Worldbuilding is my Hyperfixation

(they/them, 21) Sup I'm here to make planets and have a good time and I'm all out of having a good time. Haven't touched this thing in years and may not touch it again

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

I think right now it might be a good idea to think about left-handedness. For centuries, people who were left-handed were thought of as weird and wrong.

Even when my parents were children there were still people who taped left-handed children's hand so they were forced to write with their right hand, to "fix" them, because lefthandedness was weird and wrong.

As a left-handed person, I have never once encountered anything worse than some annoying desks and people going "oh huh, you're left-handed" like it was some interesting trivia.

An entire form of prejudice, and many people barely remember it existed.

Things can change for the better. They have changed for the better. They will change for the better.

Even now.

[outeremissary]

Art Fight attacks from the past two weeks. I have been Slow and Casual so far, but I enjoy seeing all the characters out there :)

Characters and credits:

Athénaïs and Amara - Orphee_ ( @orpheexist )

Birthday - echimyidae (insta)

Thekinamore Allantin - UnRandomEst ( @mapmaker-mapmaker )

Cali - Zeal47 (insta)

Myers - RO11ENFOX

Some earlier iterations of a few things

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

It has come to my attention that AI art of "children's hospital" has no appreciation of proper color theory. We as a tumblr community have failed

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

You know what? Fuck searching for the ultimate objective truth. I want to find the ultimate subjective truth. I want to find the truth that’s only true if you’re Steve Wilson, Junior Accountant walking home in the rain on Tuesday, August 4th, thinking vaguely about whether or not you should have your second coffee of the day and listening with half an ear to the specific sound that cars make on wet streets. I want a truth that’s only true then. I just think it would be neat.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Okay. So I have had a random thought and I know I don’t post at all anymore really but. So there’s sometimes massive globs of water floating in space. For example, in this article, (https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/universe20110722.html) it mentions that there’s a bunch of water surrounding a quasar. It also contains carbon monoxide. Why am I mentioning this? Well, soup is 92% water according to a quick google search I just did, and the other 8% is presumably organic matter. Technically, that floating cloud of water in space contains most of the molecular ingredients for soup. And although technically soup has to be boiled generally to make it soup, boiling points are waaaay lower in space due to the lack of pressure. In conclusion: forbidden space soup

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Okay this is another thing caused by me thinking about caves too much. More specifically, who would very much benefit by living underground? People whose job involved producing light. SO here you see the entrance to the Candlemakers’ Guild, all shiny and imposing as befits their status. You see, they have a monopoly on all candles produced, and therefore on light in this underground city. As a result, no one wants to offend them, and what aboveground is a normal merchant profession is a powerful and dangerous mercantile force here, with an entrance befitting a religious institution. In fact, they do have quite a bit of mysticism within their ranks, but they remain first and foremost a financial institution, to the chagrin of anyone who has to buy candles from them.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Okay so I’m trying to be looser about posting stuff here so I can do it more frequently so I’m just dumping random sketches at this point because I do art sometimes and eh why not. This is actually kind of a redraw because I found a sheet of what appeared to be musical instruments combined with weapons that I appear to have drawn in middle school and decided that I needed to work on drawing things that weren’t just a ton of backgrounds. So yeah, I guess this is a way to sneak weapons into an orchestra if your world operates on cartoon objects. There are several more, so there might be a page two at some point. Enjoy.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

I have been thinking about canals lately. I have a soft spot for them. At some point, I started wondering what a canal in the air might look like. Which is somewhat silly, because it would be like putting a canal in the ocean– the air is just there to move through. But I’m stubborn. So what would necessitate an air canal and what would it look like? I have to admit, for this one I kind of started form first and derived the function from there. As you can probably see from the picture, my idea of an air canal is basically two parallel mountain ranges very close together with a gap in the middle for the “boats” to pass through. So why would this need to be built? The obvious answer is wind. Mountains block wind, so if there was a very windy place where airships couldn’t otherwise travel, an air canal would allow them to pass from place to place without harm. The bottom of the canal would of course be a desert, since there’s no wind to blow rain through to it, but commerce must go on!

