Just an artist with a passion for fantasy creature and character design who is extremely tired of seeing terrible anatomy in professional fantasy art. I'm happy to answer questions and proivde advice and helpful critique for your own fantasy designs. I will also post my own fantasy creature/character designs and speculative evolution ideas.
This is my sideblog for talking about fantasy anatomy and biology, and the worldbuilding that comes with it! My submissions and ask box are open! I can offer design advice, answer questions about specific anatomy ideas, and provide resources for you to get better at the designs or worldbuilding details you're working on!
This blog is queer, body positive, anti-ableism, and anti-racist. I am a fat autistic aroace white woman. I get stuff wrong sometimes and I am not immune to internal biases and assumptions about my own knowledge. Please feel free to correct my posts and add extra information/sources! Learning and creativity are community activities.
Please keep asks to just a few mid-sized paragraphs at most, like three paragraphs. If you just want to info dump, post it to your own tumblr and I'll reblog it if I'm tagged.
Keeping your asks shorter makes it easier for me to answer more people, so please be courteous!
Questions I won't answer:
1. "Is my idea good?" Ideas are neutral. You make them good by how they're executed.
2. Super detailed biology questions. All I can do for you is go plug your question into an internet search and give you some linked references. You can do that on your own! So please don't come to me with questions about biochemistry and in depth genetic stuff. I can't help you with that. I also believe that getting too tangled up in ultra realistic biology can hurt the creative process and prevent you from actually making the fantasy you want, so maybe take a breather if you find yourself fussing over things like the exact chemical process of digestion required for a dragon to be able to breathe fire or whatever.
3. Critiques of specific media. I know i started this blog nitpicking on DnD monster designs. But i have had questions in the past about media i am unfamiliar with and then fans of it found me and got upset that I did a design critique without knowing the full context of the media. So. I won't be doing that anymore, for my own sanity.
commissions are open on my ko-fi page as well.
This blog is not intended to make any independent artist feel bad about their style, technique, or skill level. I'm just tired of looking at professional fantasy art people get paid to make for official purposes like D&D book illustrations and seeing so many horrible anatomy choices for things that are easily fixed just by doing a little basic research on real life creatures.
I am not a paid professional, but I've got years of self taught art and college art classes and I have a serious passion for thoughtfully designed wings and functional fantasy anatomy.
I may occasionally post my own work in fantasy anatomy and speculative evolution.
My main blog is @miss-m-winks.
More details about the fantasy story I'm writing can be found at @ava-m-gale
I tag by source and creature name as well as post theme like wing analysis or redesign process.
This blog is also (mostly) screen reader accessible! Yes, it makes all my posts a lot longer, and yes the purpose of this blog is primarily to point out flaws in visual art for the sake of other artists who may be trying to learn from my posts. But I'm going to do my best to make it accessible to everyone. **sometimes i forget or do not have the spoons to do full image descriptions, especially when reblogging other people's posts.
I also reblog other people's tutorials sometimes with the tag #outside resources, so check that out.
Masterpost links under the cut:
Fantasy pronoun chart
Vrock (dnd 5e): Intro, Wing Critique, Alteration 1, Skeleton Fix Part 1, Wing Bone Explanation, Alteration 2, Redesign Intro, Redesign Sketches, Final Redesign
Shredded Wings Pet Peeve
Pet peeve about boobs
making humanoids less human
how to make unique but recognizable fantasy designs
creature design: where to start?
