The Worlds stuck inside Mellie's Head

Mellie's worldbuilding side-blog

[bridles-for-mulebugs]

Welcome the virtual representation of my brain!!

This is @soup-crime's side-blog for worldbuilding because god if I don't have a lot of stuff in my head and I wanna share!!

This blog will be (hopefully) well managed and all posts will be tagged with the relevant project name so anyone can find everything (as long as Tumblr allows jfdslagjds).

Most of the posts will be just me talking a little about any particular topic in any of the projects I'm working on. Maybe sometimes they'll be diegetic?

My current projects are as follows:

Beetle Island: A fantasy spec-bio project focusing on an island continent populated by megafaunal descended from insects of the clade Endopterygota where several human groups have accidentally landed and settled.

The Ibria Region: A Fakemon region based on the area I grew up! I kinda wanna see if anyone can guess where it is if I give enough clues hehe =:3c

Project Silver: My giant Sci-Fi project that is basically my excuse to play with the expectations of what sapient life could look like. Do not get me started on normal sci-fi sapient races.

Keti: Basically I wanted a linguistic and cultural playground. The idea is that its like earth but I start over and build the entire history, culture, and even biosphere of a planet.

Basinish: The future of the Western United States looks very different from now. Mostly focusing on the linguistic aspect of the language spoken in the area called Basinish but also some of the socio-political landscape.

Faunworld: New world I've been working on casually. Trying to keep the scope limited in this project. Just want the cultures and languages that evolve from a single ancestor group of "Fauns" (like the Greco-Roman satyrs/fauns but deer instead of goats)

Meek Inheritors: Combining my two favorite aesthetics: Recycled Material Culture from Post-Apocalypses and Fantasy worlds populated by tiny mammals. My biggest problem with the latter is that the races in those stories are always so different in size it gets weird. There will be Magics despite being set on Earth, you'll see how.

Various: My catch-all for projects that I don't think have enough quite yet to warrant a tag but maybe someday may get promoted!!

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I was looking forward to finding out what butches have to do with conlangs but I guess now we'll never know :(

listen,,,,,,, I have more than one side blog and I am so so so embarrassed.

I really aughta get more done to talk about here

[bridles-for-mulebugs]

Beetle Island Elevation & Climate Zone Redo

My elevation map is rough and not necessarily super robust, its just a vague sloping that I came up with on the spot since I don't have (and don't really care about making) a tectonic map for the world this is in

I also just don't care about making any maps for the rest of the world, which makes being able to accurately map out wind and ocean patterns hard, probably why my first version ended up being different from this version which I now consider Canon. But hopefully this new redo will be more accurate. (Keep in mind this planet is retrograde compared to Earth's rotation)

I wish it wasn't so rare for Motivation, Momentum, Inspiration, and Focus to all align for me, otherwise I would get so much more done so much faster. I'm working on finding medications but its slow going.

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I promise I've been doing stuff while not posting jfdkslhg

Here's a few versions of a map I made for the dialects within Basinish

Both of these versions include towns with less than 1k population, then I made another version that doesn't that is my current most recent version

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Ugh. I've been working on this new world concept because I keep wanting to make a family of conlangs that are all related thru linguistic evolution.

But when I make a language, I need to make up cultural details and that begs more questions.

Then to evolve they have to live in different places so I have to make a map.

Then I also want to do spec bio because I always want to do spec bio so that gets lumped in as well

And since I don't know how to do things halfway I now have a project that gets extremely scary to work on because I really want to know how to do things properly and I love learning. Then I get caught up in just learning about weird stuff

This has happened several times.

A very "if you give a mouse a cookie" situation...

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Beowulf is, as far as I know, a pretty standard showing of storytelling of its time. A poem with modern-for-its-time themes.

For my Basinish project (which I'm thinking about changing the name for honestly) I kinda wanna find a similarly "normal" story to preserve in-world that people in the future to ponder over.

I could write a whole novel theoretically that would be fine but I think it would be fun to use a novel that already exists. Theoretically it would be passed down as a story for a few generations into the future until it stops making as much sense and maybe is found by future scholars and preserved since.

I just really have no idea which book to borrow. Something that works well as a stand-alone story more or less, it doesn't have to be perfect

Open to suggestions (as always)

[bridles-for-mulebugs]

Lighter than air animals

Hi sorry I haven't been up to much </3 But I did think about two ways that I believe to be somewhat feasible for lighter-than-air animals to evolve. They will be referred to as the Ground First Method and the Aerogenesis Method respectfully as tentative names unless someone shows me that someone else already came up with names.

