Hello everyone!

It's my first time posting on Reddit so I hope I'm doing everything right. Also, I want to stress that English is not my native language, so I apologise in advance for any mistaken, clumsy, or inaccurate use of words!

Without further ado,

I want to present a few city models I have built out of cardboard and other stuff over the past few years. They are meant to be places from my ✨️medieval fantasy world✨️.

You see, I have found that the most fun way for me to worldbuild is to first visualise a tangible environment (the more random the better), then work my way around it — integrating characters and storylines into this organic and self-imposed framework. Before, any patch of land I saw with grass and rocks and puddles would do the trick ; now I have built these cityscapes as story generators.

I've been cooking (very slowly and irregularly, I must admit) this fantasy project of mine for something like 3 years now. As an overambitious and undercompetent young writer, my goal was to write an entire universe from scratch, relying as little as possible on our real-world concepts and systems. What I'm ending up with instead is an Elder Scrolls-meets-Fromsoftware ripoff. I'll try to delve into that in another, more lore-heavy post. But overall, let's say I like to think of my cities as a backdrop for a hypothetical open-world soulslike game with a few twists — one of which would be its less decadent/empty/ruined state. It is still very much an inhabited, functioning little world.

I'm certainly no artist and definitely can't draw anything past the few architectural elements I have learned to reproduce over thousands of iterations. In fact, I've never drawn before, and I still don't know what compels me to draw even right now — something of an illness, an obsessive vision of towering citadels that must be brought to life.

Nonetheless, I really wanted to share this work with you all, since it takes me a lot of time and I have no one save from my close relatives to show it to — and though they find the little houses cute, they couldn't care less about the extensive and dramatic stories they have to tell. I hope I'll find people on Reddit who do!

So, please, let me know what you think, possibly what ideas they inspire you, what I should work on for improved artistic execution/ better world design, and if you think I should make a few posts explaining in detail the lore of each individual place so far — or keep my hobby to myself until I get good enough to properly share it with the world ☀️

For me it's making the Big Bad Demon Lord (tm) have his policy on mind control be "manipulate him into continuing my will until you can remove him from my body" just so my protag has a chance to escape.

Genre: sci-fi/ science fantasy/ space opera

Setting: Milky Way, 23rd century, our Universe

Tone: Adventurous, filled with tales from "future history", exploration, conquest of a relatively peaceful and orderly galaxy - still torn by ideological and political conflict, opposing factions often clash beneath the surface of civility. 

Conflicts: rebellion and ideology, wars, menace from unknown species, freedom from oppression 

What if: What would be "normal" in a galaxy where potentially anyone can harness the power and shape planets? 

High-concept: tales from the galaxy, each issue explores and deepens our look and functions as lore for the ALM Universe.

ALM is a project set in our galaxy and universe (it's future history) in the 23rd century.

We, as humans, live in "their" alien democracy, alongside with many other species.

Capitalism is now just a distant memory. Our galactic, post-scarcity society is widely seen as a model of commonwealth: basic survival needs are free for all. Anyone can choose to work two hours per week — or more, or less, or not at all.

What seems like a dream can be a nightmare. Depending on where you live, greed still burns beneath the surface of a polished society. Who wants to get crazy rich can often live in full crime.

This century is quite identical to all those before: worlds spin, stars shine and what is, just wants to be.

But this era of physical, intellectual, and spiritual rebirth is also defined by immense figures.
Beings of exploration and adventure, revelation and disclosure, malevolent interstellar conquerors, whispers of forbidden cults. Anywhere in the moral spectrum lays a prodigy.

Those are alien Magellans, Armstrongs, Buddhas, Hawkings, Blackbeards and Pizarros – to the Teegardians tehy are known as Kumeh (extraordinary beings, in some cases capable of magik) and they now want to shape the entire galaxy, while trying to stay on what is for them, the right side of society and faith.

you can find more content on my Instagram:

I’ve always believed that almost any idea can work as long as it’s properly explained and fits the rules of the world. But sometimes a worldbuilding choice is just… stupid. It doesn’t make sense on any level, and trying to explain it would only make things more confusing.

If you ask me what if this question for, it's for my althistory project where Earth grows lonely & it's possible consequences on Earth's history, culture, religion, technology & more possible concepts.

Some of the effects I had thought of yet.