Digitigrade legs: Three Common Problems, Exploring The Problems, An Improvement, pants/chaps, shoes,
Pop culture fixes: Maleficent, Rito, Tmnt, disney fantasia centaurs,
Personal designs: Teo, Goblin masterpost, Orc masterpost, Drow masterpost (these are all old and need a redo)
Wings in motion: media examples, basic animation test, take off/land
Dragons: DnD 5e redesigns (Brass, Black), real world physical features, some dragon heads, masterpost of other people’s dragon designs, masterpost for my own dragon designs, list of common pitfalls for dragon wing design
Ratings: Harpy,
Armor Problems: Feminine, Poorly Fitted, Spikes, Other Sources
Non-primate Humanoids: Skull shape, Hands and bodies, Expressive faces, Worldbuilding tips, feline skulls, reptilian shedding tools, hippo people, talking with a beak, triceratops, reptile faces,
Merfolk Masterpost (old, needs a redo) cephalopod mer,
Extra Things: iridescence, baby animals, two headed giant, hyena culture ideas, clothing help, horns/antlers, making humanoids less human, sky whales, chimeric design,
My personal worldbuilding: magic system, drow outsiders, vampire scars, my drow vs dnd drow, vampire portrait, orciforme faces, sylvanid comparisons, bee pixies, orc redesign, centaurs, Quetzalin,
I remember writing a setting once where a race of bugfolk, much like real life insects, had males that mated just once and then died shortly after, so since they only had a few weeks left to live anyway they sort of became something similar to the Winter Wolves from the Game of Thrones series, where they became the frontliners in battle and the defenders of their colony, eagerly sacrificing themselves for the greater good since they have already passed on their genes and are determined to protect the future of their progeny.
Ooh I like that.
My wasp-like pixies also have very short lived males, so there's a lot of ceremony around their very existence. They carry their hive's good will and memory with them as they are escorted to an allied hive and then they pass those memories along to the queen they mate with, and then they die. It is a brief life, but they are incredibly important for the continued peace between pixie hives and the continuation of their species. Since each hive has this interconnected mind/soul, the males become a sort of spiritual link between differnt groups of pixies, and they do not view themselves as an unfortunate individual sacrifice, but as a living embodiment of a collective entity.
Insects are such a fun base to start from for creating unique fantasy people.
I’ve been thinking a lot about non-human reproduction, mainly around those animals which die after reproducing and sexual cannibalism. How these would affect societies of any species that practiced these? As someone already mentioned octopi, I will instead ask about moths & mantis’s and the implications of their death-based mating habits?
My caterpillar people have a lifecycle that see’s them transition from a sapient larvae to a non-sapient moth. The larval stage is prolonged, lasting around a century and is where they experience the majority of their life. Being fully sapient and building their own civilization, doing things like using their silk for building material and farming giant leaves and fruits for food. As a larvae these caterpillar-folk have no reproductive organs, and have no concept of gender or sex (but do have concept of love and intimacy). After a century they form a cocoon and pupate into their “adult” form, becoming a giant moth. As a moth they’re completely non-sapient, their former identity and consciousness being erased, replaced with an all consuming single minded dedication to breeding. They have no mouth or digestive system, dying of starvation after about a week. In this brief period the moths take to the skies in massive mating flights, frantically breeding and laying hundreds of eggs before dying of starvation. These eggs being gathered up and raised by the younger generations who have yet to pupate, starting the cycle again. This transformation is an inventible part of their lifecycle, only dark magic (of the evil necromancy and blood sacrifice kind) having the power to stop it.
For my mantis folk they have typical mantis sexual dimorphism of females being much larger and more aggressive than males, as well as the infamous habit of females eating their lovers during sex. Sexual cannibalism being a long standing historical practice in mantis folk society, this practice being equal mix cultural and instinctive with opinions being all over the place about it. This isn’t a necessity for their breeding, but is still a strong instinct response by the mantis women (basically an evolutionary leftover), to the point of having to consciously stop themselves or be physically restrained during sex to prevent this (assuming they even choose to do so). Both have merits, eating the male ensures a greater payload and nutrition that results in a larger clutch size, on the other side an extra set of pincers will be helpful in caring for eggs and nymphs. Opinions on this practice are heavily divided across both mantis-folk society and gender lines. Some viewing it as a barbaric relic to be left behind/ others seeing as a sacred tradition or divine right to be carried on/ others only a privilege of the wealthy who can afford the luxury.
Okay, so, fun fact about mantises! Mating cannibalism is a wee bit of a myth, actually. There's no actual special mating instinct making the females eat their partners. The females may eat males simply because they're hungry and the male is nearby.
Written by Joe Ballenger Mantises, as we’ve seen, are interesting animals with a lot more going on than what it seems. They’re efficient pre
Mating cannibalism in mantises happens less than 20% of the time. So while I do understand the fun of exploring that angle in a sapient species, it's important to be aware that you're basing that behavior off of a sensationalized myth.
