#i also have an actual worldbuilding map for this project

[nerdyqueerr]

couple qs!! your latest project 8 & 17

woo ok have i said anything about this project on tumblr yet? no! am i gonna answer these questions as if everyone knows what im talking about? yes!

8. What do they find physically sexiest about each other?

ok so Stella (fortune teller and occasional real prophet, also a human lie detector) obviously cannot resist the buff sword arm charms of Rose (runaway noble pretending to be a fully qualified knight) but i had a really hard time figuring out what Rose finds physically sexiest about Stella. and then i remembered they have a homoerotic haircut scene so i'm going to go ahead and say her hair and you can take that however you want

17. Do they believe in marriage?

At the beginning Rose is probably really into marriage considering her whole schtick is following antiquated rules (partially in order to game the system but also bc she kinda believes in old ideals). By the end of the story they might consider a kind of commitment ceremony bc it's important to celebrate and Show Your Affection Even When It Makes You Vulnerable but i havent really decided what happens to them down the line. doubt they'd get legally married unless utterly necessary

[corbinite]

I've been in a creative frenzy these past few days and I went from just having a vague idea of just a regional map for my dnd campaign, to suddenly having a rough topological world map almost finished. It's in the cahill butterfly projection because it's easier to ideate in and I cannot be asked to account for much distortion so I just decided to make the world fit easily onto the projection. I'm not gonna be too anal about the tectonic realism but my goal is for someone with like a bachelor's in geology to be able to take a look at this and think it at least feels truthy (and you can see some of my sketching of what the tectonic activity is)

next step: atmospheric circulation

next next step: oceanic circulation

next next next step: climate zoning

next next next next step: drainage basins, rivers, and hydrology

next next next next next step: major eco-zones

next next next next next next step: major cultural zoning and fitting in the other cultures I've thought of but haven't mapped yet onto the map

I desperately need sleep

[loregoddess]

best part of drawing fantasy map: you will have a cool fantasy map for your fun fantasy project

worst part: labels

[elbiotipo]

Worldbuilding: Galactic Empires

My only complaint about the Prequels is that they needed MORE politics

If you've watched Dune recently, you must have noticed the whole Emperor and space noble families thing. And yes, it's likely you heard that in WH40k too… and I HOPE you know that's where the God Emperor came from, since WH40k took "inspiration" from everywhere from Dune to Star Wars. Which also has a Galactic Empire. Like so many other science fiction franchises.

In fact, if you're a science fiction fan, it's very likely that you're familiar with space or galactic empires, they seem to be common as dragons in fantasy. Despite the fact that an empire doesn't sound very futuristic, does it?

Where did all these Galactic Empires come from? Are they just a narrative tool or are they an actual possibility? How would states and societies work in space? Let's find out, and maybe I can give you some ideas on how to write fun galactic "empires" from both a narrative and plausibility perspective.

This is going be a long post. Perhaps my longest yet. But I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it. Click down to continue.

First of all, where did these space emperors come from? In another post, I've talked about the influence of the idea of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in English-language fiction. However, in science fiction, I would say the influence is more direct. The Foundation trilogy of Isaac Asimov, one of the foundational (lol) works of science fiction, was intended by the author, very explicitly, as a retelling of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon in a science fiction setting. He probably wasn't the first to think about a space empire, I'm very sure the term is older, but he certainly popularized it as a staple of science fiction. Now, if your contact with science fiction comes from movies, when you hear Galactic Empire you're of course thinking about Star Wars. But yes, Star Wars is also the same retelling, because Lucas was inspired in both Asimov AND Gibbon, even though I think we should appreciate Lucas' ability to bring it to life in the screen. Certainly, Isaac Asimov wasn't the first or the last to take inspiration in history to tell stories about the future.

The most influential science fiction work of all time.

At this point you're probably telling me (or not, I don't know you) about all other sorts of science fiction works that DON'T have galactic empires, or better yet, those that don't just transpose historical societies into the far future and imagine something entirely new (my personal recommendations on this area are Banks and LeGuin). And you'd be right. But the concept of a space empire seems popular and long-lived, much like feudalism in the fantasy genre, everyone has a picture of a sorts when a videogame or a book talks about a "galactic empire" or "galactic republic" or a "federation", an "empire" much like a shorthand name for "a country In Space", regardless of the presence of an actual Emperor or not. And so, it's worth exploring how this trope could, or not, work, so we can see the possible alternatives or more fun ways to approach it.

Besides, that's the title of the post. Galactic Empires.

So, let's approach this from the perspectives of Space, Time (or to keep with the theme, Spacetime) and Technology, and lastly, the most fun part, we'll explore some fun variations on this idea of galactic empires and societies.

Space:

Space is big, and I won't quote the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy here, it would be groanworthy at this point. Let's do a quick exercise instead. Let's image a "modest" space empire, not even galactic, 2000 light-years across. Sounds quite big, it encompasses most of the visible stars we can see from Earth… however, if you project it into a galactic map, it's actually a very small piece of sky, actually 2% of the entire galaxy which is about 100.000 ly across. Now, according to the Atlas of the Universe, there are 600 million stars in a 5000 ly radius from the Sun. Jesus Christ. This is actually hard to estimate accurately as the true number of red dwarfs and brown dwarfs, the dimmest stars, are hard to count, but we already know those have planetary systems as complex as our own Solar System, even planets that could bear life. Let's scale back to our 2000 ly across space empire, again, just a small cozy corner of the Milky Way Galaxy, something that would look like a small, even tiny, nation in any setting of a galactic scale. This gives us 240 million stars (from the estimated 200 billion stars of the galaxy) in this space, which is still completely insane but let's work with that.

From Atlas of the Universe, so you can compare and contrast, the stars 2000 ly from the sun (ONLY the brightest ones), and the entire Milky Way. Notice how small 2000 light years truly are at that scale.

Even if I just told you that all of those systems might be as complex and rich as the Solar System, let's rather arbitrarily say only 5% of those 240 million are worth of note. Not necessarily having life (no way I'm getting into that yet), just worth visiting or living in for the resources or the views or the cantinas… whatever. That's 12 million star systems. Okay, let's refine this further. Let's say of those 12 million, most of them are the equivalent of gas stations or farmsteads, a couple thousand people at most. The REAL places where the action happens are the systems or worlds where millions of people live, and those are few and far between (this makes both common and narrative sense, as people tend to cluster in population centers where trade, resources, etc. are). Let's say, and let's refine this further so I don't get outrageous numbers, the average population of those systems is 100 million (about the size of Mexico, Vietnam or Japan. Many sci-fi works throw worlds of billions like Earth like nothing). And those systems are… uh, like 2% of THOSE 5% 'systems of note' (a flimsly concept already but play along). That's 2% of 12 million. We got 240.000 systems or worlds the population size of entire countries, with all that implies (economy, culture, politics). Of course, 240.000 multiplied 100 million gives this speculative fictional empire a total population of… (Jesus Christ, not the scientific notations), 2.4e+13, or TWENTY FOUR TRILLION PEOPLE.

Let's wind back and remember I tried my best to make a "small" empire for a galactic-sized setting, 2000 light-years across, that's just from here to Orion's Nebula for Gagarin's sake! A trillion people is just outside the realm of my imagination, or pretty much anyone's. Can you imagine any kind of goverment system that would be enough to provide any kind of meaningful governance to 24 trillion people? In the case of a space empire, can you imagine a single space emperor, a single person, deciding over them? Keep in mind that emperors don't rule on their own (we'll talk about that), they need bureacrats to make their will done, and vassals to govern their territories in their stead. This would apply even in democratic systems, you need representatives and civil servants and more.

Let's scale back a bit before I go insane. Instead of assuming territory, let's go with population. Assume a spherical cow space empire of… 40 billion people, that's reasonable right? You can picture that in your head? Five times the population of current Earth, no biggie, we can work with that, it's all cool. Now, how big would a goverment for such a population would have to be? We actually have reasonable answers. China has about 10 million civil servants for a population of 1.4 billion people, but that's only the administrators, not including all the teachers, healthcare workers, security forces, laborers, etc. employed by the state. India has 6.4 million for about the same population. Okay, so easy math, let's say that this space empire has 6 million bureacrats for 1 billion people, for our empire of 40 billion people, that gives us a total of 240 million… just bureacrats, nothing else. Yes, you could reduce that with technology by say, half. It still means an entire Mexico-sized country of bureacrats. Imagine.

