Hello! (^.^)0 This one is Zebee (+21) (they/them). I do worldbuilding and writing in my free time and am generally chaos incarnate. I use these emojis -> (0-0)0 frequently cause I like them, just so you know what sort of mild cringe you’ve signed up for by being here.
I’ve finally mustered the courage to evolve from quietly lurking around the internet to screeching my writings and such into the void. Most of which will be work in progress for the foreseeable future, so I welcome feedback (^.^). Please be patient with me whilst I find my footing here (0^0) cause I’ve honestly got little to no idea what I’m doing.
Feel free to say hi if you’d like (^.^) I promise you it’ll give me horrible anxiety, but don’t worry about that! I’ll (probably) live! And it’d be nice to have some writing and worldbuilding folks to chat with d(^•^)b.
My current projects are Digitally Dead and Guildergate. 'Digitally Dead' is a cyberpunk world set in a post ecologically collapsed Earth, primarily focusing around the city of Neocago. 'Guildergate' is a mid-to-high fantasy world with extensive histories of empires, gods, and adventures. I typically bebop between these two settings as the winds of my creatively change and it’s quite likely whatever I decide to drop here in the blurg will follow that pattern.
Anyways and always, hope you are having a lovely day, peace (^.^)v
How's it going? I'm Amaiguri and if you don't know me, I've been working on a script for a new adult fantasy political drama game. I have just completed the first set of rewrites! And now, I need YOU!
I wouls be honored if you would beta-read for me. I've stared into the abyss too long and I need help to know if it's good or not 🥺🥺🥺 Please comment below, send me an ASK, or DM me if interested. Whatever is good👍
Yssaia is a fantasy world of magical geopolitics and bunny-eared demons. And in this post-War world, a burned assassin maiden must find new meaning. The game will be a hand-drawn, knowledge-based exploration adventure game with visual novel elements -- and that's what this giant script is for.
And here's some of the characters:
If you would be interested in helping me in this endeavor, while I cannot pay, I do plan on giving free copies of the complete game to anyone who finishes a full beta read!
I am pre-emptively tagging @zebee-nyx, @leahpardo-pa-potato, @satohqbanana, and @moonfeatherblue since you all have expressed interest in my work in the past, but no pressure if anything has changed!
If you are not interested, please reblog so I can find my audience!
Thank you all in advance! This means the world to me 💜
Shut up, /I'M/ not crying because I've been working on the same project for 7 years and I just finished the first draft and it's super emotional and it's about moving on past loss and deciding to live, YOU'RE crying!
I guess spoilers for the last line but I think it reveals almost nothing:
"I settled with them against altar and turned my face to the sun. No matter how the stars turned, I’d always find that same warmth."
...I am so emotionally drained. I wrote so much today. And yesterday. Yesterday, I wrote like 5k and deleted 3k of it. Today I wrote about 9k. It's usually a good day if I get in 1k. This has been a huge push. But I did what I said I would: I finished it before February ended.
Omg and this relatively high-emotion song was playing when I finished and it's by my favorite OST artist and I'd never heard it before and now it's like gonna make me cry every time I hear it:
Also, I'll have a vlog going up about it on my YouTube channel eventually but for now, you can just get this text-based glimpse of tired Amai.
ANYWAY.
...She did it. And if I ever abandoned the project in the future, I can relish in the fact that I got this far.
But as like all the characters are saying at the end, "There's still so much more work to be done."
Tagging @cee-grice and @zebee-nyx, cuz I think it might interest you.
Happy WBW! I’ve seen you mention the war between the North and South of your world a few times. So I started to get curious (>v<) What was the war about and what were some of the major events?
Zebee, I've been saving this one cuz let me tell you... I just made a YouTube video about this :DDDD
https://youtu.be/FM6axVXcUik?si=ShnZH1fsAfTPgxso
But for a tl;dw -- here's the actual conversation I just wrote between Diacaius and Arlasaire:
Di: Ah, we’re making wishes, Arlasaire… Let’s light them up!
He struck his sparkcandle against the ground. I followed. It lit in a burst of unnatural magentas and reds and blues and green. A chill settled into me and my skin tightened. I didn’t dare breathe. I’d blow out the candle and the moment would end.
Di: Are you alright?
I was perfect.
Ar: …It’s so beautiful here…
Di: It certainly is, isn’t it?
The sparks whirled down the bronze wire like the spin of a dozen children with sparkcandles. A dozen children with sparkcandles who wouldn’t set fire to anyone, if the day went right. In Thuille, they’d have been launched through someone’s windows by now.
Ar: …How did your people ever go to war?
Diacaius drew his candle before him. Like a blade. Or a prayer. He sighed.
Di: …When I was young, if you can believe it, the Senate was demilitarizing. I was in the army briefly… and then… You might be too young to know about it, but it was eighteen years ago, I think, the Demons besieged Telethens. They raped and pillaged and destroyed… most of the Northern Docks. And it was clear, even after they left, they had every intention of coming back. I think that’s when all this started.
Ar: Northern Demons or Southern ones?
