Project: World Forge

Welcome to the World Forge

[worldforge-project]

An Introduction

Hey, hi, hello, howdy! I'm Builder Mars, and this blog is meant to act as a central place to do a lot of my worldbuilding. Project: World Forge is a collection of projects that I've dabbled with over the last 20 or so years, starting when I was in high school. A lot of it's a jumbled mess, but this'll sort of make me sit down and sift through it all.

I also have a YT, which is currently empty, but I hope to start making videos for it at some point in the nebulous future. If you're curious, you can find me here [link].

The currently named projects are:

Reshoran - a fantasy setting that originally started as an attempt to flesh out a porn comic that I never got around to doing. Base tags for that will be #rashoran and #fantastical nonsense.

City Witch - an urban fantasy setting that was supposed to be the basis of a few different projects, but never really took off. Tags for that will be #project: city witch and #subway mages.

Star Shine - a sci-fi setting that, you guessed it, was supposed to be the base for a sci-fi project that never got off the ground (pun, shockingly, not intended). Base tags for that will be #star shine and #astronomical shenaniganry.

Silent Green - a post-apocalyptic setting that was, surprisingly, not actually tied to anything. I just had an odd idea and it sort of stuck. Tags for that will be #silent green, #mossy books, and #apocalyptic bullshittery.

As this is a pinned post, it will be updated as necessary.

Last edited: 22-Jun-25

[super-ion]

World building is so much fun because it's like "oh, what if they make paneer?" and then hours later you're researching vinegar production

[wild-west-wind]

You know what fantasy writing needs? Working class wizards.

A crew of enchanters maintaining the perpetual flames that run the turbines that generate electricity, covered in ash and grime and stinking of hot chilies and rare mushrooms used for the enchantments

A wizard specializing in construction, casting feather fall on every worker, and enchanting every hammer to drive nails in straight, animating the living clay that makes up the core of the crane

An elderly wizard and her apprentice who transmute fragile broken objects. From furniture, to rotten wood beams, to delicate jewelry

A battle magician, trained with only a few rudimentary spells to solve a shortage of trained wizards on the front who uses his healing spells to help folks around town

Wizarding shops where cheery little mages enchant wooden blocks to be hammered into the sides of homes. Hammer this into the attic and it will scare off termites, toss this in the fire and clean your chimney, throw this in the air and all dust in the room gets sucked up

Wizard loggers who transmute cut trees into solid, square beams, reducing waste, and casting spells to speed up regrowth. The forest, they know, will not be too harsh on them if the lost tree’s children may grow in its place

Wizard farmers who grow their crops in arcane sigils to increase yield, or produce healthier fruit

Factory wizards who control a dozen little constructs that keep machines cleaned and operational, who cast armor to protect the hands of workers, and who, when the factory strikes for better wages, freeze the machines in place to ensure their bosses can’t bring anyone new in.

Anyway, think about it.

[wild-west-wind]

Construction wizards to turn back time to root out wood worm and strengthen old buildings.

A wizard tailors who transmutes cloth into fully made clothes without seems and leaving behind no scraps

A wizard who works in public transit, timing out teleports with detailed schedules, time magic, and enchanted communications, sending dozens of people to far away cities for a day or work or leisure

A team of wizard gardeners tend to trees grown far outside their native range, and ideal climate, encircled with runes and fed potions to grow none the less

A wizard sits in their office in the aqueduct, re-casting the spells that allow its precious water to flow to the city uphill

A wizard fisher casts water repelling spells on the sailors and the stairs, keeps the hoist on the anchor from rusting, casts balls of heat that keep everyone warm below decks. Their real job is to herd fish together so they can be caught in single huge nets, and keep them cold as the boat returns to land.

There are so many possibilities outside of “stodgy academic who wears ugly robes” and “Very good holy man who helps everyone and the fact they’ve never had a job is never brought up” and “evil wizard toiling away on great evils in his evil tower in the evil country.”

[ethanrayne]

Wizards who come out and ward your home for you, like the magical equivalent of a home security system.