The moth people are great! I've seen a similar concept get passed around on tumblr before and I think it is a fascinating way to build a unique fantasy people and their culture.
Do you know the pain of wanting to make dwarf villains as a critique of rampant capitalism and how mining destroy the ecosystem but having to back it up because of the antisemitic implications people may read into them?
I actually have very few proper villains in my own writing.
But good luck with yours! It's good you're aware of the possible issues your audience will have with it.
Personally I will always advocate for an avoidance of the trope where one people species is just all villainous, and I do think dwarves have some extra baggage as a fantasy people that you may struggle with. I understand the critique you are trying to do though. So just make sure you're actually writing that critique and not just making a one-note villain species.
speaking of mixing the "walks on its wings" and "six limbs" dragon traits, i saw a dragon design once where the forelimbs were arms and it walked on its wings and legs! so each limb pair were differently specialized
How would you design a merfolk that can glide like a flying fish, and probably have enough land mobility like an epaulette shark or climbing perch to make their way back to water should they make a beach landing?
(image description: sketches of a mer person. in the top sketch, they are gliding on large wing-like fins spreading from their hips. in the lower sketch, they are crawling on the ground with their arms and a pair of smaller fins closer to their tail. end description)
This one's pretty simple, I think. Big flying fish fins, and then all the land navigation is done mostly with the arms.
How would you depict a traditional "western" dragon that uses all six limbs to walk?
I noticed how when dragons are depicted "wyvern-style" with only four limbs, they use their wings to walk on all fours like a bat or a pterosaur, while traditional dragons with four legs plus wings walk on their four legs while folding their wings to their sides or back, like a bird.
I thought it would be visually interesting to mix the two, with a traditional dragon using all four legs plus its clawed wingtips to walk, but I'm wondering how to go about it. Would the four legs be directly under its body like a dinosaur's legs while the wings are more splayed out? Would it sort of make a "crutching" motion with the wings while walking normally with the four main legs?
this would work best for a dragon living in a rough terrain of some kind, whenever just flying would actually be more energy than its worth or when their hunting tactics are better on the ground than in flight.
maybe a dragon in a very rocky location with a lot of narrow canyons and overhangs and such, so its prey can easily escape it while it's flying and there's not as much space to spread its wings when it goes low. Or maybe a smaller forest dragon using its wings as the longer limbs that are able to reach between branches to navigate the canopy instead of crawling through the underbrush.
(image description: two sketches of dragons using their wings to climb around difficult terrain. The first is a dragon crawling between cliffs to hunt prey. The second is a pair of smaller feathered dragons climbing around in the canopy of a forest. end description)
Another thing someone might use for keeping track of worldbuilding is Chiralis! It's like one of those string noteboards but a computer program.
awesome!
I admittedly do not know a lot of resources for this because I'm a fool who takes the "no notes we die like men" route XD
the only notes I actually come back to regularly to remind myself of worldbuilding details are the sketches I've made for various symbols/runes/tattoos, lists of side character names, and my conlang notes. virtually everything else is just in my head and randomly info dumped to friends, discord groups, or tumblr.
At the risk of asking a stupid question (or at least one only somewhat related to the topic of your blog), do you have any methods of organizing/keeping track of your worldbuilding? I used to use WorldAnvil myself but they kept updating it until I found it unpleasant to use, but I've noticed that I've barely done any worldbuilding since then, despite that always being something I enjoyed. I had a replacement software I was keeping an eye on that I quite liked, but when I just now looked up the state of it, I found out that the developer has gone AI-enthusiast (to the point where their Twitter, the only social media linked on their Patreon, has two coding-related AI accounts they're following... and also Elon Musk). I guess I could go looking for similar software again, but these days so much shit is vibe-coded it's just exhausting.
Scrivener and Obsidian are both software you can download. Milanote and Ellipsus are online options. Private discord server just for yourself. Paper notebooks or binders with divider tabs. Tumblr posts are an option too.
Admittedly a lot of my worldbuilding is uh. In my head. Some things are scribbled down in sketchbooks, like when I need to figure out the appearance of cultural symbols for my fantasy folks. But they're not like. Organized in the sketchbooks. I just take photos of them for easier access later.
