact, regardless of official or legal status;

actually, in fact, used to introduce a contradictory remark

Etymology: a Middle Borlish borrowing from legal Latin ad gestum "de facto", literally "to the deed", along with parallel formation a verb < ad verbum "de jure", literally "to the word". In general contexts it is seen from the sixteenth century.

A gest, aucel son progenies jug dez dragon. /a ʒɛst | oˈdzɛl sɔn ˌpro.ʒeˈnjɛz ʒaj dɛz draˈgɔn/ [ɐˈʝɛst | ʊˈdzɛl sɔn ˌpʀo.ʝɪˈnjɛz ʝaj dɛz dʀɐˈgɔn] at deed | bird be.3p descendant still out.of dinosaurs In fact, birds are descended from dinosaurs.

#conlang #boral #conlanging #boralverse #alternate history #conworld

[yuk-tepat]

2023 Lexember #16: Han

Han ‘torso, core: the center of the body.’ The glyph shows an outline of the human body (tam) with arms and legs, and in the center a small, abbreviated glyph for yan ‘person,’ which serves as the phonetic complement too (han rhymes with yan). This old word is mostly superseded by compound expressions like thok-tam (center [of] body)

#conlang #yuktepat #lexember #tepatic glyphs #conworld #conscript #writing system

[relativisticgoblin]

Sketch of a Whence specimen.

The Whence are entities corrupted by the Wither, twisted into chaotic parodies of living creatures. They possess powerful natural magics, and if a sapient entity becomes a Whence, any power it possessed before will be magnified many times over. Highly aggressive, they roam areas of space poisoned by the Wither, feeding on each other and anything from beyond the corruption that finds its way inside.

#art #fantasy #fantasy art #sci fi #sci fi art #speculative biology #conworld #worldbuilding #artists on tumblr

[tower-of-hana]

I know it's been a while but I fixed Jalo's phonology and orthography.

#linguistics #linguistic #languages #lingblr #conlang #conlanging #constructed language #conlangs #sahar #conworld #orthography #phonology #Jalo

[tanadrin]

Sogant Raha world map

Below: the world of Sogant Raha with major landmasses labeled in bold and important subregions in italics.

And unlabeled:

Adwera and northern Rezana; to the west of Adwera is the Taicun Sea.

Démora and Tlucosse (to the east)

Altuum

Vinsamaren; the large central mountain range is the Arduinn Mountains, which meet the Kelrus Plateau in the north. The northeastern quadrant of the continent is a massive rain shadow desert.

#sogant raha #conworlding #tanadrin's fiction #note the planet's rotation is retrograde #and the axial tilt is fairly low #the two parallels just north and south of the equator mark the tropics

[starcaptainslangs]

K'awatl'a Introduction - The Conworld

K'awatl'a is one of my oldest continuously developed conlangs, originating at least 15 years ago, if not more. It's a highly agglutinative nauralistic language. It takes inspiration from Nahuatl, Mayan languages, but it is not based on any of them.

Tlaxetl'an Overview

K'awatl'a is spoken in my main conworld, Tlaxetl'an /t͡ɬaʃeˈt͡ɬ'an/. I'm not super into creating a highly realistic setting with like tides and weather patterns, but I have a general sketch of the region and it's climate.

Here's the pitch of the setting:

On a far future Earth, the ancient remnants of past high stellar civilizations scatter a landscape that has been terraformed and shaped and remade thousands of times. Magic-like technology suffuses the environment; priests speak with disembodied AI spirits; robot armies fight bioengineered monsters from alien worlds; abandoned habitats orbit the planet; gateways to distant worlds stand dormant in the center of long abandoned cities; great machines march across the land leaving an alien environment in their wake; scholars and adventurers delve like worms into machines more ancient than the planet itself; and humanity slowly learns of its ancient heritage on a transformed Earth.

Tlaxetl'an Geography

The region it is spoken in is a tropical to sub-tropical river basin on the north edge of a large continent on the planet's southern hemisphere. To the south is grassy steppes, ocean and volcanic islands to the east and north, mountains and a vast desert to the west.

There are seasonal monsoons and flooding in the region so there's a wet and dry season.

K'awatl'a Speakers

I haven't done much development of the speaker's culture apart from some vague ideas about it. The broad strokes are:

They have technology that is roughly iron age. They do have access to advanced materials but lack the ability to manufacture them, relying on scavenging.

Gender is chosen when a person comes of age, with there being three (or maybe more) genders that people can adopt. Sex has nothing to do with the gender roles.

Family structure is communal with an emphasis on the community that helps raise the collective children over the biological family.

Religion is centered around the teachings of Prophets who have connected with the "god AIs" and from them gathered information, providing them with the basis of civiization: agriculture, metal working, and domestication.

That's it so far!

Next post I'll talk more about the phonology. Woo!

#K'awatl'a #conlang #conworld #Tlaxetlan

[thecrazyworldbuilder]

Another reminder that there's no universal symbolism.

And, by proxy, a reminder that languages are a way of communicating one information via different methods. Sign language uses hand gestures and movements, verbal languages take speech, there's several real-life whistling languages, there's the Morse code, there's binary and all sorts of numeral systems, there's the semaphore, ciphers like the "dancing men" or pigpen, there's the heraldics of Europe, there's the language of flower bouquets and even secret calligraphy languages that hide second layer meanings in the way the letters of a word are written down to the amount of decorative loops and tilt.

