Earnest/Lum/Waddle/Eggie - he/him - 24 - posts every once in a blue moon - please don't reblog personal posts I make unless they have an "okay to reblog" tag on them but then again i hardly make personal posts anymore anyway lmao - mobile/dashboard header credit to swordknight - icon by miniiinebulaee
reminder to worldbuilders: don’t get caught up in things that aren’t important to the story you’re writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can’t get past ‘em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can’t get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can’t get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.
May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.
I do think this could be useful for writers! …Caveat, if you’re going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it’s only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it’ll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.
One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you’re familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we’ve got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.
Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That’s because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.
This is a short free introduction to the concept: “Notes on Landscape Archaeology.” To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like…studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.
Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the “construct paradigm” of a landscape from settlement ecology,
ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.
And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:
Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes
are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and
organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments …
Landscapes are worlds of cultural product … Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform
physical spaces into meaningful places. …
Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the
milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place
contexts …
Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each
generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning …
Basically a “landscape” is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like… Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it’s like…I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it’s easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.
Also:
This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.
(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn’t try to read every essay.)
If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he’s in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta’s methodology!
Why the fuck does “womanizer” mean what it does, that shit sounds like the name of an instant sex change ray gun invented by some guy who has beef with a platypus.
context: the heritage foundation is trying to launder data in support of doge by sending a survey to only their supporters and using blatantly leading questions. the survey takes less than 5 minutes and they don’t verify your email
you CAN do it multiple times if you so wish
Oh good we broke the first one. New link is here, same story.
i have been noticing recently that people younger than me are too sensitive, while people older than me are not sensitive enough. which, if i’m correct, should be taken as a sign that the total reality penetration vortex is operating as intended – within as few as five or six generations we may very well be producing babies who can directly perceive the wound at the heart of the world
one of the best things ever is when u find a really talented artist whos obsessed with an obscure/unpopular character and just lovingly draws their underrated guy 30 times a day even tho all their posts get 5 notes. these ppl are the backbone of society. they’re thriving theyre mentally unchained
as someone who’s been an artist obsessed with an obscure character the REAL backbone of society is the people giving us the 5 notes
Under the “has cleared its orbital neighborhood” and “fuses hydrogen into helium” definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star.
ALT