I am not a good example for keeping organized worldbuilding notes lol
‘Private discord server’ No! Don’t do this! Don’t use a discord server as a store of data you ever want to see again, even a little. Discord is a private company running a messaging service, they have no guarantee how long they will store messages and images for, or their backup process, or anyway to provide that data in a format usable by other software. And they can do what they want with whatever you put there.
Same goes for tumblr posts. A tumblr post, or any social media post, should not be the only copy of any information you want to keep. You should have a local copy of any images or text in a format that is widely supported and will still be around in 30 years.
Of the suggested options, Obsidian is by far the best. Everything is stored as markdown files, which are just text files with some extra human-readable formatting symbols. Images in Obsidian/any markdown editor are kept as the original image and just linked to. The files are stored on your computer, somewhere you can find them, and can be read by a terminal text editor from 30 years ago, so will probably still be readable in another 30. Files on your own computer don’t need an always-on internet connection. And a company can’t deny you access to them. You can provide your own backups and syncing with other computers easily because there’s a thousand ways to sync text files between machines. (You could use use the paid service they provide if you want, because you know it’s not locking you out of anything, you still have the files even if they provide the sync. Which you may want for the mobile app, where it’s harder to run something like rsync.) If the company developing Obsidian vanished tomorrow, everyone who had been using it would only loose the program, not all the data accessed by it.
I’ve not used Scrivener, Ellipsus, etc, but if you want more features you will generally loose out on standardised file formats because the program will want to store things in its own way. If you want to make trade offs for certain feature that’s fine, but consider how much that platform lets you control your own data. Look for if there is at least a way to export everything to a standard format (normally this is in someway a lossy process. If the export option is PDF, that’s very widely supported and standardised, but should be considered a read-only file). As with online-only programs, can you at least export the entire contents easily to your local machine? If the company decides to lock your account tomorrow, will you also loose all the data there, or is there a way to have your own backups?
The original question was about moving away from WorldAnvil. Their wiki says that in the free version you can export everything as a PDF, which is at least something, but would be difficult to work with further, more of an archive of what you had. But to get the JSON and HTML versions you have to be using the paid version.
As you can probably guess, I personally keep all my writing and the little I write down of my world building in obsidian. I also use it at work as a lab book and for notes keeping for the same reasons. I could meet most of those tasks with folders of text files and any other markdown editor. I only use that one in particular for things like automatically creating a file for each day, and easily adjusting the size of an image with the gui without writing out the markdown syntax for it.
Merfolk could have suction cups on the bottom of them like lumpfish/ramora do so they can stick to/ride on a mount. A mount is worth it if you're saving your own energy to get around, or if the mount is much faster.
It would be a very cool way to illustrate the symbiotic evolution of merfolk and their mounts as well!
If there was an entity that was only conscious during intercourse (maybe an incu/succubus or sex robot with sentience), and it suddenly experienced a full life outside of that, do you think it would find nonsexual experiences pleasant (freeing, relaxing, anything nice) or unpleasant/understimulating?
Obviously there could be a lot of range to this answer depending on individual members and all sorts of things. But what would be your general/instinctive guess?
That is a fascinating question. I'm asexual so my view on this will be a little biased through that lens.
I suppose they'd be confused at first, waking up without the usual accompanying sensations they're familiar with. Would they have been asleep before or do they, like, kinda just go around in a mental haze and now they're finally aware of the world around them?
Either way, I think anyone's initial reaction to suddenly having full consciousness after being mostly asleep or unaware aside from one form of experience would be confusion, and then curiosity. Everything is new. There is so much to explore. So many questions to ask. Even an unpleasant sensation would still be excitingly new. And how fascinating to realize that one can feel such a range of sensations after only knowing one type of experience for so long.
At the risk of asking a stupid question (or at least one only somewhat related to the topic of your blog), do you have any methods of organizing/keeping track of your worldbuilding? I used to use WorldAnvil myself but they kept updating it until I found it unpleasant to use, but I've noticed that I've barely done any worldbuilding since then, despite that always being something I enjoyed. I had a replacement software I was keeping an eye on that I quite liked, but when I just now looked up the state of it, I found out that the developer has gone AI-enthusiast (to the point where their Twitter, the only social media linked on their Patreon, has two coding-related AI accounts they're following... and also Elon Musk). I guess I could go looking for similar software again, but these days so much shit is vibe-coded it's just exhausting.
