“So, magic is a kind of energy, right?” Ariadne scrawls a roughly human figure on the page in front of her. She’s not totally sure what she’s trying to illustrate. It’s mostly an aid for her own thought, and a means of holding Carlos’ attention. “It’s made inside the healer’s body,” a little flame shape in the centre of the figure, “then they spend it on healing.” “What is this,” Carlos grumbles, “are you studying sorcery now?” “We work with the stuff every day,” Ariadne points out, “we can’t exactly claim the moral high ground. Our hands are stained regardless.” “Fair cop,” he sighs.
The Ars Goetia is the first section of the Lesser Key of Solomon, containing descriptions of seventy-two demons. These are an eclectic bunch, made up of demons/pre abrahamic faith deities in demon form. Ever since I discovered it, years and years ago, I’ve been fascinated by it. One High Prince in particular I’ve been fond of is Stolas. How can you not love a crowned owl demon. He is the commander of 26 legions and appears as a crowned owl or beautiful man. He is a teacher of astronomy and the magic associated with plants and precious stones.
I wanted to keep it relatively true to the description in the Ars Goetia but make it more than just an owl with a crown.
Consider using gothic/gothic revival architecture if you want to have some locations that can be described as looking like the thorny monstrous bones of some long perished horrific and giant creature.
I feel like “Space” and “The Cosmos” are sort of two different but connected things with very different tones and styles.
Like when I hear space I think of solar systems, meteors, planets, and moons, that sorta stuff. You know the sorta space stuff on a “smaller” more comprheisble scale.
Meanwhile, when I hear cosmic, I think about black holes, galaxies, Interstellar clouds, and the like massive voids of emptiness between everything. Aka the stuff that’s on a comparatively bigger less comprehensible scale.
So maybe factor that in if you’re ever thinking about aligning a character, or organisation, or place with space stuff.
I think a neat idea would be having the remnants of some sorta higher plane of existence which was at some point shattered and broken be scattered across the planes that it was above.
It’s once incomprehensible near intangible form now being mostly lost and warped into the mundane materials of the planes it now resides in.
So like… is she tokyo cyberpunk or seattle cyberpunk?
Tokyo Cyberpunk: Emphasizes human relationship to technology, identity, psychological transhumanism, and the human-as-resource. In Tokyo Cyberpunk - Capitalism wants to own you.
Seattle Cyberpunk: Emphasizes class analysis through technology disparity, physical transhumanism, and the disposability of humans. In Seattle Cyberpunk - Capitalism wants you gone.
Aesthetically speaking…
Tokyo Cyberpunk showcases nightlife where clean streets are illuminated by neon signs tempting you into consumerism as a therapy for your alienation. It’s percieved cleanliness acts as a symbol where corporations justify their rulership through the illusion of social progress. The robot is friendly, companionable. Societal problems and capitalist contradiction are silenced and swept away without the common person knowing.
Seattle Cyberpunk showcases a nightlife of homelessness and decay with corporate monoliths on the horizon. The streetlights no longer work, but the darkness is kept partially at bay by the neon tubes of bars where people watch wishes of their youth vanish at the bottom of the bottle. The lucky ones working for the corporations do so with the fear they will be kicked to the street. The robot is an expression of force intended to keep the common person afraid. Corporations do not try to justify their rulership, social problems and contradiction are solved with force.
Pokemon headcanon that once Absol are studied and people realize they prevent disasters instead of causing them, particularly dangerous workplaces get themselves a workplace Absol and it also decreases accidents.
Construction sites and fishing ships and factories will have one that pretty much just lazes about until it just gets up howling one day and knocks a dude down. They almost never figure out what would have happened but they’re always like “yes absol thank you absol I am so grateful to be on the floor right now. Can I offer you a treat in this trying time”
What we really need is an open-world video game where the general approach to worldbuilding and and structuring player-facing challenges and so forth take their cues from Dark Souls, but the actual content is basically Rainbow Brite. Hellfuck Castle – which obviously wouldn’t be called that! – isn’t ruined, it’s just messy, Lord Big Sad Guy isn’t evil so much as misunderstood, and everything is done up in garish pastels.
Actually, the whole “Worldbuilding through Item Descriptions” things makes a lot of sense if the primary conflict resolution is social, rather than violent.
You find the “Wicker-Woven Basket” and the item description tells you “As a child, Lord Bigsad would fill this basket with sweets pilfered from the kitchen and go eat them in the garden”
Thus, you can Befriend Lord BigSad by figuring out what sweets he would have enjoyed, filling the basket with them, and leading him out into the garden.
Yep, that’s exactly the direction I’m picturing here – complete with a big ostentatious on-screen banner reading FRIEND MADE.
Okay so can we talk about how amazing the worldbuilding is in ATLA, particularly concerning how the bending works?
It acknowledges both the limitations and the possibilities of bending. There’s no self-immunity, something that’s established from the first introduction of Zuko, a firebender with a very obvious burn scar. There are specialized subsets of benders, abilities that only certain people within that element have - bloodbending, metalbending and lightningbending (and later lavabending in LOK). Accommodations are made in prisons that are meant to hold benders - a metal rig for earthbenders, a dry place for waterbenders. Waterbenders can heal, because water can heal. And they can bend things by bending the water in them, first seen in the swamp with the plantbender guy, and later Hama the bloodbender. They all learned their abilities from something, usually an animal of some sort. Temperature changes can be done through bending, seen mostly with waterbenders using ice, but also with earthbenders using lava. It’s just so well thought out and I love it.
