I thought I’d give you a little update on current projects and status. The past year or so has been a little hard on me “in the real world” but all that is sorted out now and things are on the up again. On the other hand, it hasn’t left me so much time for world-building: Besides my new real-life job keeping me busy, NaNoWriMo ate up a lot of free time in November. That’s done and over, and with the holidays coming up I should have a good amount of time to write and build.

• My Wacom tablet needs to be replaced, but I am not yet sure which one to get, and what size. They get expensive really quickly once you go beyond A6. I have some maps to draw!
• I’ve been consolidating settings. At least two, probably three, and perhaps four of my worlds will be merged – details to follow…
• I am totally into science fiction right now. This comes from reading everything H. Beam Piper that Gutenberg and Librivox could throw at me, but it is also related to finally playing role-playing games again; in this case we’re up to our ears in the Star Wars Saga Edition. I’m playing a shard in an IG-86 chassis with a severe identity crisis.
• I’d like to complete short “world books” for what I consider my main worlds. Say something on the order of 48 pages each.
• With the death of imaginaryworlds.net and the disappearance of Paul of the Shakespeare & Dragon podcast, I’d like to expand enderra.com to include more how-to’s, more discussion, more interactivity. This is more of a long-term goal, we’re definitely talking mid-2010 here. Anybody who’d like to get in on this, drop me a line…

I’ve added the following links to the “Worlds on the Web” page:

• Bergonia, a sqaurish fictional island nation
• Kingdom of Kaupelan another constructed nation, beware of pop-up advertisement
• The Republic of Novegrad is a really nicely done con-nation
• The Armorican Isles

More resources:

• How to design a good flag
• Flag generator
• Creating Fantasy and Science Fiction Worlds
• Inkscape – A Guide to a Vector Drawing Program

Found more interesting world building links:

• Thud and Blunder: Article by Poul Anderson about worldbuilding.
• 3D-Starmaps is dedicated to star maps.
• Atomic Rockets contains a lot of information about real and fictional rocketships.

If you’re serious about world building, this one might be something for you: The California State University is/was offering a course in World Building. The course is offered both on-campus and as a distance learning course. It focuses on realistic, scientific world-building. I am not sure if the course is still actively offered; the Open University does not seem to list it. I’m actually interested in this course, but unfortunately the professor who taught it does not reply to email at the moment. A pity.

I’ve added a few links – and since I can’t really expect anyone to do a mental diff on the two link lists, I decided to quickly post what I’ve added since I initially started the link lists.

World Building Resources:

• Climatology for Worldbuilders
• Language Construction Kit
• A Way with Worlds

Worlds on the Web:

• Planetocopia
• Life on the Planet Furaha

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.

Alien Planet is another example of “professional” world building, similar to The Future is Wild. However, unlike that show, Alien Planet is set on a world in another star system. It depicts a robotic mission of exploration to this planet.

Someone actually uploaded the thing to Google Video. Enjoy:

Personally, I feel that a lot of the creatures showing here seem a little far-fetched… however, I am still not a zoologist or botanist and thus can’t really say. Anyway, it makes for an entertaining 90 minutes.

Additional links:

• Alien Planets official homepage.

Sometimes you find gems when you least expect it. I was actually looking for a good domain name to use for this weblog when I came across this world-building podcast.

Shakespeare & Dragons is run by Paul Stark. Paul is an English teacher from California with aspirations to becoming a professional world builder. He takes a story-based approach to building worlds, which is a little different from the usual “scientific” approach to Conworlds.

Paul has published 15 episodes so far (plus a “donation reward” special dealing with monster design). Unfortunately, his publishing schedule is very irregular, but what’s already available is quite interesting and really worth the time to download: If you’re a world-builder, this podcast is two thumbs up. But even regular game masters can take a lot of value from it, as they will have to create stories just the same. Highly recommended. And do send Paul some feedback, so he is motivated enough to continue working on the podcast.

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.

I’ve been world building for as long as I can remember. As a child I owned many Lego bricks, and built many imaginary worlds from them – often space-themed, but there were more “mundane” worlds. Later, in the 1980s, my mother got me my first role-playing game, and I was instantly hooked. I used the prefab settings for a long time, but built my own modules and campaigns. At the same time, I began to fiddle with writing fiction.

In 1992 – and I believe it was November – some friends and I wanted to start a fantasy campaign. The system was GURPS, and the setting… well. GURPS comes with a strange fantasy setting based on real-world religions. We didn’t own the world-book, and to be honest it would not have been to our taste. After a friend failed to come up with a decent setting, I took up the job of Game Master. I told the guy I’d have something ready in two weeks. In these two weeks I built a fantasy world I called “Enderra“.

Map of Old Enderra (pre-Demon War), circa 1992

The Enderra campaign ran at a very irregular schedule for several years and eventually died. In the late 90s, we decided to start playing again. I was again the GM. When I started to prepare for the game I quickly decided that I did not want to use any of the prefabricated worlds. But I also thought that building a new world from scratch would be wasteful. After all, I already had Enderra – there were many things about Enderra that I did not like anymore. So I fast-forwarded Enderra by a thousand years, and built on top of what already existed. The following D&D campaign ran for years, and a friend of mine actually ran his campaign using the same world.

The creation of “Enderra II” marked the point where I became interested in world building for its own sake. I drew immense enjoyment out of the creative act of designing a world, a whole universe, and over the years I built several settings of all kinds of flavors. Most of them never got used for anything.

Recently (late 2007, early 2008) I started to look for other world builders… to share experiences, to learn, and above all to have people to bounce ideas off of. This blog is part of that effort.