Scrivener and Obsidian are both software you can download. Milanote and Ellipsus are online options. Private discord server just for yourself. Paper notebooks or binders with divider tabs. Tumblr posts are an option too.
Admittedly a lot of my worldbuilding is uh. In my head. Some things are scribbled down in sketchbooks, like when I need to figure out the appearance of cultural symbols for my fantasy folks. But they're not like. Organized in the sketchbooks. I just take photos of them for easier access later.
I am not a good example for keeping organized worldbuilding notes lol
"Tutorial" on how to draw an OC with dwarfism (well, some of it).
Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general.
You are heavily encouraged to do your own research because this does not contain everything you should know before making a character with any type of dwarfism.
Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.
If (when) you repost this on pinterest at least put a link to the original post somewhere..
Important for this blog because regardless of what you call them, if you have some manner of short-statured non-human people species, you really want to make sure they're actually their own thing and not just a caricature of a real life condition that real humans have.
And also, if you want to give your non-human characters a condition like dwarfism, you should know what it looks like in humans too.
Stop ranking cultures, especially in worldbuilding
So the Bluesky tag Anthropology August tried to promulgate the idea that one should rank cultures by things like technology, medicine, etc.
I pushed back on it, because:
1. I have an anthropology degree. I did not travel 3 hours there and three hours back from my Uni for nothing. The degree was a BA concentrated in systems for the thousandth time, but I really am interested in trade of media.
2. Because it spreads prejudicial thinking
3. Because it's a horrible way to world build that is also often eurocentric and stuck in the 19th century thinking. And we've made great strides since then.
And I can understand that one can admire parts of a culture for being really fantastic for a certain thing, it doesn't mean that all cultures then don't also have a fantastic thing.
So for example, I put up a post recently that I love, love Al Andalus for the technological innovations, but I ALSO nodded to the fact that they also got there through what? Trade. TRADE.
Islamic empire is famous for gathering items through trade. And also giving credit, but that's a whole other thing.
I also said that I thought the sweet potato was really impressive *for* a specific thing.
This is different from mythologizing the culture that created it and saying that the culture itself was ALWAYS good at everything agriculture. It's rather celebrating a specific item out of the culture. (Ecudorian Indigenous peoples [peoples being deliberately plural])
Since people don't get it in academic scale, let's try it in smaller scale.
Bob is really good at skiing. He wins a championship.
Celebrating specific thing that Bob is good at is good. You give Bob an award party because he got first place in a skiing competition.
Say that you need another team member for a soccer tournament. Bob is not good at soccer: He doesn't know the rules. Running around isn't part of Bob's athletic ability. Bob rather be skiing. He might be good at certain parts and some of it transfers, but it doesn't work like that. (There is a whole Youtube channel like this... BTW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2-KQd58gY
)
Is Bob good at skiing? Yes.
Is Bob good at all sports? No.
Could you say Bob is bad at sports? No.
Culture runs more like this. You trade-off.
Indigenous people couldn't cultivate your West Asian grains. They cultivated the potato, sweet potato, and corn AKA maize.
This created further trade-offs. Maize doesn't have all of the nutrition, which is why they needed the story of the three sisters to travel with the cultivation of the maize.
So could you say that Indigenous people are good at agriculture? Yes.
Are they good at all agriculture? No.
Are they bad at agriculture because they cultivated maize? No.
There is no better or best, more, Most, or least. It just is.
Let's try Europe again (since I did that post on Europe). Is it objectively horrible that early Paleolithic people mainly ate bulrushes? No.
Is it better to have grain?
No, there are trade-offs.
bulrushes, while they take longer to process have more nutrients and less refined carbs and no pesky gluten.
You can't exactly make portable bread out of it, but it's not a bad source of nutrition.
Bulrushes, also known as cattails, are wetland plants that are a common sight in large marshes and ponds all over ...
Sure, you can't quite get agriculture out of it but you can eat the entire plant as a human.