A lot of Western writers will look at the need to diversify their writing and try to cherry pick outside cultures to add. They then come to us with a laundry list of questions about what they’re allowed to change about those cultures because, well, they didn’t pull from a broad enough context.
The thing about researching individual cultures is: you’re never going to be researching just one culture. You’re going to be researching all the cultures they interacted with, as well.
Cultures are made by interacting with other cultures. So you can’t simply plop a singular culture into a fantasy world and expect it to work. There is too much outside influence on that culture for you to get a holistic picture by researching the culture in isolation.
Instead, you need to ask yourself, “what environments made them, and how much of their surrounding contexts do I need to add to my fantasy world to make this genuine respectful representation?”
And before you say that you can’t possibly do that, that is too much research, let me introduce you to the place you’re already doing it but don’t realize:
Stock Fantasy World 29
Aka, fantasy Europe.
It gets ragged on a lot, but let’s take a minute to look at the tropes that build this stock fantasy world.
Snow
4 seasons
Boars, pigs, wolves, dogs, pine trees, stone
Castles
Sheep
Knights
A king
Farming based economy
Religion plays a pretty big role in life
All fairly generic fantasy Europe tropes. But if you look more closely, you’ll notice that this is painting a picture of Fantasy Germany/the Netherlands, with perhaps a dash of France and/or England in there, all of it vaguely Americanized (specifically the New England area) because there’s usually potatoes and tomatoes. The geographic region is pretty tight, and it just so happens to mesh with the top three superpowers of upper North America, and arguably the English speaking world.
But let’s keep going.
They import stuff. Like fine cloth, especially silk, along with dyes & pigments
These things are expensive from being imported, so the nobility mostly have them
There’s usually a war-mongering Northern People invading places
If brown people exist they are usually to the East
There might be a roaming band of nomadic invaders who keep threatening things
There is, notably, almost no tropical weather, and that is always to the South if it’s mentioned
There might be an ocean in the South that leads to a strange forgien land of robed people to survive a desert (or did I just read too much Tamora Pierce?)
And, whoops, we have just accidentally recreated European history in its full context.
The Northern people are Norse, and their warring ways are indicative of the Viking Invasion. The imports hint at Asia, namely the Ottomans and India, and the silk road. The roaming invaders are for Mongolian Khanate. The ocean and tropical weather in the South hints at Spain, Greece, and the Mediterranean. And the continent of robed people indicates North Africa, and/or Southwest Asia.
Suddenly, stock fantasy world 29 has managed to broad-strokes paint multiple thousands of years of cultural exchange, trade, wars, invasions, and general history into a very small handful of cultural artifacts that make up throwaway lines.
Europe As Mythology And You
European history is what’s taught in Western classrooms. And a lot of European history is painted as Europe being a cultural hub, because other places in the world just aren’t talked about in detail—or with any sort of context. Greece and Rome were whitewashed; the Persian and Ottoman empires were demonized; North Africans became the enemy because of their invasion of Spain and the fact many of them were not-Christian; the Mongolian Khanate was a terrible, bloodthirsty culture whose only goal was destruction.
But because all of these parts did interact with Europe and were taught in history class, writers crafting a fantasy Europe will automatically pull from this history on a conscious or subconscious level because “it’s what makes sense.”
The thing is, despite people writing European fantasy subconsciously recreating European history, they don’t actually recreate historical reality. They recreate the flattened, politically-driven, European-supremacist propaganda that treats every culture outside of Europe as an extra in a movie that simply exists to support Europe “history” that gets taught in schools.
As a result of incomplete education, a lot of people walk away from history class and believe that cultures can be created in a vacuum. Because that’s the way Europe’s history was taught to them.
Which leads to: the problem with Fantasy World 29 isn’t “it’s Europe.” It’s the fact it’s an ahistorical figment of a deeply colonial imagination that is trying to justify its own existence. It’s homogeneous, it only mentions the broader cultural context as a footnote, it absolutely does not talk about any people of colour, and there’s next to no detailing of the variety of people who actually made up Europe.
So writers build their Fantasy World 29 but they neglect the diversity of religion and skin tone and culture because it’s unfamiliar to them, and it was never taught to them as a possibility for history.
While “globalization” is a buzzword people throw around a lot to describe the modern age, society has been global for a large portion of human history. There were Japanese people in Spain in the 1600s. Polynesians made it to North America decades if not centuries before Columbus did. There are hundreds more examples like this.
You can absolutely use fantasy to richen your understanding of Europe, instead of perpetuating the narratives that were passed down from victor’s history. People of colour have always existed in Europe, no matter what time period you’re looking at, and unlearning white supremacist ideas about Europe is its own kind of diversity revolution.
