1w ago

Accidental worldbuilding

Are there any strange confluences or patterns in your worldbuilding that arose by chance and you ended up embracing?

I have a few. There's a meme in the Civilization community about immortal leaders. Basically if you pick the Americans lead by George Washington, George will be leading his American empire from the dawn of agriculture into the space age. I wanted to reference that in my conworld. I already established that metabolic suspension exists that both extends lifespan while allowing a degree of interaction with the outside world, so I decided Firefly the Apostate, the leader of the Partisans will be permenantly sealed in a modified suspension capsule called the Eternal Womb, where he's been (nominally) ruling most of the Outer Belt for the past 33 millennia.

Since their inception the Partisans have been more or less space tree doggo commies, so I also wanted to reference the almost literal cult that has arisen in North Korea around the Kim family, especially given that, as a nominally Communist nation, one would expect NK to be officially atheist. So there's a cult of personality surrounding Lichlord Firefly that has developed into a literal cult.

So taken together, Firefly is an immortal, incapacitated, tyrannical atheist leader being worshipped by his subjects. Hmmmmm.

Another coincidence, maybe due to laziness on my part, is the large immigrant population on Hearthside consisting of Sweetwater surface dwellers. Sweetwater was originally terraformed as a sort of planet-wide gated community for the ultra wealthy. The rich live in palatial underwater cities while the descendants of the workers who built those cities eke out a living on the surface in grinding poverty, plying the planet-wide ocean as peaceful fishermen, miners, and traders, or plundering passers-by as pirates.

As with any poor community, many leave to seek a better life elsewhere, and for various reasons Hearthside seems to be their destination of choice. Maybe they resent the Allied Worlds for allowing their poverty to continue so they don't just move to Yih or Newhome which would be easier given Sweetwater is an AW member. Maybe they're just sick and tired of all the water and want to move to Hearthside's nightless desert.

The Doylist explanation is that I had already named the anchoress from the Farspeaker's Apprentice Seabreeze and had to think of why she would have that name, so I made her from a immigrant family. I used that backstory out of laziness for a few other characters as well. Then I came up with the idea that Sweetwater surface dwellers tend to have more body fat because it helps them swim. Yinrih are naturally swole (see pics of hairless chimps for a good idea of what I'm thinking). Monkey foxes are arboreal and need to pull their own weight against gravity. The side effect is they're too dense to swim. But Sweetwater has been around for dozens of millennia, plenty of time for a distinct phenotype to evolve. So now Calmwind, who was otherwise just a portly Hearthsider, is also an immigrant or a descendent of such.

So voila, now there's a distinct ethnic minority living on Hearthside.

4 comments

You're going to bring up Civilization and not bring up Gandhi, bringer of nuclear fire?
- Yinrih don't use nukes. The atomic age was brought about by faith rather than warfare. Once the Bright Way figured out what exactly stars were, sustained fusion reactions, they set about trying to recreate these icons of the Light on a smaller scale for liturgical purposes. A hearthkeeper's job is to bring light and warmth to those around her, and doing that with a miniature star seemed very fitting.
  There is a (probably not historical) anecdote about two pre-space age countries at war. One of them starts their version of the Manhattan project, but just as the first working prototype is about to be tested, one of the scientists working on the project suffers pangs of conscience and betrays them to the enemy to stop nuclear proliferation before it starts.
  The enemy nation had just undergone a regime change (whether through a coup or a peaceful election or royal succession or something) and the new leadership was keen to put an end to the war. So for perhaps the only time in the history of the galaxy, a politician chose integrity rather than short-term advantage. The enemy scientists and all their notes were gathered together, and the one and only working nuke was detonated on top of them.
  In reality, the yinrih just discovered it was much cooler and more sustainable to yeet inert masses at significant fractions of the speed of light before they got around to weaponizing the atom.
I started designing the large scale geography of my world not with a map, but with a plastic ball that i drew on with dry erase markers to make a globe. Like a year later i decided that a wide inlet on one continent was created only a few hundred years ago, when a flying island died and crashed into the shore and let seawater flood a bunch of low-elevation land. I touched up the coastline with a few steep islands like you see on the edges of big craters on Earth but otherwise haven't had to mess with it.
Somehow it got crossed in notes but the name of a planet (Alda) got named that instead of the protagonist (Alda). The protagonist was the daughter of the emperor so we said eh, maybe he named the planet after her, which seemed endearing.
On said planet, it got into the visual design that most of the trees were pine trees. This is an alien planet so that shouldn't be the case - But we kept it and said they planted pine for good lumber but it got out of hand and now that have massive pine forests.