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.

Since my last update post, I’ve added a bunch of world building links:

• PhysicalGeography.net, in their own words, is “an educational web portal that focuses on a specific area knowledge known as Physical Geography. Physical Geography is a sub-discipline of two much larger fields of study – Geography and Earth Sciences. The main purpose of Physical Geography is to explain the spatial characteristics of the various natural phenomena associated with the Earth’s hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere.” Looks very helpful!
• Geek Dad’s How to build a world series.
• Fantasy Mapmaking with Photoshop video tutorials.
• Medieval Deomgraphcis Made Easy

It’s still the weekend and I’ll get away with spending a lot of time on this world-building thing. So let’s take a quick look at what else has been happening.

Eliza has added an underground city to her world of darkness (which is not called The Black, silly me). She even posted a sort of schematic of the layout of Vastii. which I quite like for its “cave drawing” style.

Saint know-all has been working on details of a dragon-like species, known as the “taal“. Nice fresh take on them, I am not even sure I’d really call them “dragons”, but I guess “dragon” is, in a way, as general a term as “monster”.

RG Sanders introduced Arbiture, a dysmal place inhabited by – if I got this right – fallen “angelic” (very powerful) beings, who are now warring endlessly among themselves.

Cirellio has begun to build a planet called Cirellioland Lura. Lura has some funky stuff going on with electromagnetism. I’ll definitely want to see how that pans out. For my part, I try to avoid messing with the laws of physics as much as I can, except of course for fantasy worlds and even there it’s just to include magic and fire-breathing lizards and the like.

Ken Kiser started off with a creation myth for his world, which, if I understand correctly, is a setting for a novel he’s writing. Or rather, it looks more like an explanation for magic than a real creation myth, as the humans and the world already existed when this tale took place.

Finally, Aeronwy has created a world called Tria – something which she says she wouldn’t have done without world building month. And she seems to have discovered the joy of being a deity. And if nothing else came from World Building Month, this alone would make it a success. :-)

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

Today is August 1st, and Eliza’s world building month has started. So far there are 14 people who signed up – that is, including both the organizer and of course myself.

I don’t want to pre-empt Eliza – she’ll keep tabs on people and presumably post some sort of summary – but of course I’ll want to comment on what’s happening, as it’s happening. Don’t think I’ll be able to post something daily, but we’ll see.

So far, there have been a couple of “Hello World” type articles. Besides this, Eliza has posted a summary of what she intends to build: A world called “the black” which is plunged into deep darkness for long periods, reminiscent of Nightfall and – the very different but surprisingly entertaining, relatively speaking – Pitch Black. It’s a neat premise and it’ll be fun to see how it turns out.

I am assuming most of the other participants are based in the Americas, and will probably post during the evenings. I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing what develops during this month.