Entire worlds of this.

NOW I WILL STOP THROWING NUMBERS AT YOU, and let's just think about what this means. If we assume a space empire like the ones common in science fiction, or just any kind of… goverment at all, we're talking about, at the lowest estimates, entire countries worth of state employees, if not whole EARTHS of bureacrats. You can guess how things can get really weird fast. Current goverments as we know them just won't work at all it even if technology gets more powerful. Leaving aside, for now, things like god-like AI adminstration (yeah, have you seen what they are like now?)… to exhert ANY kind of control, FTL or not (more on that below) you would need a very, very autonomous empire, to the point it might as well not exist at all. Why take orders from A Guy who is not only far away but also has no hope at all of actually enforcing them in any meaningful sense? Why call yourself part of his "empire" that not only cannot enforce anything upon you, but also cannot benefit you in any way? Big question, of course, the benefit of a galactic or even smaller empire, but we'll discuss that later.

What could work, however, is that instead of a centralized state like we concieve it today, or even a loose confederation, even loose alliances, even pretty much anything… 'empires' (as in 'countries') In Space could be "united" by common ideas and culture instead of any institution. Perhaps not even a written delcration or constitution, but shared ideas: a culture, a religion, an ideology. Lots of different strong mini-states (that might mean billions of people…) that all claim to be part of the same "civilization", but share no goverment at all at all, just the same 'idea', in a looser way that even the most decentralized goverments you can think of. You can say "well all countries are made up" but these would barely qualify as even that. Not even the Holy Roman Empire was this fake.

Perhaps even a single person as a symbolic focus point of unity? Which would be actually a score for the proponents of galactic empires in the most literal sense. But at the same time, such an Emperor would be completely powerless to interact with the entire galaxy. His plans for, I don't fucking know, education reform or tax breaks, would have to be filtered by literal millions of bureaucrats and vassals that at that point might do whatever the hell on his name. Military-wise, his armies would count as nations of their own. However, the overall guidance of a single person (or constitution…) as a symbol might make otherwise disparate worlds to collaborate on the same causes, being part of the same greater whole no matter the distance. So maybe, instead of a Galactic Emperor, a Space Pope?

OH MY GOD-EMPEROR WAS THE IMPERIUM REALISTIC ALL ALONG? Probably not, but also yes, let's keep talking.

By the way, I'm sure you're tired of big numbers now, but I did one possible calculation for the whole galaxy, a true Galactic Empire. Asuming just 0.2% (400 million) of the 200 billion stars are populated, with an average population of one million, the size of the smallest countries that aren't micronations. The total galactic population would be 40 trillion, or 40,000,000,000,000. Five thousand Earth populations.

Time:

Or rather, space-time. We'll talk about both, because what concern us is the speed of information and trade, and that also limits the size of our empires.

I'm sure you know by now faster-than-light travel is impossible. Most of space based science fiction has it, of course, for narrative purposes. We don't want Our Heroes to spend two thousand years to get to the lair of the Evil Space Tyrant, I don't either, and I'll discuss FTL soon. But let's start with no-FTL here, just like in real life, and a smaller "empire", much, much smaller than my previous examples. A mere 250 light years across. Let's not even calculate population now.

This, quite logically, means that the fastest your communications would flow is at light speed. So if your emperor issues orders to a nearby world, say, 5 ly away, you will get an answer 5 years later. For a more reasonable distance of 60 ly, you would know the results 60 years from the descendants of those who recieved the order (now, assume however they keep in constant conversation, just with a 60 year delay), and by then, things there would have changed 60 years from the capital. You get the idea, Einstein sucks, don't need to elaborate more. At first glance, this might be another point for old-style feudal star empires, though. What better way to guarantee your empire is working well over centuries than by having an hereditary class of nobles loyal to you, no matter how much time passes (results may vary). Of course, how would you even enforce that? Rebels might overthrow them and you'll learn about it a century later, and you'll have to send ships to quash the rebellion… or would you?

Is there a point to send ships to conquer other worlds in such a situation? What kind of resources (ah, the lifeblood of empires) could you control with such an empire where transport takes decades and industry is so developed you could, theoretically, make manufactured goods yourself? I'm assuming you can, because you can build spaceships to get there in the first place (not unreasonable), but what would justify creating an interstellar goverment controlling people, trade, resources, over light-decades? Normally, it's at this point where sci-fi authors make up Something (what Atomic Rockets calls "McGuffinite") to justify interstellar trade. In Dune, for example, it's Spice, which is kind of like, to steal a joke, petroleum mixed with cocaine. But otherwise, in a no-FTL setting (so, real life as far as we know) there isn't really the incentive to conquer or even form a goverment of any but the looser kind with other worlds. Trade, maybe, but those are long-term investments, it's difficult to think what kind of good or service would be so in demand would justify it. Especially when you consider that light-speed is your upper limit, and ships might be actually way slower than that. And I'm not even gonna begin to touch relativistic effects.

I was going to make a joke about blowing a quarter of your GDP in Star Destroyers, but have you heard of the South American Dreadnought Race? One of our dumbest moments down here, surely.

Add FTL, and things change, of course. Even very slow ships, that would take months to transverse a dozen light years, would be able to justify trade in luxury goods and passengers, for instance. This is not too far from real-life either, after all, European colonial empires had travel times in the months, and they had to install local administrations such as viceroys because of this, yet rhose places they were considered part of the same empire (most European empires could be rather considered a collection of "countries" and colonies, look at all the divisions of the Spanish Empire for instance). Faster and cheaper ships would of course, mean even more trade (here, I'm using 'trade' as 'communication between worlds', not necessarily implying capitalism, it could be mercantilism or even a command economy) between worlds, even perhaps the classic trope of agrarian and mining worlds feeding the rich core worlds. The Open Veins of Latin America In Space. Fun.

The speed of your ships and communications not only determines trade, but the power projection of your state (we can discuss 'stateless' societies too, there's plenty of fun to be had). If, again, your Galactic Emperor makes a Galactic Proclamation from the Galactic Palace near the Galactic Core (let's roll with that) and he has no FTL communications of any kind, it means that his commanding voice would reach the outer edges of the galaxy 100.000 years after, that is, almost ten times the history of agriculture on Earth. If he, however, has access to ships that can cross the galaxy in say, months, yes, perhaps he can have a series of vassals all over the stars (perhaps, we'll see…), and the faster things are, the closer they resemble our current fast-paced society, but not quite, given the available resources and space in… SPACE and the possible population, as we discussed above. As you can see, the speed of your FTL or lack of it determines everything.

There is another, more *realistic* option. Instead of individual FTL ships, you could have wormhole portals connecting worlds. This is more realistic in the sense that it's theoretically possible (though we have no idea on how to make one), but it also has some interesting implications. First of all, there is an implication that such a wormhole network would be expensive to build and maintain, requiring highly complex technology, material (I'm not sure what the hell exotic matter really is) and production methods, well, more high than what you'd expect from the usual. Second, it would be something preferably fixed, with hubs, planned routes and regular transit (and for writers, it easily allows you to map your universe). Such networks would be vital pieces of infrastructure, built and maintained by central authorities, drawing routes and transport hubs in space. Yes, indeed, almost like… space railroads.

OH MY ASTRAL EXPRESS WAS HONKAI STAR RAIL REALISTIC ALL ALONG? (last joke I promise)

There is also a very strange effect about wormhole networks. Time is relative, as you know, and this is not a metaphor, it literally "flows" differently on how fast you're moving. The "universal" "speed" of "time" "seems" to be the speed at which matter moves in an expanding universe (red-shift and blue shift) as I understand it, but as you approach light-speed, time flows differently in your frame of reference. Wormholes are strange in the sense that they connect space AND time, the observable time in both sides of a wormhole would be the same, and as such, places connected by a wormhole network will "be" at the same "time". This has been talked about by some authors who have considered about wormholes in the context of space civilizations, and it's called (STOP!) Empire Time. So a space empire might not only imply a state ruling over a population and a territory, but also over a time. I have no idea how this works and it frankly makes my head hurt, but here is an analysis of transversable wormholes if you want to indulge or hit your head against a wall.

