Environment – The Fire Thieves Studio

World of Eos: 8 Questions to Build Up your City

12Mar

By CharlesNo Comments

Culture, Environment, Original Worlds, Unnamed Fantasy Setting, Worldbuilding Exercise, Worldbuilding Process, Worldbuilding Topic

World of Eos: 8 Questions to Build Up your City

Previously: We determined the three original seats of human civilization on Eos. Each was pitched by the servant of a god to the humans living in the creshold valley. Each servant then guided the humans who aligned with their philosophy to the location where they would build their city. Today we're going to develop the first of those cities in a number of aspects. We're starting with Banderlin. Banderlin was built by the followers of the god Infra Dev. The values he upholds are hard work, labor, honesty, stability, tradition, and dedication to the tried-and-true. These values will inform some of the details, but I want to expand out even further, into the general inspirations for this location and this culture and define some more specific elements. So this will be kind of a bra...

The Making of a New World: Arranging the Puzzle

16Nov

By CharlesNo Comments

Environment, Original Worlds, Species/Race, Unnamed Fantasy Setting, Worldbuilding Process

The Making of a New World: Arranging the Puzzle

Last week I began development of an original fantasy world. We discussed the genre and subgenre, the general aesthetic, and the tone of the world, and gave it the temporary code-name FERGUS. This week, it's time to discuss filling out the world with some detail, and determining how to bring a collection of disparate ideas into alignment. The goal is to arrange all these bits and then fill in the gaps, until we have a complete, intricate, and even elegant world. By bits I mean things like races I want to see, monsters that would be cool, settings and locations, plot devices, cultural elements... just anything I might want to put into a story set on this world. And yes, I'm going to stick with this metaphor of putting together a puzzle. 1: Dump Out the Box This part is ...

31Jul

By CharlesNo Comments

Environment, Original Worlds, Unnamed Fantasy Setting, Worldbuilding Exercise

How to Generate a Map for your World

The Goal So there are any number of ways to draw up a map of the local region, or even a continent. You can start from many different angles, such as putting the city which is the main focus of the story at the center and then just building around it. You could roll randomly for where the deserts and forests and mountains are, or decide arbitrarily as the story dictates. Consistency is pretty important, but in a lot of stories, your players will meet you half way (remember that one?), and you don't need to be perfectly geographically accurate I mean... not unless you want to. Me? I want to. At the very least I want things to make SOME logical sense. There are a few rules for map-making you can keep in mind which will help tie things together, and help it look like a real living ...

Knowing how Climate and Geology affect Your World

29Jul

By CharlesNo Comments

Environment, Worldbuilding Topic

Knowing how Climate and Geology affect Your World

Attribution: kjpargeter How does environment affect a setting? The shape of the world affects the lives of the people who live in it. Like the shape of a bucket affects the water inside. It is something that is easy to take for granted, living in modern society, having roads and highways and access to nearly all parts of the map. Where I'm at in Colorado, where we ride horses everywhere, I'm a day or less from mountain tops, lakes, forests, prairies, rivers, sand dunes, all sorts of interesting geological formations. It's all pretty easy to reach. In the world you are creating, that may not be the case. In modern or futuristic worlds, technology allows for easy travel to nearly everywhere on the map. On a colonized frontier world, however, the lack of developed roadways has to be...