I have a hard time sharing my worldbuilding publicly, so my buddy @theoarfishexpress and I are holding each other accountable for small, commitment weekly posts. With that in mind, here's a very small thing on fungi in my setting -
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If you’re seeking something a little too esoteric for the usual channels, and you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, there’s always the Unseen Market. Dreams and nightmares, next year’s weather, memories of the dead, crop yield forecasts, access to covert messages, secrets from the depths of earth and time - it’s all on offer, in the darkness of soil, not far away. The marketeers themselves live as nets of white threaded through the ground, only emerging with fruitbodies occasionally, to offer a mushroom flavoured with recollections foraged from corpses and tree-ruins. You’re unlikely to see the Market or its owners in any real sense, in fact. You’ll probably want to go through a local myceliomancer - fungal warlock meets occult economist - who knows their way around, can make sure you don’t get ripped off trading your carrion for mundane knowledge you could’ve got from any old tree. The Unseen Market has a shady reputation but its influences run deep; every plant is, fundamentally, an obligate marketgoer, trading for most of their goods and to send messages long-distance. The necessity of dealings with the fungal courts is a subject many prefer to remain, well, unseen.
ALSO BECAUSE I WAS SO INFORMED ABOUT WBW I WILL ASK A SECOND QUESTION:
What is considered like a high-class meal in this world. I saw the standard snack but what's something rare that would be seen if they're entertaining foreign royalty or something like that? - @jtl-fics
You just want me to have to draw more fantasy food and you know what. It will work
I know I could get even more creative with these but I’m still in the process of figuring out what kinds of food and stuff they have in various climates so for now - omw to give Bo some goat cheese and fresh bread
Hi! Sorry it’s no longer Wednesday, you can respond to this whenever you like.
What’s a popular dish or snack in your world? Or one that one of your characters like?
lol you’re all good, thank you!!
I think a dish in the usual morning/early afternoon rotation would be savory oats, they actually don’t do sweet oatmeal often! And if they do it’s an infrequent occurrence for evening desserts :) some additional toppings could be meats, mushrooms, or sautéed veggies, but this is probably your “basic” version of the dish:
(Thank you for giving me an excuse to do a doodle like this, I’ve been meaning to try it out lol)
HI EMRY OH FRIEND OF MINE WHO TOTALLY TOLD ME ABOUT YOUR WORLDBUILDING WEDNESDAY AND ITS NOT LIKE I STUMBLED UPON IT OR ANYTHING.
Are there any natural locations (forests / lakes / mountains) that will be of special importance to the plot? - @jtl-fics
HELLO ASH, WHO I DEFINITELY THOUGHT I TOLD AND IT TURNED OUT I JUST IMAGINED IT. HOPE YOU ARE HAVING A GOOD WEEK
anyway I don’t have a doodle for this one but I do reallyyy want there to be hot springs or thermal baths up in Bylldewn. Bo and the gang might not be used to the cold but Bo IS in the habit of night baths (he liked the privacy at home) and the water is naturally warm, so fun scenes I want include will have Bo trying to convince Q to go out to the springs at night and they end up sneaking out together 😌
I don’t know exactly what they springs or baths look like yet but I want the springs to be something like Peninsula Hot Springs if you wanna look that up!
Happy WBW! Ramble about a location you're super proud of
Hello!! Tysm, idk if I've even worked on any specific location enough yet to have a full ramble lol but I have been considering one of the capitals recently :D
It's the capital of Old Beldún, Croníl. They're based much further out closer to the desert, at the foot of a mountain range, but it still gets pretty hot down there! They usually build out instead of up when space is needed to avoid rising heat, which could become more of a problem as it becomes more populated 😅 but they also have plenty of ice melt from that (relatively) young mountain range, which means they don't need to work too hard for water!
The castle/keep/whatever is probably a very nice sprawling collection of buildings and walls, all well and specially ventilated to bring in cool air and expel warm air. Outside areas are provided with plenty of shade, if not with hardy trees then with canopies! Some are retractable/moveable, which is very handy. Can pull them open or shut depending on your needs
Gotta be careful bc lots of plant life out there is tough or has spikes. The buildings are beautiful though, made of rock and clay that sometimes shimmers in the sun ✨
Hi! It’s really Wednesday this time lol. There’s a post talking about the difference between authors who explain everything by saying ✨magic✨ and the ones who make a super detailed explanation about every single thing in their story. I was wondering if you have anything you’ve thought a lot about even if it isn’t super relevant to the plot and what that might be?
Took me all of a month to lose all sense of time and reality lmao but I'll get to sending these again next week
I love this actually, thank you! I do tend to go down various rabbit holes lol. One such being considering how they view family (specifically parental) ties and what words/etc they might use to describe them!
