New Links

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Nils

At long last we have more links on the resources page. Not a lot of them, but these should go in your “essential resources” collection. These are the additions:

Cartography

The Cartographers’ Guild is just awesome, and very humbling for someone of my sub-par map-making skills

Conlanguages and Linguistics

Mark Rosenfelder and his Language Construction Kit, provide a good first look at conlanguages.
The Zompist Bulleting Board community supports conlanguage and, to a lesser extent, conworld design.

My Worlds

As a related note, I’ve added a page linking all articles about Arnâron in the Menu under “My Worlds”. Enjoy!

What I’m up to

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Nils

I thought I’d give you a little update on current projects and status. The past year or so has been a little hard on me “in the real world” but all that is sorted out now and things are on the up again. On the other hand, it hasn’t left me so much time for world-building: Besides my new real-life job keeping me busy, NaNoWriMo ate up a lot of free time in November. That’s done and over, and with the holidays coming up I should have a good amount of time to write and build.

My Wacom tablet needs to be replaced, but I am not yet sure which one to get, and what size. They get expensive really quickly once you go beyond A6. I have some maps to draw!
I’ve been consolidating settings. At least two, probably three, and perhaps four of my worlds will be merged – details to follow…
I am totally into science fiction right now. This comes from reading everything H. Beam Piper that Gutenberg and Librivox could throw at me, but it is also related to finally playing role-playing games again; in this case we’re up to our ears in the Star Wars Saga Edition. I’m playing a shard in an IG-86 chassis with a severe identity crisis.
I’d like to complete short “world books” for what I consider my main worlds. Say something on the order of 48 pages each.
With the death of imaginaryworlds.net and the disappearance of Paul of the Shakespeare & Dragon podcast, I’d like to expand enderra.com to include more how-to’s, more discussion, more interactivity. This is more of a long-term goal, we’re definitely talking mid-2010 here. Anybody who’d like to get in on this, drop me a line…

Constructed Nations

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Nils

I’ve added the following links to the “Worlds on the Web” page:

* Bergonia, a sqaurish fictional island nation
* Kingdom of Kaupelan another constructed nation, beware of pop-up advertisement
* The Republic of Novegrad is a really nicely done con-nation
* The Armorican Isles

New Links for 2008-03-15

Posted on March 15, 2008 by Nils

More resources:

* How to design a good flag
* Flag generator
* Creating Fantasy and Science Fiction Worlds
* Inkscape – A Guide to a Vector Drawing Program

New Sites for 2008-03-11

Posted on March 11, 2008 by Nils

Found more interesting world building links:

* Thud and Blunder: Article by Poul Anderson about worldbuilding.
* 3D-Starmaps is dedicated to star maps.
* Atomic Rockets contains a lot of information about real and fictional rocketships.

(Defunct) World Building College Course

Posted on March 10, 2008 by Nils

If you’re serious about world building, this one might be something for you: The California State University is/was offering a course in World Building. The course is offered both on-campus and as a distance learning course. It focuses on realistic, scientific world-building. I am not sure if the course is still actively offered; the Open University does not seem to list it. I’m actually interested in this course, but unfortunately the professor who taught it does not reply to email at the moment. A pity.

New Worldbuilding Sites Discovered

Posted on March 8, 2008 by Nils

I’ve added a few links – and since I can’t really expect anyone to do a mental diff on the two link lists, I decided to quickly post what I’ve added since I initially started the link lists.

World Building Resources:

* Climatology for Worldbuilders
* Language Construction Kit
* A Way with Worlds

Worlds on the Web:

* Planetocopia
* Life on the Planet Furaha

Rendering Rama

Posted on February 19, 2008 by Nils

Worlds do not always have to be plain old balls of dirt speeding through space, it’s also possible to have artificial constructs as your worlds. One such design was created by Arthur C. Clarke for his book Rendezvous with Rama. Rama is a space ship in the shape of a hollow cylinder; such designs have been created by NASA as hypothetical future space stations.

Anyway, the Rama spaceship is quite large, and a Frenchman, Eric Bruneton, sought a way to render this huge scenery. He developed methods for this that are quite interesting, and you can visit his website about Rendering Rama to see the resulting art and read a very interesting article on how he accomplished the feat.

As you can see, he succeeded beautifully.

I must say that I always pictured Rama’s interior as more artificial-looking, but that could have been my misreading of the story. Of course Eric’s rendering is more a demonstration of technology rather than a faithful rendering. Either way, I thought that this was a great little gem that people interested in world building or constructed worlds might be interested in.

Alien Planet

Posted on February 7, 2008 by Nils

Alien Planet is another example of “professional” world building, similar to The Future is Wild. However, unlike that show, Alien Planet is set on a world in another star system. It depicts a robotic mission of exploration to this planet.

Someone actually uploaded the thing to Google Video. Enjoy:

Personally, I feel that a lot of the creatures showing here seem a little far-fetched… however, I am still not a zoologist or botanist and thus can’t really say. Anyway, it makes for an entertaining 90 minutes.

Additional links:

Alien Planets official homepage.

Shakespeare and Dragons Podcast

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Nils

Sometimes you find gems when you least expect it. I was actually looking for a good domain name to use for this weblog when I came across this world-building podcast.

Shakespeare & Dragons [dead link!] is run by Paul Stark. Paul is an English teacher from California with aspirations to becoming a professional world builder. He takes a story-based approach to building worlds, which is a little different from the usual “scientific” approach to Conworlds.

Paul has published 15 episodes so far (plus a “donation reward” special dealing with monster design). Unfortunately, his publishing schedule is very irregular, but what’s already available is quite interesting and really worth the time to download: If you’re a world-builder, this podcast is two thumbs up. But even regular game masters can take a lot of value from it, as they will have to create stories just the same. Highly recommended. And do send Paul some feedback, so he is motivated enough to continue working on the podcast.

Update, 2011-09-16: It appears the website is now gone as well. The episodes are still out there, I will create a page to access them more easily.

Enderra

Fiction, World Building, and Art

Tag Archives: Conworlds