Alder's Grove

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it! (I need more questions, guys)
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This eleventh one is from lilfluff: just what was the nature of the apocalypse in The Planners?

You know, I have been doing a Very Good Job of leaving that completely unsaid.

The things I know are: It was not nuclear, it was not alien, and it was not zombie. It was not climactic - I.e. Giant Flood, that thing in 2000 or whatever the movie was with a giant freeze everywhere and the book-burning, and it probably didn’t involve Mad Max. It was probably not an asteroid strike.

It destroyed a large portion of the infastructure and it was probably that destruction that killed off a large portion of the population.

It was a worldwide apocalypse, not centered on any one nation.

It may have had a lot in common appearance-wise with the apocalypse in the TV show Revolution, although it was not cause by Plot Nanotech. Basically: the power all went out. Cars stopped working. Going anywhere became a challenge.

I think it involved several EMPs or a world-wide EMP. Either a backfiring test strike that ended up with several large nations making a mess of the world, or something like solar flares that made a mess all on its own.

As far as apocalypses go, it left the landscape mostly untouched, the people devastated, and technology a mess.

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it! (I need more questions, guys)
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This ninth one is from medicmsh3141: What’s your favorite part of mapmaking?

Oh, no, favorites!


…All of it?

Okay, so when I was working on my first-ever Nanowrimo novel, The Deep Inks, one of the flaws in that book is that I spent like… 3 chapters describing an entirely-useless-to-plot town that the antagonists had built… I don’t even remember why.

But I LOVED that town.
( Read more... )

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it!
🌏
This seventh one is from inventrix:
Does everyone who does magic work with Strands? Corollary: if there are people who think they don’t, is it just like how Autumn uses ink - it’s their approach, not the fact that it’s different magic?

Also, what ARE Strands, anyway.

Okay!

So, in Stranded World, everyone who works magic is working with the Strands. Like Autumn and sometimes Summer, they don’t always directly manipulate the strands, and some of them don’t realize what they’re doing at all, but all magic involves manipulating or reading (or cutting, although I guess that’s a manipulation) the Strands.

So, yes, a psychic might be using tea leaves or a palm-reading, but what they are actually seeing is the way the Strands seem likely to move in the near future.

And the Strands are… the world.

Autumn sees primarily the Strands that are connections between people, because that’s her strong suit. She visualizes them as lines, and there are indeed Strands connecting people - love, hate, co-workers, family - everything that makes people touch and make a connection, even eyes meeting across a subway, causes some sort of strand.

They are the actions of people, too, past, current, and potential, streams of movement running through the world; they are the connections people make with things and things make with things.

Some philosophers haves suggested the whole world is just composed of Strands upon Strands. They may be right.

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it!
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This Fourth one is from inventrix:
Faepoc: Are there any Workings or Words that can’t be used when creating a functionally permanent enchantment on an object?

i.e. the enchantment doesn’t have to be maintained consciously; having to be refreshed every decade or century would count as functionally permanent for this question.

Nope!

Okay, now I have to figure out how to get 200 words out of this answer.

Enchanting an object - or a person - requires that a) you have the Words required to cast the enchantment and b) you have access to the Word for the object. In a tongue-in-cheek example: Leo could easily enchant a strand of Cya’s hair to change color based on her mood, because he is very good with coloring hair (a Tlacatl Working) and very good at reading emotions (Hugr).

Likewise, if you were really good, you could enchant a stick to throw fireballs, or, say, enchant a collar to deliver a mild electric shock in a situation where the wearer said certain words or evidenced a certain emotional state.

The thing is, anything wherein you are putting your Workings in an object takes a lot of energy. A first-year student could manage to enchant something for maybe a couple minutes. later, for a year or two. And doing so takes considerably more energy than simply doing the Working.

That is why there aren’t more magic fireball-throwing swords around.

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it!
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This third one is from rix_scaedu:
If the Family in the Aunt Family occasionally splits off anew Family with a new Aunt, where was the original Family? Is it still there? Is there some Family version of “the old country”?

That’s complicated!

Because sometimes branches die out. It requires at least two sisters, after all (or sometimes in rare occasions, brothers, but that’s, as said, rare, and very frowned on, and such), one of which (again, in most cases), remained unmarried, childless, and near her sister’s family. It requires that unmarried sister to at least have the strength to carry the power, and the family branch to have enough power to invest in her.

Sometimes branches are actually wiped out, but that is a rare occurrence in the modern day.

Let’s see.

The original Family came out of England and Germany, and for a long time (legends notwithstanding) was not nearly as formalized an arrangement as it is in the modern day. When the family that believed itself to be the root family moved to the US, they left behind no other sibling groups, but there were several members of the family who were related, carried the spark, and eventually had children of their own.

Note: Not everyone who has power is related to the Family, but they are a broad and deep family-grove with many scions over, by the point, most of the world.

The “original” family at this point would be considered the one that can trace its ancestry back in an unbroken line of Aunts to the first Aunt in America. That actually is Evangaline’s line. It was an aunt of her line who came up with the ritual that collects the power of an already-psychically-skilled family and concentrates the larger portion of it into one person, allowing the family as a whole to have more power than they would otherwise, and allowing the power to be used and directed for bigger and bigger uses.

That happened prior to coming to the U.S., but it was believed, when they moved, that they had brought their entire family and thus their entire power structure with them.

March is Worldbuilding Month! Leave me a question about any of my worlds, and I will do my best to answer it!
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This first one is from sauergeek:
Which pairs (or more) of these various universes could potentially be folded into one?

That's a good question! Let's see.

I'm not going to count, for the moment, the fact that 2/3 of my space stuff seems like it's in the same world. (Foedus is not). That's not really an established universe.

There's been some speculation/fanfic about Addergoole/Tír na Cali, but that's primarily because Tír na Cali was the parent setting for Addergoole; they don't actually exist in the same place.

Facets can exist in almost any of them! That's because it's a portal fantasy.

I'm not really getting into the spirit of this question, am I?

Okaaaay.

Science! and Modern Superheroes could and might exist in the same world.

I've speculated about the Aunt Family and either Fairy Town or Stranded World before.

To be honest, I think that's about it. Expectant Wood/Aerax COULD be part of Things Unspoken, but I don't think it is. Oh, and Cracks is probably part of Fairy Town.

I think everything that COULD be folded together already was, back in the dawn of the settings.