Gonna slip it under a read more bc this got wordy but TLDR I came up with a way for my second mc to slight his terrible dad like at least once a day
Mostly this all goes down weird bc it's a much more queer norm world and ofc they developed different ways of viewing identity and personhood. They went the "sex and gender are separate parts of identity" route, and for our purposes here that usually means there's a few common ways to address and refer to people you're related to.
Their closest words to "mother" and "father" are less gendered parental terms and more like.. a position? A role? Any parent that carried and bore the child is the child's mother, and the other biological parent is the father. You really only ever use these terms to introduce or describe that relationship to someone that doesn't know you and/or your parent, usually when it's relevant in some way. Because it's more of a detached and matter-of-fact descriptor here, calling someone "mother" or "father" on the regular (especially when that person is supposed to be considered your caretaker) or to their face is VERY uh. Icy. Very cold very distant, the relationship is probably not good and/or the child holds zero respect for them as a caretaker.
On the other hand, that means that on the gender side, what you call your parents can have tons of variation. Trans parents in this world would be medically and maybe legally described with one word, but known as and called another (ex: a transfem person with a bio child could be that child's father, but the child and community refer to her as "mom", "mama", or any other number of feminine names). And that's all perfectly normal bc of how they've separated the concepts in their culture. They have several names to call a feminine parent, a masculine parent, and gender neutral parents!
The other note here is that "parent" isn't actually the gender neutral equivalent of "mother" or "father", bc humans can't have more than two bio parents and those titles are separate. I think usually it's employed in the same sentences though, which can be confusing to us! To use another example, I have a throuple with two women and a man (all cis). If they had a child in either configuration, the man would be the father, and the woman that bore the child be the mother. The other woman though would actually be introduced in similar fashion as "parent" rather than mother, bc she isn't biologically related. "Parent" is more a word for any caretaker that you see as such, who isn't biologically related to you! Using the word "parent" isn't seen as cold and disrespectful bc it's indicating that this person holds an important caretaker role even without blood ties. The important part is you would still give your "parent" a name. To continue the above example, the father might be called dad, the mother called mom, and the parent called mama. Both women use equally valid and common feminine names.
So in short:
Saying to a stranger "my father is the king": informative, normal
Saying to a friend/acquaintance (esp who knows your father) "my father is in a meeting": waving a big flag that says do not ask about me and my father
Getting your caretaker's attention by calling them "father": the quietest and most polite way to say "I want a new parent"
Getting your friendly bio mother's (when not a caretaker) attention by calling them "mother": ??? weird that you felt the need to specify but okay I guess
Saying to a stranger "my mama went up to the capital": cool, all the info needed is there
Saying to a friend/acquaintance "I need to go help mom": of course, what other way would you ever refer to your mom?
Getting your caretaker's attention by calling them "ma": again, what else are you going to call your caretaker?
Of course, this is just in circumstances when your bio parents are supposed to also be caretakers and language is at its core extremely messy. Sometimes people are raised by other family members like aunts and uncles, and sometimes they call them by the usual "aunt and uncle" equivalent or sometimes they might adopt a parental term for them like any other caretaker. Sometimes you're hanging out with your biological mother who didn't raise you but you're on neutral or even good terms, you don't consider them a caretaker and you still introduce them as your "mother" bc it's easiest. Sometimes kids are adopted and any new caretakers become the parents without any of them being the mother or the father, and are still introduced commonly as "my ma and pa." Sometimes these general rules are broken entirely. Just depends on the context and the comfort of those involved, just like anything else.
(Bonus because I obviously thought about this through the lens of my characters lol. Q refers to his dad the king as "my father" on the reg for reasons mentioned up top.
Then one of his family members has a whole thing going on because Im considering that maybe also amongst nobility and religious figures there's a fun separation of blood ties vs spiritual ties between people; take for example Grandmater Tewdwr (spelling intentional). Q would introduce thon as "my great grandfather, Grandmater Tewdwr" while Bo, who is not blood related to thon but is at times considered spiritually related, would introduce thon as "my grandmother, Grandmater Tewdwr." Because nobility loves to make things needlessly complicated and boast their ties to other important people, so it's expected of everyone to do so.)
The telepaths took over my thoughts again, so I'm returning with another weekly worldbuilding about all their subtypes. I am too lazy to go look-up what number I was on the last time I wrote a Weekly Worldbuilding at the moment. I might fix the number at some point.
One Disclaimer before the babbling starts: I am going to be plowing through stuff that I consider spoilers for my short story, Silent Halls, here. I'm putting them below a keep reading, If you want to read that story without outside influences coloring your perception of the characters you should stop there.