Ground-First Method

Basically the idea behind this is since random mutations occur all the time, I believe it to be believable for an animal to evolve to store light gasses in an organ perhaps as storage before disposal. And maybe this organ gets bigger or grows a pocket specifically for the gas. And the buildup of gas eventually gets to the point that it affects the animal's weight. The animal might be extremely light on its feet and so harder to detect by sound. This makes the mutation beneficial and sparks it to spread thru the population. The pocket of gas might grow bigger and they might not dispose of it as much or find a way to recycle it. At first they will be able to glide around in perhaps a forest environment or a very rocky environment and survive great falls, until they are able to control their take-off and landing and propulsion thru various methods achieving true flight thru a lighter than air method.

Aerogenesis Method

This method assumes a thicker atmosphere than Earth. Much thicker. On Modern Earth, there exist Cyanobacteria and Microalgae within the atmosphere. These organisms are extremely EXTREMELY small. I imagine that in a denser atmosphere, it would be easier to live in the atmosphere exclusively and also to grow bigger. These bigger airborne organisms would be able to get super diverse and populous perhaps growing into macropredatory niches and filter feeders on the other vast swathes of aeroplankton. How big they grow would of course depend on the density of the atmosphere but certainly a similar organ as described in the Ground-First Method would be advantageous to increasing size. Maybe someday these organisms would spread and learn to live on the land? Producing an air-to-land takeover rather than Earth's water-to-land takeover.

Idk just some thoughts. I have no experience in aeronautics, especially lighter-than-aircraft so I don't know everything about what makes them actually work and be efficient, but hopefully this makes sense

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Hey Folks, its been a while, Been struggling with stuff. You know how it is. Anyway I managed to do something for the first time in a while fjdksalgj

This is the map of the Ibria Region! A valley nestled between large mountains, a quaint community lives peacefully alongside Pokémon. Barely making a name for themselves, if anything, Ibria is known for Ranching, Lumber, and farming one particular crop. But you don't have to be famous to be happy, so the people and Pokémon of the region live calm and content lives...

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Animism is so underutilized, underrepresented, and underrated in fantasy stuff. Usually you just get like. Pantheons with each god in charge of one thing or like if the church is evil there's probably only one god

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Woah!!! Another map??? Yes. I haven't posted in a while. I want to make up for it.

This is a map of the Western United States divided into dialects (that may or may not form a continuum I really can't decide if that would make sense) of Basinish in the year of 2983

The white parts to the west are parts that have mostly been abandoned as people moved away from the more violent coasts while the parts to the east are just outside the scope of the project

And this is how dialectal characteristics are placed in 2023 or so to give you some context. There are other stages of the progression thru the years where some dialects have larger areas than now but those aren't displayed for simplicity

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Here's a map I did a while ago depicting the Köppen Climate Classifications of a world in a project I really haven't talked about on this blog, mostly because I haven't worked on it recently. I've been more preoccupied with other projects but I thought this was a cool map so I wanted to show it.

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Looking at this map again, I really feel like that huge desert in the west shouldn't be as big as it is. A lot of the interior should be the pinker colors like down south of the giant desert. Maybe not like the entire interior but a lot of it.

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Another map! This is Beetle Island! You may notice that it is actually two main islands. This is because shut up. You may also notice that it seems to have been made in MS Paint and you'd be right. Kid me didn't have access to many resources so whatever lol

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Here's a map I did a while ago depicting the Köppen Climate Classifications of a world in a project I really haven't talked about on this blog, mostly because I haven't worked on it recently. I've been more preoccupied with other projects but I thought this was a cool map so I wanted to show it.

[bridles-for-mulebugs]

The Senarmates, known in scientific papers as Brachiscandia sapiens, live on the first planet from their star known to human scientists as Senarmates Star (Humans have proven uncreative when naming the stars local to other sapients for the sake of convention, boo).

Evolving on an island continent that is mainly thick, dense forest home also to the a senarmates greatest fear. A family of carnivorous plants have evolved noxious and even neurotoxic fumes to hunt for prey while disguised as ordinary plants, the senarmates evolved against them in an arms race.

This arms race has lead them to a culture filled with noise, noise, and more noise. When seen in stations, it is not uncommon for them to be wearing headphones or talking to anyone including themselves. If the world is quiet, then people are dead. Most of the communication that senarmates employ is auditory to be able to keep track of groups in dense forest with branches that block sightlines, however they still boast some of the best eyesight of any sapient species. They can see quite far from themselves and can see far into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums with organs analogous to cones and rods in their eyes for nearly every color in between.

