Post/Author/DateTime	Post
baelzemon_2200 03-01-08, 07:33 PM	Hello everyone I am doing a Diploma of Business Management at TAFE (I live in Australia, look it up non-aussies) One of my assignments is a research project. I have decided to research the production of fantasy worlds, hopefully with an end-goal-idea (rpg, consol game, novel, movie, ect) independant bias. So I have a few questions for the world at large: What inspires you? How do you create your maps, cultures, religions, ect? What tools do you use? There are 3 types of people I would like to respond to this, and please add which you are: 1) Keith Baker 2) People who work on published (or non-published, but major) fantasy (doesnt have to be fantasy. In this context fantasy includes horror, science fiction, ect) worlds 3) People who work on their own small-time worlds
CipherTheory 03-01-08, 08:04 PM	I'll bite. I'm in category #3, by the way, but hoping to someday be in category #2. What inspires you? It's tough to say. My own imagination, things I read, a video game here and there. Ironically, television and movies; as well as the writings of other fantasy authors (save for a few choice webcomics) usually detract from my inspiration. How do you create your maps, cultures, religions, ect? For maps, I generally draw an outline on grid paper. After that, I flesh out a few things in good old pencil. Once that's complete, I scan it into my computer, and then create a vector copy of it using Paint Shop Pro. A vector image allows me the freedom to put as much or as little detail as I choose into a map without dramatically increasing the file size. For my cultures and religions... well... I generally start with an "X matters" concept for every race/culture I want to add to the setting. For example, I'll say that "For elves, art matters". Then I'll expound upon that. Things like, 'what do elves consider art?' 'Are all elves artists?' 'What about those who aren't artistically inclined?' 'How does this affect their society?' 'How do other races view their society?' These are just examples; and, no, I haven't actually used that particular example in a setting (came close, though). Also, I rarely stop at a single 'X' for each culture/race. Most have three or more. From there I add details and cultural quirks as I see fit. It's the same thing for religions. While I keep a 'stock' pantheon for my settings (because I don't really like working with fantasy religions, honestly), I'll occasionally work outside of this box. When I do, I decide how many deities I want, and what should matter to them as a whole and individually. Then I contemplate how this would affect their relationships, and flesh out each deity based on these relationships. What tools do you use? As I mentioned, I use a pencil and paper setup for my basic map drawing; and Pain Shop Pro for my detailed maps. I also use a program called "wikiPad", which I find to be an excellent resource for concept mapping. For game rules and such, I post on various forums and ask other people to help me with game balance. I also have a dozen or so bookmarked articles and utilities that help to guide my creative process. Hopefully that was helpful to you. If there's anything else you'd like to know, or wish me to expound upon, feel free to send me a PM. :)
Naderion 03-02-08, 10:52 AM	Though I work almost completely alone in my free time and have no intention of making money with it, I have some fancy plans of one day making the complete contents of my setting publically avialable online for free. It's really big scale, like Middle-earth or the Realms and though I don't belive I'll ever archive that much of fame, I hope for some day gathering a small but sizeable fanbase. I'm working on it for four and a half years now and am still serious with it, so I do consider myself a freelance designer and self-made publisher. Somwhere inbetween group 2 and 3.:D What inspires you? I suppose my main inspiration are existing settings that I like, but though I do a fantasy setting, I got a lot of inspiration from sci-fi or horror and others. Most inspiration is probably visual. Movies, TV-series and Video-games that get my exited very often get my thinking "this is cool, I want some of it" and that's what inspires my to create something following the same concept. I also collect concept-arts from such movies and games, and have dozens of bookmarks of fantasy-art sites. What also greatly affects me is music. Visual impressions often look impressive or cool, but music is much more potent to transport emotion. Many pieces of music that inspire me are soundtracks of movies or games, but sometimes it's stuff you could have on the radio. In songs with lyrics there are often lines wich deeply affect me and sometimes it's just a single line that results in a deeply impressive idea, or simply the name of a song. How do you create your maps, cultures, religions, ect? I pleace great importance in the "beliveability" of the world. Things don't have to be realisitcs by real world standards in physics or society, but they have to make sense inside the world around them with it's specific and unique circumstances. I'm a major in culture in religion with geography (both physical and social) as secondary classes, and also my mother is a pastor and my father psychologist, so I do have a major background of finding out how and why people do things, and I think it greatly affects my approach on to my work. I prefer not to copy anything from the real world, or from other settings either, but I often do make a lot of research on similar things that do allready exist. How far back reaches human culture and at what level of civilization where they? What knowledge was lost and how long did it take to rediscover it? What are the values of antique cultures, which got lost, which were rediscovered? Where do people settle down and how does the location