[asthedeathoflight]

Resisting the urge to Um Actually this dragon novel because it has the dragon eggs be like three or four feet wide but there is simply a limit to how large hard-shelled terrestrial eggs can be. No matter how large the animal is, the embryo needs oxygen, and oxygen needs surface area. The larger an object is, the lower its surface area relative to volume, and the less oxygen the embryo can receive. We think of large animals as having porportionately large young because mammalian pregnancy has the unique benefit of allowing for the size of the young to scale with the adult because their oxygen is provided directly through the placenta, and almost all the megafauna remaining on Earth are mammals. But this is not the case for species which lay eggs! For fuck's sake even the sauropods hatched out of eggs barely larger than basketballs! Your hatchling dragon would be impressively enormous if it were the size of a house cat. Stop trying to make me believe that this (ROUND!) dragon egg somehow supplied enough oxygen to develop an infant the size of a large dog or even bigger. If it were possible the dinosaurs woulda been doing it!!!!

[achillbeing]

I love you /lh. Experts going off on their particular fascinating cool topics and adding unexpected context to things we take for granted is like my favorite thing this was delightful. Talk to me more about eggs and geometry and biology all you want :D

[achillbeing]

Amazing concept

[baddywronglegs]

OK so now can we reverse it and maths out the minimum atmospheric oxygen pressure based on the described size of a dragon egg?

[rapidashrider]

What does it say that my immediate response was to start imagining how an egg might be larger and yet have an adequate surface area to provide appropriate quantities of oxygen and my instant solution was PINE CONE DESIGN EGG

[baddywronglegs]

... Suddenly the common modern depiction of dragon eggs covered in scales makes sense, they're not dragon scales, they're additional surface area for diffusion

[asthedeathoflight]

Resisting the urge to Um Actually this dragon novel because it has the dragon eggs be like three or four feet wide but there is simply a limit to how large hard-shelled terrestrial eggs can be. No matter how large the animal is, the embryo needs oxygen, and oxygen needs surface area. The larger an object is, the lower its surface area relative to volume, and the less oxygen the embryo can receive. We think of large animals as having porportionately large young because mammalian pregnancy has the unique benefit of allowing for the size of the young to scale with the adult because their oxygen is provided directly through the placenta, and almost all the megafauna remaining on Earth are mammals. But this is not the case for species which lay eggs! For fuck's sake even the sauropods hatched out of eggs barely larger than basketballs! Your hatchling dragon would be impressively enormous if it were the size of a house cat. Stop trying to make me believe that this (ROUND!) dragon egg somehow supplied enough oxygen to develop an infant the size of a large dog or even bigger. If it were possible the dinosaurs woulda been doing it!!!!

[achillbeing]

I love you /lh. Experts going off on their particular fascinating cool topics and adding unexpected context to things we take for granted is like my favorite thing this was delightful. Talk to me more about eggs and geometry and biology all you want :D

[achillbeing]

Amazing concept

[random-questions-fairy]

Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!

[theredscreech]

Heads up that this is a very extensive questionnaire and might be daunting to a lot of writers (myself included). That being said, it is also an amazing questionnaire and I will definitely be using it (or at the very least, some of it).

[heroineimages]

Bookmarking this…

[backofthebookshelf]

This inspired me to see if Patricia C. Wrede’s Worldbuilding Questions are still online, and not only are they, they’re on the exact same page I saw them on in 1998. Somewhere there’s a binder of the Word doc I made of all of them and the answers I filled in for Baby’s First Fantasy World

[themboots]

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.

[mindfulwrath]

May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.

[jeanjauthor]

I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.

[oh-opossum]

One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.

[brehaaorgana]

More stuff!:

European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own

Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!

R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.

Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.

Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.

Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide

Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)

Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.

This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.

Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.

And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:

Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...

Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...

Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...

Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...

Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.

Also:

This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.

Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009

(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn't try to read every essay.)

[dedicatedfollower467]

If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!