Bread, from agriculture, especially early agriculture has issues:
You need a heat source always to process it.
You have gluten issues
It has less nutrition overall which can create famine (look up Barley bread issues)
you need more supporting plants to eat it.
you need more plants overall and larger land than bulrushes.
it creates a surplus in the long run, which can be both good and bad (as Catalhoyuk had murder for the first time and it was partially agricultural)
Again, it's trade offs. You can STILL admire Catalhoyuk for the way they painted the walls, the lime plaster technology of the time, the rooms, and still nod to the fact, yep, there was murder.
Everything human runs this way. Hilter objectively sucked at art [mostly his understanding of perspective and color needed a lot of work IMO] (and was a terrible person), but you can't say he didn't try to learn how to paint... I still wonder if someone taught him the color wheel and perspective if he could have escaped his horrid father? Doctor Who reading to baby Hilter is objectively funny. And I say that as a Jew.
You should also view world building as trade-offs.
Say the palace I posted...
Great for the palace, but what about the common folk? Did they get a chance to have water from the river?
RARELY is something created by humanity that's all good and has no negative side effects. Sometimes the harms are greater than the good (I'd argue GenAI and LLMs), but sometimes the good outweighs the bad (say, democracy, which, BTW, was invented by foragers, BTW.)
Where are the trade offs? Where is the trade?
Pills invented by Chinese.
A lot of our medicine comes from indigenous knowledge in the rain forest.
The Scientific method comes from the Islamic Empire.
Celebrating one part doesn't mean all or all of the category. (Al Andalus didn't get to defeat a lot of prejudicial thinking about religions (They taxed non Muslims heavily) or question astrology as wrong. They were on the verge of questioning astrology before it fell.) And it doesn't mean backwards or ranking. There is a trade off somewhere. For example, pills: easier to take. Downside, people are still paranoid because they don't know what's in them or what it all means. (read science.)
Neither fetish nor condemnation
It's a basic philosophy of trying to veer away from condemning a culture in your world for an entire category, or fetishizing it as the best ever. Build the Utopia and then wreck it is the backbone of some of the best worldbuilding I've read.
lol This place is so pretty because it has so many lakes. This place also has a lot of mosquitoes and it's humid in the summer and stuffy. (Florida, for those who have been).
This place is peaceful and quiet. This place is mostly painfully white (Cape Cod)
I can keep going.
It's same with people hating on Mary Sues or a character with only flaws. You need some balance in there. Culture works the same way, the good comes with some catch of bad. If you make every culture this way, and within items, I swear, your worldbuilding skills will super level up.
OMG, Healing magic. Uh-oh, it creates horrific scars.
Hate to break it, but Mercedes Lackey did broad strokes worldbuilding with Valdemar, and this part of her worldbuilding isn't my favorite. She made the white-ish kingdom Valdemar, good. The Aztec-ish Kingdom bad. And the somewhat NE-ish Indigenous tribe "less civilized" (urgghh) but more advanced in magic (urgghhh), And before you stop me, I definitely read all of the books up until her controversy. It doesn't mean all of her books are terrible this way, but broad stroking the cultures this way is really flat. (Her trade networks could have used some work too...)
The much not read Lyra series by Patricia C. Wrede, is probably one of the "But nuances" look at culture. Also, I kinda think OG, Ursula K. Le Guin did it well.
It's like saying that a character is only the tall one. Does the tall one have a personality? No. They are only tall.
So put nuance within the nuance instead of ranking the culture by most/least. I swear that's one of the rules of writing people preach at every level anyway: Magic should have consequences. Characters need flaws. The setting can't be perfect. Philosophers: Every imagined utopia on the record is horrible in one way or another.
BTW, I still stand by the idea that sweet potatoes are objectively good survival food, even with the trade-offs.
There is a Babylon 5 episode I really like where one of the characters talks about how they used to fight with this other species on their planet. They genocided them all. But after they got rid of them, they found that their species was dying because by interbreeding with this other species it helped theirs.
Because they only saw the bad, they never paused enough to see the good.
This feels relevant to my blog. Part of what I do here is try to help with worldbuilding advice and that absolutely includes cultural worldbuilding.