Technology:

As an extension from the previous section: Of course there is no working FTL method known in real life, as far as we know, light-speed is the upper limit for everything. Instead of constraining you as a writer, this can be one of your biggest assets.

Because if you're doing a space setting, the existence of faster-than-light travel and its speed is the most important decision you can take about it.

Got that? Did I emphasize that enough? You don't need to actually explain HOW your FTL system works, you can do some research and invent something, but you need to be clear, in your head, what it can DO: How far and how fast it can take you. A FTL system that takes months to go from star to star will be very different to one that takes hours to span the Galaxy like the hyperdrive of the Millenium Falcon. A FTL system that is cheap and can be installed in any tiny ship like in the Elite videogame would be different from the ones in Dune where interstellar travel requires enormous motherships and lots of drugs, or a wormhole network that needs massive infrastructure maintainment and probably a railway starway worker's union, or the case of no FTL at all. This is, again, the most important decision you could make for your setting, bar none. Got that? Let's continue.

FTL is perhaps the only place in science fiction where I don't care about how it works, only about how fast it goes

Now, technology. Space empires, are of course, not possible without space travel being cheap enough (not talking about FTL, just regular space travel): shipping stuff to space should be about the same as shipping stuff by airliner or, well, ships. This is not unreasonable. Efforts are being made right now to lower the cost to access space, and while space agencies like NASA might look expensive, they are not NEARLY as expensive as the money wasted in say, stealth jet fighters or fucking advertising (people who say 'why spend so much money in space when we could fix our problems on Earth' seem to forget about that all the time. But I digress.). A technologically advanced, wealthy (as in production, not literal dollars) society could easily afford as much space exploration as they wish with no real effect at all in their quality of life, indeed, it would improve it. Space isn't as expensive as it seems. At its very, very core, a spaceship is just steel and propellant.

And steel and propellant are very, very easy (once you got the technical research to do it) to get in space. Asteroids are MADE of iron and metals, a single asteroid is richer than all of Earth's mines combined. Hydrogen is literally the most abundant element in the universe, and water is on plentiful supply (no need to steal planets for water) on comets and icy asteroids and moons. Carbon is apparently widely available in carbonaceous asteroids, and in our own Solar System, Titan, the moon of Saturn, is basically covered in hydrocarbons (yes, OIL IN SPACE). All those resources could be very much in demand for manufacturing on a planet like for example, a future Earth that has taken its industry up to space. What's more, it's only bringing stuff up from Earth/an Earth-like or more massive planet (fun sci-fi term for you: "down the gravity well") that's really expensive. Once you get there, you can get anywhere with enough acceleration and propellant. Once there is space infrastructure and industry (and I get a feeling that it might get up fast, given that space technology would need to be very autonomous and reliable), it can sustain itself without a mother planet. In fact, if there's something I imagine would be considered a luxury in spacer life, it would be truly organic things; plants, wood, meat, wool, and so much more.

i am average astronaut man i work 15 hours in the asteroid mines to buy one burger

Which brings us to the big question; what kind of life would be out there? After all, I gave you numbers of millions and millions of worlds, it's hard to imagine at least a few of those don't have alien life. This is the biggest outstanding question in astrobiology currently and so I won't pretend to even try to answer it (my personal opinion, if you must, is that complex Earth life is extremely rare, but by sheer number of planets, it might exist by hundreds of thousands in our galaxy alone). Instead, let's try to see how science fiction looks at it.

Heinlein, another of the foundational writers of science fiction as a genre, saw alien worlds as just another frontier to be settled. Rich alien fruit, fertile arable lands, and huntable or tameable creatures just waiting to be exploited, and alien species to trade exotic goods with (or conquer). While Heinlein was not the only and probably not the first to write this subgenre, he certainly got it popular, and lots of works on his same vein follow this "frontier spirit" kind of writing, where space is seen as the last frontier to be tamed by hardy colonists in a very yeehaw cowboy western setting, and you can actually see this replicated in many modern science fiction like Firefly and the more cowboy-ish parts of Star Wars. And yes, this is balantly an expression of the 'manifest destiny' Usamerican imperialist worldview.

lots of Politics all over this Science Fiction Adventure

And yes, this idea of 'habitable' planets ready to be colonized like in a 4X videogame is also not very realistic either. We haven't found any alien ecosystems yet, but as a biologist I can tell you they would be very different from us in ways you probably won't expect. We can discuss how convergent evolution could be, a world with oceans would probably have equivalents of 'fish', 'algae' and 'worms' (I can GUARANTEE there will be A LOT of worms), we could even find very, very similar life to our own down to the body plan. However, we most probably could not eat them at all (which might sound silly at first glance but is needed to have you know. agriculture.), or perhaps even live in the same planet as them. We live in a society planet where most of the plants and animals which evolved with us can't be eaten, and many of them are toxic. It's possible, entirely likely, that the alien equivalents of carbohydrates (ever heard of L- and D-Glucose?), proteins and other substances would be indigestible to us, allergenics, or outright toxic, probably in ways we can't even think off. It's likely we won't catch alien diseases, but that's because our cells (if they even have cells) are completely incompatible with their diseases, just look at how different animal, plant and fungi cells are, now imagine whatever the fuck might evolve in a completely different biochemistry from us. There would be no farmsteads and cowboys like Heinlein wrote, living in Mars would probably be more pleasant that living in a world where everything might be toxic, not because life evolved to be toxic, just because it didn't evolve with you. If anything, these' habitable' worlds would be treated like giant nature preserves instead, you can look but don't touch.

(In one of my own settings, I sidestep this by proposing panspermia, that is, the idea that life spreads across the universe by means such as comets (or aliens) and thus shares similaritites and can eat the same stuff. A bit of a cop-out, but it does allow one to get with similar kinds of life.)

NOOO ANAKIN DON'T EAT THAT PEAR IT EVOLVED HIGHLY TOXIC ALKALOIDS IN A DIFFERENT EVOLUTIONARY CONTEXT NOOOO

But humans, if the biophilia hypothesis is right, will need nature in their lives. This is where orbital habitats come in. You know, like the ones in Gundam? Orbitals such as O'Neill Cylinders, Standford Torii (yeah, that's the plural for Torus) as well as bigger and more complex thingmajings I will write their own post about someday, have been proposed since the 1970s with technology available then, and there is no reason why a civilization with an advanced space infrastructure wouldn't try building them and even be better at it. What's very nifty about orbitals is that you can really make them your own personal custom miniworlds. Designs like the O'Neill cylinder are big, able to house hundreds of thousands, even millions of people if build to the top, but why do that? Mess with the lightining, the rotation, or the interior to make them a winter wonderland or a tropical paradise. I expect that they would be built to feed space communities at first with food that isn't imported from Earth or grown in hydroponics, and later as places to live and customize however you wish; perhaps a community would pool resources together and say, hey, we want to make an habitat that looks like a Colombian cloud forest, or the Okinawan Islands. Once they get cheap enough, and given how abundant resources are in space they might be not even as expensive as most engineering projects here on Earth, I expect actually many, many people would want to live in them, and it could be probably be very affordable, and just natural for the people who are born and raised and live and die in them. Another thing about habitats is that they are mobile. Like I said, as long as you got enough propellant and propulsion, you can move anything anywhere in space. Even whole habitats could move and cluster together depending on the local politics. Perhaps, much like city-states were the basic building block for countries in antiquity, in the future, the basic organization bloc would be the Orbital. You could have alliances of orbitals forming complex political intrigue inside a single solar system (yes, like in Gundam).

OH MY PLASTIC MODELS WAS GUNDAM REALISTIC ALL ALONG? (I lied)

This all might make space empires pretty much an unnecessary anachronism. Habitats can grow their own food and resources are plentiful once you have the right technology. They can also be mobile, so they could act like migrating cities at will, choosing to stay with like-minded "constellations" or strike out on their own without the dictates of a central state. It almost looks like an ideal anarchist society.

Or does it?