Telepathy at baseline has some basic components to it: 1) Reading, 2) Projecting, 3) Shielding, 4) Range, 5) Subject, and 6) Target. Not all telepaths are good at all of these things. I'm not going to go too far into subject itself because that's pretty much the only defining feature of the Tree Huggers (people who read plants), Zoo 'paths (people who talk to animals, which has a lot of different names, many of them unfortunately derogatory), and the Specialists (people who are limited to specific types of people).
Reading and projecting are considered basic enough telepath skills that the telepath specialized schools are divided into people who can do both reliably (Thought) and those who can't (Voiced). All the Thought classes are taught without speaking out loud, and they require class participation to be in telepathy too. If you can't keep up, it shows in test scores.
Which brings me to Cameron, who is originally perceived as a dumb jock who only knows how to do one thing. He is in thought classes by the skin of his teeth. Cameron is a Shielder, which means he is very very good at keeping other telepaths out of his thoughts. Just like reading and projecting are considered basic skills, so is shielding. They all try to learn how to do it. What makes Cameron different and specifically classified as a Shielder is that he is able to shield other people's thoughts too. He is exceptional at the number of people, the size of the bubble he can construct around people, strength, and concentration. However, he is not good at reading or projecting his thoughts. Cameron can still do it, but is slow and piece meal, completely impractical for an actual telepathic conversation. This is not unusual for Shielders, which not many people realize with how uncommon shielding is as a subtype. Reading/projecting and shielding require opposite mindsets. The telepath has to be open and flexible for communication and closed off for shielding. Asking a Shielder to read is likely asking a left handed person to use their right hand. Some people can do it, but that doesn't mean they'll be good at it or feel comfortable.
Range is a limit to how many people a telepath can read and project to at one time as well as how far they can affect. It is takes a lot of skill for a telepath to be able to reach big groups of people at one time. Doing it over more than a few feet is beyond most people's limits. If a telepath can reach crowds at a distance, they're considered a Broadcaster. Most Broadcasters cannot read as nearly as many people as they can project to. A Scanner is the opposite. They can read and sort through a lot of people's thoughts simultaneously. This one isn't a true sub-type as a lot of telepaths can learn to do this or at least learn to read fast enough there's very little difference to reading simultaneously.
The telepath's target is where most of the different telepath subtypes come from. It is also where the spoilers are kept, so
A target is the kind of material a telepath can pick up and what they can do with it. Basic telepathy is picking up thoughts as they occur to a person and projecting a telepath's own thoughts to their subject.
A Director like Dahlia is someone who is very good at imagining senses and putting them in their subjects' heads in a way that blocks out the subjects' own senses. They're illusionists.
On the other side of the spectrum is Jack's friend Tim, who can pick up only the senses of someone else. He can't read someone else's thoughts, so he's stuck in the Voiced class even though his ability is better at picking up minutiae and a longer range than a lot of the kids in Thought classes. Tim basically is so good at reading sense, he can sit in someone's head like he's sitting on a patio with a glass of ice tea just to watch the weather.
Then there's Empaths like Ruby. Ruby is another student who really shouldn't be in Thought classes because she can only read people's emotions. The exception to this is people whose emotions she knows extremely well like family and childhood best friends. She can read and project to them through the emotional connection. This is why she and Dahlia are joined at the hip. Dahlia reads the teachers; Ruby reads Dahlia. They go in reverse order when Ruby gets called on. She has to talk like an ordinary person when Dahlia is not available for interpretation. However, because all of her telepath conversations go through her cousin and she happens to be a pretty girl who likes fashion, Ruby comes across as a stuck up popular girl. A lot of her classmates are under the impression that she doesn't care about anyone's feelings when that's pretty much the only thing she can care about.
Neither of them is able to manipulate someone else's thoughts. That's not something a telepath can learn. The subtypes that fit here are always true subtypes that are born with the ability to do what they do even if it takes a while for them to discover they can. Stunners and Cleaners are some examples of telepaths who can manipulate. Stunners have no finesse. They knock out people and keep them unconscious. Sometimes they end up damaging parts of their subjects' psyche when they hit too hard. Sometimes they shatter people. But, Stunners are considered invaluable resources for controlling a population of people with abilities.
Cleansers usually end up in mental health roles when they're not involved in shady activities. They can erase painful memories and help piece other memories or parts of the brain back together if the brain damage isn't too bad.