I can't count how many asks I have received with people wondering how to subvert fantasy people stereotypes like evil orcs while also still trying to follow the expectations of some people species being "more advanced" than others.
I'm not calling anyone out, we're all writers trying to do our best here and it can be tricky to overcome the deeply ingrained tropes of the genre. The first instincts many writers have when they want to subvert a trope are either "keep it the same but now with a twist agaisnt audience expectations" or "fully reverse the trope". This is how we get "the orcs are still primitive warrior types but they're Good now" or "what if angels are Evil and demons are Good".
Which I find is very in line with OPs point about the shortcomings of trying to rank fictional cultures by how advanced they are in particular fields. I've been trying to participate in bluesky writing events like that one, though I often find the questions posed to be very difficult to answer in the limited character count and sometimes I think the people making the questions expect a writer to only have one or two cultures to explore (like big broad questions about what religion looks like "in your world", when i have easily half a dozen fictional religions i could talk about. But maybe I'm a bit of an outlier with the number of people species I've created here lol)
One of those anthropology August questions was "which of your cultures has the most advanced medicine", and my answer was "well they kind of all took different priorities in what medical advancements they were pursuing" because of course the orcs with their tusks would end up prioritizing dental advancements while the drow and bird folk with their unique hormone situations would be figuring out medical treatments related to hormones before they'd even figured out microbiology.
Because when the problems are: "our Matriarchs naturally transition into their role by way of a secondary puberty, but we want to make it happen on purpose instead of just waiting for someone in the group to randomly start that transition" or "our people undergo major seasonal changes for courtship reasons and it can be very stressful and erratic for the young folk in particular" your people are going to figure out medical treatments for those situations.
It will be more efficient once they have advancements like microbiology and better access to tools and materials for synthesizing hormones (which will probably happen via trade and cultural exchange) but when people have a problem to solve, they solve it by the means available to them.
That's an important thing to remember while worldbuilding. Your people don't need to invent modern germ theory to understand the concept of sterilizing their medical tools and washing their hands, they can just figure out that washing stuff = less infection risk. They can cultivate the plants in their own region and have their own foods, they can weave intricate textiles without needing industrial looms.
And they can interact and have cultural exchange and trade and all come to a better understanding of each other and the world they live in. Or fight each other and steal their way to "advanced civilization" because that is also part of the world. People are messy that way.
decided to make a comicfury account. I'll get the justice league au up there bit by bit, but for now I've uploaded the entirety of my Eros and Psyche au
Just gonna promote my writeblr again and simultaneously promote my new comicfury account. I'm currently trying to turn one of my WIP ideas into a graphic novel and I will be posting it to comicfury once I have enough pages to create a little backlog, so if you like my worldbuilding ideas you may enjoy my writeblr!
Eventually I will actually have finished works to publish. Someday.
Any tips or resources on how to make conlangs? I've been struggling on where to even start.
I've been using vulgarlang.com to generate a pile of randomized words with my own custom phonemes (sometimes I have it generate new word lists with the same phonemes a few times) and then I put it in a spreadsheet and come back to it when I need to come up with a new word. (Search for the word, and similar words, take the different generated word results, and then move stuff around and edit them for a better word)
Oh and by the way, vulgarlang existed before generative ai. It uses some other pre-ai technique for generating random words. It's a very very messy thing, it might give you some super long word for a short and simple English term, and then turn a complex word like "fraudulent" into a very short word. It's not great for making a finalized conlang, but it's a decent source of inspiration and a very helpful place to learn how phonemes and grammar rules work within a language.
I might also make up a word and then sort of retroactively create root words from it (came up with "takran" for a bird species, then broke it into Takuhé+Ennuran, bird+death, and then decided the grammar rules would use object/subject order so it becomes "bird of death")
I've got to look up some of my other resources again, i haven't worked on my conlangs in a while. I know there was a YouTube series and a lengthy pdf that I downloaded. I'm on my phone at the moment and it's just past midnight, so I will reblog this in the morning on my laptop, where I have my resources bookmarked
It also helps to give yourself a very simplified list of vocabulary words, starting only with words that will actually be useful to your project and then expanding.
