Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Author Topic: Zyalciw: Secondary fictional setting, need help with forming.  (Read 1229 times)

Slayerhero90

  • Bay Watcher
  • Time for Taako's opinion.
    • View Profile

It's me, Slayerhero90 again. You might know me as that person who makes all the short-lived Gelduzmorn-based games. I had been making these as an attempt to flesh out the setting of Gelduzmorn. They did a decent job, I guess, but not good enough. I'm posting this here because I have had Zyalciw (SHAHL-kyew) on my mind of late and it is... it's neglected compared to Gelduzmorn. It has next to nothing and I need help fleshing it out. Zyalciw is this darkish medieval fantasy world that only in the past week or so did I think up. I've got very few ideas as to what to do with it. Here's what I've got:

Region: "???"
   Biome: Plains
   Species: "Humans" (liable to change)
      Language: "???"
      Government: ???
         Military: ???
            Weapons: Spears, Pikes, Warhammers, ...
            Armor:
                Helmets: Combo of a Kettlehat and a Frogmouth helm.
     
Region: "???"
   Biome: Taiga/Cold Forests
   Species: "Humans" (liable to change)
      Language: Uhzyoz (Ooh-SHOZE)
   Species: "Druzobi"
      Language: "???"
      Government: Tribe-like

I'm having a hard time coming up with ideas. Could you guys help me?
Logged
My tumblr.
Yeah no I don't haunt here anymore. Peace

darkflagrance

  • Bay Watcher
  • Carry on, carry on
    • View Profile
Re: Zyalciw: Secondary fictional setting, need help with forming.
« Reply #1 on: July 15, 2013, 01:33:57 am »

It's me, Slayerhero90 again. You might know me as that person who makes all the short-lived Gelduzmorn-based games. I had been making these as an attempt to flesh out the setting of Gelduzmorn. They did a decent job, I guess, but not good enough. I'm posting this here because I have had Zyalciw (SHAHL-kyew) on my mind of late and it is... it's neglected compared to Gelduzmorn. It has next to nothing and I need help fleshing it out. Zyalciw is this darkish medieval fantasy world that only in the past week or so did I think up. I've got very few ideas as to what to do with it. Here's what I've got:

Region: "???"
   Biome: Plains
   Species: "Humans" (liable to change)
      Language: "???"
      Government: ???
         Military: ???
            Weapons: Spears, Pikes, Warhammers, ...
            Armor:
                Helmets: Combo of a Kettlehat and a Frogmouth helm.
     
Region: "???"
   Biome: Taiga/Cold Forests
   Species: "Humans" (liable to change)
      Language: Uhzyoz (Ooh-SHOZE)
   Species: "Druzobi"
      Language: "???"
      Government: Tribe-like

I'm having a hard time coming up with ideas. Could you guys help me?

Maybe you can start with a cosmogenesis: how did humans and other races come into existence? What civilizations did they first build? What seas and deserts did they cross, what mountains inspired them, what rivers quenched their thirst and irrigated their farms?

What are the plains like? Do the people scrape by efficiently on migrating herds or do they grow luxuries that they trade? Do they get the metal for their armor from trading with mining dwarves, lumps of iron that litter the surface of the world leftover from the age of falling stars? What are their relations with the taiga-dwellers? Formerly fellow citizens of a former empire? Bitter rivals who have driven each other's civilizations into extinction?

Are there greater cosmic threats? Active deities? Religions based on dogma or faiths that draw power from awakened gods?
Logged
...as if nothing really matters...
   
The Legend of Tholtig Cryptbrain: 8000 dead elves and a cyclops

Tired of going decades without goblin sieges? Try The Fortress Defense Mod

Slayerhero90

  • Bay Watcher
  • Time for Taako's opinion.
    • View Profile
Re: Zyalciw: Secondary fictional setting, need help with forming.
« Reply #2 on: July 15, 2013, 09:05:23 pm »

Maybe you can start with a cosmogenesis: how did humans and other races come into existence? What civilizations did they first build? What seas and deserts did they cross, what mountains inspired them, what rivers quenched their thirst and irrigated their farms?

What are the plains like? Do the people scrape by efficiently on migrating herds or do they grow luxuries that they trade? Do they get the metal for their armor from trading with mining dwarves, lumps of iron that litter the surface of the world leftover from the age of falling stars? What are their relations with the taiga-dwellers? Formerly fellow citizens of a former empire? Bitter rivals who have driven each other's civilizations into extinction?

Are there greater cosmic threats? Active deities? Religions based on dogma or faiths that draw power from awakened gods?

Let's see...

