Fantasist's Scroll

Which way do rivers flow?

It seems like such a simple question, doesn’t it? But, it’s not quite as easy as one might suppose. For instance, I’ve been told numerous times that rivers generally flow North to South. But, this FAQ on About.com that’s just a misconception. (Here’s another link that also dispels some river misconceptions.) Really, what matters is elevation, the degree of change in elevation, and the material over which the water travels. The flatter the land, the more the river will wander or meander, and the slower the speed of the water flow. The reverse is true as well, the steeper the elevation change, the faster and straighter the river will run. (For more details, see this article on About.com.)
So, essentially, rivers tend to flow “down” in the sense of the lowest elevation. That might be toward the coast and ocean, or toward a lake, or even toward an underground cave complex. The important thing to remember is that water in general, and rivers, flows toward the lowest point of gravity on the landscape, where ever that might be.

Well, you maybe asking yourself, that’s great but who cares? Anyone making a created world, country or culture. Rivers are a great way for people to move resources quickly and efficiently. They also tend to be sources of useful animals and plants. Water, after all, is one of the most important ingredients for life, so water attracts life. Rivers teem with life, both on their banks and in the river itself. Any place that attracts life in great quantities also attracts civilization as well. That, in turn, brings interesting things to write about. And, that, after all, is what I’m after!

So, let the water flow and the creative fiction ideas flow with it!

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Military Fish.

Well, actually, they’re still mammals, but you get the idea. William Gibson created a character for Johnny Mnemonic that was a military veteran who happened to be a dolphin. Jones, who showed up again in Neuromancer, if I recall, had advanced sensors and software hardwired into him that was useful for extracting information out of people’s electronic heads. His background was military intelligence, specifically RECON. He found, and tracked, enemy submarines and mines. At the time I read about Jones, he seemed like pretty far-future fiction. But, then I saw this… View image on MSNBC News.

So, military dolphins. I wonder what they’re paid? What kind of retirement benefits do they get? What’s their length of service? Do dolphins have conscientious objectors? The possibilities are mind boggling. And, it’s interesting to see that it’s not as far-future as I thought.

But, isn’t it ironic that we’re using marine mammals in a desert war?

Herbal remedies for pets?

Recently, we got a new puppy, and it started me thinking. With all the “natural” medicines for people, why not for animals, too? We’ve been domesticating animals for quite some time and have pretty advanced medicine to help heal them. But, what about when alchemy was the science of the day? Did we “bleed bad humours” out of animals, too? Did the local “witch” concoct herbal remedies for the local farm animals and pets? I suspect so. What about other cultures, though? Did the ancient Egyptians? How about the ancient Chinese or Japanese? I don’t know.
But, when one thinks about it, it makes sense. These domesticated animals can represent a significant investment that a farmer would want to protect. And, quite often, what works on people works on animals, too. Especially dogs and cats. Of course, there are cultures that would not think of animals as “companions” at all. For instance, the old Arabic view of dogs as “unclean”. Certainly, these are important things to think about for a well-rounded, fictional world. These are things we tend to take for granted, but how do people really feel about pets? The answer to that question, of course, raises many more. All of the answers, though, can say quite a lot about a created world or culture.

Something to consider the next time you pass by a petstore.

Be your own dictator!

Or, whatever kind of ruler you might want to be. Someone on a ConCulture list I belong to posted a link to a site called NationStates, a new, interactive game of political experimentation. It’s by an author of a book called Jennifer Government and it’s his spin on viral marketing. But, really, it’s just a cool little game. The only problem you’ll have is the pace, which is slow, and getting signed in to the game! There are so many people playing that the server is constantly overloaded.
So far, my little nation has only dealt with one small issue, but I hope for more opportunities to show the benefits of a militaristic meritocracy in action. Only time will tell. The site has been active since November 2002, but there are over 9,000 nations going. Pretty crazy. Of course, I have no idea how many of them are active at all. For all I know 8,500 of them have been abandoned. And, there might only be 12 players running hundreds of nations each. There’s really not any way to tell. In any case, it seemed like a cool experiment. I look forward to seeing how it plays out.
If you’d like to visit my little slice of the NationStates world, the Holy Empire of Megaria is up and running!

Does it really exist?