If you already have character names in the culture you're making a language for, try to break up the names into potential root words and give those some meanings! It's a start, at least, and you certainly don't need fully formed conlangs to add a little linguistic flair to your fantasy worlds. Just a little sprinkle of conlang words where they happen to fit. We don't all need to be Tolkein or pull a Star Trek with the Klingon language XD
@yellow-faerie @looseleafteeaves ik y'all have some resources
my advice, after finding a resource to give you some steps, a is to commit to a 'bad' conlang first. start making one that resembles your first language a lot, maybe a few features from a language you've learned. just make some stuff. gives you a rhythm and sense of what kind of decisions you're gonna be making
There's a website I use for word generation (again with custom phonemes) though I cannot for the life of me remember what it's called (and don't have access to my laptop rn, though I THINK @looseleafteeaves may have introduced it to me...?? If I remember correctly??)
I would also really recommend A Guide To Language Invention which is a book written by the guy who invented one of the languages in Game of Thrones - he goes through all the different aspects of what languages contain and I find as quite a good reference book/a jumping off point for my own personal research
There’s also a textbook(!!!) written by the wife of that same guy (both are linguists and conlangers): How to Create a Language: The Conlang Guide by Jessie Peterson.
Secondly VulgarLang. I've had my (main) conlang for over a decade and my dictionary has over five thousand words now. I definitely recommend looking at features of languages you don't speak. There's all kinds of different little things in languages that you might never consider.
For example, my conlang has clusivity. Clusivity is when a language inherently differentiates between We (me and the person I'm talking to, plus maybe others) and We (me and other people but not the person I'm talking to). That's not a feature that exists in English, but it does exist in other languages
Any tips or resources on how to make conlangs? I've been struggling on where to even start.
I've been using vulgarlang.com to generate a pile of randomized words with my own custom phonemes (sometimes I have it generate new word lists with the same phonemes a few times) and then I put it in a spreadsheet and come back to it when I need to come up with a new word. (Search for the word, and similar words, take the different generated word results, and then move stuff around and edit them for a better word)
Oh and by the way, vulgarlang existed before generative ai. It uses some other pre-ai technique for generating random words. It's a very very messy thing, it might give you some super long word for a short and simple English term, and then turn a complex word like "fraudulent" into a very short word. It's not great for making a finalized conlang, but it's a decent source of inspiration and a very helpful place to learn how phonemes and grammar rules work within a language.
I might also make up a word and then sort of retroactively create root words from it (came up with "takran" for a bird species, then broke it into Takuhé+Ennuran, bird+death, and then decided the grammar rules would use object/subject order so it becomes "bird of death")
I've got to look up some of my other resources again, i haven't worked on my conlangs in a while. I know there was a YouTube series and a lengthy pdf that I downloaded. I'm on my phone at the moment and it's just past midnight, so I will reblog this in the morning on my laptop, where I have my resources bookmarked
It also helps to give yourself a very simplified list of vocabulary words, starting only with words that will actually be useful to your project and then expanding.
If you already have character names in the culture you're making a language for, try to break up the names into potential root words and give those some meanings! It's a start, at least, and you certainly don't need fully formed conlangs to add a little linguistic flair to your fantasy worlds. Just a little sprinkle of conlang words where they happen to fit. We don't all need to be Tolkein or pull a Star Trek with the Klingon language XD
@yellow-faerie @looseleafteeaves ik y'all have some resources
my advice, after finding a resource to give you some steps, a is to commit to a 'bad' conlang first. start making one that resembles your first language a lot, maybe a few features from a language you've learned. just make some stuff. gives you a rhythm and sense of what kind of decisions you're gonna be making
There's a website I use for word generation (again with custom phonemes) though I cannot for the life of me remember what it's called (and don't have access to my laptop rn, though I THINK @looseleafteeaves may have introduced it to me...?? If I remember correctly??)
I would also really recommend A Guide To Language Invention which is a book written by the guy who invented one of the languages in Game of Thrones - he goes through all the different aspects of what languages contain and I find as quite a good reference book/a jumping off point for my own personal research
There’s also a textbook(!!!) written by the wife of that same guy (both are linguists and conlangers): How to Create a Language: The Conlang Guide by Jessie Peterson.