Di: Northern Demons — I mean, this is the siege where little Princess Astaroh was conceived. And of course, it was this siege that gave the last Inquisition the power it holds today.
Astaroh had been a product of the siege. This I knew. But I had never considered how the Telethenians would have seen it. Before the war, they hadn’t been real to me.
Di: It was about this time that I proposed the Philosopher King Revival Project. After all, this was an enemy far stronger than us with powers we could not understand.
House d’Magnia’s intelligence network always knew about the golem’s revival. They knew it had almost broken the world once. They knew it could break the world again.
Di: And then… we received calls for aid from the Selkie Isles — that, and the Inquisition needed to do something with all its power. And so, we went. Some of the Selkies were keen to learn our technologies and to adopt our democratic systems… but not all of them were so keen.
Ar: And they asked the North for help.
Di: So they did.
And then, the War. The Annihilation of Aonen Qiao. The Fall of Thuille. I imagined it all in flashes like the sparks of my candle.
Di: And the rest, as they say, is history.
Thanks for the Ask, again! I'm so excited for you to see this :D
Thank you @anyablackwood for tagging me, even if it was forever ago! I'm trying to get back on top of things and catch back up!
"Rules: post 3-5 images of a place in your world and tell us a bit about it."
After the fall of Old Thuille, a city-state secluded in the mountains rose in its place. A home to Noble Mages escaping the Saegen markings who could carry on the legacy of Old Thuille. Or so they claim. Their hot springs, rich mineral resources for an easy industrialization, and their affinity for magic has prepared for the return of their Emperor. However, quite often, their hubris gets the best of them...
Nouveau Thuille is very cold and only gets sun twice a day -- at dawn and dusk, when it can creep in during the sides of the mountain. It snows year round, but the hotsprings ensure that humans can actually survive here somewhat reasonably. While humans cannot drink the hotsprings water directly, their animals can and humans have learned to purify it further since -- as well as melt snow and ice for their water.
You've reminded me now that I need to do fashion sketches for the people of Thuille. I've had their fashion the most defined and least changed since the beginning and I gotta come back to it... O_O
Here's a bonus picture of their food:
Gently passing this one on to @zebee-nyx, @the-ellia-west, @maiemorrae, @pluttskutt, @theprissythumbelina, @thepanplate, @dragonprincedawn, @cee-grice, @maskedemerald, @the-down-upside-finch, @galacticsand, @reaperofcrows, and @moonfeatherblue :DDDD
Happy WBW! [sorry for getting to this so late in the day ('o.o)]
What can you tell me about the writing systems of the world?
EEE CONLANGING! So writing originated in my world from recording how you draw spells. Most places used a pseudo-logography except in the last 3 generations here: Due to industrialization and war, governments have simplified a lot of languages so the average person can access them easier!
You probably want to see them now... so here they are :DDDDD
Sealtongue doesn't have its own writing system -- but it COULD. Cuz it's a Tokiponita so it only has like 120-something words... maybe it could have a logography easier...
So Yssaia has HAD a pretty developed magic system for a while. And to recap it for you... I'm going to paste my half of me raving about this on Discord (thank you to @zebee-nyx and @galacticsand and @reaperofcrows for being so cool and letting me be an unhinged worldbuilding mad lad XD):
"What is Ysse?"
So the way Ysse works is its basically invisible dust floating in the air. And if it hits itself at certain velocities and in certain volumes, "spontaneous effects" happen -- like water materializing out of "nowhere" or fire exploding or wind gusts. You're limited a little by Avatar Last Airbender bending logic (you can't summon fully sapient creatures, you can't teleport, you can't control people's minds unless you're like... touching their nervous system, etc.)
So Mages invented the first writing as a way to record what patterns of movement did what. And eventually, used them to communicate these patterns as a shorthand for more generalized concepts...
So writing also got invented sometimes BEFORE agriculture...
"How precise do these movements/velocities need to be?"
It needs to be PRETTY precise. And this is why the average person CAN'T learn magic -- because Ysse in low amounts is invisible to the average person
But mages can see Ysse, which helps a lot. And they can see these shapes OCCURING in the natural world too -- when the wind blows, its because Ysse particles FORMED the Wind Rune/Sigil in the sky BUT this still doesn't guarantee that they cast any spells if they don't have the physical discipline too
So, in theory, "anyone" COULD move their hands PERFECTLY to spontaneously start a fire. But they PROBABLY won't
"How does this impact the natural world?"
This is also how animals and plants can do magic too. Tree roots in the north have roots that have specific patterns that warm up the soil, so snow can actually MELT and give them water and the tree doesn't die
And this is also my excuse for why so many things have bunny ears -- normally, long ears in colder-than-average climates (i.e. All of Yssaia) would be bad. But in Yssaia, these long ears are convergently evolving to channel Ysse. What they channel, exactly, I haven't decided (probably heat lol or something to increase air density so sound travels farther???)
AND all this is ALSO why the Demons are such an abomination -- because their Blood Magic doesn't obey particle physics, they just fucking do whatever they want
"Why do you need to know all this?"
The question at this point, I guess, is basically "How do I make fantasy technology that looks whimsical but also looks at least hypothetically functional under closer scrutiny?"