There is something very important to keep in mind about life in space. The technology, that is, habitats needed for life in space will require lots of maintainance and resource management, which implies there must be strong coordinating bodies with very, very strict rules so that shit doesn't blow up and you lose all your air into space, or the resources of an habitat are mismanaged and you end up with a food or water or even oxygen crisis. There is a reason why space exploration is done by state agencies or corporations with huge state backing. Another of Heinleins's favorite tropes, Libertarians in Space, would be impossible in such a situation. Actually, in ANY space situation, and this is why this section is in technology. Living in space requires you to be able to maintain complex technology and manage resources. None of this can be done ad-hoc or be left to individualism, you have to have Rules and follow them to the letter. And also, the effect of living in your 'own little world' would probably mean people have a strong indentity sense towards their home habitat. This will mean a more communitarian attitude. But before you think I'm waxing poetic about utopian habitat cultures, keep in mind that this also can mean an authoritarian mindset. After all, cults and authoritarian regimes do have "strong communities" too. An habitat could be everything from a well-managed place with responsible citizens who look for the welfare of all, to a closed society where everybody does as they're told as long as the tech works. On the other hand, I doubt habitats in a single star system would stay isolated. They'll probably trade and communicate with other habitats, forming constellations and power groups, that would prevent this 'closed system'. However, I doubt they would be too amenable to interstellar authority. Who the hell do those people from another freaking star think they are to tell us what to do in our habitat?

To be serious for a moment, habitats can be really cool places in science fiction. Especially if you imagine they could host all sorts of enviroments, from the tropical to the polar.

As an addenum… what if you really want to live in a planet? In places such as Mars or the Moon, things would be… pretty similar to orbitals actually. Habitats separated by vast expanses of barren nothingness, only now a planet instead of space (better for maps, at least). But that isn't what you're thinking, right? What if you wanted to feel the open wind and sky instead of a canned world? Well, this is where terraforming comes in. Transforming whole planets is something theoretically possible, but that would require massive investments of resources, more massive than anything we can imagine, and time, centuries at the very, very least. So stupid ideas like "terraform Mars to escape Earth", which as far as I know is only held by dumbasses like Musk, just don't make sense. It doesn't mean that terraforming itself is a worthless idea, it is a very appealing one. No matter how cool you can make your habitat, it won't ever be Earth. It won't ever be a self-sustaining biosphere with its own ecosystem that could last millions of years. For that reason, terraforming is attractive, it's something way more than an artificial "can" orbital, it's a new living world. There is a certain mystique into bringing lifeless worlds to life, but I expect that instead of the dumb Musk "ESCAPE EARTH" idea, the motivation for terraforming would be to recreate Earth, perhaps for conservation reasons (you could have whole planets as natural reserves), perhaps for tourist reasons, perhaps for spiritual reasons or even artistic reasons. On the other hand, the methods you can use to terraform a lifeless planet can also be used to 'terraform' living planets, as we've long seen in our own world… this could be done with hostile purposes. I would expect us to be better than that, but we simply don't know.

To close this section and give this post an conclusion, I think that, since there are no real borders in space, then empires, countries, polities, whatever you wish to call them, will be formed by stacking building blocs in loose alliances or confederations. The most basic would be habitats, then constellations of habitats, then inhabited planets (though I doubt any but the most populated ones would qualify), and then star systems, but little above that, and I expect up to a certain, difficult to calculate limit of population and area (though way, way below even a fraction of a speculated galaxy), things would be just impossible to manage. The effort in bureacracy, infrastructure and state control needed to project power out of a star system and the sheer scale of space probably won't ever justify empires, much less galactic empires, but you could have very interesting variations on the theme.

Fun Stuff!

So, let's play a little with what I've told you. I'm going to write a few short scenarios that might be fun takes on the "Galactic Empire" or "Space Empires" you might be familiar with already:

The Poleis Model

When the Greeks established their colonies around the Mediterranean, they didn't do it with the expectation they would be part of the same state or empire. They founded new poleis, new city-states, based on the constitution of the mother city (hence metropolis) but fully independent. The Phoenicians were much the same, with some of the daughter cities (Carthage means literally "new city") eventually becoming new cultures far from their home cities. Similarily, why should interstellar exploration mean the spread of a united state with a capital and all? Imagine that when interstellar ships depart, they do with the idea that they are going to create a completely new home, a new poleis, not an extension of the nations or organizations that sponsored them but rather more of a 'child' culture light years away from their motherland. As they develop in mostly isolation from each other, they will become new cultures on their own, while retaining ties to the ones most similar to them. This is, in my opinion, the most realistic scenario without FTL. With FTL, however, things get more interesting, as of course, Greek and Phoenician and other poleis didn't remain isolated light-years from each other, they had permanent contact. With FTL they could organize in leagues, perhaps even alliances for the ocassional military campaigns, trade and exchange of ideas, tourism and industry, and of course the Olympics.

The Wormholes Always Run In Time Model

As I've said, wormholes are pretty much like space railroads. Railroads, like other big infrastructure projects, need a centralized authority to be built and maintained. And once you are the central authority that does so, you're already in charge of the biggest arteries of trade and communication. Which makes you basically an empire, officially or not. In fact, this is the closest I imagine a space society would resemble the states we're familiar with here on Earth. If you have control over transport and the hubs of trade and politics, and that transport and communication network allows you to implent your policies, your rule might go very far indeed, and indeed, your main hub might be a great capital, the main station of known space. Now, perhaps you might be imagining a literal space empire with nobles and all that. Why not instead something else? The Socialist Interstellar, connecting the many worlds of the galaxy through a five hundred year plan of railroad wormhole construction in the path to communism... However, this would mean that people outside of the wormhole network might develop in different ways, perhaps the equivalent of nomads to the great settled empires of antiquity. And given what I've briefly touched on Empire Time (*breakdances*), the expression "the portals always run in time" might imply even more than just an aphorism.

The Civilization Cluster Model

I'll admit this is taken from Poul Anderson, as quoted in Atomic Rockets, to which I owe an inmense debt for this post and so much more. The idea is this; space is big, as is well established. Even with FTL to shorten the distances, even if you could cross the galaxy in a few weeks, the sheer number of stars is still insanely massive. Why should any civilization 'colonize' those stars dot by dot, what value is there in invading or colonizing planets with incompatible biochemistries? And how could even begin to think how to administer a thousand different worlds, each one as complex as Earth itself, let alone an entire galaxy? In this case, civilizations, instead of spreading across the galaxy, would mostly remain in their own 'civilization clusters'; even with FTL, there are so many issues closer to home that the idea of projecting power outside is ridiculous. There would be trade, exchange of ideas, and so much more between these clusters, but never constant enough and never with the authority necessary to create a "Galactic Empire"… the worlds are too many, too diverse, too populated and too far away for that. An interstellar traveller could roam the Galaxy for years exploring these clusters spread away from each other, with their own unique idiosyncracies and civilizations inside, and then a vast expanse of mostly nothing outside them. Basically, space is too big. I like to see them as constellations among the dark sky, hence the artwork.

The No Man's Sky Model

To live in space, you need complex technology, but also resilient and durable technology ready for any kind of situation, easy to repair and replace. So eventually, I believe designs would be standarized so much that every astronaut will carry or own a collection of standarized tools (somehow this reminds me of prehistoric tool cultures). Now, even with FTL, there's perhaps little material incentive for people to leave their comfortable homeworld or habitat to live in cold space. But some will, perhaps because of the sheer thrill of it, perhaps very small bands of families or friends. With a standarized tool kit for any ocassion, these small bands would spread across space, much like ancient humans spread across the world. But instead of creating space empires, without a fixed industrial base, they would be nomads. Which doesn't mean they would roam aimlessly, they would be seeking new biospheres, new resources and new cultures, and gathering in temporary or permanent market places, festivals and pilgrimages. Perhaps they could even be the majority of humans in space, while most others stay cozy on Earth.

...

This was a very long post and it took a lot work to make, so I hope you had as much fun reading it as it was for me to write it. If you did, and if you would like to see more, I would be very, very grateful if you donated to my Ko-Fi below. Anything helps a lot especially since my country is not doing great at this time governed by a libertarian idiot (not even the fun space kind), and even a little tip encourages me to post more, I'm always working on your suggestions! You can also contact me by DM or asks if you need any help with your worldbuilding or just want to rant with me a bit! See you next time, and thanks for reading.

[space-writes]

why i write in obsidian.md (and why you should try it!)

hey, hi, have I mentioned my notes app? let me tell you about my notes app! I’ve been writing in obsidian for over a year now, for fanfic and original fiction/worldbuilding (and dungeons and dragons, and life organisation, and a myriad of other things) and so far I’ve gotten at least three people to also start using it, and I am in fact on an endless quest to get more people to try it.

obsidian.md how do i love thee, let me list the ways:

It’s offline. you are not beholden to the whims of wifi!