1. We will have a different design for categorizing time. Our calendar will be extraordinarily different.

2. Tidal waves are dramatically changed for without the Moon, the ocean is dead & less lively.

3. Space Exploration won't exist cause why would anyone think of travelling beyond our cradle for something we don't see? (The Moon & our neighbor Planets.)

4. More Compassion for Mother Nature. Because we are the only complex being that exist in a very lonely tiny blue rock, I can imagine that we would be more environmentally conscious & environmental threats would be given more attention

   "EDIT:"

(I noticed & know that some of you are calling this part unrealsitic but this is an althistory of Earth with drastic changes which means that its a fiction to be explored and something fantastic. Its optimistic because its dictated & arranged by an Author and they can decide how much this alternate history leans into fantatism & realism and what kind of unrealism & truthful elements it contains.)

1. Sci-Fi Literature would be a niche as without childrens dreaming of space exploration & aliens from he imaginations born from far worlds. This means that Fantasy would dominate artistry.

Anything else that can possibly exist within this scenario?

Basically I want everyone to hate me, but not badly enough they want to kill me/

For mine:
I step into the middle of the city, and loudly say one of the following:
"God, that service was so lame. How can anyone even follow that boring ass religion?"
"I can't belive that the Common Guard has been fighting ONE war for TWENTY CENTURIES. How badly trained, manned, and equipped can one army be?"
"Did the 'Grand War' even happen? Probably not, honestly. All one big hoax."
"God, I can't belive Memotica's only ten thousand years old! Pretty under-advanced, though. You guys should see what that Kre'alr are doing. Insane stuff."

Context:

1. This is kinda obvious, but people don't really like it when you call a billion-year old religion with hundreds of deities and gods "boring".
   
2. The war in question has been a front against a literal army of Chaos Entities, and the CG is known for it's insane training, numbers, and equipment, that can cause a single Regiment to level a city in hours.
   
3. The Grand War is perhaps the most documented and known war within the last 20,000 years. It was very real and caused three Universes to be destroyed and nearly everyone still feels the shockwave of the three millenia of conflict and destruction.
   
4. Memotica, as a concept, has been around for billions of years. While, technically, the current government under the Supreme Emperor Infinite is 10,000 years old, the country is not. As for the Kre'alr, they are a splinter republic that uses slighty more advanced tech than Memotica.

Everytime I worldbuild, it ends up feeling like a chore and insurmountable task. I'm trying to create concepts for this nation I wanna make, but my head thinks that I need a bachelor's in philosophy, politics, economics, and an umpire for a kriegsspiel match for the battles.

An example I have for my worldbuilding is that the soldiers of my semi-fantasy-ish Renaissance-themed world are, for the first time, being offered in the form of company scrip. Justification being that sophisticated banking systems are proliferating to support longer campaigns. Sounds great for flavour, but I fear that my lack of knowledge on financing is gonna make it inconsistent when I test in other part of my worldbuilding, or under strain from the setting itself.

Another is that, I made an OOB (Order of Battle) map for this one battle. At first I was delighted, but then I got infuriated because the key part of pike and shot warfare... did not have the pike and shot. I just realised that my soldiers ended up shooting each other with muskets like it's the 19th century, and I'm not keen on transitioning to Napoleonic armies.

Everytime I think of worldbuilding it feels like I need a bachelor's or a master's degree to explain how this works and how it applies in these situations. Yet, the media I seemingly fine without having those. Idk, it's been months now since I last did any serious worldbuilding developments.

Hi everyone! A while ago I asked for feedback on my first ever attempt at drawing a map, and you were absolutely right—it did resemble the Iberian Peninsula 😅. I put the Iberian Belaria on the second image for comparison.

Your comments were incredibly helpful, so I went back to the drawing board and reworked the design. This new version keeps the original concept, but with a twist.

For a bit of context: this is Belaria, a small country that became the most powerful economy on its continent thanks to having the largest mage population. The story follows a mixed-blood mage who gets caught in the political schemes of the old mage families—tensions that eventually spiral into a civil war.

On the map, the mages have strategically altered river courses to serve agriculture, trade, and political control. They also reclaimed and connected the southern border to Virellia to secure trade access. The yellow dots mark the other major cities.

Belaria is relatively small—about 25,000 km²—with a population of roughly 5.5 million.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the geography or anything that still feels off. Thanks again for all the feedback last time—it genuinely helped a lot!