Yeah, and the full Answer TM to that right now is just <insert the entire design philosophy I haven't discovered yet here>
"So how IS magic going to shape technology, when you design it for the Untitled Yssaia Video Game?"
...Yeah, okay, after brainstorming all this, I think here's my strategy for how I'm going to tackle technology:
Step 1) Establish symbols for a handful of common things in both the North and the South that at least vaguely make sense with the concept of the particles
So things like:
Step 1) Establish symbols for a handful of common things in both the North and the South that at least vaguely make sense with the concept of the particles
So things like:
- Fire/Heat
- Water/Melt
- Ice/Slow
- Wind/Quicken
- Earth/Apply Force
- Sun/Light
- Moon/Closing/Locking (Thanks to @zebee-nyx for this one!)
Step 2) Create a master list of technologies I will worry about/actually visualize in the game
I will want to keep an OPEN LIST so I can add more things to it as I do research/find really specific use cases (such as scrollcases or chopstick holders)
Step 3) Design simple sprites for things that can later be shrunk down and used as set-dressing for maps BUT at a little bigger in scale so they can be shown to other people sensibly (maybe on the same sheet at the walking animations for scale?)
AND WITH THAT, after 5 years of only vaguely imagining all this, this is what I designed, using a combination of symbols I had already designed and dice that I pushed around on my desk to see what kind of patterns they'd make:
Are some of these a little funky and don't really work with real particle physics? Yeah, fair. I'll take notes, if you got 'em. I'm open to critique, if you wanna lol
Last comment that didn't make it into the big discussion with my buds tonight: Ysse particles are how temperature is distributed. So, hot areas have fewer, cold areas have more. I know that isn't how thermodynamics work but does anyone else really?
(Something something eldritch horror thermodynamics post... And my magic-god is an eldritch horror! See? It's perfect!)
Thank you for coming to my #WorldbuildingWednesday post! If you liked this, don't forget to REBLOG and follow the #Yssaia tag or something🥰 (Are calls-to-action cringe? Publicly shame me, if so)
Zombies shouldn't growl or snarl, they should babble a mixture of incomplete word sounds and whole words or sentence fragments. Every zombie should sound almost but not quite like it's trying to tell you something.
this may not be what you're saying, but what I'm hearing is that zombies should make everyone feel like they've developed sudden onset audio processing disorder.
Like if you could just hear it more clearly, you'd understand what they're saying, but in reality it's nonsense and there's nothing to understand.
And damn if it doesn't convince so many folks that their loved ones are still in there, they just need to keep them locked up safely in the barn until someone finds the cure, then everything can go back to the way they were.
THIS is exactly what this particular zombie trope is missing. Like we all understand, conceptually, that this still looks like someone they love, but it would be 1000 times more effective if it still somewhat behaved like someone they love.
oooh muscle memory. i’m not into zombie media enough to tell if this has been done or not but. zombies that will automatically reach into their pocket for their phone when they hear a ring, even if it’s dead, broken or lost. zombies that reach up to play with their hair or necklace, the same way your loved one did. zombies that bite their nails. a zombie rolling up its sleeves with perfect practice while looking at you with the utterly blank eyes of a dead animal
Oh wow, I’ve been here for a year! (^.^) Was a good call to come here lol. So happy to have met everyone I did here and see all the amazing stuff here. (^v^)
Hello and happy WBW! Hope you are doing well (^v^) So you might’ve posted something about this before, but I don’t recall seeing it. (‘O.o) What religion (or beliefs) is practiced in the South in your world?
Good question! I took the opportunity to draft some pages for my world guide/website replacement about the topic! The religion of the South is called Dyeusism -- and it's about the worship of Dyeus Themself!
I have some more I want to say and specify -- like specific subsects of the religion don't view Dyeus as a person, but like as... an entity, I guess? Like, the "Will of the Universe" -- something much more vague. But others DO view Dyeus as a specific person. Same thing with Eris... (More under the cut!)
I'm really striving for that "The religion is big and some people agree on stuff, but it's actually super diverse" vibe that I think IRL religions also have.
Hope you're doing well too! I've been in and out of existence lately... Idk if and when things might calm down :sobs:
Happy WBW, hope you are having a good one (^.^). Are there any fashion trends in your world that used to have a specific purpose/use but now is just for the aesthetic?
This isn't exactly the question but Re: Aesthetic and Purpose -- I did have a point in which my Svanihk people were supposed to be pre-Russia Slavic/Monglian. So their fashion reflected that and was kinda like:
The problem was that these people lived in the hottest part of the world and the geographical location of Russia is VERY cold. It just wasn't very cohesive...
So then, I redid the fashio to reflect the fact that they live in the hottest part of Yssaia AND they live right next to another culture with wrap clothing. Now it's Indian and Thai inspired like this:
And so now the purpose aligns with the aesthetic much much more :D
I haven't thought much about the exact evolution of fashion through the ages BUT I do have increasingly more immortalish characters -- so nailing out the exact history of the world is looking increasingly important!
Don’t Know What A “Blurg” Is, But This One Is Mine @zebee-nyx - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