[memecucker]

Invention of bread is weird bc it’s like some Neolithic ppl were like “hey you know that tall grass thing that’s sorta edible but not really how about we take it and grind it into a very very fine powder which is extra backbreaking right now bc the wheel won’t be invented for awhile and then we mix it with water and heat it up and you know what let’s also toss some mold in there just to see what happens”

[quoms]

there are a number of distinct steps though, each of which can be observed in isolation. “grind tough seeds to make them edible” is practiced with other foods besides grains (like acorns). the natural next step after that is to add water, which gives you porridge: a common ancient roman meal was puls, very similar to modern cream of wheat. once you have that you also have a simple dough, and baking it to preserve it is a logical experiment (as is baking some you forgot about and left out for a few days, just so you don’t waste it... voila, leavened bread)

there could have been, and probably was (though i’m not an archaeologist) a substantial time between each of these innovations. it’s not too hard to imagine people being chill with “grind seeds for soup, select plants for bigger seeds” for a good while

[quasi-normalcy]

Do you ever wonder how many amazing things are fated to go forever uninvented because each step necessary to invent them is a completely unintuitive thing to do?

[noctumsolis]

Okay, that's not how bread was invented. I wrote a potted history, I could try to dig that out if anyone is interested?

[quasi-normalcy]

Please do

[panecultus]

I'm putting this on my bread blog, because of course I am. Also tagging @appendingfic who I think expressed interest.

Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

There's a lot more to it, in terms of the cultivation of grains and the development of milling, than I've written here. It's been a process of millennia to go from chewing sprouts to eating soft white bread like that pictured. But every step along the way was small and simple.

[quasi-normalcy]

I never would have guessed that beer pre-existed bread. I've always just assumed that beer was an accidental discovery by breadmakers.

[jenniferrpovey]

Nope, beer came first. Mead is also very old.

[headspace-hotel]

Thanks, ancient humans!

[thirtyknives]

Australian First Nations people developed their own bread making culture independent of the beer-base route. As far as I'm aware, pre colonial Australia had little to nothing by way of fermented drinks at all, so the likelihood of beer being part of the evolution of native breads is unlikely. Their breads, made from native grasses, are both leavened and unleavened. There's also different bread making practices using different grains, dependent on location - Australia is big and Indigenous culture over here is no more a monolith than it is anywhere else. Kamilaroi bread is different to Yuin bread, for example.

The colonization of Australia actively suppressed Indigenous knowledge, and creating an image of the idle wandering tribes was required to justify taking Aboriginal lands. This means a lot of the archeology of how First Nations people developed their breads has not just been lost but deliberately suppressed. The idea that they were settled enough to have ovens, let alone a bread-making tradition, is only now really being examined. I wouldn't be surprised if the grains-porridge-bread route was true for Aussie breads, though.

[a1-b2c3-deactivated20230114]

why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like… 

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

BASICALLY like???? come on star wars you had one (1) job where are the cool alien species

[wearethesparkk]

I KNOW!! I did a report on filming locations in Star Wars last year and just made a list of places that looked so surreal they could make a convincing other planet. You covered some on my list but if I could just add a couple more:

Tsingy di Bemaraha, Madagascar

Zhangye Danxia, China (similar to the Rainbow Mountains in terms of appearance)

Chocolate Hills, Philippines

Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

So many missed opportunities with cool ass things on Earth, Lucasfilms smh…

[memcjo]

Earth is effing amazing!

[isnerdy-deactivated20190101]

Quebrada de Humahuaca, Argentina

Lake Retba, Senegal

Tepui, Venezuela

Tianzi Mountains, China

[bunjywunjy]

these would make amazing Star Wars planets OR fantasy material:

Tsingy du Bemaraha, Madagascar again (but a different part)

(those are razor-sharp, if you were wondering. very little of this area has been explored because YIKES)

Lake Natron, Tanzania

(looks cool, but is alkaline enough to Kill Your Shit)

Lake Baikal, Russia

(the deepest lake in the world, seriously)

and I’ll wrap it up with Son Doong Cave, Vietnam, the largest cave in the entire world.

it puts anything Dagobah has to offer to absolute shame:

(seriously, the largest chamber is 660 feet high. you could jam a fucking skyscraper in there and still lose it) 

anyway I really like caves thanks for coming to my ted talk

[alexanderwales]

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

[thevampireconnoisseur]

Thinking about vampires as pack animals that are as a species the same but differentiate depending on bloodline. Vampires being able to tell another vampire is of the same bloodline as them even if they’ve never met before because the pitch of the bat-like chittering that they use to tell where one another are like echolocation is specifically the pitch used by their bloodline. Vampires as pack animals who come as a swarm cloud of bats if a fledgling is in distress, the whole “family” showing up to save the “baby” because if you mess with one member of the bloodline you mess with all of them. Vampires as pack animals because it’s the closest thing they have to human connection again, to any sort of real family at all. Vampires as pack animals.

