By random chance I came across Life after People on local TV tonight – the 2h original version, not the series. While it is hardly perfect – Wikipedia lists some criticisms or omissions, and I can come up with several more – it is still an inspirational film and a good idea to watch if you’re into post-apocalyptic fiction / gaming.

Here’s an assortment of links you might find useful.

How-To’s

• Map-making tutorial using The Gimp.

Inspiration, Locations

• Photos from Paris Exhibition, 1900. In color.
• Abandoned subway stations in New York City
• The Uros people of the Titicaca lake live on floating islands, which is a cool style of living for a conpeople.

Science Fiction Stuff

• Tests have shown that it is possible to protect long-duration missions from solar wind using a magnetic shield.
• Scientists figured out that Mars’ loss of atmosphere to the pressure from solar wind isn’t a slow, gentle process; instead it is quite violent: Solar Wind Rips Up Martian Atmosphere.

NaNoWriMo 2008 Research

• Wikipedia on radioactive fallout
• Wikipedia on fallout shelters and blast shelters
• Mount Weather government bunker
• Gas masks vs bad smells: Gas masks do not filter out odors, unless they are designed for the job, but vick vapor rub is a work-around used by law enforcement and emergency workers.
• Geiger counters
• Compound bows – bow hunting is done in the US

Sometimes, after you have built your world, you may wish to destroy it. If you need ideas on how to accomplish this, there are two good sources: Wikipedia’s End of civilization article covers the basics. And Exit Mundi is a thorough collection on the topic.

More photos from Wikipedia / Wikimedia commons. Again, you can click on them to get to the source + high resolution version.

Settlement in Wadi Rum, Jordan. Photo by Steffen Sledz.

Judean hills. Photo by David Shankbone.

White Sands, New Mexico, USA. Photo by davebluedevil.

Salar de Talar near San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Photo by Luca Galuzzi.

Valle de la Luna, Atacama desert. Photo by Reinhard Jahn.

PS: I am done with the photos, I swear! ….well, okay, unless I find something extra-cool like Antelope Canyon.

More desert imagery… Again, you can click on the photos to get to the source.

Namibian Canyon. Photo by Tjeerd Wiersma.

Texas Desert by Monahans. Photo by Klaus Bertow.

Arnâron isn’t a completely dead world… like on Earth, life clings on wherever it can:

Namibia national Park Namib Naukluft. Photo by Patrick Giraud.

Namibia national Park Namib Naukluft. Photo by Patrick Giraud.

Sand dunes in Namib Desert, Namibia. Photo by Thomas Schoch.

There are so many beautiful desert photos, I am sure I’ll post more in the future.

To get into the right mood for designing Arnâron, I’ve collected some desert photos from the Internet – in this case from Wikipedia.They are all available under a free license of one sort or another – Click the picture for details. (Wikipedia also has the original size images if you wish to obtain one in high resolution.)

Libyan Desert. Photo by Roberdan.

Ancient dunes from the Namib-Naukluft Park in Namibia, Africa. Photo by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen.

Sand dunes of Wan Caza in the Sahara desert region of Fezzan in Libya. Photo by Luca Galuzzi - www.galuzzi.it.

Near Ouarzazate(Marocco). Photo by Maxme.

Photo of the Moul n'ga Cirque in the Tadrart region, Southeast Algeria. Photo by Pir6mon.

And now for something completely different: Another post in my “Plot-a-day” series, where I point out news articles that make wonderful inspiration for plots and adventures (and the series that is anything but daily).

Today, I found a great article from the Japan Times: The Curse of Roppongi. Roppongi, if you do not know, is an upscale and touristy district of Tokyo.

The article explores the bad sides of Roppongi, and includes accidents that happen in the suburb. According to the geomancers, Roppongi is awash in negative energy (”fengshui”).

“The many shrines and temples in Monzencho — as Roppongi was called in olden times — were situated to ensure the proper flow of ki (spiritual energy), and with the kimon (devil’s gates) aligned — north, south, east and west — so as to direct bad spirits from the area, but they were successively demolished to make way for new redevelopment projects that have upset the balance. It’s the changes wrought by the disappearance of the temples that are enticing more people to commit crimes.”

What a great start for a cursed part of town. Of course, in our real world, this is all superstitious nonsense; there are no ghosts, no spirits, and no curses. But in your fantasy world, all of this could literally be true.

“Foreigners worship their own countries’ deities, so one might say the old spirits that protected Roppongi have lost their force. Then came redevelopment, which was aligned unfavorably, which also affects the corporations quartered in Roppongi Hills. All these corporate crimes are a result of the bad spirits that converged on the district.”

The possibilities are endless. You could transplant this to a different world, or use it in a weird stories type setting, where ghosts and goblins roam. You could send the Ghostbusters into the Japanese capital or, in best Japanese fashion, teenage girls in powered armor. Picture battles at night, in the still crowded streets, or in the dark, dank and spacious sewers.

Tokyo Sewers

The curse could literally be true – the undead, creatures from a parallel universe, demons, or space aliens could have set up an outpost under Roppongi, and the “curse” is a result of their meddling. Or maybe the Yakuza is using stories about a curse to cover up their illegal dealings…

People in the real world do a lot of messed-up things. When a British woman discovered she was pregnant after an affair with a co-worker, she hid her pregnancy and eventually hid her stillborn baby in the trunk of her car, the Daily Mail reports.

Marketing executive Claire Jones, 32, found she was expecting after a fling with a man she met through work.

To explain her expanding stomach, she told her family, friends and partner of five years David Stoneman that a wheat allergy was making her put on weight.

After giving birth alone in her mother’s bathroom on December 27 last year, she wrapped the stillborn baby in a carrier bag and binbags.

She then drove to the semidetached house she shared with Mr Stoneman, 33.