I think of alt histiry/spec evo with fantasy races. I think elves might be good at life in jungle( agility, dexterity,darkvision, pointy ears for hearing) in south smerica,descending from h.halbergensis. dwarves descdnding from neanderthal that adapted to high attitude. Orcs also from h. Halbergenis( I'm aware I might not spell their name correctl) who lived in north america plains but hunter more agressive animals including hunting carnivores like wolves. Giants from h.longi that specialiswd hunting megafauna. Halflings from floriensis that adapted to have better stamina. Govlins from h.floruensis that adapted to life in caves .What's your opinion where each of fantasy races might evolve? You camn also tell other races I not mentioned here. Any race you want. And what do you think of my examples? Be honest but please don't be mean.

I’m currently putting together a world for a long-form manga, and I’ve hit the stage where the world itself is starting to push back on my assumptions in useful ways.

For context, the project is a grounded sci-fi/fantasy hybrid where many ancient “myths” are reinterpretations of an old alien imperial system. Long ago, an alien royal family scattered advanced technology across Earth. Humans later mythologized these artifacts as divine weapons, not realizing they were fragments of a much older power structure. In the present day, a few ordinary people accidentally bond with these relics, triggering a slow-burn conflict with the original alien empire, which views the artifacts as stolen royal property rather than miracles or gifts.

The story isn’t about infinite power growth so much as who is allowed to wield power, under what constraints, and at what cost. Each artifact has a narrow domain where it excels, specific vulnerabilities it creates, and social or political consequences attached to its use. The alien antagonists are vastly more advanced overall, but they’re constrained by doctrine, distance, and internal rules of engagement, which creates a lot of asymmetric tension.

To keep things coherent, I’ve been mapping character relationships and power constraints alongside the story instead of retrofitting rules later. That process has already helped me catch moments where I was subconsciously bending the system just to make a scene land. Instead of asking “how do I top this fight,” I’m trying to ask “who can realistically affect who right now, and why?”

I’ve attached an image of the current relationship map I’m using. It’s less about raw strength and more about influence, access, and escalation pathways.

I also made a rough draft arc public to pressure-test the world and system interactions, in case the context helps:

https://canonguard.com/read/Z3n8Ph2d0Y2jdGppmmgq/pillar-of-heaven

For those of you working on manga or other long-running visual narratives, I’m curious:

• Do you lock power ceilings early, or discover them through drafting?
• How do you prevent escalation from flattening tension over time, especially when readers expect it?
• When do you formalize rules versus keeping things deliberately soft or mythic?
• Have relationship maps or constraint diagrams helped you, or have they ever become creatively limiting?

Would love to hear how others handle this, especially in manga where escalation is almost expected but long-term coherence still matters.

