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Feb. 15th, 2005 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyes There's something very theraputic about drawing a map. It tells a story all on its own -- even if you have to change a few things (I think I had to drop a major island on mine because otherwise two landmasses were far too close together and it was too easy to island-hop). For example, I was working with the idea this this world (it doesn't have a name yet, nor does the story have a title -- I've been calling it "Untitled Fantasy Story" in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
invoking_urania) had several non-extinct animals that would be extinct in our world (it started because I couldn't think of a New World animal that could be bred up to be horse-like -- the only really fast hooved animals seemed to be deer/antelope, which don't seem likely, and llama didn't seem liek they could completely fill the horse-role Then I remembered horses used to live in the New World, so I decided that poking around the recently-extinct file makes for some interesting exotic-but-realistic animals.) Of course, now I'm looking at the precursors of the mammals in evolution (hairy reptiles -- whodathunk?) as possible ancestors for the dragons and eying this conviently-placed large island with nothing much around it on my map.
I'm also trying to shape exactly how the magic system works. It plays a lot on the idea of words and language -- language is a funny thing, since it lets us hold on to emotion a lot longer. The magic seems to work by words (at leats the control element -- it draws on energy from Faerie plants, which seem to get that from sunlight) -- every spell requires a written ideographic component (I think the alphabets used are vagule Japanese-like in history -- they borrowed an older, ideographic system, started simplifying the heck out of it to get something phonetic, then, unlike the Japanese, eventually dropped the ideographs (excpet for magic -- Chinese characters are neat for saying a lot in a small space.
But, there has to be an emotional element to it, because daemon magic uses human emotions as a power source, because free daemons would rather not attract the fae's attention. And the words thign has to be a somewhat recent development -- I know only intelligent life practices magic, but they probably had old witch doctors before writing was discovered. I'm wondering if magic was driven by emotion and the act of setting it with words was a way to make it permenant -- emotions can be fleeting, but words are a bit more durable. But words can be twisted as well...
invoking_urania) had several non-extinct animals that would be extinct in our world (it started because I couldn't think of a New World animal that could be bred up to be horse-like -- the only really fast hooved animals seemed to be deer/antelope, which don't seem likely, and llama didn't seem liek they could completely fill the horse-role Then I remembered horses used to live in the New World, so I decided that poking around the recently-extinct file makes for some interesting exotic-but-realistic animals.) Of course, now I'm looking at the precursors of the mammals in evolution (hairy reptiles -- whodathunk?) as possible ancestors for the dragons and eying this conviently-placed large island with nothing much around it on my map. I'm also trying to shape exactly how the magic system works. It plays a lot on the idea of words and language -- language is a funny thing, since it lets us hold on to emotion a lot longer. The magic seems to work by words (at leats the control element -- it draws on energy from Faerie plants, which seem to get that from sunlight) -- every spell requires a written ideographic component (I think the alphabets used are vagule Japanese-like in history -- they borrowed an older, ideographic system, started simplifying the heck out of it to get something phonetic, then, unlike the Japanese, eventually dropped the ideographs (excpet for magic -- Chinese characters are neat for saying a lot in a small space.
But, there has to be an emotional element to it, because daemon magic uses human emotions as a power source, because free daemons would rather not attract the fae's attention. And the words thign has to be a somewhat recent development -- I know only intelligent life practices magic, but they probably had old witch doctors before writing was discovered. I'm wondering if magic was driven by emotion and the act of setting it with words was a way to make it permenant -- emotions can be fleeting, but words are a bit more durable. But words can be twisted as well...