It seems like the wrong category to put with this title, but it really fits. I have several half-baked ideas for stories, but they’re all set in fictional worlds filled with people and places that don’t have names. Why don’t they have names? Because, I want to make their names new, original and not quite like anything that already exists. I want to, at least partially, dislocate the reader from their usual preconceptions about fantasy literature. So, I invented a continent that is in the Southern hemisphere. That inverts the standard Euro-centric notions of hot and cold, not to mention civilization and barbarism. But, that’s still not enough. So, names…
I want names that sound like they come from an asiatic land of some kind, but not one that can be easily identified. Not quite China or Japan, or even India, but close to all three. Now, I could just use names from each of those cultures and sort of mash them around to get something “new”, but that seems too much like cheating. The alternative I came up with, though, is so much harder: a set of invented languages. In fact, a whole set of interrelated and interdependant created languages. Yes, yes, “just like Tolkien”. Except, of course, I’m not a linguist and I don’t know Welsh.
And, therein lies the rub, I am, in fact, not a linguist. I don’t know hardly a thing about linguistic rules for sound change or grammar or morphology or phonology. Frankly, the whole process is so intimidating that I’m just about at a loss for where to begin. I tried using several different language creation programs, but they never quite produced good enough results. Close, but not quite as good as a natural language. I tried using software that just created words from source data of various kinds, but that fell short, too. The words came out okay, but how should I use them? How should they be related? Eventually, I stopped trying to make a whole language and focused only on enough words to make some meaningfull names. But, even that seemed to get bogged down in the manipulation of the software and data, ultimately producing no results.
So, in a way, I’ve come full circle. I’m back to simply not knowing how to start. I’ve been reading the various e-mail lists for ConLanging and come to the conclusion that a hybrid method might suit me. Generating series of words to choose from, but determining my own relationship between them, if any. And, I can use a spreadsheet to track them all. Or, perhaps, a simple database. But, of course, that puts the work back on me.
Now, I have to figure out how to be creative and original. I have to hear the language and the names people call each other in my head. I have to not only see the destinations that my characters are headed toward, but what they’re named on a map.
Can it be done? Yes. Can I do it? Maybe.

What goes into making a “realistic” world or game?

That’s an age old debate, actually. There are those who critisize Dungeons and Dragons for not being realistic enough, but, of course, the creators never really intended that it should be too terribly realistic. They were after smooth game play, which is what they got. Now, the current rules (3rd edition, as of this writing) are a better simulation of an imagined reality, but the game play suffers a bit for that realism. But, the more historically “pure” find that anything with that much magic in it can’t be very realistic at all.
There are alternatives to the standard Dungeons and Dragons, high-magic worlds, though. For one, there’s Columbia Games’ Hârn. And, the creator of Hârn, N. Robin Crosby, has written a nice introduction to that world. One thing I particularly like about his intro is that he reveals a certain amount of his methodology. (Readers can find that introduction here.)

Way back when I first found Hârn, it captured my imagination because it was a fully fleshed-out, authentic, working and coherent world. There really weren’t any other fantasy worlds designed for games that could say that. The closest thing would have been D&D’s Greyhawk, but even that left significant holes for the gamer to fill in on their own. For one thing, Hârn had a set of detailed, realistic-looking maps. It wasn’t done in a “arty” way, but more like a modern map might be drawn. And the “Hârndex” was a sort of Medieval Encyclopedia Brittanica. It had rough drawings that seemed authentically old and simple text. But, it was enough to ignite the imagination.
The other thing that impressed me so with Hârn was that the consequences were all pretty well thought out. In fact, that’s one of the reasons the designer gives for keeping magic fairly rare. Lots of magic being thrown around make it hard to work out all the potential consequences a society might experience. And, for me, it really added to the authenticity. The magic described in the text felt like Medieval magic. It was somewhat crude and mysterious and just a little bit random, too. It seemed to draw on ancient powers of the Earth that were frightening and dangerous. And, how else would that kind of culture, with a “realistic” education level, see magic? It would be a horribly frightening thing. Of course, so would a trip to the barber or the apothocary, but that’s in there, too.

Perhaps “realism” isn’t the right word. “Authenticity” describes it better. Hârn felt like a real place with real people because of the effort that the designer put into authenticity. Not only do the details work independantly, but all the parts fit into a complete, authenic whole. It’s that authenticity that made Hârn so interesting to me and keeps it in print and selling today.