Because they evolved in such incredibly dense forest, they needed to be able to traverse the near web-like maze in the trees and became quite adept, but so specialized that they are unable to support themselves on the ground. Any senarmates seen outside of native infrastructure have to be hanging on mobile 'trees' roughly equivalent in purpose to wheelchairs used by other species.

They are roughly the size of a large-ish Earth Cat and position their torso, with the head on the tip of one side, parallel to the ground. They have a total of six limbs. The anterior and posterior pairs are the main locomotor limbs with the median pair used like hands. They have five fingers on each hand, however "finger" is a rather loose term here. Each of the five phalanges are made up of the main finger without joints each opposed by a jointed, smaller finger that closes around branches and other things. Each of these complex fingers can be orientated so that the jointed parts all face outward OR inwards in a circle or in a simple straight line. Each arm is capable of being used on the dorsal or ventral side, however the joints that allow this are also weak so they must be careful. Their heads are mostly spherical with the primary pair of eyes on the very tip and the mouth, usually closed by 4 small mandibles, sits right between the primary eyes. The secondary pair of eyes sits on opposite ends of each other in roughly the middle of the head. These secondary eyes cannot see to the same depth of field as the primary eyes but are mostly responsible for the extremely colorful vision. The head is capable of turning to let the primary eyes zero in on anything, tho not behind 90° of prone. Overall these sapients to the untrained eye seem like they don't have a bottom or top end and flip-flop themselves whenever they please.

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I want to talk about my Fakemon ideas but I really feel like, especially for Fakemon but also for all other themes of worldbuilding, I feel like I'm not up to snuff with other creators if I can't draw anything... I do Pixel Art rarely but not often enough to feel confident in it and if I don't feel confident in it then my brain doesn't want me to attempt it... Ah well.

[bridles-for-mulebugs]

You ever have a couple different ideas for worlds in a row but you already have thirty more projects you haven't worked on in months but if you don't try working on these new projects you'll probably completely forget about them?

Lol

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A mulebug is a cow sized scarabidae beetle used by people of the island as a beast of burden.

The specimen pictured above would be actually quite a valuable animal. Animals with pure colored elytra are known to be of luxury and purebred stock. The markings seen on the elytra have been painted on by someone wanting to make their mulebug look nice.

The name of this blog came from the last world-building thing I actually attempted before making the blog. I was trying to imagine what a bridle and other tack would look like on an animal with a completely different cranial anatomy.

This is what I came up with. I do not have background in animal husbandry so I had to do quite a bit of research. The basic idea tho (that I kinda already had figured) is that you want an animal to be comfortable. An uncomfortable animal is a dangerous animal.

Designing tack for a mulebug turned out to be way simpler than I initially thought. The bridle is basically the same as a horse's but without a bit as the mouthparts aren't really able to accommodate such a thing. Instead there is a thick large pad of material situated just under the cranial horn with a strap wrapping all around the animal's 'chin' (there is going to be a lot of anatomical info in quotation marks. do you know how hard it is to make big bugs and a way to talk about them?). This connects to a medial strap that rests under the 'brow' plate. The connection between the two is where one may attach by some method reins. The medial strap attaches at last to another wraparound strap that rests in front of the 'cheek' plate. This whole arrangement allows for lots of leverage which I imagine is important for the animal and the driver.

I imagine that people tie hanging lanterns from the thoracic horns of mulebugs for when it gets dark. The end of the horn from dorsal view looks a little like a Fleur-de-lis.

The saddle lays on top of the thorax behind the horn. If it were on the abdomen, it would probably impede the animal's ability to 'vocalize'. I imagine these animals would retain their ancestral trait of making sounds by rubbing their elytra together quickly or hissing air thru them. If the saddle or any other part of the tack was on the abdomen, it would proably not make the animal very happy since it would use its vocalizations to ward off predators =:(

The stirrups hang at an angle and have foot rests at the ends. A mulebug is very wide so sitting with your legs completely open like on a horse would be uncomfy.

Finally, not pictured is the yolk for pulling carts. This would be on the 'shoulder', in front of the thoracic horn, where real-life scarabidae beetles put loads of pulling force. Other than that it would likely be pretty similar.

All of this tack was colored to look fancy, as the animal is a luxurious stock and would be prettied up often.