Travel is Old and People Did It Plenty
Multiculturalism is a tale as old as time. And while some populations were very assimilationist in their rhetoric, others were very much not. They would expand borders and respect the pre-existing populations, or they would open up networks to outsiders to become hubs of all the best the world had to offer. Even without conscious effort, any given place was building off of centuries of human migration because humans covered the globe by wandering around, and people have always been people.
Regardless, any time you have a group of people actively maintaining an area, they want to make travelling for themselves easier. And the thing about making travelling for yourself easier is: it made travel for outsiders just as possible. By the time you reach the 1200s, even, road, river, and ocean trade networks were thriving.
Sure, you might be gone for a year or three or five because the methods were slow, but you would travel. Pilgrimages, trade routes, and bureaucratic administrative routes made it possible for people to move around.
And also, soldiers and war did really good jobs of moving people around, and not all of them went back “home.” Hence why there have been African people in England since the Roman empire. When you have an empire, you are going to take soldiers from all over that empire; you aren’t going to necessarily pull from just the geographic region immediately surrounding the capital.
Yes, the population that could travel was smaller than it is now, because land needed to be worked. But Europe isn’t the be all end all in how much of its population needed to be in agriculture in order to function; the Mughals, for example, had 80% of their population farming, compared to over 90% for Europe in the same time period. That’s an extra 10% of people who were more socially free to move around, away from their land. Different cultures had different percentages of people able to travel.
This isn’t counting nomadic populations that relied on pastoralism and horticulture who didn’t actually settle down, something a lot of history tends to ignore because cities are easier to discuss. But nomadic populations existed en masse across Eurasia, and they took cultural traditions all over the continent.
Just because it wasn’t fast doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And just because a lot of Europeans couldn’t travel because of the agricultural demands of the continent, doesn’t mean every other culture was as tied to settlements.
Multiculturalism and Diffusion
While each individual culture is unique, and you can find pockets of difference anywhere, cultures exist on a sliding scale of broad customs across the globe. Greece and Turkey will have more in common than China and England, because the trade routes were much closer and they shared central rulership for multiple hundreds of years.
This is why we keep saying it’s important to keep cultures with other cultures close to them. Because those are the natural clusters of how all of the cultures involved would be formed. The proper term for this is cultural diffusion, and it happened all the time. Yes, you could get lots of people who had their own unique customs to set themselves apart. But they had the same natural resources as the dominant group, which meant they couldn’t be completely and totally alien.
Even trade influence wouldn’t produce the same results in two places. When Rome imported silks from China, they rewove them to be a different type of fabric that was lighter and more suited to their climate. Then the Romans sold the rewoven silk back to China, who treated it differently because they’d woven it the first way for a reason. They didn’t talk to each other directly because of how the Silk Road was set up at the time, either, so all they had were the goods.
And people automatically, subconsciously realize this whenever they write Fantasy World 29. They put like cultures with like cultures in Europe. Because even if they weren’t really taught to see the rest of the world as anything more than a footnote, they still transfer those footnotes to their fantasy.
The problem is, people don’t realize the gradient of customs. In the modern day, Greece and Turkey are different countries, with histories that are taught in totally different frameworks (Greece as an appropriated white supremacist “ancient land” that all Western European societies are descendent from, Turkey as a land of brown people that were Muslim and therefore against the Good Christian Europe), so it’s really easy to ignore all of their shared history.
People often fought for the right to rule (or even exist) in a place, which deeply impacted the everyday people and government. Ancient Persia is a fantastic example of this, because it covered huge swaths of land and was a genuinely respectful country (it took over a deeply disrespectful country); had it not been for Cyrus the Great deciding that he would respect multiculturalism, the Second Temple wouldn’t have been rebuilt in Jerusalem.
You can’t homogenize an area that was never homogenous to begin with. Because there was a ton of fighting and sometimes centuries-old efforts to preserve culture in the face of all this fighting (that sometimes came with assimilation pressure). Dominant groups, invading groups, influencing groups, and marginalized groups have always existed in any given population. See: Travel is Old above. See: people have always been people and wandered around. Xenophobia is far, far older than racism ever will be, because xenophobia is simply “dislike of Other” and humans love crafting “us vs them” dynamics.
This lack of unity matters. It’s what allows you to look at a society (especially one with a centralized government) and see that it is made up of people that are different. It leads you to asking questions such as:
Who was persecuted by this group?
Did the disliked group of people exist within their borders, or were they driven away and are now enemy #1?
What was their mindset on diversity?
How did they handle others encroaching on what they saw as their territory?
People do different things across different households, let alone hundreds of miles away. You wouldn’t expect someone from a rich, white area of California to behave the same way as someone from a middle-class immigrant neighbourhood from NYC. I’m sure, if you looked at your own city, you would scoff at the concept of someone mistaking your city for one five hours away, because when you know them, they’re so different.
So why do you expect there to be only one type of person anywhere else?
Cultural and Geographic Context Matters
A region’s overreacting culture (either determined by groups of people who mostly roam the land, or a centralized government) and their marginalized cultures determine the infighting within a group, even if the borders remain the same.
Persecution and discrimination are just as contextual as culture. Even if the end result of assimilation and colonialism was the same, the expectations for assimilation would look different, and what they had been working with before would also look different. You can’t compare Jewish exile from various places in Europe with Rromani exiles in Europe, and you definitely can’t compare them with the Hmong in Southeast Asia. They came from different places and were shaped by different cultures.