Did i mention it’s free? it’s free!

you can pay to support the devs, or to access the sync service, but honestly I just use a free file sync service to move things between my desktop/laptop.

It’s super lightweight at its core. you can (and I do) run it with a bunch of plugins and customisation, but at it’s base it’s just text, in simple files. plaintext. readable by anything. your writing is not trapped in proprietary file formats.

HOWEVER you can in fact customise every aspect of it and if you like Making Your Notes Cute I cannot recommend it enough as a Way To Procrastinate Actually Writing

Crucially, you can link your notes. This is phenomenal for not only worldbuilding, but planning, research, outlining and connecting characters and events. You just make a note, type in square brackets, and boom. linked notes. You can make yourself a little writing wikipedia with approximately 0 effort.

I have separate vaults (Instances, pretty much. Big overarching folders with separate sets of content) for my Valloroth project, my day-to-day notes/fanfic, and my D&D game. They’re aesthetically very different, which is so so so great for getting in the right headspace for the work I’m doing.

OH and we have obsidian canvas now! which is a simple mind-mapping feature where you can make and connect note cards, which can also be notes in your vault. I haven’t had a chance to do timelines with it yet, but it’ll be fun for that. I have made relationship charts with it, and it was great for that. If you like visually laying out boxes of information and connecting them into a pepe silvia board of plot, canvas is incredible

this is a pointcrawl map I made for my D&D game. Those red words in the boxes? links to the locations in the city the players were exploring. phenomenal

do you like split screen? you can have multiple notes open at once in horizontal and vertical configurations, and you can also open multiple tabs in each split window. it’s SO great for research and outlining, when you need like ten documents open at once to move between

finally, there are so many addons to COMPLETELY CUSTOMISE your Writing Setup. styling for tags. kanban boards. LINKABLE MAPS. ways to label scenes with metadata and pull just so many different tables/lists of story information. AND SO MANY MORE. I’m gonna do a whole post of my favourite writing plugins at some point so i can yell about them

the only downsides are that it’s somewhat clunky still to export things out of obsidian—I copy my fics into googledocs for my beta, and I have a plugin to make exporting to html easier to post on ao3, but it’s still kinda fiddly. Also, if you want a program that Has Everything and Just Works, this is…not that. you can build a lot of really useful writing specific features, but you do have to build them. it’s a sandbox, so if you don’t like sandbox-style programs, this may not work for you.

that being said, I do think everyone should try it and play with it and love it like I do and convince all their friends to start using it like i did. come play with obsidian with me! it’s fun! there’s a great community in the official discord that’s very active, plus an ever-growing collection of resources, particularly on youtube (highly reccommend Danny Hatcher’s videos as a jumping in point, they’re super accessible imo)

anyway, come try obsidian!

[calder]

hello! i stumbled across your blog very recently and am curious as to what the tag v13 means- sorry if you’ve answered this before, i’m on mobile!

fallout is based on wasteland. wasteland is based on a canticle for liebowitz. a canticle for liebowitz is about catholics bickering about fiction in the dust of america for hundreds and hundreds of years. it is about religion and the concept of a dark age

VAULT 13: A GURPS Post-Nuclear Adventure was the ip's name in the conceptual phase. the very first VAULT 13 worldbuilding pitch doc--a timeline--spoke of a Dark God, a term deployed throughout Fallout but only contextualized in the fallout bible, which does not actually use the term. Laura has a special voiced line just for Tell Me About: Dark,God: "The what?"

Project V-13 was interplay's original Fallout Online, which was cancelled by the publisher bethesda like fifteen years ago now.

pylon v-13 is a location at the end of Fallout 76's map where a character from Project V-13 built a time portal and disappeared. it is the most cursed location in the game

by accepting its premise, we arrive at v13 lore, the rejection of canon in light of canonical time travel and multiverse, which has always been a thing, and is also literally a joke. it's the realization that fallout is defined by creativity, interpretation, expression, and argument. it is the understanding that non-canon lore and controversial lore are basic and vital pieces of the history of the setting. and it's the begrudging admission that fallout is a cultural legend, irreplaceable and beyond anyone's control. fallout makes sense to everyone and demands our imagination. it always will

enabled by all the most hated and rejected lore, my characters are time-travelling supervillains who know the things i know, and scour the wastelands endlessly to expand their knowledge. this diegetic headspace and cosmology is a lens i use to explore the concepts of conspiracy theory, paranormal thought, religion, and occultism, all of which i am deeply critical of. i have learned a lot about these matters because i was able to fully engage with them in the context of fallout.

also the talking deathclaws lived in vault 13 and the courier carries the vault 13 canteen. there's also some esoteric shit about 13 high priests, 13 ghouls, and 13 landmarks. it's a pretty specific throughline. it's there if you're mad enough to look for it. and we'll never really know what it means if anything

thats what it means. to me

another thing i always say is. any setting where humans don't see ghosts is a strange fantasy. humans have always seen ghosts. don't mean ghosts are real. just means folks see ghosts. and at some point you gotta talk about it

hope this isnt complete nonsense

[friendlybowlofsoup]

Another Update

Hello Friends,

I have a rather long (but optimistic!) update to share with you all today. As many of you are probably tired of reading these kind of posts, I have a TL;DR here, but I did want to share what has been on my mind in that past half-year that I haven't been here.

It has been rough, and busy as always, but I think I'm finally facing myself and my project for the first time in a very long time.

TL;DR (it's actually long, I have a lot to say (*_ _)人)

I soul-searched and decided to stop compromising on my own feelings with regards to this project. I gave in to everything I wanted to do.

Plot changes, which means some character changes, which means some of the demo is outdated.

GotRM will be switching over to Twine.

----

OH MAN DID I SUFFER THE LAST FEW MONTHS

After my previous update, I hunkered down and really analyzed how I wanted to proceed with GotRM as a project. Because even prior to that post, I had already been going through long periods of hiatuses (which you are all aware of), and while I didn't lie about school taking up my time, I was also harboring a growing dissatisfaction with my own writing that really killed my progress for a long time.

So after everything had settled, I sat down and forced myself to peel apart my work. I know I said I would answer asks, but I uninstalled all of my social media and put aside this blog to focus. I made a note of all the things I liked and didn't like, and I made a list of things I wanted to change or improve on. The biggest point was that I also looked at my efficiency during actual writing sessions: how much of my time was spent writing vs. fighting with code? How could I change that?

And after a lot of deliberation, I figured there were a few things I had to change from the ground up, summed up in four points:

My working style was super incompatible with grad school. I can't spend 20-30 minutes scrolling up and down CSIDE checking code or looking for narratives while also jumping between chapters to make sure events line up. As this story grows, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all the branches, so I needed an alternative working method, which I am adhering to now, and it prioritizes efficiency.

I hated the way I was tracking and coding stats in-game. I have griped so much about coding stats, and I have adhered to such a rigid style that I really felt trapped whenever I was confronted with balancing them out. So I'm throwing that to the wind and redoing how I utilize and convey them. Player-side, this decision doesn't change much since I never fully utilized stats in the demo anyway, and the stats page with indicators will still exist, but I'm getting rid of stat bars and how I treat stat checks.

The story I want to write now is different from the one I started out with. I've known for a while that GotRM was becoming far more than the tiny, wishful novella that I wrote as a teenager. I held onto that old story for a long time, but there's just so much I want to change that I realized I'd been clinging to a story I no longer enjoyed writing. So I spent the majority of the last few months rewriting GotRM from scratch. I redid some worldbuilding, I changed a lot of plot points, and I fixed a lot of characters' backstories accordingly. This meant scrapping stuff from even the demo, but that turned out to not be the biggest issue because:

I wanted to branch away from ChoiceScript. Honestly, I never really cared about getting officially published, but the camaraderie in the forums and on Tumblr were why I committed to CS and CoG. However, ultimately, I really want the functionality that other tools can offer GotRM, and so after a long internal debate, I will be switching over to Twine. Fortunately, since I was rewriting everything anyways, this has been relatively painless, and passage mapping has made everything so much neater. I am trying my best to make it up to chapter 2 before I release the new demo, so please look forwards to that!

