Conworld

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Reorganized World Building Links

June 29, 2011 in Site News, Worldbuilding | No comments

I’ve split up the world building resources page into several sub-pages; the main page just got too big and unwieldy.

If you have any additional links that could be of interest, please let me know – I’d love to hear about sites you find useful, and I will add anything that is of general utility to this collection.

The new sub pages are:

Enjoy!

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What’s In a World Name?

June 27, 2011 in Enderra, Worldbuilding | 4 comments

I recently discovered that a lady on Twitter has the given name “Enderra”. I didn’t quite figure out what that means, yet, but it might be a variant of Endrra.

Endrra is Albanian for “Dream”.

There are other meanings for similar words:

Endera is a family of moths. It is also “either” in Swedish.

Indera is the Malay name for the Hindu god Indra.

Enderra is also quite close to Andorra, though this also wasn’t my inspiration for picking the name.

Ender means “rare” in Turkish.

None of which are related to how I actually came up with the name. I think I didn’t tell that anecdote to many yet: When I was building my world way back in ’92, I urgently needed a name for it and I just couldn’t think of anything. At the same time I was listening to the radio, tuned in to a station with the code/abbreviation NDR2. And when I rearranged and twisted it, NDR became En Der Rah. Enderra. I liked it, and it stuck.

Where did you get your campaign world’s names?

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The Collapsed World, Map v2 (Updated)

June 24, 2011 in Shattered Grounds, Worldbuilding | No comments

I think the map of the collapsing world is now almost done. Of course it’s just a high scale world map, and only the surface world, but as such it’s now fairly complete. I probably need to add some detail here and there – a few more rivers, but not too many; a bunch of former islands, maybe some more cracks and canyons that cut through the surface. And finally I should place at least a handful of cities and assign different parts of the world to different races and cultures.

Colllapsing World - Map v2, updated

Colllapsing World - Map v2, updated

I am really happy how this map turned out and I can’t wait to do some regional maps. Paint.Net works quite well but it still lacks some features to make it a really “good” raster editor; still, it’s free and quite good already.

The final version of this map is now available.

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The Collapsed World, Map v2

June 22, 2011 in Shattered Grounds, Worldbuilding | No comments

I took a short break from the Earth 2174 map because I just had to do something else… and because episode 10 of Game of Thrones gave me fantasy fever for a moment. I created a new version of the Collapsed World map, (More about the concept in that posting.)

I created the template myself, but the method I got from The Piazza’s The Edge project.

It’s clearly not done yet, and it is only the surface world (plus exposed part of the “underworld”), but I am quite happy with the map so far, I think it is definitely superior to the old one because it has more variety of terrain planned in.

What do you guys think?

This map was updated in a later post. The final map is also available.

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My Home as a Subway Map

May 8, 2011 in Worldbuilders, Worldbuilding | No comments

Clercon posted his home as a subway map on the Cartographers’ Guild Forums, and I figured it’s a fun exercise:

Subway Map v1

Subway Map v1

In the first version, I based my routes mostly on geography. In version 2, I modeled them much more on “traffic” flow.

 

Subway Map v2

Subway Map v2

I also changed some station names.

The “Western Station” – my front door – should be the main station if this was a city. “Fire Escape” – on the balcony – would be the airport.

 

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Sandbox: Step 1b – Still Mapping the World

April 9, 2011 in Enderra, Fantasy Sandbox, Worldbuilders, Worldbuilding | No comments

The first step of the Sandbox experiment turned into a much longer post than I had anticipated, and when I was done it was very late. I simply did not have time to do the last part of the first step, namely placing rivers and forests.

I did well by that decision; it took me two evenings to get it done. Now the world looks much less barren:

Got woods?

Got woods?

It probably still needs some additional rivers but this will do for a start. Some details for illustration purposes:

Rolling down the river

Rolling down the river

Ice, ice, baby

Ice, ice, baby

In the next step, I will finally get around to actually writing some background about this world. Stay tuned.

Continued in Part 2.

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A Much Neglected Continent III

April 2, 2011 in Worldbuilders, Worldbuilding | No comments

An update to the map of I have been working on. I think this is much nicer than the last version, but of course it’s not done.

A Much Neglected Continent

A Much Neglected Continent

I added the last mountain layer, edited the coastline in many areas, and decided against depicting ocean depths. The map really benefits from the “cleaner” seas.

A Much Neglected Continent: Closeup

A Much Neglected Continent: Closeup

Looking at it, I think I do not like the way the mountains are placed. I’ll want to have a good variation of landscapes, including some deserts, and I think I shall have to move some of the mountain regions.

The Cartographer’s Guild Forum for this map is still active, of course.

 

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A Much Neglected continent

February 19, 2011 in Worldbuilding | 2 comments

This is another little continent I am working on. After a few bad starts, I think I like where this is going. Progress is, as with all my maps, is documented on a Cartographers’ Guild forum.

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Enderra World Update

March 10, 2010 in Enderra | No comments

The past weeks I’ve been working on collecting notes about Enderra, the fantasy world. I’m going through my written material, all the way back to the first notes about the world, and gathering it all up in one document in an attempt to create a concise and definitive world book about Enderra. I’m at the point where I “only” have the notes about adventures from the Enderran Dungeons & Dragons campaigns left, and the Tales from Enderra. The Tales were a series of sword & sorcery fiction I wrote in circa 1995, and they’re about 50,000 words in total. The adventure notes are much shorter, but there’s still a lot of material in them.

Even so, I’ve reached a nice milestone today: The new Enderra World Book is just over 30,000 words long. And that’s just existing material, I added very few “new” things to it.

As a little sneak preview I thought I’d share the all-new work-in-progress Enderra map with you guys. This pushes the history of Enderra about 30-50 years into the future from the 1999 D&D campaign.

I expect to be done with gathering “old” material in about a week or two, and then I’ll start editing it. From the looks of it, Enderra will become my first World Book after all. I also have a tentative plan for the first additional book for the Enderra setting, but I won’t reveal this just yet. ;)

Stay tuned for more Enderran updates to come!

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A conworld, by any other name…

July 30, 2009 in Enderra, Worldbuilders, Worldbuilding, Writing | No comments

…you have to worry about it actually meaning something in another language. There was the anecdote of the car company – Volkswagen, I believe; but it does not matter – which tried to sell a car brand called “Nova” in Latin America. No Va meaning “doesn’t go” or even “doesn’t work” ruined their product for them.

Whether this story is true or not doesn’t matter any more than who made this mistake. It still means that any words you invents, especially names of important places like planets or your protagonist names – need to be checked on-line. Otherwise you may add just a little more humor to your setting than you’d like.

I guess I was lucky. One of our Turkish translators tells me that “enderra”, in Turkish, means “rare”.

I can live with that.

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