A culture that came from a society that hated one particular aspect of them will not form—at all—if they’re placed in a dominant culture that doesn’t find their cultural norms all that persecution-worthy. And the way they were forced to assimilate to survive will play into whatever time period you’re dealing with, as well; see the divide of Jewish people into multiple categories, all shaped by the resources available in the cultures they stayed in the longest.
Youcan’t remove a culture’s context and expect to get the same result. Even in a culture that doesn’t wholesale have an assimilationist agenda, you can still get specific prejudices and scapegoats that happen when there’s a historical precedent in the region for disliking a certain group.
Once you start cherry picking what elements of a culture to take—because you’ve plunked the !Kung into Greece and need to modify their customs from the desert to a tropical destination —you’re going to end up with coding that is absolutely positively not going to land.
Coding is a complex combination of foods, clothing, behaviour/mannerisms, homes, beliefs, and sometimes skin tone and facial features. A properly coded culture shouldn’t really need any physical description of the people involved in order to register as that culture. So when you remove the source of food, clothing, and home-building materials… how can you code something accurately from that?
And yes, it’s intimidating to think of doing so much research and starting from 0. You have to code a much larger culture than you’d originally intended, and it absolutely increases the amount of work you have to do.
Writers need to be aware of diversity not just as a nebulous concept, but as something that simply exists and has always existed. And the diversity (or lack thereof) of any one region is a result of, specifically, the politics of that region.
Diversity didn’t just exist “over there”. It has always existed within a society. Any society. All societies. If you want to start adding diversity into your fantasy, you should start looking at the edges of Fantasy World 29 and realize that the brown people aren’t just stopping at the designated border and trading goods at exactly that spot, but have been travelling to the heart of the place for probably a few hundred years and quite a few of them probably liked the weather, or politics, better so they’ve settled.
Each society will produce a unique history of oppressing The Other, and you can’t just grab random group A and put it in societal context B and expect them to look the same. Just look at the difference between the Ainu people, the anti-Indigenous discrimination they face, and compare it to how the Maori are treated in New Zealand and the history of colonialism there. Both Indigenous peoples in colonial societies on islands, totally different contexts, totally different results.
If random group A is a group marked by oppression, then it absolutely needs to stay in its same societal context to be respectful. If random group A is, however, either not marked by being oppressed within its societal context and/or is a group that has historically made that move so you can see how their situation changed with that move, then it is a much safer group to use for your diversity.
Re-learn European history from a diverse lens to see how Europe interacted with Africa and Asia to stop making the not-Europe parts of Fantasy World 29 just be bit parts that add flavour text but instead vibrant parts of the community.
Stop picking singular cultures just because they fascinate you, and place them in their contexts so you can be respectful.
This post has been waiting on the back burner for weeks and during this time of quarantine, I have decided to tackle it. This is probably the longest post I have ever done. I is very tired and hope that I have covered everything from Ancient times to the 19th Century, that will help you guys with your worldbuilding.
Materials
What you build with can be determined by the project you intend, the terrain you build on and the availability of the material. It is one characteristic that we writers can take some some liberties with.
Granite: Granite is an stone formed of Igneous activity near a fissure of the earth or a volcano. Granites come in a wide range of colour, most commonly white, pink, or grey depending on the minerals present. Granite is hard and a durable material to build with. It can be built with without being smoothed but it looks bitchin’ and shiny all polished up.
Marble: Probably everyone’s go to materials for building grand palaces and temples. Marble is formed when great pressure is placed on limestone. Marble can be easily damaged over time by rain as the calcium in the rock dissolves with the chemicals found in rain. Marble comes in blue, white, green, black, white, red, gray and yellow. Marble is an expensive material to build with, highly sought after for the most important buildings. Marble is easy to carve and shape and polishes to a high gleam. Marble is found at converging plate boundaries.
Obsidian: Obsidian is probably one of the most popular stones mentioned in fantasy works. Obsidian is an igneous rock formed of lava cooling quickly on the earth’s surfaces. Obsidian is a very brittle and shiny stone, easy to polish but not quite a good building material but a decorative one.
Limestone: Limestone is made of fragments of marine fossils. Limestone is one of the oldest building materials. Limestone is an easy material to shape but it is easily eroded by rain which leads most limestone monuments looking weathered.
Concrete: Concrete has been around since the Romans. Concrete is formed when aggregate (crushed limstone, gravel or granite mixed with fine dust and sand) is mixed with water. Concrete can be poured into the desired shape making it a cheap and easy building material.
Brick: Brick was one of history’s most expensive materials because they took so long to make. Bricks were formed of clay, soil, sand, and lime or concrete and joined together with mortar. The facade of Hampton Court Palace is all of red brick, a statement of wealth in the times.
Glass: Glass is formed of sand heated until it hardens. Glass is an expensive material and for many years, glass could not be found in most buildings as having glass made was very expensive.
Plaster: Plaster is made from gypsum and lime mixed with water. It was used for decoration purposes and to seal walls. A little known fact, children. Castle walls were likely painted with plaster or white render on the interior.