Jones then acted as if nothing had happened with her partner and colleagues.

But South Wales Police were tipped off by a health worker who noticed that her pregnancy had been registered but there was no record of a birth.

There’s a ton of plot possibilities in this tragic story. It lends itself mostly to a horror type scenario; a criminal investigation close to the real events is probably not interesting enough. But once you add evil cultists, the entire thing becomes much more sinister: Maybe the woman had designs for the dead baby’s body – why else keep it in the car? And was it really stillborn in the first place? Maybe it got switched for a changeling, a demon, or even the Antichrist (see Rosemary’s Baby).

In a dark but maybe more realistic setting, the baby could have been sold to unscrupulous corporations, who use small children for medical experiments or to raise them into rough, tough, emotionless killers or cybernetically controlled slaves.

For a happier ending, the child could still be alive. This works especially well if the child is somehow important – for example, because he is the son of a king. The protagonists must race against time to find the baby before it dies.

One of the things a lot of people seem have problems with is where and how to get ideas. Personally, I never found this to be a problem – and one of the best sources for plot ideas is still the real world. This is one reason among several why I read the news almost daily.

Here’s a very good example, posted on the BBC News Site. In Indonesia, a man was executed for the murder of over 40 women ten years ago:

An Indonesian man who murdered 42 women and girls in black magic rituals has been executed by firing squad.

Self-confessed “shaman” Ahmad Suraji, 57, told police he killed the women to improve his magical powers.

He had been sentenced to death in 1998 after police found the women’s bodies buried in a field in North Sumatra.

Suraji’s victims had come to him for supernatural help with their finances and love life.

Police said he persuaded them to be buried naked up to the neck before strangling them.

This is a pretty obvious plot idea, and it can be transplanted to pretty much any setting and genre. In a horror setting or a fantasy world, the man may actually possess magic powers, but even in a hyper-modern science fiction setting there will always be people who believe in the supernatural and there will always be con artists (and the honest insane) who take advantage of this.

The protagonists could be involved in tracking down this serial killer, or they or a friend could be persons who ask the “magician” for help. The killer might actually be using the victims to prepare a grand ritual to summon a supernatural being straight out of a Lovecraft novella. They could be explorers or tourists in the Caribbean, and stumble across a witch doctor who buries his victims in an attempt to turn them into zombies.

For extra color, change the method of killing – Instead of strangling them, he could use a ritual dagger and slowly bleed them to death. Or he could leave them, helplessly buried to their necks, when a nasty monster approaches out of the darkness and eats the victims alive.

Of course, it is just as possible in your story that the “magician” is an innocent man, himself the victim of a witch-hunt, and the players must rescue him before he is executed by the firing squad – maybe because it’s “the right thing to do”, or because they were hired (or blackmailed) to do so, or he may actually possess some vital knowledge the characters need in your campaign: A rare spell, knowledge of the whereabouts of the sunken treasure, plans to the secret underground bunker the terrorists hide their improvised nukes in… You get the idea.

The New York Times has an article on-line which describes the creation of Tho Fan, the conlanguage used in the BioWare game Jade Empire. Tho Fan wasn’t used extensively in the game, but it still seems like much more effort went into it than is usual for these games.

Since the Earth’s continents drift over its surface, the planet is slowly changing its familiar view. Everybody thinks the dinosaur lived on “our” Earth, when in fact the Earth looked completely unrecognizable millions of years ago.

Some geologists and palaeontologists have attempted to reconstruct Earth’s map at various points in the past. Two efforts have reproduced beautiful and useful maps. The first, the Paleomap Project of Christioher R. Scotese offers maps that are functional but somewhat plain. Dr. Ron Blakey, on the other hand, has created beautiful “satellite views” of ancient Earth. An example is this map, from the Middle Devonian:

In a world building context, these maps are highly useful if you create a setting that is set in the past or in a parallel universe that is based on historical Earth. But there are other uses: For example, these maps could be used as alien planets (except for the very recent maps, in which Earth’s continental outlines become quite recognizable).

I have actually used the Middle Devonian map to create the map of an Earth-like fantasy world, which I call Arth (in honor of Starflight):

Pretty, no? And nobody who saw the “Arth” map by itself would suspect that it is merely our own planet Earth, just 385 million years ago.

Worlds do not always have to be plain old balls of dirt speeding through space, it’s also possible to have artificial constructs as your worlds. One such design was created by Arthur C. Clarke for his book Rendezvous with Rama. Rama is a space ship in the shape of a hollow cylinder; such designs have been created by NASA as hypothetical future space stations.

Anyway, the Rama spaceship is quite large, and a Frenchman, Eric Bruneton, sought a way to render this huge scenery. He developed methods for this that are quite interesting, and you can visit his website about Rendering Rama to see the resulting art and read a very interesting article on how he accomplished the feat.

As you can see, he succeeded beautifully.

I must say that I always pictured Rama’s interior as more artificial-looking, but that could have been my misreading of the story. Of course Eric’s rendering is more a demonstration of technology rather than a faithful rendering. Either way, I thought that this was a great little gem that people interested in world building or constructed worlds might be interested in.

Here’s an example of professional world-building:

The Future is Wild was a joint production of Discovery Channel, ORF and ZDF television corporations. It depicts three scenarios for the future evolution of life on Earth, set at 5, 100 and 200 million years in the future.

While there has apparently been some criticism of the scientific validity of the show, it’s still a pretty well-thought out design for the possible future evolution of life on Earth. And even if not everything is accurate – I am not in a position to have an opinion on this – it certainly sounds plausible and fairly consistent. Overall, The Future is Wild can serve as a pretty good source of inspiration for the aspiring world builder; especially since they explain why they designed the creatures in the way they did. Highly recommended.