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Okay so I have more to the air canal idea and I’m putting it here because my brain won’t shut up about it. So first off, there’s towns in the canals, because even though nothing grows there, airships still need to be supplied. For the most part, these grew out of the working towns that actually built the mountains, and they transitioned more or less smoothly to trading towns. Of course, there’s one notable exception. Bandits sometimes live in the canals, hoping to steal supplies and goods from the airships. And one especially enterprising group began, about two hundred years ago, to build a town of their own. At first little more than an unusually permanent camp, with tents made of the splintered wood and ripped canvas of downed airships, it quickly grew into something more. Nowadays, it’s a thriving underground market, with many exotic and dubiously acquired wares to sell. Some upright captains merely fly right over it, but many more think that it’s the perfect place for a little shore leave-- as long as you keep one hand on your wallet and the other on your sword.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

I have been thinking about canals lately. I have a soft spot for them. At some point, I started wondering what a canal in the air might look like. Which is somewhat silly, because it would be like putting a canal in the ocean-- the air is just there to move through. But I’m stubborn. So what would necessitate an air canal and what would it look like? I have to admit, for this one I kind of started form first and derived the function from there. As you can probably see from the picture, my idea of an air canal is basically two parallel mountain ranges very close together with a gap in the middle for the “boats” to pass through. So why would this need to be built? The obvious answer is wind. Mountains block wind, so if there was a very windy place where airships couldn’t otherwise travel, an air canal would allow them to pass from place to place without harm. The bottom of the canal would of course be a desert, since there’s no wind to blow rain through to it, but commerce must go on!

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Okay, so I’ve been toying around with an idea for a magic system: basically, things get imbued with their purpose after repeated and prolonged use. For example, seven-league boots would just be boots that know their purpose is to help their wearer walk, and an invisibility cloak would be a cloak that knows its purpose is to help its wearer camouflage. So we get to what the above drawing is: flag dragons, or flagons if you don’t mind that flagon is already a word that does not mean flag dragon. What is a flag’s purpose? To proclaim. So flags imbued with magic purpose turn into dragons that follow their users around, generally being loud and ostentatious and proclaiming things. Although they are primarily aesthetic, these dragons can be quite distracting if they feel their person is being threatened into hiding what the flag represents, and will fly around the perceived threat, producing a disorienting effect similar to zebra stripes.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

You ever wonder how dwarves... live? I mean those really stereotypical fantasy dwarves that Mine For Gold and Live In Large Underground Cities. How do they get food? Do they have a really trade dependent economy wherein they get food from nearby aboveground cities? The problem with that is that if you anger any of the aboveground cities, they’ll refuse to give you food, and then what you have is no food. This is my attempted solution to this problem, for fun, profit, and because I’m currently writing a story that takes place entirely underground and I’m the kind of writer who needs to know how every single character is getting fed. These “plants” look like normal plants, but are actually an example of convergent evolution. Whereas normal plants get energy from the sun via their leaves, these plants get energy from the ground via their roots. Specifically, chemicals within the ground that they use in reactions that create energy. Yes, I just created a plant that runs on fossil fuels. No, I don’t have regrets (well, I don’t have regrets with regard to creating this plant anyways). Why are there leaves? To cool it down. You see, anything that makes energy makes heat, as per the laws of thermodynamics. Whereas normal plants get their energy aboveground and can therefore just deal with the heat by sitting in the wind and all that, these plants are only roots, and live in caves where air tends to be more stagnant, meaning they’d get real hot real fast. Now let me tell you about ears. If you want to stay warm, cover them. They have a huge influence over body temperature. Why? Because they’re very thin, so when blood goes through them, it’s not insulated from the outside air, and therefore can cool off very fast, go into the rest of your body, and cool that off too. These cave plants do that deliberately through their leaves to vent off excess heat from their energy gathering, and have created leaflike structures to maximize surface area. Tada! Magic (science) cave plants!