Wattle and Daub: Wattle and daub is a building material formed of woven sticks cemented with a mixture of mud, one of the most common and popular materials throughout time.
Building terms
Arcade: An arcade is a row of arches, supported by columns.
Arch: An arch is a curved feature built to support weight often used for a window or doorway.
Mosaic: Mosaics are a design element that involves using pieces of coloured glass and fitted them together upon the floor or wall to form images.
Frescos: A design element of painting images upon wet plaster.
Buttress: A structure built to reinforce and support a wall.
Column: A column is a pillar of stone or wood built to support a ceiling. We will see more of columns later on.
Eave: Eaves are the edges of overhanging roofs built to allow eater to run off.
Vaulted Ceiling: The vaulted ceilings is a self-supporting arched ceiling, than spans over a chamber or a corridor.
Colonnade: A colonnade is a row of columns joined the entablature.
Entablature: a succession of bands laying atop the tops of columns.
Bay Window: The Bay Window is a window projecting outward from a building.
Courtyard/ Atrium/ Court: The courtyard is an open area surrounded by buildings on all sides
Dome: The dome resembles a hollow half of a sphere set atop walls as a ceiling.
Façade: the exterior side of a building
Gable: The gable is a triangular part of a roof when two intersecting roof slabs meet in the middle.
Hyphen: The hyphen is a smaller building connecting between two larger structures.
Now, let’s look at some historical building styles and their characteristics of each Architectural movement.
Classical Style
The classical style of Architecture cannot be grouped into just one period. We have five: Doric (Greek), Ionic (Greek), Corinthian (Greek), Tuscan (Roman) and Composite (Mixed).
Doric: Doric is the oldest of the orders and some argue it is the simplest. The columns of this style are set close together, without bases and carved with concave curves called flutes. The capitals (the top of the column) are plain often built with a curve at the base called an echinus and are topped by a square at the apex called an abacus. The entablature is marked by frieze of vertical channels/triglyphs. In between the channels would be detail of carved marble. The Parthenon in Athens is your best example of Doric architecture.
Ionic: The Ionic style was used for smaller buildings and the interiors. The columns had twin volutes, scroll-like designs on its capital. Between these scrolls, there was a carved curve known as an egg and in this style the entablature is much narrower and the frieze is thick with carvings. The example of Ionic Architecture is the Temple to Athena Nike at the Athens Acropolis.
Corinthian: The Corinthian style has some similarities with the Ionic order, the bases, entablature and columns almost the same but the capital is more ornate its base, column, and entablature, but its capital is far more ornate, commonly carved with depictions of acanthus leaves. The style was more slender than the others on this list, used less for bearing weight but more for decoration. Corinthian style can be found along the top levels of the Colosseum in Rome.
Tuscan: The Tuscan order shares much with the Doric order, but the columns are un-fluted and smooth. The entablature is far simpler, formed without triglyphs or guttae. The columns are capped with round capitals.
Composite: This style is mixed. It features the volutes of the Ionic order and the capitals of the Corinthian order. The volutes are larger in these columns and often more ornate. The column’s capital is rather plain. for the capital, with no consistent differences to that above or below the capital.
Islamic Architecture
Islamic architecture is the blanket term for the architectural styles of the buildings most associated with the eponymous faith. The style covers early Islamic times to the present day. Islamic Architecture has some influences from Mesopotamian, Roman, Byzantine, China and the Mongols.
Paradise garden: As gardens are an important symbol in Islam, they are very popular in most Islamic-style buildings. The paradise gardens are commonly symmetrical and often enclosed within walls. The most common style of garden is split into four rectangular with a pond or water feature at the very heart. Paradise gardens commonly have canals, fountains, ponds, pools and fruit trees as the presence of water and scent is essential to a paradise garden.
Sehan: The Sehan is a traditional courtyard. When built at a residence or any place not considered to be a religious site, the sehan is a private courtyard. The sehan will be full of flowering plants, water features snd likely surrounded by walls. The space offers shade, water and protection from summer heat. It was also an area where women might cast off their hijabs as the sehan was considered a private area and the hijab was not required. A sehan is also the term for a courtyard of a mosque. These courtyards would be surrounded by buildings on all sides, yet have no ceiling, leaving it open to the air. Sehans will feature a cleansing pool at the centre, set under a howz, a pavilion to protect the water. The courtyard is used for rituals but also a place of rest and gathering.
Hypostyle Hall: The Hypostyle is a hall, open to the sky and supported by columns leading to a reception hall off the main hall to the right.
Muqarnas : Muqarnas is a type of ornamentation within a dome or a half domed, sometimes called a “honeycomb”, or “stalactite” vaulted ceiling. This would be cast from stone, wood, brick or stucco, used to ornament the inside of a dome or cupola. Muqarnas are used to create transitions between spaces, offering a buffer between the spaces.
African Architecture
African Architecture is a very mixed bag and more structurally different and impressive than Hollywood would have you believe. Far beyond the common depictions of primitive buildings, the African nations were among the giants of their time in architecture, no style quite the same as the last but just as breathtaking.