Now we need to talk about Jack. He is the one kid in Voiced classes that could be in Thought if he wanted to be. Jack's a Mind Miner. He has access to everything. Jack gets surface thoughts. Jack digs memories up out of places they've been forgotten. Jack can drag a person's subconscious conscious. When he's really after information, he's not gentle. It is scarily easy for Jack to break people and leave them in pieces no team of Cleansers can put back together. Jack is capable of communicating like any other telepath with reading and projecting. However, he does not like to because in order to do so he has to completely open up the person he's reading and himself. It's a lot of work and then he ends up knowing more about people than he wants ( he does pick up on everything) and his own stuff he wants to keep personal slips through. Most of what he projects is just images since it's easier to send the one message and then close himself down again than to keep sending one word after another. Jack's images are just as creative as his insults, so a lot of information gets conveyed. Mind Miners are rare. Mind Miners like Jack, who can on occasion read multiple people at once and bash mental shields into figurative dust, are nearly unheard of. The Jack and Cameron team up is basically a telepath tank but worse.
I love the nuanced telepath so much. Please yell at me about telepaths. I would love that so much. Or yell at me if you want me to talk about a different kind of ability. There are so many that cause such fun problems.
This series hasn't really been weekly for a while, but the name's not changing at this point.
Families have been covered before, but I have not discussed how families form. This week is dating and marriages. Next week I might have something on Valentine's Day, but I've got research to do on that one.
As everyone knows, the first step toward falling head over heels is actually meeting your object of affection. I'm not completely reinventing the wheel. People still meet each other at school or work, though I have mentioned before that both education and jobs are a bit more segregated along ability lines. Bars, coffee shops, and the grocery store might still produce meet-cutes. The meet-cute in question might just be someone trips and their future forcefield generator boyfriend cushions their fall. This setting has also advanced to the point where there are online and speed dating options. Instead of just being divided up by culture, their are also crazy niche sites for specific abilities like "Shapely" for shapeshifters or one of many subspecialized telepath only sites. Matchmakers are a far bigger thing in this setting. Some people don't want to consort with the commoners COUGH dragons COUGH, and other groups are too intimidating to get someone to take a chance on dating them. The matchmakers also help people who want to marry a specific type of person. This part turns into a little bit of trying to ensure whatever children they may have end up more powerful, which some people believe naturally makes them more successful. It's just superstition and false belief though. Two super powerful parents may still end up with a kid who has no special ability.
Dating each other hasn't really changed. Who dates who isn't that different either. Like tall men, people with abilities have more dating luck than people without. But it can't erase a bad personality. People stay single a little longer in this setting because they usually start dating later. Superpowers all start appearing and changing around the beginning of puberty, so kids are a little distracted from acting on their crushes. First dates go to coffee shops or to nice restaurants. There's not a lot of people who agree to do something in private or get picked up from home by someone who wouldn't be considered a significant other. Too much risk exists in the possible power imbalance between two individuals before they know each other well. People with powers dating people without isn't unusual, but it does open them to potential danger up front.
With this setting, a lot of people early in the getting to know you phase will just stop talking to the other person when they're no longer interested. It's still considered rude, but there's more understanding of why someone might do it. Telling someone who could crush your ribs with one shove you no longer want to date them can be frightening. People with strong abilities, who otherwise wouldn't have to worry about that, sometimes just get spirited away by the government. So people frequently just stop communicating, not exclusive to online dating. Ghosting isn't a term that gets used to describe this. That means something else in this setting.
People choose to get married for a variety of reasons. People who utilize a matchmaking service frequently forgo dating and skip straight to being legally tied together. If they can stand being around the other person, that's usually all this type of person needs from an in person meeting. There are of course tax benefits to getting married. Sometimes there's a job benefit. Sometimes someone just wants the status of locking down someone with an ability.
Proposals look different. Diamonds are not commonly given. There's too many people who find that to be a health hazard for that to have become trendy. People also don't tend to spend years engaged, so they don't need a symbol to mark them as "almost taken" for very long. A gift for one or both people might be given as something useful. Most of the big symbols are reserved for marriage. This is also highly variable by couple, fae, ability, job, clan, etc. Tattoos and piercings might be used for someone like a shapeshifter who could wiggle or of jewelry accidentally. Any kind of jewelry for elecro- or pyrokinetics can be a hazard, they tend to just do symbols on their clothes. The physically enhanced frequently wear some kind of jewelry, though it's not usually rings. People like matching with their significant other, but it's not always easy to tell how they've coordinated.
After marriage names get changed, people switch or quit jobs, households are combined, and sometimes the risk tier of ability users changes. The general public isn't quite sure why that happens as it goes either up or down in fairly equal rates. The people most accustomed to living with the government's surveillance have guessed it's how their significant other's abilities or lack there of are predicted to effect their own ability and behavior patterns. There's been a few cases of people choosing not to get married or filing for divorce because of this.
Still Brainstorming:
How the love potions fit in
How the romantic bond manipulation gets worked into a legal job