affect the shape and size of the settlement? I wouldn't say that I do real scientific work and model culture and society by scientific rules, but I allready do like to simply gather knowledge about these things and it mostly effects my judgement what would be probable or realistic and what not. To me, the setting defines itself not by the lay of the land, but rather by its cultures and people. I don't want to provide an exciting and suitable world for dungeon crawls, war campaigns, and world saving, but much rather a rich background for experiences of the more "interlectual" kind. Eberron is exiting because it's full of miraculous stuff and crazy creatures, Faerūn is a great world to get some rough action with mighty adversaries, and Ravenloft is great for horror. But I wan't to aim for some more "mature" wonder and exitement. There is social tension, which has to be handeld carefully, but it's rarely that one side is right and the other wrong. The mystical powers of the world are ancient and possess incredible might, but though their presence can be felt everywhere, it's very difficult to locate or define them, and though they are not hostile, their alieness in intentions and habits makes dealing with them very dangerous. Uncovering a ruins history is the real reward and not the chest of treasure at the end. In my oppinion, it's also much more rewarding or sattisfying to free a lost child from the intruding minds of spirits that hold it captive in an ancient ruin than to save a kingdom by destroying a hostile army. I think most settings want to make the player feel "you are powerful" or "you're the ones that make a change". But I rather want adventures to have the players experience wonder about the world around them and to feel with the people they deal with. There are not that many monsters, evil nations, or world-threatening events. When designing the world, I focus mostly on foreign cultures, wonderous places, and mysterious backgrounds. What tools do you use? I'm a bit stone-age here. My single most important tool is without doubt pencil and paper. Whenever I have to bring order into my ideas, nothing works better for me than doing simple lists or diagrams on paper. You couls probably say I'm a more or less severe computer-geek, but I don't really like to work with digital text. You can't do freehand diagrams in a text application and scroling always stops my stream of thoughts, so I rather have sheats of paper to sort my ideas out. But I do make heavy use of text applications for "finished text" or short summaries of my ideas. Sometimes I use excel. The main reason is my slight obsession with sorting everything into categories and having the categories orderly and corresponding categories equal to each other. (When you make list of anything for my setting, you'll never end up with 11 or 9 of them. It's always "tidy" numbers like 4, 6, 8, or 12. :D). I sued it much in the beginning to see what I have regarding races or classes or to make spell-slot progressions and so on, but not much anymore. I do maps first on paper and then scan them. Then I do some last changes to shore-lines in photo-shop and go over to shape mountain ranges and set paths for rivers until I like them. After that I have the references to where forests and swamps would be located and how their borders are shaped and last come the exact positions of specific locations. Since it's digital, chaging anything doesn't damage the paper or will mess what I've drawn close to it. I'm also strongly considering using the wikipedia-software for a website to make my work publicaly available as I don't have to programm such a thing, it works perfectly to link to other topics without having to consult a glossary, and can be edited by proofreaders and editors without having to make changes to the website.
Eldritch_Lord 03-02-08, 10:21 PM	I'm a number 3. What inspires you? Mostly books, with music on the side. I'm an avid sci-fi/fantasy reader, and I'll commonly see things I like, write the basic idea down, wait a while until I've forgotten the plot and context of the book, and make it my own. On the music side of things, like Naderion said music is very good with emotion. I'm a classical buff, so when designing something inspirational I'll put on Tchaikovsky's Marche Slav; when I'm designing a lawful race I'll put on Vivaldi's Mandolin Concerto; when I'm designing a class I might put on Dvorak's New World Symphony; and when I'm designing an evil nation...well, John Williams's Imperial March is classical, right? :D How do you create your maps, cultures, religions, ect? Well, my drawing skill is absolutely horrible and my handwriting even worse, so I tend to sketch basic outlines of anything that's best done freehand, then scan it in and mess with graphics programs until I like the result. For cultures, I draw on my impressive knowledge of the absolutely trivial--bits of Latin and Greek, some ancient history, a bit of psychology, tons of law and economics, and so on--to cobble together cultures. I say "cobble together" because I don't have a single guiding principle to making them; it's sort of a black box process where I add this, and add that, shake it well, let sit for 2-3 weeks, and voila--a culture. Religion is the only area where I'm noticeably weak, creatively speaking. I can individually come up with new and interesting gods, vaguely realistic mythoi, church practices and the like; I just can't figure out how to put them together and fill in the little details--schisms, local gods, prayers, etc.--that make them really realistic. What tools do you use? I mostly use The GIMP for my map work, OpenOffice for campaign notes and spreadsheets, and...that's about it, really. I'm not really artistic enough to need fancier graphics programs unless I need one for a single specific aspect of a map, and plain ol' text is good enough for my notes.