Somali architecture: The Somali were probably had one of Africa’s most diverse and impressive architectural styles. Somali Architecture relies heavy on masonry, carving stone to shape the numerous forts, temples, mosques, royal residences, aqueducts and towers. Islamic architecture was the main inspiration for some of the details of the buildings. The Somali used sun-dried bricks, limestone and many other materials to form their impressive buildings, for example the burial monuments called taalo
Ashanti Architecture: The Ashanti style can be found in present day Ghana. The style incorporates walls of plaster formed of mud and designed with bright paint and buildings with a courtyard at the heart, not unlike another examples on this post. The Ashanti also formed their buildings of the favourite method of wattle and daub.
Afrikaner Architecture: This is probably one of the oddest architectural styles to see. Inspired by Dutch settlers (squatters), the buildings of the colony (planters/squatters) of South Africa took on a distinctive Dutch look but with an Afrikaner twist to it making it seem both familiar and strange at the same time.
Rwandan Architecture: The Rwandans commonly built of hardened clay with thatched roofs of dried grass or reeds. Mats of woven reeds carpeted the floors of royal abodes. These residences folded about a large public area known as a karubanda and were often so large that they became almost like a maze, connecting different chambers/huts of all kinds of uses be they residential or for other purposes.
Aksumite Architecture: The Aksumite was an Empire in modern day Ethiopia. The Aksumites created buildings from stone, hewn into place. One only has to look at the example of Bete Medhane Alem to see how imposing it was.
Yoruba Architecture: Yoruba Architecture was made by earth cured until it hardened enough to form into walls, or they used wattle and daub, roofed by timbers slats coated in woven grass or leaves. Each unit divided up parts of the buildings from facilities to residences, all with multiple entrances, connected together.
Igbo Architecture: The Igbo style follows some patterns of the Yoruba architecture, excepting that there are no connected walls and the spacing is not so equal. The closer a unit was to the centre, the more important inhabitants were.
Hausa architecture: Hausa Architecture was formed of monolithic walls coated in plaster. The ceilings and roof of the buildings were in the shape of small domes and early vaulted ceilings of stripped timber and laterite. Hausa Architecture features a single entrance into the building and circular walls.
Nubian Architecture: Nubia, in modern day Ethiopia, was home to the Nubians who were one of the world’s most impressive architects at the beginning of the architecture world and probably would be more talked about if it weren’t for the Egyptians building monuments only up the road. The Nubians were famous for building the speos, tall tower-like spires carved of stone. The Nubians used a variety of materials and skills to build, for example wattle and daub and mudbrick. The Kingdom of Kush, the people who took over the Nubian Empire was a fan of Egyptian works even if they didn’t like them very much. The Kushites began building pyramid-like structures such at the sight of Gebel Barkal
Egyptian Architecture: The Egyptians were the winners of most impressive buildings for s good while. Due to the fact that Egypt was short on wood, Ancient Egyptians returned to building with limestone, granite, mudbrick, sandstone which were commonly painted with bright murals of the gods along with some helpful directions to Anubis’s crib. The Egyptians are of course famous for their pyramids but lets not just sit on that bandwagon. Egyptian Architecture sported all kinds of features such as columns, piers, obelisks and carving buildings out of cliff faces as we see at Karnak. The Egyptians are cool because they mapped out their buildings in such a way to adhere to astrological movements meaning on special days if the calendar the temple or monuments were in the right place always. The Egyptians also only build residences on the east bank of the Nile River, for the opposite bank was meant for the dead. The columns of Egyptian where thicker, more bulbous and often had capitals shaped like bundles of papyrus reeds.
Chinese Architecture
Chinese Architecture is probably one of the most recognisable styles in the world. The grandness of Chinese Architecture is imposing and beautiful, as classical today as it was hundreds of years ago.
The Presence of Wood: As China is in an area where earthquakes are common, most of the buildings are were build of wood as it was easy to come across and important as the Ancient Chinese wanted a connection to nature in their homes.
Overhanging Roofs: The most famous feature of the Chinese Architectural style are the tiled roofs, set with wide eaves and upturned corners. The roofs were always tiled with ceramic to protect wood from rotting. The eaves often overhung from the building providing shade.
Symmetrical Layouts: Chinese Architecture is symmetrical. Almost every feature is in perfect balance with its other half.
Fengshui: Fengshui are philosophical principles of how to layout buildings and towns according to harmony lain out in Taoism. This ensured that the occupants in the home where kept in health, happiness, wealth and luck.
One-story:As China is troubled by earthquakes and wood is not a great material for building multi-storied buildings, most Chinese buildings only rise a single floor. Richer families might afford a second floor but the single stories compounds were the norm.
Orientation: The Ancient Chinese believed that the North Star marked out Heaven. So when building their homes and palaces, the northern section was the most important part of the house and housed the heads of the household.
Courtyards: The courtyard was the most important area for the family within the home. The courtyard or siheyuan are often built open to the sky, surrounded by verandas on each side.
Japanese Architecture
Japanese Architecture is famous for its delicacy, smooth beauty and simplistic opulence. Japanese Architecture has been one of the world’s most recognisable styles, spanning thousands of years.
Wood as a Common Material: As with the Chinese, the most popular material used by the Japanese is wood. Stone and other materials were not often used because of the presence of earthquakes. Unlike Chinese Architecture, the Japanese did not paint the wood, instead leaving it bare so show the grain.