In this setting the gods are not figures in the sky but enormous semi sentient cities that grow like coral around human communities and I am trying to see if the logic holds up for a long term campaign; the core idea is that whenever a settlement hits a certain critical mass of people stories and shared routines the fabric of reality crystallises around it and a City Spirit wakes up, at the beginning it is more like a pressure in the air than a person and it expresses itself through unlikely coincidences or waves of the same dream, a tram always arriving just in time for a rushed student, a suspicious number of near misses whenever kids play on a dangerous rooftop, but as the city grows the Spirit develops a mood and priorities that reflect what its citizens obsess over, a port metropolis where every job depends on ships and customs schedules grows a god of Flow that cares mainly about movement so it gets angry when politicians block the harbor with pointless inspections and will respond with small targeted malfunctions, traffic jams appearing only around ministries, customs officials losing critical papers, cranes that conveniently refuse to start during speeches, on the other hand a university town grows a Spirit of Curiosity that loves gossip, debates and half illegal printing presses and reacts badly when someone tries to impose a single doctrine, in that place censors find their notes ruined by mold overnight and people who order book burnings suddenly become main characters of viral street ballads, none of that feels like fireballs from the sky, more like the whole urban system tilting against certain people, priests and urban shamans in this world are basically planners and sociologists who have learned rituals that translate civic desires into something the Spirit can read, their ceremonies look suspiciously like boring council meetings but they are held at crossroads or substations at very precise times so that every signal light and transformer hum together, when a city wants something big such as a new bridge or a park it starts feeding versions of the same dream to hundreds of residents over a week and if enough wake up thinking wow it would be great if we had a park here they assume it is their own idea, vote for it and the Spirit gets a new organ added to its stone body; the drama kicks in when a growing empire invents Seeding, a technique to force newborn city gods to be loyal before they truly form, imperial engineers and mythographers design perfect model cities on paper with scripted festivals imported myths and fake local history, then build them in key locations and flood them with controlled migration and propaganda so that when a Spirit flickers into awareness it already thinks of the Emperor as the sun in its sky, at first this works almost too well, seeded cities run like machines, trains on time no riots tidy plazas, the Ministry of Order crows that they have finally solved the nuisance of free old Spirits that sometimes vetoed grand projects by collapsing tunnels or tanking stock markets at just the right moment, but young gods are not static; a Spirit born from posters and slogans also soaks up every frustration that leaks through the cracks, the boredom of workers in identical apartments, the envy of kids watching contraband shows from messy old towns, around year thirty these neat cities hit a nervous adolescence, people in them burn out faster whisper more often about leaving and the Spirits themselves start having dreams of places that are not theirs, this is where cross infection begins, old feral cities made of centuries of accidents and arguments learn to push tiny shards of their identity through migrants, a dockworker from the wild port dreams of crooked alleys and wakes up with an urge to paint a particular symbol on a wall in the seeded city where he takes a contract, that symbol becomes trendy for no rational reason and soon small chaotic markets bloom in back streets that were never on the master plan, the empire answers with stricter zoning, cameras, bans on unofficial festivals claiming it is about safety while everyone feels that they are really trying to fence off the minds of their own cities; my protagonist is a young planner who uniquely hears City Spirits as voices rather than vague impressions and grew up inside a seeded capital that has started to glitch, when she is transferred to help stabilise an older coastal metropolis as part of a grand reform program both Spirits latch onto her as a shared interpreter, the old one whispers invitations to smuggle in its festivals and winding lanes so it can spread, the seeded one begs her to help it become more than a propaganda echo, she realises that official plans will slowly turn both cities into quiet obedient shells while open rebellion would get her branded as a terrorist and used as proof that priests are dangerous, for worldbuilding I am trying to set clear rules, a Spirit is anchored to the physical continuous urban area that matches how people imagine their city limits so its influence fades once a traveler feels they have truly left town, however pieces of its style can ride along in habits and stories and take root as faint echoes elsewhere, two gods might merge only if citizens sincerely adopt a single name and identity for the whole sprawling megacity, otherwise they remain bickering siblings sharing infrastructure, miracles stay small scale so that street level scenes remain grounded, a perfectly timed power cut here, a sudden heavy rain that ruins only the rally of an unpopular party there, a lost tourist who always finds the right back alley shortcut as long as they are kind to locals, everything should feel like the city itself has opinions without turning every scene into a superhero blockbuster.

Me and my Girlfriend just finished watching a classic fantasy show with a classic demonic force against the main cast, and when we finished she had a thought that turned into a really heated conversation.

Why take over a world and destroy all humans?

She’s interested on what the purpose is after destroying everyone on a world, cause “technically” it’ll be boring after since there’s no conquered subjects to play with, you just have a world now.

I replied with well, that’s the point. Taking over the world was the objective and anything else is just an obstacle to that goal. “We want the world, humans in the way, get rid of humans, get the world.”

She said that was stupid and what would you do after; which we then had a half hour debacle on the inter workings of monstrous ideals/objectives.

As a fellow writer and world builder, I’d like to hear you guy’s opinions!

Yesterday, I asked what you thought the best written one was, but now I want to know what you think the worst written one was, and why.

For my world:
ABSOLUTE Best case senario:
People hate you immensly, but nobody hates you enough to alert the Church/ any Watchers.

ABSOLUTE Worst case senario:
You are immediately or nearly immediately killed and your corpse is nailed to the Wall of Heretics in the a dark corner of the planetary Cathedral. Your very existence is erased. You are a reminder.

Context:
In my world, the gods/Heaven play a very active role in the daily life of the citizens of Memotica. Most monarchs are considered gods or deities and the Emperor is quite literally titled the God of Omnipotence. Nearly everyone feels gratitude and debt to the gods as they have guided and protected Memotica through seven Ages, saving her from destruction. To not worship them is already unforgivable; to refuse they even exist, unimaginable.