And so yes, I am still here, chugging along.

I love this game and this story: it's been my creative escape for as long as I could remember, and you can imagine how frustrated I was when I realized I was starting to dread working on it.

I am forever learning more about myself and my writing style, and this is simply more of that journey. Thank you everyone for sticking around, for joining the discord, and for checking up on me--that I have all of you has truly been a dream.

Hopefully more updates to come soon! I understand that there may be questions about these new changes, so please ask away! I will (try) to release some asks that I've been working on in the drafts too, but I will wait until at least tomorrow to release them so that this post doesn't get drowned out immediately.

And as always, with a lot of love,

FriendlyBowlofSoup (Mei)

[thatdassie]

Too lazy to add watermarks to every screenshot. If I see uncredited reposts I’m gonna waggle a disapproving finger at u.

context: I am going to feed this hungry fandom, single-handedly with every Murderbot doodle I have ever made.

also I will vomit words. Under the cut me screaming and crying:

longer context:

this is the product of a few nights spent listening to Murderbot audiobooks. One of the reasons I read so few actual sci-fi books is because when I have to use a ton of brainpower to remember past events and arcs and characters and worldbuilding and connections I get exhausted and it’s not fun. Scifi has a lottt of that. But I really reallllly liked Murderbot so i wanted to put in the effort to understand it. I would draw little diagrams and maps and doodles on a giant canvas while the guy was reading and it helped me to understand what was happening better.

let me tell u there is nothing more AWFUL than WANTING to invest yourself in something you like but ur brain is like NO!! TOO MUCH WORK!!! IF I HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THINGS REALLY HARD AND EXPEND ENERGY I WILL FUCKING DIE!! I HAVE TO ENJOY EVERY SECOND OF EVERYTHING and then u feel bad because u don’t feel like a real fan or whatever that means.

sometimes the stars align and I do manage to finish a series like Murderbot!! It helps that it’s novellas mostly and doesn’t have a lot of spin-offs. (Star trek, I’m gonna kill you.) Man I need to watch more tv shows though. Words can’t describe how much Murderbot is like me frrrrr. Might be projecting onto it a tad bit

I sure do love tiny fandoms that are already finished so I can bless people with large slabs of fandom meat that they never saw coming 😍

[lorenfinch]

Introduction

Hello! Very recently I found out about the existence of writeblr, and since I am currently working on a book series and trying to get the word out about it I thought I'd make a sideblog for it!

My name is Loren, and my full pen name is Loren Finch. I'm 24 at the time of writing this (though my birthday is less than a month away), I like to primarily use he/they, though I still go by she/her in some places due to not entirely being out and still experimenting with my pronouns. I am a mixed, queer, autistic/adhd, transmasc, aroace author who enjoys all things fantasy, gothic, and supernatural.

I am also an artist and you may find some of my character art here! My main blog is @circuslollipop and my art sideblog is @circuslollipopart! You can also find me on twitter @/circuslollipop and on insta @/circuslollipopart!!

I would love to meet and befriend fellow writers and seek out some beta readers in the future once I'm ready for it!

My current writing project was actually inspired by another writing idea I had! That project was moreso about faeries in a steampunk-inspired city, until I had a few worldbuilding ideas on how to integrate vampires into the setting. Then I came up with a couple characters and an entirely new setting, and found that I wanted to write about them instead!

For the time being. Perhaps when this monster of a project is all done, I can go back to that other idea! Or, idk, something about sapphic werecoyotes in an Old West-inspired town.

MY WIP

Currently, I am working on a new adult dark fantasy book series, with an aim for 5 books total. I would comp this as GRISHAVERSE x HELL FOLLOWED WITH US x THE WITCHER.

The Everdark. A vast expanse of forest and mountains where the sun cannot touch, where monsters roam wild and where magic permeates the very soil. To most mortals, the Everdark is a death sentence, but one young man hopes to make it a sanctuary. Renwick had always held a fascination for vampires, and now that he’s been turned into one, he revels at the chance to finally leave behind who he once was—scared and meek with no friends, shunned by his fellows who insisted he was a wretched little girl. Yet instead of the grand castles, billowing capes, and candlelit ballroom dances of his dreams, Renwick finds himself thrust in the middle of a conflict between vampires and monster hunters that threatens to turn deadly. With his new home and fellow vampires on the line, Renwick must uncover the secrets lurking in the fog, all while searching for his enigmatic uncle and grappling with the mysterious circumstances of his own transformation.

This series will feature vampires, undead creatures, elves, magic, a trans autistic MC, many queer characters, and an eventual MLM romance. The setting is inspired by mainly 19th century Europe with some medieval/renaissance era elements, and North American natural landscapes. Currently, I have just started drafting the first book! I am a plotter by nature, and have completed outlining book 1, and have mapped out where the rest of the series will go.

TAGS

ART: #character art

CHARACTERS: #ch: [insert character name]

TIPS: #ref

INSPIRATION: #inspo

I'll also add anything I see fit!

TAGLIST

@/angie-j-kay || @/digitalsatyr23 || @/sam-glade || @/worldsfromhoney

[kavaeric]

Painting of Light Era Neptunian gliders from 2020, along with some process stuff... Commentary and even more process stuff below.

Gosh, you know what I missed about Tumblr? Being able to post multiple pictures as part of a single large project.

When I watch science documenatires, some of my favourite visualisations were CG shots of what it would look like in the skies of a gas giant like Saturn or Neptune. Just an endless sea of clouds...I thought, what would it be like to live there?

The obvious solution would be to have airships of some sort. Which like, yeah, but also it didn't feel very...Light Era-ey, you know? I didn't really know it at the time, but eventually Light Era's whole space thing is about aeroplanes and stuff, not ships. Besides, for the science pedants out there, with the atmosphere composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, it's not exactly like you can fill your balloon with something lighter to float.

So as an alternative I thought about having giant, ultra-efficient gliders of varying sizes that would use the violent winds and updrafts of these gas giants to stay aloft. They would have some kind of intermittent thrust system that can be used in a pinch to increase power from the atmosphere around it, but for the most part, they're coasting. The largest of these would be the kilometres large and would host a town's worth of people. They'd also travel in flocks. Perhaps the sky would get crowded quick, but Neptune's quite a bit bigger than Earth: plenty of sky to go around.

Something that people don't think I do is actually do calculations and engineering thinking to investigate the viability of an idea (and if not, what would make it viable). I don't tend to speak about it, since that tends to attract the worst kinds of scifi worldbuilding people who act extremely pretentiously because they read Atomic Rockets and designed their world's map after watching Artefexian videos.

Nevertheless, I did actually run the maths. For the altitude, I learned that at the altitude of Neptune where the air pressure was around 1 atmosphere, the air density (which is important for flight) was about the same as Earth at 9km above sea level—the same as a commercial airliner. So, pretty viable, it's like flying a jetliner, except you don't actually need to pressurise because the air pressure outside is the same as inside. You would have to air seal, though, since the atmosphere is absolutely not breathable. Oh, and it's also -200°C.

More importantly, though, that placed the rough flight level of these gliders right on the cusp of the cloud levels. They can be in and out of them...how fantastic! Lots of swirling ideas of the kinds of scenery you'd be able to see, living a life in the eternal deep blue...

Around this time I also got in contact with a Twitter fan of mine who just happened to be an aerospace engineer (though, like everyone in the STEM department, they do fullstack software/web development now). Ran the idea by them...apparently it checked out. That's that diagram you see in the main photogrid above, with every glider under going a steady, gentle up and down motion between a higher fast air current and a lower slow one.

If there's one thing I wish was better? It's actually the final painting. I wanted to get the scale of the city-glider across, but I think this composition wasn't really the best. In theory the one-person glider should give an idea of how big the city-glider is on scale, but I don't think it was really clear, and the lack of atmospheric depth doesn't really convey the size.

This remains one of the top pieces I would love to redo at some point.

[dokidokitsuna]

LADYBIRD In the Works #1

I figured it’s about time I stop dragging my feet with this project and start actually seriously working on the things I’ll need for the first episode. Designs, music, actually finalizing the script, et cetera. So welcome to Ladybird in the Works! ^^

I haven’t really talked about the Admirers yet, but they are an essential pillar of the worldbuilding: they’re a worldwide organization of normal humans that work to care for and support Ladybirds (at the lowest level) and structure society around their importance (at the highest level).