Screens and sliding doors: The shoji and fusuma are the screens and sliding doors are used in Japanese buildings to divide chambers within the house. The screens were made of light wood and thin parchment, allowing light through the house. The screens and sliding doors were heavier when they where used to shutter off outside features.
Tatami: Tatami mats are used within Japanese households to blanket the floors. They were made of rice straw and rush straw, laid down to cushion the floor.
Verandas: It is a common feature in older Japanese buildings to see a veranda along the outside of the house. Sometimes called an engawa, it acted as an outdoor corridor, often used for resting in.
Genkan: The Genkan was a sunken space between the front door and the rest of the house. This area is meant to separate the home from the outside and is where shoes are discarded before entering.
Nature: As both the Shinto and Buddhist beliefs are great influences upon architecture, there is a strong presence of nature with the architecture. Wood is used for this reason and natural light is prevalent with in the home. The orientation is meant to reflect the best view of the world.
Indian Architecture
India is an architectural goldmine. There are dozens of styles of architecture in the country, some spanning back thousands of years, influenced by other cultures making a heady stew of different styles all as beautiful and striking as the last.
Mughal Architecture: The Mughal architecture blends influences from Islamic, Persian along with native Indian. It was popular between the 16th century -18th century when India was ruled by Mughal Emperors. The Taj Mahal is the best example of this.
Indo-Saracenic Revival Architecture: Indo Saracenic Revival mixes classical Indian architecture, Indo-Islamic architecture, neo-classical and Gothic revival of the 1800s.
Cave Architecture: The cave architecture is probably one of the oldest and most impressive styles of Indian architecture. In third century BC, monks carved temples and buildings into the rock of caves.
Rock-Cut Architecture: The Rock-cut is similar to the cave style, only that the rock cut is carved from a single hunk of natural rock, shaped into buildings and sprawling temples, all carved and set with statues.
Vesara Architecture: Vesara style prevalent in medieval period in India. It is a mixture of the Dravida and the Nagara styles. The tiers of the Vesara style are shorter than the other styles.
Dravidian Architecture: The Dravidian is the southern temple architectural style. The Kovils are an example of prime Dravidian architecture. These monuments are of carved stone, set up in a step like towers like with statues of deities and other important figures adorning them.
Kalinga Architecture: The Kalinga style is the dominant style in the eastern Indian provinces. The Kalinga style is famous for architectural stipulations, iconography and connotations and heavy depictions of legends and myths.
Sikh Architecture: Sikh architecture is probably the most intricate and popular of the styles here. Sikh architecture is famous for its soft lines and details.
Romanesque (6th -11th century/12th)
Romanesque Architecture is a span between the end of Roman Empire to the Gothic style. Taking inspiration from the Roman and Byzantine Empires, the Romanesque period incorporates many of the styles.
Rounded arches: It is here that we see the last of the rounded arches famous in the classical Roman style until the Renaissance. The rounded arches are very popular in this period especially in churches and cathedrals. The rounded arches were often set alongside each other in continuous rows with columns in between.
Details: The most common details are carved floral and foliage symbols with the stonework of the Romanesque buildings. Cable mouldings or twisted rope-like carvings would have framed doorways.
Pillars: The Romanesque columns is commonly plainer than the classical columns, with ornate captials and plain bases. Most columns from this time are rather thick and plain.
Barrel Vaults: A barrel vaulted ceiling is formed when a curved ceiling or a pair of curves (in a pointed ceiling). The ceiling looks rather like half a tunnel, completely smooth and free of ribs, stone channels to strengthen the weight of the ceiling.
Arcading: An arcade is a row of arches in a continual row, supported by columns in a colonnade. Exterior arcades acted as a sheltered passage whilst inside arcades or blind arcades, are set against the wall the arches bricked, the columns and arches protruding from the wall.
Gothic Architecture (12th Century - 16th Century)
The Gothic Architectural style is probably one of the beautiful of the styles on this list and one of most recognisable. The Gothic style is a dramatic, opposing sight and one of the easiest to describe.
Pointed arch: The Gothic style incorporates pointed arches, in the windows and doorways. The arches were likely inspired by pre-Islamic architecture in the east.
Ribbed vault: The ribbed vault of the Gothic age was constructed of pointed arches. The trick with the ribbed vaulted ceiling, is that the pointed arches and channels to bear the weight of the ceiling.
Buttresses: The flying buttress is designed to support the walls. They are similar to arches and are connected to counter-supports fixed outside the walls.
Stained-Glass Window: This is probably one of the most recognisable and beautiful of the Gothic features. They can be set in round rose windows or in the pointed arches.
Renaissance architecture was inspired by Ancient Roman and Greek Architecture. Renaissance Architecture is Classical on steroids but has its own flare. The Renaissance was a time for colour and grandeur.
Columns and pilasters: Roman and Greek columns were probably the greatest remix of the Renaissance period. The architecture of this period incorporated the five orders of columns are used: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite. The columns were used to hold up a structure, support ceilings and adorn facades. Pilasters were columns within a chamber, lining the walls for pure decoration purposes.