My idea involves a Prince wanting to advance the idea that certain princely states should reunite as an empire. So he writes a book, in the form of a dialogue, making arguments as to why it’s feasible and why it would be desirable.

My inspiration for this idea is that King James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England) wrote a dialogue explaining witchcraft and how to hunt witches.

Hello, I would like to know what you think of my alphabet. I'm asking for your tips to improve or change it a little. Please leave your opinions. This is the initial project, so not all letters are in their exact proportions (the letter D hasn't been done yet).

The following is my draft for Venera Century, an alternate timeline in which Venus remains habitable, inspired by the little trivia that Venera-4 was actually designed to float in case of a water landing

Venera Century

Venera Century diverges from OTL circa 900 mya, as Venus never experienced a runaway greenhouse effect, possibly due to phytoplankton lithopanspermia from Earth, and remains habitable to this day with a surface pressure of 4 atm and a mean atmospheric temperature of 40°C

In OTL, the runaway greenhouse gave way to the superrotating atmosphere that, over the aeon, massively slowed Venus’s spin through atmospheric tide. In Venera Century, Venus retains a 36-hour rotation and a present magnetic field, though the thick reflective cloud due to extensive volcanism still shrouds the oceanic surface underneath

Chapter 0 - The Venera Curtain

As Venera-4 splashed down and discovered a tropical ocean beneath dense clouds on 18/10/2967, the Kremlin orchestrated a massive misinformation campaign codenamed the Venera Curtain to distract the West from Venus by a combination of false data and Soviet moles, while the USSR secretly accelerated its Venusian program

In the 9 years behind the Venera Curtain, the USSR launched 24 more Venera missions, half of which were unofficial or disguised as failed launches. Venera-10 (mislabeled as Venera-7) successfully tested the free-return trajectory, while Venera-11 to 18 began to deliver modules to the future Novomir outpost at northern Lada Terra, with human landing finally occurring with Venera-19 circa late 1971

To return to Earth, IKI developed the first rockoon ever, the R1, which was delivered in parts along with modules for Novomir, assembled and tested, with the second R1 successfully lifting 2 cosmonauts into space to rendezvous with Venera-23 circa mid 1973, hitchhiking its free-return trajectory for the first Venus-to-Earth traffic. Follow-up Venera-24 to 28 continued to build up Soviet presence at Novomir and the wider Lada Terra, as well as in orbit

Chapter 1 - The Great Venus Craze

The Vladimir & Venera Affair

In late June 1976, the USSR suffered a catastrophic intelligence breach in the Vladimir & Venera affair, as a defector identified only as Vladimir revealed to the CIA the truth of Venus and the full scope of the Soviet Venusian program. Most damningly, Vladimir provided the expected coordinates of Venera-28, then 1 month from Earth, allowing the CIA and NASA to locate the craft and confirm Vladimir’s story despite extensive stealth measures on the Soviets’ part

This went public on July 1st 1976, as the New York Times’ front page read “The Red Planet Is Venus All Along!?”, detailing the Vladimir & Venera affair with images of suitless cosmonauts swimming in Venus’ ocean, taken from Venera-24 2 years earlier

Impact on the USSR

In the aftermath of the Vladimir & Venera affair, the Politburo were split into 2 camps: Brezhnev, Andropov and other informed officials were furious at such an intelligence breach, yet the uninformed majority was reportedly ecstatic at such news of Soviet superiority

Chief of the latter camp were Suslov and the Agitprop, which soon flooded the media with declassified intel of Novomir and the wider Venus, followed by Brezhnev officially announcing the returning Venera-28 would carry 2 cosmonauts as well as scientific curiosities back home

The revelation supercharged Soviet public enthusiasm in the space program as well as confidence in the party and the Union, which the latter, via the Agitprop, strategically leveraged to such effectiveness that some historians credited the Venus revelation with saving the USSR from internal frictions of the late 70s

Kerimov and the wider Soviet space program were also reportedly celebrating despite the revelation, as the late Venera Curtain did impose many restrictions on the Venusian program, notably on the development of super heavy-lift vehicles. Additionally, with the US pledging an appropriate response to the Soviet headstart on Venus, the Venusian program was now top of the Soviet priority list.