They began as a small group of people who happened to have personal encounters with The Veneration shortly after the apocalypse, usually the close friends and family members of the first Ladybirds. Eventually they went out in their communities to sort of “preach the gospel” of The Veneration, letting people know that humanity hadn’t been totally abandoned to die, and that higher powers were working to give them a second chance.  The Veneration noticed this, of course, and brought these people together with the other three gods to help rebuild society with the invention of the Sanctuaries. After that point, they focused their attention on their Ladybirds, and founded the Admirer Authority in Sanctuary V to establish laws and procedures to govern them.

There are many subcategories of Admirers, but these three are the main ones: Medics care for wounded Ladybirds, and are usually responsible for going out to recollect their blood if they lose all or most of it. They also care for new Ladybirds before and after their initial surgery, when they receive their Apple Cores…which I’ll talk about some other time~. Scouts are the main link between the public and the Ladybirds: they recruit new Ladybirds, educate existing Ladybirds on doing their jobs, and organize events to celebrate Ladybirds and collect donations. They are also in charge of managing Admirer stations, rest stops where Ladybirds can find maps, food, and supplies, and news bulletins on recent events. Finally, Guardians work on the battlefield and help protect civilians, so the Ladybirds can focus on actually killing the Scales. They are in charge of watching for Scale attacks, educating the public on evacuation procedures, and guiding them to emergency shelters when the time comes.

Public opinion on Admirers is mixed…most people revere them, and see becoming an Admirer as the next best thing to becoming a Ladybird. People will happily donate to Admirers and allow them to exercise authority over other public institutions…even though they’re kinda supposed to be their own separate thing…

On the other hand, there are many people who see Admirers as a giant Ladybird propaganda machine, and dislike their Ladybird-centric mentality-- the way they seem to prioritize the health and welfare of Ladybirds over that of equally-needy civilians, or even each other. In that respect, their existence kinda implies that there are three kinds of people in the world: God’s favorites (Ladybirds), their indentured servants (Admirers), and ‘collateral damage’ (everyone else…). Anyway, the Admirers will have just minor background/extra roles in Episode 1 and most of the early plot…it’s only later, when the Ladybirds run into their first Admirer-turned-antagonist, that they actually start to think about what they mean for society.

...I think I’m in love with ELyTRA.🥺 She’s just so pretty and cute all the time; I don’t even care that she’s technically a propaganda icon! >_< Which I guess means I designed her perfectly for her role in the story. ^^; She won’t be in it for very long; I’ve only explicitly planned for her to appear in this first episode. I might have her make cameos throughout the series though, or maybe she’ll catch up to the heroes again while she’s on tour~.

As is often the case with in-universe celebrities (at least in Western shows) ELyTRA is going to briefly come down from her pedestal to help the main characters with their personal problems…and kill a few Scales while she’s at it. ^^ This is why I designed some civilian clothes for her here-- her Ladybird outfits are reserved for concerts, since that’s her main job.

This is also why I put this little demo of her debut song together, which I’m hoping to use in the actual video. ^^ It’ll be like, this scene where Nell is trying to fight Scales on her own for the first time, even though her sister told her to stay with the civilians and she barely knows what she’s doing, and she’s definitely about to get killed…when suddenly she hears this distant voice, and as it gets closer and clearer she realizes that the in-universe equivalent of Beyoncé is coming to save her. XD I hope my plans don’t change too much; I really want to keep that scene in the story.

[soulsongplays]

Alright I'm currently brainrotting about a homebrew World of Darkness setting based on Project Zomboid that I'm calling "Kentucky by Night," which is basically just "What if the World of Darkness was in the middle of a really slow zombie apocalypse?" It originally started as an excuse to use the Project Zomboid Map Project for battlemaps because I didn't want to have to draw any more environments and I got carried away, here's a list of fun facts about the setting:

Most Werewolves believe that the Knox Infection (the zombie virus) is a product of the Wyrm's tampering, likely related to vampires, and as such they have acted as wilderness zombie hunters since the infection began.

Vampires initially assumed they were immune to the Knox Infection on account of also being undead, and while a zombie bite won't infect them, kindred who regularly feed on zombies, intentionally or not, will begin to rot and hunger, eventually losing themselves to The Beast.

The Technocracy created both the infection and the vaccine that grants immunity to it's airborne strain, but despite accidentally releasing the infection they insisted on holding back the vaccine because "the world wasn't quite ready for it"

Werewolves are immune to the Knox Infection, but still vulnerable to the Wyrm's spiritual corruption, meaning Zombie Werewolves are totally a thing

Vampiric plague-spreading cults began to form, insisting that zombies were like their brethren, and Vampires should aid them in infecting the world. These cults continue to exist to this day, considered an enemy of both the Anarchs and Camarilla. The Sabbat aren't too sure about them.

The Technocracy created a drug called "Zombrex" that is capable of delaying the effects of the Knox Infection, though no permanent cure has been found as the infection rapidly mutates. Zombrex is not available to the public, as they are not ready for it.

Werewolf magic users (I don't remember what they are called) are actually capable of curing the Infection via. cleansing the spiritual corruption caused by the disease, though they refuse to do this for non-werewolves.

The Technocracy is actually struggling to regain a foothold in the NUSA, the union of once-american governments formed since the collapse of the USA, as a result of a resurgence of magic during the Knox Event. it turns out people were a lot more willing to believe anything can happen mid-apocalypse, and cults across the NUSA are pushing back against Technocratic influence since the whole debacle with holding the vaccine they'd already had because 'the world wasn't ready for it.'

A Vampire Zombie can, eventually, recover from the Knox Infection- though there is only one case of a Kindred doing so, and it took nearly a decade of being staked and bathed in fresh blood as their body regenerated.

There are two tribes who willingly underwent the zombie transformation, becoming one of the first unique zombie types- the Zombie Werewolf. These Zombie Werewolves still retain some of their intelligence despite their undeath, and all of the strengths of a werewolf, making them one of the most dangerous things in existence.

One of the nations in the NUSA is actually run by mages, occupying a region that was once Utah a group of radical Mormon Mages spread some of the subtler secrets of magic to chosen followers, giving them a step up when compared to the other nations.

I am so excited to finish the worldbuilding and actually run a game in this setting, but I'm worried I won't be able to publicize anything because I have blatantly stolen a lot of stuff from various pieces of media. I might write something up anyway.

[unearthlycat]

so much potential for worldbuilding shenanigans with iterator cities though. the person that is also a place that was full of people and life and culture however weird and semi-artificial - maybe sterile and bland by intent of construction but inevitably influenced by the actual people who lived there

people living in blocks and tall skyscrapers staring out the windows and decorating their balconies. built up haphazard streets of early iterator cities where nobody was really meant to be living there at first; oddball planning choices because such-and-such a council had a decade-long fight with another over the placement of a specific type of building zone because of proximity to some piece of equipment or another, or because some rich influential type wanted to keep their nice view out the windows--

the design of the iterator puppet used like a local mascot - the colors used on the livery of official city business. marketable plushies because of course there were; cute little symbols and drawings to represent the cities themselves - in advertisements; in political cartoons; in official signs and on stamps--

the structure of luna and metropolis like the difference between a half-finished attic and a penthouse, overstuffed historical districts and dying over-capacity public utilities; half-empty miles of late-era bloc housing and shiny new construction projects. mass transit, metro maps and train stations and traffic predictions; streets of temples and meeting-houses; run-down malls and bustling shopping squares; shitty apartments a view of nothing but more buildings until the edge looks out into the sky.

i don't even know. but people lived there, enough to need to build a city like a city, and that had to have meant something.

[spotsupstuff]

I'VE COME TO RELIEVE YOU FROM THE HOARDE OF BEPPI LOVERS

this is your free ramble pass! feel free to use this ask as an excuse to ramble about whatever random crap you feel like rambling about

hmm..... how about... broadening the worldbuilding horizons a lil with some of the filler Iterators. here's the list of names that i'm slowly workin on to develop into enough of people for my tastes

most well defined of these rn are: Orion, Spore, Gem, Expiation, Rustle, NAE NAE BITCH (Embrace), Vapor and kind of Sadness

with Presence being... finished on account of literally being just IKEA memes the Iterator. that was sister's idea, not mine jglksdmcklsd he's a hippie during the day, creepy fuck during the night. one never knows what's goin on with him, but he's usually sweet n helpful. probably stands in dark hallways with a knife in hand right next to Notos tho. it also has a knife in hand

Orion's Pathway is slowly gaining on importance and characterization!

