THE PLANET CONSTRUCTION KIT

by Mark Rosenfelder • Chicago • 2010

Contents Introduction 7 E-Z Fantasy World 15 Storytelling 21 Astronomy and Geology 38 Biology 65 History 100 Culture 118 Daily life 152 Religion 189 Magic 218 Technology 224 War 243 Making maps 285 Illustrations 300 3-D Modeling 332 Further reading 351 Index 356

Introduction What we’re going to do here is create worlds. You want a world for your epic novel, or a movie or video game, or an RPG session, or as an artistic creation. Or you are a mad scientist with an army of nanites who will construct your world from the atoms up. Whatever, we’ll talk about how to make a plausible, interesting constructed world— a conworld. The companion volume,The Language Construction Kit, explained how to create languages, so I won’t cover that that here. This book covers everything else: • Stars and planets • Alien creatures • Economics and history • Daily life • Religions • Magic • Technology and war And more. We’ll also cover some of the technical details of creation: • Storytelling • Drawing • Making maps • Making 3-D models I’ve tried to answer all the immediate questions you’ll have while conworlding, from how to calculate the year (p. 42) to how far a horse can run in a day (p. 142) to how early you can have iron weapons (p. 228). Sources and extra reading TheLanguage Construction Kitserved as an introduction to one subject, linguistics. This book is an introduction to all kinds of stuff, and I’m not an expert in all of them. And in some areas, no one is: magic or alien biology,

for instance. On the bright side, one advantage of conworlding is thateverythingis source material. Anything in the physical sciences could be relevant. Anything historical or religious can go into fantasy; anything you learn about foreign cultures can help you create new ones. In some ways I should have written five books instead of one. But it’s useful, and a lot cheaper for you, to have all of this material in one place. Plus, if any subject interests you, you can always pursue it more. I’ve included an reading listat the end with books I’ve found particularly helpful. These will also supply the details and nuances I haven’t had room for. You can be inspired by fiction, of course, but make sure you read real-world sources as well. You may be able to write a convincing battle scene merely by reading Tolkien, but you’d do better to read some military history. Or join the army. Websites: URLs rot too quickly to list in a book. I’ll list some useful pages on this page of my own site: The dire consequences of failure What happens if you don’t follow the recommendations in this book? Well, not to be too alarming, but that could well be part of a process which ends in the heat death of the universe. But in the short term, the advantages of the book are these: •More options. All too often fantasy books are retreads of medieval Europe, and s.f. books of contemporary America. It’s like a painter who’s restricted to using yellow and orange.

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