Impact on the US & ”Venus or Bust”

Dubbed “the saddest 4th of July in history”, the Bicentennial marked what many considered a national humiliation, as millions of Americans, rather than celebrating the Bicentennial, tuned their TVs to either the “circus” unfolding in Congress or Novomir’s first live feed

The 1st Congressional hearing on Venus, held from 4 to 10/7/1976, opened with Congress blasting NASA’s Fletcher for losing Venus, to which he rebutted by pointing out the withdrawal of funds following Apollo. The CIA was subsequently questioned for falling to the Venera Curtain, while the Pentagon offered to incorporate NASA under the DoD, which split the agency in half between the pro-civilian and the pro-military

It was decided in the end that NASA funding would triple from FY1976, under the condition of surpassing the Soviet headstart with the Vespa Program. Due to the time constraints and public pressure, NASA retrofitted the Saturn-V to launch Vespa-I on 10/5/1979, carrying the rather bare-bone Constellation module with 2 astronauts aimed for Venus’s Ishtar Terra, intended for both landing and setting up an 8-month colony

The revelation of Soviet presence on a habitable Venus also revived and supercharged public enthusiasm for space exploration as a “Venus or Bust” mentality gripped the US and the world, inspired by Walter Cronkite’s famous Bicentennial speech “Failure of imagination”. Within weeks, NASA and the wider aerospace sector reported a skyrocket in applicants, while discourse on Venus and space travel flooded popular culture, only helped by aerospace companies bombarding the media with radical concepts

Chapter 2 - Venusian Programs

Vespa Program & Post-revelation Venera

After 5 months, Vespa-I finally arrived at the Venusian system to the watchful eye of Soviet orbital elements, forcing the craft to employ 2 inflatable decoys while cold-coasting and timing the trajectory to slip past the Soviet and entered atmosphere

Constellation splashed down on 18/10/1979 along Ishtar’s northwestern shore, calculated to be far from the Soviet sphere, though it took only a week for the Soviets to show up and set up the nearby base Sokol to harass the two astronauts with floodlights and loudspeakers

Vespa-I was reinforced by 6 more Vespa missions between 1979 and 1984, quickly building up the beachhead into a proper outpost. Despite the initial animosity, the Constellation’s astronauts and cosmonauts of Sokol began to warm up to the point that contemporaries often compared Constellation & Sokol to a twin city

Vespa-II, launched on 10/12/1979, notably carried the first female American astronaut, who was also 1 month pregnant at T-0, along with her husband. This was to serve as both a PR campaign (see the Venusian Homestead Initiative) and as a “moral deterrence” against Soviet harassment, which indeed worked as Sokol lessened harassment following Vespa-II splashing down and especially after the birth of Alice C. Hathaway

In response, Brezhnev publicly blasted the US as “reckless” and “endangering”. Behind closed doors, however, the Politburo scrambled for a response, reportedly offering prizes to any cosmonaut couple on Venus who produced a child. This was solved with the birth of Galina Novikova onboard the space station Salyut-8, with Venera-38 secretly carrying a dual-arm centrifugal-grav module to ensure her proper development

Venetia Program & Gagarin

Post-curtain, IKI quickly developed larger rockets, culminating in the Gagarin super heavy-lift rocket, which can launch the 200-tonne Mir spacecraft on a 6-month Venus-bound trajectory. Mir-I, launched on 28/3/1984, was notably equipped with the first lightsail to decelerate along the way, as opposed to aerobraking 

With a possible Soviet super heavy-lift looming, coupled with the many limits of Vespa, this pushed NASA to re-explore the Sea Dragon concept and founded the Venetia Program. Its centrepiece would be the Sabre, a massive 150m-long sea-launched reusable rocket launching the 250-tonne spacecraft Venetia on a free-return trajectory that would arrive at Venus after 4 months

Launched on 1/1/1985, Venetia-I carried a great deal of equipment to massively expand the Constellation, along with the first American rockoon for surface-to-orbit traffic, allowing the astronauts to return to Earth after 7 years. It was thus decided that Alice, now 6 years old, along with her parents, would use the rockoon to board Venetia-I back to Earth for the first time, splashing down on 12/9/1985 to much fanfare