I really don’t want to use humans as a species, it’s so overdone. Nor do I want dwarves, elves, or anything else of similar type. I just can’t figure out what to use. Anyways, part 1:

Shit happened, and the world began violently, bringing along a pair of god-figures into existence with it, one incompetent and ignorant, the other filled with enmity towards almost everything, living or not. They hated eachother; they saw the other as a threat to their well-being. The world was still an oceanless burning rock, no life, few features, freshly began of collision between astronomical objects. A perfect place for the games of the petty. Tyoes (Thoyss), the ignorant one, rose out of the burning earth at the exact opposite position on the new world as Izlihzy (eez-LEE-ish), the malicious one, did.

Tyoes assumed a somewhat masculine form, and he was a little bit short and quite emaciated in appearance. His skin was colored a sickly, pale yellowish-brown color and his hair was long, dark brown, and straight. Oftentimes it covered his eyes, small, beady, and sunken-in as they were. They were a near-solid light gray, only permitting miniscule specks of darker, ash-gray to serve as pupils. These pupils could only be seen if in extreme proximity to his face. His face itself was somewhat elongated, with unpronounced cheekbones and a chin that looked pointed enough to puncture skin. His nose bridge was thin and almost as deep-set in his face as his eyes, but the tip of his nose was rather prominent, thin as his nose-bridge, and sharp as his chin. His forehead, rather than going up from his brows and then back, simply skipped the former step and started to turn backwards the moment it left his brow. More jarring was his lack of any lips or cheeks, showing off a set of teeth, crooked, broken, and dull, nothing to be proud of. He lacks a tongue, somehow speaking in that slow, loud, low-pitched voice of his without it. He seems never to shut up, constantly chattering an mumbling to himself.  Moving downwards, his neck was a bit long, which contrasted with his close-set shoulders. His arms, even when he stood without hunching over, a seldom-occurring event, were long enough to permit him to touch his knees with his hands. Said hands had palms of a width less than their length and four-segment-fingers nearly twice as long as the palms, without nails and with the tips' bones exposed to the air. He had no thumbs. Same goes for his feet, the equivalent parts' names being swapped to fit. He was blind but his skin was sensitive and he felt the presences of life around him.

Izlihzy, on the other hand, chose a vaguely feminine form, but for the most part, like Tyoes, did not particularly resemble any mortal man or woman. Unlike him, however, she was of a more muscular body-type and a height only the slightest bit above the average. Her skin was a sort of purplish-red, tinted in such a way by constant agitation and her veins were often visible underneath. Her hair was kept a fair bit shorter than Tyoes’s, but was still decently long, and black in color. It was tied back behind her head so as to not obstruct her vision, the sense she relied on solely. Her solid-deep-blue eyes saw with more clarity than any other being can hope for and blended in texturally seamlessly with the rest of her face. Said face lacked a nose, ears, eyelids, and a mouth. It was not unlike a mask in appearance, decorated with scars in the form of an intricate floral design. She did not speak, instead opting to communicate via movement and gestures. Her neck was short and her shoulders broad, said shoulders supporting strong arms tipped with six-digit hands, two thumbs per hand, both on the same side, bottom of hand. Her legs had three segments and her feet had only four toes each, one of which was positioned at the back of her foot. She did have nails on both her hands and her feet, but they were thick, durable things which kept an edge well and grew fast. She was completely numb to any sort of physical feeling, be it pain or pleasure.

Tyoes was completely immobile, overwhelmed by the painful heat the new planet emitted. His skin wouldn’t burn, but it would feel like it. His screams of pain resounded for miles, over lakes of uncooled lava and hills of charred basalt. He would lie there, writhing in pain, for many, many years. Izlihzy didn’t fare much better. Everything was agonizingly bright; she could not see, nor could she close her eyes. She responded by trying to hit the ground out of rage, but it did not give to her strikes. She gave up after wasting hours of time and began to walk around, in search of something to hit or something that she could see. She eventually did find something. After a little over a year of wandering, her foot collided with the side of Tyoes’s head, eliciting even loader a scream from him. He had felt her presence for a day before she actually arrived, but was preoccupied with his suffering. Izlihzy, noticing her foot hit something that wasn’t too stubborn about the concept of getting kicked away, struck Tyoes again with her fist. She followed with another strike and for the first time felt the slightest bit of joy. She continued attacking for years on end, never expecting to grow tired of inflicting pain. Unfortunately, as the planet slowly cooled, she grew bored of hurting him. She stayed in the general vicinity of Tyoes, sometimes resuming the fight, as she began to see less and less intense light and Tyoes felt less of the miserable burning feeling emanating from the ground. His mind focused more and more on his hate and fear of his attacker. Izlihzy didn’t notice the cooling of the world, but Tyoes did. Tyoes intended to lash back against Izlihzy when the time came that he could.
Logged
My tumblr.
Yeah no I don't haunt here anymore. Peace