The World Creation Blog

[Dawn OOC]

The Start of Something

I have talked about doing this before and now I think I have the time and energy to handle it. I’d like to use the blog set up here to create a blog about creating a world. I’d like to this be an interactive effort by those willing to participate. There are a few ‘catches’:

1. I’ll be the final arbitrator of what makes the cut. Rather than go through a round of brainstorming, then a round of voting, we’ll do the round of brainstorming.

2. Everyone who provides an idea that is used for the setting cedes their intellectual property for that idea in this setting. I do this so that someone can’t submit an idea, then get mad and put out their idea and potentially gut the setting.

3. If this is finished and good enough, I’ll be preparing this for PoD. The proceeds, if there are any will go to the site. A PDF will be available for free, though a request for a donation will be added as well.

This is the plan as it standing. If no one helps, I’ll work on this myself.

So welcome to the first installment. By posting an idea, you are agreeing to the above statements. However, let me say that creative criticism of what is here remains your intellectual property (as it is your opinion). However, any ideas posted are grist for the mill.

So how it works is that I post the week’s topics for discussion, we’ll discuss, and then pound out what is kept. Then next week we work on the next topic. I have a long world-building document of questions to be answered. The first couple of weeks will be loose as I’ll drop or add days to try to get it revolving on Fridays.

The first thing to answer is this: what genre or genres do we want to do? There are options:

Contemporary

Fantasy

Historical/period

Horror

Humor/satire

Science fiction

Superhero

These are the broadest of strokes; feel free to elaborate as you desire. And feel free to speak up!

And… go!

[Dawn OOC]

The Continuation of Something...

Despite giving every sign of abandoning this right after starting it, I have not. The drama in my life has ebbed, thankfully, and I hope to be able to put more time and focus into this. I’d like to pick up with my once-a-week blog post, followed by discussion by all and sundry until we reach a high point of Awesome. Or just have a ridiculous amount of fun. Onward!

So in the last attempt, we seemed to have had most people at least reasonably interested in Sci Fi:

This sounds like fun!

Science Fiction

Horror

Superhero

Fantasy

Contemporary

Historical/period

Humor/satire

In truth though I would actually prefer to use a mix of two or more of those genres. For instance science fiction mixed with horror, science fiction mixed with period elements (for instance I'd love to build a world setting mixing hard science fiction and the Chinese wuxia genre), contemporary mixed with fantasy, etc.

I'm certainly down with Science Fiction mixed however you want really.

If we do go beyond a single star system in scale though we'll pretty much need some form of fast (i.e High multiple C) interstellar travel (casual or otherwise) to get some real use out of that.

One interesting twist I ran into a couple of years back was having light-speed and beyond be impossible using just physics (i.e; reality) so magic was used to twist things enough that interstellar travel was feasible.

Beyond Sci-fi I'd say I work best with Historical and Fantasy really. Though whatever we end up working with I'll see about helping out.

I agree with the Sci-Fi. Straight is fine with me, but I would really prefer not to go with horror. Dark I'm ok with, to a point, but horror is going a bit far with what I'd prefer.

I also agree with the nixing of humor/satire and for the afore stated reasons.

Any other combo would be fine, though I do think that superhero tends to lend itself easily to the pairing.

So with what we have, we have a strong interest in mixed-element sci-fi. I’m going to call this a sci-fi setting now. I like the idea of period elements, but that would depend on whether we’re humano-centric or have lots of aliens. With humano-centric societies, period elements seem more feasible. With alien, I don’t know. Which leads to the first round of questions:

1. What is our sci-fi mixed with? We’ve had a request for no horror (I assume no supernatural horror? Because space is pretty frightening in and of itself).
   
2. What is our scope? Are we going to do a few systems, a section of a galaxy, a whole galaxy or more?
   
3. Are there a lot of aliens? Some aliens? Few aliens? No aliens?
   
4. Will there be humans? Will they play a large role in the politics of the game?
   
5. Is it going to be more scientific or will we be more space opera/fantastical with it?
   

Feel free to jump in and answer any of these questions!

[Dawn OOC]

Week 3: Narrowing the Focus

Last week, we settled on some important points. I’ll keep an ongoing Q&A page about what we decide for reference in my blog. The link is here.

This week, we should settle on how big the area we’re dealing with is going to be. There was a lot of discussion on it this week, and it will factor directly into travel time. So I’m going to combine the two here this week to work out what we want, and we can talk specifics, like engines and means of travel, but don’t have to.

So the questions to focus us this week are:

1. How much area do we want to cover? In terms of AU (Astronomical Units), what do we want our hard numbers to be?
   
2. What is the maximum amount of time for our group to cross from the central world (seat of power) to the furthest rim? I think this might help us set our travel speeds so that we don’t get too fast or too slow – keeping us right where we want.
   
3. We have established two types of travel, established travel and “off the path”. How prevalent do we want the easy travel? How often do people have to go off the path?
   
4. Are the sizes of groups limited by space or by expansion? In other words, ICly do we cover a sector only because that’s the limit of exploration at this time, or is it because something is stopping further expansion?
   

Feel free to talk about these below, as always. I’ll give some of my own answers to get things started.

I’m not sure what hard numbers I want to see here, but I’d like to say that it doesn’t take more than six months to travel the “empire” or whatever the central group of beings (presumably human) are. I think that if you get much further out than 3 months from the central authority, the ability to hold planets to the governing body diminishes. And since we’re not all Star Trek and we don’t have (as yet, we might) a Federation in which people join for various reasons based not entirely on reality, we have some practical limits.

I think I’d like around 25% of the planets to be reachable by the easy travel, with up to 75% being a month or less from one of the easy travel points. The remaining 25% are long stretches of hard travel – like going to the northern stretches of Alaska in the early 1900’s.

I like the idea that there’s some kind of barrier or block to expansion in one direction or another. Star Trek never did anything with it, but the concept of Space Empires is an intriguing one to me. Even a cold war has its interest to me.