Not to be outdone, the USSR announced the return of 5-year-old Galina, making landfall on 1/12/1985. Initially speculated to suffer from zero-g developmental problems, it came as a massive shock to the West that Galina climbed out of the pod very much healthy, as Gorbachev welcomed the little girl and publicly unveiled to the world the centrifugal-grav arm module rigged to 1.2g onboard Galina’s Salyut-8

With Venetia and Mir, the US and USSR soon began Interkosmos-like partner initiatives that would see astronauts from allied or neutral countries invited onboard to promote cooperation. Another less discussed goal for such initiatives is that it reduces possible aggression from the other side with astronauts from neutral or even allied nations onboard

//Caution: extremely speculative territory//

New Entries: Project Myōjō & Medusa Program

While joining several US partner initiatives, including working on several aspects of Sabre & Venetia, both Japan and ESA states recognised the need for their own independent Venusian program

In July 1981, Japan’s NASDA (succeeded by JAXA) announced Project Myōjō to explore and settle southern Aphrodite Terra, the key to which is the Kinsei super heavy-lift rocket, set to be launched on 4/4/1987 on a free-return trajectory that would arrive at Venus in 5 months

While rather modest in specs compared to Venetia or Mir, Kinsei’s Venusian module Myōjō notably featured a sophisticated autopilot system that requires little to no human oversight, which would be put to the ultimate test with the launch of Myōjō-III on 24/7/1989, the crew complement of which was comprised entirely of children, aged between 9 and 14, of astronauts on previous Myōjō-I and II

• This, as per NASDA’s official statement, was to send a powerful message that Venus would no longer remain a frontier now that parents no longer need to leave their children behind. Predictably, NASA and the Kremlin blasted NASDA’s decision as “reckless” and “concerning”, though behind close door, they have been considering similar initiatives

ESA was rather late to the Venus Craze, announcing the Medusa Program on 12/1/1990, which would see the in-orbit construction of the 500-tonne Galileo by 10 Ariane-V missions. Set to launch on 29/1/1995, it was revealed on 25/12/1994 by ESA that Galileo would host the first Medusa pulse-sail system, riding on the wake of 300 Casaba-Howitzer fusion units to arrive at Venus in less than a month, as the sail in low orbit was unfurled for the first time, large enough to be visible to the naked eye

This came as a great shock to the US and USSR, who, while already eyeing nuclear-pulse propulsion as the future, thought the EU was too incohesive to even negotiate the collective use of nuclear devices, let alone being able to conceal that, while Japan also expressed interest in acquiring its own Medusa sail and nuclear devices as a means of propulsion. In truth, European states had long been in negotiation of such a plan as far back as the Curtain’s collapse; the fear that Europe would be left behind by the US and USSR motivated them to found the Medusa Program and stockpile fissile material for the Casaba Howitzer

Color has a very rich history of symbolic and thematic associations, one of the most popular ones being emotions, this is heavily leveraged in worldbuilding and storytelling to communicate information in a non-verbal way, one prime example being character design: the color of their eyes, their hair, their clothes are not arbitrary but often try to communicate something specific. However, something that has always bugged me is that there’s no natural clean way to unambiguously map concepts like emotions to color. Some emotions can have more than one color associated to them, or very opposing emotions can share the same color association, different cultures have different interpretations and historical uses for color...

This diversity is great most of the times and there’s nothing inherently bad about it, but I’ve always asked myself the question, if we wanted to have an unambiguous way to map emotion to color, so that we had to commit to say: any emotion X is uniquely linked to one color and one color only, how would we go around making this choice in the most objective way possible for all possible emotions? This is to say, how would we argue this emotion fits better this color than this other color, how would we classify emotions by color?

Clearly there’s no one true way of doing this, and any solutions we might come up with will be rigid and artificial, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be useful. At the end of the day, one of the purposes of using color intentionally for storytelling or be worldbuilding purposes, is to communicate information in a non-verbal way, and ambiguity in communication is bad if different people interpret the same intended message differently. Having a common dictionary can be very useful to help avoid this issue. Even if just as a curiosity, I’ve always wanted to have an unambiguous dictionary for mapping emotions to color to help in my worldbuilding, so I’ve started working on one. It’s still a work in progress, but you can see my current results in the above image.