Arches: Arches are rounded in this period, having a more natural semi-circular shape at its apex. Arches were a favourite feature of the style, used in windows, arcades or atop columns.
Cupola: Is a small dome-like tower atop a bigger dome or a rooftop meant to allow light and air into the chamber beneath.
Vaulted Ceiling/Barrel Vault: Renaissance vaulted ceilings do not have ribs. Instead they are semi-circular in shape, resting upon a square plain rather than the Gothic preference of rectangular. The barrel vault held by its own weight and would likely be coated in plaster and painted.
Domes: The dome is the architectural feature of the Renaissance. The ceiling curves inwards as it rises, forming a bowl like shape over the chamber below. The dome’s revival can be attributed to Brunelleschi and the Herculean feat of placing a dome on the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. The idea was later copied by Bramante who built St. Peter’s Basilica.
Frescos: To decorate the insides of Renaissance buildings, frescos (the art of applying wet paint to plaster as it dries) were used to coat the walls and ceilings of the buildings. The finest frescos belong to Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.
Baroque (1625–1750)
Baroque incorporates some key features of Renaissance architecture, such as those nice columns and domes we saw earlier on. But Baroque takes that to the next level. Everything is higher, bigger, shinier, brighter and more opulent. Some key features of Baroque palaces and buildings would be:
Domes: These domes were a common feature, left over from the Renaissance period. Why throw out a perfectly good bubble roof, I ask you? But Baroque domes were of course, grander. Their interiors were were nearly always painted or gilded, so it drew the eye upwards which is basically the entire trick with Baroque buildings. Domes were not always round in this building style and Eastern European buildings in Poland and Ukraine for example sport pear-shaped domes.
Solomonic columns: Though the idea of columns have been about for years but the solomonic columns but their own twist on it. These columns spiral from beginning to end, often in a s-curved pattern.
Quadratura: Quadratura was the practice of painting the ceilings and walls of a Baroque building with trompe-l'oeil. Most real life versions of this depict angels and gods in the nude. Again this is to draw the eye up.
Mirrors: Mirrors came into popularity during this period as they were a cool way to create depth and light in a chamber. When windows faced the mirrors on the wall, it creates natural light and generally looks bitchin’. Your famous example is the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.
Grand stairways: The grand sweeping staircases became popular in this era, often acting as the centre piece in a hall. The Baroque staircase would be large and opulent, meant for ceremonies and to smoother guests in grandeur.
Cartouche: The cartouche is a design that is created to add some 3D effect to the wall, usually oval in shape with a convex surface and edged with scrollwork. It is used commonly to outline mirrors on the wall or crest doorways just to give a little extra opulence.
Neoclassical (1750s-19th century)
The Neoclassical Period involved grand buildings inspired by the Greek orders, the most popular being the Doric. The main features of Neoclassical architecture involve the simple geometric lines, columns, smooth walls, detailing and flat planed surfaces. The bas-reliefs of the Neoclassical style are smoother and set within tablets, panels and friezes. St. Petersburg is famous for the Neoclassical styles brought in under the reign of Catherine the Great.
Greek Revival (late 18th and early 19th century)
As travel to other nations became easier in this time period, they became to get really into the Ancient Greek aesthetic. During this architectural movement they brought back the gabled roof, the columns and the entablature. The Greek Revival was more prevalent in the US after the Civil War and in Northern Europe.
When creating a world, it would be wise to consider the healing capabilities of each culture. What if your character is sick? What are they sick with and how can they be treated? In this post I have compiled a list of questions pertaining to health. While it is not exhaustive, the hope is that you will have a basis of where to start when building your hospitals and diseases.
By all means, get creative, have fun, and of course, answer questions you come up with yourself.
The questions compiled are inspired, taken, modified, or edited from three forums on the NaNoWriMo website: Respond, Answer, Ask 2016 Worldbuilding, Respond, Answer, Ask, 2016 Fantasy, and Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions.
Who tends to the sick and injured? Is it an actual doctor? The most experienced person in the village? The shaman? What are they called? A healer?
What happens in the case of an emergency?
What are some common ailments? The common cold? Allergies? The common fever? Something we’ve never seen on Earth?
What are deadly diseases? Cancer? Something you’ve made up? What are the risks? How do they get it? Are they able to be cured? Or is the cure just out of reach?
What are some genetic problems?
Have there been any epidemics?
What is the level of medicine? Do they still believe in bloodletting? Prescribing fancy water that may be injected with a juice or venom to seem medicinal? Or have they advanced to actual pills? Are there vaccines?
What do they believe cause illnesses?
What are some home remedies? Are they effective or just some old wives’ tale?
How effective is present medicine?
What are injuries or illnesses that are incurable?
How are people with disabilities treated? Do people recognize it as a disability? Or as a curse? Something else? Are disabled people able to receive care?
Is there mental health care?
What kind of mental problems exist?
In the case of childbirth, are midwives or doctors used? Someone else?
What kind of dental care do they have? Do they clean their teeth with charcoal? Do they just pull the rotting teeth out? Do they make false teeth? Is dental care more advanced?
VESTA An open world video game concept that takes place within an abandoned Venice, a personal concept project that I’m delighted to finally bring to fruition (part 02)
