Subject: That post is exactly what I needed for my agent's original home continuum.
Author:
Posted on: 2020-02-09 22:25:20 UTC
Thank you so much.
Subject: That post is exactly what I needed for my agent's original home continuum.
Author:
Posted on: 2020-02-09 22:25:20 UTC
Thank you so much.
So earlier today I was working on my original story, and I was writing a scene where the protagonist enters a room which is basically a library containing more or less all the books in the country. And I just put in some big numbers for the dimensions of this library and the size of the shelves, and then I thought "hang on a second... this is a lot of books." I did some rough sums and it turned out the library would contain literal millions of books, which is way too many.
But that then got me thinking: how many books would be a realistic amount? So I decided to try and calculate it... and realised I didn't have the numbers. Because I don't even know the population of the country. I've done basically no proper world-building. There's been a bit of work on the magic systems and languages, but barely anything on history, geography, culture...
And to be honest, I don't really know where to start: I've never learnt to build a world before. It's the disadvantage of writing fanfiction: all the world-building's already been done for you. So I guess I need help: how do you go about building a fantasy world? Any tips, ideas, recommendations?
Thank you!
This may help: Medieval Demographics Made Easy by S. John Ross. It was written with fantasy RPGs in mind, but it's good for a rough sketch of any medieval fantasy land. {= D
Re. libraries, my sense is that buildings dedicated solely to books aren't really a thing in a medieval-flavored world. Large, wealthy establishments such as universities and churches might have a collection for the use of their members; wealthy people might have private collections; maybe you'll find a few prized volumes in the common room of a particularly educated innkeeper. But, depending on the level of technology/magic available, printing and book-binding are difficult and expensive, and the majority of the population can't read anyway. There just isn't a high demand for books.
That's just in general, though. Your world may vary! ... And I don't think you actually said medieval fantasy, but if it's not, I'm sure there are similar resources for modern fantasy and whatnot out there for the finding!
~Neshomeh
Thank you so much.
Thanks very much!
My world doesn’t really fit into any neatly-defined category - magic is powerful enough and widely available enough that there hasn’t been a need to invent a lot of technology. I still think there would definitely be a library at least in this place - it’s not a public library, it belongs to the organisation that teaches magic, and books are an important part of that.
The British Library must by law have a copy of every book published in the country. I'd link to the BL website but Markdown on a phone is a pain. Basically, though, it's vast. It's got a collection of 170 MILLION books and the digital collection occupies a petabyte of storage space. So yeah, it's a chonksome building, but not impossibly so. The key is to have multiple smaller collections spread around a campus or big network of buildings. Hope that's useful =]
I generally start with climate and sources of income. Climate informs fashion, so generally you can take a climate that corresponds to a real-world society's climate and use that as fashion inspiration (do they wear furs? How much clothing is considered acceptable? How do they think about hair?). Sources of income will give you some ideas about where towns are, some minor cultural stuff, and what people are going to start wars over. So if there's, say, a super magical grove with healing powers, maybe a sick king from the neighboring country decides to yoink it. Get a little bit of war, with results depending on your themes. How does the grove feel about a war being fought over it? That can have interesting results. Income will give you things like "ok it's by the river, we've got a fisherman population. The poorer population eats the fairly untasty water plants that grow in the river, since fish is a little more expensive. Rivers let you set up windmills, meaning the farmers who are spread out across the land have reason to come to this town to grind their wheat. Maybe they all come once a year, and everyone has a fun party! The fishing town might also have, I don't know- some fancy snails in the river that can be made into really pretty dye. That means people will want to make clothing there, so we've got another industry. The clothing makers will need cotton from the farmers, or maybe flax. Since it's high-end clothing, nobles and rich people have a reason to visit the town. How do they interact with the town? Do they come around festival time, or try to avoid such peasant fripperies?". That's one town/city, depending how many other industries you add to it, and how it interacts with its neighbors. Macro stuff is often more along the lines of "is this city valuable enough for people to want to raid it?". A wealthy kingdom will only do this for a really shiny prize, but the poorer barbarian sorts have lower standards. Feel free to crib shamelessly from real historical economies and wars- we've spent thousands of years thinking up ways to make money and reasons to fight each other, so there's plenty to draw on. Good luck, and hope some of this was helpful!
Being me, I've now gone to completely the opposite extreme and started a timeline of historical events beginning hundreds of thousands of years before the story itself. In the first fifty thousand years of recorded history my world has had three slow, painful and bloody wars, one attempted genocide, two outbreaks of deadly plague and a giant attack... how does it have any people left alive?
Once I actually get within a few centuries of the "present" I'll definitely try some of your ideas, and see how I get on! Thank you!
Now I want to check just how deep... okay, in our world, recorded history begins around 5500 years ago, with the development of Cuneiform and Hieroyglyphics. There are forms of 'proto-writing' going back to ca. 8500 years ago, so you could argue that people might have been recording history at that point. That's also around the end of the Neolithic and the development of metalworking as a widespread technology, and around the time civilisation of some kind began in Egypt. The oldest surviving structure in the world (a tomb in France) would not be built for another two thousand years.
In the Levant, the first walls of Jericho were being built - the very first walled city in history. The first settlement in Jericho was another 3000 years earlier, 11 000 years ago. It's the oldest settlement we know of that is still inhabited today.
Push back another thousand years or so, and you're at the invention of agriculture and the start of the Neolithic. Before this point, humanity existed as hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age).
15 000 years ago, the last ice age (roughly) ended. The earliest cave paintings date to 44 000 years ago. Major modern human expansion out of Africa started about 50 000 years ago - that's how far you've gone back. Like I said, holy heck.
But you said 'beginning hundreds' - plural - 'of thousand years before', so let's keep going:
The last ice age began some 115 000 years ago. Homo sapiens only started leaving Africa 200 000 to 100 000 years ago. Heck, H. sap only evolved some 300 000 years ago.
That's a really really long time. By comparison, Tolkien's timelines (inasmuch as they exist in coherent form) show that Middle-earth itself is only 55 000 years old by the time of the War of the Ring, and the oldest incarnates - the Elves - date back a mere 11 000.
I have to ask: how have you kept a society static on an evolutionary timescale? In particular, I'm fascinated that you seem to have held it at a medieval-esque point. I can just about imagine a static magical 'hunter-gatherer' society - if you can literally magic up food, there's no incentive to invent agriculture at all - but you seem to be talking about a city-dwelling people. So - without trying to pressure you into revealing plot details you don't want to - I really want to know how. ^_^
hS
I'm pretty sure a lot of the history doesn't actually survive by the time of my story... and I'd say at this point it's a lot more "Dark Ages" than medieval. And I guess it goes through cycles: there's going to be at least one catastrophic event which basically forces society to start again from scratch between the period I'm recording and the present day. So... yeah, it progresses from this to medieval-ish to advanced society but in a weird and chaotic way and by the time of my story it's back to medieval-ish again. It's a work in progress.