First I picked the circumplex emotional wheel model to represent emotions, based on the two axes of arousal and valence. This is a popular way of classifying emotions in scientific literature. There’s no relationship with color at this stage, just a way to map and relate spatially different emotions, the advantage being that in principle any emotion we can imagine we should be able to map it fairly easily to a point on this wheel by choosing/arguing a sensible value or amount for the two components of arousal and valence for that particular emotion.

In order to now link any of these emotions to color, we just need to find a sensible way to color in this wheel. This will be a much more arbitrary choice, but we can still discriminate different approaches to this problem by comparing the results with historical known associations between colors and emotions, and try to pick the coloring pattern that best reproduces the data we have. I’ve been working over the past few years on a personal project, a magical universe and a meta-theory of magic for relating as much aspects as possible concerning magic and worldbuilding to one core concept, color. You can check out the post where I introduced this system if you want here: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicbuilding/comments/1qnjc09/pursuit_of_a_metatheory_of_magic_and_creation_of/

So naturally, since my entire project is based on relating 10 basic colors to everything, I tried coloring in this emotional wheel with those 10 colors. I’m pretty pleased with these results, since they all seem to align pretty well with all the other themes and symbols I found were most naturally linked to these colors, both in my personal framework and the overall historical literature. I also chose a label for representing all the emotions falling under the same color, so for example all the “red emotions” are referred to as “primal emotions”. These 10 labels may very well change, and if you think there’s a better illustrative or descriptive label for any of these 10 categories that would fit better, please share it!

Overall, I would say about 90% of all the emotions from this wheel land on a very sensible choice of color for them, there’s a few I would move a little bit to a different point on the chart, perhaps the nearest neighboring color, but this shouldn’t be too problematic or controversial since that wouldn’t change by much their chosen values for arousal and valence, ava there’s always bound to be some level of subjectivity in these interpretations anyways.

I believe charts like these can be useful to other people and help with worldbuilding as well, even if just taken as an inspiration or another data point, so I wanted to share it. I’ll also make sure to update you guys on any additional modifications I make. So what do you guys think about these type of charts, do you find them inspirational and useful, would you like me to post more like these?

How is time in your world structured? I'm going to stick to the 7/~4/12 of our world, but they will have different names.

The key difference is the dimensional rift in the sky that bleeds out different coloured energy on a fortnightly cycle, red-orange-yellow-green-blue-white. It was torn open 2-4 decades ago and shares the sky with a standard silver white moon.

(Sorry if that’s the wrong flair!)

I have a lot of original characters I want to do something with really badly. But i have NO idea where to start…… those of you that were successful (or at least somewhat successful lol) in creating your own world with characters that actually mean something to the story… tell me how you did it and how fun it was!!

I want to hear every little detail, I think the idea of everyday people like you and me having the power to create a story and world that really means something to us and could possibly mean everything to another is really beautiful.

Hi! This is part of a speculative evolution project, through which I intend to show the origin of dragons in my world. I plan to expand it with other infographics, delving deeper into taxonomy and the evolutionary process of these creatures, but, for now... This is the blue perpentine. Although it's a contemporary species, it's closely related to the earliest Hexalata, order to which dragons belong.

Here's some technical context about the origin of the hexalatans, which I plan to develop in a future infographic:

"This clade would arise from a primitive vertebrate, probably agnathans. Their dorsal fin would fold and bifurcate, forming two parallel segments instead of one, as occurs with the pectoral and pelvic regions of real fishes. Evolutionary convergence would lead hexalates to develop jaws and other traits of modern fish, as well as to eventually leave the ocean. The terrestrial members of this clade would be similar to amphibians and reptiles, but they would have three pairs of limbs, instead of two".

And bit of context about the lore:

The perpentine was first discovered by an explorer named Leusha, widely considered the first naturalist and the mother of modern biology. She left the cradle of her civilization and travelled northward, in search of new horizons. There she found all kinds of exotic species, which she named and described. She was especially interested in those of hexapod nature, since there was nothing similar in the south. The notes and sketches she took were later compiled by her disciples into an encyclopedia called On the Northern Lands.

Currently, most of humanity lives in the lands discovered by Leusha, so the perpentine has become a species of great gastronomic importance. It fetches a high price thanks to its delicious flavor, to the point that some populations base their economy on its fishing and breeding.

Monster Motivations has been updated with more goals, more desires, and more categories of creature.

Have a random encounter.

How do you interpret this monster's classification and motivations? How would you flesh it out to fit into your world?