[vampires-official]

official vampire post

[casuallycryptidcider]

To add to this with information I learned by going to a bat conference, vampire bats are social creatures. They will bring back food/share food with hungry companions and will also groom those they form bonds with. Here’s a link to an interesting article on how bonds between vampire bats can form. Here’s a more detailed article about the process.

So, y’all should make your vampires more friendly with other vamps in their social network. Like they notice someone hasn’t got enough to eat, so they share their meal. Like they notice another vamp’s hair is a little messy and they help to fix it

[vampires-official]

great addition!!

[theartingace]

Horses are really fragile animals. Is it still a death sentence for a centaur if one of their equine limbs gets hurt? Or can they help it somehow?

Oh god, now I'm thinking of amputees and how those would work

Horses are SUPER fragile, or maybe more like delicately balanced.. but particularly their crazy spindle-legs which centaurs get to deal with! But a big part of why hurt legs are a death sentence for horses has less to do with “It kills them” and more to do with quality of life, which a centaur can get around! A horse with a broken leg doesn’t understand it can’t put ANY weight on that leg for an extended period and will attempt to go about their daily life and act normally, which basically guarantees re-injuring the bad leg and a high chance of injuring the other 3 legs as they try to cope with the change in balance and weight distribution. It all leads to a really poor quality of life with almost no chance of truly healing properly. The story of all they did trying to save Barbaro the racehorse is a long sad story that illustrates a lot of the issues even with modern veterinary medicine with trying to deal with a broken leg in horses.

Thankfully with centaurs, They understand the need for healing, are able to manage their own quality of life and have the gear to support themselves in the time it takes for the injury to heal!

Also perfectly good for long term use in the case of aging, amputation, or general disability! Which is common with the front legs and lower backs of centaurs given the unusual stresses caused by their body-plans. They were created with thicker and more robust front legs to cope with the permanent added weight of the torso instead of a horse head, but injury and disability in that area is still very common!

Injuries to the hind are less common and usually less severe, and given the hind legs bear less direct weight than the front they can usually get away with wraps and limping until it gets back to weight-bearing. Something like a rear amputation or ruptured tendon would probably require a custom harness/brace attached to a wheel like these and/or basically a peg leg!

yeah, although the psychological aspect is part of it, physically horses are very heavy animals and if one leg isn’t weight bearing, one or the other feet are likely to founder from the strain of carrying the rest of the body weight - the internal support of the hoof deteriorates & the foot bone rotates downward ( in itself is a very painful & potentially fatal condition). its why you don’t see any amputee horses around, their size means they really need four legs.

however!! these amazing wheelchairs would really do the trick! god they look good!!

(side note, knowing the size + weight of horses heads compared to human head & torso, i cant help but wonder if there really would be extra weight from the human part at all or if they’d actually be lighter on the front end??)

[asmuchasidliketo]

Okay so. Let’s begin by the weight of the human part of a centaur.

A quick research gave me access to a list of different human body parts relative to total weights on this site. Summing it up, I found that for a 150 lbs (68 kgs) human the torso + head + arms is about 110 lbs (50 kgs).

That was the easy part.

I looked up the same things for horses but only found guides to weigh your horse, and a scientific paper that may have the answer, but it’s behind a paywall and I’m not coughing up 15€ to maybe get the answer I need.

Then I remembered I have a Facebook friend who’s passionate about horses, and has access to a lot of scientific literature. I asked her. I presented the question as something pretty weird, as I don’t know if people other than I are interested by strange scientific inquiries.

She loved it.

So here is the data :

- If we take in account the center of gravity of a horse, behind the shoulders, we know that its position varies a lot based on the position of the head + neck block (the higher the head gets, the more the gravity center moves towards the rump), so – laws of physics – the head + neck block is an important part of the weigh of the horse, with a leverage effect.