(quick concept doodle, very much subject to change yet but the mark is most likely gon stay)

he's the 3rd eldest Iterator of the Eo group, finished and brought online about 190 years (Or Honestly More, Fuckers Big n it is all very early on yet) after Boreas' construction. bein the Third means he actually got to socialize with Boreas' antisocial bum (and Zephyr too). all of the Iterator social business that Boreas doesn't wanna deal with he throws at This Kid until Euros comes around. then the two get to share Boreas' "i really don't wanna do this, here you kids go" shit

Orion might look all cool and stuff, but the idea of him wasn't actually even born out of the constellation/myth originally! the idea and also color palette all (will) come from the czech chocolate by the same name

fuckin Love this shit. and just like Orion Chocolate Shop's milk chocolate, Orion's Pathway is a sweet, soft kid that is just a delight to interact with. unlike Boreas, he's an actual angel without any blemishes. he's like the Prince Charming (cinderella 3) of the Iterators... he looks up to ol' Bee a lot <3 his voice claim is Ebucs as of rn

Orion is positioned here on the map (aaaand das Spore right under him <3):

which is Important cuz this darling fucker actually has lore that is very location specific

he serves as something of a physical border/something of a custom office(???) to the Frost's Promise group. works well with how much of a geographical choke point that there is. originally, this wasn't the case including his whole helmet look, but if u caught the whisper of that one war with Iterators in it that i mentioned, then this was it. that changed Orion from a regular Iterator to something of a border guard. the war was between the Ancients of the Eo group and the Frost's Promise group. it happened in the first quarter of Gen 2 ages, so Fish was already around but not Euros

he doesn't actually have a sword n a shield with his puppet, that is mostly mural and such stuff, but the helmet was added to make him look inspiring to his citizens n intimidating to the enemy whenever his image would be projected for whatever reason

he's also something of an old school Phone Operator and had the unofficial title of being the Chief of it just because of his age. after Euros shows up and gets the full hang of the communication systems + handling of the Aeolus Root, most of all Orion's Phone Operator privilages are stripped from him ("oh thank the void." he says, overworked and tired and so excited to get some time for himself. this little hyperactive red fuck is gonna handle it all Just Fine)

stuff for some other filler Iterators:

• Spore's whole thing was that she was originally meant to be one of the first medicine focused Iterator facilities. her placement in the shroom place was done on purpose because as we all know shrooms can get a lil funny in the RW universe. this went wrong though, when the spores of the shrooms got into her systems and started parasiting on her neurons similarly to cordyceps with ants. that is what those jellyfish lookin things stuck on her are!! parasitic neurons already tryin to take her over

a big part of Mission Self-preservation in her case was saving her from the fate that we see her succumbed to at the start of the Ascending Notos comic - her voice claim is something like... Fluttershy but with a Minion from Despicable Me effect/feel to it??? this is the real blorbo of the Eo group fuck everybody else • this is NAE. NAE is a bastard

often bitches about how stupid his name is. then two weeks after the Mass Ascension his arms just kinda Fall Off and he's like "OOOOOH. OOOOOOOOH. *OOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!!* WELL *SOME-FUCKING-BODY* IS GIGGLING FROM THE BOTTOM OF THEIR VOID STAINED BATHTUB, AREN'T THEY. MOTHER. **FUCKER.**" - he's Euros' neighbour and his Mechanic at that time came to help Sparrows out with the 1st Rot situation. Euros likes annoying him a lot • Gem in an Eye is going to be based off of a witch a lil, she's gonna do shit with ✨ crystals ✨ (she's an asshole) • Sordid Expiation will be based off of a nun and will be bitchily religious (unlike Fish who is funnily religious- he's like a conspiracy theorist while Expiation is all serious bleeeeegh boooooo 👎) - Gem and Expiation have a playful rivarly going on, crystals vs religion. with Spore in the friend group, medicine joins in, but when she gets worse with those parasitic shrooms she stops joining in on the play-arguments • Raspy Rustle's voice claim is AnnenMayKantereit and he is a Sweetheart. he and Reed get mistaken for each other often because of the initials n they might end up havin similar chat clrs too. both find it very funny • Vapor is based around the vaporwave aesthetic and is Notos' neighbour. so you have this goth bitch who doesn't care for attention and right next to it is this pastel neon chillax'd music star who cares a LOT for attention (like that one meme with the houses...). her mark is that vaporwave sun and it's splattered all over her face instead of just on the forehead • Sadness is based off of Sad Machine by Porter Robinson- her clr palette will be sampled from the album cover n her voice claim is That song as well. she's closeby to Fish and Likes Writing Poems :')

[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.

[unclear-contributions]

King, Queen, and Witch!

Heyo TC! Love what you're doing with the Dragon's Daughter.

I already answered King for Peasant. I am going to use this incredibly tenuous rationale to answer all three of these for Peasant and for the Seven Gods Legendarium. Because I can. Yeehonk, as the kids say.

QUEEN (Peasant) -- Peasant is one of the least fleshed out worlds I have, actually! At least, in this respect. The earliest planned event would likely be either the invention of Thaumaturgy or the founding of the Empire, but the two are so inextricably intertwined -- putting one before the other doesn't really make sense, considering that the overwhelming military advantage thaumaturgy grants is. Very difficult to overstate. Especially in a world without gunpowder.

The only viable military counter to a thaumaturge is another thaumaturge of equal or greater skill, after all. Or maybe fifty guys with bows.

One of those is ominous foreshadowing. Whee!

WITCH (Peasant) -- Two things, which happened around the same time. The first was ducal fantasy, a sort of subgenre in a lot of manga and manhwa, with sort of dukes-and-duchess trappings and a lot of magic, which I spliced to a magic school, because I felt like it. I wrote a scene just to prove I could, if I wanted to, and it ended up being the first duel between Noam and Emilia, which sharpened up their characters right off the bat. The story exploded out into what would become Peasant afterwards, because I am incapable of not ripping themes and symbols from anything that exists near me for more than two seconds...but that's the seed.

The second thing that followed was this snip. It came...a few minutes after I wrote that first duel, and that still lingers with me as so central to Peasant's identity, even if I don't end up getting to use it in the text. (Unfortunately, it is late summ--hang on. What am I talking about. I decide when everything is.)

(Never mind, I'm gonna slam that scene in. Hash Tag Yeet.)

Normal people can leave now. Past here be old gods.

//

LEGENDARIUM. #7gl. The big, old work, my first world, and the hardest to work with, but the most fleshed out by far. The only world, so far, that I've built for worldbuilding's sake, as opposed to part of a story.

KING (7GL) -- The Legendarium's my oldest project. It was my first real original world, my first big project, and it's influenced my whole life as I've grown up alongside it -- I've done most of my writing in the last three years, and the Legendarium is about three times as old as that, a constant slow-burn of research, refinement, exploration, and snips.

QUEEN (7GL) -- The histories I have go all the way back to the cosmogeny, to the making of the world. Technically, they also go back to the founding of the first Mordan Empire. But that's so far back that it's in the so-called Age of Formation, and that Empire's stood, more or less, for thousands of years.

But the earliest strictly historical event would be the assassination of the Philosopher-Queen of Danaan, which eventually lead to the homogenization of power in the kingdom of Danaan, which in turn lead to militarization and the Great War between Danaan and the Mordan Empire. This period was the Age of Powder. Something happened to conclude it, though -- most of the records of what exactly are lost. But it wasn't pretty, and now the gods are gone and the world's had about three hundred odd years to settle into the scars of whatever happened.

WITCH (7GL) -- The idea was simple. Li'l baby me wondered, hey, what if, like, physical forces were gods? Like, gravity. And matter. And stuff. So I mapped out seven gods corresponding to scientific concepts: spacetime, energy, physical laws, consciousness, possibility/chaos, matter, and absence and went from there. That was it. That was the base.

...we are so far past that.

Thanks for the ask! Have a normal and sane amount of response to it.