Language is a magical thing in a way that anything can be considered language, once there's a system of decoding it. Language could be a ruler with each mark assigned to a letter, used for measuring specific sticks the length of which encode the meaning of the message.

There's so many possibilities. I'm going crazy over them.

#worldbuilding #fantasy worldbuilding #fantasy #fantasy world #worldbuilding ideas #world creation #worldbuilding tips #symbolism #language #linguistics #conworld

[saldrath]

Short Story #1 - The Strongest

This is the first short story I wrote in my own universe, the main character is The Dragon King and The Sword Magus. I'm not gonna spoil more and I hope you enjoy! Please tell me what u think in the comments :)

__________________________________________

If you ask anyone on the street “Who’s the strongest mage in this era?” everyone without a hesitation will give you one name. A name which belonged to someone who took all the definitions of how “Mage” should look, and decided to just throw them all out. To someone who made their own path of magic, a true Magus. Many people at first disagreed, that it was something that shouldn’t be called magic, that it’s not true magic, but soon they were reminded of the words of the ancient Mages - “Magic can have any form, and only if u find your own path u can call yourself true Magus.”. And Midas Van Haathe was exactly that. He made his own path, and thus became the first Magus that was born in a thousand years. But even the great Magus had no way to win a fight versus this… 

In the middle of what once looked like a great palace, there were two men, standing in front of each other. One of them was Midas - a person they call the “Sword Magus”  - his once golden hair was now stained with blood, dust and sweat. His eyes were covered by a simple bandage, compared to the rest of his clothes. He was wearing a black loose long sleeved shirt, similar to something a warrior would wear under his chainmail or armor, and a black pants that were tightly tied around his waist. One can only imagine that the clothes looked good one day, because they certainly didn't now - they were torn up, and you really couldn’t tell whether they were supposed to be red, black or maybe gray. To sum things up, he looked like a complete mess, sweat was running his whole body, and u could see he was really tired.

On the other side stood a person who in contrast looked totally different. Their hair was long, bountiful and black, tied into a single long ponytail. His clothes were extremely fancy and looked like they costed at least a small fortune. Compared to Midas, he did not have a single speck of dust on his clothes. But what made him stand out the most were the black and white horns that grew up from his head, and big majestic wings that spanned at least five meters long. 

— Midas, you really should have known that you stood no chance versus me. I applaud you for being the first Magus of this era, but that’s it. — his voice was loud, and you could easily hear the power behind it. — After all, they do not call me the King Of Dragon’s without a reason. I lived from the beginning of the time, and defeated many Magus, what made you think that you’re different from any of them?

— Don’t worry, oh mighty Dragon King, I still have a trump card that will make you kneel. — Midas said with a smirk, but to be honest, he wasn’t so sure about that, but it was his only and last option. 

— Oh? Show me then. 

In the head of our Magus there were many emotions and thoughts running through right now, but a few stood up among the many. It was awe, fear and… fun? Midas couldn’t remember the last time he had a good fight, when the opponent put him in a corner. Well I wouldn’t even call it like that - right now he was getting absolutely destroyed. But he was having fun? He didn’t know the answer as to why this was like that, but the blood in his veins was boiling, he was itching to fight, to make the great enemy before him kneel, to defeat him. It was in his blood, magic, body - the itch to fight, to become stronger. No. To become The Strongest. He didn’t want to become just a Magus, he wanted to become someone who would be remembered as the strongest person that ever walked this world. 

Midas untied the bandage around his eyes, and revealed his eyes in the color of gold. No, it was an understatement, they looked like they were real gold. His eyes were extremely beautiful, they gave a feeling that u would never find something that looked better than them. But the act of uncovering his eyes was just a trigger action, to help him prepare for his next move. All of his senses suddenly expanded, and he could see and feel much, much, much more than before. All the mana in the atmosphere slowly gathered around Haathe and his sword, seeped inside of his body, in every muscle, every bone, every tiny nerve and in the end it formed a thin coat around him and his weapon. It was the first time a phenomenon like this happened in the world, even the Dragon King was looking carefully with awe.

The Magus finally looked around, and saw the effect of their fight. Hundreds of different weapons were lying around in the ground, but none two the same. Pillars made of marble and stone cutted, smashed were lying around. U really couldn’t point out a space that was not destroyed. 

— This is it, you better get ready. — Midas took a breath, knowing that this may very well be the very last breath of his life. He didn’t regret a single thing. He knew that every life had to come to an end one day, and today was his day to go and meet Death. His mouth formed a small smile, as he rushed forward with his old trusty sword. He was much faster than before, it looked with every step he took he was bending the reality, and when he finally slashed his sword - it slashed through everything - mana, space and even time. And it was the first time his sword catched the Dragon King. It was also the first time the dragon felt fear and awe.

…

The last stand of Midas took hours, and it destroyed everything in the vicinity. And I mean, everything - mountains, forests, rivers and even mana. The place where the fight took place now became manaless, and no living being could even stand in here. It became a bare crater with a span of hundreds of kilometers with no sight of anything other than the dying Dragon King — Midas Van Haathe - I have to admit, you are after all the strongest. There was no one stronger than you, and never will be. — he said to himself, knowing very well that even when he could not see the body of his opponent, he was listening. These were his last words, and soon even his body disappeared. 

#oc #ocs #writing #original writing #original character #writers on tumblr #conworld #fantasy #saldrath #custom worlds #magic #magic system #fantasy world #fantasy writing