In many ways, the details and authenticity of Hârn became the goal which I aspired to reach. Perhaps, one day, I will.

There’s more than one way to skin a loup garou.

That’s a demonic werewolf that literally sheds its skin to become human. In the last monster building installment, I talked about more or less natural monsters, specifically dragons. But, now, I’ll turn my attention to more elusive prey, the supernatural and demonic monster.
The first thing to keep in mind is that these monsters need to follow the Rules, too. But, they tend to have special rules just for them that may, or may not, follow any so-called natural laws. For demons, it may be a series of rituals that will summon and bind them. Or vampires not being able to come out during the day. Whatever the monster, there must be rules to how it lives and acts.
The most well known supernatural monster is probably the demon or devil. And most readers of modern fantasy literature are at least familiar with the story of Faust, even if they know it by another name. Selling one’s soul to the devil is quite common in popular literature. In fact, there have been quite a few movies done about it, but serious and comedic. But, those contracts follow rules. For one thing, they’re legally binding in a court much, much higher than the Supreme Court of the United States. This is big stuff here. Your soul is a pretty valuable commodity. And, it quite often will buy quite a lot.
Or, at least it will seem to buy a lot at first, but these deals never seem to work out quite they way they’re promised. That’s, in fact, one of the demonic rules. The person giving up their soul gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop. But, somehow, in almost all fiction, the hapless human somehow manages to get their soul back in once piece. That, too, seems to be one of the Rules these supernatural creatures follow.
So, even when we cheat, authors have to follow the rules!

Build a better monster and the victims will beat a path to your door.

Well, maybe that’s a bit extreme, but you get the idea. There was a show on Animal Planet of all things that really got me thinking about this. It was called The Future is Wild and it was all about ways that present day animals may evolve in the future. Some of them were pretty far out, but still, they were pretty reasonable. The animal world is full of surprises and quirks, so some really odd things are not only possible but already happening! Of course, they were talking about “real” animals and not fantasy creatures, but, still I think it’s important to pay pretty close attention to the “little details” when I’m building a fantasy monster. Whether it’s a dragon, an ogre, or a demon, they still have to be believable, consistent, and reasonable, after a fashion.
In short, they have to follow the Rules, whatever those rules may be. For something that’s more or less natural like an ogre or a dragon, they have to follow certain so-called natural laws. They eat, which means they hunt and/or gather. Because they eat, they excrete as well. They sleep and mate, which means they need a lair of somekind. Sure, dragons may violate what some of us preceive to be laws of aerodynamics if they fly, though there is some debate on that, but otherwise, they need to act like really big animals.
For instance, since they’re big, they need to eat a lot. That means that they’ll be carnivores. They’ll have to get the most “bang for their buck”, as it were, so they’ll eat meat. Meat provides the most calories for volume. And I figure it takes a lot of calories to fly and breathe fire. But, they may also be omnivores. After all, something that needs that many calories can’t be too picky about what it eats! It just has to get fuel any which way it can. So, its eating habits will determine its hunting habits. Or, even if it has hunting habits at all.
But, what an animal eats can also determine what their mating habits are like. How’s that, you wonder? Well, if an animal needs a lot of food, it needs a pretty big territory and not much competition. So, members of its own species tend to get run off as unwanted competition, including members of the opposite sex. Unless, of course, it hunts in packs. Let’s say our dragon is a loner. What does that mean to its reproductive cycle?
Well, I’d imagine that the poor female gets to lay eggs and possibly tend them. Sort of like what Bakker suspects many species of dinosaur did. But, they could be more like aligators, who lay their eggs and then abandon them to fend for themselves. Aligators mate once a year, according to Jeff Corwin of Animal Planet, and then spend the rest of the year in competition for food. Pretty brutal, but that’s perfect for our monster. The more brutal the monster, the more heroic the dragonslayer.
From those little suppositions and speculations, we can really flesh out a pretty good and believable dragon. But, it all comes from following Mother Nature’s rules. And, of course, doing our homework. Gotta’ know what those rules are if we’re going to follow them. So, stop watching the latest Evil Dead movie and flip over to National Geographic or Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel and see what’s happening in the animal world. You’ll thank yourself in the long run.

Keep a lookout for a follow up article on creating more “realistic” demons.
Until then, keep writing!