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Hi! Sorry I haven’t been here in a while, but here’s a planet. Now, I hear you ask, what’s special about this one? I usually go a bit weirder (or at least less survivable by the average human) for my sci fi stuff, and add, well, fantasy to my fantasy ones. Well, this planet has a relatively temperate, humidish climate for as large an area as I could manage, seasons without having less sun any day of the year, and lower gravity because why the heck not. The thing all these factors have in common is that, according to the research I’ve done, they would hypothetically produce ideal conditions for growing lilacs. And the gravity? It’s so they can get really tall. Or, in other words, rise up.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Okay, apparently I was lying in the tags of my last post when I implied I wasn’t going to make anything related to the City of Stabbings. Don’t worry if you’re a prospective tourist though-- it’s just that the tourism board was on strike for higher wages and wanted to illustrate their value to the city by putting out bad brochures. The explanation they gave to their superiors was that the city employs a record number of fabric artists, who often stab things with needles and the like, and oh dear, how did that picture get on there, someone must have chosen the wrong picture we have this nice one of a sunset we were going to put on it, too bad no one noticed it before the brochures were printed and distributed. In fact, the unconventional promotion lead to record numbers of tourists, prompting the city to give the tourism board a raise for work well done. Now, many of the inhabitants are employed in trying to keep up the fiction of a tough town with a high crime rate, as really it’s a rather peaceful, sleepy place. They hope that no one will realize that if they all wear leather jackets, though.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Okay, so this originated because I was thinking about all those cities called City of ___.” So I googled a random noun generator because I wanted to make my own city of something. After a bunch of obscure and frankly ridiculous nouns, I decided to take the nouns as suggestions and just use synonyms and came up with the City of Songs and Silence, because sometimes I can be a little dramatic with my names. The city is in the north of a very cold planet, and is often bitingly cold. As such, the city is almost entirely underground and sealed against the elements, leaving the outside almost completely silent, save the wind. However, the first settlers in the caves underneath the city found that the caves, through some trick of nature, echoed quite a bit. As such, the citizens quickly became used to constant noise, and over the years, superstitions sprang up about quiet corridors. Nowadays, most successful shops hire musicians to play by their stores so that the area never falls entirely silent.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Sup again. I have been asked to make a hedge that was as comfortable to lean on as it appears, so have this... untitled bush. It operates on roughly the same concept as the sensitive plant, i.e. wilting when touched, but has more dense foliage, so it essentially feels like leaning against a squishy leaf pile. The evolutionary reason for this is essentially that it’s really hard to bite a wall, so this plant, when threatened, just becomes a wall. The branches wilt until they are flat against the trunk, making the leaves harder to graze on. Basically what’s happening is a similar effect to a balloon-- when it’s inflated, it is sturdy enough to support its own weight and stick up, but when it’s deflated, it flops over. Since water is required to do this, it is native to wet, warm climates with temperatures that do not get below freezing. It’s very interesting as topiary, and requires a lot of skill to shape, because it will of course try to wilt if you trim inexpertly, but if the topiarist is skilled enough, it is a highly sought after medium, because it’s essentially two sculptures in one-- one wilted, and one not. I personally don’t mind normal hedges because one can flop dramatically onto them and they will support your weight, but I would also lean on this because squish.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

This is just a world(s) I’ve been thinking about for a while. Basically there’s two planets that rotate around each other closely enough that their oceans are pulled up due to the other planet’s gravity and connect the two. This is not possible by science but whatever I want to explore this very specific scenario and no one can stop me. The people in outfits and a kayak are from a semi-nomadic culture near the connecting bit of the oceans on both planets. These are pretty much the only people that really cross the water bridge, and a lot of their culture is focused on it. The crossing is long, hard, and only really attempted by younger people, similar to how many people move away from their homes for college, people in this culture are expected to cross the water bridge and spend time on the planet they weren’t born on. Part of what makes this crossing so harsh is that as one gets towards the center, the air becomes thinner and much colder. Since there are no animals close to the water bridge with warm furs due to its equatorial location, the people crossing bring many layers of cloth which over the course of the journey they wrap around themselves for warmth. If a person is disabled or otherwise unable to make the crossing at the expected time, they can choose to create a work that they symbolically put their soul into and entrust to someone close to them, who then makes the crossing in their stead. These crossings are dangerous and sometimes fatal, but still undertaken by almost every member of the culture at least once. Although the first crossing is undertaken alone in a kayak, subsequent journeys are usually with multiple people in canoes, both because extra people makes the crossing safer and because there is more space to carry materials for trade.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

A Theory

So everyone knows iron hurts fairies and all that. Here’s a (not entirely serious) theory as to why: A lot of fiction portrays magic and science as opposing forces, but I’m gonna go a little more specific than that. What’s at the core of most of modern technology? Electricity. What’s at the core of magical workings? Some unidentifiable force called magic. It doesn’t make sense to have Technology as a concept opposing Magic as a concept, because where does one end and the other begin? Is magic repelled by two gears? What about a potato battery? But what does make more sense is electricity, one of the four fundamental forces, having an opposite: magic. That means what conducts electricity insulates magic and vice versa. Why is iron so repellent to the fair folk? Because like us, they have nerves that carry signals. But unlike us, those are magical signals, not electrical signals, and they have more control over them than we do. They can use magic to “feel” things outside their bodies, but iron, as an insulator, is like a dead spot. How would you feel if there was a substance that caused a blank spot in your vision? Not too good, I’d imagine. Scared, confused, and maybe even repelled. Of course, more conductive materials like copper would work better, but they weren’t around in medieval times so we get iron in popular literature as the repulsive material to magic.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Of course, this means that things that insulate electricity conduct magic, so most fairy armor is probably made of stuff like rubber. So, hypothetically, if a fairy was trapped and desperate and looking for weapons, their best option might just be to go to the store and buy a raincoat. Pictured above is a fairy in last minute armor. Their expression of wrath isn’t because of whoever they’re attacking, it’s because they’re doing it in such an unfashionable manner and someone is going to pay for it.