- Also, the position of the center of gravity tells us that 50 % of the horse’s weigh is before that point : head, neck, shoulders, front legs. Even when comparing a strong torso + arms and a slender neck, it means that for a 1,000 lbs (450 kgs) horse the “front block” is about 500 lbs (225 kgs).

This doesn’t give us the weigh of the neck + head block, but it tells us that with the shoulders and front legs (that a centaur keeps) it’s nearly five times the weigh of the human part. And I doubt the front legs of a horse weigh that heavy (to give a vague idea, both legs of a 150 lbs human weigh about 52 lbs – 23 kgs).

Another thing about centaur anatomy (from the same trusted source) : in a centaur, the torso is (most of the time) held straight, so the center of gravity is closer to the rump than for a horse and the distribution of the weigh on the four legs is probably more even (for a horse about two thirds of the weigh is borne by the front legs). However back pathologies like kissing spines could happen more often, since equine anatomy means that horses need to lower their neck to limit the risk of back wounds.

That’s all folks, I hope my translation to English isn’t too bad!

[sufficientlylargen]

One thing that I rarely see in posts about centaurs is considerations of how scale works between the human and horse parts. Most illustrations of centaurs seem to assume light riding horses, but what about, say, a one-ton Shire centaur?

If you remove a Shire horse’s head and neck and replace it with an average human torso then its front half is gonna be MUCH lighter, and also it’s maybe gonna look a little ridiculous… Or do we just assume that Shire centaurs have human parts proportional to, say, a ten foot (3m) tall heavily built human?

[theartingace]

Omg somehow i missed all this great discussion happening here??! I love that @asmuchasidliketo did the math!!? That’s amazing! Not long after i made this post i started wondering the same thing about the weight of a human torso vs horse head and neck. I assumed the human torso would weigh more on the centaur because it would be like having a permanent rider but then realized even small horses like those I typically model my centaur bodies off of have heads almost as big as their rider’s torsos in pictures- and that doesn’t even account for the leverage effect and weight of the neck! So the lack of not only that big ol head’s weight but also the leverage of it being held out a solid 3-5 feet from the top of the shoulder would almost certainly make everything WAY lighter than the added human torso- even if the torso is larger than the typical rider of a horse of the same size as I tend to do when proportioning my centaurs.

(An older proportion sheet I worked up a while back for @sufficientlylargen - I have an old post on this but I may do a whole other post because I have EVEN MORE thoughts on size limits at least for my own headworld’s centaurs) Because the size of the human half that feels right to me is definitely larger than a rider of the same sized horse would typically be (for the long term health and safety of the horse) but even so, it’s still way less straight up bone weight being held up at a much more upright angle which means less leverage pressure on the (lower)shoulders. Which, I agree that would probably make them more prone to kissing spine than poor knees! Though centaurs would be more aware of the issue as it would likely be common and stretching and preventative movement would likely be implemented to mitigate some of it. But just like humans with bad backs -because everyone in their twenties thinks lifting with their back and sitting like a shrimp will never come back to bite them- it would likely be the most common issue of aging. So any which way it still results in the same need for mobility aids but it’s fun to be able to better pinpoint what the more likely issue with their crazy bodyplan is!

[threefeline]

aight its time to clock out for a bit. im tired, this has me tired. im gonna draw some dragons getting their heads stuck in things. someone give me some ideas 

[threefeline]

what about THREE donuts 

[threefeline]

i really liked that third one 

[threefeline]

featuring Fowler and his slightly disappointed father 

idiot 

[threefeline]

hey guys heres some more dragons with their heads stuck in things

see you in another two years

[dragonheritageposts]

Dragon Heritage Post

[worldforge-project]

Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music

So, I don't have any music for the project yet, but I've been compiling a few ideas and this is one. I'm not sure why the song popped into my head, but it feels kinda like something that'd be played somewhere in the world...

[aphractal2]

little design challenge for myself. designing dragons for different genres.

[herringherringbones]

Dragon letting off some steam on a telephone pole. The breeze must be nice up there.